Androider

You don't need to find them, the decision maker in the corp tells their procurement people they want to buy your product, the procurement people tell their approved reseller to reach out to you (someone like these fine folks https://www.trustradius.com/value-added-resellers-vars) for the purchase order. The VAR gives you the PO, you bill the VAR, and the VAR just hands over the license key or whatever to the corp, and deals with things like renewals (if they're good, and sometimes that's up to you). The VAR probably has no idea what your software does.

The corp still uses your software, not some whitelabeled version. This broken-telephone purchasing game is solely there because in a big corp it's really hard to write a check to a new unproven vendor, you'll just be a little line in the invoice they pay to the VAR each month.

It's like the Pomodoro technique, but with peer pressure of the Pomodoro timer being disappointed if you bail. Not wanting to let someone else down, even a stranger, I can see how that would help you stick to it. Brilliant!

A business that looks at what users want and can pay, and adjusts accordingly? Sounds like a competently run business!

Thank you Taylor for sharing your comments here as a founder. Some of us at HN still love hearing about actual new startups, business models, pricing strategies etc.

That's also a terrible feature. A card declining a charge does not in any way absolve you of the debt incurred by using a service and can even be sent to collections, it's always better to cancel your trials / subscriptions properly.

I wonder if the use of a lensmeter makes you fall into a local optimum while missing out on a potential global optimum?

Let's say I go to a bad optician and get a pair of lenses that have something way off like the cylinder is the wrong way around, or toric lenses for astigmatism when you actually don't have it. Everything looks like crap but then you get used to it (the brain is amazing at adapting). Then a few years later you go get another pair, and they use the lensmeter reading as the baseline.

I think I have astigmatism, or do I? It took me more than two months until I stopped getting headaches after getting my first glasses and I could see decently. Every glasses since then are based on that first reading. Maybe I've just become used to it, and there exists a significantly better lens that I could become used to as well.

That is terrifying.

Dystopian take: WeWork will provide companies with all kinds of metrics and tracking, like time to enter and leave. This will make remote work "palatable" to a wider range of employers.

Practical take: For the same reason companies don't let you book your own plane tickets and expense claim them, and almost always instead use corporate services like Amex Global Travel / Carlson Wagonlit Travel, as well as mandate the use of the corporate card on travels etc. When you have a non-trivial amount of employees, companies don't want to do one-off arrangements like that, or argue about what is reimbursable. WeWork being a "known quantity" / The Default(tm) is really important to Corporate. Your experience may vary at smaller companies.

As Patio11 put it, "You probably have a lot of questions but it’s a Holiday Inn; anything else?" https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1161796809741627392?lang=...

Leasing office space in a place like NY traditionally required at least a one year lease, often longer. WeWork has at least popularized the notion of extremely flexible month-to-month contracts for fully managed facilities in historically expensive markets, which is very attractive to virtually all companies (now is that a sustainable business remains to be seen, but at least the demand is there). Not just small companies and startups, but companies of all sizes like the flexible opex that can be scaled on short notice. WeWork's S1 shows that a big chunk of the customer base and growing is in fact large companies. E.g. Microsoft in New York has their entire sales organization scattered across WeWork properties. That kind of thing is where WeWork appears to be doubling down on according to their S1, not really the freelancer hot-desk market.

Companies also generally don't like to deal with anything that is not core to their business. Already previously most functions were outsourced (cleaning, maintenance, stocking the fridge etc.) but increasingly companies don't even want to deal with the hassle of sourcing a supplier. Or getting Internet. Or insurance. WeWork makes all of that a non-issue. So does Regus Spaces product, but it has to be at least acknowledged that it's a direct reaction to WeWork.

I think the future will look something like this, and why it can be likened to AWS for physical space (WeWork doesn't go this far yet, today requiring e.g. physically visiting the space before leasing which is honestly a pain-in-the-ass speaking as someone looking to place multiple people all over the US, just let me input my credit card already):

- Startup company in the Bay Area logs in online and clicks to reserve a 1x Private Office in NYC, for the two new hires starting there next week. No tour, no calls, no interaction with anyone at WeWork. WeWork is already a "known quantity" (kind of like McDonald's), no need for any of that process.

- Microsoft manager in Redmond does absolutely nothing workplace related as his new hire just shows up at WeWork Houston, as the company already has a direct expensing agreement. His cost center is just billed X for the month automatically.

Note that Aswath is detailing a best-case scenario for WeWork here, where they're somehow making $80.5B revenue in 2029. That's... a bit of a stretch, seeing as they'd have to 26x their current 2019 revenue. Are they going to buy out every building in Manhattan? So we can say the fair pricing is somewhere between $0 and Aswath's $13B.

