retyred · HackerTrans

retyred

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vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

i don't buy their security claims (weak as they are), and i don't think anyone else should either. the complexity involved in their toolchain implies a very long beta period to reveal exploits. even the existing web model is rife with security issues...and thats just for standard markup and scripting (see the recent zero-day IE exploit). downloading binaries from the web and running them directly on your computer without having public access to the source code is just not smart.

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

this is great. its nice to see google create and supporting a real market for these so-called alternative skillsets. i say "alternative" because the market for paid code is increasingly a monoculture of blub.

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

do people still dig on this infantilizing thing? i'd have more respect for the startups if they told their VC "fuck you, i'm old enough to vote, procreate, and carry a loaded gun. i know when to work and when to not work. just because you gave me some money, you didn't buy the right to make me do stupid pet tricks for your little video"

i know it all seems innocuous, but i see this all the time...people with money finding ostensibly humorous ways to strip the dignity off of people they are paying. its a power thing and its not amusing.

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

Any industry where the capital costs are low

no, that thins margins even more and drives to even faster consolidation. i can make PCs in my garage, yet there are only three real players in this market - dell, hp, apple. the lower the barrier to entry, inevitably you will erode margins to the point that only a large player can stay solvent.

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

oh come on, in this economy, if anyone had a "make $$$ NOW" button under their desk, it would have been pushed long ago. their secret plan was to ride a bubble in the markets, but thats over. i feel bad for the rank and file, if zuck had done an ipo in mid-2007, the rank and file could have made some serious cash.

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

interviewing at facebook? my guess is that there will be plenty of openings soon enough, even in this downmarket. the fb crowd have been busting their asses old-skule/90s style...and for what? zuck put the ix-nay on their get-rich quick scheme of selling their options, and now a new valuation discussed for the company is just over $1 billion dollars (down from $15 billion). yawn! any notion that the FACE stock bubble would resemble YHOO 1999 or GOOG 2007 are just hopeless dreams at this point. by time markets recover in 2012, fb itself may be passe. i wouldn't be shocked to see more early burnouts throwing in the towel there.

yeah yeah, there's more to work than money. but that logic will only work for a few months. after a couple of years of 2am nights, you're going to want to get paid.

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

i recommend people always use -nw, it will ensure that on the client or remote, you always use emacs the same way. now kill all the menubars and other stuff too...if you are going to use emacs, use the keyboard and the help system. that is the emacs-way

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

this entire "lots of small firms are the future" meme is probably just wrong. paul graham knows a lot about websites but very little about the rest of the economy. show me the ten person company that can produce the equipment to generate and transmit electricity. or food production. where are all the ma and pa grocery stores? and banking...we have fewer banks now than ever and the number is still dropping. and PCs...making a PC is easy....so what happened to the 10,000 strip-mall PC makers?

show me real examples outside of the web industry that this theory is even remotely correct

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

sadly i think college credentials in the US have lost their luster because its always a let-down. without a doubt there is only one school that i have never met a single retard from: caltech. cmu is a close second. every other school has let me down by graduating some goof who i have interviewed or worked with. never again will i get uptight or impressed by stanford, mit or the ivies.

my attitude is that i do not care where you went to school. in an interview, if you ace the questions, why do i care if you went to ball state? so what, maybe that is all you could afford. on the other hand, if you can't answer my questions, why do i care if you went to stanford?

furthermore its likely that most people here do not know what the best colleges in korea, japan, china and india really are. so best to just skip the education section of the resume entirely

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

his comments on C are completely unfounded. C's type coercion means you can ram all sorts of things into places they aren't supposed to go. typecasting says to me that there is nothing orthodox about C at all. if anything it is modern protestantism, a faith that lets you ram in whatever you want, but one wrong move and you go to hell (segfault)

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

running ads on torrent tracker search sites...that is probably the only viable business behind this technology. not much there to sell a VC, but it is money in the bank.

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

oh jesus between allthingsD, valleywag, blodget and blogmaverick, they've saved yahoo twenty times in the last month in various blog posts. give it up folks, google won. but if its still an obsession, round up some of the thousands of former y's around the bay area and just build the company you keep blogging about building.

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

yup, and also for companies whose stock prices are depressed (all of them), this is one of the only meaningful things they can do for investors in a recession. and frankly they can rehire people later for lower wages...i see a huge wave of salary resets going through the valley. developer wages were out of control, at one point last year i wouldn't even look at anything under $150k. now i have a lot of experience, but even i found these salaries absurd for developers. thats going to change.

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

absolutely. i was a programmer at yahoo for almost thirteen years and was laid off. i'm not worried about finding work again, but since i have a nestegg i think i will sit things out for a year or so since job reqs will likely be featuring lower salaries. this makes sense, if i was a hiring employer in a valley of perpetually overextended, consumption obsessed workers, i wouldn't offer top dollar either. people will be taking what they can get to pay their bills.

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

you can't put fb and google in the same category. fb is still surviving on investment capital and frankly could end up in a serious cashcrunch. google has a blank check for hardware. both companies have reason to worry about hardware expenditures, but facebook's is more imminent

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

used to work with paul saab (ps) at yahoo. super smart as this post shows. could never get them to use freebsd paul? :)