Ask HN: How to negotiate large salaries? - <AUTHOR> Hey, looking for a bit of advice on moving jobs. My current job pays me really well, about $150k including benefits. I've been approached to go to another company for a job I'd be really interested in doing but I know for a fact theyre low balling me with an offer of $125k, I have several friends who work there and I know this is the starting salary for a role about 1-2 levels below wha they're asking me to do. I think they should be offering more in the range of $190-200k including benefits (which I know they can easily afford). What's the best way to go about trying to push for this kind of number? It's obviously a lot but the role I think justifies it and in gross terms it's a big difference in expectations between offer and my expectations. I'm a bit put out by the low balling as they must know that I know that's it's low for the role. <comment><USER2> Patrick McKenzie (patio11 here on HN) has written quite a lot about salary negotiation and pricing. For me it has been an eye opening resource. Highly recommended! Start with [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary- negotiation/](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/) which I hope will be immediately helpful, but I recommend reading everything on his blog.

patio11: If you read this, thank you for sharing your knowledge so freely!

<comment><USER3> You're welcome!

<comment><USER4> yes, thank you patio11!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think you should approach it as their starting offer and negotiate from there, especially if you know people there and the payscale.

If 200k is what you want tell the recruiter "If you can get me to 200k its a done deal and I'll sign the offer." This makes it clear what you want, takes pressure off them because they know they have you for sure if they meet the number and can sell the hiring committee and if anything they will come back with a number somewhere in the middle.

Oh and make sure you negotiate your benefits first, as it'll be harder for them to give your more once they've stretched themselves.

<comment><USER6> Not OP, but what do you mean by benefits? Like options / bonuses?

<comment><USER7> Healthcare, retirement fund, more days off, remote work, sabbatical... Just everything beyond monthly salary

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a bit of a Dunning-Kruger effect analog when it comes to sizing up candidates.

You may be worth $175k to the company, and be in a realistic position to know that. The person hiring you may not be good at his job and may honestly value you at $125k. After all, his current staff were valued by others (and are thus known quantities) and must by definition be worth what they're paid (even if they're in reality only worth $80k).

I'd give that position a miss, since being bad at valuing needed talent is a red flag for being bad at other essential aspects of quality management.

It's an extremely rare bit of candor for a candidate to say, straight-out, you don't pay enough. Despite the value of this information, most hiring managers don't see it as valuable.

</comment><comment><USER9> What's wrong with explaining exactly what you explained here?

It's not like you're in a desperate situation where you need to use some trick to avoid losing the offer at any cost. So just ask away.

</comment><comment><USER10> At face value it is easy to ask, take your experience (if it is 10+ years in the game) and you have successfully completed many projects send them a response asking for $200,000 and it will be a done deal if they can actually pay that. If that is out of their range, they will normally tell you and you may have to keep looking. I have seen some employees that were literally generating millions for a company but only being paid $80,000/year, poor benefits, .5% raise and no additional compensation (bonuses, stocks, 401k, etc.) or should I say a larger share of their contributions. Good companies will try to give bonuses or above inflation raises at the least.

If you do not have around 10 years and only about 5 then 125k to 150k is a pretty good range if you are really good and have the actual work experience. If you are in a really high cost area you will need to take into consideration the cost of living there. If you do not ask for enough it may limit your living options and after work options. It is normally easier to give a number higher than you want and bring it down to something you really want.

Though, you can really only ask for this rate if you are in the top pool of capabilities, performance and results and the interview is amazing. You also have to consider the amount of risks you are accepting by wanting more money. There will be things that you will be expected to know and do that would not be asked of people they are paying less. These can be things like building entire complex systems from scratch by yourself under little to no supervision under tight deadlines, be called upon to travel to other sites around the world because you would be the one trusted to just get it done and your known to get it done right.

If you are applying for jobs in a popular metro location the chances of making the higher ranges is normally higher.

</comment><comment><USER11> There is a part in the negotiation book Never Split the Difference that covers salary negotiation. I would highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's easier to pay first engineers a higher amount after you get funded.

When the money dries up, it gets harder to offer even the same amount to an equally capable or a better developer.

Is it an established company?</comment>


Some Google Pixel devices shutting down at 30% battery - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-shutting-30-battery-738777/ <comment><USER2> It's strange irony that I happened on this link after searching around for a replacement for my 5X, and heading back to HackerNews for a little break.

The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use, and the battery is a catastrophe, requiring me to remember to not forget my anker portable battery, which I also have to remember to not forget to keep charged.

I bought the iPhone 7 but the reception on it was so awful, I'm returning it. I've been looking at alternatives and the landscape is ugly: the Samsung S7 has rave reviews but we all know they don't update the software with any attempt at haste or frequency. The Pixel is beyond a joke, given its high pricepoint with a featureset that has 'Google Assistant' as the top bulletpoint.

What in the world happened to the phone market that the choices have gotten so dismal? We used to have more variety. We used to have swappable batteries, keyboards, etc. Now it's all the same garbage with designs copied between the hardware vendors.

I'm baffled.

<comment><USER3> > The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use.

I ordered mine in November 2015 and it still works just as fine. Just as fast, if not faster with the Android updates, and the battery still lasts around a day and a half, i.e. usually 20-40% when I plug it in to charge at night.

<comment><USER4> I also have a 5X. If I'm moving, the battery runs out at about 20% an hour. I normally charge mine in the evening, so it's at 100% at midnight, about 90% in the morning, about 70% after my commute, and around 40% by the evening. It'll be somewhere in the 10 to 20% range by the time I get back home, often with the battery saver active.

