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Brain-boosting drugs for healthy people

At a point, this just goes to the competitive nature of our society. From a moral standpoint, if who we are is a product of our environment and our genetics, then we ourselves aren't anything that isn't predefined. Someone who is lazy is a product of their genes and environment in the same way that someone with a disease is the product of their environment and genes. So, what makes asthma (which I have) something that I'm applauded for overcoming with medicine while obesity is something people are generally frowned upon for overcoming with medicine? Well, the fact that we want to ascribe the later as a choice - the choice to eat.Einstein didn't believe in free will. However, he said that holding people responsible for their actions was a pragmatic approach for society to take (presumably because such action changes the environment that we are all in).There are huge struggles because people don't want to accept that they have less free will than they ascribe. As such, the goal is to hold people responsible for faults that you don't have and find excuses that let you off the hook for any faults that you have. There are organizations that create campaigns to get society to accept their fault as something that should be compensated for. Short attention span? That's ok because it's medical. Stupid? Lazy? Those are things that are the fault of the individual.It's really hard. If you can medicalize your faults, you get legal protection for them. If you can't medicalize them, you're personally responsible for keeping them in control. That creates a huge incentive for medicalization of everything in the human condition. And we're all worried about being left behind in this Red Queen's Race.

I find it disturbing that this is even controversial.First, the notion that there is an optimal "healthy" state is make-believe. We all get old and die, so in a sense we are all terminally ill. We should have a right to improve our minds and bodies as long as there is room for improvement.More to the point, brain types fall on a spectrum. ADHD is just one extreme. Equating "median" with "healthy" is a fallacy. Consider this: is synesthesia a disease? It can make life very hard, but it can also make patient extremely creative. Imagine a world where synesthesia is the normal condition -- non-synesthetes would be considered retards!If there were a drug that could turn you into a synesthete, should the drug be illegal?Second, we all already take a brain-boosting drug: caffeine, which is both undeniably effective, and has a wide spectrum of side effects. Other drugs like modafinil have almost zero side-effects in comparison, but they are prescription-only because they don't have a history of social acceptability. "Used historically" = "safe" is an even bigger fallacy.Third, you can't prevent people from taking brain pills by not funding research (if the research doesn't happen in the U.S, it will happen in other countries.). All that this policy will achieve is encourage a black market and unsafe usage.The whole thing reminds me strongly of that Kurt Vonnegut piece posted here yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388642.

Brain-boosting drugs for healthy people

I find it disturbing that this is even controversial.First, the notion that there is an optimal "healthy" state is make-believe. We all get old and die, so in a sense we are all terminally ill. We should have a right to improve our minds and bodies as long as there is room for improvement.More to the point, brain types fall on a spectrum. ADHD is just one extreme. Equating "median" with "healthy" is a fallacy. Consider this: is synesthesia a disease? It can make life very hard, but it can also make patient extremely creative. Imagine a world where synesthesia is the normal condition -- non-synesthetes would be considered retards!If there were a drug that could turn you into a synesthete, should the drug be illegal?Second, we all already take a brain-boosting drug: caffeine, which is both undeniably effective, and has a wide spectrum of side effects. Other drugs like modafinil have almost zero side-effects in comparison, but they are prescription-only because they don't have a history of social acceptability. "Used historically" = "safe" is an even bigger fallacy.Third, you can't prevent people from taking brain pills by not funding research (if the research doesn't happen in the U.S, it will happen in other countries.). All that this policy will achieve is encourage a black market and unsafe usage.The whole thing reminds me strongly of that Kurt Vonnegut piece posted here yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388642.

There could be nasty side-effects twenty years down the road, so I'd rather abstain.It would totally suck to be forced to take those drugs to remain cometitive, so I hope they will keep those drugs in limited circulation until their safety can be proven beyond doubt.

Brain-boosting drugs for healthy people

There could be nasty side-effects twenty years down the road, so I'd rather abstain.It would totally suck to be forced to take those drugs to remain cometitive, so I hope they will keep those drugs in limited circulation until their safety can be proven beyond doubt.

"Steps to keep the benefits from making socio-economic inequalities worse."Not impressed - they would rather everyone be equally "stupid" rather than some people be smarter than others? These drugs do not take away from anyone, they only add.

Brain-boosting drugs for healthy people

"Steps to keep the benefits from making socio-economic inequalities worse."Not impressed - they would rather everyone be equally "stupid" rather than some people be smarter than others? These drugs do not take away from anyone, they only add.

"But she said she was concerned that wider use of stimulants could lead more people to become addicted to them. That's what happened decades ago when they were widely prescribed for a variety of disorders, she said."Whether we like it or not, that property of stimulants is not going to go away," she said."So, substances with a known history of addictive behavior. This is what we call burying the lede (quote from page 3 of the article). As important as the other considerations are that were brought up, this seems to trump them.Do we know how addictive? Addictive like caffeine, or crack, or somewhere in between?

Is HN only about saying nice things about everything?

I can only speak of my own personal approach to commenting. I evaluate my own comments by one metric - whether I think my comment will make HN a smarter, more interesting place. I see HN comments less as a forum for chit-chat and more as a venue for a series of short essays on the topic of the original post. I try to avoid making comments of the sort that are satisfying to post but that I would not be interested in reading. If I don't think I'm being reasonably insightful, I don't bother. For every comment I post, there are usually one or two comments on other items that I decided weren't good enough to post.It seems to me that HN is relatively neutral in terms of your opinion; People here seem to avoid the vice of downvoting based simply on a difference of opinion, at least in my experience. The community generally seems to award karma based on how thoughtful and carefully-constructed your comments are. I have one one occasion been downvoted into oblivion for politely and carefully expressing an opinion that is generally morally unpalatable, but someone came to my defence and I eventually ended up with a small amount of positive karma for the comment.I think the easiest rule of thumb is to try and be the opposite of cable news. The calmer and more dispassionate your tone, the more detailed and precise you are in your reasoning, the more carefully you reference reliable sources, the better your chances of being strongly upvoted.

There's criticism and there's negativity. You seem to be confusing these two things. You can put your point across without snarky comments like:"Vertical list of applications??? Microsoft what have you been smoking?"(As we're quoting rap lyrics today) I think that you'll be doing just fine if you relax a little.

Is HN only about saying nice things about everything?

There's criticism and there's negativity. You seem to be confusing these two things. You can put your point across without snarky comments like:"Vertical list of applications??? Microsoft what have you been smoking?"(As we're quoting rap lyrics today) I think that you'll be doing just fine if you relax a little.

Based on a cursory look at your comments I would guess the problem is not what you say but how.

Is HN only about saying nice things about everything?

Based on a cursory look at your comments I would guess the problem is not what you say but how.

I wrote about this on my own blog, and someone from Hacker News came and posted a highly critical comment about me. They concluded:"The reason you were downvoted and will continue to be downvoted is because you don’t discuss topics with any intellectual integrity."The comment was interesting since it was such a pure, mirror reflection of what the commenter was doing. For instance, they posted anonymously, whereas I always write using my real name, yet they called me a troll. They also accused me of repeating myself, though they had also repeated themselves many times. You can see the comment here:http://www.smashcompany.com/politics/the-stuff-that-gets-dow...As the post indicates, I'm feeling ambivalent about Hacker News right now. Sometimes the conversations are really interesting, but there is also a lot of noise. Sometimes I learn a lot by participating in the conversations, but other times I feel like I'm talking to people who have no interest in understanding what I'm trying to say, and who are willing to use downvoting as a method of shouting me down.I'm ambivalent. I enjoy this forum, but I'm also thinking I should probably invest my energy elsewhere. I've been reading this site for almost 2 years now, and I've learned a great deal, and every day there are interesting new articles posted. All the same, I get bored with conversations where I think the other person isn't really interested in hearing what I might have to say. And no doubt, vice versa, of course - clearly I upset someone, if they were willing to pursue the conversation to my own blog (where I was writing about Hacker News).

Is HN only about saying nice things about everything?

I wrote about this on my own blog, and someone from Hacker News came and posted a highly critical comment about me. They concluded:"The reason you were downvoted and will continue to be downvoted is because you don’t discuss topics with any intellectual integrity."The comment was interesting since it was such a pure, mirror reflection of what the commenter was doing. For instance, they posted anonymously, whereas I always write using my real name, yet they called me a troll. They also accused me of repeating myself, though they had also repeated themselves many times. You can see the comment here:http://www.smashcompany.com/politics/the-stuff-that-gets-dow...As the post indicates, I'm feeling ambivalent about Hacker News right now. Sometimes the conversations are really interesting, but there is also a lot of noise. Sometimes I learn a lot by participating in the conversations, but other times I feel like I'm talking to people who have no interest in understanding what I'm trying to say, and who are willing to use downvoting as a method of shouting me down.I'm ambivalent. I enjoy this forum, but I'm also thinking I should probably invest my energy elsewhere. I've been reading this site for almost 2 years now, and I've learned a great deal, and every day there are interesting new articles posted. All the same, I get bored with conversations where I think the other person isn't really interested in hearing what I might have to say. And no doubt, vice versa, of course - clearly I upset someone, if they were willing to pursue the conversation to my own blog (where I was writing about Hacker News).

Dude, it's karma points on HN. A number on a server somewhere that has no bearing whatsoever on your real life. Have some perspective.

FAA to lift mobile shut-down rule

Good. If they were actually that dangerous, we wouldn't be allowed to carry them on board.Shutting down cell radios makes sense; as I understand it, a bunch of cellphones moving at a couple hundred miles per hour can do some nasty things to cell towers, but it drives me absolutely insane that flight attendants gripe at me about turning off my Kindle. I usually just turn the backlight off.

The thing that gets me about these rules is what an insane threat to national security it would be if they were actually necessary. If anyone really thought that mobile devices could significantly interfere with instruments on an airplane, they should 1) raise hell over fixing our obviously broken planes, and 2) demand that we put some effort into actually making sure that people are turning their cell phones off (for instance, by actually checking, rather than asking politely).

FAA to lift mobile shut-down rule

The thing that gets me about these rules is what an insane threat to national security it would be if they were actually necessary. If anyone really thought that mobile devices could significantly interfere with instruments on an airplane, they should 1) raise hell over fixing our obviously broken planes, and 2) demand that we put some effort into actually making sure that people are turning their cell phones off (for instance, by actually checking, rather than asking politely).

This looks like it will change little. You'll still not be able to listen to music on your device (even if the music is local to the drive) during takeoff and landing.The only change is that you can leave your phone in airplane mode instead of having to power it down.I don't know anybody that actually listened to the flight attendants. Most people just put their phones in airplane mode anyway.So basically nothing actually changes. It would be nice to be able to listen to my music without having to hide my headphones so I don't get yelled at.At least on Virgin they don't bother you because they just assume you're using their entertainment system (which I'd imagine generates more interference then whatever your little device does). I guess on their system you have to watch advertising though - makes it worth it to them.

