esonderegger

One of the things I rarely see mentioned when discussing career prospects of startups vs large corporations is how different their hiring filters are.

If you are self-taught, lacking credentials, and don't live in a major market, it can be difficult to get in the door at a FAANG. Whereas start-ups can be much more likely to take a chance on someone with a non-conventional background.

So for some of us, large corporations aren't even an option until after we've taken that startup job and the startup has done well enough that people have heard of it.

I suppose it depends on the method used for backup and restore. If you replace the entire graph.db directory with one from a backup, ids are kept intact.

I was relying on this just yesterday. We use graphenedb for our production database and I needed to load a production backup locally for testing. It was really useful that I could query a node by id both locally and on prod and get the same result.

I feel like the pattern of "solve this puzzle, get an interview" has fallen out of fashion in the past few years.

In 2012 I got an interview at facebook by solving a puzzle that involved adding weights to a recursive arrangement of levers on top of levers. I remember both having a lot of fun with the puzzle and knowing that I would have never landed the interview any other way because I was coming from a non-traditional background and still relatively junior.

I think Google's foobar came out a few years later. I had some fun with them and got through the first rounds, but by that point I already had a job and never got around to finishing it.

I also remember doing some fun puzzles on codeeval, hoping their business model of linking people to companies would gain some steam, but the companies they signed up never seemed to be very interesting.

Is leetcode essentially the new codeeval?

Unfortunately, all of the programming jobs here are either in publishing (low pay) or government contracting (bureaucratic headaches).

And while the cost of living is less than NYC and SF, it ain't exactly cheap either.

Amazon's decision to come to Crystal City makes sense to me because there are a bunch of young college grads and no competition from the other FAANG companies.

If you're a young, ambitious, programmer trying to decide where to start your career though, I'd suggest going to SF/SV, NYC, Seattle, or Boston because those places provide more options.

My guess is they're the films described in the CustomFlix partnership announced here:

https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2007/nr07-122....

For all the helpful advice offered both here and on Reddit about how to do this, I wish there had been more time asking if this was something the OP should be doing in the first place.

I completely understand the frustration if this is indeed the above set of films and it's been over eleven years since the digitization agreement and files have not yet been made freely available to the public.

That said, planning to use a researcher's pass to "set these treasures free" and blaming Amazon for not having generated more revenue from these films makes it sound like the OP thinks he knows better than the staff of the National Archives how to best care for these assets and that he knows better than the folks at Amazon how to turn a profit. To me, it sounds more than a little arrogant.

A big reason the National Archives enters into agreements like this with companies is that digitization, especially on their scale, is expensive. If it weren't for agreements like this, Amazon would only want to digitize the films for which they knew they could turn a profit and the vast majority of the collection would sit un-digitized and be at risk of loss. The tradeoff is between the immediacy of access vs the number of assets digitized and the team at NARA made the decision that it was better for the American people to have more assets digitized.

I'm worried that the next time NARA is in talks with someone about a digitization agreement (for example, if there's a large number of early jazz audio recordings on 1/4" reels and Spotify is interesting in paying the cost of digitization in exchange for 2-3 years of exclusivity) that the company will point to this example and say "didn't you just let a researcher publish the entire collection Amazon digitized? How can you assure us the same thing won't happen with these recordings?" The result will be the National Archives clamping down on researcher access. I think that would be a net loss for everyone.

I don't know why this popped up on the front page of HN today, but for anyone who enjoys the history of audio recordings, I highly recommend checking out UCSB's cylinder preservation and digitization project:

http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/

I spent a lot of time asking myself the question "would this company be successful if it had been started in St Louis?". On the one hand, they could offer an incredible salary to cost of living ratio. However, when I thought about my coworkers, a good number of them had spouses/significant others who worked for Facebook/Apple/Google. Also, there was a lot of value in knowing that if this company went belly-up, there would always be another company nearby to work for.

At least in this case, the decision to be located in the valley was rational at the individual level, even if it may be irrational collectively.

I think Seattle, Boston, LA, and NYC also have critical masses of talent that make them acceptable for starting a tech company, but unfortunately those places aren't really affordable either. The decrease in proximity to talent and capital probably isn't worth the marginal savings in cost of living.