During the work day, I generally only use it to check headlines at lunch. I also use it to play back mp3s over bluetooth to my motorycle helmet. The screen is typically on during the day for less than an hour.

The 5X is slower than the Nexus 5 it replaced - 50% more cores but they run slower and most apps take longer to start up. It's a mediocre device and the battery life is not good at all.

Right now, the biggest drains, after screen at 12%, are Google Play services, Android System, Android OS and Mobile standby.

I have a theory that it's Google's appetite for data that kills battery life. They make it hard to use the phone with location services turned off or in battery saving mode except when you want a location in Maps. When you want your location, it gets turned on and stays on. There's no easy way to keep it on to a minimum. I think it's a strategic goal of Google to use customer data for everything from location popularity to traffic, and they're willing to sacrifice customer batteries with nudging defaults to get there.

<comment><USER5> Listening to Spotify with a bluetooth headset is by far my biggest drain on the 5X (~40% per hour). I've come to use the jack cable more and more, and now it's okay[0]. Luckily, I'm not an iPhone 7 user.

[0] "okay" yes, but if people at Spotify would spend more time on battery and network issues than moving menus to weird places, I would be happier. Alternatives are worst, so it's just a matter of giving them money until they work on something you consider useful. As a consumer, this is infuriating.

<comment><USER6> FWIW, I have a iphone 7, and I use bluetooth literally all day listening to audio books. My battery doesn't really seem to be impacted significantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have seen the same symptom on Samsung devices with degraded batteries. With a new battery it will go all the way to 0% before shutting down. Then as the battery gradually degrades it will shut down with _no warning_ at 5%, 10%, 20%, and so on. But when you get close to that limit the point where it actually shuts down depends heavily on power consumption at the time. It might have been able to keep running fine for a while but as soon as you launch a power intensive app such as the camera it will immediately die.

My theory is that the degraded battery is still able to deliver enough power at full charge. But then as it discharges the maximum amount of power it can deliver gradually declines. This works fine for a while until it hits a threshold, and then a protection circuit trips to prevent further damage to the battery by shutting down.

Of course if you have a removable battery this is only a momentary inconvenience. Just slap in a fresh one and you're working again in less than 1 minute.

<comment><USER8> I've had the same experience and I came up with the same hypothesis. It started happening just when Pokemon Go was popular, so I had a lot of opportunity to collect data. At first I knew I had to quit the app and turn off GPS when I saw the 25% alert. Then after some time it would shutdown before it showed the 25% alert. Eventually it started dying closer to 50%. Replacing the battery has helped a lot, and with the better capacity I'm getting down to 25% less frequently.

<comment><USER9> When a battery is as its discharged, its ESR rises, causing this behavior. A small amount of damage is caused during the cycling of a battery, permanently raising its ESR, so that is why older batteries shut down sooner.

Basically, you can think of it as a 5L bucket of water with a hole in the bottom. The first liter will have a much higher pressure than the last. Running energy intensive features (GPS, 3D, camera, cell modem, etc) increases the minimum needed pressure, causing the device to shutdown when lower power features would operate just fine. As you keep using the bucket, the mound of dirt its on gets washed away, reducing the maximum pressure you can get out of it.

Building a good battery gauge is non-trivial as you have to factor in how much people use high energy features when the battery is nearing end of charge. Better low power modes would help with this, but nobody has found a good way of indicating to the user the battery has X% power left at current use vs the battery has Y% of its fully charged capacity remaining.

<comment><USER7> It would be nice if smartphones would degrade more gracefully. The instant that the protection circuit detects that the battery is no longer unable to supply enough power I would think it could immediately shut down all extra peripherals and go into ultra power saving mode (grayscale screen, no sensors, no apps, only phone calls and SMS).

<comment><USER9> The ultra low power mode might not be able to do SMS or phone calls over cellular as it needs large bursts of power to TX, depending on connection quality and type (2g vs LTE, range to tower, etc).

A capacitor that can store enough charge to send/receive a SMS would allow this to work as the capacitor can be charged slowly, but it would take up valuable room inside the phone (a few mm^3). Some embedded cell/sat radios where size isn't very important already do this to reduce demands on the hosts electrical system (eg: solar powered parking meters that take credit cards).

<comment><USER7> The ultra power saving mode on Samsung phones does SMS and phone calls over cellular. That is an existing product feature, the problem is just that it doesn't automatically switch to that mode when the battery still has some charge but isn't capable of putting out enough power to sustain normal operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This isn't just on Pixels, I have a 6P that will turn off early as well, and I'd hazard a guess it has more to do with the latest Android versions than the specific hardware.

<comment><USER11> My Galaxy Note 4 did the same thing. But this was after about a year of use. And hey, after replacing the battery it works fine again!

And as an aside, I dropped my Note 4 recently and broke the glass. I was thinking about the possibility of getting a new phone. But after looking at this season's options I'm heavily leaning toward just replacing the glass. One reason is that no top-of-the-line smartphone seems to have a replaceable battery to avoid these problems.

More generally, this season's phones are also _cheap-looking_ and _cheap- feeling_. The Pixel feels like a $200 phone at best, with its cheap aluminum shell, fragile-feeling uncomfortable buttons, and ugly plastic/glass/whatever square on the back. I've been losing faith in Samsung's build quality (I've had some issues with my Note 4 and my previous Samsung phone, and the news about the exploding Note really turned me off the company). Even the latest iphone looks uglier than usual (that glossy bezel really doesn't do it for me, looks like a free phone you get when you sign up for a phone plan).

