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stevewepayon First Year University Expenses in Canada

When I went to U of T, my tuition started at around $1900, and ended at $2500/year in my final year, all of which was covered by my scholarship. In addition, residence at New College was about $6000/year including meal plan. So you could pay for your entire year's tuition, or a huge chunk of it, by working a minimum wage job (I think that was ~$6/hr at the time). If you lucked out and got a decent $9/hr job, then you were living on easy street.

My parents weren't rich enough to pay for more than the residence costs, so I needed to get a part time job in order to do anything outside of school. It was just enough so that I could go out every now and then or buy a CD. But I left school with zero debt.

The idea that kids today leave school with 6 figure debts is crazy to me. Being disadvantaged with such a huge debt load means they can't afford to take risks, which is something that young people should be able to do. It's at the point where it might not be worth it to pay for that top school education if it means becoming and indentured servant to your debt.

stevewepayon Underwater greenhouses are growing strawberries

Maybe because it's good marketing? If someone reads about it on the Washington Post, they're more apt to believe and contribute than someone who sees a random Kickstarter campaign with nothing but a Youtube video.

stevewepayon Real time Greek referendum results

The EU has already said that the referendum is about staying or leaving the EU.

Leaving the euro would be the best thing for the country. You can't rehabilitate your economy if you don't have control over your own currency (dropping the exchange rate, encouraging and influx of foreign money, etc). Look at Iceland, only a few years after their banking crisis, they are thriving. ]

stevewepayon Real time Greek referendum results

It's never been out of the question. In the years that they have been kicking the can down the road, all of the EU financial institutions have been preparing for this exact thing. You can expect Greece to exit the euro with little to no effect. The euro will of course rise, because the caliber of the remaining countries are much stronger.

The real issue is contagion. The EU doesn't want Italy or Spain to go down as well, because the markets/bond vigilantes love to pile on when there is blood in the water. Look at what happened during the Asian currency crisis, it was mass contagion throughout Asia that caused the subsequent problem.

stevewepayon New Horizons enters safe mode 10 days before Pluto flyby

On the contrary, this is where you can really prove that you are worth your salt. There is no better arena to prove yourself than a real-live production-down situation.

stevewepayon Pete Sampras: Letter to My Younger Self

Actually I think it's slightly different.

Champions don't fear loss otherwise they would never try for the last second winning shot. Champions like Michael Jordan, etc, believe they should win every single time because they are the best. When they take that last second shot, they believe it is going to score. A championship is theirs for the taking and if they lose, it's because they fucked up, not because someone else beat them.

stevewepayon Ask HN: Open source OCR library?

I did it to count the tiles, and was going to work on a full-on cheating program but never got around to it. I did find the algorithm online though, it's pretty interesting.

stevewepayon Ask HN: Open source OCR library?

It's pretty much as other people talked about, I used OpenCV to try to detect the board, and then isolate each tile, and then used Tesseract to try to figure out the letter. The biggest problem I had was whenever the red score bubble landed on a tile, it would fall on top of the latter and thus lose information so I ended up having to create training data and associating that to get the letter. I was able to get to about 98% accuracy and it was relatively robust until they created a new app that I haven't had time to adjust for.

stevewepayon Ask HN: Open source OCR library?

I used Tesseract and OpenCV to process Words With Friends tiles.

stevewepayon Ask HN: I'm 19. Should I leave my education for my startup?

Finish school.

You're only young once. Why waste your youth working, when you have the rest of your life to work? Explore school, explore intellectual pursuits, learn things that actually interest you without the constant stress of worrying about work.

Your startup idea will likely not make any money, you have less than a 5% chance of success. Go with the numbers and enhance yourself by staying in school.

stevewepayon Is Node.js declining already?

>Node's event driven design is also called "co-operative multi-threading"

I think you mean multi-tasking, not multi-threading. And isn't cooperative multi-tasking the Windows 3.1 model on DOS? Not sure how cooperative multitasking is better than OS threading.

