skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a risk evaluation failure.

When you join a startup, when you think of startup statistics, you should think that the company you're joining has a 90% chance of failing and returning less than $0 (ergo wasting your time in addition to a lack of financial return). With this in mind, joining a startup is not for the faint of heart, and it's also not for those who exemplify hubris.

YCombinator is signal. Investing is signal. Intelligent cofounders are signal. They are not surefire guarantees of a great return on investment. Nothing really ever guarantees a return on investment.

It seems like basic vetting of a startup just didn't happen. Everyone has a linkedin, is it too much to ask that you do some googling to figure out the accomplishments of the people you're about to invest 10 years with? Yes, when you join a startup you should imagine what doing 10 years with that company could be like. If you can't see yourself there in 2 years, don't even bother (90th percentile advice).

Look. I'm all about Venture Capitalism, but you have to ask yourself. If there's no possible way that this business could do what they're trying to do without VC money and they're still on a seed stage, what is your risk? I would argue that your risk is almost incalculable (which is also true of your reward). When you trade security for potential, you can gain or lose liability in exchange for risk. Joining a YC startup is only marginally less likely to fail than joining a regular startup.

In short, every startup is a huge gamble and you have to play the game with that in mind. Your experience at a YC startup is no different than countless friends I've had over the years. Go and talk to anyone who has lived in the Valley for more than 10 years, we all know people exactly like you.

What happens from here on in matters greatly. Will you let the experience cannibalize your ambition or reinforce your drive? You don't need to join a startup to change the world, and you shouldn't let a failure like this destroy your dreams. If anything you've learned a ton of what not to do next time.

In short, be brave, be foolish and do. I applaud the writeup and hope that it becomes fuel for future endeavor.
There are definitely times when you need to make choices; you have a finite amount of time and energy and you can't put all of it into customer service. I too would suggest that spending all your time providing perfect customer service to a few customers is probably misplaced effort.

You can always make sure that all your interactions are as pleasant as possible. That will cost you very little time and will leave a lasting impression.

Today I had my first (and hopefully only) encounter with Dreamhost customer support. I was trialling a setup for a client who was looking to host 3 sites with them. By no means a big account, maybe not worth their time. Because of the way I was treated I will have nothing further to do with them as a company if I can possibly help it. I will never use them myself and I will never recommend that my clients do either. Had they taken the time to offer me courteous support I could have gone away happy and the entire process could have been completed faster. Sometimes you don't even need to be nice, you just need to show some manners.
CY.B.ORG
However, Pidgin “would encourage integration with keyrings” [0]. At least on OS X Chrome uses the integrated keychain and as Elusive mentioned [1] it apparently does encrypt passwords on Windows too.

So, I think Pidgin’s situation is a bit different and if they would have keychain integration they may solve this differently than Chrome does right now.

[0]: https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords#Isthatth...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6168039
we must apply these to memes IMMEDIATELY!
Prison isn't awesome, but you can still study all sorts of things, expand your mind, and you get out at the end. I don't really see why 28 years in the pen "might as well be dead".
How to Guide on Podcasting
How is Bitcoin a bad idea, and how do we not know what we are doing?
Beginnings of a Traveling Entrepreneur
Thanks, but can you clarify... does that mean probing (a..z)×(a..z) (one pair per probe), so there's at least a giant increase in probing required per character? And perhaps even more each character in, since probing for the Nth character now requires (a..z)^(N-1) × (a..z)×(a..z) ?

(I'm guessing also, though, it may be possible to probabilistically probe multiple ranges of the secret at once... in a process that seems vaguely similar to forward-error-correction coding.)
> Really, I can own this?

> Yes, whether you are an individual with an idea to share, a small club organizing and motivating your members, or a large company conducting educational campaigns, these 1 or 2 character .ORG domain names will provide instant recognition - not to mention a short, easy-to-remember address to any mission.

The way they put it makes it sound like the best pitch wins, not necessarily the deepest pockets.

Edit: Just click/visit any of the domains to see this message.
Ask HN: Creatives, describe your perception of the Engineer personality
I'm currently writing a book dealing with the workplace turmoil of engineers working with visionaries/creatives.<p>As a front-end engineer working at a creative agency, I am in constant contact with the personality differences, but I would like to gauge the temperature of other creatives to solidify my perceptions.<p>This is in <i>no way meant to stereotype engineers,</i> but instead to identify commonly perceived personality traits, particularly from the perspective of the creative.
"The numbers that were shared were not entirely true. It was kind of half-truth and part of the marketing pitch to VCs."

