Making money was exactly pg's reason for starting Viaweb. YC wouldn't be so hypocritical as to deny someone for advertising that as their reason, when YC itself wouldn't exist if its founder hadn't started a startup for the purpose of getting rich.
I'm trying to think of reasons why they would delete their tweets under the assumption that everything will be fine. Why would they do it, knowing that they'll eventually re-enable withdraws? I'm looking for the most convincing argument. Because if the most convincing argument isn't very convincing, then I'm going to sell my goxcoins on bitcoinbuilder.
You have at least 50 years ahead of you. That's a long time. But the next 5 years will profoundly shape your next 50.
If that feels like too much pressure, then simply don't worry about it. It's more important to relax than to optimize your life if you're the type of person who doesn't react well to a lot of pressure.
(An MtGox bitcoin can currently be sold for 0.4 bitcoin, so this was quite a lot of money being lost or made over the last hour.)
"I think that as a community we should start demanding these services continually prove that they are not fractional reserve. We cannot effectively eliminate the need for trust in these sorts of services, but we can certainly confine the exposure and eliminate a lot of this drama. With Bitcoin it's technically possible to prove an entity controls enough coin to cover its obligations— and even to do so in ways that don't leak other business information, and so we should. But this isn't something specific about MTGox, it's something we should demand from all services holding large amounts of third party Bitcoins. I wouldn't even suggest MTGox should do it first, rather— it sounds like a great move for their competition to differentiate themselves."
Here's the takeaway:
"This would leak the total holdings, and some small amount of data about the number of accounts and distribution of their funds, but far far less than all the account balances. Importantly, though— it could be implemented in a few hundred lines of python."
In case anyone from Coinbase is reading: you have a unique opportunity to be the first webwallet service to implement this, and thereby make the entire bitcoin community instantly fall in love with you. It would also set a minimum standard of quality for webwallet services in general, which would add a lot of value to the bitcoin ecosystem. It seems like this might be a pretty big business opportunity.
It will be just another page in history, yes, but it's a painful one. Personally I still believe Gox will ultimately be okay since everything still has a logical explanation, but hypothetically it seems hard to believe that Gox self-destructing would be anything but bad news.
It's certainly not an attack on not-bitcoin, so therefore it's an attack on bitcoin.
More seriously, why is the social convention to lie in these situations? Why not just say what methods they were actually using?
I suppose it's possible they were storing encrypted passwords. But then an attacker would be able to break all of them at once.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you allow for the fact that a virus is already on your system, then you've already lost. It'd be one thing if iTunes was allowing the equivalent of root escalation, but it doesn't sound like it's even doing that.
News.YC is, among other things, an experiment to see if this fate can be avoided. The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to face. If someone starts being rude, other users will step in and tell them to stop.
It sounds like we're going to be stuck with d0 for awhile. If they get banned, I assume they'll create a new account and do this all over again. I'm at least hoping they'll be reasonable.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
There is no interpretation to be made there. You willfully ignored it.
I didn't think you were new to HN, judging by your comment history, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps you've been banned before. Perhaps you feel your new identity gives you a vantage point from which to snipe at others. But either way, would you please clean up your writing?
I think this is the problem:
"There's too much woo and too many chipped shoulders and opportunists these days and they need a smackdown."
You feel you're on a mission, and that your mission supersedes following the rules. It doesn't.
Within the last couple months, there was a pretty big discussion featuring BSD licensers vs GPL licensers. If I remember correctly, the GPLers were saying that by using BSD, one enables software freedoms to be taken away, and therefore BSD and MIT licenses should be strongly opposed.
Good comment. Hopefully this leads to some thought-provoking material...
rather than applying the racism badge to it every fucking time and ignoring it to pacify some over-sensitive idiots.
... Oh. Nevermind.
EDIT: I see that you're new to HN. Please don't write in such an inflammatory style. In addition to being against the rules, it's also ineffective.
The point you're trying to make is based on the mistaken assumption that they were being unclear. They weren't. Nothing was obscured. No one seriously believed that they meant to imply ownership instead of "you are."
They also weren't doing technical or business writing. It was empathy, which is sometimes helpful.
Replace Drew's intentional lack of capitalization with this "your/you're swap," and you've got the same situation.
It seems like people are just prejudiced, and are so prejudiced that they feel justified in calling people out on a forum under the guise of "helping" them.
Yes, grammar is powerful, but this isn't a situation where it matters. They were expressing empathy. They weren't writing a press release. And we can't seem to find it in ourselves to avoid bikeshedding this thread.
Drew Houston writes without capitalization. Would you say the same to him? Ideas are what matter, not apostrophes.
Also, DDoS isn't a big deal for most games. (MMOs, yes, but not most games.) If a gameserver is DDoSed, then a few dozen or a few hundred people are going to be unhappy. Whereas if a website is DDoSed, then tens of thousands of people will be unhappy at a minimum. Since most games aren't really affected by DDoS, it doesn't make much business sense for CloudFlare to try to offer gameserver protection. The market probably isn't big enough to warrant diverting CloudFlare time and resources.
Dropbox has made my life a lot less stressful.
HN gives us all so many opportunities. For example, the monthly "who is hiring?" threads. If anyone is suddenly stricken with a run of bad luck, then they can make a post about it and the community will come together to at least offer them work. People here like talent, and can find ways to use it. Most other places aren't like that. And imagine a world with only Reddit.
Also, imagine a world with no HN and no Reddit.
YC has made seed funding more accessible, and given founders more power. The VC's had the upper hand before YC. Now the VCs seem to be closer to servants than masters. If I decide to do a startup, that will impact me.
Probably some other things I haven't thought of off hand.
Is YC fun? Not the dinners. The work you're there to do.
It seems like doing a successful startup is closer to this than to fun: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7222850
Maybe in the wake of a failed startup I deluded myself into thinking great teams are predicated on great friendships, a truism that no longer holds absolute truth.
Perhaps there's a misunderstanding of what a friendship is in a business context. The cofounders have to have been friends for quite awhile, otherwise the stress will tear them apart. But they probably don't have to be dear friends, or the kind of friend you hug. It's just business.
to those like me who held the institution on a pedestal
This seems the central issue. YC is ultimately about business. It's awesome, it's changed the world and my life, but having expectations that it's going to be fun and that you're there with dear friends seems off the mark. But I've never done YC, so this is just speculation on my part.
The last thread helped me come to peace with the situation. Thanks to the community's commentary, the obvious was made clear: There's no scenario in which it's ever helpful to become emotional about bad luck. It's over and done with, and there's nothing that can change it. Getting upset will only make life worse. Instead, why not choose to be content with all that hasn't been lost?
It took awhile for me to let go of what-if's and past mistakes. But what ultimately changed my perspective was reflecting that I live in a life of luxury and comfort compared to most people on the planet. That's when I realized that most of my feelings until now have been rooted in selfishness. What percentage of people have had the opportunity to even make any investments whatsoever? It was silly not to have realized how lucky I've been.
It took some soul searching, but...
If Gox turns out to close, I will lose some coins. Oh well. It's just some money, and at least I'll have served as an example of what not to do.