And am I mistaken, or is Node.js the same thing as Windows programming model from 1990 repackaged in Javascript? Windows programs have single message loop, and Windows events and you write callbacks that handle those particular events, like when a mouse clicks, when it moves, etc.

stevewepayon Grace: Graceful restart for Go servers

What is the technique to shutdown and restart a server without losing connections? Is it just making sure the connection isn't closed or reset before shutting down the server?

stevewepayon Tell HN: Things I Learned about Credit Bureaus This Week

The credit bureaus simply don't care.

I had my identity stolen and then bad information was mixed into my account information. It took years to get things straightened out.

Even to this day, years later I can't do any online credit verification because it has data mixed with it from the credit bureaus, and I routinely get answers wrong because of this. But there is no one I can complain to, especially for these online data tests.

The best way to get something done is to do a proposition in states that support it, like California, and get a law voted in that forces better behavior from the credit bureaus. Then, because California requires it, chances are change will occur throughout the country.

stevewepayon Last Task After Layoff at Disney: Train Foreign Replacements

This has been going on since the dot com bust. My friend had to train his offshore replacement at his company. He did things like train them saying one thing in the morning, and then say the exact opposite thing in the afternoon. The replacement workers would mention the conflict that but he would insist they were wrong. This went on for a month or so until the training period was over.

stevewepayon Senate Approves Bill to Rein in N.S.A. Surveillance

I honestly can't tell from the article if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

stevewepayon High Frequency Trading Strategies

One question I have is, when do you know to abandon a trading strategy that used to be profitable, but has not been profitable over the past N number of days. At what point do you throw in the towel and move onto another strategy?

stevewepayon Ask HN: Thank you note after startup interview?

It's definitely not common these days to send a thank you note. It used to be a lot more common 20+ years ago but these days, it's pretty uncommon from my experience.

But I don't think there's anything wrong with sending a very brief, succinct thank you email to your interviewer(s). And in one case, someone I know got a job at Cisco because she sent a well-written thank you letter to the interviewer, because it put her in their minds before they decided among 10 similarly-qualified candidates. Keep it short and on point, with maybe one sentence about something they mentioned when talking with you. There is definitely an art to writing a 2-4 sentence, non-awkward email.

Personally I think a hand-written note would be weird, I wouldn't do it.

stevewepayon Bitcoin mining on a 55 year old IBM 1401 mainframe: 80 seconds per hash

Most of the time the hash isn't successful, so you modify the block slightly and try again, over and over billions of times.

Question: What exactly gets modified over and over again? Is it the nonce that gets tweaked through every iteration? And is it correct to assume that for a fixed number of transactions that are added to a block, that there may not be a hash that works?

stevewepayon Payments company WePay (YC S09) raises $40M to go global

(WePay employee here) One thing we have spent a lot of time working on is protecting our marketplaces and their customers from regulatory risk, which is something not a lot of people think about. We've noticed the card companies are focusing the Eye of Sauron on PayFacs in the last several months, and consequently their customers. We have spent the better part of last year ensuring that all our ducks are lined up in terms of ensuring that our customers are on the right side of the regulations, and now it's paying off.

stevewepayon Ask HN: Am I missing out by not being in sillicon valley?

If you're an actor and want the most opportunities, you go to Hollywood. In the same vein, if you're in tech and you want the most opportunities, you should go to Silicon Valley.

Just like Hollywood, Silicon Valley can be a very poisonous environment. So it's a double-edged sword, because there are many unhealthy things about living here (materialism, greed, house prices, wealth inequality, etc). But if you're looking strictly at opportunity in tech, nothing surpasses it.

That said, you can definitely have a happy and prosperous life outside of Silicon Valley. You don't need to be here at all to be happy and fulfilled, but if you want a plethora of opportunity, your best bet it here.

stevewepayon Just Don't Hire 0x Engineers

I'm not a Musk-apologist, but he already denied that vehemently on Twitter. And the "source" of that statement is anonymous with little credibility. Seems like an easy case of libel.

stevewepayon Ask HN: What are some of the best HN comments that you've read?

