trevoro

Bench - Vancouver, BC

We’re Bench, and we’re hard at work turning something really old (bookkeeping) into something new and appealing. As part of the engineering team, you’ll help us build tools that augment the capabilities of real accountants, eliminate drudgery, and build inspiring interfaces.

We’re a tight-knit group of engineers. We value effectiveness, open debate, picking the right tool for the job, and the joy of accomplishment. We currently use Scala, Java, and Node. We do all of our ops automation using Ansible and AWS with a bunch of other tools in between.

We’re currently looking for:

Senior Software Engineers (Platform) Software Engineers (Full-Stack Web) Devops Engineers

If you’re interested in joining Bench please visit https://bench.co/careers/

A really great documentary that partially covers the history of suburbs is called "end of suburbia". Its mostly about the theory of peak oil, and how that would destroy the "american dream". Despite all those flaws it has some interesting buts about suburban development itself, and some original implementations. Specifically, a lot of transporation from city suburbs to city centers happened via light rail, versus individual cars.

Personally I dont think the suburbs are going anywhere. Im absolutely fascinated by the possibilites of electric, autonomous vehicles, and the small house movement. To me, those elements in combination might strike a reasonable balance between the desire to have ones own space, and the transportation requirements.

How terribly disappointing.

If you're going to get all nostalgic about running Amiga applications then you may as well just go and download the original kickstart and workbench ROMs and fire up an emulator. FS-UAE(1) works pretty well. Someone even wrote a PNaCl emulator for Chrome.

[1] http://fs-uae.net

See original discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6684318

You don't ever seem to find startup ideas. Startup ideas seem to find you. That's why it's important to always be listening - if you listen often enough then problems will "appear out of nowhere" and you'll be in a good place to understand their potential.

Vancouver has quite a few talented engineers but the teams can be a bit insular. The meetups are good and you should definitely go to either the Ruby on Rails one, or Node Brigade. CascadiaJS is happening soon too.

If you want to get some introductions I'd be happy to grab a coffee.

The rumour circulating around is that they have the ability to detect which other applications are running or installed on a mobile device. Certainly for applications that have this service installed, they could correlate the owner of the device to an ID. That might help with targeting ads, but it's just a theory.

It depends how far away from land you are.

A Tsunami has tons of energy, but it only really gets 'big' on the surface when that energy is constrained by the depth of the sea floor. That's why if you're on a boat and get a tsunami warning, it's better to head out to sea.

By your logic I'd be running a WAP site over Gopher to satisfy the progressive enhancement ethos. At a certain point it's absurd to assume javascript isn't there. [1]

What brought on this particular use case was a JSON response where all the times were in UTC. I'm not really into forcing a technique on someone when it isn't required. If that's not your use case, then you don't have the problem!

[1] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/23.0/releasenotes/

Also: http://harp.io

Actually, linode has an API but doesn't do metered billing - thats really what you want for your particular use case.

Manta is an Object Store with Compute in-situ. The client is OS agnostic AFAIK - you can use a linux instance as your client if you want.

http://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/commands-reference.html

Official Announcement: http://www.joyent.com/blog/hello-manta-bringing-unix-to-big-...

You'll probably hear this alot: Just dont do it. Seriously. Running a mail service is complicated and on your own it's barely worth the effort.

But if you're serious about it then start with learning Postfix as your MTA. This will only be good for inbound mail and delivering mail to local inboxes. If you want IMAP and POP3 then you'll need to dig into some other services. Courier is the most popular, but all the glue will still need to be written by you.

I really like using Restdown https://github.com/trentm/restdown

It's markdown with a few more conventions. Really handy.

Honest question: Is it possible that they're not worried about sharper images of distant objects insomuch as being able to survey much larger portions of the sky with a large array of satellites?

Excellent advice. Quite often when technical founders aren't quite sure how to go about the validation process, we tend to double-down on development. Instead the exact opposite is what seems to work best; get out there and talk to people you think need your painkillers.

Yup we've got that working too - but we wanted to make the email cleaning algorithm better prior to launching that feature.

You'll have that by the end of the day. (Promise!)

I'm not sure what you mean by "out of context" but I will <asssume> you mean "an email that has nothing to do with the original conversation"

This particular version relies on Google's conversation grouping implementation to extract the appropriate emails. If someone replies out of context, that would be up to a human to move into a new Thread. We had some thoughts like "fork from here" or "create a new conversation".

Right now your email conversations are not automatically sync'd but when they are, any reply to your email conversation (what Gmail interprets as such) would be appended to the page.

Unintended Consequences? Isn't that the whole idea? ;)

Cool! I'd love to hear about what you were working on. trevoro [at] coherence.io

We've definitely thought about that.

Personally I find it quite interesting that sharing a link with someone has different psychological perceptions than forwarding an email. There is implied trust with an email conversation - but the reality is you never know who is being BCC'd.

Sure thing. We'll put one up on the website. In the meantime here is a link:

https://beta.thread.is/t/c487c28d-285c-4349-8e0f-396699df3e9...

As one of those "early tech exit" Canadian entrepreneurs, this article really hits home for me. When I first started out I talked to several successful entrepreneurs who were living in Vancouver at the time and got some rather interesting advice. Paraphrasing: Move to the valley. There are too many reasons to be there. Don't be a patriot - and don't be a martyr.

Lack of critical mass in any of these "tech hubs", overall aversion to risk, lower paying jobs, and ease of moving to the valley are all cards stacked against you before you even start.

Many smart people realize that and they leave - critical mass is incredibly difficult to achieve when you're still bleeding all that talent. This is why having anchor tenants - large companies that draw talent in is so important. We can just never seem to have more than one at at time, and then they're mis-managed into oblivion.

Software at Joyent called "Cloud Analytics" http://dtrace.org/blogs/dap/2011/03/01/welcome-to-cloud-anal...

If you're interested in this sort of thing, you should watch the BBC series "Connections".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcSxL8GUn-g

Actually that is not the case. In SmartOS you have two options for networking. You can run a zone in "IP exclusive" mode which will give the zone full control over its networking stack. This means you can run a firewall or even change the IP addresses, etc from within the zone. SmartOS makes that apply to VMs as well. There are also anti-spoof mechanisms built into the OS to ensure that you dont get unfriendly neighbours.

Here is a rough overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris_Network_Virtualizat...

Are you buying BitCoin at Wells Fargo and Chase? Or are you just making a deposit? This isn't as though these banks are carrying a balance of BitCoin as they would foreign currency.

Sorry, bad typo. I meant "scrips", not "Scripts"

The major difference is between scripts which are representative of value and not traded vs an attempted representation of real, tradable currency.