danielvinson

Location: San Jose, CA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes.

Technologies: Javascript, Node.js, d3, jQuery, HTML5, CSS, SVG, Python, Django, Flask, Cassandra, MongoDB, AWS, Git, SVN, Unix, bash.

Resume: www.linkedin.com/in/vinsondaniel (email me for more information please, this is purposely incomplete)

Email: danielvinson+hn@gmail.com

I have experience at almost every level of product development: I have at various points designed, produced, coded, documented, deployed, and supported three significant hardware products. My personal projects currently - data analysis and charting with large data sets scraped from the web, a front-end SVG framework for flowcharts, and numerous small tools for data analysis on specific sets.

I'd love to hear about any role which might be interesting - I'd love a change of pace and not afraid of trying something new.

Also a musician. I have a similar problem - I just get an urge to write music when I hear something new that is really good. When I'm working I make sure to only listen to music I already know really well so it isn't too distracting.

Compare "144 deaths... more than 1.7 million robotic procedures" to "3.7 million surgical procedures at 102 hospitals in the Netherlands during 1991 – 2005, postoperative mortality from all causes was observed in 67,879 patients" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perioperative_mortality)

Seems like a huge improvement over non-robotic procedures, though, the comparison is obviously flawed.

I remembered this puzzle from HPMOR, but either way this is just writing a unit test.

Do you have a source for that? I work for a large international company with engineering teams in many countries including European and American ones, and the workers in Europe generally make a bit more than the ones over here. Small sample size, but I feel like you are comparing a small subset of workers (Developers in SF/NYC) to a large one (Developers in all of Europe).

Are these challenges supposed to be solvable within a reasonable amount of time in an interview (15-30 minutes)? Looking through the problems they are all things I could do, but I don't think I would be able to solve any of the harder ones in under an hour - and that would be on my own, not in a high-stress interview.

That statement just doesn't fit well with what is being said - what the author meant was something more like "my hypothesis is that constructed popularity goes down over time but since Wizards doesn't release data on this we cannot know for sure". This really should have been caught by the editor (cough Andy... cough) and clarified.

In my experience pretty much everyone is excellent, apart from the lower level non-engineering managers. These tend to be grads from top schools who have zero previous work experience. I encountered at least three or four in my time at Google who were just out to prove themselves and get promotions and regularly threw their teams under the bus.

Its mostly d3.js

I'm a Sales Engineer and I work mostly on the post-sale implementation side of things, which is not really a common approach - so I completely understand why people feel this way. One of my main jobs is to keep our Sales team informed of exactly what is and isn't possible, because most of them just don't know better when it comes to deep technical topics. Having somebody on the Sales team who is willing say no is really important.

HighCharts is great, but it is prohibitively expensive for a startup to use in their product.

This is exactly how I feel. I spent much of my senior year of high school talking with everyone I knew about what options I had to go into website development (which I already had a job doing). The answer from everyone was basically "Get a CS degree, but don't use it. Otherwise nobody will take you seriously". In the end I dropped out since I realized that spending 3 years doing GE and taking classes on things I already understood was a huge waste, even if the last year would have been very useful.

Just telling people to choose 5 seems really flawed. You are both telling people that being interested in working at many different places is wrong, and telling them they need to choose 5 (because programmers are going to try to optimize).

The obvious good solution would be to algorithmically recommend startups based on a quick survey. The better solution is to have somebody whose job it is to know all about every YC startup, their teams, culture, and needs spend 5 minutes with you and give a few good recommendations.

Mirror for the pitch deck? Looks like Dropbox is 429'ing it.

The fact that there were 4 pages for this little text (with multiple unnecessary charts) annoyed me enough to forget what my actual complaint was.

My research has always shown it to be within ~10% of actual figures (pre-hiring research vs. post-hiring findings).

But how would you change laws to best account for this? It is not a trivial task, and current lawmakers are on average not very good with technology, so there would be a lot of research.

The best thing to do as an employer is to ask the candidate to directly provide code samples. If they don't understand why this would be necessary (or understand your explanation), they are probably not going to be a good employee anyway.

