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turn an atx power supply into a bench power supply
| hi all, i made this! neat to have my dream of being on the front page of hn come to fruition.to use hn parlance, one might say that i have launched! (any vcs out there want to discuss other ideas i'm working on?)this kit look me about 6 months to put together, from prototyping the pcb to iterating over an enclosure design. waiting for components to arrive in the mail (pcbs, laser-cut designs, resistors) was what took the most amount of time.when i started, i was fully convinced that i would have a working product within just one or two iterations. putting together a polished hardware kit (and i'd say that this has some degree of "polish" to it, though far from perfect) is much more difficult and time-consuming than i would have ever imagined. quite different from the agile! lean! iterate! that we talk about in software-land.oh. so i have 4 or 5 pcbs from the first few iterations. if you end up ordering one (and i encourage you to do so!) then send me an email and i can throw one in the box. you know, as a collector's item.if you have any questions or anything, do let me know. be on the lookout for a post describing some numbers behind this traffic spike. | while this is fine for the home tinkerer, an atx power supply doesn't provide any of the basic safety features that are one of the main points of a professional lab power supply: protection against over-voltage and over-current. you really don't want your power supply to be damaged by a faulty circuit. and who knows how clean the power is.most people who have a use for a bench supply should also be able to figure out how to make this box for $2 instead of $45. |
turn an atx power supply into a bench power supply
| while this is fine for the home tinkerer, an atx power supply doesn't provide any of the basic safety features that are one of the main points of a professional lab power supply: protection against over-voltage and over-current. you really don't want your power supply to be damaged by a faulty circuit. and who knows how clean the power is.most people who have a use for a bench supply should also be able to figure out how to make this box for $2 instead of $45. | hey memset,i bought the fully assembled product because i felt the kit version was significantly overpriced compared to the bare pcb and the $5 savings was not worth having to assemble it myself. i hope you're making a good margin on it! :) regarding comments from others about the possibility of poorly regulated psus: you are absolutely correct! i verify the performance of the (higher quality) psus that i use before i hook them up to my projects. i've already created an integrated version of this that has worked wonderfully and i am excited for this more versatile solution. [0] still, when i need a verified good, current controlled bench supply i use a 40+ lb (18 kg) hp bench supply.[0]: <link> |
turn an atx power supply into a bench power supply
| hey memset,i bought the fully assembled product because i felt the kit version was significantly overpriced compared to the bare pcb and the $5 savings was not worth having to assemble it myself. i hope you're making a good margin on it! :) regarding comments from others about the possibility of poorly regulated psus: you are absolutely correct! i verify the performance of the (higher quality) psus that i use before i hook them up to my projects. i've already created an integrated version of this that has worked wonderfully and i am excited for this more versatile solution. [0] still, when i need a verified good, current controlled bench supply i use a 40+ lb (18 kg) hp bench supply.[0]: <link> | this thing looks great.i love the trend of people making well-documented kits that i have a good chance of fixing if they break. i'll have to scrounge up an old atx supply-- i think i just threw my last old one away a few months ago. |
turn an atx power supply into a bench power supply
| this thing looks great.i love the trend of people making well-documented kits that i have a good chance of fixing if they break. i'll have to scrounge up an old atx supply-- i think i just threw my last old one away a few months ago. | make sure the atx power supply is actually outputting 5v and 12v first! |
testing web map apis – google vs openlayers vs leaflet
| openlayers 3 dev here.all these mapping libraries are great.google maps comes with great data. leaflet has a really nice api. openlayers 3 comes with loads of functionality built in.please check out our openlayers 3 examples at <link> ones include:full screen rotate and zoom: <link> <link> heatmaps: <link> quality kml rendering: <link> geometries: <link> effects: <link>, dom and webgl renders: <link> application with openlayers 3, angular and bootstrap: <link> | i would like to add that @mourner, leaflet creator, gave a great talk last week in san francisco about why he started leaflet and how the open source community developed around it. talk is here (<link>;feature=youtu.be).one thing that i think is missing from this article is the communities around these projects and release cycles. leaflet by far has the most active community around it. where open layers 3 has been chugging along without a release for a while, and google maps api has remained pretty stagnant. a great post from keir clarke (<link> that is spot on. |
testing web map apis – google vs openlayers vs leaflet
| i would like to add that @mourner, leaflet creator, gave a great talk last week in san francisco about why he started leaflet and how the open source community developed around it. talk is here (<link>;feature=youtu.be).one thing that i think is missing from this article is the communities around these projects and release cycles. leaflet by far has the most active community around it. where open layers 3 has been chugging along without a release for a while, and google maps api has remained pretty stagnant. a great post from keir clarke (<link> that is spot on. | > google maps also has a surprising range of functionalities, although you are pretty much restricted to google's way of doing things (you cannot, for example change the background map to be based on open street map).the parenthetical is incorrect, cf.- <link> <link> |
testing web map apis – google vs openlayers vs leaflet
| > google maps also has a surprising range of functionalities, although you are pretty much restricted to google's way of doing things (you cannot, for example change the background map to be based on open street map).the parenthetical is incorrect, cf.- <link> <link> | > openlayers has a very wide range of functions, and it pays the price in terms of size, occupying almost 1 mb of digital space: not ideal for mobile applications.the stock minified openlayers.mobile.js weighs in @ ~377kb: <link> you can build your own openlayers files that contain only what you need: <link> is your mobile application really going to use osm and bing base layers? probably not, so don't ship all of that to the user's browser and spare the browser from parsing the cruft. <link> ) |
testing web map apis – google vs openlayers vs leaflet
| > openlayers has a very wide range of functions, and it pays the price in terms of size, occupying almost 1 mb of digital space: not ideal for mobile applications.the stock minified openlayers.mobile.js weighs in @ ~377kb: <link> you can build your own openlayers files that contain only what you need: <link> is your mobile application really going to use osm and bing base layers? probably not, so don't ship all of that to the user's browser and spare the browser from parsing the cruft. <link> ) | interesting article. we use google maps to lay out a list of manufacturers for hardware companies (<link>!/directory)- we use google's api + angular.this article might have us reconsider openlayer! |
new year's resolutions for startups who want to close deals
| it's funny but these are mostly the reverse of what you want to do when closing deals with customers or business partners (vs.investors):1. focus on the opportunities that are in front of you.2. establish a working rapport with the customer/partner, a deal should be the start of a long and mutually beneficial relationship.3. maintain your balance, burnout is much more of a risk than losing any one deal in this environment.4. don't get into an adversarial relationship with your customer/partner.5. focus on reaching a business agreement, lawyers can advise you on business risks, but in the end it's the entrepreneur's call what risks to take.edit: this post is not representative of the tone and quality of those on his website <link> here are two that are much more useful:<link> | not such bad advice here, especially consider that it is coming from a service provider (i.e., corporate attorney). my own opinion is that realistically, the only startups that could close an investment deal in 2010 are mature companies that have demonstrated a robust revenue model and are in need of money (and only money) for expansion. my advice to them is the same as what i received in 1999 after i secured my first term-sheet. after almost three years of hard work i finally had something to show to my attorney friend and i asked him what to do next. he said, “now go out and get another one just like it.” in other words, getting a term-sheet is only the first measurable step and to close any deal, you must have competitions. but all entrepreneurs should remember that “every problem in a startup (including funding) can be solved with the timely arrival of a po.” so even if you can't close any investment deal in 2010, as long as you have sustainable revenues, all other problem can be solved. in other words, focus on "value creation" and the "valu-ation" will follow. |
new year's resolutions for startups who want to close deals
| not such bad advice here, especially consider that it is coming from a service provider (i.e., corporate attorney). my own opinion is that realistically, the only startups that could close an investment deal in 2010 are mature companies that have demonstrated a robust revenue model and are in need of money (and only money) for expansion. my advice to them is the same as what i received in 1999 after i secured my first term-sheet. after almost three years of hard work i finally had something to show to my attorney friend and i asked him what to do next. he said, “now go out and get another one just like it.” in other words, getting a term-sheet is only the first measurable step and to close any deal, you must have competitions. but all entrepreneurs should remember that “every problem in a startup (including funding) can be solved with the timely arrival of a po.” so even if you can't close any investment deal in 2010, as long as you have sustainable revenues, all other problem can be solved. in other words, focus on "value creation" and the "valu-ation" will follow. | how about stay away from lawyers that try and make business decisions for you? |
new year's resolutions for startups who want to close deals
| how about stay away from lawyers that try and make business decisions for you? | resolution 6 - i will not pretend that my startup is glengarry glenn ross. while i should always be closing, the rest of that movie is a mockery of the deal-closing process. |
new year's resolutions for startups who want to close deals
| resolution 6 - i will not pretend that my startup is glengarry glenn ross. while i should always be closing, the rest of that movie is a mockery of the deal-closing process. | he says working really, really hard matters. just wanted to note that since there's been much opinion to the contrary here recently. |
david brooks: and the geek shall inherit the earth
| more magic from the pen of bobo. his words are like spun gold in a grim world. | please bring krugman back... |
david brooks: and the geek shall inherit the earth
| please bring krugman back... | how could an article about nerds miss the central point?from "revenge of the nerds":<link> that was wonderful.- you did things to me you've never done before.(gasps)- you're that nerd!- yeah.- god, you were wonderful.- thanks.- are all nerds as good as you?- yes.- how come?- cos all jocks think about is sports.- all we ever think about is sex. |
david brooks: and the geek shall inherit the earth
| how could an article about nerds miss the central point?from "revenge of the nerds":<link> that was wonderful.- you did things to me you've never done before.(gasps)- you're that nerd!- yeah.- god, you were wonderful.- thanks.- are all nerds as good as you?- yes.- how come?- cos all jocks think about is sports.- all we ever think about is sex. | i can pass this on to my non-geek friends and griends (short for girl friends). writing is an art. |
david brooks: and the geek shall inherit the earth
| i can pass this on to my non-geek friends and griends (short for girl friends). writing is an art. | what warmed-over yestershite is that? boo. |
adobe: 7 million people attempt to download flash each month
| 7 million people each month get redirected to adobe's passive-aggressive appeal stating that they "could totally provide flash for the iphone, if only apple would let us", because they browsed to a mouse/keyboard-dependent flash game, or a page festooned with flash ads.meanwhile, adobe has not delivered a full flash player for android or webos. i'd heard that there's one packaged for maemo as a normal npapi plugin built for arm, but nokia+mozilla won't ship it because it sucks. | "7 million people attempt to download flash each month to their iphones"i find that extremely hard to believe. |
adobe: 7 million people attempt to download flash each month
| "7 million people attempt to download flash each month to their iphones"i find that extremely hard to believe. | from the article: i’m not positive whether 7 million attempts directly translates into 7 million iphone/ipod touch users it’s entirely possible it’s just one guy who really doesn’t get it |
adobe: 7 million people attempt to download flash each month
| from the article: i’m not positive whether 7 million attempts directly translates into 7 million iphone/ipod touch users it’s entirely possible it’s just one guy who really doesn’t get it | that statistic would be more impressive if their download site worked properly. i've been stuck without flash for a while now because i use linux on a 64-bit machine, but the flash 10.1 beta page has only dead links (<link> |
adobe: 7 million people attempt to download flash each month
| that statistic would be more impressive if their download site worked properly. i've been stuck without flash for a while now because i use linux on a 64-bit machine, but the flash 10.1 beta page has only dead links (<link> | i regularly fail to install flash on computers at libraries or even on my home computers. the installer is extremely buggy. |
ask hn: fastest route to $2000/mo. cashflow, worry free and conscience clear
in the vein of "you don't need a million dollars..." (<link>, i'm wondering what the fastest way to get the effective monthly return on investing a million in a safe, worry free, hands-off investment is. i think that roughly translates to a couple thousand dollars a month depending on where you insert inflation. i included "conscience clear" in the description because i personally would want to be entirely above-board (no "spam viagra ads" and the like).<p>just to be clear, i'm not in dire straits or in need of a million dollars. i'm just curious.<p>additional clarification:
