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klochner

3,410 karma · joined April 7, 2010

Greetings. I'm Kevin Lochner, get in touch if you want to talk web development, SF tech, startups, ruby, econ, . . .

Currently working as an Engineering Director at SoFi.

follow/friend/network/read/etc:

   http://stackoverflow.com/users/110213/klochner
   http://twitter.com/klochner
   http://facebook.com/klochner
   http://www.linkedin.com/in/klochner
   https://github.com/klochner
   http://www.strava.com/athletes/klochner
   https://keybase.io/klochner
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/klochner; my proof: https://keybase.io/klochner/sigs/DbBmNhJDrimZQdQ0ADjQcTFfwlkWELzO9nPvNrpAWI0 ]
submissionscomments
klochner··on How Zuck's Old TA Helped Facebook Master Mobile Ads
I'm a bit skeptical that he somehow managed not to stumble across the most seminal result in auction theory [1] while devising the google system.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_equivalence
klochner··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2015)
Expedite Financial, San Francisco

Come help us build a mortgage bank from the ground up.

    front-end: rails, angular, react, coffeescript, sass
    back-end:  scala, rails, neo4j, postgres
    dev-ops:   chef, ec2
We are a well funded and quickly growing team of 19, including 8 engineers. Our tech team includes alumni from yc, fbfund, twitter, bridgewater, harvard/stanford/duke/michigan, and we currently have 3 Ph.D.s on the team. We're looking for talented people from all backgrounds.

http://expeditefinancial.com/jobs (or email me - kevin@expeditelabs.com with subject "HN")

klochner··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2015)
Expedite Financial, San Francisco (and remote)

Come help us build a mortgage bank from the ground up.

    front-end: rails, angular, react, coffeescript, sass
    back-end:  scala, rails, neo4j, postgres
    dev-ops:   chef, ec2
We are a well funded and quickly growing team of 19, including 8 engineers. Our tech team includes alumni from yc, fbfund, twitter, bridgewater, harvard/stanford/duke/michigan, and we currently have 3 Ph.D.s on the team. We're looking for talented people from all backgrounds.

http://expeditefinancial.com/jobs (or email me - kevin@expeditelabs.com with subject "HN")

klochner··on Last Task After Layoff at Disney: Train Foreign Replacements
The real problem is that workers negotiate salaries as part of their H1B.

A better system would allocate H1Bs to the most talented foreign workers and let them choose their own employer here in the US, negotiating a market rate salary if they so choose.

klochner··on How Cash Sent the Portland Home Market Spinning
Investment is not a bad thing. The underlying problem is artificially constrained supply. In a healthy market, increased investment leads to construction and lower costs for both renters and buyers. (/cc san francisco)
klochner··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2015)
Expedite Financial, San Francisco (and remote)

We're building a modern mortgage bank. Currently a seed-funded team of 16, 7 engineers with 3 Ph.D's. - Harvard/Stanford/Duke/Michigan

    back-end: scala, rails, neo4j, postgres
    front-end:  rails, angular, react, coffeescript, sass
    dev-ops: chef, ec2
http://expeditefinancial.com/jobs (or email me - kevin@expeditelabs.com with subject "HN")
klochner··on “Cheating teachers go to jail. Cheating Wall Streeters don’t. What’s up?”
I live in SF, but it's any midsize market (or larger) really. Loan officers are effectively sales people, they eat what they kill. The better ones have teams working for them in a sales-support capacity.

Its the same with real estate agents, a good one can be very wealthy. Some LOs hit annual comp > $1M, though that is rare. I found it pretty shocking when I first found this out.

Send me an email if you want to make the market more efficient, I'm working to build a modern mortgage bank :)

klochner··on “Cheating teachers go to jail. Cheating Wall Streeters don’t. What’s up?”
Loan Officers get a percentage of the loan amount, and it's not rare for them to make $300k/year in a good year.
klochner··on Housing markets: The spectre haunting San Francisco
because the apartments are nowhere near sufficient to meet the demands of Facebook employees

That's all you needed to say. Supply and demand works.

klochner··on Game Theory Calls Cooperation into Question
from last week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9042195
klochner··on Game Theory Calls Cooperation into Question
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9042498
klochner··on Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?
Interesting post in that this is the first time I've seen someone from the bitcoin speculator group challenge the thesis of those in the VC/startup group.

Both groups are clearly 'talking their book', but this reads like little more than cheerleading/threatening aimed at himself and fellow speculators. For example:

    If Cryptocurrency 2.0 ever replaces Bitcoin and all Bitcoins
    become worthless, confidence in the category of
    cryptocurrencies in general will be, I believe,
    irreparably damaged. If Cryptocurrency 2.0 just replaced
    Bitcoin, there's nothing stopping Cryptocurrency 3.0 from
    replacing Cryptocurrency 2.0 and sending the value of its
    tokens to zero. Ad infinitum.
klochner··on Show HN: Add “Magic” to Your Business
As a spokesperson of the company you may want to avoid a defensive tone. Let me translate that into something friendlier for you:

"At Sonar, we offer a drop-in javascript widget so you don't have to write code. Twilio is a more low-level solution."

