Ask HN:App contests -why do you Not participate(or participate) in app contests? - <AUTHOR>

Ask HN: App contests - why do you NOT participate (or participate) in app contests ?
I'm looking for data and opinions on how useful and how popular app contests are with developers
than others)
For example, I'd be interested to know whether devs are interested in app contests like http://nycbigapps.com/ (or equivalent contests within their town or state).
I'd also like to know what makes an app contest better or worse. Many govt-sponsored contests require all submitted apps to be freely available to the public (regardless of whether the app wins a prize or not). Some may require the code to be open-source. What do you think of these requirements
I'd also be interested to know what people (as consumers) think of the quality of app-contest-submissions and whether these apps are useful. <comment><USER2> I don't bother... I'd rather spend my time on paying work, or on one of the open source projects I'm already involved with, than on a contest that will pay less than my paying work (and may pay nothing at all) to create something likely to end up unsupported vaporware when the contest is over.

I build something for one or more of these reasons:

* I'm scratching a personal itch: fixing something that bugs me or creating something I want to use.

* I'm making money to take care of my family with.

* I'm creating something that I feel will make a lasting difference in the world, in some way that is important to me.</comment>


Apple's amusingly round reuse figures - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2016/04/apples-amusingly-round-reuse-figures.html <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the elevation of Mt Everest as determined in 1856:

> Peak XV (measured in feet) was calculated to be exactly 29,000 ft (8,839.2 > m) high, but was publicly declared to be 29,002 ft (8,839.8 m) in order to > avoid the impression that an exact height of 29,000 feet (8,839.2 m) was > nothing more than a rounded estimate

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

<comment><USER3> > This reminds me of the elevation of Mt Everest as determined in 1856:

Or the joke about the museum guide telling visitors the dinosaur skeleton is 100,000,005 years old, because when he started there 5 years ago, an expert told him it was 100 million years old.

<comment><USER4> I have Creationists in my family. I don't poke the bear.

But I've always wanted to ask how the Earth is perpetually 6,000 years old.

Another question, if the assorted Creationists can't agree on the true age, then why do they get huffy about science's varying estimates?

Oh well.

<comment><USER5> I think the answer is pretty obvious: at the moment it's rounded to "6,000 years old". Presumably in several hundred years they'll round to 6,500, then 7,000 after that...

Of all things to question a Creationist about, the suspiciously round 6,000 doesn't seem like one to me...

<comment><USER6> The notion of therebeing Creationists around in the twenty-sixth century terrifies me!

<comment><USER7> What's another few thousand years? People haven't been taking Genesis literally since at least Origen's day (~200 AD).

\---

For who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars? and that the first day was, as it were, also without a sky? And who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life? and again, that one was a partaker of good and evil by masticating what was taken from the tree? And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.

Origen via Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 4, p. 365 [http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04/Page_365.html](http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04/Page_365.html)

<comment><USER8> I agree with you that nothing will convince creationists. But Origen's Genesis 1 was far from representative of his time. Sure, he's an early example of not taking Genesis 1 literally, but that's only because he was pushing a gnostic "the physical world is evil" agenda. People weren't that interested in his views of creation, and IMO they're only known because his other ideas were popular. In the places where gnosticism did catch on, it mostly dealt with what happened before the 7 days of creation (eg John 1), ignoring Genesis 1. In the next 200 years, the church declared gnosticism to be heretical, making Origen's non-literal Genesis 1 heretical implicitly without any fucks being given.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They simply rounded the weights in pounds to the next hundred which resulted in the extra 644lbs.

Python code:

        import math
        def roundup(x):
    	return int(math.ceil(x / 100.0)) * 100

        materials_in_kgs =  [12750000,6090000,5420000,2050000,1340000,86000,18000,20000,59000,2000,3000,1000]
        materials_in_lbs = [i*2.204 for i in materials_in_kgs]

        materials_in_lbs_rounded = [roundup(i) for i in materials_in_lbs]

        print sum(materials_in_lbs_rounded)

<comment><USER10> Their marketing decision is really odd. I guess the engineer that came up with kg numbers decided to round it in 1000kg, which is reasonable to me. Whoever got the number don't like kg, and converted to lb. Someone else adding the number up actually counts in 100lb, and thinks it's better just to round up.

And yeah, the last two zero is fishy, I first tried to do a simple round, and wondered where's the extra 600. It's always fun to write it in a different language:

        100×+/⌈.01×2.204×12750000 6090000 5420000 2050000 1340000 86000 18000 20000 59000 2000 3000 1000

<comment><USER9> Exactly. Too bad two wrongs don't make a right.

What language is that?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's APL

<comment><USER9> Thank you! It seems very interesting, terse and powerful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find it very amusing that Apple is boasting about reducing the size of packaging, but they're still shipping accessories from their online store out in boxes about 15 times larger than required.

[http://i.imgur.com/sMyvO6o.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/sMyvO6o.jpg)

I've noticed this not only with their packaging for third party accessories, but also for first party ones like the new Magic Mouse 2

<comment><USER12> I would assume this is to create greater logistical efficiencies in ways we don't see.

Side note, I'd be quite interested to see the details of their contracts with courier companies (e.g. TNT deliver all of their new products here in Australia, although AusPost send/receive product replacements)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I always assumed it was to make other efficiencies elsewhere, but it's difficult to appreciate that when you get an order shipped in two massive boxes and an envelope when it would easily ship in one [http://imgur.com/a/Yv9wD](http://imgur.com/a/Yv9wD)

> I'd be quite interested to see the details of their contracts with courier > companies

This is always something that has interested me. Most of the time I get my orders from TNT, but sometimes they'll also come from Startrack. I once had a single order spread over both TNT and Startrack, and a friend ordered iPhone at the same time as me (during launch) and his came via Startrack and mine came via TNT. For what it's worth, Apple uses TNT to ship stuff internally to its retail stores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In metric countries (like Australia) Apple does publish the numbers in kg: [https://www.apple.com/au/environment/resources/](https://www.apple.com/au/environment/resources/) :)

<comment><USER14> But they've clearly been converted to pounds, then back to kilograms.

      Lead 19,994
      Tin 1,999
      Silver 2,999
      Gold 1,000

<comment><USER15> Interesting. For the UK they just say 1 tonne, 2 tonnes, etc - [https://www.apple.com/uk/environment/resources/](https://www.apple.com/uk/environment/resources/)

So everyone's trying to play this as some conspiracy of fictional numbers. All we've actually found is that Apple do localize their site, and possibly some weaknesses in how they do so.

<comment><USER16> Which is kinda interesting in itself.

<comment><USER14> Evidently so. This is the highest-rated comment I've ever written here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Somebody clearly never learned about significant figures. This happens all the time even among people who really should know better, giving false precision to imprecise measurements.

<comment><USER18> It's probably an educational issue as well. In the place where I came from, the people who ended up writing promotional copy were mostly humanities students in high school and university, but significant figures is considered an "intermediate" science topic not taught to humanities students.

<comment><USER19> In the US, significant figures are included in standard high school science courses. That doesn't mean they aren't forgotten though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice catch, I didn't notice that at all when I saw their numbers originally, though the fact that the Tin and Silver numbers are a multiple of the Gold numbers should be a big tip off.

One thing I'd like to know more about is how environmentally sensitive this processing actually is. My guess is that this takes place somewhere where they do a lot of other extraction from electronics components as well, probably China, and those processes are not necessarily too environmentally friendly. Extracting Gold, Tin, Copper, Silver, etc. often involves the use of strong acids, and the use of many other potentially hazardous chemicals. If care is taken it can be a relatively clean process, but if care is not taken it's pretty easy to damage the environment by just dumping the waste byproducts.

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

</comment><comment><USER21> My rant related to this:

How It's Made[1] often has lines like, "The worker places the assembly in a oven that heats the metal to 1,292 degrees Fahrenheit". Which is an oddly- specfic temperature before you realize they just converted it from 700°C. Since it's highly doubtful the oven maintains _precisely_ 700°C—and since it's not important to the viewer what the exact temperature is anyway—it annoys me that they don't just say "1,300°F" instead.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_It%27s_Made](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_It%27s_Made)

<comment><USER22> Fun fact: the reason the human body temperature is said to be 98.6 °F is because of rounding between units. It originally was said to be 100 °F, which when converted to Celsius is 37.77 °C. Round that down to 37 °C and convert back and you get the oddly specific 98.6 °F (despite the fact the human body temperature can fluctuate quite a few degrees [Fahrenheit] throughout the day).

I read this somewhere (credible), but I can't remember where, so sorry, but no source. It may be wrong, but the 98.6 °F is oddly specific and happens to line up perfectly with a round number when converted to °C.

<comment> King-Aaron When it comes to things like this, I just don't understand how you guys using the imperial system can do your mental arithmetic easily.

<comment><USER23> We can't! (or I can't)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well, most of the world uses metric system and this dashboard is more about providing magnitude of recycling to public than an accountant statement.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why bother converting from SI units in the first place? The public will never get comfortable with metric if publishers keep doing extra work to maintain the status quo.

Even scientific educational programming (Nova, NASA TV, etc.) often uses US customary units; metrication is just ridiculously overdue at this point.

