daveungerer

The story (skip this paragraph if you don't like stories in your job posts): I founded and continue to run this startup. Most of the team works from our office in South Africa. However, a month ago I moved Singapore for work / personal reasons. I used to be quite averse to the idea of remote workers, but seeing as just about everyone will now be remote from my perspective, I decided it's a good time to start focusing on hiring for remote work.

SimplePay is online payroll software for South Africa, Ireland, Singapore and Hong Kong. Our software lets thousands of small business owners (and their accountants) run their payrolls without headaches, so they can focus on the challenge of building their businesses.

Do you believe most SPAs are a pile of steaming crap, but wouldn't mind digging into Vue.js for pages that will benefit from the increased interactivity? Do you laugh when people give up the power of PostgreSQL in favour of data stores that don't offer any benefits for their use case? If so, you may fit in well with our mindset.

The work will include: Doing direct integrations with banks that offer good APIs. Expanding our API for other systems to integrate with us. Adding new features. Optimising for performance. Integrating with government systems. Squashing bugs. Eventually, the opportunity to do some mobile development (probably using Flutter).

Experience: Due to our full pipeline, we can only hire developers who have a few years of Rails experience at this time. Previous experience with remote work would be a bonus - we need people who understand the challenges and can share what they've learnt.

Location: Most of the team is in GMT+2, and I'll be in GMT+8 going forward. So anything from GMT+0 to GMT+8 should be OK, unless you keep unusual working hours. We are a registered employer in South Africa and Singapore, so it would be hassle-free if you're based in those countries. If not, and if you've never done remote work for a foreign company before, please be sure to find out how to legally do this iin your particular country (it may involve registering as self-employed, for example).

Please mail careers@simplepay.co.za and put "Hacker News" somewhere in the subject. I look forward to transforming the company to being more remote-friendly.

The story (skip this paragraph if you don't like stories in your job posts): I founded and continue to run this startup. Most of the team works from our office in South Africa. However, I'm now moving to Singapore for work / personal reasons. I used to be quite averse to the idea of remote workers, but seeing as just about everyone will now be remote from my perspective, I decided it's a good time to start focusing on hiring for remote work.

SimplePay is online payroll software for South Africa, Ireland, Singapore and Hong Kong. Our software lets thousands of small business owners (and their accountants) run their payrolls without headaches, so they can focus on the challenge of building their businesses.

Do you believe most SPAs are a pile of steaming crap, but wouldn't mind digging into Vue.js for pages that will benefit from the increased interactivity? Do you laugh when people give up the power of PostgreSQL in favour of data stores that don't offer any benefits for their use case? If so, you may fit in well with our mindset.

The work will include: Doing direct integrations with banks that offer good APIs. Expanding our API for other systems to integrate with us. Adding new features. Optimising for performance. Integrating with government systems. Squashing bugs. Eventually, the opportunity to do some mobile development (probably using Flutter).

Experience: Due to our full pipeline, we can only hire developers who have a few years of Rails experience at this time. Previous experience with remote work would be a bonus - we need people who understand the challenges and can share what they've learnt.

Location: Most of the team is in GMT+2, and I'll be in GMT+8 going forward. So anything from GMT+0 to GMT+8 should be OK, unless you keep unusual working hours. We are a registered employer in South Africa and Singapore, so it would be hassle-free if you're based in those countries. If not, and if you've never done remote work for a foreign company before, please be sure to find out how to legally do this iin your particular country (it may involve registering as self-employed, for example).

Please mail careers@simplepay.co.za and put "Hacker News" somewhere in the subject. I look forward to transforming the company to being more remote-friendly.

SimplePay is hiring mid-level to senior Ruby on Rails developers to help with our global expansion. We currently have clients in South Africa, Singapore and Ireland. We aim to delight customers with how simple we make payroll.

The role will be mostly back-end focused, with PostgreSQL as database. But some front-end skills will be a plus. Web development outside of Rails is also welcome, as long as you're happy to convert.

The most important part of the interview is an object oriented design exercise, which is also a test of problem-solving skills.

