Hacker News Reader

jsjenkins168on Most of our CS students suck at CS

Interesting about the mention of a relationship between building Legos and CS. The correlation between the two has been a theory of mine for a while. At least I have not yet found a hacker who enjoys building legos (or did as a child) that sucks at or doesnt enjoy building software. I have a feeling the mindsets required for both are strongly correlated.

jsjenkins168on TechStars 2008 Applications Now Open

Please name a successful startup that began its earliest stages in an office. Google, Excite, Yahoo, Dell, Msft, Apple? They all started in dorms/garages/apartments.

Not saying its not possible or some dont prefer it, but the majority of successful ones do not. That is just historical fact.

But its a moot point as it sounds like (according to rms) the group office space is indeed optional with Techstars..

jsjenkins168on TechStars 2008 Applications Now Open

The working in designated office space requirement is a big negative to me. I see this as they either 1) dont really understand what kind of work environment hackers want/need 2) dont trust the groups that they are funding enough to allow them to work alone without supervision. They really should consider making the office space an option for those who want it.

jsjenkins168on Google Android Challenge Terms - submitter beware

I find that very concerning. How can they expect everyone to turn over ALL of their web service code? Any app meaningful will be making calls to outside web services. I'd refuse the prize money if they demanded all of the server side code as well.

jsjenkins168on Google Android Challenge Terms - submitter beware

"Additionally, if you're building client/server type apps, you might have to hand over your services if you win the $25K prize."

Does anyone know if this is true? I do not see any indication that Google have rights to anything else but the submitted Android code.

jsjenkins168on Android contest officially open - Individuals happy, teams worried

The only potential problem is Android has funky XML config files for layout, string values, etc which are dynamically linked to the code through the R class. Handling all that could be non-trivial. But such a project could be a cool entrant in it self and I'm sure would make a lot more people willing to try Android.

jsjenkins168on Announcing Hecl Android Alpha and Hecl Android Developer Challenge Entry

Really cool stuff! This is a daunting task, my hat goes off to you for attempting it. Your work also sets a nice example for people who eventually might want to wrap other languages over Andriod.

Just curious, how is performance when wrapping Hecl over the Java API? Are there any particular bottlenecks you've run into so far?

Good luck on the Android developer challenge!

jsjenkins168on Amazon SimpleDB Goes Beta

I like the focus on simplicity, but I'm not excited about writing a custom framework to handle the new proprietary query language. I was hopeful a service like this would accept standard SQL but this is not the case.

Eventual Consistency will require a complete re-thinking of how traditional web apps persist data. This is a big problem. I'm just hopeful that it will eventually be possible to guarantee that written data is immediately accessible. Maybe by briefly buffering it in an external location until the SimpleDB data is consistent? Yet more custom framework code to write..

jsjenkins168on Ask YC: Thoughts on iPhone mobile office market

I think theres a need for this. Go for it. I know there are a lot of business-type folks who adopted the iPhone because they wanted it, but still need traditional MS doc syncing and transfer for their day jobs. Apple has never really been very accommodating to business, so if you could satisfy this need it could work well.

What technologies are you using for your iPhone app development?

jsjenkins168on 12 things I learned from pitching VCs this past week

Valuable lessons, thanks for sharing them! You mention in #4 that a quality referral is critical. Do you mind sharing your experiences meeting/using a referral to get face time with VCs?

jsjenkins168on Complaints I'm Seeing About Java

I also get tired of auto-generating getter/setters all the time. I think annotations to designate getters/setters would be easy and fit in nicely. No need to invent new class "properties" to complicate things.

jsjenkins168on Ask YC: How do you handle security?

Consult this PDF:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/webauth:tr.pdf

In general, dont ever send passwords over an unencrypted channel. People reuse passwords. The credentials they are using for your site could be the same for their bank.

Oh, and make sure to hash the passwords in your database. BCrypt is good for this task. Best not to try rolling your own methods (as has been pointed out here on YC news before).

jsjenkins168on Do these guys really help? (helping to raise capital)

As I'm sure you've noticed, Austin investors are too conservative anyway :(. VC money is still dried up post-bubble except for Austin Ventures and supposedly they are starting to move away from higher risk investments too.

You might try to meet some angels through the Central Texas Angel network events around Austin. CTAN probably wont look at you unless you have solid revenue (conservative bunch), but you might be able to convince an angel to seed fund you privately.

jsjenkins168on Do these guys really help? (helping to raise capital)

If you dong mind me asking, how did you meet this guy? Were his referrals done at a cost or for free?

jsjenkins168on A hack I'm rather proud of

I dont understand how what you propose successfully traverses NAT. Just curious: How do you punch through, and then keep your NAT pipe open?

There is no guarantee that this part: "our VPN assigns each user a public, routable, IP address, on the outside world, such as 72.10.x.y.z" will always lead back to a client behind layer(s) of NAT, unless the listening port is manually forwarded in the router itself.

Protocols such as STUN have developed methods to attempt to solve this, but its not easy because of issues such as there being no standard for the amount of time that NAT must keep pipes open after they are finished being used.

jsjenkins168on Ask YC: Are there *any* startups using ASP.NET?

What did I say that would justify you staying away? Java? I would take JSF over ASP.net any day. I consider ASP.Net to be on a similar level to old fashioned JSP (mixing and mashing of model and presentation all over the place). JSF on the other hand is a true MVC framework

So my point is: JSF is very powerful if you can master it.

jsjenkins168on Ask YC: Are there *any* startups using ASP.NET?

