inaka

Seeking Work (Remote). We built http://whisper.sh (website, iOS app, Server). We've built iOS apps for MTV, VH1, and others. I don't do a lot of business development; I just get on HN when we're done with a project.

Our team is small and we typically have one big project at a time. Specialties are a) iOS, b) Rails, c) Erlang.

chad@inaka.net

maybe $10 is so high they rejected it? similar to adding a zero on a stock purchase at etrade - they'll call you and tell you you overbid...

Ruby Rescue will be there...

Honestly your tone stings a bit, jacquesm. I guess i shouldn't have titled it 'don't trust rackspace' but my larger point is exactly the opposite of what you wrote - take responsibility for your servers - don't trust anyone, even the most expensive hosting provider, to do it for you.

probably not a good idea to comment authoritatively on a company you haven't worked with, but no, kernel management is part of rackspace's job. performance and monitoring is part of their job. they have an SLA and this is absolutely part of it...

attempting to ignore snarkyness, but failing - and that says what about the dozens of rackspace engineers configuring and monitoring and supporting the box over the past two years?

on a separate application and server, yes, and it seems faster than apache/passenger, but it still suffers from the 'passenger choke' where touching tmp/restart.txt seems to pause all web traffic for 10-15 seconds, so we never considered it here...

wow. what really impresses me is mint isn't an engineering company - they're a marketing company that put some ajax on top of yodlee. yodlee's been around for over 10 years and they never built a brand or a community like mint.

mint is now #1 on my 'notes to self' when i get so focused on engineering my way to a solution i forget sometimes its' better to partner with a competitor and move on.

they outsourced the hard stuff (scraping/banking relationships) and then focused on building a product. nice work, brilliant execution.

I would refer the high-speed-rail types to James Kunstler's brilliant post 'financial crisis called off' where he reminds us...

We blather about high speed rail, but you can't even get from Cleveland to Cincinnati on a regular train - and what's more amazing, nobody is really interested in making this happen. All we really care about is finding some miracle method to keep all the cars running.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/financial-crisis-called-off...

definitely at 30% completion - it shows you are a 'computer scientist' vs 'a person who uses computers in his/her job'

part of me can't believe this was such an epiphany for this guy.

i've found the best way to screen candidates is to just ask them to sign up on project euler and work through at least three problems, in any language, and mail me the results. the quality of code i get so far is quite representative of the quality of the employee on the job.

yes, they could google the answers, but i disqualify the easiest-to-google questions (sum of multiples of 3 and 5 up to 1000, i'm lookin' at you). but honestly it doesn't matter - you can tell if they do because they can't explain it. and i can generally weed out anyone in the first place who would try to google the answer just from a skype conversation...

project euler hasn't failed me yet.

i somehow feel like hacker news is tail-recursive, and we've been unrolled by the compiler and are now back at the top of the loop.

if only there was a summary of this article edited for brevity and targeted at a 7th grade reading level, for a mostly retired middle class audience.

US News says georgia tech is the #4 engineering school in the US...

thanks for the comments and that link.

definitely not disappointed - i wasn't implying it was a tool as much as wanting to know whether or not people would say 'you must have the seobook toolbar' or 'mozrank changed my perspective on valuing links', etc...

ok, here's what i like and dislike about living in argentina and starting up a consulting business and building a product on the side.

first, yes, it's cheaper, and yes, the wine i buy is better 100 fold than the states, and yes, i would say i've cut costs by about 40%. my kids didn't belong to a private club and take swimming and tennis lessons in seattle... so we're not taking advantage of the cost savings we could.

but it's still hard: hiring is hard. getting a good cultural fit is hard. building a business that works within the legal framework is impossible. i'm deathly afraid of hiring local talent because it's VERY easy to be sued due to the employment laws of the country.

but it's great: you get a lot of time back in ways i can't explain. it's like you get to ignore a lot of the BS that working in seattle or SF can overwhelm you. explaining the details of why that is would be a longer post, but every tech expat i know in argentina talks about the same thing - somehow you feel more in control of your schedule and your life.

do it when you can hire foreigners, keep your team small, keep your relationships and contacts with people back in the states or europe, and get paid in dollars or euros (or build a product that makes dollars or euros), and can come back once in a while - anything else and it's not such a great deal.

Moving to Argentina has given me a newfound respect for the USPS - their reliability, sense of duty, and their humanity. In many ways they are a representative slice of America - flawed but generally reliable, hard working, and flexible.

Losing things in the mail, spending hours waiting in line to pick up a package, christmas presents delayed for three months for no apparent reason, all of these experiences down here make me miss those guys.

You've never read Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. He writes eloquently about how we seem to believe that the only truly real people are those we see on the big screen and if by chance we come into contact with one, we often feel more alive...

jm4 says it best regarding the quality of editorial content in TC... but i'll just say he doesn't acknowledge that there are very solid business reasons for blocking a competitor like google releasing a voip product that competes with at&t's network, cannibalizes revenue, etc.

he accuses at&t/apple of moral failure for acting in their best business interests as if techcrunch doesn't operate according to the same principles (not that there's anything wrong with that).

But, why not just jailbreak the phone? The article is so hyperbolic... 'i quit tech crunch' is the best one sentence critique of Arrington i've seen yet.

I sold my house with redfin on Dec 31 2007. The transaction was absolutely wonderful. It was a money loser for Redfin - first offer fell through due to misrepresentation by the purchaser, second one was complicated due to an extremely picky purchaser, and it took a total of about 60 hours of work by the Redfin agent to get the deal closed. It was an unusual case but the point is i've done about 4 other transactions and this was the most professional and hardest working agent and it was the cheapest... So they don't drop you if your transaction turns out to be a statistical outlier... HIGHLY recommended.

Erlang uber alles. i love it. it just works. when i'm done and my project works, i keep wondering where all the code went.