derrick_jensen

Nah, I don't want to be that guy. In the meantime I've just locally stubbed all Stripe API calls, since internal integration tests are all I need for non-production uses. I've also reached the point where regular production deployments make sense (or at least the payments logic is stable enough).

Honestly, I don't find their support helpful with fixing any of my issues, and asking the same question multiple times gives completely different responses. I managed to completely break the Stripe Test API (nothing works, always "in the process of deleting"), and I've been in support limbo for at least a week now.

Haven't looked into the alternatives, but I hope I can move most commerce over to Bitcoin since I can run that fairly cheap internally to the company (and bypass PCI compliance, etc)

EDIT: Maybe I was being overly critical in the first half, but in general implementation has been a bumpy experience. Most transactions on this platform are microtransactions, so it isn't that Stripe is expensive as much as I'm using it in an unconventional way, and not having a $0.30 static fee drastically changes my profit margins

Early 20th century predates OSHA and most federal labor regulations in general. Its not that collective bargaining in the abstract is worth less, but there are far more federal guarantees.

DigitalOcean Spaces has the same API as AWS S3, and the download bandwidth costs a lot less. I would recommend it

I guess you could call this corona-y capitalism

I'm not concerned about performance nearly as much as regressions and breakages post-release. Not sure if this is for better or worse, but I'm the only one actively working on this, so I'm trying to streamline the develop-test-publish so I focus more of my time on delivering value when this company properly starts.

I'm also in college, so its pretty rough. In any given day I work anywhere from 10 to 14 hours, about 8 to 12 of which is for my startup. I'm sinking a lot of my time into the backend right now (integration testing, stress testing, decreasing latency, etc). I haven't launched anything yet, but I should be at some point before the end of the month. Recently I've been doing more work on marketing and getting some initial users, which I should have done a lot sooner.

What legal protections do you have, and what are you liable for as a company? Is this meant to be used in major markets, or only in societies with high levels of stranger trust like Japan? Are you trying to compete on price on the third world? No offense but I have no idea why somebody will use this

Most of my automation so far has just been CICD and automated testing, which I feel is pretty standard. I'm looking into automatically pulling in FreshBooks information and generating some publicly available live dashboard for profitability, expenses, revenue, etc based on time tracking information, pricing from Digital ocean, etc

I've also heard the case of a survivorship bias where most startup founders are men, since men are more risk taking in general (or at least the standard deviation on risk taking is a lot larger), and that these companies start looking less risky when they are already fairly successful

I've come across this in the Stripe API as a standard feature of a lot of cards. I haven't had one do this myself, but I also haven't lost a credit/debit card.

Legal: Right now I'm a sole proprietor with an EIN, but I plan to move over to a single-member LLC for the legal protections. Did this through LegalZoom

Finance: QuickBooks

Payments: Stripe, but I plan to add Bitcoin support (most of the work is already done, its just using it is a major liability)

Marketing: Mailchimp works pretty well, I have a self hosted Jekyll website too. I also have a public Telegram group that anybody can join, but few have so far

Communication: Mostly Slack

Social: I don't really network within my field. There is no hardware or physical component to what I do, and I work from my house most of the time.

I do self host things like Git, CICD, etc, and it wasn't really worth the trouble. When this scales out to beyond say ten people I'll definitely migrate to a SaaS stack. The biggest pain point with self hosting was choosing Drone CI for the CICD. That has been the most fragile part of the setup by a land slide.

I just toss a lot of applications around online. What sort of engagement have you been getting so far (phone interviews, onsite, etc)?

Stripe and an in-house Bitcoin backend

Funny thing is that I'm working on debugging an issue with the Stripe API right now (or the library I'm using)

Mine isn't particularly exciting or inspiring, but somebody has to be first to respond. I'm working on a mobile optimized, Bitcoin powered MTurk company called Labl (https://labl.ml). I have a few reasons:

1. This is my first company, so I figure starting with something simple and low-capital would be nice (not interested in capital, currently a student, etc). Most of my concerns are with litigation and running a business in general

2. I like Bitcoin, and I figure an easy way to increase adoption is to make it lower friction to earn. Contractor payments are only done in Bitcoin for the time being, client payments are done through Stripe. Having both options for both types of users is on the list

3. I'm a numbers guy, and it seems like there are a lot of interesting optimization opportunities running any automated platform at scale

The general plan is to be a platform of new reasons to pay people over the internet. We have more interesting ventures along the "find reasons to pay people" line, but are finishing this up first to test drive our infrastructure.

NOTE: Sign ups are broken right now, should be fixed at some point

iPad Mini + Apple Pencil

It is so much more convenient to

1. Read back on notes I've already written

2. Have one iPad versus 12 or so notebooks

3. Read notes on your phone or other devices wherever you are

This is the first Apple product I've owned (bought it Black Friday) and I love it

It was a .ml domain, wanted to have a play on .ai

I'd recommend Rackspace. $3 per user per month, and allowed me to bring my own domain. Haven't had any issues after setting everything up.

I tried registering this domain through G Suite and Zoho first, but they both said my domain had a TLD that's commonly used by spammers, and refused to bind it. Zoho eventually made an exception but took over a week for them to get back to me.

