itsdevlin

I really hope that part of their use of funds is to hire a design team.

Additionally, it removes a large liability on the balance sheet and makes accounting a fair bit easier.

Housecall Pro (www.housecallpro.com) | San Diego, CA | Onsite | Full Time

Our core product is Housecall Pro, an end-to-end SaaS platform that runs all aspects of an SMB home services company, including: scheduling, dispatching, CRM, invoicing, payment processing, and remarketing.

The Housecall Pro backend enables our consumer marketplace, Housecall. Housecall facilitates the complete experience for consumer home services transactions, including: messaging, direct booking, job management, and payment.

Our end-game is to eliminate all the friction of completing services work of any kind. We are looking for someone that revels in the opportunity to solve a problem of this magnitude.

We recently closed our Series-B and have been scaling all parts of the company. Engineering, Product, Sales, Marketing, and Operations all have open roles.

Apply here: https://housecallpro.com/careers

I also do those. I also climb, slackline, paraglide, ride motorcycles, surf, ride bikes, and read on the beach.

To clarify, it was one landing where I broke two bones. Made a bad decision at the bridge on my 9th jump and broke both sides of my ankle smoking into the side of the canal. I tell everyone I know exactly how I ended up in that situation, what my decision making process was, and how I assess jumps now in order to not put myself in the same situation again.

Also, I work at a large dropzone and with a well-organized group to help coach new jumpers along the way. Me breaking myself on my first weekend is a pretty strong coaching moment that I've watched shift people's view on the sport.

Happy to let you know who I am in real life if you feel this strongly that I'm part of the problem.

In short, no.

To bring a strawman into this: Would you die for your commute? What about a burger? A beer? All of these things kill people, and all of them can be avoided. People don't, because they like them. They accept the given level of risk by mitigating it as best they can, and going on about their lives. Risk is omnipresent.

The real killer is when you don't understand the risk. If you think something has a 1:1mm risk of serious physical harm, you'll probably be alright with it. If something has a 1:100 risk of the same level of physical harm, you'll probably think twice (or you'll prepare yourself differently).

Risk management takes two forms in our world: Unknown Unknowns, and Normalization of Risk. For newbies, unknown unknowns kill them. Thinking something is a 1:1m risk when it's 1:100 provides a real easy way to put yourself in a situation you're unprepared to handle. For experienced jumpers, normalization of risk is what seems to be killing us. If you take a shortcut that increases risk 10x, but you've taken it 1k times, in your brain it just becomes 'the way' and you forget that you're actually multiplying your risk. Do that enough different times and what in your brain is just 'the way' is actually the summation of a complex web of risk-multiplying shortcuts.

Remember both of those things, and you might make to your next birthday. Maybe. Maybe you'll get killed sitting at a stoplight by being rear-ended by a drunk driver, like my first base jumping mentor was.

It does, and most BASE jumpers that I know / have met / have taught are in their earlY 30's.

Active BASE jumper and wingsuit pilot here. Instructor of both.

2016 was by far and away our worst year on record. We lost newbies, heros, and damn near all levels in between. Since then, a few sites have taken a more locked-down approach where we used to be welcome, and as a community we've made progress to band together to push education and conservative decision making over 'dude that was so sketchy.'

A lot of people have brought up the why - why do people do this when they know it's so dangerous? Well, that's a question that everyone needs to make for themselves, but for me it's quite simply that it's the only time I've found my mind to be quiet. It forces me to be present, assess everything in a level of detail that is unparalleled in any other time in my life, and quiet down every other distraction.

Also, it's beautiful. Being in the mountains, on top of buildings, out on bridges, climbing antennae, all with some of your closest friends? It's incredible. There's absolutely nothing on the planet like that level of adventure.

With all that said, it's fucking dangerous. I've managed to have a somewhat clean track record in my two years in the sport, with only two broken bones, but I have probably 20 of the people on the Base Fatality List still in my phone, four of whom I'd call great friends. It's fucking awful losing friends like that, but it's who we are. If they wouldn't have lived a life like this, would they have been them?

A little while back I had the lightning strike closest to my family, when we lost Ian. Here's his story:

https://vimeo.com/167054481

About half are American, mostly from middle-class backgrounds.

Doesn't it address this in the intro paragraph?

"The production of energy can be attributed to both mortality (deaths) and morbidity (severe illness) cases as a consequence of each stage of the energy production process: this includes accidents in the mining of the raw material, the processing and production phases, and pollution-related impacts."

Being able to convey information in simple terms and pass along the depths of your understanding are two independent topics.

As an example, when we teach people how to fly a wingsuit, we essentially teach wingsuiting (which is a massively complex pursuit) as a set of nested arrays of increasing complexity.

