Virax

Holy shit his wife is hot.

I interviewed for a QA position at (Deleted to protect the guilty) where I had to answer a bunch of brain teasers like this. I always prepare thoroughly and even enjoy solving these sorts of puzzles, so I knew most of the standard ones by heart and did fine. I would say that about half of the people who interviewed me did not appear to have the mental acuity to answer such questions themselves. I did learn some new and interesting puzzles though!

Two months later I was hired for what turned out to be an excellent software development position at a completely different organization.

When I interview technical candidates, I ask a pair of related questions that encompass data structures, sorting, and time complexity. It is a very simple-sounding problem. The good candidates get the questions almost before I finish asking, and the mediocre candidates struggle.

Upvoted for vocab :)

Holy cow - when you read this article right after this one:

http://reason.com/archives/2006/03/01/why-poor-countries-are...

it really blows your mind. I think the nay-sayers are missing the point of this article - it doesn't matter if you are sympathetic to the family. You have to remember that the higher paying job isn't creating 2x the economic output - her choice to take the lower paying job means that:

There is one fewer position making $120K

There is one more position making $60K

Now consider this: the $120K position is much more likely to be a management position, which, if done well, could create several $60K positions, lets say 3. This means that for the economy as a whole, there is one less $120K position and TWO fewer $60K positions.

In my opinion this is very scary.

Oh man, I smell meme potential :D

DOUG: When is Joe's flight due it?

YOU: Why do you ask?

DOUG: Oh... umm... there's a seminar at 3:30 PM I thought he would be interested in.

YOU: What seminar?

DOUG: The underlying physics of the violin.

YOU: Why do you think he would be interested in that?

DOUG: We talked about it once.

YOU: So, just because you talked about it once, you think he would be interested in spending time going to your hoity-toity physics seminar?

DOUG: Um, yeah, I do, and it isn't hoity---

YOU: Oh yes, the fluctuations of the harmonic oscillators will exponentially dampen the transverse waves of the vibrating string...

DOUG: Dude, shut the hell up. First off, that's nonsense, second off, we don't talk like that, and THIRD, you STILL haven't answered---

YOU (sarcastically): Oh, oh, I'm so so sorry, I haven't answered you question yet have you.

DOUG (gritting teeth): No, I just want to know when he will be arriving.

YOU: I have no idea, check the fucking monitors.

DOUG: WE AREN'T AT THE AIRPORT!

YOU: Yeah, I know, I'm just fucking with you, he arrives at 3:00. He won't make it to your seminar, and in my oh-so-humble opinion, he wouldn't want to go to your seminar anyway. Joe's a real man.

DOUG: FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU%$#!^%$@$%^!

I don't really understand why this is news-worthy - he took a risk and lost. The safer path would have been to keep working as a chef and then mix-in the career change, perhaps by starting a cooking-related website, blog, Facebook app, whatever.

I find it quite difficult to believe that a chef with 10 years of experience could not find a job in Seattle. This beggars belief.

In short, don't tempt economic fate when you have a wife and kid and live in the USA - you should not count on ANY social support in this country.

Reminded me of this: http://www.manishchawley.com/calvin-hobbes/ch890804.gif

Question popped into my head: why is Colin Winter wasting his time with idle chit-chat like this? Is he bored of Unladen Swallow already?

The article is interesting, but the conclusion that all antidepressants on the market are flawed is not correct, mostly because different antidepressants target different systems in different ways. I took Celexa for over a year, it worked OK but not great, and then after reading the wikipedia article on treatment of depression, I tried SAM-e, which works much better (200mg Jarrows in the morning with a B-complex supplement to break down the homocysteine). Prior to Celexa, I tried Zoloft, which was completely useless.

This is very naive. The investor / con artist can report any attractive numbers they feel like - who is going to keep them honest?

I strongly suspect that investors who change to be pitched are in fact scam artists who do just enough investment to plausibly deny that they are in fact scam artists while taking in huge amounts of cash from ignorant start-ups and forcing the start-ups that do agree to receive investment into contracts that strongly favor the investors.

I'm sorry, but charging to pitch fails the common sense test; it is little more than a way of separating fools from their money.

Protip: on a game day, Berkeley traffic grinds to a standstill. This is due to the fact that in Berkeley, some things (well, most things) are backwards, so traffic engineers figure out new and creative ways to impede the flow of traffic rather than improve it. Don't delude yourself into thinking you can find a parking space.

"So, I rigged up a Python script to play AOL instant messenger sounds randomly every 5 to 10 seconds, turned up my speakers, pointed them at the wall, and went on vacation for a week."

ARE YOU F'ING KIDDING ME? You write a blog post on hiring and then proceed to relate a story about how you escalated a personal conflict way beyond reason? This is precisely the kind of guy you don't want on your team, because working in the real world involves resolving personal conflict without needlessly pissing people off.

Jamie Zawinski is not "hard at work building the future". According to his own website, he is managing the DNA lounge, and the last thing of any substance he worked on was a program to delete silence from mp3 streams (see http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/archiver/). He claims a copyright date of 2001-2006 for this program, which, after a quick skim, appears to be high quality. In my opinion, he is a talented programmer who has this to say about the software industry:

    (1999+) But now I've taken my leave of that whole sick,
            navel-gazing mess we called the software
            industry. Now I'm in a more honest line of
            work: now I sell beer. 

