Yelp Posts Q4 Loss, CFO Resigns - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasdaq.com/article/yelp-posts-q4-loss-cfo-rob-krolik-resigns-20160208-01009 <comment><USER5> Yelp in 2014 Q4 had revenue $110M and a profit of $32.7M [1].

Its revenue for Q4 2015 is $154M and a loss of $22.2M [2].

I see that there is an income tax expense of $20.3M in 2015 and other depreciation costs...but is this change in profit with growth in revenue typical?

[1] [http://www.yelp-ir.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=250809&p=irol- newsArt...](http://www.yelp-ir.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=250809&p=irol- newsArticle&ID=2014264)

[2] [http://www.yelp-ir.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=250809&p=irol- newsArt...](http://www.yelp-ir.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=250809&p=irol- newsArticle&ID=2136455)

<comment><USER6> This is really the only interesting question regarding the CFO's resignation. The CFO isn't responsible for revenue growth, but _would_ be on the hook for something like a bunch of previous quarters' botched taxes.

That said, it could just be that Krolik resigned to do something else. It's not like he was fired and kicked out of the office -- he's given notice, and they're looking for a replacement.

<comment><USER7> No profit = no bonuses likely, leave the ship

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The top three stories on hacker news right now are about top management resignations in three high profile tech companies. Earlier, LinkedIn lost 40% of their value in a day. Deutch Bank lost 11% of their value today.

sorry to be off topic here, but these seem like crazy times.

<comment><USER9> Of course there's a bubble, and of course it has to burst at some point. There are frankly a plethora of poorly conceived and poorly executed startups on the scene right now, with no hope of ever achieving financial sanity. Just as we saw in the late '90s with any crazy idea being given a ton of VC funding, regardless of whether they had a sane business plan, only to implode when things got tight.

Unfortunately, this time around the successes of the previous rounds actually made things worse, because they succeeded too much. VC funding is now, intentionally, a casino. The RoI you can get from growing a winner fast enough to dominate some new market so outclasses what you can earn back from helping a sensible startup grow at a reasonable level that most VCs concentrate their funding to match. It's all about disrupting and breakthroughs and growing fast. This ends up bringing a lot of "unicorns" into existence even if only a few of them are ultimately viable. It also leaves a lot of smaller, more sensible startup ideas in the dust. Silicon Valley is all about stuff that's "cool", not stuff that's challenging or valuable. Sadly, even this round of the bubble bursting is unlikely to change that.

<comment><USER10> How to investors make money on unicorns if there is no liquidity event?

<comment><USER9> It's a lottery, you only need one. One facebook, one google, etc. Those successes bring in RoI not just of double digit percentages (the sort you'd expect from high-risk investments) but in multiples, orders of magnitude even. 10x, 100x returns sometimes. And when you hit those jackpots all of your other investments are now meaningless. The result is that VC becomes a game of searching for jackpots. Everyone wants a little bit of everything, and everyone wants to have their fingers in the things that look most interesting, that seem to have the chance to blow up. VCs also push the companies they invest in to grow fast and hit the point of finding out whether or not they're a "jackpot" idea or not.

At the same time, investors have figured out innumerable ways to get paid out of companies that are obviously not going to make it and won't ever hit a traditional liquidity event. They've gamed the system to an enormous degree but they also pump so much money into it that it's hard to stand up to them.

<comment><USER11> Good summary. This is the reason tech is in bubble while economy is heading towards recession.. This and stupid fed policy

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A great read before people get on the "Yelp removes bad reviews if you pay" bandwagon: [http://screenwerk.com/2016/02/02/reviews-rashomon-plumber- re...](http://screenwerk.com/2016/02/02/reviews-rashomon-plumber-remembers- yelp-threat-that-never-actually-occurred/)

<comment><USER13> I'm 90% sure that the people calling about removing bad review are shady marketing services companies that are offering this.

The same thing happens with Google. Someone says "hi I'm your local Google specialist..." They're not exactly claiming to be from Google, but it's confusing to an offline small business owner that thinks Google is calling them.

I've heard many of these messages for Google. I don't recall any from Yelp, but if you have any friends or family that claim that Yelp is doing so - <USER2> to listen to the recording. I wouldn't be surprised if it's some other company claiming they can help.

I too have heard from a few businesses telling me directly that they don't trust Yelp and they know someone who got threatened. But like the parent comment said, it's hard to find a direct link.

At the end of the day it's shady businesses claiming to be a Yelp or Google specialist that are muddying the waters from what I can tell.

<comment><USER14> Then yelp should sue these yelp specialist for trademark infringement.

<comment><USER13> They definitely should - wouldn't be surprised if they are already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, there are soo many resignations happening this week! I am stunned. Anyone have articles on how this happened and what it means?

<comment><USER16> Do they all know that a crash is coming?

<comment><USER17> It's almost as if everyone wants to see a crash.

It's funny how crashes are almost psychological play at times. I hate "yo" as much as the next guy, but the pain of seeing a significant depreciation in wages for anyone far out weighs the joy I'd see from having my "gut feelings" about a bubble being proved right.

<comment><USER18> I'll say it: I want a correction. I don't believe that the VC-funded app economy is delivering. I dislike that SF and SV have a de facto monopoly on the US tech sector, and to participate here I have to spend my entire paycheck to rent the shittiest apartment I've ever lived in. I would like for housing prices to go down, or I'd like a nudge to walk away from this place.

<comment><USER19> You know, you _are_ free to move to any of a list of cities with booming (or at least sufficiently breathing) tech industries and more realistic costs of living, in no particular order:

      - <USER3>
      - San Diego
      - Washington, DC
      - New York
      - <USER4>
      - Pretty much any state capital will have agencies with plenty of contract development work

<comment><USER20> New York, Washington DC and San Diego are all still expensive.

Raleigh/Durham and Seattle are better options.

<comment><USER19> My point stands. Any city is better than SF in terms of cost of living, including the three you mentioned (I never said they weren't expensive, just less expensive).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yelp is kind of stuck like Twitter. Product is not shaping up well. I am not sure how they plan to grow without improving their product. Their mobile app still kinda sucks

<comment><USER22> Their mobile app is one of the most poorly designed and poorly executed major tech products out there. For a company that hires probably a thousand engineers, there has been very little improvements on the web and mobile properties in over 4 years. For a product that's innately social, local and realtime, it has missed most of the enabled affordances of years past.

I'm surprised that there isn't much competition. I was traveling recently, and found Zomato's app to be much superior.

<comment><USER23> I really can't believe how bad it is (on iOS at least).

Two rather signifiant UX issues on my end are:

1\. bad image resolution (do they resize pictures to be smaller?); this is also worse from yelp.com 2\. Why is the regular swipe from edge of screen to go to the previous screen overridden to move from review to review? (same issue with GMail app though too)

<comment><USER24> > Why is the regular swipe from edge of screen to go to the previous screen > overridden to move from review to review? (same issue with GMail app though > too)

I completely share your frustration here. I actually met a Yelp iOS engineer once and asked them about this. They said the idea is that it's supposed to feel like the way you navigate photos in albums on iOS; their expectation (whoever designs Yelp's iOS UX) is that users want to read many reviews and don't skim the review previews first to find the ones they like.

I showed them how I prefer to browse reviews: skim the previews, find a promising looking one [Yelp review signal/noise is _terrible_ ], "drill into" it, back out, continue until I've read enough reviews to make a judgment. They said they understood my POV, but stood by the assertion that most users don't use the app this way. Maybe they have metrics to justify that.

<comment><USER25> Or maybe most users don't use the app that way because of their interface? It makes using the app in a preferred (or preferable) way too cumbersome?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why is Yelp untouchable by the FTC or DoJ? The company gets up to some really shady stuff but hasn't faced much punishment if any.

<comment><USER27> What is the shady stuff?

<comment><USER28> [http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the- business-...](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-business-of- extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635)

""" The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.

"Hi, this is Mike from Yelp," the voice would say. "You've had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You've had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those."

"""

<comment><USER12> I call bullshit: [http://screenwerk.com/2016/02/02/reviews-rashomon-plumber- re...](http://screenwerk.com/2016/02/02/reviews-rashomon-plumber-remembers- yelp-threat-that-never-actually-occurred/)

<comment><USER28> It's unclear who's fibbing. My guess in the story I posted is that the sales guy said that stuff but was not actually in a position to pull the bad reviews. Here's a Yelp sales rep talking about the job [https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-work-at-Yelp-as-an- ac...](https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-work-at-Yelp-as-an-account- executive)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Serious question.

Yelp's revenue model is a bad conflict of interest. They rank the destinations AND the destinations have to buy advertising too.

What revenue model could they do that would work and not be shady? I can't think of one. Charge users?

<comment><USER30> It's not that strange. Google does the same more or less.

Search for "insurance" on Google. Google ranks a bunch of insurance companies: Geico, Statefarm, etc. They also show ratings for some specific agents. Google also sells ads if you want to drive more traffic and not just be in the organic listings.

You can find nuanced differences between Yelp and Google, but the problem is not conflict of interest. The problem is that businesses are not seeing enough value in the ad product that Yelp offers. Many advertisers dislike Google, yet they still advertise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've replaced Yelp with Foursquare a while ago for finding things around me and trusting reviews. I've found that the character limit and smaller user base of Foursquare makes reading reviews a much more pleasant experience. I also like how there is no star system on Foursquare.

