Show HN: Our alternative to recruiter spam - <AUTHOR> https://trypitchbox.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN. We were tired of recruiters so we built this because it was something we wish existed. We had "satisfying" jobs and liked who we worked with but we were not naive and knew there could be a better job out there. Either building a product more aligned with our personal interests, making more doing something we enjoyed even more, or work with a team that challenged us further. It was too time consuming to actively look for jobs and the thought of dealing with incompetent recruiters turned us off so we built Pitchbox. We link to think of it as a talent agency for developers so only personally relevant jobs are pitched to you... think of it as "Here's what I'm looking for, if you can provide it then let's talk"

Is this something that you want?

<comment><USER2> Good work! However, there is no mention of telecommuting/remote positions. Even as a US worker, I prefer remote work, and it baffles me that us "internet folk" are not working hard to fight the industrial-era assumption that software has to be written in a central office.

<comment><USER3> > it baffles me that us "internet folk" are not working hard to fight the > industrial-era assumption that software has to be written in a central > office

Have you considered that some of us LIKE working in an office?

<comment><USER2> Of course, some people like working in offices; that was never disputed. However, there are an increasing number of organizations which have caught on that offices are not "software factories", but rather, an optional luxury.

<comment><USER3> I just think that we're not fighting for it because not that many of us really care.

Not that I would be opposed to the option of course.

<comment><USER4> Maybe it seems like not many care because when someone mentions including the option they are shouted down like they're saying _all_ workers should WFH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm currently hiring developers, and I also hate recruiters, for the reasons you outline. I was interested to learn about your flat $25K fee in the comments here, and I can tell you that I'd be unlikely to pay it. I have other ways to find developers that aren't so expensive.

If I'd bothered to sign up after reading "It's free to get started" then learned later about the hefty fee, I'd be disappointed at best. Since I didn't sign up, I don't know how much bait there is before the switch, but if you talk about the fee right away after the signup I guess it's sort of okay, since you didn't waste much of my time but you did receive my contact information under false pretenses.

I'll be interested to see how many takers you get at that fee level.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey @DavidAdams, Our intentions are not to bait and switch and so far responses have been very positive. I believe most developers share your surprise when they hear about the overhead to hiring, I did. I appreciate that using outside help to build a team is not right for every stage company.

After looking at the dismal state of recruiting and the enormous typical placement fees that well exceed $25K on avg across the US for developer positions, we feel our pricing is comparatively low and the experience and results, superior.

We found that matchmaking developers and companies may seem like simple quick transactions, and many recruiters treat it that way, but the reality is it is a time intensive process to do it right.

(EDIT: typo)

<comment><USER6> >the overheard to hiring

Did you mean overhead?

Moreover, it seems like you don't validate your form input at all. (Sorry about the entry. My email address is not really aa.)

<comment><USER7> Validating email addresses via anything but verification links are a road to hell.

<comment><USER8> True, but it's not a bad idea to check for an @ in the string as a sanity check, in case the user has accidentally put their username/password/other in the field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry, but what part of 'Stay anonymous ... 100% Private & confidential - Learn your market value without your current employer ever knowing' involves me giving you my name, current employer, current title, and email address in step 2? That's just down-right cognitive dissonance. The landing page doesn't give me enough assurance, but to get any more details, I have to click through. Or do you expect a curious candidate to read the two pages of legalese (Terms of Service, Privacy Policy)? Not saying we wouldn't, but that's sort of a slow, boring sell.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is anonymous to the point that others don't know you are on Pitchbox. Your name isn't shared with anyone until you are matched with a company and you like the pitch and agree to sharing it.

It would be just to hard to send you personally relevant pitches without a little background information to incorporate in our matchmaking.

<comment><USER10> Names aren't the only personally identifying information. Many of us with specific skills working in small companies are easily recognizable based on title and company alone. For the record I'm not looking at the moment, but I know I'm the only one with my title at my current and previous job, and they're both the sort of tech companies that will find your service.

It'd give me _much_ more confidence in your site, and other recruiting sites as well, if you outlined exactly how my info was presented to interesting parties, and how those parties were selected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Our solution to recruiter spam:

Become a recruiter.

I'm sorry but how is your business model any different from that of a recruiter? (Other than claims of human or AI filtered quality.)

I just don't see how you will not run into the exact same problems that existing recruiters run into.

What makes you different than a normal recruiter building profiles of companies and employers and soliciting both? This just looks very familiar, abeit drop dead gorgeous. :-)

I guess if good design and AI are enough to solve the recruiter problem, then count me in, it's just not clear to me how you are really different from your landing page. (Other than of course it is beautiful, seriously fantastic work.)

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few things I dislike about recruiters that we aim to fix:

* They nearly all are technically incompetent, e.g. thinking Java is the cool word for Javascript and such. We know the difference between interfaces and inheritance, being developers ourselves, we are better at understanding the needs of companies and matching that to the desires of developers.

* Recruiters hide information, almost always. We're fully transparent with each pitch and include details about salary, team, etc upfront.

* Recruiters are about quick turn and will place you at any role that matches their keywords. We're more interested in long term relationships. In Pitchbox, this manifests itself in many ways...for example, just because you signed up today, doesn't mean you'll start getting job pitches tomorrow...instead we focus on relevancy and quality over quantity so you hear from us only when we think its particularly suited for you.

* The recruiting experience is horrible for companies too. The recruiter typically spams that hiring manager with resumes forcing the company to sift through it all. We provide simple useful tools for the companies connecting with Pitchbox members.

* If you liked our homepage for its simplicity and design, then you'll be happy to know we have built our entire product with similar focus. Interacting with it should be easy, purposeful, and enjoyable - pretty much the opposite of every interaction I've had with recruiters.

(BTW - Thanks for the kind words about our design)

<comment><USER12> Whilst I don't agree with the practice, the reason most recruiters are cagey about disclosing too much info on the company they represent is because they don't want the candidate to go to the company directly and saving the company $25k. How do you deal with that challenge?

Look, I'm incredibly vocal about the need to disrupt the recruitment industry but from what I understand based on the discussion here, the difference between Pitchbox and agencies is that you're developers not recruiters and you charge a flat fee. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER13> They may have an exclusive contract with the company for that position, for a certain period of time.

Or maybe the company name (or contact details) is NOT part of what they will expose to the candidate.

<comment><USER14> Generally they have a contract that says something along the lines of "if your initial contact with a candidate is through me, then you'll have to pay if you hire them". I think the caginess part is just an extra precaution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a developer, I love the concept - obviously, a tool that filters for great jobs and pitches them to developers is really appealing. However I'm curious about a few things:

1) It sounds like companies are hand picked. On the other side: How do you filter for great developers? I'm sure you can't assume every prospective employee signup is a top-tier developer. Do you have some algorithmic, human, or other process?

2) As someone about to graduate and transition to a PHD program after the summer, I'm looking at technically challenging summer internships. I'm sure there are other prospective interns. Do you have any plans to support matching summer internships?

3) Assuming a github profile is the only "resume" your site accepts (implied by another comment here), where do developers list journal and conference publications? (Apologies in advance if this assumption is wrong -- I haven't signed up due to reasons mentioned in question #2.)

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> _1) It sounds like companies are hand picked. On the other side: How do you filter for great developers? I'm sure you can't assume every prospective employee signup is a top-tier developer. Do you have some algorithmic, human, or other process?_

It is a combination of all of the above. All companies are screened so we know what makes them unique and what type of developers excel there. We do the same for the developers. Everyone is happy only when we make appropriate matches...since we are developers, we think we can do this better then anyone else.

 _2) As someone about to graduate and transition to a PHD program after the summer, I'm looking at technically challenging summer internships. I'm sure there are other prospective interns. Do you have any plans to support matching summer internships?_

Yes, right now we pick that up from your goals and by looking at your background. At times we may reach out for more information so we can understand your unique situation.

 _3) Assuming a github profile is the only "resume" your site accepts (implied by another comment here), where do developers list journal and conference publications? (Apologies in advance if this assumption is wrong -- I haven't signed up due to reasons mentioned in question #2.)_

You can supply your GitHub profile and/or Resume...ideally both. We'll look at improving the sign up process though. We just wanted to make it super simple and easy for developers to start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Aw man, am I the only one who doesn't have this terrible problem of everyone wanting to offer them a job?

I'm sure I'm not doing 100% of what's possible to be able to sit back and pick and choose whether I want the 150k job or the 180k job, but almost all of these "recruiters suck" posts apply to a small minority of people, those near the top of their profession.

Maybe I need a "Do you make shitty weekend projects that end up going nowhere? Let us know" site.

<comment> cupcake-unicorn I'm nowhere near the top of my profession, so I'm baffled by it. I'm actually glad to read about it, since my non-dev friends don't understand it and get angry at me for bitching about people trying to offer me work! I am however, a minority in the field (a woman) so I sometimes think that this fact MAY have something to do with it :/

It really gives me even more reason to hate the recruiting spam - when I'm called "Mr." or when they tell me that "We're looking for a couple of great dudes like you!"

