Ajay Kapal › Comments

"Interested in having a large impact at a young startup? Bump (YC S09, Sequoia) is hiring in Mountain View, CA. We're having a blast building our service out. There's a lot of interesting work on both the mobile client and server side. We need help with the following areas: linux/python/scaling/operations/architecture backend See http://bumptechnologies.com/jobs... for more details. Check out my profile to contact me directly." - Ajay Kapal

"Judging by your post, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you don't have children....Your anecdotal observations about parents did little to advance your point. Either way, I think the entire debate belongs in the 'bike shed' category." - Ajay Kapal

"I think he may have been thinking of the ZX-80, precursor to the spectrum. I recall reading a review of it many years ago - it came in kit form, and was a really primitive machine." - Ajay Kapal

"The C64 also improved the fitness of its owners - you could play outside with your friends while a game loaded :)" - Ajay Kapal

"But then people would upvote comments (or worse, decrease s/n by responding) just to find out who authored them." - Ajay Kapal

"I have a counter example. I've known one guy who aced his EE degree, receiving the highest marks in his graduating class. He also scored the second highest in his graduating class for his economics degree. He earned both degrees simultaneously. I knew him really well, and he usually copied assignments and spent no more than a day studying for exams. I think he was really good at getting the most from the lectures." - Ajay Kapal

"Isn't this 'definitive experiment' just showing that code which doesn't take advantage of locality of reference is bound to be really slow if it is larger than the cache size? I mean, he's just executing trivial code from random locations in memory - not a typical access pattern at all. Because of this, the experiment exaggerates the effect of code size on performance. For example, if you had a 1 million line program that didn't loop, it's performance would not degrade nearly as much as his results imply." - Ajay Kapal

"The guy wrote much of the os for the amiga, and created rebol. Those are pretty impressive accomplishments." - Ajay Kapal

"I don't know about 'hacking nirvana', but I found the Arc tutorial coupled with help from an appropriate newsgroup to grok macros (#arc? I don't remember now) was enough to write a ray tracer (LightMakesRight in the anarki distribution). Arc was my first exposure to a lisp dialect." - Ajay Kapal

"This was a really good interview. Anyone who is interested in learning about their market before building their product should invest the time to listen to it." - Ajay Kapal

"My 5 year old daughter wakes up instantly at about 6:15AM. And her first achievement every morning is to get her dad out of bed with a smile. :)" - Ajay Kapal

"I love it - how appropriate to use the PCjr (with it's awful chicklet keyboard) as a terminal for a mode of communication limited to 140 characters :)" - Ajay Kapal

"This makes the assumption that 'senior' members' voting habits haven't degraded over time. Say a bad post hits the front page - would this subtly influence future votes (regardless of how old someone's account is), resulting in more bad posts making the front page? On a semi-related note, it would be neat to keep a history of the front page at regularly sampled intervals (say every year, starting at year 1) and see how the two measurements diverge over time." - Ajay Kapal

"I probably should have been more clear - are there areas in the bay area with good schools, and homes that require significantly less earnings than 175k per year (say, 125k?) And I'd like to not spend 2 hrs commuting, because spending time with my children would be nice. In my experience, you have to pay a lot more here to get the same quality of life that you could find elsewhere. I live in the Bay area, and am raising a family here. It is expensive - 175K/yr would probably buy you the same standard of living as 80k/yr would in Ottawa, Canada, where I grew up." - Ajay Kapal

"You seem pretty sure of yourself, and some differing data points would be nice to hear. Are you raising a family in the Bay Area?" - Ajay Kapal

"As soon as I saw the title of the post, I was pretty sure what you'd be writing about. I thought the similar things when reading the discussion. One thought that went through my mind was: this kind of negativity doesn't really reflect well on the community." - Ajay Kapal

"Care to point out a few examples - just genuinely curious. In 02 things seemed pretty dry - mostly finance or glorified IT gigs." - Ajay Kapal

"For a cool example of CRT simulation, check out Xscreensaver's Apple II mode, written by tlb." - Ajay Kapal

"Please do!" - Ajay Kapal

"An experienced programmer can learn a lot about a new language in a relatively short period of time. A lot of times, the language isn't the issue, understanding the system is the issue. So I don't think it's the first thing I would think of when deciding to hire someone. If an engineer has worked on cool things, and done cool things, I wouldn't care if they didn't know X." - Ajay Kapal

"I used to live in Markham too - Pacific Mall rocks. Is the hacker job market better than it was in 02?" - Ajay Kapal

"From the interview with Tom Love, co-designer of Objective-C: "Does productivity depend more on the quality of the programmer or the characteristics of the programming language? Tom: The effect of individual differences will far outweigh any effect of the programming language. Studies from the 1970s show for programmers with the same educational background and same number of years' experience, the number was 26:1 individual differences. I don't think anybody claims that their programming language is 26 times better than somebody else's." I wonder what others think of this, especially in light of Lisp vs. blub debates?" - Ajay Kapal

"Although I haven't read any of the 56 responses here, I'm probably safe in assuming: 1) No new insight into this earth-shattering issue will arise, even from the mighty minds on HN.2) Even if 1) were wrong, it wouldn't change anyone's mind anyways." - Ajay Kapal

"What matters in life is different for everyone. For example, some might believe what really matters is what you've done to make the world a better place. On another note, academic achievement != academic credentials, or IQ. Academic achievement == learning, ability, effort. Schools aren't a perfect vehicle for this, but I'd much rather improve what we have than throw it all out to focus our students on how to make money. Thought experiment: Would it be more or less difficult for a student to become wealthy if everyone was taught how? How does this compare to mathematics?" - Ajay Kapal

"No way. 10 people creating a 100M business isn't at risk of disappearing. 10 people creating a 1M business might be. The issue is profits, not headcount." - Ajay Kapal

""Without a head count growth though, you're just supporting a lifestyle. " I don't understand how you can come to that conclusion. Business success is defined by profits, not ever-increasing headcount." - Ajay Kapal

"Anyone who has ever hacked 68000 ASM or h/w should check out this cool newsletter from the early/mid 80s." - Ajay Kapal

"Damn you for harshing on my flash card app for small business owners." - Ajay Kapal

"Clever in more ways than one. It might also be a good way to understand YC if you're trying to emulate its success." - Ajay Kapal

"Targeting a group like this makes it more believable. I mean, if Amazon was banning books about 'successful entrepreneurs', most people would have thought it was a bug in the site, not malicious intent." - Ajay Kapal