</comment><comment><USER32> Honest question. How do you know you're in the middle of a bubble bursting?

<comment><USER33> When it's become so obvious that everyone is asking the question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> These seems worring indeed, are some bubble poping now? Maybe it's just overreacting, but hopefully the trend won't continue.

<comment><USER35> It's likely just random, with the human bias to read patterns into randomness hot on its trail as always.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What do you predict will happen to Yelp this year?

<comment><USER37> Someone will acquire them. The brand and employees are worth a billion dollars, in my opinion. Local is a very difficult market to crack.

<comment><USER38> Data as well. I can think of at least three companies worth $100B+ (and several worth $1B+) that would _love_ to have comprehensive reviews of nearly every local business in the U.S.

<comment><USER39> I work for a large company that has Yelp flavored data as part of their services and can confirm that they do pay Yelp money for their data. It's worth quite a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Yelp, Zenefits and Paypal. What is going on?

<comment><USER41> Yelp: Very hard to monetize. Because they chose a model where the businesses who pay them are also the businesses being reviewed, they've given themselves a conflict of interest. They've chosen to sell their integrity, which makes their star ratings less reliable/valuable, which makes users trust them less, which makes businesses want to advertise less. It's a vicious cycle.

Zenefits: Broke the law. Also an insanely ambitious, brilliant, risky business model.

PayPal: Hated by most people/customers. Can't wait until they go out of business completely.

<comment><USER42> > Because they chose a model where the businesses who pay them are also the > businesses being reviewed

Crazy when you think about it.

> PayPal: Hated by most people/customers.

I didn't understand this until recently when I tried to "instant" transfer a few hundred bucks to a friend and was caught up in a 3 day "review" process where I was interrogated about the "reason" for the transfer. Never again!

<comment><USER43> >> Because they chose a model where the businesses who pay them are also the businesses being reviewed

> Crazy when you think about it.

Who do those guys think they are, Moody's!!!?

<comment> finance-geek @Gibbon1 this is a pretty insightful comment. Luckily for Moody's, they made themselves part of an intricate industrial structure where their ratings drive large parts of the industry (e.g., investment guidelines, lending, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> He was probably told he has to give the CEO a 5 star rating or he would be fired.

edit: i have no idea if they have an internal person-rating system based on yelp, but i hope so

As far as the recent resignations, it's probably New Years resolutions when people realize they value time over money.

</comment><comment><USER45> It aint his fault, so he must have another opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER46> Downvoters should be required to cite their reasoning. This would presumaby hinder illogical, kneejerk, emotional downvotes.

We are here to learn & understand (perhaps painfully), not anonymously persecute.

Edit: I did not consciously realize the parent was "logicallee". ;)

<comment><USER47> Downvoting is hardly persecution. It just means someone doesn't like your comment. They don't owe you an explanation and the site's author has explicitly stated one is not required. Think of what would happen if every downvote of a low-quality comment had to come with a polite note justifying the action. Noise explosion.

<comment><USER48> On the other hand, downvoting isn't really supposed to reflect dislike or disagreement, but rather a comment that is rude, lacks substance or, is otherwise against the guidelines. Unfortunately this rule seems to be pretty universally ignored on HN these days.

I'll generally re-upvote any reasonable post that I see has been downvoted simply due to expressing a contentious opinion, even if I also happen to disagree.

<comment><USER47> It's very much also supposed to reflect those.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> The second dotcom bubble is finally abouy to burst?

Github, Twitter, LinkedIn, PayPal issue and bunch of small ones.

</comment><comment><USER50> THERE MUST BE MORE TO THIS STORY. -recent paranoid end is nigh HN user.

<comment><USER51> Well, come on. A few days ago 3 news stories about companies losing stock value. Now, 3 stories in a row about company executives resigning. What's going on in the Valley? :O.

<comment><USER38> When a story gets hot on HN it tends to lead to other stories like it being upvoted. You should've seen it when the whole front page was about Erlang.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia)

<comment><USER52> In case anyone's wondering, there was a reason for the Erlangomania: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yocto: Tools for building a custom embedded Linux distribution - <AUTHOR> https://www.yoctoproject.org/ <comment><USER2> [https://www.yoctoproject.org](https://www.yoctoproject.org)

"The Yocto Project (YP) is an open source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems regardless of the hardware architecture."

<comment><USER3> Press releases should really have a description of the project or at least a link

<comment><USER4> Most people in the industry know about the two big players - yocto and buildroot. It's for when you need a custom minimal Linux distro for your gadget (IoT, router, modem, SoC, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I personally haven't been impressed with yocto: It's about as intuitive as gentoo and reliable as buildroot.

Maybe I was using it wrong though. I think it's a good idea.

<comment><USER6> >I personally haven't been impressed with yocto

That's a very mild way to express my feeling about it.

Maybe I'm asking too much, but Yocto/openembedded is the worst piece of software I've ever dealt with.

The build system is a huge pile of opaque and fragile scripts. It's so fragile, that if you don't put a space before a list of options, it would be concatenated with other options without a space, leading to incorrect options.

Because there are no lists, lists are just strings of space-separated words. Who needs proper data types?

There are no modularity either, everything is configured through strange variables with names like CONFIG_image_graphics_mesa_package=... God knows how this naming works.

Of course nothing is documented, and the discoverability is extremely low: everything is done through hundreds of opaque shell scripts, python scripts, half-baked python scripts for their build system.

The overall design of the build system is abysmally bad and fragile, and it's harder to get a notion how the things work than to just build everything with your own scripts.

Oh, and when something is wrong, build system just returns python stacktrace.

Is it that hard to use proper abstractions, data types, docstrings, introspection mechanisms so that everything would become transparent, obvious and sane?

<comment><USER7> > Of course nothing is documented, and

This is plain wrong. There is a whole bunch of manuals [https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/](https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/)

And there are several books [https://www.yoctoproject.org/learn/books/](https://www.yoctoproject.org/learn/books/)

Without understanding the philosophy behind the whole system and the recipe language just trying to "discover" something seems indeed mission impossible to me. Yes, the learning curve is steep. The recipe language is not always the least surprise if you don't understand it. On the other side, there is a lot of magic support in the system. If you know what you are doing writing recipes for new packages does not require much code.

<comment><USER6> > There is a whole bunch of manuals

Ah, yeah, the manual. I forgot another abysmally bad part of Yocto: the manual.

Yocto documentation is the single worst documentation I've ever dealt with. It's a huge giant wall of text which tells you... nothing concrete whatsoever.

Wanna know how to change an image fs or image format? Go figure with the manual, just look at these entries:

[https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/3.0/ref-manual/ref- manual....](https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/3.0/ref-manual/ref- manual.html#ref-images)

[https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/3.0/ref-manual/ref- manual....](https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/3.0/ref-manual/ref- manual.html#var-IMAGE_FSTYPES)

So concise, but even more useless. Which filesystems could I use? How to know that? Ah, don't bother.

The whole manual is a huge wall of text telling you what classes, tasks, recipes and dozens of other overengineered concepts are, but nothing about how to use them beyond the basic examples. Wanna build an fs for the device with a local storage and external ssd, good luck to figure out how: decoupling where machine starts and image ends, and which part should you modify.

> Without understanding the philosophy behind the whole system and the recipe > language just trying to "discover" something seems indeed mission impossible > to me.

Yeah, it's hard to introspect something which have dozens of concepts, yet no other form of introspection but file reading.

And I'm fine with file reading, but with yocto half of important stuff is concealed within the build system, leaving just strange config variables and gluing scripts on the surface, making it incomprehensible for a sane person.

<comment><USER7> > Which filesystems could I use? How to know that?

A simple

      git grep IMAGE_FSTYPES

brings you up a long list. File meta/classes/image_types.bbclass seems particular promising. And there it is

[https://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/tree/meta/cl...](https://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/tree/meta/classes/image_types.bbclass?h=zeus#n260)

I'm very far from claiming that Yocto is easy to understand. But you get much more than you pay for. What alternatives do you suggest with a similar functionality?

Do you think the Linux kernel documentation is better? The systemd source code easy to grasp? Still, they are widely used. I tend to say the price you pay for those is that you need to employ an expert and the expert needs to spend quite some time on it.

If you buy a product you are entitled to request something from your vendor. Good luck if you are a small company. I even tried when working for a 50,000 people corporation in the past and we got very little after many years of paying huge fees.

In open source it's take it or leave it. Preferably take it and contribute to make it better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish they'd generate toolchains I didn't have to install in order for them to work, like Buildroot already does. With Buildroot I can just tar/gz the toolchain and libs and integrate them into a build system. This lets me support cross-build in a relatively pain-free way. Buildroot toolchains do not care where they are located on the filesystem, so e.g. Bazel can download and unpack them without any issues and they work fine. In contrast, Yocto generates toolchains that have to be _installed_ and in which the installer has to _rewrite the locations of dynamic libs_ during installation. This makes Yocto toolchains effectively hostile to build automation.

<comment><USER9> If you find yourself wrestling with this in the future, you might try experimenting with Yocto's SDK generation capabilities. Most image recipes have a 'populate_sdk' task that will generate a self-extracting shell script that includes a full cross-compilation toolchain and a set of libraries for the target. You can also add custom components to the SDK very easily.

Our CI system generates the SDK along with every build of our Yocto image. Another CI job grabs the SDK and uses it for some out-of-tree compilation work. It's very straightforward to automate that way.

