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tedroden

209 karma · joined February 6, 2008

I'm Ted Roden. I make fancyhands.com - I used to work at The New York Times in R+D, before that Vimeo.com

Feel free to get in touch myusername @ fancyhands.com.

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tedroden··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2016)
Fancy Hands | https://www.fancyhands.com | New York City - Full Time (onsite)

Fancy Hands is a personal assistant service. We've had a lot of good press, we're growing and we need some help.

We're looking to hire a python programmer to work on our back end. The ideal candidate would become our head of engineering.

Specific details: https://www.fancyhands.com/jobs/python-app-dev

We're also hiring front end developers: https://www.fancyhands.com/jobs/frontend-web

Fancy Hands is a small, profitable company trying to change the way people work. We'll won't call you a guru, ninja, or rockstar

tedroden··on Programming with people: Fancy Hands lets developers add human workers to apps
Yeah. I like MTurk, but it's pretty impenetrable.
tedroden··on Recurly: All systems unavailable.
It's back: https://twitter.com/recurlystatus/status/368411341947547648
tedroden··on Recurly: All systems unavailable.
I sure hope this isn't the same type of hardware failure as the last one: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/09/05/recurly-suffers-hardwa...

We've actually started using redundant billing providers to handle this case. I'd hoped we'd never have to actually need it again though: http://www.fancyhands.com/blog/redundant-billing-information...

tedroden··on EasyDNS under massive DDoS
Found out from one of our users via twitter. We switched to EasyDNS after (one of the) the godaddy fiascos.

Hopefully they get it sorted soon.

tedroden··on Dear Apple, let's talk about photos
It doesn't have a great way to upload from the desktop to G+, does it? I've been trying to figure this out for pics that don't originate on an android/iOS device.

I guess picasa can do it, but picasa leaves a lot to be desired.

tedroden··on App Engine down
It's one of the first times the whole service has been down, but parts of the service go down at least once a week. memcache, task queues are "elevated" with regularity and urlfetch is frequently down totally. ("elevated" generally means unusable).

Of course master/slave even has scheduled downtime.

tedroden··on Google App Engine is down
It's fine, because they're at 100% availability. Just totally down: http://www.evernote.com/shard/s2/sh/64201bd8-5392-49fc-a47c-...
tedroden··on How I automated the boring parts of life
We plan a lot of people's dentists appointments (mine included). Even though I need to go to the dentist, I've got some mental block to actually schedule it myself.

(PS: Sounds like you were an enjoysthin.gs user, thanks for that!)

tedroden··on How I automated the boring parts of life
(Sorry, we were at lunch).

Nope, at this point, we don't take any percentage or fee. We even pass along any discounts we receive (we get up to 15% off flower some purchases for example and we pass that along to you).

tedroden··on How I automated the boring parts of life
Nope, at this point, we don't take any percentage or fee. We even pass along any discounts we receive (we get up to 15% off flower some purchases for example and we pass that along to you).
tedroden··on How I automated the boring parts of life
Pretty close. We charge you right away (you would have received an email asking to approve the charge) and then use our own card.
tedroden··on How I automated the boring parts of life
Hi! This is Ted Roden, Founder of Fancy Hands.

So this can be confusing. We can definitely purchase things for you. Want us to order flowers? Have someone come install your air conditioner? No problem, we can even handle the payment for most things.

However, we do this by billing you securely (just like iTunes, etc), and then letting the assistants use "the company card." So the assistant won't actually handle your credit card information, but we can still make these purchases for you.

So users never have to expose their Credit Card information to their assistants. The assistant will never ask for it. If you need us to do something that actually requires knowing your entire credit card number for some reason, that's the type of thing we can't do. But making purchases doesn't fall under that umbrella.

tedroden··on Ask HN: Candidates with no sample code?
I keep hearing this... that people send in other peoples code. I smell a startup idea: is-this-code-stolen.com
tedroden··on Ask HN: Candidates with no sample code?
I totally agree. Some people don't have time to code outside of work. I have two kids, a full time job, I haven't had time outside of work to write code in ages... and I've only been a startup founder for a short time. However, my point is that "code" is as important as "resume" when looking for a job. As someone hiring, I'm just thinking the time would be better spent on code samples than writing a resume. I'm probably wrong though as far as it goes to hiring at most companies.
tedroden··on Ask HN: Candidates with no sample code?
Very interesting. Would you really be more interested in leaving your job for a one week trial than writing a code sample?

I have no problem with trials.

Also, you mention my "loss," I've NEVER turned anybody down because of a lack of code samples, I've just moved faster with other candidates. I've never hired anybody with code samples, but there were other factors...

tedroden··on Ask HN: Candidates with no sample code?
To be clear, I'm not suggesting they need to have an online presence at all. I'm just talking sample code. They can email a zip file even.

Seems like good practice to specify UI/non-ui. I'll keep that in mind. At this point, I'm just asking for any code as a basic sanity check before we meet up. Deeper dives could come later...

tedroden··on Ask HN: Candidates with no sample code?
Interesting idea with the tutorial walk-through... hadn't thought of that.
tedroden··on Ask HN: Candidates with no sample code?
Had part of this discussion on forrst, too: http://forrst.com/posts/Code_samples_from_Programmers-6pi
tedroden··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (December 2011)
New York City - Full Time (onsite)

Fancy Hands is a personal assistant service. We've had a lot of good press, we're growing and we need some help.

Specific details: http://www.fancyhands.com/jobs

We're looking for:

- Python developers (we're on App Engine, but if you know python enough, it's no trouble) - Front End Programmers - Designers

Fancy Hands is a small, profitable company trying to change the way people work. We'll won't call you a guru, ninja, or rockstar.

tedroden··on Please Poach Me
You REALLY need to be able to limit your "browse" results to location.
tedroden··on Online services our startup subscribes to
I keep hearing asana... I like the keyboard shortcuts, so I'll probably go that way. Thanks!
tedroden··on Online services our startup subscribes to
Do you guys use a project management package? Basecamp, asana, pivotal etc?

(We don't use them either (yet), just wondering what you do instead?)

tedroden··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (October 2011)
Fancy Hands. We're hiring Python Devs in NYC, Marketing folks, and QA/Support/Community Managers. All positions are full time and on site in NYC.

Some good positions for folks who aren't on HN too, so please forward along to friends.

http://www.fancyhands.com/jobs

tedroden··on Ask HN: What API to the physical world do you wish existed?
Coming very soon.
tedroden··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (September 2011)
Fancy Hands - NYC

Hiring

  - 2 Python based engineers for Google App Engine.
  - 1 Front End (JS, etc)
  - 1 Marketing 
Definitely willing to work with engineers remotely, but would prefer you to be in NYC.

Email me for more info, etc: tedroden @ fancyhands

tedroden··on [dead]
Good gravy dudes. It's a joke.
tedroden··on Twitter Suspends UberTwitter And Twidroyd For Violating Policies
"Twitter" sure, but if they discourage tweet, it's a new thing. You used to be encouraged to use tweet in your app name instead of twitter. Remember, they didn't officially call them "tweets" until recently(ish). You can even register twitter names with "tweet" in them, not "twitter."
tedroden··on Is this a bug in how hotmail handles outgoing email addresses?
This is what the article says: When you send an email via hotmail, it converts the entire address to lowercase. So if you enter "someemail+UPPERlower@whatever.com," hotmail converts it to "someemail+upperlower@whatever.com." Despite the RFC (linked in the article)
tedroden··on Delegate or die: the self-employed trap
Love this idea. I build my entire business around it: http://www.fancyhands.com
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