randy

I'm one of the engineers working on fixing healthcare.gov with a whole bunch of other Silicon Valley engineers. See relevant Time article and Hacker News discussion a couple of weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7312442

There are certainly problems here, but that's why it's even more important to have talented people (especially engineers or SREs) come help. If you know anybody who'd like to help on a temporary rotation or permanently, please point them to:

jobs@hcgov.us

Healthcare.gov

I'm part of a small team that's been working on healthcare.gov for the last few months alongside a bunch of other Google, Facebook, and Y Combinator alums.

We'll always remember what Mikey told us in December, after the site was back up, could handle a non-trivial amount of traffic, and people who wanted health insurance could finally get it:

"1 in 1000 uninsured people die each year. It's not an exaggeration to say that due to the work we're doing here, 5,000-10,000 people will live to see the end of 2014. You should be proud of what you've done, but we should also all be grateful to have this opportunity."

We're all grateful to be here, but there's a hell of a lot more work to be done.

If any of you out there are an amazing software engineer or SRE, and want to help make our government work better, please shoot us an email: brandon@hcgov.us

For more info, see:

Obama's Trauma Team: Inside the Nightmare Launch of HealthCare.Gov https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7312442

Ridejoy (YC S11). San Francisco, CA. Full time.

Full stack engineer to help lay the foundation of our engineering team.

Interested in getting in on the ground floor of fundamentally changing the way people travel or, as one of our users said, "restoring people's faith in humanity"?

http://ridejoy.com/jobs

Ridejoy (YC S11). San Francisco, CA. Full time.

Engineer number one.

Interested in getting in on the ground floor of fundamentally changing the way people travel or, as one of our users said, "restoring people's faith in humanity"?

http://ridejoy.com/jobs

Ridejoy (YC S11). San Francisco, CA. Full time.

Lead designer and engineer number one.

Interested in fundamentally changing the way people travel or, as one of our users said, "restoring people's faith in humanity"?

http://ridejoy.com/jobs

Thanks!

The site was built with Ruby 1.9.2 + Rails 3.1 (+ SASS and Coffeescript), jQuery (+ UI), and PostgreSQL on top of Heroku (Cedar Stack + Unicorn + Memcached) using Facebook Connect and the Google Maps API. We've just been hacking on it for a little while now but the more pertinent point is that we still have plenty of hacking to do :)

We're also always looking for suggestions on how we can make the experience safer and better for our users. Let us know what else we should do!

Loved the quote from Evan Beard:

"Remember that your mind is a fortress of impenetrable happiness."

Common words of wisdom that never seem to be taken to heart nearly enough. Reminded me of another gem from Daniel Gross of Greplin:

"It’s very important to constantly tell yourself if anything, how lucky you are to be here in the first place. Even if you aren’t in the valley, remember how lucky you are to live in the 21st century."

Congrats Art! Thanks for showing us what fortresses can do ;)

Indeed:

"The third reason we took Sequoia’s money, specifically Sequoia and not another VC, was we deal with a lot of these different API providers. It’s very important to us to maintain very good relationships with a lot of these companies because we have a higher than average volume of requests that we have to make to them. And finally, we thought Sequoia was the best place to go for this because they’ve had their hand in or know someone at almost every interesting tech company in the world, and that network is super important to us."

Very, very cool. The fact I'm instantly down my CC info and $60 on three purchases is some incredibly convincing concept validation for myself, but the potential here, both in terms of impact and unique experiences, is unimaginably cool.

One important thing to note, you need to make your referral codes and messaging (i.e. refer a friend and you both win) more prominent. I told my friend about the site and when he asked me for a referral code, I had no clue what he was talking about, since apparently you don't get a referral code if you sign up in the purchase flow and I had to sign up with a secondary fake account to see what the deal was. So you probably want to:

1) Make the referral code actually accessible on the account page (It currently isn't there at all? Unless I'm in some n-way test?)

2) Make the referral code available on every completed transaction. Personally, I'd also recommend tossing in that cute turtle that appears during signup :)

3) Send the referral code, and whole welcome email, for that matter, to the user if they come in through the payment flow.

4) Add an entry on how to find your personal referral code in the FAQ.

