pavanred

Uplift Inc. Location - Sunnyvale, CA

Fulltime web application engineer

Our core team is experienced with a history of successful startups. We look for exceptional people who have a passion to individually apply their skills, learn, innovate and create tangible value for the company. We currently have a small engineering team and need to add a few more key people.

What we look for: You will be responsible for designing and implementing the Java application that connects the front-end interfaces with the backend analytics data. This is the business logic that provides realtime decisions and powers the analytics dashboard.

- Foremost you must consider yourself an expert at building web applications using Java.

- Since this component will glue the frontend UI to the backend data, understanding AngularJS and DynamoDB are helpful.

- Experience using other technologies in our stack will get you a head start. These are GitHub, Jenkins, AWS S3 and EC2.

Joel score - 12/12

contact pareddy AT uplift.com

Isn't this setting a dangerous precedent, I am sure such tendency of issuing blanket bans could be misused. Perhaps the cheapest way to attack/bring down a big website or even quell competition, just post some offensive content on a website and let the government issue blanket bans.

To provide some context, an Uber driver was arrested on rape charges in Delhi today. Uber allegedly hired a repeat sex-offender driver without a mandatory police background verification. [1] And, I agree that a decentralized system without any regulation or oversight could probably improve privacy but is definitely not the solution.

[1] http://www.firstpost.com/living/cab-driver-a-repeat-offender...

I recently met a Uber driver who had retired from a successful career in the semi conductor industry and was trying out driving for Uber as he gets to meet new and interesting people.

I agree with this, my thesis committee wanted my thesis as a research paper (irrespective of whether my work was going to be published or not) but in the final stages the graduate college declined to approve it in spite of my committee's approval because they require a predefined format of the thesis. The change of format took me a few minutes, thanks to latex. I can't begin to imagine how much work and anxiety it would have taken to change the entire format at the last minute otherwise.

>> I hear some companies actually get work done this way..

This statement and lack of any citations with statistics makes me suspect this as an opinion, not necessarily factual. I am a engineer from Bangalore, India. I worked for a few years with companies that outsource teams to many countries across the world. I lived in Bangalore for over 20 years and I know a lot of people who are in similar line of work. Most software companies provide competitive salaries (according to wages in India based on Indian cost of living, which is lower compared to the US) along with annual leaves, sick/casual leave, maternity leaves, statutory programs like provident fund (retirement benefits in India), gratuity fund etc. Many companies (all companies I have worked with and I know people working in) provide a lot more benefits than the ones I mentioned. I worked with companies that provided facilities like on-campus full time doctors, financial support programs, gyms, swimming pools, libraries, higher education support, employee rewards programs, sports programs, transport facilities etc. I have never heard of CS engineers hired and monitored by cameras to ensure work. I would like some citation on this, and even if it occurred at some place I doubt it's a problem at such a scale that it should be termed that it usually happens.

And, about quality of work, a large portion of the outsourcing projects involve support and maintenance of an existing software/website. Many of such customers do not have software as their primary business e.g. a internal web based software for a huge construction company. Such L2/L3 support work generally tends to be repetitive and does not require highly skilled software programmers. There are lot of companies that work on the same outsourcing model which cost the customers a lot higher and produce high quality work, such companies generally attract the better skilled engineers and customers that require high quality products.

My point, outsourcing software companies in India are definitely not sweatshops. There are sweatshops in parts of India mainly in the textile industry and they most certainly do not hire CS engineers. And, there are good and bad engineers everywhere, it's not determined by where they are from or who employs them.

Whether intended as a derogatory remark or otherwise, the economical mission cost is a direct consequence of very creative and clever engineering solutions. I remember following the launch, the series of orbit raising manoeuvres to slingshot the craft into a heliocentric orbit to begin the journey towards Mars, there by limiting the costs and enabling to work around mission constraints, was extremely impressive. I wonder if the success of this mission would spark a priority to optimize costs in missions across space agencies around the world.

