gt384u

ITT: People who don't React well to critical feedback from new users

And Blue Box (https://www.blueboxcloud.com/) a month and a half ago. Looks like they're investing in or acquiring cloud platform software companies like gangbusters at the moment.

I feel like completely specifying the problem does everyone in an actual engineering interview a disservice and isn't a good analogue to actual engineering problem-solving. That said, it might be acceptable or even encouraged for the purposes of this site.

In the case that you mention, if someone asked me "Can I short sell?" I'd be happy that they considered the order of events there and were trying to explore the problem. I'd certainly remember it in my interview feedback. My response as an interviewer would be more or less "That's an interesting thought. To simplify the problem, let's say we're risk averse and prefer a finite loss potential. Go ahead and just consider purchase before sale."

One of the biggest criteria I looked for from junior engineering candidates was that they didn't just jump into implementation and asked clarifying questions. That's hard to do with the sort of site this is so maybe in this case more complete specification is useful, but any way that a bit of ambiguity can be introduced means that you can have a meaningful conversation with an engineer about representation, the shape of the problem, the inputs, what the criteria for success are, what is truly necessary to solve a problem. I want working code in the end, but hearing the things a person does or does not consider about a problem is interesting and valuable to understand a potential teammate and how they think.

  > For a time, Target used Amazon's website code.

I attended this conference and spoke with the presenter about his talk both before and after. My takeaway was that the presenter was trying to accomplish one thing: educate front-end developers who (rightly or not) have been characterized as unfamiliar or ignorant of cryptographic techniques with a survey of those techniques. I believe this was the sense "Bringing Crypto To The Masses" was meant.

I appreciated the energy and enthusiasm the speaker had for the subject matter and would be delighted if any of that transferred into his audience, but I don't feel it was effectively communicated. In the time constraints presented, even something as simple as, say, discussing what cryptographic hashing (or symmetric crypto or public key crypto or digital signing, take your pick) was and doing a deep dive only in this domain would have been a valuable experience and opened a lot of eyes. I'm fairly familiar with all the topics discussed during this talk and I had a difficult time following along with it. I can't imagine what the experience of the intended audience was or what they managed to glean from it.

I would imagine this has something to do with having an existing package dependency management system company-wide and it causing friction trying to get the two to coexist.

I have similar issues where I work with trying to integrate an internal build system and rubygems. Our answer is to essentially mirror the gem version internally into our own repo. It's not the best answer I could hope for.

Another identifier which would seem to help accomplish the task is identifierForVendor. As a bonus, it isn't something that can be opted out of like the advertisingIdentifier.

Maybe it's just being on a team that's more focused on nontechnical users, but I still see plenty of PowerPoint. Product, sales, and business process people seem to swim in the stuff.

This is how I first learned about CSS circa 2001. More importantly, you could provide your browser user-defined CSS.

My first entry? Making any link from goatse.cx struck-out and brown.

Neither. If you look at the S3 URL, they are URLs with expiry times after which they stop serving the content. The cryptographic signature makes it... let's call it "infeasible" to manipulate the URL to change the expiry time.

I had a conversation with a senior engineer on SourceForge where he pointed out that most people forget that developers are actually a minority of their business: most of their users are nontechnical people that come to them to download binaries of things like zip utilities.

I think I understand the motivation behind your comment and I'd agree to some extent, but designers still have the mantra that users need to be involved in the process of design. For some design practitioners, it's maybe ensuring that designers write personas and scenarios for different types of users or engage in narrative-based design exercises, or even (if you're the right sort of weirdo) participatory design.

I honestly have no idea what stage this project is in. Are they in a phase that's more ideation? Are they refining in their design funnel? I think it's a bit curious to point at an example of a product by one company and say essentially 'They did it this way and were successful, clearly this is how all things should be designed'.

