^ Seconding this. I'm a happy user at OneSignal. Great service and the developer experience is top notch. I've been chatting up OneSignal staff to get technical assistance on their Discord chat and via email. As a business, having a reliable technical developer support team who responds quickly is important to me.
So in my original question, I was inquiring what people were actually doing to positively impact the world in the direction they want it to go (preferably, objectively measurable results), because I know everyone here has opinions about what someone else should do.
> So what are you suggesting then? that tech workers leave "high paying jobs" to work for the DoD
No. Have you not heard about the tech workers who voluntarily quit their civilian day jobs in protest of their employer, because their employer was working (or planning to work) with the DoD?
So, that is your opinion. The whole point of having a credible option to use violence, is that one is willing to use it. Otherwise, there is no credibility in the threat, which defeats the entire purpose of peace and security that is backed by the potential use of violence. In that sense, if one misses a court ordered appearance, one shouldn't be surprised to see law enforcement knocking on one's doorstep with the threat of violence for legal non-compliance.
Do black hat cyber attacks constitute an "invasion"? If you say no, then that's what Russia / China is banking on, because they're doing it, and betting that the US won't resort to conventional military use of force in retaliation. Since there's no real threat of painful retaliation, they can continue hacking away with no consequence then?
If you say yes, then you're saying that the US should respond to cyber attacks with conventional military use of force, tanks, planes, boots on ground, etc. because you see cyber attacks as no different than a conventional attack by those countries.
Regardless, the US needs more cyber security professionals and other technical professionals (e.g. machine learning etc.) to help with the defense against these actors, but that's hard to do with all this backlash from techies.
Tech people: Rant about egregious things that China and Russia does (political, freedom, basic human rights, etc.)
Also tech people: Vehemently oppose helping the US DoD with their highly-sought after skills, sign online petitions, protest and/or quit their high-paying jobs at <insert tech company that provides value to US DoD>.
Serious question for these tech people: What are you exactly doing to help solve the issues you've ranted about?
I'd like to hear thoughtful responses that are not the typical fallacies (e.g. ad hominem, ad populum, straw man, etc.)
> The sad thing about the 4 things you listed is that the person in question is rarely conscious of employing those "anti-patterns"
This is like with talk therapy. You can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped, whether they're unaware of their problems, or are aware but are in denial.
This list is more for people who do want to help themselves.
A very common misconception is that the US Army goes to war because it wants to. That is simply not how it works. The US military, unlike most other countries, are 100% under civilian control. This is a safeguard the Founding Fathers put in place to prevent a military coup, and a military dictatorship. That civilian control I refer to is of course the politicians elected into office by The People.
War is means to an end, and that end is a political one.
If you can diplomat your way to your political goal without the need for violence, then that is awesome and should always be the first option over bloodshed.
When the US Army fought the Nazis and imperial Japan, were they “promoting violence against civilians to further their causes”?
TruePill (YC S17) | Software Engineer (Full-Stack Web / Front-End / Back-End ) | Full-Time | ONSITE | SF Bay Area
Hi! I'm one of the engineers on the team :)
TruePill is an API like Stripe, but for pharmacy.
https://imgur.com/a/yeGpu4Z (screenshots of our new web site b/c current one is not an accurate representation)
If you're interested in:
- Being an active participant in the decision-making process of a YC company rapidly capitalizing on an under-the-radar market opportunity
- Applying your technical skills to a meaningful domain outside of tech (while learning about industry insider nuances), that has real-world medical implications
- Being part of a small engineering team that not only measures daily active users but also physical products shipped, revenues, and real profits
- Being part of a small engineering team that ships not only software products but also physical products
- Watching how changes in your code physically impacts the operation of not just machines but the IRL work-flow of real people (specifically, pharmacists and technicians)
- Hands-on shipping of product and taking ownership, end-to-end! Everything from ideation --> coding --> customer delight (& wash-rinse-repeat)
We have deliberately avoided press coverage around our traction, investors, and market because we have been focused on taking over the market as quickly as possible, but we will doing a formal and proper launch with more details soon!
We're in the pharmacy (not pharmaceutical) space and I'm happy to elaborate more in private for serious inquiries.
- The lower-level the category the more customers want support on it.
- The more you can commoditize the layers below you, the more the market likes it. Red Hat does this for servers.
- The lower-level the category the more the market actually “wants” it standardized in order to minimize entropy. This is why low-level infrastructure categories become natural monopolies or oligopolies.
