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billnguyen

62 karma · joined September 6, 2012

podcast nerd. product manager
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billnguyen··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2017)
Opal | Sr Frontend Engineer | Portland OR | Onsite | https://workwithopal.com/careers

Opal is creating a brand new space for marketing/brand collaboration work. We've gotten significant traction with top brands like Nike, AirBnB, Weiden + Kennedy, Target, Levis, and many more. We've recently closed our B round and are gearing up for major growth.

We believe the best products are built when design and engineering work in concert, and are looking to hire the best to support that vision. We have tons of openings including:

- Front End Engineer (React, Javascript)

- Back End Engineer (Elixir, Javascript, Ruby)

- SDET (NightmareJS, Jenkins, anything needed to get it done)

Plus, we offer relocation assistance for candidates who are looking to move to Portland (who wouldnt want to live in Portland ^_^)

If you're interested, ping at bnguyen [at] workwithopal.com

billnguyen··on Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
Schmidt, like any good CEO, will always always sell anything his company outputs. You'll never find him criticising anything Google does, maybe in retrospect but never upon launch.
billnguyen··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2014)
Seeking Technical Co-Founder for Nonprofit Startup

We are an exciting nonprofit seeking to make the world a better place by connecting international travelers with daylong volunteering opportunities in order to bring more resources to vetted nonprofit organizations around the world.

We believe that by re-engineering international volunteering and making it open to micro-contributions we can create new revenue streams for worthy nonprofit organizations and increase awareness of global issues across a wide demographic of travelers.

We have been working on this project since August 2012 and we incorporated in July 2013. We have laid legal groundwork (applied for 501c3 and have temporary fiscal sponsor), have considerable traction with fundraising, partner organizations (6 confirmed, 6 in the works), and a few initial pilot users.

We have one full-time co-founder and two part-time co-founders - none are technical. We are seeking a technical co-founder to lead our technical strategy (including but not limited to crowdfunding and social engagement), to take on projects (including but not limited to web development and CRM), and to to be a decision-making member of our core team. Web Development experience required.

The ideal candidate can contribute 8-10 hours per week, but would be able to go full time if we are admitted into a incubator program (we plan to apply to 3+ programs this year). No compensation is currently available, but is negotiable pending funding.

We are striving to create an organizational culture that values innovation, transparency, and integrity. We are a fun core group with a dynamic extended community of volunteers and supporters.

A passion for making the world a better place and engaging global issues is essential.

If interested, please email kerry@giveadayglobal.org, tell her billy sent you :)

billnguyen··on Lenovo to buy Google's Motorola handset division
Nexus phones/products have always been made by external partners (HTC, Samsung, LG, etc...), none of which have ever been Motorola. Why does the Moto sale affect the Nexus line?
billnguyen··on How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
The price of anything is a function of its supply versus its demand.

A non open (or not truly open in this case) kills demand. Without demand for a finite supply (high quality engineers) the supply's worth can never fully be realized.

billnguyen··on Outbox Is Shutting Down
Crazy. Some of the comments on this old TechCrunch article about the economics of Outbox look Nostradamus-like

http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/outbox-digitizes-sf-snail-m...

It just never fully made economic sense. Especially with the overhead of undoing something that was just done, mail delivery.

billnguyen··on Today my startup failed
Love seeing these posts but without any details on what he was doing on the "business side" that failed its unfortunately not very useful for the reader.
billnguyen··on Startup failure post-mortems
really great insight here. thanks for gathering it.
billnguyen··on I never finish anyth
I struggle with this too, my github/bitbucket is a barren wasteland of half finished products. I believe that its fully a mindset thing and realize that success is not an accident nor some ephemeral spark of genius. Success is a a choice, every day.

I find this YT video on Steph Curry to be an amazing story of how success is built by they choices we make every day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riy59ubGJiU

'Are the habits you have for today on par with the dreams you have for tomorrow?' Not yet... but its getting there.

billnguyen··on Court to Yelp: Reveal names of negative reviewers
Your theory really only works for places with a large amount of reviews (positive or negative). When you have only a handful of reviews, the need for authenticity grows because they carry much more weight.

You would need much more data points to avoid the noise of fake reviews.

billnguyen··on Coding Interview Tips
Love this! Was in a coding interview once where they just gave you a problem and you were given laptop and time to code out a solution using whatever you would normally use ie stack overflow. First interview I've had where I felt like it was a fair test of my programming capabilities.

