aketchum

there are effectively no passenger trains in America and effectively no political will to expand them. Busses take multiple times as long for the same trip compared to a car. This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both. Given these facts, it is not wild at all to prefer cars (self driving or not) vs alternate transportation methods

nano seconds matter in some miniscule number of High Frequency and Algorithmic trading use cases. It does not matter in the majority of finance applications. No consumer finance use case cares about nanoseconds. The vast majority of money is moved via ACH, which clears via fixed width text files shared via SFTP, processed once a day. Nanoseconds do not matter here.

VIVA Finance | Atlanta, GA (In Person)| Back-end Software Engineer

Target Experience Level: 2-4 years of professional software experience

VIVA is a Fintech Startup based in Atlanta, GA with the mission to build a more inclusive financial system. VIVA offers unsecured personal loans to customers who have traditionally been excluded and taken advantage of by legacy financial institutions. The VIVA difference is to underwrite heavily on employment history and set up repayments through voluntary direct deposit payments from the borrower's paycheck. Our interest rates are less than 1/3 of the rates our customers are able to get from other financing options.

We are a VC backed company and have been in business for 6 years. We have been profitable since mid 2024 and are dramatically ramping up origination volume in 2026. We are hiring an additional backend engineer to support the larger transaction volume, as well as to support new products we are launching to diversify our revenue stream (including automobile refinancing and a credit builder account). You will join our engineering team of 11 and work in a dynamic environment where you are frequently writing net new code to directly support business objectives.

Our tech stack for the back-end is fully on AWS, using Lambda and ECS for compute and Typescript as the language, but experience with this specific stack is not necessary for talented candidates. Our preference is candidates who can come in office 4 days a week to our office on the Atlanta Beltline (next to Krog Street Market). VIVA does not provide visa sponsorship, so please have authorization to work in the USA.

Send an introduction to our hiring manger (alexa@viva-finance.com) with a resume and we will be in touch!

VIVA Finance | Atlanta, GA (In Person)| Front-End Developer

VIVA is a Fintech Startup based in Atlanta, GA with the mission to build a more inclusive financial system. VIVA offers unsecured personal loans to customers who have traditionally been excluded and taken advantage of by the legacy financial institutions. The VIVA difference is to underwrite heavily on employment history and set up repayments through voluntary direct deposit payments from the borrower's paycheck. Our interest rates are less than 1/3 of the rates our customers are able to get from other financing options.

We are a VC backed company and have been in business for 6 years. We have been profitable for the past year are a half. We are hiring an additional frontend engineer to support our increasing customer volume, as well as to support new products we plan to launch to diversify our revenue stream. You will join our engineering team of 10 and work in a dynamic environment where you are frequently writing net new code to support business objectives.

Our tech stack for the front-end is fully hosted on AWS. The web app is in React and we are building a mobile app with React Native, but experience with this specific stack is not necessary for talented candidates. Our preference is candidates who can come in office 4 days a week to our office on the Atlanta Beltline (next to Krog Street Market). VIVA does not provide visa sponsorship, so please have authorization to work in the USA.

Send an introduction to our hiring manger (alexa@viva-finance.com) with a resume and we will be in touch!

VIVA Finance | Atlanta, GA (In Person)| Front-End Developer

VIVA is a Fintech Startup based in Atlanta, GA with the mission to build a more inclusive financial system. VIVA offers unsecured personal loans to customers who have traditionally been excluded and taken advantage of by the legacy financial institutions. The VIVA difference is to underwrite heavily on employment history and set up repayments through voluntary direct deposit payments from the borrower's paycheck. Our interest rates are less than 1/3 of the rates our customers are able to get from other financing options.

We are a VC backed company and have been in business for 6 years. We have been profitable for the past year are a half. We are hiring an additional frontend engineer to support our increasing customer volume, as well as to support new products we plan to launch to diversify our revenue stream. You will join our engineering team of 10 and work in a dynamic environment where you are frequently writing net new code to support business objectives.

Our tech stack for the front-end is fully hosted on AWS. The web app is in React and we are building a mobile app with React Native, but experience with this specific stack is not necessary for talented candidates. Our preference is candidates who can come in office 4 days a week to our office on the Atlanta Beltline (next to Krog Street Market). VIVA does not provide visa sponsorship, so please have authorization to work in the USA.

