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kbanman

77 karma · joined October 20, 2011

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kbanman··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2026)
Ema | Software Engineer | Vancouver, BC | Hybrid (3 days/wk) | Full-time

Ema is building the Universal AI Employee — AI that handles repetitive enterprise tasks so people can focus on creative, high-impact work. Founded by ex-Google and Coinbase execs. $75M raised from Accel, Section 32, Prosus, KPMG, and others.

We're hiring software engineers to build the core platform: APIs, backend systems, data infrastructure, and front-end interfaces.

Stack: Go, Python, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch. Multi-tenant SaaS.

You'd be a great fit if you care about clean, test-driven code, have experience with enterprise integrations and auth, and thrive in a fast-moving startup where scope is broad and ambiguity is the norm.

Comp includes salary + equity + benefits, scaled to experience and level.

https://www.ema.ai/careers

kbanman··on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
Would love to hear about the same but in Canada - As far as I know we don't have any Hetzner-like providers here.
kbanman··on Show HN: Jelly – A simpler shared inbox for small teams
Love the product and you've nailed the simple design!

I'm concerned about email deliverability--Even more so after the email verification ended up in my spam. Handling incoming email is simple enough, but for this to be useful to my team we would want to be confident that the emails are ending up in the right place.

kbanman··on Show HN: An opinionated and statically-typed TypeScript SDK generator
Congrats on launching!

For anyone looking for more (open-source) alternatives, here's one I just discovered today: https://microsoft.github.io/kiota/

kbanman··on It's not your imagination – iPhone users are worse drivers
The article doesn't dive into why this group performed worse; to me that is of much more interest than the conclusion.

Just from my own observations I would expect that this is largely due to income differences in the two groups. Rich people are more likely to own iPhones and in my experience also more likely to be careless drivers.

kbanman··on MailChimp: A side project that turned into a $700m/year revenue business
Hootsuite also started as an agency side project, and I'm sure there are more.

Intentionally following this model doesn't seem sensible though; with VC money so accessible if you have already put together a good team you might as well focus on the product itself. Agency work is not fun.

kbanman··on AWS releases Glue Databrew, a visual ETL tool
Speaking as a former AWS Engineer, I disagree with the sentiment that they are able to glue AWS services together better than what a competing non-AWS company can do. Internally the use of AWS is subject to the same constraints and APIs you and I have.

Their competitive advantage is their captive customer base, which will much rather pay a premium to use an AWS-managed service than use another vendor.

kbanman··on The good parts of AWS: a visual summary
I've seen this done for new projects, and it works really well. If your data access patterns are truly relational (varied lookup paths) then it is probably not the right tool, but many apps can be modeled in a way that DDB handles well.

Highly recommended viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaEPXoXVf2k this talk explains how relational data can be efficiently modeled for key-value stores.

kbanman··on Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes
Very well done!

I had started on a similar idea a while back, but never got around to it. Even have a cute domain for it (pifork.com) in case you're interested :)

kbanman··on I've been a software engineer for 10 years and I can't do interview questions
Having been in your position, I understand that having built a product from the ground up makes you feel like you are qualified to do anything. I was lucky enough to get hired at a late-stage startup after my endeavor failed, and am constantly reminded that time in the industry matters. Two years of intense coding is worth a lot, but you've only been exposed to a limited set of problems, both technical and business. 6+ years sounds reasonable to me if they are looking for someone with well-rounded experience.

Mind you, as someone else mentioned, some folks spend 6 years in the industry and don't gain the knowledge and experience you already have, but that doesn't mean you've attained 6 years worth of knowledge and experience.

kbanman··on The advantages of static typing, simply stated
I've recently joined a team writing primarily in Clojure, whose proponents often tout repl-driven programming as a unique benefit to the language.