Given the empirical success of such tactics (PayPal especially comes to mind) and especially given that many people will want to enjoy these experiences with their friends, you really want to make sure the user is aware of the promotion. Obviously, there are some considerations regarding the cost as you give out $10 and make less than 12% back after fees, but if you're going to run it on the traditional sign-up flow, you might as well put it everywhere. Especially since people who sign up via the purchase flow or make a purchase would be much more likely to refer their friends, since they've already validated the service.

Anyways, congratulations on the launch. See you guys at lunch ;)

For most people, there is a lot more than just a degree to seek out in college. I'm no big fan of Facebook whoring myself, but while it obviously doesn't replace stimulating conversation or actual time spent together with good friends, it does provide a lubricant for them. My guess is that when all is said and done, you'll value your social ties and personal development a lot more than your knowledge of red black trees.

P.S. I don't mean to suggest people blowing off their classes to use Facebook is the way to go, but I think that to suggest it can't have value is somewhat silly.

Although I think everyone should keep a healthy sense of skepticism toward Tim Ferris since he is above all a brilliant self promoter, I must say I was impressed by his command of Mandarin as seen here http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/category/random/ (Not that he's saying anything especially difficult, but his tones and fluency seem very solid).

Warning: The game is potentially seizure inducing.

I for one would like to see some proof on that matter, not that I neccesarily disbelieve that statement, but it is an interesting dynamic. Obviously more educated people may stray away from clicking on ads for free iPods or hot local singles dying to meet them, but you could say the same about less affluent people clicking on ads regarding BMW's, high fashion, SaaS's, or a wild excursion on the Serengeti (obviously some these examples are slightly strawman-ish, but the point is there are many products out there that need more exposure, of which advertising is an option, that require money, of which affluent people have more of and are presumably more willing to spend because of that). Rich or poor, educated or uneducated, everyone has needs, everyone.

But of course, that's not even the point, because at the end of the day, you really care about maximizing user value, which for ads is frequency * (CPC or CPM). Now, obviously the CPC rates are higher for a BMW relative to a free iPod and the CPM rates are also higher if you know the audience is affluent, higher still if they are a fan of BMW on FB, higher still if you know their status is 'looking for a new car', etc. LinkedIn has fairly high CPM's from what I hear.

So is my conclusion that more affluent users are more valuable than less affluent ones? No, I don't know that, but that is my hypothesis, and I'd like to see some evidence pointing one way or the other (actual non-anecdotal evidence, and not just Myspace makes more than Facebook, since they run two very different ad systems and since we all know that correlation only goes so far).

I don't understand what everyone's so surprised about. Myspace makes nearly $1 billion in revenue, and Facebook is larger, has better technology, has a more affluent audience, of which they have more information about, has multiple revenue streams (billions of CPM ads [I estimate 6B by Quantcast numbers, they also have a lot more space for them since the re-design], tens of thousands of targeted ad campaigns [many of which I've seen, some of which I've clicked], newsfeed insertion partnerships [youtube charges in excess of 200K for front page ads], gifts [obviously not the core of their revenue stream, but I guarantee they pull in a few million], platform [they aren't really monetizing it yet, but developers are making hundreds of thousands to millions a month on it, so I wouldn't be surprised if FB eventually gets in on some of that action]), etc.

I know it's fashionable to hate or doubt Facebook nowadays, but if you look at the numbers instead of your own personal experience with Facebook (which, since your on Hacker News, is probably not very similar with their core user base), I think you'll come to the conclusion that the demise of Facebook is not just around the corner.

An oldie but a great speech (old HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211832). For anyone who's interested, here are some other extraordinary commencement speeches:

Steve Jobs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Bill Watterson: http://home3.inet.tele.dk/stadil/spe_kc.htm

David Foster Wallace: http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

There is a lot of good advice and numerous great sound-bytes from all of these; but one of my personal favorites comes from Bill Watterson, who makes a point that I feel often gets overlooked at HN in our relentless pursuit of success:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential ― as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

> I only wish that you hadn’t implied inethical motives with words like “extortion,” “mafia shakedown,” etc. The fact is, many people hear those words and nothing else, and it compromises years of work by our small but committed team.

Well, at least now they know how Jason (and potentially thousands of other committed teams) felt.

