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mjbellantonion Los Camp Present Their Tour Accounts

This is kind of like the Steve Albini piece about recording contracts but for touring.

mjbellantonion Codebase is 250% AI generated

Yeah, the ratio of "words in blogposts" to "LOC in public repos" is way out whack.

mjbellantonion React is now effectively part of the Rails stack

Author here. In the article there's some evidence that Ember is still at least talked a lot about in Rails job posts. Maybe I'll look into that more the next time I do this kind of digging.

Personally, I made a couple of attempts to learn Ember. Though it was well documented and looked great, I just bounced off of it both times. And I never had an urgent need for it, so...I eventually found Stimulus easier to pick up.

mjbellantonion More than 75% of Job Posts are Remote

Remote is definitely a spectrum. On one end there's "you can be anywhere on the planet" to "you can work from home but we expect you to live in this city or state."

Employers know that remote is appealing to devs, so they're eager to claim they're remote employers. As folks elsewhere have said, read the fine print and get commitments in writing if needed.

mjbellantonion Ask HN: When coding, how to do remember what you were doing the previous day?

For coding or any other project, I keep a running note called "Where I Was." Before putting down the project, I add a timestamped note that's as detailed as it needs to be. I find that this helps swap back context quickly, and it also has the benefit, for me, of swapping the project out! Clearing my mind like this helps me focus more on whatever I'm picking up, too.

mjbellantonion How to Buy a Private Jet

I remember this chapter vividly -- just one of many reasons to recommend Caro's epic biography of LBJ.

mjbellantonion Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2018)

ezCater | Developers, Managers | Boston, MA | FULL-TIME ONSITE VISA| http://ezcater.com

ezCater is the #1 online - and the only nationwide - marketplace for business catering in the United States – a $22 billion market. Our 2M+ on-time ratings and reviews, our 60K+ caterers and restaurants, and our 5-star customer service make it superbly easy for business people to find and order great food for their meetings. We’re on a path to $1B in 2019, and we’ll get there - even more surely if you come help us!

We're experiencing insane growth while working sane hours.

ezCater is built with React talking to Ruby on Rails backend via GraphQL. We've begun migrating our monolith to services also built in Rails. We use Postgres and Redis as data stores. Services communicate with Kafka and Avro. Our data warehouse is built with Snowflake. Our deployment infrastructure is built on Kubernetes, Docker and AWS.

* blog: https://engineering.ezcater.com/

* jobs: https://www.ezcater.com/company/apply/

We're insanely helpful friendly people who can't wait to meet you!

mjbellantonion Motive.c: The Soul of the Sims (1997)

Is there a bug in the line computing Motive[mHappyWeek]? It seems like it should have Motive[mHappyDay] instead of Motive[mHappyNow] on the right hand side.

mjbellantonion How not to build a ship: the USS Ford

Don't forget the LCS.

mjbellantonion Half of Western European men descended from one Bronze Age ‘king’

There was similar news a few years ago relating how a large percentage of the world is descended from Genghis Khan:

* http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...

mjbellantonion If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

This topic is relevant to my interests. I've googled around a little bit on research on the topic of eliminating squatters, but haven't come up with much. I'd appreciate pointers to papers if anyone has them.

mjbellantonion Tesla Announces $2B Public Offering to Accelerate Model 3 Ramp Up

Anyone have thoughts as to why they're selling stock as opposed to issuing bonds?

mjbellantonion The Panic Sign

The "Old John Hancock" building in Boston has a similar weather beacon and an accompanying rhyme:

  Steady blue, clear view.
  Flashing blue, clouds due.
  Steady red, rain ahead.
  Flashing red, snow instead.

In summer, flashing red means the Red Sox game has been cancelled.

mjbellantonion Falcon 9 booster preparing for reuse testing at KSC

The description seems to be pretty apt if you check out some of the videos of the work being done dockside upon the stage's return to shore.

mjbellantonion Questions to Ask a Potential Tech Employer

As a hiring manager I can never get too many questions from a candidate. If there's something specific I want to ask you, I'll make sure I get my question in.

mjbellantonion Ask HN: How do you review code?

Shameless plug: I've created a tool which helps engineering teams and their managers surface actionable metrics out of their GitHub-based pull requests. Basically, it surfaces some metrics about pulls which have been open too long or which are too large to be effectively reviewed.

