lshemesh

Jackpocket | Systems Engineer | New York, NY | ONSITE, FULL-TIME | Competitive Pay | https://jackpocket.com

Jackpocket lets people play official state lottery games right on their mobile devices.

Come work with an amazing group of people who are passionate about building unique and innovative technology. Jackpocket is leading the effort to disrupt the $80B lottery industry. Come help us make the lottery better for everyone.

Apply here: https://jackpocket.com/careers/14-systems-engineer or reach me directly at leo@jackpocket.com

Would be great if this were packaged as a Helm chart.

Just turned 33. Was a terrible High School student and a less than stellar college student. I have always been into computers minus a brief stint as a wannabee rockstar. Moved to NYC after a couple of software development jobs in Boston. Got a job for a startup as a Rails developer. Did some freelance. Joined another startup and moved into a Wework coworking building. Then more freelance. Met a guy with this crazy idea to start a company that allowed users to play the lottery on their phones. Became CTO of Jackpocket. It has been an interesting journey.

I recently did a Sidekiq background job in ruby passing messages to a python script using zeromq. It was a blast.

This sounds like a promising idea to me. Transparency into what data you're giving away and a monetary incentive is a win win IMO.

Wow Emacs really can do everything!

shit I need to do this ASAP!

Best moment: Tutorialize getting its first paying customer

Learning: If you're going to use a technology like MongoDB make sure you're using it the way it was intended to be used.

and to help my dad clean up his ridiculous Rails 2 apps

Oops totally replied to the wrong comment! I agree!

I think Lenovo still makes quality products, I'm currently using their x220 (with Mint). I suppose it's possible that their newer models are worse, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. The x1 carbon looks like a cool machine to play with.

I wouldn't bet on Dell, and HP ever getting back to their glory days, but I wouldn't count out Lenovo, Samsung, Google, and Asus (Asus zenbook prime, looks amazing).

We'd love to send you to the Play store, but unfortunately the Google Play store is very strict regarding gambling. Interestingly enough, the Apple store isn't as strict. Go figure. Thanks for the comment!

I'll do my best to answer your question. We already have a couple hundred users who are quite comfortable trusting us with their lottery tickets, some have won, but clearly not the millions you're referring to. I would not expect everyone to trust us, especially so early in the game. What we plan on doing is making our legal documents clear and simple, building a recognizable brand that is closely tied with the lottery (state/goverment), and maybe building some more security layers and ways for users to feel comfortable with the process. At the end of the day, earning the trust of the Jemaclus's of the world will be tougher. If all the things I outlined above happen, then it'll likely be much easier. So, yes you should trust us, maybe not now, but someday. Thanks for the feedback.

Many people wouldn't trust themselves with a piece of paper worth that much. At least with Jackpocket the evidence is digitized before the drawing. What's interesting is that currently that piece of paper is the only thing linking lottery players with their numbers. Jackpocket actually creates a layer that makes it more secure.

Yes for right now we're only in NY. Would love to open it up in New Hampshire someday.

Totally should have mentioned this earlier. For now we're only going to be supporting NY lotteries, that's where our tickets are bought. In order to comply with current lottery rules, you have to be physically in the state of the lottery you're playing. We use GPS fencing to accomplish this.

FAQ isn't available quite yet, we'll be adding one soon. Jackpocket buys the lottery ticket on your behalf, and actually sends you a digital image of it. Your trust, and a whole bunch of fancy legal docs are what prevents us from cashing in your tickets. If you do happen to win, we retrieve the money for you, credit your Jackpocket account, and allow you to withdraw the money directly into a bank account of your choosing. Happy to answer any other questions you might have.

Hey thanks for the comment! It is not a subscription delivery service as of yet. We first wanted to nail down the basics of allowing users to select their numbers and get their lottery tickets from the comfort of their own homes.

Hey HN CTO of Jackpocket here. This has been an incredibly fun project to build. If anyone has any technology questions, happy to answer them best I can.

I can totally sympathize with the way the author feels but at the same time I'm very aware of how much of à luxury it is to be a software engineer. especially nowadays with so many emerging technologies. if you're current job has become stagnant and your not afforded the flexibility or the ability to influence change then it's time to move on. if you're afraid of losing a opportunity coming from equity or share s then that does factor in. best you can do is try to apply all the amazing things you learn from sources like hacker news and wait until you're next move becomes clearer. wrote this from my nexus 7 . really like this hackers news app.

Finally a chance to learn Haskell and iOS development at the same time! Will I be able to do this all from a Linux machine or do I still need Apple hardware?

Interested to hear some opinions on the numbers in this infographic. I for one found them pretty shocking. Didn't realize Python was so popular.

Easel.io is a really beautiful looking product. I just played around with the demo tour and it worked pretty well though a little quirky. Are you using Tourist.js to implement the demo tour?

Hope you guys enjoy my blog post! Love to hear your thoughts.

This update was a roller coaster of changes. There was a lot of erasing mass amounts of code to get it to it's current state. If anyone has any feedback on my blog post, the features, or about the service itself, I'd love to hear them. Happy Earth day everyone!

Totally with you! All too often I hear the blanket statement thrown around that you should never use a tutorial and instead focus your energy and time in creating a really elegant UI. We live in a world where things have to happen quickly, where reinventing the wheel is startup failure 101, where you can get a full web app running in under 10 minutes. Build the tutorial, and then figure out your UI when you have time and money. Not true for all cases, of course.

While I agree with you that walkthroughs/tutorials/tours, or whatever you want to call them, are not the end goal of a particular user design, the idea that you could create a design that is so elegant and perfect that it doesn't require any kind of instruction is absurd. Sure not all sites need it, but the option is out there for people who don't have the ability to hire a UX expert, and whose sites change frequently. I was literally just on Facebook and was taken through at least three different tutorials. IF you can hire a ux person to make your site not need a tutorial, then all the power to you. For the record, I founded Tutorialize (https://tutorialize.me), and I'm constantly watching this market landscape change. I've met multiple people who knew guys from Kera.io, and though I didn't get to meet them, they definitely seemed like cool dudes. I'm sure the core team with come back with something great soon enough. Peace!

I've been using Backbone exclusively for building Tutorialize's (https://tutorialize.me) chrome extension. One year ago backbone seemed like a very obvious choice, nowadays it's not the clear winner. I'm thinking about moving away from Backbone and trying out Angular or Ember. I've even thought about playing around with Dart. The most difficult thing for me has been dealing with all the things that Backbone doesn't handle out of the box. Things like zombie views, data binding, and namespacing just to name a few. The worst thing however has been the constant need to deal with strange quirks and bugs that I've found almost impossible to track down. I've posed a question to the #documentcloud irc channel three times and did not receive a single reply. I believe in the long run that the strength of a framework is about the conventions put in place. After all, isn't it about making development easier?

Pretty hilarious that almost all the comments on that page are related to native support in Linux.

I 100% agree with your comment. That is most definitely the goal of a UX engineer. However it's kind of like striving for perfection, it's impossible. If anything a really good UX engineer shoots for that 100% and fills in the rest with these types of tools. Can anyone here point to a complex webapp that doesn't have some kind of instructions system?