jcroberts

First of all, WELCOME!

I don't profess to know a perfect path for you, but the basics for HN are fairly simple, and they also apply to learning lingo and the areas in which they are used (programming, marketing, seo, finance, ...).

0.) Read. You'll learn more by reading than posting.

1.) Be Nice (note: I'm not always nice)

2.) Answer Your Own Questions. If you try to answer your own questions, you may or may not succeed, but at least you'll be far better prepared to both ask better questions and better understand the answers. --You won't get much out of an exchange unless you actually put something into it.

3.) Give Your Best Response. If you respond with an answer or even an opinion, do the work necessary to provide supporting references. As you can see, this is closely related to #2 in the sense of making the homework a bit easier. I've actually seen (and even made) one-line jokes, but the person who replied with a reference link was up-voted more than the joke itself.

4.) Remain Positive. There will always be things you don't understand being discussed, but believe in your own ability to understand them through study and effort.

5.) The Jokes Actually Are Funny, Even If You Don't Get Them, And Even If No References Are Given.

6.) Respect Decisions. Some people can not or will not give specifics of their business ventures. It's their choice.

7.) Everyone Is Busy. If you submit a story or write a comment, consider the time and effort of the reader will spend on it. The time invested is multiplied by the number of readers, so your contribution should have as much merit as possible. --You will both succeed and fail at this, (I do) but the goal is to try your best.

8.) Read the "Guidelines" [1] and the "FAQ" [2]

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Paul, I noticed some of the people posting edits/fixes (spelling, line break) got down-voted, and others wanted to argue/disagree about it. Silly. Personally, I like having others point out my mistakes; it's the best way for me to know about and fix them. With this in mind...

s/accomodating/accommodating/

I hope no offense is taken. ;)

And now, the more important stuff...

As you know, the terms often control the discussion, so kudos for your notes listing the various terms, i.e. "Super Angels" "Mini-VCs" and "Micro-VCs." Some have balked at the use of the adjective/term "super" as misleading, but the terms typically used, and their corresponding definitions don't have distinct lines. A potential resolution might be using the term "archangel" for the investments/investors beyond the typical "angel" round? Anyone fluent enough in English to know the term "archangel" will understand the implication of it being greater than "angel." --It's just a thought.

Another thought would be to break down the classifications by their most defining aspect, namely amount of capital. The lines will still be imperfect, and you have a better grasp of the numbers than I do, but the language would be generally more clear. I was thinking something like this:

seed: < 30,000

angel: 30,000 - 150,000

archangel: 150,000 - 1,000,000

vc: > 1,000,000

That would classify YC pretty much as you describe it, namely, as a "seed fund," or better said, specializing in "seed round funding." At present, I still not convinced my little idea above is any better than the currently confusing status quo, but at least it's an attempt.

EDIT: Uggh! Fix line breaks ;)

This is not a complaint, but simply a bug report.

With javascript disabled, if you type something in the provided text box and hit enter, you end up with an error message:

  Not Found
  The requested URL /projects/autotag/php/search.php was not found on this server.

I just figured you'd want to know.

I still prefer the hem line indicator. ;)

cperciva, there are actually two common scams involving charities and paypal. The first is the risk of people donating to fake charities as you mentioned. The second is the risk of criminals using stolen credit cards to make donations to charities; in other words, testing to see if the stolen credit card information is usable. The headaches caused to charities are very painful, prolonged and costly (charge backs).

There are other similar and/or related scams involving "charities" (both legitimate and fake) but I feel this is the wrong place to discuss them.

The trouble the OP has with "donations" to an open source project tend to be very common with paypal and they often result in a false-positive in the paypal "fraud detection" (risk management) analysis. I know of one example where a prominent OpenBSD developer needed some fast hardware. He does full builds of the entire "ports" tree (i.e. all software ported to OpenBSD), so buying powerful (read: expenseive) hardware was really needed. One person stepped up with a donation/gift of the needed funds, and sent the payment through paypal...

The first thing that happened is the donor got a call from paypal because the donation triggered a false-positive in their "fraud detection" analysis. It might seem like an annoyance, but this is actually a good thing.

The next thing that happened is, the donor got a call from the credit card department of his bank, mainly because he used only a credit card with paypal. Yep, there was another false-positive alert on the fraud detection system of his bank.

During these two false-positives, the paypaly account of the open source developer receiving the funds was locked. In this case, the mistaken lock was resolved very quickly due to the two separate phone calls, but it was still a pain in the ass.

