hcho

Talk to someone who actually is a hiring manager, not a recruiter. Recruiters are just middle men and most don't know what they are talking about.

Poor stats in getting replies is almost always due to having a poorly written CV. Did you try having your CV to someone who does hiring?

As for getting a degree, most things in recruitment are actually signalling(as in asymmetrical information). By having a degree in CS you'd be signalling that: 1) You have the discipline to stick with something for four years 2) You can learn any new technology thrown at you 3) You have some analytical thinking capability

The languages you learn and use during your studies is mostly irrelevant.

The quickest will be to copy from a real estate or a used car web site.

Virtual personal assistants are quite affordable these days, it's not really a luxury.

Most hiring managers delegate dealing with recruiters cold calls to their personal assistants. Anyone who's not in the preferred supplier list does not get through.

There are quite a few UX issues in your detail view pages. Browsing is not intuitive, your use of whitespace is amateur at best. Your call for actions is not there.

Sorry, if I am sounding harsh. These things matter quite a deal when it comes to retention. You have a lot of room for improvement in that area. Seek professional help if it's not your cup of tea.

Maybe stating the obvious, but did you try attending related meetups? node.js, angular, backbone, etc...You can at least get to know people who work with those. You might convince them to join, or they might know someone looking for a job.

The advertised rate for contractors with modern skills in London is around £350 per day. That's your starting point. If you are good at negotiation, and find your jobs via your network(i.e. people vouch for your work), you can easily make double that. If you work in finance you look at 4 digits per day.

For the sake of example, let's say you make £500 per day. At 220 days per annum, that's £110 000. I know at least 10 people making more than that.

I won't be attending tomorrow's meetup. I'll drop you an email.

Maybe you can delay revealing the fact that you are a startup. Don't mention the equity till you come to negotiation, drop "Silicon Roundabout" from your job pages.

Most developers have been burnt by startups at least once. I'd try not to remind the bad experiences before I have at least a chance to talk to them in person.

I am currently contracting for a company in London, using more or less the same technologies as you do. They asked me to help build their team as well, so I know both sides of the table.

I would not even think twice offering a job to someone decent with javascript at £45K. The job is 9-to-5, the company is mature, has been around for 2 decades, will probably still be in another 2. They'd be in the comfort of knowing that their salary will be in their account at each and every end of month.

Betting companies are pushing the market upwards. Every person who took another offer over mine went to a betting company. So I have a feeling that I am only pitching for people who are morally against betting.

So are you paying that kind of money? I have a feeling that you'd have to pay at least £10K over for my offer to compensate for the inherent uncertainty and as a premium the find that person quick.

On the notice board in my local supermarket, there are about 10 man and a van business cards pinned on. I'd probably call the one with the cutest logo.

How many times does that happen? Genuine question. I never needed a van or a truck out of the blue. Is it something to do with the American culture?

Because most client can't tell a wordpress installation with a theme from ThemeForest from a ground up build up. Most actually need the former, but sound like needing the latter.

If you love Django, you'll love spine.js. It's ORM is the only one which has a decent Active Record implementation.

Angular takes the gold when it comes to being opinionated. If you agree with the philosophy it's a breeze, if not you'll be fighting it every waking hour.

Backbone is the least opinionated and to be honest I don't see the point of a framework with so few opinions. It just encourages you shoot yourself in the foot.

Horses for courses, I suppose. What's the purpose of your personal projects? If you are doing them in hope that it will be a business one day, go with Angular as it does a lot of magic and things move very quickly after you succumb to its wisdom. If you are doing them to beef up your portfolio, go with Backbone as it seems to be most popular among businesses. If your purpose is to learn, write your own framework, at least initially. You'll get an appreciation of what weight they are trying to lift. Choosing a framework after that will be a much informed decision.

Clients mostly with MBAlike backgrounds come up with NDAs. If I were to stereotype; an investment banker with a lower to mid six figure bonus, who watched Social Network over the weekend.

No, never. The risk you are taking is tremendous when signing an NDA. Who is to guarantee that an exact same of your client's idea/technology is not developed elsewhere and your client will hold you responsible for leaking it?

There's also more realistic concerns as well. Most NDAs are written way too broadly. Excluding yourself from a part of the market because of such an NDA is just silly.

At the very least you have to give him credit for his persistence and attempt at hacking the YC.

"Su samuru"(literal translation: water sable) is the Turkish for otter. Turkish is an agglutinative language, that last u is actually a possessive affix and doesn't make sense when the word is by itself.

So you too are saying government is there by populations consent. Taxes and USD are by products of that consent. So is bitcoin, or any other medium of exchange really.

And what's the backing of US citizens paying taxes? If all of the population decided to not pay taxes tomorrow, what power US government has to make them pay up? Government itself operates on the backing of people's consent. That's not too different from Bitcoin users' consent.

Are you based in London? If so drop me an email at the address in my profile. I am looking for javascript developers for a team I lead.

And yet it came crumbling down with some traffic form HN. Snark aside, looks very promising. Keep up the good work.

Your point about copycats is moot. There's already a number of offshoots of bitcoin and they don't seem to matter.

Creating Zoogle, Foogle, Poogle and Loogle is kind of trivial at this day and age, and many people have a go at doing that. None of which seem to take away anything from Google.

Again, which British. We have more accents than you have states.

Leeching bandwidth? Really? This is not 1999 anymore, no one cares if their images are hot linked anymore. Be ready to be surprised, people found ways of making money from hot linked images.

You are aware of the fact that YC funds at least one Bitcoin related start-up, right? Flagging this for being a scam is a bit ironic, in the Alanis Morissette sense.

Maybe there's a business idea in payment processing for events.

If I were you, I would focus on business side of things. You are fast approaching to a point where ageism will start to bite. A purely technical skill set can be very limiting when it does.

Former. The latter is quite easy to spot and deal with.