So, I suppose, Joel is right, in a roundabout way:

Selling beer => flirtation => sex => sperm + egg = Building a future human being!

But seriously, Joel is on crack.

OK let me tell you something.

You have no idea why your startup failed. It has relatively little to do with the things you listed.

Your startup failed because you named it "trogger".

The name of a product, technology, website, whatever is critical for success. The name "trogger" makes me think of "troglodyte" or "troll blogger". Seriously, this is one of the worst names for anything internet or technology-related that anyone could possibly come up with.

Please please please make sure that someone else chooses the name of the next startup you work on.

Oh I'm sorry, I work at a social networking entertainment start-up. You're absolutely right, I should be changing the world. I'll get started on that right away.

Letsee, I'm going to need some granola, Beatles tunes, a hipster haircut, and a peace-encouraging, inner-city-black-kid-helping, hippie-esque, capitalism-hating, new-age social-green-Obama-natural job. Doing something. That will change the world. Yeah.

Reminds me of something my uncle told me: "The rich are different from you and me: they have money...and you don't!"

Seriously though - you can never have too much money, but this doesn't change the fact that it is way better to have, say $10M in net worth vs. $100,000. Of course if you have $10M you're still going to want to be a billionaire, but now you can choose to either work hard to become a billionaire or do something entirely different. You're still going to have to find your place in the world---everyone deals with this---but now you have a huge amount of freedom you didn't have before.

No, it isn't. The well-tempered clavier is good coding music. Chopin is good coding music.

Depression is very much a malfunction. When I was depressed, I wasn't functioning, and now that I take drugs every day to control it (over-the-counter drugs, btw), I function quite well.

What is true is that being just shy of depression is probably adaptive and beneficial, which is why there are many examples of brilliant people who spent part of their lives depressed. It also explains why genes "for depression" haven't been selected out of the gene pool - it is likely that they are beneficial for the majority of carriers (makes you work harder, you're less satisfied with what you have, etc...) but if you have too many of these genes, then you just hate life and want to kill yourself, at least sometimes.

BTW the Wikipedia article on depression is very good and has links to some relatively accessible journal articles on current thinking about depression.

I must vent: my opinion of Knuth went down a few notches after reading this.

I was expecting something useful - like legal documents, lots of howtos. For example: basic Linux networking including setting up services, basic security; legal documents, basic negotiating, basic people networking, PR strategies, etc...

This is just a bunch of advice - not really that useful.

Let me rebut: the problem is not with existence of rewards, the problem is the size of the rewards. Employees who are merely praised for their good work are demotivated because they realize that praise is all they will likely receive in the near future - they had been hoping for a raise, the assurance of a raise, or an opportunity to advance their career.

Case in point: in the finance industry, employees work very hard and are not praised. They are also paid very well, and their pay is usually tied to their performance except in 2008 when everyone got a huge bonus in spite of the meltdown.

Changing the world. I can make money in far less risky ways, and I can pursue my passions in my free time. I am actually somewhat surprised that you managed to fit the word "lifestyle" and "running your own successful company" into the same sentence.

Having said that, I seriously doubt I will ever found a startup - I plan to make a chunk of money and have a life first.

Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill. At my company, we don't try to turn database rows into objects. Here is how it works:

   * we use Python+MySQL
   * each table has an associated class, a CRUD-API if you will
   * a cursor object accesses a table like this:
    cursor.TableName.select_by_ids(low, high)
   * removing means set time_removed to the current timestamp
   * rows are returned as lists of dicts

So the solution to the object-relational mapping problem is: for each table, there is a class that manages access to it, and a row is represented by a a dict.

> They sender has come up with a name, but doesn’t have the focus or confidence to put up a website.

The say that focus is in they eye of they beholder

I have a full time job as a web developer, do not make open source contributions, do not have a girlfriend or a social life, and do have a healthy amount of free time. I spend much of my free time reading technical articles and textbooks in CS and finance (although I could be reading up on representation theory if I wanted to). I also program in my spare time.

Sadly, you've left out many of the details that would help others understand you: when did you graduate? What was your GPA? Did you take quantum or real analysis or a compilers course? If you wanted to, how would you prepare to finish your degree or begin grad school?

There is nothing particularly mysterious about hard work and devoting time to study.

The AEI article is stunningly bad - reminds me of intelligent design arguments. Take this: "To get more economic growth by having more start-ups, new companies would need to be more productive than existing companies." This is like suggesting that people shouldn't have kids because kids aren't as productive as adults. I usually try to not name-call on the internet, but Scott Shane is an idiot. He clearly didn't get to be a professor based on his intelligence.

Unfortunately the linked blog post doesn't quite hit the nail on the head...

I can't buy into a language that uses colon for assignment.

cough---LTCM---cough

Is it me, or does this look like an obvious ploy to get attention? It seems pretty well-timed too, to conincide with the 1 year anniversary of the attacks. I'm suggesting that he hired the botnet to attack his own site.