rdoherty

Related video about why people think CGI sucks or is still in the uncanny valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6hp8BKB24

Basically we consider CGI bad because we only see bad CGI. If it's used properly and the director/creator understands its limitations we either don't notice it or use our suspension of disbelief and don't care.

Reminds me of a 'future' talk about how JavaScript took over the world as a language even though no one actually programmed in. This was because as long as you could transpile to ASM, you could get native performance via JS.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

(Worth watching no matter what your background is, it's funny and informative)

Good point! That's why posting on HN is so great, even if you're 99.9% correct, someone will always reply to tell you precisely how you are 0.1% wrong . Thanks for the link, I tried to find official sources online and had trouble.

I'm 99% sure that any boiling will kill nearly all germs in water. I don't have facts on hand, but I do remember that once you get above ~160F, nearly all germs are dead. So boiling water will definitely kill everything.

Sounds like you have some good tips for using Lambda, got any links or posts on them?

Interesting! This type of infrastructure and coding fascinates me, thanks for sharing!

I'm curious, how does Cronitor actually monitor that the URLs were pinged at the correct times or at all? Part of me thinks they are using cron to check statuses?

Data Engineers/Data Scientists/Engineers | Mountain View, San Francisco, and Philadelphia | Full-time | Onsite | RealScout, Inc.

* REALSCOUT *

RealScout’s goal is to provide better transparency between real estate agents, home sellers and home buyers to bring efficiency to the $1 trillion residential real estate marketplace.

Our agents closed $1.5 billion in sales using RealScout over the first 8 months of 2016, which is growing rapidly as we expand across the country.

* THE TEAM *

We strive to cultivate thought diversity with candor, empathy and respect. We welcome people of different backgrounds, abilities and perspectives - it’s one of our core values.

We often times pair program, hold hack days every other Friday, and maintain 85% test coverage in order to maximize learning as well as enable us to act quickly on those learnings.

We're open source across the stack - Ruby on Rails, Python (Caffe, TensorFlow, Pandas, Celery, etc), ReactJS, ElasticSearch, PostgreSQL, Redis and take time to give back to our community.

(For the curious, check out our team page [1] for a fun, short intro to everyone at RealScout.)

* NEXT STEPS *

Feel free to peruse our open roles [2] and submit an application there or email chris (at) realscout.com. Once we hear from you, we'll reach out to schedule an initial 20 minute conversation to answer your questions about RealScout to see if it looks like there's a good fit. Next, it's your choice whether you'd prefer a 2 hour take-home coding exercise based on our production code or to schedule a 1 hour pairing session with one of our engineers. Lastly, you'll visit the office to pair program with 2-3 engineers and chat with our VP of Product, CEO, and/or COO. Our hope is that by the end of the visit, you have a good idea of who you'd be working with, how we work together and what challenges we work on day to day, as well as a full understanding of our product and business. We look forward to hearing from you!

[1] http://learn.realscout.com/team/ [2] https://jobs.lever.co/realscout

I believe sugar is a preservative because it's hygroscopic. http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/how-does-sugar-act-preservati...

Mythical Man-Month is widely considered the #1 software engineering management book out there. I'd buy that one before anything else.

I would love to read those questions, any chance you could publish them somewhere?

I've been thinking about this for a while. I think it would involve asking a highly focused set of questions to at least 3 different employees and see how much they correlate. I don't know what those questions are though :)

One question that I think correlates low with a highly functional sane tech company is "Does your CEO still write code for the product?" if the answer is yes and the company is larger than 20 people, odds are high that the company/CEO is not highly functional.

Here's what I would ask (in addition to the ones already listed)

- What is your current runway and burn rate?

- How much funding has been raised at what evaluation and type(s) of equity?

- What % of the company are my shares?

- What is the founder(s) background and expertise?

If you're interviewing for a startup, don't focus on the product at all, that will change. Focus on the founders and core team. Those are the people that matter. Are they CEO/CTO/CMO/etc level material? Mature, focused, driven? Able to accept harsh truths and make tough calls? Have a strong vision for the future, but are pragmatic now? Can you see them being able to fire someone? Negotiate with other companies?

If they don't seem to have what it takes to go from a tiny startup to big company, you may want to reconsider.

Aside from companies working on electric cars and solar projects, who else is working on large-scale projects to ameliorate climate change? Any truly massive projects akin to putting a man on the moon?

I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.

