We're hiring engineers across the stack at Opendoor. We're building technology to simplify residential real estate - making it easier to buy and sell homes. Our engineering challenges span everything from marketplace dynamics and pricing models to complex operational workflows and integrations with industry systems. If you're interested in applying technology to modernize a massive, traditional industry, we'd love to hear from you. yan at [our domain].com :D
Opendoor (https://www.opendoor.com) | In Person | San Francisco, CA | Full-time We're hiring engineers across the stack at Opendoor. We're building technology to simplify residential real estate - making it easier to buy and sell homes. Our engineering challenges span everything from marketplace dynamics and pricing models to complex operational workflows and integrations with industry systems. If you're interested in applying technology to modernize a massive, traditional industry, we'd love to hear from you.
yan at [our domain].com :D
Opendoor (https://www.opendoor.com) | San Francisco, CA | Full-time
We're hiring engineers across the stack at Opendoor. We're building technology to simplify residential real estate - making it easier to buy and sell homes. Our engineering challenges span everything from marketplace dynamics and pricing models to complex operational workflows and integrations with industry systems. If you're interested in applying technology to modernize a massive, traditional industry, we'd love to hear from you.
The fundamental piece you are missing with your logic is that the negative externalities of driving a car are massive and not borne by those making the choice to drive. This leads to people choosing to drive a car at a rate that is much higher than the optimal balance for society. The best way to control for these negative externalities (risks to pedestrians, noise, pollution, congestion) is with a tax. In the US, we subsidize car usage in an eye watering and incredibly unfair way, which results in overuse of cars. If public policy were to better reflect the actual costs of driving a car, few would be able to afford it or choose it over other options
The cognitive dissonance people have around this issue is astonishing. We are willing to ground the 737MAX fleet when a few people get a (surely terrifying) open air flying experience; but 44,000 people are killed on the road in the US _every_ year (and rising!) and very few people seem to care. In most age cohorts, death by car is the largest killer. In the US you have a 1 in 107 chance of dying in a car crash in your lifetime. Even simple and completely reasonable measures to reduce these insane numbers are seen as some kind of tyrannical affront to ones freedom (see the current CA measure to add speed limiters).
The car industry, car culture, and car centric thinking in the US and much of the world is totally out of control.
It's wild to me how much Youtube TV costs and yet they still serve you tons of ads. Coming from youtube premium where occasionally I have to skip through a preroll ad, I forget how much you are bombarded with ads while watching traditional TV. The fact that you have to pay the princely sum of $73/month on top of that boggles my mind. I canceled when they raised the price from $35/month and I'll never go back at these prices...
There are a number of reasons why battery swapping is not feasible in the real world, among them:
- Batteries age differently from one another, so swapping would only be fair if you had a similarly aged battery that had a similar number of miles & charge cycles on it
- Batteries need to be taken care of (like not using the last 10% at each limit of the battery). some people take really good care of their batteries, others don't. I would never want some random battery swapped into my car, as I've taken really good care of my car's battery
- Batteries are structurally built into the vehicle, and making them easily removable would make a lot of the engineering more difficult
- Batteries could become commoditized so that they fit in any car, but right now there are tons of different shaped & sized batteries, so it would be really hard to build the tooling to support all these different cars & battery types
3blue1brown gives me hope that there are a few Michael Jordan level teachers out there, and youtube/the internet will allow us to find those people and reward them appropriately
Coffee friend here! This is the way!
When people get me coffee or coffee paraphernalia as a gift, they tend to fall into a number of traps:
- Not understanding my nuanced preferences and getting me something I know about and don't like
- Not appreciating how to choose a good product (for example, with beans, an old roast date of more than 30 days means sad & stale coffee)
- Getting me something I like but I already have
In many cases I of course smile and am polite, and of course I am truly grateful for the thought, _but_ there is a level of disappointment which I have to hide because it saddens me to be wasteful, and I don't like putting on a performance. There are very few if any coffee things that I like but don't have, and are at a gift level price point (<$100). For consumables like filters and beans I have nuanced preference and it's unlikely that you'll happen to choose something that I like, but very likely that you'll choose something I know I don't like.