for this purpose i'd like to assume someone doesn't have a million dollars or the prospect of receiving such in a lump sum. how would they go about building up to a cash flow that would be equivalent to having a million dollars in a safe, hands-off investment?<p>edit: apparently i don't know the difference between conscious and conscience. fixed. | i made about 10k off sales from a wordpress theme over the course of about a year. not that much money, but it's a great feeling to wake up in the morning and see money in your account. i'd be walking through the mall with my girlfriend at the time and tell her, "just sold a premium copy! want ice cream?" very, very motivating. it gets to the point that you get a "taking-candy-from-a-baby" feeling that leads you to really try and improve your product day-after-day, to keep your initial customers happy, and to get more sales.so, i agree that a niche software product you're actually passionate about will help. i happened to be in a fortunate position where a demand existed for a one-off product i had created a while back, all i had to do was fill the void. customers were already looking to me for it. i feel like a total fucking idiot for not doing it sooner. i could have made probably 3x the money, just guestimating. find something that inspires you personally, because that is what will push you to completing it.i got laid off from a startup position that was caving in. i had a small severance to live off of, and had always wanted to build this idea. unfortunately while at the startup i was also working on a second one on the side (death, i know) so i never really had time to do anything but those two things. getting laid off was perfect. i sprinted as hard as i possibly could for 3 weeks, designing, coding, and building a sale site with a mini activation server. it was loads of fun. it was also very exciting to look back on those three weeks and realize that i had done a great job making the right decision when hit with a small road block. asking myself things like, "where does this fit with the 80/20 rule? can i launch this feature in a second update a week later? do i need it at all? oh, wait, these two features can easily be combined into one. the technology behind the two won't be nearly as cool, but users will probably prefer it." all of that, i feel, is what lead to my success. getting the product out as soon as possible, without cutting any essential corners. we've all heard it before, but living it was great. i guess i pretty much built my own "nano" startup.damnit, now i want to do it again. | what you're really looking for is a product. i'll even wager you are probably looking for a product that requires minimal unit production and distribution costs. that puts you in a class of products that are electronic, or products that you can convert from an electronic representation to a physical one and have a supplier to deal with those physical challenges (like shipping) for you. people often forget the 2nd option, but it's there.a short list of items that meet this qualification: software, writing (books, novellas, blogs, etc.), digital art, digital photography, music (original), sound of other types (background sounds that can be used in the production of music, for example), designs/instructions (for building something) and a probably a bunch of other stuff. if i missed a big one, please reply to this post with it. you should also be looking for free resources online that you can leverage. are there free services that you can leverage to make your business easier to manage? can you do some work (collection or processing) of some freely available data that might give it additional value which you can then extract through sales or in some other way?because your goal is to make a living and give yourself some extra freedom, you don't have to overengineer this. this isn't your masterpiece. it doesn't have to be pretty or break new ground necessarily. don't chrome plate it if you're writing software for it or to support it.frankly, i just started taking advantage of this type of business and i feel almost guilty. the code isn't that great. the idea isn't that great. it's not something to write home about in terms of engineering a solution. but it makes me money even if i don't touch it for a month at a time. i'm not living off this business yet, but i am seeing good growth and i see a virtually infinite path to expanding the digitally based offerings of the business (more offerings = more money). |
ask hn: fastest route to $2000/mo. cashflow, worry free and conscience clear
in the vein of "you don't need a million dollars..." (<link>, i'm wondering what the fastest way to get the effective monthly return on investing a million in a safe, worry free, hands-off investment is. i think that roughly translates to a couple thousand dollars a month depending on where you insert inflation. i included "conscience clear" in the description because i personally would want to be entirely above-board (no "spam viagra ads" and the like).<p>just to be clear, i'm not in dire straits or in need of a million dollars. i'm just curious.<p>additional clarification:
for this purpose i'd like to assume someone doesn't have a million dollars or the prospect of receiving such in a lump sum. how would they go about building up to a cash flow that would be equivalent to having a million dollars in a safe, hands-off investment?<p>edit: apparently i don't know the difference between conscious and conscience. fixed. | what you're really looking for is a product. i'll even wager you are probably looking for a product that requires minimal unit production and distribution costs. that puts you in a class of products that are electronic, or products that you can convert from an electronic representation to a physical one and have a supplier to deal with those physical challenges (like shipping) for you. people often forget the 2nd option, but it's there.a short list of items that meet this qualification: software, writing (books, novellas, blogs, etc.), digital art, digital photography, music (original), sound of other types (background sounds that can be used in the production of music, for example), designs/instructions (for building something) and a probably a bunch of other stuff. if i missed a big one, please reply to this post with it. you should also be looking for free resources online that you can leverage. are there free services that you can leverage to make your business easier to manage? can you do some work (collection or processing) of some freely available data that might give it additional value which you can then extract through sales or in some other way?because your goal is to make a living and give yourself some extra freedom, you don't have to overengineer this. this isn't your masterpiece. it doesn't have to be pretty or break new ground necessarily. don't chrome plate it if you're writing software for it or to support it.frankly, i just started taking advantage of this type of business and i feel almost guilty. the code isn't that great. the idea isn't that great. it's not something to write home about in terms of engineering a solution. but it makes me money even if i don't touch it for a month at a time. i'm not living off this business yet, but i am seeing good growth and i see a virtually infinite path to expanding the digitally based offerings of the business (more offerings = more money). | i'd recommend a niche software product, preferably one with recurring revenue, but you could do it with a day or two of consulting if you have skills and contacts. |
ask hn: fastest route to $2000/mo. cashflow, worry free and conscience clear
in the vein of "you don't need a million dollars..." (<link>, i'm wondering what the fastest way to get the effective monthly return on investing a million in a safe, worry free, hands-off investment is. i think that roughly translates to a couple thousand dollars a month depending on where you insert inflation. i included "conscience clear" in the description because i personally would want to be entirely above-board (no "spam viagra ads" and the like).<p>just to be clear, i'm not in dire straits or in need of a million dollars. i'm just curious.<p>additional clarification:
for this purpose i'd like to assume someone doesn't have a million dollars or the prospect of receiving such in a lump sum. how would they go about building up to a cash flow that would be equivalent to having a million dollars in a safe, hands-off investment?<p>edit: apparently i don't know the difference between conscious and conscience. fixed. | i'd recommend a niche software product, preferably one with recurring revenue, but you could do it with a day or two of consulting if you have skills and contacts. | usually if something is easy, fast and worry free to get to that kind of wage, which is very comfortable living in the vast majority of locations, there are probably many people attempting to do said thing.really you need to leverage some kind of skills to go after something either outside the low hanging fruit, or create something that people wouldn't have considered to have a good enough market. of course there is an element of luck, if you can make some apps and get them to take off, the mobile ad market seems to be like the early web advertising at the moment, probably returning above the mark. something like this for example: <link> |
ask hn: fastest route to $2000/mo. cashflow, worry free and conscience clear
in the vein of "you don't need a million dollars..." (<link>, i'm wondering what the fastest way to get the effective monthly return on investing a million in a safe, worry free, hands-off investment is. i think that roughly translates to a couple thousand dollars a month depending on where you insert inflation. i included "conscience clear" in the description because i personally would want to be entirely above-board (no "spam viagra ads" and the like).<p>just to be clear, i'm not in dire straits or in need of a million dollars. i'm just curious.<p>additional clarification:
for this purpose i'd like to assume someone doesn't have a million dollars or the prospect of receiving such in a lump sum. how would they go about building up to a cash flow that would be equivalent to having a million dollars in a safe, hands-off investment?<p>edit: apparently i don't know the difference between conscious and conscience. fixed. | usually if something is easy, fast and worry free to get to that kind of wage, which is very comfortable living in the vast majority of locations, there are probably many people attempting to do said thing.really you need to leverage some kind of skills to go after something either outside the low hanging fruit, or create something that people wouldn't have considered to have a good enough market. of course there is an element of luck, if you can make some apps and get them to take off, the mobile ad market seems to be like the early web advertising at the moment, probably returning above the mark. something like this for example: <link> | the fastest route would be an ipad app. make an abc book for kids about animals, or fruits, or things, with big pics and nice visuals. kids love them, parents love them, instant winner. |
ask hn: favorite projects for learning a new language?
most of what i do day to day is web applications with ruby/rails. i'm looking into picking up a new language or two for fun (so far toyed with scala, clojure, and haskell), and i find i learn the concepts best when i put it all together in an actual project. i'm not so interested in more web stuff or challenge-based things like project euler / codeeval.<p>what are your favorite micro-projects for picking up a new language? | my next step up from "hello world" should be relatively simple for most languages.pick a public json api.
retrieve it over http.
parse the json into a data structure.
print some interesting part of the data.this exposes you to http and json libraries in a new language, as well as working with data structures. for instance, in go, the parsing json step forces you to write some structs and learn about marshalling. | unless there are significant differences in the way a web framework is structured (i.e. pedestal for clojure), i find that making a web app doesn't really contribute much to learning the intricacies of the language.i like to try out a languages interesting features by wrapping an existing library in an idiomatic style suitable for that language. for example my most recent work is attempting a wrapper around snmp4j in clojure, foregoing the oo style for a more data-centric approach. |
ask hn: favorite projects for learning a new language?
most of what i do day to day is web applications with ruby/rails. i'm looking into picking up a new language or two for fun (so far toyed with scala, clojure, and haskell), and i find i learn the concepts best when i put it all together in an actual project. i'm not so interested in more web stuff or challenge-based things like project euler / codeeval.<p>what are your favorite micro-projects for picking up a new language? | unless there are significant differences in the way a web framework is structured (i.e. pedestal for clojure), i find that making a web app doesn't really contribute much to learning the intricacies of the language.i like to try out a languages interesting features by wrapping an existing library in an idiomatic style suitable for that language. for example my most recent work is attempting a wrapper around snmp4j in clojure, foregoing the oo style for a more data-centric approach. | i have had fairly good results just use it for data/calculation stuff that i need or using it without justification in a side project. even if what you're working on is in x, do a bunch of your experimentation in y. it costs more for the side project, but if you're not terribly concerned about the pace of the project then it's a net win. practice new skills and have a presumably enjoyable task within which to practice them. |
ask hn: favorite projects for learning a new language?
most of what i do day to day is web applications with ruby/rails. i'm looking into picking up a new language or two for fun (so far toyed with scala, clojure, and haskell), and i find i learn the concepts best when i put it all together in an actual project. i'm not so interested in more web stuff or challenge-based things like project euler / codeeval.<p>what are your favorite micro-projects for picking up a new language? | i have had fairly good results just use it for data/calculation stuff that i need or using it without justification in a side project. even if what you're working on is in x, do a bunch of your experimentation in y. it costs more for the side project, but if you're not terribly concerned about the pace of the project then it's a net win. practice new skills and have a presumably enjoyable task within which to practice them. | i try to replicate a blog with posts, tags for posts, and users. it's a good way to get familiar with the orm and creating associations assuming you will use relational data. i recently started learning play framework (java/scala web framework) and it worked pretty well.edit: this is assuming you are intending to learn a web framework along with the language. |
ask hn: favorite projects for learning a new language?
