loopbit

I'm no longer the CTO, but I'm still friends with the rest of the founders and lend a hand every now and again (I'm still a shareholder in the company).

Drop me a line at malonso [at] loopbit.com if you want :)

I buy a product or, more often than not nowadays, pay for a service for the features.

I keep using the product/service if it's stable. I have no use for a service with loads of nice features that don't work.

As someone that got to fifth year of a computer engineering degree[0] to drop off with only 2 classes left, I agree: There's stuff you learn in uni, thinking that you'll never use it again and, suddenly years later, it's the stuff that saves your ass (sometimes even vaguely remembering that there's something that might help with a specific problem helps).

So on that side, yep, studying a CS degree will give you a breadth of knowledge that you won't get learning 'on the job'.

On the other hand, I very much prefer working with someone that is able to see a gap in their 'mind toolbox', identify it as an issue and fix it to someone that just follows blindly a CS degree coursework.

[0] Hey, don't look at me, it was called like that in my country and, to be honest, it did have quite a bit of computer engineering (electronics, circuits, processor design...) as well as all the usual CS stuff. And maths, loads of maths.

Hey, sorry I didn't see this before. You can go to www.loveandrobots.com, any example using upswing image files should use fabric.js

We used fabric.js as well to create custom laser printed/engraved products. As with you, our first iteration was just standard javascript with jQuery, but fabric.js made a lot of things much easier.

It might be because English is not my first language and that rule doesn't exist in my mother tongue, but I've always written like that (also, I don't use the Oxford comma and I won't, it just looks weird to me).

It occurs to me that the influx of non-native English speakers in social media/collaborative sites has at least something to do with this change.

Technically Aol is Verizon now ;). Cheers from an ex-Aoler.

Ooops, yes, as the other comment says, I forgot to mention it was in programmer's view. Otherwise the number shows correctly.

Just for fun, I've tried that with the OSX calculator (in El Capitan, in case that matters).

When I paste the number in the article (17281580835365214242) into it, it shows as 9223372036854775807. Typing it by hand does the same, when you enter the last digit it transforms into that number, which is 0x7FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF in hex.

Funnily enough, if I paste the hex value (EFD4823541245822) and transform it to dec, it shows as the correct number, the one you can't paste or type.

So, the OSX calc looks broken too, in an even weirder way.

edit: Forgot to mention this was in programmer's view. As far as I can tell, other modes work fine.

I live in Dublin, don't work for Google but I have many friends that do (as well as in London and Zurich).

No, they don't pay anything close to that. Actually, AFAIK, in Dublin the salary that Google pays for developers is on the low side of the scale (they offset that, in part, with all the benefits like free food and the rest).

Very, very well said.

>> I'm a jack of all trades master of none. >> I've always taken that as an insult rather than a compliment.

"Specialization is for insects", Heinlein.

As someone that is 37 and hasn't got a degree, I can tell you that most of those requirements are bullshit. Send the CV, get an interview and prove the interviewers that you are capable of taking the responsibility.

And yes, I've been in managerial positions, from team lead all the way up to director of engineering for several multinationals. Most of the positions listed a BS (or even MSc) as requirement.

Good luck finding a entry-level job, any entry level job in Spain that pays you more than 900€ per month in Spain, Italy, Portugal... even France and maybe, Germany (although I have less information there).

From what I see, you might get 2-2.5K€ per month in the rest of Europe. Ireland and UK are, AFAIK, where the highest salaries in IT are and even there you are going to get 2-3K€ per month at most.

Most lawyers I know in Europe start their careers earning minimum wage. And they do that for a few years until they are promoted to full lawyers or open their own practice.

Doctors usually spend their first years with temp contracts of 3-6 months in Hospitals for slightly more than minimum wage. This is after they finish their degrees and do the mandatory internships they need to do to get their MD degree.

Actually, as an European (as in, in a completely different environment than SV), I'd recommend the opposite with a small tweak, add "small company" to the startup meaning.

