omouse (u/omouse) - Readit News

_csoo commented on Ethereum Is a Dark Forest medium.com/@danrobinson/e... · Posted by u/gottagetmac

josh2600 · 5 years ago

I really think that all of this DeFi stuff is playing with fire. If these tools scale large enough, it's easy to imagine breaking the right link in the system at the right time to cause catastrophic failures.

Remember that all complex systems operate in a degraded state. If there's ever a way that only part of a complicated swap executes correctly the trade can get really far out of position. People in Ethereum land will say things like "the smart contracts can't possibly execute if all of these conditions aren't met!", but I can assure you that lots of extremely fault-tolerant systems built by very smart people (like electronic stock exchanges) have failed in very surprising ways.

Weakly collateralized flash loans are just faster leveraged tools with all of the tradeoffs that entails.

YMMV, there's definitely a lot of money to be made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME << Relevant.

_csoo · 5 years ago

>I really think that all of this DeFi stuff is playing with fire. If these tools scale large enough, it's easy to imagine breaking the right link in the system at the right time to cause catastrophic failures.

Substitute "software" for DeFi. Every single day we're playing with fire through low quality code and bad security practices. DeFi just exposes the real financial costs and consequences of terrible software development. How many countless dollars and hours and data have been lost through bad code?

omouse commented on MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch octopus.com/blog/octopus-... · Posted by u/paulstovell

echelon · 6 years ago

I have a streaming multimedia app that I want to launch. It ingests from the client, does some transformations, then sends it back to them (or to other parties) in realtime. It's pretty novel though - Snapchat adjacent.

I can't do it clientside. Nature of the problem.

I'm writing it in Rust, so it's relatively fast. But throwing thousands of people at it will still require extreme scale. I'm going to use K8S horizontal autoscaling. This will be obscenely expensive.

I'm not sure I can afford this. But I think a month of successful demonstration will get me funded (or bought out). So in theory my costs could wind up getting paid. Maybe.

Do I risk launching this and potentially having $100k multiples of AWS bills? I can't afford that. I don't want to deplete my life savings or potentially go bankrupt.

Could I put it on a corporate card as an LLC and do my best to make it work? Then fold without harm or fowl if it doesn't? Is that unethical? Could I get sued?

All that said, I'm almost certain that a successful demo at scale with the Internet thrown at it will get me money. It's a really cool and novel product. People will be talking about it.

What should I do? Advice will be very appreciated.

omouse · 6 years ago

Go simpler and go cheaper. Why not do real-time processing for all of 2 minutes. That's about the length of an elevator pitch and shouldn't cost so much.

Or limit the number of beta users there can be.

Or work some freelance jobs for a few months and save up the cash and during that time pitch to investors. As you progressively have more cash you can hire an engineer to part-time hack on cool demos or to give you the opportunity to increase the number of beta users.

omouse commented on MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch octopus.com/blog/octopus-... · Posted by u/paulstovell

teddyuk · 6 years ago

"To bring Octopus Cloud to market quickly, we did the simplest thing possible; we took our self-hosted Octopus Server product and bundled it into an EC2 instance for each customer that signed up. We had to make changes to the product, but mostly around permissions."

I have used octopus and I could have told them that they can't lift-and-shift. The amount of requests the app makes is ridiculous, the way they wrote their database is appalling (actually crazily dumb https://octopus.com/blog/sql-as-document-store). Everything about it would mean they can't scale in the cloud without wasting a ton of money.

"Cloud stuff can be really expensive" - yes if you write dog shit, putting that in the cloud will be expensive.

omouse · 6 years ago

The best part is the "simplest thing possible". They actually didn't do that at all. I hate to dog-pile on this team, but damn, 100k spend in a month isn't simple at all!

omouse commented on MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch octopus.com/blog/octopus-... · Posted by u/paulstovell

omouse · 6 years ago

Ha, I'm re-reading The Lean Startup and this paragraph seems like a contradiction in terms of what an MVP is:

We decided to build an MVP based on our best estimates and test the market that way. The goal was to launch something in 6 months and test if the demand was there; and if it wasn’t, we’d only wasted 6 months. We chose to optimize for getting to market quickly rather than worrying about how much it would cost.

