kandalf's comments

Perhaps another way of thinking about it is in terms of being a market maker versus a speculator. I think of Opendoor as more like the former, where traditionally a flipper refers to the latter.

Hadn't seen this before, but looks pretty cool. Thanks!

We have about ~40 people in the engineering org, including the data science team who all frequently write code as well.

The cost structure service is actually what I've been working on recently. We spun up a fairly lightweight flask service (on our kubernetes cluster) that is capable of serving the cost structure to the rails app and for analysis. At its core, it uses a small DAG library we wrote, and on top of that has a migration framework that can represent cost structure changes over time as distinct versions that can be served simultaneously.

I think everyone on the team understands that helping unblock other engineers is as valuable as writing some code yourself. It generally hasn't been an issue getting timely review, though we have discussed tracking the average size of the PR queue as a metric if review times did worsen.

Most of the time other engineers on your team will review your code, but often engineers will pop across teams and doing code reviews if they have the time and the context. One change we've made is moving towards tagging a few engineers who might have the right context when you submit the PR.

Thanks for the tip about the title; will take a look!

I'm a software engineer at Opendoor- happy to answer any questions!

Very neat. Can BuckleScript compile Core?

To me this seems like the right approach - either you start with some massive amount of data that's not quite adapted to the problem (think Google), you start with full automation and have to basically write the decision tree yourself, or you generate the appropriate labeled training data like this.

However, it seems like there are some scale issues if you start upmarket like Clara Labs has been. I wonder if there's benefit in having a cheaper more mass-market version as well that can be used to generate larger amounts of data and test algorithms better?

Lynk Messenger | Full Time | Interns | Software Engineers

Lynk is a fast, powerful, and free messaging app that enhances your interactions with friends and the people you meet. Lynk enables off-line chatting via low-energy Bluetooth (no WiFi/data required), and other exciting and unique features. Find us in the app store or head to lynkmessenger.com.

We are seeking full-time engineers (and select interns) to help on all aspects of our iOS, Android, and Erlang backend development. The job is based out of our San Francisco office and includes competitive salary and benefits. Essential to our consideration are intelligence, the ability to work hard and on a team, and a demonstrated passion for coding.

Interested candidates please send your resume, along with a brief email, to [email protected].

Lynk Messenger | Full Time | Interns | Software Engineers

Lynk is a fast, powerful, and free messaging app that enhances your interactions with friends and the people you meet. Lynk enables off-line chatting via low-energy Bluetooth (no WiFi/data required), and other exciting and unique features. Find us in the app store or head to lynkmessenger.com.

We are seeking full-time engineers (and select interns) to help on all aspects of our iOS, Android, and Erlang backend development. The job is based out of our San Francisco office and includes competitive salary and benefits. Essential to our consideration are intelligence, the ability to work hard and on a team, and a demonstrated passion for coding.

Interested candidates please send your resume, along with a brief email, to [email protected].

Lynk Messenger | Full Time | Interns | Software Engineers

Lynk is a fast, powerful, and free messaging solution that enhances your interactions with friends and the people you meet. Lynk enables off-line chatting via low-energy Bluetooth (no WiFi/data required), and other exciting and unique features. Find us in the app store or head to lynkmessenger.com.

We are seeking full-time engineers (and select interns) to help on all aspects of our iOS, Android, and Erlang backend development. The job is based out of our San Francisco office and includes competitive salary and benefits. Essential to our consideration are intelligence, the ability to work hard and on a team, and a demonstrated passion for coding.

Interested candidates please send your resume, along with a brief email, to [email protected].

The student hackathon movement has definitely evolved super quickly in the last five years (as Swift says, 5 -> 150, or more than 100% growth year over year). I'd be curious to hear more stats about how hackathons in general have grown in the same time period.

Given that as far as I know, roads must be extensively mapped in advance of a self-driving car going on them, there is a nice bonus of doing self-driving cars exclusively through Uber at first. Uber can know the exact route the passenger wants to take in advance, and only send cars to passengers whose routes are already mapped. Furthermore, they can choose to only send them out when the conditions are good (no snow, etc. assuming conditions are still a problem when these go into fuller production). A nice way to roll the cars out incrementally without some of the problems they might otherwise have...

One of my favorites, that didn't make the top 7: http://ychacks.challengepost.com/submissions/25719-jugglr - a pebble + ipad app that tracks your juggling.

Neat concept - I've tried Plated which is similar.

As a note for Josh, the banner image is unreadable when the window is maximized on my 30" thunderbolt display.

That makes sense - to get any stellars from the giveaway (either from the initial sign up or from setting up password recovery), you need to confirm your identity. Otherwise, you'd be able to create a bunch of accounts and just get the 1k from password recovery on each.

@seas.upenn.edu didn't seem to work.

I saw this paper as well. But I suspect for some people the effects of telling others will be net positive, even if that's not the average. Anecdotally, I believe that to be true for myself.

A good question to ponder. But I think a very strong answer is that as a company producing bitcoin hardware you want to reduce exposure to bitcoin. Selling the machines (monetizing their future use value) instead of using them yourself does that to some extent.

I generally agree with the sentiment. I think it's very easy to each year just look at the standard prize amounts and decide that slightly beating the standard can't hurt, but over time that leads to higher and higher prizes. Certainly $1 million is absurd. We (PennApps) are at $10k for 1st place, which I think you could argue is high (keep in mind that turns into $2.5k/person). But we made a conscious decision not to raise our prize any more than that about a year ago, so at least it's not getting worse on our end.

I'm not convinced that giving already released hardware as the main prizes is a good idea. From my point of view, people don't choose to compete for the main prizes like they do for sponsor ones, and forcing them to take an Oculus Rift or something of the like that they could just buy if they wanted seems a little suboptimal. However, getting unreleased hardware is a value add in my book, and was something we considered for the latest PennApps with Myo, although they couldn't make the delivery date in the end.

Sponsor prizes are tricky. One thing we've done at PennApps is encourage more vaguely themed prizes rather than ones that reward the use of a specific company's API. OTOH, we're not ready to entirely restrict API-centric prizes since I do believe that for less "sexy" companies it is a value add (the writers behind this article both came from arguably "sexy" companies), and the competition for sponsor dollars is such that the negatives mentioned in the article about sponsor prizes do not outweigh the cost of removing them for us.