socratic

6 ms·

1.
by socratic 14y ago
Was the intent ever not to get talent acquired? I'm very confused by all of the anger at Google and Facebook for acquiring these companies. The companies look like they were designed to get talent acquired in the first place! They both ha
2.
by socratic 14y ago
Are there any good books (or other resources) on modern PHP? I last used PHP back with PHP3 (and then went C++ => Java => Python => Python/JavaScript => Ruby => Python/R), but a bunch of code I want to read at work uses
3.
by socratic 14y ago
Does anyone know if namespace packages actually work? I've been wanting to put up a few utility libraries on Github. I don't think they're good enough for PyPI, and I mostly just want to be able to pip install them and have access to a few
4.
by socratic 14y ago
Does Python have a BPEL/BPM-style workflow engine like Ruby's ruote? This doesn't seem to be it, but I would love to have a workflow engine which is designed for long running tasks, with periodic human interruption, conditional flows, and s
5.
by socratic 14y ago
If this post wasn't on Hacker News, how would someone reach this page without knowing what R is? Would you expect a JavaScript tutorial page to explain what JavaScript is? Or a statistics tutorial page to explain what statistics is? More
6.
by socratic 14y ago
Is that what Blank is arguing though? I remember listening to your office hours at TC Disrupt, when you were talking to the guy from Omniplaces. You said: "This is commercialized research? Ouch. It’s often a solution in search of a problem
7.
by socratic 14y ago
Is there a better signal than high-pay for choosing a technical internship? Looking at Alexey's list, with the exception of hedge funds, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox would be my top choices for where to do a technical internship, and
8.
by socratic 14y ago
If I'm reading you correctly, you definitely made money on the App Store. But it sounds like you are still tens of thousands of dollars underwater in opportunity cost. Is it wrong to think about it that way? You get "more than half" $3400
9.
by socratic 14y ago
Is there a standard set of tools that are being advocated here, in addition to the repository structure? I've been mostly working with Rails lately, and I'd like to continue using tests, mocks/stubs, and sensible build rules, but I'm not su
10.
by socratic 15y ago
Has anyone made a comprehensive comparison of the top web frameworks and how mature the libraries/plug-ins/services around them are? Frankly, Rails and Node.js seem to have much more in common than apart. Both are based around relatively i
11.
by socratic 15y ago
This is actually a good answer, in that it suggests that norms might be important in answering the question. However, this [1] paper by some of the authorities on P3P suggests that the answer might be less clear than you are suggesting. Sp
12.
by socratic 15y ago
What is the preferred way to handle P3P for a young startup or a small (possibly academic) project? As I see it, there are seven relevant facts: 1. The intent of P3P is to make it so that you are personally, legally bound to enforce particu
13.
by socratic 15y ago
Is there a particular type of startup that would be appropriate for Boston versus other locations? My instinct is that outside of Biotech and Enterprise software, it is still a huge disadvantage to start a startup in Boston, but I would lo
14.
by socratic 15y ago
This story lacks a summary, so here goes... Flailing Fast is an underground classic chronicaling the story of two young entrepreneurs. I got an earlier version a few months ago, though it may have been floating around the startup scene for
15.
by socratic 15y ago
Apple, Google, and Facebook all make around $1m revenue/employee and employ around 100,000 people. (Profit/employee is about $300-400k, incidentally.) While the average SV engineer isn't working at one of these companies, doesn't this mea
16.
by socratic 15y ago
Is there anywhere to read more about Geoff's Rocketmail experience? In Founders at Work , Sabeer Bhatia (who co-founded Hotmail) paints a pretty awkward picture of Four11. According to the interview, Rocketmail started out as a direct
17.
by socratic 15y ago
How do people actually test multiple client-side browsers? In terms of testing, Jasmine and QUnit both seem to have reasonable APIs, and I'd be totally happy to use either. I'm sure there are other reasonable options, too. But how are peop
18.
by socratic 15y ago
I agree that Hollywood is evil, however, is the argument that it has peaked really accurate? ("Hollywood is dying.") This RFS doesn't really give any statistics (perhaps because it will be up for longer than those statistics will be curren
19.
by socratic 15y ago
Is hiring software developers an evaluation problem or a supply/demand problem? GitHub provides a great signal for evaluating whether someone is one of the top 100 or top 1000 developers in the world. Just check how many follows or forks t
20.
by socratic 15y ago
Would you argue that students should not study for standardized tests (e.g., SAT, GRE, ACT) as well, because they should have learned the (restricted set of) material on the test in their classes?
21.
by socratic 15y ago
This presentation brings up a tangential point that has always confused me: how error-prone is starting a subprocess, really? I agree with the author's goals of making common tasks easier and more obvious. urllib2 is an easy target, as it
22.
by socratic 15y ago
Is there a list anywhere of which Computer Science (and related) textbooks are worth reading? (Perhaps based on which universities are actually using them?) Personally, I find that the research literature is usually (intentionally or unint
23.
by socratic 15y ago
Would it be wrong to think of Scala and Clojure as the F# of the JVM? I had been thinking of Scala as though it was Java++ (in analogy to C vs C++): a language that adds a few features on top of Java for better abstractions, but regular Jav
24.
by socratic 15y ago
My understanding is that 0% of MIT admissions is non-academic admits (legacy, recruited athletes, development, under-represented minorities). Is that incorrect?
25.
by socratic 15y ago
Have these two follow-up posts changed anyone's mind about the first? Yammer's productivity gains from Scala were apparently not greater than the losses due to poor tooling and the impedance mismatch between Java/JVM and Scala. Therefore,
26.
by socratic 15y ago
Do people think the hiring and talent argument holds water? The more I hear this argument (e.g., from the "Python Paradox"), the less I buy it. Is the theory that true "hackers" care more about the programming language syntax and semantics
27.
by socratic 15y ago
My question is: what has led current hiring practices, and specifically interviews, to be the way they are? I've been doing a job search recently, and to me at least, the process seems almost as arbitrary as management consulting interview
28.
by socratic 15y ago
Could someone experienced breakdown what a transaction like this looks like for everyone involved? I'm super curious. I've never been acquired, so I really have no insight into the process other than what I've read. Here's the facts as I
29.
by socratic 15y ago
This seems like an odd analysis if you mean that MongoDB is hitting the trough of disillusionment. MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase, and Redis all came out at roughly the same time (2008, 2009) according to Wikipedia and their project pages. Is
30.
by socratic 15y ago
This may be what you mean, but a common approach seems to be to create extra tables to create sort-of-implicit-schema-less-indexes, e.g.,: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496946 A PostgreSQL-specific alternative might be to write trig

More ›