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Raphomet

383 karma · joined March 2, 2009

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Raphomet··on Ask HN: Why do you find your job satisfying?
You are living my dream. Happy to hear it's going well.
Raphomet··on Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
I'm a note-taking power nerd who has used all the buzzy apps on Macs. Obsidian is by far the best — it's become my personal journal, my knowledge base, a quick and dirty blog, a place to keep loose notes.

The development velocity of the (TWO PERSON!) team behind this app is ridiculous. They're constantly pushing updates, and seem to handle all facets of app development with aplomb.

No affiliation, just a happy user!

Raphomet··on The good parts of AWS: a visual summary
Anyone know what tool the author used to make those nice animated SVGs?
Raphomet··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2017)
Lob | YC S13, YC Continuity | Senior Software Engineer, Engineering Manager, Senior Frontend Engineer | Full Time, ONSITE | San Francisco, CA

Lob exists to create APIs that help developers automate things in the offline world. Our first product was our Print and Mail API (programmatically send letters, postcards, checks). Our second is address verification, CASS-certified by the USPS.

I'm Lob's head of engineering. We are building an open, collaborative, experimental, evidence-driven culture because we think the best innovations will come from everywhere in the company—especially from engineers. Read more about our engineering team here: https://lob.com/blog/category/engineering

We're currently looking for:

- experienced software engineers who can lead entire projects

- a frontend engineer who can take ownership of our frontend ecosystem

- engineering managers who are technical, great at hiring, and have a track record of coaching strong problem-solvers

We hate contrived interviews, so our process rewards practical problem solving (based on real problems we've faced) and excellent communication.

Apply at https://lob.com/careers if this intrigues you!

Raphomet··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2017)
Lob | YC S13, YC Continuity | Senior Software Engineer | Full Time, ONSITE | San Francisco, CA

Our first API was to programmatically send physical mail. Our second, announced 2 months ago, (https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/31/ycs-continuity-fund-leads...), is CASS-certified address verification. Our long-term goal is to provide the building blocks for developers to automate the offline world through APIs.

I'm the head of engineering at Lob. In between my last job and this one, I spoke to 42 organizations before I found what I was looking for in Lob: an exceptional team at the beginning of its growth phase, and also a company with a track record of being deliberate about its culture and which is intentionally building a good place to work.

We are a small and mighty engineering team with a ton of product and infrastructure problems to solve as we keep pace with rapid growth. So, we're currently looking for experienced software engineers who can take ownership of entire projects. We hate contrived interviews, so our process rewards practical problem solving (based on real problems we've faced) and excellent communication.

Apply at https://lob.com/careers if this intrigues you!

Raphomet··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2017)
Lob | YC S13, YC Continuity | Senior Software Engineer | Full Time, ONSITE | San Francisco, CA

Our first API was to programmatically send physical mail. Our second, announced last month (https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/31/ycs-continuity-fund-leads...), is CASS-certified address verification. Our long-term goal is to provide the building blocks for developers to automate the offline world through APIs.

I'm the head of engineering at Lob. In between my last job and this one, I spoke to 42 organizations before I found what I was looking for in Lob: an exceptional team at the beginning of its growth phase, and also a company with a track record of being deliberate about its culture and which is intentionally building a good place to work.

We are a small and mighty engineering team with a ton of product and infrastructure problems to solve as we keep pace with rapid growth. So, we're currently looking for experienced software engineers who can take ownership of entire projects. We hate contrived interviews, so our process rewards practical problem solving (based on real problems we've faced) and excellent communication.

Apply at https://lob.com/careers or drop me a line at raph@lob.com if this intrigues you!

Raphomet··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2017)
Lob | YC S13, YC Continuity | Senior Software Engineer | Full Time, ONSITE | San Francisco, CA

Our first API was to programmatically send physical mail. Our second, announced just yesterday (https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/31/ycs-continuity-fund-leads...), is CASS-certified address verification. Our long-term goal is to provide the building blocks for developers to automate the offline world through APIs.

I'm the head of engineering at Lob. In between my last job and this one, I spoke to 42 organizations before I found what I was looking for in Lob: an exceptional team at the beginning of its growth phase, and also a company with a track record of being deliberate about its culture and which is intentionally building a good place to work.

We are a small and mighty engineering team with a ton of product and infrastructure problems to solve as we keep pace with rapid growth. So, we're currently looking for experienced software engineers who can take ownership of entire projects. We hate contrived interviews, so our process rewards practical problem solving (based on real problems we've faced) and excellent communication.

Apply at https://lob.com/careers or drop me a line at raph@lob.com if this intrigues you!

Raphomet··on Cambridge Analytica: The Data That Turned the World Upside Down
Thanks for sharing. Cathy O'Neil is one of the most credible voices in the room when it comes to understanding the unintended consequences of applied big data algorithms.

The original post is sensationalistic and massively overstates what's currently possible when it comes to micro-targeting.

Raphomet··on Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser
The USDS is working on vets.gov, not 18F. Apparently this effort involves taking hundreds of microsites that all look and behave differently and combining them into one unified effort. It's not surprising that this would take a long time, and my understanding is that this is one of USDS's top priorities.