FAA to lift mobile shut-down rule

This looks like it will change little. You'll still not be able to listen to music on your device (even if the music is local to the drive) during takeoff and landing.The only change is that you can leave your phone in airplane mode instead of having to power it down.I don't know anybody that actually listened to the flight attendants. Most people just put their phones in airplane mode anyway.So basically nothing actually changes. It would be nice to be able to listen to my music without having to hide my headphones so I don't get yelled at.At least on Virgin they don't bother you because they just assume you're using their entertainment system (which I'd imagine generates more interference then whatever your little device does). I guess on their system you have to watch advertising though - makes it worth it to them.

All of these rules usually drive me crazy. I'm a private pilot and I'll take up friends and coworkers for fun all the time. The most common question before we take off is "Do I need to turn off my phone?" which I usually reply with "I leave mine on for backup GPS". I do understand the need to stow away items to prevent injuries if anything were to suddenly happen during takeoff and landing, but telling people to turn off their devices because, and I've heard this before, "they will interfere with the navigation systems" is just false.

FAA to lift mobile shut-down rule

All of these rules usually drive me crazy. I'm a private pilot and I'll take up friends and coworkers for fun all the time. The most common question before we take off is "Do I need to turn off my phone?" which I usually reply with "I leave mine on for backup GPS". I do understand the need to stow away items to prevent injuries if anything were to suddenly happen during takeoff and landing, but telling people to turn off their devices because, and I've heard this before, "they will interfere with the navigation systems" is just false.

I will be beyond happy to be able to listen to my own music, read off my iPad, and just begin the whole process of ignoring the goings-on in the flight. Travel will be so much better without the useless electronics rules.Now to get rid of the TSA...

Ask HN: How does Google and Facebook do friend recommendations?

Can we instead have a discussion about recommendation "engines"? I've been interested in writing one for fun but I have no clue where to start in learning about them. Can someone point me in the right direction, maybe a Coursera/OCW course?

I mistakingly signed up to Facebook with a work email in the past. And noticed many work acquaintances appearing in Facebook's: do you know lists. Which I can only attribute to other people sharing their email address contacts with Facebook, and Facebook holding onto that data.

Ask HN: How does Google and Facebook do friend recommendations?

I mistakingly signed up to Facebook with a work email in the past. And noticed many work acquaintances appearing in Facebook's: do you know lists. Which I can only attribute to other people sharing their email address contacts with Facebook, and Facebook holding onto that data.

I'm always surprised when I see people say stuff like this. For me every recommendation on every social network was more in the line of 'SELECT user FROM users ORDER BY RAND()'.I guess I'm doing something right.

Ask HN: How does Google and Facebook do friend recommendations?

I'm always surprised when I see people say stuff like this. For me every recommendation on every social network was more in the line of 'SELECT user FROM users ORDER BY RAND()'.I guess I'm doing something right.

I would think, similar to Netflix or Spotify, that they would use machine learning algorithms (ensemble technique) to perform collaborative filtering.

Ask HN: How does Google and Facebook do friend recommendations?

I would think, similar to Netflix or Spotify, that they would use machine learning algorithms (ensemble technique) to perform collaborative filtering.

Where did you see the recommendation message? Facebook or Google Plus?

Solved By Flexbox – Cleaner, hack-free CSS

Unfortunately, the Holy Grail layout works like crap in mobile. In the most recent Chrome and Firefox for Android, the pinch-to-zoom gesture either doesn't work at all, or the whole div is resized as an image without text reflow (i.e. cropping text lines to the left and right). Also there seems to be a forced minimum width, under which the web pace can't be made smaller; this is awful for navigating long pages, or when the default font size is too big.Changing the phone orientation does reflow the text, so I assume that the problem is with how these browsers resize the web page under pinch-and-zoom in a way that the CSS doesn't detect. The funny thing is that the same browsers on desktop work like a breeze when resizing text with the wheelmouse, or resizing the window. Why does it not work the same on the phone?The worst thing is that the layout seems to be spreading like fire. I'm forced to read most major modern websites at fixed font size.

I wish there was a JS-shim that could be used to deliver flexbox (or any cutting edge CSS) to older browsers so I could begin implementing it now instead of waiting some unspecified amount of time before it becomes acceptable.

Solved By Flexbox – Cleaner, hack-free CSS

I wish there was a JS-shim that could be used to deliver flexbox (or any cutting edge CSS) to older browsers so I could begin implementing it now instead of waiting some unspecified amount of time before it becomes acceptable.

I'm quite happy with the modern flexbox syntax. I did a lot of work with XUL and xulrunner years ago - it was slick having things automatically flow into place, but the syntax (and syntax of the derivative box-flex CSS properties), but it seemed to require very heavy markup to get things "right".Flexie [1] appears to provide a polyfill version of flexbox. Has anyone used it in a major production site? What was your experience? There were a few polyfill-type projects for the older syntax, but I never got them to work very well for anything but the most basic layouts.[1] http://flexiejs.com/

Solved By Flexbox – Cleaner, hack-free CSS

I'm quite happy with the modern flexbox syntax. I did a lot of work with XUL and xulrunner years ago - it was slick having things automatically flow into place, but the syntax (and syntax of the derivative box-flex CSS properties), but it seemed to require very heavy markup to get things "right".Flexie [1] appears to provide a polyfill version of flexbox. Has anyone used it in a major production site? What was your experience? There were a few polyfill-type projects for the older syntax, but I never got them to work very well for anything but the most basic layouts.[1] http://flexiejs.com/

Flexbox (or something similar) should have been the first thing to go into CSS spec. Colors, fonts, margins and what-not are way less important than the ability to align elements.Alignin things vertically is still brainded, but at least now it's possible. Instead of setting properties for the parent element, we should be able to just say .vertically-and-horizontally-centered {align: center center;} and be done with it.

Solved By Flexbox – Cleaner, hack-free CSS

Flexbox (or something similar) should have been the first thing to go into CSS spec. Colors, fonts, margins and what-not are way less important than the ability to align elements.Alignin things vertically is still brainded, but at least now it's possible. Instead of setting properties for the parent element, we should be able to just say .vertically-and-horizontally-centered {align: center center;} and be done with it.

"Feel free to open an issue or submit pull request on Github."Why does the link to the project on GitHub open in a new browser tab? Is there some reason this behavior is foisted on folks who would rather have the content open in the same tab? (Spoiler alert: I'm one of those folks.)And, now that I take a closer look, it seems that every non-internal link on the page behaves the same way, spawning new tabs willy-nilly.Looks like a useful project. I'm just legitimately curious why people do this.

10k+ API directory

Post and Discussion from earlier today.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6898015

Please add an API!

10k+ API directory

Please add an API!

Great but I think search options could be improved with some categorization, tagging etc.

10k+ API directory

Great but I think search options could be improved with some categorization, tagging etc.

Whoa, was not expecting to see my company on here. Nice! Where do they get their information?http://publicapis.com/api/iactionable-api

10k+ API directory

Whoa, was not expecting to see my company on here. Nice! Where do they get their information?http://publicapis.com/api/iactionable-api

I've been looking for a website that is exactly what this is. Thank you!

Thoughts on Keybase.io

Unfortunately I think this particular review is missing the point of Keybase. In the same vein as attacking Twitter for not making the follow relationship symmetric or attacking Instagram for ruining the dynamic range of pictures, this author is (mostly) attacking Keybase for the very point of what Keybase is.PGP has failed to reach even a moderate userbase outside of crypto enthusiasts, and while part of this, as the author suggests, is painful UI, a large part is also that the web of trust model is unreasonably demanding for most cases.Keybase asks: who are you on the internet if not the sum of your public identities? The fact that those identities all make a certain claim is a proof of trust. In fact, for someone who knows me only online, it's likely the best kind of trust possible. If you meet me in person and I say "I'm sgentle", that's a weaker proof than if I post a comment from this account. Ratchet that up to include my Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, personal website and so forth, and you're looking at a pretty solid claim.And if you're thinking "but A Scary Adversary could compromise all those services and Keybase itself", consider that an adversary with that much power would also probably have the resources to compromise highly-connected nodes in the web of trust, compromise PKS servers, and falsify real-world identity documents.I think absolutism in security is counterproductive. Keybase is definitionally less secure than, say, meeting in person and checking that the person has access to all the accounts you expect, which is itself less secure than all of the above and using several forms of biometric identification to rule out what is known as the Face/Off attack.The fight isn't "people use Keybase" vs "people go to key-signing parties", the fight is "people use Keybase" vs "fuck it crypto is too hard". Those who need the level of security provided by in-person key exchanges still have that option available to them. In fact, it would be nice to see PKS as one of the identity proof backends. But for practical purposes, anything that raises the crypto floor is going to do a lot more good than dickering with the ceiling.And I don't buy the "don't reinvent crypto" argument at all. Sure, it's a bad idea to use your own password hash instead of bcrypt, but maybe you think you can do better and you end up creating the foundation for Litecoin. A general-case argument against any innovation is a dangerous thing.With that said, I totally agree about uploading your private key to Keybase. That's one very scary basket to put all your eggs in and I don't trust it at all. Luckily, it's optional.

The author may have some points; I have not inspected the protocols or the source completely, but the arguments made in the post are misleading and inaccurate descriptions of keybase. Seems like there may be some subtle yet festering bias.1. They are not "rolling their own" crypto. keybase seems to be an interesting wrapper around gpg that helps you establish links between accounts using "proofs of knowledge of secret keys." I haven't tried the service yet; but one can inspect the code:npm install -g keybase-installerkeybase-installergrep gpg ~/.npm/keybase/0.0.43/package/lib/*.js2. "Keybase's pitch is that rather than use a web of trust..."It is not mutually exclusive. Since you have it installed, trykeybase -hkeybase track <id>That seems to subsume web-of-trust"limits on that identification are two-fold...<security of twitter>...and...<soundness of tweeting>"So it is actually the same argument repeated. The first 3 Mission Impossible movies also demonstrate that when you meet someone in person, they might be Ethan Hunt instead of the person you think they are. For the paranoid, there are out-of-band mechanisms around this (that can also be used with keybase). Even without those, keybase is an out-of-the-box mechanism for linking identities that is weakly sound over the Internet.3. "...doing this right" One of the founders, Max Krohn, was at RealWorldCrypto this year. He is an MIT phd and he certainly knows quite a bit about applied crypto. He is also a systems person and comfortable making tradeoffs between usability and security.If keybase allows 1m more people to easily create and use keys, even if their day-to-day workflow is not secure-against-state-adversaries, that would be progress.

