skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Tips on raising money for Dev Bootcamp
Hi HN,

I'm in a predicament. After many interviews and a lot of waiting and wondering, Dev Bootcamp emailed me and said, "We loved meeting you. You're in." I'm super excited! But now I'm faced with a fast-approaching deadline to generate $20k ($11k for tuition and $3k/mo for living expenses in SF). This is the next phase of my project: raising the funds. I'm ineligible for a school loan, because Dev Bootcamp is a company, not a .edu institution. I'm also ineligible for a private loan because I'm 23 and I have no assets for collateral.

I've turned to raising cash from friends/acquaintances. Parents aren't in the picture. To date, I've raised $9k, which is super, but I'm not even half way there, and I think it was just due to a mixture of beginner's luck and the great amount of enthusiasm and conviction I conveyed during my pitch. I'm still pursuing the fundraising route (and I also began a project on Invested.in here => http://inv.st/27N). The adrenaline and social aspect of raising money and being persuasive is addicting. I feel very entrepreneurial. One year ago, I could never have fathomed having the capacity to raise this sort of money. But my leads are running dry, and I'm not sure what to do next.

I wish there was a sort of YC entity for people who want to get an unofficial education. Dbc isn't a real school, so financial aid and grants, etc. are inapplicable. Maybe there IS such a thing, and I don't know about it. Is there?

Does anyone have any light they can shed on what my next step should be? Also, if you're feeling philanthropic and you'd like my Wells Fargo checking account number, I'm happy to provide that too. ;)

Thank you, all.

Nima

PS: Do you guys think it would be inappropriate to cold email Paul Graham and ask for his financial help? After all, he's always pushing the philosophy that he invests in people, not ideas or plans.

Any wisdom is deeply appreciated. There's nothing I want more than to attend this program.
Mauricio Scheffer has written several articles about applicative functors in F# http://bugsquash.blogspot.com/search/label/applicative%20fun... To tell the truth I don't really get it, but maybe you do.
Starbucks was once a "new experience" for people who enjoy their coffee now. You paid to try it for the first time whenever you did....unless of course, you tried it via some free Starbucks promotion, liked it and then became a paid customer.
A 2TB hard drive costs $200 [1]. Why can't they just buy one and plug it in somewhere? This is a federal agency, not a small town's local PD.

There should be an investigation into why they can't afford it, because their purchasing processes are either corrupt or utterly incompetent if they're spending budget-breaking amounts for 2TB. Or the lack of space could be a justification, while there were other, real reasons that the case was dropped, maybe political, maybe national security, maybe because the fugitive's friends bribed somebody. In any case, it sounds like there's dirty laundry to be aired.

[1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236...
Myspace was full of normal people too, not just hardcore early adopters. AOL was full of normal people, only geeks wanted real TCP/IP to surf and play games.

If your client annoys people too much, they'll move on too. Nullsoft learned that the hard way with Winamp 3. Gnome may be in the middle of that lesson right now.
You're missing the point in two ways

a) "Starbucks" serves in this situation as a generic term for an espresso drink of your choice. Like Kleenex or Xerox or what-have-you. When someone says "people will spend $4 on a coffee at Starbucks without thinking about it" they don't mean at Starbucks specifically, they just mean "some coffee shop that isn't 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts or McDonalds".

b) Even within the category of espresso-serving, $3ish coffee shops, the argument still applies. In a strange town (), in the absence of other reliable information, I will probably go to Starbucks because I know that I'll get a somewhat over-roasted, but drinkable, latte. If I walk into a random independent coffee shop, there's some chance I'll get an excellent cup of coffee. But, experience has also taught me that it's more likely that I'll get something that's no better, or frequently worse, than Starbucks. Similarly, if I'm out of saline or need some allergy medicine while traveling, I'm likely to grab it at Walmart, because all their stores are laid out the same and I can find what I need blindfolded. There is value in predictability in many situations.

