Yeah very good point about USDS being in a political and less bureaucratic / civil service part of government. However, I'd argue anyone that wins in 2016 regardless of age or party (not that there aren't huge differences) will have to figure out how to leverage technology to effectively govern, so we may yet be surprised.
Zenefits is not a 2 person startup, they're worth billions of dollars, have hundreds of millions in the bank and have several hundred employees. It's probably better to think of them as a privately owned growth company than a start up at this point. (Edit: here's a source http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/06/zenefits-rising-hrs-hottest...)
cmd+f is back now, but I agree that was a breathtakingly bad product decision, I'm amazed they removed the feature and left it out for like two months. It's not like it's a hard product to dog food or they otherwise have shitty product sense.
Yeah there's also no mention about the tax implications of this stuff which is nontrivial, I suspect the example of paying $50,000 and benefits vs. $57,500 and no benefits ignores the tax implications in a way that doesn't help the employee but perhaps does the business.
Factoring out microservices into Go (I assume where you need better performance or concurrency) seems like a really interesting way to go rather than cutting over wholesale. Anything about it particularly difficult or interesting, or was it pretty straight forward?
It's just a more organized way to use callbacks, but having spent several months on a project using CPS in node I will say it certainly helps add order and remove hellishness.
I'd also add to this that you should be getting a decent base salary at a company at this phase and you should try and live below your means, both so you can save and have a cushion allowing you to work full time without outside funding and so that when you do the burn rate on that cushion is smaller.
I'd be more concerned with whether YC would invest in a company whose growth had flatlined: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html, with that said if you're making that much revenue I think there's likely other good options for you. Best of luck!
You can't do all these without roommates in San francisco (unless you have rent control pre 2011 or so) or Silicon Valley without roommates, but with roommates its manageable to a degree. Keep in mind "start up" can mean pretty radically different sizes with pretty radical mixes of base salary vs equity, later stage, bigger start ups (maybe more aptly, post product market fit, fast growing, privately held technology companies) can pay experienced engineers closer to $150k+ a year which even in an expensive area is a good amount of money. Even pretty small start ups tend to offer decent health care these days.
Heh also came to say the same thing. On reddit it would have obviously happened asap but I thought maybe there's less snarky humor on HN. Guess we couldn't resist this one though.
Tucson is really nice in a lot of ways, it doesn't have walkability though which is one of the main components used in the analysis. If it's just a proxy for a certain type of city culturally (as I suspect it is) then in some ways Tuscon could fit the bill reasonable well with much better weather. SF has pretty great weather if you're comparing it to the East Coast, too bad the affordability data is clearly stale.
Thanks for the feedback jareds, we've heard from a few folks that weekly is too much for them and will definitely consider changing it in the future, for now we've optimized the service for simplicity rather than trying to address every possible use case.
Slightly different question, was the website accessible to you as a blind person?
I'd also argue that being able to be more adaptive with how data is structured can be good for a project where things change very quickly. If you have something where the data model is of simple to moderate complexity and persistence is required, the smaller overhead of changing things on mongo vs having to update a SQL schema can be worthwhile. (For reference my specific use case was using rails with activerecord vs mongoid here).
Looks like the site has been improved considerably since I last checked it out, love the new content and context (especially the story about Alice in the about page).
Sure, I think he's also underestimating what percent of average office workers actually do have some of the talents and inclination to become skilled professional programmers. Despite excelling at math and doing some basic programming (in qbasic in fact) as a kid, it didn't occur to me to major in CS until I was halfway through college. I think broader exposure can only help people realize that programming is something they actually are interested in.
I think that's pretty correct, the entrepreneur's role is to disrupt the status quo, which is pretty much the opposite of how finance seems to operate.
As the author of said source I certainly agree, I put it together in about an hour. If you're referring to the fact it was running super slow for a bit that had more to do with overall just not anticipating how good my colleagues are at publicity, dreamhost shared servers, and some environment settings.
Also just a warning the site seems to be under a bunch of load right now :-( We'll be keeping an eye on it, but sorry in advance if you can't get through.