Thoughts on Keybase.io

The author may have some points; I have not inspected the protocols or the source completely, but the arguments made in the post are misleading and inaccurate descriptions of keybase. Seems like there may be some subtle yet festering bias.1. They are not "rolling their own" crypto. keybase seems to be an interesting wrapper around gpg that helps you establish links between accounts using "proofs of knowledge of secret keys." I haven't tried the service yet; but one can inspect the code:npm install -g keybase-installerkeybase-installergrep gpg ~/.npm/keybase/0.0.43/package/lib/*.js2. "Keybase's pitch is that rather than use a web of trust..."It is not mutually exclusive. Since you have it installed, trykeybase -hkeybase track <id>That seems to subsume web-of-trust"limits on that identification are two-fold...<security of twitter>...and...<soundness of tweeting>"So it is actually the same argument repeated. The first 3 Mission Impossible movies also demonstrate that when you meet someone in person, they might be Ethan Hunt instead of the person you think they are. For the paranoid, there are out-of-band mechanisms around this (that can also be used with keybase). Even without those, keybase is an out-of-the-box mechanism for linking identities that is weakly sound over the Internet.3. "...doing this right" One of the founders, Max Krohn, was at RealWorldCrypto this year. He is an MIT phd and he certainly knows quite a bit about applied crypto. He is also a systems person and comfortable making tradeoffs between usability and security.If keybase allows 1m more people to easily create and use keys, even if their day-to-day workflow is not secure-against-state-adversaries, that would be progress.

"A public directory of publicly auditable keys? Allow me to introduce PKS (an example server) - a decentralized system for distributing public keys."In my opinion that thought process is exactly what's wrong right now.Just compare the two interfaces [1] and [2] and you'll see why why your average person won't be happy to use the pgp.mit.edu keyserver to verify identifies. It's cluttered, complicated and the presentation once you searched for a name is subpar. I'm not saying that keybase is the best way to do it but it's a good start to make the existing tools (Like the webinterface of pgp.mit.edu) prettier and easier to use.[1] http://pgp.mit.edu/ [2] https://keybase.io/ (search field in the header)

Thoughts on Keybase.io

"A public directory of publicly auditable keys? Allow me to introduce PKS (an example server) - a decentralized system for distributing public keys."In my opinion that thought process is exactly what's wrong right now.Just compare the two interfaces [1] and [2] and you'll see why why your average person won't be happy to use the pgp.mit.edu keyserver to verify identifies. It's cluttered, complicated and the presentation once you searched for a name is subpar. I'm not saying that keybase is the best way to do it but it's a good start to make the existing tools (Like the webinterface of pgp.mit.edu) prettier and easier to use.[1] http://pgp.mit.edu/ [2] https://keybase.io/ (search field in the header)

I agree with the OP about uploading private keys being bad, but you don't have to do that – everything works without doing that as long as you are comfortable in the command line. Whether or not uploading private keys should be an option is a good question (I think they probably should not be uploaded ever), but the site is still early beta so they should be given time to work this out without getting thrown under the bus quite yet.I disagree that the existing public key repositories are what people should be using and that the twitter/github integration is pointless. In today's world, we often want to communicate with people we have never met in person. An old tweet or a gist that hasn't changes in a long time seems like a pretty safe way of verifying someone's identity. Apart from the NSA[^1], it's hard to imagine a situation where both keybase was compromised with a bad public key, and twitter/github was compromised by invisibly changing an old tweet (not possible to edit without a big hack) or a gist (not possible to edit without creating a change history within a big hack). So this makes a lot of sense to me as a way to easily verify identity.[^1]: At this point I'm not sure I would trust any encrypted online communication if the NSA wanted to read it.

Thoughts on Keybase.io

I agree with the OP about uploading private keys being bad, but you don't have to do that – everything works without doing that as long as you are comfortable in the command line. Whether or not uploading private keys should be an option is a good question (I think they probably should not be uploaded ever), but the site is still early beta so they should be given time to work this out without getting thrown under the bus quite yet.I disagree that the existing public key repositories are what people should be using and that the twitter/github integration is pointless. In today's world, we often want to communicate with people we have never met in person. An old tweet or a gist that hasn't changes in a long time seems like a pretty safe way of verifying someone's identity. Apart from the NSA[^1], it's hard to imagine a situation where both keybase was compromised with a bad public key, and twitter/github was compromised by invisibly changing an old tweet (not possible to edit without a big hack) or a gist (not possible to edit without creating a change history within a big hack). So this makes a lot of sense to me as a way to easily verify identity.[^1]: At this point I'm not sure I would trust any encrypted online communication if the NSA wanted to read it.

I agree that the Twitter integration doesn't seem enormously useful. However the GitHub integration seems to be somewhat useful for code signing at the very least.Knowing that the binary or tarball you got was created by the account you are trusting to have actually written it isn't perfect, but it's pretty good for a lot of situations.

Joke about blowing something up on Twitter, get arrested

I'm sorry, but 'joking' about blowing up something ANYWHERE in 2010 that is in earshot of another person (either physically or digitally) will likely get you at least a mild amount of attention from the authorities.My question however is did the authorities have someone report this to them, or were they proactively monitoring twitter for such? In my interactions with federal level law enforcement, it seems that their proactive monitoring is poor at best.

The convictions will continue until the quality of humour improves.

Joke about blowing something up on Twitter, get arrested

The convictions will continue until the quality of humour improves.

Sometimes I'm annoyed, and saddened by how reactionary the internet can get. WE might look at it and see it as a joke, because our frame of perspective is totally different. The government, not so much.If someone 'jokes' about blowing up a building, and the government does nothing, suddenly this is a whole different story. People ought to start figuring out how that works.Pity the guy.

Joke about blowing something up on Twitter, get arrested

Sometimes I'm annoyed, and saddened by how reactionary the internet can get. WE might look at it and see it as a joke, because our frame of perspective is totally different. The government, not so much.If someone 'jokes' about blowing up a building, and the government does nothing, suddenly this is a whole different story. People ought to start figuring out how that works.Pity the guy.

More info, earlier submission here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334580

Joke about blowing something up on Twitter, get arrested

More info, earlier submission here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334580

Original story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059803

Apple shuts down Podcaster, again

I found the original post text just by putting their URL into Google Reader. Gotta love web-based RSS aggregators that cache. Here it is:It seems that Apple has shut me down. I can no longer provision any more devices. The developers website that had a "remove device" link is now gone. I looked at the help tab but it still lists "removing a device" as one of the options. I guess Apple just shut my account down. I believe that all the copies of Podcaster I released will keep running. I will try to make an update and test it on my iPhone. If it works, I will release it to every user. I would recommend keeping version 1.0.8b around just in case.On a more serious note, what does this mean for me? All I wanted was for someone from Apple to contact me and tell me how we can work it out so that I get into the app store. Instead, Apple took the cowards way out by simply disabling features in my developers portal. This seems like a childish move for a company that has been proving such high quality service and products in the past.I plan to make Podcaster for the Android operating system. At least there, I will be welcomed instead of being walked all over. I will also try to port the app to a jailbroken iPhone.So a final note to developers. Try to stay out of Apples grey area. Don't build anything that would compete with Apple. Don't spend too much time before you submit to the app store because it could be all for nothing.P.S. Podcaster got a 4.3 our of 5 star from 63 reviews. You can read them at http://www.nextdayoff.com/reviews.aspxUPDATE: I just wanted to add that I am not surprised that Apple has stopped me. The application seems to still be working and can still be installed if you signed up before 9/22/08 Midnight EST. If you are one of these people and still want to try it, email [email protected] I will also be making updates to the application and will still fix a lot of the issues users have bene having. Give me about a week.

I think the most telling word in that post was "childish." Apple probably has legitimate concerns here, but by simply shutting him off instead of talking with him directly they are really missing an opportunity to develop loyalty with app developers.

Apple shuts down Podcaster, again

I think the most telling word in that post was "childish." Apple probably has legitimate concerns here, but by simply shutting him off instead of talking with him directly they are really missing an opportunity to develop loyalty with app developers.

Apple are doing this to a lot of people. Surely this is anti-competitive?

Apple shuts down Podcaster, again

Apple are doing this to a lot of people. Surely this is anti-competitive?

This is going to be a PR disaster for apple, from a developers point of view. He may have been asked to pull the blog post until they get time to talk to him about it.

Apple shuts down Podcaster, again

This is going to be a PR disaster for apple, from a developers point of view. He may have been asked to pull the blog post until they get time to talk to him about it.

For anyone interested, the blog appears to have belonged to the author of Podcaster. The cached url is http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:MP2KvHTWHQMJ:almerica.b... .It doesn't contain the last post, though.I'm curious to see how this develops.

Congratulations PG on the coming child

Why is everyone just congratulating PG? Livingston is the one who has to carry it around for 9 months and give birth.Kidding kidding, but congrats to Jessica too!

Congratulations!On the humorous side, this reminds me of this story: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms(Richard Stallman speaks a bit about having children)The funniest part is:"It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce, even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of.It helps more people, too."One more link that made me laugh a lot (again, Stallman): http://www.art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...

Congratulations PG on the coming child

Congratulations!On the humorous side, this reminds me of this story: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms(Richard Stallman speaks a bit about having children)The funniest part is:"It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce, even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of.It helps more people, too."One more link that made me laugh a lot (again, Stallman): http://www.art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...

The ultimate startupCongrats!

Congratulations PG on the coming child

The ultimate startupCongrats!

So, er, this would be an XX/XY-combinator?

Congratulations PG on the coming child

So, er, this would be an XX/XY-combinator?

CongratsHere in Kenya, the kids born around now are either Obama (boy or Michelle (girl)

Google URL shortener available to the public

I know there's a plethora of URL shorteners these days, and most platform providers (eg: Twitter) are introducing their own so they can harvest analytics themselves. For whatever reason though, I keep trusting Google with all of my most personal information. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but I have a feeling this will become my standard URL shortener just as Google Apps has become my standard for email, invoicing customers, document management and scheduling. Not to mention Google Reader for having information on all the RSS feeds I visit and Google's search knowing what links I am visiting daily, and probably thirty other products I'm using that stores my information on their servers.

Why do we need url shorteners again ?When I see a shortened URL the probabilities of me clicking the link go down to almost zero.

Google URL shortener available to the public

Why do we need url shorteners again ?When I see a shortened URL the probabilities of me clicking the link go down to almost zero.

Nice simple public stats: http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu#two_hoursNot a huge fan of the flash chart though.http://goo.gl/Jvhuhttp://goo.gl/Jvhu.qrEDIT: Better graph

Google URL shortener available to the public

Nice simple public stats: http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu#two_hoursNot a huge fan of the flash chart though.http://goo.gl/Jvhuhttp://goo.gl/Jvhu.qrEDIT: Better graph

Is it just me, or was I able to "shorten" an already goo.gl shortened url?http://goo.gl/fBUb --> http://goo.gl/Bkmv --> http://news.ycombinator.comThey don't want to allow this, do they?

Google URL shortener available to the public

Is it just me, or was I able to "shorten" an already goo.gl shortened url?http://goo.gl/fBUb --> http://goo.gl/Bkmv --> http://news.ycombinator.comThey don't want to allow this, do they?

