rguzman

I can't shake the feeling that the existence of leap and that it seems compelling are symptoms of deeply flawed urban planning.

> A 2013 study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that American universities graduate 50 percent more students in computer, information science, and engineering each year than are hired in those fields

This is a reasoning flaw: companies don't need people who graduate from certain fields. They need people with certain skills that are difficult to attain. A degree in those fields is correlated with the skills in question, but it is very far from a predictor.

People think that sitting is very bad for you because it is correlated with all kinds of undesirable health outcomes. Does anyone know whether these effects disappear when controlling for level of activity?

Thinking that the 'talent' necessary to make a successful startup or product is just 'coding talent' is as naive and ill-informed as thinking that the only talent needed to play in the NBA is being tall. Coding is just one of the important aspects of starting a company, there are many others.

I largely agree with this, but there's one complication. A lot of the certification aspect is that certain schools have earned a reputation over many decades for being selective, having high academic standards, and producing effective graduates (no claim as to whether they upkeep those, or even rightfully earned them in the first place). It is very difficult to invent some certification that is comparably valuable to a degree from such schools.

"As a matter of personal policy and professional courtesy, I don't discuss the details of my engagement with my current employer with third parties. I'll do the same if I work for you."

This reminds me of at least a few people in college. I tended to avoid the CS department computer lab for fear of becoming something like the essay describes. I didn't do too much better, though. I did decide to snap out of it, ironically, when I moved to SF to do a startup.

One thing that surprised me upon arriving in SF, is how well-balanced and adjusted lot of the 'hacker' types seemed. I think computer programming has developed another subculture, or maybe a couple other subcultures that are very different from the hacker subculture.

First, I really like this concept! I'm hoping you guys will be able to suggest activities that are missing 1 person based on where I am and such.

I signed up and was pretty excited. But then there is only 1 activity nearby with 1 member on it (probably another HN reader). And I live in Manhattan -- I'd expect lots of activities. The biggest problem to address is the chicken&egg problem: nobody will use it if people aren't already on it. In this particular case, this means that you really have to go out of your way to organize activities. I suspect this means that you should only launch in a city you can organize a large number of activities in and then grow from there.

Yes.

Your comment reminded me of this: http://youtu.be/9dlypec4dP4?t=40s

Even if the study doesn't live as long as its name states, a clear mission is useful because it guides people's decision making. A researcher in this should be optimizing her efforts for the 100 year timescale and not for the ~5 year one.

> something that could be set up by anyone using cron in minutes.

Just like anyone can build stackoverflow in a weekend.

iDoneThis - New York, NY/remote

Details are here: http://idonethis.com/jobs/

I was surprised with how long we were able to get away with the simplest setup: everything in one server. It was about ~2 years. I'm very glad I didn't introduce complexity in the setup from the get-go.

I don't know about those specific 900 listings on airbnb, but IIRC SF has an ~8% vacancy rate which tens of thousands of housing units.

I live in SF and I feel something different. The regulations are consistent with versions of SF that most of its citizenry would not like (e.g. like Malibu).

It is not about just suffering for the badge of it. I guarantee you that there is actually something productive and useful to do. At the very least, as you say, you can reflect on the current situation and write-up the plan to avoid it in the future.

> It’s hard to sustain a bubble for four years.

I don't think so. The housing bubble that popped in 2008 lasted a lot longer than 4 years.

If I'm the CEO and I'm going to ask some people to work 80 hour weeks for a few days/weeks/months, I'd be around and find something productive to do just to show solidarity.

This is really useful and good, esp since the source is on GH. Thanks for putting it together, OP!

That said, lines of code is really the wrong metric to gauge the merits of the frameworks. Fewer lines of code may mean better abstractions, but it also may mean more 'magic'.

A metric that may be more useful would be to have one developer write half the project and have another finish and then compare the time they take to the time they take to do the same project with angular.

Put a way to contact you in your HN profile and on your other profiles (GH, SO).

While it sucks to be short on money, it really seems like you dodged a bullet and you're better off not working there. From what I can tell from your writing and your online presence, you are far above making $8/hr.

Exercise, maintain an active dating & social life, other intellectual pursuits (e.g. learning math), waste time on reddit and social media.

heh...basecamp, meetup, vimeo, and bit.ly are 'small'.

Are there any documented instances of this happening to smaller startups? And, relatedly, are a set of best practices emerging to deal with this sort of a thing?

for anyone who is both willing and able to do one of these 'breakout technology' companies, the company is what they want to do in the first place.

From the screenshots the emails look like they have dynamic elements in them ie buttons that do stuff. I imagine that they aren't links that just point to your site, but that you have figured out a way around no-JS in emails. How? Gmail/gapps plugin? Or...?

A few similar tools have popped up recently. Like this one, they look pretty good, and like improvements over skype et. al. However, they seem to solve the easy part of the problem and not the hard one.

The problem is evaluating a candidate. For that, one likely needs to do some live-coding in some capacity along with several other things. While the existing tools are subpar, they are good enough. The hard part is what questions to ask and how to go about judging the answers as to produce a good hiring signal without alienating candidates.

You can tell that remoteinterview is trying to address the real problem from their marketing copy. However, I am highly skeptical that giving team members the ability to up and down vote with comments on an etherpad + video is a big chunk of it or even an "in".

If I were working in this space I would only worry about how to produce evaluation materials given some information about a company and a candidate. It very well may be that it is not easy enough or possible to do that at scale or cost-effectively, but that seems to be the thing companies struggle with, not having to use skype.

It doesn't need to be coupled to "fire fast". It is only the first quarter (or even 6th in some vesting schemes) that vests after the cliff.

In my vastly more limited anecdotal experience than both of you guys', companies are not just stingy with equity, but they are also overly stingy with salaries.

> we have to run the call in the web process

I know you probably have good reason for this, but this smells like an architecture problem. Whenever you are talking to an external service it is a good idea to have your code laid out such that you can do that in the background. I understand that if you didn't plan enough architecture and maybe even product design to make that feasible from the get-go it is an expensive thing to build, but regardless of who is your hosting provider sooner or later you'll likely need to do it.

One thing I've always liked about heroku, at least in concept, is that it forces you to have good architecture. Some times it is a bit of a pain, but I think this pays off quicker than you seem to realize.

Are interference effects between speakers that are in separate rooms a problem for sound quality? Does beep try to add delays to signals to compensate for this? I imagine it is a pretty hard problem for N > 2 assuming. I'd love a technical blog post about that.

The xenophobia and lack of basic logic of these protests are appalling. Even the people giving speeches at them[1] have a hard time making the connection between the buses, the evictions, and the tech industry.

"we are against the ellis act ... we see that as related to tech and we want the ruling class which is becoming the tech class to listen to our voices"

"we are against the tech money that has caused evictions of seniors and people with disabilities throughout the community"

uh...wut?

I understand that the growth of the tech sector generates quite a bit of demand for housing and that leads to increasing rents if supply is held constant. But, this is a econ 101 problem. The solution is to let more housing be built as to stabilize the prices and not YOU PEOPLE GTFO ALONG WITH ALL THE ECONOMIC BENEFITS THAT HAVING A THRIVING INDUSTRY IN THE LOCAL ECONOMY BRING!

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSHbMbkqwDk