Mathematicians find way to put 7 cylinders in contact without using their ends - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/tale-touching-tubes <comment><AUTHOR> It has been known for a long time that one can arrange 7 cylinders to be mutually touching. That was written about by Martin Gardner decades ago, and was set as a puzzle.

The result had the cylinders touching at the end of one with the length of the other, so the question arose, can one arrange to have seven cylinders all mutually touching, without using the ends. The easiest way to say this is to ask for seven infinitely long cylinders mutually touching.

This has only recently been settled, hence this paper. It's believed impossible to arrange eight identical infinitely long cylinders to be mutually touching. I suspect the result is in fact known, but I haven't searched diligently for it.

There is an associated puzzle that uses cylinders that are very short - <USER2> coins. How many coins can you arrange to be mutually touching?

Consider that a puzzle. I can do 5. If you can do more, there's a mathematical paper in it for you, should you care.

<comment><USER3> I linked to another related puzzle elsewhere in this discussion: there appears to be a solution for 9 cylinders of infinite length but _different radii_. It's not clear what's known about the case of 10 cylinders.

So there are known solutions for 5 coins, 7 identical infinite cylinders, 7 identical finite cylinders (maybe more), and 9 different infinite cylinders.

<comment><USER4> Is there an example of a similiar non-trivial problem for which there is an inexistance proof? I'm not a mathematician so I have a hard time picturing a way of proving this sort of thing when the number of objects is "tricky" (not too high, not too low), apart from simply showing a counterexample.

<comment><USER5> How about the fact that there are no more than 5 platonic solids [1]? (See the proof in the article)

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Question I've not found the answer to:

        It's possible to have 7 arbitrarily long cylinders
        mutually touching.  Currently it's not possible to
        have more than 5 coins (which are short cylinders)
        mutually touching.  As the cylinder's aspect ratio
        decreases, where are the thresholds: 7 -> 6 -> 5 ?

</comment><comment><USER6> This sort of reminds me of: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6mb%C3%B6c](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6mb%C3%B6c)

Because it is a 3D object that was found using mathematics. Any other examples?

I think there are lots of new objects discovered in higher dimensions, but I like when there is something you can actually build and see. I also like how it appears to be very asymmetrical.

<comment><USER7> The Klein bottle is sort of like that, only it's supposed to be in 4 dimensions, but the 3d version is still pretty cool and quite famous!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle)

Never heard about the gomboc before, thanks!

<comment><USER8> Clifford Stoll of _Cuckoo 's Egg_ fame has a side business making glass Klein bottles. He lives near me, I sometimes see him at the post office shipping out a bunch of them.

<comment><USER9> His site has a cool domain name: [http://www.kleinbottle.com](http://www.kleinbottle.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is going to sound like trolling, but it's not - I'm honestly curious.

Why is this important? Is it just cool, or is there some real world application? Was someone paying for this research for some reason, or was it just a mathematician's hobby?

EDIT: For the record, I don't have any problem with "just cool" research. I do that kind of research often (albeit, not as smart), and totally understand the value in it. Just wondering if this had an application immediately.

<comment><USER11> I believe this result has important applications in cylindrical stack encryption; it's very difficult to produce a solution, but very easy to verify a given solution.

<comment><USER12> Brb, I'm gonna create CylinderCoin.

<comment><USER13> I'd buy some. Would be awesome if each (coin) solution was rendered with a raytracer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great design for a no-gravity space station.

Easy to go everywhere from everywhere.

<comment><USER15> I was going to make a vaguely snide comment about difficulty in routing and managing services (air, water, power, data, &c.), but the more I look at the model, the less firmly I'm convinced that there is an intractable topological problem involved.

I'm still going to go with calling it the Villa Straylight, though.

<comment><USER16> You could dedicate a cylinder to utilities, and it will connect directly to all the others.

<comment><USER15> That was more or less what I had in mind. On the other hand, it might be more cost-efficient in general to design the cylinders to connect endwise and form a hexagon; it'd increase travel time for the station's inhabitants, but reduce the need for unique construction tooling -- instead of seven types of cylinders, each of whose interconnections are placed differently from those of all the others, you build one type of cylinder and one type of connector, then fit out each unit according to the purpose it serves in a given station design. You can also enable more complex topologies simply by developing more complex connectors, whereas what I shall please myself by calling the "eccentric" design under discussion doesn't scale nearly as well.

<comment><USER13> Or you could forego connectors and have them all intersect slightly. Once in space, pop out the panels where the intersections will happen.

<comment><USER15> That scales better than the eccentric design, but not as well as separate connectors.

Suppose, for example, you want to be able to assemble, from the same components, a flat-hexagon station, and an "asterisk" station like what you'd get if you drew radii from each vertex of a hexagon and then took the hexagon away -- a configuration which might be very useful, for example, as a "transfer point"; if the inter-segment connectors are adaptable to whatever standard governs spacecraft airlocks, then you can dock at least six spacecraft at once and interchange cargo among any or all of them. If you add a seventh "socket" to your central connector, normal to the plane of the other six, then you can tie your "transfer point" to a larger station, too, and assemble a larger structure, as for example might be very useful at a nearby Lagrange point, as a way station for ships inbound to and outbound from the Earth-Moon system.

(On the other hand, perhaps I simply spent too much time playing with Tinkertoy as a child.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's the original solution - [http://www.mathpuzzle.com/7cylinders.gif](http://www.mathpuzzle.com/7cylinders.gif)

</comment><comment><USER18> Ask HN: Is there an explanation somewhere of this "certification" that a layperson (college math and physics major, and self taught programmer) could understand?

<comment><USER4> The article is quite readable. I'm a layperson too, but here's what I made of the methods provided:

1- The first method finds a constant that guarantees convergence of newtons method to the solution; they then iterate it a few times and verify the result is almost stationary.

2- They use a set with parameter r that is guaranteed to contain a solution if it's contained in a ball of radius r; they then show that a given small ball around the candidate solution contains this set (they were able to do that because this set gets smaller faster than the radius).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So, given that this involves rounding errors in solutions to equations it is only an approximate solution. A solution with fuzz. Is it possible to prove that each point of "contact" is exactly coincident? Or to prove that exact coincidence is not possible. There seems to be room for deeper work on this problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> The initial space for the solution was found with techniques that had the possibility of rounding errors, and then exact proofs were found. This is a standard technique, one that I used in my PhD. So yes, it is possible to prove that each point of "contact" is exactly coincident, and if you read the paper carefully you'll see that that's what the authors did.

</comment></comment><comment> josh-wrale Manufacturing errors? I can't tell if this is plastic, but if it is, surely a machinist can do better with metal.

<comment><USER20> By "errors" they mean "the minute imperfections created by molding, machining, carving, etc." The rounding errors in the computer model would produce smaller physical artifacts than the manufacturing method would.

<comment><USER21> Surely mathematicians would use rationals[1] rather than floating point numbers, thus eliminating rounding errors at the expense of performance?

[1] [https://gmplib.org/](https://gmplib.org/)

<comment><USER22> It is not a matter of rational numbers, since the solution is likely to be an irrational number.

The paper [1] describes a system of 20 polynomial equations with 20 variables (Equations 10--12) and solving them is no trivial task. To the end, authors first numerically found candidate solutions up to some ten decimal digits [2] and used specialized tools to prove (!) that there exists a real solution sufficiently close to given numerical solution. It turns out that there are several ways (and corresponding implementations) to do that, e.g. alphaCertified [3].

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.5164](http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.5164)

[2] 10^-11 to be exact, according to the paper. It would be much easier to find a near-solution with larger errors (say, 10^-5). The physical model of such near-solution would be indistinguishable to the correct model.

[3] [http://www.math.tamu.edu/~sottile/research/stories/alphaCert...](http://www.math.tamu.edu/~sottile/research/stories/alphaCertified/) (that actually does use GMP and MPFR for the obvious reason)

<comment><USER21> Interesting. I would have thought that one could solve such things exactly by representing each unique known irrational that arises (root 2, pi, etc) by its own rational multiplier, and then overloading the relevant equality checks. Of course, you'd need to anticipate/implement each irrational type that might arise (roots, the geometric transcendental pi, and so on.)

[Leaving the next sentence in, for comedy value. I typed it and then realised how ridiculous it is - apologies!]

Essentially it's just teaching the computer to do the algebra for you, isn't it?

<comment><USER23> How would you test whether two generic irrational numbers were equal? Obviously you can numerically approximate them and if you see any difference in the numerical approximation then they must be different - but if they seem the same up to e.g. 10 decimal places, what do you do next?

<comment><USER21> I would generally assume that sqrts of primes don't overlap, so you can always do exact comparisons of rational coefficients? It wouldn't be perfect, but it would do as well as a person with pen and paper and a hundred years.

[[ Approximate algorithm, in case I'm not being clear: you need sqrt(35), represent it as 1×sqrt(5) × 1×sqrt(7). You simplify each expression evaluated down to roughly what you'd write on paper in RAM, and then you do exact comparisons - is that the same coefficients of the same number of the same prime sqrts? For greater than/less than you cast them to a hundred-sig-fig float, and if those are still equal, keep going down the rabbit hole. Obviously the RAM requirements for complicated numbers would be large, but that's the same with rationals - this is just taking it to the extreme. I'd be very surprised if some function of sqrts was _exactly the same as_ some other function of different sqrts. ]]

<comment><USER23> Sines of certain fractions of pi are equal to certain ratios of square roots though. And once you get to more complicated functions it's very hard to prove anything (e.g. I believe it's still not even proven that pi^e is irrational, never mind transcendental). Could we construct a countable field (for to be able to write down the numbers involved the field would have to be countable, i.e. only an infinitesimal fraction of the reals) that contained everything we need to do this kind of geometry in? Maybe. But I can just as easily believe you could construct a way of arranging objects that required a turing-complete computation to determine whether two objects met, in which case the halting problem makes this impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Links from one of the best riddle website : [http://www.wuriddles.com/cigarettes.shtml](http://www.wuriddles.com/cigarettes.shtml)

Cylinder Length | Max cylinders that can touch | Min cylinders that can touch

Infinite | 7 | 5

Actual | 9 | 7

L=D | 4 | 4

<comment><AUTHOR> Those "max" values are speculation, while the "Min" values are for definite because there are constructions. So that table is of less value than you might think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is just one of many puzzles and mathematical curiosities popularized by Martin Gardner. His books and columns make delightful light reading for anyone with a curious mind.

</comment><comment><USER26> Never seen this sort of thing before. Does this hold for an arbitrary radius? What if these were just lines in 3 space?

<comment><USER27> Intuitively, it seems that radius/length ratio is what's important here.

<comment><USER28> No, as this cylinders can be infinitely long if I'm not mistaken

<comment><USER27> Sure, there's no lower bound on the radius/length ratio.

But there is an upper bound (think huge radius, short length).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes - currently the best result for coins is 5 mutually touching. Neither beaten, nor proven to be maximal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Something special about 7 cylinders or would this be equally hard/simple for 6 or 8 ?

<comment><USER30> It gets harder and harder (and then impossible) the more cylinders you have.

<comment><USER31> Now I wonder if there's a proof that it's impossible for 8...

<comment><USER3> There's an arrangement of 8 that's very close to touching, but has been proven to not actually touch: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195669808...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019566980800022X)

Others believe they have found both an 8 and a 9: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.6207.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.6207.pdf)

though this may not be exactly the same problem. In particular, the 9 cylinder problem allows 3 radii to be selected and then the other 6 are calculated as a result (meaning the 9 are probably not all identical.) It appears the 7 result in the initial paper is 7 cylinders of equal radius.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The hippies of Marin County have known this since 1973.

</comment><comment><USER33> Don't they just have to not be parallel?

<comment><USER34> No, your thinking 2D lines, but this is 3D space. It's easy to arrange things so they all miss each other and not have them be parallel. The goal is to have them touch, but not intersect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Proof the Internet is a series of tubes.

</comment><comment><USER35>
        they built a wooden model to demonstrate their answer — although Bozóki notes
        that the model doesn't verify the result because manufacturing errors
        are much greater than any errors the computer could have made.

What's the point, when its not practically possible?

<comment><AUTHOR> What's the point of what? Physical models have imperfections and distortions, so to absolutely know the answer you need the mathematics. Then having done the mathematics it's satisfying to build the physical model, to see it and to hold it.

Can you clarify your question? Try to avoid the word "it" because the referent might not be obvious.</comment></comment>


Promoting Security Best Practices with Mozilla Observatory - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/promoting-security-best-practices-with-observatory-7b164a190425 <comment><USER2> Looks interesting, but the detailed blog post would probably be a more useful link

[https://pokeinthe.io/2016/08/25/observatory-by-mozilla-a- new...](https://pokeinthe.io/2016/08/25/observatory-by-mozilla-a-new-tool/)</comment>


Ask HN: Ever been hired through a "who's hiring" post? - <AUTHOR> How many people here have ACTUALLY gotten a job through the monthly post?<p>Provide what information you can (company, job title, post (if it's still alive)). <comment><USER3> A post from "the other side of the table" :).

The previous company I worked at, I hired two people through who's hiring posts. We pretty much tried it out for about six months as we didn't have much luck through the more traditional channels our division's HR department used. So yes, there are real positions being filled through these posts.

That said, just because it's on Hacker News and this is an informal place doesn't mean you don't need to put at least a little effort into your application. I don't think I ever received that many emails in response to a job posting that didn't even contain one complete sentence to go with the resume. I seem to remember that I received multiple emails from candidates that contained fewer than five words. The best one was the one that just contained a random link (presumably to his/her resume, but I didn't need to click on a potential phishing link that badly), no words, nothing else...

The two people who ended up getting hired (one a very junior developer, the other one a mid-level developer) wrote informal cover emails that showed signs of intelligent life at the other end of the keyboard, much like you'd expect from someone trying to apply for a job :).

<comment><USER4> You have to see it from th job hunter's perspective. It is very common to send out 20 resume's and maybe get a single response or two. It is very time consuming to write a custom multi-paragraph cover letter with every application. Eventually all job hunters learn that you get the same response rate when you write one sentence cover letters as you do when you put a lot of effort into them. Why spend so much effort when you don't have to?

<comment><USER3> Well, it works both ways.

You might send out 20 resumes. As a hiring manager - especially when using a "no filter" approach like posting on here (keep in mind that IME people posting jobs on Hacker News are more likely doing "guerilla hiring" and circumvent their HR departments) - I easily get 100+ resumes, and I don't have days to spend trawling through them. I think it was rands of randsinrepose who mentioned before that the average time an HR person or a manager gets to spend on figuring out if a deeper dive is worth it is about 30s.

So I have to filter them by something. If you as an applicant - who would like at least an interview with me -can't even put in the effort to write in a few sentences that tell me why I should look at your resume, I somehow have to assume that you'll put in similar effort after I hire you. That's not a good first impression and IMHO it counts when you're dealing with a hiring manager as opposed to an HR department.

Keep in mind I'm not asking you to write a cover novel. Put yourself in my shoes and tell me which of the resumes you'd look at if you have only limited time:

1\. The one that says

"My resume attached", or fewer words to that effect

2\. The one that says

"Hey, I'm applying for your job opening because I love writing web apps in Ruby on Rails with a ClojureScript front end".

<comment><USER5> What if I don't love writing web apps in RoR and just want a friggin job? I shouldn't send you a resume at all? Would it be appropriate for me to just lie about it?

What if the all the people who tell how they love writing web apps in RoR are just bullshitting you in the hopes that you really believe it? What if they're mostly just very excited newbies who haven't yet had the time to figure out that maybe it's not so exciting and lovely after all?

I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, but it sounds like you choose very arbitrary filters. Not that I can recommend a better filter, if your time is indeed so limited.

<comment><USER6> > What if I don't love writing web apps in RoR and just want a friggin job? I > shouldn't send you a resume at all?

Probably not. If someone is doing something they don't like, they tend to stop doing it so well as time goes on. While it may work out for a while, people usually need to care at some level about what they're doing to do a good job. Not everyone, sure, but I wouldn't take the chance.

There is also a lot more to working than just doing a job. Working around people who don't care about their work is demoralizing.

<comment><USER5> You could very well be working around professionals who take pride in doing their job well despite hating (or just not particularly liking) it. It might even look like they love the job.

Maybe it's not so common in SV startups that insist on hiring lovers. But in other industries it might be more of a rule than an exception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Two years ago when the "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?" thread appeared for the first time I wasn't quite happy where I was at, and posted my details. I was located in the Netherlands at the time and literally one of hundreds posting, thus I didn't have too high a hopes, but why not.

A few local companies reached out, and I interviewed with one or two, but for whatever reason neither ended up working out. At that point I wrote it off and went on with life.

Two months after the post someone from RethinkDB reached out explicitly mentioning it. It later turned out he had gone back through all the posts. After two phone interviews they flew me in, had a the hardest interview in my life to date, but ended up with an offer which I happily accepted.

The rest is history as they say. I had a great time at RethinkDB until about two months ago when we unfortunately had to shut down.

<comment><USER8> I'm the guy from RethinkDB who found and hired Jeroen!

I will say it's pretty rare, but when searching for a very particular skill set "Who wants to be hired" can totally work for finding new to mid-level devs.

<comment><USER9> Why are you looking for "a very particular skill set" in "new-level" devs?

<comment><USER10> And, what is this particular skill set?

<comment><USER11> Well, at the time something in the list of "C++ (Boost, STL), Python, SQL (PostgreSQL, SQLite), git" caught his eye.

Since it was RethinkDB I suspect the combination of C++ (which RethinkDB is written in), Python (one of the 4 languages for which there are/were "official" libraries), experience with 2 different DBMSs and an interest in "a challenge as a backend enginer to further hone my C++ skills" were probably all factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Speaking from the other side, I've hired 10 people from HN over the past 5 years, 2 within the last 6 months. These have included some of my best hires.

Currently, I see about 30 HN applicants per month. We interview roughly 30%. The rest are unqualified, demonstrated no understanding of or interest in what we do, and/or were spamming their resume.

These get interviews:

      * Strong candidates who did their homework (this is always the best)
      * Strong candidates with minimal or lightly tailored emails
      * Borderline candidates who did their homework

These get polite rejections:

      * Borderline candidates who did no homework
      * Unqualified candidates

These get ignored:

      * Candidates who send blatantly templated emails
      * Candidates who apply via "email blasts" (e.g., BCC all recipients; send via an email campaign tool)

I prefer to see both understanding of and interest in the role. Tell me why you're a fit and why you want to work here. A few sentences will suffice. Doing so: 1) improves the probability of an interview; and 2) for me, practically guarantees you a response.

