ktaylor

Questions such as pseudocode a "(sorting, binary search, etc)" algorithm on the whiteboard are BS questions used to haze interviewees and make the interviewer feel like the big man on campus. Almost no working programmer ever implements any of this BS unless they are doing very specialized work.

I've interviewed 100s of programmers for several very well known tech company and specifically tried to get tech interviewers to tone that down. Doing so allowed us to hire some great non-CS JR programmers who are now team leads and even CTOs at other companies.

My understanding is he looks for phrases people are increasingly searching for such as "BHP Free Sippy Cup" and then buys a domain such as bhp-free-sippy-cups.com. On the site, he just displays affiliate links to various vendor product pages for that product, e.g. Amazon, etc.

The trick is understanding the trends and having the SEO skills to efficiently build the traffic. He can't put too much individual time into any one property because it will on average only generate a few hundred dollars a month in revenue.

If the trend becomes popular enough someone comes in and buys the domain for their real sippy cup business.

A friend of mine runs a 1 person business. Well, technically, he does have an assistant who does his office admin and books.

My friend has steady gross revenues of $6M a year. When I first met him about 8 years ago he was 26 and living at home with his parents. He once remarked on how much he appreciated his mother still doing his laundry and cooking for him and his father.

I forgot to mention, he has extremely high gross margins and EBITDA. He does all the work himself other then that admin I mentioned already.

What is his business, you are probably wondering?

He owns internet domains. He flips them like real estate. He looks at Google trends, buys undervalued properties, develops their traffic via SEO, generates affiliate sales revenue, and if given the opportunity, then sells them at a much inflated value. He owns 1000s of domains and has built highly automated systems to efficiently manage them.

Joplin just released support for Vim keybindings. But, it also has a button you can press to edit a note in your favorite editor, such as Vim.

Here is how I read and annotate scientific articles and books: http://www.founderscholar.com/how-to-read-doctoral-student/

Racket is a great language that needs more recognition. Thanks for posting your experiences.

This is a good interpretation of the event as I understand it.

Culturally, it would be a good move to grant all employees before x date a token number of units so they felt validated. $1k worth of units to a few dozen employees is a rounding errors worth of dilution but would pay many intangible dividends to the culture.

I do think, ultimately, the bulk of incentive equity should go to those most likely to make significant contributions.

Maybe read the Twitter thread and then comment.

This is a 19th century view of the workplace. Don't work for employers who ascribe to this workforce philosophy.

Assuming people will create great works while living off a sustenance-level basic income is a bit of a stretch. And, it seems to ignore the extreme level of work, commitment, and persistence it takes to write books, publish science, etc.

The issue is not whether people should be able to profit off their own work but whether a rent-seeking gatekeeper should be able to hijack others' work and profit off it.

This is very true.

I've traveled the ICW from Moorehead City, NC to Dinner Key, Miami. Derelict boats bring a very bad reputation to the cruising community and have real repercussions. Also, this boat is very unlikely to pass a coast guard inspection, making it an illegal vessel, putting other boaters and rescuers at risk, as they are legally obligated to render aid if he needs it.

This is why I am concerned for his mental health. Nothing wrong with living in a boat, as I've done with children. But one must be responsible and respect the danger of the water.

Far from a homemade boat. The Bristol 27 is a seaworthy craft. But this sailor apparently doesn't know how to use a sponge and paint brush to maintain her. These are normally quite pretty boats.

I bought a $700 chair on Amazon and returned it after a week. Then I found this and it has been great for the past 3 years:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0049UCECE/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

It is $200, sturdy and adjustable. I am 6 foot and 200 pounds.

There's no excuse for keeping his boat in that state of disarray. I've lived aboard a sailboat with my family in the Bahamas and met a lot of full time liveaboards. The only boats I ever saw that were kept like that were the derelict vessels in Biscayne Bay, where destitute or mentally ill homeless lived in rotting anchored boats.

I hate IOS. I don't understand why people try to turn a consumer device into a serious developer workstation.

I'm in social sciences but have a developer background. I am trying to expose more people to reproducible research methods. They are not very receptive. The version-control-by-folder approach is well entrenched.

I believe the most important element of successful remote work as a FT employee (not a contractor) is to not be forgotten.

