seanalex's comments

I was homeschooled along with my three brothers in the state of Texas. We all did dual-courses at a community college during the highschool years, and all graduated from college with various MIS/CS/EE degrees.

We were not homeschooled for religious reasons. It was purely a choice made by the family during a time when we were traveling after both parents retired. We each had the option at anytime to jump back into the public education system after we moved to Austin, but we opted to continue homeschooling instead.

Would I recommend it for everyone? No. Homeschooling should be dealt with on a case by case basis.

I would imagine it is up to interpretation. It would probably be a good thing to ask the interviewer about to show that you are thinking about edge cases.

If it were me, I'd prefer to see those that made no sales based on the question. I guess if I didn't want to see them, I would ask for "where sales are greater than $0.00".

In SQL, this would be an issue due to the date column not existing in the group by. Additionally, because of the having statement, the left outer join is being treated as an inner join with respect to the results given.

Something like this could work (without going for an alternate approach such as Unions or sub-selects):

    SELECT a.name, ISNULL(SUM(s.price), 0.0) FROM authors a
    INNER JOIN books b ON (a.id=b.author_id)
    LEFT OUTER JOIN sales s ON (b.id = s.book_id)
    GROUP BY a.name, s.date
    HAVING (ISNULL(s.date, '20131101') >= '20131101' AND ISNULL(s.date, '20131101') <= '20131130')

Edit: Actually might be better to keep the null in the results like the original query. It's definitely better to know whether a book sold 1000 copies for $0.00 each or if no copies were sold.

It's a tough business. I'm sure things might be different today, but 10 years back it was very hard for companies and sponsors to run a sustainable (and growable) business in professional gaming. People like Angel Munoz and Ted Owen tried to make it more mainstream, and they had some great ideas on how to accomplish it... but ultimately badly timed and wrongly executed on the whole thing.

Fond memories of Clanbase though and sad it worked out like this.

There are definitely plenty of ex-gamers lurking on HN. I played under the nickname Daler in the United States. Mostly played Quake and Doom tournaments, but have competed on a variety of other games.

Unfortunately during the time I competed, there were many companies that would spring up and run tournaments with prizes that they ultimately could not pay out on. Or at best, the money would eventually get paid out months/years later. It was very hard for companies to make return on investment when running these gaming sites and tournaments. Overall, it was the work done by volunteers and "teenagers" that made the best events/sites/tournaments...

I always found it very unfortunate that the gaming scene was full of exploitation for these companies. What happened to the GGL (similarly the CPL), comes at no surprise.

Yeah I guess it might not be the best if I would have to run a VM on it.

Very good point. I guess the days of same-hardware laptops being 50% less in price are gone. I would love to just jump in and get the 13.3 macbook air, but $1200 for the 128GB SSD and 8 GB ram is just a bit above my budget.

A macbook air sounds great, but I am concerned with the screen-size as well. I would definitely need more than 11" as I wouldn't be using an LCD monitor 95% of the time.

It definitely seems like the macbook air is the go-to lightweight development machine these days.

Yeah, I've considered a macbook air. It's definitely in my top choices. It's been so long since I've looked at laptops, but surely there are cheaper options with similar hardware right?

Out of curiosity, why do you say that? I would expect it's as simple as creating a polling/request call to the phone's GPS coordinates. The data can be stored on an application's server and then displayed onto any mapping choice for that person's "group".

I haven't dabbled much in mobile development, so I really couldn't say how hard it overall would be.

Great, thanks for the suggestion. I'll set us up on it tonight and see how it works.

Surprisingly, this is the only Google service I did not want to go away. My wife and I use it frequently every work day. She is an animal control officer here in Houston, and Latitude is the way we keep in touch with where we are. The job is dangerous enough that I like to know her current location frequently just to make sure she is alright. She's on a windows 7 OS phone, I'm on an android... so a lot current-day applications are out of the question. Maybe it's time I code my own location services for us that would be more accurate, frequent, and private.

Sadly, this very much mirrors my experience. I love Azure and ASP.NET MVC4. But the moment my deploys went from 5 minutes to 20 minutes and more, I started hating myself for any random code or test I wish I cleaned up first.

