deepGem

I love the Apple wired earphones that come with the phone. However, if you travel a lot or move around, the wires tend to tangle and when you need the headset in the split of a second they don't work. It's not a critical use case but the more you travel, the more you move around, the tangled headphones start annoying you more and more. You'll reach a point at which $150 or $200 doesn't seem like a big deal to get rid of this annoyance.

If you fly a lot, then you'll really appreciate over the ear headphones, preferably the noise cancelling ones. That being said, these wireless over the ear phones are too bulky to use in day to day life such as commute etc. So now you end up owning one pair of wireless noise cancelling headphones for flying, air pods for your day-day commute. You see where I am going with this .. welcome to capltalism :)

"Watching TV/movies while traveling (you can do it on a flight on a laptop, but it's hard in an airplane seat -- this is so much easier)"

I have a Macbook Air and even with that, doing anything on an airplane seat is a gigantic PITA. The iPad is a breeze. I wanted to upgrade to the 11 inch but now will upgrade to the 10.5. Definitely worth it, just for travel.

My city Bangalore effectively enforced a plastic ban. So some grocery stores now only have paper bags even to pack veggies. I think it's doable. The government enforced the ban as there was no alternative, we don't have enough space for landfills.

A city like Singapore however uses a lot of plastic and thermocol. I wonder where they find space for their landfills. Probably they are doing the same, exporting all the trash to China or Indonesia.

Sadly, Perfectionists share a trait when it comes to building software, obsession to their craft at the expense of everythng else, shipping times included.

Absolutely, but I attribute the ability to decompose a problem into overlapping subproblems as an understanding of recursion, so I had implicitly assumed such an understanding.

"and candidates who haven't usually don't even have a chance at solving them"

I am one of those candidates, and I don't know why it is called Dynamic programming. To me a vey naive understanding of DP is this - it's just a simple cache mechanism to store intermediary results so that you don't have to recompute them and waste resources.

In the real world we always think about and do such optimizations, be it I/O, disk access or db access. I would love to understand how DP is any different.

"if you want to be productive after you arrive" Many people who don't travel for work do not seem to understand this. Unlike leisure travelers, there is no time to rejuvenate. If you fly coach, which in my experience is not all that terrible on international flights, you do end up weary and jet lagged. The one time I flew business, the difference post landing was quite noticable. So yeah, while I don't really crave for the business class comforts during the flight, the reward post landing is worth the premium.

"being considerate of users in developing countries and being frugal with their data",

This is probably applicable to other developing countries, definitely not to India. Man, data is so cheap, 4G is widespread even in tier 2 cities. Am not sure about tier 3 towns and villages but so far, I am hard pressed to find large tracts of dead zones.

I have taken multiple of these take home assignments. One from Microsoft as well. What was a 2 day affair turned out to be a week long affair. I was asked to implement one of the iOS outlook features which involved multiple nesting of scrollviews in gridviews and what not. Took me 4 days and when I submitted the repo, the response I got was 'sorry this doesn't cut it and we can't proceed'. I mean, can't the reviewers at least provide some comment in the repo ?

OTOH, I took a Facebook remote test that was timed (I think 30 mins) and the reviewer exactly told me why I didn't clear the test within 24 hours of submission. I don't necessarily agree with everything Facebook does but I really appreciate this level of response.

So, I'll happily do a whiteboard test no matter how unrealistic it is.

How is having that much debt a good thing?

Buffett answers this in a previous paragraph about BNSF. BNSF has debt but they also have cash generation even in times of recession. This is really important. If you are unable to generate cash during recession and you have a ton of debt, you are dead.

A similar analogy applies to US. During recession, they can print money and generate cash. US will never default on their debt, or the probability of them defaulting is almost 0, hence the coveted AAA rating. Granted, the value of that printed money decreases right away, but eventually the value will stabilize w.r.t all other currencies and a stable store such as gold. Also note that the combined household wealth in US is nearing $100 trillion. That should count for something.

It's ok to have debt, if you have significant cash flow to cover your debt eventually, even in times of recession. Apple follows a similar philosophy. They raise debt for their share buybacks and dividends, even though they are sitting on a cash pile.

Gosh this is not gonna go well with the public. I know several kids who just can't hold pee in the pool. They'll just let it out. Also its not like the toilets are right there. You often have to get out of the pool, walk like 100 yards or down a flight of stairs. It's a PITA. Even Michael Phelps once said in an interview that very rarely competitive swimmers get out of the pool to pee.

I had missed this gem of a post. "Put in $1 then to get the ball rolling, and we’ll circle back to this later.” - How could I have not said something simple like this in my previous negotiations :) Baller of a post.

Agreed, this is what I strive for but rarely do it in practice. Somehow, you are always in a hurry, you always want the solution now!. I think this has to change, the initial time spent on the understanding the debugging process has immense long term benefits.The time to solution decreases with time, in my kind of approach it remains linear or sometimes even increase.