Most big companies I've worked with in Europe have horrible new employee training package or no training at all. I haven't worked in a single one that took fresh out of college types and allowed them to work in different departments. The most common scenario when a new graduate gets hired into a team doing X is to throw him in, get whatever documentation the team has, even maybe someone to ask questions and the expectation is that he will do X for the next few years.

Opposed to this is the environment in a small company/startup, where you'll be forced to do a bit of everything and even lend a hand with stuff that is not your job at all. You'll have the chance to see different technologies, see the whole process end to end AND then, decide what you want to do.

BTW, is salary that important for people starting their careers? Salary advancement yes, even what salaries you might expect with 2/5/10 years of experience, of course. But for a first job? Does it matter that much?

My first salary was crap (600€/month in the year 98), but allowed me to work in multiple environments (web, databases, sysadmin, embedded system...) and when the time came to look for a new place, allowed me more freedom to choose what I wanted to do (the biggest problem I had finding a job, in the middle of the .com crisis, was convincing employers that, yes, I had indeed worked with all those technologies in 'only' 2.5 years). I multiplied by 5 my salary with that second job, which was a more than decent salary in the country at the time.

I wish I could. Cost of living, taxes, benefits... even the "culture" of the country (for lack of a better word) all play a role, but when you are working in a distributed team for an american corp in a different country and see how different the salaries are even between team members doing the same job, it hurts.

BTW, I think you'll find it difficult to find a fresh out of college job that pays you 38K€ in most of europe.

Actually, as an executive of a company that opens a subsidiary in the states (in case your startup is a success and decide to expand there) you can apply for the L-1A visa which can fast-track you to get the green card (we are talking 6-9 months instead of 8 years).

There are other options available to you as a director/executive, so definitely check with an immigration lawyer if you ever want to go back.

All I can talk is from my personal experience, but as the founder of a startup that sells physical goods online, we've had no issue with fraudsters. At all.

Granted, we are quite small and our volume of sales is not massive (Hey! Small startup with very little funding and mostly bootstrapped here), but still, I was expecting some kind of issue with this by now. Or at least people trying to get stuff for free.

For the record, we use Stripe and PayPal for payments, don't know if they do anything on their end.

Just a couple of minor clarifications:

- Athelion is a plugin for Apache Nutch, which is the web crawler part and has been open source for a long time.

- As far as I can tell, Athelion parses structured data (microformats, microdata, RDFa...) but that's not the most interesting bit. The online classifier of pages and scoring of new links discovered looks like the real important piece.

- Actually, the other two parts of the plugin are modifications of existing Nutch plugins.

All in all, I can't wait to have some time to see it working.

Cool read, however, I feel the need to point out that 20 years ago, javascript in the server wasn't "too soon", it already existed.

In 1995 Netscape had the Netscape Enterprise Server[0] that ran javascript for server-side scripting. Actually, the two books I used, back in the day, to learn Javascript was the client- and the server-side javascript guides published by Netscape.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Enterprise_Server

I immediately recalled this:

https://xkcd.com/1053/

It looks like today you are one of the 10.000 people learning about this strip ;)

Depending on the index size (and type of queries, and schema, and expected performance...), 2GB might be more than enough. Solr does a very good work in caching results, query filters and so on in memory. Apart from that, it's disk based.

Of course, performance won't be stellar if it has to go to disk to find every result, but even with that you should be able to get sub-second results with some tweaking.

Yep, and it took me years to learn that lesson :)

Again, maybe I've had more bad managers than the average (in my 17 years of professional experience I've had 2, maybe 3, good managers), but there's no guarantee that will happen.

Maybe in areas like SV, where good professionals with solid experience have no problem finding another role and companies are actually trying their best to keep good employees that happens more often. What I've seen is people skipped for promotion in favor of the manager's son friend. Or in favor of someone "recommended" from above. Or many other forms of nepotism.

I've seen wonderful managers-to-be being kept in a lower role because the company didn't want to cough up the increase in salary. And, as said before, invariably I've seen these people end up leaving and going somewhere else, causing the department a few problems (organization, lost know-how...).