<comment><USER13> > Tell me [...] why you want to work here.

This part always makes me laugh. The only possible true answer is usually "to get a job", and not much more. The applicant generally does not and cannot know about the company, nor about the job at that point.

The only info about the company is some bullshit in the job posting; and on the company website, some info intended for _clients_ , i.e. in advertising format, and a bit more of the same bullshit in the company description.

The job is just described through technical requirements and a list of tasks. Tasks that you may or may not have to perform on a regular basis, you don't know. You cannot know which task will represent 90% of your work, and which one will in fact never show up, because it was there "in case", or to attract answers.

There are so many different domains in computing that you generally don't know beforehand which will really interest you; and you often have no idea of what the specific domain in which the company works even is a thing. Anyway you could work the same way on the same satisfying job in various domains and trades, whatever these are.

So, why this specific company? Because I need a job, this offer seems to fit me, I seem to fit it, the purpose of the job does not make me sick and the location is OK for me, the rest remains to be discovered. During the interview process, for example. But why this specific company, I cannot answer, for I don't care what its name is, and yet I have studied it more than most applicants who will write how much they'd love to work in company XXX to design YYY.

<comment><USER14> I think that's an overly cynical outlook on job hunting and not in line with what I've actually found on the hiring side. In general, I've found that people have specific areas of interest. Some people love social products, others love enterprise, others love hardware products they can mail to mom and pop, others love games, others love productivity tools, etc. The list is really endless.

Of course, people have different personal situations that might result in them ending up at a job that's not in one of their particular areas of interest, but it's overly dismissive to say "the only possible true answer is to get a job", when in fact many candidates could get jobs at tens or hundreds of companies and are very selective about where they end up. We recently hired a candidate who took a sizable pay cut to work with us. I'm sure he could've gotten a meaningfully higher offer to work elsewhere, but ultimately he actually just believed in the long term value of what we were building, and that's valuable for both parties.

It is true that some people don't really care at all, but that actually seems to be the minority in my experience. I've had candidates answer me in the past with "to be honest, I saw a job listing and applied" when I asked them why they want to work at our company. I appreciated their directness, but ultimately if that's how they feel, it probably wouldn't be a good fit for either of us.

When I read your writing and you say things like

        the purpose of the job does not make me sick

that makes me quite sad actually. You should aim much higher.

<comment><USER15> When was the last time you yourself actively looked for a new job? I've found there's a strong disconnect between hiring managers/recruiters who haven't been in the job market for several years and applicants actively looking for new employment. I've been on both sides recently and have to say I'm more sympathetic to the concerns of the job seekers voiced here than I am to the concerns of hiring managers.

It takes less than a minute to skim a resume and determine if a candidate has the requisite skills/experience to merit a phone screen. On the flip side, it takes at least an order of magnitude longer to research a company, figure out what the role is _actually_ about, and tailor a cover letter. Meanwhile, my experience has been that hit rates for applications typically follow the 80/20 rule for most people (80% go to a black hole, 20% get a favorable call or email response), regardless of how much time is spent buttering up a profile vs. just sending a resume.

Unless you spend as much time as your applicants responding to their applications and telling them why they're not a good fit (which would be great), you're basically asking someone to work much harder than you for a less than even chance of getting a response back when they likely have better things to be doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Applied to about 11 HN jobs during my last job search (over the course of 2 different monthly posts). Only got acknowledgement from 3:

\- One said they decided to merge their two listings and I wasn't qualified for the new joint role.

\- One asked me to do a small programming challenge, but afterward indicated they were pursuing a local applicant (they had said upfront relocation would be covered).

\- One invited me for an on-site interview weeks later, but I had already taken my current job (found through Craigslist).

I'm not upset at all for the behavior of the companies that did respond. Even if they were working the market, from my perspective they were very respectful.

I _am_ very pissed at the non-acknowledgements and it makes me more and more likely to start sending shotgun emails. (I definitely have crafted my cover letters carefully and researched the companies up til this point.) At the very least, I'm going to start being more extreme and aggressive in my prose, and skip traditional fluff.

That said, I adore my current job, so I don't expect to be leaving anytime soon. :)

<comment><USER17> I have a similar experience. I do my homework, write a brief but specific and relevant intro letter, all together probably takes half an hour at least. Never hear back, not even a rejection email. This has been my experience with 10+ applications. I got a phone interview after one application and had the exact experience as your #2 - asked to do challenge, they hired someone immediately after giving me the challenge but didn't tell me. Wasted a weekend working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've gotten two solid leads leading to interviews through "Who's Hiring" posts, but didn't end up taking either job.

Company 1 wanted me for a remote position, but wanted to pay me about half my market rate. This is a casualty of the salary dance -- everyone is so busy hiding their numbers that sometimes you get too far into the process before you realize there's no way to make the numbers line up. If they'd listed a salary range on the original post, or I'd given a salary range in the initial contact, it would have saved everyone time.

Company 2 brought me in for an interview, then went silent for a month, then re-contacted me to resume the process after I'd already taken another job. They're a small security startup, and were really busy due to a security emergency that flared up while I was interviewing, and I slipped through the cracks. Understandable in that case, I guess, but good engineers are rarely on the job market for long, and if you're not able to focus, you will have a hard time hiring them. (Unforgivable in a larger company that has full-time recruiters and HR people, which doesn't mean it doesn't happen all the time.)

<comment><USER19> _Company 1 wanted me for a remote position, but wanted to pay me about half my market rate._

Is it possible to get anywhere close to a Silicon Valley salary on a remote position?

<comment><USER20> Sure, I always pay everybody the same (for a given position). I.e. paying for the job done, not for the needs. Else what do you take into account? "This person has no kids, so needs less cash." "This person has a vacation house; clearly need to cover those expenses". I always prefer local so if I'm hiring remote it's because of some skill I can't find locally. I want them to be a happy, productive employee, not to feel that they are getting a lesser deal.

I also have a "no salary negotiation" rule since I do a lot of negotiating, while most people don't. If I'm hiring two Scala developers, why should one get paid more because they possess better negotiating skills when what I actually need from both of them is good Scala programming skills?

(Not hiring at the moment -- at new company none of us are drawing any pay yet).

<comment><USER21> Although negotiation skills may not be valuable to you, I'd like to point out that negotiating can be a valuable skill for a developer.

I frequently negotiate with clients over requirements and implementation details. I can save a lot of development effort by negotiating away a detail that ramps up the complexity of a feature significantly. Often the client doesn't place much value on the particular detail that makes my job a lot more difficult, and is quite willing to accept the alternate approach I propose.

Some developers don't even try to negotiate that sort of thing, and end up doing a lot of work that doesn't provide much value to the client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was actually very surprised at the amount of folks that simply didn't respond _at all_ -- meaning not even an _acknowledgement_.

The folks that I did hear back from were great, though. Nothing ever actually worked out in my case, though.

<comment><USER23> In my experience for remote-position, at-least I received ack. mails like "time-zone issues are there" etc and like 20% never sent ack. at all. Strangely most often those company appear almost every-month with same job posting, I wonder whats going on.

<comment><USER24> My theory is that the no-cost HN posting allows some of these companies to keep posting perpetual openings in hopes of finding that elusive 100x developer that's willing to work for less than market rate. I can't say that bothers me too much, though. It's not that hard to see who has the same open req month after month and avoid those companies.

<comment><USER25> It's 100x now? I thought it was 10x. And theses guys work for _below_ market rate? Interesting...

I have a feeling those positions will be open for a while ;)

<comment><USER26> A 10x developer that works for 10% the normal rate, maybe :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Earlier this year I spent roughly three months job hunting exclusively through cold-emails based on Who's Hiring posts (I'm in the London area). I applied for 10 positions (and got my 10th - at a fairly large media company)

Some numbers of reasons that I felt I didn't get through the hiring process at the positions I applied for:

* Company changed their mind hiring for the position - 3 cases

* Didn't get through due to insufficient experience - 2 cases

* Didn't get through due to for poor performance on the hiring test - 3 cases

* No response received - 1 case

These numbers are a bit flaky since in the end it's a combination of factors that results in a yes/no decision. But I tried to roughly divide them into what I felt was the main "deciding factor" of the interview process.

For background, I'm a backend / "full stack" developer with 5 years experience (Most of the places that I got filtered out for experience reasons were because I didn't have enough of Brand X, etc)

<comment><USER28> Were there any hints you noticed in retrospect that the insufficient experience or a bad hiring test results were probable? If I could somehow predict those experiences up front I think it would save myself and them time and anxiety by stopping short. The best I have on the experience bit is just being very honest up front with how familiar with that Brand I am rather than trying to skate by and stretch the truth e.g. "I can do C with classes so I know C++!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am a software engineer at Periscope Data ([https://www.periscopedata.com](https://www.periscopedata.com)), and discovered the company through a Who's Hiring thread, and we have hired at least two other software engineers through HN Who's Hiring since then as well.

I was searching for "scala" and they had the word "scalable" :-)

<comment><USER30> Hah, I have the same problem, but the flip side. I'm searching the "who wants to be hired" posts on behalf of my company ([https://www.rallyhealth.com](https://www.rallyhealth.com)).

I search "scala" and get excited when I see 20 or so hits, but almost all of them are "scalable"

<comment><USER31> Try searching for "Scala " or "Scala." or "Scala,".

