Ask HN: Where to Learn Rudimentary Marketing Skills? - <AUTHOR> Anyone who works with me tells me they think that I'm a great programmer, but I don't know the first thing about marketing or sales.
I'd like to get from "employed at a dead-end job for a sinking startup making a very humble salary with no benefits or vacation with a 4 hour daily commute" to the vicinity of "self-employed consultant working from home earning $XY,000 per week on client engagements".
Where/how can I quickly learn whatever skills I'm missing? (I might be under the gun soon to come up with an answer, since rumor mill is telling me that my $dayjob is going out of business on the 1st yet $dayjob['boss'] has remained silent about this.)
For the record: I'm technically not quite going 100% solo freelance consultant, a friend of mine (whom, unlike me, does not have a felony conviction for computer hacking that shuts 99% of doors) started an LLC that I intend to work under full time. Our website is https://paragonie.com
I've already seen a lot of Double Your Freelancing and read a bunch of 'patio11's blog posts.
For those interested in knowing, my skillset covers PHP, Java, .NET, JavaScript/HTML/CSS, and Shell/batch scripting, with a specialization in application security.
WHAT WE HAVE DONE SO FAR:
We've performed two code audits on cryptography applications in the past two months, but I'm not yet at liberty to post the reports (although the client did agree to publication later this year).
We have also started a community initiative to backport PHP 7's CSPRNG features into PHP 5 projects: https://github.com/paragonie/random_compat
We also have a new post on our blog (once per week, on average) that consistently resonates with the part of the PHP developer community I can reach and, usually, explains new security concepts from a developer's perspective. Based on the feedback I've received, this is generally seen as a high value offering that lots of people benefit from.
Is this a good start? Is there something I can do today that will help me reach businesses that need the skills I have to offer? <comment><USER2> Hey Scott,

This is my perspective, and shouldn't be taken as the be all, end all of marketing. I'm also not very good at communicating, so I'm sorry that I've done a bad job.

First, deal with Google. Given your felony conviction, and the shitty college rag stories about your arrest, you need to mount simple, positive PR campaign. Create a website S....tA....ski.com, and an about.me page. Maybe a twitter, @S....tA....ski, and a Discuss account. On these properties, you'll need to communicate a very fluffy image, where you say nice things about yourself. The goal being to push the old, no good stories off the front page of google.com

Marketing is about finding an audience, and communicating the value you provide to them.

From what I've seen of ParIni, it looks like you're hanging your shingle as a web app developer who's super focused on security. That's great, now you need to find an audience.

You know much more about your market than I do, but a really great resource I've found has been forums that contain people who could be your customers. One mistake I've made is to find forums of people who are more like me, than my customers. In your case, it could be app-sec developers. The focus should be on people who own, or need app-sec.

Now that you've found a forum of potential customers, you want to create an account(use a personal name, not corporate), set up some keyword alerts, and lurk. For app-sec, keyword alerts could be something like bcrypt, or scrypt, or heartbleed. You'll know best what keywords to use.

After you've seen how the forum works, understand the lingo, and decorum, start being a positive contributor. When someone asks a question, write a good answer. If the forum allows it, answer old, unanswered questions. Be as helpful as possible, and you will be seen as an expert in this community.

As you gain status, people will mention you when they need someone with your expertise. Gradually, people will find your posts, and reach out to you asking for help. These people are now leads, and you did a marketing.

One thing to keep in mind is that you don't go from maligned employee to $XY,000 per week over night. You're going to want to think of smaller steps, how do I go from maligned employee to someone giving me a dollar for doing app-sec.

As for specific resources, read the books, 'Double Your Freelancing Rate', and 'Double Your Freelancing Clients'. Both books really teach some fundamental skills that are not intuitive. The main thing I got from 'Rate' was how to practice empathy with my clients.

<comment><USER3> To add to an already great answer by @yoloswagins, you may want to read the book "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg.

It lists 21 ways, or channels, a business can utilize to find customers.

Although the book is primarily targeted for startups, the information therein is really applicable to any business that wants to grow.

I also suggest growing your brand through developing some sort of Productized Service. If you don't know what that is, Google it up. Essentially you bundle your service as a product, which makes it easier for your customers to purchase from you versus having them ask you for a quote as a consultant.

The benefit is you can then limit the scope of what you offer at a set, fixed price.

Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting and specific suggestion. I'll check it out immediately, thanks. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook suing Ontario porn firm - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestar.com/News/article/286091 A Canadian company specializing in Internet porn is being sued by Facebook amid allegations it hacked the popular social networking website's computers and tried to access the personal information of users, court documents show. <comment><USER2> _"These requests for information from Facebook generated error messages and were detected as unauthorized attempts to access and harvest proprietary information."_

They're being sued for getting HTTP 403 error pages?

 _The suit alleges Facebook has suffered damages in "excess of $5,000" and has been "irreparably harmed."_

D'oh, their valuation is now only 14.999995 billion.

IP fishing expeditions seem like abuse. Sounds like Facebook, flush with their +5 vorpal cash-hoard, are trying it out on lowly 1st-level NPCs.

Getting some practice throwing their weight around and bullying.</comment>


The whole world should be using Scheme - <AUTHOR>

Just a silly post, nothing very stimulating. I have spent the last month and a half learning Clozure Common Lisp.
A cool implementation to be sure (it has an amazing wealth of integration with Obj-C on the Mac which is my platform). But, holy god Common Lisp is messy! SLIME? Why? I just want the interpreter running in a buffer along side the file I am editing! No need for all of the crazy connection routines.
Scheme is slim, and so much more intuitive! QUACK + mzscheme is a breeze to get running in Emacs, loads quicker, and feels cleaner...
</random_thoughts> <comment><USER2> That's a pretty broad claim!

The number of LISP dialects and derivatives is pretty impressive, someone ought to make a table that compares them side-by-side so you can select the one that is right for what you want to do.

How broadly applicable is the QUACK + mzscheme combination ?

Would you be able to write a web application in it that serves up dynamic content to a large number of users (a la HN, or larger, and without peeking at the arc sources ;) ) ?

Would you be able to make it run on an embedded platform ?

Use it as a scripting language from the command line to access a database or a filesystem and do a bunch of stuff ?

These are all common and everyday activities and I'm wondering how difficult it would be to put scheme to work on problems like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, I was having an emotional moment after getting QUACK + mzscheme setup.

As far as I know, the QUACK + mzscheme combo should work wherever you can have a running instance of Emacs and mzscheme. It seems to do the job pretty well. Running mzscheme with the errortrace argument and a few modifiers returns a full debug backtrace for errors...

Worth while questions though. I do, however, find the cleanliness of a programming language an attractor/deterrent to my learning it. Common Lisp is pretty crufty.

I imagine Scheme is certainly better suited to running as an embedded than CL.

Either way, learning the language first is my concern for educational reasons; making it useful is my secondary concern.

<comment><USER2> > learning the language first is my concern for educational reasons; making it > useful is my secondary concern.

I'm in the opposite boat, I have to somehow make my time earn me a living, it's hard to justify time out for pure educational reasons (even if I do smuggle a bit here and there).

Great to see you happy about learning a new language though, you can never have enough of those under your belt.

Especially when they're off the beaten path.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I have no debt and no dependencies so I left my job to pursue self education and personal projects.

Thanks for the vote of confidence :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There'll never be a language that "the whole world should be using." What's optimal for one problem WILL be a poor choice for another problem.

Not to mention wide variations in the capabilities of programmers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Slime is one of the things I miss most when writing scheme.</comment>


The only job of a CEO  - <AUTHOR> http://tomasztunguz.com/2011/08/26/two-great-ceos-the-difference-between-momentum-and-inertia/ <comment><USER2> I really believe its a personality type. Either you have it or you don't. Most CEO's are first-born, extroverted, visionaries.</comment>


Show HN: Finally, You Can Accept Pre-Orders after Kickstarter with Celery - <AUTHOR> https://www.trycelery.com

<comment><USER2> The name "Celery" made me think of the task queue[1]. In both cases though it's a very random name.

[1] <http://www.celeryproject.org/>

<comment><USER3> The logo looks almost identical to the old celery (task queue) logo. Not sure how the word "celery" relates to payments, but the name of the task queue is not random: rabbits like celery (rabbitmq.com).

<comment><USER2> Ah, I can see that now. I know nothing about rabbits; maybe carrot (queuerot?) would have been a better choice.

<comment><USER3> carrot was already in use. I like Celery, we have no plans to change the name

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone curious, here is a sample/demo page after creation.

<https://www.trycelery.com/p/my-first-product>

It looks solid.

I see that you mention that you have had quite a lot of press coverage for this.. by the "As Featured In".

I can't find any related articles though and I'd be interested in reading them :)

<https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=link%3Atrycelery.com>

Plus site:techcrunch.com trycelery.com doesn't work, and neither can I find any articles on BetaBeat, Forbes or the NYT?

If you are truly backed by YCombinator (which I have no reason to doubt), I'd have expected to be able to read some coverage?

<comment><USER5> Hey Chris, I'm one of the guys who worked on it. The company name is under Airbrite. We built an e-commerce API and Celery is powered off of it.

<comment><USER6> That is very misleading marketing speak, to the point of lying. You (or your copywriter) just killed Celery's credibility.

<comment><USER5> Point noted and we'll be fixing this. Thanks for the input.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm missing something. Can you explain this to me as if I were five? I'm really gun shy with anything involving my customers CC data, and I suspect others are too.

