I'm surprised DDG can donate so much money to open source. They must be doing well? Or is this money they've helped raise from their users? $225,000! That's a lot of money.
DDG has done excellent work building their traffic[0] and have been getting a solid 10-12 million or so searches per day for a while. Even if you halve that due to !bang redirects and ad blocking and put a fairly low CPM on the ads they have quite a few millions or or low tens of millions coming in. I haven't been following too closely but my impression is Gabriel has been increasing staffing and other costs at a rate far lower than the increasing revenue.
Additionally the donation itself got a vast amount of coverage in the relevant communities, including HN, so the expenditure is offset against advertising for user acquisition they didn't need to do. It probably also strengthened their core community, making their users more sticky. The donation also went to some of the infrastructure they use anyway.
Not to pour water on things, but after 8 years or so I'm not sure it's growing that well...
After 6 years, Google was doing 200m searches a day.
Google now does something like 4 billion a day. So duckduckgo, after 8 years of growth, has captured about 0.3% of the search market. At that sort of rate, it'll take decades to get any meaningful share, and that's assuming Google stand still, which they won't.
That's assuming you have to own the market. You don't, you just need more income than outcome. It would appear DDG is achieving that. Good for them I say.
That's not a bad share of the market. Their strategy is fairly smart/standard chasm crossing. Capture programmers/tech oriented users first. As long as they have solid growth in that department I wouldn't worry.
But Google also more or less owns the market now. Back then it was anyone's game (and internet usage in tdeveloped countries was growing rapidly, making the market a bit more volatile).
For what it's worth I only voted for pinboard because I like what they're doing. I didn't vote for any of the other startups. I didn't see the promotional tweet and I had hoped pinboard would become a YC company. I'm disappointed all around and while I appreciate that the money will help people at the charity I'd be lying if I didn't say that I'm disappointed Maciej didn't go and join the YC family with pinboard.
At this point, I think it's probably better for everyone to go their separate ways. Some drama was had, Pinboard doubtlessly got a nice subscriber spike, and now some homeless people will be helped. Good ending.
> I worked for a startup, under 20 machines, I tried to buy then Windows 7 Enterprise. Microsoft's partners were super unhelpful, disinterested in a small account, refused to provide clear pricing, and I was getting upsold even before we got the basics squared away ("I'll just add on 20 CALs, a Windows Server license, and let's talk exchange!"). Ultimately we just gave up, and used Windows 7 Home(!) for three years.
You were likely talking to the wrong people. You need to go through bizspark[1] if you're a startup and you'll end up with a super-helpful dedicated Microsoft representative and lots of free stuff. It's been never anything but super in my experience to work with Microsoft as a startup.
Microsoft sales are generally handled through small VARs (value-added resellers) which are hyper-local and send salespeople and technicians to drive around to local businesses. These VARs in turn buy from large distributors with more elite Microsoft partner status like Ingram Micro. Players at every level participate in some kind of Certified Partner Program and must be certified by the next level up the chain as conforming to requirements (has a physical office, X in revenue, N people on staff with Y certification, etc).
It's the same with Cisco, and really a lot of stuff in the enterprise space.
Plebes don't get to talk to Microsoft employees.
EDIT: I will add that I have worked for a few such resellers of various enterprisey tech companies. Your partner account buys you a hotline to competent vendor support engineers. They aren't reading scripts, take you at your word for the troubleshooting steps you've already tried, are happy to work a problem systematically with you, and will also readily admit that a product is defective and grant an RMA or even make a bug report, collect diagnostic logs from you, and tell you when a fix is slated for release. It's amazing.
Microsoft is a huge organization with tens of thousands of employees. We have no idea what was communicated between this commenter and the sales person. At some point you have to kind of step back and realize that you're responsible for your outcomes and not blame everything bad that happens to you on others. Searching Google with "startup microsoft" or "startup pricing microsoft" would have been enough effort to figure this out.
No. That's not how sales organizations for competent companies work.
IBM, in the mainframe era, was very good at this. It was IBM policy that if you called anyone within IBM sales with a problem, it was the IBM employee's job to get you to the right people. All IBM salespeople had a little printed pocket book of phone numbers within IBM, a directory of contacts for various types of problems.
Man, I can't upvote this enough. Say what you will about the IBM of old or new, when you called you didn't have to put up with this runaround of putting the onus on the potential customer. "Hi, IBM, I'd like to give you money." "Just a moment, sir, and the next person you speak with will be the one that can help you."