<comment><USER32> I was happy to discover Firefox now has a "whole words" option when searching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Applied for software developer position at Top Hat ([https://tophat.com](https://tophat.com)). Ended up getting hired as their 2nd employee. Worked there for 5 years, after being promoted to VP Engineering and eventually Chief Architect.

Saw the company go from 6 people to 120 people. Incredible ride!

</comment><comment><USER34> Thank you for asking this! I was thinking about what's the best way to ask something like this - I was too negative about the $subject to ask anything without offending people.

I have been watching these for months now - for a long time just out of curiosity and recently because I'm starting to look for a new job.

My own experience is that a single digit percentage of these jobs actually sound like there might be people who can interview for those if one had to check all tick marks on the skills and experience requirements faithfully!

This to me is baffling and discouraging as I typically don't want to bother with jobs I can't check all boxes for even though I am fairly confident I could easily do those jobs!

Anyone who was hired - can you comment on the delta between what the job posting asked for and what you actually had along with how closely what you actually did matched with what was asked for?

<comment><USER35> At GitLab, we have this line at the bottom of our job postings:

      Avoid the confidence gap; you do not have to match all the listed requirements exactly to apply.

We believe that while it would be nice to have someone that exactly checks all the boxes, we are willing to look at candidates that might not feel they are all the way there.

<comment><USER36> I'm impressed. This shows a lot of self-awareness. Makes me think that there's a big disconnect in hiring at companies where they're actually looking for people who check all the boxes and then complain about not filling positions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> About 18 months ago I posted on "Who wants to be hired?" and saw that Realm was looking for people in the monthly "Who's hiring" thread. I think it was Tim ('ello mate, hope you got the bucket picture) who posted those on HN back then.

I reached out to them, alongside a number of other startups that were interested in remote workers or had an office in Copenhagen (my SO and I wanted to move there from southern France). I got to the final stages of interviewing with a handful of companies before choosing Realm.

I initially applied for an engineer position on their C++ backend database, but was offered a team lead position. I'm currently leading the Realm Object Server team in Copenhagen.

We're always looking for great people around the globe, either remote, or through relocation packages.

<comment><USER38> The job listings on your web site don't suggest that remote work positions are available. If that's really the case, then I respectfully suggest updating the text.

(I really appreciate the effort Realm has put into supporting the development community by hosting conference videos; you're definitely creating a lot of goodwill that way.)

<comment><USER37> It looks like there's a change in strategy here, which goes against what I posted initially. I wasn't really aware of it, and it's still up for grabs on a case-by-case basis, but from the looks of it, we're now mainly interested in local candidates.

Apologies if I created any confusion by claiming something without fact- checking first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I used to browse the "who's hiring" every month, even though I had a job I loved. I saw an ad for an MLB team (Astros) looking for an analyst, which was super interesting to me. I sent in an application, went through the process and ended up taking the job.

I don't browse them anymore, there is no way there is anything better for me out there right now.

</comment><comment><USER4> The job I currently have I got from a "who's hiring" post about 3 years ago. When I first started there was a team of 4, now it's just a team of two, me and the founder. Back in June 2016 I was told that the company couldn't pay me anymore so I had to find another job. I think I sent out 20 or so applications from the most recent "who's hiring" at the time and didn't get a single response.

</comment><comment><USER40> While I have not, I have had three experiences recently that I would like to relay for whatever it is worth. In the past years that I have responded to these monthly posts, three of them have progressed into multiple phone/Skype interviews and two of those multiple phone /Skype interviews have progressed to on site interviews one in San Francisco and one in Berlin.

The one that consisted solely of multiple rounds of phone/Skype interviews went on over the course of a few months and had positive feedback each time. Very recently one of the cofounders emailed me and said they have decided that they aren't going to hire for this role at all. So it was interesting to see this company advertising the same position yesterday. The cofounder emailed me a week ago.

The two interviews I had that progressed from multiple phone/Skype interviews to actual on site interviews were very similar. I felt that the onsite went very well and the feedback that I got from the recruiters was that "everyone really liked me" and "thought it was a good fit" and "how did I feel about it. In each of those I had mutual positive feedback and said I was interested in moving forward.

What followed in both of these was unprofessional and disrespectful behavior. Recruiters responded with "Great, you will hear back from me by the end of the day" and we talked salary and relocation issues. And then days and weeks would go by with radio silence. Needless to say this puts the candidate in a really awkward position. Feeling that enough time had significantly passed I reached out to the recruiters and new assurances would come about they are waiting on something and they would be getting back in touch asap, by the end of the day or latest tomorrow etc. Then the dithering and silence would be being anew.

All three of these companies had postings yesterday for the exact same positions. In fact all three perennially post these same positions on the "Who's Hiring" threads.

Anyway, thanks for letting me share.

<comment><USER41> I wish you would name the companies so I can avoid them.

<comment><USER40> You don't think people would be upset if I did that? I wish there were a good forum to do so. Because like you mentioned people could potentially avoid a similar experience.

<comment><USER42> I agree that you probably should not post the names publicly. But it might be appropriate to email the forum moderator a link to your above story and a link to each of the three postings in question as an "FYI" and leave it up to them as to how they wish to handle it. They might well be interested in hearing that specific companies are abusing the privilege to post free job postings once a month.

<comment><USER40> Thats not a bad suggestion. Thanks. I wish there was an alternative to glassdoor where people could get this type f information out there, both good and bad. I am kind of put off by the whole look, feel and experience of glassdoor. Its a great idea though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Yep. Got hired by a German startup as a senior software developer, worked there remotely 3 years and quit last year. Our tech team grew from 3 to 10ish, and I think most were hired through a "who's hiring" post.

</comment><comment><USER44> Yup, came to Smarkets ([https://smarkets.com/](https://smarkets.com/)) 3 years ago via hiring thread. Before that got to a number of interviews through earlier ones.

Some of our more recent engineers have come via the monthly thread too.

</comment><comment><USER45> Twice, actually. The only two engineering jobs I've had so far.

First time: Sqor Sports (~50 person startup), I was an entry level 'Platform Engineer.' Sent an email with my resume, got on a Skype call with the CTO, talked about some code on my Github. Then went in for an in person interview, talked to him, VP of Engineering, and the head of DevOps who would eventually be my boss. Only technical questions were about linked lists. Learned a lot, made friends and connections over the 7 months I was there. Then the company had a huge round of layoffs which I survived, but knew the company was going downhill, so I started looking again.

The first of the month came around, and a couple days later I got a response from another email I sent via a 'Who's Hiring' HN post, a company by the name of Distribute (~20 person startup). Showed the CTO some of my code on Github again, then met in person, did a very quick, to the point interview. Was asked to implement DFS in python, took 5 minutes. Talked a bit about Python modules and unit testing and in about half an hour I had a job offer as a Python Engineer, with a salary 1.5x the previous company. The entire process from my first email to the offer took less than a day. Gave my two weeks and I've been working there ever since.

</comment><comment><USER46> Went through phone + video screen, in-person interview (they flew me down), and was finally hired several years back (May 2013 was the posting date, but I replied directly to an individual @apple.com email; can't find the original HN post) as a full time Sr Engineer at Apple through exactly this. I was living in Portland, OR at the time, so they paid for relocation too. Took a few weeks, but there was communication on both sides throughout.

</comment><comment><USER47> I was hired 2 years ago by Angaza to be one of their early engineers. Found the role when I was idly trawling through the massive hiring thread one evening, mildly dissatisfied with my job at the time, but not really actively looking for a new job.

The company's mission was exactly what I was looking for -- a chance to do good in the world with technology. I reached out via email, got a prompt response, and have been here since.

We are still alive, still trying to lift people out of energy poverty, and still hiring. Our entry in the most recent thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12847949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12847949)

</comment><comment><USER48> I obtained my current position through a "Who's hiring" post, back from around the fall 2014 time frame.

I currently work as a full-time remote software developer for Rackspace's OnMetal product ([https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal](https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal)), which can be succinctly described as a bare-metal cloud.

It's been an enjoyable position in many dimensions: interesting work, open- source focused development, a large degree of autonomy and flexibility, and highly competent teammates.

I believe the main reason I got a phone interview was due to the email I wrote in response to that post. It described my most recent professional experience in terms of how it challenged me to grow as a software developer, an overview of how it worked and what technologies I used to build it, and what value that work ultimately provided. That modicum of effort was well-rewarded.

Actually getting hired also depended on doing fairly well during the subsequent interview process, but that process wouldn't have happened without standing out somehow in that initial interaction.

tl;dr: Write a good cover letter!

</comment><comment><USER49> Yep. Sent an email a couple months back from a WhoIsHiring thread. Got hired after about 7 rounds. By a company 15 mins away from my house. :)

<comment><USER50> 7 rounds?? Does that mean you go in on 7 seperate occasions?

<comment><USER51> Seems like the standard 2 phone screens + 5 onsite interviews.

<comment><USER52> 5 onsite interviews? Since when is that 'standard'? Unless you mean one day with talking to 5 different people. I wouldn't consider that to be 5 separate 'rounds', though.

<comment><USER53> We do the following:

1\. look at resume

2\. recruiter phone screen, just basic are you a human who knows how to answer the phone, usually 15-30 minutes

3\. tech phone screen, 45 minutes

4\. half-day in-person set of interviews, some tech and some not

And then make a decision, although we'll filter out at each step.

<comment><USER54> This is interesting. Why not do another in-person half-day?

It's been forever since I was involved in on-site interviewing but it used to be pretty standard to have more than one (but usually not more than two) rounds of in-person interactions.