Some of my concerns:

1) Authorize now but only charge when actually shipping is standard Visa policy. Doing it any other way is not allowed. Your system seems like a workaround for that, which raises my alarm bells.

2) To be clear - you are storing the credit cards in your vault (not Stripe's vault), and then running them through your Stripe account later as normal transactions? And this is cool with Stripe/Visa?

3) What do you mean PCI compliant? Do you think you are, or are you being regularly audited? Where are your servers? Credit cards are serious business; we need to know.

4) I'd expect a _ton_ of chargebacks. How are those handled? What do the chargeback fees look like?

5) Is this Amazon Payments without the branding?

I want to love your product, but I wonder these things. Please help me understand!

<comment><USER5> In the case of pre-ordering, Celery doesn't make any authorizations/holds upon the creation of the order. We use Stripe to make sure the card is valid and the charge is processed at a later time.

Celery does not store the credit cards and all payment information transferred is encrypted with SSL. The cards are held within Stripe's vault. Each seller uses their own Stripe token.

The chargebacks would affect the seller, since the payments are linked to their Stripe account. It's important that seller is able to actually ship the item if they decide to charge the buyer. Otherwise, they would need to refund or risk getting hit with chargebacks.

<comment><USER7> Whoa - you need to make it clear that I have to bring my own Stripe account. Nowhere is that mentioned on your page. So the 256-bit encryption you're touting on your homepage is really _Stripe's_ 256-bit encryption? Not cool.

Is the "Embeddable Checkout Overlay" really Stripe Checkout too? Which of your features are you actually providing and which are really Stripe?

Right now this looks like a simple wrapper around Stripe Connect that waits X days to bill, plus a basic Bootstrap template you can use. What am I missing?

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the questions. We're working to update the FAQ and site to make all of this more clear. My personal belief is that there's more to commerce than just payments (order management, inventory management, analytics, supporting web and native mobile/tablet apps, etc). It may look simple now, but these are the types of challenges we're in the process of tackling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like <https://www.shopstarter.org>

</comment><comment><USER9> One of the main reasons I feel comfortable about using Kickstarter is the fact that I know my funds won't get released to the company/person unless enough people "fund" it. Once enough people back it then I'm not as worried about losing my money (probably more psychological than anything) because I feel like there would be a huge uproar if someone tried running off. This doesn't really seem to give me as the "pre-orderer" any security. Also...who really loves Celery?

<comment><USER5> 75% of Kickstarter funded campaigns don't ship on time (research by Ethan Mollick from UPenn). Since my money is committed, I'm not sure if that gives me comfort either :)

Personally, I feel better knowing that I won't be charged at all until the item is shipped. And in the worst case, I would request a refund or issue a chargeback if I felt the seller was being "sketchy".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome! I've been waiting for a solution like this

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to know the following: can't you already do this with Stripe? They seem to use stripe as their backend, so how is this different than me doing this with stripe on my own (i.e. collect charge tokens, charge later)? Or do stripe's tokens expire after a short period of time, I haven't looked into that yet.

I genuinely want to know because I'm potentially interested.

<comment><USER12> No, you can create a customer token and that token will forever refer to the credit card details the user entered. The only way you could consider that they "expire" is if the card as-entered expires, or if the user cancels that card. But even in this case your token still works, it just points to data that isn't valid anymore.

Unless celery does anything else on top of this (auto notifies customers if the cc expires in the interim, provides them a way to update details without you needing to do anything) then I don't see any compelling reason to use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it me, or is the grammar on this page very confusing. I had to reread sentences multiple times to understand their meanings. I understand it's a marketing page, but it seems like the author is more focused on dropping buzzwords instead of explaining the product

<comment><USER14> The only place I see a grammar faux pas is in this sentence (emphasis mine):

> Spend less time _on_ tracking down lost orders and focus on building great > products.

It should be "Spend less time tracking down..."

The bigger issue is that nearly every sentence breaks in awkward places due to the layout of the site.

Examples:

      Safely hold payment information
      without charging until you're ready
      to ship.

"until you're ready to ship" is a singular concept and should be on the same line.

      Our checkout design is responsive
      so your product sells itself on any
      desktop, mobile, or tablet device.

Same: "any desktop, mobile, or tablet device" should be on the same line.

      Allow purchasing directly on your
      site with an embedded checkout
      overlay that's elegant and secure

"an embedded checkout overlay" should be on the same line.

Similarly, none of the emphasis phrases should start halfway through a line and break:

      take pre-
      orders in person

is hard to read even though it's a key point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe I'm the odd man out, but I am so sick and tired of company names that are absolutely unrelated to their purpose. Celery? Seriously? If you're not a fresh vegetable delivery service, GTFO.

<comment><USER16> I moonlight to pay the bills by delivering fresh vegetables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> easily sell swag on Celery with <https://teelaunch.com/> \-- simply send us your XLS/CSV of orders and we'll take care of the rest.

<comment><USER18> So I can launch a t-shirt business in the next 10 minutes? Cool. I just might.

<comment><USER17> that is correct

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there a demo/ sample page of the product?

<comment><USER5> We're working with Boosted Boards to help them with their pre-orders: <https://www.trycelery.com/p/boosted>

<comment><USER20> So this seems to go against what I read earlier where charges are only made when the item ships - but it seems the Boosted Board takes a $200 deposit instead of just saving your card for the full amount?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm a bit confused but is this the same concept as shopstarter.org that was posted here a week or two ago?

</comment><comment><USER22> Why US/Can only? I'd need something like this for Argentina.

</comment><comment><USER23> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER24> Not so much emphasis with Kickstarter please. A lot of people won't go the Kickstarter route (non-US residents being among them). Being able to take pre- orders is the magic words, and won't alienate prospects.</comment>


ReSharper – a tool to develop good habits - <AUTHOR> http://bush-dev.com/resharper-a-tool-to-develop-good-habits/ <comment><USER2> It also makes Visual Studio unusable in middle range hardware.

Visual Studio 2019 + Roslyn plugins is more than enough.

<comment> non-entity Hell I have an unnecessarily large amount of memory, and Resharper still slows down VS</comment></comment>


Project Stack Push/Pop - <AUTHOR> http://blog.urth.org/2009/12/project-stack-pushpop.html

<comment><USER2> Dave Rolsky is a Perl programming machine ~ <http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/> and lead the team to create the Perl Datetime module ~ <http://datetime.perl.org/?Modules> I sat in on a talk with one of the developers ( _"Iain Truskett"_ ~ <http://use.perl.org/~goon/journal/16893> ) more than half a decade ago and was amazed at the complexity of time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I do a similar thing, but with conversations. Some friends and I have become more aware of unintentional subject changes, and instead of letting the old topic roll under our wheels, we say "push," and "pop" when we are done with the temporary subject change. This keeps us focused on the original topic because a stack push feels more transitory.

And it's not just the geeks. (But it's mostly the geeks.)</comment>


Ask HN: How to describe myself as an entrepreneur without sounding cocky? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently working on a personal portfolio site but can't decide what to describe myself as. At the moment, I've simply put Entrepreneur & Web Architect. I know many of you have great personal sites and I would love some criticism.
If you do visit my projects github page, please note my design work is not yet finished.
grimmfang.github.io/Portfolio
Thanks! <comment><USER3> Try describing what you do instead of labelling it. "I'm building an app that helps blind folks read".

Personally, I'm allergic to the word 'Entrepreneur', whenever I hear it I wince. Just say what you're building, plain and simple. I also wouldn't call myself a Web Architect, I don't really understand what that means, it just sounds fancy.

Also consider not giving yourself a title at all. If you really want a title, I'd go with something humble like "a guy who builds stuff on the internet".

For reference, this is my personal site: [http://www.davidkatz.me/](http://www.davidkatz.me/)

<comment><USER4> This is good advice. Personally, I call myself a "founder" or "co-founder" over "entrepreneur."

For in-person interactions, whenever someone asks me what I do, I always just say I work for a tiny company that does XYZ. If they pursue and ask what I do for the company, I say I bounce around doing a bunch of things (which founders do).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A writer is someone who writes, if not for a living, at least every day. It doesn't matter if they are published yet. Similarly an entrepreneur is someone who is actively building a business.. it doesn't matter if they are successful yet.

You can, of course, put whatever the heck you like on your own home page. But if it makes you twitch then maybe stick with web architect for now, and get out there and start building your business. Once you feel you are building a real business you'll be happy to use the word entrepreneur. I suggest you use this as a motivation to get out there and do what you want to do. Let the phrasing on the portfolio/profile site look after itself.

In my mind building a business means more than just having a tax vehicle around your own personal consultation services. A consultation services business probably has other employees. Once you are building a business that is designed to actually create and sell something (whether it be service or product) then be proud to use the word entrepreneur. Till then, stick it up on the fridge as a goal !

\--- signed, someone who alternates between writing 'Entrepreneur' and 'Programmer' on the immigration forms each time I travel, depending on whether I'm currently actively building a startup or just living off my consultation services.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just describe what you do. Web designer / front-end programmer etc.

Please don't call yourself web architect unless you're involved in W3C standards...

</comment><comment><USER7> If it's for a portfolio then you're probably going to work for people.

What are you going to be doing for them? How are you going to add value to their business?

If they wanted that value and were actively looking; what job titles would they put into Google?