"Hi, Microsoft, I'd like to give you money but fuck me if I can figure out which SKU or how much." "You did it wrong, sir. You should have called this other number. Or you should have Googled it. But the last thing you should have done is called me, have a nice day. <click>"
I ran into this almost ten years ago trying to price the various SKUs we needed for Visual Studio. It was appallingly ridiculous how much time I spent on that, in contrast to just going to a web page, comparing features, click a few radio buttons, click "Buy", sorted. It was the last place I've worked since that I've had to beg Microsoft to take my money. Now they just plain don't get my money.
Signed,
A very disappointed ex-MSFT employee and ex-shareholder
IBM is still like that. I called with an issue on an old iSeries machine[1] and mentioned that I might want to purchase a new one[2]. I got no less that 3 calls within 4 hours asking me about my purchasing needs and giving me exact prices and plans. They would be fine with taking my money.
1) I guess if the switch its connected to gets reset, the older version of the OS cannot reconnect automatically.
2) accounting software will make you buy strange things
I remember a friend of mine's company bought a $78k storage server around 1998, and one of the drives failed 4 months in, he called just to replace the drive and it took a call from the upstream vendor to get them to not try to sell them another >$70k storage server.
For the record, that hasn't been my experience with IBM; I used to get a pretty bad runaround, but perhaps that's changed - I stopped using their products as a result.
The fact that you have to go to Google to search to find Microsoft pricing, and have to already have the knowledge that they have special "startup" pricing is a failure on Microsoft's part.
You know given the title and the bait it presents to a particular kind of people I should have known better than share with people a positive thing about Microsoft and to suggest they think for themselves.
You shared your positive experience about dealing with Microsoft, but you also downplayed the OP's experience. Even though he went through the process he attempted in some detail, you told him he was responsible for the poor customer service he got from Microsoft.
That's why you aren't getting favourable comments.
You're not getting downvoted because you're saying a positive thing about Microsoft, for the simple reason that the thing you're saying about Microsoft isn't positive.
When my grandmother's computer finally died a couple years ago, I bought her a chromebook to replace it... mom liked it so much I gave her one... now about half of my family that I regularly talk to uses them.
"We failed to sell you something you wanted, and it's your fault."
Besides, BizSpark is solely for startups, not for established SMBs, who would quite reasonably expect to be able to sign up for Enterprise by searching for "Enterprise".
Is it really your assumption that thread parent neglected even to google this topic of such great import to business success? That seems neither likely nor charitable.
It's definitely more palatable than blindly bringing out the "M$" pitchforks but I guess if you were looking for something on HN to get your daily anger fix I guess feel free to use this as your opportunity.
It's irrelevant if Microsoft are a huge organization with tens of thousands of employees. Sales aren't made via excuses.
Putting the responsibility on the customer to find the right set of keywords - in Google no less! - to purchase copies of enterprise software is bizarre.
Shouldn't Microsoft make that clear then? If I wanted Windows 10 Enterprise for a business, I'd search for "windows 10 enterprise", follow the link to "Windows 10 Enterprise for your enterprise business - Microsoft"[1], and go to the "Buy>How to buy"[2] page. There is zero mention of BizSpark in that process as far as I can see.
It's also non-obvious from your link that BizSpark includes Windows 10 Enterprise. I had to download the "Products by benefits level" Excel sheet to be sure, and it appears to be limited to five people regardless.
I understand that Microsoft's enterprise licensing typically involves going through a reseller, but Microsoft certainly could be doing a better job pointing people (esp. small businesses) in the right direction. Even if I go through to "Contact a Windows Solution Provider"[3], it defaults to searching for UK and an 8km radius (accurate enough), sort by "Most relevant". Top 5 results:
* German-language result
* Scandinavian/Nordic-language result (doesn't look like Swedish, Danish, or Norwegian to me. Possibly Finnish?)
* English-language result, but located in the Netherlands
* French-language result
* Italian-language result
Maybe these companies can help me, or maybe they are the "wrong people" to whom you refer. Following what I would see as the obvious path to try and purchase Windows 10 Enterprise, I'd have no idea how to tell the difference.
bizspark is only for up to 7 people. I mean you could actually create a single account and use the same key for multiple machines but if it comes to office your limited to 2 keys per user. but you could install every key on up to 2 machines but licensing forbids to use both installations at once.
The fact that it's apparently not obvious who to talk to seems to be a problem for Microsoft to solve if they care about the "little guys" (maybe they don't? I'm not sure)
> I visited the homepage (https://www.teller.io/) and got a warning about the SSL cert being invalid. Kind of ironic. :)
The correct URL is https://teller.io and then you wont get an SSL cert warning. Not everyone uses "www". Nowhere on teller.io do you see a link to www. You put garbage in and got garbage out.
