hackula1

Wow, after looking on Craigslist at the real estate market, I cannot believe how cheap it is there. It really must be a supremely terrible place.

Charleston, SC

Just be careful with hunting. My wife and I have an island as well, and a couple weekends ago one of our dogs was shot by a hunter not playing by the rules. Unfortunately people will try to take advantage, and people are often less responsible on your land than they would be on their own. Also, letting people onto your land can lead to fires, garbage, and liability issues. Of course, it is always good to share what you have, just be careful.

99% of the cases I have seen where people have been working with tables that are in the 5+ TB range for analysis, there is some obvious way to compress the data that they have overlooked. Most analysts find some way to aggregate a dataset once, then do actual work on that aggregated dataset, rather than the raw data. In geospatial analytics, for example, a trillion records can be aggregated down to census blocks/block groups so you only have a few million records to deal with. The initial aggregation often takes several days, but after that you can calculate most things in a few seconds with reasonable hardware.

Still not inherently unhealthy. There is nothing wrong with calorie dense foods, provided you consume them in reasonable portions.

A few months ago I traded in bourbon and podcasts after work for yoga. I keep it simple and fairly easy. While I would probably be even better off doing intense cycling and/or lifting, basic yoga is doable for me after a hard day of work. Not only do I feel much more in shape, but I feel drastically more relaxed as well.

Congrats SO; continue to rot in hell expert sexchange (expertsexhange.com)! ;)

I suppose they could go back south where the cost of living is significantly cheaper. I live in a house one block away from beachfront on an island and probably pay about what a one bedroom studio in Detroit costs. There is also a growing manufacturing base around here as well that employs a lot of the sort of people that would have worked in Detroit (welders, for example). Also, you don't have to live in Detroit ;)

By my count, Google has 50 products they support.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/products/

1000 employees per product (many of them small) seems asinine to me. I could definitely be wrong, but this seems like extremely low productivity. Does anyone have any insights into this?

As a smoker, I wish it was illegal tomorrow. Then I could buy one or two smokes every now and then, but I would have to go well out of my way.

1 in 5 sounds pretty good to me. You could hire someone new every ~1.5 weeks.

I would just expect a person posting a job on Craigslist to be out to scam me or have no idea of how expensive software is. No one wants to waste their time filtering through the postings asking them to rebuild facebook for $100.

I typically find a company I like, then send them an email expressing interest.

None of the lines that were requested anyway.

In most of the US, you just walk into an employee's office and tell them they are fired. If you tell them a reason that is discriminatory, prepare to be sued, but most of the time you are not required to give them any reason at all.

"Ultra Error Expert" -- I can stand behind that. I take some functioning code and make it non-functioning in no time!

:) I just wanted to say that it looks like a really cool project, so I would not want some troll to come and stomp it out.

> We complain about a shortage of competent people.

As an aside, software development is one of the most internally brutal and self-critical industries out there. We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent. It creates a huge drive in our industry to keep getting better, but I do wonder if the d* measuring contest might be holding us back at the same time. The ridiculously competitive nature of our field has already been attributed to unintended consequences like blocking out women and older people. I personally was drawn to the field due to its competitiveness, but I do wonder if sometimes we let "perfect" be the enemy of "good".

IDK, I could see this the other way around too. If you are currently doing the job, then you must be qualified for it, or are soon to be fired. There are probably some small percentage of people who just slide under the radar, but I would think if you were entirely incompetent and unable to do your job you would not last long.

One more reason to work as a consultant/freelancer or for a small business (startups included). In these settings you have a lot of control over the tech stack and can optimize your skills for the changing market. You can also devote whatever reasonable amount of time you need to learning new things as you go. In most of these environments, polyglots are rewarded and encouraged, which means much less career risk, since you can hit the ground running on a wider array of projects.

One more reminder that normal is different for everyone I suppose.

Talking back is a cardinal sin in the south. It is not how I will raise my kids, but my parents even grew up with corporal punishment in catholic school, so I don't really blame them.

The landing page looks like a minefield of legal issues. Marketing everything explicitly with the references to Siri is asking for a law suit from Apple.

