sebleon

It's a matter of time before smart folks in South Asia and Easter Europe move to Latin America to get higher salaries as they get into more US-friendly timezones.

That being said there's a lot of amazing developers in India that are open to working US-work hours for max collaboration

Yeah you don't really need a middle man to "take care of payroll." Most developers in Latam prefer to be contractors on paper, and have a direct relationship with the employer. Most agencies take a 30-50% cut of what employers pay, way better for developers to skip the middleman

Dude - it's way better for companies to hire developers directly, no need for a middle man like Astro that's charging 15% (eg. 15% of $80k/yr = $12k/yr in middle man fees)... platforms like letsdeel.com or remote.com charge as little as $50/mo per person to take care of compliance and payroll

Very interesting, how did you figure out carrots were the issue?

For a second, I thought this title claimed that stack overflow reduces the need for software engineers by 15%. Now I’m curious what the actual number might be, given the productivity boost that it provides...

To be clear, it sounds like MoPub/Grindr/OKCupid aren't selling people's data. Instead, they reveal personal information (for free?) to hundreds of advertising networks when hosting auctions for ad inventory.

That would mean that after getting approved as an ad-network on MoPub, you can get all 1.5B users' data for free, just by participating in the auction (without even having to win and spending money in auctions).

Does anyone on HN happen to have a sample bid request from MoPub that demonstrates the actual data that's made available to ad networks (DSPs)?

This is a really interesting concept. While this initial prototype is rudimentary, I agree with them in this important shift to building cameras "good enough" for machine-usage.

The Big Co interview process is a binary classifier (hire/no hire). It's actually reasonable to tune it to minimize false-positives, since a bad hire can be disastrous for all parties involved - imagine an employer changing their minds on you during your first few months. Tradeoff is that this will increase false-negatives, saying No to great people, and lead to stories in the link above.

Other thing worth mentioning is that "culture fit" might make companies turn down excellent developers, who don't happen to have the founders' same personality type.

A closer analogy for a remedy to an illness would be: Whenever your yard gets overrun with bears, putting a rock on the porch makes them go away for an unknown reason. Don’t let yourself be limited by science, which is bounded by human intelligence.

What are his responsibilities as your manager?

Fair - correlation does not mean causation. That being said, countless experiments show placebo can have empirical results; even the simple belief in a remedy can improve healthcare outcomes.

Yes, if someone has a home remedy that gets great results, why switch to a substance from someone in a lab coat?

Installs is a vanity metric, the more interesting metric in consumer social is retention numbers like d30, d60, and beyond. If they're able to keep users onboard for long periods of time, TikTok becomes a threat to incumbents.

Very cool - Airbnb feels like it got overrun by professional property managers, cool to see a more personal alternative with a genuine community.

Indeed, the US presidential election is a joke on various levels.

1. The president is not picked based on the people’s vote. The US is a republic, not a democracy, where government officials cast the deciding votes.

2. The voting infrastructure can be easily tampered with, likely by design as pointed out above.

3. There is no limits on campaign spending, enabling billionaires and corporations to own the winning candidates that got the most airtime.

4. Two private entities have a duopoly on the presidency. They’ve established rules that prevent any new parties from serious consideration.

5. As surfaced by the Wikileaks DNC dump, at least one (if not both) of these parties actively sabotage some of their candidates to ensure the party’s pick a spot in the final national election.

Ha, I wonder what PR firm Stripe hired to get this story published. This piece is less subtle than the "The Suit is Back!" of yesteryear. [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Congrats, this post made the front page, seems like you don’t need our advice!

As the tables turn, did you have your friends upvote this or something?

This is a lot like consumer cryptography - yes, technical exploits are a problem, but they're overshadowed by social engineering.

In the case of US elections - even with secure infrastructure, the election will be determined by billionaire-sponsored campaign budgets and policies that entrench the 2 party system.

After the DNC email leak, I'm amazed how little attention was placed on hard evidence that the Democratic Party methodically sabotaged candidates in the primaries. Shifting public focus to the "Russian Hacking" was amazing PR work.

While Stripe is extremely developer-friendly, the alternatives aren’t that bad. They’re annoying to set up, but certainly not prohibitive to a determined founder starting out. Today, options like Braintree are comparable in terms of dev-friendliness.

There's a few reasonable reasons why FB should allow gender-specific job ad campaigns:

- Employers will likely see better ROI on their ad-spend by creating separate ad campaigns for every gender, with copy/creatives optimized for the target demo

- Employers may see that FB ads are ineffective for a specific gender, eg. fb ads are good for finding male candidates, while other marketing channels (radio, tv ads, etc) work better for female candidates.

Given these examples, I wouldn't blame Fb for allowing gender-specific ads. The onus should be on the employer to reach out to candidates of all genders throughout their recruiting campaigns, with gender balance when you aggregate efforts across different mediums.

Ha, likely there's a similarly sinister list of reasons not to do business with the United States. A quick glance at US foreign policy should suffice, or even just the actions resulting from Kissinger's direction.

Very interesting - the few times I've had a cigarette, I've definitely noticed a sense of clarity in thinking and alertness. For non-smokers, showers seem to be one of the rare times where one is left alone with ones thoughts to explore, while cigarette smokers may experience this with every smoking break.

I'm surprised more countries don't block Google and Facebook. These two sites are extremely powerful in their ability to shape public opinion, hard to imagine why so many governments are letting American corporations shape citizens' minds.

Ha, venture math is pretty hilarious. VCs basically need to give back their investors a 300% return in 10 years to make up for the risk they handle. Eg. For a $40M fund that's trying to grow to $120M, $1M here and there doesn't really move the needle.

Right on, mentality likely shifted along the way.

And yes, everyone makes mistakes, but author shows great character in making things right later on.

Ah, to clarify: Buffer threw the seed investors under the bus when they inked a deal with the Series A investors.

However, kudos to the founders for fixing this mistake later on. While their intentions at Series A were questionable (raising to pay themselves), they made things right later on, though they did pay the price of a co-founder and CTO departure. Everyone makes mistakes, but true character can be seen when you deal with them.

> Our seed investors had been supporting the company for almost six years, and several were starting to ask when they may get a return

> The Series A class of shares included a protective provision which meant that Buffer was unable to offer liquidity for other shareholders (seed or common) without approval from a majority of the Series A.

> $2.5m of $3.5m was for founders and early team [of Series A money]

Terms:

> Series A class of shares included a protective provision which meant that Buffer was unable to offer liquidity for other shareholders

> a return of 9 percent annual interest on their investment at any point

So... the founders raised a series A mostly to give themselves liquidity, at the expense of a high interest loan that also threw their early investors under the bus? Well, they definitely achieved their vision of putting together an atypical round.

Given their lack of interest in going down the VC-startup path (high growth at all costs, keep raising, aim for IPO, etc), it's unclear what their motivations were to raise a VC round in the first place.

Ah, I meant 'good' relative to options in the developing world. Getting +20Mb/s for under 0.1-5% of your annual income puts you way ahead of most people on Earth.

But yes, I'm sure there's cities out there with more options than NYC.

Cool initiative based on positive ideals. From a practical perspective, NYC citizens have a number of good options for internet access; however, perhaps learnings from this community project can be brought to more needy areas outside the US.

They're not doing a full pivot - rather they're shifting from "car-ride-hailing," to the all-encompassing "mobility" and diversifying their revenue across a number of transportation means.