omarish

Coinbase | Software Engineering | San Francisco, CA | Full-Time | ONSITE

At Coinbase (YC S12), our vision is to bring more innovation, efficiency, and equality of opportunity to the world by building an open financial system.

Our first step on that journey is making digital currency accessible and approachable for everyone. Two principles guide our efforts. First, be the most trusted company in our domain. Second, create user-focused products that are easier and more delightful to use.

All openings here: http://coinbase.com/careers

Reach out to me directly and I'll put you in touch with the right person. omar.bohsali+hn@coinbase.com

Revenue loss from not releasing a faulty product is infinitely better than the customer trust lost from releasing something faulty.

Techcrunch is an antipattern.

Coinbase (YC S12)| Cryptocurrency and Payments Engineering | San Francisco, Chicago, London | Full-time | Onsite & Remote

At Coinbase (YC S12), our vision is to bring more innovation, efficiency, and equality of opportunity to the world by building an open financial system. We’re hiring across the board and focusing on cryptocurrency and payments engineering.

Questions or want to say hi? Reach out to us directly: omar.bohsali+hn@coinbase.com. Here’s an open list https://coinbase.com/careers.

Here’s a small subset of what we’ve accomplished/shipped in the past few months:

* Added many new assets: ZCash to Coinbase Pro, Basic Attention Token (BAT), 0x, Ethereum Classic

* Raised our Series E round

* Launched USDC alongside Circle

* Presented at AWS re:Invent (and recruited an excellent VPE, Tim Wagner, the creator of Lambda)

* Received our Independent Qualified Custodian License from the NY Department of Financial Services

* Acquired two companies

* Launched Paradex internationally

Needless to say, it’s been a very productive past few months and we have quite a bit more planned that we’ll be announcing shortly. We look forward to continuing the trend :).

See openings here https://coinbase.com/careers or send me a note: omar.bohsali+hn@coinbase.com.

Coinbase | Fullstack, Backend, Frontend, iOS, Android | ONSITE in SF, NYC | Full-time | Competitive Comp

At Coinbase (YC S12), our vision is to bring more innovation, efficiency, and equality of opportunity to the world by building an open financial system.

Our first step on that journey is making digital currency accessible and approachable for everyone. Two principles guide our efforts. First, be the most trusted company in our domain. Second, create user-focused products that are easier and more delightful to use.

All openings here: http://coinbase.com/careers

Questions or want to say hi? Reach out to me directly: omar.bohsali+hn@coinbase.com.

Coinbase | Fullstack, Backend, Frontend, iOS, Android | ONSITE in SF, NYC, London | Full-time | Competitive Comp

At Coinbase (YC S12), our vision is to bring more innovation, efficiency, and equality of opportunity to the world by building an open financial system.

Our first step on that journey is making digital currency accessible and approachable for everyone. Two principles guide our efforts. First, be the most trusted company in our domain. Second, create user-focused products that are easier and more delightful to use.

All openings here: http://coinbase.com/careers

Questions or want to say hi? Reach out to me directly: omar.bohsali+hn@coinbase.com.

Full PDF here: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/john-pfeffer/An+Investor%...

+1 for Recurse Center! Doing a batch right now and I highly recommend it.

The encryption seems very insecure. I just tried turning on encryption and it revealed my password in the URL bar. And now each time I click on a new page, it shows my password in the URL bar.

https://laverna.cc/app/?password=<password>&cloudStorage=0

> The product is just too complicated (tons of domain knowledge required) for someone to come in and take over.

Are you sure about this, beyond a reasonable doubt? Reading your post, this sounded to me like the kind of story I sometimes tell myself to boost my self-esteem when I feel like I'm in a bind.

If you are in fact irreplaceable, that means you're unique and one-of-a-kind. Feels good, doesn't it? Everything is hard, but at least you're valuable and unique.

At the same time, if you're actually replicable, that means you might not be as unique as you think you are in this situation, but fortunately by admitting that, you're on the way to solving the problem.

