Great feedback. We just launched this today and honestly didn't expect it to be #1 on HackerNews. We're going to start grouping the messages together and less often so they aren't as distracting like:
"Bensign, Bob, Joe & 17 others just joined the page".
It's not the fact that I care that people know which political party I choose to affiliate myself with, it's the fact that there is no apparent way to not choose. I'm not a Republican or a Democrat, don't force me to choose. A "decline" or "other" choice would solve this nicely.
Palo Alto, California - Ruby on Rails / Javascript Hackers
GoPollGo.com is building a better polling and survey service. We've got great office space, great salaries, very generous options and a kick-ass team so far.
Join us!
No freelancers or remote works right now. We also cannot support visas.
We're currently in hiring mode and finding talent is super tough. You need people who are not only a good fit (hard enough) but are willing to leave their cush jobs, join a startup no one has heard of and believe in your vision.
Some things we've tried:
- Scouring Dribble for Designers: I built a system that allows me to search Dribble by location, then pull up all the relevant shots of people from the locations I type in. A bit of scraping work, but so much more efficient now.
- Pinging people on Forrst. I've met with a bunch of people off of Forrst. You can hack some URLs to find all people from a particular location.
- LinkedIn. I've never once used or enjoyed LinkedIn until I've had to hire people. Their search is actually pretty awesome for recruiting. Actually getting people to respond is harder.
- Emailing local universities. Finding fresh talent out of school. Sending emails to CS listservs.
Finding people is so tough. Its the hardest part of a startup I've had to do so far.
Obligatory shameless plug: Let me know if you're interested in an early employee gig in Palo Alto doing Ruby development + a bunch of awesome statistical graphing / information mining.
I live within walking distance of downtown Palo Alto and really enjoy it. It's cheaper than San Francisco in most instances and you still have a high concentration of startup people. You can't go more than a few blocks without seeing a YC-er.
Of course, you don't have the massive social scene of San Francisco, but you're a quick ~30 minute CalTrain ride away.
While I understand your points, I still think embargos still have value -- especially from an entrepreneur's perspective. As someone who has worked for TechCrunch and now have since started my own company, I completely get the power of press and how hard it is to get if you're not a Quora, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
When you have news as a burgeoning startup, it is like gold. Your startup's traction may be in large part due to having people just know you exist -- which if you've ever started a website/company, you know how hard that is.
That being said, for the press to break embargos just to have reported the news first seems sort of unfair to the entrepreneur who worker his/her ass off to get to the point to even be in a position to have press. Usually the reason the press breaks embargos is so they can "break the news first". Then, no other blog/press will cover it because its "dead news" regardless of it may have value to their readers -- even if they're a few minutes behind.
Obviously, its a bit of a gray area. However, to me, the majority of the time its competition amongst the press to "break the story" that really ends up hurting up-and-coming startups.
We're looking for a few good troops to join us in poll domination. These will be our first hires and will be full-time salaried opportunities with solid stock options.
We're looking for people who know Ruby / Rails / Redis / Nginx / Git / Javascript / HTML (HAML) / CSS (SASS) / Ubuntu.
We're located on beautiful California Avenue in Palo Alto, California.
"Bensign, Bob, Joe & 17 others just joined the page".
Our team will be rolling out fixes very soon.