Ugh. Google entering this pretty much wipes out the space - companies like bit.ly are going to need to work on seriously differentiating themselves from the pack, and even then I don't think they're long for the world.I can honestly say I hope to never be in a market - or working on a product - where google suddenly decides to enter the game. Even if their offering sucks, or is broken, it sucks all the air out of the room because it's OMG Google.

How do university hackers stack up?

Not only are you competing for that hackathon's prize, you're competing for the reputation of the entire school. I imagine HackRU will be extra competitive.

Question for HN people: Do you associate the word hacking with computer security? I know I do, and it took me a long time to find that the website was talking about hackathons and not computer security.Sidenote: rewarding students for travelling seems to bias the scoring in favor of densely populated places like the NE.

How do university hackers stack up?

Question for HN people: Do you associate the word hacking with computer security? I know I do, and it took me a long time to find that the website was talking about hackathons and not computer security.Sidenote: rewarding students for travelling seems to bias the scoring in favor of densely populated places like the NE.

I might be slightly biased, but I think Rutgers has the best shot here with their hackathon being 1 of the 2 remaining. Carnegie Mellon is hella far away, and Rutgers has an enormous community. Strong attendance could put them in the lead.

How do university hackers stack up?

I might be slightly biased, but I think Rutgers has the best shot here with their hackathon being 1 of the 2 remaining. Carnegie Mellon is hella far away, and Rutgers has an enormous community. Strong attendance could put them in the lead.

This is awesome - ranking schools by the successes of their extra-curricular hacking is a really interesting way to look at things.

How do university hackers stack up?

This is awesome - ranking schools by the successes of their extra-curricular hacking is a really interesting way to look at things.

Swift is a pretty cool guy.. keep up the good work.

London Startup Map

This map and many others include digital/creative agencies. They may be startups in the sense of new companies, but if we accept that definition why not include every new lawyer, restaurant, or retailer? Agencies are contractors and they don't own the value they build in a product. I hate to be bitchy and don't begrudge agencies but I think they're fundamentally different to tech startups.

Is there any reason why this site is limited to London startups? Does this geographical restriction add any value over a national startup map?Hint for Londoners: Zoom the map out at bit and it shows other places. These places have names like Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, and are located in the areas of the UK that are not London. People live in these places, and there are startups there too.In fact, there's already a good UK startup map: http://techbritain.com/

London Startup Map

Is there any reason why this site is limited to London startups? Does this geographical restriction add any value over a national startup map?Hint for Londoners: Zoom the map out at bit and it shows other places. These places have names like Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, and are located in the areas of the UK that are not London. People live in these places, and there are startups there too.In fact, there's already a good UK startup map: http://techbritain.com/

Social, social, social, social, social, social.I was expecting to see some "non-social" startups in the city...

London Startup Map

Social, social, social, social, social, social.I was expecting to see some "non-social" startups in the city...

Inspired by http://mappedinny.com/ here's a London version. It was built as an excuse to learn more about Backbone.js and play with MapBox's API.Source code here: https://github.com/rosario/digitalmap.Any comments and feedback are always welcome

London Startup Map

Inspired by http://mappedinny.com/ here's a London version. It was built as an excuse to learn more about Backbone.js and play with MapBox's API.Source code here: https://github.com/rosario/digitalmap.Any comments and feedback are always welcome

Here's a couple of fairly complete ones: http://batchgeo.com/map/21737d8f2b05adc3ab1b1869979f2695http://www.techcitymap.com/index.html

Clipper, the Caltrain nemesis

Clipper is a terrible service but not for the reasons outlined in this post. This post misses the point that tagging on and tagging off is a simple and relatively elegant solution to the problem posed by Caltrain charging by distance traveled.But that's not the real problem with Clipper. The real problem with clipper is their horrible customer service. Here's my story with clipper - and I hardly think I'm alone.I got my card about a year ago when I was going from San Jose to Redwood City once a week. On their web page I set up an 8-travel auto-pay system where I get 8 San Jose<->Redwood City tickets, and when I run out it buys a new set of 8 automatically.This works great until one day I missed my stop and wound up in Gilroy (woops). What SHOULD have happened is that I tag off, pay full price for the ticket I actually traveled, and have the 8 ride ticket refunded. If the card 'balance' (non-ticket cash on the card) goes below $0 (or, for them, $1.25 for reasons I don't understand) then it debits my account for the remaining balance.Instead what happened was my card went 'negative', and they shut down the card until I went to a Walgreens (?!) to pay the remainder of the balance. I was cautioned that paying online could take 1 to 2 weeks to clear the card. Where in the heck did Walgreens come in to the picture? By the way, despite having a banner outside advertising Clipper cards, my Walgreens had no idea what I was talking about. They had to call the GM to call the Clipper people to figure out what was going on.Fast forward, and now I'm commuting between Millbrae and San Francisco via Caltrain again. I just started at this company and they pay for Caltrain, so I link my Employee benefits clipper system to my clipper card - a process they made surprisingly simple which unsurprisingly completely F'ed up everything.All of a sudden I can no longer add funds via my regular portal and have to go through the company portal - and get this, though I bought my employee-benefit-purchased monthly pass on Sept 4th, that was too late for September. So I had to go to - you guessed it - Walgreens to buy a monthly pass with cash for the card that could no longer be used online.I'm hoping that it will work again in October... we will see.

I think a big part of the value of Clipper to Caltrain is to increase revenues from people who forget to tag off. You're looking at this from an engineering perspective, but not from the business perspective. Breakage is a huge revenue driver for many industries(think of gift cards), and a monopoly like Caltrain is a great fit for implementing a system like this.

Clipper, the Caltrain nemesis

I think a big part of the value of Clipper to Caltrain is to increase revenues from people who forget to tag off. You're looking at this from an engineering perspective, but not from the business perspective. Breakage is a huge revenue driver for many industries(think of gift cards), and a monopoly like Caltrain is a great fit for implementing a system like this.

This article doesn't even touch the horrible nature of Clipper. Here is a summary of some of the worst that I have experienced:1 - Intentionally inconvenient autoloading of a monthly pass.- They will automatically charge your CC for this but it doesn't load onto your card unless you have tagged on AND off in the specified zones. The even more annoying part is that during the beta period you could just double tag (acts like a refund) at a single station and your monthly would show up.2- Effectively bricking their own card and making $250 worth of mistaken charges.- This is by far the worst I have ever heard about in terms of Clipper fail. I had a two-zone monthly pass autoload setup. I changed it two a one-zone. The next period they charged me for BOTH passes. I asked them for a refund and apparently this PERMANENTLY blocks your card from ever obtaining the pass type that you were refunded for. I discovered this when I changed the autoload back to a two-zone monthly.... and they CHARGED my credit card the $126 but never gave me the pass. Clipper insisted that they never charged me and wanted me to "prove it." It took me somewhere around 5 hours of phone time to get refunds and I still had to buy a brand new clipper card. The mistakes were 100% clipper's fault and it permanently broke my card. I am still waiting for that refund... should have just had my credit card block the charges!

Clipper, the Caltrain nemesis

This article doesn't even touch the horrible nature of Clipper. Here is a summary of some of the worst that I have experienced:1 - Intentionally inconvenient autoloading of a monthly pass.- They will automatically charge your CC for this but it doesn't load onto your card unless you have tagged on AND off in the specified zones. The even more annoying part is that during the beta period you could just double tag (acts like a refund) at a single station and your monthly would show up.2- Effectively bricking their own card and making $250 worth of mistaken charges.- This is by far the worst I have ever heard about in terms of Clipper fail. I had a two-zone monthly pass autoload setup. I changed it two a one-zone. The next period they charged me for BOTH passes. I asked them for a refund and apparently this PERMANENTLY blocks your card from ever obtaining the pass type that you were refunded for. I discovered this when I changed the autoload back to a two-zone monthly.... and they CHARGED my credit card the $126 but never gave me the pass. Clipper insisted that they never charged me and wanted me to "prove it." It took me somewhere around 5 hours of phone time to get refunds and I still had to buy a brand new clipper card. The mistakes were 100% clipper's fault and it permanently broke my card. I am still waiting for that refund... should have just had my credit card block the charges!

Overall, this is such a non-problem compared to things most people in SF have to deal with (i.e. street sweeping/parking)If you can remember to scan when you get on (which doesn't fit the "normal" behavior of a paper ticket either) then you can remember to scan when you get off. It's no different than BART, the main difference is BART funnels you through an exit. If you have a round trip commute, then you are going to enter and exit at nearly the same points.

Clipper, the Caltrain nemesis

Overall, this is such a non-problem compared to things most people in SF have to deal with (i.e. street sweeping/parking)If you can remember to scan when you get on (which doesn't fit the "normal" behavior of a paper ticket either) then you can remember to scan when you get off. It's no different than BART, the main difference is BART funnels you through an exit. If you have a round trip commute, then you are going to enter and exit at nearly the same points.

Having used Clipper a few times, I think an easy way to make it less annoying is to just have more card readers. All the stations I've seen have so few you have to scan the entire platform to look for one.

Ask HN: Tell me why a room-and-board-and-bandwidth incubator is a stupid idea

In addition to the isolation that others have cited, there's quite an opportunity for moral hazard on behalf of the entrepreneurs you accept into your house. Not only would you have to be very good at selecting capable entrepreneurs, but you would also need to structure the incentives such that the entrepreneurs met some set of goals or else they would have to pay back the investment you make in the form of rent. Otherwise, there's nothing to prevent squatters from leaching your resourses and stringing you along in the process.

The Rust Belt needs ideas like this to stop being the Rust Belt.If it works, maybe you should consider expanding the idea over time – make it into something that can incubate the neighborhood and the town, not just the startup. I bet if you talked to city government, they'd jump all over this.You wouldn't be alone. I actually posted something a few months back to this effect: http://shortformblog.com/us/need-startup-funding-look-no-fur...I like your concept. Would love to see where you take it.

Ask HN: Tell me why a room-and-board-and-bandwidth incubator is a stupid idea

The Rust Belt needs ideas like this to stop being the Rust Belt.If it works, maybe you should consider expanding the idea over time – make it into something that can incubate the neighborhood and the town, not just the startup. I bet if you talked to city government, they'd jump all over this.You wouldn't be alone. I actually posted something a few months back to this effect: http://shortformblog.com/us/need-startup-funding-look-no-fur...I like your concept. Would love to see where you take it.