</comment><comment><USER26> No luck finding the 644 missing pounds but I do note that the PDF version of the document (I assume the original) reports the steel figure as 23,101,000 instead of 28,101,000 . That however seems to be a typo that was fixed later.

I'm guesses the missing 644 pounds is platinum. Several articles on Liam talk about the metal but it is not included in the list, presumably for space reasons.

[http://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_...](http://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Responsibility_Report_2016.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER27> Journalism I guess. Apple recovered 2,204 lbs sounds better than about a tonne.

<comment><USER28> Does it? Mind you, I conceptualise weights in kilos then have to make an effort to translate to pounds so maybe that sounds worse automatically.

<comment><USER29> Probably just because of the larger number I'd say.

<comment><USER30> They should given the number in grammes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Lots of examples abound, of numbers that can be explained by unit conversion.

31.8 mm bicycle handlebar = 1-1/4 inches

68 degrees F (Jimmy Carter recommendation during energy crisis) = 20 C

It's also interesting that the US units of measure are _defined_ in terms of metric. For instance there's no standard inch. The inch is defined as 25.4 mm.

</comment><comment> King-Aaron I don't know if anyone here has ever loaded an articulated semi-trailer with a loader, but something to note is that these figures (by the ton) are generally what a company like Apple would receive from the company doing the logistics here. Having figures by the whole ton means you can easily calculate how many trucks, containers and ships are needed for the process.

Somewhere, there would be precise figures to the kilogram, but the logistics mob wouldn't usually pass that on as when you're dealing with this sort of level of material, it's easier to work in lots of a thousand kilos as opposed to individual kilograms.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have a off topic question. How have you reused your old phone? I've seen some typical lists on the web - but nothing impressive given how powerful these small computers are.

<comment><USER33> I use it as a surveillance camera with a free Android app that streams the picture from the camera as an MJPEG using a built in HTTP server. It's pretty nice, I forwarded the ports on my modem and now I can see what's happening in my home from anywhere in the world :)

<comment><USER34> I do the same with an old iPhone running AirBeam. Very handy and much easier to deal with than some poorly secured IoT camera or DVR with broken security

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The russian version have it in tonnes, which is funny looking:

Золото 1

[https://www.apple.com/ru/environment/resources/](https://www.apple.com/ru/environment/resources/)

</comment><comment><USER36> "911 Metallurgist, which helps mines and recyclers extract precious metals from ore and, apparently, phones, has exhaustively checked the iPhones and other mobile devices. Each iPhone 5, for instance, contains $1.58 of gold, $.36 of silver, $.05 of platinum, and $.12 of copper."

I'd posit the missing 644 pounds (<1kg) is platinum.

<comment><USER37> 644 pounds >> 1 kg. Actually slightly less than 300 kg

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> how is this a controversy ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Who said it was? More like an amusing easter egg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I thought the patent on round numbers got thrown out?

</comment><comment><USER40> Why is this at the top of hn?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because people voted it up and found it amusing?

<comment><USER41> But oh noes, with the most critical reading possible it could conceivably portray something negative about Apple!

I'm amused that the vast majority of the comments here are mad at you for finding something mildly interesting and writing an article about it. HN is a weird place at times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Of course these are not exact numbers, did Apple ever say they are?! The point of this blog post eludes me.

<comment><USER43> What do you mean they are not exact numbers? 2204 does seem to imply 4 significant digits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> They forgot to count the 2204# (1000kg) of self-congratulatory PR value extracted. Kind of ruins their bragging rights though, when you realize how much usable material they're recovering on the cheap. They're basically just doing the obvious, efficient and profitable thing. It has taken markets a long time to catch up with how obvious it is, though. As metal prices go up, it will become even more profitable, and they'll be glad they already have the infrastructure in place.

<comment><USER45> >They forgot to count the 2204# (1000kg) of self-congratulatory PR value extracted. Kind of ruins their bragging rights though

No it doesn't. At all. Doing the right thing _should_ , at the least, be worth positive social recognition ("public relations") at any level, from the largest corporations right down to individuals who work to keep their local neighborhood clean. Ideally, doing the "right thing" should also be _profitable_ so that the Free Market can efficiently optimize towards it. That's part of the point of enforcing the price inclusion of externalities.

There is nothing negative about doing something good simply because it's efficient and profitable. I very much dislike the self-flagellating attitude that somehow comes to the conclusion that in order to be worthy of praise doing good must be ultimately rare, unpleasant and costly. Sometimes that is the case, and extra praise and recognition is part of the feedback loop to try to make it more common, but in general society should work to make barriers to positive change as low as possible.

Even if something like this is efficient and profitable once it's up and running there is still significant capital expenditure (both material and human) involved in setting it up in the first place. As always, that capital could be invested elsewhere, in areas that might be equally or more profitable and involve less risk and variability as well. Merely looking outcomes with risk-weighting and considering opportunity costs is always a mistake. You wrote:

>It has taken markets a long time to catch up with how obvious it is

Sometimes you may know better then the entirety of the market (business opportunity!), but sometimes you should consider that perhaps the markets recognize something that you don't. Maybe the reason this hasn't been more common is that it only looks "obvious" on the surface and taking into account life time costs, capital requirements and so forth most places have found that it has not been worth it.

So when companies do forge ahead it is still worthy of recognition, particularly to the extent that it may encourage more to follow and ultimately make it more effective for everyone.

<comment><USER44> Where we agree:

"Ideally, doing the "right thing" should also be profitable so that the Free Market can efficiently optimize towards it." = "It has taken markets a long time to catch up with how obvious it is."

"There is nothing negative about doing something good simply because it's efficient and profitable" = the absence of anything negative said about it. I said it was obvious [good], efficient [good] and profitable [good, but mostly for Apple]. And that they're congratulating themselves to reap PR value (absolutely true).

"...taking into account life time costs, capital requirements and so forth most places have found that it has not been worth it." = "It has taken markets a long time to catch up with how obvious it is." And the reason they're catching up now is because of scarcity, and because costs of wholesale looting metals from the commons are beginning to climb to their true value, i.e. irreplaceability. Apple's costs for recycling include the gift card they give you for turning in your old device -- which is some quantity of their own goods & services at cost -- and shipping & processing costs, all of which are surely considerable but will soon be dwarfed by mining costs if they aren't already.

"Even if something like this is efficient and profitable once it's up and running there is still significant capital expenditure (both material and human) involved in setting it up in the first place." = "...they'll be glad they already have the infrastructure in place." Starting to think you didn't read more than 10-12 words. And also why are you trying to make the argument that it's difficult and costly for them, when this is the much-hated self- flagellation argument?

Where we disagree:

1) Free Market, not being a proper noun or deity, should not be capitalized, no pun intended.

2) There is no answer to "What is 'good'?" and there is no answer to "Is recycling 'good'?" "Good" and "bad" are overrated and overused concepts best suited to the cognitively impaired, religious folk, others who desire a simplistic mental model of the world, and those who want to play out emotional issues by getting all worked-up over good-bad absolutes instead of talking neutrally. Lots of people say "It is what it is" but few actually mean it.

3) There is no self-flagellation involved in noticing that when someone does something rare, unpleasant and costly, it's remarkable for those very reasons; whereas when they do something efficient, profitable and (from the standpoint of someone who already recognizes the irreplaceability of Earth) obvious, it's somewhat less remarkable. German and Dutch companies (for just one example that I've personally witnessed), have been quietly recycling for decades.

4) I'm not in love with Apple.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Is Harvard Getting $9M in Stimulus Money When It Has a $40B Endowment? - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2020/04/21/why-is-harvard-getting-9-million-in-stimulus-money-when-it-has-a-40-billion-endowment/#619ce766f007 <comment><USER2> While we're at it, the University of Southern California has a $5,700,000,000 endowment [0], just (literally just in the last few weeks) bought an amazing $8,600,000 residence for it's president [1], and is receiving [2] $19,278,560 in CARES act funding.

I guess with that extra money could have bought a nicer palace... I mean house.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Southern_Califor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Southern_California) [1] [https://variety.com/2020/dirt/more-dirt/usc- buys-8-6-million...](https://variety.com/2020/dirt/more-dirt/usc- buys-8-6-million-santa-monica-house-to-use-as-presidential- residence-1234569818/) [2]

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry, but the article you linked clearly states that they bought a cheaper and smaller residence for their president, and they are in the process of selling the old residence for potentially more than twice the amount. What's your point here?

<comment><USER2> Cheaper and smaller, and still $8m dollars. My point is that $8m is a lot of money to be spending on a house for your president (why is the university even paying for this at all?) especially when you then turn around and take a bunch of taxpayer stimulus money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >> Harvard won't use any of its $9 million stimulus check to make up for losses

>> "Harvard is actually allocating 100% of the funds to financial assistance for students to meet their urgent needs in the face of this pandemic,"

>> Harvard will need the money. It issued room and board refunds to students who left campus.

So... they're giving full refunds plus an extra $9M, right? Not counting on it.

Government money doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from people with a median of around $41k income and $100k net worth for the entire household. What percentage of Harvard families fall below that line? They need it though. I'm sure the average American would gladly donate if it wasn't forcefully taken from them.