most of what i do day to day is web applications with ruby/rails. i'm looking into picking up a new language or two for fun (so far toyed with scala, clojure, and haskell), and i find i learn the concepts best when i put it all together in an actual project. i'm not so interested in more web stuff or challenge-based things like project euler / codeeval.<p>what are your favorite micro-projects for picking up a new language? | i try to replicate a blog with posts, tags for posts, and users. it's a good way to get familiar with the orm and creating associations assuming you will use relational data. i recently started learning play framework (java/scala web framework) and it worked pretty well.edit: this is assuming you are intending to learn a web framework along with the language. | choose your own adventure games seem to be one of the things that i work on for the longest |
why i'm moving my business from san francisco to st. louis
| the current san francisco influx is unsustainable. if you're somewhere else in the world and thinking about coming here to do a startup, i wish i could convince you to change your mind.san francisco is incredibly expensive. rents have shot up by ~50% since 2008, office space is following the same trend, and competition for (even mediocre) programmers is intense. worse, a lot of the cultural diversity that made san francisco interesting has been driven out by the high prices -- it's a much more homogenous city than a few years ago, where mom-and-pop shops and other neighborhood amenities have been replaced by places selling $10 "artisinal grilled cheese" sandwiches and "mixology" bars where you can buy your choice of $15 cocktail. sf feels increasingly like a city for wealthy yuppies, because...it is a city for wealthy yuppies. living here on anything less than a good engineer's salary is becoming a tall order.which brings us to a very important point for all the young programmer dudes: when you all crowd into the same tiny city and bid up the rents into the stratosphere, your available dating pool shrinks to a puddle (yet another consequence of the skewed gender balance in tech. sigh.) all the pour-over coffee in the world doesn't make you happy when you can't get a date, and those artisan cocktails are far less cute when you're jockeying for position at the bar in a crowded room full of guys. if you're a 20-something male programmer looking for a date in sf, i feel badly for you. hope you like bart, because you're going to oakland (if you're lucky!)once upon a time it was only a mildly bad decision to locate your startup in san francisco, but you could justify it with the appeal of a diverse, cosmopolitan city. right now, there's a very real financial penalty (rents, salaries, taxes), and the cultural benefits are waning. there are a lot of great cities in the us, and on the internet, you can work from anywhere. try those instead. | former stl startup founder here (slicehost). we were from st louis, so starting the business here made sense and gave us several distinct advantages (cheap power, data center space, etc).for startups, it's currently an ideal place imo. there are quality people here doing whatever it takes to help people get a business started. money? they can help. space? they can help. introductions? they can help. a low cost of living gives you plenty of time to figure things out. throw in a ton of good restaurants, a decent art/music scene, a couple of good universities and you have something worth serious consideration. biggest downsides are weather (winters are chilly) and you need a car. |
why i'm moving my business from san francisco to st. louis
| former stl startup founder here (slicehost). we were from st louis, so starting the business here made sense and gave us several distinct advantages (cheap power, data center space, etc).for startups, it's currently an ideal place imo. there are quality people here doing whatever it takes to help people get a business started. money? they can help. space? they can help. introductions? they can help. a low cost of living gives you plenty of time to figure things out. throw in a ton of good restaurants, a decent art/music scene, a couple of good universities and you have something worth serious consideration. biggest downsides are weather (winters are chilly) and you need a car. | > if you’re trying to bootstrap, being based in san francisco is awful.especially if you have a family. i rented a four bedroom house in a great neighborhood in sacramento that was a bike ride from midtown for $2900/mo. we ended up buying a bigger house in the same neighborhood for even less per month. no commute, food is cheap, etc. the cost savings are enormous, and i'm sure it's more expensive than st. louis...yep:<link> trick outside the bay area, if you are consult-strapping, is keeping the contracts coming in. probably better in areas like st. louis than in sac. |
why i'm moving my business from san francisco to st. louis
| > if you’re trying to bootstrap, being based in san francisco is awful.especially if you have a family. i rented a four bedroom house in a great neighborhood in sacramento that was a bike ride from midtown for $2900/mo. we ended up buying a bigger house in the same neighborhood for even less per month. no commute, food is cheap, etc. the cost savings are enormous, and i'm sure it's more expensive than st. louis...yep:<link> trick outside the bay area, if you are consult-strapping, is keeping the contracts coming in. probably better in areas like st. louis than in sac. | i was in st. louis for strange loop 2013, and i was pretty astonished at how nice (and uncrowded) the downtown was. i asked about it at <link> and got some interesting responses. the "what's wrong with..." was in the sense of "surely it can't be as great as it seems here?", by the way. |
why i'm moving my business from san francisco to st. louis
| i was in st. louis for strange loop 2013, and i was pretty astonished at how nice (and uncrowded) the downtown was. i asked about it at <link> and got some interesting responses. the "what's wrong with..." was in the sense of "surely it can't be as great as it seems here?", by the way. | and so it begins. the bay area is starting to lose some of its talent to other areas (in an already tight talent market). this is just one example and i ran into a few others in the past 2 months, that are in a gtfo state. i have also tried to hire good people from other areas of the country that used to be interested in sf but are no longer seeing it as a nice place to actually live, because they too can do the math. |
uber picks obama’s former campaign manager to wage its regulatory battles
| if the taxi industry hired the same guy, then hn would be up in arms about how the industry is dying and that lobbying is destroying the world.the hypocrisy is astounding. | i think this is where innovation will plateau and bau wars will start |
uber picks obama’s former campaign manager to wage its regulatory battles
| i think this is where innovation will plateau and bau wars will start | he's got a high profile and is smart, sure, but the lobbying world is completely different than the campaign world. seems like an odd choice to me.unless he'll be handling more of a grassroots approach than an inside-game strategy? stuff like: <link> maybe? |
uber picks obama’s former campaign manager to wage its regulatory battles
| he's got a high profile and is smart, sure, but the lobbying world is completely different than the campaign world. seems like an odd choice to me.unless he'll be handling more of a grassroots approach than an inside-game strategy? stuff like: <link> maybe? | maybe this will be the push needed for uber to take lyft out of the competition. |
uber picks obama’s former campaign manager to wage its regulatory battles
| maybe this will be the push needed for uber to take lyft out of the competition. | brilliant idea.turn public opinion, city council pretty much has to follow. the free market might appeal to us but it's not going to appeal to your typical city voter. if uber can turn its message into something urban voters can identify with, they can generate favorable legislation, and urban voters generally love obama's message. |
forebruary, an endless wall calendar
| if we had 13 months, all of them would have exactly 28 days. we would need and extra day in order to complete 365 days, but we could make it a special case (the first day of the year, for instance) not belonging to any month or week. then all months would be alike, every 1st, 8th, 15th, etc, would be a sunday, and so on. we would never need a calendar again. | i actually have a keychain just like this, i was always surprised it never caught on as much as it could have because they're extremely useful.<link> this keychain is also very old, 70s to early 80s |
forebruary, an endless wall calendar
| i actually have a keychain just like this, i was always surprised it never caught on as much as it could have because they're extremely useful.<link> this keychain is also very old, 70s to early 80s | cool, but it seems you need to remember how many days are in the current month yes? it always shows a full 31 days. |
forebruary, an endless wall calendar
| cool, but it seems you need to remember how many days are in the current month yes? it always shows a full 31 days. | yeah that's brilliant, and it looks pretty great. this would probably make the whole thing much more complicated but it'd be nice if the "unused" days were invisible, and i agree that the name is a bit awkward. beyond that though, awesome. |
forebruary, an endless wall calendar
| yeah that's brilliant, and it looks pretty great. this would probably make the whole thing much more complicated but it'd be nice if the "unused" days were invisible, and i agree that the name is a bit awkward. beyond that though, awesome. | this little bit of snark gave me a laugh: "the red stripe highlights the weekend. for the united states, where week starts on sunday (but it is anyway considered a part of weekend), alternative frames can be produced."can i just say?sunday and saturday are the weekend because they are on each end of the week. if you stack them both up at the back, only sunday would get to be the weekend. saturday would just be the day before the end.a line has got two ends. |
hand-written letters via email
| i would state more explicitly that these letters are hand-written by a human, not using a hand-written font or hand written samples. i think there is a lot of gray area when something is claimed to be "hand written" and i would want to be sure, in no uncertain terms what i am buying. it is nice that you include a sample but i've seen computer generated snailmail spam that looks as realistic. | if the goal is to make letters look more genuine, then won't it look a bit odd when the postmark on the letter shows it being mailed from a different state? |
hand-written letters via email
| if the goal is to make letters look more genuine, then won't it look a bit odd when the postmark on the letter shows it being mailed from a different state? | can you print a company logo (ours not yours) on it if you do the subscription? |
hand-written letters via email
| can you print a company logo (ours not yours) on it if you do the subscription? | another suggestion - put the sample right on your faq page. |
hand-written letters via email
| another suggestion - put the sample right on your faq page. | that's awesome! |
rocketskates let you zip along the sidewalk at a top speed of 12 mph
| not trying to be rude, but why is engadget linked here instead of the actual kickstarter? i can't be the only one who hates struggling to find a source link on most news sites? wouldn't it be more useful to just link to the kickstarter?edit: ok so engadgets source links are easy to find but still why not just link to the kickstarter? | as a person that's bought an electric skateboard in the past and a lot of other dumb stuff, i feel like i have a decent grasp on the target market here... but i couldn't buy one of these, they just look so dorky. it's like wearing cement shoes or something. way too bulky and garish. and the marketing video.. ugh. like the shirtless dude and the weird slow-mo cuts and the obvious pandering to a male audience? it just gives off a very desperate vibe. if they have to go to such great lengths to make it seem "cool" you can be almost assured they realize exactly how uncool it looks.the other thing is, your target market is basically college students to start with (probably), or kids. 400+ is out of their range. i think you can get away with cheap/functional+dorky (regular skates), or expensive+cool, but you can't do expensive+dorky (segway territory). |
rocketskates let you zip along the sidewalk at a top speed of 12 mph
| as a person that's bought an electric skateboard in the past and a lot of other dumb stuff, i feel like i have a decent grasp on the target market here... but i couldn't buy one of these, they just look so dorky. it's like wearing cement shoes or something. way too bulky and garish. and the marketing video.. ugh. like the shirtless dude and the weird slow-mo cuts and the obvious pandering to a male audience? it just gives off a very desperate vibe. if they have to go to such great lengths to make it seem "cool" you can be almost assured they realize exactly how uncool it looks.the other thing is, your target market is basically college students to start with (probably), or kids. 400+ is out of their range. i think you can get away with cheap/functional+dorky (regular skates), or expensive+cool, but you can't do expensive+dorky (segway territory). | these look neat and they made a great kickstarter video. they know who's going to want those (25 - 30 something guys) and they made sure to have lots of shots of cute girls using the skates. i watched the whole thing ;) it was also fun to see my home town of pasadena all over that video. now i'm homesick. good luck to you guys - they do look genuinely fun! |
rocketskates let you zip along the sidewalk at a top speed of 12 mph
| these look neat and they made a great kickstarter video. they know who's going to want those (25 - 30 something guys) and they made sure to have lots of shots of cute girls using the skates. i watched the whole thing ;) it was also fun to see my home town of pasadena all over that video. now i'm homesick. good luck to you guys - they do look genuinely fun! | i feel like i'll see these in skymall some day. |
rocketskates let you zip along the sidewalk at a top speed of 12 mph
| i feel like i'll see these in skymall some day. | this is kind of neat, but it negates one of the great benefits of skating (or walking, or running, or bicycling) which is exercise. |
pain we forgot
