michael_miller

Technology has a way of feeling incremental. Think about this past year, what really happened? We got a slightly faster iPhone, Facebook did some interface tweaks, Microsoft released a new version of Windows. These seem like really small improvements. But if you look back to the original iPhone, what Facebook looked like in Zuck's dorm room, or what Windows 3.1 looked like, the change is staggering.

The linked video shows this phenomenon full effect. The internet in the video is slow, clunky, and ugly. How could a page take 30 seconds to load? Why does everything have a murky gray background? The difference between the web of then and now is staggering. But as someone who grew up through the early 90s watching the internet expand, it sure didn't feel like things were changing fast. It happened gradually - companies starting coming online slowly (and often with a very limited presence): nytimes, barnes+noble, moviefone. Then the internet started getting organized better, first with Yahoo's directories, then with search engines like AltaVista, Excite, Lycos. Then, Google came along, gradually improving their algorithm to the point where we can now access almost any piece of the world's information in seconds. In retrospect, there was so much going on during that time period, but living through it didn't feel that way.

More than anything else, I think this is a testament that having a real impact on technology in the long-term is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to have a vision, and incrementally improve on it constantly, even if it feels like you're not accomplishing much in the short term.

Very well said. At the risk of taking away from your original point, going into academia (especially a non-engineering field) can give you a very different perspective and release you from the tech mindset. As an example, the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has a PhD in German social philosophy. How the hell did he end up leading a billion-dollar tech company? Basically he was really smart, and his PhD gave him the framework to think about privacy and civil liberties concerns, something the company desperately needed. The humanities often give us the scaffolding we need to answer really hard social problems which are neglected by the tech community, but are extremely important.

Will you be interning in Seattle? If so, you're likely getting an equivalent deal to $8.5k in the Valley. Washington has no income tax and a way lower cost of living.

Even if not in Seattle, the difference between $6k and $8.5k is negligible for a 3 month internship relative to your life earnings.

Just want to emphasize my point on money not being a factor in your decision. Consider you could be getting paid $8500 by working for <big company x>. That's $9000 over your summer, peanuts compared to your life earnings. Don't sweat it, you'll have the awesome experience of working for a small startup (something I never did), and probably make some really good friends. Enjoy life, you're getting paid many multiples what people with college degrees are making :).

I believe (but am not 100%) that the companies listed pay at least $7k not including housing stipend. I could be wrong, so feel free to correct me.

$7k is actually on the low end nowadays :). I was as surprised as you, but talking to my friends, salaries seem to have shot up this past year. Dropbox, Google, FB, all pay over $7k, some well over that amount.

This is a great resource, I wish I had this when I was interning. A couple tips from someone who's done this a bit (3 times, 2 years full/part time intern at Apple, 1 summer at FB):

- Yeah, you get paid a large sum of money, but it really doesn't matter. The $7k/month salary may sound like a ton as a college student, but it isn't. It will pale in terms of your life earnings. Focus on trying out new areas / technologies that you think you might be interested in, but aren't sure. An internship is a chance to try something new out. If you don't like it, you just don't accept their return offer, there's no expectation that you'll continue to work at the company beyond 3 months.

- Do NOT intern at the same place more than once. They will try to lure you back by giving you a deadline of 2 weeks after your internship ends. This is BS. If they were willing to give you a return offer, they will almost certainly wait for you to get your other offers back. Competition is too stiff for them not to do this. Interning at the same place twice yields diminishing returns: you'll be working with the same tech, not meeting new people and learning new tricks. Plus, you won't get to experience more company cultures, finding out where you fit.

- Don't even consider interning part time during the school year. The pay will seem appealing, but it will take away from your college experience. You only go to college once, you should enjoy it to its fullest, you have your whole life to work. Again, money is insignificant compared to your life earnings.

- Interning in the Valley is a rite of passage, but after you've done one internship there, consider other places. NYC is great, I live there and highly recommend it (shameless plug, you can read about why at my blog post: [1]). Boston is great too, lots of biotech startups. Overseas is also a good choice, since you'll get the experience of living in another culture, in addition to doing cool work.

