jplahn

Because a lot of people go through the aftermath of being fired, so having somebody else to empathize with is nothing if not a reminder that you're not alone.

I find it interesting that you found it harder to maintain a long-distance while an undergrad, especially because from personal experience, it would be easier that way (IMO of course).

I'm also an undergrad and what I largely find is that it would be easier to be in an LDR with regards to your workload because you don't have as many daily "commitments" if you want to call them that, i.e. you're not trying to balance your projects with going out to eat a few times a week. The expectation is that you're not going to be seeing each other all the time, so theoretically you would have more time to spend on your work. I'd be interested to hear why you've found the opposite to be true (aside from CS, I think my true passion is relationships ;-) ). Now, give me a non-LDR relationship any day and I'll find a way to make time.

I think the keyword is "alternative".

I find this a fascinating topic to think about because I've had so much experience with it.

Sports have been a significant part of my life ever since I was in 1st grade. I played several varsity sports throughout high school and had opportunities for scholarships in two different sports. One of those sports was golf and I find that it elicits the opposite response in a way that I hate (but also understand).

When I've been at interviews for Google, Facebook, Amazon, wherever, I inevitably talk about sports with the other undergrads that are interviewing with me. In an effort to avoid the perception that I'm some sort of country club WASP, I rarely mention that I played extremely high level golf throughout high school. I fear that it won't fit into the "culture" of various places that I've applied to and likely won't mesh with those I'm talking to. So instead, I let my "hipster"-ish clothing, love of post-hardcore metal, and interest in all books not found on the NYT Bestseller list, craft whatever perception people may have of me.

But despite this, I can talk about the NBA and NFL with the best of them and I'm getting to the point where I don't care what people think because I've found it's too hard to worry about it. If I want to go throw some iron over my head 4 times a week and people consider me a meathead, so be it. But it's a whole lot easier to have them think that than to try to hide it for ridiculous reasons.

I would love to throw some sentiment analysis at this and see what could be conjured up. Maybe nothing because the sentiments would likely all be very similar and it would be hard to fine tune it enough, but it still might be an interesting exercise regardless.

Yep, the extent of any programming we did with it was writing a bunch of facts about family relationships and then asking questions about relationships. Basic stuff. It was interesting, but hardly ground breaking.

We had to use Prolog in my comparative languages class last semester and it was interesting, to say the least. With any class that brushes over a topic, I didn't get a full appreciation for what it can do, but it was an interesting paradigm to be exposed to if nothing else.

I didn't feel like I was doing "real programming", which likely says more about what we're taught than the merits of the language. I'd be interested to known how it's being leveraged presently? I know a lot of the standard use cases, but is there anyone solving really unique problems with it?

From the article, it seems like you still can, you'll just pay a higher price. If you want next day shipping on one item, you can do that; you just won't reap the benefits of their bundling idea.

In the most general sense, significant algo/data structure knowledge was necessary to even make it through first round interviews.

Off the top of my head, over the course of interviews with a handful of companies, I had to do several dynamic programming questions, topological sort, a couple of backtracking questions, and a seemingly never-ending number of other tree/graph questions.

Again, I'm not saying knowing this means you _are_ hireable, but to many of these companies, not knowing them made you _not_ hireable, whether correctly or incorrectly.

> "If you can read and understand documentation, understand fundamental concepts like OO or functional paradigm, and understand what a stack is, a closure, recursion, the difference between an integer and a float, or a character and a string, methods/functions, etcetera, you are more or less hireable."

I'm sure this is true for many positions, but I'd resist the temptation to cast this across the broader job market. All of my recent interviews went significantly deeper than what you listed (though I'm not sure "functional paradigm" is a fundamental concept), so in my experience the minimum to be hireable, at least in their opinion, was higher than what you indicated.

Fair enough, I can definitely see that being an annoyance. Especially in the context of this being a light library, it's undoubtedly going to be utilized with any number of other libraries. Good point.

Maybe I'm just naive (probably), but is it really that off putting that the casing convention isn't the same?

To be honest, I don't know what most languages "are" with regards to the casing convention..and I've never been explicitly told what they should be either.

I would agree that getting a license in the US is significantly easier than in Europe. I'm American, but I lived in Scotland for 7 years and go my first drivers license there. I was told the pass rate was around 40%, which may or may not have been the truth. It was about a 45 minute test. Fast forward a few years to when I returned to the US for college and my drivers test was about 5 minutes long and an absolute joke.

As for the last point about American roads being larger and safer, I'm not sure the second part is true. They are definitely larger, but there's been research done to indicate that larger != safer. I'll try to dig up the article, but I'd tend to agree with the sentiment. I've seen significantly more accidents on large laned freeways in America with a 55 mph speed limit than skinny backroads in Scotland with a 60 mph speed limit, even with adjusting for the larger amount of traffic on the American freeways.

You're missing the entire problem with this premise.

Somebody torturing a man that has his family held hostage is entirely different than state sponsored torture. I think that should be obvious.