<comment><USER8> Yes, and that shell script can't be simply unpacked. It has to run, and when it does, it rewrites paths to libs that the toolchain needs to pull in so that they point to the correct installed locations. In contrast, Buildroot toolchains require that only relative paths match, and do not require that absolute paths are embedded into the binaries and *.so's.

<comment><USER9> You're right, of course - I wouldn't say that Yocto's SDK generator is perfect. But it does work fine, and you can install the SDK anywhere you want.

From a CI system's point of view, what's the logical difference between [tar xf toolchain.tar.gz] and [./install_sdk.sh -yd .]?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks to the Yocto team for a great release. I'm excited to start playing with the new hash-equivalency support, which is the biggest addition in this release IMO.

Keep up the good work! Yocto is an amazing project, and I'm a heavy-user in my day job.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was really hoping for big usability/learning curve improvements with 3.0. I've tried using it and other engineers I know have tried. It just ends up being a complete cluster.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yocto steep learning curve is a fact.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD4M5FoHz- TxMfBFrDKfI...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD4M5FoHz- TxMfBFrDKfIS_GLY25Qsfyj) is an attempt to help.

Disclaimer: I have not watched them yet.

</comment><comment> Const-me When I needed an embedded Linux, I wrote a 3-pages long shell script to customize vendor-supplied Debian image. Most of these 3 pages are sudo apt-get purge commands (I don't need much except kernel).

Pretty sure I would have spent at least 10x more time building my own image from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER11> Got excited then, because I thought it was a follow up to the Yocto 808 [1]

[1] [http://www.e-licktronic.com/en/content/25-yocto- tr808-clone-...](http://www.e-licktronic.com/en/content/25-yocto-tr808-clone- tr-808)

</comment><comment><USER12> I sometimes use Yocto at work to rebuild certain recipes in an embedded Linux distribution, but I'm really confused about what "Yocto" and what "Poky" mean. If anyone knows and has time to dispel my confusion, that would be awesome. (I'm trying to answer a bunch of my own questions in here -- please let me know if I got anything wrong.)

"BitBake" is easy -- that's the command you run to rebuild "BitBake recipes" (a recipe is something like a Makefile, except that it's more "meta" \-- it defines what to run in order to build software packages, i.e. how to find and build a source directory that may have Makefiles/CMakeLists/whathaveyou in it -- so I think it's a bit like e.g. an RPM spec file). So you run stuff like 'bitbake -c clean packagename' or 'bitbake -C compile packagename'. (BTW, I often want to do things in a single command -- is that possible? Reloading the whole cache every time gets old after a while.)

Fine okay, "Yocto" is presumably the name of the entire project. But what's Poky?

> Poky is a reference distribution of the Yocto Project®. It contains the > OpenEmbedded Build System (BitBake and OpenEmbedded Core) as well as a set > of metadata to get you started building your own distro.

Hrm, what's OpenEmbedded Core?

> OpenEmbedded-Core is a layer containing the core metadata for current > versions of OpenEmbedded. It is distro-less (can build a functional image > with DISTRO = "nodistro") and contains only emulated machine support.

Hrm, okay. (BTW, for the people who don't know -- "metadata" most likely refers to a collection of "BitBake" recipes (i.e. a directory containing loosely related BitBake recipes), so the "core metadata" would likely be the recipe for at least the Linux kernel.) (BTW2, in BitBake, you customize recipes using "layers". The first layer contains recipes that build things in a generic way, and then you add other "layers" that contain "bbapend" files that override variables or commands in the lower-layer recipes to build something the way you need it.)

Okay, so is the "OpenEmbedded Build System" still part of the Yocto project? From Wikipedia: "BitBake is co-maintained by the Yocto Project and the OpenEmbedded project." Okay, that explains that a bit. But why are they separate in the first place?

Why does "Poky" have such a weird name, and what kind of recipes does it bring to the table? Looking at the repository ([http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/tree/meta](http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/tree/meta)), that's quite a lot of useful packages.

One other question that just popped up in my mind: are there any Desktop Linux distros that use this as their build system?

<comment><USER13> > Why does "Poky" have such a weird name

"Poky" in English means "small". The idea being that the distro is engineered to build small OS images for small embedded devices.

<comment><USER14> Though that definition is correct (had to look it up) the more common one seems to be "annoyingly slow". at least that's the only one I actually knew or ever heard.

<comment><USER15> It might be a slightly older phrasing, but to match your anecdote: I've never heard of poky meaning slow.

More:

> It's located in a pokey little village in the middle of damn near nowhere.

<comment><USER16> You've never heard of a slow-poke? Similar usage, you can be pokey or you can be a slow-poke, both mean slow. The "small" definition is new to me. Seems like difference between British/American English.

<comment><USER15> > You've never heard of a slow-poke?

Sure, but that doesn't mean "slow slow". The poke part of that that means something similar to "yoke".

A slowpoke is something that's slow and dragging you down with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> src: [https://linuxfr.org/news/yocto-zeus](https://linuxfr.org/news/yocto- zeus)</comment>


Show HN: RemoteMore – We connect developers with full-time remote jobs - <AUTHOR> https://remotemore.com/ <comment><USER3> "Pass our screening" \-- I both like this, and do not like it. While I agree that not everyone is made for remote work, most of the skills to communicate and work effectively when remote can be taught. So what are you screening for? The underlying personality traits that make or break working remotely? Or the learn-able skills?

Also, while not as important, it is worth noting -- for people like myself who have been working remotely for almost a decade, having to go through a screening is a turn-off.

<comment><USER4> May I ask, how do you find working remotely? I imagine the freedom aspect is nice, and the fact that you don't have to spend x mount of hours every week commuting, but were there other deciding factors in your case?

Would you recommend a remote job over a job "on-site"?

<comment><USER5> Not OP, but I've been happily working 100% remotely for almost 4 years, so I'll share my two cents. Personally, I get a lot more work done from home than I ever did at an office. Offices have lots of distractions, and it's way too easy to waste time chatting up the person sitting next to you. (That might just be me, though; I'm pretty chatty.) Cutting out the commute is a big one as well, not just for the time saved but also money (gas and car depreciation) and mental energy (I found driving 45 minutes each way pretty draining). Plus, I have the flexibility to take a break and walk the dog, or run a quick errand, or play video games—things that wouldn't be feasible in an office.

That said, there are distractions at home, too, and you have to have a lot of discipline. I got almost nothing done in my first couple months of remote work, and it took me close to a year to get into the flow and develop a structure that actually felt productive. (And then I had the opposite problem of working too much because it's harder to draw a line between work and play.) I do miss the coworker comradery sometimes, but my wife and I also have a pretty big group of close friends that live nearby, so I get to socialize with people outside of work fairly often.

Working remotely is definitely not for everyone, but you would have to pay me a LOT of money to convince me to commute to an office every day.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP agrees :D I've been working 4 years remotely and I wouldn't go switch to on site. We are building our company as a fully remote company.

<comment><USER6> I worked for 7+ years remotely and turned down Google/Facebook/Uber/Amazon/Netflix because they wanted me to move. I'd rather spend two months on Hawaii than in some "cool open-plan office", distracted to death, getting sick around influenza periods and wasting time commuting in the process.

<comment> o-__-o Ha if you think you won't get the flu because you work remotely.. by not being in an office, herd protection actually goes down. I've had more illness working remotely than working in the office over my 20+ years.

That said, you're away from coworkers with kids. That's the sickness that doesn't help immunity. But once you have a kid of your own, all that worry goes out the window. Don't mean to be a party pooper, but its all reality out here

*also how does this remotemore site compare to triplebyte?

<comment><USER6> It's my observation that when I worked remotely and traveled around the world at the same time, I had the best health state in my life; that was incomparable to e.g. a previous employment with open-plan office with colleagues taking smoking breaks all the time, making the indoor air nasty, and being guaranteed to catch some long-lasting small to medium sickness every year (e.g. half of the office coughing a bit for 1-2 months). Now visiting Google/Facebook and seeing desks crammed next to each other... I meet people outside, throw own parties, visit gyms/saunas, so I am exposed to latest "flu trends", yet remote work made my illnesses infrequent (well, they do happen if I can't stop and don't cut working time to 8 hours/day...). Also, the stress is way lower, I don't need to look at a boss' grumpy face that overcompensates for their lack of capabilities by ramping up their controlling/dominance aspects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I worked remotely for years, then went back to an office environment, now am fully remote again.

If it's up to me, I'm going to be a remove senior dev for the rest of my life. No more offices.

There is absolutely no need. I work on very complex projects and am disciplined, but outside of that there is nothing special required. I discuss issues via Slack, we have occasional team video/voice chats when discussing issues that involve the whole team, and then carefully track issues in JIRA.

Can I play video games all day? Yes, and if the work doesn't get done I'll be fired. It's the same as being in an office. You get assigned work, you either do it or you don't do it, and if it's good and ready when it's due you either do more work or you're fired.

Zero issues with any of it ... and I'm not going back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally. Remote work makes work to be about the work you do, not some other thing such as hours spent in the chair, or office politics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Commission per hire: 15% of annual salary"

So basically getting the same fee as a normal recruiter, without them doing any of the work.

Lower fees will attract more companies. For the standard recruiter fee, I rather just use a firm.

<comment><USER9> They are claiming to pre-screen candidates which in case of remote job I think is not a bad idea.

<comment><USER10> How do you pre-screen people to get if they will be a good fit for remote?