<comment><USER5> > Government money doesn't come from nowhere.

That's actually closer to the truth than your idea.

> It comes from people with a median of around $41k income and $100k net worth > for the entire household.

The median federal tax dollar comes from a household making over $200k/year. But marginal spending doesn't actually come from current taxes anyway, it comes (insofar as the concept of the public purse approximates reality, which as MMT observes isn't very much) from borrowing which is repaid by marginal changes to future taxing and spending policy compared to what it would have been without the constraint of that debt. Who that comes from is...obscure and dependent on future elections and policy priorities.

<comment><USER4> True in the short term. I suppose that "In the long run, we'll all be dead."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I was a kid, my home state of Florida introduced the state lottery, one of the arguments for it was that all profits would go to education.

Of course, what that really meant was that the state could reduce the state contribution to school system by an equal amount.

Harvard says that 100% of the money goes to the students. What that really means is the money doesn't need to come from somewhere else.

Are we to believe that Harvard ("a hedge fund with a university attached to it") couldn't plan for a pandemic, or couldn't have set aside funds for this possibility?

Or (IMO more likely) assumed the government would pay for some of it anyway - private profit, socialized risk.

<comment><USER7> Barely anyone plans for a pandemic. It does not make business / economic sense.

<comment><USER8> It makes sense now, doesn't it?

You don't have to plan for a pandemic specifically. Just any kind of a downturn where you might not be making money for months at a time. It's called an emergency fund.

You always hear how people at home should have 6 months worth of expenses saved up in case of emergency. I'm honestly blown away how many businesses don't do the same thing. Basic fucking financials.

I understand a bit more if you're a smaller business, with small margins, and you're just getting started. But if you've been in business for years, with tons of money flowing through... and you can't get through a few months, maybe you should go out of business.

<comment><USER9> This has been the most frustrating thing for me. The advice for the individual is essentially the exact opposite of the advice for the 'too big to fail'. I understand that the circumstances are different, but it feels frustrating that my accountant would suggest I save 6 months for unforeseen circumstances, but wouldn't provide the same advice to an employer with many people's livelihoods in their hands.

That said: Are there any studies on the economic impact of every company hoarding 6 months worth of safety vs the likelihood of that event vs the cost of no company having the safety net during this pandemic?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This was addresses in yesterday's press conference. He was not pleased:

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us- politic...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us- politics/coronavirus-funding-trump-harvard-companies-give-back-money- stimulus-a9477316.html)

[https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/trump-mnuchin-say- coronavi...](https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/trump-mnuchin-say-coronavirus- sba-loans-will-be-paid-back-by-big-companies)

</comment><comment><USER11> Fairly certain endowments arent just bank accounts without stipulations. 1m for athletics, 1m for research, 1m for infectious diseases, etc. Not 40b to do whatever you want, there are strict rules on how these funds can be used and what they can be used for. That said, I dont agree with them getting financial assistance from the government. Yea, goes into this further down the article: "a Harvard spokesman emailed a list of bullet points about restrictions on endowment spending. The short version: The endowment is made up of more than 13,000 separate funds. The "overwhelming majority" of those are restricted to spending designated by donors, like professorships and scholarships"

</comment><comment><USER12> Because they're rich, and have the deployable resources and relationships to ensure that they got the money when they successfully asked.</comment>


Gates warns that a coronavirus-like outbreak will happen 'every 20 years or so' - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-warns-coronavirus-outbreak-likely-every-20-years-2020-4 <comment><USER2> Why not link directly to the interview? [https://www.ft.com/content/13ddacc4-0ae4-4be1-95c5-1a32ab159...](https://www.ft.com/content/13ddacc4-0ae4-4be1-95c5-1a32ab15956a)

</comment><comment><USER3> He doesn't have crystal ball, how did he came up with this?

<comment><USER4> The title is editorialized.

The quote is "...And so now people realise, OK, there really is a meaningful probability every 20 years or so with lots of world travel that one of these [viruses] will come along..."</comment></comment>


Herb Stempel, who 'took a dive' in a 1950s US TV quiz show scandal – obituary - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2020/06/09/herb-stempel-contestant-took-dive-1950s-us-television-quiz-show/ <comment><AUTHOR> He took the dive and the producers cheated him out of what they promised. He complained to a newspaper and initially wasn't believed. Then he's conned out of his winnings in an investment scheme.</comment>


Make money while surfing the Web sounds - <AUTHOR> http://www.metromodemedia.com/innovationnews/UrTurn0044.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> Groundbreaking == Happened during the last bubble and failed</comment>


Amazon stock reported at -87.24% on Google Finance - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AMZN <comment><USER3> This appears to be a hack, or data corruption.

See NASDAQ's official listing ( [http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amzn/after- hours](http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amzn/after-hours) ). Several other ticker symbols (AAPL, MSFT, etc.) are also affected.

Edit: It appears several tech stocks (AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, etc.) have their prices set to 123.47. Definitely pointing to some sort of data corruption.

<comment><USER4> > all have their prices set to 123.47

Which is what you'd get if the price was 123.456789... and rounded to two decimal places.

<comment><USER5> Plausible, but wouldn't it be 123.46?

<comment><USER4> Ugh, apparently I can't math that early in the morning. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please change the title instead of flagging this. It may not be a crash but this is newsworthy.

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://twitter.com/TDAmeritrade/status/882012933181632516](https://twitter.com/TDAmeritrade/status/882012933181632516)

</comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, this is some sort of horrible error on some sort of aggregator, I'd guess. MSFT did not gain 79% today, but that's what Google says. Yahoo! on the other hand, says it lost 57.74%.

If you go to schwab.com and get a quote there, it shows the correct prices, so it wasn't the exchange itself.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can.

US Market closed early today at 1:00PM. Market data was finalized at 5:16 PM. Data sent to third parties after 5:16PM today would have been test data - <USER2> do this every day and the third party systems receive and then purge the test data. One or more third parties took at as real data, possibly because of the odd market close time, and then re-propagated those prices to the real time systems. The reason this can happen is that certain off book transactions can be/are reported by these third parties. These reports update the stock price.

</comment><comment><USER10> Any EBAY ([https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AEBAY](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AEBAY)) went up 254%? No, these are just glitches with Google Finance. It happens once in a while.

<comment><USER11> Bloomberg[0] is showing the same thing, so if it's a data glitch it's not limited to just Google Finance.

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/AMZN:US](https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/AMZN:US)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what this is going to do to all the sub-second quant algorithms. Do they have the ability to recover quickly from this kind of data corruption?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yahoo finance shows similar numbers [https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN?ql=1&p=AMZN](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN?ql=1&p=AMZN)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a glitch not a flash crash. There is absolutely no volume on Amazon right now. This actually happens all the time .

</comment><comment><USER14> This must be an issue with Google's data provider. Their graphs still show the correct stock price.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can anyone share some thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER16> How come!?

<comment><USER17> It was discovered no one actually really used Alexa

<comment><USER18> That's not true! I use it to reply to Ashley Madison fembots. (It's a vicious circle really.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> News

Why Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) Stock Will Not Falter Anytime Soon Investorplace.com - 7 hours ago

Hilarious</comment>


I'm Patrick McKenzie (patio11). I make and sell software. Ask me anything - <AUTHOR> http://inbound.org/discussion/view/i-m-patrick-mckenzie-patio11-i-make-and-sell-software-ask-me-anything <comment><USER2> Wow, 6 points?! Sad:-/ There's a tremendous amount of advice there.</comment>


Ask HN: I'd appreciate advice on my current work situation - <AUTHOR> I'm the sole developer for a product that has been selling as a desktop version for a couple of decades, with me 'on board' for around 15 years. During my time as the helm, I've implemented a number of improvements to the architecture of the software (including a rewrite enabling development of Mac and web versions, based on the original PC-only version).
My agreements with my business partner are based on royalties (20% of all sales and renewals). He works in an office and deals with customer support, I work remotely. He covers all business costs. Our agreements included payment for development work, however then I have needed to pay these pay with reductions in royalties -> I was given an interest free loan for my own salary, and eventually he's out of pocket nothing for development costs. Total income for our royalties agreements across time equate to 2 x yearly average salaries in my home country, but spread across the last 6 years.
Now he's discussed selling the business. If sold, I would receive royalties for the balance of our agreement, using the average sales for the last year.I made a mistake in that I agreed to the 20% royalty rate without negotiation initially, I know that much. I have worked many hundreds of hours under these agreements, and he agrees sales have not been as we would like - but of course, with 80% of the income, it's still (roughly for him) 3 -> 3.5 an average salary per year.
I wish to renegotiate our agreements to include a clause that gives me part of the sale value of the company as a cash payout, the reasoning here being that my work has increased substantially the value of the company. At say a valuation of 20 x the average salary, I was thinking of 10% i.e. two years of an average salary. I feel that my value to the company is larger than what is being recognised currently, given my contributions (i.e. every single line of code in the company's products have been written by me).
Am I being unreasonable here? <comment><USER2> You're not being unreasonable but that's not the issue. The issue is the leverage you have now. Your value to your partner ends with the sale. You are valuable to the new owner as the sole person who understands how the product works. Even if they only want the idea and the customers, recoding it will cost something and be cheaper/easier/faster with your participation, plus they'll need someone to support the current product for a while, or they'll shed those customers.

