brnstz

Ally

The path you're currently on is the "IC path." You'll need to take a look at the "manager's path" to grow those other skills: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-path/97814...

Worse is Better: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

Public Static Void, Rob Pike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE

Ask a question that has more than 1 right answer (and also more than 3 right answers). To be honest, I do the "cultural" fit while I do the "technical" interview.

How would you approach solving <insert some problem>? Dig into their solution for its technical merits, downsides, pitfalls, etc. But, more importantly, pay attention to how they react when they are challenged, whether they overcomplicate things or whether they hand-wave around real problems. Do they know when to say "it depends" or "I don't know"?

You can get a "right" answer and still "fail" the test. My feedback will basically be, "This person is smart and I can't justify saying 'no' but..."

The "cultural" question is "Do you want to work with this person?" So try working with them not at them.

If you create a show with the set design of Roseanne or even the Cosby Show in 2016, you're missing out on opportunities for product placement:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2012/04/brett-ratner-...

The logic is, "Well, I need to have a car in this movie anyway. Why not get a free car instead of paying for one, and in fact, the manufacturer will pay me to place their brand new car?"

The good news is more art is created at a lower cost. Great.

But the bad news is you perpetuate the idea that everyone has a new car (or new kitchen or new 3000 square foot house or whatever) all the time, no matter what their financial situation would be like in reality. This is especially insidious when there is easy consumer credit.

Here's a scene of a doctor buying a car from 1987:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKMlx5p6n8k#t=1m58s

The premise, if you don't bother to watch, is he doesn't want the car salesman to know his job, because then he won't get a good deal.

The quaint part is that 30 years ago, a doctor and lawyer raising a family in New York City were considered almost unimaginably rich by TV standards. Now they would be "middle class."

The sad part is it would be hard to justify a scene like this on a modern prime time TV show. "So, we're going to have a car in this scene? Great! I'll call up Ford. Wait, but what do you mean the car salesman would overprice the car? Don't you know they're running 0% APR or $2000 cash back for President's Day?"

Sure, there are shows that try hard to be more authentic. But for every Breaking Bad, there are 10 spinoffs of lawyer / doctor / detective shows where the characters live in a bubble of perpetual newness the article describes.

And even Breaking Bad did its share of product placements: http://www.bustle.com/articles/5963-how-breaking-bad-product...

Good question. I don't know of any books, though they're probably out there. You could look at the table of contents and google most of the diagnoses and find more readable stuff online.

* Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5

Software engineering in particular attracts some extreme personalities. There are elements of narcissism, OCD, borderline, avoidance, etc. in every organization, even if it would not necessarily warrant a diagnosis. People have irrational motivations. This is often ignored in the rational business of software.

It's a question that can be done in any language and isn't especially difficult in a shell or scripting language. Every attempt I'd seen (except that one) in Java or C++ was a failure given the time limitation.

It is more of a test of "can you pick the right tool for the job, given limited time and resources?" In this case, a machine gun was chosen to squash an ant. A risky move, but if you can do it, then great.

(Disclaimer: I'm a former engineer at NYT and was a Go proponent there.)

The reality of the situation at NYT is that every dollar counts. Go is an effective language that enables a programmer to do both "scripting" and "real" tasks without switching between different environments. The email system described sends more email than many companies that only send email send, and have many more employees working on said system. It is one of the few systems at NYT that pays for itself with zero doubt.

The speaker did not know Go before being hired by NYT, and famously solved a Java programming task in his interview without an IDE and barely a typo (the only time I'd ever seen it done successfully, some people can't even run javac or vim).

It certainly doesn't hurt in hiring to say that you get to program Go, but filtering out "boring" engineers is not a chase of "coolness". It is seeking out engineers who want to take a risk and want to be productive.

Where do you live? I am genuinely curious. This is a local issue, and you are speaking in global platitudes. If no one near you wants to bike, fine. Make everything an interstate. But if there are bikes all around... it appears someone near you does want to bike.

I doubt the bike trails near you are even a minimally spanning tree of every place a person needs to go.

Most roads in the world were not originally built for cars:

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/...

I think that's a great idea.

Some say it is depression, but would I want a medication to fix what is obviously a lifestyle problem?

Medication is not the only solution to depression. The internet is a bad therapist. Consider a real one.

If only it were updated daily: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/

A command line utility can form the basis of an editor plugin. Go/vim users typically run `gofmt` on save, and the reformatted code appears within the editor.

Laws are not perfect. Sometimes you need a revolution (i.e., a mob).

Why is it not credible? That scene illustrates a point even more abstract than the one we are discussing.

If the result is the same (the prisoner dies), does it matter whether a legal authority performs the killing, or whether a mob does? I think it does.

You may not agree with the legal authority's process or laws, but at the very least it is written down.

Mob justice is not law.

For an illustration of this, check out the very first scene of the TV series Deadwood. There's a lynch mob outside the sheriff's office, and they want to kill the person in the jail. The sheriff fends them off so he can legally hang him instead.

The creator originally wanted to do a series on ancient Rome, about the birthplace of civilization. The studio wanted a Western. He said, oh, perfect, that works, too.

For one thing, he might not graduate at all. Ok, so he has his open source credentials. That might get him a job or give him connections to help start a company. But a bad academic record is not a positive indicator you are an open source genius awesomedude. Rather, good contributions to open source can make up for a bad academic record in the past.

Who knows, maybe the particular college is a bad fit, and there can be a million other problems. But explicitly sacrificing GPA for amorphous contributions to open source is like tithing when you can't feed yourself or your own family.

Maybe my own experience is outdated or not generally applicable, but one's grade in a computer science class is fairly indicative of how well you grasped the material. It is precisely the classes I did well in that I haven't needed to restudy (and vice-versa).

