Please help us find cool developers!!!

If you know anyone looking for a cool place to work, please send them this link!! Thanks :)

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HOTorNOT.com is a small but extremely profitable company with big ideas and the resources to bring them to the world. The company has been operating profitably for 6 years already, and is now looking for top engineers to help us grow our web and mobile applications. We are also interested in Director and VP level candidates who have experience recruiting and managing developers, but they must demonstrate an interest and willingness to code as well.

This is a unique opportunity to become an early employee at a startup that has already made a lot of progress (8 million+ user accounts, over 5 million dollars in annual revenue, currently only 5 full time employees). If you are interested in joining a startup where you can have an early employee's stake with a strong track record and high probability of success, this is it!

We offer a fun and flexible environment, and you'll be encouraged to take initiative in developing new products and features. You'll become a part of our close-knit team, with plenty of opportunities to play a big role in determining where we go in the future.

Because we care a lot about keeping our team small and extremely effective, we are only seeking people who are the best of the best.

YOU ARE:

* A creative, intelligent, independent-minded hacker.
* Interested in consumer web and mobile applications
* A computer science or engineering graduate from a reputable school, OR you have plenty of experience.
* Fluent in, or at least familiar with, PHP/MySQL, and able to show us previous work.
* Comfortable doing everything (UI + application logic + database) yourself.
* Bonus points if you have experience with Javascript/AJAX technologies, Python, Perl, and/or Ruby on Rails. More bonus points if you have experience maintaining large Linux server farms.


Our office is currently located in the Jackson Square area of San Francisco (5 minute walk from Embarcadero BART). If you think you fit the bill, send us your resume and a code sample (something meaty) to: hotornotjobs (at) gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

The best thing I've ever done.

Of all the things I've had a chance to work on over the last 6 years, including HOTorNOT, VOTEorNOT, IsTheWorldToo.HOTorNOT, and SaveMyAss, the most rewarding thing I've done has easily been 10 over 100. It's an initiative to try and create a new standard of giving...basically trying to convince people to give more to charity and non-profit causes.

Over the last few years, I have been fortunate to be in the position to be able to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity. Every year as I send out checks, I wonder if I'm being crazy giving away so much of the money i've earned that year.. I'm doing great, but it's not like I work at Google or anything!

Then I just read this article and realized perhaps I should be giving more.

http://nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html

I really hope everyone reads this article, and then pledges to give (at least) 10 over 100. If you want to make the pledge, here is the 10 over 100 website! If you make under 100k, you can still make the pledge.

Trust me.. it feels good, and it's one of the best things you can do.. you won't regret it!

HOTorNOT Inspired Youtube

YouTube founders Steve and Chad actually mentioned in an article that they were inspired by HOTorNOT to create Youtube. One thing that they don't mention that hopefully was also a factor in why they didn't launch as an exact HOTorNOT clone is the fact that we are all friends.

Over the last 6 years, Jim and I have pretty much kept HOTorNOT the same, not wanting to mess with something we thought was almost embarassingly simple but worked so well.. kindof a "if it's working, why fix it and risk breaking it" sort of thing.. so we always told our friends who worked for us (or were interested in working with us) that they should go work on their own things.

Things have just changed. We've recently decided to stop being dinosaurs, and we're now starting to work on a lot of cool stuff for HOTorNOT that is fun and innovative, and hopefully will serve as the inspiration for more YouTubes (if not BE the next YouTube).

If you are a kick ass web developer and interested in working on lots of fun stuff that would be seen and used by millions of people, we are looking to hire! Check out our jobs page.

Fun in the Sun with U2 and Kelly Hu

Me, Kelly, and my friend Betty



What a great weekend!!

I flew to Hawaii with a bunch of friends, went snorkeling, and went to U2's last concert of their Vertigo tour. Pearl Jam opened for them.

Then I went to a dinner that Patrick's buddy Kelly Hu put on.. In addition to being super HOT in person, she's also super nice (aren't all Hawaiians?). Her whole family and her friends were all really cool and mellow too.

I also met some other celebrities there like some of the people from the show Lost, which I am a huge fan of so that was insanely cool!! Thanks to Lance Bass for lending us his stuff at the beach. Amazingly, we didn't see any paparazzi hounding him and his boyfriend, who i guess were broken up but just got back together.

Also cool, apparently Lance uses my friend Max's product, Slide!


Me and Jason Scott Lee


Lance Bass

Help us help teachers

We're trying to help teachers who want to show "An Inconvenient Truth" to their students. Check out the page we made about it and learn how you can help too!

Note: We've had some emails about this being too political/liberal for HOTorNOT.. The fact is, a lot of people in both the republican and democratic parties feel Global Warming is an issue. For instance, Republican Senator John McCain is fervent about it.

We are trying to help teachers educate students about the issue. How society should handle the problem is where most politics get involved, and we think that is for everyone to decide on their own.