If anyone is going to break the chicken vs. egg cycle and set up shop somewhere truly affordable, I think it will have to be one of the big companies, opening up a satellite office and offering employees the ability to choose where they want to work. They're all so profitable that they don't seem to mind the money that's going to Bay Area landowners. I wonder how expensive things will have to get before they start to get creative.

I tried doing something very similar to this. It ended up being so draining I couldn't do it long-term.

Specifically, I was in Washington DC and the startup I wanted to work for was in San Jose. My then-girlfriend (now fiancé) has the kind of job that can only be done in DC. I agreed to fly out for a week every month or so and work remotely the rest of the time. I did it for a little over a year but the travel wore me out and I struggled to find a healthy routine working from home.

I see threads like this and think that the solution to this problem has to be more remote work. I just wish I could be one of the people for whom it works as well in practice as it does in theory.

My video conference rig is a Micro Studio Camera 4K, Video Assist 4k, and Arduino shield all going into a Decklink card on an Ubuntu desktop machine. The Studio Camera, Video Assist and Arduino shield all get pretty hot, so I don't run them continuously. The Video Assist does weird things when it's hot like having the audio meters stop working, even though it's still transmitting audio to the SDI output just fine.

That said, the Decklink has been rock-solid in the 5+ years I've owned it and we had a VideoHub at a past workplace that worked great. I actually recommend all the Blackmagic stuff I've worked with, but have seen heat consistently been an issue.

If this works as described, it will be a lifesaver.

I've been running nuts on Heroku for my Electron app and never got it fully working. (It was very good at being able to tell there was an update available, but performing the update wouldn't work)

Does it work for Linux AppImage installs?

One (perhaps non-representative) data point: I have teammates who live in Villa La Angostura and Cordoba and I chat with them using Google hangouts every day. Their bandwidth has never been an issue for video chat.

The auto-updater really isn't ready for prime time, sadly. I'd suggest waiting until https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8106 is resolved before using it in your project.

There are definitely designers who are going for pop by looking for a new font, but I've worked on a lot of projects where the designer just wanted a good, legible, sans-serif that looks the same everywhere.

Who am I kidding, what they want is Helvetica and for the website to look exactly like the comps they made in Photoshop. Sometimes they're willing to find the money for the license fee and sometimes they're willing to accept Source Sans as a substitute. I've never once had them say "the difference between Helvetica and Arial isn't worth the 250ms delay caused by using a web font."

I tend to agree with you, but I think it's important to constantly be trying to understand where other people are coming from. They might not be so unreasonable; they just have different priorities than we do.

Our idea of what a webpage is might be a text document where the presentation is less important than the content. To others, the presentation IS the content. For some people, it might depend on what message the page is trying to convey.

Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)?

Until we can get the major operating systems to include some of the most popular open-source fonts, we're stuck with web fonts.

If macOS, Windows, Debian, iOS, and Android all came with Roboto, Source Sans, Lato, Merriweather, Raleway, etc. pre-installed, then we could make the case that if we used those fonts instead of non-free ones we would have consistency across all platforms and better performance for our users.

Since I doubt that day will ever come, we instead need to weigh an inconsistent appearance against a poor experience for those on slow connections. Different organizations will choose to prioritize different things, and that's ok.

A significant portion of marketers and designers will always demand pixel perfection for their websites. I'm just glad we're not putting text inside of images any more.

That's a good point - I remembered when Reddit open-sourced a good chunk of their codebase and had figured Hacker News and Reddit shared some of their foundations, but looking into it I appear to have been mistaken.

I think restricting myself to only open-source hardware would make something like this impossible. I don't think I'm running any proprietary drivers on my Linux desktop now, though. It's stock Xubuntu using the hdmi and vga ports built into my motherboard and I haven't had any issues with it. I don't do any gaming though - the most GPU-intensive stuff I've done on Linux is running RViz and Gazebo when I was using ROS for robotics.

It's the player software making the request directly to the server hosting the xml file, no? Who would be doing the proxying?

The whole point is that other players are free to completely ignore the tag.