That's what you want to describe yourself as on a portfolio site.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe this talk will also help you figure out what to call yourself - <USER2> Start With Why: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sioZd3AxmnE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sioZd3AxmnE)</comment>


Ask HN: How to defeat interview anxiety? - <AUTHOR> HNers, I have attended 2 interviews so far in the past 4 years & I have failed to get the job on both the interviews. I just get very anxious during in person interviews & I am not able to think straight at all. I could only give out answers to questions for which I knew the answers before hand. I am not good at deducing answers logically during interviews. For instance on my last interview, I was given a problem & I fumbled a lot & gave convoluted answers but when the interviewers left, I was able to think straight & arrived at a very simple solution to the problem. My success rate is 0% so far & I am worried that it is going to take some time before I could get a job. As of now, my strategy has been to prepare as well as possible before hand for the interview and for some reason this strategy does not seem to work. Any suggestions? Thanks. <comment><USER2> 1) Practice doing job interviews. Your campus career center probably offers this. In the alternative, find an employed buddy to do it with you.

2) Have five good lines polished and ready to go prior to going into an interview. Attempt to steer the conversation such that you get to use at least three of them. For example, I always made it a point to research the company I was applying for, get one factoid into the interview, and say "I made it my business to know your business." (That line gets better reactions than almost any I've ever delivered.)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have real trouble in interviews and you think this is a long-term issue that you can't address, you need to make your paperwork so strong that it is obvious to the interviewers that you are a poor interview performer rather than an ignoramus. I keep harping on about this, but one way of doing this is strengthening your open source or other easily verifiable credentials.

Secondly, try and apply for jobs (if you have this choice) to places that don't do "monkey trick" interviews but screen using other techniques, like code submissions. (This is one of the many reasons I prefer the latter to the former)

The point about power dynamics in the link below might also be helpful:

[http://askamanager.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-can-i-stop- being...](http://askamanager.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-can-i-stop-being-so- nervous-in-job.html)

[Later edit: Since you said elsewhere that this is a problem only during interviews, make sure your reference letters mention you are a good communicator or problem solver or whatever, to indicate that anything the interviewers see is not typical]

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your suggestions. Top companies are always looking to see how well potential employees perform under crunch situations. My gut feeling is that they expect to see employees perform calmly even under pressure. They would like to see employee solve problems logically, quickly and deliver the solution in a more coherent manner. I would expect the same if I am at the other end of the table. I would like to be able to be that kind of a performer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just do not care. Or start to believe you do not care. It's more about psychology.

Or... Try do not think about how it will go and do not do any preparation for it. You afraid about something COULD happen. So just do not think about what COULD happen. If it will ever happen, then be afraid =)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have decided to stop preparation at the least 1-2 days before the interview. However, I have attended only 2 interviews & I cannot say for sure that this did not help. Probably, I might do better in my next interview. Will have to just wait and watch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you have more general problems with anxiety, or just during interviews?

There are a lot of techniques (meditation, cognitive therapy, etc.) that can help with anxiety, but which one is most appropriate is going to depend on the details of your situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just during interviews

<comment><USER5> If that's the case, some simple relaxation exercises, and a lot of practice (fake interviews with friends, etc.) ought to do the trick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Practice interview with others. Even if they don't know what the hell you're talking about, rehearsing in front of live person will help you become more comfortable.

2\. Xanax, or some other anti-anxiety med.

<comment><USER7> Ugh. No. Don't start doing meds just to get through job interviews. Better yet, don't do them at all (if you can possibly avoid it).

The fact is nobody really knows how they work, and they all have rafts of side effects which their makers are _loathe_ to discuss with you in an upfront and intellectually honest manner. (How do I know this? I worked for one of the larger makers of such drugs).

In any case it's unlikely that you'll be able to predict how they'll affect _you_ on the day of the interview (if they have any affect above placebo at all), and might even make you have greater feelings of anxiety and low self- esteem (as in "I'm so messed up I need pillz just to hack these job interviews).

<comment><USER6> I agree that popping pills isn't always the best answer; however, if the anxiety is dysfunctional and causing problems (possibly far beyond the scope of a job interview), it may be worth consulting a therapist and psychiatrist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The single most useful thing I've found is to find a way to get past the very idea that this is a one-way process, whereby it's supposedly just you who has to prove their (intellectual, economic) worthiness to others (whose own credentials completely beyond question).

In fact you might want to start practicing the complete opposite of this mindset -- just walk in there as if it's _you_ who is contemplating whether to hire _them_ (which in essence is true anyway -- as all truly desirable working situations are two-way streets), and has plenty of other options available if this particular situation doesn't work out. (Paul Graham has a few good paragraphs about this).

Another key conceptual point to keep in mind the fact that while many of these tests are presented as being nominally objective, when in fact their bigger purpose is really psychological -- the interviewer really is just trying to see whether they can "vibe" with you in this interaction as much as whether you are coming up with the right answers. So another thing you want to try priming yourself with (rather than meds) is an an air of simple humility, rather than defensiveness, or again, a need to be seen as always "right" or "worthy" of their assessments.

Some more mundane tips: concentrate on listening(!), maintaining eye contact, and (very important) speaking _slowly_ (because one of the outward signs of anxiety is the tendency to bulldoze past others). Ditto for written Q&A tests, and especially for coding tasks at the whiteboard -- even if you don't normally do so in your own personal habits, find a way to force yourself to write neatly (evenly spaced, properly alignment horizontal / vertical). And when you think it's done, check it again for failure modes and possible optimizations (before the interviewer has a chance to give you that annoying "that's nice. but aren't you missing something?" line).

Basically, it's better to answer fewer questions in more thorough detail than to get through every question the interviewer may have had on his list to ask you. And it's _much_ more important to be neat, cogent and presentable than to be superfast when writing code. And which again, all gets down to basic psychology -- showing the interviewer that you are capable of seeing things from their perspective -- which in essence is what these "tests" are really about, anyway.

Also: as others have said, do develop your portfolio and code samples -- which by all rights ought to speak volumes more than those stupid puzzle sessions).

But as to those puzzles: accept that they are represent a deeply flawed and simple-minded (when you think about it, almost zombie-like) approach to the task of assessing human potential -- but due to a lack of imagination, or simply a follow-the-herd mentality, your interviewers just don't have any better tools to whip out for the occasion -- so you'll just have to "embrace the suck" and find a way to social-engineer your way through them.

By now most of those famous, occasionally interesting (but sometimes also incredibly asinine) puzzle questions have been "leaked" to various places -- dig up as many of those as you can, and spend a few afternoons convincing yourself of your ability to answer each and every one of them. (In particular: techinterview.org, wu riddles, steve yegge's questions, etc).

Even if you miss a few, you can at least be confident that your probability of failure is acceptably low -- and (for the logic puzzles) most of those you do miss probably have some "aha!" flavor to them that doesn't have any functional relation to real-world problem solving anyway. Or you've simply gotten rusty (like many of these interviewers do themselves, particularly in areas that weren't their major focus in school).

Finally, "chill." Don't spend the morning before the interview cramming. Better to lounge around a bit, make sure you've eaten well (but not just before the interview), scoped out the route to get there, etc.

And when it does come to rejection (which is inevitable): keep in mind that it is the very nature of the hiring process, particularly at some of the better places to work, that they have an almost annoyingly high "false negative" rate -- it really is MUCH better on their part to no-hire a good candidate than to hire a bad or insidiously second-rate one (the consequences of which can by very, very expensive). So you're just bound to get rejected from places where you didn't really deserve it.

But sometimes it just so happens that you _do_ deserve it -- because you weren't prepared, or you left some interviewer the impression you were bulldozing past their questions, whatever. Either way, the Zen of dealing with it is NOT to question the rejection; but rather to consider it as a data point: a kind of a failed trade, or a missed sale -- something to learn from, definitely but not (intrinsically) as a sign that your "product" is (ie, you are) damaged goods, per se. And so to the see the rejection as being something fundamentally _good_ (despite the near-term financial and other costs), insofar as it at least teaches you something.

And that of course, every door that closes opens another.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. It was very inspiring to read your entire text. I will definitely try answering fewer questions more thoroughly & practice being cogent, neat and presentable. I have been playing back my last interview repeatedly on my mind to figure out all places where I might have not come out very presentable to the interviewers. Hopefully these course corrections will get me a new opportunity. I am in total agreement with the 'false negative' comment. Thanks again.</comment></comment>


Development time tracking for Git repositories - <AUTHOR> https://gitential.com/accounts/2/projects/29/share?from=2017-06-01&to=2017-08-30&uuid=27c026af-b978-4853-b6b6-8ba19ba2819c&demo=1 <comment><USER2> This is LOC as BS performance metrics again. Days can go into a one line change, while klocs can be auto generated in seconds. The (un)productive lines are pretty bad as well - there are good reasons to stub out, or delay properly implementing some things until next commit/day/week. I really hope it doesn't get popular and no non-technical manager find it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dropping loc requires an accurate token based diff, which requires fast language parsers. While there are such projects, non of them are widely adapted - in contrary with the notorious loc.

BTW would You prefer a magical deep learning solution which tells a grade about your code quality - also hiding most aspects of the analysis?

<comment><USER2> Requires token based diffs for what? I think the whole idea of a graph that puts automated code measurement against a dev name is misguided. It's very noisy and any actionable information you may want to get from it should be clear from other sources. Code is there, because that's the tool used. Who wrote how much code on what day is non-actionable.

