drags | 13 years ago | on: 9th Circuit Appeals Court: 4th Amendment Applies At The Border
drags | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2013)
I mentioned a few days 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.
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. :)
drags | 13 years ago | on: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)
Wanting things is a legitimate choice, and it seems unfair to deprive someone of that choice through trickery.
drags | 13 years ago | on: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)
I've mentioned this before but my company hires Rails developers for 24hrs/wk. Health insurance is provided and salary is proportional to full-time.
It's not for everyone, but it works well for us. Everyone's fresh and relaxed when they come into 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.
drags | 13 years ago | on: R packages I wish I'd known about earlier
drags | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?
edit: thanks polyfractal!
drags | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: Know of a hacker in Cambridge or Boston who wants a bookstore?
Have you looked into textbooks? There's a lot of money in the textbook market right now (for a variety of reasons). Won't help your storefront business, but could help on the internet side. I work in the industry; feel free to email if you want to chat more about the textbook side of the industry :)
drags | 13 years ago | on: Lockitron exceeds $2,000,000 in reservations
drags | 13 years ago | on: AWS issues, affecting Heroku and others
drags | 13 years ago | on: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
drags | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (September 2012)
I've mentioned before 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=3850480
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 225 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.
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. :)
drags | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (August 2012)
I've mentioned before 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=3850480
We're ready to hire a couple more in this vein, so if it sounds interesting let me know!
=========
Advantages for you:
- you get 2-3 extra weekend days for fun and profit
- we provide health insurance and all that jazz
- if some weeks you don't have lots to do and want to work more, and other weeks you have lots to do and want to work less, we can be flexible
- we're profitable and growing! so if you decide "wow I really love Verba and want to spend every waking moment there" we can make that dream come true
Advantages for us:
- you have more time to learn new things, meet new people and generally be a friendlier, happier, more knowledgeable person in our workplace
- we can hire faster with less anxiety (instead of the "gulp i just committed $100k/yr" feeling, we have the "smaller gulp i just committed $50k/yr" feeling :)
- you get to be a part of what we're doing, we get to hear about all the cool stuff you're doing, and that can only lead to good things for both of us
Anyway, I've included our spiel and "what we're looking for" summary below, so shoot me an email if you're interested ([email protected]).
========
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.
We're a B2B company working with around 225 colleges and universities, and 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, 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.
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.
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.
drags | 13 years ago | on: Summary of June 29 AWS Service Event in US-East
Based on how they behave in outages, I've always been curious (read: suspicious) about whether ELBs were redundant across AZs or hosted in a single AZ regardless of the AZs your instances are in.
It's good to hear that they are actually redundant and to understand how they're added/removed from circulation in the event of problems.
drags | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (July 2012)
I've mentioned before that we have a couple of 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=3850480
We're ready to hire a couple more in this vein, so if it sounds interesting let me know!
=========
Advantages for you:
- you get 2-3 extra weekend days for fun and profit
- we provide health insurance and all that jazz
- if some weeks you don't have lots to do and want to work more, and other weeks you have lots to do and want to work less, we can be flexible
- we're profitable and growing! so if you decide "wow I really love Verba and want to spend every waking moment there" we can make that dream come true
Advantages for us:
- you have more time to learn new things, meet new people and generally be a friendlier, happier, more knowledgeable person in our workplace
- we can hire faster with less anxiety (instead of the "gulp i just committed $100k/yr" feeling, we have the "smaller gulp i just committed $50k/yr" feeling :)
- you get to be a part of what we're doing, we get to hear about all the cool stuff you're doing, and that can only lead to good things for both of us
Anyway, I've included our spiel and "what we're looking for" summary below, so shoot me an email if you're interested ([email protected]).
========
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.
We're a B2B company working with just about 200 colleges and universities, and 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, 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. 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.
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.
drags | 13 years ago | on: JQuery 2.0 Drops Support for IE6/7/8; API-Compatible with jQuery 1.9.
One of our products is a B2B analytics tool that leverages a custom Chrome extension for one piece of functionality. As a result, all of our users are on Chrome.
We already use chai for testing, which doesn't really work in older IE versions, and it'll be great to get the performance improvement from this change as well.
drags | 13 years ago | on: Cascading errors caused AWS to go down
drags | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (June 2012)
I've mentioned before that we have a couple of 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=3850480
We're ready to hire a couple more in this vein, so if it sounds interesting let me know!
=========
Advantages for you:
- you get 2-3 extra weekend days for fun and profit
- we provide health insurance and all that jazz
- if some weeks you don't have lots to do and want to work more, and other weeks you have lots to do and want to work less, we can be flexible
- we're profitable and growing! so if you decide "wow I really love Verba and want to spend every waking moment there" we can make that dream come true
Advantages for us:
- you have more time to learn new things, meet new people and generally be a friendlier, happier, more knowledgeable person in our workplace
- we can hire faster with less anxiety (instead of the "gulp i just committed $100k/yr" feeling, we have the "smaller gulp i just committed $50k/yr" feeling :)
- you get to be a part of what we're doing, we get to hear about all the cool stuff you're doing, and that can only lead to good things for both of us
Anyway, I've included our spiel and "what we're looking for" summary below, so shoot me an email if you're interested ([email protected]).
========
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.
We're a B2B company working with just about 200 colleges and universities, and 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, 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. 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.
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.
drags | 14 years ago | on: Morgan Stanley bought 63M Facebook shares ($2.3B) to create a floor around $38
Brief summary: Morgan oversells the offering. Facebook gives Morgan the right (but not the obligation) to cover its short position by buying shares at the offering price. This is a defensive maneuver.
If the stock pops, Morgan buys the shares from Facebook at the offering price in order to cover its short. Otherwise they'd have to purchase at the market price (which would cause them to lose money). This is the hoped for scenario.
In the unexpected case, where the stock's price trends below the offering price, Morgan covers its short by buying shares directly from the market (instead of from Facebook). This stabilizes the price of the stock at the offering price and ensures that public investors don't go underwater soon after the offering.
It sounds like there are some complicated maneuvers that the underwriter can pull to make some money off the greenshoe (it's not all flowers and sunshine: http://dealbreaker.com/2012/05/facebook-ipo-goes-nowhere-in-...) but this particular implementation seems relatively good to Facebook and the public investors.
drags | 14 years ago | on: Why it's OK to leave a tech job at 5 p.m.
My company does this. Work half-time, get paid 50% of full-time programmer's salary + health insurance.
My anecdotal impression is that "productivity" is much higher than 50% of a full-time person, but everyone feels less busy, less stressed and more relaxed. Ends up being a great deal for both employer and employee I think.
Anyway, if you're a Rails dev in the Bay Area drop me a line, we're hiring.
drags | 14 years ago | on: Crowd-Sourced Flight Search
But it looks like they take the finder's fee upfront. It would be nice if there were an option to only pay the finder's fee if someone significantly beats the best price you were able to find.
Everyone does at least an _initial_ search to get an idea of price when they're considering a trip, right? And presumably the experts have an idea of the typical price on given routes and can decide whether the "price to beat" is attainable?