What I don't understand is why your interest in the company isn't mentioned at all on this "advice" page.

> Highly doubt I’ll ever do something like this but if I do… Well, you saw it here first.

Um, no sir. http://juicycampus.com/ has been around for awhile, and I'm sure other incarnations of the like existed beforehand. It also doesn't change the fact that it's a pretty terrible idea to begin with. You can read about the problems JuicyCampus has had:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23211511/

http://www.abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=4849927&page=1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JuicyCampus

There's also a lot more where that came from if you Google them. Anyways, please think a little harder next time. "People are infatuated with the lives of others (instead of living their own)." Yes! Screw people living their own boring lives! Clearly the golden path to enlightenment involves more stuff like this http://www.webfilehost.com/images/mainstream-media.php. Seriously? This is the "problem" you're trying to solve?

There's no one 'proper' way to conduct meetings, it depends on your team and situation. You'd probably be good to ask your (conveniently small) team about the issue, they'll be able to give you a better answer than any HN user.

That being said, 37signals "Getting Real" has a chapter on meetings (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php) that is probably worth reading (though most of the points have already been made in comments here), as is the rest of the book.

Fun game, but it's missing the huge boss battles that made Smash TV so awesome (Seriously, if you want to up your conversion rates on purchases, make that last room in Episode 4 an onslaught to remember instead of four easily disposable dorks).

If for some reason it isn't immediately obvious to you yet, the answer to your question is "Post this question on Hacker News."

Adventure time!

> Do you actually want to work in a large dev team?

  -- Yes

    >> Why ?

      --- Want to gain knowledge about 'working in a large dev team'

         >>> Why?

            ---- Because... it might be useful?

                >>>> You're stupid.

            ---- Don't know.

                >>>> You're stupid.

            ---- Some actually valid reason.

                >>>> Wonderful! Please state it next time.

      --- Want to learn about [insert hard thing here].

         >>> What's stopping you?

            ---- Nothing.

                >>>> Damn strait!

            ---- Not motivated enough to learn it by myself.

                >>>> Join a start-up dealing with [insert hard thing here].

                    ----- But... but... it's against my entrepreneurial spirit. (Which, by the way, please don't lump together with the hacker spirit, you insensitive clod!)

                         >>>>> Wipe off your wah-wah tears?

      --- Want to be around people.

         >>> Hint: The open source community doesn't hit up bars after work.

      --- Need large team experience to tackle cool problem X.

         >>> Are other people tackling cool problem X?

            ---- Yes.

                >>>> Join them.

            ---- No.

                >>>> You don't need large team experience. Take your passion and just get to work.

      --- Don't know.

         >>> Read 'Getting things Done'. Also: You're stupid.

  -- No

    >> Then why did you post this?

      --- Because you're silly.

Cool idea, very questionable business model. College kids excel in many areas; unfortunately for you, being cheap is one of them.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to hang out at a place like this, but I would crunch the numbers first and figure out if it's actually viable first (i.e. how much would rent, renovations, supplies, staff, etc. cost -- and how much milk and cookies at what price would you have to sell to make a profit).

P.S. I forget the name, but there actually is a very popular cookie and ice cream place right next to UCLA. You might want to think about broadening your horizons beyond just cookies.

It seems like it's really just a matter of personal semantic interpretation to me. Did Hacker News not drive some traffic to TechCrunch as a result of this post? How much bigger must Hacker News be relative to TechCrunch for it to begin "driving" traffic as opposed to some other verb? According to who? Either way, call it whatever you'd like, but the point remains that driving/sending/adding/creating/dispatching/routing traffic and/or increasing visibility is what these "parasites" have going for them. Whether or not that's worth the cost of letting them "leech" is debatable, but I'm going to go with yes given that people keep on cranking out APIs.

