skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>An hour at the helpdesk can help you discover great product ideas, feedback and suggestions - a gold mine when you're chasing product-market fit.

An hour with your front line support --or bothering to read through or even solicit their thoughts-- can do just as much for you, multiplied by however many support members you have. If anyone knows the flaws of your product, it's the guys and gals on the front lines that have to make excuses for it every day.

>A support rep can only go so far. Support agents often don't have the visibility in an organization to go back and fix bigger process problems. Only you can.

Speaking as someone who has done support before, and will likely continue to do so in the future in one way or another: you've got this all backwards. If anyone knows how screwed up a process is in your organization, or how broken your product is, it's the poor saps like us that are tasked with carrying those processes out and supporting those crappy products. Support agents don't lack "visibility." They lack authority and autonomy to handle issues on their own without fear of reprisal for not using the proper openers and closers and not keeping all calls under 12 minutes so they hit that magic 5 calls and 10 chats an hour marker. For all the talk of "horizontal" and "flat" organizations, most support shops have a very clearly defined hierarchy and strict control over lateral movement that blows up the very "gold mine" you're chasing after.

>When employees see their CEO on Support, they realize it's absolutely essential for them to go above and beyond call of duty to make sure their customers are more than just satisfied.

If you want "above and beyond," be prepared to compensate for it: more-than-COL raises, PTO, TOIL, year-end bonuses, above-average salaries/wages. You're the CEO. You'll go above and beyond because at the end of the day your compensation is tied directly to how well the business does financially. Front line support? We get paid the same amount no matter how easy or rough the day was, no matter how "above and beyond" we went. If anything, going "above and beyond" just means "this call will take me an hour," which means "my metrics are totally fucked for the rest of the day and possibly the week." And that could mean losing your job. Or it could just be justification for denying a raise or promotion.

===================================

Overall, I don't think you'll really get the experience you're looking for as a CEO. Unless you insist that your support manager treat you like any other front-line support tech, with all of the same metrics, and expectations, and "rough" customers, and "in-house" problems, and hours, and compensation, and fear of reprisal, you're going to miss things by simple virtue of the fact that what you're experiencing simply isn't what actually occurs on a day-to-day basis.
Marijuana is great if you are going to do some UI stuff and gonna work on light topics on the Front-End. The output will be more aesthetic and more artsy.

But hey! Let's don't fool ourselves here. If you are going to implement some back-end stuff and business functionality - don't code high. Thinking about abstraction levels, algorithms, core functionality, in some point you will absolutely feel like there is some sort of barrier in your brain avoiding you to think 'further'. This causes a distraction and you will have to start thinking from scratch again.

About other natural stuff like shrooms (and partially LSD) - if you get your good mind after having the first intense kick, your brain might become crystal clear and you can be absolutely productive. Coke might also work, but that's too expensive. Stay away from the rest.

Steve Jobs was on LSD when he was inventing Apple in his Garage.
Sounds neat. How do you figure out the dependencies? I have to imagine this works for a limited set of languages. Was there any language that was preposterously hard to support?
I am just about to begin work at a new company that's looking to leverage node.js to develop a fairly robust REST API that should be able to support a lot on concurrent clients. I've been looking for an opportunity to learn Go.

Would it be worth investigating building it in Go rather than node?
The last paragraph of this review is in poor taste. The most cursory research into the author's "CryptoBox" shows that indeed this project is inspired by NaCL.
Dragdis 3 minute pitch. Feedback needed
Remember AirBnB is global. Even if we said where it is against the current law it should be stopped there are plenty of places without zoning rules or even say prohibitions due to the rules of the building.

It seems to me there are reasonable community reasons to have constraints and there are reasonable reasons to allow owners and travelers to benefit by coming to terms. It seems to me then there are reasonable reasons to figure out sensible guidelines - even where no rules (or practically none) are in place today. Then laws and regulations (and building rules) can be changed to adapt to these new opportunities and risks.

AirBnB (understandably) wants more latitude than I think they should be given. But I also think it is an opportunity for benefit to society and I don't think just saying there are risks we shouldn't adapt is a great idea.
> The purpose of a brain is to control homeostasis, motor, and perception functionality.

The fact you wrote this sentence, let me assume your prefrontal cortex has actually some more abilities :)
So he went from one language to another language instead of a framework... Ok. I went from C++ to a C# instead of buying a kilo of bananas. Those are just different things.

I expected to see something like "I looked at my specific class of problems and it is not the kind of problems where Node.js gives a distinctive advantage to justify dealing with a flawed language, so I decided to pick a framework around a modern well-designed language, so that framework is..."
"Don't try this at home" is good practical advice for building real systems that have real users. It's terrible pedagogy, though. You have to learn somehow, and trying it at home is actually how you do that.
Graphs are a poor visual representation for a lot of data sets. In cases where they provide significant benefits (think maps, dependency structures, routing), graph layouts are hard problems.

