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derekchiang

195 karma · joined February 16, 2013

Founder of ZeroDev (YC W23) & cofounder of Zelos.gg (YC W20).

Lead engineer at Pachyderm (YC W15).

Worked at HashiCorp, Mesosphere, and DFINITY.

Feel free to reach out at me@derekchiang.com

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derekchiang··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2020)
Zelos.gg (YC W20) | Los Angeles | Frontend / Fullstack | https://zelos.gg

Zelos is a rewards program where gamers earn points and redeem in-game prizes across multiple games. When you play your favorite game, simply finish a challenge (e.g. get 3 kills) to earn points and trade in your points for a prize (e.g. a new game or a skin).

We built Zelos because games today focus on monetizing off their most dedicated players (whales). For gamers like us who play multiple games, spending money in each game quickly becomes expensive. When we move to a new game, all the money we spent in the old game is effectively lost.

So we built Zelos for the 55% of gamers who play 2 or more games and they LOVE us. Having launched only 2 months ago, we already have 50K+ weekly active users across 30+ countries.

Zelos graduated from YC W20 and just closed a heavily oversubscribed seed round. We are only a team of 3 and you will be our first frontend/fullstack hire. As such, you can expect great responsibilities, huge opportunities to learn & grow, and of course significant equity.

Being a gaming company, we have a very laid-back and open culture where people care about having fun as much as doing great work. You would be a great fit here if you enjoy playing games and building things.

If you are interested, please email us directly at founders@zelos.gg and tell us more about yourself.

derekchiang··on Ask HN: Who is hiring right now?
Zelos.gg (YC W20) | Los Angeles, and REMOTE USA/CANADA | Frontend / Fullstack | https://zelos.gg

Zelos is a rewards program where gamers earn points and redeem in-game prizes across multiple games. When you play your favorite game, simply finish a challenge (e.g. get 3 kills) to earn points and trade in your points for a prize (e.g. a new game or a skin).

We built Zelos because games today focus on monetizing off their most dedicated players (whales). For gamers like us who play multiple games, spending money in each game quickly becomes expensive. When we move to a new game, all the money we spent in the old game is effectively lost.

So we built Zelos for the 55% of gamers who play 2 or more games and they LOVE us. Having launched only 2 months ago, we already have 50K+ weekly active users across 30+ countries.

Zelos graduated from YC W20 and just closed a heavily oversubscribed seed round. We are only a team of 3 and you will be our first frontend/fullstack hire. As such, you can expect great responsibilities, huge opportunities to learn & grow, and of course significant equity.

Being a gaming company, we have a very laid-back and open culture where people care about having fun as much as doing great work. You would be a great fit here if you enjoy playing games and building things.

If you are interested, please email us directly at founders@zelos.gg and tell us more about yourself.

derekchiang··on HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation
I had the chance to work with Armon as a contractor at HashiCorp when I was in college. Armon was absolutely one of the most down-to-earth leaders I've ever seen. Even though he was technically brilliant and I was only an undergrad, he never made me feel like I was stupid or inexperienced, but rather patiently guided me towards the best solutions, so I was able to gain a lot of confidence and grow a lot along the way.

If you are an aspiring distributed systems engineer (as I was), I highly recommend applying to HashiCorp. They are solving some of the most fun challenges in distributed systems and they have a great engineering culture, not to mention that they are remote-friendly.

derekchiang··on Ask HN: Advice for a new and inexperienced tech lead?
I think your advice is great for tech leads at big companies, but for tech leads at startups, I have to disagree with the point about "Work for your product - not your company."

At a startup, the business objective has to come first and the engineering team has to keep the bigger picture in mind. "Long-term stability and robustness" won't matter if your company is dead. Build for the short-term and build fast while you are figuring out product-market fit. Move fast and break things.

derekchiang··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2018)
Binary Mint | San Francisco, REMOTE/ONSITE

Here at Binary Mint, we fundamentally believe in the value of blockchains, which enable the creation of “decentralized applications,” or DApps. DApps are trustless, transparent, interoperable, and unstoppable, and thus have the potential to empower users in unprecedented ways.

But just like how web 2.0 did not take off until it started seeing usage outside of the military and academia, blockchains are not going to take off until DApps are being used by the average consumers. And yet, it’s the unfortunate reality today that DApps have very little usage outside of finance. The reason is that it’s currently extremely difficult to create DApps that can handle a large number of users efficiently, due to technical limitations with existing blockchains and the lack of good tooling for building DApps.

Binary Mint is all about creating technologies that will make consumer DApps a reality. Our first product is the Tenfold Protocol (https://www.tenfoldprotocol.io/), a practical and versatile platform on which developers can easily build DApps that scale.

Binary Mint is an early-stage startup. As such, you can expect to be wearing many hats, becoming a leader in the company, and making a large impact. We are looking for people who are responsible, driven, and great at what they do. We are a distributed team with a base in San Francisco; both local and remote hires are very welcome.

