I guess it kind of depends on what you mean by this. I'd guess there are some people that bring greater than a million dollars of value to a company. But from a supply/demand/market point of view you could offer a $250,000 signing bonus and get amazing top-grade talent.

this is the key point

I'm basically thinking of guys where you compete against them starting their own business more than against them being hired by other people.
But yeah just because I think they are worth 1 million doesn't mean you have to pay it :P

Yea I think I understand what you mean clown, and yes, those people def exist.

But my point is the type of person who is going to start and run their own successful business is a lot more than a very good developer.

lol. dude, california is the land of milk and honey. you'll need to be more specific about what he likes to do.

hmm... looks like devcon5 is in santa clara, so i retract some of the above .

Probably some decent microbreweries/pubs not too far.

He's going to be staying in San Fran after conference, was just wondering if there's any must see local recommendation type things! Like amazing bars or pubs

Instagram guys are worth very little in this context - no way Facebook doesn't already have better developers in terms of ability to execute a given product vision. From a technical, engineering standpoint, the only thing these guys solved that tons of other app developers haven't is the problem of scaling for the backend, except Facebook has already solved the problem to a much greater degree. iOS/Android front-end/API is easy stuff - Facebook can even get guys who worked at Google or Apple on the Android/iOS teams for relatively little.


There are a lot of developers who would be worth 1+ million/year if you could get them to work at 100% on what you want them to do. But the better their skills are, the less likely that you will be able to get them to work on what you want them to. The result is that almost no developer is worth 1+ million in a vacuum unless you already know he's inclined to do what also helps your bottom line.

It's completely insane to see this as a talent grab - talent grab is when companies like Xamarin or some other pure developer shop get bought, because these guys are insanely great hackers who are not that great at monetizing their talent and don't care that much about money, which means if their goals and your goals align, you can underpay for great talent. Remember that Instagram's success came largely from correctly following several trends (social, mobile, photo-sharing), and executing well enough, not from any sort of great engineering prowess. And they are apparently good at getting rich. And they don't have to listen to you because they are rich and can start whatever company they want next. What's the point of paying them just to get them to the bargaining table (which is what the talent grab is all about), when they have all the chips?

The other thing about Instagram is that there's a reasonable chance (no idea - let's say 30%) that their success was mostly caused by luck or very special circumstances and its unlikely that they can continue that success in a new endeavour.

This is true, though even if luck fueled their success the first time around, the experience should be helpful in the next endeavor. But consistently successful people are successful because they care about their work - if they are easily moved off to some other project (without Facebook forcefully taking control away from them, in which case Facebook can't expect good faith from them anyway), that's almost a sign that they didn't care and success was more accidental than by design.

Just posted a question on Programmers stack exchange, though I would post it here as well

http://programmers.stackexchange.com...ication-system

You guys have any thoughts on Windows 7 + ClearType?

I just got upgraded from a Windows XP machine (RIP) to a new Windows 7 computer at work. Got my IDE (Visual Studio) set up and all of a sudden my EYES ARE BLEEDING looking at the font - couldn't figure out why, I'd exported my settings on the old machine and imported them on the new one, figured they should look the same. Eventually figured out that ClearType was turning my crisp, clear Courier New into this muddled, anti-aliased mess of pixels that was hard as **** to look at. But if you turn off ClearType on your whole computer, every other application looks like total ass.

Finally found this plugin that lets you disable ClearType in VS only while keeping it on for the rest of your computer. Still pissed at Microsoft for taking something that worked perfectly in XP and making this super ******o issue out of it - like, text still looked fine on older operating systems, how come it looks ****ing terrible in Windows 7 if you disable CT?

What are all the places where ClearType can be disabled?

In the registry on XP,

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]

the following two default values are
FontSmoothing = 2
FontSmoothingType = 1


If you have these values already it could be a font problem.

On first pass I can't think of anything better than using a cookie. It'll work for their session which seems like the most important thing. IP Address could work but seems messier with shared internet and such.

cookie is how i'd do it

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u3...p?lang=clojure



Not sure if the quality of the code is similar.

If you have an android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...p1cmVfcmVwbCJd

And gaming_mouse, you asked me earlier if I was sharing the real data from my company's website: yes.

Please add it in your notes that I am not one to bend reality to meet my own preconceptions.

I saw someones code and I would like your opinions on it. As of now I have seen two "styles" one is where your program runs in int main() {...program.. return0;} but this new (to me) looks like this: int main() {class classobject; return;} and the entire program is run by making an object, and all the code for the program is handled inside that one object.

are both okay? is one "better"? are there more ways than this that are "normal" or "accepted" (sorry for the scare quotes). Thanks!

need more context but my answer is probably neither:

Very interesting, thx.

@ main loop vs Xyz.new
This is what my current code looks like
So basically tyler_cracker's version

Oh and I bought the 30% off RubyMine...word of warning the prices they show are without VAT. The 47 Euro turned into 55 or somthing. Looks pretty sweet so far and def worth it imo

Any advice on laptops? I'll do some coding on it, standard browse web/read mail stuff and I'll use it for presentations (and work on them as well I guess). So basically an office laptop of sorts.
Will put Ubuntu (possibly some other distribution or a BSD but no Windows etc) on it.

I think I'll go with something 15" and a good resolution. Was thinking of simply getting a Dell with an HD display, i5 and standard-ish other stuff. Don't want to spend super duper much (for the spoiled US folks an i5 Dell with HD display runs about 899 Euro here).

Anyone with experience regarding 9 cell vs 6 cell? All I know is 9 cell sticks out which kind of offends my sense of style.

@Clown one of my friends bought a Vaio recently which was really nice imo, might be worth checking those out.

Also idk about USA (are you USA?) but we just bought one from http://www.asuslaptop.co.uk/ and it was a bargain, £700 for 200gb SSD, 6gb ram, 2.4ghz i7. Might want to check out asus anyway

clown just make sure you get a SSD. no other single upgrade improves user experience as much. it's easily worth whatever the difference in price is.

Yeah figured re:SSD...I was a very early adopter for SSDs for my desktop and I hate working on non SSD machines haha.

I have no clue about Linux and SSDs though because this is my poker=Windows machine (same for laptop hardware) with Linux running in VMs

And no, not US I'm in Germany

My only advice is do not ignore Cas Latency on your Memory. I would much rather have fast 2g of ram than med-slow 8g. Also, anything over 4 is waste IMHO.

Also, I have a little problem. I have a baseclass pointer and many different derived classes. But it looks like my p_BaseClass can only access datamembers (C++ fwiw) that were declared in my baseclass. Any way around this? Is there a way to do something like "if this pointer in the vector is to derived class A, A->uniqueint = 10 (because derived class B does not have a datamember named uniqueint)

edit: It makes me feel a little sick to declare n# bools in CBase when I have 5 CDerived and only one of them use these n# bools.