sdiwakar

Fair enough, you're right. It could be time to get ember.js on to G+ & drive more votes.

I'm going to change the title of this to be a call to action.

This has nothing to do with Google Plus, its about Google driving users to vote for their products instead of other open-source products.

The distinction being that both of these projects are OPEN SOURCE - therefore Google should not be taking COMMERCIAL advantage of this!

Hi HN, my co-founder and I have been working on a Google Reader clone in the last few weeks, we're not quite ready to launch, but would love to get feedback as soon as we've opened up our beta:

http://beta.newsmaven.co

We promise to have all the basics of Google Reader covered, including importing your feed data (or as much as possible through the API).

Of course, if you're looking for something to move to immediately, NewsBlur is an awesome product :)

To be honest, I'm not particularly bummed that our team Contactable (http://becontactable.com) got rejected. If anything - its encouraging us to try to hustle harder, get a prototype to market, obtain paying customers and building a profitable business.

Although I was bummed about not getting through to the next round - I DO NOT feel that I was hard done by. In fact, YC partners clearly thought that there were better businesses to back or a better fit.

... and that's OK. The best thing to do, is to focus more of your energy towards your own startup.

I do not believe any of the processes need to change - if they realise something is broken, YC's partners will adjust accordingly. After all, they are also in business to make money - so if they start picking bad businesses to back, then they will change their application process accordingly.

Life's never fair, so just get over it and hustler harder!

Bummer, we just got a rejection email for Contactable (http://becontactable.com).

The email came via Mailgun, here are the headers:

Received: by luna.mailgun.net with SMTP mgrt ????61; Fri, 16 Nov 2012 01:17:01 +0000

Every time someone managed to get a custom printed Coke bottle - the proud owner inevitably photographed the bottle for display on Facebook - which of course is the real genius behind their marketing campaign.

It may have been an expensive marketing exercise for Coca-Cola, but being so different definitely grabs headlines.

I agree, there are hundreds of guys in India that are doing a great job advancing the stated of the art - and you'll never hear a peep from any of them.

Ankit and Rahul are just good at talking themselves up. There are plenty of people in InfoSec that excel at marketing themselves.

Worst of all, they are an embarrassment to the intelligence agencies they have purportedly worked for.

I have no doubt in my mind that a graduate beginning her infosec career at the NSA, DSD, GCHQ, RAW, Mossad or other intelligence agency would show a better understanding of fundamental security concepts than these fuddiduddies.

I'm curious to know whether people in the US holding senior positions are not subjected to non-compete periods following their termination with their current employer (e.g. not working for a direct competitor for a period of 3 months etc.)?

It surprised me that Marrisa Mayer was allowed to quit Google and then start at Yahoo the very next day, is that common?

MaysonL, I believe the US position is to prevent patent violation in underdeveloped economies regardless of where the research was done or who owns the patent - this makes sense from an economic perspective given that the same could happen to a patent owned by an American firm.

However, I agree with you if you are suggesting that the US should not be strong-arming poorer countries into raising prices just to maintain the profits made by pharmaceutical companies.

I'm 30 and am in an identical decision - except, a few weeks ago, I made the decision to resign from a well paid job at a startup.

A close friend of mine from university are going it alone for the next 18 / 24 months.

I'll be relying solely on my wife's income and our substantial savings over the next 12 months.

The main propellant that started me on my journey has been the unequivocal support I've received from both my wife and parents (my own and my in-laws).

Once I was clear in what I wanted to do & had a rough plan for how I could achieve those, I waited a few months - thought about the various scenarios day & night and once I had convinced myself it was a risk worth take - I took it to my best friend (and tried convincing him).

Luckily, we have been coding together since university and we decided we could take the plunge together since our temperment and personalities are matched well.

One of my current colleagues encouraged me & said to me it'll be the best experience of my life, to paraphrase his words... "the worst that could happen is that I'd have to go back to working for someone else. There's no chance that I could die, so why the hell not give it a try?".