2016 is a really really bad year for smartphones. None of these machines seem like they're really worth their price. The next great phone is probably going to be one that doesn't feel like corners were cut.

<comment><USER12> Yes, batteries definitely need replacing after a year or so, maybe 2 if the original battery was very good quality. Don't go with the cheapest eBay batteries either; Monoprice seems to be good if you buy directly from them. I've had my phone for a long time, partly because of the bad phone options with diminishing key features recently (SD card, removable battery). I've replaced the battery every year, and I can get down to 1% battery. When it runs down faster and can't make it that low, it's time to replace the battery.

Now, why this happens in a brand new phone like the Pixel is another matter...

<comment><USER13> I routinely replace my smartphone battery after 1 year of use, occasionally a few months later. The brand of smartphone doesn't matter: after one year of daily recharging a battery has seen it's best days. The hardest part is finding an original battery, especially on Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this a similar issue to the one that seems to be plaguing iPhones as well [1]? Is this bad charge controllers or bad batteries?

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-statement-on-iphone- shu...](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-statement-on-iphone-shutdown- issue-2016-12)

<comment><USER15> Or is everybody paranoid about batteries after the Samsung recall?

<comment><USER16> Perhaps battery controller software has been tweaked in some kind of more conservative direction.

<comment><USER17> One of the failure modes for lithium ion is overdischarge. a Recovering a battery that has been overdischarged is difficult and sometimes impossible. This seems super over conservative though

[http://www.mpoweruk.com/lithium_failures.htm](http://www.mpoweruk.com/lithium_failures.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When my Nexus 6 shuts down at 25%, I can turn it back on, and it still shows 23% after that. And it does seem to be temperature dependent. So I think it has to do with battery monitoring.

<comment><USER19> Quite likely. My understanding is that battery capacity is measured based on the voltage drops as the mah runs low. Thing is that temperature affects resistance and thus observed voltage (digital thermometer work on this principle, afaik). Could be that Google has set the cutoff a bit high, and momentary chills result in a too early shutdown (possibly to avoid data loss or some such).

<comment><USER20> More likely to avoid battery damage - undervoltage can cause permanent damage to both cathode and anode (from another thread here - [http://www.mpoweruk.com/lithium_failures.htm](http://www.mpoweruk.com/lithium_failures.htm))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Android on Google devices is a joke. I have a new Nexus 7 that sometimes turns on and off correctly and sometimes does not. I see articles on how great the power management is going to be on Android N+1 but I think the people who write them run iOS because if they ran Android they'd be telling google to make the power button work right first.

<comment><USER22> Honestly, it's starting to feel like Android on a lot of devices is a joke, as far as the hardware experience. I've always been a passionate fan of the OS and anti-walled garden, but the daily frustrations of using my S6, a year old "flagship" phone, kind of makes me question what the advantages really are.

It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery life visibly ticks down from the load. How does this phone have such grotesque memory management problems that running Maps and Spotify at the same time is enough to grind it to a crawl? Battery life has gradually decreased over time to the point that some days the phone is at 38% by lunchtime after primarily sitting in my pocket all morning. At this point the single most advantageous aspect of Android for me is the voice assistant - tasker seems nice, but I can't charge my phone four times a day. Nova launcher is cool, but I'd much rather be able to text my family without watching the keyboard lag out. Even the voice assistant has random, arbitrary issues - for some reason, saying "play ___ album on spotify" now only selects the album without playing it, or shuffle plays it out of the search.

Makes it that much worse to see Cyanogen disintegrating. Somebody needs to push for higher quality at the state of the art.

<comment><USER23> This makes Apple's choice to aggressively control background processes seem prescient to me. Also aggressively pushing specific media codecs.

I have an Android (Moto E) now and have more or less alternated back and forth between iPhone and Android (last phone was an iPhone 6). The things I miss when in Android world are consistent battery life and camera quality.

<comment><USER24> I think comparing the camera on a phone cosing £70 to a phone costing £500+ is a bit of a foregone conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Every iPhone that I've ever had exhibits this after 12-15 months. I think it has to do with the number of charge cycles it's been put through.

</comment><comment><USER26> Had a similar issue on a galaxy s4 in cold weather (particularly when launching the camera app). The battery was ~3+ years old though.

After doing several hours research into buying a new phone (iphones and androids), I settled for now on upgrading the battery in my old phone to a larger 5200 mAh battery. It introduces a slight bulge, but after the first few weeks I've been extremely happy so far. The phone works 2 days under heavy use, 3+ under light use, and changed how I perceive it - essentially I don't think about charging during the day anymore, and don't worry about remembering to charge at night / while catching up on news in bed.

My assumption is that this is a better solution because it's drawing current from more cells in parallel, meaning less strain on the battery itself (there's an equation for this, but basically more current on individual cells drains a battery's capacity exponentially faster). It's also one less thing to think about carrying compared to carrying a separate usb charger.

I'm hoping there's still going to be phones with removable batteries to enable larger 3rd party ones to be installed, or that 'smart battery packs' on the iphone or moto z someday allow for current sharing between the internal+addon batteries.

</comment><comment><USER27> Maybe it's the cold weather, as it's happening to iPhones as well

</comment><comment><USER28> I was going to buy a Google Pixel C laptop, but there were reports of really bad wifi performance. Looks like I have yet another reason to pass :/. If the Phone is having basic problems like battery life, I don't have loads of confidence in the laptop.

