Show HN: Enviro+ for Raspberry Pi – Environmental sensors - <AUTHOR> https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/enviro-plus <comment><USER2> Weirdly coincidental timing on this! I've been working on a PCB design (FeatherWing form factor) to track weather data on my hikes, making use of a BME280 and a GPS module. First revision of the board[1], I discovered that the sensors started out accurate, then drifted up to a steady 3° above ambient. Probably because the GPS module was heating up. So last night I found myself reading up on design considerations for temperature sensors [2], including specific things like the cutout you have on the left side of this board.

I'm guessing you designed this — any advice as I embark on designing a second revision of my hiking log?

[1] [https://twitter.com/josecastillo/status/1134128199972130816](https://twitter.com/josecastillo/status/1134128199972130816) [2] [http://www.ti.com/lit/an/snoa967a/snoa967a.pdf](http://www.ti.com/lit/an/snoa967a/snoa967a.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Joey - yes, this is one of our boards. :-)

Are you sure it's the GPS module - 3 degrees sounds a lot for that? I'd try to take some measurements to confirm it before changing anything.

Which Feather board are you using?

<comment><USER2> I'd been planning to use it with the Feather M0 Bluefruit, but for now I'm testing with an M0 Express with one of these LED displays next to it [1] on a board doubler. Good to know that this is more temperature rise than you'd expect to see; I'll have to confirm that (and measure the thing's current draw, which I have not had a chance to do yet). Thanks!

[1] [https://www.adafruit.com/product/3132](https://www.adafruit.com/product/3132)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks great. I've been waiting for a nice, hackable, cheap set of environmental sensors!

There's only one "improvement" I would like to see - an option to buy a cheaper version without a display attached. For my application I will not need any display, and it seems a shame to spend resources on one when it's only going to get destroyed by the elements :)

<comment><USER4> A raspberry is quite an overkill for an environmental sensor. You could achieve the same with an Cortex M4 (minus the microphone).

<comment><USER3> Can you easily log to influxdb from a Cortex M4 though? That's the big benefit of a RPi from my point of view

<comment><USER4> Havent heard of it before, but according to wikipedia they accept data input over UDP in a minimalistic format, so I dont see how this would be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> By an incredible coincidence, I am putting together something to do exactly what this does. One exception: I am including a CO2 sensor to monitor and collect atmospheric CO2 levels.

I'm guessing a there is enough I/O left on a Pi 0w such that a CO2 sensor can be added to the Enviro+?

<comment><AUTHOR> Which sensor are you looking at? I'm sure it could run alongside the rest of Enviro+!

<comment><USER5> The most likely candidate is the TelAire T6613 [1]. Like most sensors in this price range, it reports data on I2C.

[1] [https://www.co2meter.com/collections/0-1-co2/products/t6613-...](https://www.co2meter.com/collections/0-1-co2/products/t6613-co2-sensor- module)

<comment><USER6> Have you considered the much cheaper MH-Z19 or even the CCS811?

Doubt they're as capable or accurate but I'd be interested in hearing the reasons behind going with the pricier sensor if you've got time to share.

<comment><USER5> Good question. My casual research into CO2 sensors is that they are generally made for indoor air quality rather than outside atmospheric concentration. Indoor CO2 concentration can soar as high as 1000 ppm where outdoors hovers around the 400 ppm level, so it is important to get a sensor made for the lowest range. The T6613 is specified for operation at 400 ppm so that is a big driver for my decision.

The MH-Z19 has a model specified for 0 to 2000 ppm so it might work fine. I don't know about the CCS811, the data sheet says it measures "equivalent" CO2, which is not a direct measurement, but a quantity inferred after measuring other compounds.

In the long run, there are calibration problems, as the photodetector ages. The best sensors have two light sources and automatically compensate for this effect. Indeed the other candidate I am considering is the Telaire 6615 which has dual sensors. My plan is to use the one of the two Telaires, preferably the dual sensor version, and correct measurements for temperature, pressure, and humidity. Hopefully, it will be accurate for a long time without the need for calibration with a known gas.

FWIW, I am just an amateur and welcome informed opinions. Scientific instruments that measure accurately in the atmospheric range are too pricey for me. The scientific community is just now starting to evaluate low cost sensors like the ones mentioned here, see [1] for a summary of some recent evaluations.

[1] [https://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/arep/gaw/documents/Draft_low_...](https://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/arep/gaw/documents/Draft_low_cost_sensors.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm working on a similar nodemcu based system that was originally proposed by Bruh Automation [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpjfVc-9IrQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpjfVc-9IrQ) later updated by digiblurDIY [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yu57vjz7AY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yu57vjz7AY) to use ESPhome [https://esphome.io/](https://esphome.io/) with no progamming.

This looks interesting, but somehow it always seems wasteful to use full blown Linux servers for this stuff, so I'm dabbling in something smaller. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes a full Linux stack is a blessing but I totally understand where you're coming from. :-)

<comment><USER7> It's just that I keep finding cool hats/phats like this that feel that way. :) I'm wondering about the possibility of building a high latency Kubernetes cluster to make use of the excess compute of some of the Raspberry Pis.