Not to mention these people will not have to deal with the loan sharks and their huge loan interest rates. Besides, this scheme is not just a bank account but also includes debit cards, which should help people against problems of keeping all their money in cash on them at all times, and an insurance, in most of India agriculture is dependent on the monsoon and mainly by this there is a big problem of farmer suicides in the past.

Here's a question on a slightly related note. It is widely known that Gottfrid Svartholm (anakata) is not provided access to books as opposed to Peter Sunde. But, Gottfrid is allowed to receive letters. I was wondering if there is any legal restriction on the content of the letters sent to such prisoners. If not, would it be OK if books are sent by the page via letters either as-is or paraphrased?

It's a peaceful protest even if the people are heavily armed [1]. But at Ferguson unarmed protests are considered as non peaceful protests and dealt with force. There's one conspicuous difference between the people who were protesting on each occasion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff#Confrontations_...

I learned about the blind spot in my Visual Analytics course during my Masters. I wasn't aware of this phenomenon prior to that and it was fascinating to take the blind spot test and to learn that the brain interpolates vision for the blind spots using data from the surroundings, memory etc. so well that we never notice the blind spot.

I wonder if such a phenomenon occurs with people who lost sight during their life and aren't blind by birth, where the brain fills in the blanks based on memory.

>> The Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated due to an error introduced because its software used metric measures, while its ground crew used pound-force units.

There was an incident in 1983 where Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet (12,500m) altitude [1] about half way through its flight. An investigation revealed that one of the cause was a conversion error between metric and non-metric units for the fuel loading calculation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

I used to choose awk/gawk, python, R for different file, numeric, textual and statistical operations. This is great, I would definitely use it.

Perhaps they could have sent a gift voucher to the wedding couple for every negative review, including a message that you wanted a "vintage" inn and we provided the best service we could, but your guests weren't happy. It could probably guilt the wedding couple to request the guests to take the reviews down. And, perhaps led to a positive story on HN instead.

>> But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way...

Perhaps in such a civilization George Orwell's 1984 would be illegal too.

>> We could live in a post-crime society...

There is no such thing as a post-crime society. Crime is subjective. It's fine when you think about murder etc as a crime in a democratic setting where citizenry has equal rights. But, the definition of crime is never a constant - It was a crime to consume/buy/sell alcohol or drugs once, it isn't anymore (some drugs in some places). Human torture was legal once, it isn't anymore. Even now, in some places of the world, education/equal rights for women is a crime, freedom of religion is a crime. So, there is no such thing as a post-crime society. All that can be is transparency, which democracy and free press have best provided. Hidden policing/courts etc are a step backward as there is no oversight on their operation.

I keep thinking an ontology instead of JSON based resume would be a lot better.

USA, Relocation, Full Time

Professional Exp Stack: C#, ASP.Net, SQL Server, SQL Server BI, Oracle, js, IIS, NUnit, WCF, TFS

Academic (MS Data Science) Stack: Java, Python, Postgres, R, Hadoop, git

Resume: http://www.cs.uic.edu/~preddy/resume.pdf

Contact: in resume

Current: Masters in Computer Science; Academic focus - Data science. Graduating in July. Prior experience of 5 years web development on MS stack

Precisely what I was thinking, I wonder what's all the discussion about, the MOM will be inserted into a highly elliptical orbit around Mars, with a planned periapsis of 365 km (227 mi) and apoapsis of 80,000 km (50,000 mi) [1]. It will not even come close Mars's atmosphere. Wouldn't that take contamination out of the question completely?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission

This is before my time, but I have heard from a few people that there were a few, at least one Hindi classic movie [1] back in the 70's that had a running time of 255 minutes and this movie was screened with two intermissions, understandably.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mera_Naam_Joker

Well, the finds range from 9000 years to 1200 years old, so that not only suggests these areas might have been previously habitable as recently as 1200 years but also that these areas were habitable for almost 10,000 years before becoming uninhabitable. Could it suggest a cyclic pattern? And, perhaps we are acting as catalysts to climate change with our greenhouse gas emissions?

Here are the ones that I found most useful, by Andrew Ng [1] and Daphne Koller [2] on Coursera.