() caveat that this applies to travel in the US, and generally for work. In various European countries, I'd bet on the random local shop. And if I'm traveling on vacation, there's value in experiencing something new and local. But, if I just want my morning coffee on the way in to the office, easy and predicable wins.
The times I have asked I have not received a response or the response I got was generic and dismissive, rather than helpful which is what I was hoping for.

I'm guessing the lack of a response is because:

1. They don't feel they have to justify their decision.
2. They don't want to get into a dispute/nit-pick.
3. They are just bad hirers and don't know how to provide adequate feedback.
4. They are trying to hire someone, not help people they are not hiring.

Conversely, when I have turned down an offer those companies have never asked me why.

- James.
Great point! I've been thinking about a better way to get cheap/free labor for my corp. Interns just aint what the used to be now that social networking has become a god given right. Plus you don't have to worry about your employee being lured away by an actual employment prospect after leeching off of the experience you've just gifted to them! Can't wait to tell my buddy Mitt.
Making Money
I've spent a fair amount of time criticizing the way estimates are done (for example: http://deathrayresearch.tumblr.com/post/4503505772/the-patho...) but although I empathize, this post missed the flight deck completely.

First, as other have pointed out, sometimes estimates are needed (If the guys at YouTube finish their work for the Olympics next month, they have a problem.)

Second, if people only work on software where there's a clear a 50 to 1 payback (as the post suggests), there would be demand for about 10,000 programmers in the world. Competition forces most companies to fight for small, temporary advantages in their products and for incrementally lower costs with their backend systems. (And this ignores entirely the relationship between time to market and returns. Sometimes software is worth a lot if you could have it today, not so much a year from now.)

Third, story points? Not the panacea they're made out to be. I wrote a post on that, too, but one self-referential link is enough for one comment.

Finally, if you're not going to estimate a completion date, why estimate at all? The reasons he gives for estimation are actually reasons to spend time on design. Estimation done that way adds nothing.
one more point: your coffee doesn't get free update. app does.
Any plans to make it available for international customers?
Sci vs. Sci: Evidence of Facebook Voting Fraud in Bespoke-Suit Social Promotion
Awesome. What are you guys using GitHub+OpenSCAD for?
Same here. I suspect this is a very well worn path.
This is how they treated another Australian called David Hicks ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hicks ... who by any measure has done far less "damage" to the US than has Assange.
________________________
Quote - "Hicks's legal team attributed his acceptance of the plea bargain to his "desperation for release from Guantanamo" and duress as "instances of severe beatings, sleep deprivation and other conditions of detention that contravene international human rights norms."
________________________
The US is effectively a Police State right now (read Pt 5 here: http://vrec.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/vilcabamba-ecuador-real...) ... and getting worse. If anybody believes they wouldn't throw Assange in the deepest darkest most inhospitable hole they have, I'm afraid they are deluded. He simply must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the USA.
Claiming that a problem isn't valid because there are bigger problems than it, is logic fail.
Omniauth strategy for App.net
No, I'm thinking of a walled garden. https://www.google.com/search?q=walled+garden+twitter
It's a great way to restrict clients that integrate with other services, especially competitors like Facebook.
I found the study:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01641212859...

Jeffrey, D.R. and M.J. Lawrence, "Managing Programming Productivity", The Journal of
Systems and Software 5, (1985), 49-58.
All manner of ridiculously expensive gewgaws are priced that way exactly in order to exploit the marginal utility of $30, or $100, or $5000 to millionaires.

The problem with pricing Starbucks that way is that a huge chunk of Starbucks strategy involves there being a Starbucks on every quarter, ready for any passerby be they millionaire or middle class, and while it is notoriously easy to do price discrimination within a band of $1-$10 prices, it is very hard to do price discrimination across a $1-$100 spectrum of coffee.
Computer for Grandma - "Pure Devices" raising funding
I have run into sysadmins who prefer to be manual, and avoid automation.

