integraton

Iterating over a hash slightly wrong when writing code in a google doc during an interview is such a stupid, trivial thing to be judged on, whether it's you or someone else doing the judging. It's clear from the "My lame attempt" example that the basic concepts are understood, and if he's written a series of articles about the Enumerable module then he probably knows it better than the majority of professional developers working with the language.

If this is a serious article, then it really highlights everything that's wrong with tech interviewing.

For example, the Node community absolutely loves MongoDB for inexplicable reasons, and support for other datastores is terrible. Despite Postgres supporting hstore for years and Node being popular for years, the two hstore modules are "node-postgres-hstore" (7 stars on github) which hasn't been updated in 1 year and "node-hstore" (17 stars on github) that hasn't been updated in 2 years. Everything I've seen indicates that this is typical for modules in Node.

Meanwhile, Ruby and Rails support Postgres extremely well at this point.

Similarly, node has several migration libraries, all of which are pretty limited. One of the popular ones, "node-migrate" by one of the most prolific node module developers, still has an open issue from 2 years ago about using timestamped migrations, with the developer commenting as if the concept is news to him (https://github.com/visionmedia/node-migrate/issues/2)

- Anything about venture investment or finance related to fundraising, company valuation, liquidation preferences, etc. Your investors will tell you everything you need to know.

- Management. There's really nothing here you need to know about. Hire fast, fire fast, have a ping-pong table and catered lunches. It's that simple.

- Product development and project management. You are a visionary and everything you are doing is novel and innovative, so don't waste your time on these subjects.

- Computer science. Really, it's nothing like it was 20 years ago when the only language was FORTRAN or whatever. Everything you need to know about building software you can learn from attending a talk or two at a conference, provided it doesn't interfere with networking. Just make sure you only go to node.js-related talks because everything else is old, outdated, and useless. Also, don't even bother worrying about databases. MongoDB is the only thing you need.

- Marketing. This is especially useless since product is everything. Just build your product, put it online, make the app live in the app store, and go back to iterating on your product. They will come.

You can get any knowledge you need related to any of this by just building a business. Since you are clearly going to be the next Steve Jobs, you don't have time to waste reading useless things.

1) That people who don't know CoffeeScript have to use CoffeeScript when they encounter CoffeeScript.

2) He thinks require might have been implemented differently, though he thinks that maybe that might have been changed, but "I don't really use it so I don't really know."

"One might look at this and go: Why can't we get the smartest people from Facebook and Google and from Twitter to come and work out these problems?" Johnson says. "The problem is that the way that federal contracting works is so burdensome that the only people who get contracts like this are experts at lobbying and experts at regulations that require you to get these sorts of contracts. And they're not experts at doing the job of building these websites."

For most of the companies that HNers talk about, whether they use Python or Rails or Scala or Node is only relevant in so far as it helps them iterate quickly and gain traction, and that's what investors care about.

Unless your strategy is dependent on choosing a particular technology (which, in the context of the web, usually means "build around the JVM"), your tech stack is not remarkably relevant to investors as long as it's part of an active ecosystem.

Don't forget that. If you aren't an expert, cut that micromanagement nonsense out, step aside, and let the experts do their jobs.

http://ilikestuffblog.com/2013/04/26/do-you-want-to-spam-you...

That you have to get approved and give references is also the biggest "f* you" to potential users. Why would any sensible person waste their references' time and goodwill with this nonsense?

Hopefully someone will make a worthwhile "founder dating" service that just lets users find others who want to work on something and gives them a way to make contact. Don't make users jump through hoops, and don't abuse users.

Furthermore, because the agricultural system and all of the regulations support large-scale farming, small-scale family farms have to work within the system. (eg, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2009-02-05/more-on-the-s...).

The trend is toward more factory farming, not less, since small scale farms are less profitable, often not covering costs. The difficulty of making small farms sustainable is generally attributed to the regulations, infrastructure, and economic realities increasingly favoring large scale factory farming.