A fast-growing YC company! (S17) | Software Engineer (Full-Stack Web / Front-End / Back-End ) | Full-Time | ONSITE | SF Bay Area
Hi! I'm one of the engineers on the team :)
If you're interested in:
- Being an active participant in the decision-making process of a YC company rapidly capitalizing on an under-the-radar market opportunity
- Applying your technical skills to a meaningful domain outside of tech (while learning about industry insider nuances), that has real-world medical implications
- Being part of a small engineering team that not only measures daily active users but also physical products shipped, revenues, and real profits
- Being part of a small engineering team that ships not only software products but also physical products
- Watching how changes in your code physically impacts the operation of not just machines but the IRL work-flow of real people (specifically, pharmacists and technicians)
- Hands-on shipping of product, end-to-end! Everything from ideation --> coding --> customer delight (& wash-rinse-repeat)
then I'd love to hear from you!
Our stack: React, Node, GraphQL (+ Apollo), ES6, Raspberry Pi, AWS (RDS, ECS, CloudFront, EC2), Elasticsearch, Jenkins, Rails, Python, Linux (Ubuntu), Docker, and moar. Right tool for the job > dogma.
We have deliberately avoided press coverage around our traction, investors, and market because we have been focused on taking over the market as quickly as possible, but we will going public with what we're up to shortly in a few weeks! (I'm sorry there's no web site or company name to google for just yet--but I promise this isn't at all anywhere close to the pejorative "stealth" mode at work)
We're in the pharmacy (not pharmaceutical) space and I'm happy to elaborate more in private for serious inquiries.
We offer competitive Bay Area salary, stock equity, healthcare insurance, and other employee benefits.
Ideological and rational are not in opposition all the time, but they're not congruent all the time either.
I don't fully agree that all non-foss are bad, or that all foss are good. You can find exceptions to the rule either way.
I think the helpful perspective is to take a step back and look at the whole system from a macro perspective. Based on traction, which do you think is "better". I think it really depends on the use-case.
There's a lot of shitty foss software out there, that is just plain unusable because developers like geeking out over code but UX + UI polish are non-technical problems and thus ignored.
This. I think when you have one lens through which you view the world, as opposed to having multiple lenses to pick from, which you swap out to apply the most beneficial lens from which to view the problem .. then this is no different than using the one hammer you have because all problems look like a nail.
I do think there are some software that in reality, for most people (including large swathes of non-technical people), work better in a for-profit model (which is usually closed source).
But there are some things that work better as open source.
I think it really depends on the fundamental problem (i.e. ends) the software (i.e. means) is trying to accomplish.
I personally do not think you can categorically say one is better than the other, because it really depends on the issue.
Why isn't there an open source Google search, that works better than Google?
If we can open source our encryption algorithms because that ostensibly makes it more secure overall, why can't we just open source all our algorithms for spam filtering, especially to the spammers themselves?
If you look at all the most vibrant communities online, are they closed source or open source? (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, HN itself) ... vs. say, mailing lists, usenet, etc.
I don't have any experience with passing the SEC's muster for going public, but if this was a scam, attracting the SEC's scrutiny would not be in their interest, because it may trigger the interest of other agencies (FBI/CIA?)
Are there examples of when the SEC cleared a company to go public, that was really in hindsight an elaborate money laundering and/or pump-and-dump sham? Because it seems to me like that would be exactly why the SEC exists: to protect the avg non-sophisticated non-professional retail investor from such things.
I guess it's hard to tease apart a pure pump and dump from a money laundering operation from one another.
- An insider's perspective of, nay, being an active participant in the decision-making process of a YC company rapidly capitalizing on an under-the-radar market opportunity
- Applying your technical skills to a meaningful domain outside of tech (while learning about industry insider nuances), that has real-world medical implications that touches us all
- Being part of a small engineering team that not only measures daily active users but also physical products shipped, revenues, and real profits
- Being part of a small engineering team that ships not only software products but also physical products
- Watching how changes in your code physically impacts the operation of not just machines but the IRL work-flow of real people (specifically, pharmacists and technicians)
- Hands-on shipping of product, end-to-end! Everything from ideation --> coding --> customer delight (& wash-rinse-repeat)
Our stack: React, Node, GraphQL (+ Apollo), ES6, Raspberry Pi, AWS (RDS, ECS, CloudFront, EC2), Elasticsearch, Jenkins, Rails, Python, Linux (Ubuntu), Docker, and moar. Right tool for the job > dogma.
We have deliberately avoided press coverage around our traction, investors, and market because we have been focused on taking over the market as quickly as possible, but we will going public with what we're up to shortly in a few weeks! (I'm sorry there's no web site or company name to google for just yet--but I promise this isn't at all anywhere close to the pejorative "stealth" mode at work)
We're in the pharmacy (not pharmaceutical) space and I'm happy to elaborate more in private for serious inquiries.
We're looking for front end, back-end, full stack web, and strong generalist software engineers, for full time and internship positions. We offer competitive Bay Area salary, stock equity, healthcare insurance, and other employee benefits.
jay liew at jay liew dot com
p.s. A totally separate position we're also hiring for is in product management: we need 1 strong product person