People understand the fact that on the battlefield, sometimes torture happens, even when it shouldn't. When a soldier tortures somebody they just captured to keep their fellow soldiers alive, we don't agree with it, but there's a different mentality surrounding it. When the government TELLS that soldier to torture somebody, then it's a different matter entirely. This same idea is at work with your example above.

I'm going to have to agree with this. After dreading the impending interview process I would have to go through this fall, I can't imagine working for a company that doesn't have it.

For all the short comings of this process, I can say without a doubt that the quality of fellow interviewees I met at onsite interviews with the top companies was _significantly_ higher than those I met at companies with a shortened interview process. Sure that's likely obvious and anecdotal, but it gives me some peace of mind.

As has been said, job applications are a fickle beast. Just because you found success within a few weeks does not mean it's the norm.

From personal experience applying to jobs as a soon to be graduate, I know many of my friends with similar qualifications didn't even receive an interview at certain companies, even though I know they would do well in them from work we've done together previously. It's also interesting that I received interviews with all of the top companies I was interested in, but I didn't even hear back from several that I would consider the next tier down.

Even better, when I was applying for internships last year, some companies sent me rejection emails in the middle of the summer, seemingly indicating my application was unearthed in the abyss of the job portal by some random happenstance.

As I said, fickle.

I think, by and large, it likely is true. That's not to say that it always holds true and it might be swayed by the strength of programmers in YC, but I think it's definitely correct more often than not.

It may also be based on the premise that if you're doing consultingish work, you're probably not doing it for one of the top tech companies, but more likely for a smaller company that doesn't have dedicated developers.

From prior experience working at a consulting startup, this tended to be the case more often than not. Obviously, YMMV.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

I've been negligent towards fiction lately, but I wanted to change that because it's always been my first love. So to do that, I started reading Flanagan's novel. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's the Man Booker Prize winner for 2014, which is more or less the British equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize.

I never thought I'd have any books that could crack into my top 3 or 5 for a while, but this one has done it.

The basis of the book is Australian POWs working on the Death Railway during WWII. The book isn't exclusively told in this setting, but much of the book stems from it.

I'm definitely going to have to look into this more. One thing I _love_ is writing, regardless of the format. While I enjoy writing code, there's something about eloquently explaining something on paper that feels amazing. I started writing a book on Haskell because I missed writing so much (now whether it's any good is another matter entirely..).

This makes me think about my current classes and how there is very little importance placed on documentation. We have to write massive javadoc comments to appease our TAs, but rarely do we write documentation of any actual substance. Obviously, much of this is due to the "one and done" nature of our projects, but I digress. But when we look to get involved in open source or "real" work at a job, we have to figure out how to write documentation that isn't horrific. But that's a topic for another day..

Anyways! Looks great! I'll have to shake off the cobwebs and see how I can get involved.

For any cynicism this might promote regarding FB's "real" intentions, internet.org was one of the things that I found most intriguing while interviewing there this past fall. Several engineers that I spoke to where genuinely excited about it (from what I could tell, obviously).

I don't know where it will end up, but it was one of those projects that I feel like I would have been proud to work on.

While I understand the sentiment, I only used a single resume for all of my applications this past fall. But I think the reason it worked is that I knew what positions I wanted to apply for and they were all similar(ish). So my resume matched all of them.

I did find that when I was applying to the bigger SV companies (and Seattle), I wasn't necessarily applying for a specific position, so even if I had wanted to tailor it, it would have been more of a challenge. That's just my experience though. I do believe that if I was going for a very specific position, I would definitely spend the extra time to make sure it was perfect.

I think one existing without the other could certainly be the case in the nearish future. Not everything they're doing is tied into the Facebook site.

I've been using this to write a book and really enjoy it so far (though I also enjoyed the desktop version, for what it's worth).

One thing I've noticed (and that I tweeted earlier) is that having my github hooked up to my book, every time I save (via cmd-s, which I do out of habit every minute or so) it automatically pushes to my repo. So without realizing it, I had something like 50 commits after working for 15 minutes. Not a big deal, but it might be nice to separate the two.

The other thing I've noticed is that saving also builds the book. So in this same 15 minute period of working, I went to the status page of my book and noticed I had 50 or so builds currently being processed, with almost all of them failing in a flurry of emails an hour later. (Side note, any reason for this?)

So the only thing I would say is that I'd like to see a separation of the saving, committing, and building, much like the desktop version had. I'd like to build my book (and commit it) at the end of the session, not on every save. But maybe that's just me.

It begs the question, do you mean Facebook the social network, or Facebook the company? Because there are surely many benefits coming from the company that don't necessarily depend on the social network.

Really enjoy this! Like everyone else, the nostalgia is so strong.

The only thing that seemed off for me was the "Drag", which I think somebody else mentioned. I found myself clicking and re-clicking it multiple times to pan around the map, which got old after a bit. That was in latest Chrome on Mac OSX.

Great work however!