Bluem00

This particular "fact" actually has a known source. Someone made it up as an example of the kinds of things people will believe: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/swallow-spiders/

Volantio (YCW09) | Full Stack Engineer | Atlanta | Full-time | ONSITE

Volantio is hiring an experienced full-stack developer to help us fix travel tech for airlines.

We make some of the world’s biggest travel sites suck less, by providing technology products to airlines and other travel companies (and drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century). Everything we do improves the airfare search process for millions of people in at least some little way. One of our airline partners likes what we do so much that they made PriceWatch (one of our products) a core part of their brand identity. Here's an ad spot they put together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWn8-QbRUKU

We’re a close-knit team and have a variety of challenging work on our plates. A typical day can consist of everything from optimizing the Fare Prediction System in the morning to putting the finishing touches on a CSS animation in the afternoon. Our work spans multiple technologies, cultures, and languages (both programming and spoken!), so we value high quality communication and a continuous process of learning from each other.

We're looking for someone with at least a few years of professional software development experience that wants to work with us. Most of our products are built on the Django framework, with Redis, a Postgres database, Coffeescript, and countless other technologies used as needed. You're not expected to be familiar with everything - that's what the 'continuous learning' is for! You'll be a core member of our team - able to develop the role and technology in a direction that you find exciting as we grow the company.

If this sounds interesting, we would love to hear from you. Please include whatever info you believe is relevant: resume, GitHub profile, code samples, links to personal projects, etc.

You can apply by emailing directly (jobs@volantio.com)

I'll start things off. When I've used recruiting firms, they get something between 15-30% of the first year salary of a successful hire. I have the conceit that you'd get better applicants via the HN ad than a recruiting firm, so I'll value a successful placement at $30k. On the other hand, a job listing on a jobs site could be as little as $100, but this low cost would be due to a lower quality of skill in the applicants and a lower chance of actually making a hire. I'll swag the chance of actually making a hire due to the post at 1/3, so I'd say the final auction price would be $10k.

The UI gets in the way of an interesting product. Nothing a little user testing couldn't solve, though!

I thought I'd suggest that you remove the underline from all of the lines at the top of the page, as it makes them all appear to be links and reduces readability. They will be just as prominent without that decoration, and it will actually make your sign up link more visible.

You may want to consider moving the sign up link to the entire phrase: "save your meal plans and make a grocery list ". People will probably click on that more often than the non-descriptive phrase "Sign Up". The latter phrase requires additional effort on the part of the user to read to text next to it, remember the sign up link, and make the decision to go back to the sign up link at the beginning of the phrase. It's worth a/b testing.

Interesting site!

Thanks for posting! I live in Minneapolis and rely on the bus system for transport. So far it's easier to use than the NextTrip website on my phone.

For my usual trip each day there are several buses that work for me, and what I was hoping for is a site that centers a map on my location (from my phone gps) and shows me all buses in my general vicinity. I would use this to select a route.

Then you will be interested in this case being argued today in front of the Supreme Court: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/united-states-v-j...

Here is the issue: Whether the Constitution allows police to put a tracking device on a car without either a warrant or the owner's permission; and whether the Constitution is violated when police use the tracking device to keep track of the car's whereabouts.

Here's an explanation I wrote about how I handled my mail: http://twelvemonthsofsummer.com/get-mail-on-the-road

I lived in it full time for about a year, inspired by Tynan's posts on the subject. However, I've now gone overseas to Bali and left my Winnie parked in Maryland. It's actually quite a bit cheaper to live here and the internet still works fine :) Have you written up anything about your travels?

Perhaps slightly off topic, but I was in a similar situation recently (a replacement phone was overnighted from verizon via Fedex and my motorhome was not at an rv park). I don't know if it applies to your problem, but I discovered that many Fedex stores will allow you to use their service to ship packages to them for you to come and pick up, like general delivery for the USPS.

I'm visiting Mumbai this week as a tourist, but leave before the meetup. Would anyone care to meet early? I'd love to change things up and be a hacker-tourist for a bit.