Send an introduction to our hiring manger (alexa@viva-finance.com) with a resume and we will be in touch!

VIVA Finance | Atlanta, GA | Back-End Developer

VIVA is a Fintech Startup based in Atlanta, GA with the mission to build a more inclusive financial system. VIVA offers unsecured personal loans to customers who have traditionally been excluded and taken advantage of by the legacy financial institutions. The VIVA difference is to underwrite heavily on employment history and set up repayments through voluntary direct deposit payments from the borrower's paycheck. Our interest rates are less than 1/3 of the rates our customers are able to get from other financing options.

We are a VC backed company and have been in business for 6 years. We have been profitable for the past year and with a new debt facility closing at the end of June, we will be dramatically ramping up origination volume in the second half of the year. We are hiring an additional backend engineer to support the larger transaction volume, as well as to support new products we plan to launch to diversify our revenue stream. You will join our engineering team of 10 and work in a dynamic environment where you are frequently writing net new code to support business objectives.

Our tech stack for the back-end is fully on AWS, using Lambda and ECS for compute and Typescript as the language, but experience with this specific stack is not necessary for talented candidates. Our preference is candidates who can come in office 4 days a week to our new office on the Atlanta Beltline (next to Krog Street Market). VIVA does not provide visa sponsorship, so please have authorization to work in the USA.

Send an introduction to our hiring manger (alexa@viva-finance.com) with a resume and we will be in touch!

It is always interesting to me when people say they are "bad test takers". You mean you are bad at the part where we find out how much you know? Maybe you just don't know the material well enough.

caveat emptor - I am not ND so maybe this is a real concern for some, but in my experience the people who said this did not know the material. And the accommodations for tests are abused by rich kids more than they are utilized by those that need them.

im interested in the answer because I have not seen the same productivity increases with claude code and copilot. When I read comments like your original one I think that I must be using the tools incorrectly. How do you use them in your workflow?

Or for anyone else reading this, are there resources you have used to learn how to get the most out of LLM coding tools?

this seems unrelated to the post

If you have a 6% profit margin (i.e. grocery store) and then you have to pay 3% of basically all revenue, you are now at 3% profit margin. This is why Costco only accepts VISA - they have 11% margins so 3% would be over 25% of their profit. So they go exclusive with one processor and have a very large transaction volume, so they are able to negotiate much lower fees and thus lose less profit.

> Where's the money coming from? You can't spend out of thin air...

Of course you can - It is a credit card

"The banks marketed the deal last week with an intention to sell down the debt at 90-95 cents to the dollar but managed to price it at a higher price of 97 cents... In late 2022, an attempt to sell the unsecured loan attracted bids in the 60 cents to the dollar range which would have seen the banks take on a large loss on the face value of the debt."

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/banks-sell-down-55-...

so I was wrong to say they were as low as 40 cents, but the point stands that twitter's financials have improved a great deal

twitter corporate bonds are trading at 97 cents on the dollar now, they were trading closer to 40 cents shortly after the acquisition. I would not assume they are still losing money

I interviewed for an internship at Ford in probably 2015. It was striking to me that they spent basically half the interview hyping up Detroit and convincing me that it would be a fun city to spend time in. It was clear that the company knew one of its biggest challenges to hiring was the location. Glad to hear things are improving but the reputation of Detroit still has a ways to go.

Most of it is linear algebra and convex optimization. You can learn a lot of it with free resources from MIT, Stanford, Georgia Tech, or YouTube. If you want more of a school style learning environment you can enroll in the Georgia Tech OMSCS program and just take the classes related to the math etc that you are interested in. No reason you have to graduate and it is maybe $800 a course.