Convince your partner that the buyers will need you, and will only get you if you're happy with the terms of the sale. If you can enlist the buyers in this campaign, so much the better.

<comment><USER3> 100% agree with this, and add the following caveat.

Don't be surprised if your partner "switches gears" and tries to convince _you_ that you are being unreasonable and selfish and screwing up the possible deal (or future deal) with these "demands." Sometimes people present as friends only because it doesn't cost them to do so, but change their presentation when being asked to reduce the amount of money they may have been counting on receiving.

Be ready for that to happen and understand that your actions are not "ruining a friendship" they are merely illuminating that the friendship was an illusion to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can't really get good advice from strangers on the internet, you really need to talk to a lawyer and dig into the details, and even finding the right lawyer can be a very hard problem, so try to ask around to other technologists in your area and see if there are contract lawyers they have been happy to work with.

(edit: And to be clear, a good lawyer is 10% the written details in the contract and laws and regs and 90% understanding the relationship dynamics and your interests, being able to suggest a range of written structures and terms that capture tradeoffs, and being able to negotiate effectively. Ideally, a counselor.)

Some meta thoughts-

* there are all kinds of contracts and all kinds of relationships. Reasonable is in the eyes of the beholders, and depends on what they value (the business vs the person, etc). I have heard of much better (for the developer) terms, and much worse, than yours.

* from business perspective, the question ultimately is one of leverage. The question isn't how much you _have_ contributed to the business- if your partner thinks that way then they value the relationship with _you_ over the value to the business, and the terms you work out are dependent on how you value the relationship with them.

* a business is acquired for the _future_ value it will bring to new owners. The question there is how much is your _future_ contributions are worth to the business. If you are not needed or are easily replaceable and the product is turn key, then your value is zero. If your contributions are needed, then your value is very high and you should try to structure the future relationship accordingly.

Again, these are meta-thoughts only, the most important task is to try to find a good lawyer who is in your area and is familiar with these kinds of situations. Good luck.

<comment><USER5> As jonahbenton said, this isn't a matter of value or right/wrong, it's a matter of leverage. How hard would it be to replace you?

You will probably have a pressure point that you can exploit with respect to the sale. ie you can refuse to work for potential new owners. Even if you are pretty replaceable, I think most potential buyers would be scared off by having to replace the sole software engineer who understands the codebase. eg the small software business sales I'm aware of typically come with commitments around the engineering staff. Be aware that doing this may burn your relationship with the current owner. As in all negotiations, make sure that you are actually willing to live with any options you bring up. Your rights here are so fact dependent that you must get legal counsel in your jurisdiction.

One smart way to approach this negotiation would be to write a contract agreeing to a minimum work period for the potential new owners; as a cost, you would need some percent of the sale price. Again, you must get yourself a local attorney experienced in these types of negotiations.

One point I would bring up though, is that engineers often _wildly_ overestimate how easy it is to turn lines of code into cash. It is quite possible that the business end of this business holds all the leverage. When OP says eg he or she has "worked many hundreds of hours", this sounds like low maintenance software that the business owner can continue to sell for quite a long while without any ongoing engineering.

<comment><AUTHOR> > How hard would it be to replace you?

It wouldn't be easy, I don't believe, and I'm generally quite negative about my own development abilities and values.

One point I couldn't fit into my original post is that I do have what I believe to be a good relationship with my business partner, but I feel he's disconnected from what valuable and capable developers make outside of his business. Also, he may well not be able to sell the business at all, and in that case he's suggested I could take over as manager (for higher pay), however I would be living with the potential sale hanging over my head, and not knowing whether this better-paid role would ever eventuate.

> this sounds like low maintenance software that the business owner can > continue to sell for quite a long while without any ongoing engineering.

That's probably a fair statement, although there are normally updates we put out a few times a year due to changing business parameters in our market, and once every year we do a major release with new features.

<comment><USER5> Also, serious question -- why don't you offer to buy the owner out?

<comment><AUTHOR> Simply - I can't afford it! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Talking to a lawyer as others advised may be a good idea, but I recommend talking to the owner first. Once you bring the lawyer in the conversation becomes a competitive zero sum game and that switch is generally irreversible.

The reason I would explore a friendly conversation first (and on agreement bring in a lawyer to write this up and sign) is that the amount you want is pretty small and, as the sole technical expert, you leverage is high. New owners will likely want to ensure technical support post-sale and you might have more weight than you think, even to a point of making or breaking the sale.

Thus the interest of the current owner in keeping you on board may be WAY more important than whatever paper you signed 15 years ago. If you really are the only person who knows how the product works under the hood you might get your 10% from the current owner _and_ a retention agreement from the new owner.

Personally, I would probe gently with the current owner before bringing your own lawyer in. Just my 2c.

<comment><USER7> Do you think he should consult with a lawyer before approaching the owner? I agree with your statement that bringing in a lawyer at this point is going to sour the entire negotiation. But I also think it might be important for the OP to understand what his options are before coming to the table.

<comment><USER8> I've been on the other side : someone trying to renegociate a deal with me after having had (bad) legal counseling.

It completely changes the tone of the conversation, no matter what. A lawyer will gives you a list of all the things that could go wrong, and all the bad behavior your partner could have (because that's what he's used to seeing). This _will_ have an impact on what you're going to tell the other person, and could really cripple the quality of the relationship.

I believe talking to a lawyer should be done before signing anything after an oral agreement was found (just as a precaution), or if no agreement can be reached.

Note: obviously my advice only applies if you already know the general best practices of an industry. If you feel like you know absolutely nothing, then ask people around you that had similar deals, people in the industry, etc, and _maybe_ a lawyer, if he's really specialized in the IT business.

<comment><USER9> I completely agree.

Lawyers have a naturally adversarial mindset. It's what they are paid for. The really good ones don't trust _anyone_ ; including close family.

In my work, I quickly learned to keep lawyers out of the loop until the last reasonable moment, because they not only injected a lot of cynicism and negativity into the situation; they often would fire off an email that CC'd a C-suite person, instructing me to do things the way they said; thus escalating the thing from the start.

That said, they are absolutely required for these types of things, especially if there are lawyers on the other side of the table.

<comment><USER10> I think most people think of lawyers as consigliere. Friends. People who will give you good advice.

In reality, they're employed by you to _legally protect_ you to the best of their ability.

This means that (a) they view everything through the lense of "What should we do now, in order to have the best possible chance in court in a year?" (to the exclusion of things which might result in not ending up in court) & (b) they can be ordered to pursue another course of action.

It's your ship, because it's your money. If you take your hand off the wheel, they're going to do their best given their perspective. But if you resolutely decide "Damn the torpedos", then they'll do their best with that too (shy of deciding not to work for you any longer).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So I agree with all the comments about needing a lawyer as to the specifics of your situation.

As far as being unreasonable: The sense I get from reading your narrative is that from your perspective, because you wrote the code for the software, you are responsible for a large proportion of the total enterprise value. I think that in general, engineers tend to discount the contributions of the business side of things. Reading between the lines (and correct me if I'm being uncharitable here), your partner is responsible for the idea and overall business strategy, all capital and expenses(!), marketing, branding, sales, contracting, and customer support. So even though you wrote the code for the product, there's a very large gap between that and creating a competitive and profitable product. He probably views you, with some justification, as more easily replaceable, which is why he perceives you as having less leverage. So while you should certainly try to get as much as you can out of the situation, this description of events doesn't strike me as being particularly unfair to you.

</comment><comment><USER12> There is already comment about this, yet I'll allow myself to reinforce that:

Do not approach anything without consulting lawyer first.

Even if you see an advice that sound reasonable, don't follow it without consulting a lawyer. A lot of stuff is dependent on your current position, location, local laws, implicit and explicit clauses. Only lawyer can help you figure this stuff out.

The only other advice I can give you, don't settle on one/first lawyer. Find 3, consult with each and only then make decision with whom you want to proceed. You can use gut feeling at that point. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER13> Your position is stronger than you think. A buyer will want your cooperation as a top priority. The owner knows this, or will soon find out. You don't need to persuade him so play it cool.

Definitely talk to the owner. Maybe start by asking him, how does he expect the process to work? Will you be expected to continue working on the product? (play naive). Then let him talk, see what he's thinking.

Best to be calm. This is your strong card, but keep it low key. This will emerge during the sales negotiations. The owner is likely to present you with a new contract to sign during the sale process, and this will be your moment to negotiate a fair outcome.

And you definitely want advice from a lawyer, starting now. At a minimum to review your existing contract.

<comment><USER14> This is great advice.

> Your position is stronger than you think. A buyer will want your cooperation > as a top priority.

To emphasize this: as the sole developer, the buyer is going to want to retain you (at least for 6-12 months, depending on the complexity of the software). The buyer's tech team is not going to want to reverse engineer software that's 20 years old. The owner of the company knows this if he's talked to any potential buyers so far (and if he hasn't, will learn it.)

