ashr

This is the exact opposite of my experience at AWS. Amazon is all about blameless fact finding when it comes to root cause analysis. Your company just hired a not so great engineer or misunderstood him.

Looks like something common between the control plane and data plane failed or there is a run-time dependency between the two (bad!) and that dependency failed.

I don't believe 2.5 hours is representative, so please cite these studies. Personally,senior engineers (individual contributors) that I have worked with spend 4-6 hours per day making significant contributions on their own and the other 4-2 hours working/coordinating with their team and sister teams. The only plausible scenario where one can do an acceptable job in 2.5 hours per day is where a senior person is doing the job of an entry level person. For people managers, having effective 2-4 hour days on an ongoing basis are very unlikely in my experience. I am open to be surprised with examples that prove otherwise.

Towers of Hanoi problem (simple version with 3 towers) is a good practical recursion problem that is stimulating and good for visualization.

This summer my kids (elementary & middle school) did the Intro to JS and Advanced JS courses. They really got hooked due to interactive creativity and video lessons. The audio narrative was really fun and kept them interested. Therefore, videos and especially the audio narrative style in Intro to JS is something I would vote for and hope that Khan academy continues that even (and especially) for CS courses.

I hear there is a river named Amazon in Southern Hemisphere and there are people landing in Seattle for river expeditions.

All I see in your argument is preconceived opinions with speculative statements and nothing to back them up. Sorry but you did not add anything to this discussion, not even in the form of new questions or pointing out flaws in the post's arguments using evidence.

You are assuming that their Business model is to profit from the difference in cost of shipping and prime subscription revenue. Rather than profit from a higher purchase volume if one has prime shipping than not.

I for one have observed that I have bought more things since I have had prime shipping. There is something to be said for the quick response to your order in the form of 2 day delivery.

<sarcasm> Right!!! </sarcasm>

Wish I could upvote more than once.

Ditto. Definitely seems like it has the potential to be the Killer app based on the viral potential of P2P, anonymity and widely adapted OS platform. All the best.

That is fantastic info about actual execution, many congratulations to you. It will be great if you could please share your age group range (very roughly; 20+, 30+, 40+ etc). Just trying to relate the results with the age group.

Start with www.coursera.org. There, you will find classes with varying degree of difficulty. If you can, audit a computer science class in the nearby college/university. Build something that you think you would be able to use yourself. Build it bottom-up, one small feature at a time.

I agree with the other observations here that the timings aren't even in the ballpark. For North Denver Metro area, it is displaying 50-60mins for places that are 25 mins away in rush hour.

+1. OpenPhoto offers the freedom of storing my photos in the storage I own and it is something I really care about. Besides, it is an open source project. I can even run my own server if I wanted to!

This is a nice idea executed well. Don't stop here.

While you mentioned that you would like to know more details, at the same time you make it sound like you know the current inner workings of how Microsoft spam filters work.

Do you work for Microsoft spam filtering/email software teams and know the details you mentioned and thus have the inside information? Even then, I am not sure how you can extend that to what are the spam filtering techniques that Microsoft Research has been working on lately.

Agree with m0th87.

Right after my undergrad, I worked in the industry for 5 years and then went to Grad school. Since completing the grad school it has been 10 more years in the industry.

My industry experience has been great so far and I love what I do. I consider my Grad school experience as an enlightening and enjoyable period of my life.

Not everyone has a bad grad school experience. No need to beat down the academic experience. A lot of people gain from it. A career in academia is not the same as being a student.

It seems to me that both are being looked down upon here.

It is unfortunate that instead of turning into a discussion about how to excel in an algorithms interview (which is what the original post is about) this thread has wandered into whether it is useful to even learn algorithms.

What a waste!

Have you ever experienced coworkers discussing something in front of the computer and touching the monitor screen time and again to point out things? It is not the most popular use case, but it does show that touching a screen to interact with a desktop is a natural inclination. Even with a desktop.

As compared to what? A traditional desktop like interface with application icons scattered over the background? As in... iOS?

One would think that the live tiles with continuously updated information show more "connection" with the user.

Facebook and Dropbox are not like running water yet and even that isn't available everywhere. A lot of users still use USB drives to copy pictures.

Yes. With the eclipse.ini changes alone mine starts in 6 seconds now instead of 30+ seconds. Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 CPU, 4 GB DDR3 RAM.

I agree. I was very skeptical about having a "Windows" OS slapped on the touch devices, but after seeing this first video I would say that it doesn't look bad.

Lack of complexity in UX and lack of capabilities are 2 different things. The former is desirable while the latter is a limitation. For instance, IIRC, iOS didn't start out with bluetooth API and they came in later. It is an example of lack of capability. Gruber seems to imply that one means the other, in fact he seems to infer that you need the OS to be less capable for it to be easier to use.

People like iOS not because it does less or in other words can not do certain things. They like it because it does things that it is capable of with ease in a pleasurable way.

Great usability and versatility are not mutually exclusive things and that is how MS seems to be approaching this.

I am guessing that this is because you are off-topic, writing about the publisher which doesn't seem to be the topic of the OP.

Note: This response is about software TDD and not some high level TDD

If you don't know the problem then you are just winging it. Writing software is always with a goal (can it be without?) and thus you should be able to write a test (first) that will tell you if it does what you expect. If you expect it to record click stream, then it records click stream or whatever.

When I was new to TDD, I too found it to be very cumbersome. It took me some time to realize that I don't have to figure out the entire design before I write any test code. I can start with a test, then write the functionality that it is testing and when I realize that this is not what I want but something else then I change my test to test that new thing. Iterate. That is what agile is about.

Discovery that you want something else, happens whether or not you are doing TDD.

Ditto. Couldn't agree more, in fact, I was going to write something very similar.

At high level also, Start-ups do need a TDD philosophy. For Start-up business ideas, the market is the test suite (to take the software analogy further) that is already there and changing the execution plan to make sure you pass those tests is vital.

Plan B? Not Really. More like a wish-list.

I have no idea if there is a specific non-engineer that this post is talking about. The author of the referenced techcrunch article Bindu Reddy is certainly not a non-engineer : http://www.crunchbase.com/person/bindu-reddy

It also seems to me that this post is criticizing two sentences out of the entire article (http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/13/engineers-startups/) without properly understanding them with rest of the context. All this article is saying is that due to the market warming up, now is a good time for engineers to work at a start up.

That said, I agree with the point that dbasch is trying to make even though I don't think that they needed to be presented as a 'rebuttal'.

The way I see it Microsoft brings a lot to the table that only a few could: A fresh new OS in WP7, cloud computing infrastructure, it's own gaming ecosystem in XBox platform and its UX integration with the phone OS etc among other things. So I don't see that choosing WP7 (over Android?) is such a bad deal for Nokia. It wasn't a very long time ago that Android ecosystem wasn't very appealing to the mobile developers as iOS ecosystem was. So I would give this partnership some benefit of doubt and time to deliver on the promise.