Overall though, Azure is a great product and once you wire things up correctly, it makes out to be a fantastic hosting service. I do not have experience with Amazon's hosting stack, but I plan on sticking with Azure for the long haul.

I bought a tablet through T-Mobile with a two year contract at $50 a month. Bad idea, I know. I ended up regretting the monthly plan due to using it primarily at home on a wifi.

After 8 months, I luckily found out that T-Mobile was changing their pricing based on roaming charges. I called them to ask for a cancellation with no ETF. I explained to them that the change of terms is a cost change to how I use the tablet. Through a story of "I use this tablet in remote areas for work...", I was able to get it cancelled. It took two phone calls to make it happen, but I soon found out many others tried but failed to take this approach.

My first $100 was baking and selling apple pies locally. It was successful, but the margins were just not there due to the price of apples and the time spent.

My first $10,000 ever made was playing video games. It was all made in one weekend at a Quake 3 tournament. It was my first tournament ever, so it was fueled solely on excitement, fun, and sheer determination. I completed 2nd place, took home a giant check, trophy, and was at that moment in time the #1 U.S. player.

Note: I've never used AWS.

Currently, I use Azure for my projects. Primary reasons are due to being a C# developer professionally, and it just made sense to use it. In Visual Studio, it is very easy to publish projects directly to Azure without ever actually logging into the Azure dashboard.

I can't comment on price comparisons, which are much different. But I'd say give Azure a try for free initially to demo it and see if it fits what you need.

One thing of note that I feel is not mentioned often when discussing these two options. If you are planning on using Azure's storage options, there will be a sort of "vendor-lock-in" involved with the code-base. I have great experiences with it, but both Azure and AWS have different approaches to how they handle storage options including the NoSQL choices such as Azure Table Storage.

Additionally, I have used Nodejs on Azure. I truly enjoyed it when using Azure Table Storage for my database. Overall publishing to Azure was pretty simple and required minimal setup effort. Let me know if you have any questions!

I've been using C# for several years, and have bounced between it, Java, Node.js for my side-projects. After all said and done, I keep coming back to C#. I feel more productive and can design and churn out code quicker than say in a Node project. Overall, I actually do enjoy coding in C# and using .NET more than any other language I have experienced so far. The day I tried to use Drupal was the day I realized I made a serious mistake for not thinking I could do things better or quicker in C#/.Net instead.

Overall though, Microsoft is trying to move to an "ecosystem" platform. Exampes are Nuget powering their closed/open-source ecosystem for projects and Azure server templates. Even their latest ASP.NET MVC 4 is pushing several open source libraries onto their default project template. They truly see they couldn't win the web battle with WPF/Silverlight as their only options, so they are going for a different angle here in the last year. Additionally, a lot of interesting things are coming out of Microsoft and its employees, such as the open-sourced SignalR which is actively being updated and may become a standard for C# webapps.

I realize C#/.NET is not the go-to language for small web-apps yet, primarily due to licensing, but give it time. I say if you are on the fence, and are interested at all in C#, give it a shot! There are many free options for development IDE's and hosting provided by Microsoft. For example, you can use Visual Studio Express and host up to ten websites for free on Azure.

Thanks! Feedback of any kind is great to hear honestly. Overall, the concept of a news/live-comment system is what we were focusing on. I believe content-driven sites are a great way to get into web development, but also wanted to introduce something new that wasnt just another blog built on a free template. The subject matter is merely a product of being within our interest and we can drive content enough until the site gains traction.

Overall, I realize its tough to gauge with no activity and a wealth of articles/comments to review. I plan to spend some time trying to gain interest in this from active communities as well as make the sites message, intent, and value clearer on the front page.

Thanks for the feedback. No, we havent taken this yet to any particular fansite or community yet. The building it was primarily driven from noticing scattered communities all still on traditional style forums.

I do agree it would play best if we go with one or a few shows initially and try and attract some of its currently existing communities. I definitely agree also that the site needs a better indication as to what its all about and why someone should register/login.

The dropdown on the main page is driven off of what topics exist for shows currently.

Thanks again for the feedback and gives a general direction on where to focus my efforts this next week. Cheers!