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pytrin

2,323 karma · joined August 11, 2012

developer, CTO Binpress (500startups batch #6), random geek http://www.techfounder.net @erangalperin
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pytrin··on Ask HN: Hiring managers what would it take for you to reply to every applicant?
For example, we posted a job for a mid-level front end developer. We got a bunch of resumes from people who just finished a code bootcamp earlier this year, when we specified 3 years of front end development experience as the main requirement. Why does someone who finished a bootcamp 3 months ago and hasn't done any professional work yet thinks they should apply for a mid-level position, is beyond me.

Other candidates apply with 0 development experience - their resume frames them as "project managers" or "Search engine specialist" with no development related prior experience anywhere. I feel I wasted my time everytime I go through one of those.

pytrin··on Ask HN: Hiring managers what would it take for you to reply to every applicant?
There is no way to automate it with the systems we worked with. We receive the resume through their interface, it doesn't go directly to our Email and doesn't share the contact details directly.

Honestly, if you'd seen the kind of resumes we received you would not think most candidates put any effort at all. Like another person said here, it looks like most of them are spamming all job listing on those sites.

pytrin··on Ask HN: Hiring managers what would it take for you to reply to every applicant?
We used to receive inbound from sites like Ziprecruiter and Indeed. Now I'm using the Stackoverflow Talent service to search for applicants that fit our requirements. I don't start conversations with more than 1 or 2 at the same time, so I don't really need an additional tool to manage them.
pytrin··on Ask HN: Hiring managers what would it take for you to reply to every applicant?
> If an applicant takes the time to apply to your posting, why not give them a follow up regardless?

I'm not a hiring manager, but as the CTO I do review a lot of resumes incoming for technical positions we are hiring for.

The vast majority of applicants do not appear to be taking any time at all aside from selecting their resume to upload and clicking submit. It doesn't seem like they even read the job requirements, since 90% of them do not meet the minimal requirements we post. Some of them are not even developers, but they apply for a developer position.

If someone does appear to be relevant and did also include a cover letter relevant to the position, I will respond, regardless if they're a fit or not.

For me the biggest pain is the sheer amount of irrelevant submissions, which makes you numb after a while. This is why I don't believe in job postings anymore and mostly do headhunting.

Hope this helps!

pytrin··on Get HTTPS for free
Nice! Bookmarked for next renewal. Thanks!
pytrin··on Get HTTPS for free
$40? I paid over $90 for mine. Can I ask where you got it from?
pytrin··on Get HTTPS for free
Unfortunately, that doesn't work with dynamic subdomains (i.e, domains assigned and edited by users). Hopefully they'll change their minds in the future - until then, I'll be paying for a commercial certificate
pytrin··on Get HTTPS for free
Does this support wildcard subdomains? If not, would you be willing to add such support?
pytrin··on Why shooting to wound doesn't make sense scientifically, legally or tactically
I've been training in a grappling sport (BJJ) for over 9 years. The advantage a trained person has over an untrained one is massive. Even someone who has been training a few months could easily handle an untrained person without anyone getting hurt.

You can see hundreds of videos out there of police shooting people without apparent just cause - just because they "felt threatened". If they had the confidence they could deal with a physical confrontation if needed, I'm certain the amount of unnecessary shootings would decrease significantly.

pytrin··on Why shooting to wound doesn't make sense scientifically, legally or tactically
The real problem is that most officers have such minimal training and conditioning in hand-to-hand combat combat (specifically, grappling), and as a result they panic and shoot-to-kill much more often than they should, or use excessive force to control a suspect also resulting in unnecessary deaths.

Instead of passing stupid legislation (anyone who's used firearms extensively knows aiming for limbs is not realistic, you have to aim for center-mass), they should work on improving ongoing officer training and conditioning so that officers would feel much more comfortable controlling a suspect without killing them.

pytrin··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2014)
Binpress, Remote or onsite in Mountain View, CA

We are building a monetization platform for open-source, through dual-licensing and customization / integration services. We are a 10 person team, funded and generating revenue.