For example, for a first jump course, the goals are as follows: - Exit safely - Demonstrate ability to navigate in-flight - Deploy

These are the most foundational aspects of flying a nylon dress out of an airplane.

After a few jumps, we'll add complexity to each of those, so to shift one point, it starts looking like:

- Exit in an unstable manner and gain stability in less than three seconds

In order to do that, you'll need to understand what causes a wingsuit to be stable, why it gets unstable, what happens when it gets unstable, and how to correct it. Additionally, you'll understand why I want you to do it in less than three seconds. However, at first, you just need to get out of the fucking plane. If I try to tell you all this extra shit you won't remember the foundational thing I need you to remember. You'll probably get unstable, you'll probably figure it out kinda, and you'll probably at some point deploy a parachute.

Teaching's hard.

So as some people further in the thread have brought up, you start flying wingsuits out of airplanes, and you start in suits that are far more forgiving than the ones you'll end up flying. It's similar to how a pilot first learns how to land a Cessna before you try to land an F-18 on a carrier at night in a storm.

We do often (as instructors) talk about how nervous we get when we're with a student that we're pretty sure is just going to flatspin uncontrollably for like 8k ft and it's just like 'Okay heres everything you need to really have a bad afternoon. Dont? Please?'

Oddly enough (and probably speaking to our mindsets as a community), it was the death of a good buddy of mine that pushed me to finally start base jumping.

Here's that story: https://vimeo.com/167054481

Off of a rooftop would be practically suicidal. Wingsuits need time to inflate and start flying, which for the best guys on the planet is around 300 feet. Normal humans require about 400. 'Margin' is a word that has a bunch of different contexts, most of which still put wingsuit base in a reasonably safe range. Terrain flying, which is the sub-discipline of wingsuit base where you're goalposting trees, is indisputably the most dangerous sport on the planet, and I've lost six friends to it in the last year.

I don't know that i'd describe it as 'controversial' but would rather describe it as 'that thing a bunch of people with nowhere near enough experience or currency to be doing it keep doing and fucking killing themselves.'

Wingsuit instructor here. Can confirm.

I traded space in the crisper for an app that's octopus recipes?

At Backplane we sold for way the fuck less for not a much smaller userbase. Tech's wild.

The Great Book of BASE - BASE Jumping, written by Matt Gerdes

Tangentally related - We deal with this a lot in Wingsuit BASE jumping (well, in wingsuit skydiving as well, but wake vortices and turbulence (aka 'burbles') have killed more than a few extremely talented pilots in the last year).

It's fucking wild how small of a wing can put off a sizable wake. With wingsuits, if you fly behind and slightly above a buddy, you're going to hit his burble and you're going to immediately lose lift and possibly start spinning. There's a clip floating around of a bunch of us on a training jump in race suits and one of the guys hits a burble from the group and just gets dropped a few hundred feet damn near immediately.

EDIT: Found it - http://giphy.com/gifs/cBP3YE9hf9oVa

Here's a solid article that touches on it w/r/t lift - http://base-book.com/speed-to-fly

...and here's one that's a bit more applied that has to do with how burbles affect canopy deployments - http://base-book.com/some-thoughts-on-wingsuit-openings

Constructor.io | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | Full-Time

Constructor.io is building the future of search. There are many parts of a search interface — from autocomplete to analytics to recommendations — that every website currently has to rebuild (often poorly) from scratch. At Constructor.io, we want to change all that, let people stop re-inventing the wheel, and offer them outstanding search and search enhancement features in a form that's dead simple to integrate.

Offering that simplicity is challenging. We have to hide bleeding-edge NLP and machine learning behind an easy-to-use interface. And to do that, we need clever engineers with a mind for turning complex algorithms into delightful user interfaces.

We’re looking to add a few members to the team as soon as we can find the right person. Key needs are:

- Senior Javascript & Rails Engineer -- Deliver the next generation of search enhancement services to our customers. You'll build new features into our Javascript client and help develop our customer-facing website in Rails.

- Senior Full Stack Engineer -- Develop outstanding back-end performance to power intuitive user interfaces. You'll be building front-end search features and configuring search engines to deliver lightning-fast performance.

- Data Scientist / Engineer -- Build search and discovery features using massive amounts of click data. Your goal will be to help make our customers' websites awesome and bring our customers more revenue. You'll develop algorithms to improve search efficiency, deliver recommendations, and power self-learning search results.

If you're interested in joining the team, please send your resume and/or LinkedIn and/or Github profile, ideally including links to source code of projects you’ve worked on, to jobs@constructor.io and we’ll do our best to reply within a few business days. We’ll usually start with a technical interview over the phone or via video chat, followed by an in-person interview at our offices.