When looking for a job, be careful when leadership says their organization is flat. You will probably find people at the top (C level) who hate being told what to do and hate management. That will poison the structure and coordination of the company. People need some sort of structure so they know where to turn to for help, responsibilities are assigned and there is accountability.

I'm not advocating having rigid, strong management and structure at a company, just that if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge. And that is far, far worse.

IMHO that's a good thing. It's not changing, works very well, has lots of plugins and is a relatively small library so you can fix it yourself. Plus a large user base, so many problems you run into are already known.

I would look at Flot, it's just 1 file (plugins are additional files) and very simple to use. http://www.flotcharts.org/

That definitely would help them, and it's something many companies do once they reach a certain size.

I agree no VC backed company will be profitable for much of its early life, my point was you can't compare apples to apples between Gillet and DSC. If DSC is spending insane amounts of money on growth and discounting their goods, at some point they have to start making money. And at that point I wonder what their retail prices will be for their blades if they are buying them from a 3rd party.

I'm not sure why Gillette should be (very) afraid of DSC. Gillette had $7B of sales in 2015, compared to ~$240 million by DSC. The real questions that should be asked are:

- Did Gillette's revenues decline because of DSC? If so, by how much?

- What is DSC's growth now?

- What is DSC profit margin? (Hint: it's < 1%)

- With > $160 million in investment in DSC, what % did the 190 employees own?

While DSC had $240 million in sales, a huge percentage of that money did not go into their bank account. Since they were buying razors from a 3rd party, easily 40-60% of the costs go to the razor manufacturer, plus shipping & handling costs, taxes, etc. According to Forbes they weren't even profitable! (http://fortune.com/2016/05/16/dollar-shave-club-2/) Gillette's profit margins are ~30%, for comparison, even with massive marketing, sales and distribution costs.

I do love DSC's model and attitude, but claiming the sky is falling because they were purchased for $1B is hyperbolic. Look at the numbers and do the real math :)

We're using Bootstrap for our site, Podium: https://podium.live. It was a great way to get started, we had a decent looking app for a while, then once we could hire a designer we were able to modify where needed. It really does make a difference.

I'm using Flot for https://podium.live, 10-20 charts with upwards of 1k points/chart updating at 10hz. It can work, but you need to do a few things like wrapping things in requestAnimationframe and not redrawing axes.

haproxy and redis are the two that come to mind. Not necessarily because they make me happy, but they never seem to make me angry or sad. Which with most infrastructure software is rare.

I agree, and I've used Laravel too. Yii is built and designed by someone who has written frameworks before and understands how to do it right. The creator wrote the Prado framework, then wrote Yii from the ground up.

Laravel definitely has all the hype, but Yii has been around much longer and is better architected imho. It does have a slightly steeper learning curve and isn't as instantaneously easy to use at first, but it's worth the effort.

This is one of those 'it depends' questions (like most important ones are!).

I've quit on the spot once and I think it was ok. I was consulting (paid hourly), had multiple disagreements with my 'boss' (CEO) about major work behaviors (wanted to literally sit behind me while working and watch, critiqued my work despite not being technical and tried to control everything). No loss, had plenty of work elsewhere, wasn't going to use him as a reference.

Other times I've quit from places I've worked at for > 6 months I gave at least 2 weeks notice.

So, use your judgment :)

I'm guessing that if they are generating nanotubes for sale, their is a collection process that keeps the nanotubes in some sort of container. Since this would take place in a location that also has coal or natural gas, I think they will have the procedures and technology to prevent fires and explosions.

I'm not sure if it does or doesn't, but the salary of $155k is normal in the SF area.

Check out AngelList's salary tool: https://angel.co/salaries . Median salary for 'Developer' is about $120k. More for a backend developer.

GlassDoor gives an average salary of $120k for the same area: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-engineer-sa...

Salaries in the San Francisco Bay Area are very high compared to the rest of the world due to high housing costs and extreme demand for engineers. $155k is average for 5-10 years of experience at a non-startup. You can certainly go much higher or lower depending on the company, your experience and your negotiation skills.

I agree 100%. I've worked for multiple companies that say "we're a family", then lay off people with no warning or remorse. Businesses are not families.

Yup: https://metastatuspage.com/

Slack's status page is hosted by StatusPage, and it appears that the Slack client attempts to load the status page when it can't connect to Slack. So in effect, Slack is DDOS'ing their own status page.