w3pm

"I'm sure they deal with this with people wanting to stay beyond their trip date or trying to book directly, but Airbnb can easily track this stuff with the scheduling feature and seeing discrepancies when users try to go offline."

Just curious, what recourse does Airbnb have when discovering these discrepancies?

Irrelevant. How valuable is the work you do? You could go around 'pitching' your window washing services and land 5 out of 100 potential clients but you still aren't getting more than a few bucks per wash.

I guess I'm not following how they are unrelated. To really stress a system and find bugs, shouldn't you be putting it under realistic usage and load? In my mind using test data that closely matches real data is desirable for development purposes. I suppose I'm now actually disagreeing with the OP's statement -- that example was a specific circumstance where perhaps more care should've been taken, but for the general case I think it's actually desirable to use realistic data.

Plus I just think it'd be cool if you could use the same service/API for both use cases.

Fair enough, but it's also advantageous to make it non-obviously fake. Consider the recent stories about services faking traffic/users in order to gain real traffic/users (ebay, reddit, dating sites, etc).

I think you misread the op's post -- the suggestion was, "would you work with them again." If they're lousy the answer is obviously no.

"Given the scale of the cash injection, the company might not have to raise another series round before going public, though a bridge round isn’t inconceivable."

Why does a company need to raise so-much-money before going public? Isn't the whole point of "going public" to raise money?

Except that go is a garbage collected language and as such will never be a replacement for C++. I could however see C++ dying, leaving C and go behind.

What about the author's complaints about exponentially increasing code complexity when introducing new features or new exception types? I feel like the author made an attempt to write c++ the "correct" way and found it unsuitable for the software's goals (zero undefined behavior).

The entire first half of the article is dedicated to why "C++ with exceptions" is not acceptable for software that strives to have zero undefined behavior. Your proposed "better title" doesn't make sense given the article content.

For a while I thought C + templates would be a great idea as well. In theory templates are a much more powerful and expressive way of generating code than macros/xmacros.

However after playing around with the idea in a few C++ modules I was writing I came to the conclusion that it's just not worth it. Part of what makes C so enjoyable to write is its relatively "weak" typing and the flexibility that comes with that, primarily freely casting between pointer types including void*'s where necessary. Templates fight against that at every opportunity and I found myself spending more time trying to figure out how to wrangle my code into the template type system than actually making progress on the problem at hand. Newer additions like C++11 constexprs take that type-system frustration to an entirely new level.

Many of these "I'd never have imagined you could get rich doing... (groceries|steel|lumber|shoes|silverware|bandaids|etc) examples take generations to build the business large enough to actually "get rich." They're definitely not "get-rich-quick" schemes but slow, methodical progress made on capturing a portion of industries with billions worth of turnover per year. Obviously counter-examples exist (Cotsco, etc.) but by and large these stories involve generational contributions to the business.

The intern bit is disturbing to me. The trouble is, he can't actually believe this is the best decision for these kids to make. He himself started a business while still in school; he didn't slave away for someone else as "low cost" labor. His own experience tells him that the best "career stepping stone" is to create things, with friends, for yourselves. Any truly "wicked smart" kids shouldn't be making this decision and he's not doing them any favors by encouraging it.

In my own experience, offering a fairly-paid internship (ie, what they would be making as a junior full-time employee), of a few months, is a great way to evaluate a potential hire down the road. Do I expect useful work to come out of these few months and build a business plan around it? Not really, and I believe it's dishonest to do so.

I agree that simply "counting" is a useless metric. I believe what's useful is exposure to different ways of thinking about programming and problem solving. In my personal experience, exposure to imperative, functional, logic, actor, and meta-programming have all enabled me to learn more about problem solving and to think about programming at a higher level. Can you gain exposure to all of those concepts, and more, in just 3 or 4 languages? Absolutely. Does the potential for learning and growing as a programmer end there? I'd hope not!

As a related note, learning new syntax is by far the least useful aspect of learning a new language. Coincidentally, it's also the easiest element to pick up and takes little time at all. Incorporating new paradigms into your way of thinking takes far longer.

Assuming they could maintain that for a full year, $6K a day is only 2.2MM. Also keep in mind that these hotshots don't do much of the grunt work, they offload it to any number of junior associates (which that hourly rate has to cover, in addition to other business overhead). Still not a bad gig if you can get it.

Good lawyers cost quite a bit more than $350 an hour. Many of the "top" law firms charge north of $1000 an hour these days, below that $500-600/hour for a good quality lawyer is about what I'd expect. Fairly insane but it's one of those things where if losing is more painful than that price, you have no choice.

Is this surprising? I'd imagine 3D printing would be capable of replicating the form of nearly any solid object that fits within the bounded volume of a given 3D printer.

