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emeerson

58 karma · joined April 20, 2013

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emeerson··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)
Orchard | Software & Infra Engineers, all levels | NYC, Austin, DC, Atlanta, Remote | Full-Time

At Orchard we're building software for life's biggest financial decision: buying and selling a home. Our products solve problems along the entire lifecycle of the home-buying transaction: from finding your perfect home to coordinating with multiple parties along the way so that the entire experience is seamless.

We're looking for software engineers at all levels and especially Senior and Staff engineers to work on scaling our consumer-facing web services, developer tooling & workflows for scaling business ops. We work with Python 3, TypeScript & Angular, Docker deployed on AWS.

Details: https://orchard.com/careers/engineering

emeerson··on Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever
Agree.

Further corollary: more workers will be concentrated around 2nd-tier hubs where their wages will be lower than 1st-tier, but higher that median wages. 2nd-tier median wages will then drive up housing prices which will rinse & repeat COL increase trends seen in the Bay Area.

Hopefully these other hubs will have better development zoning & housing policies than San Francisco / Bay Area.

emeerson··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2020)
Orchard | ONSITE (WFH for now) | Full-time | https://orchard.com | NYC - New York City, NY

Orchard is building software for life’s biggest financial decision: buying and selling a home. Our products solve problems along the entire lifecycle of the home-buying transaction: from finding your perfect home to coordinating with multiple parties along the way so that the entire experience is seamless.

We are hiring software engineers, leads and managers in all 3 of our product areas: consumer, operations platform & data.

We're a 3-year old series B company tackling a massive $1.5 trillion market in residential real estate. Our business is growing fast and we have an exciting technology and product roadmap ahead of us.

Our tech stack consists of Python3 with type-hinting on the back-end and TypeScript & Angular on the front-end, with PostgreSQL as our DB. We leverage RedShift for analytics pipelines, Python, SQL & Airflow to orchestrate ETL pipelines, and Static Site Compilation + Material Design components for low latency user experiences. Our services are developed, built, tested and deployed via Docker containers on Kubernetes.

Software Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/perch1/jobs/4487204002

Engineering Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/perch1/jobs/4487207002

Interview Process: 2 coding (pragmatic engineering leaning), system design + product collaboration, & behavioral engineering career learnings.

You can also send an email to elijah+aug20 [at] orchard [dot] com to learn more.

emeerson··on Ask HN: Azure customers, why do you host with Azure over AWS or GCP?
Super helpful - thank you! IIS / containerized .NET apps that may be optimized in Azure is compelling.
emeerson··on Ask HN: Azure customers, why do you host with Azure over AWS or GCP?
Exciting is also a confusing property for me.

AWS has offered a superset of services beyond what I or colleagues have ever been able to apply.

emeerson··on Zuckerberg: I just shared the following note with our employees
Makes sense that business incentives inform decision making, but how do you explain the difference in Twitter's content policy? They also, presumably, measure their business via MAU & DAU.

Sometimes I think its as simple as humans making decisions. And Zuckerberg is making a spineless decision (by way of inertia).

emeerson··on Coronavirus fatality rate could be as low as 0.26%, CDC says
Initially I thought of those numbers (36m in the US) as totally unrealistic. But then comparing to seasonal influenza case counts, they seem to be within that order of magnitude (39m-56m cases): https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

would that be implausible? am I misunderstanding or comparing the wrong metrics?

I'm actually curious to see the time interval of when the first true COVID-19 case appeared plotted over first true 2019-2020 influenza cases. If along the same timeline, you'd figure that social distancing would have affected the R0 of both.

Assuming that SARS-CoV-2 is truly more (or comparably) contagious, 36M could be plausible.

To be clear: I am not equivalating COVID-19 fatality rate w/ the flu, or suggesting it is "innocuous" as the flu is.

emeerson··on The evidence behind putting money directly in the pockets of the poor
Re. Money in a bank account not contributing to scarcity: I think that logic checks out when you observe money as a resource in isolation.

If you think of Money as a proxy for "captured value," then one way to look at it is how much "captured value" is "captured opportunity for wealth creation," which has a certain distribution % chance across the entire population.

In that sense, total aggregate money at any point in time can be viewed as zero-sum.

emeerson··on April Unemployment Rate Rose to a Record 14.7%
Interesting to present it as a binary tradeoff.

