Facebook stock down by 10% in 15 minutes of trading - investors have lost 10 billion (on paper)

Hedegaard · 3 days

This is flat out wrong. Display ads haven't changed as much to end users, but sponsored stories are an entirely new revenue mechanism.

Disclaimer: I don't work at fb or anything, I just develop with their api's all the time.

TedKord · 3 months

Depends what you want to go into... Are you interested by websites, web applications, flash games, computer/console games, artificial intelligence, audio software, etc?

Depending on your answer, there are lots of different paths, but I've found a strong foundation in general programming paradigms helps a lot. It separates you from thinking about any particular language, and instead just thinking about what really happens when you tell a computer to do something or need to represent real-life as some sort of symbolic model.

I feel like my best training came from the YouTube Stanford CS lecture programs (I know MIT has awesome ones too, but Stanford's the ones I watched). Start here and watch EVERYTHING, and then progress through the courses all the way through CS107: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMDCCdjyW8

Code Academy is also a great resource, as are Google Code University (free) and Rails For Zombies (spending most of my time in PHP these days, I find it disgusting how easy to read and predictable Ruby On Rails can be, dammit to hell).

While you're starting with the Stanford (or MIT) youtube lectures, see if you can simultaneously look up some free html/css online tutorials. Practicing web development is REALLY easy since all you need is a text editor and a web browser (Chrome w/ Chrome Developer Tools is my favorite these days, but FF with Firebug is great too if you don't mind the slowness). In just a couple hours you can make a simple static page and make some simple pretty css with instant feedback when you refresh your browser that's pointing to some text html file on your desktop. When that's comfy, try out some javascript, but maybe start with a framework like jQuery since that can be a lot more readable, easy to understand, and helps everything work in different browsers.

Wow I didn't expect to write that much. Seriously though, spread the word to your musician friends... even if you don't code full-time, it's great to be a musician who codes on contract... you make your own hours, can make a living with 3 days of work a week, and then use the rest on your music without worrying that you won't be able to afford food and shelter.

TedKord · 3 months

The exact same thing happened to me about 1.5 years ago. Had been gigging, mixing/producing, and running an indie label for a few years (plus playing in bands for 7 years before that), and then one day it occurred to me that I'd entirely lost my love for writing and playing. Maybe it was booking, maybe it was the hassle of creative/responsibility differences with bandmates, maybe just the frustration of playing something you loved for crowds where only 10 people ever seemed to really get what you were putting out there, but the steam just ran out entirely.

I quit my bands and went into a dark span of a couple months -- felt a lot like a breakup, actually -- and just sat in my room playing my instruments and listening to the songs I wrote. One day I decided coding might be interesting, and I spent the next couple months learning everything I could about web development, computer science, and software engineering in general.

Couple months later (maybe just b/c I live in San Francisco), I found myself as a front-end at an awesome small start-up. Year and a half later, I'm front-end + back-end + architecture at the same place, and I couldn't love it more... even more than the best parts of playing and songwriting, honestly.

I've come to know a huge number of musicians and audio engineers who moved into programming and found it immensely comfortable and easy to pick up. I think there's a lot of similarities between thinking about songs and arrangements vs. thinking about software, and the exciting part is that the hurry-up-and-wait, 10-people-will-actually-listen pain of gigging can be replaced by labors of love that actually make people's lives easier or more interesting. I still play music a few hours a week, but I'm more hyped up by the thought of solving some new code/dev problem.

tl;dr I recommend that any musician in an existential crisis gives programming a try. It might be really, really fun and intellectually rewarding (like music), but it's also quite lucrative (the exact opposite of music).

spitfire451 · 6 months

Hoping he means the original Japanese version, which is excellent.

jaeccles · 10 months

While I agree about the absurdity of the whole thing, there's actually a legal reason I've heard about... there seems to be a rule that job openings must be posted and HR must consider external applicants, even if the job is already locked in for someone in the company. Maybe it's only in some states, or for some types of positions, or for public companies... I don't know much in the way of details, but if anyone's heard of similar rules I'd be interested to learn more...

rotomangler · 11 months

He made a nice choice with that supporting role in adventureland a few years ago... he's definitely got some promise playing against type without having to hold the center of a film together.

