Set up a system that can spin up a droplet for a remote candidate. Any time a candidate expresses interest in your company, spin up an instance and email them a link to it.

What does the link do? That depends on your company. Are you making an iOS app? Then the link takes them to where they can download source code for a fake, hypothetical iOS app. It says "X, Y, and Z bugs exist. Find them and fix them. Then add a feature: here is a clear description of what to add."

When the candidate is done doing this, they zip up their code and send it back to you.

If it sounds way more effective to look at that than to look at resumes, it is. If it sounds like it will repel candidates, well... Two things. First, if you're chasing a specific developer, then that isn't really the normal hiring process. You want them already. This pipeline is for everyone else. It makes no sense to subject them to a work hire test when you're actively seeking them out.

Here's the other point. The type of candidates you will find with this method will shock you. They will be so skilled that it won't matter whether they're called a senior or fresh out of college. You'll know immediately that you want them.

Everything I've described up to this point is a remote process. There is no on-site work hire test. By the time they come on site, you're mainly checking they can show up, and telling them about your company. You're no longer trying to filter them based on ability; they already demonstrated it.

Let's say your company's website is the primary focus, not an iOS app. Ok. The link will take the candidate to a hypothetical, fake website built with a similar framework. Again, it will have multiple bugs and a missing feature. Tell them what the bugs are, and tell them what the feature needs to do. Then have them send you their code when they're done.

I feel like at this point no one will even try to do this. You can think of so many reasons not to try: it takes too much work, it will scare too many people off, it will... Etc.

These reasons turn out to be largely fake or mistaken. Try it. Invest the resources to build this pipeline, tell HN when it's ready, and you win.

If this sounds prohibitive or unlikely, remember how counter-intuitive the most effective techniques in life are. Penicillin was discovered by accident. It sounds pretty unlikely that it would work. Same deal here.

I've explained this as clearly as I can. It's up to everyone else to either try it or to watch others win after they try it. Because the filter I've explained is the only way to let talent find you.

The type of people you'll discover will range from passive people who found the process amusing, to well-off senior developers who are demonstrating why you should pay them X equity or Y salary, to high school dropouts who turn out to be one of the most valuable people that join your team.

I'm not even going to touch the topic of what tech companies currently do. It doesn't matter. I've described what works, and if whoever reads this suppresses their instincts and builds this, they will discover it's practically the key to winning.

I don't hire programmers, but have been a hiring manager, running fairly technical business teams now for 10+ years, and have found that initiative is often the deciding factor in any given employee's success.

There are other ways to select for it, and clues you start to pick up on over the years, but once you've figured out how to gauge relative levels of initiative across different people, I've found it makes hiring/resourcing questions quite a bit easier.

We've evolved the same process in my own startup - in the last 2 months we've hired 5 remote programmers in Vietnam and India by giving them 2 rounds of remote work-sample tasks (a simple web app), then ending off with a text or voice interview. We ended up retaining 2 out of 5 of them (both Vietnamese, incidentally) who demonstrated a higher level of ability after they started.

The retention rate is low, so we've been tightening up the process. What we've found is that we probably needed to raise the bar a little by asking candidates to design and architect a feature (DB-backend-frontend) during the chat interview. That would have given us a better insight into their code structuring and teamwork/communication skills.

We've just brought on a 3rd hire (Vietnamese again) who passed our improved interview, and I have a good feeling that the process works very well to weed out candidates who don't have the needed level of ability and scrupulousness.

The best of our hires didn't attend college or have much relevant experience, but was clearly very capable and possessed great initiative. We're really glad to have managed to hire him. Another guy is finishing his 3rd year of college.

In summary, I think remote work-sample tests are fantastic, and I hope you're right that they're the key to winning :)

Do we care about equality, or not? I tried not mentionining this aspect, hoping people would realize on their own. But a remote work hire test is also mostly anonymous. It doesn't matter whether you're black, white, male, or female. All that matters is whether you can do the work.

