goodgoblin

It doesn't seem like he was saying that we _are_ living in a simulation, but that at some point in the future we will be living in a simulation since virtual reality technology will be so good.

The limiting factor in whether someone becomes a manager or stays a coder is that there aren't very many manager roles available relative to programmer positions. Almost perversely because these roles are scarce, they pay more, but are managers really harder to find than programmers?

If at all possible don't do a startup with people you don't really like.

My advice to Bobby would be to stay connected with the developers he bonded with over the event and see if there is another idea they could work together on -- at least then the weekend isn't a waste of time.

Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" has always stuck with me. I read it during my lunch break for about 6 months. The book animates the ideas that brought about the modern world.

At HMH labs we are looking for a Principal Software Engineer.

Competitive salary and benefits.

Telecommute is ok, though if you are in Boston or nearby that would be better.

http://careers.hmhco.com/jobsearch/job-details/principal-sof...

We are also looking for a senior software engineer: http://careers.hmhco.com/jobsearch/job-details/sr-software-e...

Feel free to email me - alexander.reuter@hmhco.com if you have any questions.

HMH Labs - Boston

-----------------

Our mission is to empower a revolution in publishing and education. Are you a talented engineer interested in building something great?

Multiple software engineering positions open:

Principal Engineer - http://careers.hmhco.com/jobsearch/job-details/principal-sof...

Sr Software Engineer - http://careers.hmhco.com/jobsearch/job-details/sr-software-e...

Software Engineer - http://careers.hmhco.com/jobsearch/job-details/software-engi...

Web Objects was the first web framework I worked in, back in 2001, and I didn't really understand it at the time, but it already had built and running in production many of the features that I subsequently came into contact with via supposed innovations in other stacks. The J2EE 1.3 spec for example added "entity beans" and unleashed hideous vendor implementations like WebSphere on developers. The impact of all the anti-patterns that spec inspired are still visible in the development world today - I'd say it is indirectly responsible for the rise of Spring and Rails.

WO also had the added benefit of being a full-stack solution. The way the J2EE spec was built up of sub-specs really contributed to the fragmented Java framework universe. Developers then had to get used to spending think-time reasoning about the way the pieces and "tiers" fit together and less time building coherent apps.

Did whoever voted me down even read this? I wish I could delete it now, you people don't deserve this comment.

The article does well by pointing out that Uber isn't the only company to do these kinds of things, and in fact almost every corporation engages in some variation of these tactics. Everyone knows that corporations have the same psychological profile as sociopaths, but what is fascinating about the recent Uber revelations is how clumsily they play their part. Sociopaths do not understand why society is organized the way it is, yet they do understand that it is important to appear to understand it, to appear to be a good law abiding citizen. Sociopaths and corporations both take great pains to hide their true anti-social and parasitic intentions. Once spotted by the herd the sociopath must restart the painstaking process of making friends, pretending to care about things real people care about, ingratiating themselves with a community and building up trust for the sole purpose of betraying that trust in secret later.

For many reasons, the media is generally content to let the dirty tricks companies engage in pass by without examination, leaving the machinations of the sociopathic corporate spiders mostly in the dark. The media earns it's keep by convincing society that their version of the truth is the best approximation money can buy.

The mistake Uber made was in threatening a reporter, an action which triggered a very personal response, the kind of response that humanizes the parties involved and clearly demonstrates the difference in the kinds of things Uber is willing to do to advance their goal (blackmail a reporter so they can replace more cab rides with Ubers) v.s. the kinds of goals people have (to enjoy Friday night, get home from the airport). Though it likely won't last long, there is a window of time where incensed reporters may ply their trade without the usual over-riding concern for their own career, and benefit society in the process.

Their rate of expansion potentially at risk, Uber will likely respond with a bill of rider's rights and a corporate pledge to uphold the highest ethical standards. In time people will be trained to think of Uber and high moral standards as closely correlated, and all the while the corporate spiders in the shadows have been watching and learning from Uber's mistake. Eventually Uber's case will be used in business schools to teach the dos and don'ts of important subjects like Media Relations (1. never clumsily proclaim your intent to blackmail reporters. 2. always restore a tarnished reputation through a combination of both marketing and policy). Boutique marketing firms will specialize in helping corporations write privacy policies that are made to be marketed, crafted to neutralize negative impressions long enough to lull the sheep back to complacency.

We are going to need to build an even better mousetrap.

In the spirit of "any advice" :)

How did you fund the initial 5 months?