I'm not sure this is an issue of them asking a question analagous to "What do you want the iPhone to do?" so much as it's maybe "How annoying are people who aren't researchers and designers going to find wearing HUD glasses for 3 hours a day?" or "Will people feel uncomfortable using them in pedestrian or cycling settings given that they're voice-activated and pervasive?" Granted, there are maybe analogous products on the market that will maybe inform how people will interact with this new medium, but I have a few years experience interacting with someone using this sort of one-eyed projective displays (my former research advisor wore one) and there are some funny things involved with face to face interaction with someone using them that you might not anticipate. In fact, he felt that the eyepiece was often enough of a social interaction barrier that he'd take his off and tuck it into his shirt pocket when he was having a conversation.

You're not necessarily going to figure these things out in the product design lab. Maybe it's stupid of Google, but I suspect they're trying to better do design for the wild. Alternately, they're just people who don't know how to make products.

I think you give your own creation too little credit. I would have never found Peanuts by Bukowski without you, and that was worth all my internets. I never saw it on reddit, never saw it on slashdot, never saw it on digg.

Anyway, thank you for running memepool as long as you did and keeping it up for others to enjoy. I used to love Lowbrow around when you were actively posting and I'd be curious to re-read through their archives archives, but they're gone from what I can tell.

Never did I expect to have this discussion about "brogramming" as a legitimate phenomenon. My knee-jerk reaction is to lament that this is a misunderstanding of language/culture and that is why we can't have nice things, but that's just simple of me to think so. Clearly the cultural angle of this is much more interesting if a large group of reasonable, intelligent people in the software community at large can arrive at such a broken state of affairs.

I took it for granted that the portmanteau of "bro" (never a positive adjective in my corner of the world, e.g. "Ugh, the bar upstairs was full of bros, so we left") and "programmer" was something that was obviously poking fun at (among other things) the social life of the archetypical awkward, introverted programmer.

With the above in mind, I truly adored the satire of brogrammer when I first came upon it. I would have never thought of it being exclusive towards women because, frankly, all of the women in computer science I've ever worked with have been not only good computer scientists, but also properly well-rounded individuals able to comport themselves with other human beings without being painful to be around who never ever EVER desire being a Brogrammer and would be offended to be called as much.

I kind of laughed brogramming off early on in the genesis of the phenomenon when I saw people behaving like they were taking it seriously. My thought was they were using an ultra-mock seriousness in the furtherance of humor. Think of your favorite comedian looking you square in the eye and telling you that, say, they think babies are delicious for breakfast on toast.

The discourse on brogramming sort of percolated over time, then I distictly recall that I saw a post from someone in (Malaysia, maybe?) here on HN where they were referring to themselves as a Brogrammer on their website's bio, and I took it to be either someone who had the misfortune to lose something in translation, or that I misunderstood that they too were in on the joke, as it were. I know when I try to understand humor in French or Spanish I lose a great deal of the nuance and have to resort to fairly broad humor when I communicate in those languages. As a consequence, I tend to avoid trying to be funny in anything other than English. It's for the best.

Then I saw articles popping up in the media about Brogramming as cultural phenomenon and I took it to be the standard sort of journalistic fare where a cultural phenomenon that gets reported on is either wildly misrepresented or turns out to be patently false. Anyone remember "toothing" [1] from early-mid 2000's? Just think how much serious play that got in the news. So much so, that I'd be shocked if there weren't a substantial number of people who tried it out of curiosity.

And now I'm discovering that Brogramming isn't a self-deprecating joke that I've been sharing with nearly as many people as I thought. I'm not sure if this would really happen, but I'd be eager to hear from journalists who reported it as phenomenon, startups and recruiters who chose to use it as recruiting pitch, or someone who internalized Brogramming as aspirational lifestyle. I'm just confused.

At any rate, I give up. No joke is worth the shitty feelings and exclusion and hurt and animosity that I'm seeing being identified now as coming out of brogramming as meme.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toothing

Add to that the mapping companies, lala.com, Fingerworks for multitouch, Siri, PA Semi and Intrinsity for semiconductors, and a whole lot of other tiny but massively differentiating pieces[1] to their "experience" stack.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...

