thejo

Product Manager and Sr. Product Manager | San Francisco | REMOTE | https://www.airbase.com

Airbase is the first all-in-one spend management platform that provides companies unparalleled control and visibility into every dollar spent. Finance teams deserve a solution that eliminates the tedious work involved in managing spend and allows them to focus on being strategic partners to the rest of the business. We do that by replacing the multiple systems typically used to manage spend with a single platform that handles every workflow including expense approvals and payments (physical cards, virtual cards, ACH, check), while also automating away the bulk of spend-related accounting. Our customers include companies like Gusto, Netlify, Getaround, Segment and many others.

We're hiring Product Managers and Sr. Product Managers. More details here: https://www.notion.so/airbasehq/Product-Manager-Sr-Product-M...

The last thing we wanted to do was build hardware! But, we could not deliver the experience we wanted to without building it. This blog post describes some of the reasons we built hardware - http://blog.automatic.com/why-we-built-the-link/

If you want to learn more about the latest generation hardware - https://www.automatic.com/adapter/

We did not support Diesel cars when we launched two years ago. We do now. You can continue to use the device you have now if you car is model year 2006 or later, but please drive for a bit and let the firmware update to the latest version. The latest generation of the hardware supports Diesel as well.

It was very clearly mentioned in various places on our website that Diesel cars were not supported before we added support, but we're happy to give you a refund if you missed it and never got to use the product. Please send an email to support@automatic.com and point them to this comment and they'll take care of it for you.

You're absolutely right that there is a lot more information in cars than we expose right now. What we're announcing today is the first step. The goal is to continue to expose more and more data over time via simple to use APIs.

Hi TeeWEE, imagine if every car had an API that you could build apps for and drivers could give you access to the data via OAuth. That's basically what the developer platform lets you do. We have a REST API, real-time events via webhooks / websockets and a direct Bluetooth API to the car for mobile clients to access data from the CAN bus directly.

We've started accepting international pre-orders today!

I'm sorry you did not have a great experience with our first gen device. We're announcing the second generation device today with the developer platform. The connectivity issues some of our users experienced with the first gen device were mainly due to BTLE. The second gen device has MFi support which allows us to support classic Bluetooth with iPhones. It's much more reliable. You must have received an email with a discount code. I hope you try it. We're also happy to help you get to the bottom of your issues if you write to support@automatic.com.

You can disable the crash alert feature if you don't want it.

That's right!

The Automatic Link supports both Bluetooth Low Energy and Bluetooth Classic, so it will work with many Android phones that don't support BT 4.0 too.

Automatic is designed to work with multiple drivers. So yes, you can share a car with your wife and both of you can use Automatic.

A tethering plan is not required. The Automatic Link communicates with your iPhone over Bluetooth and uses your phone's data connection.

hi dlokshin, we support the iPhone 4S and 5 because those are the only models that support Bluetooth 4.0. I'm sure we can theoretically support every Android phone out there, but as a small team, we'd rather focus on a smaller set and provide the best experience possible. Our goal is to support as many Android phones as possible over time.

The Automatic Link supports both classic bluetooth and bluetooth 4.0, so it will work with both iPhones and Android phones.

We'd love to build an API. It's on a long list of things we want to build. The Automatic Link supports OTA updates (through the phone). So, our users can expect improvements. In fact, we think of ourselves as a software company. We built a hardware device because that was the only way we could achieve the user experience we wanted to deliver.

We're paranoid about not running your car's battery down. When the ignition is off, we consume less than 1 mA. By itself, the Automatic Link would take 3-4 years to drain even a cheap battery.

Hey isalmon, fuel efficiency is not related to the speed limit. We just use that as a frame of reference. The actual numbers are that fuel efficiency drops by 12-15% for every 10 mph above 50 mph. Here's an article which talks about that - http://www.greencarcongress.com/2013/01/thomas-20130117.html

Congrats guys! This team has been studying crowdsourcing for a long time and this startup is a product of everything they have learned.

