Not that there's anything wrong with just reading the stories, but I'm a bit incredulous that you haven't passively picked up the thesis, from the stories about the investment changes, demo days, and all the uh... YC startups that get discussed and front-paged.
There were some years when there were a slew of "Here's what I learned from applying to YC" stories, but those have mostly faded, and so have most startup-focused stories.
Now HN is a mix of tech news and politics, and I'm not surprised that some HN readers who are not interested in startups have no clue what YC is about.
This has been a big concern of mine lately. I spend more time here than I used to, but I increasingly get less and less value out of the time I spend here. I used to come here to learn about bleeding-edge technology and startups and cool ideas and things that geniuses were working on. Now when I come here I almost always end up arguing politics, not because I want to but because those are the stories that people actively comment on and I have poor self control.
The few tech stories that do make it through are far more pop-tech article (right now NPR, BBC, New York Times, MSN, and Haaretz are all on the front page... absolutely nothing to do with hackers or gratifying intellectual curiosity) or talking about startups that are shutting down.
I'm tired of collapsing the inevitable "Macbooks are bad" thread and finding out that was literally the only conversation under the article. I think the mods do a great job of keeping the conversation civil, but a poor job of enforcing "intellectual curiosity" like the guidelines call for.
If I can offer advice, give your piece if you feel it matters and then move on. One of the nice bits of HN is you can say your opinion and move on. There are no reply notifications. I definitely ended up engaging on forums way more than I should have. I quit one and used that to push myself out of commenting. Now I spend some time commenting here but don’t let myself get pulled back in to needless arguments. There’s a bunch of topics you can skip here and I generally guess at the sentiment of the comment before jumping in. There’s a few things that just end up rehashing the same arguments. Skip them and move on.
That's mostly true. It doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere and is not very well-known, but dang maintains hnreplies.com, an email notification service for HN. Apparently only 1860 users are signed up, but it's there.
In general, I agree with your advice. Very often I get halfway through writing a comment, but delete it because I don't think it will spawn useful conversation or be appreciated, whether it's because I'm being needlessly argumentative, or the person I'm replying to is.
I think that has to do with a general souring of opinion on the tech and startup space, including by the people in it. And we're in one of those times where politics and current events are so heavily impacting everyone in every way, including tech and startups, that it's impossible to ignore or avoid talking about, especially when some of the people who have fallen out of love with tech are politicians who want to regulate it.
Can I suggest the app "materialistic"? It doesn't show votes and, unlike the website, there's no easy way to see other people's replies to your comments. Also, being on mobile makes me less inclined to write essays. Overall this cuts the engagement feedback loop, and the result is that I mostly only contribute when I feel my comment makes a meaningful contribution.
...until recently, when I discovered that the website has a way to list your comments and their replies. Since then I've been using the website more, and I don't like how it's changed my engagement patterns. More looking at and thinking about karma, more replying to someone just because they replied to me. I guess generally more "social", in the bad (for me), human-level meta communication (ego, drama, etc), instead of with the more interesting content / ideas.
I would strongly suggest looking through some of Paul Graham's essays [1]. Doesn't matter what Y Combinator is or does but the founder of Y Combinator has some interesting opinions and writes about them a lot and some of them may enrich your life.
My company was largely run on dropbox as a crucial piece of infrastructure for many years before my arrival. As of a couple months ago, it has been cut out of our production pipeline entirely, but for many years, if you saw a digital out-of-home ad in certain places, it only got there because someone had added a media file and schedule to a dropbox folder. Looking back on it, it's pretty wild how much of their business relied on dropbox working reliably. Thankfully, that's all gone now.
I worked in a research lab several years ago that used Dropbox as their version control system for all the data analysis scripts they wrote. It took a while but by the time I left I had convinced everyone to switch over to git.
I very nearly worked there in their engineering department, but once I got through the initial HR interview into the technical stuff, there were so many red flags that I got outta there as soon as I could.
A few higher level people who were all let go with me ended up going there, and having met up with them a few times, I've heard some absolute horror stories about everything ranging from dev workload, to security, to extremely unqualified devs being hired to fill seats.
I'm not surprised by this in the least, and frankly, I'm surprised it's not worse.
I had a similar experience, but I made the mistake of taking the job. I spent several months in denial about how smart people who act so... not smart. At one point, I asked the CTO for guidance on how to work with the team architect whose feelings I kept hurting. For example, I wrote a constructor for a class, and the architect asked me what "def initialize" was for, and got upset when I asked if they knew how OOP in the language worked. Another time they asked me for help on a weekend to figure a null pointer error on a machine that wasn't running the software they were trying to debug, and got upset when I pointed that out. I brought up both examples to the CTO. The CTO pointed out that the Architect had 10 more years of experience than I did, and while I might be right, I probably wasn't. Then the CTO said (direct quote) "you have delusions of grandeur about your technical abilities" to my face. I started looking for a new job immediately after that conversation. After I left, I heard the project got canceled, the architect got promoted, and they were hiring devs straight out of bootcamps because they couldn't attract anyone with experience.