In a statically typed language (the stronger the better), aided by a good IDE, I don't need to be constantly executing my code against data during development; My editor is constantly validating my code, and when it stops complaining, my code will work. And months later when I or someone else uses that code in another part of the system, they won't need to execute that code to see how it behaves, as the types themselves provide documentation and as-you-code feedback.

kbanman··on Facebook Is Preparing to Launch Facebook at Work
We have been using this at Hootsuite, and it's been a really smooth experience, especially when compared to Yammer.
kbanman··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2015)
Hootsuite | Vancouver, BC, Canada | Onsite | Full-time

We currently have openings for the following positions:

  Build and Deploy Engineer
  Data Scientist
  Intermediate Software Engineer, Data Lab
  Intermediate Software Engineer, Mobile Web
  Junior Network Engineer
  Junior Software Engineer, Android
  Senior Operations Engineer
  Senior Software Engineer, Full Stack
  Senior Software Engineer, iOS
  Technical Project Manager
  Technical Project Manager, Operations
Learn more about our engineering challenges on our code blog: http://code.hootsuite.com/ Apply here: https://hootsuite.com/about/careers
kbanman··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2015)
Hootsuite - Vancouver, BC, Canada - Full-time scala and full-stack engineers

See https://hootsuite.com/about/careers

kbanman··on Ask HN: What are your unused domain names?
I've got plenty of these left over from my hoarding days:

  ajaxapart.com - alistpart for javascript
  alpinefog.com
  bidsoup.com
  boostwire.com
  buildzen.com
  checkalope.com
  cloudboards.com
  express.build
  freshlinux.com
  giftitude.com
  gitnest.com
  gridyard.com
  hugepixel.com
  mindski.com
  mumblemonitor.com
  nearlyneighbors.com
  pifork.com
  pixelpeer.com
  roamsense.com
  threadsfortwo.com / threads42.com - T-shirts for couples
If anyone is interested, I can post them up on the namecheap marketplace.
kbanman··on Presenting the Most Over-Engineered Blog Ever
Here at Hootsuite we just finished rolling out webpack, and we're using it with grunt. If there is interest, I could probably get the project lead to do a writeup on our code blog.
kbanman··on Why Node.js is becoming the go-to technology in the Enterprise
I don't think enterprise ever has or will adopt Rails. Even node.js isn't at the point where it can really be considered "enterprise".

Java is dead. Long live Java!

kbanman··on Are mobile web apps slow?
Or you could close the app. Double-click the home button and hit the red badge.
kbanman··on How Email On Acid stole our work
And he seems rather eager to expend his company.
kbanman··on Scientists find woman who sees 99 million more colors than others (2012)
Seems to me the banding might be caused by bad rendering, and not a deficiency of 24-bit colours. On my MBP the gradient is indiscernable.
kbanman··on Yahoo Mail users hit by widespread XSS exploit
I personally witnessed two instances of this attack as early as December 8. I couldn't figure out until now how it was done.
kbanman··on The poor own almost as many TVs as the rich
This rings very true to my own experience. I've watched repeatedly as struggling, low-income families purchase huge TVs. I find it comical to walk into a trailer home to see a brand new Bravia barely able to fit on the disheveled TV stand.
kbanman··on 9GAG (YC S12) Raises $2.8M
I would guess that the majority of those visitors are minors without a credit card. Even if you could convince advertisers to pay for those impressions today, they would soon become wiser and realize that they have no value.

See facebook's steadily falling income as an example of this happening: sure they have a stupid number of pageviews, but people are learning the real value of a pageview today.

kbanman··on The True Problem With PHP
So, basically make it javascript. I'm a long-time PHP developer, but I'd very much like that. Someday I'll have to learn node.js...
kbanman··on PATCH Method for HTTP
Could you elaborate on your sarcasm?

Given due care on server side, I'm not sure why that would be so terrible.

kbanman··on Mozilla Thimble
Javascript is not an essential part of web development. This tool is geared towards web pages rather than applications, where client-side scripting might play a bigger role.

Unfortunately (and with some good reason) there are still many people who use NoScript et al to browse the web without javascript.

kbanman··on One way to fix your rubbish password database
The subscript i denotes that the variable belongs to a single user i. The tick at the top is pronounced 'prime' and is used to differentiate between versions or iterations.
kbanman··on Your iPhone calendar isn’t private—at least if you use the LinkedIn app
Just to be clear, this only applies to an opt-in feature of the app.
kbanman··on Make Better Select Boxes with Chosen
This has nothing to do with the article.
kbanman··on Call PostgreSQL functions via HTTP JSON-RPC
Maybe coming from a web development background has left me paranoid, but this just screams scary to me.
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