bartonfink

I hate finding work. Let me rephrase. I HATE finding work. That is, by far, my least favorite part of freelancing.

I don't think it's that people with money NEVER stress about spending money - it's a matter of degree. Most software engineers are good earners by US standards, and as such, going to the water park for $40 doesn't really register. Buying a $1 soda isn't even worth thinking about. However, buying a $20,000 car would certainly lead to some thoughts like "Can I afford this? What won't I be buying because of this car?" The advantage that a good income provides is that you're not stressing about daily purchases - not that you stress about nothing at all.

One of the common mechanisms that homeschooling parents use is a co-op mechanism. A group of homeschooling families in an area decide to school their children together, with varying degrees of cohesion. This, especially coupled with extracurricular activities, can easily address any concerns about socialization. The adults I know who were homeschooled and seem to have socialization issues by and large were homeschooled in a bubble and not encouraged or given opportunities to socialize. Another benefit of these co-ops is that they can allow for shared resources and expertise that replicates some of the other benefits of a more traditional school environment.

An easy example of this might be to take advantage of guided tours of theatres or museums. It's not often easy to get a guide for one parent and one child, but organizations will accommodate a group of 30 more frequently. Another example of this collaboration is electives. Even the best-intentioned homeschooling parent might not know some skill their children have taken an interest in (e.g. cartooning), but if another homeschooling parent knows that skill (e.g. a professional cartoonist), it's common for such parents to make arrangements for lessons in the interest of the group. A parent with an interesting hobby (e.g. model rocketry or electronics) could very easily expose other children to that hobby in an educational way. A group of willing parents can go a long way towards replicating the breadth of educational experience that a traditional school and its resources can provide, without any of the drawbacks.

I'd like the option to do that at times, but I'm not so sure I'd stick with that pace for good. I get a lot more pleasure out of evenings at home with my family than I do out of that intensity of focus.

I don't live in SF or need that sort of instruction, but that strikes me as a bargain rate - even for group instruction.

Helium is extremely expensive, rare and likely to escape Earth's atmosphere, but not reactive under any conditions I know of. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is extremely flammable.

Also one in Park Meadows where I live. Slightly less weird...

I see one just about every other day cruising downtown Denver.

I would be extremely hesitant to take a "contract-to-hire" offer, because that expects me to take on all the risk of a job not working out. That said, I wouldn't mind a 40-80 hour paid engagement, on my own schedule, as a sort of job interview. I only wish you guys served more markets than NY and SF.

Not that this has anything to do with your story, but Lua was originally written in Brazil because of governmental restrictions on imported software which precluded the use of more mainstream languages. They did, in fact, have special programming languages in Brazil.

Hope everything went well with your surgery and your recovery is speedy. I found HN because Slashdot changed their UI one too many times and programming.reddit didn't offer very high quality discussion.

I work as a software developer, mostly doing web apps (currently in RoR and node). In the past, I worked on simulations of vehicular networks in grad school. I found that far more interesting than web development, but only because of the problem domain and not necessarily because of the work itself. There's very little sense of "pushing the envelope" in most web development, and while the simulations I was writing and running weren't exactly doing that either, I had more sense that I was actually producing something than I get by burning through code to resell flights and hotel bookings.

I enjoy software development, but I feel conflicted about it at times. I used to be a professional landscaper, and I found my life much more intellectually fulfilling then when I compare it to now. There's something to be said for a job which only requires bodily presence but leaves your mind free to do whatever you want, and I really enjoyed that. I did not, however, enjoy working for subsistence level wages under constant threats of being replaced by immigrant labor - noone wants to work in an environment where they're treated as if $7 an hour is an outrageous wage.

SEEKING WORK - Denver or remote

I've worked with Node/Express, Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, Java, Mongo, Redis, lots of RDBMS's. I work full-time as a full-stack developer (everything between provisioning hardware to graphic design is in my ballpark) at MapQuest and moonlight as a software developer to help fund emigration down under (Australia or New Zealand). I'd love to chat if you're looking for something I could help out with!

E-mail: jsbeal@gmail.com

I was asked in an interview in Denver, so for varying values of "Midwest" HN is notable there as well.