That said, when I receive github links with resumes, I always look at them (and often spend a long time reviewing the code). If the user has a non-picture avatar it is very relieving. I wish GitHub and LinkedIn would provide a build-in service to change your photo into an avatar or something to avoid this.

Why call it TrafficGun? Feels like a weird name and carries bad connotations.

The reason for not including pictures is entirely a legal issue. If a picture is included in the resume and the company decides to not hire that person (despite being qualified), they could sue for discrimination. If the company instead throws out ALL resumes with pictures, they don't ever get sued. Logically, any company that is large enough to have a legal team should be expected to throw out all resumes with pictures on them for this reason.

It is common practice at larger companies now to also obfuscate names of candidates to further eliminate bias and lawsuits.

Some larger corporations are required by company policy to throw out resumes with pictures on them (I know this from first hand experience). This is due to discrimination laws and attempts at eliminating bias.

FYI in the US it is considered inappropriate to have your picture on a resume.

You can't really optimize for SSDs in general. You CAN optimize for a specific brand/model/controller on a certain chipset. If an optimization in general is possible, you can be sure that the SSD manufacturer already is utilizing it in firmware on higher-end drives.

BootRacer tests are really inaccurate. The problem is that boot times are dependent on many things outside of the SSD, namely Chipset, drivers, and BIOS settings. Testing methodology for the manufacturer would be to disable all features in the BIOS for this test to try to reduce variables, which leads to unclear lower numbers.

As somebody who worked on SSDs here is my commentary:

1. Most of the recommendations are things that will have little to no benefit on any modern SSD because all of this is handled for you in the firmware. When SSD firmware is not perfectly optimizing your performance, it is doing so to extend the life of the drive. Take this with a grain of salt though since many SSD manufacturers use really bad code provided by the controller manufacturer (SandForce notably provided awful stock firmware).

2. SSD benchmarks commentary is mostly accurate - since performance is very motherboard chipset-dependent, we chose the best ones to publish. Can't really blame anyone, but it means that if you bought the drive you are incredibly unlikely to achieve identical performance.

3. "Benchmarks are hard". No, not really. I wrote most of the benchmarks we used for linux testing. The reason benchmarks could be considered difficult is because all of the internal benchmarks that are used were written in-house and not released to the public. Reviewers never really had the right tools.

4. Enterprise SSDs and Consumer SSDs are drastically different. If you want consistent high performance, get an enterprise PCI-X drive. NAND quality is the major difference... and good NAND is hard to find. Generally an enterprise SSD will also have a significantly faster controller, and on larger drives, will contain more than one controller to avoid straining resources.

If the past is any indication, Google will have really good support at first for this, similar to how it worked for Glass. Then once the product has been received well by early adopters (and received good publicity), they will layoff/downsize until everyone is unhappy.

I think people have a tendency to recommend books relating to things that are currently important to them, like math, programming, technology. While I wouldn't shy away from these, my first inclination would be to recommend books that will influence positive personal growth. There is no guarantee that any particular topic will be crucial in 10 years.

I can't recommend a specific book in these categories (since I have learned mostly independently), but I would look for good books which cover: Music Appreciation and low-level Theory, Philosophy (especially Eastern), and Argumentation and Logic.

It is legal to put money on it as a participant.

I can enter a Magic: the Gathering tournament with a $30 entry fee and 2 players where the winner gets $50. This isn't gambling since it is considered a game of skill.

It would not be legal for a spectator to put money on the result of this match since their skill is not relevant to the outcome.

The reason it was removed was because it was extremely hard to set up and use properly. Glass is seen as a similar device as Chromecast in that it is supposed to be completely plug and play where even the most basic users will be able to figure it out with minor instruction from a Guide. Since Hangouts was unable to work with this experience, it was not seen as adding value to the device.

The teams I was a part of most definitely were not just for minimums (Chromebook/Glass). Google has incredible support for their hardware products.

I used to work at Google in support. You were not talking to a random engineer - the support people are all dedicated support contractors. Most of the teams are all non-technical and the only thing they know about how the product works is from a two week training where most of the time is spent on learning how to avoid lawsuits.