Hacker News Reader

seattlematton American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

First, people vote on a candidate, not a single issue. Many voted for Trump despite his tariffs stance rather than because of it.

Second, reducing consumer prices was not the goal of the tariffs. The primary goals were to encourage companies to move manufacturing to the US and to be used as leverage in negotiating other matters with foreign leaders.

seattlematton I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]

Seems like a market opportunity for dual pod packets.

seattlematton Lessons from Washington State’s New Capital Gains Tax

It's because the Washington state constitution prohibits a state income tax. The state Supreme Court somehow found a way to interpret the capital gains tax as an excise tax rather than an income tax.

seattlematton Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2015)

PlayFab (http://www.playfab.com) Seattle, WA

PlayFab is a Backend-as-a-Service for video games. Our mission is to power the future of games by providing developers and publishers with the best live game operations platform in the industry. We offer competitive salaries, stock options, 100% employer-paid health insurance and a focus on getting stuff done (no Foosball tables here).

Director of Engineering We are looking for an experienced, results-driven Director of Engineering to mentor and grow our engineering team under the technical direction of our CTO. This is a critical role with enormous impact on the long-term success of PlayFab, and our expectations are high.

DevOps Engineer: Help us in our mission to automate everything by continually improving the deployment and monitoring (both internal and customer facing) of our AWS-based service, using tools such as CloudFormation, Salt and Elasticsearch.

Sr. Software Engineer (SDK): Help us build SDKs for every game platform (iOS, Android, PC, XBox, PlayStation etc.) that make it a joy for developers to make better games by using our service.

seattlematton Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2015)

PlayFab (https://www.playfab.com) Seattle, WA - FULL TIME

PlayFab's mission is to power the future of games by providing developers and publishers with the best live game operations platform in the industry. We recently raised a Series A and are well funded. We offer competitive salaries, stock options, 100% employer-paid health insurance and a focus on getting stuff done.

Our current tech stack is C#, ASP.NET MVC, EC2, DynamoDB, S3, Redshift, Elasticsearch, and Kibana. We use Jenkins, Salt and CloudFormation to deploy multiple times per day. We are always open to new tools and technologies that make our product and development process better.

Sr. Front-End Web Developer: We have a solid back-end for games with a HTTP/JSON API. Help us build powerful and beautiful web-based tools to make our service accessible to everyone, including non-developers.

Sr. Game Client Engineer: Help us build SDKs for every game platform (iOS, Android, PC, XBox, PlayStation etc.) that make it a joy for developers to make better games by using our service.

Apply at https://playfab.com/jobs or email me at matt@playfab.com with any questions.

seattlematton VR and Steam days

Michael Abrash's post about his talk at Steam Developer's Day, which includes a link to his slides: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/my-steam-developers-da...

seattlematton 30 Weeks of Game Development

VO is voice over (the announcer). Uber Entertainment definitely runs a lean operation, with everyone wearing multiple hats. In fact, the person responsible for VO in the game happens to double as our office manager. You can check out some of the other stuff we do at http://www.uberent.com/

seattlematton Sharding and IDs at Instagram

Back in 2003 I was a developer on a team at Microsoft that was responsible for building a new storage backend for all the MSN Messenger and Hotmail contact lists. This store had to hold data for close to 300 million user accounts, which we sharded out to a few hundred SQL server databases. Our sharding system consisted of a database with a single table with a row for each user that mapped their 128 bit guid user ID to the ID of their assigned shard. New user creation involved generating a new guid and inserting into this table. Each read operation involved a select from this table.

The database ran on a machine with enough RAM to let SQL Server do its thing and cache almost the whole table in memory. At the time I left the team in 2005, it was executing over 25,000 requests per second, with an average latency of under 3ms. Pretty sure that on modern hardware it would handle much, much more.