wuster

Hey pg, I've followed your writings ever since Hackers & Painters was published, and you've thoroughly influenced the decisions I've taken at every major juncture of my career. Sorry if the initial comment was too quick trigger, I did not mean any malice towards the project creators. I've left more useful feedback elsewhere in this thread.

The essence of my discomfort with this is that because this is YC's slogan, having a YC startup publish it with the blessing of YC the organization seems a bit like self-worship. I never got the sense through any of your writings that you'd advocate for this sort of thing. I guess I interpreted it more as YC worship than a what's presented by the message, and I doubt I am the only one that might think that.

My humble 2 cents. Thanks for HN.

is the intent of this to prevent bad actors from re-selling them?

With such a small volume, what if the price increased by $.25 for every poster sold. Max price still wouldn't be that unreasonable if you're buying it with charity in mind.

Any thought on making a run of Zen of Python? I'd be interested in that more than this version. Would pay $40.

IMO his purchasing decision is legitimate. I think he liked the poster regardless of the charity element of it, that aspect just makes paying $40 palatable.

This smells like the new corporate motivational poster, except for cooler kids. IMO a little pretentious, just make something people want, without the wall ornaments.

Intel Core i5 and HD 4000 - I think this thing can be Hackintoshed!

gotta go through the motions of putting up good readmes and documentation, not a trivial amount of effort, only worth it if I think enough people want it. open sourcing something isn't exactly free effort.

I don't think storing passwords in any format in source control is good. Like someone else said, it's mixing app logic with deployment.

We use a combination of Google's open source Keyczar [1] and a relatively new Python keyring [2] library which uses the Keyczar crypter to read/write keys to a keyring storage backend, where the backend interface can be implemented with local crypted files or a cloud service.

[1] http://www.keyczar.org/ [2] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/keyring

We built this Python wrapper called appauth around of the concept of a Keyring service by application domain.

e.g. pseudo code:

    import appauth
    auth_service = appauth.AuthService('my-web-app')
    db_creds_cfg = auth_service.get('primary-db')

Inside of db_creds_cfg, it can be a free-form dictionary that provides whatever details is needed to get into a resource:

    db_creds_cfg['db_host']
    db_creds_cfg['db_port']
    db_creds_cfg['username']
    db_creds_cfg['password']

I put in some honest effort to find an open source solution to this, but failed to find anything with a simple install process AND programming interface. Is there any interest from HN if we choose to open source this?

Furthermore, we use Google Authenticator on our servers to require two-factor auth: http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/, on top of disabling password auth in favor of signing in with ssh keys. All log files are then either set to permission 600 just to be super paranoid.

high five from Steve Jobs's spirit

Yah... I'm reading this as you wanting to exploit them.

Agreed. I always make the time of day to talk to high school or college age kids aspiring to be in engineering or the sciences. Paying it forward if you will, because I got the same help when I was younger.

If they don't personally know the answer, the partners have a broad network of education insiders and experts to tap from, both on the educator and investor side. IK12 has funded companies in the e-learning space, browse through the companies page: http://www.imaginek12.com/companies.html

(I'm the co-founder at LearnSprout, IK12 W12)

I co-founded LearnSprout (ImagineK12, W12) with jobowoo. This was my first time doing a startup, going through the program at ImagineK12 was an incredible learning experience. What makes IK12 stand apart from other incubators is its understanding of the education market and grounding you to the realities of product distribution in edtech. Starting an edtech company is unlike any consumer idea you may have, IK12 helps you check your assumptions at the door.

You can expect: 1) First Day – get your ass kicked and assumptions checked on your product and vision 2) Educator Day – make your pitch to enthusiastic early adopter edtech enthusiasts and investors from the community 3) Weekly lunch/dinner speakers 4) Demo Day – self explanatory 5) accessible partners (Tim, Geoff, Alan) in person or via Skype whenever you need help

With edtech, it's incredibly rewarding to know that our late night coding sessions and long work weeks at LearnSprout translate into something of tangible social value: principals, teachers and students getting their software headaches out of the way and focusing on teaching + learning. ImagineK12 will help you focus on finding a real need within education that you ought to be solving with your team and talents.

We believe in the vision that software will eat the world, and it's only a matter of time that all classrooms will be immersed in new learning methods driven by and aided by technology. This sweeping change is begging for hacker-entrepreneurs to step up and build that vision. If that's you, ImagineK12 is the place to get started.

