jrubinovitz

Like all posts by me, not an official HackNY opinion, just my own:

The piece should speak for itself, so I definitely agree that if that's what you got out of the piece, it looks bad.

The purpose of the piece was to satirize startup culture. HackNY is young, and just developing a culture. Cultural aspects I believe are distinctly HackNY are the living arrangements (having around 30 hackers on one floor of a building is pretty awesome and leads to a lot of brother and sisterhood), along with the talks and activities with amazing people involved in the New York technology sector. That's it. The rest of it you can find at any startup technology internship, and it was the actual incredible, different, interesting, and often difficult, experiences of working at startups, and their stereotypes, that I sought to satirize.

I love HackNY, and I love startup culture although I find it really amusing at times. I'm the kind of person that is literally wearing a shirt with 1's and 0's forming a "binary tree" on it right now. I love this community, and if you have an interest in what HackNY really is, I strongly suggest you take a look at the other pages of the site. I should actually go to bed because I may go to a BBQ with some hackers tomorrow.

Alright, so this was yesterday:

I got up around 8:30 AM to get to work in SoHo by 10 AM. I live in a dorm at NYU with a floor full of other HackNY fellows really central to NYC, which is amazing. I made breakfast and ground some coffee and worked on a personal Node.js project then walked to SoHo around 9:30AM. Work started at 10AM. I work as a front-end engineering intern primarily with Backbone.js and Require.js lately, so I spent between 10AM-6:30PM doing a quick standup, then coding or getting food from the kitchen (I eat a lot).

Then at 6:30, which is relatively early for me to leave, myself and another intern (non HackNY), went over to Pivotal Labs. We don't usually get to bring other interns with us, but we were having an intern buddy night. When we first got to Pivotal Labs we ate dinner and networked. I got to catch up with a lot of the other fellows and their "intern buddies." We're having a demo day coming up soon so we were all sharing what we would present.

Then Josh Knowles, of Pivotal Labs, gave a talk on the process of developing software and took questions along the way. I got to ask 2-3 on agile software development, recruiting and automation. It was like tech lead 101. After the talk we were allowed to ask him questions separately, but I was all questioned out, so I went out to a bar with my intern buddy and another friend of the program and we talked about the startup spaces we were interested in and how to encourage technology innovation on our respective campuses. I then talked to my suitemates (also HackNY, sans one) about everything from girl stuff to Ruby on Rails database preferences. The peers are one of my favorite parts of the program. Living on a floor full of hackers is incredibly inspiring and we get so much done by inspiring (and sometimes competing) with each other.

So yeah, that's a real day in the life.

I'm really sorry to hear that. We had some people read it and they enjoyed it, but they were from the area and already knew what HackNY was.

It's a parody.

But real HackNY, for me personally, is hack at work for 9-10 hours, then hack with fellows on personal projects for 2 hours or go to a talk with an established person in the tech industry, rinse and repeat.

If you want an factual diary of the day, I can write one for you, but as it's a lot of coding and networking, you would probably find it dry.

It is very much satire of the batches of "a Day in the Life" posts from people involved in startups that have been posted lately, along with startup stereotypes as a whole. Please don't take it literally.

Are avocados a trend on the west coast as well? I see them in so many startup kitchens in NYC.

I really wouldn't mind paying for a textbook access code for every class I take, if the price was actually reasonable (unlike new textbook prices). In an ideal world: go around the print publishers and digitally publish books with an access code at a low price with nearly all proceeds going to the author.

I have teachers that won't actually use textbooks because kids at my school cannot afford them. Professors will actually photocopy the material for us.

I do it weekly, but mainly because I experiment a lot with my OS and will generally have to re-install it once a week.

What are the jobs and projects you want looking for? When I decide to commit most of my learning time to a certain language, it's because that's the language I want to and like programming in the most. For instance, right now I'm trying to branch out and do less frontend work, so I'm learning more Ruby on Rails and Django and concentrating less on JavaScript.

I have done work at a charity that mails donations of books to prisons called "Books Through Bars", and I am always excited to get a request for books on programming. You may want him to send a request to them, there will be some lag time, but it sounds like he has a bit of time left.

I'd go with "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" or a Donald Knuth book.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I think I'm looking for something more scientifically demanding. I'm basically trying to convert a bunch of kids pursuing medical school, most of which probably do not have the chops to get in. I would love to teach them some basic data mining that has to do with health science, or dig up some data startups to talk about. I'll keep researching.