From this experience as a recipient, I have learned to be very careful about the gifts I give to others. I steer clear of things in the realm of someones passions, and try to share something I know and love. For example, I don't give whiskey lovers whiskey, or whiskey glasses, because I don't know what kind of whiskey they like, and I'm likely to give them something they know and don't like! So often times I'll use my superpower of knowing a lot about coffee to give the whiskey lover a high quality coffee that they would probably have more difficulty finding or choosing themselves. A great conversation can ensue where I can share why I think that coffee is great and interesting, and why I think they'll enjoy it.
Conversely, when Whiskey person wants to get me a gift, I would much prefer they give me a whiskey they like and think is great, and explain it's merits to me. I don't know much about whiskey, so it's easy to wow me and I love learning about it from friends who do!
The car has done so much damage to our world and most people are completely blind to it. Obesity, climate change, isolation/loneliness, excess deaths/injuries from collisions, out of control housing costs, can all be tied back in a major way to car centric society. And yet people will defend their car and the "convenience" of it like their life depends on it, and force it down the throats of everyone around them. Boggles the mind.
I don’t think 4 year college will ever go away, especially for great academic students. That said, the argument is that the cultural pendulum has swung far too much towards pressuring everyone, regardless of their life goals, into attending a 4 year college. There are so many great alternatives, especially if you don’t want to be a doctor/lawyer/ etc. as a society, we should elevate blue collar jobs and career paths, and not elevate the cultural value placed on 4 year degrees (esp from random non prestigious private schools). Most blue collar jobs (plumbers/electricians) are interesting, enjoyable, and fruitful work (150k+), but in the US many people look down on these careers and steer their children away from them.
I agree for the most part, but I don’t think many of these creative endeavors are helped by college (and the costs/debt it brings). In fact, there is a counter argument that perhaps there would be more successful creatives if we did not push everyone to go to college and take on lots of debt; they would have more time, energy, and money that they could more directly apply towards the pursuit of those creative dreams
Preach! I do not understand this criticism at all. Rails scales just fine, in a web app it's the DB that's the bottleneck 99% of the time. Sure, the ORM can get you into hot water easily if you do dumb things (or just don't pay enough attention to N+1's etc), but one should be using the ORM wisely and deliberately, rather than living ignorantly of what's happening behind the scenes.
I understand the "too much Magic" criticism of Rails from novices & intermediate Rails developers, but once you reach a sufficient level of mastery, I think this goes away.
After using Rails every day for 12 years I know pretty much all the ins and outs, and what is "magic" to others is just the robust tooling I love. Just like any tools, they are overwhelming and daunting when you don't know how to use them, but once you become proficient with them, they make your life so much easier. While it might be difficult when the "magic" doesn't do exactly what you want for your edge case, when you have a sufficient level of mastery, it's easy to find a way to adapt/modify/override the tooling and make it do what you want. Further, many times the tooling is there to keep you from doing things you probably should not be doing, and this kind of strict, opinionated, best practice enforcing philosophy has gotten me out of trouble at times, and I think it makes it much easier for engineers to move between Rails codebases and start being productive even faster.
I've done plenty of Node/JS/React and I honestly do not understand how people can prefer to use these stacks over Rails. For full stack web dev, Rails is such a pleasant place to work every day.
Proton | Backend, Frontend | Remote | Fulltime / Flextime
We’re a digital distributor for electronic music labels, artists, and DJs. Distro platforms like Proton help deliver music to other platforms like Beatport, Spotify, or YouTube who sell, stream, or monetize music. Over 2000 music labels trust Proton to power their catalog, with over 1M streams daily on Spotify alone. Learn more about us in the links below,
I agree completely - techno is hypnotic and almost by design is meant to be heard and not listened to, and I find this really helps me maintain focus/flow while working. No vocals, ear catching melodies, or overdone chord progressions that try to grab your attention. Techno is my go to work music for this reason!
We're hiring engineers across the stack at Opendoor. We're building technology to simplify residential real estate - making it easier to buy and sell homes. Our engineering challenges span everything from marketplace dynamics and pricing models to complex operational workflows and integrations with industry systems. If you're interested in applying technology to modernize a massive, traditional industry, we'd love to hear from you. yan at [our domain].com :D