Clex- · 1 year

While I'm more of a front-end guy than backend and thus cannot speak with 100% certainty about this matter, I've noticed that s3 certainly takes more than a minute for small changes if you use multiple availability zones around the world.

Clex- · 1 year

In case you weren't joking and are curious, it probably takes time to sync the uploaded file across the numerous data centers in their cdn.

HopeGrenade · 1 year

They took a vial of his blood, or at least that's the official report from the government. I'm sure they felt that taking his entire head might be... tasteless?

bluesmojo · 1 year

Not sure about your second point... for a while lots of bands argued that full-time touring was a sure-fire way to make a living in the new music market, but I know numerous nationally recognized bands who barely broke even after international tours... that stuff is plain expensive and exhausting, and mostly only jam and bluegrass bands are able to continue regular touring for 5+ years and still maintain a consistently large audience (unless of course you become one of those few famous, respected groups who always pulls a crowd).

Being web-only, on the other hand, works quite well for some groups, and has a much lower cost of entry and risk. Pomplamoose has killed it with that strategy, as have others.

Raerth · 1 year

Let's not forget Synecdoche, NY while we're at it!

RepJohnGaramendi · 1 year

You're thinking of brick and mortar businesses, which are a special case. Oil, finance, and online companies could certainly replant their main operations in other countries though if given the tax incentive. Right now, loads of contract mftg factories for well-known products are being built in indonesia instead of the usual china locations, and this is entirely due to tax incentives. Those would have been chinese jobs for the chinese economy, and tax incentives drove that money elsewhere.

For another microcosm, check out what Amazon did in texas recently.

jaeccles · 1 year

Yup, actually skimmed the credits of the poster assuming it might involve some of the same people from Bad Santa. Was happily surprised to instead see Kasdan, awesome filmmaker. This makes me hope that this could be a really good comedy that just has shitty low-brow marketing (think 40-year-old virgin and superbad, for example).

And I'm totally with you, Zero Effect is one of the unsung heroes of 90s comedies in my opinion...

jaeccles · 1 year

6 years is too long for a publicly owned company to care that much about and make a big risky investment. If that risk takes a year, sure, but no studio these days will wait around for fans to age.

jaeccles · 1 year

You're right about the money vs art, but Cameron as producer doesn't make a huge difference. Look at the marketing campaign for the recent release Sanctum... JC's name all over it, and it bombed anyway.

dscott7 · 1 year

From an earlier WATMM discussion on this same chart:

These comments

And these

I could also mention countless other things that are just flat out wrong, like referring to a V of ii secondary dominant as a VI, or ascribing colors/emotions to particular keys of the same quality (a longer discussion I went into on the previous WATMM thread).

Learning a quick summary of music theory is great, but it's counter-productive when the source material is full of bad information.

dscott7 · 1 year

Seriously, this chart was posted some time ago in WATMM and was torn apart for good reason. As a former music teacher and composer, it really saddens me that this is what loads of people are trusting to make music. The author obviously wasn't using his/her ears to transcribe the chord progressions, is far too reliant on chords rather than melody/rhythm, and pretty much just seems like an amateur in every way.

If you want some music theory instruction, use Elements Of Music by Straus, go to musictheory.net, learn songs by ear, but for the love of Wesley Willis DON'T use this cheat sheet as a reference. It's tripe.

ColonelGibberish · 1 year

I'd be shocked if creative professionals and pro studios account for > 2% of Apple's business. I think strategically Apple just cares about having an incredibly good reputation in this field so that they can down-market to hobbyists on Garageband/FCP/iMovie/Logic who don't need anything better than USB but still will lean towards pro-features due to their professional aspirations.

FarsiDunlop · 1 year

Saw ecsr play a bowling alley with thee oh sees a year ago... one of the highest energy shows I've been to, those guys are a joy to watch.

jaeccles

TROPHY CASE

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