The reason I ask is, if you don't have a ton of people to support at this point, you might want to move into "hibernation mode" and get a job to pay your bills while looking for folks you can count on to help you advance your vision and get to a point where you have traction, users, sales, etc, something that would be appealing to an investor.

If you already have taken money from an investor though, your options will be more limited.

Take a hard look at the market you are trying to penetrate and give yourself an honest assessment of what your chances of success are. Would you invest in yourself if you were angel or VC?

Think about how long you would have to spend on this idea to reach that goal and decide whether it is something you really love or not because 'success' can involve an arduous climb of 7 years or more.

Clearly what Whisper was doing was newsworthy, but at the same time I can understand why other journalists would want to debate the issue since it could impact one of their profession's building blocks ( on-the-record v.s. off-the-record distinctions). The ethics around exceptions for similar tools such as attorney-client privilege and doctor-patient privilege are subjects for professional debate but what sets journalism apart is the number of people impacted by the scope of their decisions. Would a majority of lawyers feel compelled to alert the authorities in Whisper's case? Only if they were committing fraud. Lawyers necessarily are privy to an incredible amount of malfeasance, and no matter how troubled this knowledge might make them, their function depends on their silence.

Would a majority of journalists would feel this story was damaging enough to the public that they had an obligation to publish it? Probably.

Should we feel bad for the public personas who are being taken to task for expressing an opinion that ended up on the wrong side of the issue? To some degree, yes. While these avatars did seek out the relative fame that now shames them, their mistaken logic forces the projection of humanity that twitter and blogs represent to consider both sides, and pause.

Did anyone else see the headline at the bottom of the page claiming that 'Amazon Workers are Today's Coal Miners'?

I haven't read the article, but given the amount of death and human suffering coal miners overcame, I can only assume it is consciously sensationalist.

It is almost as if certain villainous categories are built into our collective minds and we are looking for actors to play the parts.

props to any CEO who references Rilke in his rally-the-company-speech-that-gets-forwarded-to-the-world:

'Rainer Maria Rilke's words say it best: "The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.'

As we get older it gets harder and harder for our brains to learn new things, but it also gets harder for our bodies to do a lot of things. Rebounding from injury or a night of heavy drinking is much tougher. Staying in shape becomes an almost part time job. You have to go to the gym and watch what you eat just so you don't get overweight.

Think of learning new programming frameworks or languages like going to the gym. Studies have shown that learning new things throughout your life can prevent Alzheimer's disease.

Liquidity refers to the fact that when you want to sell a stock, you can sell it immediately.

The more liquid something is, the closer it is to cash.

Think about your car -- if there was a public price for your car and you could decide at any moment whether you wanted to sell for that price, or close to that price, that would be a benefit to you. But instead selling your car is quite a chore and you are never sure whether you are getting ripped off or not. A liquid market has a public price and a degree of fairness and confidence baked into that price.

In order to provide liquidity market makers agree to buy stocks from anyone who will sell them, and then take care of finding the buyer on the other end. The difference between what they buy it for and what they sell it for is called the 'spread' and it is how market makers traditionally have made money. The spread is also the fair fee they charge for the service they provide, which is liquidity, and the risk they take. If market makers did not know for sure that someone else would be willing to buy the stock right away, that they might have to sit on it, they would be taking on a very large risk. The more people that buy and sell, the less real that risk becomes.

HFT makes their money, generally, by front running. Front running is the practice of buying a stock because you know the California Pension Fund is about to buy it, and so you know the price is about to rise. You can immediately turn around and sell it when it goes up.

Front running by a bank is illegal, but it is widely suspected that many banks engaged in the practice for years. It is illegal because the bank is supposed to be acting on their client's behalf and in their interest, so when they are trusted to place the order, they first buy some of the stock for themselves or for the bank's inside funds. It is basically insider trading.

When HFT engages in front running, they have detected that an order is coming down the pike, and they jump in front at the last nanosecond. The reason they spend so much money trying to do this is because it is essentially fool proof when done correctly. You can argue that by not taking any market risk, and not holding the stocks, they aren't providing liquidity, they are parasites on real stock traders and they are essentially using inside information. But its not that cut and dried because there is almost no way to eliminate the problem. At least HFT reduce the time window during which someone's signal to purchase something can be exploited.

It used to be that humans managed all of this. Large brokerage houses would be responsible for executing these trades, and it was common practice for brokers to tip each other off when they received large orders. These tips were very valuable because they guaranteed a winning trade. If you ever wondered how meat-head frat boys could make millions of dollars on Wall Street despite not being especially intelligent, this was a big part of it. At least now the people who are scalping everyone's orders have to be brilliant.

