stevewepay

Put the bare minimum, and do not say anything about compensation, etc. As a3n says, just say you are leaving, and when your last day will be.

When it comes to the exit interview, DO NOT SAY ANYTHING EITHER. It all goes into your employment record. You don't owe them any honesty, so just leave quietly and don't burn any bridges.

Interesting, thanks for the insight. We are doing something similar to the nonce that you mention, but your argument that at-least-once semantics is more appropriate is very convincing to me, as is your RPC argument. I'm old enough to have had to endure both ONC and DCE rpcs :)

I want a message queue to hold credit card authorization requests. I want to ensure that the authorization requests occur at most once, since having a customer's credit card charged twice is infinitely worse than not charging the card.

If the request never goes through, then I can always get the customer to try again, but if it gets charged more than once, then it's a huge headache, and our customers get extremely angry and lose confidence that we know what we're doing.

Most of the self-taught engineers that I've met struggle with algorithm questions, even relatively straightforward ones. Most also don't have a clear idea of things like algorithmic complexity and how to get an idea of how efficient an algorithm implementation would be. This is mainly because CS students are forced to learn this whereas self-taught programmers would need to be particularly motivated to sit down and teach themselves this, because there are no immediate practical uses for this.

The great debate of course is, how important are those skills? Many self-taught programmers I know reject the idea that these CS fundamental knowledge is important. And to their point, many self-taught programmers that I've met/hired/worked with that would be productive on day one because they have real-world knowledge and experience. Case in point, the founding engineer of the company that I work at is a college dropout, he's more than 15 years younger than me, and he's excellent. As well, I'm a self-taught programmer but came from a EE background, so I had two CS courses under my belt before I decided to pursue programming after graduating.

No, they did not know it existed. I'm sure they suspected something (no idea why), but they just pulled over her entire family's car, and did a blanket search. She was on H1B, so she lost her job and had to fly back to Asia with nothing except the clothes she packed for a weekend road trip to Canada.

They can read through the person's text messages to look for evidence of illegal activities. This happened to one of my friends while trying to enter the US, and she was given a 10 year ban from entering the US because of things written in her text messages. They essentially accused her of trying to engage in immigration fraud because she had texted with one of her friends some jokes about getting married for a green card.

I used to be very big into algorithmic and day trading, and one trader I was introduced to had Martingale'd himself into a record of something like 2 years without suffering a loss. Then he suffered a 300k loss and wiped out all of his earning plus more and then he lost a lot of his followers, at least for a while.

That is the point I'm making: start small, make useless programs and see results quickly. If you start from scratch, trying to tackle something big will only frustrate you because there's too many things you need to learn before you can get a complex program up and running.

No one needs a program that outputs the listing of a directory, but if you can get that working, then that's a huge accomplishment, especially for someone that hasn't taken formal programming classes.

I'm in the process of teaching one of my friends how to program. He's starting off with almost no knowledge, but he's a smart guy, so hopefully it won't be too painful.

The #1 thing I told him to do is start by programming small, useless programs and work up to more and more substantial programs. The more you program, the more you learn, and you build on that wealth of knowledge. And more importantly, you learn how to avoid the mistakes that you made from your previous programs. I'm in the process of learning Scala on my own, and this is the tract that I'm taking as well, and I've been programming for years now.

And in the process, the key thing you learn is perseverance. If you don't have perseverance, there is no way you can be a programmer, because that is the life of a programmer. You hit roadblock after roadblock, and you need to figure out how to get around those problems by yourself. You have to try 100 times to fix a problem, so that the next time it might only take 97 times, etc, etc.

No, this is in the case of fraud, and then unlock it after 3 months. If you want it frozen until you rescind it, it costs $10 per bureau, but there may be an exception for fraud.

The one bad habit you learn from coding in school is you take a project and then throw it away. So speed does count when it comes to finishing an assignment so you can goof off, go party, etc. And then you never see it again, so who cares if the code sucks as long as it produces the outcome you want.

What you don't learn in school is how to write maintainable code. This is a much different style of writing code, and much more valuable once you go out in the "Real World". I'm not sure if there are CS programs out that start with a small project and then force the students to make massive changes to that project throughout the course of the year, but to me there is immense value to that. Even better would be if they had CS101, CS201, CS301 and the students taking CS201 would be forced to dig up their project from CS101 and work on that, CS301 would work on the code from CS201, etc. It's eye-opening how much you forget about your code after a few weeks, so it would drive home the notion of commenting, writing easily readable code, etc.

That's a pretty impressive lineup of investors. With that kind of funding, I imagine that Coinbase isn't just setting themselves up as a Bitcoin company, but they should be able to create infrastructure that processes/handles any sort of cryptocurrency. So even if BTC loses favor, they'll be one of the few companies that have the infrastructure to support whatever the up-and-coming cryptocurrency is. Regardless of which specific cryptocurrency is in vogue at the time, I do believe that cryptocurrencies are here to stay, and Coinbase is aiming themselves up to be the market leader. This is an investment that even I'd be willing to buy into as well, if there were ever an opportunity.