If you can grade code quality, do it pre-commit/pre-merge. Why allow bad code in the first place?</comment></comment></comment>


Use FreedomBox running open source software to regain control of your privacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/04/how-to-use-a-freedombox-to-regain-control-of-your-online-privacy/ <comment><USER2> Man, I need me one of them "Etherned" cords.

Way too many neds running around that need to be properly ethered.

;)</comment>


We wrote a solid application, made a silly video, and got into YC (hack-free?) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.makegameswith.us/post/34608527485/how-we-wrote-a-solid-application-made-a-silly-video

<comment><USER2> "We'll never know if we got in because of our silly accent video."

You did not get in because of your silly accent video.

(As a rule it's a mistake to try to do amusing things in your video. Gags usually make you harder to understand rather than easier, and since we are usually at or past the limit of understanding when reading applications, any loss there is dangerous.)

<comment><USER3> I really appreciate that you comment on these application posts. It's interesting to hear their theory contrasted by your comments.

<comment><USER2> If there's a trend, it's that we like people for simpler reasons than they think.

<comment><USER4> So why did you like them, if not for their accents?

<comment><USER5> I'm no YC dude, but if I were a betting man, I'd give them money due to:

1\. History of shipping stuff 2\. Huge ass market 3\. Solving a real pain point for indie game devs out there 4\. Simple, easily understood, business model 5\. Domain experience

<comment><USER2> That's about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's really nice to hear a really genuine story about this process. The long list of "hacks" strike me as orthogonal to the simplicity of the application. This is the story I had hoped to hear about the YC process: simple, humane and honest.

<comment><AUTHOR> You summarized it exactly as we experienced it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's refreshing to hear someone suggest they got in due to their ability to build something, rather than a shortcut or gimmick.

Good luck with your business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It occurred to us that had we been reading HN before applying we'd have gotten a little demoralized once we found out that all YC companies had apparently "hacked" their way in with some generally non-reproducible gimmick. We figured we should point out that this probably isn't the case.

<comment><USER7> If you have time, it'd be nice to read a "what we got out of YC, and how it's shaped our path going forward." This would be interesting independent of whether you are still working on the startup you did with YC.

<comment><AUTHOR> YC changed a lot for us and we're still going strong on the startup we did with YC. Perhaps that'll be next week's blog post :)

EDIT: And it'll be full of more silly things we did that probably didn't matter and that you should also not do.

<comment><USER8> OT, but if someone publishes though you, and you provide art and music, who owns what? What happens if they want to go cross-platform? Do you sign over the rights (if any) to the art to them? Or will you take royalties off the game if ported to, say, Android? Or will it not be permitted at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> Simplified, we own the art and music, the developer owns all the code. We get a license to the code and can publish it across multiple platforms, we owe the developer their share no matter what platform their game ends up on. The developer gets a license for our art only valid if published through us. So if the game is ported by us to Android, we still take royalties.

The developer can strip out all of our assets and republish on any platform without giving us a rev share if they want.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, that answers my questions. I didn't realize you do cross-platform publishing yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Glad you wrote this. Looking at my YC batchmates, I don't see a lot of people with "how I got into YC" stories.

YC tends to select founders who are both talented and confident, so the overwhelming attitude among founders is, "of course I got in," not, "oh wow, I can't believe that happened!"

Of the 80-ish companies in the S12 batch, I can think of 3 with interesting "How I got in to YC" stories, and two of those boil down to, "we had amazing traction." Only Instacart's beer delivery was really a hack, and even that was a demo that their service really worked.

The hack stories are interesting because they're rare. It's important to show off your scrappiness and tenacity, but most founders do that by describing something they've done that produced a worthwhile outcome, not by performing a stunt during the application process.

The only reliable way I can think of to "hack" the YC application process is to apply with a business that you're going to pursue regardless of whether or not YC accepts you. The YC application is full of questions young companies should ask themselves, anyway, and the added confidence can't hurt during interviews.

<comment><USER10> I do wonder what percentage of people drop or pivot due to a YC rejection. It seems weird to me that not continuing would be the norm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel like a "How to hack the front page of HN" that is about how you shouldn't hack HN: you should just post/write/produce great content is also needed. I'll write it now, post it tomorrow.

I feel like the title of this post hints at a similar sentiment.

<comment><USER11> [http://tommy.authpad.com/how-to-get-on-the-front-page-of- hac...](http://tommy.authpad.com/how-to-get-on-the-front-page-of-hacker-news)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I haven't heard much about the Skype pre-interview. Does anyone know more about that? Are they common?

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure if everyone receives the same email but last year we got one from Harj Taggar to setup a video call. They wanted to:

1\. "Give you a heads up on the kinds of things likely to come up for you specifically at interview".

2\. "Let you ask us any questions you might have about YC".

It was a 5-10 minutes thing.

<comment><USER10> Interesting, thank you. Was that after they had already invited you out?

<comment><USER12> Yes, a week or two after being invited.

<comment><USER10> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You should've just started video in your native tongues, then slowly transition to the accented English and then phase out the accent as well :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Can you share a link to the actual application?

<comment><USER15> PDF here: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/mgwu/YC+GM.pdf>

What is interesting to us (discovered as we just re-read it), our slight pivot mid YC was to another idea we listed on our application.

<comment><USER10> The proximity sensor hack is delightfully ingenious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks interesting, good luck with it! Good to see more game-dev related startups coming through.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hahaha. Glad my misuse of "hack" inspired you to write this great post :)</comment>


What is the name of this operator? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028

<comment><USER2> It's pretty neat that the "-->" just happens to look like an arrow. The converse of x = 0; while(x ++< 10) doesn't really make any sense though.</comment>


Show HN: Globally distributed mtr (a better traceroute) - <AUTHOR> http://mtr.guru <comment><USER2> mtr - the oft forgotten best tool out there, awesome!</comment>


A New Standard Deal - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/a-new-standard-deal/ <comment><USER2> A big reason they said they were raising the deal previously was the cost of living in the bay area and increased cost of starting a company today[0]. Are they anticipating that those costs are going to come down now? They suggest that this decreased amount will allow them to fund more companies, and hint that it has to do with economic conditions as well. But, if that amount of money is still needed to live in the bay area and work for 6 months, then wouldn't it make more sense to decrease the number of companies funded as to not potentially handicap startups with not enough money?

[0][https://blog.ycombinator.com/new-standard- deal/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/new-standard-deal/)

<comment><USER3> If cost of living is so high, I wonder why they wouldn't invest in a dorm-like living space for founders? I'm not familiar with the area, so I imagine there's reasons for it, but being able to focus on work instead of life- maintenance details seems like it would benefit the organization.

<comment><USER4> (a) It's not clear why YC could run an apartment complex better or cheaper than the many companies who already do it (including some YC-funded startups like [https://zeusliving.com](https://zeusliving.com))

(b) Founders tend to be independent-minded people who like to do things their own way.

<comment><USER5> > better or cheaper than the many companies

why would existing companies be offering cheaper? The price will be set by the market, and any saving will be taken as profit, not passed on to the tenants.

The easiest way to insure against rent increase is buy a big chunk of local land. Actually offering it to your own startups just means they reduce overheads a little, provide an extra perk, and a small competitive advantage.

<comment><USER6> What is the opportunity cost of that land investment? Is YC really better off getting into the landlord business rather than using the same money to fund more companies?

<comment><USER7> I mean the money is going to landlords either way is it not?

<comment><USER5> A larger entity would have more bargaining power?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know this is HN and jokes are shunned, but you wrote "We do not expect this to be the last time we change the deal" and I can't help but think you missed a golden opportunity to write,

"We have altered the deal. Pray we don't alter it any further".

<comment><USER9> The disclaimer killed the joke.

<comment><USER10> Pray someone does not kill the joke further. Whoops...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great for YC, not great for YC backed startups.

By giving each company $25K less, they can now place bets on 3,000 more companies. Less money for you, less risk for them.

I wonder if their success rate has declined as their batch sizes have gotten larger.

YC has become less and less attractive to me over the years. Is it just me?

<comment><USER12> You do YC for the network and guaranteed funding post demo day. Getting $125k is inconsequential and has almost no barring on YC's value to a new startup.

<comment><USER13> But they are saying that they now want to bring 3000 more companies to demo day, which dilutes its value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Our startup is profitable, scaling, and in the single-digit millions of revenue per year. We don't have any investors but are still capital constrained. The default YC valuation of $125k/0.07 = ~$1.8M is way too low for us, nor do we want the requirement of having to meet with other startups once a week since we're already quite busy.

Does YC have a "funding offering" for startups at our stage?

<comment><USER15> > The default YC valuation of $125k/0.07 = ~$1.8M is way too low for us

This is the wrong way to look at it.

Instead, ask yourself: would you exchange 7% of your company to join the YC community and be able to leverage their resources forever?

The answer should be a resounding yes if you think your company will be > 7.5% more valuable if you join YC [1]. Which it should [2]. The $125K is just the cherry on top and just one of many perks of joining YC (albeit a useful one for companies that have no funding/revenues so they can focus 100% on building their product instead of having to worry about paying for housing/food/servers/SaaS).

The vast majority of us who have gone through YC would've done it even if it wasn't for the monetary investment.

[1] See PG's Equity Equation essay: [http://paulgraham.com/equity.html](http://paulgraham.com/equity.html)

[2] You'll likely even make up for the 7% almost immediately because you'll likely raise your seed round at a significantly higher valuation (> 7.5% higher for sure) than if you hadn't gone through YC. But it's very likely that your company will _intrinsically_ be worth significantly more than that too.