I suppose if the podcast creator didn't want other players to be able to access the feed, they could set up some flavor of authentication. Requests from the preferred player app would include a key, and all other requests would get a 403. I don't really see what advantage that approach would have over a completely closed platform, though.

SkipCast looks really cool! Nicely done!

I think there is a lot of potential for funding the production of great content via donations. I think the "right" way to fund a particular piece of content depends largely on the content itself. For example, PBS funds NewsHour largely through donations and sponsorships, but NBC funds Nightly News via advertising. Both are valid choices, and I believe everyone is better off when publishers are free to decide how to monetize, and viewers/listeners are free to decide what they want to give their money and attention to.

I'd love to support the <rawvoice:donate> tag in Cast-a-net, but unfortunately AppleTV doesn't have a web view, so a link to a Patreon page wouldn't really work. I may try to set up something like a <castanet:acceptdonations> tag that uses in-app purchases, though. I think both users and publishers might like that better than the first monetization options being advertising.

I've been wrestling with the idea of how to enable monetization for smaller podcast producers since I decided to start building an AppleTV app for playing video podcasts this past winter. What I think could work is namespaced tags for specific players that offer ad-insertion. This allows for the platform to remain default-open and opt-in for publishers who want to go this route.

For example, much like <itunes:explicit> is not part of any RSS spec, a publisher could choose to include a tag like <castanet:monetize>yes</castanet:monetize>, which would tell the Cast-a-net app that the publisher of that podcast would like ads to be inserted. The publisher would then need to setup an account with Cast-a-net to share the ad revenue, verify ownership, etc.

There is a significant chicken and egg problem, of course. The player needs to have enough users for the publishers to consider setting up an account to be worthwhile. The ad experience also can't get so obnoxious that users move to other apps. This approach allows publishers to gain monetization and metrics without ceding ownership and control to the platform.

By the way, my player, Cast-a-net, doesn't yet offer this feature. I've been working on making the UI good enough to attract real users first, then hoping it can grow to be something worthy of specific attention from video podcast producers.

(edit: as was pointed out in a reply, Marco is very anti-ads, so I swapped the example tags. I had only meant to use Overcast as an example of a popular independent player that doesn't want to become a walled garden for just a subset of the total podcast universe.)

And in Bend that would be a delicious beer!

I'm thrilled Deschutes Brewery has started distributing here in DC. Also, count me among the many who have no issue with the use of Amazon affiliate links.

Lawyers for In-N-Out say DoorDash's delivery vehicles aren't compliant with the California Retail Food Code, and In-N-Out would never authorize DoorDash "or any other entity to deliver its food products to consumers without the necessary food handling licenses and food safety procedures in place."

This, to me, seems like a valid concern. The folks at In-N-Out take the freshness of their food very seriously. If someone gets sick from an In-N-Out burger delivered by DoorDash, it's not unreasonable to assume this will have negative consequences for In-N-Out's reputation, not just DoorDash's.

Related: How is DoorDash getting away with delivering food and not complying with California's retail food code? That seems like a really bad idea.

To me, it comes down to whether the deliverable is the source code itself or the process by which the source code is created.

If the deliverable is static html, for example (it often is), then it shouldn't matter if that static html is authored in Eclipse or Sublime Text. By all means, the dependencies used in java projects should be scrutinized. The problem is, when it is too cumbersome to even experiment with something new from the open-source community, you end up trying to create your own in-house solution, which is way more expensive and usually less secure.

Fortunately, even top levels of management have recognized this problem. Virtual workstations are just one of a couple proposed solutions, but it's a serious option.

Fortunately, the source code and test data we're working with are not considered sensitive. As a matter of fact, the separate, less restricted part of the network approach has also been proposed. I don't know what's been holding up that proposal, but assigning responsibility for that separate part of the network can be tricky.

I had always figured DO was the wrong approach because ssh isn't an option, but I suppose if you create a droplet with the VNC over https stuff already set up, then it could just be cloned by everyone else. Thanks for the idea!

Good to know - thanks!

Although I would say that would cripple the entire point of having node, since now things like grunt, gulp, browsersync, etc. would all need to go through that same approval process. Better to have development happen on a network so far removed from sensitive data and mission-critical hosting that the admins aren't scared of it.