What's your e-mail address, boss? It's not visible by default in your HN profile - you have to explicitly mention it. Alternatively, you can ping me.

I'm not in NZ yet, but am planning to emigrate there from the US in a couple of years. Do any of you mind if I ping you with ?'s about life in general over there?

If I had no further need for money (e.g. if I could provide for my family at a middle-class level permanently), I'd landscape full-time.

I've been remote pairing for a while, and either use a Google Hangout or an RDP connection depending on latency and pair preference. RDP allows both parties to control the host, but seems to have higher bandwidth requirements and can lead to some other confusion when pairing (e.g. moving the mouse in the RDP window by mistake). The Hangout doesn't allow for remote control, which I prefer (it makes pair responsibilities very clear), and further, seems to share a screen more clearly than RDP.

I would not recommend trying to constantly push-pull to keep code in sync when remote pairing: you're cluttering the hell out of your repo and making "good" commits much harder to see.

1500-1900 hours per year is considerably more than most software engineers? Are you sure you haven't miscalculated somewhere along the way to derive that?

Assuming we're talking about the US, I just don't see how that assertion can hold water. 2000 hours per year is a widely-held rule of thumb for "full time" employment - 40 hours a week * 50 work weeks per year. 1500 hours means you average a 30 hour work week or take a tremendous amount of vacation - neither of which sound anything like the employment situations for "most software engineers."

It does seem odd to not even pay it lip service with eggs replacing the O's.

0.1% of a house's value is almost certainly not an appreciable amount of money. It's so low that, if the parties could not find a way to come to terms over it, the agents may swallow it themselves just to get the deal done.

For a half-million dollar home, which would be a relatively nice house for most of the country, you're talking about $500. For any party on that transaction (buyer, seller or their respective agents who each stand to make $15k on a normal 3% commission), that's not a lot of money and is almost certainly not worth arguing over if you're in all but the earliest stages of negotiation.

I think, in the best case (the right people are all together, and the right raw materials are readily available), you could probably get a modern computer built in 10 years, and a relatively basic microprocessor built in a few years less. If we don't have to reinvent a global communications system to get experts talking to each other, build mines and refineries to produce chip-grade silicon or rebuild airplanes to get materials from around the world, this task is a lot simpler.

The biggest problem isn't that modern computers depend on some piece of technology or process that is lost to us. It's that all the people who understand every step in that chain, from survivalist blacksmiths who can smelt ore to make tools to industrial chemists who can fashion substances that nature doesn't readily provide to electrical engineers and developers who will actually program the damn computer in year 9, are currently widely dispersed. Put them together and give them what they need and I think they could get the job done more quickly than you think.

Of course, it's more likely that everything and everyone you need will be scattered around the world when this instant occurs, and if that's the case, I'd honestly bet it would take hundreds of years to independently reinvent a modern computer because you'd need to reinvent most of modern society to gather the people and the materials to do that.

Do you think you'd be able to keep up the nights/weekends commitments without cofounders?

20 hours a week? I think your math is wrong (1 hour * 2 ways * 5 weekdays = 10 hours).

I did for some time, and still don't use the "smart" capabilities of my phone very much. I got a smartphone when I changed carriers to Sprint and found that, with a data-enabled plan for my wife, it made no sense to stick with a regular phone since I was paying for data anyway.

My argument against having one in the past was that, for large portions of my day (at work or home), I was never more than about 10 feet from an internet connected computer, and didn't need an extra device for the unconnected parts of my day. I still don't see my phone as a primary computing platform, and likely never will - it is, at best, a convenience that replaces the pad of paper I used to carry around to make notes/observations.

Another good approach is to replace 'delete' with 'select count(1)' or something similar. The where clause can remain the same, you know how many rows will be affected and there's less overhead of remembering to set up a transaction, writing an update statement, rolling back, etc.

Interesting tangent, as someone who was fluent in Latin many moons ago (could speak it at an English conversational pace), I literally had to force myself to ignore your filler (which includes several Latin fragments).

Please ping me directly, but at this time, we're not looking for anything like a CTO.

