Well for one thing, desktop sales were down in 2015 and I think laptop sales were up for 2015 but are expected to decline 2017. Microsoft blew it more or less in mobile computing so they have to change. They had a huge layoff in 2014 as they layed off a lot of SDETs because they adopted a TDD more or less for a lot of their development teams.

VC funding ftw. You live in NYC area right? Might Silicon Valley be in your future?

I'd give this a try, https://www.npmjs.com/package/socket.io-stream

Theres a good chance its blowing up because you're on windows btw. My understanding is core node.js support for windows is solid but 3rd party libs usually couldn't care less about windows support.

I was going to say no because I know it pretty well but then I realized I literally read a book on it. Using it to build bar graphs is like learning react/redux to make a slider widget.

Mother****ers at the coffee shop think they're so hip with their macbooks :/

I'm currently working on a socketio node project that I'm doing most of my dev on windows and no real problems at all.. after I got the thing installed i.e. had to install visual studio and python 2..

Of course sending about 1kb in my sockets not 30 mbs.

i should have been clearer. it doesn't have to be a static file. was just saying it should be returned over ordinary http. from the client's perspective, it's the same whether you serve a static file or pull from postgres.

That just means you aren't trying hard enough.

Right, yeah. I was thinking that longer term there would be constant bidirectional communication between client and server, with client being like "yo I need this data" and server sending it down, but I guess I don't really need sockets to do that, and I can just send clients to some URL containing the data and the server can parse it and respond with what the client wants?

The one wrinkle with HTTP (potentially, I'm imagine there's probably a simple solution) is that the communication might be somewhat asynchronous - i.e. client saying "hey, I'm looking at this area at this zoom level" and the server maybe responding with more data, or maybe being like "nah, the data you have right now is fine, I'm just gonna ignore you". Like, rather than a constant request-respond, more like the client is just providing updates to the server and keeps displaying whatever the last thing the server sent was, and occasionally the server will give it something new. Sockets feel like they make slightly more sense for that because the server can associate a client socket with state information about that client (i.e. what data they currently have), but there may be a way I can wrap HTTP requests (or something that already exists that does so) to emulate that behavior.

The benefit of HTTP is that the server is never going to send something to the client out of the blue, it will always be in response to client requests.

I wish I had sound advice for interviewing, but I think you will do fine. You seem like a super intelligent guy and a decent person. I think that most ads I've seen are for senior-level programmers, so you should definitely get some interest.

I will say that I think doing career transitions are much more difficult today. A job opening will get something like 100 applications, so getting to the top 5 is pretty difficult, though far from impossible.

Can't say I never thought about it but I don't think it's quite compelling enough given 1) high cost of living, 2) lack of familiarity with area, 3) wife and little kids and 4) NYC being the financial center of the world and not a bad tech city either.

I think Boston and Seattle are slightly more compelling but any move is a really long shot for us.

I have to say, Austin has a lot more startups and VC / incubators than I would have ever guessed.

It was kind of interesting. I attended a talk given by one of the VC people, and he was comparing how Austin and SF are different. Basically, he said that SF lost its luster because the idea of helping each other out turned to being cut-throat, and Austin still has that open and friendly spirit about it.

I wish I had the money and knowledge to invest in start ups and local businesses. I think it would be a lot of fun to be part of it all.

Thanks Dave!

I just realized that I've done very few tech interviews - excluding those before my first job out of college, I've done about ~20 interviews (counting only distinct positions) as an experienced candidate and 10+ were for finance jobs, ~5 were hybrid positions and only about 5 cared at all about my programming skills. When I took my current job 9 years ago, I didn't even really think of it as a software engineering position and I had every intention to go back into finance after 2-5 years.

And I'm not sure exactly what I'm transitioning from or what I'm transitioning into.

What kind of thing are you thinking of doing, do you have options you are considering?

hi friends!
quick question,

suppose I have a function which approximates PI with input n, and as n increases the approximation becomes more accurate,
if i want to find n minimum such that error =abs( f(N)- PI) < error_required(say 10^-6 or something)
my solution is that i dynamically increase chunk size, say if f(1) fails i try f(2) then f(4), f(8) etc etc, and then do a binary search to find the minimum n, is there a better way to do this?

seems like a good approach for the general case. if you knew some properties about the error graph of f(N) beforehand, you could do better, ofc, but i'm assuming that's not case. eg, if you knew the error was a linear function of N (or deduced that from a small sample), then you could basically jump right to the correct guess (or close enough region around it).

sooooo....thoughts on LinkedIn? (perhaps more importantly the market in general)

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ALNKD

I don't know if this is the right thread, but as someone who has paid LinkedIn from $30-$500/monthly since basically the system came out, it has always been a product that is "almost good" and has failed to ever deliver.

Their mobile experience was an absolute disaster until ~6 months ago, and it still is relatively bad. The content is 90%+ spam, comments are worse than youtube, and to find anyone on LinkedIn you have to search through Google.

Add all of that to guidance that revenue will be down in Q1 and its hard to be anything but negative on it, imo.

I get an email from a linked in group on my device - click to read the content - and it wants me to log in. Ugh. Just let me read the damn article.

On the more quantitative side of finance, there's quite a spectrum of positions between programming and non-programming and I'd interested in seeing what I'd qualify for and how strong the job market is. My entire experience in finance is from before the crisis and in an area that was heavily affected so I have no idea if there's much of a market. On the other hand, tech hiring within finance has accelerated due to increased automation and reliance on quantitative analysis and I think my profile may stand out more because finance doesn't attract top technical talent the way they used to. I'm really curious as to what's out there.

I could also go away from finance and get a more standard tech job at a big tech firm like Google, Facebook, Microsoft or a smaller software company with a similar recruiting philosophy. I'm not sure exactly how my profile would be perceived - I've heard stories about technical hiring managers not wanting people who are product/business-oriented for a lot of understandable reasons. I think the tier I'm likely to be placed into probably won't match comp-wise what I could get on the finance side because I don't have that much experience that they'd find attractive. But I could very well be underestimating their willingness to spend whatever it takes to get the people they want or overestimating my market value in finance.

The goal, beyond the immediate satisfaction of working on something new and interesting, is to give myself more options in terms of starting my own business - gain more insight, expand my network both in terms of rich investor types and talented technical types and see the world from a different perspective. But if I find myself in a great, extremely rewarding situation, maybe I wouldn't think about starting my own business at all. Likewise, if I figure out some great plan for a new business, I may very well pursue that instead of a new job. I'm definitely trying to keep an open mind. One thing that is a bit challenging for someone who has been on multiple specialized tracks is that LinkedIn kind of forces you to define yourself in one way - LinkedIn was not a big thing last time I looked for a job so it was easy to create multiple resumes that present very differently depending on the audience.

I haven't used VS in forever, trying to include a header file in my main cpp file and I keep getting "unable to open" error message when I try to include it. is this a file path issue? I haven't made a VS project in a year, but I feel like I'm doing nothing unusual here

Yeah I think so. Go to the Solution Explorer, right click on the project, expand configuration properties, you will see an entry for directories on the left, add the folder to your include path.

candybar,

Are you not considering small businesses/start-ups?

thx a lot that makes sense, i'll plot error against N, and have another think

Not ruling it out but I think the jobs that meet my various needs will be disproportionately concentrated at big software companies (again including unicorn types) and within finance. I could very well be wrong so I'll be approaching everything with an open mind.

Could you pm me too please