There is hope. The way to get around the paypal "requirement" of an open source project needing to be a vetted and registered 501(3)(c) organization in the US (or equivalent in other countries) is to have the payments classified as a "gift" rather than a "donation" in paypal parlance.

The article wasn't very useful compared to blog posts by google itself, but the discussions on what google can "understand" always reminds me of this:

http://www.fun-images.com/thumbs/25-my-fucking-keysbig.jpg

I wish it wasn't such an unpleasant shock for so many people, but very few people even think about how something actually works and the risk models being used. In the case of paypal Max Levchin (sp?) created a brilliant fraud detection (risk analysis) system, and also made sure to mitigate risks to his company by making sure someone else could be put on the hook when something goes wrong (i.e. why they press so hard for direct access to your bank accounts). Even though it is a brilliant design, and a profitable business, the entire company is dubious because it profits from putting normal people (users) at risk without ever informing them of the risks.

Ahhh, though you said "corporate account," I'm betting you actually mean a "Merchant Services" account. There are actually a number of different types of paypal accounts, each with their own set of rules and features. Paypal --very intentionally-- tries to confuse people by not clearly listing both the various types of accounts and the various risks associated with them. They also very intentionally do _EVERYTHING_ they can to get your bank account credentials.

For example, in your situation, there may have been a somewhat hidden link to "other payment options" but of course, the only default you saw was "enter your bank account number." Paypal pulls this shit constantly, and all it takes is one wrong click (or less than careful reading) to trap you into an endless page reloads of "please enter your bank account" nonsense. --It's extremely scammy and they use every anti-pattern in the book, heck, they probably wrote the book.

I should also note, NEVER use a bank account debit card with paypal or online. These are also another way your bank account can be completely drained by attackers or less than honorable businesses.

> unfortunately paypal would not authorize any > payments (from my credit cards!) until they > had a confirmed (and thus accessible) bank > account.

Please elaborate. I'm not sure what you mean by this, and there may be (are!) differences between how paypal operates in the .us versus the .eu.

Were you not allowed to _send_ money with only your credit card on the paypal account?

Or were you not allowed to _receive_ money with only a credit card on the paypal account?

Sorry. It's late here, I'm tired, and I'm not reading your words as clearly as I should. Though I haven't done much in recent weeks, I do volunteer work for a non-profit organization here in the US that specializes in helping victims of online fraud. Sadly, the "paypal drained my bank account" story is repeated regularly.

jacquesm, There are two potential solutions. The first is having a separate bank account specifically for use with paypal. This gives your "real" bank accounts some degree of separation from the at-risk account you've used to become "verified" according to paypal (note the unhealthy amount of sarcasm on "verified"). This is the only working approach if you must be "verified" by them.

The second method is far better; _ONLY_ give paypal a credit card number. You will not be "verified" according to paypal, but you now have control. If palypal does anything stupid, you just file a dispute/charge-back with your credit card company. When you reach the stupid "spending limit" for an "unverified" account, simply delete your credit card number from your paypal payment methods, then close your paypal account. Now you can create a new paypal account with a new email address and the same credit card. The result is you just by-passed their spending limit that _forces_ "verification" when reached.

EDIT: Yes, I feel giving paypal your bank account credentials is absolutely foolish. They try everything they can to get access to your bank account(s), but at least there is a way around their stupid games.

Some of this was covered by Dan Ariely in his TED talk on the "Predictably Irrational."

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...

I realize English is not your first language, but on this particular topic, one must be VERY careful with the terms you use. In classic rhetoric, the ability to control and define the terms is the means to control and define the argument. If you honestly seek a fair resolution, step back from the politics and word-smithing by trying to address everything as fairly as possible including the terms used.

Given that I respect tptacek for being bright, level headed, and having a good mind for reverse engineering and analysis, I had hoped to get him into a friendly discussion addressing root causes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1798540

Human nature is acquisitive, but this manifests itself in two distinct ways; for a group or for an individual. In the former, there is a part of human nature wanting collaboration (for group), so we want to return favors and want to reward efforts. In the latter, there is a contrasting part of human nature more avariciously (selfish, greedy) inclined to benefit the individual, so there is also a desire to not return favors and not reward efforts.

Copyright laws are an attempt to enforce the former, and of course, copyright infringements are an attempt to enforce the latter. The former creates "monopoly" and the latter creates "theft" but both of these terms are rhetorically loaded, and worse, both of them are a detriment to markets.