> Best to be calm. This is your strong card, but keep it low key.

The owner may resist your initial ask. If you at any point see red and are tempted to raise an ultimatum, step away from the send button / tell him that you'd like to continue the conversation later. The worst thing you can do is back him into a corner where his ego gets involved. You may well run into conflict, but better to leave him aware that you disagree until you pick up the conversation again than to get into a heated dispute (that will incentivize him to think about a solution in the meantime too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How the amounts equate to salaries is completely irrelevant unfortunately. This is a legal issue, not a moral one. A new product may double the stock price of the company, but it does not entitle the engineer to a percentage of that increase, even if that product would not exist without said engineer. As per the contract, the engineer's labour is being compensated by wages and benefits. All the fruits of his/her labour are solely owned by the company. This is at least true in North America.

20% of royalties is not wages, and implies some sort of IP ownership agreement. Do you have such an agreement in place? Are there any patents with your name on them? The IP is (very likely) one of the assets of the business and will be listed on the net worth balance sheet. If you own a portion of the IP, you are entitled to a portion of the sale value of the company.

If not the IP, then do you own any percentage of the company? You say he's a business partner, but it sounds like a work for hire arrangement (see first para). If the company owns all of the IP and your partner owns all of the company, it's basically his company, and you might be out of luck. You could still try negotiating a fairer payout, but it would be up to your partner's largesse. Furthermore, as you probably realize, the new owners are not obligated to honour a work for hire arrangement.

<comment><USER16> >As per the contract, the engineer's labour is being compensated by wages and benefits. All the fruits of his/her labour are solely owned by the company. This is at least true in North America.

[IANAL] Labour - yes. My understanding though is that despite wages, etc. the copyright/IP belongs to the engineer until there is an assignment agreement in place - that piece of paper we all sign coming to a new job and every time again when our patents get filed. If it were in the US and the OP doesn't have such assignment signed, i'd think the sale of the company without his cooperation would go nowhere.

<comment><USER15> In the absence of an explicit contract, the courts will take the typical approach or what would be reasonably accepted for that industry. Fairness of compensation also matters. If compensation seems reasonable for a work for hire, then that standard will be applied. If the payout is fairly consistent then it could look like a salary. Engineers cannot hold up sales of companies unless they have an ownership stake. They could dispute IP ownership but even then the sale would go through usually. If majority of the voting directorship is in favour of the sale, there's nothing to stop it.

The engineer could file a lien in that case. Perhaps that might give the buyer pause, or they could decide its easy enough to fight or pay out and may go through with it anyways. Liens do not block a sale if the buyer is willing to assume the risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Partners that take more than 50% aren't really your partner, they're just employing/using you. They'll come up with all kinds of wonderful excuses as to why they shouldn't pay you, like they're the "business" person, they have to support their spouse but you're just single, it was their idea, etc etc etc.

The best thing you can do is ask for 50%, then when they refuse, get out of the partnership. It took me a couple of decades to learn this simple truth, and cost me (I don't even want to think how much) money. I basically worked for less than $1 per hour for YEARS.

If you take the 10%, then treat it like investment income and don't do any more work on the product. It's a big world out there, and the opportunity cost of sticking with it is the income you could be receiving from other projects.

Sorry to be harsh, but this is the #1 thing I wish I would have told myself when I was young and motivated.

</comment><comment><USER18> Consult a lawyer. Bring all paperwork and contracts. Not doing so may be the most expensive mistake of your life.

</comment><comment><USER19> I felt like asking this but I'm not sure it merits an Ask HN by itself: _how_ would you (in each of your different countries, contexts, etc) find a lawyer?

Would you directly ask your personal network? Make a public Twitter announcement asking for recommendations? Just google "good lawyer for tech stuff"?...

<comment> kube-system Any time I need a professional with a specific focus, I always ask a professional I know and trust in the same/similar field for a reference. That has always worked well for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Of course, get a lawyer. That said,

> I made a mistake in that I agreed to the 20% royalty rate without > negotiation initially, I know that much

This is the root of the problem. You were always hoping some day this would be corrected, and now that day is here.

I'd recommend crunching the numbers and back this up with data. There should be spreadsheets and charts made of sales figures, expenses, salaries, profits, loses, etc. Prove to your partner that you didn't really get a fair deal as the deal doesn't consider a sale. You should get more simply due to the change in risk.

</comment><comment><USER21> Everything is negotiable, but based on the info you've given here you don't have much leverage in any potential negotiation. The only thing you might be able to use is the fact that the acquiring party will likely want your cooperation and possibly to keep you on for a while post acquisition.

This is far from completely necessary though so it doesn't give you much. You are not being unreasonable but don't be surprised if your partner doesn't respond positively to your attempts at renegotiation.

</comment><comment><USER22> Don't know about the unreasonable, I don't think there's any such thing in business, but do you have an assignment of copyright set up? If not you may own all the code - depends on your jurisdiction - IANAL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. All copyright is clearly assigned to my partner, it's written into our agreements. I don't have a problem with this at all.

<comment><USER23> Looks like you do have a problem given that you created this thread in the first place.

And I have a "suspicion" assigning full copyright to your partner, of the code you wrote, may have something to do with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> > And I have a "suspicion" assigning full copyright to your partner, of the > code you wrote, may have something to do with it.

My problem is with wishing I had more certainty and, yes, compensation, related to a possible sale of the company. The code is not of use to me outside of the company itself, and from a developer satisfaction point of view I've enjoyed crafting and developing it; it's something I'm proud of, but it doesn't mean I need or want to own it. I think developers need to be good at 'letting go' their children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is fair and there is legal. It seems to me your requests are fair,but since I dont know anything about your contract or legal environment I agree that you should consult a lawyer to find out if your requests are legally enforceable.

</comment><comment><USER25> I would encourage changing your mindset here to think about a negotiation in terms of power rather than reasonableness.

And I don't mean fists or violence type of power. It's much more what power do your future actions have to impact the sale value of the company? Those are the things that matter in a negotiation.

When people talk about what's fair or reasonable, as the OP is doing, I think they get lost in arguments that don't hold any water. "I put in so much work" is much weaker than "This is how much money you'll make if you change the deal and how much money you'll lose if you don't change it."

So, looking at it from the perspective of where do you have power, mainly you have power to keep working up to the sale of the company, to keep working after the sale of the company, or to leave right now.

Do any of those things change the value of the sale? If so, you have a pretty clear path to negotiating for a piece of that value.

I've been the business owner giving out a deal like this recently. The deal was that I'd guarantee a minimum amount of money and split the revenue, but I'd maintain 100% ownership. I think I was a bit more up front than this owner about what the implications were.

IMO, even without ownership, it can be a pretty good alternative structure to a flat contracting rate or salary. For the employee/contractor it gives a lot of upside, while still giving the owner some leverage to renegotiate down the road if that upside gets out of control. Given that the future is hard to predict, this allows for some punting on deal terms. I literally told the counterparty, "If this really works, yes, you may live with some anxiety that I will come back and try to squeeze you."

In practice, this deal has made a lot of money for both of us and the counterparty has been protected by my fear of losing continuity or momentum in a business that's doing well.

But this also points to these sorts of contracts only being appropriate for experienced people. If you aren't comfortable that contracts are not permanent and that they can and will be renegotiated as leverage changes then you shouldn't be in these types of deals.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the detailed and helpful reply, much food for thought!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm shocked at all the suggestions to get a lawyer as step one. Yes you will need a lawyer at some point to get the terms into writing but what you need is business advice to prepare you for a convo w your employer.

That sort of advice is hard to provide without thorough context but few things to think about:

1\. How key are you the sales process? If technical due diligence is a big part of the sales process then you have leverage. 2\. Are you a key employee that the acquirer will want to put under contract for a couple years to ensure continuity? If so, you have leverage. 3\. Do you generally get along w your employer? If so, you have soft leverage.

As an earlier commenter said, it's all about leverage, leverage, leverage. No (or almost no) owner is going to give you a significant portion of his or her windfall because it's "the nice thing to do". This will only get done if you have leverage and the courage to use it.

P.s. there are all sorts of expensive tax implications here too when it comes to ownership transfer. Lawyers and accountants will be needed but not until you've neared some agreement in principle.

</comment><comment><USER27> 1\. Get a lawyer. The advice they give you should outstrip anything you read here.

2\. Prepare to cut your losses in a worst case scenario. The best time to contractually quantify ownership stake is before you enter into the engagement. By the end, you have neither contractual support for your expected ownership stake, nor the leverage to ink it into a legally binding document.

3\. (my $0.02) Practically, the most you may get from this scenario is a very expensive learning experience. Whether or not you have the grounding to enter legal proceedings (or threaten that), the payoff compared to the mental and financial cost of litigating are likely not in your favor.

Sorry this had to happen to you. It happened to me, too. I learned a valuable lesson when it comes to doing this kind of work -- you need to get an airtight legally binding document before you start working, or else you'll be exploited. That your business "partner" never formally entered into a contract with you likely indicates the latter.