(note/update: for this comment, I'm mostly considering the 23-unit building)If not for long-term, maybe for programming camps/meetups/etc? Something similar to Big Nerd Ranch[1], or many of the other teaching sessions.With a very low cost of room and board (and people often traveling to meetups anyway), you might be able to find people who want to host (weekend? weeklong? longer?) events at your 'hacker complex.'And possibly have long-term residents that qualify for discounts on the camps? i.e. live at the 'hacker complex' over the summer, enjoy the hacker culture of all of the people coming in and out, and go to the events that interest you.[1]http://www.bignerdranch.com/schedule.shtml

Ask HN: Tell me why a room-and-board-and-bandwidth incubator is a stupid idea

(note/update: for this comment, I'm mostly considering the 23-unit building)If not for long-term, maybe for programming camps/meetups/etc? Something similar to Big Nerd Ranch[1], or many of the other teaching sessions.With a very low cost of room and board (and people often traveling to meetups anyway), you might be able to find people who want to host (weekend? weeklong? longer?) events at your 'hacker complex.'And possibly have long-term residents that qualify for discounts on the camps? i.e. live at the 'hacker complex' over the summer, enjoy the hacker culture of all of the people coming in and out, and go to the events that interest you.[1]http://www.bignerdranch.com/schedule.shtml

I've been thinking along the same lines, looking at properties that could work. Ultimately, I foresee one major problem -- their bandwidth, servers, food, electricity, water, heat, etc. will cost you hard cash, while they live rent-free, with no incentive to change the status quo.My alternative would be to charge rent... to their investors.I envision a group of investors to whom the tenants would apply. Investors pay rent to you on behalf of the entrepreneur(s) of their choice. As long as they keep the investors happy, they stay at your place, and you have the financial means to make it work.I've identified multiple sites at which this plan could work, but would need an investor of my own to quit my day job, move into a site, and get it ready.

Ask HN: Tell me why a room-and-board-and-bandwidth incubator is a stupid idea

I've been thinking along the same lines, looking at properties that could work. Ultimately, I foresee one major problem -- their bandwidth, servers, food, electricity, water, heat, etc. will cost you hard cash, while they live rent-free, with no incentive to change the status quo.My alternative would be to charge rent... to their investors.I envision a group of investors to whom the tenants would apply. Investors pay rent to you on behalf of the entrepreneur(s) of their choice. As long as they keep the investors happy, they stay at your place, and you have the financial means to make it work.I've identified multiple sites at which this plan could work, but would need an investor of my own to quit my day job, move into a site, and get it ready.

I think the problem would be the isolation. It could end up as the blind leading the blind. The advantage of most of the "accelerators" is that they're run by successful entrepreneurs, bring in more to serve as mentors and provide a network of successful entrepreneurs on top of that. Since you'd be competing with that, you'd probably only get the folks that didn't get into those places and then the most successful startups would leave to go to startup hubs.

Betraying Salinger

A review of the story in question, for those who are curious:http://www.thesatirist.com/books/HAPWORTH.htmlI also tracked down a copy of the full text, but in the interests of some kind of vague respect for copyright I'll leave you to figure out how to obtain it for yourself.

I think this publishing attempt was doomed from the outset. There was no way that the attempt could ever escape notice for long; and any notice made of it would have upset Salinger. At best, Salinger would have felt duped, if contracts etc. had proceeded to the point that publishing could no longer be aborted.

Betraying Salinger

I think this publishing attempt was doomed from the outset. There was no way that the attempt could ever escape notice for long; and any notice made of it would have upset Salinger. At best, Salinger would have felt duped, if contracts etc. had proceeded to the point that publishing could no longer be aborted.

An interesting tale. Salinger wanted the book published but also wanted nobody to know that it had been published.

Betraying Salinger

An interesting tale. Salinger wanted the book published but also wanted nobody to know that it had been published.

The real problem here is the length of copyright terms, which now stand at pretty much forever. If we had more reasonable laws then anyone who damn well pleased could published it.

Betraying Salinger

The real problem here is the length of copyright terms, which now stand at pretty much forever. If we had more reasonable laws then anyone who damn well pleased could published it.

Wow. If he had actually finished producing the book it would quickly become a bestseller once someone discovered its existence. I think the old man would have had a chuckle buying the plain-looking book at some small, non-chain bookstore.

Girl with genetic disorder sues sperm bank for providing defective sperm

I'm curious; by the logic given in the article, a woman who was inseminated by way of a glass tube has the possibility of legitimate legal recourse for defective semen, whereas if it were provided via a meat tube, it would be seen as a cruel aberration of nature. It's almost as if in the former case, the semen is considered to be manufactured, since it was purchased. I would like to hear from someone with a legal background to comment on this.

This is a crazy advancement of that cleché argument when the kid screams "I never asked to be born!"It's not like they would have gotten a version of her without the problem if they had better screenng.

Girl with genetic disorder sues sperm bank for providing defective sperm

This is a crazy advancement of that cleché argument when the kid screams "I never asked to be born!"It's not like they would have gotten a version of her without the problem if they had better screenng.

The girl "does not have to show that [the sperm bank] was negligent, only that the sperm it provided was unsafe and caused injury"I thought the notion of biological products like this as defective was an interesting idea. I'd never considered it before, and thought it might pique others' interest as well.

Girl with genetic disorder sues sperm bank for providing defective sperm

The girl "does not have to show that [the sperm bank] was negligent, only that the sperm it provided was unsafe and caused injury"I thought the notion of biological products like this as defective was an interesting idea. I'd never considered it before, and thought it might pique others' interest as well.

The more interesting issue is that we consider people with mental illnesses defective, like faulty car brakes. That kind of scares me.

Girl with genetic disorder sues sperm bank for providing defective sperm

The more interesting issue is that we consider people with mental illnesses defective, like faulty car brakes. That kind of scares me.

Doesn't this bring up all sorts of existential issues?

Ask HN: CTO vs. VP of Engineering

The CEO has decided that you have technical ability but not management ability. He doesn't want to lose your nagios-installation skills but he thinks that an imaginary person whom he has not yet met or hired will be better than you at leading the tech team. He's happy to let you keep the fancy CTO title and perks so you don't lose face, or because he doesn't want a confrontation.I would guess based on your comments and the fact that you're asking this question that politics are not your strong suit. "Politics", b.t.w., is just the natural state of people working together... it can be dysfunctional or functional, but as soon as you have 3 people, you have some kind of politics.Since politics are a major component of management, you may actually be happier not doing management.In situations like this the CEO is probably overestimating his ability to find a Magical VP Technology that will magically solve all his problems (unless he has someone in mind, a buddy from a previous company, for example). Likely he will spend 6-9 months trying to find someone, finally hire someone imperfect in despair, and spend the next year or two discovering that person is incompetent, too. But now I'm really just projecting.If you don't like the CEO it may be time to move on. Life is to short to work with people you don't enjoy spending time with.

Two cents here. Similar situation happened to myself, except I wasn't the CTO but the de-facto "lead architect" of a major project/death march that had all of the stereotypical problems you read about again and again: product mismanagement, feature creep, overzealous salesforce, and heightened expectations reaching the impossible.Much like yourself, I had been put in charge of an incredibly difficult project and somehow managed to grow a solid engineering team and build the system with them and get something out the door. 500k lines of C#, unit tests integration tests, the whole 9 yards over two years. We had finally launched (late and with much more baked in than accounted for) and started to tighten up iterations and bring in customer feedback. (Yes! We really had no customers using our system for two years during development!) I of course was under a lot of stress as feature backlogs grew and defects lists exploded because the software wasn't rolled out slowly and incrementally to clients but instead sold from day zero as if it was 100% rock solid.So, as you probably had, I had my lunch with the CEO where I was being asked (ie told) that a new VP of Engineering position was going to be pursued to fix all the horrible problems plaguing the software development team. The problems which, at least from our perspective, had little to do with us since we pulled off not one but a series of those small miracles that only happen at 4AM by yourself in the tech room. However, taxed was I and naive, so I figured hey, what the heck, maybe I'll be able to write code some more if this magical hypothetical person can swoop in and take care of all that other nasty business like "talking to the sales guys and telling them not to sell features that don't exist."So, we interviewed for this position fully unaware of what it was, exactly, we were looking for. Being young engineers if a candidate came in and had managed teams before and knew what unit tests were we were thrilled. We had no idea though what to look for, what red flags there were in hiring this person, so the third person or so who came in to talk to us ultimately was hired since it's hard to say no to someone who you don't even know how to judge. (And you can't, of course, just hire the first or second candidate that walks in the door because then you just look like you don't know what you're doing!)So soon after this new hire we began interviewing for additional developer positions, but all folks that came in to meet us for interviews were developers this new VP of Engineering worked with in the past. As it turns out, the first candidate didn't know how regular expressions worked, so I said "no hire." The second, turned out, worked with a friend of mine some years back and spent days on end simply reorganizing the file structure of their svn repository, and so again, I said "no hire."Well, they both still work there and I have long since left. Our system we worked on for years completely thrown out for yet another re-write from scratch, now to be done the "right way". The all stars on the team I helped build are all gone except one who has a family to support, all moved on to do startups or larger more innovative software companies.A long story, yes, but I'd urge you if nothing else to consider the impact a hire like this can have on your entire team, since they will now be the ones making the hiring decisions. If you cannot trust them with that (and it's hard to trust anyone with that after just a few interviews), I'd say push back as hard as you can on this particular decision and try to, as PG says, "be resourceful" and bootstrap solutions from folks already in the organization you can trust.

Ask HN: CTO vs. VP of Engineering

Two cents here. Similar situation happened to myself, except I wasn't the CTO but the de-facto "lead architect" of a major project/death march that had all of the stereotypical problems you read about again and again: product mismanagement, feature creep, overzealous salesforce, and heightened expectations reaching the impossible.Much like yourself, I had been put in charge of an incredibly difficult project and somehow managed to grow a solid engineering team and build the system with them and get something out the door. 500k lines of C#, unit tests integration tests, the whole 9 yards over two years. We had finally launched (late and with much more baked in than accounted for) and started to tighten up iterations and bring in customer feedback. (Yes! We really had no customers using our system for two years during development!) I of course was under a lot of stress as feature backlogs grew and defects lists exploded because the software wasn't rolled out slowly and incrementally to clients but instead sold from day zero as if it was 100% rock solid.So, as you probably had, I had my lunch with the CEO where I was being asked (ie told) that a new VP of Engineering position was going to be pursued to fix all the horrible problems plaguing the software development team. The problems which, at least from our perspective, had little to do with us since we pulled off not one but a series of those small miracles that only happen at 4AM by yourself in the tech room. However, taxed was I and naive, so I figured hey, what the heck, maybe I'll be able to write code some more if this magical hypothetical person can swoop in and take care of all that other nasty business like "talking to the sales guys and telling them not to sell features that don't exist."So, we interviewed for this position fully unaware of what it was, exactly, we were looking for. Being young engineers if a candidate came in and had managed teams before and knew what unit tests were we were thrilled. We had no idea though what to look for, what red flags there were in hiring this person, so the third person or so who came in to talk to us ultimately was hired since it's hard to say no to someone who you don't even know how to judge. (And you can't, of course, just hire the first or second candidate that walks in the door because then you just look like you don't know what you're doing!)So soon after this new hire we began interviewing for additional developer positions, but all folks that came in to meet us for interviews were developers this new VP of Engineering worked with in the past. As it turns out, the first candidate didn't know how regular expressions worked, so I said "no hire." The second, turned out, worked with a friend of mine some years back and spent days on end simply reorganizing the file structure of their svn repository, and so again, I said "no hire."Well, they both still work there and I have long since left. Our system we worked on for years completely thrown out for yet another re-write from scratch, now to be done the "right way". The all stars on the team I helped build are all gone except one who has a family to support, all moved on to do startups or larger more innovative software companies.A long story, yes, but I'd urge you if nothing else to consider the impact a hire like this can have on your entire team, since they will now be the ones making the hiring decisions. If you cannot trust them with that (and it's hard to trust anyone with that after just a few interviews), I'd say push back as hard as you can on this particular decision and try to, as PG says, "be resourceful" and bootstrap solutions from folks already in the organization you can trust.