Spot on. I think a salary is also more or less like float, at least part of it. For that part, you are answerable to no one and can choose to invest it the way Buffett does. As much as people say that you can't pick stocks, you can, if you just stick to a very niche that you really understand, spend hours researching that niche, and invest for a really long term (> 10 years)

Startup founders in India are feeling the pinch of this hit back. It's routine to hear employees just leaving without notice, or not even joining after they have signed up on an offer. So there is this natural bias that employees are not reliable. What they don't understand is that they have done little or nothing to assuage the hidden 'fuck you' attitude that is emanating from employees. At least, you know you can be ghosted, what is the best you can do to stop that from happening. I haven't heard any discussion on that front, most of the discussions are 'oh yeah, this candidate turned out to be a scumbag, he just ghosted us, perhaps we should make a list of such candidates and circulate amongst ourselves'

Severance always depends on the length of your stay at that company. Typically it's 1 week for a year of service. So yeah, good luck with that if you are anything less than 5 years into the job.

why “being able to quickly google the answers to questions” is inferior to “learning, knowing and remembering the answer

At least in the world of programming, this is not necessarily true. There is so much flux that you do need to rely on Google for the semantics at least. In some instances or in time crunch, it is a make or break scenario and how fast one can get to a solution trumps everything else. So the ability to quickly Google what you want is indeed not inferior. To quickly quote an anecdote, a couple of my fellow programmers couldn't start a Flask application on AWS to listen on all interfaces. Smart guys but they couldn't figure this out. 'What' to google for is also valuable.

Of course, the ability to learn, know and remember is tremendously useful and this is what most of the interviews test for, but the ability to quickly Google and find answers in the nick of time is not inferior at all.

You can even satisfy the ceremony of signature in a pdf document by inserting your hand drawn signature in Preview.

From what I have heard, YC is pretty good at sniffing such teams out during an interview and also while reading the application. It's hard to fake good co-founding relationships.

I couldn't read the full article since I am not a WSJ subscriber, so forgive the naivete, but what inherently is wrong in Neumann leasing a building that he owns ? I mean, he could have rented that building to someone else, instead he is leasing it out to WeWork.

How did get get the money to buy that building - if he is siphoning money from WeWork revenues and using that, that's illegal I suppose. If he used Wework stock options as collateral to finance the building, that could be some grey area I guess.

I somehow remember most of my good memories when I was drunk and buzzed. On those few occasions that I had passed out completely, I remember the time till I passed out, like the time I just barely reaching my hotel door, opened and collapsed on the floor.

On the most strenuous hikes or endurance activities that I have undertaken, I have vivid memories of the struggle, like I can remember feeling so thirsty and walking for most of the last 5K. I also remember how foolish was I to play an 18 hole the next day, without using a buggy (talk about male ego). By the time I reached the 18th hole I was about to pass out and collapse.

Nowadays I stay away from alcohol and just restrict myself to a single beer or a glass of wine. It takes me 4-5 pints to get buzzed and leaves me with a terrible headache later. Not a good sign.

Single founder here. I think this doesn't work in B2B or may be I am talking to the wrong people, most of the potential customers I've spoken to want to see something - so the first question they ask is what have you built. This is in financial industry, building fraud product and like I said I may not know the right people to talk to. I think having domain contacts in B2B works great, specifically if you have somewhat tried to solve the problem before. I think PG writes this in one of the essays.

"All this makes C fast but fragile."

IMO all these features of C makes programming and therefore system design anti-fragile. Anecdotal experience based on interactions with a few C programmers who work on embedded systems.

That's way too harsh to describe a man's personal quest for adventure. It's not just vanity. You have no idea how many young minds have been influenced by this adventure. How many potential new startups will come about because someone somewhere out there thinks 'well this guy just gave up his life trying to cross the Antartic, what stops me from doing something perhaps tiny in comparison, but monumental in value, or something that I can undertake'. This is true of all adventurers who seek to accomplish something beyond perceived abilities - free diving, climbing k2 or summitting Mt.Meru on the shark fin route.

The indirect benefits of such expeditions have not been measured. If someone did, I'm quite certain, a ton of benefits will crop up.

When I used neti pot long long ago, our instructor made it explicit that you should only use boiled and cooled lukewarm water mixed with salt, if you cannot find a readily available saline solution. She even gave the salt:water ratio which I've forgotten. The general consensus in the yoga community is to better be safe than sorry.

A good raincoat is pretty expensive. At least $200. So the guy submits an expense report with a $200 line item, gets rejected and splits the $200 into probably 7 or 8 incidentals which usually have a $25 limit, probably on different expense reports.

The geography matters. I did the Self driving car nanodegree and not having a US work permit pretty much took out all my chances. I did have an interview with Voyage but I didn't clear round 2 or 3 I don't remember.

I don't mind getting downvoted but can someone please explain why - this is an honest question. Many devs have scoffed at interviews when I've asked them some really basic quesitons such as finding max element in an array.

I am just curious, why do you need to test somone's ability to find max of a list. Language designers have recognized this as a basic utility and incorporated them into the language. Is the hypothesis that - if someone cannot write a simple algo to find the max of a list then what other difficult tasks he/she can perform ? Even though in reality we all understand no one needs to write a max algorithm.

I think this is one of the most overlooked safety features of a self driving car. It is not just safe for the car occupants but it will be safer for pedestrians and 2-wheeler riders - motorcyclists and bicyclists. There was a video of a Tesla just following a cyclist at a safe distance in a single lane road. The car was in a way protecting the cyclist from other cars. I will not be surprised if the motorcycle deaths come down dramatically once self driving cars become more pervasive on the road.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdpasOHDjXc