manlio

HAL.xyz | Backend (Golang), Frontend (Typescript), Product | Remote

We are building the IFTTT for blockchains - a tool to query, trigger and automate blockchain data :) [0]

We recently raised a $3M seed [1]; it's 9 of us at the moment and we are working on pretty fun stuff: rebuilding our frontend from the ground up, new GraphQL API, adding a ton of features to our real-time monitor backend - it's still very early from both a code and product perspective.

We are fully remote and we try to get the team together every few months, usually for crypto conferences around the world. Previous get-togethers include Sardinia (Italy), Lisbon (Portugal), and Denver (USA).

We have a bunch of open positions [2], feel free to apply there and send me (CTO, co-founder) an email at manlio at hal.xyz with a [Hacker News] tag in the subject to make sure your application doesn't slip through the cracks ;)

Crypto experience of any kind is a plus, but if you're intrigued this can also be an excellent way to get your foot in the door.

Happy to chat if you have any specific questions re the product, the industry, or anything else.

[0] https://hal.xyz

[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/hal-raises-3-million-from-coinfund-...

[2] https://join.hal.xyz/

I was taken aback by how incredibly naive/amateurish most of the answers so far are, but I'd rather upvote and try to highlight this post instead which is excellent and very insightful.

An extra piece of advice for anyone serious about learning meditation:

1. You'll need a teacher. Find your local Buddhist centre and chances are they'll have classes focused on teaching beginners. You simply won't learn by making something up yourself and calling it meditation, or reading stuff on the internet (including my answer) - you'll need both guidance and someone to look up to. I can't stress this enough: even the Buddha himself had teachers :)

2. "Meditation" as a technique is obviously found in countless religions and other secular systems, so that some people claim you can learn "mindfulness" as a stand-alone tool, without the Buddhist package that usually comes with it.

Although it might be possible to a certain extent, the understanding you'll have of the practice will be immensely impoverished. You don't have to become a Buddhist to practice meditation, but without some Buddhist context you'll limit yourself to an extremely diluted, dumbed-down version of the real thing. So I'd recommend you start there, and in time you'll carve your own path.

Best of luck, it's an incredible journey.

The first and fundamental question you want to ask yourself is not how, but why: when your reasons are clear, the path naturally follows.

I can see three strands:

1. For health reasons. This is IMO the weakest reason. I'm not interested (nor qualified) in starting an endless debate about the health risk/benefits of meat; but if you only want to eat healthier is best to start with the obvious: cut sugar, snacks, sodas, sweets, junk food and deep fried; eat more low-GI and greens, etc.

2. For Ahimsa [0]. Ahimsa is a beautiful and subtle topic, but broadly speaking it means that you try to minimize the amount of suffering caused by your actions. Buddhists (as well as Socrates) believe we constantly fail to understand that our actions have consequences. Ahimsa is about getting in touch as best as we can with these consequences, and act accordingly to our insights.

3. For environmental reasons, i.e. reducing your ecological footprint. This has some overlap with Ahimsa, but the reasons are practical rather than ethical and there are exceptions: in terms of sheer sustainability, battery farmed chicken might be OK (maybe, I don't know).

Whatever your reasons are, it's something I believe is worth thinking about.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa

* The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley. [0]

So famous it became a bit of a cliche. I read it years ago and it didn't make any sense to me. But now that I've been studying Buddhism and practicing meditation for a while I picked it up again and I found it nothing short of brilliant, packed with interesting insights on philosophy, the arts, theology, the history of mysticism and the quest for the meaning of life. I know it sounds trite, but I simply wasn't ready for it the first time.

* The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. [1]

I read this 10 years ago. It touched my heart back then and it did it again this time. It's one of the few works of fiction that changed, a little or a lot, the way I think about love, relationships, loneliness and happiness.

I can't wait to re-read it a third time, in 10 years.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5128.The_Doors_of_Percep...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9717.The_Unbearable_Ligh...

I helped writing the Alexa skill for The Guardian [0], and I really didn't think highly of it, nor I thought I'd ever use it myself: the voice recognition is still poor, and it's difficul to understand what you can/cannot do with it. All in all, a big meh.

Then one day someone forwarded to our team this email, and it really touched my heart.

I am quadriplegic and the Amazon Echo has transformed my life. I haven't been able to open a newspaper for 10 years, but now I can! [...] Please pass this email on to all of those concerned at the Guardian... They need-to-know the difference that they have made".

[0] https://github.com/guardian/alexa-skills-lambda

We also have an open API ;)

http://open-platform.theguardian.com/

Yep - I was lucky enough to be hired by The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com) :)

Oh, and we're still hiring! Happy to help if you have questions, or want to be referred. All positions are in London, UK.

I hit the front page with "Where is who is hiring hiring?" [0]

I got my current job through it and from time to time I still get "thank you" emails from random people telling me it helped them get a job too - a really good feeling (:

[0] http://whereis-whoishiring-hiring.me

I got my current, first job through "who is hiring?" alone. The response rate was insanely high, I reckon >80% if I include the "thanks no thanks" answers. A few (obvious, but HN-oriented) tips:

  1 - don't spam
  2 - really, don't spam
  3 - put in some effort
  4 - keep it short

Make sure you understand what they do, what they want, and what you can offer. Make sure you (quickly) go through the latter. You probably have something to offer even though you don't fit the profile they had in mind.

Make sure you know who you're writing to, and craft your email accordingly. Google him, go through their HN submissions/GitHub/whatever, get a feeling for what they might like.

Oh, and try to be nice and genuine, at this stage is a lot about people skills :) Good luck!

Fell in love with this one years ago, and still love it...

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  
  APPEAL:
  
  listen (please, please);
  
  open yourself, wide;
      join (you, me),
  connect (us,together),
  
  tell me.
  
  do something if distressed;
  
      @dawn, dance;
      @evening, sing;
      read (books,$poems,stories) until peaceful;
      study if able;
  
      write me if-you-please;
  
  sort your feelings, reset goals, seek (friends, family, anyone);
  
          do*not*die (like this)
          if sin abounds;
  
  keys (hidden), open (locks, doors), tell secrets;
  do not, I-beg-you, close them, yet.
  
                              accept (yourself, changes),
                              bind (grief, despair);
  
  require truth, goodness if-you-will, each moment;
  
  select (always), length(of-days)
  
  # listen (a perl poem)
  # Sharon Hopkins
  # rev. June 19, 1995

I know the feeling. We're somehow wired to blindly believe in the decades ahead of us for so many aspect of our lives -- be it compound interest or love affairs. The most peculiar aftermath of losing somebody you love way too early is this sort of spell being irremediably broken. You start being skeptical about even the not-so-distant future, because you can't help but feel it might won't be for you after all.

It's not even a good or bad thing on its own, you've always known it was part of the game: the sun rises, bigger animals eat smaller animals, tides come in and out; yet learning to live with it on your skin affects you deeply. Anyway, thanks for your comment.

Lots of good essays already, so I'll chime in with some literature/fiction suggestions off the top of my head:

- Borges, Ficciones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones); that's the quintessence of mind-blowing literature: an unparalleled mix of genius, culture and crazy imagination.

- Celine, Journey to the End of the Night; a harsh, hopeless journey to the bottom of humanity. It's not an easy read even though the style is so simple. Think Houellebecq, but much better :)

- Dostoyevsky; I was obsessed with him when I was younger. "Notes from the underground" is one of the best introductions to existential nihilism I can think of. "The Idiot" one of the few books that made me cry.

- The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony; if you're into Greek literature, this book will become your Bible; it requires a lot of attention and dedication though, it's incredibly dense.

Could you elaborate on what kind of MAs are you into? I always wanted to try, but I hate the hyper aggressive, macho-alpha-thing attitude that I suspect I'd find in, say, the box gym down the road. Is it even a true stereotype?

Contributing with what I bookmarked so far:

* Watsi - https://watsi.org/ - A nonprofit healthcare crowdsourcing platform

* Akvo - http://akvo.org - Akvo builds open source internet and mobile software which is designed to support international development partnership networks, and make cooperation and aid activity more effective and transparent

* DuckDuck Go - https://duck.co/ - Delivering a world-class search engine with great results and great privacy and with open-source instant answers at its core

* Electronic Froniter Foundation https://www.eff.org/

* Greenpeace - http://www.greenpeace.org/

* A bit meta, but good for inspiration: http://www.nonprofittechforgood.com/

Thank you, but I want to point out I'm driven by selfish reasons just like anybody else: spending your life on something you hate/don't believe in is the recipe for alienation.