If you are not against Java you might want to check out JSF. Code your pages using Facelets though, its better than using JSP. JSF is nice because (unlike ASP.net) it cleanly separates behavior and presentation (its purely MVC).

And its a component based architecture which is rendering format agnostic (HTML, WML, XHTML-MP, cHTML). So you can code one page which can render the contents in a different format depending on the client device. This is what the JSF MobileFaces library does when you hit the page from a mobile phone. It automatically renders the page in the proper format for the target device without the developer needing to worry about the details.

The problem is JSF is complicated, which can be very frustrating. For this reason I just use it as the underlying framework, which basically just directs to my GWT pages.

jsjenkins168on Ask YC: What Language Do You Use for Multiple CPUs?

Your OS process scheduler should do it to some degree at runtime, but beyond that there is not a lot that can be achieved without explicitly handling synchronization and locking of shared resources. I know there are some startups working on parallel processing optimizations though, so there could be some new developments in the future. Google has been acquiring a few of these startups recently..

jsjenkins168on My rails ecommerce startup launched: RevZilla.com

Attractive interface, I like it. Its a little busy, but not to the point where you get lost. I think it works really well, awesome work.

jsjenkins168on Ask YC: What new technologies are you exploring?

GWT, Android, Ericsson JSF MobileFaces, Metro web services using Glassfish, JPA (mapping to MySQL DBs), and Flash Lite are what I'm dabbling in right now. With the exception of Flash Lite, all of that is Java based... Meh.

jsjenkins168on Which Y Combinator backed companies are still alive?

Is it standard practice for publically traded companies to keep acquisitions secret? I know price does not need to be disclosed if it does not have any real effect on shareholders, but keeping an acquisition secret all together just doesn't seem right to me.

jsjenkins168on Which Y Combinator backed companies are still alive?

Can anyone confirm that TextPayMe was acquired by Amazon? I wonder if this is the YC acquisition that they still cant talk about. That would have been over a year ago..

http://textpayme.amazon.com

jsjenkins168on Loopt May Be Friending More Mobile Networks

I havent heard about that, but if thats the case and you find out more please share. It might be proprietary code rather than an official optional library.

jsjenkins168on Loopt May Be Friending More Mobile Networks

Loopt wont work on the iPhone yet (natively), because it requires GPS hardware (which the iPhone does not yet have). Hopefully someday though, its a cool app.

jsjenkins168on Paris Hilton is the ultimate web 2.0 platform

Being about Paris Hilton I nearly skipped this, but was surprised that it is actually pretty insightful.

The problem is you have to get attention first somehow, before you can create attention by plugging others. I guess Paris did this initially with her association to the Hilton name and the sex tape. Ways to do this in the startup world are obviously much different.

jsjenkins168on Startup Casting Call: Google is watching!

I cant find any indication of how much funding they intend to provide, or how much equity they intend to take. Anyone know?

jsjenkins168on Cryptographically and Constantly Changing Port Opening

Ah, so your server only accepts 1 connection at a time on a given listening port? That is good protection.

I didnt realize there was a TCP standard for the max acceptable amount of retransmissions. But yeah if you can account for this with a pad then you should always be safe.

If you ever opensource your network code I'd love to see it.

jsjenkins168on Cryptographically and Constantly Changing Port Opening

Yes, you are correct this approach would be vulnerable to a simple man-in-the-middle attack. Just sniff packet headers to find out what port the server is accepting indicated by packets sent back with an ACK flag set. Headers with that flag set will be the currently valid port at that instant, since all other packets will be sent back with RST set (blocked).

And yes you could have potentially very frustrating synchronization problems. With TCP you wont be able to control certain things such if a connection request is going through exponential back-off due to network congestion. For example, lets say you could make a connection request within your alloted tolerance, but if there is network congestion and your NIC is not getting either RST or ACK packets back, it will continue to send connection requests at continuously increasing intervals which you cannot easily control since its done at the transport layer. Then one of your connection request packets finally reaches the server late, and you are blocked from connecting again for 15 minutes.

If you could work around the second issue though it could work. I think its a great idea in general, nice creative work!!

jsjenkins168on What Android's really about (hint: not the iPhone)

I hate to say it, but handheld application development on Windows Mobile (using VS2005) is actually quite good (comparatively speaking). Deploying and testing to a Windows Mobile handset is seamless and tightly integrated. But thats what you get when you have propriety development environment and mobile platform designed specifically to talk together.

Android is platform and dev environment agnostic which is impressive given how feature rich the API is. And it should be possible to become language agnostic too, if a compiler can be created to compile code down to the native Dalvik byte code used by the Android VM.

I think Google needs to get on the ball and create compilers for other languages if they expect to attract developers who really matter - hackers.

jsjenkins168on Android developer challenge ($10 million in awards)

Just curious, why is that a problem? The whole idea behind Android is that handset manufacturers can be free to vary their underlying linux implementations as long as they can adapt their drivers to the Android libraries. Then the programmer can code to this common interface without worrying about differences between handsets. If you were coding directly to the handsets native functionality then you break the cross platform universality. Then its just a repeat of JavaME all over again where you end up with separate builds for different devices.

From what I've read so far, there technically shouldn't be a reason why Ruby (via JRuby) and Python (via Jython) couldnt eventually be used to code Android apps. The SDK compiles Java code to native java byte code, which is in turn compiled to "Dalvik" byte code to be used by the Android VM. How the java byte code is generated (javac, jruby, jython, etc) should not matter, assuming it is using only the supported libraries.