</comment><comment><USER29> My new Samsung Tab S2 does this too, it sometimes shuty down with 10% remaining.

Seriously, looks like battery management isn't exactly the strength of today's device manufacturers -.-

</comment><comment><USER30> It seems to me like most of the problems of modern tech are related to quality yet everyone is rushing for new features and quantitative "improvements".

</comment><comment><USER31> I got a Moto E 2nd gen (2015) and I also have the same issue sometimes with CM14 nightlies, so I would definitely consider it a software issue.

</comment><comment><USER32> My Galaxy S6 does this as well. Once it drops below 15% there is no telling when it will decide to shutdown.

</comment><comment><USER33> And my iPhone shut down at 30% last night.

</comment><comment><USER34> That is what my iPhone 6s Plus does too.</comment>


Show HN: MySiteVitals, a simple Google Analytics dashboard in your inbox daily - <AUTHOR> http://mysitevitals.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We are planning to release the pro version soon. Until then I hope you enjoy the free version and if you have comments or suggests on features you'd like to see please let us know.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is cool. Congratulations on launching. I'll be interested in the pro version I reckon when you get around to launching it.</comment>


Stop Using the text-indent:-9999px CSS Trick - <AUTHOR> http://luigimontanez.com/2010/stop-using-text-indent-css-trick/

<comment><USER2> Notice that the linked google employee([http://maileohye.com/html-text-indent- not-messing-up-your-ra...](http://maileohye.com/html-text-indent-not-messing- up-your-rankings/)) has no real solution. Everything is still in development. Though if your site layout is conducive Google's search results are a good alternative (They still don't use the alt property).

While the text-indent css is a hack. For now it is the best we have. The alt property will get you in the search index, it will not allow for good display when google returns a result. That little snippet of each site that google shows is hard to get right using just alt text.

We should be moving away from using it, however right now almost everyone uses it. Google won't penalize you for it yet.</comment>


Slack Is Raising $250M from SoftBank, Others - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com//news/articles/2017-07-26/slack-is-raising-250-million-from-softbank-others <comment><USER3> It's amazing to me that Slack has been so successful, considering how so many other alternatives exist.

I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client, and each time I wait a few months before trying it again, yet more bugs continue to occur.

It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky.

I finally realized that the web version works pretty well so now I just use that when I need to use Slack.

I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.

<comment><USER4> > I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it > just works and doesn't require any proprietary client

IRC isn't a credible alternative for most users in 2017. It stagnated ages ago, which is obvious from problems like the fact that you can't even write a multi-line message.

My personal opinion is that Slack has been so successful primarily because nothing older than it (IRC, Campfire, HipChat) was a decently modern product by the time Slack launched and Slack was really good at marketing.

Personally, I'm trying to solve the problem of open source projects increasingly moving to Slack by working on Zulip, the leading open source alternative to Slack by contributor activity. Here's our story for why one should prefer Zulip to Slack for fellow open source projects (written a few days ago; feedback welcome!): [https://zulipchat.com/for/open- source/](https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/)

<comment><USER5> > My personal opinion is that Slack has been so successful primarily because > nothing older than it (IRC, Campfire, HipChat) was a decently modern product > by the time Slack launched and Slack was really good at marketing.

I disagree about the decent competitors -- there is e.g. Flowdock which in many ways (such as proper threading) is _still_ better than Slack, and was doubly so back then. I think it's more about access to VC money and network effects, and indeed the successful marketing you mentioned.

<comment><USER6> Flowdock was a more opinionated service and that was IMO to it's detriment. It's primary usage wasn't internal communication but rather communication around social media.

Slack took the simplicity of IRC and gave it a modern interface with things like showing a preview when you link. easily share files etc.

<comment><USER5> > It's primary usage wasn't internal communication but rather communication > around social media.

What makes you think that? I don't see any connection between Flowdock and social media. As far as I can see, it's purely an internal communication tool with easy file sharing, hooks for external services as GitHub, and so on.

<comment><USER6> As far as I remember it started as that. But maybe that's not accurate. I just remember them pushing how twitter could be monitored and then important tweets could be send around the organization to deal with them.

<comment><USER5> That feature is a flow (or channel) specific "inbox". You can add different sources such as e-mail, GitHub pushes, CI results, or the Twitter you mentioned. Basically looks like an in-channel RSS feed of different sources. Personally I love the feature.

A neat thing is that you can start a discussion thread from any of these items, so the context of the discussion is clear.

<comment><USER6> Oh I like FlowDock a lot was just trying to explain how I believe Slack won over it by being less opinionated about how it approaches conversation. It's IRC core functionality and then apps on top for specific needs.

Flowdock went a little further ahead when it came to how they constructed the base communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We've been paying customers of Slack since the beta. In general the experience has been great. Although I do worry that with a huge funding round it will bring more employees and those employees will need stuff to do. There's only so much you can do with a chat platform, and Slack eeked out a ton of value out of it early on. What I'm seeing now is features being added or reworked seemingly just so someone has something to do. I see Apple falling into this pattern too (mDNSresponder being replaced by DiscoveryD for example).

For example, IMHO one of Slack's best features from the beginning was on the iOS app when you clicked the button to upload a photo you were presented with "Last Photo Taken", "Camera Roll", or "Take a photo". That "Last Photo Taken" button was genius. Simple and I found 90% of the time was what I wanted to do, and it just worked. In one of the last revisions of the iOS app, they removed that feature and replaced it with a newer redesigned photo picker. The new photo picker is riddled with bugs and a good percentage of the time fails to upload the photo at all for most of our paid team members. Some have resorted to using the desktop app to send a photo after transferring it over from their phone. When Slack was a small scrappy startup I'd open tickets and spend the time w/them to get them the information they needed to debug various issues, but now that they are at this scale and size I can't be bothered.