I have a destination in mind, and I'm always looking for new travelers. But I havent seen many lately.
Kbuuk is cool
Time for self publish your first book!
Python Virus
No one who "really knows what Philosophy is" takes Ayn Rand seriously. Actually, taking Ayn Rand seriously is a pretty good sign you don't really know what Philosophy is... or at least that understanding is 80 years out of date.
2012 Red Bull Indianapolis GP
Interchange goes to Visa, MasterCard, et al not the issuing bank. This is their vig.
I've never heard of ActivityStrea.ms, and their website is sufficiently obtuse that I still can't tell what it is. Can you enlighten me? Are you saying that app.net will support some kind of federation, maybe, hopefully?
I find it ironic that the company that's created Bootstrap - an entire toolkit encouraging developers to adopt their site's visual style - is so opposed to any other aspect of following their lead.
>Their client is their main product

Is it? Their revenue stream will be coming from paid tweets, so aren't the tweets themselves their main product?

It seems grossly unfair that they punish other 3rd party clients who are doing exactly what Tweetie were doing 2 years ago.
Sure, that's a difference, but a rather incremental difference IMHO. Not nearly as big a difference as federation and open source, which is what we really need to break out of the walled gardens.
This is actually not true. There's one pop-up at the top of the page, and you can still read without closing it or clicking on it.
If app.net gets the userbase, i.e. the people I want to follow, i will be over there in a flash.
It's not really a bind. They could just as easily say "Sorry, Sweden, he made it to neutral ground" as "we're going to violate the Vienna Convention". At this stage it's all politics; if the UK is threatening to do this, then it's getting something out of the deal.
I'm working on an "SMTP for payments" protocol. I'd like to turn it into an RFC someday, after some problems are solved.
Help menu -> XCode User Guide ?

You can also get it all offline by going to Preferences -> Downloads, clicking the Documentation tab and selecting what you want installed e.g. iOS 6.0 Library.
She goes to a shelter for battered women and complains that they don't like the men who battered them, and maybe don't want to risk being battered again-- she calls this extremism. I call it once burned.

Burning Ken Dolls in front of a camera is not journalism.
This doesn't surprise me at all. When you develop on someone else's platform, you have to walk a fine line between not being successful at all and being too successful such that the platform provider co-opts your business (maybe you get lucky and get bought out). This is nothing new. Such moves as this were (IMHO) inevitable. They'll slowly chip away at anything they see as taking revenue from them.

The part I disagree with is that this will doom Twitter. It will not. They've already achieved a certain level of success. Most people use and will continue to use the Website or the official client and be happy with that.

I do believe that Twitter is doomed to be acquired however. Apple seems the likely frontrunner for this but I think Twitter needs Apple more than Apple needs Twitter at this point.

Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at best. There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.

There are many reasons I'm glad about Facebook's floundering market debut. This is one of them: it's taking the wind out of the sails of the social hype (IMHO).
Yeah. It's really just a kind of a protocol. A game with quirky rules, but which we kind of have to play anyway.
Agreed! No real point throwing out random estimations instead of actually sitting down and writing the code
If so, he didn't express it that way. It just sounds like an unnecessary sideswipe.

Anyway, I think the matrix does make it more clear than just saying "we don't want 3rd party twitter clients...and some other stuff".
So is following around the UPS truck pretending to be doing door-to-door sales.
$GOPATH is like $PATH in that it is a list of colon delimited directories, so it more like ${ANYNUMBEROFPLACES}/src/packages
Parallelism For The Win! How Golang kicks Ruby in a real life usage.
True. Coding and coders are ever-lasting.
Took me a while for the actual thing-that-makes-us-look-bad to snap into focus here. Initially I thought it was having banks of monitors around the place full of "We are so awesome". Turns out the hagiography was in the wrong font.
The cost of those hard deadlines is often extra bugs that delay the actual launch date. But they make everybody feel like they're doing some serious management. ;)
Connecting The Dots: Mergers Of Early-Stage Startups
When is demo day?
Sorry again, but you're really not getting this. Under your analysis, how is one to determine if a "rape" took place or not?
On the say-so of the woman/women?
On Julian's say-so?
No, of course not. It'll (hopefully) be on a JURY'S say-so!
Therefore ALL YOU HAVE is whatever evidence you have, which in this case comes down to BEHAVIOUR and CREDIBILITY and whoever's story a jury feels more inclined to believe on the day of reckoning AFTER such evidence has been presented!
If you disagree with this, please let me know how any jury would otherwise reach their decision. I can't wait to hear it!
Your flippant rudeness is inappropriate. Sweden has an established history of extraditing on behalf of the US in various illegal fashions. Here is one example: http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-b...