<comment><USER16> This reasoning would be true only if YC was the only investor in town. In truth, the options actually are a superset of:

* Do not raise

* Join YC at a very low valuation and justify it with the nebulous value of the "YC network"

* Raise from any other investor at an appropriate valuation and benefit from the nebulous value of their network.

<comment><USER17> The options are a huge superset of those you listed. Some that you didn't list are bonds, loans, and grants, but there are so many many avenues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > In 2011, Yuri Milner and SV Angel began offering an additional $150k to > every startup in YC.

What happened to Yuri Milner, haven't heard his name in a while. Is he still actively investing?

<comment><USER19> FT, June 2020: Instacart raises $225m from Yuri Milner's DST Global and others: [https://www.ft.com/content/da9dfac9-8186-41c4-8a1c-9052c8bef...](https://www.ft.com/content/da9dfac9-8186-41c4-8a1c-9052c8bef4b5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As an outsider, is this for a 6-month very early angel investing, and is a total offering (meaning that's all you get for 6-months for your startup?)

edit: Also I have no idea what a 'post-money safe' is.

<comment><USER21> No offense, but some quick googling will answer those questions.

[https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/](https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/)

<comment><USER22> I appreciate when someone asks such questions as a post here saves 50 readers googling. Also it might start an interesting discussion.

<comment><USER23> Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Didn't realize yc did so big batches. Surely it's basically a shotgun approach at that stage

<comment><USER25> They are not going to do a batch with 3000 companies. They are saying all in all this will allow them to fund more companies over the coming years - " In the coming years, this will enable us to fund as many as 3000 more companies".

<comment><USER24> Fair. Point still stands. My (misinformed) perception was that they were doing like 15 hot deals a year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I figured the increase to over 100k is when non-technical people started doing it. They hire people to make their MVP instead of the founders themselves. Or am I wrong about that?

<comment><USER27> $100K won't buy enough professional services to build, launch, and operate an MVP unless the app is very simple. If it's simple enough that anyone can drop $50K-100K on design services and have your business cloned, it's not a very defensible startup idea.

There are occasional exceptions, but typically the founding team must have the majority talent and skills required to launch the MVP.

<comment><USER28> That doesn't seem right.

In what timeframe?

By looking at plenty of the "Show HN:" posts we can see many examples of more than just "simple" services that were made on a much smaller ( or $0 ) budget.

<comment><USER29> "Show HN" posts are usually the result of people doing free labor, not the result of people hiring out tasks to an agency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How many YC companies are "remote"? What is the optimal deal if the cost of Bay Area located startups is balanced with the cost of distributed startups?

<comment><USER31> In the Summer 2020 batch every company is remote. My guess would be that 25% of the companies in the batch are currently based in the bay area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Per the blog post, this is to enable funding more companies in the future. How is YC able to scale funding all these companies? Are the ratios of partners to companies consistent? Does it scale linearly? Or as YC grows do they leverage their outside network more?

<comment><USER33> We've kept the partner-to-company ratio consistent as we've grown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What if all the easy stuff has already been done and heavy lifting is necessary for the next wave of impactful startups? This funding model looks like it's going to continue fishing for guppies for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER35> All considered this doesn't seem as harmful as valuations could be in the current environment.

Still valuations north of 1mm.

</comment><comment><USER36> What is "post-money safe" for a priced round like this?</comment>


Why You Don't Need 2 Factor Authentication - <AUTHOR> http://sakurity.com/blog/2015/07/18/2fa.html <comment><USER2> 2FA auth is fundamentally harder to crack due to computational complexities and also physical constrains and it is definitely better than just a plain password. Also, 2FA doesn't add extra inconvenience when done the right way - see google's 2FA.

I am not quite sure what to make out of this article but here is a simple scenario which I believe it puts everything in a bit of perspective.

Say that I somehow loose my password. Without 2FA that's it - the attacker is in. With 2FA the attacker will have to do more work. I don't care how complex is to crack to token. The point is that just because you know a secret it doesn't give you all other secrets.

<comment><USER3> Google's 2FA is kinda broken though, in that it generates permanent 'per-app' passwords that aren't actually limited to one app, they can be reused as often as you (or a data thief) wants. That always bugged me...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author missed the obvious and common attack scenario where an attacker gains access to an email account associated with a vendor account, uses the email account to reset the vendor password, and logs in. Two factor effectively prevents this attack.

Third parties (like Google Authenticator) possessing the 2FA codes is not a problem because they don't possess the passwords and are generally "trustworthy." Losing access to the 2FA hardware isn't such a problem on platforms like Heroku that assign account recovery codes. Just PGP encrypt them and call it a day.

2FA is a valuable last line of defense against a targeted attack.

</comment><comment><USER5> For me what this misses is the reduced impact of a single session compromise.

If an attacker gets your password, that account is compromised until you change your password (could be weeks months or never).

with decently configured 2FA, the attacker gets a single session. If you have decent session termination/logout and restrictions on sensitive actions (like disabling 2FA) such that they require re-authentication (And re-entering another 2FA code), it can reduce the impact of compromise by quite a bit.

<comment><USER6> > with decently configured 2FA, the attacker gets a single session

not really. the telecom and/or email provider are still in full possession of MITM'ing your authentication credentials</comment></comment>


Peak California - barry-cotter https://medium.com/@byrnehobart/peak-california-7cf97baecaf0 <comment> barry-cotter > There are three related problems that make California economically tenuous, > and a fourth that makes the situation worse: It's no longer the best place > in the world to start a startup. The gains from the existing tech industry > increasingly accrue to a) passive investors, and b) lucky landlords. The > state government is a levered bet on tech compensation. These three > problems, which are interrelated, won't show visible symptoms until well > after they're terminally un-fixable.

California made a lot of money for a long time based on a technology ecosystem that requires big exits to make angels and VCs. That ecosystem is being strangled by the ever rising rents which mean VC funding accrues to landlords and you can't keep your startup running unless you're a success. No long hard slots of slow growth. This is part of why YC thinks 10% month on month growth is necessary. The disappearance of this possibility will make the tech ecosystem stagnate.</comment>


Flexible working can make you ill, experts say - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jan/02/work-life-balance-flexible-working-can-make-you-ill-experts-say <comment><USER3> My last company tried very hard to make me "on call" without any extra compensation.

I think it's very important to separate your work life from your home life so you have time to switch off and decompress. Never give your personal phone number(s) or email address to bosses at work - carry a separate work phone if you must, and turn it off or leave it at the office. Also don't check your work email from home, ever.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) where work pay you a pittance to use your personal cell as a work phone is a joke. There is no universe where it's good for you.

If you set this expectation from the very beginning, it will be much easier than trying to change to this down the road.

<comment><USER4> Wrt: byod- what I want is complete number mobility.

And the ability to have multiple numbers on the device.

I should have a phone in this era that allows me to have calls inbound on the employer number show up as work - and have any personal number calls be differentiated easily.

In the same manner as I have three email boxes in the damn mail app - <USER2> are easily deleted or locked once I leave a company, why can't I bolt additional phone numbers onto the phone during the time I'm employed there!?!?

<comment><USER5> Google voice with call forwarding. It's a life saver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was just thinking to myself yesterday how sometimes it would be nice to have one of those jobs where when you are away from work, there is no work to be done. Like working in a factory or something, where there is literally nothing I can do during the off hours other than relax.

This through crossed my mind because I had just finished two weeks of vacation where I literally did nothing related to work, and it was really relaxing.

<comment><USER7> Exactly.

So the take away is that in order to avoid burnout you need to mindfully develop the skill of 'stopping work'. While that is easy when you work on a factory line and you can't bring the tools home, and its really really hard when your job consists mostly about thinking about how to solve a problem.

I found early on that since I really enjoy programming I couldn't "stop" instead I had to shift to one of my projects so that it would be more enjoyable for me. That works a bit but not as much as sitting on the deck of a mountain cabin with no Internet connectivity does :-).

But the bottom line is figure out a way to "not work", whether it is by reading, exercising, or doing some hobby, so that you don't let the stress of work overwhelm you.

<comment><USER8> >sitting on the deck of a mountain cabin with no Internet connectivity

As someone who often struggles to 'turn off' after work, this is my favorite way to disconnect. I try to make it out fairly regularly to camp deep in the backcountry–there's no better relief from work stress than sitting by a campfire in the forest, a full day's hike from the car, parked an hour's drive past the last trace of cell service.

The feeling of freedom is intoxicating–the feeling that there is literally no way that some work 'emergency' could crop up and demand my attention. It's something I used to get on airplanes, but with the increasing availability of in-flight wifi it's not quite so peaceful.

<comment><USER9> Since I live in a city where my ISP has a bunch of "public for customers" wi- fi hotspots (Vancouver), I've considered dropping my cell-phone plan and just using a VoIP provider for calls/texts. You can find the wi-fi hotspots near most places you might _need_ Internet (e.g. when shopping), but they don't extend into public spaces like parks, and you can't use them when moving in a car/bus/train (or even when walking at a reasonable clip.) It seems like it'd separate life into connected and disconnected spaces, rather than forcing a constant decision (that's "on you") to disconnect—and I quite like the sound of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This strikes me as very odd.