It sounds like you're in a generally good situation, and maybe there's someone smart and ambitious out there who would be willing to step up and help you make yourself redundant?

Good luck!

Congrats on the launch!

I feel bad for anyone who's still an investor in this social media network of bots and marketers.

Hopefully you'll keep developing this (add more articles & whatnot), because the usefulness is definitely 10 out of 10.

No, this is absolutely wrong. The housing crisis happened because people did not appropriately price risk and subprime mortgage bonds with poor underlying mortgages were rated highly and then leveraged 30:1 by banks like GS and BoA. An extra billion dollars in insurance exposure to the greater NY area will not precipitate the another financial crisis.

Is that a bad thing? It just means that it's an existing market, done better. Your comment reminds me a lot of the first criticism of the iPod "less space than a jukebox" or the guy who berated Dropbox by calling it a dumb GUI to rsync.

And then there's manual labor...

All sarcasm aside, I don't think there is anything "exceptional" about being a programmer, just like how there is nothing exceptional about being a management consultant. I wouldn't say it's the most thankless job, nor would I say it's the job where you get the most praise. It's a spectrum.

Often times, when I have thoughts like these, exuding confidence that my job is the most in any dimension, I realize that they might be more about me than the field of software engineering. Put differently, I'd probably have the same thoughts about welding if I was a welder, or the same thoughts about monetary policy if I worked at the Federal Reserve.

Great catch. I actually wasn't aware of that. Thanks for the correction!

Hey there! Thanks for the feedback. Could you clarify what's incorrect about effective_cache_size? Would love to correct it.

LendingHome | San Francisco, CA & Columbus, OH | Full Time - Onsite

LendingHome is reimagining the mortgage process from the ground up based in technology as a simple, fast, transparent marketplace for borrowers and investors. We’re chasing the goal of being the best way to get a mortgage and the best way to invest in them.

Our engineering team is 35 right now, 6 of which are ex-CTOs of previous companies, so no level of experience or authority is too senior.

Open Positions:

- Senior Software Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/lendinghome/jobs/85149

- Senior Data Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/lendinghome/jobs/123601

All careers: https://www.lendinghome.com/careers

Feel free to apply through the site, or message me omar+hn@lendinghome.com if you have any questions.

We should be careful to not conflate intensity (at one's work) with being a one-dimensional human being. Intensity is generally a good thing. Being one-dimensional is not.

Regardless of whether you're just starting out and are the most intense programmer ever, or if you've been at it for 20+ years, there's immense value in understanding and being proficient at many things other than software.

Many big discoveries happen at the intersection of two fields. A lot of our latest breakthroughs in AI are based on our newfound understanding of the human mind. Same with computational genomics. Black Scholes for option pricing. The list goes on.

The majority of complaints here:

- Ergonomics sucks!

- I can't re-map caps lock to be escape, what trash!

- This is so old!

- Too expensive!

- Dell makes cheaper monitors!

- Fingerprint authentication can be hacked.

But what everybody is not considering is:

1. You have to have a Bloomberg keyboard to work in finance. It's not even a question. It's a COGS for anybody who wants to work in finance or trading.

2. Bloomberg chat is Facebook messenger for finance people.

3. If your trading desk is bringing in $10M in profits/year, four Bloomberg terminals are a rounding error.

People who berate Bloomberg and it's tech need to have more empathy and ask why things are the way they are.

LendingHome | San Francisco, CA & Columbus, OH | Full Time - Onsite

LendingHome is reimagining the mortgage process from the ground up based in technology as a simple, fast, transparent marketplace for borrowers and investors. We’re chasing the goal of being the best way to get a mortgage and the best way to invest in them.

Our engineering team is 30 right now, 6 of which are ex-CTOs of previous companies, so no level of experience or authority is too senior.

Open Positions:

- Senior Software Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/lendinghome/jobs/85149

- Senior Data Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/lendinghome/jobs/123601

All careers:

https://www.lendinghome.com/careers

Feel free to apply through the site, or message me omar+hn@lendinghome.com if you have any questions.