| i also wish that programming were a lot different today than it was when i started learning it. that being said, a lot of this article's points are things i've heard before. they led to the development of visual basic & co., mostly by people who had no contact with the smalltalk and lisp environment in the 80s, while people who did were shrugging and throwing tantrums like why the fuck didn't you fucking like it ten years ago?imho, all these things went down to the bottom of history because things like these:> anon the intern needs to be able to open up programmingâ„¢ and click 'new web form'are adequate for people who usually don't program, and extremely inadequate for people who usually do. generally, and for good reasons, programmers will dislike a tool that hides implementation details for ease of operation. past a certain level of complexity, the time spent manually doing the right cruft becomes significantly smaller than the time spent manually cleaning up after a smart tool.i sympathize with anon the intern, but perhaps he should rethink his expectations about complexity; if discoverability is a problem, perhaps he could switch to something that's better documented?and at the risk of sounding like an elitist schmuck who rants about how things were back in his day, maybe he ought to start with something other than web programming. the size and complexity of that tech stack is humongous, to the extent that a large proportion of those who use it don't understand it more than two layers of abstraction down. programs are also hard to pack and the environment that runs them is hard to setup. because it involves at least two servers, possibly with several add-ons in order to allow the server-side languages to run, learning at least three languages (assuming server-side js is an option), two of which (html and css) aren't quite being used for their original purpose. this is a beginner's nightmare and it has exactly nothing to do with the development tools.and then there are things that are far harder to solve than they originally seem:> i want to just type 'email' and see a list of functions and libraries relating to email.related how :-)? should mime-related functions, needed to reason about attachments, also come up here? html parsing/converting, in case you need to deal with html email? information cluttering does nothing to alleviate the opposite problem of information breadth: if anon the intern's problem is he doesn't know how to google for libraries or how to make efficient use of documentation, an ide that presents him with a gazillion of possibly related things won't help him. especially when, like all beginning programmers, one of his main difficulties is correctly defining the problem he's working on which, in turn, makes it likely for the solutions presented by the ide to be nowhere even close to the one he needs, because the ide (like anon himself) thinks anon is trying to solve another problem.there is, on the other hand, a lot more truth in this:> tightening the feedback loop between writing code and seeing the results reduces the damage caused by wrong assumptions, lightens the cognitive load of tracking what should be happening and helps build accurate mental models of the system.i do think that the real resolution to this problem is writing simpler programs whose state is easier to track. on the other hand, programming tools today suck considerably at presenting program meaning. things like evaluating what an expression comprising entirely of constants, or at least evaluating it based on the default values of the variables involved, are well within reach for today's tools, and yet programmers' calculators are still employed because 99% of the available ides couldn't evaluate addr_mask & io_segment if the life of every kid in africa depended on it.this is wicked cool: <link>;c... . however, i also find myself thinking that the very fact that we need debuggers that are this smart is proof enough that we don't reason about our programs well enough. except for the fringe case of having to quickly debug a (possibly horrible) codebase i haven't written, i'd much rather prefer being good enough a programmer to avoid the need for a debugger that can tell me why foo is not 8 despite the fact that i fucking said foo = 8 ten lines above, than being a programmer with good enough tools to help me when i'm stupid. | what a wonderful article.i'm not allowed to forget a lot of this pain. i teach programming, so i see it anew every semester.and of course i still experience much of it in my own work. so, yes, let's deal with these issues better.one little disagreement. in the "what?" and "why?" sections the writer present some ideas for debuggers. while these are good ideas, i prefer to think of the inadequacies of existing debuggers as motivation for good practices: modularity, loose coupling, unit testing, etc. certainly, it would be nice (say) to be able to examine the entire state of a running program easily. but i would rather code in such a way that i do not need to.so to those who would write the world's greatest debugger, i say, "good for you." but even better would be to turn your efforts to producing languages, libraries, frameworks, and programming environments that make such a debugger superfluous. |
pain we forgot
| what a wonderful article.i'm not allowed to forget a lot of this pain. i teach programming, so i see it anew every semester.and of course i still experience much of it in my own work. so, yes, let's deal with these issues better.one little disagreement. in the "what?" and "why?" sections the writer present some ideas for debuggers. while these are good ideas, i prefer to think of the inadequacies of existing debuggers as motivation for good practices: modularity, loose coupling, unit testing, etc. certainly, it would be nice (say) to be able to examine the entire state of a running program easily. but i would rather code in such a way that i do not need to.so to those who would write the world's greatest debugger, i say, "good for you." but even better would be to turn your efforts to producing languages, libraries, frameworks, and programming environments that make such a debugger superfluous. | i totally agree. it's true even for us, experienced web guys (and gals), in this mess ruled by packages and their managers.for example, i am trying to make my first rails app outside a tutorial.okay, i want to use bootstrap. should i use gem? guess that's the ruby way. okay seems like there a few of them. tried one, another one. doesn't work. don't know why, since i am just copying half-cryptic stuff because i am new to rails.a friend suggests to use bower. it's easier. right! i had totally forgotten about bower, it rocks! google: bower rails. okay, there is that thing sprockets which i apparently need to configure. googled, a few blog posts opened, they offer a bit different advice each, let's try. doesn't work. nope. not really... google: bower rails bootstrap sprockets. and yay! works.two hours later, i have included bootstrap. properly. |
pain we forgot
| i totally agree. it's true even for us, experienced web guys (and gals), in this mess ruled by packages and their managers.for example, i am trying to make my first rails app outside a tutorial.okay, i want to use bootstrap. should i use gem? guess that's the ruby way. okay seems like there a few of them. tried one, another one. doesn't work. don't know why, since i am just copying half-cryptic stuff because i am new to rails.a friend suggests to use bower. it's easier. right! i had totally forgotten about bower, it rocks! google: bower rails. okay, there is that thing sprockets which i apparently need to configure. googled, a few blog posts opened, they offer a bit different advice each, let's try. doesn't work. nope. not really... google: bower rails bootstrap sprockets. and yay! works.two hours later, i have included bootstrap. properly. | can't be sure but it seems like the surveying has resulted in most of the right conclusions and the right direction for the project.however, i still think most everyone is missing the real issue here. as evidenced by the powerful tools cited in this article that address various aspects of the "programming" problem, there have been numerous efforts to move the state-of-the-art in software development forward. and to a great degree those efforts have _proven_ quite a few superior paradigms.and yet, we haven't seen those new paradigms become truly mainstream for most programmers. why? i do not believe it is because the approaches haven't integrated the right new concepts, because there are so many existing useful tools combining many different new ideas effectively which have failed to become mainstream among programmers.i think many of those new approaches could and should have become normal operating mode for programmers.i think the reason they did not is this: the core definition of "programming" (and by extension "software engineering" etc.) is an antagonistic and largely manual process of creating complex textual source code that can be used to describe system behavior. period.for example, if i want to call myself a web "developer" i dare not use an interactive gui tool to generate and maintain the source code for my web site. web developers will always say, for example, they avoid this because the source code generated that way is less maintainable by hand. in many cases that may be true. in some cases with advanced code generation it is not. regardless, i don't believe that is the actual reason. its just a rationalization.what do we call someone who's entire job entails creating a web page using a graphical user interface? in other words, this is a hypothetical person who has found a hypothetical gui tool that can accommodate all of his web site design and implementation needs without any manual edits to source code. if he builds a web site or web application this way, and writes zero lines of code, do we refer to him as a very smart and advanced web "developer"? or do we call him a web designer or simply a wordpress user (for example)?we do not refer to him as a web "developer". he has no right to refer to himself as a "developer" or "programmer" because he has not wrestled through an antagonistic manual process to create complex textual source code. and that's what people are not understanding. the reason we don't call him a programmer is not because he didn't create an effective program or website. its because the way he did it wasn't hard enough and doesn't match our outdated definition of what "programming" is.to create a popular system (among "real" "programmers") that makes programming more practical or easier using new paradigms, you must either redefine programming to include the possibility of new paradigms and a non-antagonistic process, or perhaps somehow trick programmers into thinking what they are doing is actually harder than it is. maybe if there are a few places to type a command to generate source code, that will be sufficiently complex to still be considered "programming".if you are too successful without doing those things then you will just have another tool that only "users" or "beginners" would ever admit to using. |
pain we forgot
| can't be sure but it seems like the surveying has resulted in most of the right conclusions and the right direction for the project.however, i still think most everyone is missing the real issue here. as evidenced by the powerful tools cited in this article that address various aspects of the "programming" problem, there have been numerous efforts to move the state-of-the-art in software development forward. and to a great degree those efforts have _proven_ quite a few superior paradigms.and yet, we haven't seen those new paradigms become truly mainstream for most programmers. why? i do not believe it is because the approaches haven't integrated the right new concepts, because there are so many existing useful tools combining many different new ideas effectively which have failed to become mainstream among programmers.i think many of those new approaches could and should have become normal operating mode for programmers.i think the reason they did not is this: the core definition of "programming" (and by extension "software engineering" etc.) is an antagonistic and largely manual process of creating complex textual source code that can be used to describe system behavior. period.for example, if i want to call myself a web "developer" i dare not use an interactive gui tool to generate and maintain the source code for my web site. web developers will always say, for example, they avoid this because the source code generated that way is less maintainable by hand. in many cases that may be true. in some cases with advanced code generation it is not. regardless, i don't believe that is the actual reason. its just a rationalization.what do we call someone who's entire job entails creating a web page using a graphical user interface? in other words, this is a hypothetical person who has found a hypothetical gui tool that can accommodate all of his web site design and implementation needs without any manual edits to source code. if he builds a web site or web application this way, and writes zero lines of code, do we refer to him as a very smart and advanced web "developer"? or do we call him a web designer or simply a wordpress user (for example)?we do not refer to him as a web "developer". he has no right to refer to himself as a "developer" or "programmer" because he has not wrestled through an antagonistic manual process to create complex textual source code. and that's what people are not understanding. the reason we don't call him a programmer is not because he didn't create an effective program or website. its because the way he did it wasn't hard enough and doesn't match our outdated definition of what "programming" is.to create a popular system (among "real" "programmers") that makes programming more practical or easier using new paradigms, you must either redefine programming to include the possibility of new paradigms and a non-antagonistic process, or perhaps somehow trick programmers into thinking what they are doing is actually harder than it is. maybe if there are a few places to type a command to generate source code, that will be sufficiently complex to still be considered "programming".if you are too successful without doing those things then you will just have another tool that only "users" or "beginners" would ever admit to using. | > i want to just type 'email' and see a list of functions and libraries relating to email.do people even remember what life was like before google?i type 'email python' and get back a link to an email module. am i being closed-minded in thinking that can't get much easier?yeah, i need to understand a bit as to how email works, smtp and imap/pop and what not, and how to send vs receive email, but some level of understanding is just necessary. |
hacker news is depressing
