tonysuper

I'm 18, and my co-founder is just turning 18 in a week.

So we never really expected to get in. We are both completely broke, so we're going to launch a kickstarter campaign to see if we can get the funding for more hosting (and the ability to work full-time over the summer). From there, well, I guess we try to grow and take over the world.

I think you may have the wrong imgur link there, buddy.

Well. Now I'm completely terrified.

I've been working on a project for about 8 months, with about 3 months on-going after a decision to re-write and reign in focus, with YC as a major end goal the entire time. Now that it's actually time to apply I'm extremely nervous—especially since I'm an 18-year-old kid who hasn't even finished high school yet (1 semester left) and I'm competing with people twice my age and with several hundred times more experience. We're quite close to a major beta release so that should help the process along.

Is there anything somebody in my (and my co-founders) circumstances should seek to convey in order to increase our chances of getting accepted? I've read quite a few articles on the best application type, but none of them had a "What to do when you're completely unproven and also extremely young" section.

I really hope this blog is only talking about Tor the community and not Tor the technology. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to ban people who are harassing others without storing some identity information, which completely defeats the purpose of Tor.

So, for those of is trying to start companies, how do you create an effective work-place environment?

It's obvious from articles like this that you can't just dump a bunch of cash on slides and ping-pong tables, but it also isn't fesable (for most companies) to have 4-hour workdays. How can you balance the need for breaks with budget concerns?

I'd really appreciate somebody with experience in the area weighing in.

goto is perfectly acceptable in C code. The most common use case is for cleaning up after errors before returning, although they're also used to break out of nested loops cleanly.

goto is harmful when used improperly but fine everywhere else.

There is a limit on information to area in space. Eventually, bitcoin is going to be impractical to store even if you have a very large storage device at absolute maximum capacity.

Deflationary currencies reward saving over spending. Aka, you can just sit on your money and it increases in value.

That's really bad for an economy.

My ideal cryptocurrency would constantly "leak" money, trying to maintain a 0.1% or so inflation rate a year, to prevent this problem.

Until somebody invents a quantum computer with a sufficiently large number of Qbits. Then they can completely destroy the blockchain.

Alternatively, wait a few hundred years until you need several hundred terabytes to store the blockchain, which is required for transactions. That's going to be a problem.

Or you could switch to Bitcoin before realizing that currencies which deflate in value are a terrible idea.

(For the record, I support cryptocurrency. I just think Bitcoin has too many issues to be viable long-term. Nice proof of concept, but it needs to be refined).

C needs wider adaptation of Apple's "Blocks" extension and MAYBE extremely limited generics and it's perfect.

This is my first major open source project, so any comments or criticism are very welcome!

LibDispatch is actually FOSS, and it kind of works on Linux. Sadly, nobody seems to bother with supporting it in any way, shape, or form.

I'd consider that fusion of paradigms to be a huge strength of the language.

HN is getting a mobile-optimized site?

Best news I've heard all day!

I don't really see how this is feminism. I do think that supporting women in tech is a noble goal, but "considering user needs in the design of a system" never struck me as a uniquely feminist concept.

Objective-C is probably the saddest story of any programming language.

Absolutely fantastic libraries, incredibly easy to write high-level abstractions over very low-level C code, and completely useless outside of one platform.

I wish projects like GNUStep would get more love.

This might be proprietary, but Apple's other major codec is open.[1] Hopefully this will be as well.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless

Really great to see a company acknowledging that privacy is a major concern.

It's also a great business decision, because privacy is one thing that Google will never be able to beat Apple on. They pretty much have no way to for them to respond if Apple starts running ads about privacy.

Am I the only person who finds the digit separator syntax ugly and a bit unnecessary?

I love the rest of the changes, but that just doesn't sit right with me.

And, presumably, get cartoon-style dollar signs in their eyes seconds afterwards.

It's an image-search site. We have the core product (searches) about 99% finished. We're mostly trying to make the frontend as responsive and intuitive as we want it to be.

I want to work on it with my partner a little bit more before we get outside technical help. I'll keep you in mind, though.

Yeah. This was pretty disappointing for me. I'm in the process of starting a company with a friend, but neither of us are 18 yet, so the chances of us getting into an accelerator or VC fund are next to zero (not that it's going to stop us from applying). We could have really used this service.

Oh well. I understand why Google is doing it, but it's still disappointing.

Technically, a lava lamp is deterministic.

Still, I'd say that it's "close enough" to be considered a real RNG. There's almost no way to see a pattern in it, and I'm pretty sure that it would be completely impractical to simulate the contents inside, even if you knew all the initial conditions.

Then you do it out of a sense of duty to the past.

People spend ages carefully preserving forks and other trinkets from the 1700s. Surely an entire person would be worth equal care, and a group of people more so.

The "flag" example could be easily replaced with named parameters. Seems a bit unnecisary to add a new type for that purpose, unless I'm missing something.

As a young (18 in a month) programmer myself, I enjoy this idea. I'm not certain about distributing aid in this manner, however. A lot of kids who would deserve this might not necessarily be the best at presentation or marketing.

Still, it is nice to see people taking an interest in young coders. There's a lot of support for teaching kids programming, but I sometimes I feel like those supporters don't know what to do once we actually learn.

Isn't this applicable to any kind of bitmask, and not just Obj-C?

I suppose that Cocoa uses bitmasks fairly often, but this article could have been titled "Working With Bitmasks in C" and it would have been just as accurate.

It should be noted that this might not have been a coder error, but a merge conflict. Nobody should be reprimanded in that case, since it's nobody's fault (except whoever decided to not test or lint this file, but he should have been punished for negligence even if it hadn't caused a bug.)