ChuckMcM can always be counted on to have a thoughtful and interesting comment. He is my #1 favorite HN commenter.

stevewepayon How New York and San Francisco's Tight Housing Markets Are Hurting the Economy

Wouldn't it actually encourage people to relocate outside of NYC/SF, which would be good for the economy, according to the article? The drastic difference in house prices would mean that you could sell your house here, and move to an equivalent house with many hundreds of thousands of dollars in your bank account.

stevewepayon Ask HN: Do you gamble?

I play poker in card rooms often, but I don't consider it gambling. There is an aspect to luck, but it's mainly skill. Betting and knowing how to bet is a dominant aspect of the game, and there is a huge skill component to that.

stevewepayon Tesla Energy

I wonder how many years this battery will last before requiring replacing?

Storing power over the course of the day is an intriguing idea, because the house is generally empty then. Instead of selling back to the power companies, I would rather have it power this battery so that my night time use is "free".

stevewepayon Ask HN: Should I testify?

Testifying isn't as big of a deal as someone who bring a lawsuit against their company. There are a lot of people who testify in lawsuits, and their names never make it to the articles. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

stevewepayon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2015)

WePay (YC09) - Palo Alto/Redwood City - Full-Time - Only current US work authorizations

Company Description

WePay is a fast-growing payments company that has built its API specifically for platform businesses like marketplaces, crowdfunding sites and small business software. Through this API, WePay allows platforms to easily offer payments to their buyers and sellers. WePay uniquely offers platforms a customized user experience while shielding them from fraud risk.

Job Description

We are looking for great software engineers to join our rapidly expanding team. Our transaction volume has more than tripled year-over-year and we’re rapidly outgrowing our existing tech stack.

We’re working to rebuild our application on top of a brand new service-oriented architecture and need your help. Do you love programming, take pride in the quality of your code, and are awesome at ping pong?

We’re working with real money so writing efficient, maintainable and well tested code is a must. We believe that great coders can adapt to whatever programming language they need to, whether it’s Java, Python, PHP, Javascript, C++, Scala, Ruby, or whatever it is that’s hot this week.

Qualifications

Be able to take complete ownership over a bug, feature, or entire project and drive it to completion. We have to trust that each of our team members can work independently because we hate micro-managing. Be open-minded, flexible, and have a pragmatic approach to solving problems. The payments industry can be baffling at times, so we value people who can persevere and continue to make progress with a positive attitude.

One or more of the following skills would be awesome:

  *Front-end expertise including: HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, AngularJS
  *Back-end expertise with RDBMS and NOSQL databases, messaging and queuing systems, batch and scheduled tasks
  *Restful API design and implementation
  *Building highly available and distributed systems 
  *Big Data experience including Hadoop, Storm, Kafka, etc.
  *Machine Learning and Modeling
  *Experience in Risk and Fraud Detection 
  *Experience in payments and PCI compliance 
  *Expertise in Security 
  *Leadership experience
  *Prior open source experience, we love open source!

stevewepayon Process and thread fundamentals

You can't really compare thread pools to semaphores. They're don't have the same intended use, where semaphores are a low-level synchronization mechanism and thread pools are a bit higher up. In fact, I would wager that many, if not most, implementations of thread pools use semaphores to some degree.

stevewepayon “Platform” risk

I'm not sure which specific time period you're referring to with respect to Microsoft, but I've worked for several companies who had paid for Microsoft support contracts, as of the mid-90s, and Microsoft support was always phenomenal, most especially SQL Server support.

stevewepayon Tim Cook: Pro-discrimination ‘religious freedom’ laws are dangerous

People use the excuse "it's for the economy" in much the same way that people use the excuse "it's for the children", or "it's to fight terrorism". It's a lazy argument to shut up the opposition because how dare anyone do something to hurt the economy/children/help terrorists?

That being said, this law is insane, and it will be overturned or repealed. It's just a shame that people need to be discriminated against during this waiting period.