Also, I suspect a lot of companies are exploiting the fact that bright people in our field will be happy to work on stuff they don't believe in as long as you throw interesting problems at them. It's a tradeoff I can understand, but it still is a tradeoff. To answer your question, I'm 25.

Done! Better late than never ;)

The awesome thing about Tinder is: a ton of hot girls use it; not just girls: hot girls. This sounds shallow, but it's not. They somehow managed to make them believe there is nothing wrong with looking for a hook up online (and that's true) but only if you look for it through the right channel.

So at the end of the day no hot girls care about anonymity, they care about not being judged for their choices, and for the better or wrong we still need a hip app to make it happen.

Which in turn is quite ironic: the philosophy was around since the 60s, but the implementation is unmistakably a product of contemporary capitalism.

Unfortunately no, 1) you can't trim the whitespace if you're matching cities, 2) matching the cities lowercase opens up too many false positives. At the same time, matching every city with its uppercase equivalent doubles the time requested to build the db but only adds a tiny handful of posts. That's why (for now) I settled with a tradeoff where I catch the uppercase equivalent for the biggest cities only.

All these strategies are interesting, but I'm afraid we are over-engineering the problem here. The pretty simplistic strategy I'm using now is basically just pattern matching, and so far I had only 4 misplaced posts out of the 840 for April alone: that is < 0.5%. And it's blazing fast! I can rebuild the entire db in less then 30 seconds.

Given these number I believe pretty much everything more complicated than that would be a total overkill... Good food for thoughts though!

Fixed that.

Love the alphabetize idea! I just fixed that, thanks for the suggestion :)

Aaaand, feature is up ;)

HN Hiring Trends is really sweet, I didn't know about it. I do include only top level comments; and incidentally, digging through HN's HTML code was... uhm... let's say a bit messy.

Not really, but if you want to do it all it takes is to replace the URLs to wget (i.e. you want to wget all the "Who's looking for work" pages instead of the "Who is hiring?").

You can easily build your local Sqlite database like that. I wrote some more instructions about it on the README.md on Github.

I've pretty much determined that some degree of manual review will be needed

You're spot on with everything. I did a lot of manual review and the site already filters out "NO REMOTE", "REMOTE no", "Remote not" and "No Remote" entries. I did spot the "Remote work isn’t an option" post, but I decided I'm not going to write that kind of completely ad-hoc filtering rules, it's just ugly.

Quite the opposite, both Venice and Santa Monica had so many posts I decided to treat them as independent cities, e.g. http://whereis-whoishiring-hiring.me/city/2015/4/Santa%20Mon...

I actually thought about it, but it's a total mess to parse :( Think of posts like "We're sorry we can't sponsor H1B at the moment, but we might get you a VISA for our London office".

On the other hand, once you're already browsing New York City, good ol' ctrl-f for VISA will probably serve you well enough.

Yep, plain Cambridge is "Cambridge, MA", the other one is listed as "Cambridge, UK". In the same fashion, "Venice" is actually "Venice, CA". It hurt a bit but it was the right thing to do ;)

Thanks for the feedback! That particular post is missing because the city is written in all caps (TORONTO). I used a bunch of tricks to be able to catch as many cities as possible (say NY and NYC and Manhattan and even NEW YORK all go under "New York City"), but not every city is tested against its "all caps" equivalent atm because I wanted to be able to rebuild the db as fast as possible during development phase. I should probably fix that now.

One day somebody sent me this. It still gets me every time.

  I will try to live on earth without you.
  
  I will try to live on earth without you. 
  
  I will become any object,
  I don’t care what—
  
  I will be this speeding train.
  This smoke
  or a beautiful gay man laughing in the front seat.
  
  A human body is defenseless 
  on earth.
  
  It’s a piece of fire-wood.
  Ocean water hits it.
  Lenin puts it on his official shoulder.
  
  And therefore, in order not to suffer, a human spirit
  lives
  inside the wind and inside the wood and inside the shoulder    of a great dictator.

  But I will not be water. I will not be a fire.

  I will be an eyelash.
  A sponge washing your neck-hairs.
  Or a verb, an adjective, I will become. Such a word
  
  slightly lights your cheek.
  What happened? Nothing.
  Something visited? Nothing.
  
  What was there you cannot whisper.
  No smoke without fire, they whisper.
  I will be a handful of smoke
  over this lost city of Moscow.
  
  I will console any man,
  I will sleep with any man,
  under the army’s traveling horse carriages.
  
  
  -- Polina Barskova