</comment><comment><USER28> Not sure if you are being reasonable or not, you need to decide that, there aren't enough details for me to be sure. Can they fire you and still go through with the sale? Are they a decent, reasonable human being? If they are a reasonably decent human I would say, hey I put a lot of work into this thing and I think I deserve a piece of the action from the sale. Then see what they say and get their point of view. And if they offers you a deal make sure it is on paper. If they are a terrible human and they can fire you and still go through with the sale, then without a prior deal you are not getting anymore money than you previously negotiated. If they are a terrible human being and they need you for the sale then you negotiate a deal asap with the aid of a lawyer, or you walk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. My partner is one of the most decent, calm and hard-working people that I know. We have a good relationship, and perhaps I'm over-worrying about these matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> " At say a valuation of 20 x the average salary, I was thinking of 10% i.e. two years of an average salary. "

If you take that tack you're going to end up with the short end of the stick.

I realize you're just asking for info but you should state this more positively. "My value to this company is $XXX as sales went from $A to $B and I can continue to grow it"

Just that simple update changes the power dynamic and also puts you in a better mindset.

Because I can guarantee you'll crumble in negotiations when the buyer says "20 times a yearly salary! That's far too high!" And you, as a software dev that probably undervalues your worth, will likely agree. Now you are on the back foot trying to justify your 15x, then 10x, then 5x, then some sort of rev share as they keep on chipping away.

</comment><comment><USER30> Folks are saying "get a lawyer". Note that you should get a lawyer who practices in the jurisdiction that governs your contract. It sounds like you might be in different countries, and even if you were just in different states this would be important.

Also, in addition to your contract, think about any emails or even conversations that affected your relationship. Most people don't realize that oral agreements are just as binding as written agreements in nearly all cases (not for transfers of land, or agreements that, by their terms, must take more than a year to complete). The difference is that oral agreements are more likely to be a he-said-she-said, since there is generally no documented proof of the precise terms.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is a negotiation so think about your leverage. Reasoning about fairness is very little leverage.

Two Questions:

1\. How important are you to the _ongoing_ revenue of the business after it changes hands?

If you're an ongoing key person, you do have some leverage with the current owner. You may have even more leverage negotiating a consulting contract with the buyer. This is a business negotiation and then a lawyer can help you draft a good agreement.

2\. Do you believe your 20% royalty continues in the event of a sale?

If your 20% royalty is supposed to survive the sale, maybe you should negotiate a buyout of that royalty. There are lots of factors in valuing this, but your anchoring point would be 20% of the expected sale price, and its a financial discussion not a fairness discussion.

</comment><comment><USER32> > I wish to renegotiate our agreements to include a clause that gives me part > of the sale value of the company as a cash payout, the reasoning here being > that my work has increased substantially the value of the company. At say a > valuation of 20 x the average salary, I was thinking of 10% i.e. two years > of an average salary. I feel that my value to the company is larger than > what is being recognised currently, given my contributions (i.e. every > single line of code in the company's products have been written by me).

One very unfortunate and many times unfair part of negotiations is they are based on your future work, not your previous work.

Also hundreds of hours of work for 2 years of salary sounds like you are well compensate already.

</comment><comment><USER33> Your only leverage is a) Your partner's good faith and good relationship as your employer, and b) Your willingness to leave your situation. Both are worth something, and leaving will have negative impacts on your employer. These situations can get ugly, because once you broach the subject, your employer may not only decline to negotiate, they might start looking to replace you. Tread carefully. Much is dependent on your hopefully warm relationship and the business ethic of your boss.

</comment><comment><USER34> Like others have said, talk to a lawyer. But first - who owns the source code? Are there legal protections in your country (assuming not US) like a copyright? That could be your leverage in a business negotiation if you own the code.

If your partner doesn't want to entertain renegotiating, then maybe say from this point forward (since he is aiming to sell the business) that any dev work needs to paid for separately from the royalties on existing work. Find other work in the meantime (maybe before this step).

</comment><comment><USER35> The key question is what happens to each of you if you don't come to an agreement.

If you can get a good job elsewhere or otherwise monetize your time, you are in a good position. If the company fails without you, you are in a better position. If he's able to replace you easily you're in a weaker position.

Also - if he's covering expenses and you aren't, it's not really an 80/20 split. If costs equal half of sales, then it becomes a 30/20 (60/40) split.

</comment><comment><USER36> It is not clear what kind of relationship you have with your business partner. It seems you are not a (co-)owner of the company, but does that mean that you are an employee. If you have the legal status of an employee, I guess you might not have any right on part of the sale. But maybe you have some right for a compensation if you become unemployed as a result of the sale.

</comment><comment><USER37> Well, there is nothing wrong with trying to negotiate. However, if it is true that you have an agreement, and if it seems your partner has fairly respected his part of the agreement, I don't think you would have any legal case. As an owner of the business, he took on all the risk, paid for all the costs. You agreed to be paid a royalty.

<comment><USER38> How is that any different, generally speaking? If you agree to be payed a royalty, you agree to take on risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Talk to him first.

"hey i thought about our agreement and i'm not that comfortable with it" I would like to discuss it with you.

<comment><USER40> Since things are coming to a close I dont think OP has any leverage in the situation.

<comment><USER41> He's got plenty of leverage, assuming that the product is a part of the company sale pitch, i.e. the company is not being sold just for its customer list, website rankings or other non-product assets.

Edit - looking through OP's commenting history, it appears they are working on the real estate market software. In this case it is _very_ likely that the company is being sold for the list of its customers to a larger competitor, to allow migrating customers to the competitor's platform. In this case the OP has little to no re-negotiating power, because the product is not what being sold here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> 25% or you won't work on it any more. If you won't work on it any more the sale will _not_ go ahead. Negotiate a better arrangement (for your time) with the purchaser.

</comment><comment><USER43> You need a lawyer

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that does indeed appear to be the consensus here, and it's already on my action plan of what to do before talking to my partner about things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Nobody here can help, and you shouldn't trust them even if they happen to say something helpful on this forum. You need a business/contract lawyer in your locality.

<comment><USER45> Yes we should never, ever, under any circumstance, ever bother asking questions on the internet about anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> again, get a lawyer.

But out of interest:

* are your "agreements" a legal contract, or verbal? Are you an employee or a contractor?

* what are the terms wrt duration? was it 20% royalties while you continued as a developer, 20% for the lifetime of the product? Do you have any say in e.g. pricing/offers, which would affect sales/sale price, and hence your %

* you say they "included payment for development work" but that "however then I have needed to pay these pay with reductions in royalties" \- if it comes out of your royalties, how does it include payment for dev work? i.e. how does this differ from " _not_ included payment for development work"; Do you mean he gave you an upfront loan to cover living/dev cost, but there is no additional payment for these on top of royalties?

* is your salary 2x avarage salary (in your home), or 2x salary _for that job type or industry_?</comment>


This is Water (David Foster Wallace on Life) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5THXa_H_N8

<comment><AUTHOR> In light of the disaster in Japan, a nice reminder to keep it all in perspective on this spring (on the eastcoast US) weekend.

Text Version: <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html></comment>


Tell HN: Thank you whoishiring, a.k.a. Matthew Walsh-Cloonagh - <AUTHOR> Back in 2011, an HN user volunteered to consolidate the scattered "who is hiring" posts that were popping up and post one automatically at the start of each month. This not only worked well, it became an HN institution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391828
Four years of yeoman service later, our mysterious benefactor has gotten a lot busier and arranged with us to take over the account. I asked if we could thank him publicly and he said sure. So thank you, Matthew Walsh-Cloonagh! You've helped a ton of people get jobs, and made Hacker News a better place. We're all much obliged.
Any thoughts about "Who is Hiring" and related threads that any of you want to share? Fire away.
Edits, based on the discussion below:
I think we'll change the time of these postings to 11 AM Eastern time. This balances east and west a bit better, and has the practical advantage that when something goes haywire with one of them, the problem won't languish for hours before we fix it. (If anybody posts before 11 AM Eastern tomorrow morning wondering where the thread is, or tries to make one, please refer them here.)
We'll also make the posts show up on the first weekday of each month, instead of each day—but that won't make a difference until August.
Finally, we'll make it more explicit that to post a job in the thread you need to personally be part of the hiring company, not a recruiter or third party. <comment><USER3> The ranking of stories on the hiring threads should be randomized.

It's one thing for my comments to be bolted to the tops of threads about crypto, owing (in reality) mostly to name recognition.

It's another thing entirely for my _job posts_ to be bolted to the tops of hiring threads, which they were, routinely. It felt like cheating, and it was pretty valuable to us. It's perverse.

<comment><USER4> To be the devil's advocate: that the community recognizes you as high quality (even in an unrelated field) IS in itself a signal that the job might be higher quality than a random new user's. A kind of reference from a trusted source.

<comment><USER5> I would disagree that karma is useful in this case. Given that there are no real standards for voting up or down, what _quality_ , really, does karma measure? Popularity and account age, and maybe little more. Does it mean the same thing as having high karma on reddit, or having a popular youtube comment?

I would argue that it does, and for that reason, it's useless outside the context of sorting a comment thread. Certainly, it doesn't justify giving top rank to a job post.