Do you consider that a due diligence failure on the employee's part or a misunderstanding regarding the general nature of numbers?
...Better get to work then!
A friend evaluated these folks about 4 months ago and concluded there was too much hype.

Since none of this has happened, this is a pattern of not following through.

You be the judge.
"I'd say all of them got a slap on the wrist."

The two judges are in their 60s. They'll probably die in prison. I'm satisfied with that.

The other two fuckers, yeah.
They also sell it as a powder that's $10.25 per 2,000 calories. Soylent is currently pre-selling for $9.29 per "day".

http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Nutrition-Powder-Vanilla-Flavor...
If the site or domain is compromised, wouldn't a mildly competent attacker change the hashes also?
And that's why it's all the more important that Tor ships only very-secure-by-default software, including disabling javascript by default, even when that will confuse some new users.

I believe this issue has caused the Tor people to realize this more than ever, and think/hope that some priorities and tools within the project will change as a result.
Biometrics is not fundamentally different from using a password lock, just stronger. It's virtually impossible to break iOS' encryption with today's technology.

Or you know, just don't use a phone... there are plenty of companies offering password management solutions using browser extensions or desktop software.
> I wonder if people would appraise it quite as highly without context

That's a really silly idea. Context is as much a part of art as the actual piece itself.
Maltodextrin has a GI of 85 vs table sugar of 68. Not being sweet doesn't automatically make something healthier.
Good job making an honest and good recommendation sound naive.
What does that have to do with anything? PuTTY is not windows-exclusive.
Why Sony Won’t Become the Next Yahoo
All it takes is for a nutritionist to come in, do something better and open-source. Squish
Libertarian group sues to block Plan Bay Area
At first, I am in disbelief about k.org and b.org - I figured KORG would have acquired the former and some Star Trek fan (or Paramount themselves) would have acquired the latter. But then I realized that the holders of these domains were probably asking too much and while there's no infringing content being hosted, the owners of these marks don't care.

If you're planning on acquiring one of these and hosting anything related to someone else's "IP," be ready for legal harassment.
Markdown version of Seth Godin's ShipIt Journal
This could be a simple passive aggressive annoyance tactic, perhaps by someone you may have spited recently?

Once upon a time I was targeted in the same way, every day I would receive a notice stating that too many attempts were made to login to my account and I would have to reset the password. The frequency of needing to reset my password ramped up to a point where every time I checked my email I would be prompted to reset my facebook password. In the end, their tactics got the best of me, I made a new facebook account, and started adding friends back cautiously. I kept my facebook login email private from that point forward.
Isn't one of the selling points of .NET that any language on the platform has full access to the whole .NET ecosystem?
Eh I'd say its a mixed bag today. I've run into startups that still grind their programmers into pulp trying to crank out product. And I've seen the opposite - where the engineering culture will veto genuinely good business opportunities because they're not up to the engineering challenge.
I like my joke generators like I like my preteen drinking parties, unsupervised.
The apache module to do this is like a screenful of code. Really, mod_perl or mod_python or mod_wsgi can do this with dynamic languages, the code is only loaded once (per child in prefork apache). Your apache config can avoid reading the filesystem all together.

As long as you have a web server that can load modules and be invoked on specific URL requests, you can embed this.
Inside Search: Discover great in-depth articles on Google
"When I hear the word culture, that's when I reach for my revolver." --Hanns Johst

I'm often struggle with the whole notion of "company culture" as well, and I can't help but agree that much of it is bullshit.

I can think of things that are perhaps "software engineering culture" like the public shaming of folks who have broken the build. At one company I worked at you had to wear a stinky old Viking helmet if you were a build breaker, at another you had to buy doughnuts for everyone on the team. There are probably more examples out there.
A font doesn't need to be anything more than a series of bitmaps. And then each character location on the image, ignoring errors, references one of these bitmaps. That's how documents with embedded bitmap fonts generally work.

That mapping isn't a very big thing. Sometimes text-based PDFs don't even have it, and you don't notice unless you try to copy out and get the wrong letters.
T.ORG should go to the Tor Project.
Regarding the grouping behaviour of Windows, I have long been using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker [0]. I believe it works with Windows 8 as well, but I have never used it on 8.

You can configure it in many ways. I have it always show small icons, but you can have it group icons by program and have them auto expand on mouse hover.

[0] http://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker
This reads like a hit piece on "YC Startups". I'm not saying it was intended to be so, but it sounds like one. Why?

1. Where is the evidence that any of this is true?
2. You could have named the company in question and given them a chance to respond..
3. Instead your claim aims to hurt the reputation of hundreds of YC startups.