Visas: We can't point you in the right direction for getting a visa. You'll need 2 years of experience if you have a related qualification and more if you don't. The visa process does take at least 3 months, however.

Please mail careers@simplepay.co.za if you're interested, putting "Hacker News" in the subject line.

https://www.simplepay.co.za

SimplePay is hiring mid-level to senior Ruby on Rails developers to help with our global expansion. We currently have clients in South Africa, Singapore and Ireland. We aim to delight customers with how simple we make payroll.

The role will be mostly back-end focused, with PostgreSQL as database. But some front-end skills will be a plus. Web development outside of Rails is also welcome, as long as you're happy to convert.

The most important part of the interview is an object oriented design exercise, which is also a test of problem-solving skills.

Visas: We may be able to assist with visas for foreign candidates. However, the South African government does not publish clear guidelines on experience required. A comp sci degree will be a minimum requirement. If you also have 3 years of software development experience it will greatly help your chances. I'm sure you'll love living in Cape Town.

Please mail careers@simplepay.co.za if you're interested, putting "Hacker News" in the subject line.

He does ambient stuff, but I prefer his SONOIO project, which is more poppy and has vocals. Here's a cool song made 100% on the Buchla 200. I was hooked by the unique sound the first time I heard it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0jA3R6CnF4

https://www.simplepay.co.za

SimplePay is hiring mid-level to senior Ruby on Rails developers to help with our global expansion. We currently have clients in South Africa, Singapore and Ireland. We aim to delight customers with how simple we make payroll.

The role will be mostly back-end focused, with PostgreSQL as database. But some front-end skills will be a plus.

The most important part of the interview is an object oriented design exercise, which is also a broad test of problem-solving skills.

Compensation: R420K to R720K per year.

Please mail careers@simplepay.co.za if you're interested, putting "Hacker News" in the subject line.

Exactly. My previous reasoning was indeed a bit muddied, but what you're saying now clarifies it. I don't disagree with your math.

There are so many logical contradictions in the concept, which is why I end up making silly assertions that you correctly pointed out. Instead, the argument should simply be that the rate of return on bitcoin, due simply to built-in deflation, and expressed in dollars, may or may not be so high that it always makes sense to hold the asset rather than use it as currency to buy other assets. In which case it can't function as a currency: contradiction.

Of course, I do believe the BTC USD exchange rate will be the dominant factor in determining prices expressed in BTC in the long term, but I'm sure plenty of people would disagree. If that does happen, a lot of this becomes theoretical - the worsening exchange rate will take care of the deflation.

Note I'm not necessarily for or against bitcion. Thanks for the discussion.

Eureka! That's also known as bitcoin hoarding. If the value (in dollar terms) of holding on to bitcoin is indeed greater than spending it, people and financial institutions will hold on to it and primarily keep transacting in dollars. Which leads to a nice logical contradiction, since how can a currency be worth anything if no-one wants to spend it?

Disclosure: I have no stake in the success or failure of bitcoin. I'm interested in knowing if you do, just so I know to stop wasting my time?

A counter-example: Your pot dealer says you can have 4 bags of pot now, and you have 1 year to pay the 1 BTC you owe him. Being a man of better impulse control than you, and a prudent financial manager of his drug enterprise, he values 1 BTC in a year more than 1 BTC today.

That is, of course, assuming the expected value (after applying the deflation and factoring in risk of non-payment) is greater than the value he could build by investing the 1 BTC in his business today - an open question until we have some real deflation figures.

> (If 1 BTC is worth 4 bags of pot today and 5 next year, 1 BTC in a year is worthless to me if I want to smoke now.)

As I tried to illustrate above, finance is not something that's based on your personal preferences - it's a complex inter-dependent system.

Also, constraints breed creativity, and this is just another example of that.

It's not the type of music I would listen to generally, but insisting that this should be the case completely misses the point of what's interesting about it.

Then all you need is intermediary parties that will exchange your V2 Bitcoins for V1 Bitcoins (which will currently have the highest acceptance for buying things). Over time, V2, V3 etc. may even become accepted directly by merchants, if they become big enough.

