jswinghammer

It's always exciting to see what's in the works. In every cycle it seems like there is a YC site that I end up using a lot.

Has the culture around here gotten so hostile that a "be nice" request is needed?

One thing that I've noticed over the years is that almost no one prepares for an interview in any way so you'll still keep out the worst candidates with this question.

Yeah but I wouldn't care if someone saved money in my name. The government takes out loans based on the idea that the people will service the debt.

I would be happy if more than 1/10 interview candidates managed to pass my most basic programming questions. I consider my standards to be too low for the type of jobs I interview people for and I'm still disappointed routinely.

One thing that's true about our brains is that even if we fail having not fully committed we will change our internal narrative to always say something like this:

"That didn't work out but there's really nothing I could have done differently. This outcome turned out great because of X, Y, and Z anyway so who cares?"

Anyone over 30 :)

And basically all of them listed PHP.

I guess you need to be a little older to truly form a deep hatred for PHP.

Probably any that you've seen accept uploaded video from their users. My company's software is dependent on ffmpeg and a few other open source tools for converting and dealing with video. I don't accept uploaded video but I do a lot of transcoding and ffmpeg is excellent for that. I also use mp4box and handbrake if anyone is curious.

You can script Sorenson Squeeze through a command line but that's expensive software and was probably not available in the form that exists today when YouTube launched.

I'm going to go with yes you are being too pedantic. No one really knows what to call programmers so we make up things to say. I write code for my company so I'm the guy who makes things happen to some and to others I perform some sort of dark arts.

I'm pretty good at making things work and bringing a lot of knowledge to any situation requiring my skills.

Does that make me an engineer? Does my lack of degree disqualify me?

Most my favorite games over the last 3-4 years have been on the DS so I might have been if it hadn't been for the fact that I've been enjoying games on my iPhone and iPad almost as much.

If Square/Enix released more games for those platforms I'd be excited and would stop even considering getting a 3DS.

It's probably just a way of saying that they need more math and data mining skills than your average software engineer with a BS or no degree at all.

I'm not always a big fan of Cato but a short blog post isn't really the place for a full dissertation on libertarian education perspectives.

I'm probably the biggest libertarian you'd meet (that doesn't live in his or her mom's basement) and I feel like HN is pretty friendly to my thinking.

I'm not surprised they went with memcached since PHP and most other languages have the client code written.

I've had good luck using MySQL as the data source of record (setup in a NoSQL style InnoDB table) and then having a Membase cluster which supports replication between different servers. I will probably start using the MySQL/memcache features to play around with them but I don't really see a compelling reason to do so considering that I probably execute less than 10 queries a day against the MySQL version of our caches. I use deflate to decrease the size of my caches so they only really use maybe 2 GB of memory.

These days they'd be more concerned if people on this site refused to work for them and passed this story around to friends who would avoid it as well.

I would list a few reasons that US health costs are so crazy:

1.) Insurance drives up the cost and hides true costs from consumers. What we buy isn't even insurance it's pre-paying for health care (thinking of HMOs here). My wife took medication for awhile that was $50 a pill. We paid $100 for 3 months worth of the stuff. Those true costs are hidden from us.

2.) You can't outsource it to China or India. If you've been to a Toys R' Us ever you will notice that every toy there is pretty cheap by any standard that you'd want to use. The reason is the cheap outsourced labor. If you want stuff that isn't made in China you end up paying prices that are much higher and more consistent with what you'd expect from the rate of inflation in the last 30 years.

We've been engaging in a devaluation of the US dollar for the last 30 years (continuing a trend that's been happening since 1910). Those new dollars have to end up somewhere so they end up in cost of medicine, lawyers, computer programmers, etc. As a computer programmer it benefits me but after meeting some family who are in less in-demand fields times are tough even for those who have jobs.

Why would you say that? Do believe yourself to be above sports or the people who enjoy sports?

If I were to fault that metaphor for anything it would be that it has become cliche at this point.

I think you have to write a post like that with such a statement even if it's not true. He deserved and should want an apology.

Even if he was trying to be a bad guy why bother sending hate mail? And the guy trying to get him fired was particularly strange.

More websites support SPDY:

http://www.chromium.org/spdy

Who cares?

I sort of liked it because I do have tons of experience and I often see job postings that make me think that my experience would not be appreciated. If I lived around there and was considering a move I'd apply.

That's cool but I don't care about that at all. I wanted him to not waste my time in the interview.

Believing something should be legal doesn't mean I want it happening in all cases ever. I don't like adultery but I don't want it to be illegal.

That's assuming that being a programmer or whatever you're referring to is related to education and not something that you're born able to do or not able to do.

I just interviewed a CS grad from a great school with 10 years experience who could barely write a line of code let alone do something useful for my company. The village didn't do him much good from where I sit.

So if one agrees that drugs should be legalized then I should be excited about my 4 year old daughter using crack? They're not even connected things.

Games in particular would be easy for younger kids to get if they knew an older kid who could buy them. When I was 18 I would have bought anyone a game because I like games and don't seem them as harmful. Maybe that isn't the best thing to do (I wouldn't do it now probably) but I definitely would have done it at that age.

I wish the government would stay out of these matters. If you don't want to use a single Google product you as a consumer don't have to. Google provides a very high quality product and competitors don't like it. I don't like it when my competition is better than me either but I don't think to file lawsuits about it.

I think these cases is about making a statement rather than improving anything for consumers. The attitude of consumers is pretty clear given that most everyone uses Google. If I felt like I was being deprived of good search results I would switch.

How many people here on HN have wondered if Google is in decline anyway? I know it's occurred to me. What is the government hoping to do with this case?

Well it makes success seem more like the result of hard work and not dumb luck-which seems to very often factor into things.

I've only worked at startups and never found that anyone asked me to work one more hour than I wanted to. I have always been considered a top or the top contributor on every team I've been on so no one really has thought to hassle me I guess.

I have avoided companies where the founders worked too many hours for my taste. I think it's unhealthy and I have two daughters who need me around more than the company does. I just don't want or need the pressure to stay late.

I tend to be on the "MORE APPS" side of this discussion.

I like apps and in particular I like games. I spend a decent amount of time on the train every day standing up so reading would be unpleasant for me. I listen to music or play a simple game while I ride to pass the time. The people who produce those games provide me a real service.