BTW, reading my comments on this one might think I'm bitter and maybe I am: I worked 6 years in Spain and France, where nepotism is the norm and techies are considered second class citizens. I must say that I don't think I've been skipped for promotion many times and personally I haven't had many issues moving up (and down) the ladder in all the places I've worked. But I also know that one of the reasons for this is that I've never had a problem with getting up and leaving a company if I wasn't happy.

Genetic algorithms are not brilliant, but their results sometimes can be. I remember reading and article[0] about a researcher using genetic algorithms on FPGAs. One paragraph stuck with me through all these years:

"Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest— with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output— yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type."

Now, I agree with you that, even for a problem as simple as that one (or specially because it's a simple problem, maybe) a "normal" algorithm would perform better. But the fact that the genetic algorithm was able to find the effects of magnetic flux (those five disconnected logic cells) in that specific FPGA is nothing short of brilliant.

The problem I've always seen (not an expert, by any means, but I've played around with them a bit) with genetic algorithms is that they require a weird balance. For simple problems, a normal algorithm will probably work better. As the complexity of the problem increases, the scoring and evaluating rules' complexity increases as well (I've got no hard data, of course, but my feeling is that the complexity of the scoring process increases much faster than the complexity of the problem), making a well thought algorithm a better/easier solution. This, and that any mistake in the scoring process might throw away thousands and thousands of generations.

[0]http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

Maybe I've had more than my share of bad bosses, but I don't really agree with you here. I must say, also, that in my experience, it does depend on the company size, culture and abilities of said managers more often than not (big, hierarchical companies tend to be worse at this kind of thing, also, banking and financial, not sure why).

- A good manager will notice, and appreciate, your effort. But promote you? You are one of his best tools, why should he? Usually he'll try everything he can to keep you where you are. If it's a bad manager, he won't even recognize your effort.

- Yes, unless you work with mixed teams or on different projects. In that case, two managers might end up fighting to get you on their teams and it might be a good thing for you.

- Nothing to say here, you are totally right, but depending on how you play your cards, the reward can come earlier. Only thing I'll point is that I've seen departments go to hell because managers failed to recognize this.

My tip would be to communicate. If you have free time, don't wait for your boss to assign you work and ask. If you see something else that you can be doing (sometimes there are features or bugs that could be worked together), say so, but always comunicate first and wait for your managers decision.

Of course, all this is IMHO and your results may vary.

Didn't know about policeman and looks really, really, nice. Will definitely give it a try! I love the idea of writing my own rules.

As for including jquery from google, of course and for good reasons, even from the user's perspective. The main one, of course is that chances are that your browser already has it cached (from other site that uses it), so retrieving it and loading it is (almost) instant.

Then learn Chef/Puppet or something like that and write/reuse recipes to install and configure whatever you need to configure.

I haven't set up an environment manually in a few years: I simply have my own recipes for the types of apps I'm developing in Chef (most of them just minor tweaks or config changes over existing recipes), my own vagrant boxes (I like different flavors of linux for different types of apps) and so on.

Starting a new project implies choosing the necessary recipes, adding them to a vagrant file, 'vagrant up' and wait a few minutes until everything is set up. Done.

It's not even America, look around you: Germany has great opportunities for people with developing knowledge, Netherlands, England, Ireland... On the other hand I know France is in that situation, as well as Spain, Italy...

But a part of it is definitely your attitude; move around, search for your options.

This comes from a Spaniard that dropped out of college, has lived in France (I worked for Renault, FFS), Holland and, for the last 10 years, in Ireland. And I wouldn't change a thing.

Not an expert in cancer by any means, but I know a thing or two about leukemia and race, sex and age are, precisely, the most common 'risk factors' that are looked into.

Maybe a bit off-topic, but I have a relatively close example of what you are talking about.

An older friend of mine got together with his childhood friends and built a retirement home, they essentially built a small building with small, private apartments (1 bedroom, bathroom, kitchenette and small living room), common areas and so on...

Now that they are all retiring (this friend of mine retired 3 years ago), they are all going there, each couple having their small apartment but being able to socialize whenever they want. Plus, they even have a kitchen service, cleaners, etc, etc because the shared cost is way less of what they would pay to have it at home or what they'd pay in a normal retirement home.

Been thinking that I wouldn't mind doing something like that...