I'll end with another shameless plug. I work for Palantir, a really great company that's growing extremely rapidly and working on some pretty cool projects across a variety of spaces: government, healthcare, local law enforcement, finance to name a few. We've also done some kickass philanthropy efforts, such as our work with Hurricane Sandy: [2]. I've only worked at Palantir full-time, but several of my friends have interned here, and said it's the best place they've interned. If you're interested in interviewing with us (for either fulltime or internship), please email me at <firstname>.g.<lastname> [at] gmail.

[1] http://michael-g-miller.tumblr.com/post/20168723440/why-i-ch...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPqtQ9DbeQY

The target was set in a shareholder letter, so if Tesla intentionally mispredicted the target, they would likely be liable to a shareholder suit. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that the target reflected all available information at the time and that Tesla sent out the press release. Therefore, the most probable event is that Tesla had an abnormally large influx of orders, which is a non-artificial accomplishment.

It will be interesting to see if anyone is successful hacking the Model S. I assume that the software is signed with Tesla's private key, and verified by the car. If someone finds a way around this without requiring local access to the car, an attacker could cause a lot of damage. I shudder to think what a BackOrfice for Tesla would look like.

Presumably, game developers would serve up the game to the browser via localStorage. This would make the experience very similar to Steam today, where you download the game, then play it.

To play devil's advocate:

- Can't failures be counteracted by having failsafe measures? For example, if the market goes down more than 5% in a few-minute period, the market temporarily shuts down for a cooloff period of several hours to diagnose what's happening.

- Isn't HFT irrelevant to long term investment, given that it erodes away short-term profit, leading to accurate pricing of the stock?

My guess is that the first customers for this cable will be in the finance industry. A 30% improvement in latency doesn't matter much for the layman, but in finance, it can mean significant amounts of money. Already, an enterprising trader constructed a more direct line from Chicago -> NYC [1]. Going from 16ms -> 13ms was apparently worth $300 million. This fiber could bring a very large profit if you had exclusive rights to it via a patent. You could execute guaranteed-to-profit arbitrage strategies between any two markets if you were willing to build out the network. And no one could compete with you for a whole 15 years!

[1] http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/outfront-netscape-jim...

Another way to look at this is that the US is subsidizing the world's healthcare. Take the example of drugs in the linked article [1]. Given their pricing power in the environment, the article asserts that we pay 2x what other countries do for identical drugs, for no other reason than we aren't negotiating as a large group. As an anecdotal example, when visiting Beijing, I had some trouble breathing, so I went to a pharmacy to buy an inhaler. I didn't have insurance that worked in China, so I had to pay out of pocket. Not only did I not need a prescription, but I also only paid $4 for the inhaler, complete with medicine. The same inhaler + medicine costs $10 with insurance in the US (god knows how much without it).

Tom Sackville, a UK politician quoted in [1] summed it up nicely: "We end up with the benefits of your investment. You’re subsidizing the rest of the world by doing the front-end research."

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/why-an-mri...

I don't think we'll see big companies throwing their weight behind iOS-quality web frameworks in the near term. It would be misaligned with their incentives. When Apple develops UIKit and the associated development tools, they convince developers to move to iOS. When Google develops Android, they convince developers to move to their platform. When someone makes a web framework, they convince people to move to a platform where they have no skin in the game. You don't sell more devices through convincing people to move to an open platform.

Further, I think the author hugely underestimates the effort that goes into designing an iOS/Android quality framework. Those frameworks go way beyond the MVC microframeworks that are the rage these days. These frameworks consist of many detailed high-quality images, gradients, sheens, and finely tuned animations. You can't just start an open source project and expect engineers to magically produce these assets in a coherent manner. It takes a large team of designers (and a dictator) many man-years to produce these assets.

I agree with you 100%. We don't see many 65-year-olds around. My intuition is that software engineers are intellectual athletes. Like traditional athletes, our abilities start to dwindle after a certain age. We can't learn new technologies overnight, simply because our brain can't process information as quickly. Our memories become faded. It's sad to think about, but definitely worth planning for.

At the point in my life where I'm financially set for life and ready to move on, I plan to become a pilot in some capacity. Probably not for a traditional carrier, but maybe for sightseeing around NYC, or aerial photography. Aside from technology, flying is my other passion. I'm just not pursuing it commercially because it's a terrible career (salaries start at $20k, and you have to go through security every day. yuck!).