[edit] Thanks Matt, that's what I was looking for.

klochner··on Show HN: Add “Magic” to Your Business
why would someone choose sonar over twilio?
klochner··on More than 39M Americans Only Have Access to One Wired Broadband Provider
Our building in downtown San Francisco is limited to 2 options that are both more the $700/month for 20Mbps up/down.

It is insane.

klochner··on Game Theory Calls Cooperation Into Question
Many people seem to have game theory backward.

Game theory is a modeling tool that assumes all relevant utility is baked into the payoff matrix.

Games (payoff matrices) that capture unique outcomes/behaviors are often given memorable names from human situations that approximate the games. For example the matrix referred to as 'prisoners dilemma' demonstrates a situation where dominant actions give a suboptimal outcome. In describing where this game may apply, economists found simultaneous interrogations to be a colorful and close enough approximation to the idealized game.

It's not the case that game theorists started with the situation of interrogating prisoners and ended up with the game matrix.

Similarly, for anyone saying that 'that wouldn't happen in real life', you're actually saying that the payoffs don't accurately model the outcomes.

klochner··on Google Is Developing Its Own Uber Competitor
Influence, and they also get paid - as much as $500k/year for public corporations, and equity at startups.
klochner··on Student fury over 'impossible' economics exam
Same story when I was at Duke. Students can get either a BA or a BS in Econ, where the BS requires more math courses. Many BA students freaked out when there was calculus on the first exam.

As a EE major I found it pretty amusing.

klochner··on Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
He wasn't the first - slashfilm in 2009:

http://www.slashfilm.com/orangeblue-contrast-in-movie-poster...

based off a reddit thread:

http://www.reddit.com/comments/a8mqz

Reddit seems to be the go-to source for 'original' blog content these days.

klochner··on Extroverts may have stronger immune systems
The conscientious group ("introverts") had lower levels of inflammation, which is an immune response.

Inflammation can also be caused by stress.

It's a lot more plausible that the conscientious group is just less stressed.

The researchers likely invented the immune hypothesis in order to tie in with another study showing the same immune/extrovert link.

klochner··on Startup jobs with low salary and negligible equity, what gives?
You may need to recalibrate before graduation, it's about right for recent grads, depending on amount raised and team size of course. You'll get more cash comp post series-A/B/C, with lower % equity.
klochner··on Startup jobs with low salary and negligible equity, what gives?
They're offering you the comp of someone who just graduated, they may not realize that though.
klochner··on Predicting Lending Club Loan Defaults and Using Them to Maximize Returns
light on details or analysis
klochner··on YC Demographics
They likely don't record the team composition, so this would require hand-labeling of any data points.

Do we know total applicants? I'd like to know what n produced a 5% sample.

klochner··on Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?
Yes, and I know of other companies who also do, but favored candidates come from other technical disciplines (math, physics, stats, etc.) rather than liberal arts.

shameless plug: we're hiring in SF for ruby/scala/angular, email me if interested.

klochner··on Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
I doubt many projects take the same disciplined (akin to micro-services) approach that postfix does:

     ... mail delivery is done by daemon processes that have no parental 
    relationship with user processes. This eliminates a large variety of 
    potential security exploits with environment variables, signal handlers, 
    and with other process attributes that UNIX passes on from parent to child.

 [edit] sorry for the spam, there was some problem with the submission form.
klochner··on Why Remote Engineering Is So Difficult
Very much like a service-oriented architecture: fairly easy if you design that way from the start, but difficult to refactor into after you have a giant monolith.
klochner··on Why Remote Engineering Is So Difficult
My experience is that engineers often:

    * hate meetings
    * prefer slack/hipchat/etc even if seated adjacently (myself included)
    * work asynchronously
So the main friction is in the interface between engineering and other disciplines. Remote works well so long as non-technical leadership has a local lead they can interface with.
klochner··on Private colleges are a waste of money for white, middle class kids
My experience is that top students can get an equivalent if not better education at large public universities. (I went to Duke and Michigan)

Public universities are much less forgiving, which means mediocre or unmotivated students get crushed in cases they would get hand-holding (and A- grades) at a private university.

As for connections, they're important and you get better ones at top schools, unequivocally, but you don't need them for many careers.

klochner··on If Eventual Consistency Seems Hard, Wait Till You Try MVCC

  > Does the first part of this excerpt contradict the second part? (Emphasis mine)
No, it's perfectly clear and consistent. Does anyone else find it confusing?
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