I use msysgit locally on my machine with a svn repository upstream. Everything seems to work fine for me in my daily work. Like another commenter noted, the initial import took a really long time, and would stop seemingly randomly.

Oh. Thank you. I suppose I'll go re-read the other post and learn something.

Is the term 'asymmetric key encryption' meaningful, or did I just make that up?

I've heard a different variation of the metaphor: I have box with two keys. When I use the first key to lock the box, it can only be opened with the second key, and vice versa. I keep the first key hidden, but publish details of how to make a box and the second key for all world to see. This means that anyone can send me a secure message by simply making a box to my specifications and locking it with the publically available key. Only I can unlock it. This is asymmetric key encryption.

Asymmetric key encryption is slow, and symmetric is fast, so we use the former to set up the conditions necessary for the latter: If we both have a box and keypair like this, then you can send me your secret phrase using mine and I can send you my secret phrase using yours. Now that we each know both secret phrases and nobody else knows either, we can combine the secret phrases and switch to symmetric. That's how SSL is set up.

The time taken to fill the form is dominated by the time it takes a user to understand the field label and fill the input box. I think UX people use the term 'cognitive load' to describe the effort taken to understand. This paper presents research that shows that vertically aligned labels cause less cognitive load on users, resulting in faster form entry: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement...

In order of decreasing importance, I recommend you: Constantly check that you're building the right thing. Get some kind of testing framework. Look into Test Driven Development as a methodology.

With a testing framework, you won't waste time rolling your own. For Java, you could start with JUnit.

TDD is a formalized approach to writing test functions as you work, which you already do, while simultaneously designing your code. There are many sources on it around the internet, but Kent Beck's book took the magic out of it (a good thing) for me: http://www.amazon.com/Test-Driven-Development-Kent-Beck/dp/0...

Of course, there are many other specific techniques you can use to test that your algorithms do the right thing, all dependent on what you've made. Regardless, I try to make sure that the a real user gets their hands on an up to date build as often as possible, and they're sure to show me all of the ways that my software is technically excellent, yet in no way solves their actual problem.

While it's not what you're asking for, you might be interested in Robocode: http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ It has been around long enough to be 'balanced', and even the most advanced strategies are documented by the community and available for you to improve upon. The community has also developed a way for people to submit their robots and have them run against all of the other robots via a distributed tournament client.

The description, from the website: "Robocode is a programming game, where the goal is to develop a robot battle tank to battle against other tanks in Java or .NET. The robot battles are running in real-time and on-screen."

I missed the how to hire article so I'm glad you included it. (For anyone else who did, here's the HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1445500 )

Are you going to also follow his advice and hire two or three different people to work on the the first bit of the project?

I think it's an interesting idea; it acknowledges how likely it is for a software project to fail, or to at least be mediocre. I've always wondered whether large companies might be able to do well with several teams working on the same projects, and a process where one team's code is periodically selected to form the basis of the next version, then everyone else starts from there.

You will always be able to come up with reasons not to take risks, and they don't have to be particularly good ones as long as they give you an excuse to wait a little longer. There will never be a right moment. I recommend you evaluate whether you're happy with your current situation, and if not, then seek to change it. Your choice isn't simply between keeping the job and quitting it; perhaps you can find a different way.

I was in a similar situation as you are; running a small programming team at age 27, with no real commitments. I decided to stay because the opportunity seemed too good to pass up, but I'll never know where I'd be now if I took a risk back then. Over those three years it seemed like everyone I interviewed ran their own project. Many popped back and forth between working as part of a team, and running teams several times in their career, so it's not as special an accomplishment as I'd thought at the time. Now it's three years later, and I've gone part time and started telecommuting so that I can travel wherever I want and have time to figure out what I want to do next. Your choices may vary. Good luck!

If you scroll to the bottom of the very long Experts Exchange page, the question and answers are down there. While I realize your question was meant to be rhetorical, EE has answered my question a few times, and I want to say that they do provide some value, which I suppose is reflected in its page rank.

The other articles on this blog are fascinating too. It applies math to real life with excellent explanations.