Contrast it to what the Lean Startup principles say:

The Lean Startup methodology has as a premise that every startup is a grand experiment that attempts to answer a question. The question is not "Can this product be built?" Instead, the questions are "Should this product be built?" and "Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?"

So instead of doing what a lean startup would do, they did the opposite. Let's see what they could have done instead...

"How many customers will actually use it?"

- Lean startup: create a signup page with a mock up or landing page and a few buttons that work and every potential behind a "coming soon" screen - Their approach: actually build the whole product and then launch it and see who's interested

"What is it all going to cost?" - Lean startup: As little as possible to discover the insights we need to iterate and evolve the product - Their approach: well we already paid the salary for our engineers and we've given them six months, so what's half the salary+benefits of X number of engineers?

"What should we charge for it? Is it going to cover the infrastructure costs?" - Lean startup: experiment on costing and pricing as you go along - Their approach: give away the product for a 30-day trial at a high cost to ourselves! Unbelievably expensive customer acquisition costs.

Reference: http://theleanstartup.com/principles

And now I guess I've truly learned why product managers exist. Someone let this crazy experiment run for six months. You're saying in six months you couldn't spend one month finding the simplest/cheapest ways to test these various hypothesis?

$100k customer acquisition spend is insane.

The whole post is just a lesson in contradicting what an MVP minimal viable product is.

Even when we were building v1, the team knew it wasn’t the ideal architecture. Before v1 even launched, there were plenty of conversations in our Slack about whether we should port Octopus to Linux and run it on Kubernetes, or see if we could run it on Windows within Kubernetes or use Nomad by Hashicorp?

Lol, engineers always want something fun to work on and sometimes it turns out to be a great idea. But they porting software for an MVP? Why not evolve the new product so that it generates more revenue or reduce the costs in some other way instead of talking about porting and rewriting?

If you're at an established company that has money to burn, go ahead, read the whole blog series. If you're trying to create a new startup, whether it's a product or service, avoid this article or read it as a warning. When you've spent as much as a decent engineer costs in one month...something's gone off the rails.

omouse commented on Online courses vs. colleges for software engineering raahul.me/posts/online-co... · Posted by u/cplat

omouse · 6 years ago

The conclusion is sound, the assignments reinforce learning through multiple and repeated usage of the various skills needed to complete them. The lectures and notes and readings are there to give a foundation and to be a reference to some extent. However, it's difficult to say that the only useful part of these courses are the assignments...

>The best way to learn is to do your own experiments. Once understood, that understanding lasts a lifetime. Facts can change, but the governing rules, if deciphered, won’t.

I recommend to all software developers that they join the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery). This gives you access to computer science papers which are the foundations and the governing rules. There's also access to Safari Learning which gives you access to the latest books and video courses:

https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-benefits

It costs a few hundred bucks a year and I've learned more in reading random CS papers and having access to great books and video courses than paying for many courses.

omouse commented on Ask HN: Germany vs. Canada for Tech Jobs? · Posted by u/startuplife01

hacknat · 6 years ago

This is changing. I work with Canadian colleagues at a remote-friendly company, and they make the same salary as the folks in NYC and SV, taking conversion into account (most make >200k CD). I also know that Shopify pays very well. Canadian tech is catching up in compensation terms, and the dominoes are going to start following as demand picks up.

omouse · 6 years ago

>Canadian tech is catching up in compensation terms, and the dominoes are going to start following as demand picks up

Slowly changing. The US companies are going to pick up all the talent here.

omouse commented on Ask HN: Germany vs. Canada for Tech Jobs? · Posted by u/startuplife01

manishsharan · 6 years ago

As an immigrant from India who is happily living in Toronto with no desire of going (back) to US, here are my reasons why I like it here better. My reasons have nothing to do with job opportunities. (I lived in NY for about 8 years ).

