Hacker News Reader

rdoubleon Would you trust a software developer in shorts?

Cal Henderson, the guy who made Flickr, doesn't seem to own a pair of long pants. Also when I met Paul Graham, he was in shorts. So, yeah, I'd trust a software developer in shorts.

rdoubleon So, you want to hire me? My response to recruiter spam.

I felt the same way as the OP right before the dot com bust. Then all the startups went out of business and the only way to get a decent job was to know a recruiter for a big company.

rdoubleon So, you want to hire me? My response to recruiter spam.

I quit LinkedIn and now receive almost no recruiter spam. Recruiters seem to only exist on LinkedIn now, so if you really want to avoid them just delete your account.

rdoubleon Existential Depression in Gifted Children

Murakami's solution is to start jogging.

edit: to answer your question, I suggest The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Murakami is overrated. Once you've read that one, you've essentially read them all.

rdoubleon The Locust Economy

Your comments don't make any sense if you weren't talking about the USA.

rdoubleon The Locust Economy

Rosaria The Housekeeper consistently votes for scary people every time who then do abominable things.

Neither the Rosarias or Hipsters in this country vote much at all, and when they do it's for the same guy.

rdoubleon The Locust Economy

I've found that cheap hotels are usually cheaper than AirBNB if I want the whole place to myself.

rdoubleon Welcome to the ‘Sharing Economy’

Kick them out for breaking the terms of the lease and raise the rent up to current market rate for the next tenant.

rdoubleon The curious case of the fall in crime

Crime actually went up slightly in suburban and rural areas during 2000-2010. The suburban homicide rate actually increased by about the same percentage as the urban rate went down.

rdoubleon Why Canada Has No Big Tech Companies

Every opening of another satellite office that exploits the large salary gap...

I was under the impression that the satellite offices aren't just to exploit the wage gap, it's also to set up a pipeline to get more foreign engineers to the SV based motherships through the TN-1 visa.

rdoubleon Why Canada Has No Big Tech Companies

It would be cool if the Silicon Valley area could somehow be replicated without the tech industry. I wouldn't mind living in the Atherton of the 1950s.

rdoubleon Why Canada Has No Big Tech Companies

Anyway, I can't imagine anyone under 45 willingly living in "Silicon Valley"

In my experience, a large percentage of engineers of any age have suburban tendencies. There are way more "nerd's nerds" down in the valley. If you want to run into people who build robots as hobby projects, they will be at Menlo Park Techshop on the weekends, not at Dear Mom. (although I've heard these days that a lot of maker-hacker types live in Oakland)

rdoubleon Apple Acquires Nigerian Tech Entrepreneur's Startup HopStop

What tptacek, rdouble and james_madison said is accurate.

Hmm? I love being accurate but I didn't post anything to this thread.

rdoubleon Reading the Ruby Source to Understand Rails Idiosyncrasies

I vastly prefer magic, so long as it works.

rdoubleon The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements

Is that really true, though? It seems like you'd be healthier eating healthy salads and a donut, rather than never eating a donut, but never eating a salad, either.

rdoubleon When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?

If you say "how old is they?" or "they is adorable" it will sound cooler, like you're speaking some sort of patois.

rdoubleon How to Farm Insects at Home

Peer pressure works. I had some chili dried grasshoppers in Mexico. My sister forced me to eat them. They weren't that great, but weren't bad, either. Sort of like eating sunflower seeds. I'll admit I don't know how one would psych themselves up to eat a plate of grubs on their own. Maybe drop some hallucinogens first?

rdoubleon Bill Gates on the future of education and programming

Intuitively I want to agree with you, as I've had similar thoughts , but is it really the case that younger people don't do as much programming? I'm around your age and almost nobody did programming when I was a kid, or even when I was first getting into the workforce. Now it seems like there are hacking meetups everywhere, millions of people posting their code to github, and more young people than ever to compete with for work.

rdoubleon Hacker News Folks Get Long Overdue Thanks

It's because of "American Exceptionalism." Single payer health care was not invented in America, therefore it could not possibly work in America. Education is similar. There are always at least 20 countries ranked ahead of the USA in primary and secondary education. Yet none of the successful approaches used in those countries can even be experimented with in the USA, because they "would never work here." Things are just different here, you see.

Knowing this, if one really wanted to implement single payer care in America, it would be more likely to succeed if the program was marketed as something like "Super Patriot America Care, just like our boys get in the US Military!" rather than calling it single payer care, which is some Euro/Canada not-invented-here thing that can't possibly ever work, because of America.

rdoubleon Hacker News Folks Get Long Overdue Thanks

I've been to the doctor in Australia and Germany, and you do have to pay but the price was less than what I had to pay in the USA with insurance.

rdoubleon How I Earned A Lot More on Projects by Changing My Pricing Strategy

The PDF doesn't actually go into detail about how the author made over $200K in 19 days. In fact, the rest of the story doesn't mention anything else about that claim at all. It's a discussion between a fictional "Steve" and "Karen" about how Steve should not charge by the hour.

rdoubleon How I Earned A Lot More on Projects by Changing My Pricing Strategy

The linked PDF would have been more interesting if it actually got into detail about that claim.

rdoubleon Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight Blog Is to Join ESPN Staff

Sports are what he did before politics. He's returning to his specialty. Sports and gambling are very typical inspirations for career statisticians.

rdoubleon Your Startup’s Office Is Missing a Room

It doesn't cost that much, really. The salary of the guy running the lab is the largest expense by far. At a startup I worked at a few years ago, they had a lab running 40 hours a week. It would have cost about 10 times as much to have a market research company do this for us if it was even possible.

rdoubleon Fake Signs On Bay Area Highways Say Drones Looking For Speeders

More likely state troopers would be making $300K a year.

rdoubleon How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

I deleted my anecdote because I didn't feel it was appropriate to leave details up about my friend's company as he's still my friend and they still need to fill the position.

I guess I don't get what you're saying. Who does contract to hire where it's good a good deal for someone other than the employer?

rdoubleon How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

I'm not sure what I said contradicts what you're saying. I've been involved with hiring over 100 people in Boston, San Francisco and NYC. Everyone does not really know everyone but that's a different story. Contract to hire is very popular in the part of the Midwest where I'm originally from because of no particular reason other than the hiring firm can and the person being hired doesn't have many options. At one place I worked in Boston everyone was theoretically "contract to hire" but it was atypical as the rate paid was so high that nobody ever took the full time job.

rdoubleon How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

That's the issue. A job explicitly labeled "contract to hire" is never done right. No good developer is going to do contract to hire at 1/52 of the salary, because they already either make an equivalent salary or far more as a contractor. The company isn't going to pay an actual contracting rate, because they are either cheap or can't afford it. Contract to hire is almost exclusively done in places where it's hard for a developer to find a good job and it's used to take advantage of this situation.

rdoubleon Isla: a programming language for young children

You must have had a very atypical childhood and never interact with kids because there are tons of art supplies, picture books and "count the apples" type arithmetic books that are only for kids.

rdoubleon San Jose State suspends online courses

I majored in math and had pretty good ACT and SAT scores but I still find Calculus and related math very difficult.

My unscientific observation is that some people find the analytical/continuous parts of math difficult but can still do really well with stuff like abstract algebra, combinatorics, linear algebra, and so forth. Other people (i.e. physics & engineering majors) are the exact opposite.

Then of course there are a select few who are good at both.

My brother is a math teacher and was more of a physics guy and his claim is that people who struggle with calc generally had poor instruction in trigonometry in their youth. I'm not sure how true this could be but I definitely hated my trig instructor the most out of any teacher I've ever had.