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vassvdm

1,326 karma · joined December 6, 2012

Founder at Sevendays: https://www.sevendays.co Blog: http://www.thestartupfreelancer.com Twitter: @vassvdm Email: vassvdm@sevendays.co
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vassvdm··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2025)
Sevendays | Hybrid (UK, France or Netherlands) | Full-Time | https://sevendays.io Sevendays is an international community of digital professionals working on cutting edge digital projects.

We are looking for a dynamic data engineer with a hands-on, entrepreneurial mindset. You will be working on both customer projects and exciting internal initiatives around data and AI/LLM agents.

We offer a chance to work on great projects with a competitive international package and a caring and supportive team.

Job page: https://sevendays.io/careers/data-engineer-europe/

vassvdm··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2024)
Sevendays | Hybrid (UK, France or Netherlands) | Full-Time | https://sevendays.io

Sevendays is an international community of digital professionals working on cutting edge digital projects.

We are looking for a dynamic data engineer with a hands-on, entrepreneurial mindset. You will be working on both customer projects and exciting internal initiatives around data and AI/LLM agents.

We offer a chance to work on great projects with a competitive international package and a caring and supportive team.

Job page: https://sevendays.io/careers/data-engineer-europe/

vassvdm··on New Shepard: Bezos claims success on second spaceship flight
Elon's reaction (quoted from Twitter):

"Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the BO team for achieving VTOL on their booster

It is, however, important to clear up the difference between "space" and "orbit", as described well by https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

Getting to space needs ~Mach 3, but GTO orbit requires ~Mach 30. The energy needed is the square, i.e. 9 units for space and 900 for orbit."

vassvdm··on Ask HN: Any successful startups that is founded by a designer?
Sunrise Calendar
vassvdm··on Yelp Buys Eat24 for $134M
They even seemed to be quite vocal about it: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/10/04/food-delivery...
vassvdm··on Microsoft Acquires Calendar App Sunrise for North of $100M
Congrats Pierre, Jeremy and team!
vassvdm··on Aubrey de Grey AMA
One more hour to go - plenty of time for more questions for Dr. de Grey.
vassvdm··on Slick – Carousel
I agree for the most part. I guess the Airbnb landing page is an obvious counterexample. I'm confident that they A/B tested it to death. In that particular case the transitions are very subtle and don't detract from the CTA (even though it's in the middle of the carousel images). The images themselves serve the purpose of "showing, not telling" what the product is.
vassvdm··on The startup freelancer
Thanks, fixed.
vassvdm··on The startup freelancer
I agree that the way I work is definitely not for everyone, and I only accept projects where I am confident that the client sees eye to eye with me. It wouldn't work if I was the only developer working on the project. There are several other, more junior developers on the team who work more hours than I do.

The client is very happy with the arrangement because it ends up costing much less than if I was on the team full-time and he is sure that every day I work is a day where things actually move forward significantly. He rather gets frustrated when freelancers charge several days of work and little progress seems to occur. There is at least a perception of lesser waste of time/money when work is concentrated over a small period of time, and I would argue that there is less actual waste.

vassvdm··on The startup freelancer
Well, my own startup is also making a little money, and I resort to a couple of life hacks to get extra income and reduce costs. I'll write another post about that soon.
vassvdm··on The startup freelancer
If you're in it for the money, early stage startups are not the way to go as far as clients go. As I mentioned in the post I do it because I love startups and working on MVPs specifically. It also lets me get my mind off my own startup and see how others do things differently.
vassvdm··on Stripe Checkout
The use case is for marketplaces (and maybe crowdfunding sites). An escrow service is a means to increase trust for both the buyer and seller sides. Funds are paid up front but held in escrow until goods are effectively exchanged or services rendered.

I realize that it is a major feature and requires more than just code, but I'd love to see another major player in this space that isn't PayPal. Balanced Payments and MangoPay are great but they aren't household names (that customers are likely to recognize) like Stripe is fast becoming.

vassvdm··on Stripe Checkout
Hey pc, do you plan to add escrow to Stripe Checkout at some point?
vassvdm··on Obama's Trauma Team: Inside the Nightmare Launch of HealthCare.Gov
Thanks for the insights. Apparently Accenture has been contracted to help out (or take over) the HealthCare.gov website:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230381970...

