jhull

Don't usually turn to this guy for advice but I 100% agree with this. I am going through the same old interview template right now that everyone has copied from google/facebook and I think while it applies some places, for early startups, its ridiculous to use that as a marker.

You should hire for a developers ability to execute, not their ability to solve problem about bowling balls and skyscrapers, and not their ability to reverse() a string without using reverse(). I get that they are testing your overall data structure knowledge and your algorithmic thinking, but those are also things that one can find on google, things that one can educate one's self on when they need to. Early stage companies want to look for those people who will do that, people who encounter a problem and then just go out and solve it.

(.....now I will stop ranting and go back to memorizing stupid puzzle/data structure interview questions, for my next phone screen in a few hours)

I bet it's these types of missions that Presidents really love. It's not the obvious stuff that is asked of (one of) the most powerful people in the world, like declaring war or making executive orders or living in the White house. It's the slightly quirkier stuff, like brokering a clear version of Coke. I bet Truman loved this. It's like working at a company doing the same thing everyday, but being most excited for this little side project you have going on.

There are ways to obliterate from git[1], but to your point of complexity, its not as easy as just "git obliterate some-file"

[1] https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data

Buying ExactTarget adds 6000 more prospects/customers that Salesforce can sell to. Assuming that it signs up a fraction of those to use Salesforce Service Cloud or Data.com or any of the other Salesforce products, that's more money and helps justify the price.

Oracle has been doing this for years (and probably where Benioff got his playbook) They buy up a company, fold in their customers and cross-sell their other products to them.

We were a 6 person startup that hired a CFO and cut soda because our burn was too high and we hadn' t raised money in 3 years. We experienced that exact same meeting and resulting effect at our company. It probably seems strange that we would get a CFO this early, but our finances were a total mess and we had a co-founder who dipped so 4 years after the founding we were hamstrung when going out to raise money.

I wonder if putting something like this on a checkout page for Gas-X or anti-diarrheals might actually increase conversions.

Just scroll on the site itself

Was just inspired to add goat herding as a skill. Please endorse me for it: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=22023530&trk=tab...

I don't get why everyone is so paranoid about this. What are people trying to hide?

probably exactly the way someone feels when a non-technical person wants a website made and a google search tells them it only costs $200

the person in charge of ordering must really hate fish sauce and made the final decision.

All artists work off of methods/themes that other artists might have coined before them.

Picasso said "Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal"

what difference does it make?

or he's just capitalizing on a post that he know will get lots of attention to plug his next gig

I wonder if he will eclipse the current top 10 [1] and if priests worldwide will encourage their folks to "follow" him

[1] http://twittercounter.com/pages/100

A big fan of Pelican as well

East/west africa are also very cheap. have been away for 4 months and spent close to $500 a month in Rwanda, Kenya and Sierra Leone. Only costs are flights really.

RTW ticket may be cheaper but it also limits the direction you can go. Buying a one way ticket gives you the ultimate flexible.

Also, working with a travel agent allows you to get "fake" return tickets which many visa's applications require.

how does this affect systems in africa and asia where mobile banking is widespread. tons of money transfer is done by sending it via text messages. any idea how they handle this? is spoofing a text message totally different?

I think the approach of asking a user if they are using an iPad Mini or an iPad 2 is a good one. Apple values the UX so much that anything which degrades it will be noticed and updated.

Couldn't a rogue government easily take down the internet this way? Seems like if one guy in Indonesia can take out Google by accident, a government entity could do the same.

One huge disadvantage also is that many Africans don't have access or the ability to get credit cards and so it locks them out of the ability to pay for hosting and cloud services. If someone can figure out how to connect the local SMS payment infrastructures that most countries have to Amazon AWS, then there could be some serious dough gained from the developer community. I learned this the hard way when I did a presentation on deploying Python Apps to Amazon at klab.rw in Rwanda. Everyone loved it but no one could actually try it out because even for the Free Tier AWS requires a CC.

I can speak a bit from personal experience. I just spent close to 3 months in Rwanda and one of the coolest things I found there was an incubator called kLab in Kigali (www.klab.rw) that was modeled after incubators they have in Kenya. I heard from some ex-pats who lived there that one of the main problems affecting the ICT industry in Africa in general is that you can go through the CS programs at their university and never touch a computer. Many teachers don't have the programming chops and their students can't do anything about that, so anyone who does know how to code either learned on their own, or learned outside of country. At kLab they love Udacity and run study groups where students and former students meet up and learn Python and work on project/homeworks together (they have a demo night tonight in fact.) They also have all sorts of regular meetups for web apps, entrepreneurship etc.

Another thing about Rwanda that is surely affecting their growth and blows many African countries out of the water is they have wired most of the country with Fiber where most have dial up speeds. It is not yet common residentially, but for global businesses to establish a base in East Africa, this is huge. I lived two hours outside the capital in a mud house with out running water inside, but I did have 1-Mbps download (was near a rural, well-financed hospital, but still, it was faster internet than I had in Boston.) This is largely all due to the government there which is a pretty well-oiled machine with a bit of a benevolent dictator, but one who gets things done for the benefit of the country IMHO. Contrast with where I am currently living in West Africa in Sierra Leone where the infrastructure is dismal and there is no kLab type place anywhere. There is a lot less action in the startup/entrepreneurship scene. Bad infrastructure, a long civil war and countless other things feed into this.

In terms of startups...so much of Africa runs on mobile phones (the majority of small amounts of money is transferred via SMS) and most of what I saw in terms of startups was based around Mobile-Social-Local. Not unlike what you see in the US and elsewhere.

I agree with you if the button is standing alone, but if its a "Pay with Stripe" button alongside a Paypal and Google Checkout button then I think it adds more street cred than is taken away.

How are you getting the location data? Are you just scraping Kickstarter's site? Can't find any docs on their API...

Like Northeastern's coop program as well. They build the 6-months to 1 year off into their degree. Not sure if any student's make 80K but they do make a decent amount for an intern

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/co-op/employers/index.html#salaries

I think the argument here can be summed up as:

Don't shop at Home Depot, Amazon or Whole Foods. Shop at the neighborhood Hardware store, the corner Bookstore and the local Farmer's market (for tech.)

And you thought Apple was famous for their "product launches"

You can use the HideMyAss VPN service. I used it to stream the Olympics http://engineerwithoutacause.com/how-to-stream-2012-olympics...

"Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of copying and pasting the error."

I am pretty sure I would have gotten higher grades if I had known about StackOverflow in college. There is definitely value in figuring out things for yourself, but at the same time, staring at a C program acting differently every time because you didn't understand pointers from Day 1 and your dataset kept getting randomly overwritten, only had me learn a deep dislike for C programming.