Mapquest.com

Primarily in Denver, CO and Lancaster, PA, but we're a relatively distributed company so go ahead and ask if you live somewhere else. As an AOL subsidiary, we've got employees who work out of AOL offices around the world so it wouldn't be unheard of to work from e.g. Seattle or New York if you decide Denver's just got too much sunshine. I've also been told we will sponsor an H1B.

Over the past year, MapQuest has brought on an almost entirely new management team to shake things up and change the direction of the company from answering the ? "How do I get there?" to answering the more interesting ? "Where do I want to go?" We've released two new products in the last year (Discover and Local, formerly known as Vibe) and are aggressively working on creating an engineering-driven culture that actually builds things people might want to use instead of polishing products that were cool in 2004. We've had a banner year, and are looking to hire engineers as well as product managers to continue this upward trend.

Among the technical roles we're looking to fill are several Ruby developers at varying levels of expertise to help develop new products as well as one Java developer to work with our data team and revamp various backend services (i.e. search, geocoding and a data ingestion service that populates our location databases). Ever since Valve leaked their company handbook, the phrase "T shaped" has been been thrown around a lot by upper management, so you'll need to be able to do full-stack development. We do a lot of pair programming right now, so if you've got experience doing that, it'd be a big plus. We're particularly interested in someone who's got very deep Rails experience to serve as a sort of tech lead, but we have many positions open for Rails people so if you'd be interested at all drop a line.

Product is looking to bring on people with some combination of travel industry knowledge and mobile applications to help get the company past maps and directions. Most of our product people have development experience, so you'll be expected to be able to "talk shop" with the engineers you work with, but your day- to-day responsibilities aren't going to be producing code as much as producing ideas, pitching them to the rest of the company and helping the engineers and designers see them through to completion.

I can definitively say that MapQuest is among the best places I've ever worked. The office space is fantastic (Downtown Denver right off the 16th Street Mall) and the new management team is very serious about doing things right as we try to pivot the company away from directions and into product development. The brand is practically a household name, the product team is happy to listen to engineers for feedback or ideas, and we've got the interesting position right now of being able to work like a startup except with a large pre-build audience (I've been told that we had 40M UV's on a brand new product on launch day, for example). You can read the company postings here (http://company.mapquest.com/careers/) but I'd really enjoy being able to answer ?'s directly. My e-mail is in my profile and please feel free to contact me personally if you have further ?'s, want to chat, or anything else. Happy 2013, and hope to hear from some of you soon!

Presumably because, among the languages (and standard libraries) you mentioned that have implemented this pattern, Groovy is the language that is most tightly associated with the JVM (which Kotlin is obviously targeting).

I'm not particularly savvy to diamond prices, so all I can offer is my limited experience from 2008 when I was in the market. Further, diamonds aren't really fungible, so it's hard to compare pricing as you're really never going to buy the same diamond in two different contexts. That said, I'll provide the details of my own experience and let you decide whether Blue Nile's prices qualify as "good".

I got a "perfect" (D color, brilliant cut, flawless clarity) 0.5 carat diamond in a platinum band for about $4500 all inclusive. Looking at 3 brick and mortar stores, I did not find a single ring that compared in quality with what I bought from Blue Nile. Most retailers seem to cater towards larger diamonds, and I didn't want one of those - diamonds exhibit a serious iceberg effect, and a "larger" diamond doesn't always appear substantially larger when mounted in a ring. Based on what I did see, I expect a comparable ring from a brick and mortar store would be around double the cost and significantly harder to find. I did not check other online retailers.

Also, for what it's worth, I did not involve my wife in the ring-buying decision, favoring the element of surprise (I got her ring size by pretending to talk in my sleep for two months before the purchase and asking her nonsensical ?'s). Blue Nile's interface would be exceptional for involving a significant other, though - you can check pictures of an individual diamond as it would appear mounted in various rings, and I believe you could upload a photo of a hand to see how it would look when worn (I didn't do that - element of surprise and all). If it's not obvious enough from my posts so far, I'm a big fan of the company and would encourage anyone out there who's looking for a diamond to check Blue Nile.

# EDIT - Noticed the caveat about pregnancy. Blue Nile will also resize their rings for free provided you ship it back to them.