Here you go:

http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/

Enter St. Louis, MO and San Francisco, CA. Housing is 276% more expensive. Columbia? 252%. Kansas City? 215%. You get the idea.

Also, just for fun, try some other "large towns":

Dallas, TX: 276% Columbus, OH: 268% Austin, TX: 245% Jacksonville, FL: 242% Phoenix, AZ: 225% Atlanta, GA: 217%

Plenty of companies I know pay $5-10k or more for a successful hire referral. Good engineers are in demand, foreign or not. It's way easier to get the interview and be hired if you're local, though -- can't beat skill + convenience.

Considering you pay 25-30% or more of first year salary for a hire by a recruiter and $10k is a complete bargain.

One thing I've wondered -- rather than spending so much effort building an extensive network, why not build a very small network of solid connections... with people who have lots of connections?

In any industry there are those individuals who seem to "know everyone," have been next to many industry-shifting moments one way or another, have worked at a half-dozen of the most important companies, etc etc. It's clear that a large part of their time is spent networking (after all, it's a hard job), and a large part of their value is as a connector. As an added bonus, because they're a connector and value having lots of connections, they should be open to the idea of getting to know you and forming another connection.

Why not just make connections with 6,7,8 of those people and then be done? You'd be one hop away to almost everyone in your industry with far less effort than actually getting to know everyone in your industry. Anyway, just theorizing at a more efficient way of networking. Agreed on the article's premises that a real network is with people you know as human beings.

For what it's worth, I see identical behavior with stock market enthusiasts as well. Good job numbers? Market goes up. Bad job numbers? Market goes up -- clearly Ben Bernanke must keep printing until employment stabilizes. "A" is good for the stock market and so is "!A." It really is a crazy time we live in. Cognitive dissonance everywhere you look.

Exactly right. In our current zero-interest rate environment everyone with spare cash is scrambling to figure out what to do to generate a return. Stock market? Risky. Bonds? You've got to be insane. Real-estate? Very risky. Angel investing in tech companies? Used to seem crazy but now it's not any less risky than the other options. They'll all implode if the money printing ends. It is unfortunate since out of all of the options, investing in tomorrow's inventors is actually one of the better uses (for society) of idle money.

Does it matter? What are the odds these guys are telling the truth when the President himself has lied about it? Maybe it's a concern of national security?

How about just displaying the result below as soon as the selection is changed? Having me click a button, and then click 'Back' to try a new combo, is annoying.

Other than that, great idea :)

I believe it's about the money your money will earn that buys you the freedom. Consider having $5 million in the bank. You buy some conservative Pimco bonds earning 5% per year and bam, you've got $250k in yearly income (pre-tax) doing literally nothing and never spending a dime of that 5 million. If that's not freedom in any city in the world then I don't know what is.

Prices are on the right side of a menu in America. It means you never have to care how much you're spending on a meal.

C has the benefit that it's as close as you can get to a WYSIWYG language. There's no VM or garbage handler running behind your back doing god-knows-what at the most inopportune time. You can look at the code and know exactly what instructions it's going to execute, every time.

(Yes the compiler can do some trickery at certain optimization levels but even then, you're able to look at the generated assembly very easily and verify the output you expect to see).

I'm a little surprised they aren't running their own OS with a custom scheduler; I guess the odds of that being bug free vs the odds of running into a Linux bug make it a losing proposition.

The clockspeeds on the processors they're using are probably relatively slow. Plus they don't have to worry about retina displays or WiFi or other major power-consumers in today's devices... I bet the overall consumption isn't that bad.

No dynamic memory allocation, no recursion, no longjmp, etc. Program execution must be entirely predictable, every time.

SpaceX's programming rules are probably very similar to those used at NASA JPL: http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf

Sorry but I don't think this analogy works. How many people would it take to lift a plane 38,000 feet into the air at 600 mph? You can't measure the usefulness of jet travel by such labor utility metrics, it's nonsense.

Perhaps you can quantify how much gasoline and time jets save as compared to other methods of travel, such as by train or boat. But going on some hypothetical equivalent of Google search with hundreds of thousands of librarians made me stop reading midway through.

Look at heavily unionized industries like hollywood and the writers guild for guidance. They effectively have a "minimum wage" where if you're part of the guild, you must be paid a MINIMUM of $64k for an original screenplay.

http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts...

Guess how easy it is to get a job writing screenplays as a member of the guild? It's actually incredibly difficult and the vast majority of prospective writers are effectively unemployed, working jobs at coffee shops instead.

Putting a price floor on labor creates unemployment, period. The writers guild is just one microcosm of this effect.