A friend of mine expressed the problem described here in a more formal manner in this paper: http://gittup.org/tup/build_system_rules_and_algorithms.pdf

He ended up creating his own build system, "tup" < http://gittup.org/tup/ >, based off of it. It also has the property desired in this article that, "No-op builds should be O(1) and instantaneous, and most other builds should be O(WhateverChanged)".

The first diagram in the paper is the commonly implemented version of waterfall. Dr. Royce didn't intend for it to become so, however: "I believe in this concept, but the implementation described above is risky and invites failure."

He goes on to explain what else is required to do it correctly.

You might be interested in the Venice Beach public art walls. They are repainted every weekend with high quality "graffiti".

http://www.veniceartwalls.com/

Facebook couldn't fix it because they just licensed the old Java/ActiveX uploader from a company named Aurigma. Even though Aurigma would give you the source if you paid them enough, you didn't get any ownership over it. When Facebook first started, it was probably the right choice for them, because photo uploading wasn't their focus, but now that they are huge, the improved ability to iterate the design is probably worth it.

I'm also very slow... It's not immediately clear to me what a 'favorite' is.

Kohn says that compensation is perfectly fine, as long as it's not used as a cudgel to mold behavior. You should get high quality employees because they want to be successful and good at what they do, not because you pay them to be. One way of solving the problem you propose is to pay your people well, so competitors have a hard time offering significantly more, and then give them the opportunity to enjoy themselves at work. Why would they leave?

I understand that Netflix does something like this. They pay salaried employees top dollar, give them choices about what to work on, and demonstrate their trust with policies such as the no-vacation-policy policy. < http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 >.

Accelinova provides chapter 10 for free off of their 'bookshelf': < http://www.accelinnova.com/pdfs/kohn.pdf >. This chapter is focused on motivation in the workplace, and he does have several concrete proposals, organized into sections: 1. Abolish Incentives - While pay is not a motivator, it can be a demotivator. "Pay generously and equitably...Then do everything in your power to put money out of [the employees] minds." 2. Re-evaluate Evaluation - Do away with the regularly scheduled performance review, and instead give employees regular, useful feedback, and in particular, the entire process of giving feedback should be separate from the process that determines compensation. 3. Create the Conditions for Authentic Motiviation - Attend to "the collaboration that defines the context of work, the content of the tasks, and the extent to which people have some choice about what they do and how they do it." He goes on to give more details about these three conditions in the second half of the chapter.

The other 2 chapters in this end section are similar, with one each focusing on raising children and how to structure education.

You might be interested in the book "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn. It goes into detail about why praise can be detrimental, and what to substitute for it. From the description on his site <http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm>, it "[draws] from hundreds of studies, [and] demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives." The biggest revelation for me was that 'other incentives' includes both praise and punishment.

We have 4 developers sitting in a room with a giant white board. When someone discovers a bug, or one is reported to us, we write a few words or a sentence up on the board; enough so that we'll be reminded what its about. When a developer decides to fix one of the bugs, they stick their initials next to it and check it off when completed, which signals to someone else that it needs to be tested and erased.

The goals of our bug tracker are to get bugs fixed and tested quickly, with the main goal of having no known bugs in the system. Specifically, we realized that most tracking systems are optimized for bug archival, whereas we wanted a system which is optimized for getting the bugs fixed, given our environment.

I've found that I have a very strong preference for an empty bug-tracking whiteboard, and the more items on it, the more I feel compelled to fix bugs rather than work on other things. It's great for communication, because you can just go talk about the item on the board. Even the process of marking something off on the board makes everyone else peripherally aware that something changed, so nobody has to check whether there's something for them to fix/test - they know. Often bugs are fixed and tested within the same day they're discovered. If something stays on the board for a while it's obvious to everyone that there's a more serious issue that we need to discuss.

You might be interested in the book "Accelerando" < http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0441014151/charlieswe... >, as one of its plot points is that the basic unit of exchange in the economy changes from money to reputation.

I had the same problems. After checking the url to figure out what the site was called, I finally got it.