mtviewdave

The original Star Control was one of my favorite games. It came out when I was in college and my friends I spent many hours playing the Amiga version in our dorm room.

I happened to know a developer at Accolade who asked if I had any ideas for new ships in the sequel they were planning. I sent an email that seems to have inspired a couple of their ships. Here's a blog post I wrote up about it a few years ago:

https://daveschreiber.com/2016/03/17/my-small-role-in-star-c...

I would doubt the groundwater contamination at Moffett Field would migrate inland. Groundwater in Mountain View moves in the direction of the bay.

The groundwater contamination in Mountain View proper comes from the many companies that manufactured semiconductors and other electronics in the '50s through the '80s. Many of which did a poor job disposing of the chemicals they used in electronics manufacturing.

on the east side of Lawrence Ave I think, before they moved to the west side of Lawrence.

541 Lakeside Drive, Sunnyvale, to be exact. That was the original location of the original Fry's. That location moved across Lawrence Expy. sometime in the fall of 1990.

The key card still works, as I would expect. The car isn't dependent upon network infrastructure; an optional convenience is dependent upon it. You can operate a Tesla fully without installing the Tesla app.

As a comparison, my last car was a BMW. For that car, I had key fobs. I always had to take one of these key fobs in order to unlock and use the car. So going out, I would have one key with which I could operate the car.

Now, because I always carry the key card in my wallet, and I always have my phone, I always have _two_ keys with me. This isn't worse than having only one key, even if one of the keys is failing today due to an internet outage.

Essentially, I'm experiencing the worst case scenario right now, which is that I'm exactly the same situation as when I had my BMW. It's annoying (and as an iOS dev, I Have Questions on how the app came to be architected such that a network outage erases the app's settings). But I'm not worse off

I just tried this with my Tesla. The app cannot connect over the internet to the car, but unlocking and starting the car still works, as does using the app to open the charge port and the front trunk.

The Tesla app uses both internet and bluetooth to connect to the car. I would expect that even with no internet connectivity, bluetooth-related functionality would continue to work, and at least today, that is the case.

EDIT: After seeing dawnerd's comment, I just re-opened the app (didn't kill it, it was in background), and now the entry for my car is gone, which means all the bluetooth functionality I mentioned above no longer works. That's one hell of a bug.

Touchless Networking: like Chat Roulette for business networking. It helps organizers of online events replicate the "mixer" portion of in-person events.

https://www.touchlessnetworking.com/

Here's a thought experiment. Let's say an employer is based out of downtown San Jose, and employs people on-site. Would it be reasonable for them to adjust salaries depending on what city an employee lived in? The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $3,291 in Mountain View, but $2,390 in Morgan Hill. If an employee moved from Mountain View to Morgan Hill, would the employer be justified in reducing the salary of the employee to adjust for the fact that the (on-site!) employee now lives in a lower cost-of-living area? (Let's assume that other CoL factors are not more expensive in Morgan Hill than Mountain View, which I feel is a safe assumption).

Would it be justified if the company was fully remote?

What about if the employee moved to Sunnyvale? The average rent is $3,016; a smaller difference, but still cheaper than Mountain View.

Here's a link to the original video (without the animated text overlay):

https://youtu.be/fkWrjrdT3Zg

SEEKING WORK | Mountain View, CA | Remote or On-Site

I'm Dave Schreiber. I'm a mobile software engineer, with over nine years of experience developing for iOS. Started with Objective-C but moved to Swift in 2015. I also have experience with Node, Express, Typescript, PostgreSQL, Heroku, and React. Currently freelancing to bootstrap a startup.

Prefer part-time (20-30 hours/week), but am open to full-time.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtviewdave/

Startup Website: https://www.nextweekapp.com

Email: dave@metebelis.com

Thanks,

-Dave Schreiber

The very first Fry's was at 541 Lakeside Drive in Sunnyvale, on the east side of Lawrence Expy. Sometime around late 1990 that store moved to 1177 Kern Ave in Sunnyvale, and then by the late '90s moved again to the current location at 1077 E. Arques.

The second store to open was in Fremont (though not at the Fremont store's current location), and the third was the Palo Alto (at the current location).

Source: I worked some summer jobs at the Lakeside Dr. store in the late '80s.

...it emerged in SF...

It didn't emerge in SF. Quite the contrary, virtually all tech startups for most of the Bay Area's history were no farther north than Menlo Park, and often much farther south (Netflix was founded in Scotts Valley). That's why YC was headquartered in Mountain View until recently.

SF only became a startup hub within the last decade, IMHO in response to the desire of Millenials to live in urban environments.

