2
points
amoorthy
Joined 558 karma
Co-founder at Rocksalt.ai - helping SMBs get found in forums where their prospects hang out.
- Insane that Volvo doesn't just replace the car. The cost is trivial compared to the brand damage here. The complaint is so well documented and the customer is not being a jerk at all; not sure what Volvo's logic is.
- Agreed. Put another way: because software has low marginal cost and high up-front cost (even higher in very competitive markets) it makes sense to raise venture early to hire a great team and build an awesome product that then scales incredibly well (great investment returns).
- Oh cool! Thanks so much. (Btw, I didn't mean to suggest that the project should address an unanswered question. Ok to repeat known experiment if it's fun/insightful).
The gravitational acceleration one is cool. I remember doing this in high school back in the 90s. Let me suggest that to him. Thanks again.
- Xpertly | Founding fullstack engineer | Remote (US), ideally Bay Area | $150k + 1% equity
Seed-stage company, backed by top-tier investors. CTO is former YC co-founder.
Founders previously built and sold startup so fewer dumb mistakes this time around (i.e. smarter about when to invest, such as in this hire!)
You: 5 years backend/fullstack experience at Series A/B company
Stack: Vue/Node/Postgres/AWS-lambda. Use of vector DBs/AI where it makes sense.
Why join? CTO is one of the smartest and nicest engineers to work with and learn from. We are building something enduring and useful, both for our customers and the world at large.
ps: we're somewhat in stealth so not much info on our socials yet about the company/mission etc.
Email me: arjun (at) xpertly (dot) ai
- Sorry for tangent but any recommendations for small smart phone (i.e. <6" screen)?
I like my iPhone 12 mini with its 5" screen (though it is glitchier than one would hope) but now all phones seem to be 6"+ which is hard to fit into a pocket or even manipulate with one hand.
I know the Samsung ZFlip 6 and Motorola Razr+ are small, though rather pricey at $800-1000. Any opinions from folks on reliability/usability etc of these?
I am embarrassed to say I have some Apple lock-in with earbuds and even basic conveniences like "find-my" working for my children's watches so not sure if these are worth staying with Apple for, even if I dislike their latest devices.
- I'm very curious if experienced staff is available and less expensive now. As a venture-backed startup founder myself I'm quite eager to hire such folks and don't have the money to compete with larger firms. Maybe silly question but where are such folks hanging out, besides HN? :-)
- Thanks for sharing your experience and glad to hear you've found a good job/team/product-environment!
My experience working with junior devs is that while they may be smart they haven't worked in teams and contributed to large codebases. So they may struggle to understand how a larger codebase is structured, where is the optimal place to fix an issue, how to structure their own code to be maintainable longer term etc. So code-reviews take longer, with seniors sometimes having to refactor a large amount.
I think some younger devs that contribute to open source projects do much better in this regard.
- I don't have a view into many large tech companies but I imagine some level of tech debt exists in all of them. Are you suggesting that hiring fresh grads to resolve tech debt is unwise given the complexity of doing so?
- 3 points
- Sorry to hear you're burned out. Do you want to work after your current job? If so, curious why you feel this is your last tech job. Is it because of ageism or something else?
- Really thoughtful comment. (An upvote was not enough :-)
- 2 points
- Hi Richard - I'd like to donate as well to help you retire your debt.
I'm sorry the company didn't work out but I am so happy there are people like you in this world doing such a good thing. I hope there is a way to resurrect your project in future.
- Excellent points. Let me see if I can address:
1. We do not enforce an equal number of articles from all sides of the political spectrum. We use the political lean ratings only to help identify different framings on topics so people can see different angles to a story because issues are complex and no single article will have all the facts.
2. We agree that media skews towards outrage because it funds their advertising based business model. That's why our ratings emphasize the most objective and least opinionated writing. And thankfully, there is a lot of great writing that is trying to inform, rather than emotionally manipulate people. It's hard to find which is why we built such a search engine.
3. News orgs are eager to keep publishing stories even if the topics are not that important because they want more of your attention. That's why we group articles by topics on our site (factual.news) so that you can actually "finish reading the news". Oh, we're also ad-free and don't care to keep you longer than absolutely necessary.
- Rats. 26 actually (scroll down) but bad presentation layer for sure. Our search engine doesn't do great on one-word search terms so "ukraine mariupol" shows 100+ articles.
- Hi folks. If you’re worried that Google is giving you biased search results when it comes to news, or just unsure which of the many search results to click on, then you might like The Factual’s news search engine, which I built with my co-founder, Ajoy.
We rank individual news articles for how informative and objective they are using a variety of signals that proxy expertise: depth and extent of research (links, quotes), neutral tone of writing, historical topic focus and ratings of journalist, and source reputation. We overlay political bias ratings and select multiple highly informative articles across the political spectrum on each topic. We also give additional context like read time, and make it easy to filter out paywalled articles.
More on how it works here: https://www.thefactual.com/how-it-works.
Feedback/questions appreciated. Thanks!
- 7 points
- Ah silly me. Thanks for the clarification.
1. If they really have so many faulty cars on the road that's a serious hazard and any accidents where people die may end up destroying Volvo entirely because of negligence.
2. An economically reasonable answer might be refund the guy making the complaint and ofter all other owners $10k credit towards your next Volvo purchase or free 3 years of maintenance and service. Something like this might be enough to stem the bleeding while protecting the brand.