Xodarap
Joined 16 years ago
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311
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40
Member since
Feb 15
Recent submissions
Comment · 10 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago
Thanks for the question – this is Ben (subject of the article).
I think living on minimum wage is a nice thing for journalists to put as a headline, but I tend to shy away from it as actual advice. If you are able to donate $100,000 per year as an engineer and then your car breaks down, making you unable to get to your job, what then? Are you really going to not fix your car and therefore quit your job, just so you can save $500 on the repair and meet some arbitrary spending target? That would be pretty stupid.
The [giving what we can](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/join/) pledge is that you will donate 10% of your income, and I encourage people to take that since 10% is a reasonable amount to donate (particularly for the sort of person who is reading hacker news).
Comment · 10 years ago
Health eFilings | REMOTE | Senior Backend Engineer | http://healthefilings.com/
Health eFilings software enables physicians who provide better care to get paid more money.
We are looking for innovative, self-starting software developers to create additional and manage existing back end integrations with Electronic Heath Record (EHR) systems as well as working with the team to continuously develop and improve our current and future software products.
We believe in working smarter not harder: much of our backend code is “meta-“ code that parses government specifications and then generates our actual code from that.
This position has large amounts of autonomy, and you are held accountable for results, not process. You will have the opportunity to grow into management or tech leadership. This position reports to the CTO.
See http://healthefilings.com/careers/ for more information.
Comment · 11 years ago
Health eFilings, software developer, REMOTE (US only)
Venture backed startup; our software enables physicians who provide better care to get paid more.
We have five team members, tons of paying customers, and are looking for another two awesome backend developers to help us scale.
* Working software in the hands of customers is the best measure of progress * We like functional design patterns and meta-programming * We use Rails, Backbone+Handlebars and Mongo, but believe in using the right tool for the job.
Comment · 11 years ago
Health eFilings, software developer, REMOTE
Venture backed startup which is the premier provider of software solutions that enable health care providers to comply with Medicare reporting regulations while saving them time and money, enabling them to focus on delivering quality care.
We recently closed our seed round, have four employees, tons of paying customers, and are looking for an awesome backend developer to help us scale.
* Working software in the hands of customers is the best measure of progress * We like functional design patterns and meta-programming * We use Rails, Backbone+Handlebars and Mongo, but believe in using the right tool for the job.
Comment · 12 years ago
Entrepreneurs are, in general, not motivated by money. This may be what you are saying - in which case I agree! What I object to is this statement:
> Or may you just don't have the risk tolerance for entrepreneurship.
Risk tolerance is at best weakly related to the likelihood that you will become an entrepreneur, and risk-tolerant entrepreneurs [perform worse](http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/85/66/06/PDF/PEER_st...) than average.
Comment · 12 years ago
Generally researchers identify industries by using a code system like [NAICS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Industry_Classif...). My guess is that the Google founders would not have been in a similar industry code, but I'm not familiar enough with Stanford to say for sure.
Comment · 12 years ago
I would disagree with the causality. The sort of person who can get an influential job in a top-tier startup is probably also the sort of person who can start a good company.
Comment · 12 years ago
> Most entrepreneurs arise out of an idea.
And how did you get that idea? How did you get the experience to see that there was an unfilled need in the marketplace?
People who have experience in a field perceive their risks as lower (correctly!) and are therefore more likely to start a company. It is a perfectly rational decision and is unrelated to risk tolerance.
Comment · 12 years ago
I think this is in interesting point (modulo the remark made elsewhere about "assuring" success), but I don't have the evidence to know how it should affect your decisions.
The research I cited found that first time and failed entrepreneurs have a 20% chance of success, whereas "skilled" entrepreneurs have a 30% chance of success. So if you can become "skilled" in one stint of employment, then you would expect to succeed sooner by being employed first than if you were doing startups that whole time.
But it's entirely possible that it takes multiple stints of direct employment to obtain whatever knowledge makes you skilled, in which case your argument is valid. I just don't know of any evidence about this though.
I listed some causes I think are valuable in the interview, but in general I think GiveWell and ACE are good evaluators:
* http://www.givewell.org/ * http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/
For each charity they recommend, they have estimates of number of lives saved per dollar.