I'm wondering - how is this perceived within the current team? Are you relieved that you will be getting reinforcements, worried that another big contractor could contribute to the complexity, or even disturbed that they could get the credit for fixing the site after all the hard work you put in?

I used to work at Accenture, so I'm curious as to how this will turn out.

vassvdm··on Show HN: Newzly-phantom – Asynchronous type-safe Scala DSL for Cassandra
It's great to see new asynchronous NoSQL drivers popping up regularly now. I guess the Play framework team started something when they made ReactiveMongo.
vassvdm··on Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs
One of the co-founders, Jan Koum, had 45% of the company at the time of the purchase, which makes him worth about 6.8 billion.
vassvdm··on Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs
It's the current record for the acquisition of a venture-backed startup
vassvdm··on Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs
Whatsapp raised another 50m from Sequoia after those initial 8m
vassvdm··on Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs
MySMS is a similar service that also enables to send text messages via a desktop (web) application. I've been using it for a while. It can be a bit buggy though - not as polished as Whatsapp.
vassvdm··on Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs
This is fascinating. To think I was trying to convince people that MySMS was better than Whatsapp...
vassvdm··on Infamous Hacker Creates SkyJack to Hunt, Hack, and Control Other Drones
Funny how we talks about his breakthrough in understanding video recording software at the end, after going on for several minutes about zombie drones, deauthentication et al.
vassvdm··on Falcon 9 GEO Transfer Mission
Elon Musk: "If launch aborts, we will bring the rocket down for engine inspection, so probably a few days before next attempt"
vassvdm··on My experience hiring a developer on Elance to build my first iPhone app
I think you're on to something. Ratings on sites like Elance are broken. Clients feel compelled to give 5 star feedback to freelancers, sometimes just to get them off their back. This basically means that you can't look at a reputation score to tell you how good the freelancer actually is. I like the idea of a third-party anonymous person doing an audit. That person would need to have access to all the relevant files though, and have the right skills to judge the freelancer's work. Even the prospect of being audited could be a deterrent to the kind of behavior we saw in this case, which means that randomly auditing one out of every x gigs could be enough.
vassvdm··on SpaceX Launch - Official Webcast
Full version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4C9bydkX8

Complete with the intro from SpaceX employees. Is that Elon I hear at 10:41 saying 'CE is go' ? Assuming CE means chief executive...

vassvdm··on What’s new in Play 2.2
BTW if you're interested, Martin Odersky and others will host a brand new Coursera class focusing on Reactive programming starting in November:

https://www.coursera.org/course/reactive

It doesn't say so explicitly in the course description, but I guess we will be using Play and Akka during assignments. If it's half as good as his introduction to Functional Programming in Scala, it will be a treat.

vassvdm··on What’s new in Play 2.2
I agree with the above. As a Java and Scala programmer I've tried both and Play! 2 Scala is a joy to use if you're fond of idiomatic Scala and functional programmming.

I use Eclipse with the Scala IDE plugin and although I write all of my code in Scala, I do have a couple of dependencies to Java libraries (the interop works perfectly, but of course you should be careful when mixing immutable code with potential sources of mutability). The Intellij plugin is probably still the more stable of the two, but as mentioned by yareally the Scala IDE is the officially maintained one so you can expect new features to come to Eclipse before Intellij.

vassvdm··on What’s new in Play 2.2
Also using Play at a start-up, but as a customer-facing web app. It's great for productivity - getting both compile- and runtime errors in the browser kind of means that you have the advantages of Scala/statically-typed languages combined with those of dynamically typed languages. If you're ready to go fully stateless and (mostly) asynchronous/non-blocking, this is the framework for you.

I agree that documentation is still lackluster. I would add that although I love the Scala templates, the support for html forms in Scala is a bit clunky. Also there are still a few too many changes requiring code refactoring on minor releases, but I accept those as a byproduct of quick iterations/improvements.

vassvdm··on Programmer gives entire talk as a Pirate
"If your memory is between two and four times the size of yer vessel, ye be screwed hahaharrrr..."

Epic.

vassvdm··on Aubrey de Grey: Finally, the War on Aging Has Truly Begun
Hopefully Google/Calico will align their efforts with those of the SENS Foundation. I suspect they will. Having recently hired another such visionary in Ray Kurzweil I'm sure they are aware of De Grey's body of work. In fact Aubrey De Grey may well be partly to thank for Calico's very existence.
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