mikecx

Joined 15 years ago

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Jan 11

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Totally, the departmental audits happen yearly and are available to the public. It doesn't bother me if they want to do a separate audit but these aren't audits, aren't being performed by auditors, and are clearly just a partisan attack on our institutions.

Comment · 1 year ago

I don't question the need for an audit. I do question having a ketamine fueled oligarch and a rag-tag group of 20 year old software developers doing an audit, pretending audits take days, and somehow only finding things conservatives hate as waste/fraud.

Comment · 2 years ago

Love learning about image/video formats and I enjoy how you broke it all down. Just a heads up, pretty sure you've got a typo:

"Next is the Global Packed Field, which in this case is 70 which in binary form is 00000000."

70 in binary would be 100110. (64 + 0 + 0 + 4 + 2 + 0)

Comment · 3 years ago

As a counter to your first example, I once had software deployed in some U.S. embassies in some not so great parts of the world. The machines the software lived on were air-gapped and on computers built specifically not to allow external connections (different keyboard/mouse connectors, no USB, no CD).

To deploy an update required a human, some long flights, and replacement parts. While it's not common, I think it would still break that definition of what is/isn't an engineer.

For me, it comes down to the level of rigor required. I think developing avionics software is probably engineering whereas building an phone app to view/share pictures of cats likely isn't.

Comment · 4 years ago

Not sure if this will be considered off topic, my apologies if so.

The article says that octopi is the plural of octopus, but it's actually octopuses. Octopus is originally Greek, not Latin and thus does not get the Latin plural -i, but instead would get the Greek plural -odes. Since it ends in a way English can deal with, the commonly accepted usage is octopuses (English) over octopodes (Greek) with octopi being the least correct.

https://qz.com/1446229/let-us-finally-resolve-the-octopuses-...

Comment · 8 years ago

Not sure what the policy is on self-promotion but if you're using Rails, my company wrote https://github.com/CatchRelease/stenographer to keep our team up to date on changes. It works by detecting [changelog foo] in your commit message and detects deploys across environments.

Comment · 8 years ago

For me it's still software, the hardware is definitely solid. My experience is from when Windows 10 first came out so maybe it's all fixed now. The process to upgrade involved waiting for the bubble to pop-up in the bottom right. It didn't after a week so I had to search out the command line incantation to make it show up. Once I got it to show up, it did nothing until the 5th or 6th restart. Once it started to install it took 3 days, running constantly, on a brand new Surface Book. After that I remained unsold on Windows yet again.

Comment · 9 years ago

I feel like another step missing or at least not fully acknowledged is knowing your competition. I just did a quick check and both Angie's List (1995) and Yelp (2004) were around years before this idea (2010). While it's certainly possible to be late to the game and win there's no visible differentiator here.

Comment · 11 years ago

Zappos Labs - San Francisco, CA - ONSITE

Zappos Labs is looking for a Full-Stack Developer!

What is the job?

We are a small team of smart people looking to solve tough problems and brainstorm new ideas. Our projects focus on the future of Zappos and customer experiences using a combination of new technologies and new approaches to old technologies. As the Zappos Labs team, we have freedom to incubate new ideas with the backing of a large yet passionate-about-culture organization. Some of our recent projects include researching new lines of business for Zappos, exploring the physical pop-up space, and creating the tools to support self-organization.

What skills do you need?

We are looking for an experienced full stack developer with a focus on front end development. Some of the technologies we use are Ruby on Rails, Javascript frameworks, Node, Mysql, Postgres, and R. We also have a mobile project or two going on at any point in time. Our general approach is language agnostic, choosing the best language for the job. Being able to design applications from top to bottom, troubleshooting and fixing tough problems, hitting quick deadlines, knowing when to push back on requirements, and mentoring other developers will all be very important parts of this role. Knowing a programming language or two like the back of your hand will also come in very handy. We are ideally looking for a "T-shaped developer"—someone who has a broad interest and understanding of technology and the web, but also has deep interest in a specialized area. However, being a Labs developer isn’t a full-time programming job. We want someone who has their own big ideas, loves brainstorming sessions, and will participate in user research.

What kind of people do we want?

Our team is always in search of people that are self-starters, visionary thinkers, and people who don’t mind a little bit of ambiguity. There are many open ended problems that there are no solutions for...yet. Can you brainstorm and come up with innovative solutions to new problems? Are you willing to work closely in a small team and push everyone to be the best that they can be? Do you love learning new things, expanding your knowledge, and iterating quickly? If so, the Zappos Labs team might be for you.

Zappos IP, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer and a drug-free workplace

https://hire.jobvite.com/j?aj=ooKf1fw8&s=Ycombinator_MikeCar...

Comment · 11 years ago

I would suggest walking through the list at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9812245, finding things that interest you (more so than location, really like what the company does) and reach out to them. As one of the companies on that list that's hiring, having someone reach out that really wants the job helps quite a bit. It's a super long list with a lot of options.

In the meantime, since you don't have a ton of experience, i'd work on your Github. Right now it's a lot of small learning projects but nothing that shows how to build anything in particular. Personally, I was looking for some Ruby that wasn't boilerplate or some Javascript that wasn't other people's libraries.

Comment · 11 years ago

Zappos Labs - San Francisco, CA - ONSITE

Zappos Labs is looking for a Full-Stack Developer!

What is the job?

Some of our recent projects include researching new lines of business for Zappos, exploring the physical pop-up space, and creating the tools to support self-organization.

What skills do you need?

Being able to design applications from top to bottom, troubleshooting and fixing tough problems, hitting quick deadlines, knowing when to push back on requirements, and mentoring other developers will all be very important parts of this role. Knowing a programming language or two like the back of your hand will also come in very handy.

We are ideally looking for a "T-shaped developer"—someone who has a broad interest and understanding of technology and the web, but also has deep interest in a specialized area. However, being a Labs developer isn’t a full-time programming job. We want someone who has their own big ideas, loves brainstorming sessions, and will participate in user research.

What kind of people do we want?

Our team is always in search of people that are self-starters, visionary thinkers, and people who don’t mind a little bit of ambiguity.

There are many open ended problems that there are no solutions for...yet. Can you brainstorm and come up with innovative solutions to new problems? Are you willing to work closely in a small team and push everyone to be the best that they can be? Do you love learning new things, expanding your knowledge, and iterating quickly? If so, the Zappos Labs team might be for you.

Zappos IP, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer and a drug-free workplace

https://hire.jobvite.com/j?aj=ooKf1fw8&s=Ycombinator_MikeCar...

Comment · 12 years ago

What i'd really love to see is an administrating Elasticsearch guide and a common recipes guide, both would be super helpful for getting started and more advanced tasks. Having run into issues with Elasticsearch data scaling, trying to pull answers out of the current guides or the IRC channel is like pulling teeth... from an alligator... with a laser attached to its head.

Comment · 13 years ago

Sounds to me like you need to have a discussion with your friends or pare down your friends list. If you are old enough to have a boss and a schedule, your friends should be old enough to not post a photo of their morning accomplishment. Problem solved.

Comment · 13 years ago

Ugh, maybe i'm the only one that hates this but if I have to spend time/effort just to get a price for something it's already off the table as a choice.

This makes it seem like it's either too high priced and you know it or the pricing scheme is too complicated and should be simplified.

Comment · 15 years ago

Another option, though still expensive, is to use the Google Earth Enterprise tools. They basically let you build your own private Google Maps though this too runs into some problems.

1.) Imagery, 2.) Cost for GEE ($10k I think), and the cost of maintaining your own servers to host it on.

I think it's still cheaper than going over the 20,000 free, but not optimal either.