What were you trying to do at the bank that used node, but didn't need npm?

I see a bunch of comments asking about the use case, so I'll share one...

The Defense Department agency I work for employs between 50 and 100 developers, many of whom, like me, are contractors. The security folks have things locked down to such a degree that developers don't have root access to their own machines and the process for getting new software approved for use on a developer machine takes months. We just got permission to have git installed, for example. Getting Nodejs installed probably isn't going to happen unless they could figure out a way to disable npm. All ports to the outside are shut down except for 80 and 443 and everything runs through IronPort, so anything running https has to allow you to not verify SSL.

If the latency/general performance is good enough, I think developers would love to use something like this for their primary development environment. From the agency's perspective, $50-100 per developer per month would be cheap enough to be a no-brainer. As far as the security folks are concerned, this is just web traffic, so they would have no problem with it.

My only issue is that this pricing doesn't seem to be very friendly to the use case of wanting just one instance, but with unlimited hours.

Lots of good advice here about establishing a healthy routine and communicating. I've only been working remotely for a few months, but here are some things I've learned so far:

1. Assuming you'll be calling in to a lot of meetings, a good pair of headphones with a microphone is invaluable. I have and am very happy with the AKG 551, but there are lots of good options out there.

2. For calling in to those meetings, I love using Google Voice from the Hangouts app. Using wifi instead of cellular service is the difference between a land-line quality connection and a noisy one that drops out far too frequently. This gives you the added bonus of being able to call in to a US number for free while travelling abroad if that is something you wish to do.

3. For a while I felt like my employer was doing me such a favor by letting me be remote, that I owed it to them to be glued to the computer in case a chat or email message came in. Taking breaks is important. Personally, I like cooking real meals for breakfast and lunch. I find the 30-40ish minutes it takes to make something tasty are the perfect amount of time to be away from the computer and on my feet.

3a. Being remote isn't a favor and it isn't special treatment. It is simply a different negotiated work arrangment. It has the potential for enormous productivity gains but it also has the potential for less team cohesion. Personally, I think the pros outweigh the cons, but it depends on the team.

4. Not being in an office environment means you can pace and think aloud without annoying anyone. When I'm not actively reading or typing something, I try to walk around as much as possible.

Good luck!

I've been enjoying reading the TripleByte posts about what you all have been learning while trying to build a better hiring funnel. (Thank you for sharing!)

Have you been able to place anyone yet? I'd love to know out of the 300 or so interviews you've done, how many have led to accepted offers, and what those successes had in common.

Our brains perceive what we hear trailing what we see by small amounts to be completely normal. If you show people a video of an orchestra concert with the sound of a violin coming 50ms before seeing the bow move, most would immediately notice something is off.

Musicians performing together, however, is a much harder problem than just listening. Ask anyone who has ever performed in a DCI-style drum corps, they will tell you compensating for hearing someone on the other side of field 200ms or so late is incredibly difficult.

I'll remain skeptical about OMB's ability to know about all the datasets from federal agencies, because as you said, there is a wealth of government data that is "public" but obscure.

Another example is the Department of Defense's budget justification data. The PDF documents that go into the annual President's budget are made public and are easily found on agency websites. They look like this:

http://www.saffm.hq.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-150130-...

What the public would have no way of knowing, though, is that attached to those documents are files with the extension of *.zzz. Those are really zip files, but need to be renamed because DoD computer systems tend to view anything with a zip extension as toxic. Inside those zip files are the xml files used to create the PDF document. The data is both clean and comprehensive.

I'm writing a set of scrapers that will download the publicly available PDF files and extract the XML, so if someone wanted to import them into their own database for querying, they could. I really wish that weren't necessary, though.

Edit: I should mention that those xml attachments only exist for the Procurement and RDT&E budgets, which account for about a third of total DoD spending.

I just finished reading The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll this morning (And I highly recommend it!). In the Epilogue, Stoll writes about the Morris worm and briefly mentions:

(Harvard student Paul Graham sent him mail asking for "Any news on the brilliant project")

When I read that, I wondered if that was THE Paul Graham.