volkadav

17 ms·

121.
by volkadav 10y ago
"most of the rest of the country" by square miles, perhaps, but citizens are not square miles. Why should someone's vote count less because they happen to live in a more densely populated area?
122.
by volkadav 10y ago
Same experience a few years back with another vertical (video, as I recall), so it's not just you. I later went through the process far enough to get offers from AWS and Alexa and ... meh. Went with the Other Guys. Seattle is full of
123.
by volkadav 10y ago
#1) I was in the very same boat and though it is NOT EASY, it is POSSIBLE and possibly VERY REWARDING to go back to school later in your career. I did end up taking compilers in part because of this post and it was awesome . Looking back
124.
by volkadav 11y ago
If you needed to stay open source, you could probably wire something up with Apache Poi to handle the msft end of that and pdfbox to handle the pdf end (edit: I mean read the msft file with poi and write out equivalent info using pdfbox int
125.
by volkadav 11y ago
Supposed to, sure. The majority of them I've worked with have been nothing special, however. They could hack java or perl or whatever with varying degrees of ability, but none of them have been so extraordinary that I can't imag
126.
by volkadav 11y ago
Twitter didn't even send me a ping when a friend working there sent in my resume (for a role rhat at least on paper I'd be well suited for), but I'm moving through the interview process now with two of the GAFA constituents.
127.
by volkadav 11y ago
The entire spec, yes, is big, but the part you actually need is not that complicated. I implemented the IdP for the new york times (there's quite a bit of third party shit plugged into the nytimes.com web experience that we wanted to
128.
by volkadav 11y ago
A few data points to consider: 1) I happen to work in a dev tools company and we definitely see momentum towards git in our customer base. Broadly speaking 2/3rds of our customers (SMEs, F50s, etc. across a broad array of industries) a
129.
by volkadav 11y ago
Since you mention children, I feel obligated to say that imho as a Texan parent, Texas public schools are a travesty. Even the good school districts are hampered by the nonsense the state gov pushes down (e.g. just google "texas textb
130.
by volkadav 11y ago
Agreed; I took this the first time around and had a great time. Highly recommended! :) For what it's worth, Sipser's _Introduction to the Theory of Computation_ helped me get through some of the gnarlier spots (and in turn, the l
131.
by volkadav 11y ago
You get the benefit of children in 30-40 years when you retire and those children pay your Social Security and Medicare (or whatever government programs might be equivalent wherever you are; and all this after decades of hard work by the pa
132.
by volkadav 11y ago
Maybe in 2004 you could. ;) That's 40-50% below the market prices I've seen in the past few years; if you have that deal now hang onto it with both hands, heh.
133.
by volkadav 11y ago
There's a lot of interesting engineering that goes into finance. It's hard to get into the domain where milliseconds are of crucial importance and not involve some seriously hairy engineering. Finance, even aside from the prac
134.
by volkadav 11y ago
Some people (e.g. Bill Gross) think there's a bond bubble too. As bond prices and interest rates are inversely correlated, and it's hard for rates to go anywhere but up at the moment, imho they're probably right. I don&#x27
135.
by volkadav 11y ago
> no kids I hate to be that guy, but everything changes when you have kids. Trust me, a spare hour when you have nothing better to do than jump through some hoop for a company is an extremely rare luxury item when you've got little
136.
by volkadav 12y ago
(I'm not a ZP employee, but I have worked in environments of significant scale a fair amount. The below is just my opinion...) #1: The usual approach is something like remove app servers from the load balancers' rotation, upgrade
137.
Silicon Valley Synopsis: Fundamentalism in Technology(ceteri.blogspot.com)
3 points by volkadav 12y ago|0 comments
138.
by volkadav 12y ago
Echoing what others have said, tech was kind of tacked on, and SXSWi itself is more of an industry conference than a tech conference if that makes sense. Not that you couldn't find people (anything is possible), but imnsho you'
139.
by volkadav 12y ago
As mentioned, a phone screen, to check if the person is minimally capable of doing the job. So named for the FizzBuzz problem, described for example here: http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
140.
by volkadav 12y ago
"This package of loans returns N times the risk free rate of return but is just as safe, according to ratings agencies!" Do people really not remember 2008? Jesus. The problem of course is that a conflagration in one sector of t
141.
by volkadav 12y ago
It's 100% ready for production. Joyent runs a very large platform on SmartOS, and I can verify that at OmniTI we had the vast majority of our hosted customers running on OmniOS. I worked there for a bit over three years, starting jus
142.
by volkadav 12y ago
We already have visas specifically targeted at letting in exceptional talent: the O (temporary) and E (permanent) series. Of course, the tech industry lobbying is not generally speaking around those visas, but rather H1-B. So I don't
143.
by volkadav 12y ago
I certainly don't think it's terribly common anymore, but there's still a bunch of stuff out there that uses it. I've seen it most often as a scripting extension to some larger software package (e.g. visual molecular dy
144.
by volkadav 13y ago
Strictly imho, the translation overhead of reading one or the other if you're used to the opposite syntax is not that high. We're not talking haskell vs. c++ here, it's operand ordering and maybe a few characters' worth
145.
by volkadav 13y ago
Minor nitpick: Stasi was East Germany, not the Soviet Union.
146.
by volkadav 13y ago
States used to subsidize more of the operational budget for public schools than they do now, so the students were shouldering considerably less of their actual attendance costs.
147.
by volkadav 13y ago
I have to add my vote to the "quit sooner rather than later" column. Several years ago I worked in a similarly dysfunctional environment (also in a monopoly position in their industry): terrible code, terrible development processes, you na
148.
by volkadav 13y ago
The postgresql.org docs are a great starting point: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/ for example. (They also serve as a good reference when you're forgetting some finer point of syntax or admin later... the manual's nicely "pha
149.
by volkadav 13y ago
"Saving" can mean much more than a simple savings account (which are still useful even if rates are negligible -- having a few months' worth of living expenses in savings against emergencies is a hugely calming thing), e.g. saving in tax-ad
150.
by volkadav 14y ago
As pointed out down-thread, there's a lot more to this than a simple website (voter analytics/GOTV stuff just for starters), and the potential user base/traffic load is enormous (ramping up particularly as you near election day). Just as a

More ›