When I first came to Silicon Valley, I had a couple of senior engineers as my mentors. The most important lesson I learned from them is that they were extremely supportive. I had a couple of ideas for new features, and instead of shooting them down and telling me why it wouldn't work, their responses were always "Hmmm, sounds interesting. Why don't you spend some time on it and let's see how it works out." When I did something dumb, they would point out the mistakes after implementation, but never in a "I'm smarter than you" way.

Of course, since then I've had many jobs where the other engineers were always hypercritical as this article points out. In this industry there certainly is an undercurrent of everyone trying to prove how smart they are by showing why everyone else is dumber than them.

However, I'll never forget my first mentors and I try to respond exactly as they did, which is be supportive to any of the junior engineers that I mentor. I always try to not say "no", even if I feel they are wrong, and I always engage in a conversation. Even if I disagree with what they want to do, I'll try give them the opportunity to prove me wrong (within reason) as opposed to simply shutting them down with a curt "you're wrong, no."

This is also not true. A lot of people enjoy playing limit poker, like 3-6, because they can chase big hands much cheaper. It's a completely different strategy than no-limit, where you could potentially risk your entire stack in any hand you're in.

The other thing is that poker has an unexpected (at least to me) social aspect to it. The people who play against each other are largely friendly to each other, and they play against each other every day so playing 3-6 limit lets you spend more time at the tables than 1-2 or 3-5 No Limit, etc.

I play poker in the card rooms around the Bay Area very regularly, and limit poker is absolutely popular at the card rooms that I go to, as well as in Vegas. To say that it is dead is completely untrue.

Awesome work! How much more/less radiation does this expose a patient to than a traditional CT scan?

Everything I've read suggests that this doctor is conscientious, selfless and kind. I don't believe he would have exposed others to Ebola if he had any inclination that he was infected. He measured his temperature twice a day as was required and didn't feel sick until today.

It could be the case that he was infected 2-3 weeks ago, but since the average time of symptoms showing up is 8-10 days because he was symptom-free before leaving for nyc, he might have thought he was fine.

I'm at a YC startup, and our culture is very much to not have late nights, work people to death, etc. The belief here is that working people to the bone does not build a scalable business, and the only way to grow at a sustainable pace is to maintain regular work hours, have realistic goals in terms of work, and to give people a life outside of work. Sure, we all monitor our emails on our phones, and on occasion we need to work a little extra, this is still Silicon Valley. But many people here have young families, and the office is pretty empty by 6:00pm.

WePay.com - Palo Alto, CA - Full-time (Relocation assistance provided)

WePay is looking for talented and motivated software engineers to join our rapidly expanding team. Our transaction volume has more than tripled year-over-year, and we need your help to scale our customers’ payments to even higher levels over the next few years. We are eager to grow our team of engineers who love programming, take pride in the quality of their code, and are at least decent at ping pong (rock climbing is a nice-to-have).

Requirements:

You must be a great coder that loves to write efficient and maintainable code. We believe that great coders can adapt to whichever new language they need to, whether it’s Java, Python, PHP, Javascript, C++, Scala, Ruby, or any other SEO-optimized buzzword, so we don’t care what background you have (unless you have solely coded in brainfxck). And in fact, we have outgrown our current PHP-MySQL environment and are in the process of architecting our next-generation service-oriented architecture, so we will be excited to make full use of your experience and perspectives as we select the right tools for the job.

You must 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 in relative independence because we hate micro-managing.

You must 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 specialized skills would be awesome:

* Front-end expertise, including JavaScript, CSS, AngularJS

* Back-end expertise, including extensive database experience

* High Availability and Distributed Systems

* Big Data experience, including Hadoop and/or Storm

* Machine Learning and Modeling

* Experience in Risk and Fraud Detection

* Experience in payments and PCI compliance

* Expertise in Security

* Team Lead experience

If you have any interest or questions about WePay, please contact me directly at steven at wepay.com. I'm an engineer, not a recruiter, so your email will get a response.

WePay.com - Palo Alto, CA - Full-time (Relocation assistance provided)

WePay is looking for talented and motivated software engineers to join our rapidly expanding team. Our transaction volume has more than tripled year-over-year, and we need your help to scale our customers’ payments to even higher levels over the next few years. We are eager to grow our team of engineers who love programming, take pride in the quality of their code, and are at least decent at ping pong (rock climbing is a nice-to-have).

Requirements:

You must be a great coder that loves to write efficient and maintainable code. We believe that great coders can adapt to whichever new language they need to, whether it’s Java, Python, PHP, Javascript, C++, Scala, Ruby, or any other SEO-optimized buzzword, so we don’t care what background you have (unless you have solely coded in brainfxck). And in fact, we have outgrown our current PHP-MySQL environment and are in the process of architecting our next-generation service-oriented architecture, so we will be excited to make full use of your experience and perspectives as we select the right tools for the job.

You must 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 in relative independence because we hate micro-managing.

