Virax

Holy shit his wife is hot.

I interviewed for a QA position at (Deleted to protect the guilty) where I had to answer a bunch of brain teasers like this. I always prepare thoroughly and even enjoy solving these sorts of puzzles, so I knew most of the standard ones by heart and did fine. I would say that about half of the people who interviewed me did not appear to have the mental acuity to answer such questions themselves. I did learn some new and interesting puzzles though!

Two months later I was hired for what turned out to be an excellent software development position at a completely different organization.

When I interview technical candidates, I ask a pair of related questions that encompass data structures, sorting, and time complexity. It is a very simple-sounding problem. The good candidates get the questions almost before I finish asking, and the mediocre candidates struggle.

Upvoted for vocab :)

Oh man, I smell meme potential :D

DOUG: When is Joe's flight due it?

YOU: Why do you ask?

DOUG: Oh... umm... there's a seminar at 3:30 PM I thought he would be interested in.

YOU: What seminar?

DOUG: The underlying physics of the violin.

YOU: Why do you think he would be interested in that?

DOUG: We talked about it once.

YOU: So, just because you talked about it once, you think he would be interested in spending time going to your hoity-toity physics seminar?

DOUG: Um, yeah, I do, and it isn't hoity---

YOU: Oh yes, the fluctuations of the harmonic oscillators will exponentially dampen the transverse waves of the vibrating string...

DOUG: Dude, shut the hell up. First off, that's nonsense, second off, we don't talk like that, and THIRD, you STILL haven't answered---

YOU (sarcastically): Oh, oh, I'm so so sorry, I haven't answered you question yet have you.

DOUG (gritting teeth): No, I just want to know when he will be arriving.

YOU: I have no idea, check the fucking monitors.

DOUG: WE AREN'T AT THE AIRPORT!

YOU: Yeah, I know, I'm just fucking with you, he arrives at 3:00. He won't make it to your seminar, and in my oh-so-humble opinion, he wouldn't want to go to your seminar anyway. Joe's a real man.

DOUG: FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU%$#!^%$@$%^!

I don't really understand why this is news-worthy - he took a risk and lost. The safer path would have been to keep working as a chef and then mix-in the career change, perhaps by starting a cooking-related website, blog, Facebook app, whatever.

I find it quite difficult to believe that a chef with 10 years of experience could not find a job in Seattle. This beggars belief.

In short, don't tempt economic fate when you have a wife and kid and live in the USA - you should not count on ANY social support in this country.

Question popped into my head: why is Colin Winter wasting his time with idle chit-chat like this? Is he bored of Unladen Swallow already?

The article is interesting, but the conclusion that all antidepressants on the market are flawed is not correct, mostly because different antidepressants target different systems in different ways. I took Celexa for over a year, it worked OK but not great, and then after reading the wikipedia article on treatment of depression, I tried SAM-e, which works much better (200mg Jarrows in the morning with a B-complex supplement to break down the homocysteine). Prior to Celexa, I tried Zoloft, which was completely useless.

This is very naive. The investor / con artist can report any attractive numbers they feel like - who is going to keep them honest?

I strongly suspect that investors who change to be pitched are in fact scam artists who do just enough investment to plausibly deny that they are in fact scam artists while taking in huge amounts of cash from ignorant start-ups and forcing the start-ups that do agree to receive investment into contracts that strongly favor the investors.

I'm sorry, but charging to pitch fails the common sense test; it is little more than a way of separating fools from their money.

Protip: on a game day, Berkeley traffic grinds to a standstill. This is due to the fact that in Berkeley, some things (well, most things) are backwards, so traffic engineers figure out new and creative ways to impede the flow of traffic rather than improve it. Don't delude yourself into thinking you can find a parking space.

"So, I rigged up a Python script to play AOL instant messenger sounds randomly every 5 to 10 seconds, turned up my speakers, pointed them at the wall, and went on vacation for a week."

ARE YOU F'ING KIDDING ME? You write a blog post on hiring and then proceed to relate a story about how you escalated a personal conflict way beyond reason? This is precisely the kind of guy you don't want on your team, because working in the real world involves resolving personal conflict without needlessly pissing people off.

OK let me tell you something.

You have no idea why your startup failed. It has relatively little to do with the things you listed.

Your startup failed because you named it "trogger".

The name of a product, technology, website, whatever is critical for success. The name "trogger" makes me think of "troglodyte" or "troll blogger". Seriously, this is one of the worst names for anything internet or technology-related that anyone could possibly come up with.

Please please please make sure that someone else chooses the name of the next startup you work on.