Code is not literature

Interesting thoughts on code reading and how we should educate ourselves by exploring code that we didn’t write, from Peter Seibel.

Who Killed Net Neutrality?

This is the most important tech story of the week, and everybody has chosen to write about it. This just happens to be the one I’m linking to. It’s by Tim Wu on the New Yorker’s Elements blog.

Tim Bray: Software in 2014

Solid summary of where things stand right now.

Update: Sam Ruby follows up.

Felix Salmon: Netflix’s dumbed-down algorithms

Good piece on the evolution of the Netflix user experience, necessitated by the transition from the “rent movies by mail” model to the streaming content model, and the licensing fees for streaming content online. I find that Netflix is OK if you just want to watch something, and mostly terrible if you want to watch a specific thing. The Netflix experience has been changed to discourage you from attempting the latter.

Katie Siegel: It’s Not “Too Late” for Female Hackers

Paul Graham’s comments in an interview behind the paywall at The Information (and unflatteringly excerpted by ValleyWag) have been the subject of much discussion this week. Siegel’s post gets at what was really problematic about them. I’m one of those people who started programming at age 13, and it has always been easy for me to advocate hiring people like myself, for exactly the reasons Paul Graham gives. Siegel ably makes the point that this line of thinking is unfair to everybody who doesn’t fall into his select group, but I’d argue further that it’s also just bad business. More on that later.

Update: Paul Graham says he was misquoted. I’m glad Graham cleared things up. In his update, Graham says:

If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself.

That’s a sentiment I agree with completely. One reliable indicator that a person loves programming for itself is that they started as a kid. The problem arises when we treat that as the only reliable indicator, which Graham does, at least based on this passage from the transcript:

The problem with that is I think, at least with technology companies, the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology. In fact, I’ve heard startups say that they did not like to hire people who had only started programming when they became CS majors in college. If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it own their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13.

Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

In 2011, Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony (basically everyone not in the Android camp in the mobile handset business) teamed up to buy Nortel’s patent portfolio. Today they filed a suit to recoup some of that investment, suing Google and six Android handset makers for patent infringement. Interestingly, they’re not suing them for violating a telecommunications patent, but rather for patents related to search advertising. I hope Google fights this one to the bitter end and wins.

(And yes, I know that Google has been on the offensive side in patent lawsuits as well. My stance is simple. I’m for the utter collapse of the patent system, and failing that for the defendant in every case.)