<comment><USER11> IMO you'd look for time management and communication skills as well as a strong sense of self-assessment and independent decision making.

<comment><USER12> Note that the comment you're replying to asked _How_ , not _what_ do you screen for. How do you screen for the skills you've outlined?

<comment><USER11> Thanks for pointing it out, and ya its really hard to do. I think you identify certain signals and do the best you can in your interview process to flesh them out, for example:

1) History of working remotely successfully in the past

2) Strong verbal or written communication skills, i.e. ability to explain complex ideas concisely or to break down large ideas into consumable smaller ones.

3) Higher education background, indicating the ability to push through benign task and consistently reach performance goals (c's get degrees)

4) Aligned long term-goals for example, engineer foo wants to hit a certain salary level by gaining an expertise in $tech_x, and at the same time your company has domain experience in $tech_x that could facilitate for your employer

5) Ability to break down past projects in the context of "how would you do it differently with a do-over" or "what are some examples where you mismanaged technical debt"

None of these ideas are perfect, and execution in the interview is perhaps the hardest part. I myself am a college drop out which makes it ironic that I would suggest people with degrees make for better remote workers, but when it becomes a search for signals a degree from certain tiers of universities is too hard to pass up as a hiring manager who just wants to do a good job.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here - ^ that's one very good a answer!

Yes, pretty much like that. I wrote one long reply in this thread on what we're looking for and it is about the same as this post above.

I would qdd to it that experience with working remotely successfully is a great predictor, but it leaves out the candidates that have not worked out remotely so far. In that case, the focus becomes on the other indicators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" We will review your profile and ask you to submit a short video to ensure that you have good fit with working remotely."_

Why is a video needed? Seems counter-intuitive; someone's age, appearance, and presentability are probably less important in full time remote work (should never be a factor in any job, but the reality of course is that there is a likability factor for on-site workers).

The only thing I can think of is if some of the employers need to video conference a lot, and want people who don't look like hideous monsters, or some such thing. What am I missing here?

<comment><USER14> Probably avoiding people presenting themselves as a skilled Dev but actually being a dozen folks in sweatshop.

<comment><USER15> Form what I read on HN, that doesn't help. You can hire someone to do the interview for you, and then get the remote job.

Similarly, some people will interview well, know all the right answers, and then sell or outsource the job to someone who will do it for less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the relationship with the employers? I find the main issue with job website that are posted here is that there is usually zero relationship.

Meaning it's mostly information copied from the career page of companies. That's why most these job boards disappear after a couple years.

I suggest if you gather enough interest here today, use it to get actual connections with employers, even if it's a handful.

</comment><comment><USER12> The "Developers hired through our service" section is super fishy. I googled the 2 devs presented and found their Linkedin. The guy hired "in Portugal by a Danish company" doesn't list any Denmark based company in his profile. The one hired "in Spain by a German company" seems to live in Eastern Europe and doesn't list any German company in his employment history.

Also, including Basecamp, Gitlab, Zapier, Trello, etc logos without having a formal relationship with them probably opens the door for legal actions.

<comment><AUTHOR> The guys have not updated their LinkedIn profiles - but feel free to reach out to them to ask them! The company that hired Klaus is now hiring 2 more remote developers through our service.

<comment><USER17> Probably a good idea to limit the hiring examples to people who have updated their LinkedIn. :) Make the additional exposure a fringe benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sorry, what makes this different than all the other remote job boards that have been posted at HN over the past years?

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=remote+job+board](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=remote+job+board)

<comment><AUTHOR> That it is not a job board :-)

You create your profile once, and the companies contact you with remote work job offers.

<comment><USER19> How many companies are actually on the platform?

I'm currently in the market for a remote job, but have a hard time seeing how this would deliver me value over actively applying to remote job board positions.

\----

Quick EDIT: I just noticed Basecamp as the first company in your showcase. Basecamp has been on a hiring freeze for 18 months now with a public blog post about it.

Are you actually working with those showcase companies or simply mention them because they're well known remote-first/remote-friendly companies.

Post: [https://m.signalvnoise.com/things-are-going-so-well-were- doi...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/things-are-going-so-well-were-doing-a- hiring-freeze/)

<comment><USER3> "We aim to bring all of those companies on our marketplace"

Sounds like they are not working with them at all, but want to. If I were them, I'd be worried about those companies coming down on them for mis-use of their logos.

<comment><USER19> Ah, I skimmed over that.

Looks like this site is going to be a hard pass for me. Questionable ethics touting companies like that.

<comment><USER20> It's a rough in, I guess.

Site has spelling errors, you sign in with linkedin.. but, you still have to enter all your details (job experience, skills, etc).

There's no way to change your email address, or delete your account. When you click on 'contact', you have to use email.. they don't have a build in messaging app.

I'm guessing it's very much a work in progress. Which is fine, but ... not for me yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't want to _have_ to add a photo to my profile. Doge.jpg! I choose you!

Once a value in the "city" line of salary selection is selected, I can't unselect it. If all I want is remote work, and I accidentally click that line there is no way (that I found) to undo it. Except for starting over. Which I did.

I'm interested in what you do for a "profile review".

</comment><comment><USER9> That page has a fantastic TED talk about why work does not happen in office [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XD2kNopsUs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XD2kNopsUs)

BTW all the best OP

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much, @Rohan1024

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Toptal has definitely cut out a brand name for themselves. But most good companies has their in house recruitment team. I wonder how RemoteMore will value add to them. This is one trend I really want to accelerate

<comment><USER23> If you have any ideas, i m all ears (making a similar community)

<comment><AUTHOR> @Buboard - great to hear! Let's talk some more about this. My email is firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One thing often not discussed with remote work is the legal aspects of it. It's easy to say you want to work for a company on the other side of the world.

What if there's a disagreement in the team and the employee goes rogue and puts the code out in public? You can't do much unless there's a legal entity in the country of employment.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are bringing up a very good point. We will build the solution to this - <USER2> will incorporate in different countries, and offer to take care of the legal part as a service. Then it is real employment and not freelancing like on other platforms.

It makes a lot of sense to allow people to work together regardless of where they are based. So someone needs to build the solution to make it easier/better.

Btw, Remote work doesn't have to be across countries.

<comment><USER25> Why is this being downvoted?

<comment><USER26> Probably because it's a bit ridiculous for some random guy that set up a website to suddenly declare that he's going to solve this complex international legal issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Would be good with an example video so you know what kind of video you should do with yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks for the feedback! We will implement it :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's never any remote FPGA or circuit design work posted.

I know it's niche, but a ton of embedded stuff requires or utilizes them, and it's a relatively difficult skill to hire for. So you'd think it would be a great fit for remote work.

<comment><USER19> Doesn't that have a pretty big hardware dependency? That seems like the biggest challenge of working remotely.

<comment><USER28> Last time I consulted for a startup, they sent me something like 15k worth of hardware, and I just expensed stuff like cables.

You can get a big bad FPGA development board for a few grand, but finding people who are any good at all with FPGAs is really difficult.

<comment><USER29> Seems like you know something others don't. Maybe you should build this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why your contact address is in Berlin but phone number in Denmark?

Also: please fix "How does it works?" to "How does it work?" on the front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> We used to live in Denmark with my co-founder, we got investment in Germany and we relocated. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/bborisov/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bborisov/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is there a way to see potential job descriptions before signing up?

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't see the job descriptions - the companies see your profile and get in touch. This approach is better for the developers, you don't need to make lots of applications, just 1 profile.

<comment><USER31> Not necessarily better for the developers. If you don't have any recruiters or jobs I'm interested in, its a lot of work to create a profile and no benefit. In fact, it could just create a bunch spam for shady, underpaying gigs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It sounds like a reasonable idea for another job shop who gets a cut, perhaps dealing with some of the contractor's paperwork over time. The more the merrier. Good luck.

What I would like to see are contractor middlemen who are more technically specialized. An embedded systems one would be a great thing.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been working remotely for past few years and have been a team lead before and now am a consulting senior dev. But I would like to move into a leadership role such as management or even directorial. Are those available remotely?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you should target the more mature remote companies. There are even fully remote companies (Zapier, GitLab and so on), so it's definitely possible.

The companies that are very early on their remote capabilities typically avoid hiring remote juniors, and remote higher-level management positions. The reason is that those levels require communication with more stakeholders which means more mature remote practices. Project management type of positions are typically not too difficult to have remote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I work remote for 4 years now. One year as employee and three as freelancer.

I think the last one fits me perfectly, because of the time/space freedom both freelancing and remote work bring.

I sleep till noon. Only work a few months a year and have plenty of time for my relationships.

</comment><comment><USER35> I hope you are screening based on actual skills and not just what they look and sound like.

</comment><comment><USER36> I tried making a profile and noticed a few points of friction:

1) LinkedIn syncing does not seem to work, had to enter everything manually.

2) required entry of end date of your current employment in the experience section

3) Spelling and grammar errors (e.g. "Freelancng")

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the feedback!

1) LinkedIn, unfortunately, doesn't allow the use of their API for hiring products. So we cannot pre-fill the profile using their API. We're thinking about two possible solutions: \- To add a checkbox for permission to import data from LinkedIn manually. \- To write something that gets the data automatically from LinkedIn.

The problem with the automatic solution is - what does LinkedIn think about that? Are we allowed to do it?

If anyone has feedback, or experience with this topic, it will help us very much!