<comment><USER8> When a company like Slack gets all this money, can they decide to not spend the money? Like you said, what else could you really add? Why do companies find the need to expand?

<comment><USER9> _> When a company like Slack gets all this money, can they decide to not spend the money?_

Not really.

E.g. The firms investing $250 million basically would like to see ~3x return or more on their money. The want their $250 million to turn into ~$750 million. That's the whole point of _investing_.

If Slack simply parked $250 million in the bank for 1% interest rates, that's something Softbank could simply do themselves. If Softbank can buy $250 million treasury bills for 1% return, there's no need to give Slack $250 million to do it for them. Besides, VCs like Softbank can't survive on 1% returns; they're hoping for ~20%+ returns.

Instead, Slack is supposed to put that $250m to productive use and make the company more valuable. This makes more money for everyone including investors. (This doesn't mean Slack spends the $250m all at once though. Softbank and CEO Stewart Butterfield probably had long discussions on the strategic uses of the potential capital. Presumably, Softbank agreed with Butterfield's vision which is why they invested.)

<comment><USER10> > E.g. The firms investing $250 million basically would like to see ~3x return > or more on their money.

That sounds more like a loan with very high interest then.

<comment><USER9> Well, a loan would have set terms and schedules of repayment and default.

For investors, the 3x & 20% figures I gave are not formalized terms of payback. Instead, they are _desirable financial targets_ for the investor so they can be considered a prestigious firm that attracts capital from more limited partners. Slack won't be in "default" if they provide 0% return to Softbank. However, future limited partners like university endowments or police/firemen pensions will avoid underperforming VCs that deliver low or negative returns. (If VCs don't perform to expecations, the market will punish them and they will shut down.[1])

To trace the causal chain, VCs want 20%+ because your grandmother and her pension plan investing in the VCs want 20%.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/death-of-venture- capital-2011...](http://www.businessinsider.com/death-of-venture- capital-2011-2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> OT: I am the only one who thinks Slack is overrated?

There are use cases where a group chat is important and crucial but almost every chat product out there has a proper group chat. Even with weaker APIs than Slack they are still ok to use. Moreover:

\- Slack is the huge distraction and greatly improves ADD

\- The admin UI is like a forest full of trees, slow, crowded, littered with settings and options, has more pages than Wikipedia, finding the right setting is a ten minutes task if you are not used to Slack; this is my major gripe with Slack which drives me nuts every time

\- Why do I have to create new accounts with email verification with every new Slack channel?

\- While people post a lot of crap on Slack (memes, gifs, jokes) important stuff is still handled over email or respective ticketing systems; so now I have many topics in Slack, email and Trello

\- Slack is def. good for socializing but again--every other group chat is good enough for socializing

\- Ok there is second use case: echo chambers for token ICOs and obviously there are many at the moment

\- As a side note: 95% of startups and SMBs use G Suite/G Mail as their mail server which includes Google Chat which has group chat and all the features 95% of us need, which is integrated in everything (such as the address book or search works seamlessly with chat and email messages); why aren't folks just using this? Why the hassle of setting up another tool, setting up roles, team members in the horrible admin pages of Slack? Just to have an ADD powerhouse called Slack in the company? I really don't get it and if I miss something please enlighten me, I want to understand why I need Slack

With their market share and their API they have reached a nice network effect without a doubt. But the question is, is it a winner-takes-it-all market and will they ever find somebody who will buy them at that valuation.

<comment><USER12> No, I also think it's massively overrated. I hate the interface, how I have to login and create accounts for each channel and so on. I'd rather just use discord tbh, but IRC is simplest.

What in earth is some glorified chat room software going to do with enough money to have an impact on a small country's economy? It's insane.

Someone argued elsewhere in the comments that IRC and such is inaccessible for normal users. Sure, but who are the people that are using slack? Definitely not normal users. I don't think slack will last only catering to developers and such, because for example discord has a massive user base of average janes and joes and I honestly can't see what slack offers that's better.

<comment><USER13> > I have to login and create accounts for each channel

No you don't. It's per "team". Assuming that's what you meant: how many teams do you honestly use? Sure, it's not ideal for a bunch of little communities. As you said, Discord is good for that.

For a business, I haven't seen anything that even compares with Slack. I'm not sure what you consider a "normal user" (I'd argue that there is no such thing). If you mean non-technical users, then there are plenty of non- technical users in a business that need to communicate. For most businesses, they outnumber the technical people and rely on good communication tools more.

For work, Discord would be terrible for me since I can't have more than one username (to my knowledge). I want to keep my personal chats/username/status separate from my work ones.

Different people need different solutions.

BTW I'm focusing in on the business use case as that seems to be who Slack targets. They are trying to sell to people that have used Skype and Lync (or whatever they are calling it this week) and hated it.

EDIT: also, building a decent chat app is a very difficult problem. I imagine they will use that money to maintain the various clients they have and try to keep adding communication features (as they have been doing).

<comment><USER14> You can set a separate nickname for each server. [https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en- us/articles/219070107-S...](https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en- us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So much hate for an app that has tried to replace (and done a damn good job) for really bad chat clients FOR BUSINESSES.

At least for Silicon valley, really we want to go back to AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Lynx, IRC (the latter is possible I guess).