Personally, I feel that no matter what price WeWork IPOs at, it's going to pancake pretty hard. There's a good business in there somewhere (AWS for real-estate), but it's saddled under so much crap, debt, and hot air.

Don't go confusing the kool-aid drinking employees of WeWork with the people investing in WeWork. The 80% haircut on the IPO pricing (to date) is the institutional investor's saying "no thanks" to exactly that type of feel-good BS being spouted in the S1.

How would you do a backup of this KV store if it's not exposed as a filesystem or block device? You wouldn't (it's for ephemeral caching?), or you'd just walk the entire keyspace?

Go is probably pretty safe, but even internally at Google Flutter is still sort of flying under the radar and nobody knows (or cares) about it too much. But if leadership decides to take a look at what the heck is going on in that corner of the organization... that would be a hard one to explain.

Equinox is $180-$500/mo, and popping up like mushrooms on every block in NY (36 so far). A Peloton bike is downright frugal in comparison.

We started a greenfield project a few months ago and decided not use Redux and try the context API instead. In retrospect, that was a bad idea. Context is fine for a small app, but small apps tend not to stay small... and then you're stuck with the Yugo when you what you really need is a truck.

In our main app we also use advanced features like what Slack is describing in their post, like having multiple Redux stores. We also combine stores from multiple sources (e.g. appStore = [...store1, ...store2, ...storeFromALibrary]. It's incredibly flexible.

ConvertKit is an absolute rocketship of a bootstrapped company. What Nathan as done is nothing short of amazing, I'm saying that having followed your story for years. But that amazing MRR curve is the bootstrapped equivalent of a unicorn, which is what allows you to have those nice things. Taking them for granted or lamenting why other companies simply don't do the same is entirely unrealistic.

Look at any of the other companies on the Baremetrics open startups page https://baremetrics.com/open-startups (save maybe Buffer). Should Baremetrics itself hire a SF developer, blowing 25%+ of their annual ARR on it? They've been around for years, and are doing pretty well. Of course they should not, that would be crazy, and it has nothing to do with the company being cheap. They should keep hiring for reasonable salaries in anywhere-but-SF.

It's interesting that a lot of people in this thread seem to assume that the end-goal of remote working becoming mainstream and some inherent sense of fairness is that everyone ends up being paid SF wages in the end. But basic economic theory says that if remote working becomes the new standard, you should expect the salaries between high and low COL to average out. So somewhere between SF and an Asian sweatshop... let's say a Berlin developer salary. That's not great for the SF developers, and also why SF is one of the last places I would expect remote work take off.

Companies that want to hire remotely rarely publish wages online for this exact reason. They get called out for being "cheap" and "I can make X times more in SF". Yes, but most companies in the world are not looking for and can not compete for SF developers with the FAANGS in the first place. When the company is not in the Bay Area, them posting a non-SF salary is not trying to screw you over, hiring you was never on the table. Unfortunately they cannot say simply that in the job ad without calling down an epic shitstorm.

It's incredibly common. See Stripe for example https://stripe.com/docs/api/authentication

Authorization: Bearer <API Key>.

OAuth doesn't have a monopoly on bearer tokens. And it is literally the definition of a bearer token: you shall know the messenger who presents this token, a concept old as history itself.

I have a 100K+ LOC project in React started in 2015 that's going strong, and I imagine Facebook has much, much bigger projects than that using React. I can't recall a single time during all these years that something would have broken in a non-backwards compatible way. We're on the latest version of React, writing class-based components (with zero intent to move to hooks) and feeling very good about it.

Not a Vue programmer, but looking at the code, why is the example code using {{ count }} instead of standard JS interpolation like ${count}, and using an App.template block instead of just returning the template with the count and other params. E.g. why not just make it plain JS, and minimize framework surface? I could rewrite that example removing almost all of the "Vueisms", and it wouldn't be a single line longer.

Wait what, Baldur's Gate 3? And DOOM Eternal at 4K/60, they must be pretty confident about the latency... OK, I have to admit it's a pretty compelling alternative to upgrading my aging computer. I'll still wait for the reviews / Digital Foundry analysis, but I'm interested.

Marketing and Sales budgets are bigger than R&D at most tech companies. So, you can work with the people who's job is literally to spend that allocated pot of money every single month. Or you can try to change how businesses operate.

If your ultimate goal is to work on OSS and to get companies to chip in, I'm quite convinced the former will yield better results and be less frustrating for everyone involved.