On the flipside, what you're saying is that you genuinely want to spend a vacation day meeting a new company instead of with your family or working on your own projects.

And it's like, if you think you're a good dev, why wouldn't you leap at the opportunity to show it off? I get that it's a little annoying to spend a few hours on it, but the standard interview is literally random noise. Why subject your future to a random process?

I don't know. I respect your view. I'm going to bow out now. Have a good week.

And, FWIW, when salaried, I not once have taken a vacation day to interview. I've said "hey, I'll be in late," and because this industry is so deranged as to think that 50+-hour weeks are normal, no manager has had the temerity to get mad at me for taking a morning off because invariably it will be cashed in when I have to pull a sixteen-hour day to deal with a problem. (The days around Heartbleed earned me some goodwill at that gig, if you follow!)

...

Every week I see posts reposted daily - for example Bootstrap was posted multiple times over a time period.

This project is unlikely to be successfully funded. In fact, "unlikely" is a mild word for just how unlikely it is to succeed.

Problem #1 - No clear value demonstration to the end user. The video is... not very good. The primary reason it's not very good is because it's asking people to read. People react instinctively to faces, to the sound of a person's voice, and to feeling connected with them. It's no coincidence that virtually every successful Kickstarter campaign contains monologues by their campaign creators. Thus, while there may be a value proposition embedded somewhere in the video, it's probably lost on most people who watch it because they just aren't really identifying with what is being presented.

Problem #2 - a $25 minimum price point. The gamedev industry has repeatedly proven that by enabling people to contribute $5 and $10, you reap about 20-40% more income than you otherwise would have. This truth isn't restricted to the domain of gamedev. The evidence for this is that virtually every successful Kickstarter project has low-tier contribution levels, often contributing a significant amount to the bottom-line of projects that aren't going to deliver a tangible product. E.g. this may not be so important for projects like Soylent, where the end-user will receive something tangible, but it's pretty important for most projects that weren't set up with the goal of taking preorders.

Problem #3 - Too high of a threshold for funding. $50k is not reasonable when the value proposition is so unclear. I could see this project reaching $5k or maybe even $10k. But it's not reasonable to calculate how much it would cost you to work on it, and then use that as the funding goal. "What would the crowds be willing to pay?" takes priority over "How much would this cost me in terms of my time, and what is my time worth?"

Problem #1, the video is all I could do. I am not very good at doing videos, it's not my profession. I have little time to hire a cameraman or do professional video editing and I'm not all that photogenic to boot, so it might be a good thing you don't see me on camera.

Problem #2: Easily fixable. I can add other incentives while the project is running.

Problem #3: If the goal isn't reached, then it becomes a matter of it's not even something that's reachable since I must have enough time freed (by having money) to complete what needs to be done. Without the time, the work can't be done at an accelerated rate since I will need to continue to do it in my spare time. So, while the funding goal is high, it is not unreasonable for a project this size.

This project is now a business seeking outside funding and should be conducted as such. There are no excuses and perception is everything. Instead of an itemized (note: this projects as petty) response, you need to fix it and say "thank you" to sillysaurus for the valuable input.

You've since added $1 minimum contributions. Awesome! What does that person get? An honorable mention? Their name on the 'Founder's List'? There's nothing in the tier descriptions...

The overall message is still unclear. How does Johnny MacBook benefit from all of your hard work? What is the point?

I want this project to succeed, and that is where the feedback comes from. It's obvious to me and everyone else here that you've put a lot of time and effort into this project. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that it's enough to build it. If they don't know what it is and what it does for them, they won't come.

The video IS all I could manage to do. I don't have the equipment or the skills to make a professional looking video.

The second point does make sense, I'm acting on this.

