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knwang

346 karma · joined February 4, 2011

Founder at Launch School

https://launchschool.com

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knwang··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2020)
Nervos Network | Remote | Full-time | Contract | www.nervos.org

Nervos Network is a public permissionless blockchain and we're building the future of the decentralized economy! We've raised significant funding, launched our mainnet platform and is now expanding our team. We're looking for the following positions - all are remote, full time positions. Whether you're an experienced blockchain engineer, or are interested in the tech but have been watching from the sideline, we'd love to hear from you! Please send an email to kevin at nervos.org

* JavaScript / TypeScript Engineer

https://angel.co/company/nervos-1/jobs/771271-javascript-typ...

* Senior JavaScript / TypeScript Engineer

https://angel.co/company/nervos-1/jobs/771277-senior-javascr...

* Senior Systems Engineer

https://angel.co/company/nervos-1/jobs/771291-senior-systems...

* Developer Relations / Evangelist

https://angel.co/company/nervos-1/jobs/710826-senior-blockch...

knwang··on Stripe: Bitcoin
Congrats team Stripe! Fantastic feature as always.

In our case, we promise full refund if our users are not happy with our service. Is there a way to refund customers bitcoins as easy as how it is currently with credit cards?

knwang··on Kotlin, the Swift of Android
Can Swift be the Swift of Android?
knwang··on The Future of Computing - An Interview with Yukihiro “Matz" Matsumoto
Thank you for the translation Fred.
knwang··on An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business
I would say this is not only for non-technical co-founders, but even for people with technical skills, starting with service, but the type of service whose value is not measured by hours. Then just come up with the engineering to automate said service. This approach has several advantages:

1. You will be working with real, money paying customers from day 1 - right there you are ahead of 90% of startup projects.

2. You get to work your customers to understand their pain points, needs directly, without annoying them - they will actually be delighted that you are trying to understand them better!

3. You have revenue coming from day 1.

4. When you launch your product, you already have a group of people in your target audience, with whom you hopefully have already eared trust.

knwang··on Learning to Code: Lessons from building a simple Rails app with Treehouse
I agree with much you say here - I have personally seen too many beginners jump to use Devise, Cancan etc (every app has to have authentication and authorization, right?) without first understanding the core of Rails, and it just adds unnecessary abstraction to what's already a heavy framework.

When we teach (we run an online web development bootcamp), we teach folks Ruby first, then the general web concepts (HTTP, HTML, etc), then lay the foundation of dynamic web programming (rendering templates, routing, etc) with Sinatra, before finally tackling Rails. When we do teach Rails, we stay very close to the framework itself and ask students to build things like authentication from scratch. After they get the core of Rails under their belt, that's when the fun really starts - we introduce comprehensive testing materials, advanced Rails topics, service integrations, complex application workflow, git/github based team collaboration and production app deployment and maintenance concerns.

It takes a while to build up all this from the ground up - but we found this being very effective in pushing people to an intermediate level and build up confidence along the way.

knwang··on Ask HN: Are startups a good market?
Testing now - what do you think? :)
knwang··on How Tealeaf Academy increased student engagement 3x
The MailgunGateway class is kind of an application specific wrapper, with out account info and only with the functions we need.
knwang··on How Tealeaf Academy increased student engagement 3x
They can - we just need to create a course specific email address and let people email to that, and determine the poster either by sender email address (they will have to use the same email that they registered with us, and this is also less secure) or embed a user token in the "To:" field (more secure, but harder for people to remember)

For us, when people ask questions, they are likely on our site already, either working on homework assignments or watching lecture videos, so initiating a thread with email is less of a need.

knwang··on How Tealeaf Academy increased student engagement 3x
Typically there are 3 use cases for email services - transactional emails, campaign emails and receiving emails. You have the most options with it comes to sending transactional emails. But pay attention to some of the lower priced providers because they only help you to "send" emails, but not putting much effort that the emails are actually delivered - it is hard engineering with all the email provider's spam rules etc. The ones I recommend in this area are Mailgun and Postmark. Both have good reputation doing this well.

Then you have inbounding emails, which is newer and less providers do that. Both Mailgun and Postmark have it, and there are some newer players like cloudmailin, which I haven't used.

On the campaigning side, the biggest player is MailChimp with good reputation. I have used their service, but it feels like it's mostly built for marketers - Nice UI, a lot of templating choices, and your workflow is mostly in the browser. If that's your use case, they should serve you well.

As for as I know, Mailgun is the only email provider that has all 3, plus Mailing Lists and Storage (you can create mail boxes.. or basically build your own version of GMail on top of Mailgun).. For Tealeaf Academy (http://www.gotealeaf.com), we use delivering, receiving, mailing lists and campaigning, so Mailgun is what we picked. It also has a "closer to the metal" feel with their lower level APIs, which we like a lot.

I'd also recommend Postmark, if your app focuses on delivering and receiving transactional emails, and their pricing makes sense to you - I have seen some of their developer's posts and they know this stuff very well too.

I'd avoid some of the cheaper options, especially on transactional email delivery - it's a big deal (sending people receipts, notify credit card expiration, resetting password etc) and you want to stick with people who know how to do this.. don't cheap out

knwang··on How Tealeaf Academy increased student engagement 3x
Author of the blog here. In my opinion the inbounding email workflow is very under-utilized. Email is one of the best user input channels - while most people do not keep a web page open all the time, they do check emails very often and knows how to use it. Posterous and TripIt are great examples of using this well when collecting user input/data is a high priority for their apps.