We are looking for help with marketing, content and community. You must have experience with software development, either in a technical or managerial role, and a strong understanding of the software development cycle. Compensation is market competitive + equity depending on background and experience.

If this sounds interesting, please get in touch at http://www.binpress.com/jobs/positions

pytrin··on Are coders worth it? (2013)
The article is technically well written, but somewhat uninformed which stems from the author's limited experience and what he sees in popular media.

I thought the top comment below reflected what I have seen in my 10 years in the industry, much better:

" This is a very well written piece, but it's only covering the frothy tip of a very deep phenomenon. I too am a Rails developer, have been coding professionally for 15 some odd years, and I too find what VCs are chasing nowadays to be mostly time wasting crap. But that's not what software, even web software, is really about right now. It's just the glam side of the game.

The real folks making real things happen are building tools and technologies that literally could not have existed 10 years ago. In my personal experience, I've built integrated web portals that show real-time electricity usage for factories, saving them 10-50 grand a month by lowering usage during peak hours. I've built sales management tools that allowed a 2 man company to scale to a distributed team of dozens. Online rental advertising systems to cut out costly newspapers. Medical order management systems.

It's not glamorous, it doesn't get on TechCrunch or Hacker News, but it's real value, delivered by real professionals. And that, more than the stupid photo sharing cruft, is what's really driving developer salaries.

During the late 90's, the joke/threat was "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" - the point being that lots of human work could be automated by a savvy developer. That threat has become a promise, and we (costly) web developers are the ones fulfilling that promise across a huge range of industries." - Rob Morris

pytrin··on Send money to a customer’s checking account using their debit card number
It's the only thing we're waiting on to switch to Balanced. We talked to you guys before about that (my co-founder, Adam, from Binpress) and it seemed to be progressing but then it stalled. Looking forward to May 22
pytrin··on Firefox Developer Tools – Editable box model, Sublime Text keys
Firebug gives you the option to toggle all pseudo states for an element and edit its CSS. IMO Firebug and Chrome's dev tools still lag behind Firebug's.
pytrin··on Atom Is Now Open Source
You're confusing "free" in pricing with "free" in freedom. A free trial creates a completely different type of community than free and open code. GitHub could have just provided a closed binary for free if they wanted to go the Sublime route.
pytrin··on Airbnb closes $500M round of funding at a $10B valuation, led By TPG
You are correct. Besides, raising x amount of money at y valuation, doesn't mean the company as a whole is worth y. Investors typically get preferred stock, which are worth more. Marc Andreessen had a nice tweet chain about that exact topic yesterday, ending with this one - https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/457017580385873921
pytrin··on Dragdis 3 minute pitch. Feedback needed
Some context needed - who is the target audience? investors? potential hires? users? I would make some modifications to accommodate each. I think the product concept translates well and is easy to understand. Since you focus most of the pitch on it, it seems like a pitch for users.

If you're pitching to investors, a few things need to be sharpened / clarified -

* You say "0 marketing spend" - which most investors will call bullshit on that. Typically, what you really mean is that you spent nothing on ads. Unless you consider your time as worthless, you probably spent quite a bit on marketing. Even if you have the most viral product in the world, you need to kickstart it until it reaches critical mass. Investors want to know that you've given some thought on how to scale that operation (and not that you'll spend 0 on marketing going forward).

* Regarding marketing, you briefly mention that user acquisition is built into the product. You need to elaborate a little bit on that, cause right now it's not clear how that is the case.

* Dates on the x-axis of the user growth graph would be helpful. Did that growth happen mostly after the public launch or during the closed beta? most people would assume the latter unless you tell them otherwise.

* At the end you briefly group together your recruiting needs and fundraising goals. Depending on the audience, I would focus on one. If fundraising interest is the goal of the pitch, put a dedicated slide on that, and move the hiring part to a footnote on the team slide. If it's the reverse, do the opposite.

* I would make the contact details at the end way larger, and move it higher. In addition, it's always good practice to put the name of the company, a tagline and basic contact details in the header of every slide - for people who lost concentration, or want to put a note for themselves before you reach the last slide. Btw, it should be in header and not the footer, because sometimes people's heads obscure the bottom of the deck during presentations (depending on how the seats are arranged). That is also why you should move the contact details at the end higher, just in case.

