skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Career Advice – How to Go from Presales to Exec/Founder
Hi All

Hope to gain some perspective from the community. I'm currently in Solution Engineering (SE/Presales) after having been in tech consulting for a while. It's a great job with a major player in the B2B SaaS space.

But now I'm not sure if this is the right career in the long term. As an SE you don't have the same accountability at the Sales people for delivering the sales quota and inevitably that limits where you can go at the top i.e. working towards becoming an executive at a tech or traditional company as the CIO or similar.

I'm good at presenting, communication and managing stakeholders to deliver outcomes successfully but I want to build the right skill set to advance my career upwards and/or in the right direction to start my own company.

What next step do you see that would help me in or put me in the right spot to progress my career?

I'm thinking about a few things that will help me become ready for an exec position or a non-technical startup founder.

- Moving to Product Marketing (learning to tell stories and go to market with a product)
- Moving to Sales (owning the sales cycle but being subjected to "the number")
- Moving to join an early stage company as the first presales (SE) hire and hope to build a varied skill set.
- Stick it out in SE and aim to move to manage an SE team and go from there...
- Other career paths...

Any experience from anyone who moved in any of those roles who can talk about career paths and perspectives?
I have worked a lot in JavaScript before and I am pretty up to date with it. Recently I had to pick up PHP for work. I am tempted to say that PHP has become better than JavaScript. I was shock at the improvements.
Yes. This is what we want. Touch controls that involve the sensation of touch! :)
Personally I developed a dislike for it because of Eclipse, Android Studio, Swing and JavaDoc.
If devices have other radios such as WiFi and GSM these can function as a backup plan (I don't think BT would suffice, unless there would be P2P between Bluetooth devices with devices who can provide coordinates such as WiFi and GSM).

For example, the first iPhone used Apple WiFi positioning; it didn't have GPS. I still remember I had a an iPod Touch with a 3rd party GPS which worked with the predecessor of Cydia.

Check the sources UnifiedNlp [1] can use. Quoting:

> AppleWifiNlpBackend - Uses Apple's service to resolve Wi-Fi locations. It has excellent coverage but the database is proprietary.

> OpenWlanMapNlpBackend - Uses OpenWlanMap.org to resolve user location but the NLP backend did not reach release-quality, yet. Users interested in a freely licensed and downloadable database for offline use should stick with openBmap for now - Last updated in 2015

> OpenBmapNlpBackend - Uses openBmap to resolve user location. Community-created, freely licensed database that can optionally be downloaded for offline operation. The coverage varies from country to country (it's best in central Europe).

> MozillaNlpBackend - Uses the Mozilla Location Service to resolve user location. The coverage is OK. Only the cell tower database is free.

> LocalWifiNlpBackend - Local location provider for Wi-Fi APs using on-phone generated database.

> LocalGSMLocationProvider - Local opencellid based location provider backend. Has been surpassed by LocalGSMBackend which also has an OpenCellID option - Last update in 2014

> LocalGSMBackend - Local location provider for GSM cells. It works offline by downloading freely licensed database files from Mozilla, OpenCellID, or lacells.db.

[1] https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_UnifiedNlp
Yup. Just means the normal distribution applies to software engineers too, which makes perfect sense. A handful will be so god awful you'll wonder how it is they even have a 10 year career in the first place. A handful will be in the first couple of years in their career and you'd think they have been doing it for 10 years. Most are average.

But here's the kicker... in software engineering average means bad. Because average code is not good code, because only amazing code is good code. So all these questions and tests trying to figure out who's a good engineer are kind of rubbish. Mostly they will be average engineers. But companies seem to think "we only hire the best" all the meanwhile the trash-fire slowly burns.
This is the problem with programmers: everyone gets obsessive about finding perfect unicorn universal solutions, and gives up on obvious stuff that works 95% of the time. Get out of your own way!

