bsirkia

Brynson | Full Stack Developer | NYC Onsite (3-4 days in-office / week) | $120 - $160K brynson.com

Brynson is a fast-growing SaaS company building Brynsights™, the leading business intelligence platform for the multifamily real estate industry. We help property management companies, owners, and operators unlock actionable insights by connecting data across property management systems, CRMs, marketing channels, and more.

We’re a bootstrapped startup with real momentum — and we’re looking for a Full Stack Developer with 2-4 years of experience who can grow into a technical lead role, working closely with our CTO to expand the platform, build scalable systems, and help guide product development. Our stack is Ruby on Rails with React front end.

To apply, please email a resume and brief cover letter to careers@brynson.com

I think this is generally right. We tend to focus on the one side of the slippery slope which is "descent into an Orwellian dystopia", but the other side of the logical extreme is what, that no matter what private companies aren't allowed to remove and censor certain things on their forums?

Like you said, if there were an app where 90% of the conversation was about child pornography, no one would cry "1984" if it's removed by Apple. So we're just having a conversation about where the line should be and if hate speech and planning insurrection should meet that standard, not beginning a rapid descent into thought control.

Right now an entirely separate platform, but the original idea was an integration with Zoom. Unfortunately their API doesn't support breakout room management yet (https://devforum.zoom.us/t/breakout-rooms-api/4255/111) so the idea was to build it entirely separately, get some validation/learnings, and then integrate with Zoom when ready.

In terms of mingle-naturalness, right now it's set so the organizer just says how big the mingles should be and how long they should last. So from a user's side, you're in a group with two random people (from the company/larger group) for 5 minutes, then cycle into a new mingle with two other random people, rinse and repeat. Somewhat like speed dating, you don't have any say over who you're mingling with, but it is time constricted.

Been building https://zoomingle.com over the last few months, it's a group video chat service that automatically creates randomized breakout rooms to facilitate 1:1's and other small group chats within a larger group. Came up with it because happy hours during Covid had no side conversations, spontaneous chats, etc. and figured that's the whole point. It's somewhat do-able with Zoom's breakout rooms, but if you have a company of 60 people and what people to be able to chat in random groups of 3 for 5 minutes for an hour, the person manually creating all these breakout rooms would go insane.

I'd like to continue running the tech/product side, but looking for a CEO/co-founder to run the biz dev, strategy, marketing etc.

I'm Brian, a 30 y/o Canadian living in NYC (but totally happy to work with someone remotely, ofc). I've co-founded and ran the engineering teams of two other tech startups, and currently doing misc tech consulting and freelancing.

Very cool! I'd be happy to help with the NYC one (moved here from Canada about 5 years ago) but can't tell exactly where to edit the spreadsheet?

Hey @econcon, I think my friend and I will give this a try. We're starting to spec everything out, and probably want to start out with laser gauge to have high accuracy. Would love to ask a couple questions if you have time, my email is just my username at gmail.com

This really resonates with me as an engineer/CTO working on a product that went into the jungle with a machete. We never anticipated how difficult it would be educate the market, so eventually pivoted to more of a "toll-road" product.

There's really a second/third/fourth mover advantage that often isn't talked about, which is that you don't have to explain the entire point of your product before convincing them that your pricing makes sense and it's worth their time. When clear competitors exist, the sale is just why your specific solution is superior (more efficient, smarter features tacked on, cheaper pricing etc.)

Definitely worth reading the Naked Capitalism series he mentions in a footnote:

Part 1: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...

Part 2: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-deliver...

Part 3: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-deliver...

Part 4: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-deliver...

Part 5: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-deliver...

Part 6: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/can-uber-ever-deliver...

Love original version! Only thing stopping me from making it my regular client is the lack of "best" menu item. I love checking out day's best or week's best if I've been to busy to keep up. Great work though.

Can you ask your friend to send me an invite? Price is negotiable :-)

Yes, you've correctly identified what the article is about, and I've never disagreed or said "this article is about Theranos as an investment". I still think it's interesting to think about the article in the context of due diligence in startup investing.

True, but I'd say that the unreliability of blood testing as a diagnostic technique is extremely pertinent information for investors to have when investing in a company that is built on blood testing as a diagnostic technique. My point is just that it's surprising that the journalist for this story appears to have spent more time researching the subject for this article than the investors putting in ~$700M.

Right, there seems to be a big problem with pattern matching, i.e. "quirky Harvard dropout" and simply associating that with success.

I'm consistently surprised at the low bar for due diligence in startup funding. In my personal experience, it goes something like "send us a business plan, pitch deck, three customers (that you handpick) for us to talk to, the legal paperwork, and maybe some bank records but not usually". I always assumed investors required credentials to Google Analytics or Mixpanel or iTunes analytics or whatever to actually verify that the usage numbers are what founders say they are, yet I've never had an investor do that or even heard of it being done. It's completely baffling to me that Theranos can raise ~$700M w/o any third party testing or diligence.