The point being:

A) avoid "having a bad day" bias on both sides

B) not decide too quickly on the "maybe" candidates

C) get more senior people in to convince the outstanding ones

Any strong "don't hire" reactions could cut this short of course but it seems like a good idea to give it a little more time for a serious candidate.

Is that not done anymore, or are you trying to make your hiring decisions faster than other companies?

(And in either case, do you have any insight as to why?)

<comment><USER52> 2 in-person interviews means twice that an employed developer has to either take a PTO day (for something that might not work out), or lie to their boss for why they need to take a really long lunch. Also a lot of companies fly candidates in to interview (i.e. Google), it'd be really expensive to fly the candidate out twice, plus the candidate is effectively investing at least 2 days for the round trip flight and interview.

Since it's a buyer's market for developers (supposedly, I haven't always seen evidence of that out here in the midwest), a developer that's already employed (and thus, signalling that they're good enough to keep their job, which makes them more desirable to other corporations) isn't going to want to take a bunch of time off for interviews with a single company (especially if they're actively looking for work with other companies too - going through the process with 4 or 5 companies could easily eat up most of my PTO time for the year).

I know I hate to take a PTO day for an interview, and if you made me take two you better be willing to pay me an ass load of money and be doing something I really want to do.

Besides, the interview process is exhausting enough. Since so many companies have intense coding exercises or quizzes you have to practice for (especially since they rarely warn you what you're going to be asked you pretty much have to refresh your entire computer science degree), I may have spent 20-30 hours in my spare time refreshing my knowledge ahead of the interview already. I had a five hour intense onsite interview at Google and I needed a couple days just to recover from the mental exhaustion of it. If I know you're going to do that to me twice, for maybe a 25% chance of getting the job (assuming a handful of other good candidates), I might just not bother altogether.

My girlfriend is going in for her second onsite interview in a couple days, but she's in corporate real estate, and all she had to do to prepare is get dressed and make sure she had her portfolio. The first interview they asked her a bunch of personality questions, some questions about her job history, and looked at her portfolio. If that was as intense as a developer interview was, it wouldn't be AS big of a deal to have two onsites.

<comment><USER54> I see your points.

Flying someone in twice probably only makes sense for higher-level positions, though you could always schedule two days of interviews on the same trip. Having already paid for the flight and expenses, you could make an argument for it that most flown-in candidates would I think accept.

(For local candidates, AFAICT the "doctor's appointment" or similar excuse seems pretty easy to manage.)

As to the exhausting Google-style interviews, I guess they're designed as a one-pass filter. Which seems unfortunate -- many people are more compelling on the second pass -- but apparently works pretty well for giant ad brokerages that also happen to do lots of computer-science-y stuff.

<comment><USER52> The vast majority of onsite interviews I've had were exhausting Google style interviews. Generally speaking, the ones that haven't been were the ones where I got the job (exception is the current job, that was a two hour sit down exam where I was left alone. I made it, but I'm surprised I did. I've seen dozens of people come in and fail at the test since).

My favorite interview, in fact, was one were a grizzled veteran (he was the Lead Programmer on NBA Jam), asked me a couple questions on the code sample I brought in, showed me an example (uncommented) class from their actual code base (I verified later) and asked me to interpret what it's doing, asked me a couple more questions, then said "Okay, I know you can handle the job, now let's see what you really know."

And he proceeded to ask me deep questions about memory and graphics, which I could only partially answer most of them, and then he proceeded to teach me about the details.

It felt more like a mini-lecture at that point than a pop quiz ("Do you know this? No? Well tough! Better look it up later. Next question!"). I legitimately learned things from that interview that I can still recall today.

Then I had a friendly chat with the president of the company afterwards, who used to work for Midway and designed many classic arcade games, most notably Rampage, about what they do at the company. I played that game a ton when I was a kid, so I was happy just to be chatting to him like we happened to run into each other at a family BBQ.

I was in and out of there in about an hour, and there wasn't even a weed-out phone screen.

Then I got a job offer a few days later, which I ended up accepting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I actually got my current job at IBM Watosn through a Who's Hiring post.

It stuck out to me because my hiring manager put his email in the post. Since I would be talking to an actual person rather than applying into a black hole, I decided to send an email asking for more details.

A few months and several remote interviews later, I got an offer.

I can't find the actual post anymore though.

</comment><comment><USER56> I got hired at Twitter(pre-IPO) through the monthly Who's Hiring post. Definitely the best outcome from multiple povs - career, money, learning, future-proofing. I would literally not be able to do what I am doing today if I hadn't clicked on that HN Who's Hiring thread & taken a chance.

</comment><comment><USER57> Yes. Capsule ([http://capsulecares.com/](http://capsulecares.com/)). Interned while in school, contracted for a month after graduation (couldn't work full time at the time), and now joining as a full time employee.

They posted in the last Who's Hiring and it was similar to the one I replied to.

</comment><comment><USER58> I got hired at my current gig through a who's hiring ad. Our recruiter had sent me a message on LinkedIn, which I basically ignored, but when I saw the Who's Hiring post, I reached out and was eventually hired.

I've even tried doing a "who's hiring" post myself, but it didn't produce strong candidates.

</comment><comment><USER59> Yep, my current job is with a company I found via "who's hiring". (I'm in the UK, outside London, if it matters)

<comment><USER60> This is good to hear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I was hired from the monthly posts! Firepoint's Phil posted the ad when I was looking for post-grad employment. We chatted, they were exactly as described, and then they flew me out to meet in person. Couldn't have asked for a better team to work with, thanks HN!

</comment><comment><USER62> I just accepted a job kind of through this. It was with a big tech company but the recruiter ended up having me interview with a different team than the one advertised in the thread.

I submitted a thread yesterday about doing reviews for who's hiring companies but it seems like it was deleted or I didn't submit it correctly. I think there should definitely be more open dialog directly related to these companies posting.

I have had a lot of luck getting interviews through this process and I'm currently writing a blog post on how I approached it and tried to game my way in almost to interviews.

After reading the post by TheMog about the emails they received I can see now why putting in a little effort goes a long way for this.

</comment><comment><USER63> I got hired from a "want to be hired" type post, not replying to a company listing.

I was hired recently as a product designer, and my understanding is that the CTO saw me in a thread and passed me on to the design team. Overall, a great experience, because I was talking to real people from the jump, rather than going through a recruiter/web form layer in the beginning.

I've gotten many other inquiries from similar postings, but few were of interest. In general though, the answer to the question "do people respond to the postings" is a strong yes.

\---

The freelancing section is a different story. I've only gotten one serious lead ever from that, and he dropped off shortly after in search of cheaper labor. So it goes.

</comment><comment><USER64> For a couple years at Matasano, the Hiring thread was our most successful recruiting tool.

</comment><comment><USER65> Throwaway from my main account.

I am a recent grad and I was looking for a job since May to Sept. I applied to a lot of places from the HN Who's hiring threads.

I thought I'd post my stats below:

Remote: I applied to around 25 of these posts - I got only ~3 replies.

* Coinbase: Had a hacker rank challenge that didn't work seem to work (and was disqualified)

* Hola Networks: Extremely slow & async (took almost a month)

      - Google Docs code test (2 questions - was not allowed to use an external editor or compile my code) and the contact refused to talk to me before I had complete this challenge.

Now for in-person local interviews (in and around Toronto):

I must have applied to over 50 companies posted in that timeframe. A few rejected at first reply (needed more experience although the posting itself didn't mention how much experience was needed), a few didn't bother replying and finally of those who did reply (~10):

* 1st interview stage: went to about 5 companies (rejected for culture fit, not enough experience, didn't do well at the white board [0]). Others made me use hacker rank or other similar tools.

* 2nd Stage: white boards (most went well apart from [0]). One hired an internal referral (and rejected me).

* 3rd Stage: Rejected because they had better candidates. One offered me a Job Offer (but not in my field at all - it was a call center support role - they why even interview my coding skills? :/)

Notes:

Overall, while I didn't have a lot of success at HN Who's hiring, the quality of interviews was much much better than from other places I had applied. If I were looking for a job again, I'd definitely use it as a source of Jobs.

[0] - It was at an American car manufacturer: First stage: phone call with coding questions over the phone (and verified against answers his paper) and 2nd stage: in person, they kept asking me _THE_ _EXACT_ _DEFINITIONS_ of various stuff in Java (I explained what they were, and what they did but they were not the exact definition as in Wikipedia - WHICH THEY WERE VIEWING AS THEY WERE INTERVIEWING ME)

</comment><comment><USER66> Yup, sent a cold email with HN in the subject line and ended up with a job as a software engineer at a YC startup.

</comment><comment><USER67> I did not _actually_ get a job, but reached out to 3 companies (Robinhood.io, Intel and can't recall third one) and all of them responded.

Robinhood.io (it was 3-4 years back). Got a coding challenge on HackerRank. I did horribly and obviously did not make progress.

Intel's position was in Portland, OR. I am in Bay Area. I inquired about working from Bay Area offices. The position required me to be onsite.

Can't recall 3rd company. Email communications only and figured it doesn't work for us.

So, I had 100% success in terms of responses, by far best acknowledgement rate.

</comment><comment><USER68> I was doing the hiring for Netherlands Cancer Insitute I got maybe 40 replies with some really solid candidates. We did ~15 interviews and made a couple of offers. But the people we liked had too high salary requirements (or mine is too low, haha). We've tried to persuade them not everything is about money to no avail. I will definitely post the salary range in the ad next time.

