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I continued to be impressed with Sam's clarity. Keep it up!

Sidenote: interesting to see that YC has a BBerg terminal (and careful with the RMB claim in the near-term)


Fido is a great shop and 100K is relatively cheap for that important of a lesson... and of course we shouldn't ask too many what-ifs.


GMO is the laughingstock of the HF community... trying to make a name for themselves with a permabear outlook.

Their index and commodity projections are truly hilarious and they've been claiming this sort of shit for years, generating bottom-decile returns.


2006

But seriously, why are you limiting yourself to PHP and jQuery? JQuery especially - really odd considering you could easily work with any framework if you have the JS background...


Are other frameworks really that popular? I was assuming AngularJS was still a niche (outside of HN)?


honestly I have jQuery experience but not so much Backbone.js or Angularjs experience which seems to be the norm. I have used Meteor.js but then it's not much of a demand than the other two


Well I have a lot of experience with 16 hour/day work weeks (have worked at banks most of my life). Yeah, you're right, it's not fun.

It really comes down to the time-sensitivity of your work. For someone in their 20s, I think the perfect balance is less than 80 hours/week but more than 40-50. If you're being paid two standard deviations over US median household income ($120k+), you're going to be expected to put some work-life balance on hold.

"Knowledge worker" makes you sound like you think programming is rocket surgery. VC is actually much closer to knowledge work than programming, and could more realistically have 16-hour work weeks.


Honestly for someone in their 20's 50+ hours per week is not a prerequisite for getting to $100k to $120k. Find jobs that are using technologies that are in high demand for companies that respect your work-life balance. Temporary spikes in hours comes with the territory but working 50+ hours a week isn't required. Startup work may have that kind of grind but there are plenty of companies where you can advance your career quickly without sacrificing your work/life balance.

I think the key is learning technologies that are in demand and pay well and choosing jobs where you can build experience in said technologies. Bottom line is that if you spend 60+ hours a week at a job programming in Objective-C for 3 years you're unlikely to make significantly more money than the guy who has 3 years of Obj-C and only worked 40 hours a week. The quality of the experience is what will matter more.


Programming is, or at least can be, rocket surgery. Programmers at SpaceX are building and modifying the (figurative) brains of self-stabilizing rockets...


I down voted you for the VC being closer to knowledge work than writing software. Sorry but that is just plain wrong - on both ends.

Hen is right that expecting 40 hours out of a software engineer is ridiculous.


I'm not sure that "hen" has spread quite so much yet that you can expect to use it in English conversation. Nu undrar ju folk varför du kallar OP för en höna. ;)

If anyone is curious what I'm on about, "hen" is a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish that has had a resurgence in the last few years. It's partly politically motivated and a little controversial, since we generally only use gender-specific ones. Sorry for this very off topic aside.


I don't care. Will still use it and educate. I am aware that it might mean höna for some, but I am expecting curiosity to get the better of 'em and hope they look into it.


Unfortunately, "hen" in English means a female chicken (or other bird, e.g. a peacock is male and a peahen is female), so all you achieve is giving the wrong impression that your language skills are lacking, AND you could be making a sexist remark (hen might be misconstrued as a condescending term for a woman), the complete opposite of what you intended.


I think it's a bit weird to be honest. Are other Swedes doing this, trying to shoehorn "hen" into other languages?

I've seen "they", in the singular, used as a gender-neutral English pronoun pretty extensively, perhaps that's worth looking into. Either way, kudos.


English has some invented gender-neutral pronouns as well, such as Zie, Hir, etc.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...


You guys should organize. YC Founders Union. Obviously shortened to YCFU.


Unrelated: Don't go to UChicago if you want to study CS. The department isn't built out.

Consider UPenn SEAS or Columbia Fu for a similar tier CS program.

It's really excellent for economics (which I was considering), but ended up not going to Chicago after talking to some of the comp sci majors.


It might not be what you were looking for, but to say it's not "built out" is a bit of a reach. I don't see how a department whose faculty include Alexander Razborov and Laszlo Babai can be considered lightweight. If you're interested in theory, UofC is a very good place to go. Are they upenn, columbia, cmu, etc.? No, but they're not trying to be. It's much more an extension of the Mathematics program than at many other places.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Razborov

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/László_Babai


That's not completely fair: the math department is world-class, and the computer science department is sort of an offshoot of it. It does have a very theoretical bent. That doesn't mean it's bad.


He didn't say it's bad, but rather that it's not built out. It's true that all else equal, UChicago isn't a good choice for CS.

Anyone have thoughts about UIC? djb is a professor there, and it seems like their CS department is pretty extensive.


As well all know though, UIUC is where it's at for CS.


Of course, but I would say UIC is very good as well.


nor NIU


I did an undergrad in CS (Columbia) - in retrospect I should only have minored in CS.

I'm not sure it's worth the workload!

You will have _no_ free time and get reamed in GPA

Very math-heavy and the project based classes were brutal.


I did undergrad CS @ Columbia as well. Of course you're not going to skate by as you would in insert-non-offensive-easy-major-name-here, but you learn a hell of a lot more. It's my personal belief that (especially in technical fields) you can't learn without putting a lot of hard work into something. But in doing so, you'll also keep yourself a step ahead of the curve in the job market. As per the article, plenty of people know how to code, not quite as many know CS.

Also personally I felt like this is an exceptionally competitive major (as are sciences in general) but I'm sure that's true for other schools as well. It's okay to get a B -- you're being compared against other brilliant people and plenty of people would be lucky to hire you. This is probably the one piece of knowledge I would have told myself 3 years ago when I started it.


I completely agree. It was more that I ended up going into finance, so GPA became a sticking point. It all turned out okay - I just wonder whether Columbia could make CS less brutal.


I'm sure this depends a lot on what your preferences are. I just finished my undergrad in computer engineering at Columbia. I thought the project-based classes (and the vast amounts of work they entailed) were the most valuable parts of the program. Sure, you'd probably get higher grades if you just minored, but when it comes to hiring for software engineering jobs, companies tend to care more about what you know and what you've done than what your grades are. And you're more likely to know more about CS and have done more interesting projects if you have taken difficult project-based classes like operating systems, embedded systems, and programming languages and translators.


I will never forget OS 1... I still have nightmares


I would hope you enjoyed computer science! Learn up on the arts, politics, etc in your spare time. These are the fun subjects.


I can guarantee that they will lose to Interactive Brokers on price. IB has structural cost advantages in internal matching and zero customer service (possible given the more advanced user base). It's also very very stupid for a retail investor to chose a broker based on fees.

A 10-25bp difference in execution on a $10k+ trade easily covers any commission.


Congrats Garry!


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