pcsanwald

6 ms·

1.
by pcsanwald 7y ago
+1. I'm a musician who has released albums and I'd never use something like this, because who wants to manage distribution for every platform? DistroKid/CDBaby are a much better way to do this.
2.
by pcsanwald 7y ago
I found this article quite interesting, it's about implementing an analytics system at stackoverflow: https://jasonpunyon.com/blog/2015/02/12/providence-failure-i...
3.
by pcsanwald 8y ago
Being a "tech luminary" is a pretty high bar, no? Who would self-identify as this anyways? I graduated from NC State in 2000 and I've had a really awesome, rewarding career filled with interesting problems and fun. As an engi
4.
by pcsanwald 8y ago
I would upvote this by 1000 if I could. I lived in the bay area for 2 years, and one way streets + right on red is a recipe for disaster for pedestrians because drivers will never look to their right. Interestingly, people in SF rarely ja
5.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
my .02 from having been CTO at a SaaS analytics company for a long time: "we want to see how your algorithms made their decisions." that's great product feedback. and a problem you need to solve. You shouldn't solve it b
6.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
I agree, although if the company asking is not engaging with an aforementioned auditing company (Mitre is the one I've dealt with the most), then that would be a red flag to me.
7.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
in my experience, a couple reasons: 1. It's far easier to raise money from VCs if you are located in SV/SF vs anywhere else in the country. 2. Once you raise that money, the only thing you are going to spend it on is employees. In
8.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
You could make the same argument about most programming languages. I hate to sound like I'm parroting Spolsky, but, he's right that the reason that the reason every developer ever wants to re-write the code they inherit is because
9.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
When I worked at a large investment bank we spent a ton of time and effort on a system that allowed equity analysts to use excel and sync their data back and forth to the firm's centralized system. it was a great approach because it ke
10.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
package management is a harder problem than most people seem to want to admit. I've run into tons of issues with every package management system you can think of: rpm does some extremely dodgy caching stuff at times, navigating maven d
11.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
In the poorer areas of NYC there are few, if any, healthy options. Access to fresh, healthy food is a big socioeconomic problem.
12.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
yeah, I guess my point is that maintaining internet and general office stuff is not "free", in that it's costing you your time or money. I don't spend much time on office stuff, but if the office is just software enginee
13.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
sure, I've subleased a bunch. my experience with that is that two kinds of companies generally sublease: places that are growing and will eventually want the space you're occupying for themselves, or places that aren't doing
14.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
exactly. Finding less than a 5 year lease in Manhattan is extremely challenging in my experience.
15.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
instead of non-relational, think of it as denormalized. I also can't think of any cases where you wouldn't want some relationships. I can absolutely rattle off tons of cases where applications benefit greatly from some kind of den
16.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
I agree. I wonder if most people in this thread saying that renting your own space is cheaper has ever really done this. I have, a bunch, and keeping the lights on is not free in terms of time/money. At a small company, this means eith
17.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
Do they seriously claim this? It sounds like a pretty far-fetched thing for them to say. I've opened several offices and moved my company around a fair bit, and I don't know how WeWork or anyone else would have their "foot in
18.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
I'm pretty sure at least a few people genuinely wanted to. they ended up being pretty happy as they ended up working at our company for many years. I have no idea how long you've been working, but for myself, my wants and desires
19.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
I had the same experience, although I didn't end up using wework because they gave me a runaround on location (I wanted manhattan space and they were clearly trying to get ppl to lease in dumbo, this was a while ago). I 100% agree that
20.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
I've hired lots of people that used to run their own businesses and want to go back to being an employee.
21.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
this has been my experience exactly and a great summary. starting your own business vs being an employee is not about being your own boss, it's about trading one boss for many bosses (your customers, your investors, the bank, etc).
22.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
all tuning is relative, of course, but my comment is thinking about singers or horn players that play consistently sharp, for example.
23.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
I've hired 5 people from flatiron school, all of which worked out very well. desperation had nothing to do with it, I found the folks there were very helpful with matching potential candidates to what I was looking for. Additionally, I
24.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
agreed, but even in classical music it doesn't really bother me that much sometimes, some of my very favorite string players have occasional intonation issues (who doesn't?). And think of all the jazz records with an out of tune p
25.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
The ubiquity of auto-tune is particularly interesting because most people don't seem to have a lot of pitch sensitivity. Tons of very famous recordings are slightly out of tune and no one seems to complain, ever. I'd imagine its p
26.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
I read the parent comment as don't, on average, make money for their employers. Which I assume is the way that Taleb points out, which is make a little most of the time and occasionally lose a lot.
27.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
Couldn't agree more. The only thing I know about the situation is what I've read, but many in this thread says "clearly he's a brilliant engineer" and yet, after reading the article, it's less clear to me that
28.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
I said fund managers, not funds themselves: John Meriwether raised a new fund just a year after LTCM collapsed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Meriwether
29.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
The skillset is fuzzier, but the results are not fuzzier, as reflected by common practices of sales compensation across the industry.
30.
by pcsanwald 9y ago
Having done a lot of hiring in SF, NYC, and Baltimore, it's not clear to me that optimizing financially means avoiding SF and NYC. Market salaries for software engineers in Baltimore are quite a bit lower (like, 40-50% lower) than SF o

More ›