Apart from that it was a really pleasant experience and handling the emails was an interesting break from what I usually do.

<comment><USER69> > But the people we liked had too high salary requirements (or mine is too > low, haha)

Not everything is about liking the candidate. You don't have to like them for them to do a good job, because if you don't hire the ones with high salary requirements, you end up with no one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I was hired at Moveline as a software engineer (MEAN + CoffeeScript + Golang) back in the summer of '13 via HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5971762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5971762)

The company shut down in '14\. A few former Moveliners and I co-founded Crater in early '15 ([https://crater.co](https://crater.co)).

</comment><comment><USER71> I believe I answered Leaflabs' ad here in March 2015. I was put through the interview process and still work here as a Member of Technical Staff.

</comment><comment><USER72> Found my current gig at 500px through Cmd+F "Toronto". It was the most effective filter for finding progressive tech companies. Also interviewed at a couple other places. This was the most interesting by far. Started out as just a series of conversations regarding technologies/processes used at 500px and other places I've worked and the conversations evolved into an offer.

</comment><comment><USER73> As a freelancer, I've found lots of work through HN. My most recent posts [0] have gotten a decent amount of attention and I usually get emails for a few days after the posting. I find that most people from HN are my best clients, but a few are people who I have absolutely no interest working for (never reply to emails, low pay, confusing project specifications.) They rarely lie in the middle.

I'd bet that freelancers (or people hiring freelancers) are way more successful than people looking for full-time jobs, because the process of hiring an employee usually involves a lot more people than just one "normal person" typing up a comment on HN - a handful of people will work together with budgeting, interviewing, salary discussions, HR, etc to get a person hired as opposed to a freelancer who can be hired by just one person who says "sounds good, here's the project, let's get started."

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12853391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12853391)

</comment><comment><USER74> I got a pre-senior year internship at PagerDuty through a Who's Hiring post back in 2011. Ended up converting to full time the next summer and working there for nearly four years. A+ experience, would apply through HN posts again.

The post in question: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2431094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2431094)

</comment><comment><USER75> At my place of work we no longer post in Who's Hiring threads because we found the quality of engineers applying to be relatively poor.

Based in London.

<comment><USER76> Without context, what does this mean? It could simply reflect the quality of your advert rather than the medium.

For example, on yesterday's Who's Hiring I saw a London advert for a full stack dev with 4-5 years experience for £38k-£44k[1].

That's a very low salary for London.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846786)

<comment><USER77> Honestly, all London companies who posted salary range are quite unimpressive...

The ones around £40k are not even trying to recruit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Other side of the table: we've hired at least 2 people from the "Who's Hiring" posts at here at iRobot.

<comment><USER79> Out of curiosity, for what specialties? I appreciate your help in getting my resume in front of humans up there, but I'm still kinda upset I couldn't get anyone to even talk to me.

Also, y'all better be nice to my first-cousin-one-removed-in-law.

<comment><USER78> Both of the people that we hired through my iRobot posts are embedded software engineers (both on my team, actually).

I'm sorry that we didn't get back to you, though - I saw that I replied to you when you asked about your status, but our HR people should have closed the loop with you too. That's our bad; my apologies!

I think we've gotten a lot better at recruiting communication in the last couple of years, both for "yes" and "no" situations. Of course that doesn't help you from a while ago, but hopefully it's better for more recent candidates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> When I was searching. I went through the listings and sent out a number of messages. Not bulk, but carefully looked at each company. Gauged my interest and figured out why I wanted to work there. Nary a response. I thought it was because I was a lurker, and didn't post before that point.

<comment><USER24> Did you mention your HN handle in your application? I don't do that but I still get a pretty high response rate.

<comment><USER80> At the time I hadn't started commenting :). So didn't have a HN account to mention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've gotten a pretty high response rate to my applications to HN Who's Hiring posts, but about half those companies end up ghosting me. I had good experiences (prompt, courteous, professional, etc.) with DigitalOcean and CrowdStrike though I did not receive an offer from either.

</comment><comment><USER81> pretty sure DRChronos has been "hiring" for several years now only to put their interviewees through 2 day hackathons and then use the code they wrote

</comment><comment><USER77> Yes. Working since 1 year for one of the company regularly posting in the "Who's hiring".

</comment><comment><USER28> A few years ago I contacted a few people, and got contacted myself a few times with a "who wants to be hired" post. Some of those led to interviews, the one that led to a job was from being contacted through my "who wants to be hired" post.

</comment><comment><USER82> Yes, and I wrote a short informal introductory email along with my resume. If you don't understand the problem from the perspective of the person doing the hiring you don't come across as a good problem solver. Hiring is a social human transaction.

</comment><comment><USER83> I got an interview wit a company that I really wanted to work with. I didn't even apply with them originally so I was very pleased to have them contact me from an Ask HN thread. I didn't end up getting the job but I have no doubt that I could have.

</comment><comment><USER84> I was reached out to by almost every single company that I approached (NYC) and finally ended up accepting an offer.

If I can make a recommendation, go for the companies that supply personal email addresses. If they don't supply them, go find them.

</comment><comment><USER85> I got a couple of meetings and interviews from Who's Hiring posts but none of them resulted in offers. I'd still say it's my best and first channel for finding work beyond my network/relationships.

</comment><comment><USER86> No.

But I did get flown to the US (from Australia) for an interview.

It was for a DevRel position at a (quite successful) YC company. I've never done DevRel, but I did have a background in the field. Almost my communications was with the CTO.

</comment><comment><USER87> Interestingly, I got a job as a senior data scientist at Oracle via a "who's hiring" post, and I found out later that my hiring manager wasn't aware of it at the time. A contractor at an Oracle acquisition posted that the acquisition had open reqs, and I emailed him. He forwarded my info to a recruiter, who passed me along to the hiring manager. When talking with my manager later, we were both amused to discover that he thought I'd been approached by the recruiter, and didn't know about the HN thread.

</comment><comment><USER88> I found an internship, and my roommate has found his last two full-time jobs through "Who's hiring?". I haven't checked the thread recently, but I appreciated the early days when some companies had a filter for people coming from HN (e.g. "email firstname.lastname@example.com"). It felt like there was some sort of community.

Now there are probably 1k+ posts in those threads so I'm guessing that feeling is gone, but I still recommend it to friends that are looking.

</comment><comment><USER89> Yep, I was hired as a software engineering intern from one of Scribd's Who is Hiring posts (also ended up interviewing at Stripe by contacting them from their post).

</comment><comment><USER90> I _almost_ got hired.

I had a very good phone interview and then an interesting set of coding questions with Silicon Valley Bank. Unfortunately, before we could meet in person and _possibly_ have an offer - I got an offer from a startup I really liked but they wanted me to respond within the next few days. Given that my start date was less than three weeks out, I accepted the offer and had to quit the process but nonetheless it was quite a positive experience.

</comment><comment><USER91> It sounds a little like you are disappointed about never having succeeded at finding a job via the monthly posts.

Despite obvious reasons like lack of corresponding skills or lack of intention on the job poster's side this can have a lot of other reasons, though. Finding a good match and having the right ressources, department green lights, etc ready just at the time when you want to hire is also tough. Lots of things can go wrong. Hope you keep up trying!

</comment><comment><USER92> I got my job at YourMechanic as a Sr. Software Engineer by applying to a job posting on HN. It wasn't the monthly who's hiring thread but close enough.

</comment><comment><USER93> Yes, my first real engineering job at Factual. I applied as a data scientist (not actually really knowing what that entailed) and was re-routed to be a data/software engineer, which ended up being a great fit. Once I was at Factual I kept running and updating the Who's Hiring post and picked up some other amazing candidates, my favorite of which now works at Google LA with me! It's definitely a worthwhile funnel.

</comment><comment><USER94> My team ended up hiring a candidate found through the Who's Hiring post. I found the resumes I got to be better than those I get from HR on average.

</comment><comment><USER95> Yes, several years ago I found a great REMOTE C++ job. The first contact, the interview process and the actual work - every step with this company was very enjoyable. The team, the most important factor for me personally, consisted of extremely talented, friendly and simply great people from around the world. The company is defunct now, but I still have a nostalgia of working with these guys and gals.

</comment><comment><USER96> I sent out around 9 emails yesterday, got back 3 responses (so far). Both responses came from ads that included real emails rather than jobs@ emails.

<comment><USER97> I did the same thing for the October thread and had a much better response rate for real emails versus applications/jobs@company. I ended applying to about 25, 15 direct emails, 5 HR emails (jobs@company), and 5 applications. Only about half of the direct emails got back, but the ones that did all ended up having interviews with (about 3/15 are in later stages of interviews or have an offer). 4/5 HR emails replied, only 2-3 were genuine and of that 1 got me an interview (ended up not being a good fit anyway). Of the 5 applications, I nearly got automated rejections within 24 hours :(.

Even though the emails had lower response rates, they work much better in my experience. You get to talk to someone (usually an engineer or manager, sometimes a founder or exec) at the company.

Wish you the best!

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> We (Credit Karma) hired two engineers from September's posting. One so far from October's (5 candidates are still in pipeline, more new grads).

We've hired front-end, data engineers, and eng lead roles. A bunch of full stack engineers are in the pipeline.

I personally respond to every candidate that reaches out (scott.shumaker at credit karma dot com), so that helps ensure they don't get lost in our HR pipeline.