Generic algorithms are great for large networks but computationally intensive. Small network diagrams with an explicit message often have to be manually curated to make sense.

That said, this is a great library, especially since it works so well in the browser. I'm looking forward to future development.
How to apply and do you offer relocation?
Thanks
http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/5/5177584/google-glass-swap-...

Seems you're right. It doesn't look like there was many changes so it just flew under my radar.
PS3 is correct. That was a particularly amusing episode, well worth looking up the full story.
The article mentioned both -x and -v, didn't it? ;)
Given how often democracy is raved about in the US, you'd expect this to be taken seriously. Of course, the "raving" is really polispeak used to manipulate the electorate.

I'm such a cynic.
> in germany filling taxes took me about 5min..

I assume that what you meant by that is merely doing what is required for your employer to withhold taxes from your salary.

The (for most employees optional) Einkommensteuererklärung might be doable in 5 minutes if you know it like the back of your hand, have all necessary data immediately available and no special cases apply to you at all.

Otherwise, if you use the Germany equivalent of TurboTax, merely reading and answering "no" to all the questions that determine whether any special cases apply to you would take longer than 5 minutes.
wow, I actually love it. how can I go about getting a fork of this?
At least I got an impression that Tptacek's most points are easily accountable so lets wait for Practical Cryptography With Go, 2nd Ed. :)
First off, I mentioned a basic income (not by name, but implied by verbiage). Second The point of companies returning monies to share holders, is to simplify tax/business structures. The income given to shareholders as profit is then taxed at 50%.. not favoring anyone.. it's a straight across the board flat tax + basic income for every adult.

I'm in favor of a much simplified structure, applied evenly, as fairly as possible, and much smaller government needed to operate it. A lot of spending comes down to complicated bureaucracies, reducing those is a big step. Another benefit of a basic income, is it would allow the revocation of a lot of welfare and stimulus programs, and their own layers of corruption and bureaucracy.

I'm also in favor of cutting the overall defense and operations budgets by at least 2/3 ... There's a lot of ways the federal government could be much more effective, and reduce expenditures at the same time.

And although I don't know how much I feel it is the government's place, a baseline healthcare system could even be funded in a much better way than Obamacare. I tend to lean libertarian, but I'm a pragmatist. I just want solutions that are responsible, and have a chance at making things better, while avoiding as much chance for corruption and bureaucracy as possible. Not to mention reducing the footprint of the federal government, and reducing the impact of corporate protectionism along the way.
Just as the ever-increasing low cost accessibility of technology has made YC possible in that you can give someone just a little bit of money to build something, self-funded startups are also becoming possible for more and more things. Here are some resources:

http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/

https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23microconf - lots of information on the recently concluded MicroConf with patio11 and many others from HN.

http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/

And Rob's book, which is a great starting point: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/...

Granted, bootstrapping is not viable for some things, but for many others, it's a good path.
On the consulting world I work on, there is only space for polyglots.

The customers dictate the technology stack and we are expect to be able to dive in, learn what is missing from our side and start developing.
Ask yourself this: why is removing the GIL a very low priority for the Python community? Or why has the GIL not slowed the adoption of Python, esp. in financial services?
If Intuit can do it for 1/1000th of the cost, they could bid for the contracts at extortionate markups to cover their lost future revenue and still likely win them. Especially given that they apparently know the lobbying game quite well.
I totally agree with this!
Only if you stick to the language grammar, instead of the mathematical concepts, eg Lambda calculus, Logic, ...
True.. but in capitalism, if you earned something, it's yours... if you make two sandwiches for your son, does that mean you have to give one to the community? Why does the same apply to money?

I understand that taxation is necessary. I also understand that people like to keep what they earn. I draw this line at half... and I would draw that same line for the wealthiest (who bend current tax law to pay far less than half) to the poorest, who would recieve a basic income (along with everyone else) to subset the half that they earn and get to keep.
Swedish politicians compete in StarCraft 2 tournament ahead of election
Then let them.. and that becomes public record, and a non-living entity isn't directly affecting political sway.
The repo is hosted here:
https://github.com/lollipierre/react-bullet-app

Feel free to tweak as you wish :)
Can I talk to that William fellow? He was so helpful [1].

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/11/23/99270...
If you hire the right people, empower and listen to them they will be the source of feedback you speak about. The problem there seems to have been someone not humble enough to listen to anyone. There's nothing magical about a cofounder. Imagine two guys like your PhD.