Sweden has been breaking international law for some time now, at the USA's behest. As the UN panel noted there is no reason to think Sweden might uphold their own diplomatic assurances as they have been caught violating them repeatedly.
Pretty neat! Looks amateurish but a good platform to start off on
It's interesting that ParcelMotel's site blocks all crawlers, including Google. Do they rely on a very strong offline presence and have no need for organic online marketing?

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
But even if they felt they could, they wouldn't really have much to say about your shortcomings, because... they're not you. They don't know anything about what makes you tick, or the path you took to get to where you are now. And they certainly don't know where you'll be in 10 or 15 years, regardless of their current impression of you (+ or -).

All they have is this fleeting impression of how you "performed" in this one weird, pretentious moment. Which doesn't have much to do with anything, really.
Looks awesome! Good stuff!
So, should BufferBox pay 7-Eleven, or should the money transfer in the other direction? On one hand, the BufferBox takes up valuable floorspace, especially in the urban markets most likely to be BufferBox's bread and butter. On the other hand, effectively guaranteeing 20+ people walking through the front doors of a store every day certainly has value. What percentage of people receiving packages will realize while walking past the refrigerator case that they have no beer in their fridge?
Agreed! Way too overused!
Sooooooooo you're re-making the ipad?
I keep seeing people who reflexively refuse to entertain the notion that Assange could be guilty. The other beauty if you want to call it that, of rape as an accusation is that it's so easy to brand the woman as a liar and a slut. Especially to the people who matter-- other men.

I do not know why it's so hard to believe that a driven, virile man who is gathering the reins of power into his hands for the GOOD OF MANKIND must be pure of heart and soul. My experience with suchlike is that they are bullies at heart. We hope they will be bullies on the side of light and goodness, but-- maybe not in every part of their lives.

People who KNOW WHAT IS GOOD FOR MANKIND often KNOW WHAT IS GOOD IN BED too, and go for it regardless.
The UK does not, but Sweden has violated said treaties. Here is an article on the subject, where several men were extradited from Sweden at the USA's behest, to Egypt where they were tortured: http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-b...

As the UN panel notes this is in violation of the very treaty you cite. This is precisely the fear and it is clear the fear is reasonable and well founded in fact. The UN findings are unequivocal.
Comments using the phrase "using the phrase" considered as harmful as comments using the phrase "considered harmful." :)
I would tend to think of the whole thing as a service (e.g. "Twitter" - all of its apps, data, brand, users, infrastructure), versus individual apps (e.g. "TweetDeck") being "products".
When you see the same startup over and over again, it does raise an eyebrow as well.
Interesting point about being acquired.

Do you think perhaps restricting 3rd party clients is a way to make them more appealing to a potential buyer like Apple?
Pretty sure the list of companies that have made billions charging users is nonzero.

Text messaging has certainly been driven by user fees. If you look at the tv market it's moved from primarily ad driven to primarily fee driven.
Twitter's developer problem is probably at about level 9 right now. My question is what's really the big deal. Twitter can do what they want and really more to the point, I don't think Twitter should be the primary focus of innovation from our community. It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char messages. I get it it, it's amazing ... but come on, we can get past Twitter.
I wonder if "antitrust" and "monopoly" talk are HN forms of Godwin's Law.