The important question is, can we design a better system to both fairly reward efforts of collaboration and at the same time also benefit individuals?

It's a very tough question, but until people are willing to step back from their biases and heated opinions, we will not be able to figure out a better solution.

I don't know why you were down-voted, but I agree with what you seem to _mean_ even though your use of strong rhetoric distracts from your point.

The trouble is one can define "institutionalized theft" as either widespread "illegal" sharing (as you do), or as "unjust" laws preventing sharing, but not both. More accurately, the former is the masses breaking the laws, so only the latter actually qualifies as institutionalized. Though "institutionalized" was a poor choice of words, I see no merit in rehashing the tired debate over the term "theft" versus the more legally correct "copyright infringement." --Either way, I still get what you mean.

Both of us value good work and believe the worker should be rewarded.

A functional marketplace can be simply defined as paying someone else to do something you are unable or unwilling to do yourself. There is usually a level where it makes more sense to pay someone else to provide for a particular need. Those who specialize in providing for a particular type of need, gain advantages (expertise, resources, tooling, scale, ...), and can therefore sell for far less than it would normally cost others who don't have the advantage of specialization.

The most important thing to realize is both "theft" and "monopoly" are deterrents to a fair and functional marketplace. Yes, I intentionally put "monopoly" in quotes because it is admittedly equally strong rhetoric as "theft" but I simply could not think of an better word.

When one gets to the point of being able to admit both theft and monopoly are bad for markets, the very nature of the discussion changes dramatically; The question becomes, "How do we reward good work?"

I'll be the first to admit any attempt to address the root cause will be exceedingly difficult. Additionally, we will most likely fail at completely eradicating theft and completely eradicating monopoly, but one needs to maintain an overly-optimistic view order to find a better solution to an unsolvable problem.

I think you're a bright person and level headed, but if you'd rather not discuss this issue publicly, I completely understand. Like myself, I'd bet you have close friends or partners with vested interests in the status quo, and any public mention of change will undoubtedly piss them off. I like to think I'm very lucky in that my friends trust me to be fair minded even when the don't like me questioning the most difficult things. --maybe off-list?

Votes, either up or down, are an expression of perceived value to the user. If I write something and you extend the time and effort to read it, then you will have an opinion of its merit based on your experience.

Did I waste your time and effort?

Did I make your time and effort worthwhile?

A contrary point of view is can be very valuable when presented well, even if you happen to disagree. On the other hand, if one regurgitates an already well known, and hence stale, point according to the opinion of the given reader, reading will be a waste of time and effort from their perspective. Of course, the next person to come along may not know the point is tired and stale, and their perspective is the opposite.

There is another important aspect of investment applicable to both the reader and the writer; you must sell your investment. If you bought an Apple product, and you found someone factually stating the mistakes Apple made in the NVRAM of a particular machine, you are naturally inclined to protect the value of your investment since you have an intrinsic need to justify your purchase, both to yourself and to everyone else. In more common terms, you're looking at "fanboyism" or even "advertisement," and it takes a very clear and careful mind to both know and disable your bias.

Equally, when writing you are attempting to sell your words as worthwhile to the reader by some means (insight, humor, expertise, shock, horror, ...). The more interesting question is why you even bothered to write? Did you do it for karma? Did you have some unknown internal need to refute a point of contention? Did you want "respect"? Were you trying to "help"? Were you looking for something more exciting to do? Were you frustrated? Were you fascinated?

Whether clearly admitted or not, there is a motive for every single post and submission on HN.

Knowingly or not, today you seem to be selling your lament on being down-voted --with the hope of it happening less-- by bringing it to the attention of HN readers. Why did you write it? Why do you care about a few bits in a database? Why do you believe down-votes are a bad thing?

Personally, I enjoy the feedback of getting down-voted. It's the only way I'll know that I wasted your time and mine.

> Does it bother anyone else that piracy would force

> an arbitrary low price point for books?

> ...

> Piracy is preventing the market from establishing a real

> clearing price for books;

In the above question about being bothered by sharing, it seems you are forgetting your previous arguments about value, particularly in the sense of limiting the idea of value to fit your argument. To give an example, the time you spend reading this email might be a completely wasted effort, or even a mostly wasted effort, but with some degree of luck and skill, I might manage to make the time you spend worthwhile. Essentially, the words I'm writing might have value to you.

In a world where writing something is extremely easy, the overwhelming majority of written text has little or no value. The invention of text editors, desktop publishing, printers, and all associated technology has vastly increased the volume of written text, but at the same time it has decreased the value of written text. It's a signal to noise problem, since when any idiot can write, many do (myself included).

