Not just trust, but also social proof. Humans are hard-wired to find interesting what other humans seem to be interested in, regardless of whether it's a positive or negative interest.

The size of the pool is the total number of people you expect to evaluate for a given decision.

SEEKING FREELANCERS - NYC area

Lambda is a talent agency for freelance developers and designers. We help you find clients, negotiate for higher rates, and take care of the business side of freelancing.

  - Exceptional talent only: $100/hr minimum rate.
  - No recruiters or spam. We're developers too and we only match consultants with projects that fit their expertise and interest.
  - Serious clients only: Wanna hear about a disruptive social network for cats that "just needs a coder"? Neither do we.
  - Freelancers with side projects or startups are especially welcome!

If that's appealing, you can read more and sign up at: http://getlambda.com/

We've posted about this on HN a few times and have been amazed by the response. I apologize in advance if it takes a while for us to get back to you -- we interview everyone personally and are still ramping up the process.

Right now, we're particularly looking for NYC-based iOS and Android devs, as well as designers.

> I apologize in advance if it takes a while for us to get back to you -- we interview everyone personally and are still ramping up the process.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7077493

You tend to ignore people, you're the same as a recruitment agency. I personally think these threads should be restricted to direct hires, not your skimming-the-top fodder.

If we've ignored you, it's unintentional and I apologize.

Ken and I (Andrew) list our email addresses on our home page. Similarly, every automated email we send comes with the reply address set to one of our personal email addresses. Sometimes, people reply to those automated messages asking for things we can't really help with. I try to respond to everyone, but honestly, sometimes messages just slip through.

I've considered removing our email addresses from our web page. I'm sure that would decrease the number of messages we receive, which would increase the percentage we could reply to. But that would ultimately make us less available.

If you have any suggestions on how we can keep track of a high volume of inquires, I would love to hear them. Neither of us have run a startup at this scale before, so we're naturally trying to figure things out as we go.

Agreed. I'd still like a response from my initial email.

You guys look cool, are you US only though?

Yes, we're US-only for the moment, although we can work with anyone who has a US corporation.

Hi, this is Ken. Sorry we didn't get back to you -- we've been getting a lot of interest and it's been difficult getting back to everyone promptly. I can't tell who you are from your HN handle, but I'd be happy to get in touch today if you shoot me another email.

So you will get in touch with him because the issue surfaced on HN. Says something about being proactive. Doesn't it?

The overhead ratio is a pretty poor indicator of a charity's effectiveness. http://overheadmyth.com/

I would think overhead would be the 7.3% cited on Charity Navigator and the 22% fund raising would be separate. Maybe that 22% will really pay off in the future. If Bill likes them though they can't be doing too bad.

The proportion spent on fundraising isn't a good indicator of effectiveness either. Generally, the metrics tracked by Charity Navigator are easy to measure, and aren't very useful.

GiveWell is a much better evaluator of charity quality. Since they spend much more time on analyzing each charity, they cover way fewer charities. They are quite strategic about prioritizing which ones to interview. http://www.givewell.org/international/process

Interesting, GiveWell goes as far as to not recommend Heifer, though for different reasons.

We posted on this thread already, so I hope this isn't spammy, but we're http://getlambda.com and we personally screen all devs for quality.

Our company Lambda (http://getlambda.com) helps negotiate contract work for our freelancers. We often set up the following arrangement: the client pays in advance for a week or two of work, and we agree that "a week" contains X hours of developer time. If there are hours unused by the end of the contract, we refund the money. It's an elegant way to avoid most payment issues.

On your site it doesn't say whether or not you get a cut, but given the natural alignment of interests I think it's safe to say you won't have a problem with having to return unused hours, even an honest developer will simply maximize those hours.

How much work have you managed to get? Do you restrict where dev's are located (e.g. north america?)

We get about 15 qualified leads a month (on average, each project is worth about $25k). We're focused on the US and Canada only for the moment.

Do you guys need any Python or Django people?

Yes, we're currently looking for Rails, Django, js, and iOS.

College is also a really good place to meet and work with people who could eventually become your technical cofounders, the scarcest ingredient for most startups.

Good point albedo, I have met a lot of interesting people.

There is a difference between contextual self-promotion and irrelevant spamming. What you are doing is the latter. Please limit the advertising, it only hurts the PR with not much to gain.

Sorry about that. We'll cut back and be more relevant next time.

Yes. As a daily reader of HN, you guys randomly insert your advertising without adding any true value to the discussion.

Is that your normal business practice? To spam but actually add no real value?

Lol at the thought that spam would actually adds value.

I feel like you've made too many comments advertising this site ... Seems like spam ...