AstroChimpHam

He keeps talking about how this is going to prevent malicious employees from getting at your data or sharing it with the NSA. It's not. Facebook, Google, and every other website you use will still have unencrypted access to all of the information you give them on their servers. The only thing this would keep them from having is the password you use to protect that other stuff they already have access to anyway.

Constructor.io founder here. Swiftype does a great job of being pretty good at a lot of things. Constructor.io focuses on state-of-the-art in autocomplete. Looking at one of the websites Swiftype advertises powering like www.bulbamerica.com, you can see they miss basic misspellings.

Constructor.io, aside from providing typo-tolerance as you type, also optimizes autocomplete rankings to prioritize results most likely to lead to conversions, provides search suggestions as well as product suggestions, and much more.

If you want a pretty good full search solution, use swiftype. If you want to add the best state-of-the-art autocomplete that's proven to increase conversions, get in touch with us at constructor.io :)

It's 2015, and this is a search engine. Why is there no autocomplete? You guys should check out https://www.constructor.io

Thrilled this is finally out. I've always wanted to be able to turn all my posts from adventures into stories. Now I finally can!

Not really. The population is large enough that you're treating each potential hire as a random variable. Given the amount of possible good new hires the effect of passing on one actual good hire has negligible effect on the next potential hire.

The theory behind the "raise the bar" argument is that obviously good hires are easy to spot (this is the part most people reasonably take issue with), so people who do not pass that bar of "obviously good" aren't worth taking a risk on. The conclusion is statistically reasonable if you accept the premise (which, again, you probably shouldn't).

No. What I'm saying is people's decisions being one of the biggest determining factors of their fates is the null hypothesis. If you want to prove the alternative hypothesis-- that it's not generally poor people's decisions' fault they're poor, you're going to have to bring data to back-up your alternative hypothesis.

I'd love to believe that alternative hypothesis, but that would be naive and irresponsible without data.

Believing it's most poor people's fault they're poor is the null hypothesis. We generally believe people's decisions matter. It's especially the null hypothesis for me, because this is what I grew up seeing with my own eyes, in my own family. It's even more so because the people I grew up with would have also said "it's not my fault I'm poor," even when I could clearly see them make bad decision after bad decision. Then there's the additional circumstantial evidence of seeing who invests in poor financial vehicles like lottery tickets and playing slot machines.

Yes, I'd love to know these are all exceptions to the rule-- it would make me feel much better about the politics I'd like to believe, but the other camp is going to have to provide the data to back up their alternative hypothesis.

I grew up poor among other poor people, and it never struck me that anyone was buying expensive stuff because they thought that's what would lead them to a better job or some such. They were buying expensive stuff because they wanted it. There's this new feel-good ideal that it's not poor peoples' fault they're poor, but no one ever supplies data to back it up. Only well-written personal stories. I'm sure it's not a binary, but from personal experience where I grew up, the poor people in my family and around me were poor mostly because they were lazy, wanted expensive possessions, and refused to work the long-game to getting out of poverty.

I'd love to see real data that points to this being the exception.

Is there a way to remove "withdrawn" applications from averages? There are a lot of decimal point errors there, which skew the average way up.

That's enough for lots of jobs. It's just not enough for all jobs, and the ones it's not enough for tend to get more publicity (and, with good reason, higher salaries).

No, it's not. It's not that working at Tesla is more important for everyone. It's that if you do work at Tesla in that employee's role (which was key because he's getting direct emails from Elon Musk), then that's a sacrifice you need to make. For me, I'd much rather witness my child's birth, which is why I wouldn't take a job where I might have to miss that. The solution is not to take the job, not to criticize a guy literally changing the world for his process.

So, don't work there. We're talking about really smart people that can get jobs wherever else if they don't like the culture at Tesla. All the replies on my comment share the same issue that for them seeing the birth of their child is more important than being a part of Tesla. That's fine. Don't work at Tesla. That's why I wouldn't work there either. I wouldn't work in the army either, which has the same setbacks when you're on a deployment. Elon Musk consistently delivers on actually changing the world, so yeah, he's allowed to have rules to work with him.

Also, to the people that downvoted: it's really disheartening to see you'd rather downvote out of existence than have a dialogue with a contrasting opinion. Enjoy your echo chamber.

All the negative press and comments about this miss the point. The guy has very specific, very ambitious goals that he has a track record of achieving. He prioritizes those literally above everything and expects the same from key employees.

Working at Tesla, which has already done a ton to change the entire car industry is a huge privilege, and no one's making you do it. If you can get a job there, you can get a job elsewhere, but if you do want to have your job there and help reshape the world behind someone with a track record like Elon Musk's, yeah, you're going to have to play by his rules. If other stuff is more important to you, go work at like 95% of other companies.

Two main ways come to mind:

1. Become interested in something esoteric in programming, then find people more knowledgable than you who are interested in the same thing. This always works for me when I get interested in something new.

2. Just reach out. I've gotten questions on LinkedIn from people I've never met before, and as long as they're not obnoxious, I always reply. Even if this doesn't work for everyone, try to make enough connections, and some will work out. Just be respectful, and show you've put thought into your questions. Questions like, "how do I data science?" won't get good responses.