<comment><USER17> Ha! Definitely can relate (except for the great dudes part lol), but I wonder what kind of deals these recruiters have with companies? Do they really care about finding the right people for positions, or do they just want a quick cut of whatever commission they're making? It's flattering sometimes to see a voicemail full of recruiters, but one has to wonder if their intentions are optimally in line with what companies need.

<comment><USER14> Mostly the latter (the quick cut). They're basically like realtors in that sense. I've worked with a few recruiters on both sides of the fence (hiring and behing hired). They're are a few really good ones out there and a shitload of noise. The trick is to find one you trust and just run with them (or, increasingly, just use your personal network).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The salary ranges seem very high from my experience. I've been developing for a few years, and I know a handful of excellent developers working for big-name companies...and I know they're not making the numbers listed here.

I want to believe $180k is doable for a software engineer, but I've yet to meet a salaried programmer over $110k. Am I keeping the wrong company?

I should note I don't live in a major city, but even amongst devs I know in San Francisco, $180k would be very high. It seems most of the programmer salary estimates I see online are similar. Are these numbers real? Or are the numbers I see coming from software fantasy land?

<comment><USER19> They are very real. Perhaps you should sign up :P

<comment><USER18> If you are correct, I've been working for absolute peanuts the last few years :X.

<comment><AUTHOR> These salary brackets are very real for US based developers.

<comment><USER18> If you could be so kind, could you clarify exactly who could expect these salaries? Are these entry/mid/senior level? 1, 5, 10 years experience? Top- tier developers only?

I ask because there are plenty of companies hiring at sub-$70k salaries and they're having no trouble filling their positions with decent programmers. Are the programmers I know selling themselves short, or is $140k for extraordinarily experienced and talented programmers only?

<comment><USER20> I can only speak for web application development, but $140k is definitely not for "extraordinarily experienced and talented programmers only" in San Francisco for someone doing js/rails.

Are the people you know working in startups where part of their compensation comes in equity, or the prestige of working at a well-known "great" place?

<comment><USER21> I'm working in the midwest where the average experience level among developers is "several" years. (I don't know exactly, but it's probably at least 5). I'd be surprised if the average engineer salary here is as high as the lowest pitchbox bracket.

<comment><USER20> Then I expect the average developer could get a big bump in salary working for an SF company.

But it's not a free lunch: cost of living is high here and some things like commuting are terrible. I know developers who moved back to Minnesota so they could waste less of their lives in their cars.

Hence the appeal of "work from Ohio". 100% remote seems to be an ever more realistic option, but I expect it's still harder to find work, although work is so easy to find this may not matter much. A bigger issue may be finding a 100% remote job at a company with a remote culture. Working remotely with a company whose culture is centred around an office can be an exercise in a thousand little tediums.

The different social dynamics of working remotely can be a challenge as well.

I feel as though my post reads a bit like "don't try to work for an SF company", but that's not really my intent. I mean more to convey that the pitchbox salaries are perfectly real, but it's not too good to be true. Moving to SF to work, or working remotely are options, but salary isn't everything and these choices won't be right for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting - kind of reminds me of a site a friend built a few years ago. It was a resume site with contact info hidden. In order to contact you the recruiter had to pay you - at whatever price you put on a contact (usually a buck or two). If you didn't respond in a reasonable time the money was refunded. But he was trying to solve the same problem - recruiter spam. Unfortunately he launched right in the deepest pit of the financial meltdown and he was unable to get any traction with the site.

<comment><USER23> If I'm looking for a high paying job, a few dollars isn't going to interest me. Your friend probably had to create a ton of code to allow for the applicant to store and eventually withdraw his few bucks. If I'm really looking for a job, how many recruiters could possibly contact me? 10-15? at $2, that's $30 at the end of the process. Seems more like a distraction from my job hunting.

It seems more like a distraction from core development (having to manage the cash accounts for applicants) and not enough money to be interesting.

I can see charging the recruiter to email people (sites like Elance do that) but that's where it should end. The money will never be interesting enough for an applicant to care and it confuses the process.

<comment><USER24> I expect the intent was really the other way around. To someone who is truly interested in what you have to offer, a buck or two is just a rounding error on the salary they will eventually pay you. To someone who is harvesting contact information to fire spam your way, $2 * n-number-of-contacts starts to add up very quickly.

<comment><USER23> But that's the point. It's supposed to be a no brainer for someone who actually wants a real contact with the applicant but prohibitive for a spammer.

A recruiter who is genuinely interested in you for a job opportunity wouldn't mind paying the $2 but a spammer who is emailing hundreds or thousands of people just trying to build an interest list would suffer.

Still, this hinges on the person actually responding so the spammer wouldn't suffer in this case. They'd be happy to pay for a $2 lead and not suffer any expense if the person doesn't respond.

I think you'd have to pay regardless of the lead responding for this to have a chance of working. Again, that's how a successful system work with Elance. You pay regardless of getting your bid accepted.

<comment><USER22> I see your point. He really didn't ever get enough usage on the site to know if the refundable upfront fee would have been a sufficient anti-spam tactic or not. Several sites with the same basic idea all launched around that time. His was bootstrapped, at least one of the others had millions of VC behind it. I don't think any of them made it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd prefer it if I could see the possible "goals" before entering my contact information. At the moment it is the usual: no information before signup. (I didn't proceed past the contact information tab, so can't comment further).

</comment><comment><USER26> Just went through the signup process. There should be a textbox for those of us who don't maintain great github profiles to say a few words about ourselves.

<comment><USER27> I just submitted, but I'm a product manager - looks like you're focusing on engineers only? We're useful too (sometimes).

<comment><AUTHOR> Our focus has been developers because we are most familiar with how messed up the status quo is for us and how we can improve it.

That being said we have also seen an overwhelming response from those that don't write code. We are figuring out how to expand the product.

<comment><USER28> I feel like you could emphasize your DEVELOPER-ONLY focus a little better: it's not clear who should be filling out the form a) unless you scroll down the page and read _all_ the content or b) until you get to the github handle input and think, "Hmmm..."

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 I think the signup flow could use more handholding as far as telling the prospective developer why you need the information you are asking for and what you plan to do with it (i.e. how it will help you find them a good opportunity).

As an example, I got as far as the second part of the form where I am asked for my name, current company, location and title, and became hesitant because I have zero idea what you are going to use this information for specifically.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We'll certainly to address that and be more clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looks pretty sweet. It's been a few years since I've done the job-search thing, but this looks like what I'd want to use.

Now that I think about it, this reminds me a bit of Feynman's pickup technique [0] - why waste your time with the whole song-and-dance routine if what you want was never on offer to begin with?

Anyway, good luck!

[0] [http://www.roberttwigger.com/journal/2010/9/16/richard- feynm...](http://www.roberttwigger.com/journal/2010/9/16/richard-feynmans- pick-up-technique.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> Seems like a great idea. I recommend making the "what do you want to do" a bit more explicit (e.g., more multiple choice, asking me to give examples of jobs I'd leave my current position for, etc). When I completed this, I wasn't sure how you'd know what my "dream job" was. I know you're probably trying to keep it short, but I think I'd be more of a believer that this was going to yield good results if I were asking for slightly more info.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @esharef - we really are focused on making the experience very simple and painless. For developers, we can extrapolate a lot from the basic information provided (GitHub/Salary/Goals/Location/Resume)...the goals in particular are often revealing. It may take one or two pitches to calibrate but overtime pitches get more relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I made a collaborative Gmail filter up on GitHub. I no longer get any recruiter spam at all.

<https://github.com/drcongo/spammy-recruiters>

</comment><comment><USER32> A little sketched out about putting my real name on here.. how do I know my current employer won't see it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Every single developer is reviewed by a human before we begin any matchmaking and we also screen every employer (this means names are in a predictable format).

<comment><USER33> Ah this clarifies something for me. I was just wanting to try it out but didn't want to put my details, can't go to the next step, but down the bottom it says "stay anonymous".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I used to run a software developer job board startup for several years and I came the the conclusion that what the market needs is a better way of reaching passive job seekers.

While I think this approach is along the right lines, the big problem is that it's incredibly hard to get passive job seekers to sign-up, so mostly you'll get active job seekers signing up and then you'll essentially just be another curated job board / CV database.

I think your key to success will be if you can figure out someway of getting lots of passive job seekers to signup.

Personally if I was doing it I'd go the route of making hyper-targetted mailing lists. So like a reverse groupon catering to specific niches. So have one for developer evangelists, one for flash games developers, etc. with the idea being that the niches are specific enough that people want to be on the list not because they're job hunting but because they want to keep their finger on the pulse of their niche.

(feel free to email me if you want to talk more about the developer recruitment space; I've spent a lot of time thinking about it!)

<comment><USER35> > I think your key to success will be if you can figure out someway of getting > lots of passive job seekers to signup.

