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dewitton Recommend a Founder for YC

Does YC still require founders move to the Bay Area? That is a significant burden for say, older founders with families.

I mention that because the pitch says:

"We know that great founders can come from anywhere — any city, school, country or background"

But the application form says:

"If we invest in you, your group is expected to move to the Bay Area for June–Aug 2017."

There's a bit of a disconnect, and I'm curious how it's reconciled.

dewitton Introducing TJSON, a stricter, typed form of JSON

I take it you don't know who either of the two authors are?

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Laurie

- https://github.com/tarcieri

They know about protocol buffers.

dewitton Apple Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable Music Player (2001)

MP3 encoding (Fraunhofer Institute) and the Arcos Jukebox (Arcos). Both paved the technical way for the huge usability and ergonomic improvements offered by the iPod.

Edit: And HDD density / price per MB reaching a point where storing several dozen MP3s was noticeably more convenient than swapping CDs.

dewitton Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

That's a strange reaction. Hasn't the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation been one of the most successful philanthropic organizations of all time? I thought they've saved millions of lives fighting malaria alone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...

dewitton Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announcement [video]

"You must log in first."

Sigh.

Edit: The reason I mention this is the disappointing incongruity of announcing a project for the global, public good hidden behind a self-serving walled-garden approach to media.

Facebook Zero is a more meaningful example of this, of course.

I realize this post alone isn't a big deal, but it's part of a fabric of disconnect. One where you get the feeling that the goal of some is to ensure that FB effectively is "the world." And it's a damn shame, because from everything I hear about the people is that isn't actually the goal. But perception matters.

dewitton How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

That was my original thought as well, though I can see the other reading now, too.

So while the title could perhaps have been better worded, I can believe no conscious bias was intended.

dewitton How a Technical Co-Founder Spends His Time

*Or her time.

dewitton Most olive oils sold in the United States are adulterated or deceptively labeled

After learning a few years ago about the large-scale fraud involved in the export olive oil industry, I started trying domestic olive oil instead (I'm in the US).

My favorite domestic oil, which is available everywhere now, is California Olive Ranch (e.g, http://amzn.com/B005CT8R90). It's delicious. Tastes nothing like the horrible oils I had been unknowingly eating for years, and there's no way I could ever go back.

dewitton Interactive Sudoku Zero-Knowledge Proof

I don't know the math behind ZKP, but how does this statement work:

> If Peggy didn’t have a solution, there was a chance she’d be caught in this round if Victor had asked for the right set of 9 squares to be revealed.

Doesn't this technique make it a "slightly more than zero knowledge proof", where the amount of knowledge revealed correlates to the probability a proof was obtained? The more knowledge, the more proof?

dewitton Twilio S-1 Amendment

You probably can't. The IPO price is what's being shopped around to private institutional investors via the underwriting bank. You can get in early in public trading, however, though that's historically at a higher price.

dewitton Tased in the Chest for 23 Seconds, Dead for 8 Minutes, Now a Life of Recovery

"I've seen instances in some departments where the police just stand on the victim until all the life is gone, or the paramedics never arrive, or the paramedics just nonchalantly go through motions but never attempt resuscitating."

What do you do for a living that causes you to see these things firsthand, if you don't mind me asking? What happens when you report them?

dewitton Snapchat Employee Data Leaks Out Following Phishing Attack

Once we get past the predictable schadenfreude, it's crazy to think how easily this could happy to, or because even of, any one of us.

Do you think you'd think twice before responding to a mail from your manager asking for information that they had reason to ask for? Would you challenge them to verify themselves over the phone at 11:00 PM, just to be sure no one spoofed their email address?

I bet I wouldn't, and I'm paranoid.

dewitton Twitter’s updated Mac app wasn’t made by Twitter

> … there should just be one full time engineer on it …

Agree with everything you just said, except, please make it two engineers. Speaking as a prototypical eng manager who typically inherits these types of projects when "that one engineer" leaves the company, I strongly believe that any job worth doing is worth doing by more than one person. (Plus, a good peer, just to bounce ideas off of and do informed code reviews with, is worth their weight in stars.)

PS: I thought @jack was going to open the third-party ecosystem back up again. That also has the potential to help address this problem. Did that not happen?

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/21/9586084/jack-dorsey-twitt...

dewitton Beautiful Decay of AOL

I don't know why the author's tone is so mean and snarky. Yes, the web won (inevitable and thank goodness), but it's not like many 19-year-old web pages are still around and serving working links either.

And for all its fundamental closed-ecosystem walled-garden flaws, AOL brought the first taste of the Internet to millions. We should celebrate the accomplishments and learn from the failings, not dance on the graves of the vanquished.

dewitton When a Unicorn Startup Stumbles, Its Employees Get Hurt

Real data is good, but that's not a good way to get real data.

I'm not a stats person, but it would seem to suffer from both an extremely small potential sample (those who read your post), a self-selection bias (those who gain an advantage by participating, e.g., the aggrevieved), and an outright unsual candidate sample pool (Hacker News).

Perhaps try something like Google Consumer Surveys, and ask a one-two question like: (1) are you currently working for a pre-IPO startup and (2) are your options underwater. Or similar.

dewitton Let's Create a Better Product Hunt

I think that people here are way overestimating the importance of Product Hunt.

dewitton Can't sign in to Google calendar on my Samsung refrigerator

FWIW, Google Calendar does support CalDAV:

https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/caldav/v2...

