drags's comments

My understanding is that the "testimony" would be in the text of the password: compelling someone to reveal the password could be self-incriminating if _the password itself_ led them to additional evidence (e.g. a password of "I hid the revolver in the Conservatory"). [1]

I can't think of a case involving a fingerprint where there's a similar risk since the fingerprint is arbitrary data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Hubbell#Summa...

Race is the theme of the article:

"Our national history is rife with examples of black Americans facing exclusion from labor movements, as well as general workforce discrimination. It’s not hard to see how the effects of these policies have trickled down. I see my family’s work history, rendered briefly here, as a particular kind of ingenuity necessary for black Americans."

I think it's interesting that we're 44 comments in and nobody has commented on how race fits into this.

She sees herself as someone working her way up into a freelance writing career. Her customers, her bosses and her family view her as the kind of person unlikely to do anything more than what her parents and grandparents did: bounce around through low-wage, low-prestige jobs like Instacart their entire working life.

When everyone around you assumes you won't make it higher, it's hard not to wonder if they're right. And society assumes African-Americans are much less likely to achieve career success. [1]

[1] See http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html for instance: "Race, the authors add, also affects the reward to having a better resume. Whites with higher quality resumes received 30 percent more callbacks than whites with lower quality resumes. But the positive impact of a better resume for those with African-American names was much smaller."

There's some evidence that a related effect may not be real: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...

If he's the one who can't handle the breakup then shouldn't he be the one to leave? The knee-jerk assumption that _she_ should leave is an example of the implicit sexism that sucks about our industry.

>>> VERBA - San Francisco, CA

>>> [email protected]

>>> http://staging.verbasoftware.com/ (we're mid-refresh)

>>> Senior Rails/JS Product Focus - FULL-TIME or HALF-TIME with benefits

We're making higher education more affordable: Helping students compare their bookstore’s prices to those of its online competitors; Giving recommendations on close-to-market bookstore prices; Getting professor book choices in faster; Helping bookstores buy and sell books on a level playing field.

We guide every stage of a used book’s life. We help students save money, and bookstores become and stay relevant, competitive, and transparent.

> Metrics: 350 colleges and universities, serving 4.5 million students, tracking ~200k unique book titles, integrating with 7 vendors & 20 retailers, raising the “win rate” for bookstores to 80%, and dropping prices across the board. 17 employees, 3 part-time. 2 dogs. 5 cats. 3 children.

Profitable. Growing.

> Code: Ruby, Rails, JS (Coffeescript/Backbone), Clojure for Hadoop, MySQL on RDS, AWS w/ Chef. We love experiments and go with what works! We also love making a stable, solid product which is why we have a ton of metrics and a one-click build pipeline.

What’s in it for you: A great team and company culture, benefits (even for part time!), a laptop, unlimited books, BART pass, pool table, healthy (and un-) office snacks, great conversation during our yearly company work-cations, and hard, challenging, fulfilling, good (in the public sense) work.

> Message us if: You want to help make education better. You’ve got strong Rails knowledge (several years worth), solid testing practices, a good head for architecture, and know enough JS to help out on front-end. A stats background, experience with Hadoop and knowledge of scheduling algorithms would be awesome, but not required.

How to get the job: Write a cover letter to [email protected] that speaks to why this job might fit with you, and how you could help us out. The first step is a phone screen to solve a small programming problem. Then we’ll schedule an on-site interview for a few hours, where you'll present for 15 minutes on any topic you'd like, have you walk through some of our code with us, and then deep-dive into the whole stack. Also we’ll ask you some historical behavior questions, not logic puzzles. Then we’ll make you an offer, and you’ll accept and we have a new employee party!

If this story piqued your interest in late Communist Poland, give Timothy Garton Ash a read.

His "The Polish Revolution" is a great in depth account of the 1980/81 Polish uprising, and "The Magic Lantern" is a romping retelling of the last few months of Communist rule.

Beautiful books.

I'm being audited right now (over a $2,500 student loan interest deduction, of all things) and it's totally automated. It seems like they have an internal process that goes "Taxpayer claimed deduction, IRS doesn't have paperwork matching payment activity, ergo send letter asking taxpayer to pony up".

If Coinbase is going to report earnings to the IRS, it's a good idea to match what they report or you might trigger the algorithm.

It doesn't fix the "custom book" problem, but if you're an instructor you should encourage your institution/bookstore to mandate price comparison for textbooks.

We run white-labelled price comparison sites for about 350 campuses, and the stores at those campuses end up winning 80% of the sales. The need to look competitive against online retailers is a really powerful incentive for the local store to do everything possible to get lower-cost options on the shelves (and we do things like help them get more used/rental books, lower prices strategically, etc).

Here's our website, shoot me an email if you're curious: http://www.verbasoftware.com

I've mentioned this a couple times before but we hire Rails engineers for 24-40 hours a week + health insurance (in fact we're majority part-time at this point).

It's not for everyone, but it works well for us. We're all fresh and relaxed at work, and the free time is great for learning, side projects, exercising, travel.

Anyway, we're actually hiring right now: if you're in the Bay Area and looking shoot me an email.

This post boils down to one statement: "every 100 days we have a 20-day-long crunch time". I'm all for getting things done, but scheduling arbitrary crunch times is a great way to wear the team down until people quit.

This is where triggering deploys through Jenkins is really helpful. Now you have a record of which SHA was deployed, when it was deployed and a copy of the console log for the deploy. Can't do much better than that.

