the first question seems a tad ambiguous to me. Is a contiguous rectangular block a rectangle s.t. all restaurants == P, or is it rectangle in which every P has at least one immediate neighbor == P?
To Long, Didn't Read: I'm down with what you're saying, but I didn't ask that question. Where's the hot links?
Yes yes, I've asked ever so foolish a question and missed the fundamental problem, really failed to develop an overall understanding of the root causes of my interests and their dynamic nature, and lack a general theory of communication.
That, or, I had hoped that the widely read and interesting people who take the time to read arbitrary questions from strangers and give coherent, considered replies might direct me towards exactly the thing that I described: an internet content aggregator that is, in aggregate, more focussed on the technical and aesthetic issues, and less concerned with embedding those issues within a specific economic framework? A specific one that I can point ol' Chrome at?
More science, less startup. That's all I'm askin'. I do not care what Steve Jobs said to a guy who's iPhone was too beepy. I do care that a professor at MIT has claimed he's got a widget to beat photosynthesis, and I do care that someone's unearthed a video of bookbinding as practiced in 1947.
Certainly, I appreciate that I would be doing myself a disservice if I insisted that all I read, watched, or heard were something that I had already approved. I have no expectations that a community perfectly support anything. The nice thing about HN as a community is that I can ask this question, and perhaps find a supplementary community to address the imbalance that I personally experience. Also, I'm calling startup kids dorks cause I think it's dorky.
I agree with revolvingcur-- I was pretty skeptical at first, but I certainly got the value out of this for free (and was mildly entertained, too.). More to the point, just on principle, one could take a _day_ to find out how realistic any of this is.
I wouldn't try selling fruit in NYC without a permit, though.
The API is weak, though. Everyone knows you lead with something interesting, and go to the name only after an actual conversation. UNLESS you're using friend-based authentication, where a third party initiates the handshake.
Write interesting job posts. You may be able to tap into the small but motivated and smart pool of people with non-traditional backgrounds.
Evaluating them means being clear with yourself about what makes one a suitable candidate. Extracurricular projects of any sort are going to be invaluable, but ask general problem-solving questions and feel out how they do. Do they ask questions when they're stumped, but don't get stumped until they've chewed the problem over for themselves? That's the number one sign of a good junior programmer.
There was a study in a CS dept. somewhere that had a pretty convincing test. I can't remember where I saw it or the school, so I'll just try to recount it.
The test was given to students before the first bit of instruction in computer science (and for the sake of simplicity, let's assume it controlled for those with previous experience). Basically, students were given a problem set of code snippets in a non-existent language, and were asked to write what the code evaluated to, i.e. 34 @@ 14 --> [2], followed by possible answers.
It turned out that the students who performed well in their subsequent CS courses were not those who got the right answers, or those who got the wrong answers, but those who answered consistently. The best single predictor of a good student of CS (not strictly equivalent to a programmer in a startup...) was forming a consistent model of what they were looking at, and sticking with it.
I'm good at photoshop for sure, but I wouldn't suggest it for mockups, either. It's not what the tool is designed for, and it's not what the majority of the userbase is doing with it.
That said, if you want to edit photos, or do pixel-based image manipulation of any sort, it's superb piece of software.