seanalex

I was homeschooled along with my three brothers in the state of Texas. We all did dual-courses at a community college during the highschool years, and all graduated from college with various MIS/CS/EE degrees.

We were not homeschooled for religious reasons. It was purely a choice made by the family during a time when we were traveling after both parents retired. We each had the option at anytime to jump back into the public education system after we moved to Austin, but we opted to continue homeschooling instead.

Would I recommend it for everyone? No. Homeschooling should be dealt with on a case by case basis.

I would imagine it is up to interpretation. It would probably be a good thing to ask the interviewer about to show that you are thinking about edge cases.

If it were me, I'd prefer to see those that made no sales based on the question. I guess if I didn't want to see them, I would ask for "where sales are greater than $0.00".

In SQL, this would be an issue due to the date column not existing in the group by. Additionally, because of the having statement, the left outer join is being treated as an inner join with respect to the results given.

Something like this could work (without going for an alternate approach such as Unions or sub-selects):

    SELECT a.name, ISNULL(SUM(s.price), 0.0) FROM authors a
    INNER JOIN books b ON (a.id=b.author_id)
    LEFT OUTER JOIN sales s ON (b.id = s.book_id)
    GROUP BY a.name, s.date
    HAVING (ISNULL(s.date, '20131101') >= '20131101' AND ISNULL(s.date, '20131101') <= '20131130')

Edit: Actually might be better to keep the null in the results like the original query. It's definitely better to know whether a book sold 1000 copies for $0.00 each or if no copies were sold.

It's a tough business. I'm sure things might be different today, but 10 years back it was very hard for companies and sponsors to run a sustainable (and growable) business in professional gaming. People like Angel Munoz and Ted Owen tried to make it more mainstream, and they had some great ideas on how to accomplish it... but ultimately badly timed and wrongly executed on the whole thing.

Fond memories of Clanbase though and sad it worked out like this.

There are definitely plenty of ex-gamers lurking on HN. I played under the nickname Daler in the United States. Mostly played Quake and Doom tournaments, but have competed on a variety of other games.

Unfortunately during the time I competed, there were many companies that would spring up and run tournaments with prizes that they ultimately could not pay out on. Or at best, the money would eventually get paid out months/years later. It was very hard for companies to make return on investment when running these gaming sites and tournaments. Overall, it was the work done by volunteers and "teenagers" that made the best events/sites/tournaments...

I always found it very unfortunate that the gaming scene was full of exploitation for these companies. What happened to the GGL (similarly the CPL), comes at no surprise.

Yeah I guess it might not be the best if I would have to run a VM on it.

Very good point. I guess the days of same-hardware laptops being 50% less in price are gone. I would love to just jump in and get the 13.3 macbook air, but $1200 for the 128GB SSD and 8 GB ram is just a bit above my budget.

A macbook air sounds great, but I am concerned with the screen-size as well. I would definitely need more than 11" as I wouldn't be using an LCD monitor 95% of the time.

It definitely seems like the macbook air is the go-to lightweight development machine these days.

Yeah, I've considered a macbook air. It's definitely in my top choices. It's been so long since I've looked at laptops, but surely there are cheaper options with similar hardware right?

Out of curiosity, why do you say that? I would expect it's as simple as creating a polling/request call to the phone's GPS coordinates. The data can be stored on an application's server and then displayed onto any mapping choice for that person's "group".

I haven't dabbled much in mobile development, so I really couldn't say how hard it overall would be.

Great, thanks for the suggestion. I'll set us up on it tonight and see how it works.

Surprisingly, this is the only Google service I did not want to go away. My wife and I use it frequently every work day. She is an animal control officer here in Houston, and Latitude is the way we keep in touch with where we are. The job is dangerous enough that I like to know her current location frequently just to make sure she is alright. She's on a windows 7 OS phone, I'm on an android... so a lot current-day applications are out of the question. Maybe it's time I code my own location services for us that would be more accurate, frequent, and private.

Sadly, this very much mirrors my experience. I love Azure and ASP.NET MVC4. But the moment my deploys went from 5 minutes to 20 minutes and more, I started hating myself for any random code or test I wish I cleaned up first.

Overall though, Azure is a great product and once you wire things up correctly, it makes out to be a fantastic hosting service. I do not have experience with Amazon's hosting stack, but I plan on sticking with Azure for the long haul.