Never know when a good idea comes up, my twitter is @freefreecocaine

Uber could very easily reduce carbon emissions if they bias their payments/ride assignments towards EVs and other efficient vehicles. I'm not sure about the legality of that, but its definitely an interesting idea if they need to pull some PR shenanigans.

>Commercial exploitation of subsidized infrastructure What makes trucking different than Uber in this scenario? Is driving my own car around not abusing the infrastructure, but hailing an Uber is? Uber doesn't make money if nobody is riding somewhere in the car, so the market forces try and make utilization as efficient as possible.

>Increased collision risk to cyclists and vulnerable road users Are Uber drivers more likely to hit people than non Uber drivers? If you control for the population utilization of the roads, does this have a measurable affect?

>Abuse of contract law by preventing independent rate setting and concealing negotiable information You have a point there, but personally I disagree that these should be required by law in the first place.

>Artificially depressed prices fueled by venture capital in order to create a monopoly and capitalize later Well its doing a pretty bad job if the goal is to create monopolies. For most tech companies, they have a reasonable amount of competitors given the chicken-and-egg situation they need to solve. Prices are artificially depressed, not going to lie, but a lot of prices are artificially depressed to make them usable by the masses, and its all the better for it.

There's no expectation otherwise when you click on the link, whereas Quora always starts with a question and the advertisement can't be unbiased if the author has any stake in it.

Coffee and caffeine pills. If those don't work like they used to, then its probably a manifestation of a larger issue (not going outside, poor hygiene, etc). I don't have anything against people who use more advanced substances, but I've found roughly the same effect as caffeine pills.

I'm the founder of a startup, and I hire people I trust and people I have worked with in the past. It just so happens that most of these people have made it to the CS/ECE/Math departments at my university (otherwise I wouldn't have had the opportunity to work with them). If I measure merit by how qualified I think they are, then I'm more inclined to hire people I already know, and this is just knock on effects of gender/race composition by major[1] and university enrollment in general. Any hiring/enrolling system that puts diversity above merit has to bare the opportunity cost of not having more qualified people, and for most companies/organizations this isn't a reasonable compromise.

[1]: http://waf.cs.illinois.edu/discovery/Gender-Diversity-at-UIU...

I either bike around or go on the elliptical or treadmill at my gym.

Cardio helps a lot for me personally. I'm a firm believer that most people (myself included) don't get enough exercise when compared to hundreds of years ago. It gives me a dedicated hour or two block of time to listen to podcasts, and exercise in general is healthy anyways so its a win-win.

The issue with lower horsepower motors is that regenerative braking is not as effective. For the most part, regenerative braking can only absorb as much torque as it can put out, and anything above this has to fall back to the traditional brake system (or some other system).

I've been pricing out how to perform EV conversions as cheaply as possible. Battery capacity is by far the most costly section, and having a smaller horsepower motor isn't going to change how much power it draws (assuming driving habits stay the same). I've been basing my calculations off a 40HP motor and here are some preliminary numbers you might find interesting

On a typical car, a 200 mile radius will require around 44.4kWh of capacity (at around 45MPH, no stops). This is the capacity of 3483 3.4Ah 18650 cells, costing around $13.6k (you can bring that price down if you have some connections and more supply, but that's the cheapest rate I could find for a non-business). 100 mile range is also pretty reasonable. The motor and all other components cost less than $1.5k, man hours required for conversion is another main question, but hopefully that becomes more streamlined over time.

Lol wrong thread my bad

Remember, this is in comparison to public schools, which are regional gerrymandered monopolies. This system isn't perfect, but sets incentives in place to make it better. I grew up near some sketchy neighborhoods, and although I went to an average school, I know a lot of people who fared worse.

I'm not going to write a response to everything you said, but the tl;dr falls into a few categories

1. Privatization does not mean deregulation. Imagine Obamacare style regulations to a private marketplace for schooling (price caps, cannot turn away certain sets of people, etc).

2. If we can't agree on some measure for effective education, then there's no way to improve this, since we have no bar to go by. Everything is empirical and mileage may vary from person to person. You can create a seperate class of high school education (will flesh out in next point).

3. Property values are strongly correlated with the quality of the public schools (since all states help pay for public school with property taxes[1], and you are locked into a public school depending on where you live). My main motivation for supporting this is to help poor people have access to the same quality education as everybody else, and maybe even allowing specialized tracks that bias towards vocational schooling that funnels into direct employment after school (universities can boast about employment post graduation, why not high schools?)

4. There is nuance with the specific numbers here, and if it is systemically impossible for reasonable competition, then this price will go up.

[1]: http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/funding-approaches-th...

Are you accepting internship applications?

>education

One of the Libertarian propositions to public schooling is giving a check to all children to redeem at any private school that passes some bar set by the government. I love this solution, since it removes the requirement for residency for admittance to quality education, and strongarms the schooling system to be more efficient and competitive in how they produce students (assuming that the primary reason to choose one over another is test scores). Primary efficiency would come from reducing the amount of faculty required to hire.

>gas/oil/electricity

I don't see how this is tied to the public sector directly, unless you're talking about the military and Pentagon specifically.

>healthcare

It's complicated, not going to flesh that out. In general, we have a fairly privatized health care sector compared to a lot of other countries.

>law enforcement

Mass shootings have a lot more to do with the overuse of social media and the underuse of meaningful in person relationships than it has to do with law enforcement.