As for the third... he acts like I'm supposed to ask for $10,000 for such a goal. GNUstep is an very large project. Getting it to 10.6 compatibility is going to take time and I can't take the time off of work unless I haver the money I need to make it happen. Asking me to do this for anything less than what I projected is ludicrous beyond belief.

So, yes, I realize where the input comes from and I respect that. I will, however, not simply take those comments and act on them when some of them are unsupportable and untenable.

All of that being said I am planning on adding a video in the next couple of days (most likely tomorrow) of me talking about the project so that people have a face to put to it.

I seriously do thank all of you for your input and I apologize if my responses seem combative. It was my understanding or impression, however, that this was not simply a case of me taking input and mindlessly acting on it, but, instead, a discussion of what's best to help the project succeed and that does include my responses to your feedback.

GC

You should. There's no downside, but there's plenty of downside to being brusque. You don't need to act on the suggestions.

> As for the third... he acts like I'm supposed to ask for $10,000 for such a goal. GNUstep is an very large project. Getting it to 10.6 compatibility is going to take time and I can't take the time off of work unless I haver the money I need to make it happen. Asking me to do this for anything less than what I projected is ludicrous beyond belief.

He's saying that unless you recontextualize the project, you're asking for too much. Potential donors will have their expectations anchored by (a) their ideas about Kickstarter projects in general, (b) their ideas about similar Kickstarter projects, and (c) their understanding of the value you'll be providing relative to their needs.

If your goal is high relative to similar Kickstarter projects you have to make it appear worth that premium. If it's unclear what value your project will add to your donors' lives that will make your job that much harder.

That's what he's saying.

By the way, if you're asking for donations to pay for the time you're working on it and not the hard costs of the project then it's absolutely critical you have a video with your face on it and not just text. Folks are really donating for your labor, not to for this abstract project.

Those were always there. They are always there. The top-level commenter was complaining about reward tiers. Apparently he thinks developers aren't incentivized enough by the work getting done on the platform they want to use. I think that's pretty bizarre.

> How does Johnny MacBook benefit from all of your hard work?

He doesn't in any way you could successfully communicate to "Johnny MacBook". The drive is squarely aimed at exactly the people who would most directly benefit from the work being done, and be the most likely to contribute: Developers.

Huh? No it isn't. It's sponsored improvement of an existing open-source project; it might very well be useful to businesses, but is in no way a business itself.

To be honest, I wouldn't worry too much about the rewards; most people contributing to this will likely do so because it's something they'd either like to see or would find useful themselves.

Also, any plans to address UIKit?

I looked at this and had the opposite reaction. $50K is between 50 and 75% of a full-time developer's salary in NYC for a single year (I believe it's similar in SF). Are we expected to believe that that's all it would take to get Cocoa libraries running seamlessly on GNU?

Granted, I've never dealt with Cocoa at all, so maybe I'm overestimating this, but it seems like a lot of work.

I mean, how can you take a 15-year, multi-person project, and then assume it's going to be completed with a single person-year[0]?

[0] I don't mean literally a single person - I'm referring to a person-year being a unit of "work" (ie, the theoretical work equivalent of one person for a year).

Granted, if you have to hire devs not already part of your project at market rate, things will go way up from that.

That's not what the project plans to do. Apple's implementation of Cocoa isn't open-source. GNUStep already has large parts of the Cocoa APIs implemented, but they're very outdated. I think fixing this on $50k is extremely ambitious, but note that the project says they'll be brought up to at least 10.6 (which would be good enough to allow easy ports of a lot of Mac software), not all the way to 10.9.

That is a problem.

No one said that. It is a lame criticism - focus on whether there is a need for the project, is it possible in the time frame, etc. Substance over style, please.

I think, here, the rewards are more tokens than anything else; this isn't really a product-oriented Kickstarter, except arguably for people who are interested in Darling. Min contribution is actually $1; there's just no reward.

> Too high of a threshold for funding. $50k is not reasonable when the value proposition is so unclear.

