I love PostgreSQL, regardless of the version as far as it's >= 8. Super efficient and reliable RDBMS yet less "enterprise" that Oracle. I always wondered why MySQL gained more popularity.
38 karma · joined March 25, 2015
Benefits/perks are rather equal across the employers. Europe is a socialistic world, lots of things are regulated by law.
Again, that's what I heard from some folks currently working there.
While I enjoy a very broad spectrum of music in general (from classical music to death metal, and from avant-garde jazz to hardcore gabba), fast, complex, loud or noisy music seems to get pretty distracting in many cases.
But that might depend on your job, actually. If you are a football player and you spend most of the time working out or outdoors, energetic music may work much better. Or, if you are a factory worker, where you have to deal with 120dB noise over your shift. I don't think ambient would be a good choice there, rather thrash metal or hardcore. :)
If you need some specific examples of "calm" music that works for me, please let me know, I probably could recommend something in particular.
PS I apologize if there were screenshots, but I just failed to find them.
I am afraid that I have to say now that most of the things you have written are objectively wrong. Too bad you don't seem to comprehend that... But it's good that it doesn't really affect me and my life (which I consider pretty happy, by the way :) ).
You could try to go outside and talk to different kinds of people more. Maybe changing multiple occupations wouldn't hurt either. So you could meet and perceive people from different worlds. That usually helps broaden your mind.
Have fun with your objectively wrong life. :)
By the way, please note that I never argued with anyone here regarding their beliefs and personal views. Neither did I give them advice or ask to do something. I just pointed out that various people can live, think and behave differently (some of them a lot). I never said anything regarding what is right/wrong or good/bad. I prefer to let people decide for themselves. And I believe this is very important for people to keep open-minded so the humanity could continue developing itself and thrive. Make mistakes, learn from them, improve, and so on.
Do you really think that people can treat seriously what you write and feel respect for you when you constantly tell them what they "have to do", or make such references as "baloney", "stupid", or ask them to "seek therapy", and stuff like that?
I respect what other people say and do even if their views are totally different from mines. Sometimes I learn something from them, sometimes they learn something from me. But whatever they, or I, think and do is our personal choice, and no one can tell whether it's right or wrong.
You sound very judgmental, but it doesn't make you right (or wrong). It's all still only your personal opinion. Is Trump the future of the USA or its doom? Is Putin a rescue for the whole world or evil? There are both supporters and haters. Who is right? I am not to judge. And neither anyone else, I believe. The future will tell us. I respect your way of thinking, and will appreciate very much if you start doing the same (regardless of whether you agree or not with some particular things, and towards all the people around, not me specifically).
BTW, I love this article: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/204856
Not spending a lot of time with your family doesn't necessarily mean having bad relationship or having troubles with your relatives. Moreover, if your partners accept what you do and how it affects them (sometimes maybe in an unfortunate way), it actually can make your relationships much stronger.
What will happen with the next generations - no one knows. I think it's a bit irrelevant and idealistic. I live my own life. I want to make the best out of it. For myself, for my family, and for all the other people. What will happen after my life ends won't really matter for me (I am an atheist/agnostic). I am not saying we shouldn't invest our resources in the next generations, but instead of hoping on our kids and putting all the burden on them, I firmly believe we first should do whatever we can ourselves.
I am afraid your examples actually play against you. Steve Jobs (just off the top of my head) completely abandoned his family and built one of the greatest company of all times.
Please just try to get a bit out of your personal mindset and try to think and look at these things from a different angle. If something seems to be bad or wrong for you doesn't really mean that it's bad or wrong for everybody.
I am not saying that all people should follow that. Again, my point was that there are people who try starting/running a business, who are in love with what they are doing, whom you may even call insane to a certain extent, and who expect to find (at least at early stages) people who completely share their goals, vision and beliefs. And who won't hire a person who thinks that there are things more important, regardless of whether it's their family or a weekend hiking.
I've read while ago that founders of some startup (AirBnb?) had spent about half a year to hire their first employee, and the question they typically asked the candidates was "Would you take the job if you knew you would die in a year?", or something like that. So, I personally understand and share that approach completely. As you can see, at least I am not the only person who treat these things that way.
And, again, I am not saying that it's for everyone, but people should keep in mind that it can totally be the case when they apply for a job at a startup. People are different. I agree that most of them feel about life same way you do - treating their families or some personal hobbies as higher priorities. But not all of them. Some people approach their lives differently.
Regarding the skills, the motivation is much more important (I believe, at least). Say, if you don't know a thing about software engineering, but you love the industry the product targets at, and you are willing to learn, I would be happy to hire you and reject all the experienced engineers from Google, Facebook and other fancy companies who don't give a damn about the product, regardless of how skilled they are.
So I went to the main page and tried to watch the video (it's just about 2 minutes, I think). The things did not get better.
I am a fairly technical person but I am always trying to look at any idea from the consumer perspective. So here we go...
1. I generate content, say, videos. I upload them on YouTube and I know how it might potentially get monetized. I mean that for X views and Y ads I may get Z dollars. All these Bitcoin/Blockchain kind of ideas always explain some kind of technology improvements but they never touch how the end user would actually benefit from it. Saying "everything will be better", "you will get fair profit", "no piracy anymore", and stuff like that is close to saying nothing. No one usually tells "why", "how" and "what" I would need to do as a user.
2. There is YouTube. There is Vimeo. There is Facebook which is constantly trying to make video integration more efficient. Instagram. Twitter. Etc. So, if the idea is to build another YouTube with some different technology behind the scene, then my question is - who would follow? I won't. Seriously. Because YouTube works, and there are millions of people there. If you build a network with different content, different functionality, different user experience, I may consider switching or using it at the same time with YouTube (YouTube also sucks a lot). But I will never care, as a user, whether it's built on MySQL, Big Table or Blockchain. That's not my business at all.