For the vast majority of human history, work has always been something that was interwoven into our lives. From hunting and gathering, to farming and ranching, to woodworking and blacksmithing, and so on, up _until_ the industrial revolution, nearly everyone "worked from home" and I'm unaware of any documented ill health effects from this. Intuitively, I'd suppose that aggregate stress levels actually _rose_ with the advent of commuting to dedicated factory/office workplaces, as factory quotas and office micromanagement are far more psychologically demanding than the farm or home workshop in which you ( or your remote, usually undemanding lord, in the case of feudal work relationships ) set your own schedule and degree of competitiveness.

<comment><USER11> In each of those cases, none of those occupations can be really be interwoven into your life as tightly as a job where +90% of your labor is done via a laptop computer. If you're a farmer, woodworker, etc. you still need a separate place of work from where you live, be it a workshop or the fields. In the evening when the farmer returns to his house to rest, there is no question he's done for the day, and he can fully relax and sleep.

The dangerous mindset is that if you're capable of working whenever and wherever you are, then why should you ever really disconnect? This problem is an epidemic with people who don't know how to create a mental separation between work life and everything else, and I would argue that although it's easier to fall in the trap if you work over a VPN, it can also happen for any worker that is permitted/encouraged to work at any time of the day regardless of the situation.

<comment><USER12> _In each of those cases, none of those occupations can be really be interwoven into your life as tightly as a job where +90% of your labor is done via a laptop computer._

Software development is not a special occupational snowflake, and I'm going to guess that you've never been within the property boundaries of an actual farm, let alone actually done farm work. Your job is interwoven into your live so much because you choose to allow it, and don't know when to say "no" to your boss. Close your laptop. There, work's over. Farm work? Yeah, well, those fences aren't going to mend themselves.

You don't live at the office, do you? Not metaphorically, I mean literally sleep there. No? Guess where the farmer sleeps? At work. Every day. Extrapolate from there.

<comment><USER13> At the same time, you probably own the farm if you're living on it. Someone who's doing unpaid overtime for their company isn't getting any benefits from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has been following what others have mentioned is a best practice for working from home: Set work boundaries, both in terms of time and physical location, as to what constitutes work and what is otherwise personal/family time.

Enforce set hours as to when you are actually working as opposed to when you are doing something else, and let others in your household know what they are. Create a separate physical environment that you can mentally associate as being where you perform work, and work only, and take any other activities such as social life and games out of it -- preferably using a different computer altogether.

Setting virtual walls where work begins/ends can greatly reduce the cognitive overhead your brain has to endure when trying to separate what is work from the rest of your life, and thus lower overall stress.

</comment><comment><USER14> This has little to do with Flexible scheduling. A waiter may have a flexible schedule, but there not going to worry about checking there work emails.

It's really a problem with always being available, a 9-5 worker that checks there e-mail every night is going to have the same issues.

</comment><comment><USER15> From working in co-working spaces, I've met a lot of freelance people, and some people have it worked out. Set hours, strictly observed. The same days and hours each week, whatever they may be, and then life can be planned.

It's very easy to slip into 'flexible' hours when doing freelance, which can often mean working all day, any day of the week, not taking proper breaks, for weeks on end.

I've done that, felt awful for long periods, and needed time to recuperate afterwards. My body gave me a lot of signals to communicate that this wasn't good for me. I overheard another guy in one office who was doing similar hours to me, telling his Dad on the phone that he was sleeping really badly, a problem he hadn't suffered from before.

And of course that made perfect sense.

<comment><USER16> Same here. I can be somewhat flexible about when I work during the day. I choose not to. Instead I often work out of a co-working space and work the same hours daily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Instead of all these methodologies for managing programming teams, I've often wondered why no one came up with methodologies for managing employees working from home. That seems to be an untapped market for the "methodology" folks.

I've worked from home for years, and not as a freelancer. I just have my work hours like I would in any office.

It's worked out well for me, but it would be difficult for many people to hack it due to the extra discipline it requires. I can see why companies don't want people doing it but there's definitely big economic potential held back, and environmental/mental harm done from the daily travel into the office.

I grew up in rural Iowa and worked the typical farm boy jobs, went to school all the way through in Iowa then lived in Chicago, Nord Pas de Calais (France) and now Austin. The majority of the population that doesn't come from a similar diverse cultural background (talking true, meaningful rural cultural diversity here not skintone) and there's a lot to be said for having "grit" ingrained in who you are, it helps with handling remote work in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER18> You really do need to set boundaries, so the article's not wrong. On the other hand, I couldn't juggle my child's preschool and my spouse's teaching schedule, if I didn't have flex time.

<comment><USER19> The article isn't actually talking about flex time or flexible schedules. It's talking about "grazing" your work, always being available, keeping track of work emails after hours or answering work calls outside your scheduled time, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I just read this interview with Brunello Cucinelli and found it inspiring. "In this company, you cannot send emails after 5:30 PM, when the company closes for the evening. The day after, when you turn up for work, what are you like? You are a still person. You are better." [http://pi.co/brunello- cucinelli-2/](http://pi.co/brunello-cucinelli-2/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I usually try to learn/use a language I don't use at work. Then take a leisurely approach to learning the new language. Many times it works. Many times it doesn't. I try to do things I know I won't be doing at work right now. The stuff I do outside of work is just because I'm interested in it. I also workout, watch TV and meet up with friends etc... which involve not being at work mentally.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been on an always-on project for the last year or so where taking time away from work means that there's more to catch up on when I come back, no matter what. In some cases taking too long away from the project means a huge pile of other people's mistakes have accumulated, and I have to go in and clean them up.

Incidentally, I've also spent a portion of the last year on medical leave. The two have interacted pretty poorly so far, and I can definitely confirm part of the article's argument, at least in my case: When your work and personal lives are intertwined like it describes, the stress never goes away and you're constantly amped up. It's not good.

I am happy to note that nobody sent work emails over the holidays, so that's nice - at least then you get a chance to use that time to disconnect and get some distance from things and spend time with your family.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hm. Fixed working can make you ill, too. Better of two evils.

</comment><comment><USER24> The place I worked in a few years ago handled this the best. We had a level 2/3 support team embedded in our division who handled 90% of calls.

The calls were taken by junior folks who were overtime eligible, they rotated 1 week cycles and received 20% of their hourly rate, plus a 3 hour minimum for time worked. They handled all vendor dispatch, all telco callouts.

For the resolver groups, there was a severity-1 process, with an on-call manager & call tree to the higher skill people. People were on call for two- week cycles, but any call-out to these people was treated as a defect in the process.

The average was 2-3 escalated calls to senior staff on different teams per month, out of about 5-7000 calls total.

</comment><comment><USER25> It can. I just worked through Christmas, without any real external pressure. As always, putting in extra hours requires much more extra effort than the reward you're getting for it, so it does not make too much sense.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you work from home you have to set boundaries and go out of your way to _set the tone_. Meaning, everyone knows you are working those hours at that place everyday. When you're not within those hours you're not working, period. This is how I worked from home when I telecommuted.

Being a startup founder now, I don't really find a good balance and my health is suffering. So I'm trying hard to follow my own rules this year. It's tough. There is so much work to do.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you work in ops, you will get paged sometimes, and you'll handle maintenance windows/unplanned emergencies during off hours. It's the cost of doing business. I don't see this as "flexible work", necessarily - we don't say that a nurse on a 14-hour shift has flexible hours. That said, if you handle a midnight outage, your boss had better be ok with you coming in late the next morning.

</comment><comment><USER28> The article is incredibly unclear or muddled:

> "but If I wasn't at home with my kids it costs me something."

> "To create free evenings, Veenendaal limited the working day"

Or is it more like:

> "evening events like a recent programme of talks on the food chain."

Is it:

> "Flexible working policies can also raise the risk of poor working > conditions"

Or is it more like:

> "And past the table a dozen people work at long desks on chains."

Is it:

> "while the blurring of lines between work and home life is stressful for > some people."

Or is it more like:

> "for staff lunches, yoga classes" (Seriously, I can't get away from work > even to eat or sweat?)</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a static site generator that supports [[wikilinks]]? - <AUTHOR> I've been testing a new markdown editor called "Obsidian.md" recently. In Obsidian you can use [[]] to create links between notes, just like a wiki, however this is different from the standard link forming syntax in markdown. Thus, when uploading the markdown files to a static site, the [[]] will be broken if not converted. I wonder if there is a static site generator out there that has a out of box support for [[]] links. If not, anyone interested in making one? I'm pretty sure this is going to have a market with the new trend of bi-directional linking tools.<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> With Eleventy, you can specify a markdown parser which supports wikilinks. [https://github.com/kwvanderlinde/markdown-it- wikilinks](https://github.com/kwvanderlinde/markdown-it-wikilinks)

</comment><comment><USER3> Would this use the [[]] linking or the standard markdown syntax? See example below. Edit: Also, what benefit does linking give?

[link text](/another-page)

vs

[[another-page]]

<comment><AUTHOR> [[]], the most obvious benefit would be, with the growing trend of the note- taking app adopting [[]] style backlinks, people can easily convert their notes into blog posts to build a static site.</comment></comment>


ClojureScript Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://www.niwi.be/cljs-workshop/ <comment><USER2> Sweet! I've been learning cljs/om and one problem I had while going through tutorials is understanding where to put your state, where and why. This answer on Stackoverflow helped me grasp the bigger picture of Om.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22883759/what-is-the- diff...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22883759/what-is-the-difference- between-application-state-and-component-local-state-in-cl)

</comment><comment><USER3> Learning ClojureScript is on my to do list for today, so this is a nice coincidence. It looks fairly complete (but I haven't learned it yet, so I could be very wrong!).