I think it's easy to underestimate how hard it is to ship something on the scale of vets.gov from the outside.

Source: had early talks with the VA to join this project. I didn't, but came away with a lot of respect for the team working on it.

Raphomet··on Bug Prediction at Google (2011)
Hi! Just curious, why did you stop running the code? Seems like a useful thing.
Raphomet··on PagerDuty: You Have The Power
Chiming in - PagerDuty has saved many butts at Airbnb, too. We love to hate getting pages from you guys.
Raphomet··on Ixoth
Presumably this was a design choice: "Ixoth" doesn't really sound like anything else, which means Siri is unlikely to confuse it with another name or command.
Raphomet··on Mark Zuckerberg to speak at Startup School 2011
Startup School in 2010 was the reason I quit my job and went straight to Airbnb without taking a single day off in between.

This event is a life-changer.

Raphomet··on 1 million nights booked at Airbnb (YC W09)
Hey, thanks for your feedback! We're continually working to improve the core experience on Airbnb, and we'll be fleshing out some updates to the calendaring system in the near future to address problems like this.

(I'm a backend engineer at Airbnb - feel free to write me at raph@airbnb.com if you have any other feedback to pass along.)

Raphomet··on Ask HN: Where are the best places to post job opportunities for developers?
There's a Hire HN thread that shows up here about once a month.
Raphomet··on A Brief Look At Paul Graham's Writing Habits (with Charts)
That sounds amazing. Link?
Raphomet··on PG: Thank you for putting on Startup School
Yeah, thanks to YC for organizing it and to the speakers for volunteering their time. I have almost never learned so much in one day for free. You guys have really made me think about what I want to do with my life.
Raphomet··on How do I know if I am good enough?
I felt this way before taking my current job, but I took it anyway. It turns out that you can learn way more way faster when you're working in a team on a real project.

There's _a lot_ of stuff that your teammates can teach you in five minutes that would take a day of Googling and experimentation to learn yourself, especially when you're a beginner.

Raphomet··on Your favorite programmer doesn't like coding
I don't know if I'm anyone's favorite programmer, but I derive enormous satisfaction from building working applications - even unsexy CRUD applications - from nothing. What we do professionally is already god damn wizardry: we turn text into something that moves.
Raphomet··on Most Tweets Produce Zero Replies or Retweets
I'm frankly surprised that 29% of tweets DO produce replies or retweets. This really changes my perception of how the average user uses Twitter - people are interacting with each other a lot more frequently than I thought.

I guess this might be a result of Twitter hiding replies to your followees' tweets if you don't also follow the repliers.

Raphomet··on New Twitter Is About 50 Percent Rolled Out. Where’s The Facebook-Style Backlash?
New Twitter feels like Old Twitter, except it's faster and puts more of the stuff I want to see in front of me.

Facebook has many, many more features than Twitter does, and the features it has are not as easy for users to understand or use. When they reorganize the UI or change fundamental site behavior, users struggle to relearn how to use the site. It is a necessarily evil side effect of iterating on complex application features.

Raphomet··on Chrome OS Looks to Refresh Standard Fonts
Yes, it's a lot closer to Microsoft's Consolas than it is to Courier.
Raphomet··on Presentation Hacks: It's a performance
A thing that I'm realizing more and more is how few presentations are one-offs; that is, when you're developing a presentation, it's actually going to become part of your repertoire, and you're going to be able to use it again and again. Convention and conference speakers certainly reuse presentations, but the same applies to entrepreneurs (to investors) and employees (to senior stakeholders).

Rehearsal and practice became more palatable to me once I came to see individual presentations as permanent fixtures in my professional archive of works.

Raphomet··on Aves Engine: HTML/JavaScript Game Engine
Having built it once, you could probably write it again in half the time. Even if you don't have the code, you have the experience.

Writing code changes you.

Raphomet··on Aves Engine: HTML/JavaScript Game Engine
Check out the video on the wall playing at 2m35s; it's an HTML5 <video> transformed with CSS3!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol3qQ4CEUTo#t=2m32s

Raphomet··on Ask HN: Who's hiring?
We're hiring web developers at Context Optional, in San Francisco. We make web applications on social platforms. We use Rails, but we're open to a range of backgrounds and experience - we've even got a summer internship position open! http://www.contextoptional.com/

Write me for more information: rleeATcontextoptional.com

Raphomet··on Web Inspector Vs. Firebug
The Firebug team officially supports Firebug Lite for Chrome. Have you tried it? It still doesn't have full JavaScript debugging, but it'll cover 80% of everything else you need.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bmagokdooijbeehm...

Raphomet··on XKCD Explained, One Strip at a Time
Hey! It's like Marmaduke Explained (http://marmadukeexplained.blogspot.com/), but, in a subversive twist, the commentary is less funny than the comic. Postmodern!
Raphomet··on Why the Granny Coder decided to make her first iPhone game aged 77
Oh, man. From the title I thought _why came back in a brand new geriatric form - Why the Granny Coder. It's going to be a long day.
Raphomet··on Adobe Shuts Down for a Week
Adobe employees will be fine - they get an unheard-of 24 days of PTO per year (three of which are automagically consumed during the holidays).
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