davidbalbert

We don't sponsor visas or have any type of accreditation, but if you can figure out how to be in NYC for 3 months, you're more than welcome to apply.

This is exactly how we see it, in a lot of ways. We hope that we're creating value that wasn't there before (I think we are), and we would be very happy destroying stupid hiring rituals.

It's also the reason that we're not charing for it right now. We think it could be really big and important. We're going to see if we can get it there fast while breaking even.

If you weren't busy, we'd love to have you :).

Thanks for the kind words. It means a lot.

Just a bit. The basics of control flow, algorithmic thinking, etc. You should be comfortable writing and running code. Honestly, the most important thing is how fast you learn and how much you love programming. In previous batches we've accepted people who've known very little over people who know more because we think they're more enthusiastic about coding and more likely to do well.

Thanks for the kind words Richard!

We'd be happy to have him.

It's where we live :). Maybe in the future we'll do it in SF/SV too, but building Hacker School takes time so it would be quite some time before that happened if at all.

I just watched the author's tutorial video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKJC6cqdGdE). It's clear that he's a musician.

It's fascinating when people with a deep expertise in another subject can also write code. Makes me wish I had a deep understanding of some other field.

The Ksplice blog is one of my all time favorite programming blogs. I am very happy it's back. If you haven't seen it before, it's well worth looking at the archive.

In question 2 I got tripped up because I assumed sizeof(int) == 8 on a 64 bit system. I also got question 4 wrong because I didn't know that &x gives a pointer to an array of size 5.

Honestly, it's a little of both.

I am so excited about this! Watching other people use vim has been the most valuable part of my vim education. I think this is going to be a great venue for it.

Edit: I'm also clueless when it comes to vimscript. It would be nice to see some stuff on that.

You got it. That's what I was going for.

This was exactly what I was getting at. I found that I didn't learn a lot in the classes that I wasn't interested in.

I'm not trying to say that CS degrees aren't valuable. Just that being a programmer and Computer Scientist are different things. Just because many great hackers are also Computer Scientists doesn't imply that they were great hackers because they studied CS.

Most of the great hackers I know have been hacking since they were kids. This doesn't mean studying CS didn't add anything, just that studying CS alone won't make you a great hacker. Just a Computer Scientist.

I know many great hackers who studied CS too, but almost none of them are great programmers _because_ they studied CS. They had to become great programmers on their own.

Pythonbrew installs multiple versions of python and manages your path so you can switch which ones are active. I have only played around with it a bit, but the combination of Pythonbrew and Virtualenv should be approximately the same as rvm for ruby.

Looks like their blog is down too (http://blog.ksplice.com). This was by far one of my favorite blogs. Good, long, articles about kernel hacking. I hope it comes back up soon and isn't gone for good.

I've been thinking the same thing ever since this story broke. I don't think bidding mathematical constants says anything about whether or not google was taking the auction seriously.

I am the author :). It's possible I didn't make my point as clearly as I could have in my post though.

Also re: phone prices, I agree with you. I think the pundits were wrong and pre-judged Apple's path to success on little evidence. I think there's plenty of evidence that their current path on the web is the wrong one.

No they're not failing over all at all. They're just failing at web stuff (which they keep trying at). I wouldn't change a thing with their hardware business, and as a result I wouldn't change apple.com. I would change me.com though, because it's not a success by any definition of the term.

Also, my point was not about whether a site is amateur or professionally done. It's whether the focus is on amateur or professional content. Apple is very good at the latter and not so much at the former which is why they have so much trouble with the web.

Yeah, I guess there are a few small leaps in the first two points there. The connection I was trying to make was that Apple's taking it's experience with things they understand (desktop apps, marketing to professionals, making beautiful things, etc) and applying it to a new domain that they don't have a good grasp on.

I don't think these situations are parallels.

Clones were a bad idea because they diluted Apple's brand and cut way into their margins (Apple is a hardware company and makes money from that).

As for cheap phones, Apple now sells the 3GS for $49. I don't think this is an example of the naysayers being right, it's just Apple having their cake and eating it too.

The point is not that Apple should do the same thing as everyone else to succeed at the web. It's just that they've been trying one thing over and over again with no success. They have to change something.

My point wasn't that less professional looking websites succeed over more professional looking sites. It's Apple's focus on professional content (the select few) vs amateur content (all of us).

I didn't mean to use amateur in a derogative sense. Amateurs are just people who don't get paid for their work.

Re: Facebook/MySpace, I think this was a different dynamic. The thing facebook did right was tone down the design significantly so that everyone's content became the only important thing on the page. It's still amateur content though.

If Apple had done Stack Overflow, I bet they would have had a team of certified experts to answer the questions and I don't think it would have worked very well. In Stack Overflow, there's no separation between who can ask and answer questions (besides a few karma points). That kind of chaos Apple doesn't excel at.

I've always wanted a search engine that is optimized for searching for code embedded in web pages. AFAIK google code search isn't really an option because it only searches through code, not through blog posts, stack overflow, and other pages with code in them.

As far as language design goes though, I'd rather use a language that's optimized for writing code than for searching for it :).

Often times you are behind a firewall and this isn't a viable option. It's also easier to remember a domain name rather than an IP address.

Well significant debt complicates everything, but assuming you don't have any debt, necessity is the mother of invention. If your livelihood depends on you learning something, you will probably learn it much faster and better.

Totally forgot about this point. Starting up right out of college is great because you know how to live like a college student :).

Perhaps I was overly strong, but my point was that whatever you're learning at your job, you'll learn it faster if you're starting your own company. I worked a few jobs right out of college and I learned some stuff that I think is applicable to our startup, but I was still virtually clueless when we actually went to start it.

When it comes to the quickest way to put yourself in a position to successfully start your startup, there's no comparison between learning at your job and just starting it.

This is super important because the longer you wait, the more risky it becomes to start your startup in the first place.

Series A + 2 to 3 people is way earlier than I thought. I would like to have someone to take care of all this paperwork for me though... :)

How did you find yours? Was he a friend before hand?

With embedded browser views (a la webkit), this is actually pretty doable.