When working on a team or working in management, so many decisions are decided outside of meetings. As a remote employee or manager, you need to go to great lengths to make yourself available at a moments notice through slack, zoom, etc.

Don't become forgotten...and then irrelevant.

There's a guy named Ken Auer who took the life-work integration message to heart. He established a craftsmanship studio in his house. In large part, it was to integrate work, family, personal into one.

https://www.rolemodelsoftware.com/why-we-build-software-syst...

This is also why I quit the tech startup rat race and transitioned to my current lifestyle that allows me to work on the projects I am interested in, be around my family, travel when I want to travel, and go in whatever direction I am interested.

Work-life balance has always smelled of a construct created by corporate "personnel" departments to stem the tide of fleeing, burned-out workers.

My friend (PhD in Physics) runs a small hedge fund in Chicago. A team of about 6 traders and quants. They have been doing all their fairly sophisticated quantitative models in Fortran for the past 15 years.

He is currently learning R, though, and so Fortran at this shop may have its days numbered.

This is built on the old Harpo Studios (Oprah) location in Chicago. Nicely done. But, you can class up the headquarters but you're still selling burgers at the end of the day.

set -o vi

Economics is endlessly fascinating, IMO. Mixed with history and does it get any better? TFP.

Website is broken.

Writing takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to just gain basic competency, let alone master. You have to put in a lot of butt-in-seat time.

Though I've gotten paid to write for a technology website, I am not a strong writer. But, I currently spend about 10 hours a week writing for my blog and other mediums and am continuously trying to get better.

Assuming one is putting in the time and effort, the next thing that will most quickly speed improvement is having an editor or other competent reviewer provide critical feedback, including on grammar, structure, and style. Then, keep rewriting a piece until you are no longer unhappy with it.

You should check out https://yalabot.com/

This is a fantastic resource, esp. for my research work. I appreciate that you posted it.

I started this blog to share some of the research that I've been reading on management and entrepreneurship. As an investor and entrepreneur, I've never looked at academic research--I always considered it impractical. Now I am reading 5-6 papers a week and most of it is, well, impractical. Some of it is intriguing or thought-provoking.

I'm sharing a brief review of the best one I come across each week (a la what Adrian is doing here for CS https://blog.acolyer.org/about/).

Funny how so many programmers think programming meetups are for learning something. There're not. They're about meeting people who could, at some point, become collaborators, colleagues, co-authors, friends, mates, bosses, or candidates.

If you won't ever need any of those, meetups are terribly inefficient and ineffective for just transferring knowledge. Skip them.

I've just recently started to read academic papers and have fussed a bit with the best workflow. My hardware that I owned when I started the process were a Macbook Pro and Android Samsung Tab e 8.0. I've avoided purchasing any new hardware so far but may end up going with an iPad Pro or iPad Air if I cannot get satisfactory results with my Samsung Tab.

My software setup currently includes: - Zotero -- reference management - Zotfile -- pulls annotations out of the PDF for saving in Evernote, among other things - Evernote -- The workhorse of my setup. I use this for both organizing my research projects, task lists, etc and also for notetaking while reading a PDF. This includes pulling annotations out of the PDF with Zotfile and storing them in an Evernote note. - Google Drive -- for storing my PDFs. Each PDF has an Evernote note linked to it. This allows Evernote to full text search all my PDFs that are stored in Google Drive with OCR, so it will even detect any handwritten notes in a PDF. - XODO -- I've tried many Android PDF annotation tools and currently XODO has been the best as far as UX while reading/annotating and also stability and integration with Evernote via Google Drive. Ideally I would use the built in annotation tool in Evernote but it is frustratingly slow on my Android device and the UX is suboptimal.

I've had a few issues with the Samsung Tab - It is only 8" so it involves a lot of zooming and panning while reading. - It has a split screen mode so I can have my notetaking app in one pane and my pdf annotator in the second screen. This works well except that, again, there is limited screen space - I've struggled with finding an acceptable PDF annotation tool on Android.

I invested in a startup that did this--the first one--called http://www.urbanbound.com. they quickly realized there was no demand for this in the B2C world so they switched to become a B2B employee relocation platform (again the first to do this as a SAAS) and they just landed a Series B. Fish where the money is!