Let me know if you have any questions, or Mailgun in general - I have looked into a few different email service providers and happy to share perspectives

knwang··on Ask HN: Are startups a good market?
Yes, and I would say it's much easier to make businesses pay than consumers. As a startup founder myself (http://www.gotealeaf.com), if your product helps me 1) increase revenue 2) cut cost 3) reduce risk 4) save time, paying is a no brainer.

The key difference is this: when you target consumers, people tend to have a fixed budget on discretionary spending and a fixed amount of time to pay with their attention. You will be competing with the big players with their unlimited marketing dollars, polished content, and not to mention the countless startups that are piling on.

When you target business, if you can help me with any of the above 4, just "shut up and take my money"

knwang··on A letter to my daughter, Augusta, in ruby
amazing!
knwang··on Rails Tutors is now Tealeaf Academy
Tealeaf Academy teacher here. :)

We use a custom built application for our program. There's a discussion board that Chris and I monitor often and students questions are answered typically in a few hours, sometimes in minutes. We have a chat room too, where students work together to solve problems, and we are there often to help out.

Teaching wise, we follow the "flip the classroom" model - there are lecture videos and we use the live sessions to tie up all loose ends, demo and live code, and do code critiques.

For the curriculum, we have looked at all that's available online but in the end decided to build our own - most online materials either teach concepts in isolation or try to teach too much all at once, which is very overwhelming to students. We crafted a curriculum and refined it from over one year of teaching, and we want to introduce concepts slowly and plenty of exercise before students move on to new topics.

All our courses are project based - our students will write code on their own (not copy and pasting!) for 3 projects, with increasing difficulty, with the last one being a production quality e-commerce app.

Check out our site and I'm happy to answer any questions.

knwang··on Root Domain Support for Amazon S3 Website Hosting
GETs are easy, what about POSTS? Unless you support CORS?
knwang··on 1983 Radio Shack Catalog
30 years later, future generations will see the mbp i'm using now with the same amazement.
knwang··on Denver's gSchool: 6 months and 60 hours per week turns you into a web developer
Hey Barry, we teach an instructor led online Ruby on Rails course at http://www.railstutors.com - would like to be in touch.
knwang··on Show HN: Telescope, an open-source social news app built with Meteor
And this is CPU bound or memory bound?
knwang··on Show HN: Telescope, an open-source social news app built with Meteor
how many concurrent requests killed it?
knwang··on Show HN: Telescope, an open-source social news app built with Meteor
Really good job guys.. I have a couple questions:

1. How does the Meteor community look at Coffeescript? 2. Can the backend database be anything other than Mongo?

knwang··on Ask HN: I made a list of Ruby / Rails learning resources, should I open it up?
This is exactly the sort of thing I am concerned about. Definitely don't want it to be a place to piss people off.

Thanks for the reply

knwang··on Ask HN: What is the best (online or offline) resource to learn to code?
If you are a beginner, I wrote a post about how to start with Ruby / Rails as a beginner that you may find interesting:

http://www.railstutors.com/blog/the-best-way-to-learn-ruby-o...

knwang··on Announcing mails_viewer - easiest way to test mails in Rails app
Nice. very useful gem.
knwang··on Video matters But which hosting service to use?
Youtube also has the advantage of discoverable. The downside is that you don't "own" the comments. If someone puts in a bad comment everyone else will see.

I'll give SublimeVideo a look.. seems interesting

knwang··on Ask HN: What is the best (online or offline) resource to learn to code?
The Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails framework would be your best bet. The ecosystem is quite polished on building web apps.
knwang··on Ask HN: What is the best (online or offline) resource to learn to code?
Learning to code is a bit too general for concrete advice. what would you like to code for? websites? mobile apps? games? algorithm? or automating systems?

do you have a language / framework in mind?

knwang··on Ask HN: Effective ways to attract visitors to your site
Thanks for the feedback. We do have a separate page talking about details of the course, but looks like that's not obvious for people coming to the front page.

I like your suggestion of HN search and will do that - thanks.

knwang··on Ask HN: Effective ways to attract visitors to your site
Thanks a lot for the feedback! appreciate it very much.
knwang··on Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
>> My point is that this is a Chinese national who lives in China and has actually worked at the plant. Regardless of journalistic pedigree, the writer is vastly more capable of writing an honest story from the Chinese perspective than a Western journalist or the OP.

I actually agree. What I wanted to point out is for the reader of the story to keep in mind that the writer is a white collar Shanghai journalist, and would inevitably come with his frame of references because of it. For a NYT journalist living in NY, I believe most Western readers will assume a liberal bias, and view the reporting through some lenses, but the sophistication towards China probably stops at the reporter being a "Chinese Journalist".

Sure, the writer is more qualified than you and me, but he didn't answer some critical questions - is this factory above or below average in Chinese manufacturing plants? Is Foxconn raising or lowering labor standards in the area? Is Foxconn providing better alternatives to local labor, who may have to make a living by going down a tunnel in a coal mine or planting rice under the sun? Is having the plant there better or worth than not having the plant there?

knwang··on Journalist goes undercover making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
just want to point out that merely "being Chinese" does not make the journalist as qualified as you may think.

Think it like some journalist in NYC working for a major media company goes to some manufacturing plant in the Midwest, finding people are doing hard work under not good enough conditions. And that'll give some perspectives.

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