The takeaway is that YC companies need to offer more equity, if they hope to attract people like the OP. At the end of the day, most YC companies don't have money to fund the salary and benefits packages the OP wants. This is expected for startups, the idea is that you get paid in equity instead of cash/benefits. Given more equity, the OP could sacrifice some savings to pay for the benefits he wants (clipper card, health insurance for his daughter, health club membership, etc.), with the idea that the expected value of his stock would pay for these benefits in the long run.

It seems pretty clear that he feels YC companies are not offering enough equity to make this tradeoff worthwhile. Thus, the only practical solution for YC companies to attract talent like the author is to provide more equity.

Write up lecture notes, and design your own assignments. This is how a lot of my upper division math classes were setup, and the arrangement worked quite well. Textbooks are usually full of fluff not relevant to the class. Lecture notes, being designed by the person teaching the class, only contained material directly related to what was being lectured about / tested on. Of course, creating comprehensive lecture notes is not an easy task, but it's well worthwhile - write up your lecture notes once, and you can reuse them every year, without your students paying $100 for a textbook they'll never look at again.

The best way to reinvent the airline industry is to fly private. Think about how terrible a bus is, and how most of us use cars because it's an immensely better experience. Going from commercial -> private is a similarly massive leap (I've never flown on a chartered private flight, but I am training for my pilot's license). You go to the FBO (the equivalent of the commercial terminal, but on the other side of the airport), sit down on a comfy couch, watch some TV on a nice flatscreen, grab some free snacks and drinks, then walk out onto the tarmac to your plane at your leisure. No backscatter machines, no metal detectors, and CSRs who give a crap and want to help you (since you're paying them!).

Of course, flying private is not viable for most people. I see the day approaching where owning a plane will be on the same order of magnitude of expense of owning a car. Two things make flying really expensive: fuel and maintenance (you can buy a flyable used plane for ~$50k). Fuel is a fairly intuitive expense: avgas runs about $6 / gallon in the northeast. Figure a small piston plane (4 people) burns ~12 gallons / hour, and you're talking ~$72/hr to operate a plane in fuel alone (note: you're traveling about 150mph in this piston plane, much slower than a jet). Maintenance is a huge issue as well. Every so-many thousand(~2k for a piston) hours of flying, you have to shell out a ton of money ($15k for a piston plane) to overhaul the engine(s). This is in addition to standard annual and 100-hour inspections.

One thing is going to change both of those factors: better battery technology is going to make electric planes viable. Energy cost goes down since energy from the grid is way cheaper than that generated from the ICE. Maintenance is hugely reduced as well. No oil changes. No engine overhauls (electric engines last for ~10x as long as their ICE counterparts and are way cheaper). Increased reliability (adding engines is a trivial cost and doesn't increase weight significantly). Recapturing potential energy during descent. Reduced drag (no nasty air inlets for that combustion reaction).

I don't think this change is going to happen overnight, but given the focus on battery technology for EVs, I think the requisite batteries will become available within 10 years (historically, battery density has doubled over 10y).

Part of this is likely due to building restrictions. For example, Palo Alto has a 50 foot building limit [1]. If developers were allowed to build 20-story apartment buildings, it's very likely that housing prices would plummet.

[1] http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=27136

True enough, but it's always possible to fork the project, given it's GPL status -- heck, this is what Apple did to the KHTML project.

The reason that WebKit is different from Trident (IE's rendering engine) is that WebKit is open source. If a company comes along and says "hey, it would be really cool if we had an NFC API for the web", they're not stuck in a rut. They can hire some developers and submit a patch. So I'm not worried about lack of feature development.

The thing I'd be most worried about with a single engine is lack of compliance with the standard. If multiple people are implementing the standard independently, there are bound to be some differences (for example, if an SVG line is rendered at 0px, with a 1px stroke width and crispEdges, do you snap to [-1px, 0px], or [0px, 1px]?) People run into these issues in practice, and report them; it causes clarifications in the standard to be made, and ensures there is an accepted standard of behavior for pages. This ensures we don't end up in a situation like Ruby, where Specs ran on the official compiler dictate language rules. It means that WebKit is allowed to change its implementation details without anyone crying foul when the maintainers change undefined behavior.