| this is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but i think we could use the introspection.on the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. i spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and i would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on hn, even if everyone just told me it was terrible.on the other hand, i do think the meanness of programming communities is a the biggest problem we have. programmer-types are just not as supportive/empathetic as nearly everyone else i know. and i'm not talking about criticism, i'm talking about needless mean, shitty behavior that gets repeated and defended all too often. when the linus/"mauro, shut the fuck up!"[2] was posted to hn every single top comment was defending linus' behavior.linus' mission and position do not excuse his language. in defending users, he's still attacking a person.it upsets the hell out of me, and i think its a big part of why many women (and i'm sure men) prefer not to engage in programming communities. even on stackoverflow i see people being horrible to confused newcomers, instead of steering them in the right direction.i think rooting out this kind of shitty behavior is the most important thing we can do to advance programming communities and make others feel welcome. by miles. especially if we want to alleviate gender and general newcomer disparities.this article reminds me of one from 117 days ago, "what it's like to be ridiculed for open sourcing a project".[3]~~~~~[1] there were some remarks in the article that just left me confused, such as:2 they said i thought javascript was a bad language. how funny, because i'm writing almost all my code these days in javascript. they say i'm old and out of date. funny. they're the ones who are out of date! :-)???~~~~~[2] <link> excerpts:2 mauro, shut the fuck up!2 it's a bug alright - in the kernel. how long have you been a maintainer? and you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?2 if a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. we never ever blame the user programs. how hard can this be to understand?2 shut up, mauro. and i don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. seriously.if you talked to your spouse like that it would be called abuse.i was horrified by the hn reactions. you can read some of them here: <link>[3] <link> | i find this post by dave winer a bit hypocritical? the reason he is writing about hacker news being depressing is because of the comments against his article on yahoo acquisitions and marissa mayer. as he says, he wrote it in 15 mins and i'd probably write something similar - but what he doesn't mention is how depressing that post must have been if marissa were to read it. he makes a point about abuse being bad - but did he stop to consider that he wasn't being exactly friendly in his post about marissa? he was publicly discussing a fairly "closed door" meeting he had and extrapolating that into a rant.basically, if you're going to publicly throw stones, i feel it's fairly expected that someone is going to be throwing stones back your way. there is nothing perfect about hacker news - but i don't think that dave winer is perfect either. blocking off content is not the solution, however, and i'm not sure what the solution really is. sticking your head in the sand, perhaps? at any rate, if there is a solution, i'm sure pg and yc will work something out. |
hacker news is depressing
| i find this post by dave winer a bit hypocritical? the reason he is writing about hacker news being depressing is because of the comments against his article on yahoo acquisitions and marissa mayer. as he says, he wrote it in 15 mins and i'd probably write something similar - but what he doesn't mention is how depressing that post must have been if marissa were to read it. he makes a point about abuse being bad - but did he stop to consider that he wasn't being exactly friendly in his post about marissa? he was publicly discussing a fairly "closed door" meeting he had and extrapolating that into a rant.basically, if you're going to publicly throw stones, i feel it's fairly expected that someone is going to be throwing stones back your way. there is nothing perfect about hacker news - but i don't think that dave winer is perfect either. blocking off content is not the solution, however, and i'm not sure what the solution really is. sticking your head in the sand, perhaps? at any rate, if there is a solution, i'm sure pg and yc will work something out. | i'm not sure what he's proposing. if he means let site owners specify that people not be able to submit their sites to hn, i've actually daydreamed occasionally about doing that myself for paulgraham.com. but it might not work in practice, because determined submitters would just mirror the text elsewhere and submit that.he's right though that twitter has a big advantage in that it's easy to ignore jerks. it might be a good idea to introduce some form of following or blocking here. |
hacker news is depressing
| i'm not sure what he's proposing. if he means let site owners specify that people not be able to submit their sites to hn, i've actually daydreamed occasionally about doing that myself for paulgraham.com. but it might not work in practice, because determined submitters would just mirror the text elsewhere and submit that.he's right though that twitter has a big advantage in that it's easy to ignore jerks. it might be a good idea to introduce some form of following or blocking here. | i'm very sorry it has come this far.it's easy to forget we have a tendency to make remarks about people online that we would never bring up in a personal conversation. i'm not excluding myself here, i too feel i'm sometimes harsher online than offline - and it sadly also happened in the dave winer thread yesterday. people can come across in a certain way through their writing that we would never attribute to them if we met them face to face - yet that's all we have to go on in most cases.keeping these difficulties in mind that are inherent to all online communities, i think this article is a damning statement about our discussion style here specifically. it's important to acknowledge that most commenters on hn do not behave that way, but some do and they are very loud. to make matters worse, "good" people sometimes overshoot their target because something in a news item or an article pushes their buttons, leading to a disproportionate response.all in all i think hn has a lot to offer. i said it before, but it bears repeating: i come here to have insightful discussions with clever people who sometimes disagree with me. hn is the only community that does this for me, because i feel there are many like-minded hackers present who have a lot of value to contribute through both their work and their opinions.at the same time i believe we should take a long hard look at these other instances where we're simply not at our best. again, this includes myself specifically. |
hacker news is depressing
| i'm very sorry it has come this far.it's easy to forget we have a tendency to make remarks about people online that we would never bring up in a personal conversation. i'm not excluding myself here, i too feel i'm sometimes harsher online than offline - and it sadly also happened in the dave winer thread yesterday. people can come across in a certain way through their writing that we would never attribute to them if we met them face to face - yet that's all we have to go on in most cases.keeping these difficulties in mind that are inherent to all online communities, i think this article is a damning statement about our discussion style here specifically. it's important to acknowledge that most commenters on hn do not behave that way, but some do and they are very loud. to make matters worse, "good" people sometimes overshoot their target because something in a news item or an article pushes their buttons, leading to a disproportionate response.all in all i think hn has a lot to offer. i said it before, but it bears repeating: i come here to have insightful discussions with clever people who sometimes disagree with me. hn is the only community that does this for me, because i feel there are many like-minded hackers present who have a lot of value to contribute through both their work and their opinions.at the same time i believe we should take a long hard look at these other instances where we're simply not at our best. again, this includes myself specifically. | the author of the submitted blog post writes,"one of the main reasons it doesn't work is that people don't ask questions to clarify. they jump to conclusions, some of which are very wrong."i think that is the nub of the issue. people who are genuinely curious about an issue try to find out more. i routinely upvote comments here on any subject that ask for more information or more sources on factual statements made in articles submitted to hn or factual statements made in comments. we don't all have the same background in life experience and formal education, and i often learn new facts about the world from other hacker news participants. i can't always assume that i understand another person's comment on the first read. moreover, quite a few participants here write english as a second language. (how many americans can write in any language besides english?) so sometimes the first thing to do when replying to an article submitted to hn is to ask follow-up questions. another good thing to do is to point to other sources, if you know of any, for more information.civility is a core value of paul graham, the founder of hacker news. he wants us to be able to disagree politely<link> we do disagree, and the hacker news welcome message<link> the basic rules of the site into a simple statement: "essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."don't be rude. don't be mean. that's not easy, but that is the community guideline here. or maybe not being mean or rude is easy, if you practice it. it's worth finding out how much we could all habituate improving our social skills by how we behave here on hacker news.after edit: it's worth pointing out that i wrote all of the above part of what i wrote before i really wrapped my mind around the fact that, after all, the submitted blog post comes from dave winer, whose blog posts i have been reading for more than a decade. i still stand by my statement that we may all as well be as civil as we possibly can and as factual as we possibly can here on hacker news. this is a community we can all improve by our individual actions. that said, i think dave winer and plenty of other bloggers have plenty to learn from the best comment threads on hacker news, the comment threads that most follow pg's aspirations for this site, precisely because there is a back-and-forth in the comments and a fact-checking that many bloggers shy away from. the difference between a blogger and a journalist is that a journalist is a reporter who writes for an editor. sometimes bloggers write only for themselves, and when they do, they can learn from comments, if only they are willing to do so. when a blogger writes about another public figure, the blogger has to be able to take the heat, or maybe the blogger should find another kitchen. |
hottest indian startups in 2012
| fusioncharts is 10 years old is it still considered a startup? | question for people in the indian startup scene -it looks to me like the "acquire users first, figure out how to make money later" mindset does not fly in india in general. would i be right in saying that such companies are a relative minority? how do indian vcs respond to this mindset which is acceptable in silicon valley? |
hottest indian startups in 2012
| question for people in the indian startup scene -it looks to me like the "acquire users first, figure out how to make money later" mindset does not fly in india in general. would i be right in saying that such companies are a relative minority? how do indian vcs respond to this mindset which is acceptable in silicon valley? | there are many more that normally haven't taken a deep marketing track (and that remains a challenge).for example check out colama - <link> - using vms for college education; <link> (note - this is my employer's product) - gamification of enterprise workflows, and <link> - which allows you to record videos and embed them in the website (and often used in many conferences, for internal company presentation). |
hottest indian startups in 2012
| there are many more that normally haven't taken a deep marketing track (and that remains a challenge).for example check out colama - <link> - using vms for college education; <link> (note - this is my employer's product) - gamification of enterprise workflows, and <link> - which allows you to record videos and embed them in the website (and often used in many conferences, for internal company presentation). | for people who can't access the website: <link> |
hottest indian startups in 2012
| for people who can't access the website: <link> | companies, with diversity in the culture would always win in the long term. simply because these companies would be able to hire the best, from larger pool of candidates. |
stop the presses: essay shows that hard work can be unpleasant
| here's the big thing that you missed in pg's analysis:2the most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. that's schlep blindness.thus defined, schlep blindness isn't the unwillingness to do hard work. instead, it's the unconscious aversion to ideas that have unpleasant tasks associated with it. this idea is actually pretty profound and it's good to have an awareness of it. | i think this analysis is a little unfair. it may be true that pg wasn't really saying anything new. that doesn't mean that it wasn't worth writing about, however, because it is one of those lessons that seems to continually go unlearned.i don't believe his allusion to the inverse correlation between the age of founders and the likelihood of big successes is entirely unfair, either. of course there are exceptions, but in general i've noticed that as my friends grow older, they have become more risk averse. they seems to be much more likely to talk themselves out of pursuing big ideas by enumerating all of the ways in which they might fail.having said that, i think there's a lot of value in older founders who can use their experience and judgement, but are still willing to adopt a "damn the torpedos, full speed ahead" attitude when they realize that a lot of hard, boring work lies between them and their goal. |
stop the presses: essay shows that hard work can be unpleasant
| i think this analysis is a little unfair. it may be true that pg wasn't really saying anything new. that doesn't mean that it wasn't worth writing about, however, because it is one of those lessons that seems to continually go unlearned.i don't believe his allusion to the inverse correlation between the age of founders and the likelihood of big successes is entirely unfair, either. of course there are exceptions, but in general i've noticed that as my friends grow older, they have become more risk averse. they seems to be much more likely to talk themselves out of pursuing big ideas by enumerating all of the ways in which they might fail.having said that, i think there's a lot of value in older founders who can use their experience and judgement, but are still willing to adopt a "damn the torpedos, full speed ahead" attitude when they realize that a lot of hard, boring work lies between them and their goal. | i think that this is only half of what pg was trying to say. it's not just that hard work can be unpleasant - it's that hard work can be unpleasant and this blinds people to working on problems with large impact, simply because they will hard. he's describing a very particular failure mode of potential startup founders that he sees.if this weren't a real problem - why are so few people trying to tackle actual problems that make millions of people miserable? like health 8 sanitation in the third world. or fixing the political process in the u.s. (and everywhere) so that people with less than a million dollars actually have a voice? or matching up the millions of job seekers with the millions of jobs that go unfilled because there's nobody suitably skilled for them? or finding a sustainable energy source so that we can maintain our lifestyle when the oil dries up? |