</comment><comment><USER99> I did 5+ years ago. It was for a senior Java engineer position in one of the cities I was hoping to move to. Ended up being one of my favorite jobs.

</comment><comment><USER100> I have. I think only sent emails to one or two companies in that month, and this one had me an offer in a couple weeks if not shorter. Much preferred their interview process to others.

And.. I'm still working there a year and a half later with no intention of leaving any time soon! The people are great and things are going quite well.

[http://gladly.com](http://gladly.com)

</comment><comment><USER101> We've hired two amazing (remote) ML and Distributed Systems engineers at Mediachain Labs from "Who's Hiring". We try to post every month. They were both excited about our vision and finding them in the wild like that was a perfect fit!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846907)

</comment><comment><USER102> Yes, twice.

First I was hired for a mid-level mostly-remote web dev position at Moveline and stayed there roughly a year until the company folded.

My current job at Socrata, where I've been quite happy for the past 18 months, also came via a monthly HN jobs thread; it has been mostly doing frontend web dev (but with enough variety).

If I find myself in need of employment again, I will undoubtedly turn to the jobs thread again.

</comment><comment><USER103> I got contacted by an advertisement agency. I worked with them remotely for a year (until I decided to join a startup)

Very nice people indeed. Projects varied in topics and difficulty. From editing HTML pages to managing RC Robots via internet and gathering/analyzing data from huge databases.

Not sure if they want me to share more info. But I'm thankful to this monthly post for it. It was a nice gig.

</comment><comment><USER104> I've hired somebody directly from a who's hiring post.

This was the post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830111).

The developer was remote - we did a couple of phone screens and sent a contract over within a week or two. I still work with him and he's one of the best engineers I know.

</comment><comment><USER17> I got an interview through one and wound up spending an entire weekend frantically working through their "assessment project" only to be told on Monday morning that they hired someone else, before even looking at my work. I don't blame HN for this, just sharing my experience. Not sure whether I'd be willing to do assessment projects in the future.

</comment><comment><USER105> I have received 3 offers through "who's hiring" for a job as a iOS developer. As a Canadian I am still waiting for some VISA requirements to finalize the job I accepted and I will be moving to SF.

I believe I got a lot more responses when applying through HN than I did elsewhere. My experience has been very good.

If the VISA does not work... square one and I guess remote work again.

</comment><comment><USER106> I got my current role at Apple via "Who wants to be hired," which, although not the same, shows the value of these threads.

</comment><comment><USER107> I've hired three from these posts.

I really wish every candidate had a one page lander that let me evaluate without clicking so many links.

</comment><comment><USER108> [raises hand]

SRE, not going to post the name of the company but its a distributed org and former YC alumni company. It's only been a few months but I am very happy there so far, and the process that resulted from reading their post here was one of the more enjoyable interviewing experiences I've had.

</comment><comment><USER109> Early in my job search, I sent a few emails out to companies through Who's Hiring. Turns out I was a bit under-qualified for the positions (college sophomore, they wanted post-terminal-degree types), but each chat was a positive experience.

Maybe 1 in 5 stopped replying before we could have a serious talk.

</comment><comment><USER110> No, but I have had some fantastic companies reach out to me, just not the right position for one reason or another. [http://angel.co](http://angel.co) ended up having the right fit though which I discovered through some other comment on HN.

</comment><comment><USER111> Yes! I learned of Mixmax ([https://mixmax.com](https://mixmax.com)) in a Who's Hiring post from last fall, interned with them from January to August of this year, and am returning early next year after I graduate.

We're still hiring like crazy :).

</comment><comment><USER112> Yep - I was lucky enough to be hired by The Guardian ([https://www.theguardian.com](https://www.theguardian.com)) :)

Oh, and we're still hiring! Happy to help if you have questions, or want to be referred. All positions are in London, UK.

</comment><comment><USER113> I've gone through the interview process and received two job offers as a result of "Who's Hiring" posts. The posts tend to come from first parties that are motivated to hire talented new members for their teams, so the opportunities are very legit.

</comment><comment><USER114> I did a couple years ago. Attack Pattern ([http://attackpattern.com/](http://attackpattern.com/)). They are still alive and well, but I ultimately had to find a different job when I decided I wanted to go remote.

</comment><comment><USER115> Not through the monthly post but I got hired at Vitrue because of this comment on HN getting me the lead: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112938)

</comment><comment><USER116> I did! I guess the title was "generalist hacker type." Here's the original post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7325886](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7325886)

</comment><comment><USER117> In my most recent job search, I drew from the Who's Hiring thread almost exclusively. I probably contacted about 10-15 companies, of which I heard back from about 5, did the full round of interviews from 2, and got hired.

</comment><comment><USER118> Several years ago, the company I worked for hired an awesome C++ dev we found from a listing I posted to "Who's Hiring". It definitely works. He was one of the most resourceful and talented developers we had.

</comment><comment><USER119> Yep, my current gig (ridewithgps.com) I found through a "who's hiring" post. Didn't have to move, I have a 15 minute bike ride to work every day and get to work with great people in a fun industry.

</comment><comment><USER120> On the company side, I've only gotten scripted applications which is a bit disheartening. Going to thumb through the "Who wants to be hired" post for November and see if I get any good leads in there.

</comment><comment><USER121> I was hired through a "who wants to be hired" post. I was looking for part- time work, provided my background, and got contacted by a great company. Not long after, we decided to make it full-time.

</comment><comment><USER122> My current job is from a "who's hiring" post. The post was in the last July edition and I was hired this last August. It's also the best job I've ever had. So there's that.

</comment><comment><USER123> I've hired about 10 folks via HN in the past years (not going to share names for obvious reasons). The average quality is really good, better than any other 'channel' i've used.

</comment><comment><USER124> To those of you remarking on the lack of response to applications:

1) recruiters get a lot of applications.

2) it's risky providing feedback. "Unlikely to be a team fit" could lead to discrimination claims.

</comment><comment><USER125> Indirectly. A friend pointed me to the forum when I was looking for a job - <USER2> reached out through the company website listed on a few posts and accepted an offer at one of them :)

</comment><comment><USER126> I got a job offer in 2015 from a company I found through their who is hiring post. I also have had lots of informal conversations and a few other interviews from those posts

</comment><comment><USER127> I ended up being hired as a result of hn conversations before who's hiring started.

I have hired one person through who's hiring. Terrific results.

</comment><comment><USER128> I've been at PillPack (pillpack.com) for more than three years now and I found them by searching for "Cambridge" in the June 2014 post.

</comment><comment><USER129> I got an interview and offer through posting in a "Who wants to be hired" thread, although I ended up taking another offer.

</comment><comment><USER130> Yes, I have gotten contracts (not salaried jobs).

</comment><comment><USER131> Yes <3 UseTrusted, Software Engineer Intern :)

</comment><comment><USER132> I hired someone who found our job listing on the "who's hiring" post and it worked out really well....

</comment><comment><USER133> Yes, I got hired in my current role through HN. Even moved countries for it (Australian now residing in NYC).

</comment><comment><USER134> In May 2014 I got two onsite interviews and one offer from the "Who wants to be hired" thread.

</comment><comment><USER135> I've only ever gotten blanket spam from posting in "Who wants to be hired?"

<comment><USER41> Try our blanket today! It is best blanket, used by astronaut!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER136> I was hired for an internship through this last summer by a Boston-area startup.

</comment><comment><USER137> I have gotten consulting gigs through it. Never looked for a full-time position

<comment><USER138> Was that through the Who's Hiring or the Seeking Freelancer ones?

</comment></comment><comment><USER139> We hired our designer through a who's hiring post earlier this year!

</comment><comment><USER140> Yep, currently transitioning to a company I found in the October thread.

</comment><comment><USER141> \- Gotten a contract gig \- My current Job was found here

I'm a front-end engineer.

</comment><comment><USER142> I found my job (InfluxData) through "Who's Hiring".

</comment><comment><USER143> Got a contract, it took awhile for a response but found it on HN.

</comment><comment><USER144> I've definitely been interviewed, never hired though.

</comment><comment><USER145> Yes! Got an internship with Twilio 5 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER146> I made one hire through Who's Hiring.

</comment><comment><USER147> I got one, back in 2012.

</comment><comment><USER148> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER149> +1</comment>


Reddit wants to fight the gender pay gap-it should disclose everyone's salaries - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/04/07/if-reddit-wants-to-fight-the-gender-pay-gap-it-should-disclose-everyones-salaries/

<comment><USER2> Their employees just need to post more salary information onto glassdoor.</comment>


Ask HN: Sharing all my startup ideas - <AUTHOR>

What do you think the best outlet/website to share startup ideas and projects is?
I come up with some many ideas for startup companies that I would love to get feedback on. As Seth Godin says, your first idea will suck. You need to have it thrashed, criticized, etc. by others before it turns into something good.
But my friends are tired of me spamming them with ideas, and I don't want to turn HN into "Sean's brain farts" <comment><USER2> I don't think first ideas suck. First executions may suck, but first ideas? Not neccesarily. I've had loads of great ideas over my lifetime that I never followed through on. Energy drinks and juicebars (me: 1994 now: everywhere), Hooters in Japan (me:2003 now: someone is doing it just now), the design of the "Chrysler 300C" (me: 1992 in art class, Chrysler: 2002ish). Proof that ideas are cheap and if you're thinking of it, someone else probably is, too.