Things seem aimed a bit more at designers than developers. If it was to be more developer-centric it would definitely need some references to things like GoF patterns, dependency injection, code reuse, testing/testability, loose coupling, etc. Someone could have a perfect score on this and potentially be terrible, even at web development specifically. If someone had a perfect score on the programmers competency matrix, however, they would be a sure thing.

http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/

The best sort of skill tree is one where it is hard enough that you cannot make it down every path in the time that it takes to play the game (in this case a career). Someone needs to create a new competency matrix with a broader scope.

14-15 is prepubescent for many individuals. Definitely children.

I did not grow up with any sort of crazy parent situation but I imagine I am not unique in the fact that if I asked my mother to "please stop screaming", I would have received about 20 more minutes of screaming + a wooden spoon. I really like the idea of teaching EQ, however, I agree that the example you point to is entirely unrealistic.

Not from SF here, but I study maps of it frequently for analysis work. Is there really not a single startup there??? I find this a bit hard to believe considering its proximity to downtown.

I also want to mention that I retract the part about leaflet. I think you guys have wayyy more features than them, but they are the new kids on the block so we can cut them some slack. Also, their controls are the best designed for aesthetics and usability IMHO, which is no small matter.

Honestly, I had to take a look at in depth to respond, since it has been a while since I looked at the google api in depth. What I still notice is that Openlayers and the esri allow for a lot more service types. You have KML and GeoRSS, which are fine, but do not seem to support many other of the more common formats out of the box such as Arcserver services,WMS, or WFS (which are probably the 3 most common types in the GIS world). I have seen some workarounds for these, but they seem hacky and slow in the implementations I have seen. I do not have a big problem with KML, but I cannot always change what format a 3rd party serves a map as.

The other thing that appears to be lacking is front end geoprocessing. With esri at least, you can do quite a bit of geometry manipulation out of the box. This can be extremely useful for realtime data visualizations, as starting up a new map service is often a bottleneck with any of the backend platforms. If you can just render the new layer on the client, you save loads of time.

My last issue might just be a lack of understanding, but from what I have seen of the backend offering that google maps enterprise offers, it is missing some major features. For one, the documentation is lacking, and it appears that the entire rest api is marked as experimental. Second, although it allows for some basic hosting and whatnot (easily replicated by a free server like geoserver, which is trivial to set up), it once again does not have any real processing engine, so you have to download all of the data to another server you own anyway to do any real work on the data.

That being said, I really do think it is a great product, and I definitely point people in your direction if they are looking for a quick an easy way to add a map to a site with some basic data. At the same time, I am not sure the enterprise plan really makes much sense, since the results can be so easily replicated with geoserver + openlayers and you already need a server solution anyway for running a processing engine like grass or pyqgis.

Also note: I am probably not your typical use case, and I realize that most people just need to throw preprocessed layers on a static map. All I can say is that I look forward to the day when I do not feel like I am the only one around doing dynamic big data GIS on the web, so I don't have to keep building all of this stuff from scratch ;)

I would not think interpolation would be that much easier than a creating a TIN. I have not looked at the dataset though, so it might be "pre-interpolated" (probably using a TIN if I had to guess), in which case this would be pretty easy with something like pyqgis on a flask server or whatever. The entire api could basically just be:

    @app.route("/elevation")
    def elevation():
      fileName = "/path/to/raster/srtmRaster.tif"
      fileInfo = QFileInfo(fileName)
      baseName = fileInfo.baseName()
      srtmRaster = QgsRasterLayer(fileName, baseName)
      res, ident = srtmRaster.identify(QgsPoint(request.form['lat'], request.form['lon']))
      return ident[0]

I can test this out and throw it on github with some polish if anyone is interested.

Building a robust elevation api is definitely not trivial for the average dev using the google api. If someone thought the only way to get elevations was through google then they definitely will not know how to find and compile the data, then write the TIN (triangulated irregular network) algos necessary to appropriately estimate the elevation of an arbitrary point. No, it is not that hard, since tools like Grass can do a lot of the TINing stuff for you, but just running Grass, much less scripting it, is not trivial for someone unfamiliar with GIS. Making this stuff stable and performant on a server (as opposed to a one off calculation on a dataset) is also not trivial in the least.