I want to win, but I want to make sure that the thesis has some modeling diligence =)

emeerson··on Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake
Strongly agree with this. Dates serve a critical goalpost in technical planning, yet they should be viewed as flexible (having a reasonable margin of error) and informed by tight & trust-driven feedback loops. I subscribe to Gantt charts as a planning tool, not a bible. Use it to empower development teams to plan and track execution, but don't use it for 0-margin accounting.

One anti-pattern in engineering management is shielding engineers entirely from timeline estimates. A CEO with limited runway, reporting to the Board, doesn't have such a luxury of infinitely elastic time.

Edit:

Note: dates should never be prioritized over value. If you're hitting dates and not delivering value then it won't do good for anyone. Product value should always be the function to optimize for, but rarely is it entirely independent of time.

emeerson··on Jack Dorsey gives $1B to fund global Covid-19 relief
not an argument, an attempt to synthesize this event into a parable. Failed attempt at that ;)
emeerson··on Jack Dorsey gives $1B to fund global Covid-19 relief
To clarify my thinking: defunding Govt' pandemic preparedness became a forcing function for the individually wealthy to deploy private capital with much higher $$$ cost.

Point taken that its a stretch of the imagination.

emeerson··on Jack Dorsey gives $1B to fund global Covid-19 relief
What's remarkable is how this is a clear case study of the amount of wealth destroyed _by gutting government_

If I were to try to be pithy: Capitalism destroyed by the incompetency of libertarian ideals.

emeerson··on Reid Hoffman's $30M bet: Send partners, not cash, to startups
I suspect this is because these are wolves in operator's clothing. If you deploy true operators that are doing labor in their area of expertise, and if they can pre-empt obvious mistakes + generate reproducible playbooks, you could net out ahead.
emeerson··on Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
Won't claim this is the absolute priority, but recently been thinking about the generalizable problem of: "domain disentanglement."

In other words: solve the Data Model Coupling problem programmatically. Applied to an RDBMS, one could imagine a graph with weighted edges representing coupling between database tables and dynamically reverse-engineering joins into DB-isolated API calls.

emeerson··on Economic Inequality (2016)
PG, this is a thoughtful essay. Yet I'll point out a flaw in this thinking below.

Intellectually Honest merits here: - you want to incentivize people to create value for society and optimize globally by raising the quality of life of (most) humans. - Wealth creation itself is not by default at the cost of others.

Intellectually Dishonest: - That startups and wealth creation converge on a quality of life optimization function for humanity.

In other words: startups and wealth creation operate within the randomness of free market. And most software technology in the last 30 years has not unlocked some kind of massive step function value in global problems.

If we could align more Venture Capital funding and R&D output to solve fundamental problems (in other words: can we solve access to affordable nutritious food, reduction of common disease, reducing cost of housing ahead of 5-minute media formats or SaaS Invoicing Applications?)

Housing has continued to become less affordable and poverty still prevalent in the US.

- That there is a binary debate: "should there be wealth or not?"

Social Programs, funded by government, funded by taxes on higher earners and large capital gains, are one lever to address this.

The reason the inequality gap matters is less that its a metric of the _delta in absolute wealth_ but more that opportunity and livability of average Americans has a worse outlook in the last 20 years, not a better one.

emeerson··on Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time
You don't have to imagine. You can do a real cultural economic comparison to other countries: Italy, Greece, Russia, Spain (and others) are countries that index more on your proposed value system: socialization, family, quality of life over hard work.

China, Japan and the US index very highly on the productivity side of the spectrum, China probably significantly more than the US.

Some of those QOL-indexing countries also have high unemployment rates and relatively lower GDP per capita.

Unemployment + GDP are probably the wrong things to optimize for. Personally I believe Unemployment is overloaded as our optimization function for economic health, where median wage increase is more representative of livability.

One question I have (and genuinely can't guess at): if you are unemployed in Greece, on average, what exactly is your quality of life?

All that said, there are countries that strike a healthier balance with strong economies: Germany, Canada, UK.