P.S. Since you didn't seem to notice, "perhaps" was sarcasm on my part. FriendFeed will most certainly create some additional traffic and/or visibility for the sites it "leeches" off of. It is important, however, to note that traffic != visibility. Sometimes times visibility detracts from traffic because there's no need to visit the source (i.e. Google Maps, YouTube, Scribd, etc.) but other times it creates traffic because the source provides added value (i.e. Thumbnails -> Larger Image, HN Links -> Stories, etc.). It's also worthwhile to note that the former (increase in visibility, decrease in traffic) still has benefits, as your service becomes more well known (creating future traffic). I'll leave you with this: http://friendfeed.com/e/d1ffcc73-040a-5609-6168-993c4549591a

I wasn't particularly impressed by her screencasts, but I'm pretty sure you're looking for something like http://demogirl.com/. You could also do it yourself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screencasting_software. If you're looking for an actual video (like the one you linked to) as opposed to a screencast, you might want to look into some of your local advertising agencies.

So, I don't think I'm really the most qualified person to answer this question, as I don't use Twitter at all (I do understand the potential value of it, but I think the fanaticism surrounding it is beyond silly) and have only recently started to scan FF (sometimes I'm able to pick up a cool link or two with minimal time investment, which is good).

I disagree with the post because it contains over the top sensationalism, misinformation, and trivial matters -- not because I've a FF evangelist like some others noted in the post.

Those things being said, I do think they have a few things going for them (Disclaimer: I was interested in interning there this summer, but had committed to a position by the time they got back to me):

Minus Twitter, they're still supporting 34 other services. (http://friendfeed.com/about/faq#services).

Their team seems pretty strong if you ask me, or anyone with a clue (http://friendfeed.com/about/team).

Some people obviously like the service (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com/?metric=uv).

There's a few other things but honestly, to me, by and far the strongest point about FF seems to be their vision as a content discovery service (http://mashable.com/2008/03/25/podcast-friendfeed/). They're gathering a lot of data, and while it may not seem very useful or valuable yet, I think when they work it all out, it will really be something special. You might want to read Paul Bucheit's (one of the co-founders of FF + Gmail creator) post on this (http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/04/power-of-links-and-...).

To be fair, I do think they have a few things going against them as well:

Out of the box, there's way too much noise on the service right now. Although they've given users fairly good tools to deal with it (Subscriptions, Likes, Hiding, Views, Rooms, etc.), it's still not good/easy enough for most users. I just want to see interesting content without any work or knowledge on my part. Even simple things like sorting by most likes or most comments (or some sort of magic 'ContentRank') would go a long ways. They are working on this, so we'll see how it goes (in the meantime, you could check out http://friendfeedlinks.com/, but it doesn't seem very satisfying to me because it's only for the link/digg entries of FF).

Facebook seems to be trying to get in on this space by integrating external services (http://mashable.com/2008/05/23/facebook-friendfeed/) as well as their upcoming profile re-design: "As part of the redesign, Facebook is dramatically playing up the role of its News Feed" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9949475-7.html). To be fair, they are in slightly different groups (Subscription Model vs. Friend Model - Relatively Open vs. Relatively Closed), but FB still poses a very big threat (not to FF's current user base, who all seem think FB is old and lame, but to their potential future user base).

To get perhaps get a more qualified (though obviously a little biased) perspective of what they have going for them, you might want to check out what some of their users think: http://friendfeed.com/e/cf6b48c8-29d8-11dd-92fc-003048343a40

P.S. You note that when you see widgets on people's blogs, they're twitter loaded. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it, I mean how often do you post photos on Flickr versus sending out a tweet? Again, this is an issue with noise. You'd probably be way more interested in their non-tweets if only they'd show up.

I don't know, maybe by perhaps driving traffic back towards the original site? Yeah, I think that's how it worked for Google (and all other services that have APIs). You might even have heard of the little known market known as SEO these days (or in more familiar words: parasite baiting).

Translation (as I read it):

Twitter was down due to a bug in their Jabber APIs.

Although FriendFeed does not use this API, I obviously don't know that, so I'll pretend to act smart and smugly blame them for Twitter's downtime.

Also, FriendFeed has nothing going for them minus Twitter. Forget about their 34 other supported services, evangelical community, and the fact that we already proclaimed them this years Twitter (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/14/friendfeed-is-this-year...). Yup, nothing.

Now if you'll forgive me, I must return to sucking on the teat of my God that is Twitter.

In other news, I am high as a kite.

I don't think the issue is about lowering their standards, but rather re-evaluating them. Throwing more interviews at applicants doesn't give you much more info beyond a certain point (which is presumably somewhere before 14).