Of course YC startups could fail, whether in raising money or making something people who want. ANY startup could fail. A YC startup may be less likely to fail, but YC doesn't ensure success .. for that matter neither does being a post series-a (webvan, color labs etc) or even being a public company (zynga for example).
May I ask what similar problem Safari has?

As far as I know, Safari uses OS X’s keychain which means you practically have a master password (very likely your user account password, although you could use a different keychain). If I try to retrieve a password (either through Keychain Access or Safari’s Preferences) I get asked for my “master password”.
> The fact remains that at any given moment, there's a single set of policies that apply universally within society.

Is your issue with universalism, then? That the policies fail to discriminate between different groups for different reasons? Would it be more proper to bring in communitarianism?

> In a system where all social questions are political ones, and all political questions are addressed as universals, there's no alternative to all-encompassing political conflict Every divergence in values or priorities serves as the basis for an all-or-nothing struggle

Except that this has been true for all of history, and it's by systematizing it that we gain some measure of control over it. Instead of conducting warfare every time people disagree, we have means for communicating and compromising as a first resort.

> by some unstated but presumptively singular authority.

You keep straw-manning me by implying that I'm proposing a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy, but you've yet to actually show that I'm doing this. Since I'm trying to argue in good faith, then either your interpretation of my claims are mistaken or my understanding of the consequences is incorrect. I'm willing to cede the latter, but you have to actually demonstrate that incorrectness.

Alternatively, you could make a positive proposition by suggesting an actual system that goes beyond "diffuse power as widely as possible to make sure no one can ever accomplish anything and the status quo never changes".

> It comes from the recognition of the fact that society is the patterns of interaction that exist among individuals who assert their own agency, in pursuit of their own purposes, in undertaking relations with others, and that in doing so, they create a great plurality of autonomous communities and institutions, and maintain the inherent right to define the nature of those communities and institutions without making reference to putative universals promulgated by external third parties.

I absolutely agree. This is exactly what I've been describing. If it were up to me, I'd strike down every single national border. I haven't figured out what to do about land use, but I'm a proponent of Benjamin Barber's federation of cities in the abstract: I simply do not find nations to be a useful social construct. Other people disagree with me.

But here's where we run into a problem. You say "autonomous communities and institutions" and I see a state. That's what a state is. "autonomous" is just another way to say "sovereign". These "putative universals" you refer to aren't "promulgated by external third parties". That's the entire point of a democracy: the universals come from the community expressing itself through a system of law.

They aren't third parties.
Biggest problem with SMS is that it cost and its not cheap at high volumes. Twitter pays a lot money to secure short-codes and delivery of SMS into countries around the world. Slowly they'll phase out the SMS auth and save money.
Tube amps distort in a very gradual way when overdriven. The "fuzz" sound is a more severe form of clipping. This is why transistor-based stomp boxes were sought out; it's actually hard to get a tube amp to clip in this exact way.
Cool idea, I think there is room for innovation in this area. I never noticed from the video, but are these requirements based off your weight or the RDA 150 lbs? I think it would be cool, if you just opened up the site so people can build example meals without having to create an account. This will most likely drive traffic to your site.

Also, having ways to create and see calorie/fat/protein rations per meal would be cool. For example people on the zone diet [1], would have a "40:30:30" ratio of calories obtained daily from carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, respectively.

I think you are onto something with how you group these foods together and show the total value for the entire meal.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_diet
Wow, thanks for the brain dump!

We're an established team/product, so we have an internal wiki, help/support desk, and use PagerDuty. We just want to shift away from only a few people (basically 2) handling DevOps emergencies and spread the experience over more members of our engineering team.

With the "all on call/no schedule" route, have you ever had a scenario where no one acknowledged an issue?
> I realized that the holders of these domains were probably asking too much

Up until now these domains have been reserved and never released for registration.
Infochimps Acquired by CSC
Seems to be a totally incoherent braindump of every populist psuedo-fear, similar to a political stump speech.

The only half-way valid point is on organic greenwashing.
It's two clicks after you install putty.

select Default, go change those two options (recommend the Mensch font, but that's purely personal). Go back to the sessions screen, save this as default.

done. now every session you create will have UTF8 and a decent font by default.

I also suggest you change scroll back to 999 or 9999. And change the color of bold blue to something readable.
Strictly speaking, Twitter does not check what you "have" - it only checks that you "know" the secret key. If I stole your phone, dumped all info there and then returned the phone to you - I still could use the private key to fool Twitter into thinking I'm you, couldn't I?