So, the technology might be great (I am not to judge), but the application of it looks still blurry to me. People just don't seem to come up with any good idea how to apply Blockchain, and they are trying to take any random industry and build a solution which "should work better" than existing ones. But from the user point of view, it doesn't matter.
1. "I have kids that I can use my vacation time for". If you think this way, you shouldn't apply for a job at a startup. You need to be prepared that there is a good chance for you to not spend a minute with your family, nor to have a vacation, over next months/years.
2. From what I learned, startups don't necessarily hire the best technical person. The are looking for the best motivated one. From what you write, it may appear that you are not really motivated/interested.
A few years back I was looking for a job and spent about half a year to manage that. Got rejected by, probably, 100 companies, and got only two offers. And not because I am a jerk or technically incompetent. It's just in most cases I was not really interested, and I believe people saw that. So, it looked really strange and unfortunate to me, but I totally understand why it happened, and don't blame anyone except for myself.
Usually, it's your fault, in fact. You might be not well prepared, you didn't sleep last night, you don't care about the company/product, you don't have enough skills that they require, you behave offensive, you are late for the interview, and so on.
You know, I am not defending the interviewers and hiring managers, but they all have their point as well. It's you who wants to change your job, so it's all on you. Regardless of how ridiculous the interview process may appear to you.
The criteria could be:
* The time one would need to implement some particular task (build a website, application, algorithm, etc.) – you can measure it in minutes/days/months and compare.
* How much support the written piece of code would require over time – the number of bugs, the time required to fix those.
* How much effort is needed to extend the code – time spent on new features or changes built on top of that code.
* How clean the code/design is – the time another person would spend to understand the logic to get onboard to comfortably work with it after.
These are just off the top of my head, you can come up with much more, probably. I believe, everything is measurable. You just need to understand the specifics of the industry and decide what exactly to measure.
I am 100% with you. Especially regarding the direct support from fans. Bandcamp, Kickstarter, Patreon, and other similar online projects proved the validity of their models pretty well. I mean it's not necessary to force people to pay. If you are good at what you do, if you are open to directly communicate with your audience, if you can developer your "brand"/"name" online well, you have great chances to succeed, and to get supported by people who love what you do. I believe in goodness of people in general. :)
If we think thoroughly, one can say that anything that comes through the cables, amplifiers and speakers is lossy. Just because it's not the direct transmission of the sound from the music instrument to a human ear through air. As we all know, our ear is a pretty complex audio sensor that consumes sound waves from multiple directions (perhaps, the unlimited number of directions) - direct and reflected waves. So if someone says that all the performances of every rock or electronic band are "lossy" just because the sound gets transmitted through a limited number of speakers (not to mention the number of sound effects getting applied - distortion, hi/lo-frequency filters, reverb, compression etc.), that guy could be onto something in actual fact. That position also has some grounds and rights to exist.
Also, I doubt one can precisely emulate the actual performance of an artist with just 2 (5, or even more) recorded channels. As every performance, from the listener perspective, also depends on the location, current place's acoustic parameters, etc. (say, if you are in a garage with metal walls, the sound is reflected differently than in an open field or mountains). As well as different people attending a music event will hear different kind of sound, simply because each of them will be located in a different position and receive different/unique sound waves from different directions. From this perspective any record of that exact concert would be "lossy" (not the same) for every single person.
Some people in the thread discussed whether the audio record keeps lossless after mastering. Well, you could say, applying any filter to a record (regardless of whether your intention is to make it sound better or not) distorts/changes the record anyway. Especially keeping in mind that it may involve eq-filters and compression for different frequency bands. I mean, do we lose something in that case? Sure. Do we call it "lossy"? I suppose most people don't.
The other guys tried to use the limitation of a human ear as an argument as well. But this is also debatable. Where would we stop that way? Exclude all the frequencies above 22KHz off the consideration while speaking of "lossless" vs. "lossy"?
I might be mistaken here, but I think applying the term "lossless" to CD quality is a convention amongst the most people simply to have some kind of a common measurement standard to refer to as a basic "unhurt" record in the digital space. Whether it is correct or not technically... Well, I am not sure it really matters now.
PS That being said, you seem to have got down-voted wrongly. While you may have an opinion which is a bit different from what the other people have regarding the use of "lossless" thingy, you don't seem to have said anything bad. I am voting you up myself just trying to negate that wrongdoing. :) BTW, I even didn't know that one can down-vote here. Every time I visit this web-site, I feel like I got back in 80s in terms of how this forum looks like (UI/UX). I wonder when YC will finally do something about that and align it to the contemporary web standards. It's super weird that the company funding most promising startups in 2016 has a forum-like kind of stuff lost 20 years behind. Sorry for the off-topic.
Over last few years they have done for the music industry much more than anyone else in the business. Yet avoiding a huge buzz that the other players generate (like Spotify, Pandora, Apple, etc.).
* They seem to be the only profitable company in the online music business,
* They pay directly to the content owners (artists and labels) avoiding stupid useless institutions like RIAA and SoundExchange,
* They don't raise hundreds of millions just to squander them on advertisement,
* They are actually helping increase the income for indies,
* They provided tools to anyone to easily sell their music and merch,
* And it's still just a couple of dozen people working there.
This company is kind of the ideal example that every single startup should follow, I believe. Instead of infinite noise and funding rounds keeping unprofitable for years, they just did the job and continue to grow.
Kudos!