2) We'll fix this in about 2 sprints

3) We'll fix this in the next 2-3 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> 15% + my info? With so many remote job boards out there I don't see a benefit.

</comment><comment><USER38> remotemore is a "palindrome" if we group the letters 2-by-2: re-mo-te-mo-re (I guess this is on purpose)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we like this name for multiple reasons. It is a palindrome. Also, it repeats the same sounds in two words, which typically make the words sound better. It's easy to pronounce, and spell, etc.

But most of all, it shows what we stand for: More Remote work :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Wouldn't a flat fee work better than a percentage given the obvious workaround of giving the newly hired developer a sudden, gigantic raise?

</comment><comment><USER40> Wait, I can only read the terms and conditions and privacy policy AFTER I login (thereby agreeing with them)?!?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can read them before logging in - just click on their link? Do let me know if it still doesn't work and we'll fix it asap!

EDIT: I see the problem now, on the main page the links work, on the app page they don't work properly. To be fixed asap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> "Headquartered in Berlin" you probably should have the legally required information about your company and a privacy policy. Not worth the potential trouble.

</comment><comment><USER42> What do you screen in a candidate?

</comment><comment><USER43> The video presentation is a kill.

Are there any other remote jobs listing companies available?

</comment><comment><USER44> Typos on various pages : "How does it works?"

fix to > "How does it work?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there anything else that you've noticed? Do let me know and I'll get it fixed. :X

<comment><AUTHOR> That one is now fixed, the other 2 that were mentioned yesterday will also be fixed soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Onboarding is broken, can't get through.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry to hear! Could you email me more details to email@example.com so we can fix it faster?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> What program is required for this?</comment>


Google Is Now Listing SourceForge as a Malicious Site - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/FAv6VdV.png <comment><USER2> I'm guessing OP took this from reddit thread. If you read that thread you'll see that it's not sourceforge but this one project. So this title is misleading.

Edit: Thread: [http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3a9h9x/soureforg...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3a9h9x/soureforge_now_listed_as_malicious_when_clicked/)

Response from one user that sourceforge is actually whitelisted by google: [http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3a9h9x/soureforg...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3a9h9x/soureforge_now_listed_as_malicious_when_clicked/csamu9j)

[http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnost...](http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=sourceforge.net/) [http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnost...](http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=downloads.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER3> UBlock is actually blocking all of SF

<comment><USER4> Which filter is blocking SF for you? UBlock is not blocking SF for me.

<comment><USER3> Looks like it's maybe uBlock Origin that is blocking (versus just uBlock)

<comment><USER5> This. It's just in Origin. Started a few days ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've seen a few differing reports on what SourceForge is doing. From what I gather so far:

1) Originally (a couple years back or so), they started (as an opt in from the project owners) bundling adware with the Windows versions of installers on selected projects.

2) Recently, SourceForge editors have taken over abandoned projects (i.e., projects that no longer use SourceForge as their primary distribution page, and haven't updated the project pages), and have replaced the installers for some of them with their adware-bundled installers.

3) A firestorm erupted over this, SF stated that they would back away from the adware (on taken-over pages -- it would still be present on projects with an agreement from the project owners).

4) They are still taking over abandoned projects and updating them.

Now my question -- for point (4), are they just updating the project download pages with the current versions, or are they still bundling their adware with the projects? Everything I've seen so far (after their "apology" post), it appears that they haven't done any new adware bundling, just taking over the projects. Is this the case? And if so, is the concern that they will slip in the adware in the future?

</comment><comment><USER7> Let us keep SourceForge in mind as GitHub goes public.

<comment><USER8> GitHub has a paid business model, so I think they're less likely to be tempted by the dark side. SourceForge is another cautionary tale about how "free is a lie" \-- how free leads directly to scummy business models.

<comment><USER9> >GitHub has a paid business model, so I think they're less likely to be tempted by the dark side

So did Sourceforge. Github has competition in business space (Gitlab Enterprise, Stash) and if it falls out of favor with businesses, anything can happen.

<comment><USER10> Stash is not a competition. GitLab is. Stash just falls more behind every update. Look the release Notes of 3.10 and 3.9. I mean it took from 2.8 to 3.8 that you could use "go get". And still Stash won't implement git protocol in the near future (while gitlab and github enterprise both have this) [https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/STASH-2508](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/STASH-2508) however they released a read-only plugin since stash 3.8 READ ONLY.. and there are even more issue's to come that stash won't support or support in the near future. Gitlab and github enterprise are so far ahead of stash and there is another github like solution coming that is written in go. Also stash is slower than Gitlab, even while gitlab is coded in ruby. Also the CI, way easier to setup (and cheaper) than the stash way of linking their projects.

<comment><USER11> Stash's feature is reliable performance and support.

Github.com goes down; Github Enterprise crawls on very large repositories. (Not everybody's, of course, but the bigger they come, the worse Github performs, and the more money the customer is worth.)

When you call Github support, a support engineer will tell you, "At Github, engineers work on projects that we find interesting. Github Enterprise doesn't get that much interest on our team."

When you call Atlassian support, they fix your problem.

<comment><USER10> they won't. maybe they only look at their bigger customers? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The following page lists stats for sourceforge itself:

[http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnost...](http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http%3A%2F%2Fsourceforge.net&client=googlechrome&hl=en- US) :

> Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 332 time(s) over the > past 90 days.

<comment><USER13> I also find it fascinating what Google has to say about itself [https://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=Google.com](https://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=Google.com)

<comment><USER14> Very interesting! Of course Google itself is not hosting any malicious content, but they are acting as a bridge between the user and malicious content which they honestly write about. Interesting that they also include blogspot.com pages in that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not happening for me when I go to that link from Google in Firefox. Can anyone else reproduce this?

 _edit:_ Now happening for me in Chromium. (Both of these on Xubuntu 14.04, versions from the repos.)

<comment><USER16> Nope, can freely access the site on both latest versions of Chrome and Chromium. Though the project seems to have moved from that page already.

<comment><USER15> I got the warning in Chromium just now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Where to move from SourceForge: [1]:

[1]: [http://helb.github.io/goodbye- sourceforge/](http://helb.github.io/goodbye-sourceforge/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I love google for this and many other ways the fight abuse of browser users. First, they removed CA, which produced a bad certificate, and now sf with their bundles.

</comment><comment><USER19> The important thing (for retrogeeks like me) is that [http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/) is not doing anything particularly evil.

<comment><USER20> ... that you can notice ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> U-Block origin is blocking SourceForge as well (||sourceforge.net^$other)

<comment> k-mcgrady I was just looking into U-Block. What's better to use: U-Block or U-Block Origin?

<comment><USER22> AFAIK: U-Block Origin is a fork of U-Block which hopes to stay in sync with U-Block, but maintain a per-site block/allow feature which was removed from the newer version of U-Block.

<comment><USER23> Actually, U-Block is the fork, U-Block origin is the branch of the project maintained by the original dev.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Counterexample: [http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/)

<comment><USER25> Interestingly (to me) this link is blocked by my ad blocker, rather than Google.

> uBlock₀ has prevented the following page from loading: > > [http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/) > > Because of the following filter > ||sourceforge.net^

<comment> X-Istence uBlock Origin added a filter to block all of Sourceforge...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Damn machine learning software. :) Google needs to tune some of the parameters.

</comment><comment><USER27> Oh how the mighty have fallen

</comment><comment><USER8> Because it is.

</comment><comment><USER28> People always complain about the power that countries hold. Tech superpowers hold a lot more, and yet nobody elects or really regulates them.

<comment><USER29> Which "tech super power" has a military and nukes?</comment></comment>


Misconceptions About IP Geolocation - <AUTHOR> https://ipregistry.co/blog/ip-geolocation-misconceptions <comment><USER2> I've seen "what's my IP address" websites that ask to get your location from your browser, that's a good trick to get fine grained IP geolocation (until the IP address is reassigned).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what is referred to as "HTML5 Geolocation API" in the article. The problem of this method is that it is really intrusive since it requires an explicit permission along with a device that includes a GPS chip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> > If IP addresses were considered PII, then no routers database or Whois > registries could legally exist, which would mean to a larger extent Internet > routing could not exist as we know it.

I think this statement is misinformed. There are countries that have rules around protecting PII. WHOIS implementations have changed as a result, but I think these laws have carve outs that allow routers to function. The laws are more nuanced than this.

Examples:

ICANN adopted tiered access for gTLD registration information: [https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/gtld-registration- data...](https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/gtld-registration-data-specs- en)

EU courts believe that IP addresses, even dynamic IP addresses, can indirectly identify a person: [http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...](http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=184668&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=1034974)

GDPR, however has a carve out that I think permits use by internet routers. One legal justification is:

> Processing is necessary to satisfy a contract to which the data subject is a > party.

If my ISP doesn't announce my IP address, then they can't connect me to the internet, which I pay them to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the links.

> If my ISP doesn't announce my IP address, then they can't connect me to the > internet, which I pay them to do.

Indeed, it's more nuanced and that's the message that we try to give here. As long that you do not use IP geolocation to identify an individual by itself, it seems to be a legitimate use.</comment></comment>


Rapidapi and cloudflare workers based subscription API for spotify metadata - <AUTHOR> https://rapidapi.com/sloev/api/spotiflite <comment><AUTHOR> hi, i just released an api version of the opensource "spotiflite" spotify metadata scraper ([https://github.com/sloev/spotiflite](https://github.com/sloev/spotiflite)) that lets you fetch metadata for an artist.