If you want people to do something there is way that often, but not always, works: pay them.

Why not share the fee you charge the companies with the people on the list? Obviously there are issues to be worked out to stop people from gaming the system, they need to be legitimate candidates, but I'm suspect there is a way. Basically it's the same as cashback on credit cards - they charge the merchant and share some of that with the consumer.

Just some food for thought

<comment><USER34> You want to incentivize the best developers, not those who want (a relatively small amount of) money. By replacing intrinsic incentive with monetary incentive it may end up making the situation worse.

Someone might happily sign-up to a mailing list for interesting jobs based on the inherent incentive, but offer that person $10 to do the same and they'll think "my time is worth more than $10" and just walk away.

You'll almost certainly better off just putting that same amount of money into traditional marketing channels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think this is much needed service. However, I did not see anywhere mentioned - how long I might have to wait after I said I am interested in, lets say $100+ job. What I am asking is how exactly does your process-timeline work? (i.e. Roughly how long do I might need to wait? Is there some sort of strategy/rational that helps me set some realisting timeline expectations?

<comment><USER37> My understanding of this service is that it is meant to be used for people that currently have jobs, but would consider offers above a certain amount. Basically a way to say "only contact me if I get an offer that matches my interests above $XX".

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Recommendation: go niche if you have trouble building a critical mass of employers and prospective employees. Be known as the "go to" place for getting jobs in obscure but important technology/programming language <X> (for example). Brand appropriately, and manually reach out to companies and developers that use those technologies and try to kickstart the process. Get on the first page for "X jobs" in google. Then build out from there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey @arscan, thanks for the feedback - totally agree. We did this at first and was able to build relationships connecting developers and companies around ruby/python/js roles. With this we HN post we wanted to guage the appetite of the broader tech community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I applied, it will be interesting to see what kind of jobs you have in mind. Although one way to improve is to be able to tell you where I would be willing to relocate. Id love Seattle for instance, but wouldn't consider a job in Colorado or Austin. Other than that, it is a very cool service and look forward to finding out what you find for me.

</comment><comment><USER40> Nice and interesting idea!

Out of curiosity, are you also working on Coderwall?

Your email ( from your HN profile) matches the twitter username of a Coderwall founder.

In your privacy page, you have "Appdillo, Inc. [..] provides this Privacy Policy" and the domain <http://www.appdillo.com> has a coderwall email address in it.

</comment><comment><USER41> One item to pay attention to is location. If someone currently works in San Francisco and choose to remain there, will a Palo Alto company be able to contact them? Is there a default radius?

Perhaps someone wants to relocate, but only to specific cities. Expanded options would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we understand there are unique situations like this so we typically reach out for more information when someone says they are willing to relocate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> For me I would do it if the salary field was optional, I think the employer should decide what value to place on a specific candidate based on his or her past experience.

Companies who can afford to pay for someone with an expansive background will do so, but certain candidates might also be more interested in working with local startups who don't have Silicon Valley or NYC budgets, but allow for more flexible positions (i.e. Telework, like others have mentioned).

Not to mention certain people thrive in a small team environment versus a large corporate culture, and there's a chance to get meaningful equity to build something new and exciting.

</comment><comment><USER43> I noticed you guys used the same form UI as Barack Obama's donation page. I like it!

<comment><USER44> I was about to make the same comment. @kylerush, the developer with Obama posted the A/B testing of Barack Obama's donation page. Its a great design (apparently well-tested design) glad you guys are using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Have you considered adding StackOverflow as one of your "Resume" links? That's, personally, where I keep my most up-to-date information. And now I think it's time to update that information.

</comment><comment><USER46> Maybe my liberal arts major is showing, but I keep reading your URL as 'triptych box'.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptych>

</comment><comment><USER47> I understand you're trying to create an alternative to spam from say Linkedin, but that really is what I use for my resume these days. Can I use that for my "application"

<comment><AUTHOR> Putting your resume online, on a resume board, or elsewhere is sure to send many unsolicited jobs in to your inbox. You'll then have to engage with each individual to determine if its interesting work, good pay, etc...That works if you are actively looking but it can be time consuming and you can be overlooked by great companies. This is meant to be a filter, we'll spend the time filtering out the junk jobs for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> $25k is ridiculous, unless you make some guarantees, which you don't seem to do (wouldn't know, there's no relevant info for employers without signing up).

<comment><USER49> It's not $25k upfront for every potential hirer, it's $25k to the company that _actually hires somebody_.

<comment><USER48> I know, it's too high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I can't fill out the form as I have two major problems. I am legally entitled to work in the USA, but only for my current employer. - there is no option for this. The salary I expect depends on the type of job and total compensation (equity) - there is no way to specify this.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1% at one company vs 1% at another company can vary so drastically we thought it was almost meaningless to ask...we instead prefer to present the whole pitch and let you determine if that equity and everything else that comes with it is interesting. It is preferable if you let us know you want in the goals...something to the effect of "small startup where X, Y, and Z" or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Good idea. Does that Cinema Display on their homepage also look odd to anyone else? [https://d2221r371oqwhn.cloudfront.net/assets/feature- image-b...](https://d2221r371oqwhn.cloudfront.net/assets/feature-image- bd723f3eda6ad77ccfb6584ae4da89ba.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER52> Quick design comment: I like the clean look, but I find the home page a bit long (i.e., a lot of scrolling is required), even if that's the style these days. Best wishes with your project. I look forward to updates. Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER53> I submitted my information; it doesn't hurt to give it a try. I live in the Philadelphia area, but I'm open to relocating if the position is right, so a service such as this may be able to work for me. I'll have to see.

</comment><comment><USER54> I stopped at entering my name, company and position. Why can't I try this out anonymously? The stakes are too high for most people to willy nilly add their personal info to a conduit for recruiters.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't share your information with recruiters, that's part of the proposition as we are a conduit to companies that you decide who to share your information with.

We match jobs to your goals AND to your relevant experience, if we didn't collect information about who you are we couldn't accurately do our part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Do a lot of people click the lower "what do you want to make?" options?

<comment><USER56> And, I'm guessing all the jobs are going to be in the Bay Area, judging by the salary levels...

<comment><USER57> I would assume so. Living in Ohio, I nearly choked when I saw the lowest was $80k

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Nice and clean/simple. Also great use of filepicker, just joined!

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm curious: in

"Every pitch received improves our personalized matching algorithm, making pitches get even better over time."

how would you distinguish a "good" pitch from a "bad" one?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is part of our secret sauce, but when you receive a pitch, your very basic interactions with it feed back into the system.

<comment><USER59> I was asking because if you optimize for pitches response rate, you end up with better pitches but not necessarily good matches between candidates/companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Re: Your overboard filepicker thing on the last page, if it's blocked by noscript, enabling causes a total back-to-step-1-hassle for the user.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, looking at improving that step...will address the bug

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> This reminds me a lot of Developer Auction (<http://www.developerauction.com/>).

<comment><AUTHOR> They are doing something also interesting, albeit different. They timebox the offers which is clever but the "Auction Price" that is non-binding is confusing and people I've talked to felt it was sorta gimmicky for that reason.

We feel compensation is _very_ important but so are the problems you'll be working on, who you'll be working with, and the culture fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I don't know why but the font on your website appears as times new roman. I'm on Mac OSX, Firefox 12.0. On Chrome looks ok.

</comment><comment><USER63> Can we make changes? I have submitted, but would like to amend my resume to include some of my relevant side projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should receive a welcome email shortly if not already, respond to that with any updates. You can always email email@example.com too

<comment><USER63> Cool cool, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Just a small ui thing. When the info icon is clicked the layout flicks everytime. Can get annoying for some people.

</comment><comment><USER65> Is it US only? How about telecommuting?

<comment><USER66> I presume "I want to make 80k" means USD80k, no choice of what currency I would like to earn.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is USD.

Right now we are only hiring for US companies and a few in London.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Awesome, any plans for designers?

</comment><comment><USER68> I didn't realise it was a requirement of a dream job to be earning over $80k a year...

</comment><comment><USER69> I may have missed it on a quick glance, but how does this stop recruiter spam?

</comment><comment><USER70> It reminds me of jobdreaming.com

</comment><comment><USER71> Nice site. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem; have you thought about an "allocate <number> points" solution? I've had the thought that an "allocate 20 points" resume / requirements list might be superior to the traditional, cluttered approach. ( [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/why-i- wiped-m...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/why-i-wiped-my- linkedin-profile/) )</comment>


Google backs gay marriage - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/our-position-on-californias-no-on-8.html <comment><USER6> Personally, I have some concerns over this approach.

Google is a mediator between users and information. As such, it's really important to have and appear to have as little bias as possible - otherwise it taints the information that is coming through. To be effective as a tool, Google really needs to be transparent and impartial as possible. (See Google in China as a counterexample).