It also supports a richer API, for features that don't fit into CalDAV:

https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/overview

While I tend to agree with what I think is your point, it's all well and good to say that there's a standard and one should use it (which I support, and have worked on many throughout my career), but standards aren't a panacea either, especially since many of best standards are ones that standardize a previously proprietary (but working!) design.

(No relationship with the calendar team, but I'm pretty sure they'll read this thread if you have comments for them.)

dewitton Montana Standard newspaper plans to retroactively unmask anonymous commenters

If that's an exercise in irony, you nailed it, "killface".

dewitton Facing Cash Crunch, Retailer Jet.com Racing to Complete Funding Round

I put in an order when Jet launched. No joke, from the best I can tell, they sent someone to a physical Walmart, where they purchased the product at full retail, for more than they charged me, packaged it up, and shipped it to me with free two-day delivery.

But they'll make it up on volume, right?

Smart people have said, "do things that don't scale." I guess Jet took that at face value.

dewitton Jack in a Box: Can Twitter Be Saved?

> Facebook won the war on Twitter by making ludicrously large offers through proxy bidders on all of the well-established twitter clients.

Citation needed.

dewitton YC Research

> "To start off, I’m going to personally donate $10 million..."

Holy cow. That's real money. Sincerely very impressed by the commitment.

dewitton One Major Difference Between Clojure and Common Lisp

Sure, it does have cons, but your second argument wasn't a sequence. Try:

  > (cons 'a ['b])
  (a b)

  > (doc cons)
  -------------------------
  clojure.core/cons
  ([x seq])
  Returns a new seq where x is the first element and seq is the rest.

dewitton The Post-YC Slump

This post is probably the best reason I've seen yet to be a YC startup. The investor who can call you out on stuff like this is the investor you want.

dewitton After the Layoffs

Amazing how much of that post was about the CEO's personal relationship with the layoffs, considering the #1 bit of advice in every comment on yesterday's thread about layoffs was "whatever you do, don't make it about yourself." [1]

I don't know if it's good advice or bad advice, but the dissonance was strong.

PS: I still respect the CEO. The actions (severance, health care, references, etc.) speak loudly, even when the words, no matter how heartfelt and sincere, aren't always the right ones.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876009

dewitton Apple Boss Tim Cook Hits Out at Facebook and Google

You might be also interested in https://myaccount.google.com, which offers full visibility and fine-grained control into everything in one place.

I wasn't personally involved in building it, but in my opinion it's really impressive. I wish other companies would do the same.

dewitton Apple Boss Tim Cook Hits Out at Facebook and Google

Google has a one-click opt-out as well:

http://www.google.com/settings/ads

I remain opted in, fwiw.

dewitton BuzzFeed Says Posts Were Deleted Because of Advertising Pressure

I read this expecting something super shady, but to be totally fair to BuzzFeed, the incidents cited (all three of them) were surprisingly benign.

According to the NYT, one of the articles was taken down because it accused Axe (the body spray people), who happened to also be an advertiser, of "advocating worldwide mass rape", which the editor-in-chief decided was beyond even BuzzFeed's questionable writing standards.

Another article, about Internet Explorer, was written by a editor who had recently worked on an ad campaign for Microsoft while on another job. BuzzFeed took the IE article down (again, according to the NYC) to avoid the appearance of conflict, and instituted a policy against such rotating-door behavior going forward.

And finally the last case involved removing an editorial piece that criticized a Pepsi advertisement created by BuzzFeed itself.

If those were really the only three cases of content being changed because of the relationship with advertising, I'm not sure even I think there's a major issue here. At least at this time. While reputable papers like the NYT or WSJ of course have firm policies in place to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest, I don't think anyone is putting BuzzFeed anywhere near their level yet.

To be honest, when I heard the rumors last week that "BuzzFeed was manipulating content due to pressure from advertisers", I admit I just assumed the worst of them, too.

But this might be a case of me (and probably a lot of people) expecting poor behavior from a company simply because we're not fans of their product.

Maybe that's actually the biggest lesson from this? (Or maaaybe... the NYT is in on it too, and this is all part of an elaborate cover up by Big Advertising.)

dewitton WikiLeaks publishes 30,000 leaked Sony documents

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I concur on a number of your points. In particular, I would be significantly more swayed by the argument that WikiLeaks is press (even responsible press) if the did indeed selectively publish only documents of clear and material public interest. I haven't looked at these documents myself (and won't) but it sounds like that's a small number indeed.

Incidentally, press doesn't default to being for the net good just because it's press (which is a broad classification, and an amoral one). It still has to act on behalf of good, and on a case by case basis.

As far as corporate rights go, it's not black and white, but we shouldn't lose sight that corporations are made of up people, and those people should have rights, and it's probably better not to just throw those rights away just because something was done in the context of work (since work is such a huge and generally unavoidable part of all of our lives).

Thanks again for thoughtfully debating. I appreciate that.

dewitton WikiLeaks publishes 30,000 leaked Sony documents

As a hypothetical, if you started a one-person side project, or freelanced or something, would you feel it equally appropriate for your work emails to be published, in bulk, unredacted, without your permission or consent, by people who hacked into your computers?

Would it be appropriate for all YC funded companies to have all of their emails published on WikiLeaks tomorrow?

If not, what's the difference, and where do you draw the line?

dewitton WikiLeaks publishes 30,000 leaked Sony documents

Certainly some email does (expose political corruption and influence peddling), for sure. And if we published all email of every person everywhere, then we'd uncover a whole lot more.

Do you think we should do that? Where is the line?