So over the years me (and my team) have built up a lot of experience dealing with these for sensitive industries like healthcare/insurace/lending etc.

We are bringing these ideas out as a router to other parsers, but with some key takes that allow you to manage failures. "Failure is inevitable so route for it."

It is called Openreading - https://openreading.ai/ and open core here: https://github.com/openreading-ai/openreading-core

It is still WIP and will be more polished in a month after some more rigorous testing and benchmarks.

If this is a problem you deal with, would love to chat.

Note: the intent is to launch a managed version that provides more durable compute/retries, parallel execution, intent understanding etc but this is for later.

Xcode is the most "diff" IDE from other IDEs. I like Swift but just dont like Objective-C. The build tools and ecosystem is too tightly tied (I like to switch between development machines without having to always be on a mac).

Java is definitely painful, but I suppose the bias I have here is that I have developed on it for several years.

The breath of fresh air so far has been React-native and i wish more things get ported over to JS (or like Expo kit).

Are you building a relationship with the hospitals and clinics so that we wont't have to talk to them, but just use your api to get and push our patient's data?

I am in early 30s, which means I am mostly interviewing for senior engineering position. I have been part of teams where we have made offers to several folks older than I am for similar or higher position. This is the only time when age does come up for discussion (is he really qualified to be a senior or not?)

However, some patterns I do notice from time to time are:

- Younger folks are more eager at times to do more.

- Their enthusiasm also comes with quality of work that needs some additional care. But, it is critical we mentor them during these times.

- Older folks are generally more clear on what they want to work and how they want to solve a problem. Experience most likely.

- The really bad situation to be in is when some of the older (senior) folks don't drive and take initiatives and just wade through. With someone senior you want them to be there to mentor, help, guide, keep an eye out on many things, but we have seen a few senior folks who don't make that effort - This is probably the #1 problem I have seen in teams. A sense of agility is almost vital.

- I have seen the same lack of "drive" amongst some younger devs as well.

- End of the day, its not age, its almost the subject scale of how passionate they are about their work that has worked for us. Old/young is really irrelevant.

Sure, its easier to apply it to the mathematics domain and harder to something that many of us might think in OO. I guess it comes with taking small steps (as someone already said in a comment). Also, making conscious effort to keep questioning how functional our code is helps.

I saw this talk on functionatalks.org by Paul Chiusano (author of Functional programming in Scala) http://functionaltalks.org/2013/06/20/paul-chiusano-how-to-w...

If you see he repeatedly asks how can we make it more functional. I think that is kind of thinking we need to practice. Its hard after too much of imperative thinking I guess. One more thing I have heard is read SICP and forget OO for a bit :).

His own example, forget the manager, the players themselves have to be on the same page in so many levels during practice. Don't you think Messi, Neymar, and Alexis (all 3 different countries playing for Barca) would have to practice and know precisely about their timing.

I think the key thing here is the who really needs whom. Most entrepreneurs need YC/VCs and so might have to suck up what they expect.

I see this happen all the time here at startups in Bangalore. Of course if the audience is YC and the investors, it goes without saying what the language requirement is.

Indira Nooyi (Pepsico, CEO and one amongst that cnn list) articulates it perfectly in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8PC5U55AUU

http://money.cnn.com/gallery/leadership/2013/07/08/global-50...

Even empirically your dataset consists of startups that target USA markets mostly and hence this conclusion. I am guessing CEOs are good and can come from anywhere, its perhaps "sales" that really needs the idiomatic speak.

Perhaps a good practice for companies to completely delete emails after a few days? (Its impractical, but maybe there is a need?)

Even the other often abused visa L1 is primarily filled by outsourcers (I am trying to find some numbers on this but hard to find).

The outsourcing companies have been filing h1 for less than 1k lawyer fee (outsourced too!). 5K seems too high for someone to take note . The best law firms themselves charge about that here in USA.

I think this company can help out the startups in the bay area that are clueless how to sponsor a H1 (all the legalities of it) and makes it simple to them perhaps doing everything online from get go. That won't be more than 15/20k per year. So even the best case they are probably seeing a $1million dollar run rate per year (Which might be great for a 4/5 member startup?).

They should diversify into other areas - tax (for immigrants)/corporate (hiring/transfers) - which will have more incidences to charge.

If you want to drink the cool aid of single page apps, 'rich' client side etc, you have to invest into some MVVC/MVC frameworks like Angular, Ember or now Sails, which works well with Node.js apparently.

I think I was one of the few (perhaps?) who did not like the new redesign of github. I did not like the content above that red/color bar at all. It is that much real estate taken away from me to see the code/commits/documentation of the page. I often use last commit and all commits to compare and see what is going on. I also quickly switch branches on the UI to compare stuff. The current github just feels its a always one extra click or I am searching for something. Somehow it doesn't feel minimalistic at all.

Ian's redesign makes it elegantly simple and minimalistic.

- Learn complete web development. Use something like CodeAcademy/Udacity to learn the complementary skills you need. My guess is since you know Html/css and Java, you are better off learning Javascript as well. Nodejs / advanced Java might be a good fit.

- Learn some of the theoretical fundamentals. This might not be of immediate need for freelancing, but you should almost always be honing your fundamentals. Take up the core computer science courses on Coursera - Algorithms (1,2), Programming Languages, Basic Math (linear algebra, graph theory etc) are some must haves. This can be a longer term goal and plan it beyond 6 months.

- Sharpen your skills with coding exercises. Do some of the stuff on InterviewStreet and other such sites. Being able to solve small problems effectively and time bound, is very important skills. You should practice hard for the first 6 months I think.

- Know your domain. Being a web freelancer means you might have to be full stack. Being able to write the client and server side with ease. You might want to be good at some specific domains - like building sites for X, Y, Z (you can build your own reusable code). Then expand. Looking at stuff at elance is an easy start.

Its doable in 6 months. IMO don't stop learning.