Also, I question how effective this approach would be. I'm not sure many people that oppose gay marriage would be swayed by Google's statement... I mean, Google has a strong brand, but I really doubt people will vote no because "Google says so" in the same way as they would with say, Oprah.

I think there are other advocacy paths that are more effective, and don't spend Google's brand/position in this way.

<comment><USER7> This idea that neutrality is something to strive for ends up marginalizing the correct point of view by giving equal time to the opposing point of view. In this case, the correct answer is obvious, that gay marraige should be permitted at the federal level. Being neutral about gay marriage is like being neutral about evolution -- it only ends up making the creationists look more legitimate. They don't deserve any attention or neutrality. In this case, Google has no bias because they are right.

<comment><USER8> _Being neutral about gay marriage is like being neutral about evolution_

What a strange analogy. Evolution is a natural phenomena, while marriage is a state-regulated union. There is a set of reasons apart from tradition why legal marriage exists, and very little in that set would apply with any frequency to "gay marriage". The most obvious reason, of course, is that the division of labor between the sexes is inevitably derivative of the constraints created by pregnancy.

Brin doesn't really argue beyond this,

 _we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality._

But this is an error. It's an easy error to make.

<comment><USER9> "The most obvious reason, of course, is that the division of labor between the sexes is inevitably derivative of the constraints created by pregnancy."

You are claiming that this is the primary reason why we have state-regulated marriage? Two words: [citation needed].

<comment><USER8> _The universality of marriage within different societies and cultures is attributed to the many basic social and personal functions for which it provides structure, such as sexual gratification and regulation, division of labour between the sexes, economic production and consumption, and satisfaction of personal needs for affection, status, and companionship; perhaps its strongest function concerns procreation, the care of children and their education and socialization, and regulation of lines of descent._

<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/366152/marriage>

<comment><USER9> That's about marriage, not state-regulated marriage. You are being intellectually dishonest.

<comment><USER10> The quote is about marriage as a social institution. States are known to regulate social institutions within their spheres of influence.

<comment><USER9> Nothing you've said amounts to anything near a citation for his claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As the father of a gay son who one day wants to marry, I am opposed to same- sex marriage. The word "marriage" has significant religious and cultural significance and this significance should be preserved. Same-sex unions with all of the benefits? Sign me up.

More significantly, I disagree with Google's taking a position on this issue. I think corporations should think seriously about taking positions in domestic, cultural issues. Civil rights issues? Go for it. Changing the definition of religious terms? Out of bounds. I'm not religious, but this seems to make the most sense in my own life. Google should do the same.

If Google wants to wade into politics, then welcome to the party. I'm sure they are comfortable with the results of becoming political -- when people with opposing views make and change the laws in order to diminish Google's political power. That's the way politics works. I'm also concerned with idealists who only whine about things that are easy and never take a stand where they could make a real difference or where it could really hurt. What about billions in China not getting the full internet? Well, to listen to Google that's a much more complex subject.

Right.

<comment><USER12> I am opposed to our government getting involved in marriage, period.

Gays nor straights should have to turn to the government to have their unions blessed.

But since straights have such advantages given to them as a result of our legal system, it would be silly not to have the rights given to all.

Marriage is NOT a religious construct. It is a construct granted because of other dependent bodies of law, including taxes, health care, child custody, property rights.

Without marriage laws to assist, it is more difficult to have our courts administer the other dependent laws. You are therefore denying gays equal access to the legal system and its protections as a result.

You have the right to believe in whatever you want.

You do not have the right, in MY country, to deny other human beings rights or protections that others have.

Go to church all you want. Just leave me out of your bigotry.

<comment><USER11> I'm not religious -- perhaps you missed that point.

Marriage is deeply a religious idea. Religions and their ideas of marriage pre-date all existing governments and other social structures. Therefore it would be silly to make an argument that marriage is government-based: it's not. Governments simply codified and wrote into law those commonly-held ideas of marriage. Later on, as society became more complex, sure, other rights were given based on these definitions.

Civil Unions offer all of the advantages of marriage without getting into a cultural war (unless you want to do that).

Sounds like you enjoy feeling very self-righteous about your beliefs, ie, the whole "in MY country" routine. I wouldn't want to deny rights to anybody. Why don't you calm down a bit and realize that you're trying to argue with somebody who basically agrees with you?

And don't call me a bigot. You don't know me, and based on your post you don't even understand my position on the issue. It's an ad hominem.

<comment><USER13> By this logic you also advocate replacing any state or federal use of the term "marriage" with "civil union" for heterosexual couples as well, and leave "marriage" as a term exclusively to religious groups, then?

<comment><USER11> I don't have an opinion one way or another on that one.

Since the gist of my argument was "let's not fight over something we can solve" perhaps we just add the term "civil union" wherever the term marriage appears. Or perhaps we have a constitutional ammendment that makes the two phrases equal. For instance, I don't think you could go back in the historical record and change terms. The answer to that question may be based on how you make laws.

Another poster made a comment about 3 or more people in a union. I believe this follows naturally as well from an extension of the term "marriage". Things like multiple partners seem just fine in the 21st century. At least to me, but I'm a libertarian. Since the term seems to be opening up, as a hacker I say make the new definition in one place to be equal to anywhere else the term "marriage" was used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow! One generally doesn't expect that out of a corporation, much less from google. I'm very much impressed, and at the same time pleased with their stance.

I do wonder if I would be similarly impressed with it if their stance were the opposite, and whether I would feel comfortable supporting them by using their products and services afterward. Very gutsy decision to come out on a divisive issue like this.

<comment><USER15> > much less from google

Why?

<comment><USER16> it's probably because of the size of the company and what they're risking by having an opinion on this non-business issue.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. Breaking it down, what do they gain? Possibly some good will of the more liberal users. But powerful religious figures could just as easily (and almost certainly will) turn it into something of a pr nightmare that will ultimately affect some of google's users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The primary argument for gay "marriage" seems to be equal rights for both gay couples and married couples. Another key argument I keep hearing is to "keep government out of the bedroom."

Couldn't both of those goals be accomplished without getting into a cultural war over the term "marriage"?

If "civil unions" are legislated to having the same rights as marriage - <USER2> that solves the equality problem.

Also, "civil unions" can have a much looser definition. So if there is a threesome of men that really love each other and want to make a life commitment to each other and have equal rights as a married couple, they could do so. However, with gay "marriage" that would not be possible unless it also included plural marriage - and given our nation's history that's pretty unlikely.

"Civil Unions" just seem to be much more flexible in preserving rights of people in minority situations. Even for non-homosexuals. I had good friends who were cousins in their 50's and had lived together non-sexually for over 30 years. They were inseparable and they shared all their resources. When one of them had a brain tumor and was in the hospital, fortunately because they lived in Germany, it was no issue, but if they had lived in the US, there would have been issues with visiting, etc from what I hear. For them "marriage" would not be something they wanted obviously, but it would have made their lives much easier in many situations if they could have had a "civil union".

So, I'm all for having equal rights and government out of the bedroom, but gay marriage just doesn't seem to be the right solution for those two goals. 1) It leaves out other very legitimate situations where companions - either non- sexual or plural arrangements would not have equal rights, and 2) it starts a divisive cultural war that could be avoided. Peace and love right?

<comment><USER18> So you support "seperate but equal?" That was the winning attitude of our nation for about a century; and that turned out just dandy!

Why should polygamy or polyandry be outlawed? If multiple people feel they love each other enough that they wish to be bound by the legal act of marriage, who are you to say otherwise? Who does it hurt?

This concept of marriage and single sex partners is not only anti- evolutionary, but is only backed by religious nonsense. Granted some animals wish to be this way, but why should anyone say others cannot?

<comment><USER19> I see a common thread between your post and the gp--marriage vs. civil union is an artificial distinction. The best solution I've heard is to remove government-sanctioned marriage, and replace it with civil union. Religious institutions can still perform religiously-recognized marriages; so there's no controversy over eroding definitions. Government gives the same rights and privileges to civil unions, regardless of who's involved in them, so there's no controversy over differing levels of privilege.

The only push-back I anticipate would be from the Dominionists who can't stand seeing church and state separate a little further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good on ya Sergey Brin. Its nice to see a company taking official support in regards to the things that affect their employees in non-work situations.

And for those saying companies don't take sides or make announcements, lets name a couple. Chick-fil-a is closed on Sundays. Why, because the founder is a hard-right Christian who thinks everyone should go to church or they go to hell. I worked there when I was a teenager, firsthand experience.

How about Dominos? The founder built a town outside of Naples in Florida strictly for Christians. Ava Maria, I think its called.

And don't forget SC Johnson, "a family company". Jeesh.

<comment><USER21> When is the last time you saw Chick-fil-A write their political stance on their corporate blog?

<comment><USER22> Excellent point.

Never. Neither does In-N-Out, another privately owned "openly" christian company.

Staying private is one good way to alleviate issues with upset share holders and continuing to passively support the owners beliefs. This is fine as long as the company still respects the rights of the share holders, customers and employees.