When I mustered up the courage to tell my CIO (who I report to...) that I was leaving - he was sad to see me leave, but overjoyed that I'd be taking the risk and trying a new venture (he co-founded the company I currently work for and previously sold an earlier startup to Cisco).

So with the encouragement of others around me, I could only blame myself for not following through and giving the 'startup' thing a try.

... and thus, I would impart this advice to you.

Over the last few months, we've been brushing up our coding skills by building prototypes of ideas we like (and launching them - this is the hard part). One of them is a project we call Math Brain (http://mathbrain.com.au/exam) which helps students in Grade 12 practise for their university entrance exams (or as we call them in Australia - High School Certificate).

The site is not supposed to be a billion dollar business - but it seems to have started getting some regular usage (we were plesantly surprised). Hopefully, we can continue building upon this and perhaps build a proper business out of it (we would never had known if we had never launched it).

At the same time, we're not putting all our eggs in one basket - like you, we've got a number of other app ideas we'd like to prototype and release - all built & following the lean startup methodology.

The difference though, is that we have external pressure to deliver - i.e. both my wife and parents are invested our venture succeeding and therefore we demo things to them regularly. They got sick of me telling them about the ideas I have and showing them mockups of products - now they tell me to shut up and build it.

The trick, I believe is to make sure that you have someone outside of you and your co-founders putting the pressure on to deliver the project. Once you've got this external pressure, your likelihood of success is already higher.

The fact that you have a wife that can support you financially is great - because now you are both invested in making sure you are successful - this is great motivation!!!

I hope this helps in getting the fire started... god speed!

Is this an indication that Digsby is going out of business?

Amazing, I wonder what this means for creationists and more importantly - our understanding of our universe?

I think its wrong that you are espousing password security, when you have not taken the required steps to secure your own accounts across "a ton of forums"?

Security in the real world is hard. I worked as a penetration tester, so I have some authority to say so.

For most startups getting users is a priority and everyone is prone to taking shortcuts (clearly including YOU - sharing passwords across forums); incidents like this are common place in the business world and the fact that Envato had the balls to own up is kudos to them.

I suppose it is somewhat related to physical security and the general mistrust of TSA agents by some HN readers. I agree with you though - not quite HN worthy.

Amazing, I'm quite surprised this hasn't been picked up by larger media outlets.

Whilst there's nothing wrong with a 3rd party service accessing a publicly available web-site; for my ISP to _willingly_ on-sell my web access history to a 3rd party service managed outside Australia could well be illegal.

I hope Telstra doesn't just get let off the hook for this.

Nice dude, my wife cooks for the both of us while we work on bootstrapping our startup. Nothing like a healthy, lovingly made meal.

Nice one dude, good on you for taking the leap. Any thoughts on what pitfalls to look out for after quitting and doing my own startup?

The major difference I see between starting a company somewhere in the USA versus outside of the US (at least from my sheltered Australian perspective) is access to an engaged market.

Not to mention that the risk culture outside of the US is very different to what most American born entrepreneurs appreciate.

So while starting a company outside of a US tech-hub is definitely possible (and makes sense for many things) a web-startup gains some value from being surrounded by other complementary startups. It seems to spawn a culture whereby engineers at one firm are friends with engineers at another - allowing natural partnerships to form. Silicon Valley seems to attractive like people, accelerating the process.

In Australia, software engineers are hard to find and at least in Sydney - the best engineers get absorbed by the likes of the banks, Google, Atlassian et al.

Summing up, while its great that you can pull of starting in Philly (or anywhere else) - its probably still easier to start a company in Silicon Valley because of its start-up gravitational pull.

@nl you couldn't have summarised better.

There are plenty of problems in Australia, including insane housing prices, negligible government support for the manufacturing industry and comparatively lower research & development spending (I don't have data to prove this, but I think this is obvious in comparison to other countries esp. the US).

