berkeshire

6 ms·

1.
by berkeshire 3y ago
Yes, if they bring insights. Not merely facts or data. Matt Levine, Farnam Street, James Clear - they add value in their own ways. I dont read every issue though.
2.
by berkeshire 3y ago
Wayfair, Qurate, SAIC, Insight Enterprises, DXC ... Fortune 500 companies that have billions in annual revenues.
3.
by berkeshire 3y ago
A philosophical approach may help. Change is the only constant expectation that I have. All of my past work over 25+ years is now deprecated, obsolete, tech-debt, or irrelevant. It is the nature of software. Intangible work built upon ephem
4.
by berkeshire 3y ago
Had a torture filled 4 years in my undergraduate degree. Mostly poor grades throughout. But I aced the 2 internships as part of the degree program. Several profs told me that had the university believed in absolute marking versus relative,
5.
by berkeshire 3y ago
Elephants have gratitude, can sense human death, and can mourn their human protector and friend. That is spiritual in a way. Or more spiritual than many humans. Sources: 1: https://www.cbc.ca/strombo/news/saying-go
6.
by berkeshire 3y ago
The idea of leaving behind a lasting legacy of work is vanity squared. The ones who do selfless work for open-source do not necessarily do it for a place in history. The point of choosing a purely materialistic software career was to have t
7.
by berkeshire 4y ago
Nice tips, but context specific. In my observation and experience, no rules apply when power dynamics and culture specific nuances are in play. Examples: A setting where the group has pre-decided to exclude you - think snooty neighbourhoods
8.
by berkeshire 4y ago
Greybeard with 26 years in the industry. Sorted in decreasing order of impact: [1] Back in 2006, created a web scraper with .Net framework and C# that helped my wife run a home-based scraping business for 2 years. There were no tools /
9.
by berkeshire 4y ago
Am one of the black sheep of my Electrical Engineering batch who moved to software. Why? The steep learning curve that involved loads of memorization of long formulae and static values which sucked for someone like me. An easier, and more f
10.
by berkeshire 4y ago
1995 India - Had a paid internship (Rs 2500 per month or ~ USD 80 back then) with a small software company that worked on FoxPro + dBase. A very diverse team (gender ratio), the highly enthusiastic bunch created software for non-banking fin
11.
by berkeshire 4y ago
Mid-2001 - the dot-com I worked for folded. Switched to an enterprise (B2B) company that wanted to bring their legacy systems to the web. Win-win. Pay was conservative but the stability was what I needed then.
12.
by berkeshire 4y ago
One cant do much. I have had a couple of terrible experiences. Its amazing what power does to some technical managers and senior HR. Its their karma and they are going in the right direction of being assholes who will have a miserable old a
13.
by berkeshire 4y ago
- Product Market Fit - find that before continuing to perfect the product. - Market size and especially addressable market size. We learnt it the hard way with children's apps. - Tech is a tool. Unless you are doing groundbreaking res
14.
Ask HN: How many domain names did you park and what have you spent on them?
1 points by berkeshire 4y ago|1 comments
15.
by berkeshire 5y ago
- Minimal sugar or sweet stuff. 5 grams sugar a day, max. - 250 grams to 350 grams of food per major meal. - Lots of water through the day - Small, healthy snacks of 50 to 100 grams, twice a day.
16.
by berkeshire 5y ago
Mobile apps startup almost a decade ago, for 2 years. Failed. Joined a FAANG company, initial months were depressing - narrow scope, cog in the wheel, shoddy culture. On the plus side, the interviews were a breeze due to the depth I had bui
17.
by berkeshire 5y ago
Footstool. Pen and paper for long form note taking. A marker for whiteboarding. That's it.
18.
by berkeshire 5y ago
New hires across roles and seniority levels jump ship after a month, since offers just keep pouring in. Very hard to hire DevOps folks. Roadmaps are heavier than ever and fewer folks to haul them.
19.
by berkeshire 5y ago
https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/134717615072916275... https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1329330848919810049
20.
by berkeshire 5y ago
Excel - a) Rows limited at a million since 2007. b) SQL querying capabilities, especially when large datasets (1M+ rows) are queried in-file.
21.
by berkeshire 5y ago
a) Their work load - whether they will burn out or become a lazy bum. Neither extreme is good. b) What the next job level entails and how to get there. Whether to take the career path of being an individual contributor, manager, architect,
22.
by berkeshire 5y ago
Failure taught me one thing. My self-attested labels of being creative, a builder, risk taker ... were more likely rose tinted glasses. They were the fuel and the motivation of my all-nighters, that effusive optimism and self belief. Motiva
23.
by berkeshire 5y ago
Ageism. 40+? Good luck finding that fitment with younger decision makers. Biases. Started startups and failed? Too risky for the banks or old-school software companies. Industry. Worked in non-profits and created entire software stacks for
24.
by berkeshire 5y ago
Yes, FaaS is a good choice for early stage products, where the traction cannot be predicted, or the user volumes would be predictably low. Combine Lambda (execution) with other free tier + subsequent low cost serverless offerings like Dynam
25.
by berkeshire 5y ago
Comparing AWS EC2 pricing [1] and AWS Lambda [2]. Assumption: Let's say you run an application / function with 5 qps traffic, needing 256 MB RAM max, 50ms execution time. EC2: t2.micro instance - 1 instance available as always fre
26.
by berkeshire 5y ago
1) Watching English movies, with subtitles (close captions) "on" is very helpful. 2) Reading aloud an English language newspaper, an article in a news category of your interest - say - Sports - read it aloud in front of a mirror,
27.
by berkeshire 5y ago
The interviewers want to prove how much more they know, as compared to the candidate. Or worse, they have one optimal solution in mind and anything else is a square peg / round hole. Ageism is also a factor with some age cohorts prefer
28.
by berkeshire 5y ago
Since money / savings is a deciding factor - you could leetcode your way into much higher compensation via FAANG over 6 to 9 months versus 1.5 years for a MS. However it would be a path of : Join in India, wait for a year, get a L1 vis
29.
by berkeshire 5y ago
You could invest in US Tech Companies that you understand well via a brokerage firm - the FAANG list is one example. Or ETFs that cover the best tech companies. [Not an investment advice, markets are risky, losses are probable - you know th
30.
by berkeshire 5y ago
Context: Not from the investment banking or trading background. Have been an investor / trader with modest gains. How does one solve for risk in the markets? As in, mathematically. How does one do short term predictions of prices, with

More ›