Before Twitter would be remotely concerned about antitrust, there would have to not be a place with more users that you can talk about your cat's lunch to your heart's content. Facebook has more to fear than Twitter does.
And of course there is still the arc forum...

http://arclanguage.org/forum
You are either lazy or deliberately obtuse.
Here's the letter. Pretty unambiguous effort at intimidation. A monumental FAIL for that matter as well.
http://www.twincities.com/allheadlines/ci_21326040/letter-uk...
> Do you really know what Philosophy is?

Yes, I do -- it's an area of human thought where you can say absolutely anything, and coming to a testable conclusion is regarded as extremely bad form.

Scientists focus on what and how, and sometimes arrive at a conclusion. Philosophers focus on why, and never arrive at a conclusion. Both are doing exactly what they were trained to do.

If you think my outlook on philosophers and philosophy is bleak, you should read Richard Feynman's:

http://physicshead.blogspot.com/2008/03/feynman-philosophy-i...
Of all the social media and web services that have cropped up in the last 5 years, Twitter was the one that really filled me with joy. It's so simple! It's just plain text in bite sized pieces at a time. And it's universal! It works just as well on state of the art hardware as it does on a crappy SMS dumbphone or green-screen serial terminal. And it's as compelling in Egypt or Pakistan as it is in New York or London.

Whenever I get fed up with the complextiy of Facebook or Google+ I'll load up Twitter on an old Apple II, via TTYtter and a serial connection; I'll watch the green text scroll along at 1200 baud and think about how this one simple, geeky text service, pure as a 1980s BBS, somehow made it, worldwide, in 2012.

And now they're hellbent on ruining all of that. Fuck Twitter.
He still has access to the Internet with his phone and nearby wi-fi networks. It's not like he suddenly became Amish.
That is a great idea--it's funny because I was thinking along similar lines where bitcoin has the blockchain and maybe a similar scheme could be used to have a central, p2p verified stream/history of tweets.

I was thinking the downside would be that the blockchain would end up being HUGE if it got even 5% of the traffic that twitter sees every day. That said, maybe you could get around it by breaking the chain into randomly distributed sub-segments or something like that. Maybe I'm overestimating the storage requirements and it wouldn't be so different than what bitcoin has to deal with already. And ah yes, the miners... Not as much motivation for miners to verify transactions (or posts or whatever) with a service like that, and kind of a pita for the users if they have to pay something for each tweet... then again, would probably cut down on twitter bots/spam...

It seems to me that a project like that would be really difficult as Twitter has had enough problems scaling an infrastructure they control 100%. But yeah, I think there's a lot that could be learned from bitcoin to do something like that.
"Objectivism is objectively the greatest system of Philosophy ever put together up until now."

I wish this post spent less time concentrating on revealed truths, and instead supported assertions like this one with reason and argument.
Nice. It's great to see how quickly an app.net development community has come today. I think it says a lot about the potential of the service.
Do you remember the heat debian used to get because of the installer?

I rejected debian a number of times early on because of d-i. Just like the parent I did slack->redhat->debian and it was a friend in college that helped me get over my debian installer phobia. After that I have not looked back.

I will admit I flirted with Ubuntu once or thrice but I never found any compelling reason to switch and I was never been able to get used to the minor modifications that they make to Debian. Do not read that as a knock on Ubuntu. I think Ubuntu is a great distribution for casual linux users. Ubuntu (and canonical) has done a lot for the adoption of linux in general.
What is the argument you're making? Any public figure cannot by definition commit a rape?
The whole point with app.net is that this doesn't happens. They don't mind that you use the data any way because you're paying for the platform, not the client.
Ah, appears we're both correct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walled_garden_(technology)

"... refers to a carrier or service provider's control over applications, content, and media on platforms..."

"More generally ... refers to a closed or exclusive set of information services provided for users"