BUT, on the other hand, we have what other citizens in other countries lack:

  * an excellent superannuation system
  * a social security system that provides some real security (centrelink)
  * a medicare system that provides for all Australians
  * a public university system (although since the Howard govt. universities have suffered)
  * an excellent public schooling system 
  * relatively low gun crime and,
  * a tolerant, multicultural workforce.

I was in the same predicament a few months ago after coming up from Australia (though not for job interview ;-)).

My wife and I rented a car from San Jose and drove around. If you are used to public transport in Europe or even Australia - you'll find navigating your way around solely on public transport difficult.

But, California has a great highway system, so if you feel brave enough and have some cash - a rental car allows you to see more in the short amount of time you'll have.

That said, when I visited the Google campus in Mountain View, there wasn't a whole lot to see; plus I found myself feeling a little unwelcome with everyone doing a double check on whether we had badges on (which is a good thing... for campus security!). But that may have just been the SLR camera I was walking around with ;-) On the serious side - their campus is nice - and they have multi-coloured bicycles for getting around... cool!

I'd definitely try to checkout Stanford - the campus is gorgeous (as is Berkeley - if you can get there); Luckily, I happened to be there the day Steve Job's ceremony was being conducted - so we got to see the campus, the secret service, California police, and a whole bunch of celebs.

For the Icons of IT tour, if you have the time (and a car) you could check out all the other Silicon Valley icons within short driving distance:

    * Apple in Cupertino
    * Yahoo! in Sunnyvale
    * Cisco in San Jose
    * eBay's Whitman campus (they have a nice play house with an office built inside) 
    * Intel museum in Santa Clara

The Facebook office isn't very exciting - we arrived at their Palo Alto campus but there's nothing to see - you can wander into the foyer and take a peek through the glass doors where all the staff work, but that's about it.

Also, the computer history museum is excellent - it'll take you a few hours to really get through the various sections so if you have the time - I'd check that out. That's right near Google, so you could walk (20mins?) from Google's office.

Great article, although it doesn't seem to suggest any strategies for countering memory loss.

I may have to purchase the authors book to find out ;)

Useful, especially if someone needed to do a quick and dirty 'webifying' of an older desktop based python app.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks for sharing your experiences, 'though I've yet to try interviewing with YC, stories like this are always encouraging (even though things didn't work out for you this time around - I'm sure there will be plenty or opportunities in the future!).

Soldier on, man.

Likewise, I thought code-search was invaluable. I used it often while coding.

The plus side is that the team could reflect honestly (and in public). At some companies, commenting publicly would be a career limiting move.

I agree. To demonstrate an exploits effectiveness - it has to be exploited in a realistic situation (in this case the app store).

There's always this flip-side to reporting security findings. I don't know the details of Charlie Millers exploit, however had he gone through the process of informing the vendor (in this case Apple) and then allowing sufficient time to address the issue, perhaps a showdown could have been avoided (I'm assuming that he hadn't).

People however, also forget that, there are other pressures facing info-sec researchers - such as pressure from management at the company where they work to 'publish' and/or present their findings under the company banner. Often, this irks vendors, because vulnerabilities are used to promote the researcher's (or who they work for) interests.

That said, Microsoft, Google and Facebook have very transparent processes & expectations for submitting vulnerabilities.

I believe the title is misleading, as it has incorrectly labelled this an "Aussie" design.

The article states IAT21 as being an "Austrian research company"?

AUSTRIAN, not Australian.

I'm guessing you are on Windows, so I'd recommend Keepass (google for official web-site). Store all your passwords in there or any similar password store.

If Windows 7 now has the ability to securely store passwords ala MacOSX's Keychain or a Java's Keystore, that could also be an option worth investigating.

I love it... I'm looking forward to the stable release being available in a few months. The web app space is now maturing and competitors like Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox and Opera are at the forefront right now. Lets see what IE can do with its newest release.