HFT provides liquidity, and extracts a price for providing that value.

HFT seems like stealing only because they are using advanced technology methods to make money, whereas in the 1980s and before market makers routinely manipulated the spread and pocketed likely a similar percent of trading profits.

At least the online brokerages and pioneers of HFT broke down the antiquated 1/8 stock price ticks and lowered the spread and per share transaction costs.

Just in case you need to check on something like this in the future -- github commits are separated by branch, so there is a chance he was working on a branch for which you didn't get a report. It is also possible he didn't push his commits to a remote repository at all, in which case you wouldn't have seen his work. This is generally not a good idea b/c if you lose your laptop, you've lost your code, but I'm just pointing out what 'could' have been happening. He could have been endlessly typing a single comment over and over

#All work and no play make Jack a dull boy

and committing to a 'shining' branch.

Did he admit to not working, or were you past a point where communication was possible between you two?

I wasn't making a jingoistic point, but you can take the opposite side of 'never' quite easily. China already has fallen, the communist revolution took place in 1949. Iran recently (from a historic perspective) had free elections in 1951, see Mohammad Mosaddegh. Ideas really are the most powerful things in the world.

I saw that -- it was an amazing reversal. Apparently those limits have stood for almost 50 years, surviving a challenge in 1979 even on the grounds that campaign contributions can quickly turn into legalized bribery.

It does seem like something that needs to run its course though. At some point people have to think for themselves, and learn to ignore or deconstruct the commercials which result.

Yes, there always is the possibility of "full fail", but look at how difficult it is for autocratic regimes of the world today to suppress human curiosity. My faith is in the endless reaching and searching embedded in the human DNA, though one worry is that we could reach a future state which may not be obviously dystopian but still represents a far from optimal resource configuration. We may in fact we approaching that now. One trump card humans have always held is violent revolution, but the TV shows keep getting better and better, and as long as they aren't murdering union members and forcing children to work in dangerous factories, our corporate overlords may be able to escape a new round of safe guards.

True -- though the Republic lasted over 500 years and embodied a conscious understanding of the dangers of power concentration. Roman Senators demanded that foreign kings pay deference to them, and no self styled absolute ruler was allowed to set foot in the city limits. The power elite of the day saw themselves as custodians of an excellent system to some degree and took pains to maintain it. These days it does seem that very few at the top have that sense of responsibility.

Yes history is full of monarchs but our current configurations of government in the West are also reactions to them. We are programmed from birth to revolt at the notion of an American King, and safeguards exist to prevent concentrations of power. What isn't always obvious is the ways that new abuses are being perpetrated, but once that reaches a certain level then the threshold for action is crossed, and new safeguards can be implemented.

The math does seem really appealing, getting 4 extra hours of sleep (assume up to 8), and planning out 2 hours of whitespace during the day (both ideas I would love to try, don't get me wrong) leaves 14 hours to work.

Assume that realistically only 12 of those hours can be spent working, given you have to eat, shower, dress, socialize, general upkeep, a 60% increase in productivity gives you 19 hours of comparable effort, a potential +7 or an entire working day. Worth a shot, but there are deadline pressures which often force your hand and there are likely physical constraints which would limit the amount of increase you can legitimately experience. I.e. how fast can you type? How quickly can other people absorb the genius thought flows you are expounding? +4 seems like a fair upper bound, plus you get to feel better.

I think it depends to some degree though on the type of work you are doing, but the power degradation that occurs when pushing yourself is kind of akin to going insane, you probably won't realize it is happening until you are staring at some javascript error haplessly and suddenly remember that you used to be able to summon the solution at will, or remember that you used to know that it was considered impolite to scream at random people on the street.

Does anyone know if 94. is standard practice or not?

If you were looking for harder problems, I would suggest buying one of the books recommended on the home page. Kleinberg & Tardos Algorithm Design for example was used in an algorithms class I took, and the questions after each chapter were used for both homework and exams. I found them very challenging.

One more general question to pile onto this -- what is a 'normal' junior developer salary, for someone fresh out with a bachelor's degree? I'm thinking $60k plus options(for a startup).

The nice thing about this is that it gives people who want to break into 'design' a place to get their first jobs perhaps, without having to cultivate a a flow of contacts. I imagine people who are already experienced designers will have a more steady and stable body of work from their network.

Also make sure that enough people need it. There are a lot of unoccupied niches that are currently not sustaining life for a reason.

This was the link --- http://svstartup.com