stop the presses: essay shows that hard work can be unpleasant
| i think that this is only half of what pg was trying to say. it's not just that hard work can be unpleasant - it's that hard work can be unpleasant and this blinds people to working on problems with large impact, simply because they will hard. he's describing a very particular failure mode of potential startup founders that he sees.if this weren't a real problem - why are so few people trying to tackle actual problems that make millions of people miserable? like health 8 sanitation in the third world. or fixing the political process in the u.s. (and everywhere) so that people with less than a million dollars actually have a voice? or matching up the millions of job seekers with the millions of jobs that go unfilled because there's nobody suitably skilled for them? or finding a sustainable energy source so that we can maintain our lifestyle when the oil dries up? | well, most first-time parents confess surprise at how difficult it being a parent turns out to be. among them are parents who did their research, knew lots of other first-time parents, and didn't believe they would be surprised.it turns out that believing you are prepared for something and actually being prepared are often not the same thing, hence the "blindness" pg refers to.you say "don't be fooled, what pg is doing here is thinking like the vc that he is." i say, don't be fooled by analyzing the source, "schlep blindness" really does exist.he's also writing about fear and perfectionism. and i find his admonition to"...ask 'what problem do i wish someone else would solve for me?' ... there's plenty still broken in the world, if you know how to see it."to be useful.it's fine to point out his (vc) bias, but i think you're doing a disservice in not pointing out that he's also giving useful advice. |
stop the presses: essay shows that hard work can be unpleasant
| well, most first-time parents confess surprise at how difficult it being a parent turns out to be. among them are parents who did their research, knew lots of other first-time parents, and didn't believe they would be surprised.it turns out that believing you are prepared for something and actually being prepared are often not the same thing, hence the "blindness" pg refers to.you say "don't be fooled, what pg is doing here is thinking like the vc that he is." i say, don't be fooled by analyzing the source, "schlep blindness" really does exist.he's also writing about fear and perfectionism. and i find his admonition to"...ask 'what problem do i wish someone else would solve for me?' ... there's plenty still broken in the world, if you know how to see it."to be useful.it's fine to point out his (vc) bias, but i think you're doing a disservice in not pointing out that he's also giving useful advice. | i disagree that the point of the article was to make the obvious point that hard work is unpleasant. rather, i thought he was trying to illustrate that there are components of many tasks that are easy to discount the importance of. instead of attending to certain details that seem pointless on the margin, or may have less obvious benefit, the focus may be placed on more mission-critical tasks. it's not that those other tasks don't require hard work; it's that it may be easier to place the focus on them because it's more apparent why they need to be done.perhaps, it would do everyone some good to focus on the things we suck at doing or can't see the obvious benefit to doing. |
android can be beautiful
| android is no longer an ugly-duckling platform trying to catch up with ios, but a beautiful platform that truly rivals ios in all important ways -- and now surpasses it in terms of market share. however, mobile app developers have only recently begun to transition from "we need an app for android too, quick!" to "we need great apps for both android and ios," so it will take a little while for all those ugly, hastily-put-together android apps to become a thing of the past.update: koko775 raises a good point: the large installed base of pre-ics android versions may also be a factor. see <link> | i'm bit surprised by all the comments about "consistency". all of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc.i would think that web designers, and designers in general, would be happy with the flexibility to create their own thing rather than having something that pretty much looks like everything else.the web used to have some consistencies, like 0a2 tags rendering as blue with an underline and always loaded a new page, but that's long since gone. nowadays designers are free to make links look and work how they want.i, personally, don't see the problem with lack of visual design consistency. i prefer to not have every app on my phone look the same. |
android can be beautiful
| i'm bit surprised by all the comments about "consistency". all of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc.i would think that web designers, and designers in general, would be happy with the flexibility to create their own thing rather than having something that pretty much looks like everything else.the web used to have some consistencies, like 0a2 tags rendering as blue with an underline and always loaded a new page, but that's long since gone. nowadays designers are free to make links look and work how they want.i, personally, don't see the problem with lack of visual design consistency. i prefer to not have every app on my phone look the same. | since ics, android is beautiful. well, the os core is, anyway. widget makers and the like still don't seem to have got the design memo, but i suspect that's because design talents are so focused on ios.we just need the app makers to catch up. foursquare, for instance, has been redesigned and looks great. however, their widgets haven't been touched and look awful by comparison. spotify has done a far better job of updating everything at once. |
android can be beautiful
| since ics, android is beautiful. well, the os core is, anyway. widget makers and the like still don't seem to have got the design memo, but i suspect that's because design talents are so focused on ios.we just need the app makers to catch up. foursquare, for instance, has been redesigned and looks great. however, their widgets haven't been touched and look awful by comparison. spotify has done a far better job of updating everything at once. | the problem with the android ui isn't (only) the lack of beauty, it's the lack of consistency, style and attention to detail. things like included/used fonts (although the default ios notes app also fails horribly here), placement of back buttons. and that's exactly one of the things that disturb me in the android ui, things like the 'back' functionality, which is utterly confusing. in ios the 'back' button is always on the same location and tells you where you're going back to. android has a dedicated button, and it surprised me more than enough where it was taking me back to.so yes, android could use a better/cleaner visual style, but that's not it's biggest problem. also, if a new visual style would be adopted, it should be universal. right now it's a mess of apps trying to do their own thing because the default style is ugly, and these examples demonstrate that perfectly... android 4 has shown some improvement but i still don't like it.there are also quite a few ios apps that don't necessarily respect the general look8feel of ios, but some of them succeed in having a distinct style without clashing badly with the rest of the interface. hell, google showed that it is capable of doing just this, just look at the google+ and the new youtube app, they are pretty neat.i think android ui designers should use iphones and windows 7/8 phones as their daily device, or switch at least once every week. then they'd see what's wrong, what irritates them about every os and find a way around some of the moronic decisions were made in some of these os's, and all are guilty of this to some extend. android at this moment however gets the crown in usability wtf's.disclaimer: i own an iphone and ipad, but mainly develop for android/bb/winmobile. |
android can be beautiful
| the problem with the android ui isn't (only) the lack of beauty, it's the lack of consistency, style and attention to detail. things like included/used fonts (although the default ios notes app also fails horribly here), placement of back buttons. and that's exactly one of the things that disturb me in the android ui, things like the 'back' functionality, which is utterly confusing. in ios the 'back' button is always on the same location and tells you where you're going back to. android has a dedicated button, and it surprised me more than enough where it was taking me back to.so yes, android could use a better/cleaner visual style, but that's not it's biggest problem. also, if a new visual style would be adopted, it should be universal. right now it's a mess of apps trying to do their own thing because the default style is ugly, and these examples demonstrate that perfectly... android 4 has shown some improvement but i still don't like it.there are also quite a few ios apps that don't necessarily respect the general look8feel of ios, but some of them succeed in having a distinct style without clashing badly with the rest of the interface. hell, google showed that it is capable of doing just this, just look at the google+ and the new youtube app, they are pretty neat.i think android ui designers should use iphones and windows 7/8 phones as their daily device, or switch at least once every week. then they'd see what's wrong, what irritates them about every os and find a way around some of the moronic decisions were made in some of these os's, and all are guilty of this to some extend. android at this moment however gets the crown in usability wtf's.disclaimer: i own an iphone and ipad, but mainly develop for android/bb/winmobile. | these seem really inconsistent to me. feedly looks almost like a metro (sorry, "windows 8-style") app. doubletwist looks like an ios app, as do square card reader and tumblr. reddit sync pro seems to fit in with google+, so i assume that's what modern android apps are supposed to look like.none of these general aesthetics are bad, but the inconsistency seems to be an issue. (actually, a few of them do look bad to me, like rdio, with the very dated "app home screen" that looks like it was copied from the old facebook ios app.) |
ios apps can be hijacked to show fraudulent content and intercept data
| sooo... the news here is that apple's caching framework works and apps that don't care about connecting to the right remote service (aka apps that don't use ssl) can be hijacked with mitm. this is ... news?i mean, i'd love to see more apps capable not only of ssl but certificate pinning, binary data transfer, and more.besides we all know in-app communication is low-hanging fruit for security researchers, even with otherwise secure apps. twitter's hard-coded oauth token with unlimited usage comes to mind, for example. it's not that the apps themselves aren't "secure enough" but that once you remove the restrictive nature of the browser as sandbox with an exposed address bar, apps can get up to some funny business seemingly out of sight.a useful reminder, to be sure, but it must be a slow news day for this to get so many up votes. | "unencrypted tcp/ip connections are susceptible to man in the middle attacks"there, i just saved you from reading the article, and you probably learned more anyway. |
ios apps can be hijacked to show fraudulent content and intercept data
| "unencrypted tcp/ip connections are susceptible to man in the middle attacks"there, i just saved you from reading the article, and you probably learned more anyway. | man, what a spammy headline. this has very little to do with ios in particular.i've seen this before from goodin and ars technica. what a shame. |
ios apps can be hijacked to show fraudulent content and intercept data
| man, what a spammy headline. this has very little to do with ios in particular.i've seen this before from goodin and ars technica. what a shame. | > the weakness, dubbed http request hijacking (hrh), is
> estimated to affect at least 10,000 titles in apple's
> app store.
i hate reading numbers like this. how did they arrive at 10,000? it's very easy to "estimate" by making up a number. |
ios apps can be hijacked to show fraudulent content and intercept data
| > the weakness, dubbed http request hijacking (hrh), is
> estimated to affect at least 10,000 titles in apple's
> app store.
i hate reading numbers like this. how did they arrive at 10,000? it's very easy to "estimate" by making up a number. | original headline: "apps using unencrypted http are insecure"editor meeting: "can you spin this into an apple story. it will be great for clickthrough rates."new headline: "ios apps can be hijacked to show fraudulent content and intercept data" |
safe: free easy file system encryption
| first thought on the website: don't do that. don't force me to go through lengthy animations, just show me your actual content and let me use it like i use the rest of the web.second: the 'learn more' presentation actually says nothing, nevermind that the start page is equally uninformative. not a single word about techniques used or what makes this service supposedly 'safe' or why i should trust it with my data.i am highly suspicious of anything claiming to be "safe" or "secure", expecially when it is this dodgy around details.
i'd not advise anyone to actually use this for anything sensitive.edit:
just noticed the tiny light-grey 'about' link at the bottom, which gives a little more info.
still, i absolutely dislike the site design. | safe is a wrapper around encfs, which (a) potentially leaks a lot of metadata and (b) is a weird combination of cbc and cfb. i'd feel better about truecrypt. |
safe: free easy file system encryption
| safe is a wrapper around encfs, which (a) potentially leaks a lot of metadata and (b) is a weird combination of cbc and cfb. i'd feel better about truecrypt. | although it servers an entirely different purpose, there are a couple of things i would ask:
1) how would one share encrypted files?
2) what happen when user forgot password?
3) what cryptographic algorithm is this using?actual issues when i gave it a try:
1) unmounting the safe is possible but there's no easy way to remount the safe
2) all the filenames are obfuscated (good and bad). abilities to search for files, view thumbnails etc., usual filesystem functionalities are affected.i think it's quite early but it is an intriguing project. like others, i would love to learn more about the folks behind it as well as the product details.i wrote a little bit about data security, especially cloud data security a while back: <link> if anyone is interested in my humble opinion.-v. |
safe: free easy file system encryption
| although it servers an entirely different purpose, there are a couple of things i would ask:
1) how would one share encrypted files?
2) what happen when user forgot password?