You must 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 specialized skills would be awesome:

* Front-end expertise, including JavaScript, CSS, AngularJS

* Back-end expertise, including extensive database experience

* High Availability and Distributed Systems

* Big Data experience, including Hadoop and/or Storm

* Machine Learning and Modelling

* Experience in Risk and Fraud Detection

* Experience in payments and PCI compliance

* Expertise in Security

* Team Lead experience

If you have any interest or questions about WePay, please contact me directly at steven at wepay.com. I'm an engineer, not a recruiter, so your email will get a response.

I did this all the time with my iPhone 3, 4 and 5 without any issues which is why it developed into a habit. The fact that I can't do that with the iPhone 6 is a surprise and disappointment.

I've had the iPhone 6 since Sept 19. In the 10 days since then, I've shattered the screen, when it slipped out of my pocket as I got out of a chair, and bent the phone just yesterday, after putting it in my back pocket and sitting down on it (and then immediately getting up when I realized what I did). Let me tell you that the bending issue is very real. My phone isn't bent like those consumer reports videos, but it is definitely warped.

I realize that both incidents are my fault, but this phone is by far the most fragile iphone I've ever owned, out of 4. In the 10 days that I've owned it, I haven't changed any of my behavior and it already has been damaged twice. I'm pretty disappointed with the poor durability of the phone and am considering replacing it with my reliable iphone5, and waiting for the 6S which hopefully fixes these durability issues.

Sales 101 is being able to take the conversation away from "price" and change it to "value". 20 years ago, my friend was selling IBM desktops and servers to educational institutes and I learned this from him. There was no way IBM could compete against the prices of those small computer stores, so he had to actively show how buying IBM would save money over the long run, etc. He was a very good salesman so it worked pretty well.

If you have a USPS PO Box, some allow you to specify the street address as the address, and they can match your box to your name.

So now what? Now that the canary has disappeared, is there no other information that can be transmitted to us? It feels like it's a binary signal that just got set permanently, so there's no more information we can glean from it.

This is what happened to someone I know. He made a single mistake, hanging around with the wrong crowd, and then even though he was trying to change his life, he kept getting screwed over by "the system". There were lots of issues related to going to halfway houses or going to jail. He got sick and missed an appointment with a parole officer, which caused him to lose his job, which caused him to be thrown back in jail. He was trying his best to follow the rules, but after losing his temper and threatening to attack someone who had been bothering his father, he eventually ended up getting thrown out of the country (he lost his permanent resident). Obviously he made a few bad choices, but if someone is making a concerted effort to change his life, it feels like they should be afforded more of a chance to succeed.

I come from a different generation where people aren't all assumed to be equally smart and equally talented. So I very much subscribe to the idea that some people are clearly smarter and more talented than others.

There are definitely A players who are demotivated and become B players. But the point of "Only hire A players! Fire B players!" is simply due to the fact that most startups can't afford to sit around and move demotivated employees around until they find a good fit. It's also the same reason why many startups don't train people for jobs and instead expect them to be already experienced. The number 1 currency for startups is time, and if they don't get traction quickly, the entire company will falter. Wasting time and money on an employee that isn't a good fit, regardless of how intrinsically talented they are doesn't make sense, because the entire survival of the company demands that everyone is performing at top levels for a relatively short period of time.

As the company grows and turns a profit, and if it can afford to invest in employees, it might make more sense to try to elevate the performance of their B players by moving them around, etc. But that requires a more mature company.

The weather in the Bay Area is essentially perfect. The scenery is beautiful, and you can see the ocean, the desert, magnificent forests and the mountains all in the same day. It doesn't get too hot, it doesn't get too cold, it rains only for a few months out of the year, and it never gets very humid. Living in the Bay Area makes you spoiled and lazy because it is too comfortable. As the piece [1] by Mary Schmich (and again by Baz Luhrmann) says, "Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft."

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-su...

I've been living in the Bay Area since the dotcom days and they've been asking the same question since I've been around. Until people in tech stop making money, I doubt SV will collapse, but it will go through boom and bust cycles. But the booms tend to be huge and the busts tend to be not as bad.

I had the opportunity to get a job in Seattle at Amazon about 10 years ago. I would have taken a paycut, but with the 0% state income tax and with the generous signing bonus it would have more than made up the difference. (I'm pretty sure property taxes are higher though.)

But then I had to contemplate exchanging 300 days of sunshine for 200 days of rain. At the time, I was playing rollerhockey outdoors at 8pm and came to the conclusion that I just couldn't do it because of the weather. And I grew up in Vancouver, BC so the rain didn't bother me as much, but I just got too spoiled by the amazing Bay Area weather. If you're not used to it, the rain in the Pacific Northwest truly is relentless, so it takes getting used to.

Mind you that was during the time when rent prices were high but not as ludicrous like they are now. Even during the dotcom boom there were similar stories of people living in their vans, so it's not really a new story.

But my friend was charged 5100/month for a 2 bedroom at mission bay, which doesn't make sense. If I had to make the same choice now, it would be a lot harder to make and Seattle is definitely compelling if you can get past the 200 days of rain.

Are there any risks to adopting Scala as a language for a project knowing that it will change over the next few years? It sounds like as opposed to an evolution, they are going to change the language itself, which sounds like backwards incompatibility and refactors within a few short years if you don't want to be considered legacy.