The key is just harder to steal because it is big and is not sent out. But this doesn't seem to have much to do with phones...
Do you practice your negativity or does it just come naturally? What's wrong with this idea?
Open source, made from whole foods, Soylent Orange:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZ...

I guess I'm going to write up an explanation and justification based on my review of nutrition research at some point. But it's not like it's monetizeable, so I lack motivation.
>A good user experience can be achieved by providing users with an efficient way to understand and fix problems that they encounter.

Agreed.

>De-featuring a product

If I were building a browser today, I wouldn't want the option to be where Mozilla had placed it. I think of this more as a correction than as removing a feature. I don't think we're going to agree on this one, which is fine.

>produces a worse experience for everyone

Not at all. The majority of users do not need this feature, and those that do are likely to be sufficiently experienced to find it anyway.

>Those who _would_ have had a problem they couldn't solve will _still_ ultimately have a bad experience, because it's their own pattern of usage, and not any defect in the software, that's ultimately getting them stuck.

This is debatable. Good UX means preventing these kinds of pitfalls.

>the notes say that it was removed

This is a failure on their part to communicate the move, which sucks. It's also possibly a direct attempt to prevent people from using this feature for whatever reason, which is kind of sleazy.

>and that user-set values will be reset to default, which, IMO, is an unacceptable thing for an update patch to _ever_ do.

I'm pretty sure we're in agreement here. I take no issue with moving the option to about:config. I also wouldn't take issue with it being removed entirely, because add-ons such as NoScript are superior to that feature anyway.
I think Justin's arguments are fair.

The reality is that you're using the browser under a certain user profile. If you want to really separate your data from other users using your computer i would suggest icognito sessions or creating different user profiles. If you share your user profile (active user) you expose all this data (bookmarks, extensions, passwords).

Seems logical to me

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kgrrtil2s7hi43j/Screenshot%202013-...
ThreeNodes.js - vvvv in Javascript
My misunderstanding. Thanks.
At one company I worked at you had to wear a stinky old Viking helmet if you were a build breaker

I guess 'shame' is relative... that would only encourage me to break stuff so I could keep wearing the helmet.
VC-funded startups have exactly the same kind of incentives that result in Big Food not producing healthier products than health-over-maximizing-profits oriented independents.

Sure, they are going to want to differentiate from existing Big Food products (so do new Big Food products), but otherwise, the trust factors are pretty much the same.
It's extremely dependent on the niche you're serving.

Something like a games website will, at best, get around $3 CPM (counting all ad blocks). By contrast, something about cancer or payday loans will probably get $20 CPM or more.

This is further complicated by how you're doing ads, but let's just assume that you're planning to go the Adsense/similar route. (If you were thinking to run your own ads and optimise them yourself, you can make significantly more than the CPMs above, but there's more work and specialised knowledge involved.)

It's perfectly possible to make a very nice income off 50k visits a month, but you have to be in a very competitive niche.

As a rough guideline (and, as you may have guessed, I have recent practical experience in this area), aim for 800,000 visitors a month in a low-CPM niche, or 100,000 a month in a high-CPM one.
IOS 7 Beta 5 Tidbits
yeah, because managing windows is not the problem a window manager would be responsible for... what then? you have a dozen word documents? and a dozen text files? and a dozen images? ... do you keep changing your tools everytime you pass a window number threshold?

just get rid of windows 8. as troll as this comment may sound...
1. Bitcoin has no rigorous security definition.

2. Bitcoin can be "attacked" (for some vague notion of what it means to attack a system that has no security definition) in polynomial time.

3. The economics of Bitcoin are extremely suspect and based on a poorly developed economic model, supported by neither the Austrian school nor by modern monetary theory. This is probably the underlying cause of the lack of a security definition, as the security definition of a digital cash system will almost certainly be driven by the system's economic model.

These issues have been covered ad nauseam by many people, and have been largely dismissed by the Bitcoin community. All the while we have seen increasing amounts of energy sunk into Bitcoin mining, we have seen a major block chain fork that left transactions in question, and we have seen wild fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin currency.
If he serves the full 28 years, he's not likely to survive the sentence.
Apparently yiw can be shortened to yw as well
"During pager hand-off, last week's guy and this week's guy should talk about what happened and if there's anything they should know"

Agreed, we were thinking of doing week long rotations (Tuesday - Tuesday) with a "hand off conversation" happening on Tuesdays.
The defendents appear to be in their 60s.
Offensive jokes occur in real life. The level of censorship should be a tuneable parameter of the NPC in question. Who's going to be able to suspend disbelief when the unsavory thug restricts himself to inoffensive jokes?