For engineering sure we can do IRC...but really sales/marketing/HR? No.

Slack is not perfect...but they have done a pretty damn good job hitting 90% of most tech company needs.

(Omg there is even an API)...c'mon give em some "slack"

</comment><comment><USER16> I like Slack as a product.

I don't like how some open source and general interest communities use it for communication, as you have to go through this awkward sign up process that describes language like "welcome to the team!" and you have to set individual passwords for each team you join.

Slack seems to me like it's designed for businesses and teams to communicate, not as a public forum.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, Discord is much better in that sense.

<comment><USER18> Interestingly enough, Discord errs on the other side of the spectrum by not providing a good story for segregating personal/work identities:

[https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord- dream-...](https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream- land/suggestions/10492779-support-multiple-accounts?page=1&per_page=20)

<comment><USER14> Though you can have a different nickname for each server: [https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en- us/articles/219070107-S...](https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en- us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was recently pissed off at seeing how many open source projects use Slack despite so many issues with it.[1]

Like others have mentioned, I tried several chat clients (open source and non- open source) and realized none of them fit the bill/don't have the customizability that I wanted.

So, as stupid/crazy as this sounds, I sat down over a weekend, wrote a simple chat app on Phoenix/Elixir, hosted it on Google Cloud AppEngine, and Bingo! We were done. I know many people will advise against this, but:

1) I'm not into devops, so this setup works really well for me since AppEngine is precisely meant for this.

2) AppEngine allows you to setup firewall rules within their interface, so I restricted access to the outside world and whitelisted only my company's IP. So, I don't really need to worry about security much.

3) Because, this is a custom solution, I was able to integrate stuff such as time tracking, verifying that confidential docs aren't shared between teams, etc. Also, our own custom branding, client support integration within the chat (you can answer to support tickets right from within the interface).

4) I enjoyed the experience thoroughly and it integrates with my entire Saas I've developed[2] very, very nicely.

Ironically the Phoenix open source project (and similar others) themselves use Slack (why god, why?) and it's really terrible because Slack doesn't allow you to search for more than 10,000 messages. That's the last thing you want in an open source project - the inability to search for solutions / snippets of code.

Hope they move it else where or did what I did.

[1][http://sircmpwn.github.io/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using- slack...](http://sircmpwn.github.io/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack.html)

[2][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209)

<comment><USER20> That's an interesting use-case. I'm curious if Slack would find open-source work compelling enough to grant a free license for searching messages. I do know for non-profits they offer free standard plan for up to 250 people and 85% off their pricing for those above the 250 person limit.

Any chance you mind sharing that code on GitHub? I've been curious about Elixir/Phoenix lately :)

<comment><USER19> Sure! I plan to Open Source it soon :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> $250m for about 5% of the company, reminds me of when microsoft got 5% of facebook in an investment. Somehow I don't think this will end as well for softbank as it did for microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think what Slack got right was the on-boarding/time to wow. In a sea of vanilla, sterile enterprise products was this tool that just seemed to be having fun with it. For small companies, particularly in the SF area, it felt like it understood their vibe. For larger companies, it felt like they were joining the cool kids. My team uses Slack now and honestly, it's nothing _that_ special. It's a chat room. It's done well and has nice integrations (that's their product moat), but adoption is so key and they nailed that.

<comment><USER23> I think Slack is that kind of product that would never happen outside of the SF. A well know founder with an access to the capital, marketing machinery machinery and critical mass of early adopters. I like Slack and I use it but it's just because others also do. Otherwise I don't find it as amazing shift for the quality of my life or work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just let me block people and bots. Absurd that you can't. I emailed their support and got the most weak, SV response possible: 'If you need to block people then that shows you have a communication problem'. F-the-F-off. If we want to block people or bots who are annoying or irrelevant to us, let us!

<comment><USER25> Slack channels are hard to get into; if you've made it open via e.g. one of those auto inviter bots, you've done it to yourself. Slack is not built for big / open communities.

<comment><USER24> Who said I was talking about open communities? I don't care if someone moves a Trello ticket, e.g. on some projects, but I do want to still be able to talk about the project in the channel.

<comment><USER26> Then you can use the "mute" feature

<comment><USER24> Mute the whole channel because slack won't just let me mute a user? That's ridiculous UX.

<comment><USER13> "Bad UX" gets thrown around like "bad customer service" in retail: usually, it really means "fix my problem before I've even tried to solve it myself" and then throwing a tantrum when that doesn't happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why does Slack need the money?

<comment><USER28> >> _Slack will also let employees and other shareholders sell equity to investors as part of the deal_

Translation: partial liquidity for founders and early employees.

<comment><USER17> So that means not all of the $250M is going into the company? How common is that?

<comment><USER29> Common enough, Atlassian did the same thing a few years before it's IPO - <USER2> this case all the money went to employees:

[https://www.atlassian.com/blog/archives/atlassian_closes_60_...](https://www.atlassian.com/blog/archives/atlassian_closes_60_million_investment_from_accel_partners)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When I first heard of slack, I signed up right away and pitched the idea to my supervisor to move to slack. It has all we need. The idea was turned down. But I still wanted to try it out. So, I setup a slack for my family. It has been a great experience. I have multiple channels, trips, events and all. My parents enjoy it. I get asked why not use "Whatsapp Groups". I did tried it, but I felt Slack was a better and I really dont like to get added to random groups without having my consent. So, I stopped using whatsapp.

I integrated Dropbox and kayak and ton of others app. My parents are not tech savvy and they can still use it.

