SeanOC

If you're consumer focused, you're probably fine and will just need to clean up some mess later when you get big enough to care.

If you're B2B, it's going to be a problem from day one. GDPR has a defacto viral component for service providers. Basically, any the business that wants to become your customer that is itself GDPR compliant needs to ensure that you too are GDPR compliant. Accordingly, GDPR will come up with a large portion of web-facing B2B sales, even for US companies.

a) PR b) From what I understand, Hawaii's power utility either doesn't allow or strongly discourages new net metering customers (e.g. where excess generated power goes back to the grid and you get credited). Accordingly, on-site battery systems make sense for most PV solar installs to help deal with the difference in generation and usage over time.

Stripe connect (https://stripe.com/connect) is probably the easiest option available today.

Otherwise, it's a pretty complicated negotiation and certification process as in addition to the processor twitchiness there are a bunch of state wire transmission/money laundering laws that you are getting rather adjacent to that can be a mess to navigate.

They look into it every few years but so far the costs to do so have been astronomical so it doesn't go past studies.

I don't have a good reference at the moment but from what I understand, most of it comes down to it being much harder to retrofit that kind of thing on to a 100+-year-old system than it is to build it into a new system. More specifically, since nothing was built with that in mind there are all kinds of challenges that would be very expensive to address like not all platforms are level or straight (imagine the cost and disruption involved in expanding and rebuilding the 4/5/6 platform and tunnels at Union Station to make them straight) and not all trains have doors that align in the same places (different generations of trains in service at the same time, different designs of trains on different lines, etc).

None of this means it can't or shouldn't be addressed eventually, but like many things in life there are reasons things aren't "just done" and it's important to understand those reasons if you want to make change happen.

If this ever happens again in the future, take a note of the cab's number and call 311 or go to http://nyc.gov/311/.

They take reports of this kind of activity very seriously and will usually prosecute the driver if you're willing to testify.

This is likely a function of your grind size. I've had this happen in the past and once I got the grind size set right, things were much better.

If what you're doing now works well in a drip coffee machine and a french press you probably want a smaller grind size. I usually do well aiming somewhere between the drip and espresso settings on my grinder.

They're actually a Canadian company but looking at the reader, it does look like it only supports swiping the mag strip of a card.

Author of the post here. Is the only reason you think the post is spam that it's hosted on medium?

I mostly posted this there to try it out but if there is something wrong with doing so (other than seeing a tld of medium.com), I'd really appreciate hearing about it.

New York, NY - Full Time - Application Engineer

Bitly is seeking an application engineer to create the next generation of our social media sharing product, enabling social media producers to better understand, engage and interact with their audience. This is a great position for you if love building products that generate insights from massive amounts of data and simplify workflow to make your users the hero.

You obsess about software quality, scalability, and usability You have mastered at least one server-side programming language (Python, Ruby, Java, C, C++) You have experience with a relational datastore You have some experience with non-relational datastores You have experience with Javascript, HTML and CSS You are a hacker at heart, with wide and varied interests

Bitly is based in NYC's Union Square. Benefits include Macs with huge monitors; a kitchen filled with your favorite treats; flexible hours; frequent guest speakers; company-sponsored training and conferences; excellent health benefits; equity; and a chance to do work impacting millions of users and the underlying fabric of the social web.

Apply at http://bit.ly/15nLfsB

There's a lot more to running a production database than simply installing the software. At a minimum you have monitoring, tuning, backups, failover/replication, and security. These and more are all tasks that some people look to outsource as it is outside of their core competency/business (for better or worse).

Awesome, thanks for the feedback!

The homepage could probably use a bit more detail. The idea is you upload a image, tell us what you need counted in it, and then we get you back a number.

You could use this for gathering statistics about an audience at an event, inventory counting, or field research. Part of our goal in putting this out is to see where it will get used.

We'll definitely work on improving the homepage and look at making a free option.

I'm one of the people behind ThingCounter, feel free to ask me any questions.

If you have a car, going down to the local UPS or FedEx depot usually isn't too bad but if you don't have a car (e.g. most people in NYC) it can be a real nightmare. In urban areas, depots tend to be in industrial areas with poor mass transit access. Accordingly, having a local, secure, place to have packages dropped would be a great service for the latter group.

Should be pretty soon but I'm not 100% up to speed on the sponsorship side of things. Definitely send a note to djangocon@holdenweb.com if you have any questions about sponsorship stuff and feel free to give me a ping at sean@seanoc.com if that doesn't work.

I am the DjangoCon US Community Char and would be happy to answer any questions or comments you have about the program or the conference.

SEEKING WORK - NYC or Remote

Developer based out of New York with significant Django, front-end, and product development experience.

For the last 3 years I have been the main organizer of Django NYC, the community chair of DjangoCon.US, and I have worked on more than dozen Django projects over the last five years.

On the front-end side of things, I have developed a number of projects from start to finish including projects where the front-end work ranged from entirely static HTML+CSS sites to single page javascript applications that interacted with a REST APIs.

Additionally I have worked done a fair amount of sys admin work deploying and managing django/postgres/mysql stacks. This experience has been entirely linux based (mix of Ubuntu and RHEL). I've worked with both cloud hosting providers (AWS) and dedicated hosting providers (Rackspace, Softlayer). I have also done a fair amount of work automating deployment and management using Chef.

I'd be very interested to learn more about your project and seeing what we could accomplish together.

You can find my email in my profile or you can reach me via http://seanoc.com

I think the key difference here is the audience. Offering credit cards to college kids is very different than offering cards to a more mature audience. Especially when you've been teaching that audience how to use credit cards as what they are, tools.