* Again, investor audience only - add a slide about the market / opportunity size. Especially if you're aiming for a series A round, which typically means venture capital.

Hope this helps!

pytrin··on Yahoo to early Reddit: You are a rounding error
Haters gonna hate. What every starup founder needs to keep reminding themselves, especially in the beginning.
pytrin··on Heartbleed and the misconceptions about Open Source
Thanks for the explanation, we always appreciate sensible feedback on our messaging and product. We are always looking for ways to get our projects more open and accepted by the traditional open-source community. Our default option when adding new products on the marketplace is GPL + a commercial license (which is the option you mention). Most developers still pick only our own proprietary licenses, since they are worried about people abusing it.

We are also in touch with the OSI for creating a 100% open-source compatible license of our own that could be officially sponsored by them. It's been a slow process, but we hope to get it done in the near future. Our own license was created with the help of copyright lawyer that has dedicated his professional life to supporting and advocating open-source. It is a compromise between closed-source / commercial and fully open-source (what we call "commercial open-source"). For many purposes, it is less restrictive than the GPL (no stipulation on releasing your source if you modify and distribute on other formats), which makes it more attractive to businesses building commercial products (for example, iOS application, which cannot use GPL).

Hope that makes sense!

pytrin··on Heartbleed and the misconceptions about Open Source
It's interesting how you choose to spin it to fit your narrative. That product has multiple licenses, the one that allows redistribution of the source is this - http://www.binpress.com/license/read/id/1567/app/859

The one you linked to only allows binary distribution. This is how those projects support themselves, by offering tiers of pricing depending on the user needs. We just require that at least one of the licenses allows redistribution of the source. So I'm understanding that by your world-view, Open-Core projects are not open-source? or that open-source can only be used if sanctioned by the OSI? I'm afraid that no one has monopoly on that term. It means different things to different people. We call our products "Commercial open-source", which you can find the usage of which on the web and wikipedia as well. Most projects on GitHub do not have a license, which means they are copyrighted by default. We vet licensing for each project on our site, to make sure there are no copyright or licensing breaches, and provide a range of licensing options to fit the developer POV. Not sure where all the hate is coming from.

pytrin··on Heartbleed and the misconceptions about Open Source
We are a marketplace. Our developers can pick which licenses they want to use - our only stipulation is the complete source-code would be included and meets the guidelines we publish (i.e, nothing is closed-source on Binpress). We have FOSS licensed projects, dual-licensed projects and projects licensed with our license generator, which for most purposes only differs from open-source licenses on one point - that the code cannot be redistributed as-is without any modification or extension. The reason we provide those licenses is that a lot of developers are worried that people will copy their code as is and sell it somewhere else. We think it's better if people share more code, if we can alleviate some of their concerns.

I don't think it's that surprising that our most popular projects use our own licenses instead of FOSS licenses. Most people care about results and access to the code, and not whether the license was generated by the OSI or the FSF. You can go over our licenses and provide commentary if you feel the need to do so - but please don't accuse us of doing something we don't.

pytrin··on Heartbleed and the misconceptions about Open Source
You are correct, of course. But what the Heartbleed showed us is that even at the scale of OpenSSL (millions of users), almost all were using it blindly. People often care more about the free in pricing aspect more than the freedom to inspect, modify and contribute - because as you say, dev time is precious.

> open source doesn't necessarily mean "anyone can edit it and improve it".

I think you missed the point in the article - it was about how anyone can create or contribute to open-source. Not about submitting patches to existing projects and have them pulled upstream without any review process.

pytrin··on Israeli hackers counter attack: posting private photos of anti-Israel hackers
Yes, the U.N is definitely known for its objectivity regarding Israel.

http://imgur.com/4FQNZBu

pytrin··on Ask HN: I am a good developer but have a serious gaming addiction
Are you working from home? if so, my first advice would be to stop and go find a co-working place. Somewhere you can't just put the laptop aside and turn on your gaming console / PC. If you have games installed on your work computer - uninstall it. Physically separate working hours from leisure time, if you can't control it yourself.