This article suggest it's because Holmes is "enthralling" and investors had an "exaggerated faith in the power of medical testing". Faith and charisma are very abstract concepts, but data and testing aren't, so why rely on the former instead of the latter? As Deming said, "In God we trust; all others must bring data."

Incredible that this is the first time in 13 years that Apple hasn't posted quarterly growth. I'm sure there will be lots of "Apple has lost its ability to innovate" articles based on this, but growing for the last ~52 straight quarters is insane.

And I don't think one quarter without growth is enough evidence to conclude "Apple may be reaching the saturation point among potential customers in some countries" or "other smartphone makers using Google’s Android operating system continue to challenge the company with powerful, lower-price devices."

"Argentina on Two Steaks A Day" is one of my favorite essays ever: http://www.idlewords.com/2006/04/argentina_on_two_steaks_a_d...

sorry for being late to this, please send me that email if you can.

"Oh wait, our attempt create a backdoor to every private citizen's iPhone, using a single terrorism case as a trojan horse, has been discovered? Oops sorry but we still need those backdoors."

It also amazes me he thought it was a helpful metaphor to say that the FBI doesn't want a backdoor, just for Apple to take the “vicious guard dog away” and “let us pick the lock.” I think every American would prefer having a guard dog protecting their personal property and data than just let these liars pick the lock.

I wonder if that just shows that having the both the open bullpen and quiet space as dueling options is ineffective. FOMO is extremely strong in everyone, so even though engineers might prefer and be more productive in a quiet space, they're afraid of missing out on the action in the bullpen so migrate there.

Just out of curiosity, do you know how Craigslist sources it's real estate listings? Does it integrate with the MLS or do agents list there separately?

Looks like a great app and would love to try it, one thing to note is that searching "Solo" in the iOS app store returns a bunch of various guitar apps, I couldn't find it without including "share moments alone".

I've always been a big fan of Motley Fool, particularly their podcasts, and I think it's for the same reason I like this article: their contributors seem to value honesty, to point of self-deprecation, over the desire to appear superior.

What surprised me the most about PG's essay was his use of tiny small sample size to make a broad statement about an entire field of study. He puts together an interesting argument about the pros and cons of ancient Greek philosophy and their discussion of metaphysics, and includes modern perspectives, but then titles it "How to Do Philosophy". That's akin to writing an essay called "How to do Computer Science", then only discussing the shortcomings of COBOL, FORTRAN, and LISP and concluding that Comp Sci is still a young field and has a long way to go.

Yes, Philosophy is still a young field, but there's at least 2000 years of material not covered in his essay.

Hmmmm, probably Jalen with Sunglasses, since Champagning and Campaigning is my favorite segment.

I'm a huge fan of Grantland and HN, love it when a Grantland piece makes it on here.

I usually find the HackerNews police too strict, and I really like the New Yorker, but I can't think of what relevance this specific article has to the HackerNews community...

One important contrast that I don't think this article makes is that there is a big difference between Facebook Organic Reach and Facebook Targeted Ads. While Organic Reach is going down, Targeted Ads is going up, especially on mobile.

It's not far to compare Facebook organic with YouTube ads, rather Facebook ads with Youtube ads. I never thought your company's page likes made a difference, while I do find Facebook ads to have a high ROI.

Very refreshing read for a few reasons:

- The use of specific examples, rather than broad generalizations. - Explaining that the intent and attitude of the potential offender makes a huge difference (ie. Feld vs. hand in pants dude). - Acknowledging that even she has made some un-PC comments unintentionally. - Not offering any silver bullet solution, because there isn't one.

As a white guy, hearing stories like this are really helpful at getting a sense of what real world challenges women face in the entrepreneurship/tech world.

Definitely a good point, particularly that bitcoin will have credit mechanisms built on top of it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that the point of bitcoin is that any credit mechanism built on top of it wouldn't have the same problems of identity fraud.

I also don't think the article is necessarily saying that we will have different crypto-currencies for each business, just that we already use a bunch of different payment methods (points, air miles, credit, etc.) and it will be faster and easier to choose which one you use.

I like that this is at least opening up to the possibility of new, more efficient transaction methods. Marc Andreessen made me think about credit cards differently after hearing him on a Freakonomics podcast:

"And so one way to think about credit card fraud, is credit card fraud is a two-to-three percent drag on the entire economy. It’s an artifact of the fact that credit cards were never designed to be used the way that they’re being used today. Credit cards never anticipated online transactions. Credit cards, by the way, the credit card system, never anticipated malware running inside a cash register at Target. In the 1950s that was an inconceivable idea, which is when credit cards were dreamed up.

And so if you have a payment system like Bitcoin where you don’t have the credential exchange, and you have no risk of identity fraud, and you have no risk of people being able to run transactions on your credit card after the fact, you can basically eliminate that entire category of fraud…"