<comment><USER4> Giving extreme examples, wouldn't you agree that:

1\. "Andrew Ng forming brand new GPU machine learning team in Bay Area for Baidu, apply at []"

would rank way higher than

2\. "I am a newly graduated MBA, I have a fantastic business idea but until the funding is lined up, looking for a co-founder to build MVP, 5% equity negotiable but we're taking a salary cut until Round A"?

I certainly upvote the better job ads and assumed everybody else did, and if you want an Idris research job, you'll probably be searching for the keyword rather than browsing top results.

It goes both way - I also enjoy reading the top posts because they indicate what the community thinks are the best jobs at the moment (and thus what's hot).

To be more meta, the "standard" for voting is the ranking algorithm, and should be designed to generally allow better comments to filter through _regardless of their subject_ \- including jobs. The specifics are left to the HN team but based on my year and a bit on this site, they seem to be optimizing for quality and be quite successful at it.

To answer your comparison above, I think (but never checked) that the key implementation difference is that some voters have more power than others, and/or the audience is more qualified on most subjects, than YouTube's (although the Haskell subreddit, the only one I'm relatively familiar with, has excellent upvoting and moderation habits imho). Nevertheless, in the one subject I'm relatively familiar with (classical music) it seems that better performances DO get ranked better on YouTube, so I'm not sure whether I am right to criticize YouTube either.

Edit - just had a thought - the OP might be correct in the case where there was just too much volume for anything past the first, say, 1/10th of job postings to be read - even with floating new posts to the top. It's relatively easy to check for this case by looking at the distribution of views, upvotes and flags per post.

<comment><USER6> > I certainly upvote the better job ads and assumed everybody else did, and if > you want an Idris research job, you'll probably be searching for the keyword > rather than browsing top results.

I never upvote or downvote job offers, and I think it might actually go the other way: people would downvote good job offers hoping that less people would see them, which means less competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _you need to personally be part of the hiring company — not a recruiter or third party._

What about recruiters who are full-time employees of the hiring company?

I think a stronger restriction, namely "you should only post about positions which you will be personally involved with" would make this more even useful -- we don't need to be told every month that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple are hiring, but if tptacek (to take a local celebrity as a convenient hypothetical) posted that Starfighter was looking to hire a sysadmin then potential candidates would be able to ask questions and anticipate getting useful answers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally agree with you. The best kind of job post, to my taste, is by someone I'd be working with. But I fear it would be a step too far to impose this on the whole thread.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it makes sense. I am the hiring manager, but I only ~5 positions available where I am the hiring manager. My company has ~50 positions open for engineering.

Do you prefer to see 10 posts from my company, from each hiring manager with open positions?

<comment><USER9> Actually I think I might if only because your team (and manager!) probably affects your well being much more than what company it is.

But I can also see why it seems inconvenient to have many people from the same company post as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hadn't thought about this very much until I read this post, but I got my first job out of college through a "who is hiring" post back in 2011 (so I guess it was one of the first posts!) and that job changed my life. I flew out to California from the east coast, lived in SF, met a large number of incredibly smart and passionate people, and to this day the network I grew out there is hugely influential on my life and my career. So thanks from me as well!

</comment><comment><USER11> > "Any thoughts..."

Existing HN hiring threads start with:

> "Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords > INTERN, REMOTE, or VISA if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome."

Searching for "intern" matches postings with "internet", "international", etc. I've seen comments suggesting that a search for "remote" matches "no remote".

Here's a quick fix that uses a prefix, for consideration:

> "Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords > +INTERN, +REMOTE, or +VISA if..."

<comment><USER12> Is the +VISA keyword meant to indicate that the hiring company will aid candidates in obtaining a visa, or that the candidate must already have the right to work locally?

<comment><USER13> I always thought it was the former, since otherwise the location implies that the company is looking for people located nearby them. Good point, nevertheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think you can probably fix the "REMOTE" issue, which makes it difficult for the _hundreds_ of talented people looking for remote-only work and having to deal with this:

\- "Sorry no remote"

\- "REMOTE - No"

\- "remote unavailable currently"

\- etc.

The phrasing should change to:

REMOTE _or_ ON-SITE

That way, from amongst even the coolest "Who is Hiring" sites, like this:

[http://hnhiring.me/](http://hnhiring.me/)

Folks can finally filter out the non-remote work properly.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm happy to add ONSITE (probably best without a complicating hyphen?) but can't say I share your optimism about it fixing the inevitable issues with free-form text.

For the same reason, I think it's a lost cause trying to impose a machine- readable format on text fields, as many have been suggesting. There would be so many exceptions as to make the situation more complicated, not less.

<comment><USER14> Maybe a combination of timv and my suggestion together then?

Eg.

Hacker Job1, SF, ONSITE, $120k-$150k (here is an example of local only) --- [short description]

Hacker Job2, NY, REMOTE(East Coast only), $100k-$130k (remote but within same time-zone) --- [short description]

Hacker Job3, London, REMOTE(global), £70k-£90k (remote "anywhere") --- [short description]

\</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Also, I agree about the free-form text issue, it's not something easy to overcome (especially when HN touts as "minimalist" \- which I incur to mean "simple" too), so maybe you and the community should gently try to nudge posters that "No remote" in their messages just makes peoples lives a bit more difficult.

Lastly, I guess I'd just like to add that what made the "who is hiring" partly successful (IMO) was that it was simple. Too many rules and too much detail will turn posts into TL;DR .

</comment><comment><USER15> One particular down-side I've noticed when browsing those sorts of threads:

I often "view" them before people have stopped posting to it. As such, I have absolutely no idea which ones are new or which ones I've already read after I've refreshed the page to get new items.

The only easy-to-implement solution I can think of is allowing us to sort the posts in chronological order as opposed to the hybrid point/time system that's currently in place.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I have absolutely no idea which ones are new or which ones I've already read > after I've refreshed the page to get new items

After thinking about this for a bit I believe it's best addressed by solving this problem for all threads, not just whoishiring threads. That is, make an easy way to optionally limit a thread to just the comments that are new to you. This is something we intend to do.

<comment><USER16> That's great to hear. The "hckr news" extension for Chrome marks new comments, but it means you need to be careful e.g. commenting midway through a thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great service, thanks Matt.

One suggestion for the posting text: maybe provide a more machine-readable template for submitters to provide metadata? Just a minimal amount of metadata to make it easier for those who write mini-apps to parse the submissions.

To refer back to the most recent hiring post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9471287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9471287)

Seems like submitters try to do their own, e.g.

          Soostone | NYC or Remote Possible | Functional Programmer (Haskell) | Backend, Frontend, DevOps, UI/UX Engineering

          San Francisco - Full Time - iOS, Android, Design

          GoDaddy | Product Manager - Managed WordPress | Sunnyvale, CA or Phoenix, AZ | Local

How about this, for each job:

[Company name] | [Job title] | [location(s), semi-colon delimited] ["Remote", if applicable] | [Full-time/Part-Time/Intern/Visa/Remote | [Optional list of semi-colon delimited skills]

e.g.

Acme | Senior Database Engineer | San Francisco, CA; Las Vegas, NV (Remote possible) | Full-time | MySQL

<comment><USER18> We're on HN, right ?

{ "company_name": "Acme", "job_title": "Senior Database Engineer", "locations": [ "San Francisco, CA", "Las Vegas, NV", "Remote" ], "full_time": true, "skills": ["mysql"] }

<comment><USER19> That's a little too far in the machine direction, it would be annoying for humans to read.

<comment><USER20> Yaml then?

<comment><USER21> Yaml I think would take too much vertical space and make reading the normal thread not as useful as it is right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A lot of concerns on this thread about making job posts easier for machines to read. I understand why, but as someone who used to write a lot of hiring thread posts: I'm a little skeeved out by machines reading them, because usually that implies that some other site on the Internet is going to host the ad without my permission.

<comment><USER22> I agree, as someone who is considering applying for a new job (although I've yet to apply... maybe this month :-).

Much of the value in hn in general and the who's hiring in particular has to do with the community.

On the other hand, the postings have grown in number, and with the poor (non- existent) tooling, it's getting harder to find a subset of "interesting" jobs.

I'd be happy to see changes that focused on making the ads better for the "typical" target: make it easy to short-list interesting opportunities. The classical problem here is browser text-search and "remote/no-remote/remote- ok/remote: no" (my: suggestion: #remote).

The removal of paging is great for this. I only now figured out that the "time since posted"-text is the new place for the "link-to-this-comment"-link. That's also useful, as it allows one to "save" ads to new browser tabs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My partner found his first job through Who Is Hiring working at an American firm (we're based in the UK). He's on considerably more money than he would be if he were working locally. I'm envious that his first job was so good - <USER2> was working for a pretty awful web dev firm, highly underpaid. Things have gotten better since then (I run my own company now, for one), but I can't thank Matthew enough for enabling him to not have to go through a bunch of poor quality, poorly paid jobs before he found something he really enjoys.

Thanks Matthew.

</comment><comment><USER24> If you're going to add some code to this, it may make sense to add an additional rule around who is allowed to post that is related to karma and/or account age.