One word of advice: have it proof read by a native English speaker. There are quite a lot of awkward-sounding sentences and some grammar errors that seem a bit jarring and distract from the content.

Other than that, it looks good. Thanks for posting!

<comment><USER4> If you want a clear, interactive walkthrough of the basics, I can't recommend the Koans highly enough: [http://clojurescriptkoans.com/](http://clojurescriptkoans.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks nice, although less like a tutorial and more like a reference book.</comment>


Eat nuts to live longer - <AUTHOR> http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/739777/Eat-nuts-live-longer-doctors-prescribe-fight-killer-diseases-heart-disease-cancer-obesity <comment><USER2> Paper is open access and freely available [1][2]

Quoted conclusion:

        > In conclusion, our results provide further evidence that nut
        > consumption may reduce the risk of coronary heart
        > disease, stroke, cardiovascular disease, total cancer, and all-cause
        > mortality, and possibly mortality from diabetes, respiratory
        > disease, and infectious disease. In 2013, an estimated
        > 4.4 million deaths may be attributable to a nut
        > intake below 20 grams per day in North and South
        > America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Western Pacific.
        > These findings support dietary recommendations
        > to increase nut consumption to reduce chronic disease
        > risk and mortality.

[1] [https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...](https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-016-0730-3)

[2] [PDF] [https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s129...](https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s12916-016-0730-3?site=bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com)

<comment><USER3> "may reduce" \- they found some correlation but correlation doesn't imply causation. They can't say that it was definitely nuts, it may be caused by some other factor. But the article is written like eating nuts is the actual reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I mean this isn't a pro on nuts so much as it's a pro on eating anti- inflammatory foods, particularly the omega-3s, which are found in foods like walnuts...but also in foods like salmon, sardines, wild rice, edamame and free range eggs.</comment>


Australian Government Repeals It's Carbon Tax Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-17/live-blog-coalition-in-bid-to-push-through-carbon-tax-repeal/5603830

<comment><USER2> We sure have our share of rednecks on sundecks in Australia. The only thing more retrograde and embarrassing is the fact that Abbott was going around trying to form some sort of 'coaltion of climate change denying countries', whose sole purpose was to oppose action on climate change. I seriously don't think I've ever heard of anything so stupid in my life. Normal people create alliances to achieve something like 'reduce poverty', 'increase economic growth / trade' etc, but Abbott wants to be the first to create an alliance to not do something.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Australian government has repealed the carbon tax scheme punishing polluters in favour of a "direct action" program of providing financial incentives to reduce pollution.

<comment><USER3> So instead of carbon costs being passed onto consumers, their taxes will be used to provide green subsidies instead? Seems like some perverse economic incentives there.

<comment><USER4> You really need both the carrot and the stick, what is an incentive for one organisation may not be for another.

But funding green initiatives is not in this government's agenda as the vote to strip ARENA of $432 million went through, apparently leaving it only $100 million to invest in new projects over the next four years.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it OK to ask feedback on a business idea here? - <AUTHOR>

I am a new user and I am not sure if I will offend people.
I have a small idea and I want to see what other people think of it. So I want to post the details and get feedback. Is "Ask HN" the right place for it? Or, is there a more suitable place somewhere else on the internet for this kind of thing.
Also, if some of you are wondering: I am not worried that someone will steal my idea since I believe that execution of the idea is infinitely more important than the idea itself. I get 1 new business idea every day.
[Edit]: I have asked feedback on my idea via this posting:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4335201 <comment><USER2> Totally ok. Go ahead, ask HN.</comment>


Man arrested for modifying Xboxes - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/04/console-hacker-arrested-faces-up-to-ten-years-in-jail/

<comment><USER2> This title is misleading and inaccurate! A 27 year old is not a "youth" and it wasn't his Xbox. He was modding other people's consoles to make money.

<comment><USER3> I think the definition of ownership has been lost recently.

I pay other people to "mod" my car with new parts. That's perfectly legal because I OWN the damn pile of steel. The mechanics won't get arrested because the manufacturer has no say about what will go to my car after I BOUGHT it and, therefore, it's MINE.

Now, if I pay a hacker to "mod" my game console, it should be as legal as above. I OWN the damn pile of plastic and silicon. The hacker shouldn't get arrested because the manufacturer shouldn't think they have a say about what will go to my game console after I BOUGHT it as, therefore, it should be MINE.

<comment><USER4> It's interesting that you brought up the car, so let's use that example. Would you argue that you should have the ability to remove emissions-regulating devices from your car? After all, they add weight, complexity, and reduce power.

We have emissions regulations. We also have the DMCA which prevents anti- circumvention of piracy protection measures (which the modifications in question aim to do). We, as a society, have generally agreed that emissions regulation is important. We have also agreed that software piracy undermines the viability of the computer/electronics industry.

It's not as black-and-white as "it's mine and I should be able to do anything I damn well please." These modifications have an effect on society at large. In the case of the car, your "right" to modify your car does not trump the rights of society to not have to deal with whatever modifications you deem you deserve. Similarly, even game console modifications have externalities and effects on the industry. They damage the online gaming ecosystem. They reduce revenue. The prevent game consoles from patching and regulating online play.

<comment><USER5> There is a large difference between the rights of society to well-being and the rights of a private company to profit. Emissions-regulating devices are a requirement because removing them will _physically harm other people, in a measurable way, over the long-term_. Removing the anti-piracy features from your console harms no one real person—that a corporation loses profit is simply a reason for its employees to seek employment in a different company, presumably one that is not relying on such volatile externalities; it is not a reason for laws to be passed.

For an example that is almost equivalent in every way: cheating at casinos is completely legal. You are "harming" a company, and they _really don't like it_ (and they'll show it, too) but it's not _illegal_. Console companies simply find it a lot harder to kick people out of their "casinos" when the house advantage falters.

<comment><USER6> Its not always that simple to seek employment in a different company, and the process might not so harmless.

The problem is with the gaming market, and your suggestion for the developers to move to a 'safer' company - simply means leaving the gaming industry.

And I'd say that this has a negative influence on the quality of games, and it does harm customers.

<comment><USER5> But neither "games" nor "industries" have rights, and, for the most part, neither do "customers" (other than the rights afforded by the fact that they're also persons.) I don't have a right to own a nice car; if some bad decisions crash the auto industry, I might not be able to buy a nice car. That, again, doesn't mean there should be a law. If the gaming industry is built on sand, let it sink until it finds a workable revenue model (MMOG companies seem to be doing well enough.) If people don't _like_ that it's sinking, maybe they'll, y'know, express that with dollars?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I saw this some place else the other day and he wasn't just modding his own game console. He was modding for others and charging them for the service ($100 a pop I think).

I don't think it's right that he's been arrested for that, but he isn't exactly the innocent youth this article makes him out to be if these charges are proven true.

<comment><USER8> He was modifying devices that those people legally own. Implicit in owning a thing is the right to modify it. These anti-modder laws are illogical and IMO indefensible. Essentially for these laws to be passed and upheld, courts need to accept the argument that despite paying for something, you don't really own it.

Protecting someone's business model is not enough to justify abrogating the most basic property rights.

<comment><USER4> The purpose of the modifications is to run pirated games. I don't see anything illogical or indefensible with these companies (and the government) going after people who modify hardware in order to run pirated software.

This particular modder crossed the line between hacking for fun or knowledge to facilitating a crime. I know the "criminal" aspect might not get a lot of sympathy from the pro-piracy contingent on this site, but it's still a crime. If you don't want people like this to get arrested, then call your congressmen.

<comment><USER9> Don't forget that the same regulations also prevent you (theoretically) from running homebrew code on your consoles in most cases. I have to note, however, that the Xbox 360 (not sure if that's the "Xbox" they meant in the article or not, but they also mention the Wii) mods really have no purpose other than running backups/pirated content.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Defending Uber's Growth Narrative Requires Ignoring Industry Economics - <AUTHOR> http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-seven-ubers-narrative-vox-stratechery-critiques-naked-capitalisms-uber-series-defending-uber-requires-ignoring.html <comment><USER2> They need to pull an amazon. if they can offer their platform as service, and offer it to a market much larger than them. Boom bada bing. 0 marginal cost business.</comment>


Tor Exit Node Operator Issued Subpoena - <AUTHOR> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2015-April/006804.html <comment><USER2> I've received a subpoena from Cook County before regarding a site on Neocities. Related to Tor, actually. Easily the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life.

The person that signed the subpoena was in the news for allegations of corruption, and so was her husband (it's called Crook County for a reason). They spelled the name of my company wrong (noahcities.com or something like that), and when I sent a letter to the designated agents requesting they fix it (I control neocities.org, not noahcities, how can I respond to legal requests addressed to a different web site?), they never responded, and the subpoena basically just died.

If they had followed up, they would have gotten a tor exit IP address somewhere outside of their jurisdiction (read: another country). I told them this before they filed it, and they told me "That decision is for someone above my pay grade, man". You can't spend 5 minutes to google for Tor because of your "pay grade"?

Oh, and they also love to put unlawful (but unfortunately, not illegal) gag orders in their subpoenas. I chose not to waste our lawyer's time (and our money) on this piece of trash, so we didn't make too big of a deal about it.

The take home lesson for me was that crooked regional governments abusing the subpoena system are just as big of a problem as the NSA, if not worse.