I thought it could be a fun exercise to see how easy it is now-a-days to setup a subscription paid api "without pulling up my credit card from the pocket"

so here is the steps i took:

 _1\. setup a free api using cloudflare workers:_

I started by creating the api on cloudflare workers since they are by far the cheepest and their fremium model makes it possibly to publish an api without a credit card.

Key learnings for me was:

* env vars can be created in the UI and then they get injected as vars in your js script.

* use the url.pathname to have multiple paths in one api

* Use custom headers from your apigateway provider to only respond to those requests.

The sourcecode for the cloudflare worker is here [https://github.com/sloev/spotiflite/blob/master/cloudflare/w...](https://github.com/sloev/spotiflite/blob/master/cloudflare/worker.js)

 _2\. use rapidapi.com as api gateway_

After i had created my api i needed a place to publish it and "receive moneyz cuz lulz" so i choose rapidapi cuz they dont need any credit cards either and have a simple way to setup.

With rapidapi i created an endpoint pointing to my new api with my new path: "artist-meta" and then i specified some ~random~ price ranges include a free option and pressed publish.

All in all, publishing an api and get moneyz for requests is more easy now than ever.</comment>


A good idea is only a small part of the battle: Snipshot - <AUTHOR> http://startupstories.com/2006/12/11/a-good-idea-is-only-a-small-part-of-the-battle-greg-dingle-and-beau-hartshorne-co-founders-of-snipshotcom/ <comment><USER2> but the most important part

<http://juwo-works.blogspot.com/2007/05/ideas-are-worthless-wrong-ideas- can.html></comment>


Why Indian IT firms are hiring failed entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.livemint.com/Industry/tDr4iXm1d5dYNPisSY9sHP/Why-Indian-IT-firms-are-hiring-failed-entrepreneurs.html <comment><USER2> The subheading of TFA is

"Eyeing fresh business from outsourcing clients, IT firms are creating start- ups focused on disruptive technology "

riiight. You create 'disruptive' startups to get more T&M projects by projecting an image of kewl.

There is a lot of unintended hilarity in that article.

"A banking customer that has huge data is asking why I can't do what Google is doing with data. "

Duh, that question is going to get a very long or a very short answer.

"At Wipro, Sajjad Hussain, a company veteran based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is busy creating a start-up organization that can compete with the best and most disruptive ventures in the valley. "

uh oh watch out stripe, YC etc. All your best engineers are going to leave for Wipro!

As someone who has friends working in TCS (and other "service companies in India) and so hear about the various shenanigans that go on in this particular bodyshop, I'll just say that any "entrepreneur" who joins TCS deserves everything (s)he gets.

<comment><USER3> Your snark is misplaced. Atleast they're trying to change. You can't go from IT services to Silicon Valley overnight.

Though the article was right when it said :

"Some experts feel Indian tech firms should instead be freeing up the talent they already have to work on the next big thing."

This doesnt happen enough .I work at a small IT firm in India. Its trying to develop its own apps in a small subsidiary it incubated with its own revenue. They aren't very successful yet. But understand that things here are changing and eventually we will catch up. There's too much potential here . Its only a matter of time.

<comment><USER4> Erm, Indian IT services companies aren't exactly youngsters. Here are the 'birthdays' of the biggest four:

\- TCS: 1968 \- Infosys: 1981 \- Wipro: 1966 \- HCL: 1991

To clarify, I'm disputing your "overnight" remark.

<comment><USER3> As long as their services divisions were growing fast they had no reason to look elsewhere. Now that growth in their traditional markets has slowed down they have no choice but to innovate.

<comment><USER4> > Now that growth in their traditional markets has slowed down...

Would you care to clarify what year "now" means?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> An utterly confusing and glib article.

Firstly, it says Indian IT companies are hiring "failed entrepreneurs and successful VCs" without specifying what that means, or why that should be the case.

As another commenter has pointed out, the entrepreneurs being hired are "experienced" (I'd even say "ex-entrepreneurs"), not "failed" ones. There's no evidence as to why they "failed". Did they go bankrupt? Did they grow at less than industry average? And what company on earth goes looking for "failed entrepreneurs" by design?

Conversely, why are "successful VCs" joining staid services companies that are poor paymasters? Doesn't make sense.

The combination - "failed executives and successful VCs" is even more hilarity. What is the logic? [Edited a typo]

<comment><USER5> "And what company on earth goes looking for "failed entrepreneurs" by design?"

One weighing cost/benefit. Failed entrepreneurs will be easily an order of magnitude cheaper than their successful counterparts. If you think you can identify and correct why they failed, you have a good source of talent. e.g. "this person was great at product development but lousy at business administration, so we'll give her a CTO role"

There are workable strategies other than "get the very best, and pay the moon for them"

<comment><USER6> Yahoo seems to have done it. Successfully.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure you're not conflating true disruption with media coverage/stock price appreciation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just (temporarily) moved to Silicon Valley three weeks ago to work as a contractor at Google (fun and interesting!). The whole area of Silicon Valley has a vibe of energy and wealth. My wife's and my permanent home is in the mountains of Central Arizona where the ill effects of the current economy are so clearly visible. It feels good to be at an epicenter of wealth generation, and I am going to enjoy this area as much as possible while we are here.

I used to think that there are compelling economic reasons to start tech businesses in much less expensive cost of living areas, but it is difficult to argue with the success of his area.

It makes sense that Indian IT companies would also want an R&D presense here.

</comment><comment><USER8> They are not failed they are experienced entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER9> this is a big improvement over this article.

"Indian IT firm accused of discrimination against "stupid Americans"

[http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2013/08/indian...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2013/08/indian-it-firm-accused-of-discrimination-against-stupid- americans/)</comment>


Instacart Launches Costco - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/22/instacart-adds-costco-to-its-same-day-grocery-delivery-service-and-you-dont-need-a-membership/?utm_source=Twitter&awesm=tnw.to_e0XQl&utm_medium=Spreadus&utm_campaign=social%20media <comment><USER2> Can someone tell me how exactly Instacart is working this? Do they have an agreement with Costco? (I'm guessing not.) Do they have individual shoppers who just do their thing as though they were individuals, and then deliver? Are those individuals employees or freelancers?

I'm guessing Costco would be a bit reluctant to formally allow something like this, as I also presume that one reason they get lower prices from suppliers is that they only sell to members, so there is less of a perception that a supplier is undercutting other retailers by letting Costco sell at a reduced price. A sort of price discrimination... but if stuff gets resold without a markup to bring the price in line with other retailers it would make their negotiations more difficult.

<comment><USER3> I don't know the answer to your question, but isn't Instacart free to resell anything they bought at Costco? So would they even need an agreement from them?

<comment><USER4> Because Costco is a paid membership service. I assume reselling is against their membership agreement. It'd be difficult to enforce, especially on the scale they probably operate at, but still.

EDIT: It's not. I somehow assumed it would be. Interesting to know it isn't.

<comment><USER5> Former Costco employee here - nope. A lot of the point of the store is reselling large items to small companies. Not many families need gallon jugs of butter or 100lbs bags of rice, but tons of restaurants do.

That being said, the reselling is normally for people who do something with it (ie cook the food, print with the ink, etc), not turn around and sell the exact same product.

<comment><USER6> When I lived in the Mission the guys who ran the bodega across the street bought half the stuff they sold from the SOMA Costco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used Instacart for the first time yesterday to have Trader Joe's delivered. It was awesome! Their website shopping experience could use a little TLC, but other than that it was solid.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Would love to hear your feedback: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, this is awesome. It works even better for Costco than most places since Costco inventory is fairly consistent, so ordering in advance is fine.

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone who lives outside the valley, I feel so weird seeing articles like this. I think they bother me because they illustrate just how much this whole universe of tech is totally rooted in a single geographic area.

In anything else, changes in a business that had such a tiny area of influence would not make the news next to stories on international business. I shouldn't feel so bothered about this, but I do.

<comment><USER10> Rooted in doesn't mean intrinsically limited to. Apple and Google are also rooted in the Valley in the sense that their original users were here. But anything sufficiently good becomes ubiquitous.

And incidentally, Instacart may well be such a thing. The effect it's had on my life is almost entirely a function of having small children rather than being part of the startup world.

<comment><USER9> Having typed my previous comment on my phone, I think I'd like to expand on what I was feeling:

When I read HN, I think of it as a place for news that appeals to the mind of a "hacker". That's the "box" that it inhabits in my mind.

When I see posts like this one though, I'm reminded that there's a very large bias towards things going on in a relatively small area or set of areas (SF, NYC, Boston, Austin, maybe Seattle). I think my feelings on seeing this post are just facing the reality of these natural biases.

Also, I'd like to say that these biases aren't a bad thing. It's natural when lots of people with the same interests live in just a few places. But it does exist, and it gives me a bit of a mental jolt when I run across them.

\-----

Also, I agree with the sentiment that "anything sufficiently good will become ubiquitous." I've live(d) in the Seattle area all my life, and services like Amazon Fresh are wonderful for more than just people living the startup lifestyle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How do they get the inventory of a costco if it isn't officially sanctioned by costco? Do they buy the stuff on their corporate card then charge you on yours and bank off the $10 fee? I don't live in an instacart location, so am not sure how their biz model works (sounds like peapod).

</comment><comment><USER12> I love Instacart... that is all. Please branch to NYC soon!