As many have already stated, and i'll reiterate. There are two issues being discussed here. 1) gay rights. [no question they should have equal rights] 2) entangling support for social issues with a public company [this is where people have problems].

All the publicly held multi-national companies that I know of offer benefits to a homosexual partner. But they do it through the normal workflow of HR. The problem is Google does everything differently. Including making this announcement. So the question remains is this an acceptable way to do it? Google thinks so. (now my libertarian free market tendancies come in to play) If you support the way they did it, buy some more Google and give them a positive blog article. If you disagree sell it or short it and go use duckduckgo or yahoo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For all of you who are worried about your stock price: don't forget to consider what effect this has on Google's culture. From a business perspective, if you look only at the external effects, taking this stand probably does weigh out to a bad idea. But the internal benefits of employee loyalty and a culture of tolerance might outweigh that, making the blog post justified even from your strictly financial perspective.

</comment><comment><USER24> _Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions -- Democrats and Republicans,_

Please, isn't Google made up of 99% Democrats? I'm all for gay marriage, but that is a misrepresentation. One Republican does not make great diversity.

<comment><USER25> What about libertarians? I don't know of any at Google (except for that guy who wants to build a libertarian city on an offshore platform), but I do know that they're highly overrepresented among hackers.

</comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill Did they donate money to one side or the other, or did they only express an "official" opinion?

And how would a person who was supporting Prop8 (say, a practicing Orthodox Jew, a Tibetan Buddhist, a Muslim, a Sikh, or a Christian, all faiths which explicitly proscribe homosexual behavior) feel about working at Google after hearing this?

<comment><USER26> How would they feel about working at Google after hearing this? There are two possibilities...

1) Said Orthodox Jew, Muslim, Christian, etc., while privately disapproving of gay marriage, recognizes that his right to be offended ends where my rights begin. Said employee does not wish to shove his own personal brand of "morality" down everyone else's throats by codifying discrimination into the State Constitution, and therefore has no issue with Google's stance on the matter.

Or,

2) Said Orthodox Jew, Muslim, Christian, etc., is upset with his employer because said employee feels he should be entitled to infringe upon the human rights of others. Said employee is free to leave Google, as he is doubtless of little value to the company, or to society in general.

<comment><USER27> Google employees should be careful to not mention that they are "Jew, Muslim, Christian, etc". If they want to keep their jobs they need to align themselves with company policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder how much shit Sergey is going to take for this. Will it be enough to stop him from doing similar things in the future? The day Google stops being able to do surprisingly/crazy things like this is the beginning of the end.

<comment><USER29> If I were a shareholder, I wouldn't want my company to be running around taking stands on social issues unrelated to the business of the company. Let Sergey advocate against proposition 8 in his private life if he feels that strongly about it.

<comment><USER30> It's not just Sergey's position. It's Google's position. And it is very related to Google, since there are a lot of gay software engineers, this is very important to many of them, and Google wants to attract and keep these employees.

<comment><USER16> A software engineers sexuality should have nothing to do with his/her work. It's like google asking people to vote for obama because they want to attract and keep black engineers. Bullshit, that's right.

<comment><USER31> No. Google would have to tell people to stop being racist, not to vote for Obama, for that to make any sense.

Also, my sexuality SHOULD have nothing to do with my work, but if I were affected adversely by this or other similar discriminatory nonsense, it would most likely _affect_ my work. I daresay the same would apply to anyone regardless of sexuality.

Prop 8 is about more than just marriage, it's about what _comes with_ marriage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> To me, this boils down to a few simple points.

      Should Sergey have posted this on the official company blog? Probably not
      Do I support his position even though I'm not gay? Sure do.
      Are people blowing this way out of proportion? Absolutely.

</comment><comment><USER33> To someone who thinks that gay marriage is about equality, this could be seen as similar to a companies stance on racism or slavery (which is obvious now, but wasn't a hundred years ago). If Google believe that in the future people will look back on this issue in the same way, then this could also be a savvy business position. Also, in the eyes of Sergey, this is probably just another way for Google to not be evil.

</comment><comment><USER34> First of all, I think those who brought up the question of why THIS issue when there are other, more life-and-death serious problems in the world (such as AIDS orphans in Africa) are missing the point. Sergey didn't decide to come out in opposition to prop 8 because he was just looking for some social cause to throw Google behind or because he thought it was necessarily the most pressing or deserving issue, but because it is something that will directly affect the company and the employees he is in charge of and responsible for. As he states, it "is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8." Clearly, this decision was made not because Sergey believes that banning same- sex marriage is wrong in the larger moral sense (though obviously he does) but instead because of the comparatively specific, micro concern of how it well effect the people who work at his company.

While Google surely puts more thought into how its practices affect society than the average giant corporation, it is hardly a charity and I don't think this statement should be any indication that it plans on becoming one. "Don't be evil" is still a long way on the altruism scale from becoming a humanitarian NGO.

...

Is it, though, appropriate for a head of a public company to officially align said company on a piece of controversial (and not strictly relevant to the business) legislation? Well, perhaps not. In this situation however, I think it was an admirable and fitting action. It reinforces Google's "not business as usual" stance and commitment to social awareness and doing good. Of course, though, there will be many who see this as the opposite of "doing good."

The values of tolerance, diversity, and meritocratic inclusion are, though, so fundamental to the company (and, when at its best, the Valley and the tech industry in general) that this seems like a natural and reasonable move. Though I agree there is certainly room for argument, particularly over specifics, here, many will surely see opposition to Prop. 8 as reflective of the above values. I took Sergey's blog post as more a statement of "live and let live" and respect for all than as a focused and specific endorsement of gay marriage.

I don't work at Google but I do live in the Bay Area and I'm confident that the employee culture at the company is such that those with strong feelings against gay rights are used to keeping their position largely to themselves. In other words, conservative Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Sikh/etc. individuals who work there have, I'm sure, resigned to keep their religious convictions a personal matter in order to effectively and civilly participate in a diverse environment. Consequently, I would be surprised if this pronouncement causes much of a stir even from pro-Prop. 8 Googlers.

<comment><USER17> Wow, thanks for the thoughtful reply. Seriously, great points. On a lighter note - I guess if we can get more AIDS orphans to work at Google, it would shift priorities ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Dear Sergey -

You're surely aware of how divisive this issue is by just looking at the polling on this matter. By taking a hard stand on a very divisive issue on behalf of your whole company, you are spending an enormous amount of your Google brand and influence on this issue. Right?

According to gaydemographics.org, there are less than 100,000 gay couples in California. Let's assume _all_ of them want to get married. Let's also assume, which I think is reasonable, that those gay couples wanting to get married are already cohabiting, have plenty of food, have shelter, have access to world class health care etc - and after this huge expenditure of Google influence and brand change, that will be the same - but they might have a marriage certificate.

So, I just wonder why you chose that issue over this issue - that of AIDS orphans in Africa (unfortunately that label often hides the fact that these are real living breathing children). According to one.org, there are 12 million children who have lost BOTH parents to AIDS and are on their own now. This is a rapidly growing problem and there are estimated to be 25 million AIDS orphans by 2010. The sheer scale of this disaster is mind-boggling - <USER3> it's mostly an information problem that needs to be solved. These children need parents. There are many couples around the world that are eager for children. Who better than Google to find a solution? For many of these children, adoption would mean hope where now there is only despair. As impactful as a marriage certificate would be to 100,000 gay couples in one of the richest states of the richest country - I'm guessing an adoption certificate would be tremendously more valuable to these children who are truly destitute. And I'm also guessing this would be much more inspirational and unifying to Google's share-holders and users.

In deciding on where to spend your resources, I would suggest watching this: [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities.html)

and reading this (the irony is not lost on me): <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118124139854628069.html>

I can understand the draw to be edgy and controversial, but sometimes the causes which are most worthy also are the least popular. I applaud the work the Google Foundation is doing, don't get me wrong - but please consider the costs vs benefits to Google in working towards these two pieces of paper I mentioned: the gay marriage license for wealthy westerners or the adoption certificate for a destitute, yet living breathing child who has lost both parents in Africa.

Cheers, Matt

<comment><USER35> Your argument is just plain old stupid. Not bad, not poor, just stupid.

Because there are big problems, one should not solve the small problems? Because I know of aids, I should not give a dollar to the local begger?

Please stop this bullshit about aids orphans in Africa - it's just propaganda by the charity organisations who want you to give them money. Children are children everywhere in the world. Those aids orphans are not abandoned by Africans - every human being has the nurturing instinct. Neighbours are not letting orphans starve in Africa. Africa does not NEED you to solve this problem - it is a large problem, but it's not a critical problem.

There are WORSE things, but they are not sexy. There are men who work their entire life shoveling coal for hardly any money to survive, but nobody cares about them. They are not cute, they are not small, so they are abandoned.