In my company, the CTO and CEO are the co-founders. The CTO has a PHd and our revolutionary product is pretty much his brain child implemented by the tech staff under them. We also have a VP of Engineering that they hired. (a Director of Eng in their previous venture). However, the VP of Eng reports to the CEO. The CTO has his own set of staff and they basically brainstorm on new ideas. We engineers respect all of them, but the CTO is definitely placed at a higher pedestal because the bread & butter produect being his idea. But, the CTO does not deal with most of the engineering staff except a few members who are working under him for some latest ideas or our product in the R&D phase, not released to the market yet. As an analogy, the CTO is more like a College professor with a bunch of RA's under him :)I am not sure what your background in your company is. Just wanted to share what i saw in my company.

Ask HN: CTO vs. VP of Engineering

In my company, the CTO and CEO are the co-founders. The CTO has a PHd and our revolutionary product is pretty much his brain child implemented by the tech staff under them. We also have a VP of Engineering that they hired. (a Director of Eng in their previous venture). However, the VP of Eng reports to the CEO. The CTO has his own set of staff and they basically brainstorm on new ideas. We engineers respect all of them, but the CTO is definitely placed at a higher pedestal because the bread & butter produect being his idea. But, the CTO does not deal with most of the engineering staff except a few members who are working under him for some latest ideas or our product in the R&D phase, not released to the market yet. As an analogy, the CTO is more like a College professor with a bunch of RA's under him :)I am not sure what your background in your company is. Just wanted to share what i saw in my company.

Sounds to me like he's trying to push you aside.

Ask HN: CTO vs. VP of Engineering

Sounds to me like he's trying to push you aside.

I worked in a company where the VP of Engineering didn't report to the CTO. It made some sense because the CTO mostly directed the 6 months into the future vision of the company (next features, next product). This worked ok because the CTO had a research team that reported to him and the VP of Engg had the development team reporting to him but it was not optimal.The issues we faced were:- CTO+Research team builds some amazing enhancements for the product but have to fight to get them into the next release (Dev claimed there was no time for regression testing..but next cycle there will be)- Dev team thought the research team were ivory tower elites (even though this was not the case). There were Ph.D.s and people who never went to college on the team.- Research team eventually thought they were superior (reaction to having all their input regularly ignored by dev team)In short, if your company has a legitimate need for a research or forward looking team, there may be a way to make this situation work, but not without regular political disputes and bitterness between teams. Try to find a way to have the VP report to you.

Our approach to gender diversity

I think this sort of affirmative approach is going to become more common as tech is dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.When I was an engineer, I never worked under a woman in a technical role. Since I've been a lawyer, I've had a majority of female bosses and mentors. 50 years ago, this would have been unthinkable.Doctors, accountants, and many other professionals can tell the same story. Today nobody thinks twice about the head of internal medicine at a hospital being a woman. Medical schools don't go out of their way to find qualified female candidates. Because of measures taken decades ago, these professions have achieved a level of normalcy that has totally eluded engineering as a profession.

I can't help but wonder how this guy would go about to fix the lack of white people using public transportation. Reserve special seats in the front of the bus? It's discrimination all the same even though it's well meant.Please stop portraying the lack of female programmers as a problem caused by males while it's a problem that women just choose to not do it. From what I have seen most United States tech companies are exceptionally welcome to people from all different kinds of backgrounds. All women I ever met were that worked as a programmer or related (UI, QA, etc) always treated with respect. If you're female and you are an awesome programmer you will notice that you have a big advantage in this industry.

Our approach to gender diversity

I can't help but wonder how this guy would go about to fix the lack of white people using public transportation. Reserve special seats in the front of the bus? It's discrimination all the same even though it's well meant.Please stop portraying the lack of female programmers as a problem caused by males while it's a problem that women just choose to not do it. From what I have seen most United States tech companies are exceptionally welcome to people from all different kinds of backgrounds. All women I ever met were that worked as a programmer or related (UI, QA, etc) always treated with respect. If you're female and you are an awesome programmer you will notice that you have a big advantage in this industry.

I agree with the start of the article. The tech industry (and engineering in general) suffer from a distinct lack of women. It's a problem that starts at school and filters all the way through to the top end. It's also a problem that's not getting better particularly quickly - in my mechanical engineering course (graduated 2012) the class was around 12% female. It's a slight improvement on my dad's experience in the late seventies, but not by much.I also agree that good female role models are important. Selling technology and engineering to girls as a viable route to take is the key to increasing gender equality in the field.This said, we also need to accept reality. The reality is that the experts in their conference's area are primarily men. Based on my experience, I'd be willing to be that somewhere around 95% of people who work with the database technologies the conference targets are male. Assuming that only a small proportion of people who start working with a particular technology end up being considered "experts" in the area, it's fairly obvious that the pool from which to select women is diminuitive compared to that from which to select men.My experience of technical presentations is that the level of expertise the person giving the presentation has directly impacts the quality of the presentation. I'd argue that by taking the approach they did singnificantly diminishes the quality of their conference. This isn't unique to gender - if they'd selected based on any under-represented group they'd have a similar outcome.Promoting female role models in tech is hard. Perhaps a compromise - ensuring female representation was at least a certain proportion - would work. Affirmative action is always a tricky area to deal with, and it is always more complicated than it first seems.

Our approach to gender diversity

I agree with the start of the article. The tech industry (and engineering in general) suffer from a distinct lack of women. It's a problem that starts at school and filters all the way through to the top end. It's also a problem that's not getting better particularly quickly - in my mechanical engineering course (graduated 2012) the class was around 12% female. It's a slight improvement on my dad's experience in the late seventies, but not by much.I also agree that good female role models are important. Selling technology and engineering to girls as a viable route to take is the key to increasing gender equality in the field.This said, we also need to accept reality. The reality is that the experts in their conference's area are primarily men. Based on my experience, I'd be willing to be that somewhere around 95% of people who work with the database technologies the conference targets are male. Assuming that only a small proportion of people who start working with a particular technology end up being considered "experts" in the area, it's fairly obvious that the pool from which to select women is diminuitive compared to that from which to select men.My experience of technical presentations is that the level of expertise the person giving the presentation has directly impacts the quality of the presentation. I'd argue that by taking the approach they did singnificantly diminishes the quality of their conference. This isn't unique to gender - if they'd selected based on any under-represented group they'd have a similar outcome.Promoting female role models in tech is hard. Perhaps a compromise - ensuring female representation was at least a certain proportion - would work. Affirmative action is always a tricky area to deal with, and it is always more complicated than it first seems.

> Ours is a male-dominated industry – and weaker for itHas this ever actually been shown? I hear it a lot but have never heard any evidence either way. (the latter part)

Our approach to gender diversity

> Ours is a male-dominated industry – and weaker for itHas this ever actually been shown? I hear it a lot but have never heard any evidence either way. (the latter part)

that makes absolutely no sense at all, you should invite the speaker by experience and knowledge and not anything else, the criteria should be technical and not political.If there was a selection criteria of newbie then you could select women over men more aggressively.I know a few great female developers but then you have to hope that they have the skills for public speaking.This needs to be done at the grass roots, not at the top level.But saying that, any top level female developer should be automatically included. There are some no doubt but they need to turn up.

Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success?

One thing that annoyed me (and it's typical of writing on gender and racial issues) is that he bends over backwards to state, effectively, "not that having women execs don't drive success". This hyper-careful threading brings to mind the famous Seinfeld "not that there's anything wrong with that" episode ("The Outing").My approach in these matters is Bayesian: Do having female, black, Asian, Indian, etc. executives drive start-up success? The a priori probability I assign to this statement is 0.5, i.e. may or may not. I also employ the My Human Law of Large Numbers, i.e. any "large enough" human population (i) has a Gaussian distribution of any cognitive skill and (ii) the parameters of this distribution is pretty much independent of the particular population sample. I don't have solid proof of this principle and in certain subdomains it may be wrong (e.g. the great cognitive differences between men and women debate, etc.) but I doubt that population differences would be significant.Now, armed with the simple Bayesian approach and the MHLLN, we can see that most of these articles are BS. The evidence to move the a priori value of 0.5 up or down should be substantial, e.g "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". I would be extremely surprised if any gender, racial, etc. factor would derive success of any size company.Since the above analysis is rather trivial, one then has to ask why these things continue to be written. I think the motivation is usually benign: One sees the dearth of women in startups and wants to show that "it's a good thing". This approach, however, is misguided in that, by making silly arguments or sub-par statistical analysis, it hurts the cause due to the "the lady doth protest too much" effect: many people politely nod, but see through your sloppiness and internally become convinced of just the opposite cause (especially if they are inclined to do so, i.e. if the prior was less than 0.5).A quote I like a lot is "To be ideological is to preconceive reality." These authors, rather than being objective, have already decided what their results will be and are just filling up the blanks.

I couldn't give a shit less if someone is male or female: either they can help me code&sell and they can stomach startup life (which is not for everyone, and certainly not for me in the long run) or not.Period.Who hires sex/gender? Big companies and organizations. Startups hire specific people who can do specific things, and, quite literally, can't afford to give much of a shit about this stuff.

Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success?

I couldn't give a shit less if someone is male or female: either they can help me code&sell and they can stomach startup life (which is not for everyone, and certainly not for me in the long run) or not.Period.Who hires sex/gender? Big companies and organizations. Startups hire specific people who can do specific things, and, quite literally, can't afford to give much of a shit about this stuff.

Out of curiosity, I often read gender/green studies mentioned in mainstresm press, published by various NGO. I am constantly horrified how misused statistics is. I believe that most of these studies are written for a specific purpose and math is there just to give it a science-cover. Even worse, I hear them cited by politicians making a real impact to our lives.

Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success?

Out of curiosity, I often read gender/green studies mentioned in mainstresm press, published by various NGO. I am constantly horrified how misused statistics is. I believe that most of these studies are written for a specific purpose and math is there just to give it a science-cover. Even worse, I hear them cited by politicians making a real impact to our lives.