Do you always look both ways before entering the street? I always try to do that, both because that's what I was taught to do as a child, and because it seems like the best way to ensure my safety when walking. The only times as a pedestrian when I've been nearly hit by a car is when I've failed to do that.

If you don't look both ways, why not?

Have you ever been to the DMV?

Last time I was there (California DMV) it was to pick up a custom license plate. I made an appointment and was in and out in less than 5 minutes. I spent more time in the parking lot removing my old plates and installing the new ones.

Social Security Administration?

Had to get my Social Security replaced a few years ago. Was in an out in a reasonable time (comparable to a doctor appointment)

The Post Office

USPS works fine for me.

Also had no problems getting a business license from either the City of Mountain View, or San Francisco. The staff at Mountain View City Hall were also very helpful in verifying that local zoning permitted me to run my software consultancy out of my home (it does).

The thing is, there are actual parts of government that are terrible. Caltrans (aka California Department of Transportation) is quite incompetent. Apparently, if there's a big transportation project in California, often the first goal is to try to figure out how to get someone other than Caltrans to run it. When that fails, you get messes like the new Bay Bridge.

The VTA (who runs public transportation in Santa Clara County), also seems quite inept, with light rail lines that are little used and obviously dumb ideas like a BRT lane on El Camino Real.

It would be nice if people who are skeptical of government would direct their skepticism at the parts that are the most broken, rather than just pulling out Stereotypical Examples of Government Incompetence (DMV, Post Office) that actually work fairly well most of the time.

Recently 500 Startups started offering coworking space at their Mountain View location:

http://go.500.co/coworking

Seems to me to suggest they're looking for alternative ways to raise money.

Equifax's Q2 earning report came out after hours on Wednesday, July 26:

https://investor.equifax.com/news-and-events/news/2017/06-28...

with an investor conference call on the morning of Thursday, July 27.

Any public company I've worked at has had a trading window that opened a day or two after an earnings report came out, with most people who want to trade trading early in that window. Admittedly I've never been an executive and I don't know how the rules differ for execs, but the dates when these trades took place are when I would expect Equifax employees to execute options and sell stock.

It also strikes me as possible that information about a security breach discovered on the weekend might not make its way up the company hierarchy for a few days, and that execs might not have been aware of it when they traded.

I do think this should be investigated by the SEC, but I'm a little disappointed at the rush-to-judgement in this thread.

Does anyone seriously doubt FB's commitment to RN? When they themselves dogfood it?

After the shutdown of Parse, I don't see how anyone could avoid having doubt about Facebook's commitment to React Native, or to anything else outside of their core business.

There is a core truth that there are "programmers" out there who cannot program, and the only way to filter them out is to have them implement some algorithm live.

But I think a lot of the grief around whiteboard interviews comes from all the additional crap that's grown up around that, including:

1. That ideally a candidate should code up solutions on a whiteboard, while standing. That it's unnecessary, or even bad, to try to replicate a working situation by having the candidate seated at a computer.

2. That there's a correlation between difficulty of question and quality of developer. So a candidate who can implement both fizzbuzz and quicksort at whiteboard from memory would be a better developer at your company than one that can do fizzbuzz, but not quicksort.

3. That the ideal programming question has some sort of "trick". So the ideal flow when a candidate is answering a question starts with the candidate implementing a naive solution. After which the interviewer says "it's possible to do better". Then the candidate ponders for, ideally 30-60 seconds, whereupon they realize the trick and code up the optimal solution.

My ideal interview process recognizes the need for a developer to demonstrate the ability to code while at the same time recognizing the above interview style for the cargo cult exercise that it is.

I see that you don't say you want immigration labor laws enforced. What you say is that you don't want illegal immigrants to get benefits.

This is sadly typical. There are plenty of people here in California who are fine with using illegal immigrant labor to save money getting crops picked or construction built, but if one of these laborers slices their hand open on piece of equipment and needs to go to the emergency room, then and only then does the hand-writing about "spending money on illegals" begin.

I have no patience for this sort of sadistic, extractive capitalism. Especially when it wraps itself in a faux mantle of concern about the law. If you don't want illegal immigrants in this country, then enforce the labor laws against the employers.

What's ironic of course is that most of the 14 California congresspeople who signed the letter represent districts who are heavily dependently upon illegal immigrant labor, and thus upon the very sort of lax enforcement of immigration laws that they claim to be against. At this point, I'd be more than happy to see ICE conduct a vigorous enforcement of immigration laws throughout the Central Valley. Perhaps staring in September?

