I like how it starts out as quirky jokes about tech minutiae and slowly mutates into bitter social criticism directed at the company and its leadership, presumably as the old systems of power crept in and eroded the idealism that was present when they joined the company.
Heh, it certainly visualized his decline in hope very well. Google was a cool company once and some of its products and tech still are, but you simply have to manage your expectations when a companies goes public. It stops belonging to the people working there.
Also, companies have proven to be inept to tackle social problems, even if they genuinely wanted to.
For me, the beginning of the end of my enchantment with the company was when one of the founders responded to a major internal scandal at TGIF with the thought that he didn't want to deal with this distraction; he just wanted to make cool things.
And my internal response was "Friend, you manage a ten-thousand-person company. Garage tinkerers have the luxury of their job being 'make cool things.' Your job is people."
I would love if it was possible to just track general industry sentiment over the same time period. As someone who was working at another big tech company nearly over the same duration he was at Google, I myself noticed it became "less fun and exciting" to be in tech within that large company. However, some of that is undoubtedly just a part of getting older and becoming less naive about the world.
I would love to see a site like HN but focused more on scientific discussion. The level of scientific literacy in the software startup community is definitely inconsistent and at times disappointing.
There are various science subreddits with large readerships but quality there is also mixed. Although you do see some high quality discussions.
I think you will have a challenge incentivizing high quality scientific discussion because the people with the acumen to have them are busy actually doing science.
I think another challenge would be balancing moderation between scientific accuracy and general discussion/speculation. Posts on reddit r/science usually become a sea of deleted off-topic comments. The Eternal September problem aside, a bio-focused site would have to be seeded with people of life science backgrounds. It is tempting to just do a Show HN and hope for cross pollination. I suspect, however, the discourse would quickly get dominated by data science/bioinformatics and machine learning on healthcare topics if HN users are the earliest users. Finding a large core group of users with strong biotechnology backgrounds to set the initial tone will be the foremost priority. Life science is ultimately grounded in the wet lab, pure computational hype and speculation without theoretical rigor would just bring about another Theranos.
I love this paper and always recommend it to engineers I work with who might otherwise not read academic papers. It is a well written paper that introduces still relevant concepts like images, processes, the shell and pipes very succinctly, albeit with some amusing artifacts of the 1970s.