UPDATE: Thanks for the info on additional ones. This is getting really interesting. So my initial scarcity hypothesis was wrong, which means it's just pure herd mentality. Hopefully over time the availability of multiple currencies will lead to some sort of equilibrium though.

Or it could be that people older than 55 are the biggest market for card games, regardless of platform? The entire article is filled with illogical conclusions. Please don't post this bullshit on HN, articles that so grossly underestimate their audience's intelligence are just irritating.

Flagged.

Or how about firstly determining which old commit you would like to revert a single file to, then secondly doing the actual revert. I can just view the file's log at a glance, get the revision I want, right-click and select "Reset File to This Commit".

By the way, I love Vim. But your disdain for "pointing-and-clicking" sounds like so much machismo.

Needing to use git now and then while SSH'd in is not a good reason to make your entire development process slower and more error-prone. I would also say that there is a larger problem with your process if you have the need to use git on "a remote server in a pinch".

It's kind of like learning to play a musical instrument. You absolutely must pay attention to the fundamentals as a beginner, but if you only ever work on the fundamentals you will never become a great musician.

The best thing is the discoverability - you don't need to know about the -p flag, for instance, since it's handled by the UI. Same for many other useful git commands that are hard to remember - they are often a simple option on a right-click menu, or a checkbox when performing an operation.

If you tell a database to store something, and it doesn’t complain, you should safely assume that it was stored.

This has nothing to do with the 2Gb limitation. Nowhere in the documentation does it mention that it will silently discard your data. What will happen with the 64-bit version if you run out of disk space, more silently discarded data?

I know a lot of you may have cut your teeth on MySQL which, in its default configuration, will happily truncate your strings if they are bigger than a column. Guess what? Anyone serious about databases does not consider MySQL to be a proper database with those defaults. And with this, neither is MongoDB, though it may have its uses if you don't need to be absolutely certain that your data is stored.

EDIT: Thanks for pointing out getLastError. My point still stands, since guaranteed persistence is optional rather than the default. In fact, reading more of the docs points out that some drivers can call getLastError by default to ensure persistence. That means that MongoDB + Driver X can be considered a database, but not MongoDB on its own.

I'm just struggling to imagine being willing to lose some amount of data purely for the sake of performance, so philosophically it's not a database unless you force it to be. Much like MySQL.

EDIT2: Not trying to be snarky here, but I would love to hear about datasets people have where missing random data would not be an issue. I'm serious, just want to know what the use case is that MongoDB's default behaviour was designed for.

EDIT3: (Seriously) I'm sure MongoDB works splendidly when you setup your driver to ensure that a certain numbers of servers will confirm receipt of the data (if your driver supports such an option), nowhere am I disputing that. But that number really should have a lower bound of 1, enforced by MongoDB itself. And to the guy who called me stupid: you are what's wrong with HN.

One thing is that it's hard to anchor the figures to actual medal counts. I think normalising the data would be awesome. The normalisation should be such that sum(actual medals won) = sum(adjusted medals won).

If that's what you're saying, then you've already failed. The fact that your application is for both SMB and enterprise customers means you lack customer-based focus and probably don't know who your customer is. Pick a smaller sub-set of customers and focus on that.

If Notch launched a startup in a space where no-one knows or cares who Notch is, he'd have no advantage from his fame. Of course he shouldn't, that would mean giving up an advantage. But that means you or I can enter that area on a more level playing field.

The world of startups is much larger than the tiny slice of the world that cares about internet fame, and much more varied than your social circle (e.g. HN).

I think the author does make good points, but framing the whole thing as if not being internet famous is a disadvantage shows a very distorted view of startups.

You're right about traction - it can get you excited even if you're in a mudane industry. That's much better than doing something "cool" that never gets off the ground.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=872283

I think it should be a given that it's frustrating when a computer doesn't do what you tell it. That doesn't mean that the cost of that frustration isn't offset by the added convenience for many users. In my case it isn't, and those (relatively frequent) times when it does frustrate me, I seriously consider switching search engines.