As a feminist management theorist and geek, study conclusions like this always frustrate me. Obviously, the study sheds little light on the actual cause of the correlation, but my guess based on my personal experiences with leadership strategy is this:The choice to hire diversely is symptomatic of certain types of thinking: 1) Open / wide / flexible thinking. Someone who hires diversely is more likely to find it easier to conceptualize worldviews farther from their own as still relevant. 2) Civic responsiblity / empathy. A desire to be a part of the solution to gender imbalance rather than a part of the imbalance. 3) Long term thinking. Having people who are more different from you on the team is a more effective solution in the long run, because you're likely to cover more bases.This means that leaders who make the choice to hire diversely are more likely to also be leaders who plan slightly further ahead, are more dextrous in the different ways they could see problems, and able to focus on non-top-down perspectives on the business, such as what the customer might be thinking. (All of this is correlative of course, not a->b.) As a result, leaders who hire diversely are more likely to be already be leaders who are better at running a successful company.Ie, diversity is a litmus, not a direct cause.I would be very, very surprised to find if, someday when women run 50% of companies and are in workforce balance, companies with women executives are still more likely to be successful.EDIT: I do, however, think there is also an edge to leadership that can sometimes come simply from being in a minority, whatever the minority is. Not because there's anything wrong with white men, but simply because there's a unique perspective on problems and indirect causality that you get from being at a cultural disadvantage that, if you manage not to get weighed down by it, ends up being pretty useful in business.

Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success?

As a feminist management theorist and geek, study conclusions like this always frustrate me. Obviously, the study sheds little light on the actual cause of the correlation, but my guess based on my personal experiences with leadership strategy is this:The choice to hire diversely is symptomatic of certain types of thinking: 1) Open / wide / flexible thinking. Someone who hires diversely is more likely to find it easier to conceptualize worldviews farther from their own as still relevant. 2) Civic responsiblity / empathy. A desire to be a part of the solution to gender imbalance rather than a part of the imbalance. 3) Long term thinking. Having people who are more different from you on the team is a more effective solution in the long run, because you're likely to cover more bases.This means that leaders who make the choice to hire diversely are more likely to also be leaders who plan slightly further ahead, are more dextrous in the different ways they could see problems, and able to focus on non-top-down perspectives on the business, such as what the customer might be thinking. (All of this is correlative of course, not a->b.) As a result, leaders who hire diversely are more likely to be already be leaders who are better at running a successful company.Ie, diversity is a litmus, not a direct cause.I would be very, very surprised to find if, someday when women run 50% of companies and are in workforce balance, companies with women executives are still more likely to be successful.EDIT: I do, however, think there is also an edge to leadership that can sometimes come simply from being in a minority, whatever the minority is. Not because there's anything wrong with white men, but simply because there's a unique perspective on problems and indirect causality that you get from being at a cultural disadvantage that, if you manage not to get weighed down by it, ends up being pretty useful in business.

That kind of hokey abuse of statistics always gets me riled up. Just because cigar smokers are likely to live longer doesn't mean the habit extends longevity.A more telling study might be to compare success rates of startups with all female teams, versus all male teams. Then at least you remove the bias of having success attract a more gender-diverse team. Although you'd probably need to correct for industry area, since I'm guessing females choose a different set of markets to go after, in aggregate.Crappy logic aside, I actually do think the original claim that women boost startup success is probably true. It's super valuable having team members who understand 50% of the population (and ~85% of purchasers), and knowing your customers is critical.

Why Mahalo employed a felon hacker

There are things that I don't understand about this story.I don't understand why Calacanis' choice was between firing his trusted CTO and retaining a convicted computer felon.I don't understand how Mahalo could have checked any reference, let alone 3-5, and not found out that Schiefer is one of the most famous computer felons in California.I don't understand why Calacanis is characterizing something that Schiefer did in 2005, in his mid-20's, as the actions of a "stupid kid".I don't understand how Calacanis arrives at his estimation that Schiefer did only 0.0000001% of the damage he could have with his botnet. Schiefer stole random Paypal accounts and used them to buy things, and passed stolen Paypal accounts on to his acquaintances. What's the "worse" thing you can do with a botnet? At least the DDoS extortion botnets target gambling sites, and not your mom.For that matter, I don't understand how Calacanis can equate what Schiefer did to the dumb things lots of teenagers do on computer networks (and, for that matter, on conference room floors). Schiefer wasn't a "hacker". He's a carder.(As a side-note to Calacanis: sniffing people's passwords at conferences? Also illegal!)Calacanis says Schiefer was supervised in his work at Mahalo. Is there someone who isn't supervised there? I don't understand how Mahalo believes they had the capability to supervise someone who can manage a 250,000-host botnet.Unfortunately, I do understand why Calacanis thinks he doesn't handle sensitive information. He doesn't see the link between tens of thousands of email-password pairs and those people's bank accounts. Just a wild guess, but I'm thinking the guy who steals the Paypal accounts out of bot-infected Windows boxes can make that leap.This is just such a weird post. I guess I can understand not seeing "contrition". But Calacanis seems proud that this happened. It's just head-explody weird.

Calacanis' reaction is an interesting one. As he states himself it was the risky, not socially acceptable, decision to make. His telling of the story makes it seem that he made the right decision. I would agree. A little grace, which by definition can only be shown to someone completely unworthy of it, is encouraging. I am fascinated by my own reaction when I read stories like this. Why is it that justice waived produces such a positive response in me? I think it is because my experience shows that I too need grace more often than not. Whether its something as small as being allowed to turn in an assignment late, or a boss who overlooks a broken rule that they had every right to enforce, I need a measure of grace on an almost daily basis. So to Mr. Calacanis: Thank you for reminding us that there is grace out there when we need it.

Why Mahalo employed a felon hacker

Calacanis' reaction is an interesting one. As he states himself it was the risky, not socially acceptable, decision to make. His telling of the story makes it seem that he made the right decision. I would agree. A little grace, which by definition can only be shown to someone completely unworthy of it, is encouraging. I am fascinated by my own reaction when I read stories like this. Why is it that justice waived produces such a positive response in me? I think it is because my experience shows that I too need grace more often than not. Whether its something as small as being allowed to turn in an assignment late, or a boss who overlooks a broken rule that they had every right to enforce, I need a measure of grace on an almost daily basis. So to Mr. Calacanis: Thank you for reminding us that there is grace out there when we need it.

I'm sad to think that they would have cut him out of the process if they had known.I sort of hate our culture which demonizes anyone who has ever been prosecuted by the justice system and quickly shuffles them into a corner of "people who we can't legally round up and gas but are just as worthless". It's really unhealthy to think that decent, worthwhile people can't ever make mistakes in judgement (and learn from them!) and to presume that the law is always morally correct. It's really a great disservice to the idea that we are trying to rehabilitate people.

Why Mahalo employed a felon hacker

I'm sad to think that they would have cut him out of the process if they had known.I sort of hate our culture which demonizes anyone who has ever been prosecuted by the justice system and quickly shuffles them into a corner of "people who we can't legally round up and gas but are just as worthless". It's really unhealthy to think that decent, worthwhile people can't ever make mistakes in judgement (and learn from them!) and to presume that the law is always morally correct. It's really a great disservice to the idea that we are trying to rehabilitate people.

Turning a hiring mistake into linkbait -- you stay classy, JCal.

Why Mahalo employed a felon hacker

Turning a hiring mistake into linkbait -- you stay classy, JCal.

Actually, people with a criminal past (or general oddities that are looked down upon by corporate americal) are often a good choice for a small startup trying to save money. My company often would be someone's 'opportunity' to prove themselves after a major setback in life.They are motivated, willing to work for cheap, and appreciate the opportunity so much more than someone 'willing to take a paycut' to join your startup. And when times get tough they will be your most loyal employees.In a startup where cash is tight and the outlook is 'hazy', an employees loyalty is priceless.

Kryptoradio – A Bitcoin data transmission system

This means parking meters, vending machines, laundromats, etc. can receive bitcoin payments without an internet connection. That is actually really cool.

Talking about that, Can anyone please transmit wikipedia via long wave radio? It would be interesting in censor states. Hiding wikipedia in tv/movie firmware would also be a possibility.

Kryptoradio – A Bitcoin data transmission system

Talking about that, Can anyone please transmit wikipedia via long wave radio? It would be interesting in censor states. Hiding wikipedia in tv/movie firmware would also be a possibility.

Thats all good and gimmicky but can you tell me: the 1-way connection offers any value to anyone?

Kryptoradio – A Bitcoin data transmission system

Thats all good and gimmicky but can you tell me: the 1-way connection offers any value to anyone?

Fascinating idea. In the areas that this would work, would it not be simpler to just use a normal cell phones data connection or SMS?

Kryptoradio – A Bitcoin data transmission system

Fascinating idea. In the areas that this would work, would it not be simpler to just use a normal cell phones data connection or SMS?

I had a similar idea like this, but using shortwave instead of DVB.

Ask HN: my startup addresses a small market. How much of a problem is that?

I have a SaaS app, but in a larger (and crowded) market.First of all, I don't think you should charge $25 per month. A company of 10 people spends more than $25 per month on toilet paper! If you're in a market where your customers are cheap or have no money (or both) they may actually be unwilling to pay more than $25 a month. In which case you should ask yourself why you're entering a market where your customers have no money and no desire to spend the little money they have?You're in software! Software is used in every single company in every country in the world. In planes and cars, in phones and toasters. You could be building _anything_. You could be saving companies millions of dollars with 12 lines of clever Perl code!But I digress.- the rule of thumb is that you should charge high prices in small markets and low prices in huge markets. You need a good reason to deviate from the common sense route.- you generally don't need to worry about total market size. Worry instead about reaching potential customers in the first place.- If there are only 5000 potential customers, why not really _sell_ to them? Get a fresh college graduate to cold call potential customers and schedule a meeting. Then sell them a site license for $10.000+ and get them to buy a support contract. This I'd say is the "default" way to sell to these niche markets. For $25 a month you can't afford to spend any money on customer acquisition. You can't afford phone support. Every hour you spend per customer on email support is equivalent to 3 months of use of your product/service. Insanity!- Customers who are only willing to pay $25 a month are a not the easiest customers to have. All customers who pay for my most expensive pricing plan are my best customers. They don't email me, and if they do they don't make demands. They pay on time, every time. The people who send 5 emails in a single week end up purchasing the cheapest plan and end up leaving after a couple of months. You're going to attract these customers with a $25 price point.- monthly payments doesn't mean "free money forever who-hoo!". It means your product has to convince every customer every month again your product is worth the money.- ignore all of the above if your goal is to get to ramen profitably as quickly as profitable. You're going to make so many mistakes when building and selling your first product you might as well accept that you're not going to make a lot of money. Building a second product is a lot easier when you're already profitable.- it's normal to question yourself when just starting on a new product. Everybody else is flying blind too.- if you can get to the point where you have $200.000 profit where you have to put in 2 hours a day to keep things running smoothly you've hit the jackpot. You can then use your experience and funds to build a bigger and better company that can grow to millions of revenue.- growth will be linear for your kind of app, not exponential in nature. If you need another 4 months to build the product and another 2 months to get the billing/subscription stuff to work right and another month to set up your company and legal issues you won't realistically launch before April 2011. If you get 5 new customers every month with an "average" marketing effort (and this is not extraordinarily pessimistic) you'll have only 60 customers after 12 months! Of which you're going to lose at least 30%. So you're looking at $25 * 40 = $1000 monthly revenue 12 + 6 = 18 months from now. People are not kidding when they say starting a company is a lot of hard work! Starting a SaaS app is not an instant path to riches.I've written way more than I planned to so I'm going to leave it at this. I'll just say that I don't have any regrets and starting a SaaS business was one of the best decisions I ever made.