There's also a significant difference here in that in your situation, you would have been providing the rewards and you would have had power to artificially manipulate the value of those rewards (make it harder to win your game without reward points. Here, the author doesn't provide the rewards he is simply stating what offers the credit card companies themselves are making.

At the end of the day, there is certainly still a moral hazard here but it is also a very different situation than the one you described.

Yup. At the last two DjangoCons in the US, if you got up on stage you basically had a sea of glowing Apple logos staring back at you.

While I agree that this problem could have been handled better in absence of a sexual harassment policy, there's a lot to be gained by having such a policy. In this situation I don't agree that conferences having sexual harassment policies are "scar tissue".

First and foremost, the scare tissue complaint largely relies on a policy being applied to an extremely rare event. Unfortunately this kind of thing is almost certainly less rare than you think. If you run a large or frequent enough event, sexual harassment will happen. It really sucks, but it's a reality of the world that we live in that we need to deal with. To make things worse, it probably will go un-reported and the person that it happened to will simply feel uncomfortable with the event and the community as a whole.

By having an explicit policy that addresses sexual harassment you accomplish a number of things:

  * You make attendees more mindful of their actions.  Often people who commit sexual harassment don't really realized the full extent and consequences for what they are doing.  By stating that this type of behavior is unacceptable, upfront, at least some people will be a bit more likely to think before they act.
  * Should something happen, the path to action is clear.  Running a conference is a bit of a crazy job.  You're keeping track of a hundred things at once and dealing with a dozen people's problems.  This is not the best state to be in when you need to decide how to handle a delicate situation.  By stating upfront how this type of behavior will be handled, it takes a load off of the organizers' shoulders on the day off.
  * A strong signal is communicated to people who are concerned and possibly afraid to attend an event.  People go through all kinds of horrible things in life.  Often those experiences leave people (understandably) cautious about situations that might lead to similar experiences.  By having an explicit policy, people with fears and concerns are given a strong signal that the event in question will be a place where they are safe and welcome.

This is pretty comparable to being asked to be critical of yourself (e.g. "What's your biggest weakness"). Generally speaking this is a bit of a trap and your main goal should be to not take the bait and move on to another topic ASAP. If they really press the issue focus on issues where there's nobody to blame and there's not that much that's going to be held against anybody (e.g. Old Co become very big which was fun but now I'm looking to be part of a smaller team). The key thing is to keep things positive and move on to why you want to work for them instead of why you don't want to work for your old employer.

Same reason most infrastructure as a service companies exist.

Setting up, maintaining, and scaling web socket messaging servers isn't my core business. Accordingly I am happy to pay a reasonable fee to somebody like Pusher to have the problem go away.

If real-time messaging is core/fundamental to your business, then you probably should run your own servers. Otherwise let somebody else deal with that bit of complexity and focus on the parts of your business that matter most.

That's your discretion but for the sake of argument, what's the value in keeping that information private?

If both the candidate and the employer are honest in communicating their priorities in regard to what they hope to get out of the relationship it allows both parties to better understand each other. Additionally, assuming they are sufficiently aligned, such discussion allows both parties to focus on things that matter to everybody involved and not waste time quibbling over things nobody cares about.

There's lots of good advice in this thread already but I would add a pitch to take a look at Brooklyn. While not cheap, it's generally way less expensive than manhattan and there's an awesome mixed community of people from all kinds of different backgrounds.

As far as office space, there are are couple of co-working spaces mentioned already, but there's also a great place called GreenDesk [1]. GreenDesk lets you rent anything from a single desk to an office for 6-7 people, it's relatively inexpensive, it's month to month so you're not locked into a lease, and it's in a pretty nice neighborhood with good subway connections.

Finally as far as culture, I'd say the NY tech scene is a more fractured than SF (there's a lot of finance folks here who usually don't interact much with the startup world) but within the startup space it's very active and friendly. One of the best things you can do to get involved and to get to know people is go to various meetup groups [2]. There are groups for virtually every neighborhood, specialization, and technology.

Good luck with the move and hopefully see you around NYC soon!

[1] http://greendesk.com/index.html [2] http://www.meetup.com/find/?userFreeform=10001&radius=5&...

I've used CheddarGetter (http://cheddargetter.com) for a few projects and I've been extremely happy with their service.

* API is reasonably nice to work with (wrote a Python client called Sharpy https://github.com/saaspire/sharpy) * Lots of options to control exactly how and when your customers get billed. * Support for a bunch of payment gateways * Tools for handling tracked items and one-off charges (e.g. discounts or fees) as part of your subscriptions. * Fantastic support - I don't think I've ever waited more than a few hours for a response and their support team has been very helpful.

If there was a massive pool of unemployed programmers sitting around, this could be a pretty good idea. Unfortunately I think you have a rather oddly skewed picture of the current state of the job market. Right now there is a huge talent crush for programmers. If somebody has the skill and ambition to be a useful team member in this kind of setup, they are unemployed because they choose to be at this point. You're going to have a very difficult time attracting anything other than leeches and "business guys" looking for free/cheap labor. Think about this: from the perspective of a recently unemployed programmer, why do I want to join your project instead of signing on with one of the dozens of startups currently hiring or just starting something on my own?

All of that being said everything goes through cycles and there probably will come a time in the not too distant future where something like this could do very well. If you can overcome the adoption challenges of today, you'd have something very powerful when the next tech recession comes.

I'm working on http://wtales.com/. Think collaboratively authored choose your own adventure books. So far wtales is just a side project and is just getting off the ground. To kick things off, I am running a kick start program where people can earn amazon gift cards for posting stories (more info on that at http://wtales.com/kick-start-landing/).