Iftheshoefits

That's a bit pedantic, innit. It isn't strictly O(1) but with any reasonable implementation the collision resolution algorithm will make it have an amortized O(M), where M << N and therefore effectively constant.

It depends on the context but generally less meaningful and sometimes less relevant. One hasn't really had time to fully absorb certain "life lessons" until they've had the benefit of years and therefore other additional experiences to provide more contextually relevant information. Consequently advice derived from such immaturity isn't necessarily as meaningful or relevant.

I think the parent's glibness is a bit much, though.

I'm not sure we disagree about the purpose and utility of tests. I certainly was not complaining about tests. If anything, I was complaining that too often, in my experience at least, it seems to be presented as an undeniable truism that, generically, 'tests' are always a benefit, and usually the more tests the better.

My point is that tests (at least, unit/integration tests of the variety usually mentioned in TDD) are more code that has to be maintained (and designed, and debugged). They incur overhead and as such impinge on development resources. As a result tests introduce the need for considering tradeoffs between developing tests and developing the software product itself. Simply writing tests for the sake of having tests to test code is naive; at least as naive as assuming that once working a given piece of code works forever, but it is a mistake that I've witnessed on more than one occasion.

Here is another one: failing to understand that tests introduce additional maintenance and design overhead.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Tests are additional code that is tightly coupled to the target code that is meant to be used in production. This additional code requires design, debugging, and maintenance just like the target code. It is also tightly coupled to the target codebase: a change in either necessitates at least an inspection to determine what, if any, changes must then be made in the other.

This all adds overhead to the whole process, and too often I see casual, glib statements implying or even asserting that the overhead is nonexistent or else pays for itself. It isn't free and it is especially not free the more dogmatic the test proponents and tests themselves are.

> You say it as if it was easy. Like they had it handed to them. Clearly a lot of tumblers fell into place, but that doesn't mean the NSF is due a share of the profits. Would you claim Harvard is due a share of Microsoft if it gave Bill Gates a scholarship?

A private educational institute giving a student a scholarship is very much not the same thing as a public institution granting monies for research. That isn't to say the NSF ought to receive a share of profits, necessarily, but your comparison isn't reasonable.

Moreover, it underlines the point: that the risk of research was socialized (NSF Grant), but the profits were privatized (Google). I think the debate is whether or not that's a good thing. Personally I think it depends on the context but generally I don't think that public grants should result in private profits (at least not exclusively), and it should be especially closely scrutinized if any of the resulting research work is not 100% made available as public knowledge.

> What are you getting at? I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

He's mocking the "rah rah free market! American Capitalism is awesome!" mentality that he perceives "Americans" (clearly a generalization; I doubt he thinks all, and hopefully not even most, Americans actually subscribe to that view) to have.

I can't say I disagree with his point. It's especially prevalent in the software industry, where all the programmers are Jon Galt (apologies to Garrison Keillor). It's an especially amusing thing to see given just how much the software industry is and has been, since its inception, reliant on government for its existence.

Actually I think engineering requires the same analytical ability as the science that forms the basis for it. It's just applied in a different context and requires a different path to develop into a good talent.

I guess. I just can't fathom how anybody could have any information at all about property values anywhere else and still look at the housing prices out here and think, "Gee, it's a great idea to buy!" For most (the overwhelming majority of) people it's much cheaper to rent than service a mortgage here, and while there are positives to ownership (e.g. control of the property), it strikes me as less than financially rational to believe they outweigh all the many negatives (opportunity cost, cost of ownership, etc.).

The only good reason to buy in the Bay Area is to be able to control the property. Buying homes as an investment is risky anywhere, but it's especially stupid around here for most people, simply because the expected ROI is so much worse for a given sum of money than can be had in almost any other investment. Only the super (top of the top 1%) have any business putting "home ownership" and "investment" in the same thought for this area.

I think in some (maybe many) cases it is a "pissing contest." In other, and probably the majority, of cases I'd hope it is a case of simple inexperience coupled with arrogance resulting from the relative immaturity of the field. And I mean "immaturity" in more than one sense. The industry itself is young, especially compared to "traditional" engineering and sciences, and it is also filled with a high proportion of relatively immature people, at least in comparison to the slice of academia I was in.

Listings in the Bay Area are absurd. I can buy 6 (larger, better maintained) houses almost anywhere else in the country for the price as one house that would be a "starter home" in those same places. The opportunities and culture in the Bay Area are better, but not 6x better than many of these other places.

I absolutely would expect a theoretical physicist to at least be able to competently contribute to the design of an experiment, especially as it pertains to his specialty.

The bridge analogy is spot on, in my opinion. It mirrors my above comment, and I couldn't agree more.

I've interviewed, and been an interviewer, in interviews with the most obnixous technical questions, interviews where the hardest technical question was equivalent to "can you code?" and interviews that were in between. In no case was there a discernable correlation between the technical difficulty of the interview and the abilities of the eventual hires.

This industry's biggest hiring/talent problem isn't "posuers." The biggest problem is the persistent and incorrect belief that applied mathematicians (CS majors) can easily learn the skils needed to engineer complex systems as they go (or, worse, that said skills are trivial or even irrelevant compared to the ability to recite textbook DS/Algorithms trivia) and that they are also able to adequately determine the capabilities of other similarly trained persons to do the same mainly by relying on textbook test problems (albeit sometimes with a twist).

In other words the (undisputed, in my opinion) existence of people who can't write a simple for-loop doesn't justify the absurdities seen in modern software interviews.

I think hiring is broken for a different reason: workers, whether in software or any other industry, are viewed as less-than-equal ("second-class citizens"). Except in rare cases the entire hiring process in software especially, from start to finish, just about everywhere I've ever interviewed, seems to me designed to find reasons to reject candidates, and as a side-effect is (perhaps unintentionally) also designed to demean and diminish human beings.