You ever hear of a publication called Congressional Quarterly? Extremely niche market: people willing to pay out the ass for the best and fastest coverage of everything (and I mean everything) related to Capitol Hill. Government employees, contractors, lobbyists, and oh, you know, 95% of Congress because they're just that good.They offer a large number of even smaller niche services; you're sort of expected to make your own bundle of subscriptions that apply to you. But as you may guess by their name, their flagship publication is the quarterly one. Yeah, their big moneymaker is published just four times a year.You know how much CQ charges for their services? Hint: this is their subscription page: http://corporate.cqrollcall.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=79 Yes, that's like 30 different phone numbers you're looking at. No, they don't let you subscribe online.When that happens, you're either dealing with someone living in the stone age or a hyper-niche publication that everybody who's anybody in the world of Federal politics subscribes to, despite its absurd pricetag (e.g., four figures for a one-year sub to just Quarterly). That subscription isn't a status symbol, it's a necessity. Their livelihood depends on the information Congressional Quarterly provides.It doesn't matter how small your market is. If your product is only of value to a slight fraction of the population, then make it so good they can't live without it. And charge out the ass for it.

Ask HN: my startup addresses a small market. How much of a problem is that?

You ever hear of a publication called Congressional Quarterly? Extremely niche market: people willing to pay out the ass for the best and fastest coverage of everything (and I mean everything) related to Capitol Hill. Government employees, contractors, lobbyists, and oh, you know, 95% of Congress because they're just that good.They offer a large number of even smaller niche services; you're sort of expected to make your own bundle of subscriptions that apply to you. But as you may guess by their name, their flagship publication is the quarterly one. Yeah, their big moneymaker is published just four times a year.You know how much CQ charges for their services? Hint: this is their subscription page: http://corporate.cqrollcall.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=79 Yes, that's like 30 different phone numbers you're looking at. No, they don't let you subscribe online.When that happens, you're either dealing with someone living in the stone age or a hyper-niche publication that everybody who's anybody in the world of Federal politics subscribes to, despite its absurd pricetag (e.g., four figures for a one-year sub to just Quarterly). That subscription isn't a status symbol, it's a necessity. Their livelihood depends on the information Congressional Quarterly provides.It doesn't matter how small your market is. If your product is only of value to a slight fraction of the population, then make it so good they can't live without it. And charge out the ass for it.

If your count of the number of businesses there are is accurate, than that sounds like a very small number of potential customers. How are you going to address them all? Unless they have a website where they all hang out to talk shop, you'll have to spend money to get to them, and $25 a month does not permit all that much of a marketing spend.I sell bingo cards to elementary schoolteachers. The idea strikes most people as pretty niche. I once estimated the total addressable market at 2,000, which turned out to be severely understating the number. (Using Twitter accounting I have over 200k users.) If I had acted upon that estimate, I probably would have shut the business prior to starting and never learned I could sell to a multiple of that.It is highly likely that you are underpricing the service at $25 per month, particularly if it creates revenue or provably decreases costs for the business involved. That is a fraction of what an ad in the Yellow Pages costs, for example. (They cost enough to have pricey sales reps pitch them directly to customers.)There is always the option of using the revenue/experience/etc you get from this app and using it to power your next adventure, by the way. If you're intimately connected to this problem domain and will have far and away the best solution for it, and can't see a path to more than $100k revenue per year... oh well? Try it, learn a little, apply your lessons to attacking the next problem.

Ask HN: my startup addresses a small market. How much of a problem is that?

If your count of the number of businesses there are is accurate, than that sounds like a very small number of potential customers. How are you going to address them all? Unless they have a website where they all hang out to talk shop, you'll have to spend money to get to them, and $25 a month does not permit all that much of a marketing spend.I sell bingo cards to elementary schoolteachers. The idea strikes most people as pretty niche. I once estimated the total addressable market at 2,000, which turned out to be severely understating the number. (Using Twitter accounting I have over 200k users.) If I had acted upon that estimate, I probably would have shut the business prior to starting and never learned I could sell to a multiple of that.It is highly likely that you are underpricing the service at $25 per month, particularly if it creates revenue or provably decreases costs for the business involved. That is a fraction of what an ad in the Yellow Pages costs, for example. (They cost enough to have pricey sales reps pitch them directly to customers.)There is always the option of using the revenue/experience/etc you get from this app and using it to power your next adventure, by the way. If you're intimately connected to this problem domain and will have far and away the best solution for it, and can't see a path to more than $100k revenue per year... oh well? Try it, learn a little, apply your lessons to attacking the next problem.

I would be more concerned about what % of that 1.5M you can make and how confident you are of that. Market size just by itself is a pretty useless figure in most situations if you don't get into the nuances.We are in a similar market-size(even smaller). But this issue has never really worried me too much. At this stage, I am a lot more concerned about how easily I can make the sale in a market than how big of a market it is. Right now, I would rather be in a small market I can easily sell and make payroll/salary. Once you have that covered, you should be able to come up with new product ideas for bigger market.This is more of a problem if you are going the VC route. If you are bootstrapping, it is more important IMO to focus on not dying before shooting for the stars. So if you are not financially safe(ie. no vc/angel) and can get 50% of a $200K market in 3mos with some certainty, I'd go for that over being in a 100M market with a lot less certainty! Of course larger market does not automatically mean more risk. But if it does, I prefer the smaller market.Rephrase your question:1. How much money do I need in short-term to not die as a start-up? Or do I?(may be not, if you are well funded).2. What are the paths to getting the $ along with the seeming risks? You can cold-call or buy some clicks for each market and see which one is an easier sell/less risky and vice-versa.tl;dr: if you are bootstrapping, go after whatever market is most quickly to get you your min $ you need to survive. maximize profit later with new products/bigger markets.

Ask HN: my startup addresses a small market. How much of a problem is that?

I would be more concerned about what % of that 1.5M you can make and how confident you are of that. Market size just by itself is a pretty useless figure in most situations if you don't get into the nuances.We are in a similar market-size(even smaller). But this issue has never really worried me too much. At this stage, I am a lot more concerned about how easily I can make the sale in a market than how big of a market it is. Right now, I would rather be in a small market I can easily sell and make payroll/salary. Once you have that covered, you should be able to come up with new product ideas for bigger market.This is more of a problem if you are going the VC route. If you are bootstrapping, it is more important IMO to focus on not dying before shooting for the stars. So if you are not financially safe(ie. no vc/angel) and can get 50% of a $200K market in 3mos with some certainty, I'd go for that over being in a 100M market with a lot less certainty! Of course larger market does not automatically mean more risk. But if it does, I prefer the smaller market.Rephrase your question:1. How much money do I need in short-term to not die as a start-up? Or do I?(may be not, if you are well funded).2. What are the paths to getting the $ along with the seeming risks? You can cold-call or buy some clicks for each market and see which one is an easier sell/less risky and vice-versa.tl;dr: if you are bootstrapping, go after whatever market is most quickly to get you your min $ you need to survive. maximize profit later with new products/bigger markets.

>There's something like 5000 businesses of this type in the U.SDon't mean to be rude but the world doesn't end at the US border. There are likely to be other companies in the same market outside of the US, why write them off before you've found out the size of the non-US market.

A Crash Course in Sales Hacking and Deal Closing [video]

...what is happening right now in this comments section? I came here to get a thoughtful response about the video, or a brief description at least (videos at work aren't a fantastic idea), and all I see currently are "great video!" and "Steli is neato!"Also, title seems click-baity.This smells.

When did sales and biz dev become "hacking"?Can we put this nonsense to bed already?

A Crash Course in Sales Hacking and Deal Closing [video]

When did sales and biz dev become "hacking"?Can we put this nonsense to bed already?

Most of the comments in this thread seem to be added by people who are associated with the OP.

A Crash Course in Sales Hacking and Deal Closing [video]

Most of the comments in this thread seem to be added by people who are associated with the OP.

Good stuff Steli! Btw - Close.io is an awesome product with even better service.

A Crash Course in Sales Hacking and Deal Closing [video]

Good stuff Steli! Btw - Close.io is an awesome product with even better service.

I am currently the Director of Sales @ Krossover Intelligence. I have worked with Steli in the past and he is a master of sales techniques. His tactics are efficient and most of all they work.

Debug your programs like they're closed source

"Your program communicates with something on a network, but some of the information it’s sending is wrong? It’s probably sending it with write, sendto, or send."If you want to debug network traffic, a higher-level tool like Wireshark[1] (which knows about the packet formats for all sorts of different wire protocols and has sophisticated tools for filtering out just the packets you're interested in seeing) would be much easier to use than looking at system call traces.Still, this is a great article, and I definitely agree that learning about your operating system's debugging facilities is useful, but in many cases you can save yourself a lot of time by using a tool that's optimized for a particular task.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireshark

If you find strace useful, you should check out sysdig[1]. Sysdig is like strace but uses kernel trace points instead of ptrace so it has a lower probe effect on the running process.[1]: http://www.sysdig.org/

Debug your programs like they're closed source

If you find strace useful, you should check out sysdig[1]. Sysdig is like strace but uses kernel trace points instead of ptrace so it has a lower probe effect on the running process.[1]: http://www.sysdig.org/

Should I stop feeling guilty now about debugging Java programs on Windows using Process Monitor?

Debug your programs like they're closed source

Should I stop feeling guilty now about debugging Java programs on Windows using Process Monitor?

While I suppose this may be a "new way" of debugging for the author of this article, it's hardly a new technique. strace, trace, truss and similar tools have been around for decades now. They're the kind of tools that many developers and sysadmins use without a second thought.

Debug your programs like they're closed source

While I suppose this may be a "new way" of debugging for the author of this article, it's hardly a new technique. strace, trace, truss and similar tools have been around for decades now. They're the kind of tools that many developers and sysadmins use without a second thought.

strace with Haskell is really messy because of the run time scheduler for green threads.I would guess that it is similar for other run times that involve similar concurrency management techniques.