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1. Math - You probably should know real analysis, abstract algebra, linear algebra, and some logic.

2. Whatever else interests you


What compiler settings were you using? In my experience, C is faster than Java if you turn on full optimization settings.


Now that is just ridiculous! With O2 and O3 I get 0.03 seconds on average! I try to understand what could possibly mean all of the flags that get switched on with optimizations from this page: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html

I also wonder if Java has any kind of optimizations to experiment with.


If you don't put in ANY optimization flags, it puts in full debugging info, which slows things down a lot.

I don't know anything about Java optimization.


Java doesn't have any optimization flags and the debugging info slowdown makes sense I suppose. That is the exact difference between them, GCC with -O3 is almost 100x faster in another test I just did: 10s for Java, 0.1 for C. When you turn off the optimization flags C jumps right at the same 10s figure though.

Really cool interesting stuff!


That's what I figured - a lot of people who say "Java is as fast as C" aren't doing proper compiler optimizations on their C. I suspected that was true, but I didn't spend the time on a proper test.

-O2 or -O3 does some neat stuff like unrolling loops and inlining functions

--fast_math is another one I use


Due to accounting/tax rules, "qualified incentive" options are required to be priced at "fair value".

It's better for you to just ask for more equity.

However, realize that equity is usually worthless. If they already raised a lot of money, you're probably only going to get a tiny slice. If the equity is a factor in your decision to accept the job or not, you probably shouldn't.

Remember that the recent investors probably got a liquidation preference, which means they need to eventually sell for a LOT MORE than the price of their last round, or common shareholders may get nothing.


Law of Headlines says "no".

My experience also says no. The two issues I'm facing are:

1. Due to technology churn, after a couple years of experience, your experience loses its market value faster than you can get new experience.

2. At 40, I'm starting to feel age discrimination. When you go on an interview and everyone else is <25, you see that you "aren't a good cultural fit". Younger programmers have started talking down to me like my experience is irrelevant. Then they ask me to debug their code for them.

As a programmer, you can make good money from 25-35. After that, it's starting to look like it's over.


Technology churn. I have been sailing on the concepts of http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html for the last 10 years. It is true that not all IT employers or clients reason at that level of thinking. But then again, that is good thing (tm). It means that we do not need to waste time discussing and that we can all save time. To cut a long story short, I do not experience any technology churn at all.

age discrimination. In online recruitment, nobody asks anybody else's age. What for, anyway? Nobody ever asks me for a resume either. A github account is more than enough. I am also over 40 and I have never made more money than today. I certainly did not make more money when I was 35.

You see, I have always instinctively felt that I needed to stay away from certain corporate situations and practices. I have always found them absolutely imbecile, annoying, constraining, and ultimately useless. What you are complaining about are issues that only occur in a corporate cocktail of idiocies, of which the ones you have mentioned, are just two. If you have always evolved in that soup of stupidity, you should not be surprised that you now suddenly get hit by that kind of things. It was just an accident waiting to happen.


I see a lot of companies with websites that say they "value diversity" and yet have no one person in any team photo over the age of 40, which suggests their definition of "diversity" covers a singularly narrow range of characteristics.

This may contribute to the lack of women in software development: women tend not to be quite as stupid as men with regard to probability, and recognize that a profession where they are obsolete at 40 is not a good bet. Most of us won't make enough to retire on before 40, so only an idiot would go into the business if that really is what we face as we age.

"Software development: it's not a career, it's a lottery ticket!"


I think this will change when there are so many programmers above 40 that companies can't afford to turn them down. Due to age pyramids I can't really imagine total age discrimination to persist in the future.


It heavily depends on the company; Facebook may be all 20-somethings, but Microsoft is much more balanced. As one data point, I'm 43, joined Microsoft 2 years ago, have an offer from another big tech company.


In Canada here, you have this opposite issue I was just fired because a couple of 35+ said I was not a culture fit LOL, despite bringing a project out of development hell and giving the product a doable realistic feature.


This scares me. I'm thirty-two and therefore not very far from peaking, including salary unless you get a management function.


I'm the youngest senior where I work at 36. Our leads are approaching or past 50. This may be a localized problem.


It is localized, the work force is aging and the population is not growing at a rate to replace those aging out. For the most part I have seen the ration of young faces to old ones lessen. It seems my generation 40 is really the generation that grew up coding and therefore the age bounds are being pushed with us. I know in certain markets that is not true, but in others it is.


Ask for an exec-level title if you pick #1. In an early stage startup, it's easy to get. It makes it harder for them to hire someone over you later.


Your index wouldn't be clustered, is it? For a regular index, insert is O(log n). For a clustered index, insert is O(n).

You can also bulk insert records, rather than 1 at a time.

We have 2k operations per second on our aws rds.


Definitely agree re bulk inserting, say every 1 minute or 1 hour or whatever.

I was paying around recently with Amazon's Kinesis for this, but if you don't want the vendor lock-in you could easily roll your own system that bundles up events and stores a bunch at once.


If you do

open database connection

do one insert

close database connection

That adds up fast.

At work, I've been very disappointed in the performance of their Amazon RDS. They had unexplained master/slave replication issues.

You also can put a memcached in front of the database.


+1 for sell, before they depreciate

Use the money to rent an ordinary VPS (aws, linode, etc.)

There's no reason to own your own servers unless you have unicorn-level success, and Netflix still uses aws.


Get a friend or relative to buy the puts for you.


For 2D images, fractals can be used for image compression. I don't know if any of the popular image compression algorithms use this method.


Another flaw: The Y-axis should be log scale.

In any stock market chart for 5+ years, the Y axis should be log-scale. The stock market tends to go up exponentially over time. If you don't use a log scale, then old prices look flat while recent changes are distorted.

(^DJI interactive chart max time interval)

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI+Interactive#{%22rang...

Notice how, on the linear scale, the 1987 crash looks like nothing, but on the log scale, it's obviously one of the biggest dips.

The OP makes the same error. Private equity valuations go up exponentially over time for the same reason that the stock market goes up exponentially over time. Since his time horizon is more than 5 years, the Y-axis should be log scale. He's artificially exaggerating more recent gains by using a linear scale.

Also, with a log scale, he wouldn't need to use a different chart for seed/A/B/C/D.


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