David Cohen of TechStars has written a good post about this -

http://www.davidgcohen.com/2010/06/18/you-have-acquisition-i...

The concept of having to reinvent stuff because we lost all of the tacit knowledge associated with it is very interesting. Donald MacKenzie wrote about this in the context of nuclear weapons - Tacit knowledge and the uninvention of nuclear weapons ( http://books.google.com/books?id=c5YaHkcP6DEC&lpg=PP1... )

It's highly recommended if you're wondering how things can get uninvented.

NSFW is the name of the weekly column by Paul Carr.

Social pressure is pretty much what micro-finance depends on to ensure repayment.

>> I'm really skeptical of this new fashion of claiming that the US's worst problem is that our standards of healthcare are too damn high.

I don't think anyone is advocating lowering of standards. The Aravind Eye Care and similar success stories are all about innovation in the model of delivering healthcare. They excel in lowering costs through scale while ensuring high standards. The founder of Aravind was inspired by the process standardization of McDonald's and succeeded in replicating that in healthcare. The doctors at Aravind are actually considered to be among the best in the world simply because they perform far more surgeries than doctors elsewhere. Others like Narayana Hrudayalaya are replicating the model in areas like treatment of heart disease in India with great success. So, there's definitely room for process innovation which can improve the standards while reducing costs at the same time.

For web applications, understanding the concept of state and managing it takes you a long way towards building a scalable system (on a related note, any time spent really understanding HTTP is time well spent). It's very useful to read books, presentations and war stories, but for me, reading code in applications designed for scale was far more important. I strongly recommend the Amazon Dynamo paper. Read and think about the design decisions they made. Then go read the Cassandra code for the actual implementation (pretty much, in terms of the big ideas, at least as it was back in 2008).

As with any learning it's very hard to truly grok the importance of loose coupling, service oriented architecture, embedding statelessness in the architecture etc., unless you try to build something, get it wrong and then fix it. So, the very best way to learn would be to put yourself in a place where you get an opportunity to do that.

Some hyperbole, but the general idea that employees are on the bench for a very long time is true. I spent the first year of my career at a large services company and saw a number of friends go through this. It may seem surprising that people are paid when they don't have anything to do, but that's part of the business model. The companies want to be able to say, "we have 300 people ready to start now if you sign the contract". If I'm not mistaken, 20-25% of the workforce can be on the bench at any given time.

The sad part is that new college grads are thrilled that they get paid without having to do anything, which is dumb. Some of the most productive time of their lives is lost forever.

This paper is very popular / influential in the area of usable security. It's interesting to note that though it's possible to securely exchange e-mail, most people don't. I took a course offered by Prof. Tygar (co-author of the paper) last year and we evaluated how easy it is to send encrypted mail using Thunderbird+Enigmail+GnuPG. While the usability of the software has improved in the 10 years since the paper was written, it is nowhere near the level required to make this a mainstream technology. Maybe it is inherent to the process itself. I don't see how you can simplify key exchange to make it very easy for the average user. I guess the price you pay for security is to go through the pain of figuring out how it works. Of course, most people will not / cannot do that even if it is in their best interest.

I'd loved to hear the thoughts of the security gurus on HN about this...

* How do you hear about the startups you invest in? (Introductions from people you trust?)

* What is the one piece of advice you would give to people who pitch their startups to you?

* How do you add value?

Related: an excellent debate on the social responsibility of business featuring Milton Friedman, John Mackey and T.J Rodgers

http://reason.com/archives/2005/10/01/rethinking-the-social-...

Prof. Varian lectured on this topic at the School of Information at UC Berkeley in October, 2009. The audio is here -

http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/dls2009...

Here's an IT Conversations interview with Sal Khan - http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4386.html

> How about supporting public key encryption for SMS?

The protocol in its current widely deployed form does not support it.