So, now you know the story behind this commit [http://github.com/neocities/neocities/commit/4983a9b24eac00b...](http://github.com/neocities/neocities/commit/4983a9b24eac00b8d8bfd300a18cdcee0152a271)

It's not good enough for the NSA, but it will prevent these idiots from ever figuring it out. And there's no US data retention laws for web sites, so it's completely legal.

This is textbook Neocities business philosophy. Instead of raising money to hire more lawyers and take the legal risk individually fighting bad John Doe subpoenas, we changed our code to make the data they can actually get worthless to them, so we can just serve them (if they're valid) while still protecting our users' privacy. If we get dragged into court over it, our liability insurance kicks in, we pay a (relatively) small deductible, and then we can use the precedent we set there to throw out any new cases for everybody with this problem, not just us. Way more sustainable.

Phase 2 is that I delete the hashes after a few months. I haven't gotten to it yet, but it's in the ticket tracker.

<comment><USER3> How long will it take to hash all 4b ip addresses with your salt? I guess if you tune scrypt to 100ms, that would be 400m seconds, or about 100,000 hours of machine time. If you buy machine time at 1 cent per hour, that would be $1000, spread across 1000 machines it will take about 4 days total. Not good.

Log anonmimization is hard. I wonder if a probabilistic approach would be better, because it's deniable. Something like a bloom filter. You can tune the false positive rate to match that of a human admin making an error, so business impact is less pronounced.

Yet another option I'm thinking about is an external service that takes 32 bit IP address and returns a 256 bit handle, which you would then use for logging. The service would be rate-limited to prevent enumeration, so those 100k hours would have to be spent sequentially, turning 4 days into 4 thousand days.

<comment><USER2> Not good for a serious agency, but it stops the lower level ones that aren't going to do this.

We use these hashes to fight off spammers. A bloom filter won't do us any good because it will provide false positives.

An external service will be legally subject to subpoenas, so pawning it off doesn't solve the problem either.

You're right. Log anonymization is hard.

The only really good way to solve this is to throw this information away, which is also legal. Because of the spam considerations, we need this for now. I might decide it's not worth it though and just stop storing even these hashes.

<comment><USER3> If your scheme becomes prevalent, someone will create a service that for $10k will brutforce $1k worth of hashed IP addresses. $10k and 4 days is comparable to a legal bill, so you're not deterring anyone, but the most casual snooper.

<comment><USER4> But if it isn't prevalent (which is likely to remain the case for the near future), and the regional agencies issuing subpoenas are technically pretty clueless (which I think they mostly are), then it will be effective. That's pretty near the best you can do, as long as you need to log IPs in some form for spam prevention.

Incidentally - a slightly more effective solution might be to put the 'did this IP visit recently' function in a secure microprocessor, rate limit it so it can't be bruteforced at more than a modest rate (in case of DDOS you can always temporarily stop using it), and throw away the keys to reprogram it. That really will stop everyone but the NSA, but it's about a million times more difficult and expensive...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They know about Tor. Five years ago it was magic to most cops and all prosecutors. Today they have been educated, to some extent by people like me. They acknowledge that the exit node is a proxy. In years past they would have tried sending cops to the door to seize the server, or at least make some allegations.

That's why I do not think that they expect any results here. They expect nothing. They need nothing. They need a non-response to take things to the next step. That step is probably political. They want the bullet point about why criminals are getting away due to VPNs, Tor and other online nasties.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. The actual subpoena is really short and reads like it was thrown together so that someone could tell their boss they tried.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Okay, reading the subpoena linked in the original article, it appears that Cook County, Illinois is trying to subpoena a company in Romania. IANAL, but I didn't think an entity in one country could compel anything of another entity in another country without getting the governments of both involved.

So, what was the point of this subpoena? Did a clerk somewhere fail to realize that Romania isn't even on the same continent, much less in the same country? Or is there legal mechanisms involved that I'm not aware of?

<comment><USER8> Maybe the receiver of the subpoena could be charged with contempt of court if he/she ever enters the US? Not sure if that's possible under US law.

<comment><USER7> If a specific person were named, I could see that possibly happening if said person were to ever set foot in the US (or maybe just Illinois).

But a company? That brings in additional questions. Would not Cook County have to prove that the person to be held in contempt had been employed by the company in question at the time of the subpoena? Wouldn't they also have to prove that responding to the subpoena would have part of said persons duties at said company? For example, if I were employed by EuropeCo in 2014 as an engineer on their Foomatic line of widgets, and travelled to the US next month for a conference, I don't think it should be possible for me to be held in contempt of court because someone didn't respond to a subpoena regarding EuropeCo's Baritron service. Yes, it's a silly and contrived example, but hopefully you get the idea.

But again, IANAL.

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure Cook County would need to show some sort of nexus in order to compel, eg that significant business is done by the Romanian company in Cook County. Otherwise, anyone could break any laws so long as they didn't live in the place where they're breaking the law.

As is, providing an anonymous an non-specific service to anyone doesn't really satisfy that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FBI's Comey (crypto backdoor promoter) has just visited Romania calling for data retention laws after several such recent laws were declared unconstitutional. The FBI basically gave an ultimatum saying that if such laws aren't passed, then it could hurt the US-Romanian relationship. So the US is actively threatening/bullying other countries into adopting mass surveillance laws right now - _or else!_.

The ultimatum is also BS, because the US _needs_ Romania more than ever in the Russian-Ukranian conflict (Romania is also one of the countries that has a missile shield against Russia, installed by the US). But I guess that's the level of diplomacy US enforces with most weaker countries (bullying).

The Romanian NSA sees the US NSA as some sort of mentor and tries to do whatever it gets told to strengthen that relationship. It's also very likely the NSA subsidizes/gives away its spying tech to countries such as Romania to make spying on its own citizens easier. Surveillance oversight is even weaker than in the US/UK.

Both Romania and Poland were accused of holding secret CIA prisons as well about a decade ago (likely true).

<comment><USER11> > So the US is actively threatening/bullying other countries into adopting > mass surveillance laws right now - or else!.

A ploy which worked just fine against Australia (and our spineless luddite government). They probably didn't even need to threaten, just asked nicely and promised our Prime Minister a photo opportunity one day. </rant>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Title would be better as "Exit Node" and based on what I know, this isn't altogether uncommon. A relay-only node receiving a subpoena would be novel as far as I know.

EDIT: Title was changed, thanks!

<comment><USER13> Yes exactly, I was alarmed by the HN title, but then the link content was pretty usual. Tor is not broken, fiew :).

That said I'm pretty curious to see the answer of the administration to the answer of the exit node admin explaining what is Tor and why he can't help them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cook County waged a war against Craigslist back in the day: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/10/cook-county-sheriff- lo...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/10/cook-county-sheriff-loses-case- against-craigslist)

</comment><comment><USER15> Probably from this: [http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2014/04/09/cook-county- comput...](http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2014/04/09/cook-county-computers- hacked)

<comment><USER16> Maybe. The IP address that is referenced in the subpoena (18.104.22.168) is the IP address of cookcountyboardofreview.com. Maybe that box got hacked and it had access to some big cook county DMZ?

<comment><USER15> Who knows. Sounds like some idiot logged into [https://apps.cookcountyil.gov/oe/](https://apps.cookcountyil.gov/oe/) (same IP) and attempted to do something bad.

These poor guys from this county are probably pretty distressed and using whatever means they have to find out whodunnit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can't stop giggling at the red hand-circled bit in the subpoena.

( IP? ) <\-- This is the one we need

</comment><comment><USER18> This is why individuals are generally less likely to operate an exit node than large bodies such as universities.

It can happen, has happened, and will likely happen again.

</comment><comment><USER19> Isn't this an everyday thing for Exit Node operators ? Many ISPs simply forbade Tor because it wasn't worth the legal hassle/paperwork.

<comment><USER20> I ran a Tor exit node for about nine months and only ever had two complaints sent to me. Both were for people performing some form of hacking through my exit node. I responded to both with a form letter, and that was that. Granted it was a low bandwidth exit node.

I hear US-based nodes get more legal attention because of the DMCA, but I can't comment on that as mine was based in Romania as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> funny info request from the subpeona IP -> 184.108.40.206 -> 18.104.22.168

<comment><USER5> Give them some credit. By this they are acknowledging the concept of a proxy. Compared to most, this request does a reasonable job of describing what they have and what they want efficiently. They aren't asking for everyone connected at the time. They aren't asking for 'any and all' records. They are asking for one connection record and are providing reasonable information on their end to facilitate. The diagram is a reasonable and, considering the source, a novel means of conveying the vital data.

The fact that the connection record doesn't exist, or if it does would be virtually useless, should not take away from the reasonableness of the request. "We don't have such records" is a legitimate response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What next? Everyone who operates an IP router on the internet starts getting subpoenas?</comment>


Rehabilitation Nation - <AUTHOR> http://exposure.watsi.org/rehabilitation-nation

<comment><USER2> Lovely-looking webpage, a great story and fantastic pictures - a real contrast to the text-heavy SEOd wordy articles I often read and because: "a picture is worth a thousand words".

Never heard of Watsi before but will definitely now consider donating.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never been to Cambodia and it seems to me that every time I see videos or pictures from this country, everything is really tidy and clean in spite of it being very poor.

This contrasts with my experience of other poor countries where most places are dirty and messy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome photo of Ly! His smile really shows how good it feels to help :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I absolutely love Watsi - particularly for their amazing transparency and updates.</comment>