Don't let those charity fat cats shape your perception of where help is needed. THINK first! And everyone cannot fight the same battle, we have to diversify and fight different battles. So if you see someone doing nothing, then ask him to do something. If you see people already helping in one way, don't try to make them do what you are already doing, otherwise all these other problems will get ignored.

<comment><USER17> You may notice that this letter is not to a private citizen working with their own resources - it's to one of the wealthiest individuals leading one of the wealthiest companies in the world. A company that is not primarily owned by him, but by investors all over the world. This is about using Google - <USER4> multi-national giant funded by the investments of others to take a large risk alienating users to help a cause that already has wealthy and vocal advocates. Big risk with other people's resources and little potential upside for those people - doesn't seem like a great idea.

<comment><USER35> Today you help gay people, tommorow you help aids. Not mutually exclusive, one does not prevent the other. One step at a time, and try for real change.

Look at Bill Gates - they open this "charity" and then invites all his friends to save on their taxes by donating money in there. Utter bullcrap. Charities are the new Tax Havens. And they just hit people like you with propaganda on what needs to be done. It's all about:

Aids, Cancer, Malaria, Darfur, Earthquake in Sichuan, Tsunami, Pandas, Eagles, Dolphins, Whales, Cats & Dogs, Zimbabwe.

The media topics are almost always the same, but are you telling me you really think that the bulk of the worlds suffering is in any of those topics? Are Dolphins more worthy than Hyenas?

Charity is a big-industry, and they use marketing techniques to get money from people. And in marketing, you need to get a clear brand - Darfur is a brand, Aids is a brand, Starving Children are a brand. They don't run billboards with real and unsexy problems in the world.

I spent a lot of time in Africa and in China, and the people I really respect are very small - I met this American couple who have been running a haven for monkeys in the border of Cameroun for the last 20 years. They make a real difference - they have put everything they have into that project, and they have saved so many animals. But these large charities will collect millions and do nothing there! I've met doctors who go to villages and treat the poor people there for free. Those are REAL heroes! They touch disgusting wounds and look at wretched people without flinching. They are people to look up to, people to admire.

Not cigar smoking men sitting in offices in New York and meeting with advertising agencies on how best to create a fundraiser for the new batch of teenage stars.

I would just ignore these people if I could, but when I see them influencing otherwise intelligent people, it really pisses me off.

THINK! If people are asking you for money, don't believe everything they tell you!

<comment><USER36> _Aids, Cancer, Malaria, Darfur, Earthquake in Sichuan, Tsunami, Pandas, Eagles, Dolphins, Whales, Cats & Dogs, Zimbabwe._

Don't be so quick to trivialize cancer and aids. I assure you: if you ever have to see someone close to you suffer and ultimately die of one of those nasty diseases, the problem of getting a marriage license for gay people will pale in comparison.

Sometimes the media serves a good purpose. Not all the time, but sometimes. I personally think that cancer and aids, darfur (last i checked something like 400,000 people, mostly innocent, were massacred), are much weightier issues, and therefore deserve the bulk of media attention.

This is not to discredit the honorable work of people working on relatively small societal problems such as gay marriage, but in most of the above problems, the core argument is that _lives are being lost_. Think about that.

<comment><USER35> Darfur is utter nonsense. Remember Sierra Leone? Liberia? I saw the videos coming out of those countries, and yes, that place was a war - a REAL war. Remember the Hutu Tutsi thing? Another real massacre. There are pictures all over the net.

But Darfur is just wierd. In this age of Cameras, Camera People, Live streaming, how come 400,000 people have died, and there are no videos of actual combat? Darfur is the strangest "war" I've ever heard of - it seems to be a theoretical war. I've never met the people running from there, I've never seen the videos of the actual war, I've never seen real photographic evidence of any massacres.

People want to constantly hear about wars in Africa. But that age has suddenly ended. All the wars in Africa have ended, what's just left is just local clashes and conflicts between ethnic groups, and various organisations who have a vested interest in there being conflicts in Africa push up these topics. Do some real research, you'll see how wierd the Darfur war comes across compared to Sierra Leone or Liberia. Also, research the role of China in the region.

Cancer sucks, but cancer has been there since the beginning of time. People get it, people die. The only reason so much focus is given on it is that it is the one disease that being rich has no effect on. So the rich people have vested interest in getting rid of cancer before other diseases like Malaria.

Aids is of course a problem, but seriously, remember 10 years ago? 1998? The news about Aids was the same panic as right now. But the thing is this - <USER5> an exponentially growing disease, with drugs that are ensuring that the people infected stay alive longer, should it not have been more devastating than it turned out?

The Aids projection seem to be staying at roughly the same number. I'm not saying it's not there, I'm just saying that it's not an explosive epidemic.

<comment><USER36> In this age of Cameras, Camera People, Live streaming, how come 400,000 people have died, and there are no videos of actual combat?

Perhaps if you did more research you would actually find that its kind of hard to _get videos of actual combat_. Even if you could get said footage,how easy do you think it is to publish stuff like this when there is a suppressive government? Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

And i'm not arguing about whether or not these are problems. I'm saying that they are bigger problems than the one posted.

<comment><USER35> Then how come there is so much footage of Liberia and Sierra Leone? And Sudan is not a supressive government, it's a failed state where the central government is weak and cannot control the country.

<comment><USER37> Mark,

Have you heard of the phrase, _stop while you're ahead._

I followed your rebuttal essentially stating that one should not lose sight of small problems for the larger ones, but your derivative spiel about charities and about Darfur is incoherent babble.

Seriously.

Darfur was a non-issue in the US/ world-media until perhaps 2006, and even now, most Americans (and perhaps Germans as well?) don't know much about Darfur, don't care, and most importantly to your argument, they don't donate time or money to the issue. So what charities exactly are benefitting by distributing the 'propaganda' about the 'war' in Darfur.

It's not war, it's genocide.

Are you one of those who also didn't believe Holocaust Germany happened? Not enough evidence for you?

Stick to a logical argument backed up by either logic and data, or please do not argue here again. I'm tired of seeing your pointless rants where you spew this ridiculous, utter, nonsense.

<comment><USER35> Ridiculous, utter, nonsense? And what other pointless rants of mine are you talking about? If you want to make a point, then make a point based off my argument, not by descending into personal name calling.

What other pointless rants are you talking about?

(And by the way, I've been several times in the general conflict zone area. What are your info sources that make you so sure I am wrong?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Google is helping people to see that these decisions have far-reaching effects. Google is pretty confident that the vast majority of people like its products. So now you have to ask yourself: is it wise to cast a vote that would insult a large percentage of the people responsible for making the products you love so much?

<comment><USER10> I would argue that they are more dependant on us than we are on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ok Google... Keep it up and stand up to China... You got people's attention, now get governments' attention...

</comment><comment><USER40> Get rid of "marriage", and this whole mess would be a moot point. :) But, anyway, go Google!

<comment><USER31> $deity forbid gay people have the same rights as married couples without calling it a marriage. I have a feeling some people would still be offended like their own personal marriages would be under attack even if you removed all trace of "marriage" for gay couples.

Don't forget that couple that got offended at the removal of "bride" and "groom" on their wedding license: <http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/1239279.html></comment></comment>


HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers - <AUTHOR> Rtm has lined up a new, faster server for us.  He currently plans to switch over to it at 6 am EST on Saturday.  He says the site will be down for around 10 minutes, but you know how these things go... <comment><USER2> If even rtm, tenured professor of computer science at MIT, can't escape from sysadmin duty, I really have no hope.

<comment><USER3>
        Compared to system administration,
        being cursed forever is a step up.

\-- Paul Tomko

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you think you could go down for a week?

That's generally how long I need to break an addiction

<comment><USER5> Add me to the list - I'm in for $100 if we can make it a one week outage. $250 if we can stretch it out to two weeks.

I'm sorry, but 10 minutes on a saturday morning does nothing for me.

<comment><USER6> My router at home blocks Reddit and HN except from 5-7pm and 11:45-midnight (and all day Saturday). Worked amazingly well to cut back the addiction. Now if I could just get HTTPS blocking to work on FB and Twitter.

<comment><USER7> I do the same. It works pretty well, it's crazy when you start catching yourself trying to go to one of them by habit.

<comment><USER6> I don't know why but I find myself opening new tabs without thinking about it. On Facebook? Ctrl+T, fa, down arrow, enter. Why? Who knows, I was already there... That's when I noticed that I have some major problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 2,000 startups will be launched on Monday morning as a result of this downtime.

<comment><USER9> ... broken window fallacy ?

<comment><USER10> Not sure what you mean by that but I think it'll be closer to: >"HN's Down!" >"fuck it, lets get some work done"

<comment><USER9> I misread it as, "2000 startups are created to replace functionality." :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For all the flak HN gets about fnid problems, etc, it's still awe-inspiring to me that such a popular site runs on a single server, with so little admintime ;)

<comment><USER12> Just how popular is HN?