Zooming way out, my take on productivity generally is: human pressure to push our productivity is inevitable because we still need to solve some very hard, expensive problems: (1) Our history of industrialization has led to unsustainable environmental impact. This may require 10-100x the engineering focus & coordination we've ever had before. (2) Disease still has significant impact. (3) We still need human labor to harvest and transform resources (agriculture, metals) (4) We still need human labor to generate more "life necessities" supply: electricity, housing, water / plumbing.

One could argue that for (3) & (4) we can be more like Germany and we'll still do great. Also one could argue that if we increased taxes / shifted government spend to subsidize housing development (vs. home ownership) we might also be fine.

Edits: grammar

emeerson··on Spotify Becomes Latest Tech Company to Hit Pause on Political Ads
Is this even addressing the root cause of 2016 misinformation campaigning? I was assuming most misinformation was distributed as user-generated content, not ads.

How much was Spotify exploited as a media platform for campaign misinformation? Its cute that Spotify is doing this, but I think Facebook + Twitter were the big distribution channels (and probably Reddit is closest to the “astroturf core”).

Edit: grammar

emeerson··on “Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)
eerily poignant
emeerson··on Ask HN: How to speak like a leader, not like an engineer?
This is very wise advice, and I can especially appreciate the layer of empathy: empower engineers to add to their toolchain (mgmt or technical).

To complement this thinking, however, I also expect a leader to align engineers to business priorities. There is a fine line to walk in balancing the growth of engineers with the needs of a business. I expect engineers with certain years of experience to understand that as professionals we are hired to address these needs.

Of course there is also the flip side of this alignment: aligning the business to the real (vs. imagined) capabilities or investment needed.

emeerson··on Walmart Beats Amazon in $15B Flipkart Battle
It would take Googlmart 5+ years to play catch up if not longer.

Google's too disorganized and they don't have any supply chain tech built up. Amazon has years of supply chain infrastructure (both software, physical systems and organization) including supply/demand forecasting models and warehouse operational investment (Kiva systems, etc...).

The only differentiation that Google adds to Walmart is: - Top-talent engineering resources & brand which attracts talent to work on these problems - Layers of developer tooling and services that remove the "systems at scale" development curve of startups and smaller companies.

Now if Alibaba teamed up with Walmart... (read: acquired).

emeerson··on CRISPR eliminates HIV-1 infection in live animals
This is all true.

The flip side of this, however, is that "trial phase failure" does not conclude "ineffective biologic." There are many other variables to Clinical Trials, including flaws in trial design, time spent and difficulty in operations, and biased reporting:

https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/clinical-trials-fl...

http://www.outsourcing-pharma.com/Preclinical-Research/Parki...

https://www.iths.org/blog/news/avoid-common-biostatistical-f...

emeerson··on No tipping means better business
No-tipping trends are starting to reverse now, however: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/why-rest...

Upscale and some midscale restaurants in NYC have seen a drop in demand since no-tipping policies have been applied. Its not clear if this is purely a product of pricing psychology, or if service quality at the upscale end starts to suffer with service staff having less incentive to provide top-notch service.

emeerson··on Megacities, not nations, are the world’s dominant, enduring social structures
Other than intuitive observation of the creative class economy, this article offers neither a definition of "dominant, enduring social structures" nor evidence outside of GDP as a metric. So far it's like "duh GDP in this day and age is a product of high-density geographic regions." Am I missing something here?
emeerson··on 10 years later, Twitter still isn't making money
Both the 5c/per ad and user-willingness-to-pay estimates are way optimistic. Ads you see probably has a CPM (cost per milleu, or thousand) of at $5 on the upper end and I'm guessing average around $1 CPM, which would be .5c and .1c respectively.

Facebook's per-user revenue in the US as of Q4 2015 was around $11/yr (source: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-average-revenue-per-...) although its grown by 50% yoy.

Chances are if FB / Twitter / Instagram had high confidence that could monetize their product with a subscription model averaging even $10/user a year I think they wouldn't hesitate to implement such a model.

emeerson··on Antibiotic resistance: The last resort
This looks like a viable research route? New pathway for eliminating bacteria thats viral instead of antibiotic (fungal?) based:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120724104640.ht...

Can anyone speak to the validity or promise of such research?

emeerson··on Why Should I Care That No One’s Reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights?
The author admits a valid case for eschewing miranda rights within the first paragraph. You can't make an argument for a constitutional right and say 'oh wait but there is an exception. and by the way this one might meet it.'