It's a matter of time before smart folks in South Asia and Easter Europe move to Latin America to get higher salaries as they get into more US-friendly timezones.

That being said there's a lot of amazing developers in India that are open to working US-work hours for max collaboration

Yeah you don't really need a middle man to "take care of payroll." Most developers in Latam prefer to be contractors on paper, and have a direct relationship with the employer. Most agencies take a 30-50% cut of what employers pay, way better for developers to skip the middleman

Yeah, good point, of course direct freelancing is always on option. We believe that we provide enough info so that everyone can make a rational economic decision.

For example, the way customers pay is : 1) Customers pay for the developer's salary "en mano", which is specified by the developer, not us, 2) Customers pay for a standard benefits package and taxes (Health insurance, education, equipment etc.) and 3) Customers pay our 15% management fee (charged to the customer, not the developer)

That setup, of course, may not work for everyone, but we do have great companies, companies whose names we would recognize, that feel more comfortable using a US business entity that they can sign contracts with to move specialized equipment, like locked down macbooks, installing special software on work equipment, or specialized local network equipment, etc.. These companies have physical security requirements that makes it tough for them to directly hire freelancers. Thus we bring those kinds of opportunities to our teammates that would be otherwise localized only certain US cities.

Dude - it's way better for companies to hire developers directly, no need for a middle man like Astro that's charging 15% (eg. 15% of $80k/yr = $12k/yr in middle man fees)... platforms like letsdeel.com or remote.com charge as little as $50/mo per person to take care of compliance and payroll

Yeah, we get the concern that Astro is just a middle man. Let me give a concrete example for why we think we provide more value than that.

We work with a few companies, whose names people would recognize, that feel more comfortable using a US business entity that they can sign contracts with to move specialized equipment, like locked down macbooks, installing special software on work equipment, or installing specialized local network equipment, etc..

These companies have physical security requirements that makes it tough for them to directly hire freelancers. Through our platform we bring those kinds of opportunities to our teammates that would be otherwise localized only certain US cities.

It's also common for freelancers to come onto our platform for various reason, 1) they didn't get paid by the customer or the customer withheld payment for onerous project tweaks 2) "contractors" were the first to get fired when times got tough, 3) "contractors" didn't get access to certain dev environments thus limiting their growth, etc.

We understand it's not a solution for everyone, that's why we describe our business model clearly, and people can decide if what Astro brings to the table is worth it!

Have you ever had to deal with paying salaries in local currencies in many countries, with all the legal/tax implications in countries like Argentina and Venezuela with ramping inflation and multiple legal currency exchange rates? Maybe if you need one you are better off doing it yourself but if you are going to build a team and want to avoid dealing with all that crap this model sounds interesting at least

Oh, it’s only 15%. No, it’s not say better to avoid paying that. Just marginally better, and that assumes the ability to reliably attract and retain the same talent.

Very interesting, how did you figure out carrots were the issue?

Substitution.

Changed to organic/no carrots, symptoms went away, ate cheap carrots again, boom issues returned.

For a second, I thought this title claimed that stack overflow reduces the need for software engineers by 15%. Now I’m curious what the actual number might be, given the productivity boost that it provides...

To be clear, it sounds like MoPub/Grindr/OKCupid aren't selling people's data. Instead, they reveal personal information (for free?) to hundreds of advertising networks when hosting auctions for ad inventory.

That would mean that after getting approved as an ad-network on MoPub, you can get all 1.5B users' data for free, just by participating in the auction (without even having to win and spending money in auctions).

Does anyone on HN happen to have a sample bid request from MoPub that demonstrates the actual data that's made available to ad networks (DSPs)?

At my previous job we had a dormant bid server hooked up to MoPub for months, receiving hundreds of bid requests a second that we just dropped or replied "no bid" to.

Many publishers and exchanges these days are using the OpenRTB format, which you can find e.g. here for MoPub: https://developers.mopub.com/dsps/integration/openrtb/

The call out to make are the fields device.d(p)idmd5, device.d(p)idsha1 (both now deprecated), and device.ifa, as well as the user/data/segment fields. That's where user ID's (and potentially other data) are passed around. Some exchanges pass a bunch of data, others pass less data but allow you to do a cookie or device-ID exchange/sync so that one side of the transaction can map the other's ID's to theirs, so that the bidder can look up their user profile information. (which they've either bought or accumulated somehow).

Looks like MoPub doesn't pass ID/buyerId any more (it's strikethrough'd), but they do still pass data/segment fields. Not sure what those contain though, perhaps others can chime in.

For what it's worth, getting approved as an ad network is potentially non-trivial. I don't know all the steps involved, but you do need to demonstrate that you can at least meet minimum network response latencies, among other things. Additionally, most exchanges do have some sort of bidrate/winrate monitoring that will eventually throttle you if you're not participating "in good faith" or with reasonable bids/expectations of winning (it's costing them processing power and bandwidth to send you a request even if you don't win). Most also have ToS (for whatever good that does; enforcement may or may not be strong) restricting your ability to collect and store data received from bids (you're typically only allowed to store data from the bid IF you've won the auction). I've heard anecdotes of companies trying to tap into bid flow as "passive observers" this way and ending up getting cut off.

This is a really interesting concept. While this initial prototype is rudimentary, I agree with them in this important shift to building cameras "good enough" for machine-usage.

The Big Co interview process is a binary classifier (hire/no hire). It's actually reasonable to tune it to minimize false-positives, since a bad hire can be disastrous for all parties involved - imagine an employer changing their minds on you during your first few months. Tradeoff is that this will increase false-negatives, saying No to great people, and lead to stories in the link above.

Other thing worth mentioning is that "culture fit" might make companies turn down excellent developers, who don't happen to have the founders' same personality type.

What are his responsibilities as your manager?

Yes, if someone has a home remedy that gets great results, why switch to a substance from someone in a lab coat?

Exactly, that's what I keep saying about my bear repellent rock I keep on my front porch. Haven't seen a single bear yet.

People whose reactions when confronted with something new, unknown, and unexpected are to laugh at it or respond sarcastically, instead of to accept the surprise, approach with curiosity and humility, and question if there is something they're not understanding, are unlikely to ever discover anything new.

Everything that we call science today was once alternately laughable or mysterious.

Because science isn't about belief, its about reasoning. One person having a good response to something doesn't say anything about that something, that person, or that good response.

Only after things have been repeatedly tested, and alternative explanations thoroughly ruled out, can a claim be considered accurate. Everything was once alternately laughable or mysterious, until it was thoroughly proven to be true. There is a reason why we aren't letting your blood because you have a cold anymore.

Yes, but one person repeatedly having a good response to a thing is good evidence that thing is helpful to that person.

While it's good for society to find and recommend things that are beneficial to most people, we shouldn't prevent people from doing the things that they find helpful.

A closer analogy for a remedy to an illness would be: Whenever your yard gets overrun with bears, putting a rock on the porch makes them go away for an unknown reason. Don’t let yourself be limited by science, which is bounded by human intelligence.

Your employer wins because you're spending less time worrying about bears.

My employer wins because I spend less time thinking about whether I would benefit from a sit/stand desk...at the very least. I suspect I get a real productivity advantage from it at times.

And both of you lose because you're purposefully dismissing the value of research and making decisions based on ritual and conformity.

I think you meant your reply to go to the homeopathy comment. Unless you have specific research into the effectiveness of bear-repellent rocks.

One person randomly having a favorable outcome doesn't tell you if a result is great, let alone even exists.

Fair - correlation does not mean causation. That being said, countless experiments show placebo can have empirical results; even the simple belief in a remedy can improve healthcare outcomes.