Anyone got info on uniques or pageviews a month?

<comment><AUTHOR> We currently get just over 200k uniques and just under 2m page views on weekdays (less on weekends).

<comment><USER13> Does a single server support this level of traffic? That is pretty impressive - it would be great to learn about the server's hardware and software configuration.

<comment><USER14> Old server: two Xeon E5450 chips, 3.0 GHz, 8 cores total, 24 GB RAM.

New server: one Xeon E5-2690 chip, 2.9 GHz, 8 cores total, 32 GB RAM.

<comment><USER15> Wow, nice, that was exactly the HW I was predicting; the fastest single-core- performance xeon under turboboost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just out of curiosity, what are the specs of the old vs the new server?

</comment><comment><USER17> Can you please post a picture of the server so we can see all the sweet LEDs on network cards?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://imgur.com/VuSH2j5>

<comment><USER18> And the shiny new server replacing it: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Ibm_pc_51...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Ibm_pc_5150.jpg)

<comment><USER19> My guess was this: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Com...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Commodore_2001_Series- IMG_0448b.jpg/280px-Commodore_2001_Series-IMG_0448b.jpg)

<comment><USER20> What about <http://imgur.com/BOaFPtn>

So compact yet so powerful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In case anyone wondering colo place appears to be The Planet.

whois -h whois.arin.net 220.127.116.11

NetRange: 184.108.40.206 - 18.104.22.168 CIDR: 126.96.36.199/15

Name: 6a.e1.84ae.static.theplanet.com

Address: 184.108.40.206

OriginAS: AS36420, AS30315, AS13749, AS21844

NetName: NETBLK-THEPLANET-BLK-15

NetHandle: NET-174-132-0-0-1

Parent: NET-174-0-0-0-0

NetType: Direct Allocation

RegDate: 2008-06-17

Updated: 2012-02-24

Ref: <http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-174-132-0-0-1>

<comment><USER22> *SoftLayer. ThePlanet is no longer, but a lot of their reverse DNS entries still point to .theplanet.com.

<comment><USER21> I had forgotten that but that was actually a merger:

[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/11/10/softl...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/11/10/softlayer- the-planet-complete-merger/)

In any case they never got the block changed at arin. We switched providers at one point within the last 6 mos. and the old colo already changed the arin block.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does all of HN run on one _single_ server?

<comment><USER24> I think a lot of people underestimate how powerful a single well configured server can be. You don't need Heroku/AWS for everything.

<comment><USER25> Also, people underestimate the power of serving out of RAM. It's not unreasonable to serve 20-30K QPS off a single server if the work it needs to do is limited to minimal request parsing and fetching some data from main memory. That's about 2.5 _billion_ requests/day, fully loaded. Granted, I'm thinking something more like memcached than a fully-formed webserver, but an in-memory webserver that stores its data in hashtables (like news.yc) and has a really fast templating languages, or just writes output directly to the socket, could probably come close.

<comment><USER26> I use redis for this exact reason -- I prerender over 2,000 page templates twice a day, and store them in RAM. The app server has to do a little processing before sending the pages to users -- it picks a different template depending on whether the user's logged in or not, and then substitutes the user's info into the template (for logout/profile links). The session info is also stored in redis. This lets me reboot the server and be ready to serve pages again almost as soon as it's back up. With all the data, redis uses about 300-400MB RAM on a 64bit Debian VM.

I use a VPS for my site, and on a VPS, the only thing you're allocated that you can depend on always being available is RAM. The processor cores might be shared with a busy user, and you can't always depend on high disk I/O speeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It would be cool to see some performance "brag numbers" posted after the cutover!

</comment><comment><USER15> Given that you've got performance issues and a fairly limiting deployment model, I never understood why you didn't get the most absurdly overpowered machine possible. (I assume you're not, because if you were, you'd be upgrading every ~6mo or so as faster single-core machines come out)

<comment><USER28> Would the CPU really be the bottleneck for HN?

<comment><USER15> I assume it's CPU and cache/memory bandwidth.

If I were specing a machine for HN, naively, it would be a competition between a Xeon "enterprise" CPU with huge cache and memory bandwidth (interleaved up) and a gaming/desktop CPU with maxed-out single-core performance. Xeons can do single-core turboboost now, so E5-2690 which goes up to 3.8GHz is probably the best bet, but a desktop i7-3970X 4.0GHz might be an option if you don't need ECC (which also gets you slight speed improvement on memory).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What are we supposed to do on Saturday morning?

<comment><USER30> Let's be honest here... 6 AM? It's a good time to be asleep.

<comment><USER31> That's 11am in the UK, noon in Western Europe, 4:30pm in India, and 8pm in Japan.

Also, it'll be 3am on the West Coast, so some people will still be enjoying their Friday night.

<http://everytimezone.com/#2013-2-16,-60,6be>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is just idle speculation but are there any stats on HN traffic? I have always wondered just how many folks read it, how often etc? I heard a million accounts being bandied around at one point and I cannot tell if that is excessive or not?

<comment><USER33> It was said up in the comments.

120k unique IPs per day. 1.3 million page views.

source: <http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html>

<comment><USER34> Newest data straight from pg in this thread: 200k / 2M.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230201>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Well, it looks like I'll be getting 10 minutes of work done I didn't plan on doing.

</comment><comment><USER36> Oh maybe on the maintenance landing page you could post up a big bunch of static links to say the top 50 most voted articles ever! (Or such like). Something like that would keep us busy for a while.

</comment><comment><USER37> I have a bad habit of checking hackers news to know when my wifi is up or down.. I'm more productive when wifi is down because I'm not tempted to read articles. Saturday will be productivity day!

<comment><USER38> profile, procrast settings use them! they are amazing!

<comment><USER37> I usually just block it in my hosts file, but that's a good idea! I'll try it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Will the beefier machine mean the lifetime of the fnids can be increased?

(Funny surprise: the one for this comment box expired before I submitted this comment.)

</comment><comment><USER40> For a moment there I read "will be shut down". Phew.

</comment><comment><USER41> I guess tonight would be the wrong time to post my Show HN project that I've been working on then.

</comment><comment><USER42> Geez, could we stop posting these 'site X is down!' threads? Its gotten so bad that they're being posted preemptively. ;)

</comment><comment><USER43> Hi. Could someone please explain to me why it is necessary for a service (e.g. HN) to go down while people play with the (increasingly amorphous and abstract) back end? Is it 1990?

Sorry, just hit a nerve. Like doing some OS updates (Windows) and then needing to reboot to "complete the installation". I'm sorry. That totally sucks.

<comment><USER44> Because the single server that runs it is being turned off and another one is being turned on? Its probably not worth the time to write something to sync processor state from one to the other or clone some sort of vmotion type thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> 10 minutes!? 10 minutes!?

oh gosh its okay, I'm just kidding :P

</comment><comment><USER46> Where will we ask "Is HN down?"

</comment><comment><USER45> you know this will tickle funny bones more than calm panicked ones right?

</comment><comment><USER47> Wheee - currently much faster, although the true test will be on Monday, around 5pm GMT.

</comment><comment><USER48> It's Friday night. My favorite band (<http://www.theanatomyoffrank.com/music>) is playing a house show in my town, which is the best kind of show because it's BYOB. Then, my best friend from Texas is in town for the night, and we're meeting up. I'm definitely going to go tear it up and create some memories.

And yet..... all I can think of is to stay up all night creating a "replacement HN" just for Saturday morning. I just started using Django and it would be perfect for this. Must. Resist. Must. Live. Real. Life.</comment>


Crystal - Better Ruby, compiles to native code - johnx123-up https://github.com/manastech/crystal

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks interesting. \- How about programs that are using other gems. What is the coverage of the standard libraries? \- Does it over enough to write command line programs using fileutils, File, Dir, IO ? \- Are there samples of some large programs that compile ? \- Any benchmarks of performance ?</comment>


Computational Breakthrough: Faster Integer Multiplication [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cse.psu.edu/~furer/Papers/mult.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> And the paper is available here: <http://www.cse.psu.edu/~furer/Papers/mult.pdf>

<comment><USER2> Thanks - I really don't understand why scientific publications go into "closed" journals...

<comment><USER3> Lack of funding. Personally I think most scientific publishing should be publicly funded by tax dollars as it eventually benefits everyone, but such is life. To go out on a further, yet still related tangent here is a humorous (read: sad) plot ([http://commontragedies.wordpress.com/2007/11/14/a-question-o...](http://commontragedies.wordpress.com/2007/11/14/a-question- of-priorities/))</comment></comment></comment>


Minix 3.2.1 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.minix3.org/releasenotes-321.html <comment><USER2> Anyone care to give a very cursory run-down on why someone would look at Minix in this day and age instead of one of the BSDs? Particularly since those release notes mention bringing in the NetBSD build system and much of its userspace.

Not to say that I think it's bad to have plenty of unixes floating around - just curious.

