wesleyfsmith

Isn't this the nature of abstraction though? As the high level tools get increasingly powerful at solving common problems people will invest less in learning their underlying implementations.

I'm sure all the assembly programmers were complaining that the C programmers had no respect for "how anything works".

I taught at a bootcamp for a while and always covered big O. It's pretty important for interviewing. Bootcamp kids know more CS than you might think...

I have to say that I didn't really understand the perspective the writer was coming from. It kind of felt like he just wanted to finger wag at SF.

> Everything is too expensive.

Just normal supply and demand economics. This happens all the time all over the world when lots of high earning people suddenly move to an area.

> There are thousands of dumb startups.

Yup. And most of them will die. And some of them will become AirBnB. The problem is, it's extremely difficult to predict which is which. That's just the nature of searching for "the next big thing". I'd rather live in a world where there are lots of dumb companies so that the few exceptional ones have a chance to get started.

> People are spoiled.

No, people in SF value their time, as it's the only resource you can't get more of. I absolutely understand why someone with the money would have groceries deliver for them. It's more efficient. The locally sourced and organic thing does feel a bit silly though, although I would say that's a fad you see everywhere.

> There cannot be these many quality engineers.

I'm sure there are some bad engineers there. But SF has a massive pool for exceptional talent, and while I'm sure not every engineer is extremely high quality, I have no doubt that a substantial amount of top tier programmers are in SF. If the majority of programmers weren't making meaningful contributions to their companies, I don't think you would see them being compensated the way they are.

I have to disagree. The inherent nature of open source is forking projects just to make some small change that you really want. Sometimes those changes make it back into the original project and improve it. Code diversity is far more important than "developer fatigue".

Must have been really hard shutting down your baby. Do you wonder what could have happened if you hadn't sold?

I had the exact same thought.

So I take it then that working remote with founders was actually much more successful than the folks at YC originally thought it would be? Because I remember sama saying that he was very skeptical the remote thing would work.

If you don't feel compelled to code outside of work, it's probably because you don't love what you are working on enough. I find that programming itself is not enough for me to want to work constantly--I have to legitimately love what I'm building.

From the evidence I've read, it does sound like a lot of these colleges are promising jobs and pushing students into extremely expensive loans in a predatory fashion. I just hope that ultimately these schools have to foot the bill and not the taxpayers for these schools' mistakes.

As someone who recently started integrating with Plaid in my app, I can verify that the extra information they give you access to is extraordinarily beneficial to better understanding your user. Also, asking for account and routing numbers is a massive inconvenience to users.

Making this system integrate with Plaid out of the box was a smart move. Plaid is so much better for users' than having to manually enter bank account and routing numbers.

I am trying to build a lending platform where we by definition cannot afford to lose 3% on each transaction. I'm am thrilled to see this. We have had to hand jam our current system with a local credit union (where we literally have to print out forms and bring it to them), so being able to switch to a fully programmatic system is awesome.

I remember my lifeguard training. I used to play water polo so I pretty comfortable with picking the bricks up off the bottom, but some of the other guards that got certified scared the hell out me.

I think the linux comparison is quite apt. Even now, there are multiple distros that all use the same package format, deb or rpm. They are different forks of linux, but they've made a point to still have interoperable packages with one another.

Thank you! I'm glad we were able to share a brain wave. I'm loving the term 'forkophobia', and the comparison to Berlin. Freedom to choose means that people will gravitate to the best ideas. At the end of the day, everyone wins with open source.