shawnps

Hi, I work at Rackspace. If you don't mind me asking, what makes you initially want to move away?

Rebase also helps me make less useless commits.

For example, if I commit something on a branch, and then later realize I made a typo in that commit, I can make a commit that fixes the typo, then use git rebase -i and make it a fixup commit. Fixup squashes the commit into another one, and discards the message.

Thanks, I appreciate the response. I'll look into OPT and think of some big companies like Google and FB.

Thanks, got mine. It said "handle taken" in red text briefly before I signed up, but I ended up with the handle that I wanted.

Regarding this one:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pyguide.ht...

I commented about this on another post. There's a nice explanation here as to why using mutable objects as default values in function/method definitions is bad:

http://effbot.org/zone/default-values.htm

In short, it can be bad to set default arguments to mutable objects because the function keeps using the same object in each call.

In the first example under "When to use which", the reason you want to set a default argument in a function to None, check if it is None, and then set it to an empty list is explained here:

http://effbot.org/zone/default-values.htm

In short, it can be bad to set default arguments to mutable objects because the function keeps using the same object in each call.

Is there anything like Udacity/Coursera for non-CS courses? I'd love to do some Advanced Japanese.

> First, the sample size. Clearly, github is very popular with the Ruby crowd, with more than four times as many projects as Python, the runner-up.

It looks like Python is at ~400 in the graph, and Ruby is at ~1200. Am I missing something?

Great job, Dan!

I'd like to apply as a new grad (I'm graduating in May), do you have time to chat via email or phone so we could talk about which position would be best, or should I just apply to one and see what happens?

I left a comment asking for him to reiterate on that part, let's see what he says.

I liked Moneyball a lot, very interesting read. I felt it encouraged me a bit to take more risks, regardless of what others think.

I always welcome feedback, thank you! I didn't realize how important a personal site is. I actually recently bought the smallest Linode available, so I'd like to get shawnps.net up soon. I've been doing schoolwork and working on the Kanji website, but I'll try to get a personal site up soon.

And thanks, my team and I worked hard at the competition. I always thought it was kind of cool that had a post about us on the White House blog. The website is down now, so here's a cached copy:

http://tinyurl.com/5uzs5yp

Thanks, I did hear about this yesterday, but it's too late to register. They're allowing people who can figure out how to insert themselves into the database to register (the code for the site is open source and has hints on how to do it), so I'm about to clone the git repo and look around.

shawnpsmith@gmail.com, http://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnps

and thanks for taking an interest in me

Thanks, it helps to see a comment like yours when I'm in this kind of slump. Next time you mill through resumes, keep me in mind :)

I'd like to, but I feel like I've exhausted my options. I've interviewed all over the place, and I'm generally a nice guy and I think I'm pretty smart, but people seem to never want to hire me, I dunno why.

I forgot to add this: the most recent interview that was discouraging was with a large travel-related company. A recruiter reached out to me (so, I didn't even apply), gave me a few questions to complete that I spent hours on. I worked super hard, typeset it in LaTeX, and figured it was way beyond what they normally receive from candidates. The recruiter even told me they were very impressed. I went in to interview, chatted with some engineers (and I even taught the second guy a few things, like the rename command), and never heard back. I emailed the recruiter and asked why. The recruiter said that the team simply needed to hire a senior candidate. I felt stupid for wasting my time.

Something similar happened with Jane Street; they wanted solutions to questions in OCaml. I spent a long time on the problems, submitted them in Scheme, Python, and OCaml, all using recursion, higher order functions, etc. After submitting the code, they turned me down.

Yelp also turned me down after I spent a long time on the problem they gave me. I did what the problem asked, including writing unit tests. It was fun to write since it was in Python, and I like Python. But again, turned down after submitting the code.

Also, I figured it wasn't a problem with the code, as I had friends who were hired by Amazon and Google review it and they said it looked fine.

These are the types of things that are making me want to stop interviewing.

What I'd like to do is become more active in the HN community, and eventually start working on projects related to studying Japanese or learning about Japan. I'm working on a small project now that will show a new Chinese character per day, because kanji-a-day.com is currently the top result in Google for "kanji of the day", and it's not nice looking.

I've been chasing internships and jobs at Google on and off for the past two years or so. I'm still in college, and I met a recruiter for SREs at a conference. After talking to her on the phone, I decided it wasn't worth the stress, and called off any further interviews. I suck at interviewing (I get nervous pretty easily), so I've tried to do various things on the side where the pressure isn't so high (competitions, side projects, etc.) but companies still don't seem to care. So I think I'd be happiest working for myself, on something that I'm passionate about :)

I disagree with his statement that learning is not itself an achievement. I enjoy learning on its own, and see it as an achievement in itself. I often learn things without the goal of applying them to anything in life, just the goal to learn them and know about them.

Submitted my resume (but forgot to attach cover letter, darn), thanks for the heads up! Seems like it'd be a cool place to work.

I'd like this, as I've begun searching for a 6 month internship to start in July for my third co-op.

Is there a way to find out for any given domain how many actual servers hand out responses to other DNS servers to hold in their caches?

What would happen if he suddenly decided to unplug dancer and forcewall forever, would all the other DNS servers in the world fail to resolve yp.to after their cached responses expire?

Could someone clarify this for me, please? On this page:

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/intro-dns.html

under the "Multiple Servers" section, he says

"To protect against computer failure, there are actually several root servers, several .to servers, and two yp.to servers."

I don't understand, is he saying there are only two DNS servers in the world that you can contact to resolve yp.to?

Just so you know, the "Cost" link on this page is broken:

http://octopart.com/api/documentation