slezakattack

Reading this made me think a lot about "Brave New World". The beginning of the book triumphantly describes the conditioning of newborns to optimize economic contribution. A really good but dark read.

I did a take home assignment a couple years ago where it was time constrained to 2 hours. At first, the idea sounded cool: nobody looking over your shoulder, I can listen to my music, use my tools, and work in my most productive environment. Selfishly, it can be nice (assuming that you didn't just have a long day of work and aren't dirt tired).

I'm very quickly realizing it wasn't that great and in fact, comes off as lazy from the interviewer perspective. There are several "coding interview websites" where you can ask the question, give the candidate a terminal to code, provide a list of available languages, and even have unit tests from the interviewer side to make sure the solution is correct. We've completely abstracted out the interaction and questioning of candidates and it has become a binary "did they get it right or not" type of process. Sure, there's follow up interviews and such but what have you gained from this process that couldn't be asked over the phone?

Worse yet, if you aren't using these tools and simply letting the candidate email you a project (or however they choose to deliver it to you), it can quickly become a time sink as you spend it trying to understand the solution (i.e. why did they interpret the meaning of "API" as a REST service? What is this obscure library they're using? etc.)

No thanks.

This is similar in emergency situations. When you need somebody to call 911, don't ever say "Somebody please call 911!". You have to look at someone, point at them, and tell them "I need you to call 911". Most people will either stand in shock or think that someone else is on it.

Or comments written in the first person. "// We need to increment i by 1"

I think you may be conflating the Halting Problem. The problem simply states whether it can be determined that a program, given a set of inputs, will eventually halt. Attempting to use a null pointer can be deterministic at compile time but it's not telling you that your program would halt or not.

I understand the rationale behind your comment but I think it expresses a form of emotion when including something like "unfortunately" to an already negative statement. It feels like an expression of regret. Personally, saying something like "unfortunately, my grandmother passed away this year" instead of just saying "my grandmother passed away" feels a bit more emotional.

I went to South Dakota School of Mines and was sad to learn this wasn't my school doing this..

I found that the side-story as to how they even got this story was pretty fascinating: http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/revealing-a--year-old...

I just described a home that is $100k less than the $1MM example. The property tax rate in San Jose is roughly 1.3% of the price of the home you bought it at. So for $1MM, you're looking at $13k in property taxes, not to mention a higher mortgage overall from my example. A quick mortgage calculator tells me that we're adding another $400/mth for the $1MM example. This doesn't include the second mortgage which will roughly be $100,000 loan at about 6.5% interest.

So, you're telling me that the $1MM home (which will be roughly $5600/mth) will give you nearly $20k in tax deductions (in order to meet your ~$4000/mth)?? Effectively making your property taxes free for you? You're either delusional or I am going to have a very exciting tax season come next April...

Where did you get 3k a month for housing?? Remember, this is an 80-10-10 loan which means you have two loans. I have a 80-10-10 loan for a roughly $900k house and the first mortgage is $3400/mth (30 year fixed at 4.15%) and the second loan is $600/mth (same but around 6% interest). $4000/mth just for the mortgages, property tax is about 12k for the year, which means you pay $5000/mth on housing. For reference, this is San Jose.

So with your estimate, you're actually left with $4k saved for the year..

The apartment complex i lived in while in Rapid City, South Dakota was $650 (2011-2012)...How many places in the US do you think have $500 rent where you need no roommates, completely functional (A/C, heat, working kitchen), in a low-crime area?

You missed the student debt part. There's a lot of people I know (my brother included) who went to the more expensive schools for various reasons and walk out with some debt that's hard to pay back.

This is a neat idea but it would be great if there was a bit more substance to the post. Do we have any performance benchmarks? Why would I consider it a strong contender? Stating "multi-core support" to me is not necessarily scaling.

I'm in no way an expert, but I work in Erlang in my day job and just glancing at the repo, this solution can't possibly be performant. A) Erlang is slow at math. B) Arrays don't have O(1) access(ETS tables might be able to help with this). C) You can't scale this solution with more Erlang nodes(without some additional work).

I really like Erlang and want to evangelize it but I don't think this is a good way of doing it. I only see this as a neat toy but not a selling point for using Erlang..

As a side note: I noticed the repo has a feature note about adding NIF's for performance bottlenecks (native C code for Erlang to talk to). If you end up writing C code, then what are you gaining from Erlang?

+1

I'm curious how different it would taste if the containers weren't sealed during fermentation. It would be informative to see what their gravity readings were to understand how much fermentation took place during the experiment.

