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Even though you may not feel good at LeetCode type questions, study algorithms and data structures anyways!

Try watching YouTube videos, reading 'Cracking the Coding Interview' and get familiar with the programing language you are most competent with already or are trying to get a job with.

The best way to make up for a gap in resume or short stints at other companies is to prove you have the technical knowledge anyways.


I'm not by any means bad at ds/algo. Back in university I worked on pretty much all the CLRS problems. It's just that I freeze up in time-bound situations and outside of actual interview situations I don't know how to get used to solving those questions under pressure.


The demo videos in the 'Installable' section should be up in your hero with the benefits listed alongside as subtitles. It took me a while to fully understand what your service does.


Great feedback. Thank you.


I have nothing but positive things to say about coworking spaces after having worked at them for the last 3 years. I've met great friends, business partners and clients. I think they'll continue to be important as the freelance and remote working economies grow.


Could you share which coworking spaces you've used?


Coloft (closed), ROC (closed), and now Spaces - which is owned by Regus.


Cool dialogue between PG and Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow cofounder) on the tweet thread - From Jeff: “You can always borrow concepts and ideas from other startups, too. It's good to look, and understand the competitive landscape in detail, but not to obsess over.“


After using Jira for the last 2 years, Atlassian has struck me as the 800 pound gorilla that's resting on its laurels.

On my dashboard, I'm consistently annoyed by being shown the option of creating a new user account and having to decipher the UI to choose wether my ticket is a bug or feature during mission critical moments. Just give me one big button that says 'Create Ticket', we'll figure out the rest later. Secondly, why aren't tickets shown on the dashboard by default? When I log in, I'd expect to see what's going on, not have them tucked away in the nav menu.

Recently during a mission critical ticket, email responses to Jira threads were not creating new messages in Jira, creating massive delays in communication with the team until we figured out messages weren't posting. Diagnosing the issue later, it seemed to be due to file attachments in the email responses.


What's Voltron? Their SEO must be poor because Googling "Atlassian vs Voltron" brings up TFS as the top hit and a page full of Atlassian spam.


Doh! Thanks for asking. Voltron is a white labeled version of Jira (which I did not realize when writing my post). Edited.


The problem I have with statements like this are that they apply to every large framework, not just Rails. ASP, Django, Zend, Cocoa etc. A combination of libraries are bound to be hard to update two major versions later when methods and variables are deprecated.


It seems like the core of the argument is Javascript has wider adoption than Ruby, in enterprise and startups.

I was expecting a more technical comparisons to Rails and Node. The point made about Ruby not being adopted by well established companies seems half true considering adoption of Rails - AirBnB, Twitter, Coinbase, Github, etc


I avoided the tech part because, to be honest, I don't think it is relevant now. There is many information about that on the web. And from the technology standpoint both are fit for purpose if you're going to develop a web app.

The central point for me is exactly the adoption on the startup and enterprise world.


The brewing trade war can't make running the company easy for Ma, considering Alibaba does more volume than eBay and Amazon combined as a portal to Chinese manufacturers. Taking into account that the company's listed on a US stock exchange yet still has to answer to government regulation back in China, I can't imagine he's having a good time being caught in the middle.


They'll be ok, even with the trade war. The majority (about 90%) of Alibaba's sales are domestic (Chinese). The rest is exports (not just to the US though): https://www.statista.com/statistics/226793/e-commerce-revenu...

And read this if you want to get an idea of where their revenue comes from: https://www.nasdaq.com/article/alibaba-baba-misses-q1-earnin...


>The majority (about 90%) of Alibaba's sales are domestic (Chinese)

But how many of those domestic customers get their own paycheck from exports? China is moving towards a more domestic-focused economy, but exports are still a big deal for them.


I'm not current on the statistics but my understanding was that at the moment there is a flow of real goods (and services?) from China to America.

If that assumption is reasonable, it is difficult to describe a situation in China where the customers get worse off due to reduced exports without the leadership going crazy (like shutting down all their factories and everyone sitting at home sulking instead of selling their goods locally at a discount). If they pretend the American dollar is the be-all-and-end-all they will get into trouble, but it is hard to see why they would do that.

I'd speculate the situation would be OK for any shareholders in China, where any on-paper drops would be countered by improved real access to stuff, and probably bad for shareholders in America where on paper drops may as well be real. Of course, real life is so complicated it is who can even guess?


Did you try reading the above linked NASDAQ link?

Total overall revenues:

Alibaba reported revenues of RMB80.9 billion (US$12.23 billion), up 61% from the prior-year quarter. Also, revenues came in slightly above the Zacks Consensus Estimate of US$12.25 billion.