VERBA - San Francisco

* Rails/JS Product Focus - HALF-TIME with benefits

* Rails/JS Product Focus - FULL-TIME

* Product/Infrastructure Reliability/Performance Focus - HALF-TIME with benefits

I mentioned a couple months ago that we have a couple engineers who work half-time-ish (and do their own things the rest of the time) and it got some positive feedback: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235860

We're looking to hire a couple more engineers who are interested in being part of a team but would prefer to work 24-40 hours per week instead of the usual 50+. We're also looking to hire someone full-time (40ish hours per week). If this sounds interesting let me know ([email protected])

=========

About us: The college textbook market is currently being disrupted. Verba helps colleges and universities transform themselves so that they a) embrace the power of transparency and the internet, b) become agents of change in the textbook industry instead of agents of reaction and c) continue to make approximately the same profit margin from course material sales.

About 300 colleges and universities use our applications to acquire low-cost inventory and price textbooks competitively. Then millions of students visit our white-labeled sites to transparently compare the bookstore's offers against online competitors, and around 80% of students choose to buy from their local bookstore.

We're looking for people familiar with some of Ruby, Rails, Clojure, MySQL and JS who can help us grow faster. We have a great team, embrace new technologies (we just switched to Puma, we're moving to the JVM so we can use Netflix's Hystrix project to reduce API-related downtime), but also care a lot about producing and maintaining a stable, solid product for our customers.

The ideal person has strong Rails knowledge, solid testing practices, a good head for architecture and knows enough JS to help out on front-end. Additional pluses are a stats background, experience with Hadoop and knowledge of scheduling algorithms.

You can check out our website (http://www.verbasoftware.com) to read about our current products and hear people say nice things about us. :)

This article makes it sound like an either-or, but JRuby is a mature alternative that allows you to pair Ruby's excellent web tools ecosystem (Rails foremost within it) with the ability to shunt off expensive tasks to Java or another JVM language.

It's easier to make this work when the company is smaller.

One of the big advantages of SF (and especially the financial district) is that it's possible for most people in the city, the East Bay _and_ the South Bay to get to work in less than an hour. I want to make the commute decent for as many employees as possible.

Why does it need to access my data on all websites? Shouldn't it only need access to mail.google.com?

Same question for the tabs and browsing activity permission.

The federal system of justice doesn't generally work like this. Except where specifically allowed by statute US courts don't issue declaratory judgments, and the fact that LinkedIn didn't cite any statutory authority that would give the FISA court the authority to do this is telling.

If LinkedIn wants to publish the stats they are absolutely free to do so; they just open themselves up to a lawsuit from the government. The fact that LinkedIn is filing a useless motion instead of publishing the stats sends the message that this is more about PR than results.

* SF - Rails/JS Product Focus - HALF-TIME with benefits

* SF - Rails/JS Product Focus - FULL-TIME

* SF - Product/Infrastructure Reliability/Performance Focus - HALF-TIME with benefits

I mentioned a couple months ago that we have a couple engineers who work half-time-ish (and do their own things the rest of the time) and it got some positive feedback: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235860

We're looking to hire a couple more engineers who are interested in being part of a team but would prefer to work 24-40 hours per week instead of the usual 50+. We're also looking to hire someone full-time (40ish hours per week). If this sounds interesting let me know ([email protected])

=========

About us:

The college textbook market is currently being disrupted. Verba helps colleges and universities transform themselves so that they a) embrace the power of transparency and the internet, b) become agents of change in the textbook industry instead of agents of reaction and c) continue to make approximately the same profit margin from course material sales.

About 300 colleges and universities use our applications to acquire low-cost inventory and price textbooks competitively. Then millions of students visit our white-labeled sites to transparently compare the bookstore's offers against online competitors, and around 80% of students choose to buy from their local bookstore.

We're looking for people familiar with some of Ruby, Rails, Clojure, MySQL and JS who can help us grow faster. We have a great team, embrace new technologies (we just switched to Puma, we're moving to the JVM so we can use Netflix's Hystrix project to reduce API-related downtime), but also care a lot about producing and maintaining a stable, solid product for our customers.

The ideal person has strong Rails knowledge, solid testing practices, a good head for architecture and knows enough JS to help out on front-end. Additional pluses are a stats background, experience with Hadoop and knowledge of scheduling algorithms.

You can check out our website (http://www.verbasoftware.com) to read about our current products and hear people say nice things about us. :)

SF - Rails/JS - HALF-TIME with benefits (or FULL-TIME)

I mentioned a couple months ago that we have a few engineers who work half-time-ish (and do their own things the rest of the time) and it got some positive feedback: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235860

We're looking to hire a couple more engineers who are interested in being part of a team but would prefer to work 24-40 hours per week instead of the usual 50+. If it sounds interesting let me know ([email protected])

=========

About us:

The college textbook market is currently being disrupted. Verba helps college bookstores transform themselves so that they a) understand and embrace the power of the nets, b) become agents of change in the textbook industry instead of agents of reaction and c) continue to make a healthy profit.

About 300 colleges and universities use our applications to acquire low-cost inventory and price textbooks competitively. Then millions of students visit our white-labeled sites to transparently compare the bookstore's offers against online competitors, and around 80% of students choose to buy from their local bookstore.

We're looking for people familiar with Ruby, Rails, MySQL and JS who can help us grow faster. We (thankfully) don't have too many scaling problems on the technical side, but we have a ton of opportunities (product and partner-based) that we could move on much faster with a few more hands on deck, and we're always looking for ways to provide more control to our support team so they can provide top-notch customer service.

The ideal person has strong Rails knowledge, solid testing practices, a good head for architecture and knows enough JS to help out on front-end.

We're also looking for a part-time designer/front-end person! If you have good taste and know HTML/CSS/SCSS inside-out, drop us a line.

And be sure to check out our website (http://www.verbasoftware.com) so you can read all about our current products and hear people say nice things about us. :)

If you're interested in learning more, "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein goes into some depth on these and other shenanigans.