mquander

23 ms·

211.
by mquander 11y ago
For people on Hacker News? Easy as shit. You have employable skills and Internet access. Life will be strictly better than it was when you didn't have a smartphone fifteen years ago.
212.
by mquander 11y ago
Yeah, I trust Moxie. He's worked really hard on security for a long time. If the government came to his house and threatened to shoot him unless he sabotaged Signal and WhatsApp, I expect he would get shot.
213.
by mquander 11y ago
Maybe that's why AlphaGo is exciting to you. I don't give a shit about technology and AI compared to how much I want to watch AlphaGo play more games of Go, and I suppose that professionals probably feel the same way.
214.
by mquander 11y ago
Why would anyone even expect the set of companies that are most fun to write about to be the same as the set of the companies that are most successful? I kind of figure they would just have a representative amount of success. I don't k
215.
by mquander 11y ago
This is totally irrelevant to the parent's point, that point being that Paribus seems to be defecting in the refunds-when-reasonable game in a way that will probably harm consumers in the long run. It irritates me that you just wrote a
216.
by mquander 11y ago
> It is absolutely the case that with just a few months of modest practice almost anyone can beat the pants off the best go playing computers. It sure isn't. The strongest computers are a few stones worse than professionals. You c
217.
by mquander 11y ago
+1 on this. If AWS wanted to hire you then, likely as not they probably want to hire you just as much now.
218.
by mquander 11y ago
If that AI has, say, one-third the risk of accidents as I would have, then I want it driving my car even if I enjoy it slightly less.
219.
by mquander 11y ago
It's not super easy to figure out what things other people might be scared of if it never occurred to you to be scared of them yourself. If I saw someone walking around with a bunch of electronics draped over themselves it wouldn'
220.
by mquander 11y ago
I'm sure you know, that a lot of hiring at that scale is systematized and (hence) heavy-lifting is done by non-technical recruiting people. Right, this is what I'm arguing against. Doing filtering with non-technical people requi
221.
by mquander 11y ago
When I was a Director of Engineering at Box, the engineering team was tasked with hiring 25 engineers in a single quarter. For several quarters. When hiring at that scale, it's hard to hire based on personas and elaborate preferences.
222.
by mquander 11y ago
I just spent the past month looking around for interesting new work after quitting my last position. Two of the ten or so smaller companies I've interviewed with so far had work-sample-ish tests as part of the hiring process: Keybase a
223.
by mquander 11y ago
OK, I agree it's also really important to spend a few hours meeting people, and I would never accept a job where I couldn't do that first. But I am personally thrilled to be able to spend two hours demonstrating that I am a really
224.
by mquander 11y ago
I don't get why you perceive the realistic-work-sample test as "working for free", but the unrealistic-whiteboard test as "isn't work." They are both taking a similar amount of time and effort, serving the same
225.
by mquander 11y ago
If you just write everything in order of usage, the executable code still winds up in a very easy-to-find place -- the very bottom, rather than the top.
226.
by mquander 11y ago
Quixey - Mountain View, CA - Lots of good programmers - ONSITE Quixey wants to make the functionality and information living in apps externally accessible, like web services are today. As such, we work on ways to search, present, and link t
227.
by mquander 11y ago
If you can't adjust to such a simple context, there's no way I can be sure you can handle an occasional tight deadline, urgent and critical failure in production, rewrite of stinky and hairy piece of code left by a less competent
228.
by mquander 12y ago
"Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires." - Steven Kaas
229.
by mquander 12y ago
As it happens, the author of the article just inexplicably cut out the transcript of doing the middle two steps, which are indeed necessary for the player to perform the ritual. It's possible that it would still be too fiddly for you,
230.
by mquander 12y ago
Racket has loads of libraries and I used it happily for a long time for automating everyday tasks (recently I switched to Python since we use it at work and I needed to learn it.)
231.
by mquander 12y ago
app.route("/") is just a function call which will be run by Python on module import, like any other function that you call in the top level of your module. The return value of the function is a decorator, so then the @ syntax
232.
by mquander 12y ago
Being impersonally evil to people who can never hold you to account is merely the lowest-effort kind of evil to be. I agree that if our politicians had to actually walk up to people and physically steal their wallets in order to pursue thei
233.
by mquander 12y ago
I eat a couple a week. The taste is hard to characterize -- it's sort of like some pretty rich slightly fruity bread -- but they have dark chocolate which dominates the flavor when you bite into a chocolatey bit (I suggest microwaving
234.
by mquander 12y ago
If you're a naturally competitive sort of person, you should try doing TopCoder and Google Code Jam. I also skipped formal CS education and when I was roughly at your level of ability I found that doing TopCoder SRMs in particular taug
235.
by mquander 12y ago
Quixey - Mountain View, CA + Tel Aviv, Israel https://www.quixey.com/about/ We're a well-funded, ~100-person startup making app search that doesn't suck. Our goal is to index the state and functionality of ap
236.
by mquander 12y ago
It's not about conformity, it's about quality. His website at http://resume.patrickcurl.com/ is buggy and doesn't have a consistent look, feel, or writing style. Seeing as building websites for people is the
237.
by mquander 13y ago
This is some refreshingly pleasant transparency as to the spirit of the rules. Thanks!
238.
by mquander 13y ago
I think that there's a real difference between types of behavior in this category. For example, if the same employees were calling him at night to yell the same message at him, I'm sure you'd agree that would be a terrible re
239.
by mquander 13y ago
Let me be clear: I believe Brendan Eich is wrong about gay marriage. But I don't think the price of his convictions should be his career at Mozilla, a company he's played a large role in building, when there is no documented inst
240.
by mquander 13y ago
The difference between running your own tutoring business and volunteering for a hacker school is that N dollars go into the school's pocket, instead of yours. Why would society care about that difference?

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