aketchum (u/aketchum)

aketchum commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

aketchum · 3 months ago

VIVA Finance | Atlanta, GA | Back-End Developer

VIVA is a Fintech Startup based in Atlanta, GA with the mission to build a more inclusive financial system. VIVA offers unsecured personal loans to customers who have traditionally been excluded and taken advantage of by the legacy financial institutions. The VIVA difference is to underwrite heavily on employment history and set up repayments through voluntary direct deposit payments from the borrower's paycheck. Our interest rates are less than 1/3 of the rates our customers are able to get from other financing options.

We are a VC backed company and have been in business for 6 years. We have been profitable for the past year and with a new debt facility closing at the end of June, we will be dramatically ramping up origination volume in the second half of the year. We are hiring an additional backend engineer to support the larger transaction volume, as well as to support new products we plan to launch to diversify our revenue stream. You will join our engineering team of 10 and work in a dynamic environment where you are frequently writing net new code to support business objectives.

Our tech stack for the back-end is fully on AWS, using Lambda and ECS for compute and Typescript as the language, but experience with this specific stack is not necessary for talented candidates. Our preference is candidates who can come in office 4 days a week to our new office on the Atlanta Beltline (next to Krog Street Market). VIVA does not provide visa sponsorship, so please have authorization to work in the USA.

Send an introduction to our hiring manger (alexa@viva-finance.com) with a resume and we will be in touch!

aketchum commented on Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine solarshades.club/p/dispat... · Posted by u/notarobot123

aaplok · 3 months ago

> Students don’t seem to mind this reversion.

Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice they are given. They are devastated that the degree for which they are working hard is becoming worthless yet they all assert they don't want exams back. Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions and in contrast excel in open tasks that allow them to explore, so my sample is biased but still.

They don't have a solution. As the main victims they are just frustrated by the situation, and at the "solutions" thrown at it by folks who aren't personally affected.

aketchum · 3 months ago

It is always interesting to me when people say they are "bad test takers". You mean you are bad at the part where we find out how much you know? Maybe you just don't know the material well enough.

caveat emptor - I am not ND so maybe this is a real concern for some, but in my experience the people who said this did not know the material. And the accommodations for tests are abused by rich kids more than they are utilized by those that need them.

aketchum commented on Things that have a bigger impact than coding assistants codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/flail

wewewedxfgdf · 3 months ago

Sounds like you're trying to find out why I'm wrong about my productivity boost from AI.

aketchum · 3 months ago

im interested in the answer because I have not seen the same productivity increases with claude code and copilot. When I read comments like your original one I think that I must be using the tools incorrectly. How do you use them in your workflow?

Or for anyone else reading this, are there resources you have used to learn how to get the most out of LLM coding tools?

aketchum commented on Bletchley code breaker Betty Webb dies aged 101 bbc.com/news/articles/c78... · Posted by u/danso

aketchum · 5 months ago

this seems unrelated to the post

aketchum commented on Did A16Z get it wrong about stablecoins? · Posted by u/axelwang

BOOSTERHIDROGEN · 5 months ago

Could you explain how a double increase is calculated following a 3% reduction?

aketchum · 5 months ago

If you have a 6% profit margin (i.e. grocery store) and then you have to pay 3% of basically all revenue, you are now at 3% profit margin. This is why Costco only accepts VISA - they have 11% margins so 3% would be over 25% of their profit. So they go exclusive with one processor and have a very large transaction volume, so they are able to negotiate much lower fees and thus lose less profit.

aketchum commented on Did A16Z get it wrong about stablecoins? · Posted by u/axelwang

orbisvicis · 5 months ago

I don't see any value to unnecessary transaction fees. In particular:

> These fees enable consumers to potentially spend more than what they have.

Where's the money coming from? You can't spend out of thin air...

Let's say I offer to provide an automated payment system in exchange for 0.1% transaction fees, which is an equitable exchange. My inclination is to then raise the transaction fees, but when the fees become burdensome I jeopardize my business. So I both raise the fees to 2-3%, and introduce rewards cards to justify the raise. The problem is that not everyone is eligible, or willing, or able to qualify for rewards cards. So I've mollified the consumers that matter while managing to rip off the disadvantaged.

Rewards cards can be seen as loyalty programs for merchants, but only merchants who command dominant market positions. I think franchises are particularly bad because the link between owner and brand is hidden. A small franchise (ie print/ship stores) cannot differentiate itself. A large franchise (ie gas stations) is essentially a monopoly which does not benefit from loyalty. That's why you have so many small retailers offering discounts for cash payments.

Now as a merchant stuck covering transaction fees, my incentive is to increase loyalty. This means increased rewards through steeper discounts on higher prices, but this is a network effect that only benefits businesses with a large customer base. Just as with disadvantaged consumers, retailers with smaller customer bases simply cannot compete. Large businesses with higher prices can also negotiate better agreements with payment networks.

What we have here is are two rent-seeking trends and a hidden network of rewards agreements that obfuscate market signals for the consumer. If you are banking on rewards to buy something otherwise outside of your means, chances are that blood money was unwittingly liberated from someone less fortunate.

So yes, control of payment rails is crucial and is responsible so many large-scale social trends.

aketchum · 5 months ago

> Where's the money coming from? You can't spend out of thin air...

Of course you can - It is a credit card

aketchum commented on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time sfstandard.com/2025/02/08... · Posted by u/NaOH

squigz · 7 months ago

> shortly after the acquisition

I would expect this to be a particularly low point. Can you link some data?

aketchum · 7 months ago

"The banks marketed the deal last week with an intention to sell down the debt at 90-95 cents to the dollar but managed to price it at a higher price of 97 cents... In late 2022, an attempt to sell the unsecured loan attracted bids in the 60 cents to the dollar range which would have seen the banks take on a large loss on the face value of the debt."

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/banks-sell-down-55-...

so I was wrong to say they were as low as 40 cents, but the point stands that twitter's financials have improved a great deal

aketchum commented on San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time sfstandard.com/2025/02/08... · Posted by u/NaOH

jonkoops · 7 months ago

Twitter is losing more money than before Musk, so I personally don't see how this is working out except as a mechanism to extract power.

aketchum · 7 months ago

twitter corporate bonds are trading at 97 cents on the dollar now, they were trading closer to 40 cents shortly after the acquisition. I would not assume they are still losing money

aketchum commented on Detroit’s revival takes shape after decades of decay theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

aketchum · 7 months ago

I interviewed for an internship at Ford in probably 2015. It was striking to me that they spent basically half the interview hyping up Detroit and convincing me that it would be a fun city to spend time in. It was clear that the company knew one of its biggest challenges to hiring was the location. Glad to hear things are improving but the reputation of Detroit still has a ways to go.

aketchum commented on Theoretical limitations of multi-layer Transformer arxiv.org/abs/2412.02975... · Posted by u/fovc

Matthyze · 7 months ago

I'd humbly like to ask people who've read the paper whether it's worth trying to understand it without a great math background. The paper looks intersting but daunting, and I'd hate to sink a lot of time into it and leave defeated.

It sometimes sucks being in ML with 'only' a CS background. Feels like all the math and physics grads are running around having fun with their fancy mathematics, while I stand here, feeling dimwitted.

aketchum · 7 months ago

Most of it is linear algebra and convex optimization. You can learn a lot of it with free resources from MIT, Stanford, Georgia Tech, or YouTube. If you want more of a school style learning environment you can enroll in the Georgia Tech OMSCS program and just take the classes related to the math etc that you are interested in. No reason you have to graduate and it is maybe $800 a course.