<comment><USER13> We in SF really do take for granted that we get all of these services at launch.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. I'm moving to NYC and I'm realizing this fact just now knowing Instacart isn't in NYC yet.

<comment><USER4> Instacart isn't but Fresh Direct is and is honestly usually cheaper, even with delivery fees, than it would be buying from the local grocery store. And since the city doesn't have many regular grocery stores -- in Brooklyn you have some of the various NSA (National Supermarket Association) stores, but frankly most of them suck. If you ARE lucky enough to live near a Trader Joe's (and keep in mind, you'll need to be in walking distance or be willing to take the subway with your bags), prepare for lines from hell.

I wouldn't go to Costco without a car -- and since you've really only got Long Island City, the one in Brooklyn Heights and the one on 117th Street, traffic is going to SUCK.

To that end, I'm not even sure if a thing like Instacart would work with NYC because most of our grocery stores -- aside from Walgreens/Duane Reade and CVS are local bodegas that you're lucky if they take credit cards, let alone have a consistent inventory system. In the suburbs like Long Island or maybe parts of Staten Island, but not in Brooklyn or in Manhattan (can't speak for the other 2 boroughs but I assume Queens and the Bronx would be hard too).

Anyway, long comment short -- Fresh Direct. Oh, and ZocDoc for finding a doctor. Those are the two startups (aside from Seamless and GrubHub) that totally made my first two years in NYC.

<comment><USER12> Thanks! That was super helpful! I'll be sure to check them out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hm interesting that you don't need an existing Costco membership. I hope they are able to expand service beyond SF!

<comment><AUTHOR> We plan to have Costco available as we launch other cities wherever it is logistically practical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is excellent news for Chez JJ. Thank you Instacart, you just made our hacker house network more scalable.

</comment><comment><USER16> This alone would have me as a customer in Portland, but I agree with titlex that forcing a signup modal before I can peruse the site is really unfriendly.

<comment><USER17> In Portland you can use <http://www.indigomart.com/costco-products/> I had added limit Costco & Bob Red Mill products few months back and I can try to meet your needs. Try us out.

<comment><USER16> Awesome, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ugh I can't even look at the Instacart page without having to sign in. I don't even live in the valley, I just wanted to check out their page.

</comment><comment><USER19> Do the terms of costcos membership agreement allow them to do this, or did they negotiate a separate agreement?

<comment><USER20> "the fee associated with delivery from its stores will be higher, clocking in at $9.99 for your collection of items, stiffer than the normal $3.99 rate."

I'm sure Costco is getting a portion of that fee.

<comment><USER21> I'm not. It takes a long time to make it through a Costco, and the higher cost may simply be passing on the extra labor cost to customers. Also I think the distance to travel would be longer on average than, for example, Safeway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why do they force you to sign up? That could potentially turn away customers.

<comment><USER23> Probably the increase in revenue from having people signup is more than (or is expected to be more than) the loss from people opting out. They look like they're doing well so I'll assume it is working out for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Will you deliver non-food items from Costco? Are there weight/size limits?

</comment><comment><USER24> as a user I have never been more excited!! this is so awesome :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Hurry up and come to Seattle!

</comment><comment><USER26> So.. it's 1999 again?

<comment><USER10> What?

<comment><USER27> I think they're referring to the dotcom era when other companies tried same- day delivery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Oh my god. If this includes berry ice cream delivery I will be a happy man.</comment>


Paul's Online Math Notes: Cheat Sheets and Tables - <AUTHOR> http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/cheat_table.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> The submission I made earlier - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346092> \- apparently has notes that are mostly ripped without giving proper credit. As a result, I thought I'd submit a link to the originals, rather than that rip-off.</comment>


Www. is not deprecated - <AUTHOR> http://www.yes-www.org/ <comment><USER2> Interesting read, but I can't say I agree.

 _> ... Back then, virtually everyone dutifully typed <http://www.pepsi.com/> into Mosaic or Netscape to see just what it was that Pepsi had put online. These days, many people will just type in www.pepsi.com or even pepsi.com or, believe it or not, just pepsi._

URI's will never go away. Search is just getting better.

 _> The source of this confusion is the simple fact that users today don't understand two things. First, they don't understand why the www. is (or isn't) there, and second, they don't understand that the Web is not the whole of the Internet._

I don't understand why it's there. It's a bit redundant given all the arguments of the no-www folks.

(edited for formatting)

<comment><AUTHOR> > I don't understand why it's there. It's a bit redundant given all the > arguments of the no-www folks.

I agree. It's redundant and, like '<http://>, can and should be inferred. I also think it looks much better without it.

The reason it won't go away is technical. See Heroku's article on it: [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/avoiding-naked- domains...](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/avoiding-naked-domains-dns- arecords)

I do hope that the technical reasons for not using naked domains can be worked around some day. Whether by evolution of the technology or by the browser inferring it.</comment></comment>


Critical fix for a potential data corruption issue in PostgreSQL 9.3 and 9.4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1587/

<comment><USER2> Is it possible to check if my data has been affected by this data corruption issue?

</comment><comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL This is extremely scary, update fast!</comment>


Creating reminders was never easy before - <AUTHOR>

With KickBorn(www.kickborn.com) creating reminders is very easy . Simply say "I have a laundry at 8 pm" or "I have to submit paper at 11 tomorrow" or "I will soccer match on friday"  and many more... check out www.kickborn.com and provide your feedback. <comment><USER2> From the footer:

        This is a tech preview of the application and
        soon a released version will be made public.

So it doesn't work yet? It isn't live yet? You're just harvesting emails? This is a wish list?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> KickBorn is a startup and i am trying to reach out to the people and then simply work on feedback.</comment>


Ask HN: I may be facing retaliation, unfair treatment at work, any suggestions? - <AUTHOR> NOTE: I will not reply to this thread but I will actively monitor this thread.
My employer is in CA and I work in CA.
I believe I am facing retaliation and unfair treatment at work. I am not looking for help in deciding if this specific instance is retaliation or not.
What resources do I have, legally, to raise this and request an investigation without risking my employment immediately. <comment><USER2> I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Document all the facts with no emotion whatsoever, along with time stamps of when each fact occurred.

If there are others that you know for a fact are not two-faced that will also provide statements, then get quotes from them. There are power in numbers, assuming those numbers are not snitches trying to earn points with the bad bosses.

Do everything in email, ticketing systems and other things that leave trails that may be backed up.

Form a rough draft of a document on your own system that pulls together all the facts, time stamps, etc, then have a section below that goes into detail for each item. Remember to update your document as things unfold.

If the document is on your work computer, they may be able to see it and they can take it away from you.

Be ready to provide this document to HR, Legal and potentially your own legal counsel if you believe the company has malicious intent. They have to know that you have all your ducks in a row and that you are ready to contact outside counsel and your state.

Or, just move on to a better company and make sure people know that company is toxic, again, stating only the facts that can be validated.

Glassdoor is such a place. Perhaps you can save others from the toxicity.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Caveat: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

I'd start by finding and consulting an employment law attorney, they can best walk you through your options under California and US Federal law.

Beyond that: document everything dispassionately in multiple places, including paper. Ideally have a copy you can bring to and leave with the attorney if you engage the attorney. Assume your employment can be terminated at any time and that you'll be escorted from the office with no access to your desk or computer.

Assume that anything you've said or written, regardless of context, will be used against you.

If your employer is large enough it may have an HR organization which _may_ be able to help, but HR primarily exists to mitigate risk to and to protect the company.

In my personal experience, if the conflict is with one or two specific individuals, it may be resolvable without leaving the company but resolution to your satisfaction will depend on the roles of the individuals involved. If the conflict is with some inherent characteristic of the company then you should prepare to leave, ideally on your terms by working with an attorney.</comment>


An update on our political ads policy - <AUTHOR> https://blog.google/technology/ads/update-our-political-ads-policy <comment><USER2> Their misleading ad policy is pretty milquetoast

> making demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine > participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process

> we expect that the number of political ads on which we take action will be > very limited

From the description, I can't tell if a hypothetical ad buy from AOC claiming Lindsey Graham supports the Green New Deal would be allowed or not, but my sense is it would be</comment>


It's nothing like a broken leg: why I'm done with the mental health conversation - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/30/nothing-like-broken-leg-mental-health-conversation <comment><AUTHOR> "The Conversation tends to focus on depression and anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. It is less comfortable with the mental illnesses deemed more unpalatable – people who act erratically, hallucinate, have violent episodes or interpersonal instability."</comment>


Stanford Libraries unearths the earliest U.S. website - <AUTHOR> http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/october/slac-libraries-wayback-102914.html

<comment><USER2> Yes! There is a photo of the NeXT cube hosting the SLAC website at the bottom right of this page:

[https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2014-10-29-earliest- webs...](https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2014-10-29-earliest-websites- reappear-stanford-wayback.aspx)

And on that cube is a yellow post-it note: "PLEASE DO NOT TURN COMPUTER OFF":

[https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/sites/www6.slac.stanford.edu/...](https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/sites/www6.slac.stanford.edu/files/styles/lightbox_large_image/public/images/Wizards-2.jpg)

Shades of the original server of Tim Berners-Lee:

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> Direct link: [https://wayback.stanford.edu/19911206000000/http://slacvm.sl...](https://wayback.stanford.edu/19911206000000/http://slacvm.slac.stanford.edu/FIND/default.html)

If you view source, it's utterly depressing that literally 98% of the page's code is dedicated to rendering Stanford's fancy overlay. The actual site, OTOH, is 8 lines. Wish we could have stayed with that simplicity and elegance.</comment>


Nvidia Launches Year-Long Research Residency Program - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/11/02/residence-in-nvidia-launches-year-long-research-residency-program/ <comment><USER2> Great opportunity to gain AI expertise and create fun tech!</comment>


Pinterest Completes $200M Funding at $2.5B Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130220/exclusive-pinterest-complete-200-million-funding-at-2-5-billion-valuation/ <comment><USER2> Always great to hear about success coming from humble beginnings:

 _Pinterest used Hacker Dojo as their primary workspace in late 2009, and hired both of their first two engineers from the Dojo's membership._

Source <http://www.hackerdojo.com/InvestinStartups>

<comment><USER3> (Writing this as I take a break from working on my startup at the Hacker Dojo...)