I think there would be significant benefits to all parties if GitHub just put the proper automated scaffolding for large scale sponsoring in place instead of relying on such ad-hoc conventions:

1) Individual developers and the companies that want to sponsor projects will otherwise just continue to talk past each other. The developers ask "Why aren't companies donating?" while the very use of the word donation is already a complete showstopper for a company that otherwise doesn't flinch at dropping $50K on a one-day booth at a developer conference that draws maybe 15K visitors at best (a website like Material UI or Webpack probably does 10x that in a month, a perfect fit!). If GitHub doesn't set the system in place, large players like Webpack will continue to "get it" (they offer invoices for sponsors!) while Bob with his 5K stars project will be left out.

2) If the attribution is on a case-per-case basis, companies will continue to select just a few big showcase projects. If the handling is uniform it would be much easier for companies to do things like spreading their spend out all over some segments like "top-100 Go projects" or "libraries built on top of D3" or whatever audience they'd like to target.

3) If there is actually significant uptake in a project, meaning more than a handful of sponsors, it quickly becomes a serious timesink for developers just to track who is active which month at which tier, which sponsors churned etc. and then to actually attribute everything correctly. How about, sponsor picks the project, developer does nothing except gets paid, and all campaign links, logos etc. automatically taken care of. Hmm, I guess what I'm describing is sort of like an AdWords for GitHub now that I think of it :)

This is a nice start for allowing sending "coffee money" between persons. If however you want to drive Serious Money into actually funding OSS projects please remember this: While virtually no company has a donations budget, almost every company has a $$$ marketing budget.

Please let me give you some of that money that would otherwise be spent on blue pens with logos and endless display ads to GitHub projects. I'd be happy to drive $xxK/mo to open source projects my company depends on or that are simply being used by an audience that aligns with our own. To sell that internally, I need (as in, I would be laughed out of the room to propose it without):

- My sponsoring company logo on the GitHub project page

- UTM links and all that jazz to attribute traffic and campaigns to the specific projects that we sponsor

See https://webpack.js.org/ for a good example of a successful sponsorship program. Literally the biggest hurdle remaining for BigCorp to sponsor something like Webpack today is selling your boss on "Patreon" and "OpenCollective". But if you just increase our GitHub budget by a few K/month, AND the marketers get attributable traffic to boot that we can point to, well that's an easy sell!

This thing was driving me crazy since the last Chrome update a few days ago. Entering "cn" into the address bar would put "Google search for CNAMEAlreadyExistsException" as the first autocomplete entry, a term I've randomly googled once, instead of cnn.com which is a site I visit every single day.

Is this a new dark pattern to drive more traffic to google.com?

In the US there are PEOs (professional employer organizations) that function as virtual co-employers that allow companies to hire in all 50 states without establishing a physical presence, handles payroll, state taxes, health insurance and benefits in all the states etc.

Something like that, but on a global scale, would be amazing for remote hiring. What unfortunately now seems to happen is that remote foreign employees get classified as contractors (which probably wouldn't stand up to any real scrutiny), which isn't great for either party.

Remote wages are surely lower than SF today, but so are non-remote wages everywhere as well.

From a non-Bay Area company point of view, it simply doesn't make any sense to hire remote employees that are in the Bay Area, when you can pay above market rates for top-talent employees in Chicago, Vancouver, Berlin, London, etc. and still pay less than half the going SF rate. I think this is also why Bay Area employees are still dismissive of remote, it's taking off everywhere else but the factors that are making SF the highest paid area are also what makes it the least attractive for remote hiring.

But I think what we'll see is, as SF companies themselves slowly start hiring remotely it will push up both remote and local wages globally. Non-SF and non-remote companies will have a harder time competing as their local employees now also have high-paying remote job opportunities from SF companies to consider.

3 days of parental leave is a travesty. Fuck them, seriously.

Find a company that values you more, and that allows remote (or remote-first). Plenty of companies in the latest Who's Hiring that have fully-remote work-from-anywhere $100K+ positions. Just Do It.

There are plenty of very successful 100% remote companies, including GitLab, Zapier, Automattic (Wordpress) etc. I think it's fair to say they've solved it well enough.

Traditional office space also comes with its own fair share of challenges and problems.

HN remote workers, does your company pay for your use of a coworking space? Or even fully manage it?

I've noticed that companies I admire greatly like Basecamp, and also in yesterday's Who's Hiring thread, that they list a $200-$300 monthly stipend towards coworking space fees as an employee perk. That doesn't seem quite enough to fully cover a coworking space in NY or SF. I'm tasked with building a remote engineering workforce myself in our business, and was initially thinking that we as the company will be the ones setting up the contracts with WeWorks etc. But perhaps you as an employee would actually prefer to be in control of that?

Are there companies that are fully remote but don't contribute anything towards coworking? If you're in that situation, what do you think of it?