I've worked for several big companies (though not Facebook, Google, Apple, or others in that class). None of them showed any interest in analyzing developer productivity, much less looking for ways to increase it. My gut instinct is that developer productivity is hard to measure, real estate costs are easy to measure, so you end up with 500 people in a noisy environment doing the work that 100 could do in a quiet environment.

I also suspect there's a status thing going on. People working on the floor are lower status than people with offices, and I suspect some execs find status signaling more desirable than productivity.

I've been told (including by current members of the Mtn View city council) that the lack of a grocery store in this neighborhood stems from city staff who are convinced that the neighborhood can't support one. Many people in the neighborhood are skeptical of this, and expressed a desire for a grocery store (along with restaurants and more retail) at a neighborhood planning meeting this past summer:

http://www.mountainview.gov/depts/comdev/planning/activeproj...

I believe there will be future community meetings, so if you live in the area, get involved!

I think the reason is that, at some level, Wadhwa believes that immigrants make better entrepreneurs than (native-born) Americans. He's never said that outright, but that's been a theme in his writing for a while. For example, from the article:

America has lost an entire generation of entrepreneurs and innovators and bolstered its global competition. That is also why the proportion of immigrant-founded start-ups in Silicon Valley fell from 52 percent in 2005 to 44 percent in 2012 and is probably even lower today.

It's possible that a lower proportion of startups are immigrant-founded because there are fewer immigrant founders, but it's also possible that there may be more native-born Americans becoming entrepreneurs. One can't tell from just this statistic. If the ratio has changed because of an increase in American entrepreneurship, then Wadhwa's argument becomes that it's bad for the U.S. if more Americans become entrepreneurs.

Which is weird. And being an American myself, something I find quite offensive.

Nobody wants to admit it but we are in a tech bubble.

On the contrary, people love to claim Silicon Valley is in a tech bubble and have been doing so continuously since 2011.

It's not just that they're "non-software" business. They're not really even technology businesses, in the traditional Silicon Valley (HP, Intel, Apple, Atari, Synopsys, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Snapchat) sense. Both DSC and Casper are innovative companies, but (as far as I can tell) they don't innovate in technology, they instead use technology to leverage innovation in other areas.

Casper could have been founded 30 years ago. But would NEA and Norwest have invested in 1986 in a version of Casper that used late-night TV ads and a 1-800 number? My guess is probably not. So what does it mean that they do now? Does this mean that the current fashion in VC is shifting away from technology innovation? If so, does this mean that pure technology ventures may soon find it hard to find funding?

The tech-aloofness of the two nominees marks a sharp break from President Barack Obama, who fought to keep a mobile phone when he entered the White House...

It was Clinton's desire to do the same thing that led to her setting up her own email server and the resulting scandal.

Clinton also balked at agency guidance that she use a government-issued personal computer in her Foggy Bottom office

Obama wanted to use a mobile device instead of a desktop computer for email, and that proves that's he's tech-savvy, but Clinton desire for the same thing means she's a luddite?

As an outsider, the solution to the SF housing issues seem pretty simple

Complex problems often look simple from a distance. That doesn't mean they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10884840

There was a skyscraper in downtown San Jose that was proposed a few years ago that was designed to the maximum height allowed by San Jose airport. After the designs were finalized, the FAA decided that the maximum height was too high, and lowered it a few feet, leading the developer to almost abandon the project, before redesigning it at some expense.

Lesson: it's a mistake to design to the limit.

I suppose in some idealized, maximally YIMBY world, the difference between 8 stories and 10 represents some horrible market interference by "NIMBY asshats". But in the real world, Google would be foolish to build above 8 stories no matter what the Mountain View city council says. The Precise Plan just reflects the practical limits of building in that area.

Indeed, there's been discussion about connecting Moffett Blvd to the North Bayshore neighborhood a new bridge over the creek that would connect to La Avenida. And creating a spur of the Light Rail system into the neighborhood as well.

Google's current buildings were built years (or decades) ago, long before the current space crunch, and say nothing about current City policy. The maximum height in the current North Bayshore Precise Plan is 140 feet above ground (155 feet above sea level), which takes it pretty close to the federally imposed limit.

http://www.mountainview.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?...

The "corporation" you've described is a government. Literally.

A government (in the United States) is just a mechanism for an area's resident citizenry to express their collective will. Whether you call it "government" with "citizens", or a "corporation" with "shareholders", it's the same thing.

History has shown that, when it comes to strings, developers have a hard time getting even something as simple as null-termination correct. If grapheme handling is complex, that's an argument for having it implemented by a small team of experts exactly once. The resulting abstraction might not be leak-proof, but then no abstraction is.