Right, people use to think this Satoshi was brilliant, and now if he is Satoshi all people will think is what a self-promoting and incompetent jerk he is. He should have just stayed quiet or made a simple blog post like the litecoin did without the PR blitz campaign. Doesn't seem like a very smart person tbh.
That's not how the F-35 was conceived or designed, not at all. It was a highly competitive contract with the requirements given to a few companies and they were given some amount of money to compete for the best design[1].
> Please don't tell me about how a treaty should be voted on by the people, because I already agree about this part.
Direct democracy in diplomacy and trade negotiation sounds like a really terrible idea. It would just be constant protectionism, xenophobia and probably ruin economic growth and everyone will be the worse of for it. Sometimes giving more people a voice does not result in positive outcomes.
That's the difference between signing and ratifying. There's a story that USA's Congress never ratified the end of the war with Europe. A lot of countries voted No to the European referendum. Most of them voted Yes. Ultimately, the citizen should decide when they give up power, and they must repeat it regularly.
It's hard to see how you can have much success with this method. Current recruiting strategies involve getting from recruiter telephone call to final decision within 2 weeks, or 1 if possible. The faster you move on a candidate the more likely they end up working for you. At my current employer initial phone conversation, telephone interview and on site were all within 7 days.
While I'd never argue its a "good" thing to have a slower pipeline, in the past when I had pipelines with timing similar to this companies, it didn't have extreme negative impacts on the success of the pipeline.
I don't know why that was, but my suspicion was that our highest qualified leads were those coming from candidates that were "happy enough" at their current positions to not be frantically searching.
As long as we seemed like a good place to work, and we did a good job of communicating why back logs were happening, we didn't lose many of the candidates we were most excited about.
my experience is that I am mostly happy where I am, and I am not in market when I am Happy, but when I am not happy, I want to get out asap and wait times as high as a month is a real turn off
If you complain about CS requirements for software engineering jobs your complaints are going to fall on a lot of deaf ears because people desire competency. Dunning-Kruger is having its impact felt in these threads. If you think computer science fundamentals aren't a requisite for software engineering it's probably because you don't have the experience and skill necessary to understand what engineering competence looks like.
Mindcrime isn't saying CS isn't required, they're saying it doesn't require a full hour to judge whether they're competent or not
Yes, exactly.
That said, I should add the disclaimer that I'm referring to fairly general roles. If you're genuinely hiring for a highly specialized role that requires more specific knowledge, then that might change the equation a bit. I should have been more explicit about that earlier.
I find it very difficult to imagine how an engineering position wont benefit from having strong CS fundamentals. If you write code you need to understand how the code you are writing works. How the libraries you depend on do what they do. If you run into problems you'll be need to able to think of solutions. This idea that you'll look up how to do some computer science algorithm when you need to is ignorant, because you may not know when you need it.
A lot of the CS fundamentals in interview questions demonstrate an ability for problem solving and abstract thinking. It demonstrates your ability to handle coding problems under stress. Resorting to complaining about hard computer science problems is the exact opposite response you should have. It should motivate you to improve and learn more, not feel bitter and angry. Likely this attitude indicates a poor culture fit as well. So in effect asking computer science question is doubly useful, because it helps filter out candidates who opt for alternatives to self-improvement and overcoming challenges.
You were replying to me, but I agree 100% with all of that, and it doesn't contradict anything I said, so I'm not sure what else to say. I guess I could just be more clear in saying that, for me personally, I'm not "complaining about hard computer science problems", I'm just thinking about how to optimize use of time. Personally, whether I'm the interviewer or the interviewee, I'm not partial to interview processes that take all day. That and I'm not partial to asking people to implement difficult algorithms on the whiteboard. My take is this:
1. If you're doing whiteboard stuff, keep it high level, see if the conceptual understanding is there, and move on.
OR
2. Give the candidate a computer, editor / IDE, compiler, google, etc., and let them work they way they work, implementing $WHATEVER.
A couple of questions - how many years out of college are you, and how many red-black trees have you actually had to implement from scratch in that time? Me, 20 and 0, respectively.
Dunning-Kruger is about competence, as in competence at the job you will be doing. Competence in CS does not translate into competence in software engineering. People who are employed to write REST APIs or most other software should not regularly write novel implementations of basic data structures like hash tables, it's an incredible code smell.
Thinking that CS makes you competent as a software engineer and that you will regularly be implementing red-black trees is a typical fresh-out-of-college mistake.
Your comment would make sense if CS is all they talked about during the interview, but it's actually only a small portion of the total process--an hour or less.