Maybe development is not for you - you might have the talent for it, but not the discipline required to constantly deliver working code. Only the first is not sufficient to be called a "great" developer. In fact, I would say that in most cases discipline and dedication are more important than raw talent. I have worked from home for a couple years, and yes, the temptation is there to put aside work on some days and just watch TV or play a game. And sometimes I did. But having discipline meant I knew I would make for those hours - later in the day or on the weekend if I had to, since I made a conscious choice to do something else.

pytrin··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2014)
Mountain View and the Bay Area - Binpress, the marketplace for commercial open-source.

About us

We are building a platform that helps developers build sustainable businesses around open-source and cultivate the next Red-Hat and MySQL. We are a small team of 7 located in Mountain View (some remote).

What we're looking for

* We are looking for an experienced content producer to join our team as our content marketer. You should have experienced in producing and directing the production of many forms of content, including articles / posts, podcasts, videos and infographics. Experience with producing developer related content is a big plus. This job can be remote if very qualified.

* A junior marketer - a person who has the marketing bug but not the experience. You are a doer and a quick learner. You will be working with our marketing team to implement our marketing plan, learning the full stack of marketing approaches. This position is onsite in our Mountain View offices.

If you are interested in what we do and in the intersection of open-source and commercial software, please get in touch through our jobs page - http://www.binpress.com/jobs/positions

pytrin··on Accept my accept-language
Those sites are not relying on accept-language, but rather on IP geolocation to select the default language. I sometimes use a non-US proxy when I'm feeling vigilant, and Google always uses the IP of the proxy to determine what language to serve me (even though my browser accept-language hasn't changed).
pytrin··on Why is Atom closed source?
If you're interested, we have a license generator for source-code over at Binpress that creates licenses based on the conditions you set. Similar use-cases to what GitHub is doing with Atom

http://www.binpress.com/license/generator

pytrin··on The awkward copyright collision of Fair Use and Creative Commons
Presumably, User wants to include your library in their open-source BSD release. If that is the case, what they're asking is correct since a work extending / modifying a GPL licensed code needs to be released as GPL as well. That is the main difference between GPL and non-copyleft licenses.

They could distribute their code without your library, as you say, but that would require more hassle from the end-user, especially if there's some configuration / integration process that is required to make both work together.

pytrin··on AngelList is the NASDAQ of our generation
I would like to focus on point #3 - market analysis software. In my opinion, this effort is misdirected for private companies. Simply put, the information available publicly on most of those is completely irrelevant. You can't infer anything about a startup from the number of twitter followers or alexa score - those are (inaccurate) vanity metrics that shouldn't be used for any serious investment decision.

The important information is (mostly) private - revenue, users, conversion, CPA, LTV, etc. Guess what - if you want to invest in private companies, you should be talking to founders and get the actual information.

Going back to the NASDAQ comparison - publicly traded companies have had market analysis software for years, and it hasn't been very good at predicting stock prices, even though there is much more information available, and historical data about a very important metric - stock price. Doing the same for private companies with the important data missing would produce the kind of results you can expect from it.

pytrin··on Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding
Ultimately, this is a decision every founder must make for themselves. Without knowing the specifics of the offer, it's also hard to really know what went behind it.

Having said that, the rule of thumb is that you want at least 12 months of runway, and that's at the rate you want to go at. It takes typically around 6 months (if things go well) to raise VC money (unless they come to you - which is pretty rare).

From what I understood, Groove had 8 months at the current runway - before hiring the additional people they want to bring on board. That's typically when you start raising before you go into the danger zone with your runway. Also, considering the current perceived drought of Series-A funding, a $5M offer for a business generating $16k monthly is an outlier.

Of course, I hope Groove does well and never needs this money. Also, it's possible the deal terms were not favorable, though it's not mentioned specifically in the post. If that was not the case, in my opinion they had a chance to significantly derisk their business and they choose not to take it. Time would tell if their gamble pays off or not.

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