</comment><comment><USER31> Slack! That productivity killer... at least from the point of view of a software developer

<comment><USER32> Well at least they put it in the name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It seems to me the only justification for them taking half a billion dollars in VC money[0] -- besides of course "because we can" \-- is that Slack must have plans to grow into much, much more than the "enterprise group-chat app."

As annoying as Slack's UI can be, it's not as annoying as Jira's, and Atlassian has a market cap over $8B. Salesforce has a market cap over $64B and also has a lot to do with people in big businesses communicating about stuff.

My hunch has long been that Butterfield, having sold Flickr too early back in the day, badly wants to join the Three Comma Club. That annoying knock-knock- knock sound is just the beginning.

[0]: [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity)

<comment><USER34> If you don't like their UI , you can also try out [https://flock.com](https://flock.com).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The Slack client is a mind boggling exercise in excess. It often requires 500MB+ RAM when I am connected to two different Slack "networks" and it's an IRC client!? Honestly with so much money and theoretical engineering talent what went wrong here?

<comment><USER36> My current slack app session is using 27MB of ram.

<comment><USER14> I'm curious what makes use 500+ sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> $5B valuation for a chat app. Not bad.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is fantastic news. Congrats to Slack and the team.

Slack recently ran a Slack Developer Workshop (conference with 100+ attendees) to a small group of developers in SF. I was lucky enough to be a part of it. They made it abundantly clear that Slack has a strong interest in being an application distribution platform and they are focused on creating a superior developer experience for their ecosystem. It was amazing to hear.

As somebody who grew up on IRC, the power, to me, was in how robust and easy IRC was to build for and around. Bots and commands were very easy to script and get the hang of. In my mind, Slack has actually built something more valuable than IRC. They have built a new model and ecosystem for application distribution, and they've added the right product features to do the job. The next step is to make it insanely easy to develop for and truly surpass the "ease" of the IRC experience for devs. It's inspiring to hear stories about how companies are building entire workflows with Slack being the center of their business; Mike Brevoort of Missions for Slack [1] spoke of a use case they're dealing with where Slack is powering the entire operations of a Canadian craft brewery using Slack + Google Sheets.

What Slack really has the potential to do here, in my mind, is be _the_ application layer for business. Think about companies like Envoy (check-in, etc.) with Slack integration; somebody shows up at your office, you get pinged on Slack. You open Slack on your phone to check the notification, there's Slack Actions available for you to unlock the door (or what-have-you). The time-to-delivery on similar applications without Slack... well, it oftentimes just straight up wouldn't happen. We'll see more of these.

This is what Slack is getting insanely right. They didn't stop at massive growth + having a "good chat app." They're innovating and enabling new and veteran businesses to grow in novel ways.

Disclosure: Slack is an investor of ours [2] and we're also pretty passionate about developer experience. Through that, I've had a chance to interface with a number of their team members and I truly believe it's a fantastic organization. I can't help but root for good people.

[1] [https://missions.ai/](https://missions.ai/)

[2] [https://stdlib.com/](https://stdlib.com/)

<comment><USER39> "I've had a chance to _interface_ with a number of their team members"

TIL people actually say stuff like that.

<comment><USER38> They don't: I used a simple markov chain text generator that I fed a bunch of software developer and founder HN comments into.

... this post, too.

<comment><USER40> You even got "craft brewery" in there. Is anything on the internet still real?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Crunchbase[0] lists the previous funding total at $539.95M over 9 rounds. This would bring the total to $789.95M.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack#/entity)

</comment><comment><USER42> Slack's bottom-up approach to getting their foot in the door worked well for them.

Providing a fremium service allowing the first email from a domain to be the admin encouraged adoption without official blessing.

</comment><comment><USER43> How does one start to raise money from SoftBank??

</comment><comment><USER44> and they want me to pay for screensharing !!! Take my $please.

</comment><comment><USER45> Wasted money.</comment>


Ask HN: How much would you pay for your Facebook account? - <AUTHOR>

Say Facebook provided you with the option to have full control of your privacy at a very granular level.  They would not store anything you didn't want stored.  They would not share anything you didn't want shared.  You'd have no ads pestering you and applications were controlled by you.
In other words, you own your person, your data, your profile and everything you post on FB.
Yes, you get to share with friends and family but you have a full guarantee that nothing will go past the limits you impose.
Don't want facial recognition or heuristics applied to your photos and posts:  You get to turn it off.
The catch is:  You have to pay an annual or monthly fee for that.
Would you?
How much? <comment><USER2> 0 EUR.

For me, all the options you mention are covered by the EU data protection directive, and guaranteed by law. Now, if only Facebook would actually follow the law...

</comment><comment><USER3> I would pay $0. I see Facebook as more of a "nice to have". I don't need Facebook. Facebook needs me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Actually a bit. I wouldn't be able to connect with a bunch of people and it would be a huge tax if it was cut. It is a valuable product. It owns such a strong signal for so many people

</comment><comment><USER5> Given that my information remains completely private to my friends and nothing is given to advertisers or even stored with Facebook, I would willingly pay at least $10 per month

</comment><comment><USER6> Actually there are other social networks on internet which give you full control of your privacy for free

</comment><comment><USER7> $0.00

I might be willing to pay if I could also control how it looks, maybe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you elaborate on that? $0 for privacy and related controls but > $0 if you could control how it looks? What do you want?