One of the toughest things to do as an entrepreneur is to let go. It's all too easy to want to own every corner of your business and micromanage it all. And that's the easiest way to torpedo a business. Your job as a founder is to eventually surround yourself with people smarter and more tuned-in than you and hand them control of different aspects of the business. People care and fight for their beliefs when they feel responsible for something. If an entrepreneur creates an "It's my business; My decisions" atmosphere you'll get the kinds of reponses you quoted and nobody will care enough to offer constructive feedback.

Companies can be launched and taken to "flight altitude" by experienced solo founders. They generally cannot survive if said founder does not divest responsibility to build a fully functioning organization with smart and dedicated people.

It's not easy.
New Twitter photo collages are great for brands Here is how?
Because I didn't want to be playing games, games are addictive, and I'm pleased I was able to control the temptation and focus on the things more aligned with my goals.
Exactly. It's easy to tout this CEO on support as new age profundity but it has no basis except in dinky startup a where the CEO is most likely doing a lot of other tasks because the funds are tight or employees few. In a reasonable company, not a little hipster startup, the CEO is not going to waste time on tech support calls when they can survey their tech support workers and see an overview.

Look tech world, it's a sorry thing but a startup is just a 'small business.'
Why not just Java with an JAX-RS-based REST framework, such as Jersey or RESTEasy? Maybe it's boring, but it is proven technology, the JVM scales very well. You can develop on OS X and deploy on Linux without recompiles. Added to that, Java has an enormous ecosystem, including good IDEs (such as IntelliJ) and libraries.
Now? They are time travelling, I want a comparison yesterday.
Thanks! Now how about some more highly technical jacquesm classics? :)

Not sure I'm getting you about the caveat, unless you mean that we shouldn't penalize any threads. If we didn't do that, the front page would be overrun with low-quality controversies and shouting matches: in davidw's words, "articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive or interesting discussions". [1]

So there's editorial judgment involved. There always has been. HN has always been a blend of voting and curation.

What I'm saying above is that we exercise that editorial judgment less, not more, when YC-startup-related controversies crop up—precisely because we don't want to be accused of censorship for venal purposes. Of course people accuse us of precisely that anyway, but that goes with the territory. I don't expect not to get acccused; I do want to be able to reply in good conscience.

Two more caveats for you. I'm not saying there aren't unconscious biases—that would be foolish—just that we consciously try hard to guard against them. I'm also not saying that every bad story about YC gets a free pass to the front page. The bar may be lower, but it still exists. When articles come up that are just plain terrible, we don't, in Mrs. Thatcher's immortal words, go wobbly.

The "Drop Dropbox" story you cite is an example of all this. I initially penalized it. Why? Because it's a classic specimen of the riler-uppers davidw was talking about. The penalty made it go from #1 to the lower part of the front page. However, I forgot that Dropbox was a YC company (perhaps they're so big that I don't think of them as a startup any more). When someone reminded me of that, my first thought was that we needed to lighten the penalty and I immediately went and did so. That made the post go to #9. From then on, we didn't touch it at all [2]. The reason it fell from there was because, as incredibly many votes as it got, it got even more incredibly many flags. I just wrote some code to scan the last million posts to HN and sort them by flaggedness. That post is the most flagged by far; it has 3x as many flags as the next. (In the same data set, it is the third most upvoted story and has 11% more votes than the next.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495446

[2] Actually, we did. A moderator fat-finger later that evening caused several things to happen, one of which was killing that story. I saw that in the logs and immediately reversed it, along with all the other effects of the fat-finger. I think the story was in that killed state for a couple hours. And now you have a complete dump of my memory about "Drop Dropbox". For the love of God or at least Mrs. Thatcher, please, no more "examples" tonight!

(Also, once Kevin's mobile-friendly markup is out, there should be no more moderator fat-fingers.)

Edit the morning after: I hasten to add that my Thatcher references were merely an attempt at a joke, not an oblique political statement.
I mostly agree, however I find moving house is a complete PITA, and I'm fairly young. For someone in their later years, the stress, their physical limitations etc make it very difficult. I don't think its possible to over estimate the difficulty an elderly person could face when forced to move.
King teams up with Tencent to bring Candy Crush Saga to China this summer
A custom quote written in the milky way
For me it's obvious that rejections are often born out of a very high bar, limited capacity to take on startups and the limitations of human foresight.

It would be one of the more difficult tasks for me to imagine ever being upset at YC for a rejection (Got my 4th tonight, no stranger to it). If this was your first or second, don't worry , it gets better.

I can honestly say I've never felt closer to success and making progress than I do as I, every six months, write up a summary of where I'm at, where I'm going and then compare it with the previous series of rejected applications. Heck next time I could see myself easily with an actual website and customer base, or, if I get lucky, with a co-founder - how novel would that be?

So grow, YC, do it in a way where you don't loose your soul. And hey, if I never get in...well I'm in enough...