First, most programmers have at least some code they can show you. Stop fretting about the 5% who don’t. If you give up here simply because you have a theory about programmers “devoting their life to coding”, you lose.

Second, you call their references. Yes, really. I know it’s not “objective”. Do it anyway. You will learn a lot. Really.

Third, look around for other people they’ve worked with, who weren’t listed as references. Call some of them. See if you get different opinions.

If your candidate truly, honestly has no code available, no enthusiastic references, and you can’t find anyone who worked with them who will vouch for their skill, then do you really want to hire them?

Finally, yes: do a trivial fizzbuzz coding test to filter out the total fakes.

Listening to coders complain, you’d think that nobody else in the world hired anyone, ever. Let go of your need to make hiring a failure-proof system, and you’ll discover a bigger world.
"Collins Aerospace is coordinating with safety regulators and its equipment clients after a GPS connection outage on its parts resulted in the cancellation of hundreds of flights, especially flights on aircraft operated by US regional carriers." [June 10 2019] https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/collins-gps-outag...
Oops, you meant -2^15 I guess.
It's the right way to do it if you're more interested in making money than helping people.

Drugs aren't criminalised to help addicts. Drugs are criminalised to maximise profits. The US and British establishments have centuries-old links to the drug trade, the jail trade, and the "legal" opiate trade, and decriminalisation would create significant financial inconvenience.

This doubtless sounds wildly implausible to anyone unfamiliar with the evidence. But there's ample historical record of involvement, either direct or strongly implied - from the days of the Opium Wars, to the curious history of cocaine smuggling during Iran-Contra, to the fact that opium production increased threefold after the US invasion of Afghanistan.
All good and impartial points. Another is that dark background and light text leads to distracting retinal afterimages. But it can be mitigated by understating the contrast: making the black dark gray and the colors muted
Before a case like this would ever go through and have a positive effect, thausands of vision impaired people worldwide have already lost their job or could not begin a new one because of lack of accessibility of these platforms. The damage has already been done / is ongoing. And disable people already have a hard time finding a job. So this damaging to those that already have a hard time to cope in our society. Slack and Discord are actively toxic. And nobody cares / waits for a court ruling. That is why I said I dont see much light here. The tech industry is in the process of selecting out those that have visual disabilities. Not just because of Slack and Discord. The general trend of moving everything ith browser is death by thausand cuts for people with visual disabilities. It doesnt matter if I am forced to use Slack or SharePoint, or your favourite commercial issue tracker. Almost all modern pwb based products reduce my productivity to almost zero.
I agree. While I'm in theory in favour of alternatives to CSS, my experience with css-in-jss using the React Material-UI framework has been pretty painful.

Definitely worse than my usual approach of writing some LessCSS and trying to be quite specific.

CSS is decent enough for overall theming, but quite bad for actually laying things out.

I think CSS's cascading and inheritance are bad design choices for most of the things that people actually use CSS for.

The alternatives need to do better. Or, I need to find out which alternatives are already better.
It’s a gradient.
Except that the memory overhead for each thread is MUCH higher: the default would be 1Mb for most JVM implementation.

Yes, you can change the thread stack size, but that's a global fixed size for all threads, so you can't make it to small, or you'll risk stack overflows.

Meanwhile, Go is using dynamically growing stacks, starting at 2k.
‘AWS for blockchain’:ArcBlock aims to build,manage and deploy decentralized apps
Someone who has talent in a way that the incumbent is unfamiliar with is far more likely to be able to demonstrate that talent in a coding test (where the interviewer can't deny that their code works, even if they don't understand it) than in a conversational interview (where the interviewer can easily dismiss anything they don't understand as bullshit).
Is Microsoft Teams Coming of Age?
touch screens requires diverting your eyes from the road than reaching over to a dial or button. it's extremely dangerous
Fourth decryption tool neutralises latest version of GandCrab ransomware
I think it depends a bit what you want. The skills you need for building a company from scratch is very different from the skills you need from scaling a big organisations. If you want to be a founder I recommend you either just fund a company or you join a very early stage one, say as the first sales hire.
I agree with the gist of your comment, but the revival of synths with lots of single purpose knobs and sliders started much earlier than the 2010s. Clavia Nordlead and Roland jp 8000 are two examples of mid-'90 synths. I would say I that the demand started with the birth of house and other electronic dance music.
Yes. It has an acronym - ARBD (alcohol related brain damage).