The full list of open positions can be found here: https://github.com/binary-mint/careers

To apply to any of these positions, please email careers@binarymint.io

derekchiang··on Reusable and type-safe options for Go APIs
That's a good point, and I've since updated the blog post and the code to use anonymous interfaces instead.
derekchiang··on Ask HN: How do you version your data?
Check out Pachyderm [0]. It supports distributed, version-controlled data storage. The API is very Git-like: you modify data by making commits.

[0] https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm

derekchiang··on RunC – A lightweight universal runtime container, by the Open Container Project
As noted in the parent comment, the Open Container Format will supersede appc. It will also adopt a lot of the ideas from appc, as noted in the CoreOS announcement [1].

[1] https://coreos.com/blog/app-container-and-the-open-container...

derekchiang··on Dreamweaver CS3 crashes with files that are exactly 8KB in size
If this was the case then any multiple of 8KB should also cause the bug to happen, but according to OP only exactly 8KB causes the bug.
derekchiang··on Distributed systems readings
For a more ambitious reading list, refer to CS6410 from Cornell [0]. The topics of the readings range from operating systems to distributed systems and networking.

[0] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6410/2014fa/sched.htm

derekchiang··on Teaching OCaml
1 would like to recommend the lecture notes [1] used in CS3110 at Cornell to people who want to learn OCaml. They have been used and revised over the years and are of very high quality.

[1] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/cs3110/2014sp/lecture_note...

derekchiang··on Why Broken Sleep Is a Golden Time for Creativity
FYI, I have worked at several bay-area tech startups and none of them has meetings in the morning, probably because many engineers tend to work late at night.
derekchiang··on Lecture 1 – How to Start a Startup [video]
That simply means if you are extremely unlucky (e.g. luck being 0, like being hit by a bus), then all the other factors don't matter. On the other extreme, extreme luck can turn your company around even if you don't do so well on the other parts.
derekchiang··on Aerospike goes Open Source
Hi Brian, could you recommend some resources for learning to write high-performance code?

And also, would you care to explain why O_SYNC is better than fsync?

Thank you!

derekchiang··on Stripe Open-Source Retreat
Wow, this is the exact idea I have been thinking about!

For successful companies like Stripe, the cost of doing this program is negligible. And yet many open-source projects (OpenSSL comes to mind) can really take a huge step forward by having several professional developers working full-time on it for three months. Lots of kudos to Stripe for doing this, and hope to see more companies follow this example!

derekchiang··on Rust 0.10 released
Yes, lots of people have started using Rust for hobby projects [0] and their feedback has been invaluable to the development of the language.

[0] http://rust-ci.org/projects/

derekchiang··on Rust 0.10 released
The language will still change a lot before 1.0, so I don't recommend serious usage in production, unless you are prepared for updating your codebase every now and then. However, many people have already started using Rust for personal projects, and their feedback has been invaluable to the development of the language!
derekchiang··on Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award
Not sure why you seem to think researchers are flowing to Google. Microsoft Research is still the biggest name in distributed systems, if not CS in general. They have been consistently producing high-quality papers [1].

[1] http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html

derekchiang··on Intern at a YC Company
I think most US undergrads start applying for internships during the fall semester and many of them will have already accepted an offer by now. I strongly suggest YC to open up this application earlier, ideally in October or November.
derekchiang··on Numbers That Explain Why Facebook Acquired WhatsApp
The post mentioned that all WhatsApp's early competitors benefited through advertising, while WhatsApp dedicated to keep the UI clean, and earn revenues by charging users one dollar a year.
derekchiang··on Show HN: Codewars
I didn't expect much but ended up pretty impressed by the site. It's beautifully designed and the flow is very natural. Lots of kudos!
derekchiang··on Ask HN: Where are the interesting jobs?
What I used to do was to browse the companies funded by leading venture capital firms like KPCB[1]. These companies tend to do non-trivial stuff.

[1] http://www.kpcb.com/companies

derekchiang··on Go’s Type System Is An Embarrassment
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Rust[1] yet. It's a systems programming language that has managed to get rid of null pointers by carefully controlling the ways in which a a value can be constructed[2].

[1] http://www.rust-lang.org/

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Doc-language-FAQ#how-do...

derekchiang··on How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system
Perhaps the biggest red flag: papers are to be sent to icriest@gmail.com
derekchiang··on The state of the Rust Runtime
It might be worth noting that both PRs described in the slides have already been merged.

Links to the PRs (the discussions are worth a read):

1. https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10830

2. https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10965

derekchiang··on Heroku WebSocket performance
Yeah, it's killed after a timeout and restarted when a new request comes in. Which is why when you revisit an old Heroku app it takes a long time to load.
derekchiang··on Lime – Experimental Sublime Text clone
Thanks a lot for doing this project! I have been hoping for an open-source alternative for ST for a while.

As a side note, could you clarify the build section where it says we need to modify cgo.go? I'm not exactly sure what to do there. I'm using Ubuntu 13.10.

derekchiang··on Lime – Experimental Sublime Text clone
Same issue here. No build.go in completion. Please update the instructions because I REALLY REALLY want to give it a try. Thanks!
derekchiang··on Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor
I love the tool, though it'd be great if the editing windows support full-screen mode. Writing in a small grid is a pain.
derekchiang··on Anti-FB: I don't give a fuck
In fact I wrote this in Erlang :P
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