If you compare top and bottom of the May 2015 thread it seems that the quality drops with newer accounts or low karma accounts.

I think a rule like this would also ensure that it's this community posting to the thread and not someone from the outside trying to post to yet another job board--which is the spirit of the "no recruiters" rule.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this idea. The threshold could be small.

Any objections?

<comment><USER25> I generally find the bias against recruiters here to be a bit narrow minded and short sighted. Yes, they're a pain. Yes, most are idiots misrepresenting themselves from the first second they talk to me.

But I'm all about increasing interactions. Not restricting them based on race, gender, or having a unfortunate job title like "recruiter."

I'd rather let in 500 crappy posts than turn away a single valuable newcomer to HN. Has upvote/downvote truly proven inadequate for moderating this particular thread?

<comment><USER26> I'd rather not have 500 crappy posts for every single valuable post. The former starts detracting from the site and ultimately decreases quality. You'll eventually reach a breaking point where everything is being drowned in the noise. Downvoting only works if you're an active enough participant, especially when it comes to the who is hiring posts many probably have minimal or zero participation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Companies should be encouraged to share the salary range for the positions, as well as their interview process (take home assignment, whiteboard, pair programming, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER28> Why not just include Who's Hiring as a top level navigation item. If it's that popular perhaps it deserves it's own archive/timeline.

<comment><USER29> I agree, and while it's not the same, you can always look through the submissions of the account.:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring)

Now if it didn't become a feature of some sort, it could still become an addition to a plugin for small convenience (or a Stylish script or something).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Any thoughts

1\. If it's not done yet, can you disable pagination for these posts to always show all comments?

2\. Order top-level comments by submission time rather than with the regular HN weighing algorithm. This would make it much easier to see what new was posted since the last refresh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Re 1, We don't paginate comments any more. I had a fine time ripping out that code.

Re 2, that seems worth considering. Presumably most recent at the top?

<comment><USER30> > Presumably most recent at the top?

Seems fair, yes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9636566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9636566).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I just want to say that as a college student, HN Who's Hiring has been a great resource in both applying for internships and finding out about new companies.

My university has little to no programming jobs in their career resources, so I have to rely on my own research and HN has made it a lot easier.

Although I haven't gotten an offer yet (really just applied to a few out of curiosity), every company I've interviewed from here has been excellent interviewers and people in general. Way, way better than Angel List!

</comment><comment><USER32> Always seen them, never used them. Due to recent events, I've been patiently awaiting tomorrow for the last two weeks.

Thank you Matthew, and HN for continuing it on his behalf.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'd like to see a way to "review" job postings that stick with companies. I've had many applications on postings go completely ignored without a response even when it is through email and mentions Hacker News. I've also seen what appears to be many purposefully misleading remote labels for jobs.

</comment><comment><USER33>
        > make it explicit that to post a job in the thread you
        > need to personally be part of the hiring company—not a
        > recruiter or third party.

I thought this was already the case, and have held off posting jobs I'm hiring for.

It would be nice to be allowed to post a single "OH HAI I'M A RECRUITER WITH THESE ROLES" comment on the Hiring Threads. Spamming the thread with 10 jobs, or misrepresenting a recruitment role as the company hiring are obvious losses, but if you're looking at a "Who is Hiring" thread, you're looking for a job. I would like to be able to mention my recruitment speciality and my recruiter email address on these threads, clearly labelled as such. If it gets downvoted to all heck, then it gets downvoted, but it would be nice to give this a go.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thank you Matthew! As someone who found a job through who is hiring as well as created a side-project built on it to learn new things and study trends, I appreciate the idea and the work to keep it going.

@dang Will it be published by the "whoishiring" or "_whoishiring" account going forward?

<comment><AUTHOR> Exercise to the reader. This site was built by a minimalist. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I got an incredible job last year through one of these threads. It's quite likely altered the trajectory of my (still nascent) career in a way that none of the other options I was considering at the time would have. Thanks, Matthew.

</comment><comment><USER36> Why was the Who Is Hiring post from this morning flagged?

<comment><USER37> Because it was posted by someone else than the "official" whoishiring account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I am extremely thankful for the "whoishiring" threads and the kind people who post job offers asking for competence independent of degrees.

I worry that even though I work through the real analysis, linear algebra, topology, probability, and convex optimization books that someone will not hire me but I get a sigh of relief seeing people willing to look past not having a degree.

</comment><comment><USER39> I moved to San Francisco at the end of July 2012 and started my first programming job hunt with the August Who Is Hiring thread. I found a great company to work for (what's up Factual!) and almost three years later I see how my life has completely changed and improved. This community made a big difference, so thank you all and Matthew in particular.

</comment><comment><USER40> Thanks a million Matthew!! We (CircleCI) have made over a dozen hires sourced from HN. It's been amazing, thanks for doing it!

</comment><comment><USER41> Are you guys also doing "Who wants to be hired?"?

If so, the quality of responses to recent threads has taken a nose dive lately. I posted in the latest month's thread, and I'm starting to see a couple of bad effects:

1\. Recruiters who send a canned response to every email in the thread (my post very specifically outlined what technologies I have experience with, mostly Python and Django, but now I'm getting offers for iOS jobs. The recruiters responding aren't bothering to read the posts).

2\. Startups who respond trying to sell me their shiny 'get hired' app. These people need to know that this isn't what "Who wants to be hired?" is for.

</comment><comment><USER42> Any chance we could move it a little later in the day? 6am Pacific is a little early for people on the west coast.

(I know not everyone is in the US, but there's no denying that the SF Bay Area contains a huge proportion of this site's audience.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Since I dread having to get up at 6 tomorrow to make sure that my code worked, I kind of agree. But we don't want to make it west-coast centric either. So perhaps 10 AM Eastern? Or 11 at the latest.

Edit: I updated the OP to say 11 AM. What swayed me was remembering all the times that problems with a whoishiring post stuck around for hours before one of us western types could fix it. This will make that less likely.

<comment><USER43> 11 AM EST is a bit late for all the people on the Eastern Hemisphere, especially in Asia. 10 AM would be much more preferable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't easily change it now for tomorrow, but if people still feel this way next month, let us know and we'll shift it back an hour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I''ve never applied to through his posts, but I've to say it's pretty awesome am sure lots of great candidates can come through those posts he have posted in the past.

Kudos on volunteering my hard working internet friend.

</comment><comment><USER45> My suggestion is simple. Don't require anything. Instead someone create a HN hiring post linter, and/or a form you can fill out that can generate a correctly formatted HN who's hiring post.

</comment><comment><USER46> i didn't see anybody else mention this, so i will ...

how about moving it back or forward if the first of the month happens to fall on a weekend? seems to me like it should get moved to the nearest monday in that case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we should do that. First weekday of the month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I replied to a posting on the 'Who's hiring' thread back in Jan 2011 and landed at my first real job out of college. I just left that company after 4+ wonderful years. I was an international student who wanted to work for a startup and very few startups were willing to take the risk back then. I had very little to prove and also came along with strict visa requirements. I am so thankful to this thread, i was able to connect with a person who identified my potential and eventually became a great mentor for me.

</comment><comment><USER48> The best way to improve the "Who is Hiring" posts is to require searchable metadata in posts:

Name: xxxx

Location: xxxx

Url/E-Mail to apply: xxxx

Remote: yes/no

Technologies Used: xxxx

Required experience:

Are candidates expected to already know your stack, or will you consider people who are switching areas?

Do you have open offices? Cubicles?

Do you have daily meetings?

etc

For example, I'm only considering NYC, so I would like to easily search for:

NYC only

experience matching mine OR employers willing to let people switch

If anyone didn't have open offices, that would be a big ++ for me, so that would be nice to know.

<comment><USER49> First, thank you Matthew and HN for a great resource. Re metadata, please don't "require" it. I agree it would be nice if posters could find a more search-friendly way of saying "no remote", but I think it would be a huge mistake to impose any sort of format or content requirements, or any other barriers that increase the hassle for posters. Even something innocuous like "please read these simple guidelines before posting", and I would predict the number of posts will go down significantly. Our goal as programmers should be to write filters that can handle free form data, within reason, not to force humans into rigid forms for the convenience of easy filtering. Please don't surrender yet another valuable tool to the HR everything-must-fit-in-its-box mindset.

<comment><USER50> This is a Chrome plugin I wrote to search for jobs using multiple keywords on Who is Hiring:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-whos-hiring- job...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-whos-hiring-job- finder/jbmfinkemdkmjkiffngecpkbnhocgpla)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> We hired our first engineer through a "Who is Hiring" post. It's a fantastic tool.

</comment><comment><USER52> The words "rockstar" and "ninja" are not allowed in posts?

<comment><AUTHOR> That could be measured. I'd like to see a graph of how often those occur in whoishiring threads. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but I bet they've gone down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Position: iOS Mobile Developer

Details: www.satispay.com/careers/ios-mobile-developer/

Company: Satispay (www.satispay.com)

Location: Milan, Italy

Url/E-Mail to apply: firstname.lastname@example.com

Remote: no

<comment><AUTHOR> Wrong thread; you want [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9639001](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9639001).

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Why not weekly?</comment>