Echoing a lot of the other sentiment here, I think a lot of these points are good, but some are pretty broad statements that apply to a lot of early stage tech. The paid acquisition one stands out in my mind - early stage SaaS or social gaming apps can successfully POUR money into paid acquisition for a long time and be successful.

Same can be said for the 'is the product of high quality' line. I don't think the first four iterations of my last product were of particularly high quality, but we were shipping things and it worked just enough to make users happy.

The one that stands out the most to me is the 'Would you be afraid to hire your smartest friends.' This is IMO the end-all gut check. If you wouldn't try to sell your best friend on leaving whatever they're doing to come join you, you don't believe in the company. If you don't believe in the company, find another one. There's plenty of work in SV.

IIRC this is how the IRS recommends milage expenses are to be treated. The delta of your normal commute = work.

This doesn't seem unreasonable. As a data point, we're just shy of 10k customers with one full-time support person (and two part-time). In my experience, it was the process of setting up the KB and process by which you'd answer tickets that was the most arduous. 0-10 users, easy. 10->100 OMFG EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE. 100->n becomes just an optimization problem.

Isn't the supply side of this being neglected? This article (and tbh a few others I've read on it) feels as if they're trying to say the following, but in 500 words: "They couldn't increase revenues enough."

The piece of this equation that I'm much more interested in is the cost side. By handling the training & bookings all in-house, it just feels like they couldn't get a low enough unit cost per job. Especially in something as low-skilled (read: low-margin?) as house cleanings, it sounds like what actually happened was that Handy couldn't get costs down low enough to deal with the true market equilibrium.

While I'm not disagreeing that the legal fees from lawsuits may have made the next round of funding a challenge and was likely a heavy drain on cash on hand, I think jumping on the 1099 vs employee debate is a bit of a cop out.

It's another company failing to launch a double-sided marketplace, which sucks for all parties involved, but I'd be really really interested in reading about what actually broke.

There are to very specific versions of how a presentation should be made: As a supplement to a live presentation or a replacement of it.

If you're using it as a supplement to something you're saying live, the slides should be simple, limited, and support the big points which you should be making verbally.

If you're using it as a handout (or essentially in lieu of a live presentation), it should be much more information-dense.

Startup cofounder here who spends ~20 days/mo on the road - also don't forget about BD meetings, meetups, happy hours, etc. A ton of deals get done over a few drinks, and when you're stacking a meetup, a dinner, cocktails, latenight, and a hotel bar together regularly, it's pretty easy to hit the 15/20 drink figure.

Also, when i'm out drinking with friends, I tend to keep a bit of a mental note of how many i've had because the tab's coming out of my pocket. When i'm on the road i'm on the company's tab, and the moral hazard totally wipes out my concern for how many i've had and instead i'm focused on whatever I'm at that meeting for (close deal, increase client expenditures, lock in investment, whatever).

The solitude also definitely plays a role, and like the top commenter on here it's really easy to be totally oblivious to how much you're drinking as it just becomes part of the routine. I had a mentor once point out that the best salespeople are usually alcoholics with shitty relationships who work too much, so I think there's a lot of parallels between the personality traits that are helpful for an entrepreneur but can be wildly destructive if pointed in a negative direction.

I was a double-major at a party school and in a top fraternity, so over the last decade i've become rather accustomed to being a borderline functioning disaster. However, over the last few months I really peeled it back and have instead spent a ton of time getting back into the gym, running, rowing, and doing crossfit.

Going out all night is fun, but getting up at 5a and cranking out a workout while it's still dark, running back to the office, and having breakfast while most people are just getting out of bed has become my new high to chase.

Can confirm. Did this all through college.

Speaking of 'things that should be tracked' - I'm blown away that it didn't raise any red flags when I 'lost' ~50 Drivers Licenses over the course of a year or two.

The first five times I read this comment I read it as:

"To be fair, mixing meth and display logic in a giant function like that is a bad idea in any programming language."

Frankly, I agree with either statement.

I read this strictly for the animated gifs.

From a gross accumulation of points, yes. From a 'most likely to go viral' standpoint, we've noticed quite the opposite.

In the several communities my team and I manage, those most likely to go viral / frontpage / call it what you will, are members of one of two camps: Great curators or trolls.

Trolls will generally go viral almost immediately based on the sheer volume of interaction with their posts (think, nude selfies posted as 'fashion').

Being pretty proactive with the banhammer will enforce the norm reasonably well, as people will pretty rapidly figure out that in order to make it to the leaderboard, you need to not be banned. It's more Hunger Games than Cocktail Party.

Also as a bit of a tangent - those who spend the most time on site are overwhelmingly not top commentors, contributors, or voters. They're consumers. We have several thousand users who spend an average of 4 hours on site /per day/ who've interacted with a post less than ten times.