brosephius

I know he has an investment vehicle of some kind to manage his wealth (I think it's called Cascade?) but does anybody know what it has stakes in? And his quoted wealth figure doesn't include what he's given to his foundation, right? I just think it's pretty amazing that he's still #1 or 2 on the richest list given how little he owns of Microsoft and how much he's given away.

the depiction of "wall street jobs" isn't very accurate...most people are not wearing many "hats", and quantitative modelers certainly aren't getting coffee for execs. outside of a small trading firm, you're likely to have a specific role as a programmer, quant, or trader. making 500k after a few years is very unlikely, and probably involves as much luck and being in the right place at the right time with the right people as startup options paying off.

There's a huge spectrum of what a "workout" can be depending on your goals. The original title of the post said it was "amazing" and "beautifully designed", which is a bit of an overstatement. It's a fine low-impact beginner's workout, and if you just want to sweat a bit each day it's fine. If you're looking to become a competitive athlete or get totally jacked, this isn't worth anything to you. There's no one-size-fits-all.

Working out isn't hard. Figure out what your goals are, pick a selection of exercises that fit that goal, and do them. Forget gimmicks, train yourself to want to work out and it's much easier. And don't forget to pay attention to what you eat, that can make or break your workout.

Anybody want to venture a guess as to what those 350 million daily messages are worth as far as advertising goes? I feel like they would be relatively "low quality" ad impressions but could they be worth a 0.1 cents per? I'm also wondering how much better and more targeted an ad platform it could be by figuring out users' interests based on the social graph data.

There's no guarantee that all the IPO shares would have been placed at $46 (I'd doubt it).

US Cellular has a program where you can bring your phone to any retail store and swap out your battery for a charged one. No need to return to pick up your original. Granted, that's for a $10 battery, but why wouldn't this work for Tesla? Charging an extra fee is fine too - it's the price for convenience, vs waiting for a full charge of your own battery pack.

Wouldn't readers be better off if the author wrote about this problem with PCA in the book, instead of ignoring it entirely?

Pretty fascinating reading the comments here about how big WhatsApp is outside of the US. I've never encountered anybody using it here, never would have guessed it's so popular elsewhere that it's been turned into a verb.

I think this is a great example of why you should never be afraid to try and reinvent something. Even a concept as simple as messaging apparently still had a (potential) billion dollar opportunity.

So we can't discuss for-profit startups on HN either, since they're walled-gardens that try to make money off their apps and services, without open sourcing their entire codebase?

Wouldn't this cause spreads on stocks to get very wide? Liquid stocks are a penny wide now, I could see that going up to five or ten cents with such a tax. While the average investor isn't going to get hit much, in aggregate it seems like it could cost average investors billions. I'm not saying that's worse than what HFT allegedly costs, but just a point of comparison. Not that I'd expect this tax to get enacted anyway.

Sorry, I still can't agree with #1. It assumes that all workplace programming is gluing things together, fixing/maintaining legacy crap, or writing generic CRUD apps, which is untrue. I know some great programmers who never code in their spare time, and some that do that are, quite frankly, very uninteresting people to be around due to their lack of other hobbies.

I know the current trend in startups is all about "show me your github", and I admit that it has some value as a filter, but I feel like I'm seeing people writing fairly uninteresting code snippets and blogs just to put it on their resume, in the same way that high schoolers join a bunch of student groups to beef up college applications. There are plenty of programming jobs that require writing complex code and having deep domain knowledge, and to discard those candidates because they can't show you their code and have other hobbies outside of work is just not smart.

I wonder if they're thinking of going to a for-profit model where users pay to take a class and earn a certificate.

On a side note, who owns the course material a professor creates while employed at a university?

Sounds like your complaint is against mediocre programmers and enterpriseyness, not C# (which in my opinion is a technically superior language to Java). I use it all the time for simple one-off tasks and while it can be a bit verbose it's never really been a hindrance.

Yep...why go through the normal interview process to work at Google when you can get acqui-hired, get paid the same, but get a million-dollar "signing bonus"?

For all the times I've seen people on HN say "ideas are worthless", you would think HN would love this. I myself think it's a great experiment.

What do you do now, if you don't mind me asking?

Maybe it's just me but I like the "Strong use of color" better. I find it hard to quickly find the tool button I want when they're all monochrome. I'm sure I'd get used to it, but I can't really say the colors in the GUI are my primary distraction when I'm coding...

You found companies willing to wait a year for you to start? That's surprising, I wouldn't have guessed that would be easy to do. I'm thinking about this myself, but I'm looking to join a startup and I can't imagine that would be feasible given that a year is a long time for a startup.

Visual Studio compilation times are ridiculously fast for me, are you talking about Mono/Linux in point #2 also?

In the accepted answer, what's so bad about the "non-restful" approach the author describes? Who cares if I use GET/DELETE/PUT/POST vs putting the "verb" in a query string argument or the name the file that's being called?

I wasn't cool when tech wasn't cool, and I'm still not cool now that tech is cool. Maybe I need to start wearing sunglasses when I code.

While there isn't enough trading history to say with confidence, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that GRPN has a pretty high beta to the broader market, so I would expect it to rise (or fall) several times the % of (most of) the rest of the market.

Not necessarily. It's completely normal for borrow rates to be ~100% shortly after IPO, it takes a few days for the stock borrow market to settle on a more realistic rate. I wouldn't read much into the drop, and remember that rates different based on your account status and broker, so it's not 30% for everyone.

is anyone else a bit skeptical at the number of countries averaging over 3,000 calories/day? wouldn't such a person consistently gain a pound or two a month, every month?

not much of a vc scene compared to SF/NY, weather sucks almost half the year, and chicago is generally underrated as a place to live for various reasons.

a lot of it is chicken and egg - the top talent doesn't see chicago as a place to go to achieve your startup dreams so they don't come here, and chicago won't be that place until people come here. groupon - meh. barely a tech company in my opinion, and (correct me if I'm wrong) smart, ambitious, top-notch coders aren't really banging down their door for a software engineering job.

that being said, lightbank now has plenty of money to spread around, and there is an incubator or two to get things going. can't do much about the weather though.

hah, I though this was going to be about a site where you can rent someone's dog for a few hours here and there. there are already dog rental sites, but how can individual pet owners monetize the hours they're not at home to enjoy their furry friends?

sorry, but I think this is an arrogant and insulting attitude. I get the value of side projects, but assuming that someone who doesn't have any is an inferior candidate is bullshit. I know the blog post says "Not having pet projects doesn’t mean that you are a bad developer" but dismissing such people out of hand says otherwise.

you don't care about experience? so someone who writes ultra-high-performance code for a trading firm is worth less to you than someone who writes a 50-line rails app that lets you use the fabled "pomodoro technique"? good luck finding great developers with that attitude. but hey, at least they'll have "passion", right? because all salaried coding is generic and mindless, and anybody doing it is a drone with no skills or ambition.

I like that they separated it into basic/advanced, originally I was thinking of signing up and skipping the homework when I didn't have free time for it, but now I can just do the basic and not feel bad :)

anybody know if it's inappropriate to sign up to be able to watch the lectures and check out the homework, but not actually intend to submit all the assignments? it's not clear if the course materials will be accessible without being officially "enrolled". I want to check it out at my own pace but I can't guarantee I'll have the free time each week for the assignments.

how does this work? is he using stark's card balance to buy a new starbucks card?