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My favorite piece of writing by Martin Luther King is his letter from a Birmingham jail. I explained what I like about it last year on Martin Luther King Day. If you’re interested in commemorating the day by volunteering (any time in the future), you can find opportunities with this widget, which, I have to admit, I think is pretty cool in its own right. Get the MLK Day Technology Challenge widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox! Not seeing a widget? (More info)

Yesterday I argued that while it’s true some people might benefit by having more of a tendency to better promote their work, they probably won’t be capable of doing so. My argument isn’t that it’s impossible to be more thoughtful about the decisions you make and choose to go against your nature. The problem is understanding what those choices are. Let me give you an example. One of my coworkers got advice from a friend that she should always be nice to people at the gym. She responded that she’s always nice to everyone (which, in my experience, is true). Then her friend explained that she should be especially nice and friendly to people who work at the gym for marketing purposes. Guys at the gym who are interested in her will ask the gym employees about her, and it’s important to have a good reputation with them. ...

Clay Shirky wrote a whole essay about chutzpah without using the word. In it, he argues that men tend to exhibit more of it than women do, and it prevents women (in general) from enjoying the success they otherwise might. Here’s the crux: There is no upper limit to the risks men are willing to take in order to succeed, and if there is an upper limit for women, they will succeed less. They will also end up in jail less, but I don’t think we get the rewards without the risks. ...

Since last year, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with continuous deployment. One of my work projects for this year is to start moving toward a continuous deployment model. Making progress is going to require a lot of engineering work, and also a few cultural changes. My first big goal is to start deploying bug fixes as soon as they have been tested. Eventually it would be nice to break features out of the deployment process, but I think that if you have identified a bug and checked in a fix, the fix shouldn’t wait around for the next scheduled release to go live. ...

Bitterness is an almost universal trait among funny people. They hate it when their friends become successful. They grow positively apoplectic when success comes to someone they consider unworthy. The bigger the success, the bigger the resentment and Leno has attained a level of fame most comics can only dream about. Even more unforgivably, that success came at the expense of more worthy souls: first Letterman and now O’Brien. Nathan Rabin in Why Some Comics Aren’t Laughing at Jay Leno Essay. ...

Here’s Jonathan Chait talking like a programmer: In any case, as Robert Solow suggests, reducing the incentive for talented people to enter finance might be a feature, not a bug. I’m going to be on the lookout for more examples of this.

As cellphones become ever more entrenched as our indispensable interface to the networked world, this kind of smart-mob-philanthropy will only increase. It’s hard to imagine anything that takes less physical or mental effort than texting a five letter word to a five digit address. (HAITI to 90999). (Why, it just took me seven seconds to do it in between writing the last sentence and this one.) You’d have to be pretty lazy, or pretty flint-hearted, or pretty destitute not to do it. You don’t need Internet access, you don’t need a computer, you don’t need to tell your credit card number to anyone… you just need a cellphone. ...

As for the calls to treat the would-be bomber as an enemy combatant, torture him and toss him into Guantanamo, God knows he deserves it. But keep in mind that the crucial intelligence we received was from the boy’s father. If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this country safe, we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn in the terrorist next door. ...

Here’s what happened. Here’s how to help. You can donate $10 to the Red Cross relief efforts in Haiti right now by texting “HAITI” to the number 90999. Here’s a chart that shows Haiti’s GDP over time. Last year Haiti’s GDP was about $7 billion. Giving Haiti a huge leg up financially to help recover from this awful tragedy would be relatively affordable for the international community. I hope the United States leads the rest of the world in doing so. ...

Everyone is blogging about Google’s big announcement about their Chinese operations today, but one day I’ll want to see this in the archive. Cause: In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different. ...