Total revenues related to selling exports:

· International commerce retail business (6% of the total revenues) - Revenues in the quarter were RMB4.3 billion (US$652 million), increasing 64% year over year. The increase was driven by robust GMV growth in two marketplaces, namely Lazada and AliExpress.

· International commerce wholesale business (2% of the total revenues) - This business generated revenues of RMB1.8 billion (US$278 million), increasing 14% from the prior-year quarter. The growth was due to an increase in the number of paying members on alibaba.com platform.

So a total of 8% of total revenues were due to selling exports. Plus, it's not clear how much of that revenue is from Lazada, which is not subject to US tariffs because its target market is Southeast Asia. If anything, everyone is suffering from US tariffs, so Lazada can only grow because it's a trade relationship that doesn't depend on the US.


I think you misunderstood what they were saying... That it's possible the domestic customers that make up the majority of Alibaba revenue may decrease their spending on the platform if their own incomes rely on exports.


Yup completely misread and misunderstood, my bad. :)


as a chinese, we barely rely on export as you may already aware of. domestic economy doesn't change even a bit during trade war. simply because we are LARGE in many perpective. the cost of renting the house or buy one are on a up-hill. you may felt we should be affected, but the fact is that we use your tech(computer engineering) and change our life without much expense of research and development.


Everyone hurts from a trade war. As an American, you should know we have seen so much boasting lately that it sounds like the noise of young children.


i work in engineering and math so my eco-knowledge is limited. yes it seems we need to boast to keep economy grows and that's what domestic gov do. i am in age 22 and i was in euro 2 years ago, i been to shanghai, hang zhou, and if i may i could judge we haven't been really hurt. personally when i was little i can't afford whole day air-conditioner open, and i so couldn't i drive to anywhere far, but these days my family economy status didn't improve considerablely but appreantly they are cheap


Well that and he hasn't been running the company for a while. He stepped down as CEO in 2013. This is very similar to Bill Gates leaving Microsoft (who Ma has actually mentioned as an influence).


I visited Alibaba in 2011 and at that time he had already handed the reigns over to David Wei.



There's one key fact they seem to be either missing or intentionally ignoring: Alibaba's websites are marketplaces populated by third-party sellers. So they don't need to have enough staff to ship all those parcels because they're not the company shipping them, and it's perfectly normal that customers would be receiving multiple packages because every seller packs their goods seperately.

The reason I'm suggesting that they're intentionally ignoring this fact is that it's actually in the information presented in the article. For example, the video they link in their section about the logistics explains this in detail.


Not an easy company by any stretch. British Virgin Islands registered and extremely hard to unwrap ultimate ownership even.


Alibaba is much more transparent than say Huawei. Alibaba is even publicly traded on an American exchange, so its ownership is much more clear.


It's illegal for foreigners to own a Chinese company. A shell company based in the Caribbean is publicly traded. It owns no assets.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/beware-the-pitfalls-of-the-...


It is not illegal for foreigners to own part of Chinese companies. It's generally illegal for a single foreign entity to own a controlling interest. Softbank and Yahoo invested into Alibaba relatively early on. It was incorporated in China. Their positions represented the majority of shares in the business, just not individually.


> It's generally illegal for a single foreign entity to own a controlling interest.

This is also not true. China, like all developing economies that have reached the global stage, allows WFOEs and FICEs [1]. There's significant taxes involved but these taxes are being decreased all the time .

(It's quite remarkable the stuff people believe about doing business in China. Really have to wonder where these ideas come from.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholly_Foreign-Owned_Enterpris...


There are severe restrictions on WFOEs. For all practical purposes they're useless for running a domestic tech business.

Really recommend this write up on VIEs and Alibaba: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2017-imo/Documents/M...


Good points but probably not the reason why he is really retiring. Jack Ma cannot be more famous than their President.


Maybe you're being too hard on yourself and expecting drastic results too soon. Day of meaningful work + gym consistently over an extended period of time will help further you in life. Reading can help further you in life (obviously pending what you read). Only thing I see up there that I'd consider as a time waster would be video games... but even then a few hours a week to unwind can't be all that bad. I think Steven Spielberg and Elon Musk are known to game from time to time


The upcoming videos in this series are mostly presented by startup founders, employees, and investors speaking from their personal experience. To your point about generic advice not working for startups, his advice seems distilled down to the most general advice that does work for startups. Given the number YC has incubated he probably has a good grasp on that. To me these videos are like candy, intuitive but great reminders nonetheless.


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