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mountain_man

37 karma · joined December 6, 2008

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mountain_man··on Wolfram Alpha Miscalculates What Its iPhone App Should Cost
The phone costs 199 and 75 a month. It is expensive, but why exaggerate?
mountain_man··on Better
Good programmers can get far removed from the tools advocated on hacker news when they work for large companies. They tend to use a lot of internal tools. That doesn't mean they can't pick up external tools later.
mountain_man··on Flickr, Django, PostGIS: Mashing up a world of photos
Really cool. Love the lion cub photo. It'd be neat to see where each photo was taken on the map. Not sure if flickr exposes that though.
mountain_man··on The "I'm Linux" Video Contest
meh, I bought a desktop that shipped with ubuntu. Changing users makes it crash. My keyboard didn't work. Flash works about 80% of the time.

On my thinkpad, which I installed myself, suspend only works if I disabled the nvidea drivers. It really isn't great yet.

mountain_man··on Why Google Employees Quit
Orkut dev in Mountain View had a lot of Indian engineers. They've since moved all dev work to Brazil and India.
mountain_man··on Why Google Employees Quit
yeah, but it kind of sucks thinking about it as part of your salary, because then you feel like you're throwing money away if you don't stay for dinner every night. Sometimes you just want to eat with your friends and family.
mountain_man··on Why Google Employees Quit
Teams and managers are very different there. I was told they liked it for people to stay on projects for at least 18 months, and that it's difficult to get a transfer with less time than that. That was the company line from my very first project there, in 2004, when it was still a relatively small company. A lot of it is just luck of the draw with your initial allotment there. Glad you found something that you enjoy though.
mountain_man··on Why Google Employees Quit
I worked at Google for 4 years, and chatted with you many times. I was unhappy for nearly all of my time there. I wouldn't say that I wasn't into algorithms or scaling, or hardcore cs, but I was never on a project at Google that used them, and I found moving between projects much harder than advertised. My job was routinely mundane and repetitive, and things that were exciting somehow got caught up in management red tape. But now I'm at a startup where I get to work on exciting algorithms, and I'm happy.
mountain_man··on Ask HN: Can you help me not confuse the Googlebot?
I don't understand what you mean. If you update the location with location.href, the page will reload. I think the poster wanted to avoid reloads, hence the whole point of using rsh.
mountain_man··on How to Run a Meeting Like Google
I worked at Google. Most meetings had way too many people in them, and 90% of the people would sitting around using their laptops through them, attempting to tune in when it was relevant. It wasn't really all that efficient. Marissa's very special meetings were run in a special way, and were more efficient, but teams meticulously prepared for their 5 minutes with her.
mountain_man··on My visit to American Apparel
oh, Quality. I thought he meant Quantity.
mountain_man··on Ask HN: Free accounts for students?
A lot of students really are that poor. I went to a state school, where tuition was 1500 a semester, my apartment cost 104/month, and I spent 100 on food a month. I wasn't atypical among my friends. I never went to the bars. Spending 2-4 days worth of food money on a source code repository would not have even crossed my mind as possible. There are a lot of people at public schools, and they have very different resources than those at private. 7 dollars a month does seem small compared to 30,000 a year.
mountain_man··on Review My New Home Page: TrailBehind.com
I like the new search, though I'm not sure about the division of functionality between the two boxes. Also, the explore the map button is way too low-rez. But the transition to the map is very fast! Looks good, keep at it!
mountain_man··on [dead]
Haha, i love propane tanks!
mountain_man··on Ask YC: Review my Website, Being Served from My Laptop Right Now - dev.trailbehind.com
This is awesome. Is that usgs data? Best representation of way points I've seen yet.