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purewater

33 karma · joined March 7, 2011

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purewater··on The decline of Vancouver
Even 2100 CAD ($1670 USD) is about half of San Francisco 1 bedroom rent. His post is still correct in terms of ratios. http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/03/03/mapping_the_median_...
purewater··on The 23rd-Best Sandwich I’ve Ever Had
That makes no sense. You only have to remember one sandwich at a time to decide on the best sandwich, but you have to remember at least three numbers to recall the mean and standard deviation.
purewater··on Show HN: UChicago admissions asked me to find Waldo. I did.
FYI, you made typo on "Boltzmann" in the essay.

Edit: looks like you already submitted the essay. Oh well. Good luck :)

purewater··on Startups Court Dev Bootcamp’s Ruby Grads, 88% Have Offers At Average Of $79K
Yes, ask any Facebook/Google new grad. Standard offer is $100k base salary + $15k bonus + $30k stock a year + $XXk signing bonus.
purewater··on Startups Court Dev Bootcamp’s Ruby Grads, 88% Have Offers At Average Of $79K
Isn't $79k somewhat offensive for a software engineer? At a time when new college grads are making well over $150k their first year?
purewater··on Rob Pike on regular expressions in lexing and parsing
> However, for the most part, the "efficiency" argument is off base. You can COMPILE regular expressions into tight code.

Rob Pike has written multiple regular expression engines and at least 4 programming languages. I think he understands the efficiency part pretty well.

purewater··on Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t
I was being nice before, but it's obvious that you don't know what a greedy algorithm is.

Please don't make offensive comments like, "I guess the algorithms course is no longer required at MIT?!"

purewater··on Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t
Greedy algorithms run the same way every time given the same choices. Why? Because, if options are received in a deterministic order, it'll make the locally optimal choice.

With iterate and repair, people are using an internal heuristic to make a choice and refining that over time. These are not necessarily the locally optimal choice.

purewater··on Ask HN: Is there a search engine which understands regular expressions?
The slowdown is nowhere near what you've estimated.

To run a regular expression, you have to search through the entire corpus.

Right now, when you type a search in, it searches through its index to look only through the top documents that match those words.

My guess is that it would be more like 1000000x slower.

purewater··on If average salaries are 80-100k why does everyone keep getting 40-60k offers?
$80-100k understates the salaries in Silicon Valley. $100k isn't even a recent college grad salary, it's usually closer to $110k + $40k in other compensation == $150k right out of college. A few years of experience pushes you well over the $200k mark. Heck, interns even get paid $8k/month which is almost $100k/year.

Seriously, brush up your resume and apply to the major firms.

By the way, I should note that cost of living and taxes are much higher here. Standard rent is >$2k (which is nothing compared to some parts of NYC, I guess...)

purewater··on Bottom just fell out of Nikkei
Thanks for posting this. I like to buy into crashes (with some safety margin if I'm wrong). +$4k on the SGXNK so far because of your great timing! :)
purewater··on Why Hiring for Start-ups is so Hard Right Now.
Usually it's not $200k salary, but compensation package. A typical example is: $165k base salary, $25k annual bonus, $40k stock.

Sorry, I won't mention any particular companies, but if you're close to anyone at a major software firm, you should easily be able to find out what it's like.

purewater··on Why Hiring for Start-ups is so Hard Right Now.
There's a difference between average and high-end:

Washington D.C. Avg Software Engineer salary: 102k http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Software-Engineer-l-Washingto...

Bay Area Avg Software Engineer salary: 113k http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Software-Engineer-Bay-Area-l-...

Except none of my friends in the bay area make that little. In fact, few of my friends in their late 20s are making under $200k a year in terms of what they write on their tax returns (total compensation package).

Your experience and the "average" typically are not comparable.