[1] https://class.coursera.org/ml-003/lecture [2] https://class.coursera.org/pgm-003/lecture

I am Asian and am currently a student at an American University. I don't exactly think of my self as an introvert but here is my (opinionated) 2 cents based on my experience.

1. You say you don't have any roommates, you should probably start there. It will help you save money too. craigslist should be helpful there.

2. You mentioned that your internship is about to end, why don't you take your team out for a couple of drinks/lunch/dinner. You can thank your colleagues for their help through your internship and also get to know them personally/share anecdotes.

3. Make a trip to the local pub/bar (specially near universities), you can always strike a conversation with the bartender (maybe something like how you miss a particular beer back home). After you had a drink or two, it lowers your inhibitions, you could start up conversations with others, perhaps with ones sitting next to you at the bar. I met a lot of different people like this, not necessarily friends but you sure will have a good time.

4. Since you are at the university, you should try to get into the community groups, sports clubs etc.

5. You would definitely have group projects at the university, pick different teammates every time and make sure you use every opportunity to socialize with them, meet at the library to study, ask for/offer to help in assignments, suggest going out for dinner/drinks/movie etc. to informally celebrate start/end of project, perhaps even a tiring day working on the project. And, make sure you follow up and don't let those people slip away after your projects. Invite and go out with them to catch up once a while etc.

6. I noticed that, at least in my university, there are barely any Americans in the Masters program if you choose courses in core computer sciences. If you want to meet locals or people from different backgrounds/interests, then you can choose to take up at least one course that coincides with your hobby/interest e.g. music101 etc.

Edit - If you are at/visiting Chicago, let me know, I will definitely be up for a beer to two and meet a new person

Well the poor don't necessarily end up with bad phones, there are a few indigenous phone manufacturers like Micromax [1], Maxx Mobile [2], Spice [3], Intex [4] etc. that have carved out a market for themselves in the past few years. These brands manufacture phones with features quite comparable to "good" smart phones and are comparatively very affordable. So, unless the consumer is brand conscious, its possible to get a smart phone with decent features and data support at affordable prices.

In fact, Spice and Intex are the manufacturers that Mozilla has partnered to produce the $25 smart phones.

[1] http://www.micromaxinfo.com/mobiles/smartphones [2] http://www.maxxmobile.in/mobiles/smart-phones [3] http://www.si2imobility.com/spicemobiles/ [4] http://www.intexmobile.in/Product.aspx?PCatId=3

In that case, won't wearing an anklet keep one even safer?

Isn't this a slippery slope? The general consensus is changing slowly and everyone slowly is starting to accept and tolerate privacy invasions? Isn't that the same with other human rights too?

I don't think you can attribute most incredible art to be inspired by religion, considering that during those times, art (sometimes just ideas) that lacked religious conformity were dealt with severity. Perhaps the reason there is so much art that is inspired by religion because not much else survived.

This brings a famous bit by George Carlin (I think) to my mind - ...It start's when we are kids, we are told to be creative and to colour within the lines... (paraphrased)

Not sure if you based it on this, but it's a very famous argument made by George Carlin [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

What mapping software did you use? Just curious, because when I lived in Bangalore, India, I used to use one of the many android apps that record a gpx file, whenever went cycling. And, I used this mostly when I cycled in parts of the city that weren't mapped well on OSM. Then, all I had to do was upload the gpx files and if I found time I used to annotate street names, landmarks etc. And, nothing in this process seemed resource intensive to be slow.

I interviewed recently for a Data Engineer position in Chicago and was surprised when 2 interviewers from the data team introduced themselves as astrophysicists. They reasoned that they weren't happy with the career path in academia and so found a way out.

USA, Relocation, Full Time

Professional Exp Stack: C#, ASP.Net, SQL Server, SQL Server BI, Oracle, js, IIS, NUnit, WCF, TFS

Academic (MS Data Science) Stack: Java, Python, Postgres, R, Hadoop, git

Resume: http://www.cs.uic.edu/~preddy/resume.pdf

Contact: in resume

Current Masters Computer Science, Academic focus - Data science. Graduating shortly. Prior experience of 5 years web development on MS stack.