The real value is in execution and then only good execution.

</comment><comment><USER3> I started working on a idea management web application this weekend actually. You can not only share ideas, get feedback (threaded comments with voting, HN style) but also signup potential customers. Probably will launch MVP this weekend. Would love to know what you would be looking for in such service. Email on my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> I REALLY think you're on to something with the sign up of potential customers. I know that every time I think about launching a new product, I do the same thing. Throw up a fake beta landing page for people to sign up. Run some Google/FB ads to draw in traffic. Based on the response, I can judge the quality of the idea, and get feedback from people.

If this was automated for me, all I had to do was write the copy for the idea, I would be in love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was thinking about this last night. We should start an HNideas site. Similar layout to HN, add in some areas for suggestions, maybe a button to try and form a team. It wouldn't be too hard. Maybe I'll do that tonight...

</comment><comment><USER5> Instead of sharing all, just execute one. You will learn enough to judge them on your own and you will learn that ideas don't matter - execution does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely agree, but I'm looking for an outlet to share my ideas that I won't execute on and a way to critique ideas. Partly for fun, shared knowledge, through exercises for why an idea may or may not take off...

I actually am (and have been for 2 years) executing on one idea. And I'm learning a ton...

<comment><USER5> Well that's the point - there is not much learning in critiquing ideas. Just assumptions and personal opinion. No one liked Google or Twitter as Ideas.

But anyways, since you've been executing, the next question is - shipping. What have you shipped and how often do you ship something out there?

Working on an idea forever in your own private corner is not a good learning either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Different perspective than I have, but you're right that Google/Twitter at face value aren't anything.

Well I am good at shipping. OrangeSlyce.com is the manifestation of an idea I had 2 years ago (which has changed), and we pivot, on some level (may be very small) every 2 weeks.

<comment><USER5> That's awesome then.

IMO Discussing the problem you want to solve with your idea is more useful than discussing the idea itself.

Btw, my startup Besperk ( <http://besperk.com> ) is about discussing such things. Interesting I meet you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linux Timeline - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/views?q=linux+view:timeline

<comment><USER2> Here's the same search on the timeline search engine that I built with a friend last year:

<http://onetimeline.com/timeline?query=linux>

Scroll to the bottom to get, I think, a pretty good early history given that it's all automatically generated. Shame we never got around to properly de- duping things though!

It was an evenings-and-weekends project, written in Common Lisp (SBCL) and running on a bunch of ec2 machines.</comment>


Show HN: Wuchthosting - We were frustrated by cPanel and built this - <AUTHOR> https://wuchthosting.com/?culture=en

<comment><AUTHOR> If you find time, please tell us what you think about our design and panel UI. We appreciate your feedback!

You can find our startup story here: [http://blog.wuchthosting.com/post/17710161894/wuchthosting-a...](http://blog.wuchthosting.com/post/17710161894/wuchthosting-a-2012-webhosting- startup)

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks nice and clean. It would be very easy for a novice to work with it and get their site hosted.

FYI - Your demo site is very much live ... as in I can upload and host files on your s1 server. Might create a demo account that doesn't have real FTP/MYSQL users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for your feedback. We currently limit file upload to 1mb for the test account. But I fully agree, disabling it would be more secure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The site seems to be very fast and reliable. I like the Javascript header and I love your pricing model. :P

To be honest, I think jpmc is right. Allowing demo users to upload files on a real server could cause U some serious damage one day.</comment>


Semantic Web: Making Advertising More Relevant to Consumers - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_advertising.php

<comment><USER2> I'm not saying that I don't like the idea of web 3.0 but where's the reality? While its nice to believe that we'll all create APIs that will "talk" to each others APIs - currently we can't even agree on which programming language is the "best" much less the which data format should be used. I guess if we could get a standard set like the appliance industry does with electricity (120 Volts, 60 Hz, 3, 2-3 prong plug) then it might happen. I'm not even going to touch on the invasion of privacy...

</comment><comment><USER3> "This is where the semantic Web comes in," Solomon explained. "Businesses finally understand the Internet, and recognize that advertising is a good business model - if you can make it work."

This guy's a genius. Trading hot dogs for cars is a good business model, too, _if you can make it work_. He's basically saying nothing. I wonder what his non sound-bite remarks were...

</comment><comment><USER4> In my opinion, semantic web is way ahead of its time. I'm guessing it's about 5-10 years away from mattering.</comment>


Rspamd 1.2: Fast, free and open-source spam filtering system - <AUTHOR> https://rspamd.com/announce/2016/03/21/rspamd-1.2.0.html <comment><USER2> I've started using this a few months ago on my mail server that mostly just forwards stuff to GMail, and it's been really good. It catches (and rejects) most of the bad stuff before it even ends up in GMail's filters and, more importantly, this means my forwarding server doesn't get rate-limited anymore by GMail for sending so much spam.

I've been packaging rspamd for Gentoo, and it's pretty straightforward to build and run (more so now if you run Gentoo, of course), so that's good too.

<comment><USER3> This is the first time I've seen rspamd, looks interesting, do you find it better than spamassassin?

<comment><AUTHOR> My opinion is definitely not very objective as I'm the author of this project, however, I tried to do some recent comparison of rspamd vs SA: [https://rspamd.com/misc/2016/03/03/rspamd- performance.html](https://rspamd.com/misc/2016/03/03/rspamd-performance.html) and there is another 3-rd party opinion here: [https://github.com/haraka/Haraka/pull/964#issuecomment-10069...](https://github.com/haraka/Haraka/pull/964#issuecomment-100694945).

In brief, rspamd can use the most of SA rules but it provides more optimization tricks than SA does. However, it is less mature and could be harder to setup than SA. You can also check my recent FOSDEM talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fl9i-az_Q0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fl9i-az_Q0)

I'm really sorry that this information is not in the landing page of rspamd.com - that's obviously my fault.

<comment><USER4> You may already have this posted somewhere, but a feature comparison between SA and rspamd would be very handy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I've recently ported a massive setup of SA rules and I've tried to add all functions that are supported by SA to rspamd. The only ones unsupported are pyzor/razor/dcc (all that is covered by fuzzy check: [https://rspamd.com/doc/modules/fuzzy_check.html](https://rspamd.com/doc/modules/fuzzy_check.html)).

Both systems support statistics (rspamd uses 5-gramms hidden Markov model and SA uses naive bayes), they both support different backends for statistics (redis and sqlite for rspamd), per-user statistics, autolearning. Among network checks, they support URIBLs, RBLs, DMARC, DKIM, SPF. Obviously, both systems support regexp rules. However, I'm not an expert in SA features and might thus miss something...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone using this in a large environment care to comment on how it compares to SpamAssassin, especially with regard to per-user settings and false negatives/false positives?

</comment><comment><USER5> The code is really refreshing, not surprising since the author is a BSD developer :)

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks really solid. I know one of the big methods to work around something like this is to change the destination of included links after successful delivery.

Does this provide a way to replace links in a message so that they can be evaluated on click for continuous protection? Optionally of course since this would be more of a company policy type of protection than anything else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rspamd itself does not alter message in any way. However, it keeps all urls with their relative positions during scan. Moreover, it can resolve redirects for urls (e.g. for t.co or goo.gl) and provide 'real' links. But the second part of job: links analysis and rewriting is not provided by rspamd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The level of documentation for this project is super-impressive, especially since it seems to be mainly a one-man effort. Great job on this, congrats!

(Apologies in advance to other contributors if I was incorrectly discounting their efforts; I made an assumption based on the number of commits on the repo.)</comment>


Show HN: Bluenote, a notes, task and password manager for Mac - <AUTHOR> http://bluenote.io

<comment><USER2> Nice one, well done. Any deadline for the dropbox sync?

</comment><comment><USER3> Will this use dropbox sync for syncing with an iPhone?</comment>


Verizon, Google make net neutrality pact, sources say - <AUTHOR> http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/08/google_and_verizon_have_come.html

<comment><USER2> I suspect Google is hedging their bets. Google may be big and have a lot of money, but the telecoms have more politicians in their pocket. Google has spoken out FOR net neutrality many times before. I think Google's talking to Verizon now before they start capping access to their service.

I, however, think this will backfire and make people think that Google is OK with a non-neutral network, which will give other ISPs and content providers (e.g., ESPN) an excuse to implement non-neutral policies.

Thanks for nothing, Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounded to me like they convinced Verizon _not_ to give preferential treatment.

 _Specifically, Google and Verizon's agreement could prevent Verizon from offering some prioritization to the biggest bidders who want better delivery of content on its DSL and fiber networks, according to the sources. But that wouldn't apply to mobile phones, the sources said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the companies have not officially made their announcement._</comment></comment>


How small a world is Silicon Valley? - <AUTHOR>

I recently heard about someone who was not made a job offer because he quit his last job in a bridge-burning manner, it made for a good story, and one of the people in the place he was applying to just happened to have heard it from a friend in the old company. Did he just get spectacularly unlucky, or is this sort of thing commoner than I imagine? <comment><USER2> The tech community is pretty small and Silicon Valley is even smaller. As a general rule, in any business, it is a bad idea to burn bridges. It's too small a world to do so and you are ultimately bound to bump into the people you wronged.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was surprised because before moving to SV I spent the last six years working in Bangalore, and I cannot imagine this happening there unless someone proactively went digging for background info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> SV is a very small world in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> Back when I lived there, it indeed was very common.</comment>