MaxScheiber

> Coming from Europe I'm used to see that every vineyard makes their own wine.

This isn’t strictly true. Europe has négociants, who buy grapes from smaller growers to make wine from (to be fair, often alongside their own vineyard holdings).

> But then again, who cares for American wine (certainly not the Euros).

Huge fan of Old World wine here. With that said, the Americans are producing remarkable wines these days. For my palate, I enjoy Sonoma and Willamette Valley. Even tasted blind, top critics have preferred California to France — look up the Judgment of Paris!

I second this. Wilma's eye passed over us, which was my first time ever experiencing the eye wall of a hurricane. I vividly remember watching our house's patio enclosure get destroyed from my parents' bedroom.

I wouldn't stick around for this one if I were still in Florida.

Laser Quest closed about a month ago (as did everything else in that plaza). If I remember correctly. LinkedIn purchased the real estate.

You know, I've had people assume I was an inferior software developer solely because I was in a social fraternity and therefore must not have spent any time studying for my exams or working on my problem sets. That's not really a nice prior to have about an individual, sort of how it would be considered quite offensive to assume that a woman were an inferior software developer due to her gender.

Additionally, I'm not going to pretend that Greek life is 100% free of douchebaggery. Some people in fraternities do bad things to other people, or harbor bigoted worldviews. I feel that you grossly overestimate the proportion of people who do. To address the racial and sexual homogeneity point, I'm fairly confident that every single fraternity at my alma mater had individuals of color and homosexual individuals. My own certainly did.

I'd also like to point out the obvious blanket statements you've made about the demographics and attitudes of fraternity members. However, I really don't think anyone or anything can budge your opinion.

In my experience, #4 has held up extremely well over time and is the most compelling reason for choosing an ML over another language. Algebraic data types are an absolute joy to work with when dealing with abstract syntax trees. The other points are obviously great to have, but strong language support for ADTs is key, in my opinion.

I'm not certain I agree with #3. It seems to defeat the purpose of a strong type system. Either way, it can be very nice to express meta-level constructs in a matching object-level type. For example, if the language you are writing a compiler for has an int32 datatype, but you use an int64 in the language you're writing the compiler in, you'll need to simulate overflow. It would just be easier and safer to use an int32 in both places.

These days, I'd recommend Menhir over ocamlyacc unless you have a very specific use case that the former breaks on but the latter works on.

To be clear, they raised $129M in this exact round of funding, which complements $550M previously raised in 2015.

Does anyone else have the following issue with the footnote hotlinking on this blog post? When I click the "return" icon on a footnote to jump to the point in the text where the footnote is, I end up several lines below where I should. The sentence with the footnote is concealed by the black WaPo header bar.

I can replicate this behavior in Chrome on Ubuntu, Chrome on El Capitan, and Safari on El Capitan.

I recently graduated from the Wharton / SEAS undergraduate dual-degree program. I can't currently think of any PMs that didn't have a technical background. I completely agree that being able to grok technical concepts is necessary, and that being a good software developer isn't. However, it is pretty difficult for someone to grok technical concepts in a way that can add value to software engineers without some soft of software engineering or computer science background. I haven't been able to think of a better way to pick up the technical context than to actually program. The banking analogy is the stereotype of the "clueless" MBA associate who didn't put in the two years as an analyst, can't build models, and therefore doesn't add much value to his or her analysts.

In other words, I submit that it is significantly easier to fully understand the architecture, as sologoub is referring to, with a technical background.

It seems like your CS minor and Rails experience gave you the necessary background, which supplements the soft skills that PMs also need.

A lot of my friends and peers who were "interested in technology" but did not understand software engineering took jobs as PMMs, venture capital analysts, or investment banking analysts on a TMT desk. I think this makes sense; I can't see them being very good in a PM role.

It wouldn't surprise me if this were somewhat different for MBAs, though.

I've never heard of a guessing reward before. I've heard of guessing penalties, though. Back when I took the AP exams, there was a penalty (negative points awarded) for guessing, whereas leaving a multiple-choice question blank was worth 0 points. (This stopped being the case in 2011.)

First, sorry to hear about your experience.

I wonder if you would have any luck escalating this to Chesky, Gebbia, et al. The Airbnb founding team really seems to take pg's advice on start-ups seriously. I'm sure that they're huge proponents of delighting their users, which your experience obviously isn't an example of.