I found $315 blown against a street curb on my run with my wife one morning. It was roughly 7am and nobody else in sight so we just took it... Admittedly, when people ask the ethical question of "do you report it to the police?", I suppose my answer is "no". I gave myself solace in thinking it might've just been a drug deal that went wrong. ;)

Unfortunately, declaring your company a start up is sexy. My last company was about 130 employees, made some profit but mostly enough to keep the business afloat, been around for a little over 10 years, and was reluctant to call itself a start up.

The company I'm currently at has close to 1,200 employees, been around for close to 10 years, its own free cafeteria, profitable enough to fund several high-risk initiatives, but easily calls itself a start up..

My personal opinion: you're no longer a start up if you're able to afford your own "free food cafeteria". ;-)

There are significantly more ride-sharing drivers on the road than pizza delivery cars.

A sex toy being hacked by some hacker could make for an interesting porn plot..

Completely untrue. I'm not a Haskell evangelist (I appreciate it for what it is) but I thought I would at the very least point out that most of the documentation for basic data structures (i.e. Data.List[1]) not only are well-documented but have a link on the far-right side of the documentation site that directly shows you the source code and it's usually easy to tell what it's doing. Any developer should be able to grok that code and determine the run-time complexity.

[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.9.1.0/docs/Data-L...

Well, he's the co-founder of Channable so... :P

"It is said that Haskell programmers are a rare species, but actually the majority of developers at Channable had used Haskell before."

Could you imagine if this wasn't the case? The hurdle to actually get people excited about a language such as Haskell especially moving from something like Python would potentially be huge. Kudos for already having that problem solved.

I think you have an interesting point but I disagree with your analogy of a presidential election. The motivations for voting in a presidential election are not always financial (even though future policies could very well determine your own financial outlook..). I think you're right about investors are in it for the returns but having control can help steer your returns. If everybody thinks the CEO is not increasing shareholder value, you vote to remove said CEO. This is not always positive either as many investors want quick returns and not always have patience for visionaries..

I think for every batch of successful people with ADHD, there are others still finding their way. I have ADD and my brother has ADHD. I'm super quiet, observant, and methodical at times. He's very energetic, passionate, "never give up" kind of personality. It's interesting to see the similarities and differences between us. I'm not sure if it's related to the mental disorder or just hereditary or shared personalities from growing up together, but we both didn't do well in school as our parents would hope. He was definitely a troublemaker and I was just..in my own world I suppose. I'd like to think I'm "successful". I have a steady job and able to pay the bills while affording the thrills of life. I'm extremely grateful. My brother, on the other hand, lives with my parents, working 60 hours a week and has no health benefits or paid time off. Perhaps it's part of "growing up" and I just got lucky. I'd like to think that him and I look at the world from a different lens from others but I don't think it's affording us any sort of life hacks that make us successful or brilliant.

That looks vaguely right. I remember it being a bit more richer green look to it but the shape and everything looks about right.

When I visited Nepal, a lot of the street vendors had these bowls made of leaves (perhaps banana leaf, not really sure). I have no idea if they are financially better off or cost effective but thought I'd mention that I've seen something like this before.

I'm wondering where the loss is coming from. I'm skeptical that it's all coming out of the cost of infrastructure and workforce. I know they've had some company acquisitions in the past, so I wonder how that is coming into play.

It's not that Haskell can't be used by industry, it's just that the language has mostly been used by enthusiasts and academia (that's not a bad thing). No big companies have really committed to making Haskell industry focused. Facebook has dabbled in it and even made some improvements to the GHC compiler but I don't think they are replacing swaths of their tech with Haskell.

I agree with the "never has" part of the statement but a little skeptical on the "never will" cause we can't really predict that. I feel like the language itself has been picking up popularity in recent years so who knows.

Are you a one man team or...? My wife would probably leave me if I was on-call for that long.

I get this too. However, I can say that it's not just Indians. There are quite a few people from all backgrounds who have questionable skill levels from prestigious schools and/or who have masters degrees. I've given enough interviews to realize that there is an alarming amount of people who can't figure out how to write an "addition" function given two strings representing positive integers in a 45 minute window. So, I honestly skip over the school and education in the candidate's resume and see what their work experience is (or side projects if they have that).

I don't remember if GTA V had this same feature as GTA IV, but I remember being impressed in GTA IV by the cell phone interference through the radio when you had an incoming call and the radio was playing. I just absolutely loved the attention to detail that game had. It was truly the small things that added up that made you want to figure out what other details they put in the game.