<comment> saiko-chriskun yeah I would imagine functionality and network completely trumps "look". doesn't make much sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> -$2/month. I want a cut.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't have facebook...</comment>


Free Trade with China Wasn't Such a Great Idea for the U.S - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-26/free-trade-with-china-wasn-t-such-a-great-idea <comment><USER2> Do they actually conclude it was bad for the US, or that the benefits weren't equitably distributed (more going to those who suffered most)?

I suppose you could conclude that the inequality itself damages the US but I'm not sure that's a popular angle in these parts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The paper:

[http://www.ddorn.net/papers/Autor-Dorn-Hanson- ChinaShock.pdf](http://www.ddorn.net/papers/Autor-Dorn-Hanson-ChinaShock.pdf)</comment>


Tribler makes Bittorrent anonymous with built-in Tor network - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/tribler-makes-bittorrent-client-anonymous-built-tor-network-140902/

<comment><AUTHOR> For the experts the protocol specifications can be found here: [https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Anonymous- Downloadin...](https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Anonymous-Downloading- and-Streaming-specifications)</comment>


Google to Offer Better Medical Advice When Searching for Symptoms - <AUTHOR> https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2016/06/im-feeling-yucky-searching-for-symptoms.html <comment><USER2> Can folks just set "hypochondriac" in their preferences so medical searches just return variations of cancer? This would probably save folks a lot of time... well.. everyone except doctors :)

Or alternatively... if set always return "You're fine. Eat a bit better and take a walk now and then."</comment>


Easily render D3 examples in Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bradoyler/d3-node <comment><AUTHOR> See examples in repo, that output svg or png</comment>


A quite handy tool for online base64 encoding and decoding - <AUTHOR> http://onlinebase64decoder.com/

<comment><USER2> Why is the encoding/decoding done on the server side? You can easily do it with javascript, and fallback to normal <form> post if JS is disabled.</comment>


Justin Frankel: Big Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://1014.org/?article=468

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is Frankel's own TL;DR:

>"TL;DR: Ideas are worth a lot to society, but not much to individuals. Execution is the opposite.

Finally, some advice for anybody who wants to make things and profit from them: figure out something you can contribute; ideas aren't enough. If you're content to just contribute to society: publish your ideas, let people use them, and hope for the best."</comment>


The Minimum Wage is Racist - <AUTHOR> http://oregonmag.com/Cox404.htm

<comment><USER2> This is one of those issues where I realize just the vastness of the cultural divide between the US and over here.

I live in Sweden, we've got lower unemployment, better average living conditions, free health care, all that jazz AND of course minimum wage. As often is with labour issues in Sweden, it's not dictated by law but by a voluntary agreement between unions and employer associations (called kollektivavtal, or the collective deal), but it is established in most all sectors. I know companies like McDonalds refused early on, but were forced to cave in due to strikes.

Of course a minimum wage will take away some jobs. Jobs that doesn't support your LIVING on those jobs. They suddenly become jobs for the sake of fueling companies, not jobs for the sake of sustaining yourself, which is sort of bizzarre. I'd rather we as a society pay for people to have a dignified life then force them to work three jobs to make ends meet. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wharrgarbl. Economists frequently state this as a fact, with zero recourse to empirical analysis.

It's a theoretical statement based on microeconomic reasoning which itself has flawed assumptions (assumptions like "people make rational economic decisions" and "consumers and employees are well-informed about their options). The econ 101 supply and demand model is an extremely poor model of most real-world economic systems, employment included.

When it hits the real world and a standard of __evidence __, it doesn't hold up. The wealthiest countries in the world with the highest employment rates and the lowest poverty all have minimum wages. Implementation of minimum wage laws is highly correlated with improved standards of living among the poorest, and is not correlated with significant increases in unemployment. (Empirical studies show things like a 0.6% decrease in employment, and only among teenagers, for a 10% increase in the minimum wage.)

</comment><comment><USER4> There are many side effects of having an entire strata of impoverished people. A minimum wage is actually one of the mechanisms that is available to the state which it can use to re-internalize many of the social cost (i.e. externalities) of a below-sustenance level job.

From a personal perspective, I am actually quite wary of the idea of a minimum wage since that is usually set by the government but for a different reason. If the government is really pro-business, I wouldn't trust them to set the minimum wage high enough for sustenance.

What I would prefer a system as described by marcusf where employers and employees are required by law to periodically negotiate with each other to set a salary floor in each of their localities where they do business.

Like what unions are supposed to do. Before they got demonized and destroyed in the Age of Neo-Liberalism.

And yes, the article is horse manure.

</comment><comment><USER5> If someone's going to assert that socialism is bad, as an accepted fact, I really can't take them seriously. He also immediately calls his opponents children, and says that they want people to be "dependent" on the government; by contrast business owners aren't at fault for racial discrimination when they hire, that's apparently nobody's fault. How is it not racist that minorities would be hired, if only they didn't have to be paid as much as white people?

</comment><comment><USER6> An economist (who is coincidentally black) explains how the minimum wage kills jobs. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMMN3UIQmEk&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMMN3UIQmEk&feature=youtube_gdata_player)

</comment><comment><USER7> This article is the biggest load of guff I have read this year. Absolutely no proof or argument is given that the minimum wage hurts the lower income population. Simply that well trained "economists" know it so. Elitists right- wring garbage.

<comment><USER8> While this article didn't show anything, the mainstream argument about minimum wage causing labor surpluses is well enough explained on wikipedia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Economics_of_the_m...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Economics_of_the_minimum_wage)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Absolute horse-shit. Don't waste your psychic energy reading this trash.

<comment><USER10> "psychic energy" sounds like horse-shit and trash to me</comment></comment>