If you don't trust your coworkers' ideas about what needs to be fixed right now, that's a separate issue.

If you're at a start-up and some unforeseen problem occurs that needs to get fixed right now, and you're the only person who can fix it: yes the start-up expects you to fix it before you can pick up little Suzie from soccer practice. Yes, they will hire the person most likely to make that choice. If they don't do that, their chance of failure is much higher.

We make sacrifices to work in some areas of tech, and we get paid well to put work before most other priorities because that's what's needed in some (not all) tech jobs. If you want to put kids as a priority before work, that's fine. There are plenty of jobs in tech you can take, but don't expect the same positions as the lady who puts work above all else and consistently delivers when stuff's on fire. She's devoting more of her life to the company and deserves a better title and more pay.

Can we quantify a bit more? What numbers mean a "minor success?" What numbers define one that's big enough to be worthwhile?

Also, I don't see buyouts discussed anywhere in the article. Lots of those minor success founders will want an exit as well, and when they sell their business, the investors get to exit as well.

In all situations, you really have to look after yourself. If someone ever asks you to work without pay, they're asking you to up your risk. Demand more equity. The greater the risk, the greater a return you should get, otherwise you're making a bad investment.

Founders can be assholes. So can investors. Always look after yourself (and your team, if applicable). Too many assholes and horror stories not to be wary.

I've been both a founder and an early employee. As an early employee, I always received a salary, and knew I could leave any time I felt like it. My level of risk was low, and I was perfectly happy with my equity knowing I had a nice upside without much downside at all.

As a founder, I haven't paid myself in months, and have commitments to my customers such that I 100% can't just shut things down and leave to do something else without killing a lot of relationships and getting a terrible reputation.

Of course, I can only speak to my own experience, but I'm satisfied with my amount of equity in both situations.

Why rent more servers when it's so much easier to spin them up as you need them in AWS and tear them down (and no longer pay for them) when you don't. If you're expecting unknown change in scale, it's so much easier to be able to just spin up servers to keep up than anything else.

> To handle peaks, it is both simpler and cheaper to keep enough capacity just idling around than spinning up and down Amazon instances.

At a growing website, you have no idea how much "enough" is. Why try to estimate caps when you don't have to?

Is there a way to switch explicitly between Python and Bash mode? The "ls -l" example makes me pretty worried that this could mess up basic bash scripts that already work just by defining a variable like "ls" and forgetting about it, or forgetting where it's defined. It's a great idea, but there's a lot of room for stuff breaking that worries me.

A lot of the commenters are understanding this post as the author putting down unbreakable commandments and then demonstrating that there are exceptions to the rules, and thus the author is wrong, or bad at his job, or whatever. We programmers have really got to learn to take stuff less rigidly.

OP can correct me if I'm wrong, but I read this more as "here's the ideal I'm working towards, and I follow it as much as I can unless there's a good reason to break it." Read it that way, and there's actually a lot of good advice in there. I've never met a programmer that didn't need to be in the zone to get big projects done well, and everything mentioned here is good advice towards finding time to get into the zone more often. As a start-up founder, I have a ton of little things I constantly need to do, and following advice like this to get those little things into manageable clusters that allow for less context-switching has been incredibly helpful in getting stuff done.

I'd never heard of some of the tools the author mentioned, and I sometimes forget some of the strategies, and a refresher is always nice. Thanks for the post!

> Realistically, only bad things happen to the whistleblower. So when someone tries to discredit one, ask yourself — what could the whistleblower’s motive possibly be? They’re knowingly ruining their own lives.

Whistle blowers become folk heroes to a lot of people. No one cared what Edward Snowden, the NSA analyst had to say. Everyone cares what Edward Snowden, the whistleblower has to say. If you want that kind of popularity and respect, be a whistleblower. I'm by no means saying that's the motivation for all whistleblowers, but I'd be dumbfounded if it wasn't the motivation for some, and separating the two is frequently difficult.

It would be nice to have something that makes the hard-to-remember stuff in git more accessible. @qw3rtman, how often do you plan to work on this? I wouldn't use it yet, but I might if it were more built out (and had support for branches).

Yup. It does all of the stuff I had trouble finding and figuring out by myself. I'm sure more annoying corner cases will come up later on (as they always do with alphabets and unicode), and I'll keep adding to it.

>But eventually the researchers homed in on 10 pairs of male identical twins, one of whom regularly exercised, while the other did not, usually because of work or family pressures, the researchers determined.

That "work and family pressure" sounds like stress and a pretty important confounding variable.

Phabricator's great, but the intention of the list is free hosted services, and phabricator you have to host yourself.

This is a list of free services mainly geared for start-ups. A lot of companies cut start-ups some slack and have a free plan for them, and we thought it would be useful to people to compile that in one place.

Founder here. Would love to hear feedback.

I wonder how she feels about hispanic immigrants to the USA? Does she think we should keep them out because they're "ruining" American culture? This whole thing smacks of this weird anti-immigration mentality that I wouldn't have expected from the left-leaning groups leading the protests. I'm going to make a side-by-side of Texans upset about Latinos and San Franciscan hipsters upset about techies.