As a "visible minority", life in Toronto and Vancouver is less stressful than it is in USA or Edmonton. Also your dating life will be better in Toronto. If you plan to have a family and kids, you don't have to worry about school shootings -- this is now a thing parents worry about in USA. Your parents can visit you and getting a visitor visa is not a pain.

Of course taxes are higher and take home pay is lower than in USA and the rent is too damm high. But somehow your quality of life will be better here. People are more chill here than in USA (my experience is limited to NY/NJ) and I will bet you already have someone you know who has relative living in Canada. So loneliness will not be an issue.

Also, you can start your own business as soon as you get permanent residency. in USA, a green card could take upto 12 years. In Canada , you will get it in 3 years at most. And when you start contracting as an independent , you will make a whole lot more.

I have never been to Berlin but I hope to visit it one day. I have German friends and they are wonderful people.

omouse · 6 years ago

>And when you start contracting as an independent , you will make a whole lot more.

This is true and more true if you're freelancing for US dollars. That sweet sweet conversion rate from USD to CAD works very well. But again this is why Europe is a better choice, Euros to USD or Euros to CAD whenever you want to travel is also a nice conversion rate.

omouse commented on Ask HN: Germany vs. Canada for Tech Jobs? · Posted by u/startuplife01

rapind · 6 years ago

As a Canadian coder who lived in Toronto for 20 years, I recommend Germany hands down.

I love my country, but high taxes, housing bubble, stagnant salaries, horrible choices when it comes to political candidates...

I will say the healthcare is great, and the people are generally awesome (to a lesser degree in Toronto though).

omouse · 6 years ago

>high taxes, housing bubble, stagnant salaries

Salary ranges are still the same since a decade ago even though cost of living has gone up.

My first job as a full-time dev was $65k rent was $1500 or thereabouts, I'm sure there are first-time devs making $65k now. Even though rent is now $2000 at least for the same place I was living at.

After tax income is $49,190 (https://simpletax.ca/calculator) and rent went from $18,000 to $24,000. As a percentage of after-tax income that's going from 36.6% to 48.8%. The rent would have made me poorer if I hadn't changed jobs!

omouse commented on Ask HN: Germany vs. Canada for Tech Jobs? · Posted by u/startuplife01

jakozaur · 6 years ago

Another possibility. Go work somewhere else in Europe at USA company. Get transferred to USA on intercompany visa.

omouse · 6 years ago

Yeah this is the way to go. European internet/cellphone plans are also cheaper than in Canada. So for freelancing or working at a company, it's worthwhile. Plus you can travel more easily around Europe when you're within an EU country.

_csoo commented on Ask HN: Germany vs. Canada for Tech Jobs? · Posted by u/startuplife01

_csoo · 6 years ago

>tech companies in Canada pay peanuts

This is because:

- Canadians are happy to accept whatever wages they are given (the "smart" Canadians move to the US to get higher salaries)

- immigrants to Canada are happy to accept whatever wages they are given

With those two factors, you're not going to make a lot of money in Toronto unless you're working a US company (Google, Amazon, and so on) and even then it'll be less than US counter-parts.

Berlin is a better choice because you can easily travel around Europe and there are more markets. It's also a faster flight back to India if you're visiting family.

>However, once a Canadian citizen, there is a possiblity to get transferred to a Silicon Valley arm of a US company from Canada (using the TN visa) and hence receive a higher compensation.

This is what I'm talking about. The employer will dangle this prize in front of you for as long as they can and will continue to hold off on promotions and keep your salary the same for as long as possible. This is why Canadian salaries remain low, because there will be another sucker that comes along and will also be offered the same "we'll give you a promotion in a few years!" or "we'll transfer you to the US soon! very very soon!" line and they'll accept it.

>How would you compare between the two countries for building a career in tech for an immigrant?

Is immigration required? Because if not, all you need is a good internet connection, a good computer, and knowledge lots and lots of knowledge to distinguish your skills from others and get the higher freelancing rates.