I used to work closely with Quicken Loans and other FoCs and can attest that this behavior is commonplace. There is this strange culture within the Family of Companies where non-tech leaders think that tenured Quicken engineers and tech people are these sort of super-geniuses. Many years back I was a part of a company in the Quicken led start-up space. We were often "encouraged" to meet with Quicken or FatHead senior engineers for advice. One time I reluctantly agreed and met with "the best programmer in Michigan" who's first piece of advice was:
"Delete your app and start over. Ruby on Rails is trash. Real programmers use C#. With C# you can create libraries that you can reuse across all your apps."
While I don't agree with the way he spoke, was C# one of the de facto or explicit in-house languages of the company, and Ruby was not? If so, he may have been referring to the fact that the company already had many libraries in C# that you could use. Plus, if C# was one of their areas of expertise, it's typically best to use that as opposed to a new, unfamiliar language unless you're explicitly testing out a new approach.
Also, in general, for programming in the large, many experienced programmers, having worked on multiple large-scale software projects, tend to prefer statically-typed languages. We've found by experience that in such large-scale systems, major refactorings are much, much smoother and feasible in statically-typed languages (although unit and integration tests are certainly still needed). And a whole class of errors are eliminated.
I don't think RoR is trash, but if you were starting a large program that would be used across multiple departments whose in-house language was C#, it was probably the right call to suggest switching to C#.
Please note: I'm not a C# programmer, and have never done any work in C# (although I've worked many dynamically-typed and statically-typed languages, and have a clear preference for the latter for large-scale software projects). So this isn't something I have any personal investment in.
Finally, I do get it, working for these types of companies is misery for most programmers. I've worked in such companies. But in this case, the senior may have had a good point.
>While I don't agree with the way he spoke, was C# one of the de facto or explicit in-house languages of the company, and Ruby was not? If so, he may have been referring to the fact that the company already had many libraries in C# that you could use. Plus, if C# was one of their areas of expertise, it's typically best to use that as opposed to a new, unfamiliar language unless you're explicitly testing out a new approach.
[...]
>I don't think RoR is trash, but if you were starting a large program that would be used across multiple departments whose in-house language was C#, it was probably the right call to suggest switching to C#.
According to the parent comment, he was working at a startup that was in the "Quicken led start-up space". My interpretation is that Quicken was acting like an incubator, and he isn't working in quicken, and so the engineering teams are separate. Therefore I don't think organizational inertia applies here.
This is correct. Our company was under the Quicken "Family of Companies" umbrella, but we were a 5 person start-up building a web app unrelated to Quicken.
Yikes. I worked on a team whose de facto tech lead (it wasn’t explicit because we were “flat”) had no idea what SQL parameter binding was (I had to explain why interpolating strings in SQL queries is dangerous). And we apparently went to the same university and got the same degree, and he had at least ten years of “industry experience”.
I’ve also had to explain why logging is a good idea and how to use SSH. What frustrates me isn’t that people don’t know these basics (nobody is born an expert), but that people get hired to do a job for which they lack core competencies. If your job is to fix engines and you don’t know what a spark plug does, you probably shouldn’t be fixing engines. This was at least an issue for me. I know people at Quicken proper who have told me even more ridiculous stories.
It’s a shame. Detroit’s got a lot going for it, but I think most of the tech companies there have some connection to Gilbert and Quicken, and no amount of coneys will get that taste out of my mouth.
I dodged a bullet indeed. Out of the dozen other devs there, there was exactly one person I'd care to work with again. They got pushed out a month or two later, and post-shenanigans felt infinitely better.
My advice is to do what you gotta do to pay the bills, but don't delude yourself into thinking that a crazy sauce employer will change its ways because you try extra hard to change them when they resist your attempts to do so.
This is endemic to the FoC. When your entire team is recent boot camp grads, this is the end result. The engineering culture is a joke. (Source: former employee.)
I'm a current employee in the FoC (just not StockX), and with more than a decade in software development, I am easily the least experienced on our team by several years.
Piggybacking on OP's suggestion of youtube-dl, i have this alias for quickly grabbing the audio-only version of a youtube video. (I use it when I come across a song on youtube that I can't find for sale or streaming anywhere else)
alias dl-audio='youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3'
If you have ffmpeg installed, just drop the video ID after dl-audio, and you'll get an mp3 of the highest quality audio stream available for the video.