I'd love to get some feedback. You can find it here: https://www.pipelineinsight.com.

mjbellantonion Satoshi Nakamoto Is Probably This Unknown Australian Genius?

Basically, it's supply and demand.

Satoshi has a large position relative to the whole market. If he every wanted to convert those coins to US dollars or some other currency, I'm guessing the supply it would introduce would cause the conversion rate to crash unless done in a sophisticated way.

mjbellantonion Satoshi Nakamoto Is Probably This Unknown Australian Genius?

"As Wright told the Bitcoin Investor’s conference, he’s applying that second machine towards the mysterious task of 'modeling Bitcoin's scalability'[.]"

If he is Nakamoto, I wonder if he's using this computing power to test strategies for divesting of the "nine-figure fortune" of coins which is assumed to be controlled by Nakamoto.

mjbellantonion We need to rethink employee compensation

As a hiring manager I have found that this adjustment already started occurring about two years ago.

Firstly, the market for technical talent is so competitive right now, that cash is an easy way to compete for people and salaries have been driven up.

More importantly, people have become far more sophisticated about options and what a payoff is likely to look like. Ten years ago I would never be asked a question like "how many shares are there outstanding on a fully diluted basis" but now I hear it essentially all the time.

edit: grammar

mjbellantonion Seen that job listing for a while, its no coincidence

Hiring velocity is one area where small companies can use their agility to advantage when competing against larger companies for talent. As a hiring manager, I always endeavor to make this process as streamlined as possible.

A couple of anecdotes:

I was able to hire an outstanding candidate simply because I got them through the process and extended them an offer. Our competition was a reasonably high-profile company in the area. In the end he joined us because after more than a week, the other company was unable to execute their paperwork to get an offer generated.

More recently, I saw a very big name West Coast company (think Google/Facebook/Uber) lose out on a great person because they had a third party do a reference check. In the time it took for that check to happen, the job seeker had lots of time to re-consider the offer and instead ended up working for a smaller company on the East Coast which kept in touch and was able to move blindingly fast.

mjbellantonion The Failures of “Intro to TDD”

Here here to this. I never continue to be surprised by the number of people who don't realize that engineering is the practice of breaking big and confusing things into small things you understand.

mjbellantonion Financial Indicators for Startups at Different Stages

Management should be sharing it with you at least quarterly if not monthly. Typically, I've seen it done the day after or the Friday after the most recent Board meeting.

mjbellantonion Financial Indicators for Startups at Different Stages

Absolutely. This should also be on the list of questions you should ask before you go to work at a startup. You probably wouldn't ask these on a first interview, but as you get close to the offer stage asking questions about money in the bank, burn rate, cash out date and such are fair game.

If the company will not answer those questions, that in itself is useful data for guiding your decision making. :)

mjbellantonion React JS Best Practices

Has anyone built their app using ES5 and Flummox? The Flummox documentation is sparse to start and is completely devoid of ES5 examples.

Edit: grammar.

mjbellantonion Ask HN: How to avoid giving a scathing code review?

Agreed: this is now an in-person conversation where you have an opportunity to help your colleague grow.

I have to say that I find it odd that you spent any time at all re-writing this person's code. If I was your manager, that is not what I would want you to do.

Further, reviewing code over 400 LOC _total_ is generally a waste of time (never mind a single method larger than that.)

mjbellantonion Mind the Burndown, Comrade – Scrum Propaganda Posters

Agreed! I recommend reading "The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development" by Donald G. Reinertsen, which while not actually about Scrum, explains a lot of the useful underlying principles at work in Scrum -- like queueing theory.

mjbellantonion N.F.L. Playoff Simulator

This is really cool. Nice job.

I'm wondering at which week does your simulation become usable?

I've work on this problem as a side project before but with the goal of being able to make this kind of prediction from Week 1. I would be able to compute various probabilities about who would win Divisions, but figuring out anything outside of a division would become computationally prohibitive. In my attempt I used a probability distribution based on historical performance of the home team instead of giving each team an equal chance of winning.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing your code!

mjbellantonion Trailblazer: A new architecture for Rails

I think Nick should be applauded for his attempts over the years to find ways to introduce interesting architectural concepts into the Rails world.

mjbellantonion The best small computer in the world (1968) [pdf]

This actually does remind me of classic Oglivy work.

mjbellantonion The best small computer in the world (1968) [pdf]

I actually just finish reading that and it's what lead me to this!