Are you associated with Confnow? I only ask because of the newness of your account.

Thanks. Here's the reddit post you were talking about, I believe:

http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/qjgkk/show_reddit_...

Could you comment on what proportion of the CLECs you partner with are allowed to demand higher access rates from the IXCs?

> It doesn't look like traffic pumping.

What makes you feel confident about this? The assertion that "We get paid from termination" strikes me as very much that sort of arrangement. Perhaps I'm abusing terminology.

Can you maybe elaborate on how you're getting paid from termination? Perhaps I abused the term "traffic pumping", but this definitely sounds like the sort of of thing I was picturing being exorbitantly expensive to the carrier initiating the call to your service.

I previously worked as a telecom engineer at a VoIP startup and we definitely characterized http://freeconferencecall.com as a service monetized by traffic pumping and denied connecting to its NPA in our dialplans. While by no means absolute truth, the concern I'm voicing is further reinforced should it be true that Google Voice is refusing to terminate to your DID as described below.

Where are these calls terminated? I ask because I am always concerned that these sorts of services are being monetized by pumping traffic[1] into Iowa.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_pumping

Thank you. I knew that it was an editor feature I'd seen before for lisp code, but didn't recall the name of any one in particular.

Something I'd be curious to hear from the pretty lisp designers: what advantages do you feel this offers over an Emacs which just highlights the symbol of interest or region between the matched parens for a particular code block?

By way of context, I was a test subject for a perhaps related project called Code Bubbles http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp a while ago. Since it was for Java, a language which is comparatively verbose and I often have difficulty getting decent code density with, this new IDE interaction was truly novel and I found often useful.

I test drove the Pretty Lisp Demo and felt myself wanting for code density in a language where I don't typically have those issues. It was just too hard to fit a useful quantity of code in a screen.

To clarify, "lazy" isn't a pejorative in this case. It's just the technical term for deferring work until it needs to be done. "Eager" would be the term for doing everything right away.

Interesting. If I were interested in the current recruiting landscape for high school athletes, do you happen to know of any good survey or review-type sources? I'm curious about the context surrounding your company's service.

Based on my (perhaps limited) understanding of where they get their data set, isn't it possible that the percentage of athletes interested in engineering be overrepresented by the source? I would imagine an online social network for recruiting student athletes would be just sort of thing that would skew towards people who had computer access and savvy?

Wouldn't someone like the NCAA be a better place to derive this sort of representative data as far as what incoming high school students are interested in majoring in? Presuming of course that the NCAA was the only game in town as far as collegiate athletics was concerned (is it?).

> No, it's not.

I think you may be right, but only if you consider piracy to not be part of "the economy". My understanding at least is that it very much is.

But that is the pawn business. Anything else is a different business entirely, e.g. being a second hand goods dealer.

Pawn shops can deal in second hand goods and often have the licenses for outright purchase (which may be where some of the confusion that I've seen from people originates), but that is not strictly speaking what pawning is.

THIS. I worked at an organization with ~700 branches with names all pretty much meaningless for a single project, when maybe 10 were actually being developed on. Makes it almost impossible to understand the repo.

For the sake of another data point, my own company provides a hosted PBX platform and just recently acquired another hosted PBX platform provider.

We are a hodgepodge of J2EE pre-SIPServlet on JBoss using Rhino for the scripting layer. Also, we acquired a company which essentially wrote their own Asterisk for Tomcat and built the current incarnation of our PBX platform on that. We do SBC with OpenSIPS and there are a number of other random bits and pieces (including Asterisk) which have played a role over the years. I have not seen the other company's codebase, but I am told they are a similar hodgepodge of PHP, Erlang (but not for the telephony bits), and possibly Java.

I would rather enjoy and appreciate any consistency in the platform, but I doubt we'll ever get to do the sort of rewrite that would provide that consistency.

What about the update experience do you find so bad/discouraging?