For each point there is a counter-point about why it's a good place to invest:

FinTech businesses don’t scale quickly. => it takes a long time to build a business, but once you're there it's harder to get usurped by new upstarts.

It’s really easy to get fooled by early adopters => this can be said about any market, not just fintech.

FinTech is not an acquisitive space. => yeah, you build long-term equity value in the companies you think are going to be successful and big wins.

The sale cycles are really long. => this is endemic to the entire finance & banking space itself; not just fintech. That also means once you're in, you're in for a while.

Customer acquisition is hard to hack. => moat, and this can be said about any space.

LendingHome | San Francisco, CA / Columbus, OH | Full Time - Onsite

LendingHome is reimagining the mortgage process from the ground up based in technology as a simple, fast, transparent marketplace for borrowers and investors. We’re chasing the goal of being the best way to get a mortgage and the best way to invest in them.

Our engineering team is 30 right now, 6 of which are ex-CTOs of previous companies, so no level of experience or authority is too senior.

Open Positions:

- Senior Software Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/lendinghome/jobs/85149?gh_jid=8...

- Senior Data Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/lendinghome/jobs/123601?gh_jid=...

All careers: https://www.lendinghome.com/careers

Feel free to apply through the site, or message me omar+hn@lendinghome.com if you have any questions.

Loved this article. It really reminded me of some of Seneca's writing, specifically _On the Shortness of Life_:

> Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.

Haha, Wara2 3in-App.

Based on everything I learned about this space from starting, operating, and later selling a company that does exactly this in the summer of 2014 [1] [2], I'm bullish on this idea. I think it's definitely a step in the right direction and incentives are starting to line up.

The "I'll do anything for you by SMS" space (I call it the "Houdini app" space) space affords the middle-to-upper class in first world countries (where labor is much more expensive) the same power you'd get if you were in a country where labor is much cheaper.

Example: in Lebanon, where I grew up, the middle-to-upper class of the population has: a stay-at-home maid ($200/mo), a driver ($300/mo), and a concierge at the bottom of their building ($30/mo), who will take care of pretty much anything for you. This is possible because labor is so cheap. I'd say you have to be in the 0.1% in the US to be able to afford this (since labor would cost you much more), but in third world countries, it's within reach of probably the top 15% of the population (by income).

I think the most successful concierges have a "fixer" mindset - you give them a very loosely defined need, and their job is 1) coordinating and finding a solution, and 2) actually following through and executing on it. The fixer's advantage is 1) the end user trusts them, trusts their taste, and there is a pre-existing relationship with the customer, and 2) the user has a general idea of what they can and cannot do.

The real value Magic brings is that they can be the fixer for your day-to-day life. If I were Magic, I'd change the pricing to $200/hour, but only charged if the task is actually completed. That way, the incentives really line up in that 1) they're more incentivized to complete the task successfully, 2) users trust them a lot more and know that they will get their money's worth, and 3) they develop the "fixer" brand, where Magic gets you what you want, and you only have to pay if it gets done.

Lots of important technologies start off as "toys for the rich" - I could see that happening here too. What I am curious to see, is how they plan on bringing the cost of the service down. Or if it's possible to get a big enough market share at this price point.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8094351

[2] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/08/my-disruptive-d...

I've been using Anki on my iPhone for the past 3 years and it's been quite effective. Highly recommend it for anybody who has a lot of content to learn. It's really useful if you can make time for it on a daily basis.

I'm probably going to get downvoted a lot for this, but this is probably the exact feeling people on the other side get that causes them to go to Syria and take up arms and join isil.

Edit: To be 100% clear, I'm by no means sympathizing. Rather, I believe that understanding an adversary's motivations can help resolve a conflict.

Aptitude is very overrated. I think if you're curious enough to wonder if you're good enough / have natural "aptitude", you more than likely have enough "aptitude" to go with it and can pursue programming.

I think pg has a quote online somewhere to the weight of "if you're spending time thinking about whether you're smart enough, you're most likely smart enough."