I’m not being a troll I’m seriously asking - how does crypto replace banks? Am I going to get a mortgage in BTC? If narrow banking, why give them my btc at all instead of holding myself? If not narrow banking then they are lending out my btc? Does that even work on blockchain? How do you do fractional reserve lending with a deflationary and one of one asset?

this is a tangent for sure but I doubt you can find payday loans that lend for 30% APR (Apple Store takes 30%). People really have no idea what realistic rates are for people with bad credit. If you have a sub 580 credit score the average APR for unsecured loans is 100%.

we are not going to end public school. Just look at Kentucky where trump and R candidates won easily but the school choice amendment was crushed

AI is a term that changes year to year. I don't remember where I heard it but I like that definition that "as soon as computers can do it well it stops becoming AI and just becomes standard tech". Neural Networks were "AI" for a while - but if I use a NN for risk underwriting nobody will call that AI now. It is "just ML" and not exciting. Will AI = LLM forever now? If so what is the next round of advancements called?

My company is an online lender - we use plaid so that users may instantly link their bank account. They have an alternative of verifying with micro-deposits, but that does take 2 days and the company gets less information on the user, so there are more manual verifications the user must do (provide paystub and id etc).

Plaid Cons:

- The end user must type their bank account credentials into a third party platform that uses their banks logo. It is terrible for general population cyber security because this is the exact type of you thing you should never do in general. However I do not know of any data leaks or info sec issues from Plaid specifically. As far as I know Plaid is totally safe with this information. Im sure they will be hacked eventually though - everyone is.

- Plaid shows the permission you are granting but the user can not make it more restrictive. For example the company with the plaid integration can choose from 1 to all off these functionalities (they all increase api cost though): KYC Verification, PII from the account, one time current balance, ongoing current balance check, all transactions for previous 2-24 months. The vendor chooses what they want to get and the end user can take it or leave it, they cant pick and choose.

Plaid Pros:

- instantly verify bank account instead of waiting 1-2 days for Micro Deposits to hit account then come back to the app to verify. This is just better flow for the user, who often wants the loan asap. It is better for company too, because there is more conversion.

- balance checks, transaction history - these are useful for us to not overdraw accounts when pulling a payment, and verify income. Budgeting apps use these to auto import values of course.

- many banks have been forced to move to OAuth because of plaid. Having worked at a Top 10 US bank, I do not believe that any other than maybe Capital One would have OAuth today if it were not for Plaid pushing them

- There is really no other feasible option to get this data (other than competitors with same exact strategy so no difference). This is the customer's data that is valuable to them! They should be able to share it with trusted partners if it gives them value.

unlikely, who would pay the plaid bill here? they dont really have ala cart pricing - you have to create an account with them etc

this sounds incredibly hard to do - plaid's moat is that it is a bunch of work to keep up to date with all these different bank UI's, plus many banks have moved to OAuth which they only provide to trusted partners - like plaid. You cant get an oauth token to your BofA account just because you have an account there

internship programs are ways to lock in top talent from top universities. I don't know the stats but I bet the majority of graduates end up taking a job at a company they interned with. You still need to hire juniors to have the eventual seniors.

cant show up on your credit report though - so why does this matter?

if you make it illegal to convert btc to cash (which a government can do trivially), my contention is that this will kill crypto. Most people simply don't want to break the law. Much of the liquidity in the system dries up. Yes you can break the law if you want, but that just goes to show that crypto's number one real world use case is to skirt regulations.

I would agree

The government in question can easily pass a law making it illegal for traditional financial institutions to interact with crypto. In this scenario, most users will simply stop using it to follow the law. For the die hards fans they will still reduce the use of the currency. They need to pay for taxes in the national currency and thus need income in the national currency. You still owe taxes on illegal income. Businesses need to pay payroll, vendors, and all taxes in the national currency. All of this means that individuals and businesses need national currency backed transactions to get the national currency to pay the taxes.

I agree that if you made "using btc" illegal then you and I could still send each other BTC. But I believe that you would rapidly see the use of crypto die out if governments cut it off from trad-fi, which they could do trivially easily.

I would have agreed, but the US BTC ETF success shows that people care about the asset of BTC divorced from the promise of lack of regulation.

I think the autor would argue that we are still in the era of "crypto is too small to fully regulate" stage. But if we take it to the extreme and 50% of all transactions are done with a crypto currency, why would governments _not_ apply all the traditional financial regulations to crypto? Moving money internationally is not hard due to technical reasons, but due to political reasons.

a lot of negative comments here but i think this is really neat! It is unclear what the case adds besides the form factor and buttons. Is that the main value or does the case provide charging or additional memory or anything like that?

Thanks for sharing!