Ben/Pinterest are probably the most well-known ex-residents of the Hacker Dojo. It is an awesome place to work, and there lots of promising startups that have set up shop here.

Speaking of hiring engineers, the 2013 Hacker Fair is coming up: <http://www.hackerdojo.com/HackerFair3>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Two notes:

      1) They raised $100MM just 9 months ago.  That's $300MM raised in
         under a year.  Money is stupid cheap and this is sorta terrifying.
      2) The word "revenue" is not contained within FTW.

Instagram drew an incredible line in the valuation sand as a "comp".

<comment><USER5> That's smart of them. Anyone remembers 2007-2008? Even blue chip companies had to beg and give their proverbial first born to refinance their debt.

A billion is not what it used to be, was my first thought but who can blame Pinterest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think Pinterest is in a great condition ... at this time.

Like they have tons of users who religiously use their product, and it's actually coupled with intent to buy, which makes monetizing easy.

However, you can't change the fact, that pinterest is riding on a "trendy" wave right now. There is not a whole lot that keeps you threre. Just in two years, there can be another spot where all the women in world woo about their lives.

It's an inherent social problem which accounts for the so far pretty short lives of social companies. You gotta have to be able to tie/commit your users much like Facebook does (owning your diginal private life).

<comment><USER7> I thought the problem with Pinterest was that "intent to buy" was actually really low compared to other traffic sources.

I know its an old article, but has anything come out contradicting it? [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/07/13/new-data- show...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/07/13/new-data-shows- pinterest-users-look-but-dont-buy/)

<comment><USER8> This is just one data point, but my mom and I run a cooking blog that makes a decent amount of money from the Amazon affiliate program, and people from Pinterest definitely come to her site with an intent to buy. Given how much money we making from Pinterest visitors, it doesn't seem crazy to think that they could figure out a way to monetize their user base.

<comment><USER9> My girlfriends makeup site embraced pinterest in early 2012 which resulted in gradual traffic growth from females who have been strong contributors and buyers.

I feel its more saturated now but still a great platform to leverage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The amount of ideas my wife, her sister, and many other women in their lives get from Pinterest is amazing. It's a household name now in our family. From birthday gifts to children's crafts, I'd venture to guess at least 1 idea every 1-2 days.

There's something there in terms of monetization. I'm just not sure what yet.

</comment><comment><USER11> It is worth pointing out they are using AWS. Gave a really interesting talk at PuppetConf '12 [1]. Talks about the stack and how they use it. Seems they used AWS to their advantage, to keep up/ahead of the hunger for computing power.

[1] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU-bCbBq8zs>

</comment><comment><USER12> I do not understand how the company is being valued at 2.5B. It doesn't look like even the business accounts at Pinterest have any type of fee associated with them.

How do they make money? Or is this valuation most likely based on the possibility of making money down the line?

EDIT:

According to this post, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5254498>, it seems like it is based primarily on potential revenue from data mining.

<comment><USER13> Not being snarky but is there a profitable website who's primary source of revenue is based on data mined from their users?

I keep hearing about this "data mining" revenue stream but can't think of a place where its worked. That being said Pinterest seems like one place where it might.

<comment><USER14> Google? Targeting interests is a solved problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Surprise, suprise Andreessen Horowitz involved in another crazy valuation.

<comment><USER5> They are throwing lots of money trying to make a name as VCs, that's my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pinterest as compared to Instagram is better deserving of this kind of valuation, I think. Their product is so good (pretty much a picture focused front-end) that thousands of others (myself included) have copied. And it works, brilliantly.

I'm confident that they can drive sales... however, can they do something interesting with that.

Or maybe Yahoo should buy them.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is it just me or did they just make their site require you to register to view it now? <http://pinterest.com/>

Edit - Interesting. If you do a google search for something like "Pinterest Cake" you can get past the registration.

<comment><USER18> I noticed that today too, I don't like when sites force behaviors like that. Groupon used to be the biggest offender, Quora still use these tricks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The "where is the revenue?" line is tired when talking about Pinterest. Unlike sites like Instagram and Facebook it's pretty obvious they can start making a shitton of money at any time. The biggest question is how sustainable this product is. People focusing on revenue for a product like Pinterest are missing the point: I would want the company to be focused on growing the user base, not toying around with revenue models at this point.

<comment><USER20> What is their path to making a "shitton" of money? I don't know, I am really asking.

<comment><USER19> They have purchase intent up the wazoo. They could cut a rev share deal with one or two of the big vendors easily. They could add paid placements. They could cut affiliate deals on behalf of their curators. They could add a payments system for people to directly purchase items they browse on Pinterest. Etc etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Do they charge websites for traffic referral?

<comment><USER22> That's only part of it.

It seems this "affinity data" model is the basis for the high hopes and high valuation: [http://gigaom.com/2012/03/24/pinterest-weve-got-a- business-m...](http://gigaom.com/2012/03/24/pinterest-weve-got-a-business- model-for-you/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Pinterest is in a great spot. Everybody pins products - they'll be able to monetize. I'm betting this'll be a decent investment. I see why Tapiture is doing the same thing for the men's market here in LA <http://wp.me/p1fNUP-gK>

</comment><comment><USER24> Cool. I never thought Pinterest would reach this far. It's promising for all web startups.

<comment><USER25> EDIT: Removed because I'm tired and my reading comprehension is crap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How do they make the evaluation evaluation, when they don't earn anything? I would imagine it is hard to put a number on a user on their site, when they dont generate any income?

</comment><comment><USER27> I would love to see the pitch deck they had for this round.

<comment><USER28> My impression is that most pitches that happen at that stage are simply growth rate followed by revenue projections, no real magic when you're seeing the growth that they are.

<comment><USER27> $200m is a lot to throw at a company that _only has a lot of users_.

They have little to no revenue at this point and no current revenue streams that point to being able to generate anything worthy of a $2.5b valuation. I guess my point was that I'd like to know what revenue streams they are anticipating creating that would warrant such a high valuation.

<comment><USER29> That's not how the game works:

The investors at this stage still don't care about revenue. The main question is whether or not they can flip the investment to some other firm later (that is to say, will the picture look rosy enough in the future that someone else will buy in at a higher valuation).

Revenue starts to matter in the last round before the IPO (if it goes that route). If the sequence ends in an acquisition, revenues won't really matter..

<comment><USER30> yeah it's weird, especially since you can't be sure they will make money in the end, but that's how the incestment money works

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can someone shed light on how Pinterest and Instagram can be worth billions? But Reddit is only worth 400m?

<comment><USER32> This is a complicated question with many angles. First, Reddit is now apart of bigger company. Obviously, this changes anything to do with valuation. Do investors want a "piece" of a company that is within a bigger company? Maybe, but if they do the valuation is going to be a lot lower compared to if Reddit was independent.

The other issue is that Reddit makes money therefore the valuation is based on earnings. Their earnings might be low for the amount of traffic they get. Sometimes it's better to not generate any money because the valuation would be based solely user growth+engagement.

With this being said, if Reddit was an independent company then they too would have a crazy valuation. I am sure the founders think they sold way too early but at the time, it was the best option. Kudos to the buyer who didn't let it enter the M&A dead pool.

<comment><USER33> If they were an independent company and didn't have any revenue history to go by I think they would be worth more. Part of the Pinterest valuation would be speculating on how much they could generate through various forms of advertising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What's their revenue/net?</comment>


I'm shaving my head for chemotherapy patients please donate - <AUTHOR>

I've been meaning to cut my hair off for a while. After 5+ years the geek chic is getting kinda old.
So I'm shaving my hair off today and donating it to charity. The more money that's donated the shorter I'll cut my hair. So please donate for the kiddies HN. Also they'll be a video of me getting the chop for your amusement.
Horrible flash badge to track donations here:
http://www.networkforgood.org/pca/Badge.aspx?BadgeId=114274
Locks of Love here:
http://locksoflove.org <comment><USER2> I have been planning on doing the same thing. My original statement was to grow my hair until ridewithgps earned $1000, but, given the length of time I have been saying that, I am only 3 or so months away from the required 10 inches. Nice to see other people willing to do the same thing!

Plus, with all the positive karma we will receive from donating to cancer children, we can cut people off in traffic and still feel good :P

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought that there was a minimum amount of hair that Locks of Love required; you can't just cut off a few inches and send it to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well that's ok because I have 5 years worth of hair, half-way down my back to get rid off. It's just about how much the remaining hair gets buzzcut afterwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A clever way to get a free haircut, sh1m. :D</comment>