<comment><USER3> Minix is a microkernel architecture. Many of the services which in other OSes live in kernel space are pushed out into standalone processes.

The main goal is to improve reliability. Bad drivers or bad hardware are the leading cause of lockups these days. If you isolate the drivers, file system etc from one another, you can prevent the whole system from dying. Minix3 goes further than its predecessors by adding a "reincarnation server", which periodically pings other servers and kills/restarts them if they've become unresponsive.

Minix essentially does at a single-system level what cloud architectures try to do at a multi-system level: assume that the parts are unreliable, isolate faults and recover by restarting sub-units.

To me the more interesting possibility is that in a microkernel world you could solve a number of classic OS/system software bunfights. Databases, for example, tend to fight a bit with OSes about the best way to buffer data or flush to disks. In a microkernel system you can arrange matters so that the database provides its own memory and disk management. It's just another process; nothing special.

Here's the report that was written about the design: <http://www.minix3.org/docs/jorrit-herder/osr-jul06.pdf>

<comment><USER4> It's also for security. If you find a security vulnerability in e.g. the sound driver, you're not going to get root access.

Andrew Tanenbaum explains it well: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3KuE7UjGA>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's no need to visit that graveyard to read the actual article, which is here: <http://www.minix3.org/releasenotes-321.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm only familiar with the QNX microkernel from working in safety-critical systems. I'm really excited for the possibility of an open source microkernel getting some mainstream attention, since the benefits (modularity, reliability, maintainability, security, etc.) of a microkernel are just too real to ignore now.

Can someone explain how Minix compares to Hurd? In terms of how far ahead both projects are, the differences in their architecture and visions?

</comment><comment><USER7> This is my first time hearing about Minix, and the new architecture seems interesting. Are there any other linux distributions that use something similar to Minix's micro-kernel approach, or is this a bit of an oddity?

<comment><USER3> Poe's Law strikes again. I can't tell if you're making a joke or not.

Assuming you're being serious: no. Linux distributions do not work this way because Linux was itself deliberately designed to be unlike Minix.

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't say that Linux was "deliberately designed to be unlike Minix" -- after all, Torvalds' original announcement [1] was in comp.os.minix and he admitted that his OS "resembles [Minix] somewhat".

It's more accurate to say that Linux evolved to be very different from Minix because of Torvald's focus on pragmatism.

1\. [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/comp.os.mi...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RRrGA/SwRavCzVE7gJ)

<comment><USER3> I think that's a better way to characterise it, but I was definitely referring to the famous Torvalds/Tannenbaum debate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't wait for Minix on the RPi!

</comment><comment><USER10> Unanswered Question: why Minix?

<comment><USER11> Minix is very good for learning internals of operating system. In my second year of undergrad, I went through the code of minix and and it was a great learning experience. I could learn a lot about the internals of operating system by looking at real working code rather than just reading theories. The Linux code is too complicated for beginner. I think, Linux can not replace minix in educational world.

<comment><USER12> Circa 1999 I studied Minix in a operating design course, but in the same way we studied Amoeba or Mach; in fact we used a pre 1.0 Linux kernel for practice (I don't remember the distro, it could be custom), and it was small enough to understand the different parts, hack, compile and run.

"Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" (included Minix) and "Modern Operating Systems" are great books and I think is because of them that Minix is relevant in OS teaching (specially OSDI, although I enjoyed MOS too).

EDIT: typo

<comment><USER13> In 1999, Linux was already in the 2.0s or 2.2s; did your course deliberately use an old Linux kernel for simplicity?

<comment><USER12> I think so. Besides the computers we had access in the laboratory were limited in resources so a smaller code base I guess had its benefits in compile time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Use OOP in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://blog.oshogunle.com/how-to-use-oop-in-javascript-ckemxzcw804ow8cs122ikhob0 <comment><USER2> That is a really nice introduction (+1). If you are writing JavaScript it is important to understand basic OOP concepts, becaues it's only a matter of time before it is encountered in the wild.

Personally, I try to avoid OOP in JavaScript. OOP tends to be a little more verbose, but this is me being petty about vanity. The best reason to avoid OOP in JavaScript is that people who aren't strong in JavaScript but have experience or formal education in other language see OOP in JavaScript as something familiar which presents all manners of false expectations and future disappointment.</comment>


Show HN: Sapien's Muse, my project to collect unfiltered thoughts - <AUTHOR> http://www.sapiensmuse.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to throw in a little more detail on the project.

Sapien's Muse is a current project of mine to try and create a newsfeed that will help people become exposed to new thoughts and ideas. Ideas that they otherwise wouldn't see due to our inherent knowledge or interest bubbles and biases.

The idea simply sprung from the fact that I often don't spend enough time researching counter points to my own thoughts and views. When I try to fix this I also often get stuck wondering if there are other views on a topic that I simply am not exposed to or that aren't immediately obvious to me.

That is where Sapien's Muse comes in, by allowing anonymous posting with a character limit to keep it concise, you can simply scroll down the latest thoughts page or filter by broad topic to hopefully expose yourself to new thoughts and views.</comment>


Ask HN: Can we build an open source platform that helps COVID-19 patients? - <AUTHOR> Many communities around the world are finding themselves in dire need of trained medical professionals and first-responders to deal with an influx of critically ill COVID-19 patients. Other areas need volunteers to work at food banks and shelters.
The demand for resources will wax-and-wane as local outbreaks are identified and then addressed. The supply of resources will likewise be dynamic. For example, there are many retired, semi-retired, and part-time doctors, nurses, and EMT staff who are able and willing to help. There's currently no way for people to know where or when they are needed. The HN community can help.
The mission would be to build an open-source platform QUICKLY that could be used by communities around the world with little-to-no deployment overhead. If successful, the final product makes it possible for community leaders to partner with 1-2 developers that would clone the repo, customize a few parameters, and deploy instances in less than an hour.
I am a physician and an engineer with product development and full-stack experience, but I can't do it alone. Any help is appreciated, particularly with the following immediate needs:
- Experienced PM who can flesh out the specs further and assume ownership of the roadmap. This would free me to focus my efforts on coordinating with public health officials, healthcare providers, and (if needed) to help care for patients on the front lines.
- DevSecOps lead with open-source experience and a reputation for QUICKLY building consensus involving key technical decisions. This would allow me to focus my technical contributions to those involving clinical data pipelines.
- Open-source community manager who would own all the engineering components that are not directly part of the product - this includes the project landing page, community rules, and offering assistance/guidance to developers around the world who are looking to deploy the platform.
Anybody interested in helping out? <comment><USER2> To offer a little feedback: Focusing on an immediate deliverable that solves a finite problem was good, but I think the proposal was structured in such a way that it asked for too much commitment too fast.

A "hackathon" has a short time horizon. At the end of the hackathon you'd have some idea as to whether or not you'd want to continue, regardless of whether the goals of the hackathon had been achieved. Give people a chance to try out contributing in small amounts, and to evaluate whether they want to continue contributing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well put. We're working on the testing site locator right now. We've gathered contact info for 3500+ public health agencies, plus starting to add info for urgent care facilities, health systems, community hospitals, and academic health centers. We've got CIOs and CMIOs from across the country helping us gather the data we need. The goal is simply to make it easy for people to get tested.

Would be great to have your help. Send me an email if you'd like to learn more (see my profile)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If we break down the challenge, we can start having an immediate impact. Here's how:

\- Now: there's an immediate need for a single source of truth for all the locations where COVID-19 testing is available. Trump recently said that Google was working on it, but it turns out not to be the case (they are weeks away from an MVP that would only cover the SF Bay Area). I propose we start by solving this problem.

\- Next: What is the scope of COVID-19 infection? Today, the CDC doesn't have an accurate count of the # of COVID-19 tests that have been performed because they don't have a way to collect that info from the growing number of labs that are performing the tests. Moreover, there's no way for anybody to know how many _people_ have actually been tested, because the same person can be tested multiple times. We could solve this problem by crowdsourcing that information directly from individuals.

\- Next +1: We need to know where the sickest people are _right now_ , and predict where they _could be_ in the near future. This is crucial information for healthcare providers (like me) and public health officials alike. Without this information in hand, it's virtually impossible to know where to direct resources (like doctors, nurses, ventilators, medical supplies, testing equipment, etc.). We need to be able to track demand _AND_ supply in real-time --> this is the point at which the project starts shaping itself into an Uber- like platform.

\- Next +2: Enable individuals to post offers to help and for others to request assistance. This would enable individuals with medical training to help meet the need. It would also enable everyone to help in other ways, like delivering food for the elderly.</comment>


Improving GitHub Issue Labels - <AUTHOR> http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/posts/improving_github_issue_labels/ <comment><USER2> In left wondering what the actual pain users are experiencing with labels and how this actually solves that pain. Hearing things "all issues need to be assigned a label" makes me think this way of working will cause more pain than it solves.

I've often added/removed labels from the GitHub label set depending on the project but I've never found them fundamentally troublesome</comment>