It includes things like Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (also called Korsakoff's Phychosis), and alcohol-related dementia.

It's likely that younger people are more susceptible to alcohol related harm.

People who drink heavily are at higher risk.

This would be people who drink more than about 50 units a week for men, or 35 units per week for women. (Current safe drinking guidance is to drink no more than 14 units a week, spread out, with some days drink free).

There are roughly 40 units in a litre bottle of spirits.

18 UK pints of 5% ABV beer would be 50 units. Over a week that might be 2 pints a day and a big session on friday and saturday.

It's hard to know how many people drink this heavily because the stats are all self reported, people don't know what a unit is nor how strong the alcohol they drink is, and alcohol affects memory so people can't remember what they've drunk or when. But we think about 4% of men and 3% of women drink this much. https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/research/data/consumption-uk/
Code Is Law and the EU Copyright Directive
People who can't get a job interview far more often than people who have a job. Rejecting a large proportion of candidates at the first step is not necessarily a red flag.
Doesn't that argument work for the plugin too. I mean most people using uBlock Origin probably started with Adblock (and maybe moved to ABP), or uBlock.

You can achieve similar results with pihole, or hosts file managers.

Back in the day I used a local proxy tool, Proximator or something.

AFAIK uBo isn't doing anything particular unique technologically (which doesn't mean I'm not grateful, nor that anyone could make it).
You can always start with linters and make them part of your CI acceptance. You can go quite far with this eg in C# enforce code contracts to ensure no rouge nulls. Or keep it light and just check for basic things.

This doesn’t automate the review but saves discussing minor things in the reviews.
Anyone have familiarity with anything like these that will work on a Mac in single user mode? In the little experimenting I’ve done, I’ve found nothing that’ll work. Single user mode is pretty picky about what keyboard it’ll accept, even those made by Apple itself depending on the vintage of the computer and the keyboard it’s mated to.
Leftpad was an example where we should reinvent the wheel.

Introducing a dependency on an NPM module for so little returned value is a lot different from a physicist or mathematician relying on a peer reviewed result from another academic.
Dominik Honnef's staticcheck tool for the Go programming language will probably warn about these as well[1].

[1]: https://github.com/dominikh/go-tools/issues/516.
I've registered entire defunct image hosts (back from the 2000s) - with thousands of existing old image links. Need to do something interesting with those when I get the time.
That would be a spectacular finding, implying everybody could become a good coder with a little bit of practice.

I'm not saying it isn't so, but I think the word is still out in that.

In any case, the solution seems simple: just practice some leetcode before the interview.
Au contraire, fathers don't have an option of relinquishing responsibility of having a child (at any time after conception). They have to pay child support, or face jail time! Not only do women have access to abortion, but they can also (AFAIK in many states/countries) give up the child for adoption (in which case they also don't need to pay child support, as the taxpayers/adoptive parents cover the child's costs).

I support abortion, but I also support "financial abortion" for unwilling fathers (same as currently exists for sperm donnors).
That's not usually a choice. nginx is first and foremost a web service and a proxy. It is not built primarily for rewriting traffic and simple run time state changes, which is what you generally need an http router for

Normally you choose between something like Apache and nginx, where nginx is a bit easier to configure and write modules for, but the former has more functionality and third party support.

You choose between haproxy and something like Varnish, where the former is a bit more featureful on the routing part and the latter has more focus on the caching part.

