balajis

Hey, drop me a line: balajis at a16z dot com. We try to help entrepreneurs who have an experience like you've had get back on their feet. No promises, but often we can find you a great job at one of our portfolio companies.

Hey all. Surprised to see our little site at the top of HN :) We'll be updating the website at some point with more news. Till then, sign up for notifications and check out trybtc.com and blockscore.com.

:) I assure you that we are going to be hiring engineers through this process.

Hmm. In all fairness, the full quote is:

  A BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or the equivalent is nice 
  to have, but the most important requirement is significant 
  independent programming experience as demonstrated by your 
  GitHub account, personal projects, academic publications, 
  or startup success. Your accomplishments are much more 
  important than your paper credentials.

Sure, go ahead! We just ask that you not share the questions with others after completing it.

It's an ongoing opportunity, but we will be hiring the first set of people soon. So it will be to your advantage to apply sooner rather than later.

Did you include the country code prefix? Otherwise please try emailing vivek at hackerrank dot com with the bug to see if he can reproduce.

Well, empirically we're getting quite a lot of people attempting it! :) Three hours is pretty lenient (you could blaze through it in less time), though the last question is challenging. We think the questions are kind of fun as well.

Without something like this we'd just have 100s-1000s of unstructured resumes in different formats to rank against each other. This process is more fair and (IMO) allows someone without a college degree, or from outside the US, to compete on a level playing field.

Great question. The short answer is that there are many social goods which are only available when people of like mind are in the same physical location. Among other things:

1) Walkable communities where everyone has some things in common are extremely popular (e.g. college).

2) By contrast, today many of us live corridored lives in anonymous apartment complexes, knowing more people at work than at home. Just from an efficiency perspective, that is a huge waste of time and life. Every single person there has to do a commute (or get on the internet) to meet people they know.

3) The specific location that people end up concentrated at is unimportant. But being located near someone else will be extremely important for the foreseeable future; among other things: you can't read body language, you can't yet easily collaborate on physical objects, and people can't yet reproduce over the internet :)

4) In more detail, it's a bit like dinner. Whether you meet your friends at place X or place Y doesn't matter. What matters is that you meet your friends in person. You could be more technically precise and say only the variance in location matters, and not really the mean (the specific spot on the surface of the earth).

Anyway, I have a much longer version of the essay (really, a short book) that I had to edit down which went into this and related qs. I'll post that at balajis.com soon.

Sheesh. Balaji here. Clearly this touched a nerve, so will be writing on this at some length. But this is the bit I don't get:

  But when I asked him what harms techies faced that might   
  prompt such a drastic response, he couldn't offer much 
  evidence.

  He pointed to a few headlines in the national press warning 
  that robots might be taking over people's jobs. These, he 
  said, were evidence of the rising resentment that 
  technology will foster as it alters conditions across the 
  country and why Silicon Valley needs to keep an escape 
  hatch open.

  But I found Mr. Srinivasan's thesis to be naive. According 
  to the industry's own hype, technologies like robotics, 
  artificial intelligence, data mining and ubiquitous 
  networking are poised to usher in profound changes in how 
  we all work and live. I believe, as Mr. Srinivasan argues, 
  that many of these changes will eventually improve human 
  welfare.

  But in the short run, these technologies could cause 
  enormous economic and social hardships for lots of people. 
  And it is bizarre to expect, as Mr. Srinivasan and other 
  techies seem to, that those who are affected wouldn't 
  criticize or move to stop the industry pushing them.  

But that was actually exactly my point: as Farhad states, people may indeed "move to stop the industry", so we need to keep an escape hatch open. A huge chunk of the people here in the Valley are first or second generation emigrants who picked up stakes from their home countries and currently work from a laptop. They left their N home countries because those locales weren't favorable to technology. Is it impossible to think that backlash could make it necessary for us to leave an N+1st, as our ancestors (recent or distant) did?

I can only speak for myself, but the motivating emotion here isn't arrogance. It's one part apprehension, knowing what happened to the Chinese in Malaysia, the Indians in Uganda, and the Jews in Europe. And it's one part hope, thinking that we can build something better with a clean slate, without 230 years of legacy infrastructure and cruft.

Instructor here. We'll be doing a v2 of the course after a few months and will repost the materials at that time (we've learned a ton from the first MOOC run).

Hi Smirnoff: try out the first few lectures and see if it fits your background. The key is how quickly you can pick up the web programming stuff.

The full Stanford course materials for the Jan-Mar timeframe are at stanford.coursera.org/cme184-001. The startup.stanford.edu URL tracked the first few weeks, but this was redundant for Stanford students and another page to keep up to date. So the material there is more of a teaser for people interested in the Coursera MOOC class.

That said, it will be more useful for the Coursera students to have a site that is accessible when logged out, so look for startup.stanford.edu to track the MOOC course material beginning tomorrow evening or so.