Please don't fall into the trap of believing "reviews" (or karma for that matter) will be an adequate filter. There will always be a risk/reward ratio for time invested in reading, and for something to be ranked poorly, someone had to waste their time reading it.

There are really only two primary motivations for writing, fame and fortune. The minor motivations such as sharing and contributing thoughts or efforts are often entangled with the primary motivations. This goes back to the pessimistic view of, "There's no such thing as a selfless act," but rationally, it is applicable.

For the sake of argument, imagine the end of copyright, and hence the end of books as we know them. More accurately, we're looking at the end of the financial motivations to write, edit, and publish books in any form. With fortune now missing from the rather short list of primary motivations, all we have left is fame. Since one can profit from fame, financial motivations have not been completely removed.

When you boil it down, no matter how "useful" written content may be, it is still a form of advertising.

When you want to hire someone for a programming position, you look at their advertisements, such as open source contributions.

When you want to be entertained, ...

When you want to be informed, ...

Assuming you've read a book (advertisement) by J.K. Rowling, and enjoyed it, would you be willing to pay to see her read/tell a new story to an audience?

Assuming you've read a book (advertisement) by Lawrence (Larry) Harris on "Trading & Exchanges," and found it useful/enjoyable, would you be willing to pay to attend one of his classes or lectures? (note: he's a prof at USC, and hence, actually teaching/lecturing as well as maintaining his employment by advertising his mastery of a subject).

Similar could be said for everything covered by unjust and corrupt imaginary property laws, but the more important question is very simple; Have you fallen for the typical "Price Anchoring" [1] and are responding in a "Predictably Irrational" [2] manner by purchasing advertisements?

The time and effort invested by a 'user' to evaluate a work has value, regardless if the user determines the work to be worthwhile. Additionally, a user admiring a work has value for the creator of the work, regardless if the work itself is purchased.

Go look at your karma score and think about the non-obvious ways you have financially or otherwise profited from "freely" contributing your words to HN.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1244967 [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...

Seems like you were starved for attention and couldn't answer your own questions, so you decided to waive your female bait, twice, to see if you can sucker any of the dorks into helping you with your homework.

Congrats on nailing two suckers so far!!!111oneoneone~~

A (supposedly) smart (MIT) girl like you should already know all the programming (manipulation) instruction you need can be found in the pages of Cosmo.

You're probably an overweight male sitting in his dirty underware thinking he can socially engineer HN. If so, you're pathetic, but if not, you're still pathetic.

so much for my karma...

If you want device specs for the Verizon Apple iPhone:

http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=specs&id=2548&c=verizon...

The database at pdadb.net has specs on a number of "known but unreleased" devices.

uggh! The term "permanent" means "timeless," so a "timeless work" is the same as a work with "permanent impact."

As for me, I can do genus quality work, and occasionally I can even do species quality work. ;)

Beautiful. Absolutely Beautiful.

It would be wonderful if it was implemented here on HN. Instead of having a page full of "Angel-Gate" stories, there would be only one, and it would include all the others. Similar for every other duplicate submission.

At the moment, I believe HN has a very much simplified and inaccurate version of this concept implemented. If an exact url is submitted a second time, the second is simply added as a "vote up" for the previous submission of the same thing.

If even if reitzensteinm was talking about capacity-per-watt, he's still wrong. The specific drive he mentioned was the "Raptor" model but that's an old, slow, small (150G) and power hungry (9.5W) disk. The newer WD "VelociRaptor" 10K RPM disk is more likely what he meant, and is a more fair comparison. The new Velociraptor only has a 600 GB capacity. The highest capacity OCD IBIS drive is 960 GB.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=821 http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid-state-drives/hsd...

OCD IBIS Power: 6.6 Watts Idle 9.5 Watts Active

WD VelociRaptor Power: 4.30 Watts Idle 6.20 Watts Active

Now we do the math. A total of 9600 GB would be 10 OCD disk or 16 VelociRaptor disk.

16 x 6.20 = 99.2 --WD VelociRaptor

10 x 9.5 = 95 --OCD IBIS

Similar is true for idle.

If we were not limited to VelociRaptor, when you get into some of the very slow but very huge disks (1-2 TB), sure, you could beat the rather specific OCD IBIS models on Capacity-Per-Watt. But it is very unfair to open only one side of the rotating vs. ssd comparison to every disk made, and there are higher capacity SSD's with even better power consumption numbers than the OCD IBIS.