It is not uncommon to use both.
Can you give a few numbers what counts as "very small" here? Most of my big java projects take less than two minutes for a full compile and incremental compile of the whole project is usually in the range of 10 secs. If you run the whole test suite it can take longer depending on the tests, but that's not what I'd count as "compile time".
I'd suggest breaking out this board to decouple it from rpi, since rpi heats up enough to make temperature readings from attached board inaccurate.
That still seems very clunky and also very inefficient compared to what I'd do in Swift:

func isSuperset<Type: Equatable>(superSet: Set<Type>, actualSet: Set<Type>) -> Bool {
return actualSet.contains(where: { !superSet.contains($0) })
}

What is all the noise about "collect"? Why allocate a while new list? What's with the "final"? And why do I have to type out obvious types in 2019?
I'd like to see a JVM with a garbage collector that isn't designed to always consume the maximum amount of memory before it starts collecting. If you configure the JVM to have at most 400MB and it's current heap size is 120MB and you allocate 0.5MB every second or simply allocate 400MB of temporary objects that could be collected right away, it will allocate more GC heap until it hits the maximum 400MB and only then it decides to start a collection cycle. This makes the JVM useless for anything that isn't a web server that uses the entire RAM anyway.

Although Shenandoah looks promising but it's pretty telling that even in 2019 the JVM only has a single good garbage collector and it's still experimental. 23 years of history my ass. Other than the awful JEE ecosystem, the JVM is probably the worst part about the Java ecosystem. You can't fix it with a language that runs on top of it. It's slow (mostly startup performance), the GC is awful and it gobbles up a huge amount of memory. Obviously my company doesn't care because 8GB of RAM for a webserver costs them almost nothing.

It wouldn't surprise me if a WebASM implementation will take over one day, because the JVM is such a failure.
But Spring gives you the best of both worlds. A lot of verbose code (as annotations and class inflation instead of explicit boilerplate) and inscrutable magic.
The philosophy of just copying data makes sense, but your justification not so much.

> Drive interfaces change over time, and I have drives where there is no way to hook them up to a newer computer

20+ year old PC drives will have IDE interfaces, which you can of course get a USB adaptor for very cheaply and I have several laying about. Really old PCs or non-PC hardware (e.g. the Amstrad CPC 6128 in the 1980s had an after market hard disk option) will need a different adaptor, but it's still just not that hard, and certainly shouldn't be categorised as "there is no way".

> For example, good luck trying to read a 5.25" floppy. You'll need to build your own hardware and write your own device driver to do it.

You can easily buy refurbished 5.25" drives, and you can convert the data signal (which for a PC was basically the same as for 3.5" drives, but with a different physical connector) to USB. They're bulky and they need a lot of power at 12 volts, which is probably why off-the-shelf 5.25" USB floppy drives aren't a thing unlike for 3.5", but it won't require that you "build your own hardware" in any real sense.

You're only going to need to go writing device drivers if you've got some crazy disk format, and it'd have to be pretty crazy because the Catweasel already covered a lot of that territory (a Catweasel was a thing for Amigans, whose disks are a crazy format, to let them use PC disk drives to read their disks years ago, the last ones have an FPGA in them so that the uploadable firmware can decide how to control the drive).
Mazda has shortcut buttons as well. See: third image in the article. Their UI is very similar to BMW.
It gets tricky as soon as you need labels and/or more complicated visual feedback attached to "dumb" buttons.

The touchscreen is "lazy" in that it can defer thinking hard about your problem space and I can see why that alone would feel scary in a car.

On the other hand, there is only so much foresight you can have when you are innovating. Developing a Tesla might simply not be feasible without the flexibility a touchscreen gives you.
I'd prefer that behavior.
What disaster would knock out only one constellation out of four (perfectly one) and also go unnoticed to users?
When cars eventually go self-driving, not having a touchscreen will be a big competitive disadvantage. Over-the-air updates of car software will be essential to adapt the driving/transportation experience, also for the existing fleet of cars, as the product matures and manufacturers can use people's experiences to make improvements. This does require part of the car's user interface to be software driven, and touchscreens are the best way of doing that. If the car is capable of safely driving without human input, most of the the safety concerns of touchscreens disappear. There's also the question of being able to configure the car to operate in fleet/rental mode, which would probably be challenging with controls that are less intuitive than a touchscreen. You're left with some UX considerations of sometimes needing longer time or needing to look at the screen for operating common functionality.