I agree, it will depend on the courses, but if the courses cover content that would make one a good fit for the team, the student has demonstrated the mastery of the content, and they have a good portfolio, I do not see why I would not consider hiring them.

I really like the "try to have at least two internships: one at a small start-up and one at a tech company" sentiment. Internships aren't just for your resume, they're for you to figure out what areas in the business you like and to gain a variety of skills and experiences.

Is this the Geolocation API the Marauder's Map team at PennApps used this to build a virtual Marauder's Map? If so, now it suddenly makes sense how they had time to make the awesome UI design. I definitely agree on the feedback looking for examples. I'd love to see some open source Cloudmine apps.

Can you be more specific? Please let us know your skill set and what you'd like to be doing.

I went hunting for "macbook pro i7" and every item I clicked on (something like 4 or 5) had already been sold. It does look like something I would use otherwise(EDIT: as in if I had a better success rate when I clicked).

Yeah, I will try that next time we work.

I like this a lot. I would love to be able to code in the same online terminal with someone (I'm teaching someone Python right now and she's overseas), but I know collaborative editing is a whole different beast. I may even shoot it over to some professors in case they want to use it. It's better than taking a few minutes to boot up IDLE and can get people coding on the first day without having to teach them about the terminal first.

White on black. Black on white makes me feel like I'm writing an English paper.

It's more like having to take 19 credits a semester to graduate within my budget and working 20+ hours a week does not leave me much time for unassigned reading, but I will take that suggestion to heart whenever possible (hopefully during this winter break).

As a computer science student, I don't really have time to read as much material unrelated to Computer Science as I would like, so this was quite a treat. Thanks for bravely humanizing Kim Jung Il and North Korea, and reminding us why we need to change the world, Mr. Kim Hyun Sik (author).

Wow this is a great hackathon project. It's simple, but something that people will actually want to use after the hackathon. I do agree that the message may need some tuning up though. Maybe say "John is using anonysize.me to ask you for your size" etc. It adds some credibility even though no one has heard of you, and it leads to brand awareness, advertising, and hopefully more users (this is just based on the text message on your homepage, however).

What do I think? I don't know what to think, I cannot base my thoughts on a start up on an knowledge of a 35 year age gap alone. Ergo, if you're asking if it matters, I do not think it does. It could even be advantageous to have the different views of two different age groups.

And he made the front page of Hacker News. I think he's a better business man than people give him credit for. I think he's a really entertaining guy and tune into his podcasts whenever he puts them out.

I find the title of this thread (based on the line from the article, I presume) deceptive: "What happens to a kid who's too smart for school?"

I'm used to reading, and seeing first hand, articles like this: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,699423,00.h... http://blogs.wsj.com/informedreader/2007/08/17/students-at-r...

Even the article says: "The prognosis for exceptionally gifted students in America is poor. The only federal program that provides money for gifted education includes no provisions for the exceptionally gifted, and it was just defunded. The one reform pending before Congress does not distinguish between levels of giftedness and creates no new educational programs."

I think it is incorrect to say Gonzales is the general case. The other side is mentioned, but only briefly. There is a BIG problem with what generally happens to kids who are "too smart for school," but I'm glad Gonzalez is getting the education he deserves at such an early age.

This post is disappointing to see after all the talk about people working in start ups being depressed last week. If you are hurting at a start up, you should definitely take a good look at your life and figure out what you can change to make it better. I am glad the article says "if you work at a startup and you think you’re working too hard and sacrificing too much, find a job somewhere else that will cater to your needs", but I think working with your start up to try to arrange a job that is more compatible with you is an option as well. Please do not just suck it up, if you're feeling bad, start making a plan that will make you feel better.

I know I personally would consider that, but it really depends on the project and it relies on the fact that I do not have a family to support. Definitely feel free to email me.

Unfortunately, nothing in that trailer convinced me that he can make a series with the same tone and sense of humor as Entourage. I think posting a trailer for the series would be helpful.

I agree with the seizure point. I think this is a bit too "nuts." I showed it to my friend who has frequent seizures and she agreed. I would not recommend CSS moving this quickly for general use.

I find it interesting how on the pricing page one of the selling points is "No advanced technology No technology at the Point of Sale. Set-up is simple, print once and your loyalty program is ready to go. Sign-up completely online in 10 minutes or less." While this a turn off for me, I'm a technology person, so I guess for some markets simple is better.

Other than that, I love the marketing here. It feels very simple, clean, and honest, like the product (hopefully, I haven't tried it).