If you doubt any of what I've said here, the USDA and others have plenty of reports available: http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r...

Think about this: I can see from the linked page that you understand how adding type="password" to an input makes some consumers, like various web browsers, treat that field differently. There's a lot of stuff like that in HTML.

If you want a short intro that also explains some of the "why" behind various aspects of HTML5, read this: http://www.abookapart.com/products/html5-for-web-designers

The HTML5 spec also has a lot of info ( http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/grouping-content.html#the-div-ele... ). For example:

> Authors are strongly encouraged to view the div element as an element of last resort, for when no other element is suitable. Use of more appropriate elements instead of the div element leads to better accessibility for readers and easier maintainability for authors.

"Semantic" actually means something important in the context of HTML, and this project completely violates it.

Among the failures of the system is the excessive emphasis on the traditional four year path, as well as the lack of clear information about the alternatives.

A growing share of mobile devices in addition to the growing desktop web traffic just means more opportunities for everyone.

I've had to correct the distortion of these numbers before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847337), and I'll do it again. Using Wikimedia as an example, as mobile accounts for a bigger share, overall traffic is growing significantly, and even desktop traffic is growing, not declining:

Wikimedia June 2012: 149,085 M requests - http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2012-06/Squ...

Wikimedia June 2013: 223,725 M requests - http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2013-06/Squ...

As you can see, Windows declined in share from 70.45% to 56.10%, but total number of Windows desktop requests grew from 105,035M to 125,520M. Similar pattern with Mac Desktop.

Mobile means more web traffic, not less, and desktop web traffic is also growing.

Edit: Here is another example from the past few days that's unusable on mobile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302825

This is a common problem with media sites. I dread trying to load quartz, usa today, gawker, etc since every thick-client media site is intermittently a bad citizen on mobile browsers (for example, gawker in Chrome on iOS currently perpetually reloads the page). Even when these kinds of sites work, there's often a multi-second delay where where the user has to sit and watch elements fly around as the page is built.

Edit again: just to be clear, if you are a non-technical product manager or CEO type, my comment should not be interpreted in any way as an implication that the web or JavaScript is somehow inherently bad and therefore your developers must build a "native app." My comment's intended audience is developers with a deep, working understanding of these technologies.

See the following thread of comments on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aqdxn/temple_o...

This is essentially the equivalent of "outsider art" in the technology world.

While I could be accused of excessive cynicism, I do believe this is common enough that it should be addressed. There's a pervasive delusion that decisions are made by rational, informed actors, when that is rarely the case.

What is "crave" in this context? This is already an unconventional action for an interface. Am I to assume that you are trying a new variation on "like" / "favorite"? Since it doesn't use a conventional name, does it do something different? If it is just essentially a "like" action, do you have sufficient reason to break from convention? If an affluent white male interface-creating technologist in the bay area like me doesn't immediately know what the action does, maybe the unconventional icon isn't the only deviation from convention that's causing confusion.

From a less cynical perspective, the fact of the matter is that compared to anywhere I'm aware of, the Bay Area has a much stronger culture of entrepreneurs assisting each other. There's a much stronger culture of what could perhaps be framed as mentorship, with a large population of people who have been in the game for a long time and are still engaged as founders, executives, or investors. It's also probably one of the few places where there's a widespread acceptance that innovation means experimenting with risky business models without being forced to constantly focus on short-term revenue.

From a more cynical perspective, in many cases for younger or newer founders, this means it's easier to climb the social ladder and be in the "tech entrepreneur" scene. It feels exciting and the money flowing around between young people (something that doesn't exist everywhere) makes everything seem more real than it is. I also think it's far easier to inflate the value of companies here for a variety of reasons.

Says the .NET developer with empty github and bitbucket accounts. Meanwhile, there are those of us who live and breathe open source software, building industry-transforming businesses around open source software and contributing to the open source ecosystem. Don't even try to pretend you are anything other than an outside observer.