It's just a toxic environment.

Companies who have such low expectations already have alternatives in the form of a WebView with extra bells and whistles, like cordova or any of the numerous JS-based native-but-not-really frameworks and libraries. This is just one more among many, many similar alternatives.

I can't speak for the person you're addressing, but I regularly express skepticism about the entire range of judgments in this industry, whether it be skills, culture, personality, or anything else, regardless of the gender of the person expressing said judgments. There isn't a single adjudication of skill that is free of external context that introduces what is effectively a bit of subjective chaos. That includes judgments about something seemingly as straight-forward as "fizzbuzz", all the way through to what constitutes "good" software design.

It's pretty tiny when the expectation is that one will be treated like a regular employee with respect to compensation and benefits but expected to behave like a 20% (or more)-equity founder with respect to passion and (especially) effort.

That may be standard, but it's entirely not in the interests of any employee to play the game. The founders' and investors' beliefs regarding "skin in the game" are missing one key component: the reduced salary one takes at a startup. That reduced salary is skin in the game, as is the acceptance of risk by agreeing be compensated in equity in the first place.

I don't object to 4-year vesting. I don't object to cliffs, either, per se. But I wouldn't consider being treated that way for such a tiny stake as 1%.

Do you know what I call a 1%/4-year vestment "equity" plan? I call that an ESPP (employee stock purchase plan) by another name, with inflated valuations due to startup hype.

Why would anybody agree to that? At least insist the first half percent vest proportionally over the first year with each paycheck.

Orbit is precisely halfway to the boundary of a region of space for which double of the to-orbit energy is required to attain. It's barely "anywhere" much less "everywhere."

"Space travel is utter bilge" is correct, in my opinion, from one viewpoint: specifically with respect to its cost effectiveness along any axis you care to measure save one: the emotionally-driven ego/pride/curiosity axis.

I really wish the trillions "invested" in manned space travel over the decades had instead gone to basic research in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and some of the applied research disciplines that derive from these.

What about pay, though? Here in the US, at least from my perspective, .NET contracting is slightly better than PHP contracting. That is, most of the .NET jobs are (relatively) poor paying with the kind of cheap, demanding client we've all had horror story experiences with. Exceptions would be in finance, where you get to be treated like shit because you aren't a tradeer.

One of my colleagues lumped "webdev" (of the sleazy WP theme shop variety) and .NET jobs in the same category as a "cesspool". I can't disagree.

It seems to me those EA and Google billboards are going to help you attract smug, arrogant people who may be talented, but whose talents are almost certainly going to be overshadowed by their own egos, or people who are good at looking up trivia and may or may not be talented otherwise.

In other words I don't see how such gimmicks work to actually find real talent that can actually be leveraged.

I don't disagree that posting salaries ought to be far more common than it is.

I also am not convinced that it's a seller's market. Most programmers (developers, software engineers, whatever) are treated like second-class citizens from the first phone screen through the "culture fit" portion of an on-site interview.

Regardless, my point wasn't about whether companies should or should not post salaries; it was that applicants to companies that don't ought not be considered "desperate for any job" because it is simply a fact that all but a very tiny percentage of jobs are advertised without said salary listed.

You are assuming that price and value are positively correlated. They aren't necessarily. Anecdotally I find price has little to do with value in the App marketplace.

Buying users, which is in fact what sales and marketing is for indirectly does not mean the marketed product is provides more value nor does it mean the app, in this case, is performing better. All it means is the marketed product has backers willing to spend more on marketing.

There's a difference between not posting salary and not telling a potential candidate when asked. Given that in America at least incredibly few companies post salary ranges to the public it is a stretch (and insulting) to claim applicants for positions with no posted salary are desperate.

Because like the (vast) majority of very successful people he started from a position of financial independence and social connections that absolutely are far beyond the norm.

Becoming very financially successful is very much more about what family you were born into and fortune than it is about skill or talent, although the latter certainly still matter.

You're assuming that a lot of Google's employees live in Mountain View, and that "a lot" is potentially a political vote majority. I'm not convinced it's a valid fear, if what that councilman said is a generally held sentiment. I've only lived in the bay area a few years, but it seems to me people commute quite a lot, and it's not unheard of for San Jose residents to work in S.F. or any point between, in the east bay, etc.

Even so, the other fear, which I distill to a sentiment of fear that Mountain View will become a city that is more business and less residence/public space, is one that has more merit.

Cost of Living is just one factor to consider, and everybody has different priorities.

I discount the CoL "bonus" because of the generally poorer environment with respect to culture, public institutions like libraries and parks, and educational opportunities. I grew up and lived in the south for most of my life. With precious few exceptions I found it to be mainly a canvas upon which the bigoted (race, gender, sex orientation) and extreme anti-government types painted most of the landscape. You could give me 100% of my current salary/year tax-free in a high-yield/low-risk investment account and I wouldn't move back to one of those places. I may have considered it before I had kids, but not now.

Just about every concept (mathematical and physics) in the arXiv paper linked from the article is covered by the end of a typical undergraduate course in electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. The ones that aren't (specifically with respect to certain particulars of fluid dynamics and flux) are easily supplemented with material of the same depth and complexity (i.e. undergraduate level).

His view is that in the valley, the VC investor relationship to founders is more like an employer/employee relationship.

I happen to think that is true to some extent. For all the...excess...in MoC's commentary, there are kernels of truths that people who have drunk the SV/VC kool aide are made uncomfortable by.

Why ever is your comment being downvoted? It's the plain truth.

Wages aren't ridiculously high in SV--they're ridiculously low, just like share of equity is.