I'm not too sure about this. A lot of people, myself included, would like to see GNUStep brought to parity with modern Cocoa. It's never going to be a mass appeal project, but I can see it making its goal.

Just using Bitcoin for transactions doesn't eliminate legal obligations. I imagine that if they ever got popular, tumbling services would be the first things that would be regulated (or shutdown by the gov't).

The level of regulation it would take to actually trace lots of tiny transactions between pseudonymous parties is next to impossible. How is me paying a friend back for half the pizza we shared to a new address of his going to be handled?

It's pretty straightforward for the Government to come up with a scheme to defeat tumbling services. Just make it mandatory to only accept payments from whitelisted addresses. Banks and your average business are not going to go all cypherpunk and circumvent such laws.

http://zerocoin.org/

Under my scenario, if you used zerocoin, and anybody else using the service wasn't whitelisted, you would be blacklisted, since there would be a chain of coins being sent from non whitelisted addresses to yours. So it would just be up to you not to use it.

The key is at what stage the Government becomes involved. If they implemented this sort of proposal right now, they would just say "if you're using zerocoin, you'll likely be blacklisted- tough luck". If everyone starts using zerocoin, including all legitimate businesses, and then they try to regulate it- then people would have more power.

Well, yes. Of course, it's not like tax authorities haven't had to deal with money laundering before.

So thanks for whatever you did in keeping the boats safe (both in design and construction), it was certainly much-appreciated in the Fleet.

As an example, responsive design allows small businesses that may not be able to afford to build multiple versions of a website to instead create a single site that provides multiple experiences based on the type of device used to view it. Users win, whether they care about it or not, because they can now use the site on the device of their choosing, without worrying about it being functionally broken.

  User-Agent: * 
  Disallow: /x?
  Disallow: /vote?
  Disallow: /reply?
  Disallow: /submitted?
  Disallow: /submitlink?
  Disallow: /threads?
  Crawl-delay: 30

https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt

shows no such thing...

The file from January 2013 appears just as permissive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130109093744/http://news.ycombi...

If that's true, then why don't they just, you know, end privacy? Tptacek was right when he said:

Obama could give a speech in the Rose Garden this week carefully explaining that NSA requires access to American communications, all of them, in order to defend the country against terrorist attacks, and that while privacy is "important", the expectation of perfect privacy in your cell phone and Internet communications isn't reasonable because it helps terrorist cells without providing much benefit.

I would recoil from such a speech, but the public probably would not.

The American public currently has a weak expectation of privacy in their electronic communications. But they make virtually no meaningful demand for that privacy. Thwarting terror attacks are a much higher priority to them. Want evidence of that? Well, the body-conscious, vain, generally out-of-shape American public routinely submits to electronic strip searches to get onto airplanes. You think they care if someone's screening their calls to catch Abu Shahid? They would accept that argument. And with that acceptance, the expectations of privacy and the notion of what "reasonable" searches are would be, in short order, redefined --- those rights being explicitly predicated on contemporary mores by the Constitution.

When I look at it from this angle, it becomes apparent that while privacy is inconvenient to the USG, and something they feel they have to work around, it's not something they're intent on eliminating. Despite the rhetoric from the tech punditry, the USG has not stated that it's reasonable for them to surveil US citizens; their defense has instead been that they are not surveilling them. I too think that's a falsehood, but it's truth or falsity is not the only thing that matters about it.

By covertly erecting systems that end privacy (and attacking privacy tools like Tor), they are, in effect, ending privacy (without hurting the "US is a champion of freedom" brand to the same degree that explicitly ending privacy would do).

That feels a bit privacy invading, but there wasn't much fuss over it when it was introduced.

What do you mean by "not universal"?

(http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security-finger...)

> The U.S. government has been collecting digital fingerprints and photographs of nearly all non-citizens aged 14 and up entering the country since 2004, officials said, in a Homeland Security program called US-VISIT, at a cost of $1.7 billion.