Currently open to contract work. I have 7+ years of experience shipping complex web applications for startups and established companies. I'm proficient in all layers of modern web application development, from CSS and Javascript to database architecture, query optimization and deployment infrastructure.
I was previously Head of Engineering at a YC and venture backed startup, and currently run a development consultancy based in NYC. I studied Physics and Philosophy at Yale and did graduate work on Applied Math at NYU.
Currently open to contract work. I have 7+ years of experience shipping complex web applications for startups and established companies. I'm proficient in all layers of modern web application development, from CSS and Javascript to database architecture, query optimization and deployment infrastructure.
I was previously Head of Engineering at a YC and venture backed startup, and currently run a development consultancy based in NYC. I studied Physics and Philosophy at Yale and did graduate work on Applied Math at NYU.
This is an excellent guide and one I wish I had when I first started my business.
One particularly tricky topic that I'd love to see covered is paying foreign employees. Paying members of a distributed team is straightforward when they perform as contractors. As we've grown and they've continued working with us, the relationship has become one of employer-employee in the eyes of U.S. law. This puts them in a nebulous situation where they are de facto employed by a U.S. company, but are non-U.S. persons deriving their income from a non-U.S. source.
It's likely other Atlas users could find themselves in a similar situation.
Acknowledged on the topic; this is something that I hope we can cover in more detail in the future, but not something that I can opine about semi-officially without it getting vetted by lawyers first.
I second this request for discussion. Over the past 7 years we've accumulated contractors working regularly from 10+ countries. The complexities of sending/receiving payment with contractor status (and other employment ambiguities) are significant.
Cellular data networks in many parts of the world deliver incredibly slow speeds. In those places, the hassle of finding and connecting to a WiFi hotspot is often worth it. I'm currently traveling in the Philippines and malls, restaurants and cafes commonly offer WiFi to attract customers, and it works.
Even when the local network is fast, buying a SIM card may not be an option if your phone is locked and under contract, which is very common for US users.
Fallacious arguments (of which circular arguments are a subset) aren't literally meaningless. "My point is true because my point is true" is perfectly comprehensible, it just fails to establish the fact that "my point is true". You can disagree with it reasonably by pointing out the fallacy, so it has linguistic substance, and it is not meaningless.
It is very different from, say, "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" which is literally meaningless.
A talent acquisition signals something more than a job offer. It shows that you're able to conceive and build a product that people are willing to use. It also means that you've had experience negotiating terms. This is very important when/if you decide to take an entrepreneurial step after being at the acquihirer.
All things equal, future investors are more likely to trust someone who has had an acquisition in the past. You're more likely to get press exposure. All these things are meaningless if you're building something no one wants, but they definitely help if you're on the right track.
It's not contradictory to say that the scientific method produces our best understanding of a subject to date and that its statements are falsifiable. In fact, it is because of the standard of falsifiability that scientific knowledge reflects, in all likelihood, the actual facts much more accurately than say, religious dogma.
Wolfram and you both make the mistake of thinking that there is any value in saying that an established natural fact 'feels like a hack' or 'disagrees with your intuition'.
One of the most important lessons of modern physics is that intuition is a terrible guide when it comes to understanding the physical world at its most fundamental level.
To me, 'hack' and 'unintuitive' carry different meanings. 'Hack' indicates some kind of ad-hoc patch to fix the model. Even if it fits the data, there could be a theoretical irregularity. I suspect that programmers experience this quite often when making a change that keeps the program working. Sure, it is possible that ultimately the hack is indeed how nature works, but its still worth exploring and making precise the nature of the irregularity.
Ha! I remember reading somewhere that Einstein refused to acknowledge Big bang theory and accelerating universe, because eventual heat death of universe was too depressing or something. I'm sure we'd all like a subspace communication channel, a warp drive, etc. but things are the way they are, we can just observe them, for now.
Einstein introduced the cosmological constant lambda Λ in an attempt to produce a steady state model of the universe -- in his view the most elegant solution to the problem of our existence was a universe infinite in age.
Later on when the Big Bang was firmly established it came to be seen as an unnecessary mistake.
In a twist of fate, when we discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe in the 90s -- also known as dark energy -- Einstein's cosmological constant Λ was the perfect place to 'absorb' it.
Can you provide further reading on that? I'd love to find out more about how exactly dark energy "absorbed" Einstein's ideas, and I'm sure I'm not alone here.
Quite likely. I think Sequoia's bet goes hand in hand with the trend as of late of 'democratizing' programming and CS education (Stanford online classes, Udacity, Codeacademy and others). More and better programming means more projects and more demand for payment platforms like Stripe.
It's a project by Ele.me, a Chinese food delivery company. Alibaba and Ant Financial invested $1.25B in it last year [2].
[1]https://ant.design/docs/react/introduce
[2]http://www.wsj.com/articles/alibaba-ant-financial-to-jointly...