3) what cryptographic algorithm is this using?actual issues when i gave it a try:
1) unmounting the safe is possible but there's no easy way to remount the safe
2) all the filenames are obfuscated (good and bad). abilities to search for files, view thumbnails etc., usual filesystem functionalities are affected.i think it's quite early but it is an intriguing project. like others, i would love to learn more about the folks behind it as well as the product details.i wrote a little bit about data security, especially cloud data security a while back: <link> if anyone is interested in my humble opinion.-v. | i'm not totally up to speed on encryption techniques, but it looks like this makes it somewhat obvious that you have encrypted files on your machine by mapping a new encrypted file 1 for 1 to the files that you're storing.in this case, wouldn't you lose plausible deniability? if i remember there's a feature in truecrypt which allows you to have two passwords, a fake password that you could use if questioned that decrypts a portion of the volume, and the real password that decrypts the entire thing. i maybe conflating two separate things, though. |
safe: free easy file system encryption
| i'm not totally up to speed on encryption techniques, but it looks like this makes it somewhat obvious that you have encrypted files on your machine by mapping a new encrypted file 1 for 1 to the files that you're storing.in this case, wouldn't you lose plausible deniability? if i remember there's a feature in truecrypt which allows you to have two passwords, a fake password that you could use if questioned that decrypts a portion of the volume, and the real password that decrypts the entire thing. i maybe conflating two separate things, though. | this website doesn't tell me anything about what safe actually does. the svg tour says it "prevents" other people from seeing my data, but given the low competence most products have with regard to security, without details, i am never going to trust it.edit: i found this after installing the app: <link> it has a bit more detail. |
getting over it
| i am confused by the little science that was quoted in the article. for example, it reports that college students are studied that are survivors of child abuse, and it is found that the effects they suffer as a result are small. there are two problems with that:first, these are college students so there's a giant selection effect in action: they are by definition the child abuse survivors that were functional enough to have gotten to college.secondly, a lot of the problems with problematic childhoods don't express themselves until the children become parents; in other words, i don't care how well enough these kids did at college if they went on to abuse their own children. (not that they all would; but the issue is more complicated than how it is presented).overall, the whole point of the article is that experience is not destiny; some people can survive the most horrific abuse and come out of it; others are completely destroyed by the experiences. this is not news. the fact that as a society we may want to worry more about the latter than the former is not, imho, a problem. | this article hints at something i find quite provocative; the idea that the culture of the 1950's somehow was more open to the truth then the present is an amazing thesis. i entirely agree with the author (malcolm gladwell) in that the simple nature of the novel would definitely be a source of criticism if it were published today. the idea that presenting the simple truth would be ignored by most people (including myself) today is just baffling. i wonder if this is related to the expectations we have set by todays entertainment industry. i would love to find out what is driving this change, i can only hope mr. gladwell publishes a follow-up piece. |
getting over it
| this article hints at something i find quite provocative; the idea that the culture of the 1950's somehow was more open to the truth then the present is an amazing thesis. i entirely agree with the author (malcolm gladwell) in that the simple nature of the novel would definitely be a source of criticism if it were published today. the idea that presenting the simple truth would be ignored by most people (including myself) today is just baffling. i wonder if this is related to the expectations we have set by todays entertainment industry. i would love to find out what is driving this change, i can only hope mr. gladwell publishes a follow-up piece. | malcolm on being old school. damn, we need more people with names like 'betsy' and 'hank'.there is a certain attraction to 40's/50's imagery - this polite simplicity masking darkness beneath... alcohol, war stories, adultery, mental issues:“i want you to be able to talk to me about the war. it might help us to understand each other. did you really kill seventeen men?”
“yes.”
“do you want to talk about it now?”
“no. it’s not that i want to and can’t—it’s just that i’d rather think about the future. about getting a new car and driving up to vermont with you tomorrow.”
“that will be fun. it’s not an insane world. at least, our part of it doesn’t have to be.” |
getting over it
| malcolm on being old school. damn, we need more people with names like 'betsy' and 'hank'.there is a certain attraction to 40's/50's imagery - this polite simplicity masking darkness beneath... alcohol, war stories, adultery, mental issues:“i want you to be able to talk to me about the war. it might help us to understand each other. did you really kill seventeen men?”
“yes.”
“do you want to talk about it now?”
“no. it’s not that i want to and can’t—it’s just that i’d rather think about the future. about getting a new car and driving up to vermont with you tomorrow.”
“that will be fun. it’s not an insane world. at least, our part of it doesn’t have to be.” | class war is also war. there is more to psychology than self-medication for the troubled, ssris for the moderately dysfunctional, and anti-psychotics for the very troubled. isn't there? i couldn't help but notice that the little trick memory plays on our conscious minds of forgetting about trauma, kind of scabbing and healing is very like what happens on this site: we meet interesting people and get to sample their thoughts and then we immediately forget what we didn't know five minutes ago, or that we didn't know it.it seems to me that war-mongering takes advantage of these blind spots by hammering away at our attention it always seems to start with something new. did you know they sank a patrol boat in the golf of tonkin? did you know...whatever, and builds from there. i have to thank mg for reminding us that we can actually get up, dust ourselves off and walk away. a lesson that doesn't require action or revenge, just awareness. |
getting over it
| class war is also war. there is more to psychology than self-medication for the troubled, ssris for the moderately dysfunctional, and anti-psychotics for the very troubled. isn't there? i couldn't help but notice that the little trick memory plays on our conscious minds of forgetting about trauma, kind of scabbing and healing is very like what happens on this site: we meet interesting people and get to sample their thoughts and then we immediately forget what we didn't know five minutes ago, or that we didn't know it.it seems to me that war-mongering takes advantage of these blind spots by hammering away at our attention it always seems to start with something new. did you know they sank a patrol boat in the golf of tonkin? did you know...whatever, and builds from there. i have to thank mg for reminding us that we can actually get up, dust ourselves off and walk away. a lesson that doesn't require action or revenge, just awareness. | i find these and some other similar high-brow essays repulsive.basically, they subtly want to encourage the status quo : the poorer classes of society join the army and get themselves killed while doing horrible things to other people because our leader said they have wmds, while the middle classes with a brain go to uni, and some of them get to write beautiful essays about how one should forget the war. and i'm not even mentioning the subtle connotations in there to forget other negative associations that war has, such as torture and the robbery of the other nation's resources. the beauty of the thing is that the subtle messages are couched in an arguable parable of a soldier who chooses to look forward, not at the past.what the article actually is, is propaganda.fuck you. i will not forget the war, the people who made us go to war unnecessarily, nor the effects it has on everyone, and definitely not the poor fuck soldier veteran who got a raw deal from educated assholes who tricked him into sacrificing his life with propaganda just like this. first they massage you with the anthem and the flag to get you to war, then they massage you with such essays to calm you down from the resulting anger. |
lastpass and the heartbleed bug
| i don't understand how anyone can throw last pass under the bus here.0day where an unbelievable amount of sites are affected. last pass comes out and says we were vulnerable and we fixed it and provides information as to what it means for your data... i wish everyone did that...edit:
a lot of people recommend keepass. keepass is vulnerable to the same thing everyone else is worried last pass was vulnerable to. kee pass' download site is http. you could be getting trojaned binaries and incorrect shasums if you download it from anywhere. | not understanding some of the responses, i think they did a pretty nice job trying to address the issues in their posts. of course you could have been mitm but the vast majority of that danger comes from using public wifi and if you're smart you should be using a vpn provider anyway.realistically speaking here they found out about this at the same time as everyone else did and addressed it pretty quickly and professionally. is there really anything else they or anyone else could have done, other then just use keepass? which has it's own major inconveniences that can only be addressed by some sort of cloud based solution (whether controlled by you or someone else), which probably would very likely have been using openssl as well ... |
lastpass and the heartbleed bug
| not understanding some of the responses, i think they did a pretty nice job trying to address the issues in their posts. of course you could have been mitm but the vast majority of that danger comes from using public wifi and if you're smart you should be using a vpn provider anyway.realistically speaking here they found out about this at the same time as everyone else did and addressed it pretty quickly and professionally. is there really anything else they or anyone else could have done, other then just use keepass? which has it's own major inconveniences that can only be addressed by some sort of cloud based solution (whether controlled by you or someone else), which probably would very likely have been using openssl as well ... | i don't get it. if someone capture the ssl cert, they could be mitming the server. which means they could be serving poisoned javascript code to everyone who was using the website or the bookmarklets, code that could send the master password to the attacker's servers.how is this not vulnerable?edit: and more, what guarantees can they offer that the plugins downloaded from their site ever since their were vulnerable are not themselves trojanized? openssl has been vulnerable since march 2012, how many downloads did they have since then? |
lastpass and the heartbleed bug
| i don't get it. if someone capture the ssl cert, they could be mitming the server. which means they could be serving poisoned javascript code to everyone who was using the website or the bookmarklets, code that could send the master password to the attacker's servers.how is this not vulnerable?edit: and more, what guarantees can they offer that the plugins downloaded from their site ever since their were vulnerable are not themselves trojanized? openssl has been vulnerable since march 2012, how many downloads did they have since then? | lastpass puts vulnerable in scare quotes.but to my understanding, with this bug session information to the website could have leaked, and they don't seem to address this. could an attacker have hijacked logins? |
lastpass and the heartbleed bug
| lastpass puts vulnerable in scare quotes.but to my understanding, with this bug session information to the website could have leaked, and they don't seem to address this. could an attacker have hijacked logins? | the issue i have with lastpass is that they claim to never see your master password. this is not true in any sense. open their website, log in using your master pass. you just submitted it to them. as a secondary thing, pick a random password from the list and say "show me the password"; it will ask you for your master password. the extension you install has nothing to do with this: you are entering the password directly into their web page and interacting with their javascript and their server-side code. at this point they have your master password.i understand why they do this: it's convenient and lets you share/give passwords to others. but this feature is 100% incompatible with the claim that they never see your master password. |
ask hn: please review rentmethod
rentmethod allows landlords/property managers to quickly and easily screen potential tenants by just entering in a tenant’s email address. the tenant verifies their identity and pays for the screen directly, and the landlord/manager receives a detailed report (credit score, background check, eviction notices, etc).<p>we would love to hear what the hn community thinks of what we’ve built. with limited ui/ux expertise in-house, we hacked together the front-end of the application and would certainly appreciate some feedback for future direction.<p><link><p>thanks in advance for taking the time to check out our stuff! | this is an awesome idea.i’m not a landlord and have no use at all for this, but i really like it so i’ve decided i’m qualified to weigh in.
instead of being specifically designed for landlords, you should be more agnostic about who uses it. there are many reasons to screen people. you probably have horizontal expansion built into your future plans already, but i wouldn’t sit that idea long as it is basically usable to other markets already, it’s just not easy for them to find because they won’t be typing anything about rental property into google.i think your faq comes off as a bit greedy. it should focus on answering questions about the service not recommending policy to individual landlords. see the following:q: "whom should i screen?"
