For a few years I worked as programming director for a local film festival, selecting and scheduling all the films. And I've helped a friend who selects films for a very large film festival, serving as a sort of first-line screener for him, pulling out the worst so he didn't waste time on them.

Even with our local (L.A.) film festival, we had a ton of submissions. I could cut 80-90% of them very easily. They just weren't very good. We got a lot of submissions that simply weren't competent, they had multiple fundamental flaws.

There's always a few that are easy calls. Very good work, and you know you can build a night around them. Then there's some that are obviously good enough to screen, if not to be the keystones.

Then there's the borderliners, and that's where you spend all your time. Trying to make those choices. Sometimes it literally comes down to how long a movie is and if it will fit in the slot you have to fill. Sometimes it's how a given movie will play off the others you've decided on already. It's not completely "fair", but it's how it is sometimes.

But you know, even those awful films (and some of them are really awful, worse than you've ever seen)... They represent a massive amount of work. And perseverance. And dreaming. And I always respected that, and it sucked to reject even the worst. These were people who DID something with their time, and I hated hated hated sending the rejection emails. Even the worst filmmakers deserved some respect for having actually done it.

It's important to separate the work from the person who did it. The person who did it almost always deserves respect and admiration.

I will say that where I work we appear to have managed to get on a list of "startups to send your resume to" by one or two of these bootcamp shops, and the resumes tend to be severely underwhelming. Here are some of the things that have been negatively affecting my reaction to them (I share in hopes this is useful, not to bash bootcamps or folks that attend them!):

ONLY A GITHUB PROFILE

It seems pretty clear that the bootcamps told you we really care about your github profile, and that sometimes gets interpreted as "to the exclusion of everything else".

APPARENTLY BORN SIX MONTHS AGO

Related to the over-emphasis on github profiles is the exclusion of anything not-code related. I get that code bootcamps attract lots of folks who maybe got a political science degree or spent the last three years in real estate. Tell me that. I'd love to see what you've been up to, we're looking to hire you, not your ability to code. I hope these institutions aren't making folks feel like their past isn't valuable because it didn't involve Rails.

ALSO THE GITHUB PROFILE IS BORING

The profiles tend to have some code camp rails homework in them. It's hard to go from learning to code to having a github profile that's impressive in a short period of time (Hell, I've been working for well over a decade and my github profile isn't impressive!).. That said, if you do want me to care about your github profile I'd rather see signs of enthusiasm in the form of personal gists or projects or thoughtful bug reports or feature tickets on other projects.

DISGUISES THE CODE BOOTCAMP AFFILIATION

Seems like the elephant in the room on these things is where you've been learning to code and how you found us. Many of the resumes seem to avoid being transparent about this. I wanna know which bootcamp you did, what got you interested, and how it went.

THEY TOLD YOU TO EMAIL US

It's clear that we're on a list and plenty of candidates email us without knowing (or maybe caring) about what we do. That's a non-starter. Frankly, I doubt that the people who even put us on the list of shops to mail looked any closer than a crunch-base profile or Who's Hiring post on HN.

RAILS

The resumes I'm seeing clearly come from a bootcamp that emphasizes Rails and JS/HTML. That's great, but we're not a rails shop and the candidate is brand spanking new to this. It's probably better that you continue your investment in Rails before doing a wholesale dive into another platform.

At any rate, I love that camps like this exist. I've long thought our industry needs really good trade education to supplement CS programs which are focused and affordable ways to launch folks who are interested into software development. I just think the packaging and presentation of folks coming out of these things could use some work.

Those who are defending this as a reasonable and commonplace policy are dissembling at best. This is another example of the emerging electronic class system. Those who are members of the Silicon Valley clique are privileged to take what they want from those who are not. Recall the Googler who was able to have a web page he didn't like shut down, just by calling his connection at Digital Ocean.

One might argue that a thing such as an Instagram account is just a service provided by a business and the business can do as it likes, but this isn't the case. A social media account is a vehicle for the user to interact with the entire world, and it shouldn't be able to be unilaterally revoked, especially if the only reason is to give it to a"more deserving" insider. We need a system of due process for situations like this.

If I had written a book on implementing cryptography in Golang, I assure you that someone else would have reviewed it harshly too. It's simply a difficult subject to get right.

Virginia's Department of Taxation used to have a pretty decent online tax website. It was shutdown because of lobbying such as this. There was a year when no free online filing so I took the extra effort to do a paper return that year. Even FreeFilableForms are run by the Free File Alliance which is part of the group that lobbies against the IRS and state taxation departments from doing their own filing websites for personal profit. So they make sure that their own free filing options are just good enough to be barely acceptable while making their paid (for filers with income over ~$58k) options seem much more attractive.

Between this and intentional complexity of the tax system that hinders making the IRS more efficient and hides true tax rates that corporations and higher income people... I dunno, it's one of the blacker marks against America in this aspect of policy.

But I've without doubt decide I'll try as hard as possible to never, ever pay a company like that to file tax returns.

For those of you who don't know what the acronyms stand for, I've compiled a list, in order by their appearance:

  AES   - Advanced Encryption Standard
  CBC   - Cipher Block Chaining
  PKCS  - Public Key Cryptography Standards
  SHA   - Secure Hashing Algorithm
  MAC   - Message Authentication Code
  PBKDF - Password-Based Key Derivation Function
  NIST  - National Institute of Standards and Technology
  FIPS  - Federal Information Processing Standard
  KDF   - Key derivation function
  CTR   - Counter Mode
  RSA   - Rivest Shamir Adleman (last names of each creator of the RSA algorithm)
  OAEP  - Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding
  PSS   - Probabilistic Signature Scheme
  ECDSA - Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
  PS3   - Playstation 3?
  DH    - Diffie-Hellman key exchange
  ECDH  - Elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange
  TLS   - Transport Layer Security

It's a tough thing for anyone to read: it's browserWidth wide and monospaced.

Here's a readable version: https://gist.github.com/mikemaccana/10847077

While I was in college, I was put on a committee to choose a new Director of Admissions. One of the internal candidates said during his interview: "There is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is not a good reason why people are rejected."

It many ways that seems obvious. To get in you have to have something going for you. To not get in you don't have to do anything wrong, you just have to not have a thing that does get you in. It would be just as hard for my college to write high school seniors a letter saying, well, you were 2nd in your class and had a 1500 but noting stood out as would be for YC to write people direct feedback at scale. What would it really mean? How do you action that? No special sauce isn't really feedback. You can't point to anything wrong other than you can't point to anything great.

This has proven true for me in the admissions processes I've gone through on the other side: whether at a consulting firm, or Stripe, or Standard Treasury, or Echoing Green (I read semi-finalist apps). Most people self-select to apply for good and just reasons but some people really excite you and some people don't. Some people just have that something special, and the people who don't don't really have anything wrong with them.

So to me this commentary rings true and is honestly put.

Before we all seemingly jump on the "she should have updated her account" bandwagon, it would help to see actual evidence of her inactivity, or at least evidence/statements in Instagram's TOS that state what "inactive" really means.

This doesn't cut it: "We encourage people to actively log in and use Instagram once they create an account."

How long can I go idle before Instagram takes my account back?

Also, as someone else stated in this thread the very least Instagram could have done was to email her and inform her that she was about to lose her account due to inactivity.

Lastly, it's important to note that Instagram didn't just "prune" her account, they renamed it and gave her original account name to an employee. If they were concerned with squatters or dormant accounts they would have actually nixed the account, not renamed it to something else.

Is this... a Let's Play of learning a programming language? Because it's surprisingly effective. I learned and I was entertained.