Your problem is not that your family is conservative. I don't know how "bad" your GPA is, but if it's trending downward, the problem is not your aunt/grandfather's views on the world, however outdated they may be. You don't necessarily need to change their view on programming / open source, but you should appreciate they are concerned for you, possibly for good reason.

pg has a PhD in computer science from Harvard. Do you think his undergrad GPA was low?

You have four years to get a decent GPA, you have your entire life to contribute to open source. You can possibly do both while in college, but the former might be more important.

You can stop reading after the picture, which happens to be at the top.

Why doesn't every programmer have a great GitHub profile? The same reason not every mother of 3 children looks like a fitness instructor. Priorities.

You write C++ all day at a bank, can't use any open source, and your mind is filled with the intractable legacy issues, politics, etc. Maybe you're married and your spouse wants to go salsa dancing on Tuesdays. Should you prioritize throwing some Ruby into GitHub? If you want to work for a startup, yes, you should. If you don't care, don't bother.

Imagine a (very fictional) Yelp user who has 0 money, will never go to a restaurant again in his life, or buy anything at all for that matter. But he has perfect memory and can write excellent reviews of thousands of restaurants he's been to in the past.

Does he have any value to Yelp as eyeball for advertisers? No. If Yelp's audience consisted completely of people like him, no one would ever advertise on Yelp again, no restaurant owner would ever pay Yelp for premium whatever status thing they sell.

But our fictional user can write reviews that are consumed by other users. He is providing real value to Yelp, as a non-eyeball.

In the television case, this guy is completely worthless.

Facebook is a simpler example, because most people are both supplying content and seeing ads. If there were no content, no one would go there to see the ads.

You might say this is frivolous lawsuit, and I'd agree. The plaintiffs have zero chance of winning, there is no coercion, there is no semblance of employment.

But.

Take a moment to think. What is the value of a website like this, without the user-generated content? A Yelp with no reviews, no photos, etc. is just a phonebook. Alternatively, a restaurant review with no platform, no audience is just a journal entry. It's symbiotic.

Maybe that's obvious. Ok, so. Yelp gets paid. Why don't the reviewers get paid? Too easy to game? Too impractical? Because people will do it for free anyway?

Musicians and exhibitionists will do it for free, too. That doesn't mean they are creating no value. It would be good if Yelp reviewers could be paid. It would be good if it were possible to pay people for the value they create voluntarily.

I don't particularly think it's important how Bush spent 7 minutes in response to an unprecedented situation. If he spent the next 7 months (or even 7 hours) going on a book reading tour, well... 9/11 was a confusing day. I was actually in a classroom at that exact same time, a mile uptown from the WTC. The professor got a whisper about the first plane, and then another about the second. I recall we broke class after the second. It's an easy target to criticize Bush, because it's a comical situation, but it has no real substance.

I agree in the West Wing situation, there is a national security concern. But why? Shouldn't this "great" man be able to use his power justly for the greater good, and not let things get personal? No, he understands he wouldn't be able to resist that temptation. Relinquishing his power is showing that his family is more important to him.

From the recent Penn Jillette AMA on reddit:

"I'm very very careful with my time. I try to do nothing that someone else could do. So, I write, I perform and I spend time with my family."

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1opzae/penn_jillette_h...

This doesn't answer the dichotomy of work vs. family, but puts it in a different context. What is the most effective way to spend your time?

The president's daughter scrapes her knee, but there's also a school shooting? I think Obama's gonna be giving a speech, and Michelle's on neosporin duty.

(West Wing spoiler alert 2003) The president's daughter is kidnapped? Well, I hope John Goodman is available, it's about to get Season 4 cliffhanger in here. Someone else can be president. Right now it's not the most effective use of Martin Sheen's time.

The problem is not gender parity at conferences, but gender parity in the industry. You see the inverse at conferences in fields dominated bg women, and there are no "boy tickets".

You can do:

  m1 := map[string]int{}
  m1["a"] = 1

This article conflates the ideas of pure price discrimination (where goods are identical) and premium pricing (where they are not).

No one is better at this than the travel industry. Remember that story about a travel website showing higher prices to people with Apple User-Agents? Yup.

If a restaurant wants to charge $1,000 for a premium cheeseburger on the off chance some rich person wants to distinguish himself, well, that's weird, but that's capitalism.

But if this "software" were to read everyone's mind and calculate exactly how much they are willing to pay for any good at any time, consumers will get fleeced.

Don't worry about changing the world. If through your best efforts + chance, you happen to change the world, that is great. But if you go through life believing you are without value unless you do something grand, you've got a 99.99999% chance of disappointment.

You're 21. Want to play more sports? Play them. You haven't even reached your physical peak. What, did you want to be a quarterback in the Super Bowl and it's not worth playing sports unless you are? Welcome back to 99.99999% disappointment.

You think that your procrastination and intelligence are unrelated. You think you're horrible on the inside, but you "get away with it" because you're smart. This is nonsense. You are bored. Maybe you didn't do the shit that was assigned to you in high school, but the SATs are not a genetics test. You learned it somewhere.

Don't feel guilty about the money you make. Don't think that you're a hamster on a wheel and you're worth nothing unless you're going at 100% speed. If your job doesn't give you enough work to interest you, be proactive and find some inefficiencies that need fixing. Fix them. Don't wait for someone to tell you to do it. After you fix it, tell everyone. If there isn't anything to fix, get a new job. And... to go against the grain of HN, consider a large company, one that has endless problems and technical debt. If you aren't happy in your own skin, working on a startup to change the world is probably not the best thing.

Also, seriously consider going to a therapist to discuss your issues. I hear that you can afford it. You're basically asking the internet to be your therapist. And the internet is not qualified (on average).