I'll make it. That's one of the best feelings. I know that it may look nothing like I presently imagine, but I'll make it. That's the beauty of malleable but relentless dreaming.

Now someone call Hollywood, er Kickstarter, I've got a killer idea for a film about two co-founders in the valley, 'Dotcom Quixote de la Big Chanca' and 'Sancho "the Ramen" Panza' as they go tilting at Heroku Dynos and courting Aldonza Horowitz aka "Andreesenea".

:)
You seem to be confusing "solo founder" with "single person company". A solo founder can go and hire ten people, build an amazing team and knock it out of the park. A "single person company" is severely bandwidth limited across all required disciplines. That's the case of your music example.
http://vimeo.com/18274128#t=28m28s
Pass me a bucket. Fund or don't fund. You didn't pick the companies you didn't pick for a reason. Don't be warm and fuzzy about it. Having a Kumbaya moment is just patronising -- and I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but that's how at least one person perceives it.
File system paths may belong in the shell, but what about paths with spaces?

To be honest, I trust myself more manipulating paths in a language like Python than to put all quotes in the correct places in Bash :(
can someone explain this?

* This book, I am not making this up, contains the string: "“We can use ASN.1 to make the format easier to parse".

Last time I had something to do with ASN.1 was years ago but it seemed to work well, libraries were full featured and cross-language interop was ok. What am I missing that makes ASN.1 bad ?

Or is the critique to an attempt to write a custom ASN.1 serializer/parser?
Hemingway app judges writing–badly « Why Evolution Is True
You've got a point about VCs. (Hollywood works in the exact same way) Some industries act like a high school hive-mind popularity contest that runs on social proof over logic. Perhaps it works better for them to think emotionally like customers and users do. However, I've gotten 3 job offers when I posted my failures on HN. I've gotten no job offers when I posted my successes. Overall as hackers/entreps we understand that "failure = successful trying" so sharing failures on HN has it benefit.
Right now nodes do not accept double spending transactions, no matter how much they pay in mining fees. This makes simple security promise for 0-conf transactions: the most relayed version is the one that most probably will be included in the block. So merchants can accept such transactions because they know that reversing it would cost much more than 100% of the transaction value.

If enough nodes on the network replace transactions when the mining fee is, say, 10% higher than the previous version (or 10% of the total amount, or whatever), then for the user it is much cheaper to “take money back”. You will send $5 for your coffee and get back $4 with no sweat. Merchant will lose all $5. You can say goodbye to 0-confirmation transactions.

So what do we have:

1) Users get some sort of “undo” function which is nobody was asking for. In my view, if there’s a problem with accidental button clicking in the UI, it’s simpler to fix right there, not by changing the entire network.

2) No one can rely on 0-confirmation transactions anymore. Even today they are not safe, but for small purchases the risks are pretty low, so they work for many people to everyone’s satisfaction. But with network-wide “replace with higher-fee transaction” the risk will go up significantly to make this feature unusable.

However, in the long run, 0-conf transactions won’t be the future of instant micropayments (we’ll have some sort of distributed clearing network instead), so we might not care that much. But the value of “undo” is still very questionable to throw away usefulness of 0-conf transactions today.

Final note: Bitundo can’t be useful when it’s small. It’s either working more than 90% of the time for legitimate “undos” (which makes 0-conf txs useless) or it’s used marginally only by those who wish to rob merchants who accept 0-conf transactions. In which case they still may render 0-conf transactions useless.
A link on HN about improving bash and it wasn't instructions on how to install zsh. I'm pleasantly surprised :)
This is the best feedback the author could receive: a violent but objective review of every weak spot. Well done.
Get a picture of a starry sky with an arc of milky way, an a quote written with stars
I can't say I expected it to look like that.
Filename completion on remote systems using ssh/scp. It is a fairly common situation for me, although I wouldn’t say it takes 20s. Maybe 2-5s?
"It leaves me feeling down for many days after our application process." Nothing about this statement suggests he feels empathy for the people he rejects; much more, he feels bad for himself because he had to make a decision that makes him feel bad. Play the world's smallest violin.
My entrepreneurial experience so far has been about making a lot of mistakes and learning from them.

I think for a lot (but not all) of issues in startups and in life, "not being good enough" or "not smart enough" really just means "not having enough exposure or practice". Based on this view, constructive, specific feedback goes a long way in helping dedicated founders improve so that they too, can add value to society via their startup.

I realize it is unfair to expect this from YC, considering they also have finite bandwidth. I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable fee for this type of feedback from YC and I suspect a lot of founders wouldn't either.
An "inexperienced practitioner of cryptography" should not be writing a book about cryptography. It's great that such a person is learning, but you shouldn't be trying to pass on such information at that stage.

(I don't know the author either)