I'm not saying that tactile controls in general should be banned, and I'm probably also saying that most car manufacturers _absolutely suck_ at software and will elegantly botch any attempt at integrating a touchscreen.

Maybe Tesla has gone overboard and should add (software-controlled) physical dials for the systems that are used all the time and are never expected to change much, such as A/C, seat heaters, trunk & frunk and so on. But that's a comparatively minor UX modification.

The million dollar question is whether proper self-driving is 5 or 15 years away -- if it's the former, auto companies really don't have as much time to adapt as they think. Some customers might like a touchscreen-less Mazda if they can tack a safe self-driving system onto it, but they will have a hard time competing with companies that understand software and have good integration of intuitive touchscreen interfaces. Once (if?) proper self-driving is here, software suddenly becomes critical, and it's hard to control a complex software system through physical knobs. People will also want better entertainment systems integrated in the car at that point, and a touchscreen makes such modifications simple.
No need to compare, they're all amazing for what's mostly volunteer work.
Well after owning a Tesla Model 3 I am of the opinion, why in the hell do we need forty plus buttons in cars? Seriously! (Go count your buttons, some cars are higher than that)

First off with regards to the touch screen in the Tesla. In the vast majority of drives I never ever touch it. Not once. Why not? Well I have my temperature preference set, I usually play the music that is coming off my phone, and well, what else do I need to adjust in my car? I can do music volume, do next or previous song, and pause music, from the left steering wheel button. Wipers and headlamps are automatic. Navigation is voice controlled and works.

I posted before when people came down on touch screens but let us be honest. In most modern cars there is so much automatic that you really never use the majority of controls you are presented with. Go ahead, put a sticker on every button in your car, count them. Then for each you use take a sticker off. Have fun.

Fortunately the Tesla interface is simple to use and almost everything you need is only one level deep. Unlike my other previous cars where menu travel seemed to go on for weeks.

So yeah, badly designed or badly placed touch screens are not good in cars but so is this myriad of buttons in most cars. Each car you get into you have to do a quick take on where things might be. Plus there are so many buttons. Buttons for functions you truly may never use!

edit: grammar/typos
That's great when I'm going somewhere for work. It's not so good when I've not put the "appointment" in my calendar. If the voice interface were 100% perfect it would be OK, but it's not (especially with weird road names).

The key issue for me is, if I'm driving, I have to look at a touch-screen to hit the right button. With physical controls, I can use muscle memory and keep my eyes on the road.
Except that Java is that 20 year old thing, and it has stood the test of time, it's not the new COBOL.

I learned vi about 30 years ago, Java and SQL over 20 years ago, and they're tools I can still use every day to get stuff done.
To answer that, I'd need to know what you actually mean by summary. Most screen readers present an overview of the number of HTML elements in a page when it just loaded. Something like "5 headings and 28 paragraphs".
One thing I would really love to see is a better way how you manipulate strings. Variable interpolation would be nice and you wouldn't have to have all that ugly string concatenation all over the place.
This gave me pause for thought. It really toes the line of socially acceptable behaviour for a driver, as evidenced by how common it is to do so. How many times have you been a passenger in a car and the driver has pulled over to adjust GPS?

I don't think I have particularly dangerous friends and family, but they rarely do.
Well, the article claims that that is the definition which is false. The definition of a meter is ‘the distance traveled by light in 1/299792458 of a second’ so a kilometer is a thousand times that.

The story in the article is the original, obsolete definition.
You don’t have to disrupt an industry to succeed