Of course this requires that you design the question in a way that is not completely google-able, but real world programming is not just about solving a trick question but being able to be resourceful enough to find a real working solution.

billnguyen··on Why Pierre Omidyar decided to join forces with Glenn Greenwald
Indeed, the internets do seem to be trending towards highly focused niches rather than broad services like before.
billnguyen··on Why Pierre Omidyar decided to join forces with Glenn Greenwald
Glad someone is taking this on. The recent threat to investigative journalism is a real bad indicator to America's future. Hopefully this in conjunction with Aaron Swartz's will really bring some bite back to journalism.

Now if only they can change that apathetic/ignorant attitude that so many of us Americans have...

billnguyen··on A beginner's cheat sheet for web development
yes, seconded! the most difficult part is not the languages themselves but how to glue everything together...

Does anyone on hackernews have a resource like that? Its been such a pain trying to glue together a site.

billnguyen··on Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose
I could live with the new Compose... its the hidden/floating "Formatting Options" that really grinds my gears.
billnguyen··on Startup - Bill Watterson, a cartoonist's advice
i miss calvin and hobbes.
billnguyen··on Square open-sources its Vim repo, Maximum Awesome
luckily its open sourced and someone can create a Windows distro if they are so inclined.
billnguyen··on Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
As a former Googler definitely agree with the 120% time. But I think its more because its hard to do any work effectively only once a week. So in order to make your 20% time be useful you just have to put in more time than 20%. And obviously you can't reduce your other workload so you put in extra time to make your 20% project successful.

And for what its worth, I personally have never had a problem requesting for 20% time. Like all big companies, it really depends on your team and boss. I believe your experience of straight out rejection is more the exception than the rule.

billnguyen··on Google blocks Windows Phone YouTube app again, for “manufactured” reasons
its not anticompetitive to not allow a third party to release your product on their platform without following your rules (reasonable or not).

Hundreds of millions of dollars in engineering effort and bandwidth go into Youtube. In reality Google is completely within its rights to no do anything to support any platform it chooses not to. Why allow a platform and company to leech off that if they're not willing to. Microsoft is just trying to win in the court of public opinion here.

billnguyen··on Asking the U.S. to allow Google to publish more national security request data
The US needs to close its tax loopholes and stop blaming people for taking advantage of its own terrible laws. As long as the loopholes exist its in everyones best interests to take advantage of everything they can.
billnguyen··on Ask HN: I'm lost. Please help
Don't be dragged down by the weight of your past decisions. Do what you need to be happy tomorrow. And from your post its pretty obvious to me what that would be.
billnguyen··on New Google+ is beautiful?
if you want single column theres an option under More called Steam Layout
billnguyen··on New Google+ is beautiful?
@jack-r-abbit: its just a setting in your browser, chrome makes it sticky so once you set it for your google+ page you should always see it zoomed in/out to your setting
billnguyen··on New Google+ is beautiful?
no, but its pretty apparent that the G+ team doesn't think it matters. 3 columns just helps my brain get on that same wavelength, whether I agree with it or not :)
billnguyen··on New Google+ is beautiful?
I find it makes more sense when you're zoomed out enough to have it rearrange itself into 3 columns vs 2.

When its at 2 columns I waste a lot of eye and brain strength trying to make some order out of it. But when its at 3 columns my brain just stops trying to make any sense of order and just starts consuming content.

billnguyen··on Why I am building a product with a tiny market
why would advertising skew the factual information presented in wikipedia? Advertising is based off content, content isn't based off advertising.
billnguyen··on Facebook Home suffering from poor Google Play reviews: 48% of users award 1 star
Except none of those launchers remove functionality like the Facebook launcher is doing by hiding your status bar and removing widgets.

The 4+ star rated launchers add functionality to android.

billnguyen··on Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes
If this is Apple that'd be true, but since when has Google really bragged about any sales numbers?
billnguyen··on A conjecture about code reviews
Code reviews can definitely suck but sometimes the short term cost needs to be sacrificed for long term gain and this is definitely one of them in my opinion.

Code reviews help enable a 'hivemind' within a project. It helps other engineers learn how to do what you do, and helps you write readable code that enables other engineers to learn what you do helping to accelerate code velocity in the end. The resultant sense of coherency in the code is immeasurable.

billnguyen··on Apple Officially Reveals The iPhone 5
iphone 5: Bigger iphone is bigger and fits bigger stuff.