As you noted, the metric of Cost-Per-Capacity is often 10 or more times more favorable for rotating disks. If you don't have a valid _need_ for the speed offered by SSDs, they are certainly not worth the added costs.

  >In terms of online gigabytes per watt, SSDs will 
  >lose out badly to traditional hard drives.

Incorrect. You forgot time. Think about it this way (with very rough numbers); The traditional Raptor drive will move data at 70 MiByte/s. These new SSD's move data 700 MiByte/s. Assuming that they both consume equivalent power, this new SSD will have a gigabyte-per-watt rating TEN TIMES BETTER than traditional drives.

  > And the "hackers as founders" thing is kinda 
  > what Y Combinator is all about, yes?

The only person qualified to answer this question is Paul Graham himself. If you read his essays, as well as the various FAQ's and similar for both HN and YCombinator, you can see it in his own words.

After thinking about it for a bit, your article against people using of the term "entrepreneur" shows a lack of experience with "hackers" (as per it's original definition). The vast majority of the greatest hackers I've known absolutely suck at business, marketing, socializing and other important aspects of entrepreneurship. If you read up on Steve Wozniak or Robert Morris, you'll realize their success in business probably would not have happened without having someone else around willing to learn and do all the other stuff required by a successful venture. From what I've read of Paul Graham, including "On Lisp" and "ANSI Common Lisp," he seems to be a rare breed; good at tech and good at business. Most of his writing, HN and YCombinator all seems to emphasize and encourage people to be good at both. In essence, he promotes the idea of hackers as entrepreneurs.

There will always be those self-embracing the term "hacker" or the term "entrepreneur" who really are not what they claim to be, or do not meet the higher/highest end of the definitions. They are both terms of endearment and respect, but they are great things to aspire to be.

It seems you misunderstood my statement. I never called your post irrelevant. In fact, it is relevant for this site. --I should have made it a bit more clear.

On this site, "hackers as founders" is a strongly expressed correlation, and hence, all of the wonderful startup, business and entrepreneur postings. None the less, the original definition of "hacker" was someone good at solving problems through programming computers. The term was later redefined as someone who breaks into computer systems, and redefined again as someone who breaks into computer systems for profit, or steals via computer systems.

If one did not know the "hackers as founders" idea/definition here on HN, then a post about "entrepreneurs" would seem out of place with any of the more common definitions.

I will not say you are "wrong," in fact, I see your side of it, but you need to accept the fact that language changes ever so slowly. More precisely, language is self-encrypting.

For example, you're posting to "hacker news" when this has nothing to do with "hacking."

I mostly wanted to say I've enjoyed your blog in recent weeks, but only through your HN submissions (I'm not one to "follow" a blog).

I know very little about monetizing web sites, so even I would not follow my own advice without having someone smarter than me look it over.

Google AdSense is easily defeated/filtered, and technical users tend to be more inclined to use filtering. Similarly, users who do not employ technical means of filtering have generally adopted "mental filtering" of AdSense. In short, they ignore it since it is often misleading.

Pushing your own book on Amazon doesn't hurt, but I sincerely doubt it will help very much.

A working solution is potentially more work. You could use amazon affiliate links to * RELEVANT * books/products mentioned in your posts. For example, the following blog post mentions IDL:

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/11/about-that-cru-hack.html

It took a simple google search to find out there is a book on the topic sold through amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Programming-IDL-Interacti...

When your advertising is essentially part of your content, as well as complimentary to your content, it should be more effective (in theory). You are the one who knows your content best, so allowing others to decide what to advertise on your site is a dubious proposition. Unless advertising is effective in its goal of making money for you, then there's no point in having it on your site. If you have to do more work to make it effective, so be it. --That's why it's called "work" ;)

As for why "IDL" (Interactive Data Language) jumped out at me as a great example is because I had a "WTF?" moment caused by only knowing the other "IDL" (Interface Description Language).

Your link to the correct wikipedia IDL page was helpful, but there was no reason why you could not also include affiliate links to relevant books/products.

Since I'm admittedly ignorant to monetizing websites, hopefully some of the pros around here will have better ideas and show me why I'm wrong.

Bastards! ;)

  > asteroid collusion

I mean no offense, but that was one of the most hilariously accurate typos I've ever seen.

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." --Douglas Adams

You might want to note that the most common "lorem ipsum" you find as filler text is actually an incorrect quoting of a work by Cicero. The actual text from Cicero might yield better results.