How do you feel that the term has been diluted? As far as I can tell, the statement is true to the Collins dictionary definition of "intellectual property, esp computer source code, that is made freely available to the general public by its creators" [1]. The data is intellectual property that will (hopefully) be made freely available for the general public to scrutinize.

[1] http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/open-sou...

Given NYC's sky-high rent, I wonder what would happen to the real estate market if these apartments were occupied by full-time residents. It seems grossly inefficient to have an apartment sitting empty for that long, no matter how much money you have. I guess there aren't too many good options, since airbnb-style renting is probably a) illegal and b) frowned upon by the building. If I were these people, I'd just treat the apartment as an investment property and stay in a really nice hotel when I was in town.

I'm skeptical of Musk's claim that the review was fabricated. What motive would the author have to fake the review? He would lose all of his credibility as a reporter, essentially killing his carer if anyone found out. Seems like a really high price to pay.

That said, Musk also has a lot to lose by calling out a reporter for fabricating data. It's a pretty serious allegation, and he could get into hot water over it. Therefore, my intuition is that either: 1) Musk is not reading the data correctly, missing some important details, or 2) The data was recorded incorrectly by the car. My bets are on (2).

I'll provide a different option: it takes too much time to get it right! iOS for example provides so many default widget toolkits complete with gradient, sheen, and dropshadow which make it really easy to create a polished experience quickly. The web has no such concept (well, bootstrap is sorta close but not nearly as polished and not for mobile). Why does the web not have these polished frameworks? Simple - ROI. The incentive for Apple and Google to develop said frameworks is large: a pool of developers who will take advantage of the toolkits and write much better / way more apps. What's the incentive for the web? Basically nil. Anyone can rip off what you did (one of the downsides to the web being open and standardized!), and you gain none of the benefit of enhancing your platform.

Knowing nothing about heaters, I'm curious: why does electric heat make no sense? My intuition would be that an electric heater would require far fewer components (especially considering the battery is already in place), be less dangerous, and require less maintenance. What is the relative efficiency of electric heaters to propane heaters?

The HN title is misleading. What the article is stating is that Google is essentially building its own FBO [1] at the airport. There won't be any additional runways, nor control towers. Just a small (relative to commercial terminals) terminal and space for Google to store their planes at.

A little bit of background for people who aren't pilots / have never flown private before: if you're not flying commercial, you fly out of a Fixed Base Operator at the airport. These are usually on the other side of the airport from the commercial terminal, and are responsible for filling up planes with gas and providing hangar or tiedown space. They usually have a nice lounge area with flatscreen TVs, comfortable seating, and a pilot's lounge with computers that can be used to file flight plans and check weather. Some of the nicer ones go so far as to have beds for pilots who are doing a layover, and offer amenities like free snacks, and movie rooms. These FBOs have (in almost all cases) no TSA security - you just walk out to your plane and hop in. This is infinitely nicer than commercial air travel. The people at the FBO actually want to earn your business and treat you nicely, going out of their way to help you!

In this case, Google is just contracting with an existing FBO to build a new building with a lounge area, and building out more hangars to store planes, both of which will be exclusively for Google's use.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-base_operator

How is this accomplished? Does the car talk to your home router via Wi-Fi? Is there a cell connection?

Given your experience in the area, what battery technology are you most optimistic about? Yi Cui's nanowire batteries [1]? Li-Air [2]? Anything else promising?

[1] http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n1/abs/nnano.2007.411...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium–air_battery

This is definitely a really useful component to the interview, but I don't think it should be the only component. A lot of our jobs are doing straightforward things: "implement spec X, where X is pretty close to what's been done before." But occasionally we'll encounter a problem that requires us to think up an algorithm. It might be similar to what's out there, but it's not going to be a googleable solution. It's these cases that define a good engineer.

I'd liken our jobs to those of pilots. Most of the time, anyone can fly the plane: just punch in the flight plan to autopilot, and press 'A/P engage'. However, when a pilot is near cumulonimbus clouds with an engine failure, he is forced to step up to the plate. This is what pilots are paid for: to handle the crazy emergency situations that can arise when you're in the air. This, too, is what good engineers are paid for: handling the difficult problems that occasionally arise during development. If you're not hiring for this, you're hiring code monkeys.