gokult

I have a Master's degree in CS from UW's Professional Master's program. I also had an undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from a different school in the east coast.

I recommend you get a Master's degree from UW for 2 reasons: 1. You'll learn a lot. I certainly did. You'll meet smart, driven engineers from other tech companies in Seattle. UW's program is challenging and will push you as long as you're engaged. 2. Depending on how you branch out in your career, employers may prefer someone with a hard science background, or at least will give them an edge when hiring. If you have taken an OS course, you'll be that much better an engineer anyway along with being able to put it on your resume.

The stack varies depending on the application. We're mostly built on top of JVM, and mostly Java. There's a mix of other languages and technologies as well. Our datastores are a mix of SQL and NoSQL, from several different Vendors depending on the application.

Most importantly, there isn't a dogma here. These decisions are fully driven by engineering.

Apple - Cupertino, CA

We're looking for backend server engineers who really understand distributed systems to be a part of iCloud. Apple keeps small teams that have large responsibilities. If you love owning big pieces, and love distributed systems, you'll really love it here. Everyone here is really passionate about our work, and we hope it shows in the product.

There are a lot of openings across iCloud you can search for in jobs.apple.com. I'm specifically looking for engineers to join our Messaging Services team (https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?#&ss=25546086&t=0&#...).

Here are some highlights:

Scale

    - Hundreds of millions of active users using some of the most desirable devices on the planet
    - 2bn+ iMesssages/day, 4 trillion push notifications sent
        - http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/23/apples-icloud-now-has-250m-icloud-users-imessage-users-send-2b-messages-a-day/
        - http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3908330/apple-q1-2013-earnings
    - Super high throughput, ultra-low latency network services
    - Write code deploys in thousands of machines, datacenters around the world

    - iMessage, FaceTime, Apple Push Notifications, and exciting new projects
    - Define future of the industry with services for Apple's current and future hardware

    - Best of breed modern open source systems
    - High performance asynchronous I/O
    - Distributed algorithms and highly parallel systems

If there are other openings on iCloud that interest you, please apply through jobs.apple.com and mention Hacker News when applying!

These look great. What are folks doing with them? Is there a separate sensor plugin market where I can shop for ideas?

Divvy's a great alternative - http://mizage.com/divvy/. I've been using it for nearly a year now and very happy with it.

This TED talk by George Whitesides titled "Towards a science of simplicity" comes to mind - http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_toward_a_science_...

This a delusional. The author prides himself on his ability to break-in and stay anywhere "by choice", forgetting that someone else has paid or is paying for all the things he's enjoying.

Yes, you can get by without paying rent. Why not pay the $200 and live in a bare apartment? At least it's an honest life.