a: "everyone"at worst this reads as, "send people here to give me money." at best it’s unsolicited advice on how to run my business. there's nothing wrong with wanting money for your service, but don’t punish the readers by slipping things like this into faq’s. if i’m there to read about rentmethod, it’s likely that i already have an idea of who i should screen. | what might be cool is if i can direct my prospective tenant to you to fill out a digital version of my rental application (standard form), then i get a copy of that 'signed' application, and how they answered all the questions on rental history, employment history, references, key questions on bankruptcy, felonies, etc, as well as your credit screening result.otherwise it seems i'm still managing a paper-based application for the info i need, then applicant has to redo part of that effort directly with you to get the credit screen. |
ask hn: please review rentmethod
rentmethod allows landlords/property managers to quickly and easily screen potential tenants by just entering in a tenant’s email address. the tenant verifies their identity and pays for the screen directly, and the landlord/manager receives a detailed report (credit score, background check, eviction notices, etc).<p>we would love to hear what the hn community thinks of what we’ve built. with limited ui/ux expertise in-house, we hacked together the front-end of the application and would certainly appreciate some feedback for future direction.<p><link><p>thanks in advance for taking the time to check out our stuff! | what might be cool is if i can direct my prospective tenant to you to fill out a digital version of my rental application (standard form), then i get a copy of that 'signed' application, and how they answered all the questions on rental history, employment history, references, key questions on bankruptcy, felonies, etc, as well as your credit screening result.otherwise it seems i'm still managing a paper-based application for the info i need, then applicant has to redo part of that effort directly with you to get the credit screen. | really great job overall. one minor issue with the accept/reject buttons on the report.when you hover over the buttons, they appear grayed out. this may be an intentional way of signaling that you can't actually perform those actions. but if not, i'd encourage you to just use a different shade of red/green. |
ask hn: please review rentmethod
rentmethod allows landlords/property managers to quickly and easily screen potential tenants by just entering in a tenant’s email address. the tenant verifies their identity and pays for the screen directly, and the landlord/manager receives a detailed report (credit score, background check, eviction notices, etc).<p>we would love to hear what the hn community thinks of what we’ve built. with limited ui/ux expertise in-house, we hacked together the front-end of the application and would certainly appreciate some feedback for future direction.<p><link><p>thanks in advance for taking the time to check out our stuff! | really great job overall. one minor issue with the accept/reject buttons on the report.when you hover over the buttons, they appear grayed out. this may be an intentional way of signaling that you can't actually perform those actions. but if not, i'd encourage you to just use a different shade of red/green. | click: <link> |
ask hn: please review rentmethod
rentmethod allows landlords/property managers to quickly and easily screen potential tenants by just entering in a tenant’s email address. the tenant verifies their identity and pays for the screen directly, and the landlord/manager receives a detailed report (credit score, background check, eviction notices, etc).<p>we would love to hear what the hn community thinks of what we’ve built. with limited ui/ux expertise in-house, we hacked together the front-end of the application and would certainly appreciate some feedback for future direction.<p><link><p>thanks in advance for taking the time to check out our stuff! | click: <link> | if i'm a perspective tenant and fill out the form for one apartment, do i have to do it again if i apply to another property that also uses rentmethod? |
spyparty: a turing test disguised as a game
| i would pay $100 for this game. i don't play games because i have below average skill, dexterity, and coordination. last game i played till finish was the first splinter cell game in 2002-2003. i hit save after every shot, movement, and action because i really suck at shooting targets, especially if they fire back at me or move. what i love are solo games where i can take my time, plan my course of action, and hit "go!" this game seems exactly what i want. another example is one of the original variations of desktop tower defense where you couldn't buy/sell equipment/weapons once you hit 'play'.i divide games into two types: frying or baking. the frying games are where you have to be active throughout the course of the game from start till finish and you have to race against time. there may be preparation beforehand but execution during the main act is critical and if you slow down, you get burnt veggies. the baking games are where preparation is the only thing that matters. there is no race-against time and if you prepare well, you're almost guaranteed to win. i prefer baking games. | more of a reverse turing test, but i really like the concept. |
spyparty: a turing test disguised as a game
| more of a reverse turing test, but i really like the concept. | i'm surprised that this game is 2 years away. isn't that plenty of time for someone else to create a clone? sure, the graphics are primitive, but it doesn't matter for a game like this. |
spyparty: a turing test disguised as a game
| i'm surprised that this game is 2 years away. isn't that plenty of time for someone else to create a clone? sure, the graphics are primitive, but it doesn't matter for a game like this. | it's an excellent idea, i can give it that, but i do not see how this fleshes out into a full game. we're talking about person a tries to find person b in a crowd. person b has stuff to do, persona a just has to find him.if you're playing on the same screen (as the article indicated) person b can't have an interesting interface because it's shared with person a, and vice versa. likewise person b can't be doing anything interesting, because (as indicated in the article) his possible actions are easily investigated by person a.don't get me wrong, i'm all for new concepts in gaming. i play far too many games right now... i just don't see how this extends beyond a mario party / wario ware style mini-game. |
spyparty: a turing test disguised as a game
| it's an excellent idea, i can give it that, but i do not see how this fleshes out into a full game. we're talking about person a tries to find person b in a crowd. person b has stuff to do, persona a just has to find him.if you're playing on the same screen (as the article indicated) person b can't have an interesting interface because it's shared with person a, and vice versa. likewise person b can't be doing anything interesting, because (as indicated in the article) his possible actions are easily investigated by person a.don't get me wrong, i'm all for new concepts in gaming. i play far too many games right now... i just don't see how this extends beyond a mario party / wario ware style mini-game. | feels almost like a virtual version of the party game mafia. it seems like you would be able to memorize the different missions and then watch for them, but i'm sure the developers are aware of that risk. |
our pre-y combinator interview experience, day 1
| thanks for coming by the office -- it was cool to hear how the business is going. | grubwithus is a fine seed of an idea, but fact of the matter is simply that people don't really enjoy eating with strangers. also have a non-strangers use-case, as that's the most common way people eat together. also, facebook login gave some error.on an unrelated note, why does posterous not do something about the view count display issue? it has been irritating me for some weeks now. the viewcount is constantly showing as "viewed 154times" lacking a gap between the digit and the text. are they too busy to notice this? perhaps they are getting acquired and stuck doing a lot of business stuff/travelling around and have little time for technical stuff? |
our pre-y combinator interview experience, day 1
| grubwithus is a fine seed of an idea, but fact of the matter is simply that people don't really enjoy eating with strangers. also have a non-strangers use-case, as that's the most common way people eat together. also, facebook login gave some error.on an unrelated note, why does posterous not do something about the view count display issue? it has been irritating me for some weeks now. the viewcount is constantly showing as "viewed 154times" lacking a gap between the digit and the text. are they too busy to notice this? perhaps they are getting acquired and stuck doing a lot of business stuff/travelling around and have little time for technical stuff? | what do people see as the pros and cons of publicly discussing that you have a yc interview?if they get rejected, now every investor they talk to, etc. knows for a fact that they got rejected from yc. that may not be a situation they'd be happy with. |
our pre-y combinator interview experience, day 1
| what do people see as the pros and cons of publicly discussing that you have a yc interview?if they get rejected, now every investor they talk to, etc. knows for a fact that they got rejected from yc. that may not be a situation they'd be happy with. | off-topic technical comment: the sign up page at grubwith.us gets a mixed content warning. it seems like you guys are hitting jquery from <link> |
our pre-y combinator interview experience, day 1
| off-topic technical comment: the sign up page at grubwith.us gets a mixed content warning. it seems like you guys are hitting jquery from <link> | any meals planned for saturday/sunday? |
5 things they told you not to use in javascript
| this is all spectacularly bad advice. some of it is actually just false.2 a linebreak indicates, in most cases, the end of a statement; a semicolon is automatically inserted for you.these are weasel words. either a line break is the end of a statement or it's not. in javascript it is not.2 in order to be able to write properly working code, you need to be aware of the rules of automatic semicolon insertion, regardless if you choose to add semicolons at the end of lines or not.you absolutely do not. i don't care if you use semicolons or not, but don't claim that knowledge of asi is required to write good javascript.2 fix problems when you actually have them. use the time you’ve freed up by not prematurely optimizing and spend it with your family or have a holiday on the beach.using deprecated features like __proto__ and arguments.callee is not something that you can trivially fix later. these are advanced features and i can't think of an easy why to duplicate their behavior once they are gone. you're going to have to rewrite a significant chunk of your code. please never, ever use these features in libraries that are shared with other developers. | i'll say that i disagree with just about every point made here and certainly not because of some religious fervor. i won't enumerate them all, and i completely refuse to get drawn into the debate of semicolons vs. no semicolons; but statements like this,"whether you like it or not, whitespace is significant in javascript. a linebreak indicates, in most cases, the end of a statement; a semicolon is automatically inserted for you."are just flat out absurd. like it or not, automatic semicolon insertion is not significant whitespace and the second sentence completely contradicts the first by pointing out that asi happens in most cases--but not all. if whitespace were truly significant, it would apply in all cases. again, i'm not debating whether you should use semicolons or not--but i'm willing to flat out state that javascript does not have significant whitespace; no matter how you want to spin it.that said (and now here comes the "someone had to say it department") this strikes me, yet again, as thomas being contrarian for the sake of getting a rise out of folks to draw attention to himself. i mean no disrespect with this statement; but anyone who has followed him for a long time on twitter knows that he's apt to taking an unpopular position and leveraging it as a marketing opportunity for himself (and, by extension, his consulting and training enterprises). that's a fine approach; but, i felt it time someone identified it for what it is. thomas is a smart dude and he's built some amazing things; but his public persona and style is carefully crafted and contrarian and we're all buying in by popularizing the debates he either creates or catalyzes.[edit: fixed a typo] |
5 things they told you not to use in javascript
| i'll say that i disagree with just about every point made here and certainly not because of some religious fervor. i won't enumerate them all, and i completely refuse to get drawn into the debate of semicolons vs. no semicolons; but statements like this,"whether you like it or not, whitespace is significant in javascript. a linebreak indicates, in most cases, the end of a statement; a semicolon is automatically inserted for you."are just flat out absurd. like it or not, automatic semicolon insertion is not significant whitespace and the second sentence completely contradicts the first by pointing out that asi happens in most cases--but not all. if whitespace were truly significant, it would apply in all cases. again, i'm not debating whether you should use semicolons or not--but i'm willing to flat out state that javascript does not have significant whitespace; no matter how you want to spin it.that said (and now here comes the "someone had to say it department") this strikes me, yet again, as thomas being contrarian for the sake of getting a rise out of folks to draw attention to himself. i mean no disrespect with this statement; but anyone who has followed him for a long time on twitter knows that he's apt to taking an unpopular position and leveraging it as a marketing opportunity for himself (and, by extension, his consulting and training enterprises). that's a fine approach; but, i felt it time someone identified it for what it is. thomas is a smart dude and he's built some amazing things; but his public persona and style is carefully crafted and contrarian and we're all buying in by popularizing the debates he either creates or catalyzes.[edit: fixed a typo] | doesn't `with` have significant runtime costs? i didn't think people didn't like that one because it was a 'bad pattern' - i thought it was because it was really slow.edit: i went ahead and jsperf'd it, and it is 13x slower to run the example in the article.<link> lot of times this doesn't matter, but it's not nothing.edit 2: also people avoid using `with` so their minification tools have a better chance. another thing that can be overcome, but just pointing out that it's not religious dogma that makes people avoid `with`. |
5 things they told you not to use in javascript
| doesn't `with` have significant runtime costs? i didn't think people didn't like that one because it was a 'bad pattern' - i thought it was because it was really slow.edit: i went ahead and jsperf'd it, and it is 13x slower to run the example in the article.<link> lot of times this doesn't matter, but it's not nothing.edit 2: also people avoid using `with` so their minification tools have a better chance. another thing that can be overcome, but just pointing out that it's not religious dogma that makes people avoid `with`. | the reason features like 'with' and callee are being pushed out of js is because they are a complete nightmare for js engine optimizations. doesn't mean they are not useful for certain (hacky) things. google dart is a direct response of the v8 team against js having (among many other things) these kind of constructs. if you want your js to keep getting faster, try not frustrating the guys that make your crap code faster by advertising these constructs too much. thank you. |
5 things they told you not to use in javascript
| the reason features like 'with' and callee are being pushed out of js is because they are a complete nightmare for js engine optimizations. doesn't mean they are not useful for certain (hacky) things. google dart is a direct response of the v8 team against js having (among many other things) these kind of constructs. if you want your js to keep getting faster, try not frustrating the guys that make your crap code faster by advertising these constructs too much. thank you. | i kinda hope i never have to debug or modify any code written by a person who writes javascript like this. |