lynchdt

I signed up and created a sinatra and java app. Wouldn't usually be one to but a downer on a new product but the whole process was quite buggy.

Great idea though.

It would be a great way of learning Scala.

> Age or experience has nothing to do with getting things done.

I would argue it has everything to do with getting things done, in particular the right things.

Also, why write an article detailing your experiences and then write experience off completely.

31 years living, studying and working within 20 minutes of Dublin City Center. Got lucky I suppose.

I love the way he only dropped maybe two beats in executing that one.

The metrics you provide are certainly useful in putting low ad-revenue in some context for a business.

Have any of your customers used the metrics they gleaned to size up an ad-blocker white-listing offer themselves?

The first paragraph of the "recent study" you linked.

"In a poll commissioned by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), 92 percent of 1,000 Americans surveyed agreed that free news, weather, email, blogs and video content was either somewhat or extremely important to the overall value of the Internet."

What kind of category is "somewhat or extremely important" and how is 1000 people of undisclosed circumstances (other than being American) representative of people that use the internet?

The study that is linked from "the majority are not bothered by the static, non-intrusive ads" asks users of Mechanical Turk to look at an ad and rate it on its "annoyingness". Each user was paid 25 cents flat, and 2 cents per ad to a 172 ad maximum - so there's a $3.75 incentive maximum on completing the test will ratings on everything.

How annoying is any ad that you are being paid to stare at? That's missing the point completely.

I don't buy this sentiment that ad-blocking will be the end of the internet. Continued innovation on payment models, and content worth paying for is what we really need.

>> The program will cost $60,000, which school officials >> said compares favorably with other professional degree >> programs. Entry-level data scientists in the San >> Francisco area can command salaries in the $110,000 to >> $130,000 range.

$60,000 is laughable. The justification based on salaries in California is laughable.

Unless a relocation package to California from anywhere there is internet is included in the fee?

Even then......

I couldn't get it out of my head for the whole article.

>> "Hide had become 'withdrawn'"

Priceless!

Actually, the social graph is directed - like, say, twitter. So I can explicitly follow people I know have a penchant for picking up decent new music first.

This might be the "muso" in your real-world social group or it might be a respected journalist outside that group. It might even be Bono himself.

I'm in a similar age bracket, and I've had "so what are you listening to these days" conversations with friends. I find them quite rewarding, even though my broader tastes have settled down.

I'm biased (obviously) but I think we've built something along the lines of those conversations - and more (check-out maps!).

I've seen six months work - that's time enough to ramp up somewhat and deliver. In that regard, it's plenty of time to assess the traits that we're looking for in strong developers.

> And admittedly, the questions I asked were so difficult that I seriously doubt I myself could've answered them when I first got hired

Sometimes I have to stop myself doing this before conducting interviews. I think it's an ego thing, or perhaps an insecurity. When I worked at Amazon the culture drove this kind of rubbish and skewed our hiring process immensely.

There was something perverse about being in an interview loop, all 8 of us "not inclined" to hire a single candidate because they missed an recursion terminator in a solution to something properly complex and scratched out on a whiteboard in 15 minutes. All of us nodding like "that's so stupid" and I was sitting there 100% certain of the 8 people in the room the 7 of us who hadn't conducted the same interview 50 times would drop a bollock somewhere along the way. Yet there was no way this "otherwise competent, and quite nice guy" was as technically astute as all of us gathered here today indulging in our nice cup of ego massage while other people got actual work done.

Now when I interview candidates I want to see some code you have written you are proud of. Above all, I'm looking for pragmatism, effective reasoning and discipline in execution.

I love the idea of a paid working trial of some length, followed by a permanent hire but I've yet to convince the powers that be that it's an effective strategy.

You did not get the job because of your attitude.

"...I realize I’m a pretty well-rounded and high-performing developer/engineer/architect. At the scale of Facebook, I’m exactly the sort of engineer I’d want many of...."

In my opinion there are at least three no-hire red flags attached to this statement.

I thought some of you might be interested in this. It's a good read and there are echoes of many PG articles throughout.

http://www.randomhouse.com/book/176227/antifragile-things-th...

Patrick writes about this extensively here http://patrickcollison.com/post/stripe-ireland

Just be happy you don't live in Ireland.

[1] Our prime minister explaining what cloud computing is - "A wireless connection to shared storage" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzaQxLFl3rQ

[2] A senator explaining why the abundance of rain on the west coast of Ireland makes it particularly suitable as a base for, wait for it, _cloud_ technology - https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056460271