2,476 karma · joined October 11, 2007
Substack is building a new economic engine for culture. Many of the world's leading thinkers, writers, and creators are using Substack to produce their work and connect directly with their audiences.
Substack is a startup funded by YC, a16z, and others. We raised our Series B two years ago and are growing quickly.
We are hiring for:
- iOS engineer
- software engineering manager
https://substack.com/jobsSubstack is building a new economic engine for culture. Many of the world's leading thinkers, writers, and creators are using Substack to produce their work and connect directly with their audiences.
Substack is a startup funded by YC, a16z, and others. We raised our Series B two years ago and are growing quickly.
We are hiring for:
- full-stack engineer
- iOS engineer
- software engineering manager
Please submit your resume at substack.com/jobs and mention HN Who is hiringWith annotations: https://www.reddit.com/r/venus/comments/7vpr1w/sound_recordi...
Energy usage is distributed across industries and sectors, and we frequently criticize oil/gas and automobiles. Other technologies, like batteries, seem to avoid the laser-focus of the eco-oriented press. Batteries are very energy-heavy/carbon-heavy to produce. For example, the total carbon impact of a Tesla may in fact be higher than a conventional automobile. [1]
Point is: understanding total environmental costs of any technology is a Hard Problem.
[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/cleaner-cars-cradle-grave
His cultural insights, historical perspective, and witty language are all exquisite.
I routinely buy these for friends/family who want better digital audio setups and they tend to work great. I’ve never had any issues.
The best feature is “Ok, Google, play X.” When combined with Spotify’s amazing music index (really good for rare recordings/composers/etc), this is a super powerful mechanism to play any music at high quality. Best of all I can do it without needing to look at my phone and fend off the distractions there.
And quick nit on the Presidio: it's a lovely place to live and if you live there, there is a free shuttle to downtown called the Presidigo that's easy and efficient.
But for now, I use the iPhone's Do Not Disturb option and allow calls only from contacts. I used to get harassed daily by shit companies selling me stuff, and I'd report them to the FTC, and it was a huge annoyance. Now I have to see the missed call from an unknown number, but at least my phone doesn't ring.
One Bay-area company doing awesome stuff, not mentioned in the article, is Blue River Technologies. They make lettuce crops (of all things, lettuce!) insanely efficient with AI and hyper-fast distributed systems computations. This stuff is so cool.
My company, Thumbtack, got a lot of this right early on. Years ago we doubled down on getting the unit economics right. So right that we were (IIRC) profitable for a month or two before taking a big VC round. Not sure how many other companies can say that. But at the end of the day, if the bubble is a bubble and it pops, knowing that we would survive and be able to make a profit is hugely satisfying.
My advice to any young startup is figure out how to make money early on. It's the rare Google/Facebook that can blow up and use the platform to sell ads. Most startups will not do this, but many can still make good money doing important things that people will pay for.
[1] http://qz.com/356620/mark-cuban-is-absolutely-convinced-we-a...
Re: Netflix/Spotify price differences. The relative size of the libraries (vs all content in the domain) is something to keep in mind. Netflix gives users access to some videos, but Spotify gives users access to almost all songs [1].
[1] Can't find precise estimates for sizes of libraries, so apologies for the argument from anecdotal evidence.
We are backed by Sequoia and Google Capital. Offices in SoMa with daily home-cooked food and a friendly, ambitious team of 30 engineers. We're looking for expertise in Go, Python, data science (ML and NLP), mobile, and web.
Current projects:
* Hadoop/Spark data research platform
* Two-sided search and discovery system to connect the marketplace
* Scaling of core systems on AWS
* Building an Android app to empower service professionals to be more efficient
For more information:http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering
Also, feel free to email me (chris at) with any questions!