The apparent repetition is due to the triviality of the example. Imagine if you had to translate the display string or change the display name without renaming all of your code references to the constant.

[ Edit: add more context ]

My use case for this is to map between the database and application logic.

In the example, the short string 'N' is for storage in a db column, *.NEW is for use in code, and "New" is for use to display in an UI. You don't necessarily want to persist the display or var name because you may want to rename them in the app later. IMO it's a bad idea to store display representations as data.

Congrats to Geoff! We're looking forward to working with him at ImagineK12 to build out our edu product. In two offices hours so far, he's given us some hard hitting feedback about our customer development progress, so we've taken that to heart and "left the building" to talk to our potential users, not just relying on phone/email/social media like we were before.

I hope YC doesn't steal away -too- much of his attention ... =)

Do you blog about your knowledge in this area? I'd be interested in reading more of what you have to say.

Thanks. I should have thought about the other angle of this. Mostly I was fascinated with the fun possibilities.

I've been wondering if independent software vendors might benefit from some humanizing of the sales effort. Instead of charging $2 for an app, how about framing it as "buy the developer a taco", or for $4 "buy the developer a grande latte". The amazing $10 app could be "buy the developer a roll of sushi". You get the idea.

Psychologically, I find it much more satisfying to be rewarding friends & associates with more tangible things than some dollar amount.

Does anyone know if this model has been attempted before?

I actually use this to the opposite effect to convince myself whether an app is worth the cost. I think of it as "for the price of half a latte, I get to own and enjoy an app for the next N years". Seems like a great deal to me. If all I have to do is buy some developer the equivalent of half a latte for a productivity app I'll enjoy daily, I think I'm actually getting a steal.

BTW - I did buy Shift Jelly's PocketCasts app from the Android Market for something like $2.99. I highly recommend it, the app has un-tethered me from iTunes podcast syncing. Now I just download/stream exactly the episodes I want to listen to.

The app has some rough UX edges regarding behaviors of the back button, etc, but I'm going to write the developers about that.

I think the best thing for everyone to do is to calm down and not go running to Costco/Amazon/Newegg to hoard hard drives.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/11/02/141771712/how-fe...

The perception of scarcity, which leads to hoarding, only makes the scarcity problem worse for everyone.

I'm possibly rationalizing here, but some of the NOs I've received in my life have led to decisions and outcomes that I know ended up being the better path. So, definitely not something to feel down about, it's a tough YC class to get into.

Anyone who think they got jibbed because of supposedly amazing creds should congratulate YC that the applicant pool is so strong that so many other applicants are at least equal in ability.

Anyway, like Zuck said at Startup School - just go F'ing build it and prove them wrong if you can - it's so damn cheap to put out an MVP these days. I know we will continue our experiments and move methodically through our own process of trying to build a viable business, regardless of YC's opinion. I am pretty sure this is what pg would encourage as well.

He said there's a team of people sifting through that, and he instructs them to pass on only the stupidest and best (?) ideas.

I am mentoring a cousin and younger brothers of some of my friends who want to study CS or consider a career in this field. If they ask questions about how to prepare for a CS major, or eventually getting a job at companies, I tell them what I wish I had known when I was 17. I didn't have such a person to turn to when I was college age and was wondering whether this was the right career for me, given there are so many interesting options.

It only takes a few tens of minutes of my time to reply to their emails, but the type of mentorship, upbringing, or just sheer luck you had while growing up may not be available to someone else. Sometimes, it just takes a few words to help set their course.

While I am nowhere as accomplished as dmr, it's empowering to know that someone ten years younger would still love to be in my position, and that a few kind words can give them the encouragement to keep going.

Re: what it would look like? I am guessing just like a typical Apple ad?

* white or blurred background, putting the focus on product or user * clean graphics and visuals * montage of products in use, in real situations * subtlely snarky towards the competition

IMO, as ex-Googler, academic minded engineers will find more "kindred spirits" at a company like Google than most others.

It wouldn't surprise me if Obama was more in awe of Jobs than the other way around. After all, Steve's been in the spotlight for 30+ years now, and Obama was an unknown until 2004.

Google Maps with Voice Navigation was the killer app that made me ditch iPhone 3G for Nexus One. Now with Nexus S, I haven't looked back.

If your digital life is in Google apps, a Nexus phone is a very sensible choice.

I'm not willing to put up with carrier crapware on non-Nexus phones though. That would be too big of a compromise for me.