The HomelabOS project [https://gitlab.com/NickBusey/HomelabOS](https://gitlab.com/NickBusey/HomelabOS) is something I have been looking at. It would be neat if I could use a handful of Pis across the house wasting cycles for something like that in a kubernetes style fashion.

One other since you're the poster and presumably work at Pimoroni, is there a preferred distributor in the US?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the co-founders of Pimoroni. :-)

Adafruit carry most of our range - hopefully they'll pick this up too soon!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love Pimoroni Modules, having used the MicroDot pHAT, Unicorn boards, Touch pHAT, (and several more). The only problem I have is that the libraries aren't particularly well written. Of course they're open source and I would like to improve them, but as far as I know there are no schematics available.

Example being, the Touch pHAT (very good board btw) doesn't use interrupts and library is sorta messy. I still use it though, because it's not a big deal — however it'd be nice to be able to take full advantage of the components used in the boards. I guess my rant is mostly about not having access to some schematics of the products.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on opening up the schematics to our range, watch this space!

<comment><USER8> Thank you! That's all I needed, and of course I'll contribute back the changes I made to libraries (particularly the Microdot pHAT — which I love by the way — just that the changes are not pretty at the moment...).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> By coincidence I actually need this -- going to be doing some data analysis on indoor hydroponics grow rooms and this would give me all the environmental data I need if you include the particulate matter sensor.

<comment><USER10> I was thinking the same, would be really nice for hydroponics!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is pretty cool. I've been looking to expand / replace PurpleAir with something that monitored gasses in addition to particulate matter.

I don't think this is exactly what I want, since it has an LCD, but the sensors and board are really cool.

The only thing I wish this tracked was SO2.

I'm thinking i might have to make my own with Arduino. But this is very cool.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how easy it would be to convert, or design something similar to the Enviro+ that is in a waterproof enclosure with battery. Could be useful for collecting data on some basic water quality(turbidity,conductivity,pH,temp) alongside water level.

We currently use In-situ Aqua Trolls[1] to gather these parameters, but a solution like this could almost be considered disposable; hand them out to people in remote areas and you could potentially realise data for rivers/creeks that rarely flow, and would otherwise go unmonitored due to the time and finial investment required.

Very interesting project, thanks for sharing!

[1][https://in-situ.com/products/water-level-monitoring/aqua- tro...](https://in-situ.com/products/water-level-monitoring/aqua- troll-200-data-logger/)

<comment><USER13> The trick with waterproofing is that it's easy to do rainproof enclosures, but much harder to make fully submersible things.

For measuring water parameters I would be tempted to use a rugged box for the Pi and then cable (via a removable connector) to something you put in the water. Basically design a probe like the device you linked. The fewer parts that need to be fully waterproof the eaiser life gets.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely! There have been too many attempts by management to push our technical team towards devices with replaceable batteries as a means of reducing operational expenditure. Such loggers fail, often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was looking into some hobby sensors for home recently and came across this the Ruuvi [1]. I prefer this model to having on-board sensors. This doesn't do everything the Enviro+ does, but for a lot of use-cases it's pretty nice and affordable.

[1] [https://ruuvi.com/personal/](https://ruuvi.com/personal/)

<comment><USER15> Do I understand it correctly that this doesn't store the data, and uses bluetooth so you only see data for times when your phone was nearby, and on iOS when the app was open?

That sounds kind of limiting. I guess every hacker has old smartphone somewhere that can be used for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Was looking into something like this recently, but apparently a lot of the sensors out there aren't super precise:

\- [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325416608_Suitabili...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325416608_Suitability_of_the_Low- Cost_SDS011_Particle_Sensor_for_Urban_PM-Monitoring)

\- [https://www.scientevents.com/proscience/download/potential-a...](https://www.scientevents.com/proscience/download/potential- and-limitations-of-the-low-cost-sds011-particle-sensor-for-monitoring-urban- air-quality/)

They are often easy to set up, but make sure to double-check just how much you can use your particular model for.

</comment><comment><USER17> Are the sensors pre-calibrated? I found that you can easily get cheap air quality sensors from China, the problem is that they could do better with calibration, which may require expensive (in relation to the sensor itself) equipment.

<comment><USER18> You can easily calibrate co2 , 02 and n2 sensors by going outside in a "wild/nature" place

<comment><USER17> Depends on the sensor, also full auto mode usually means (for example MH-Z19) that it recalibrates every X hours, which means you'd have to go to the woods fairly often ;)

<comment><USER19> can be disabled. But then I'd recalibrate them after a few months. (I do it after 6 months usually)

<comment><USER17> Which sensors do you use? Are you happy with them overall?

<comment><USER19> MH-Z14 and MH-Z19.

Yes, for the price absolutely.

<comment><USER17> Are you using hass.io? Its plugin for MH-Z does not support switching auto calibration off, and in not sure how to do it.

<comment><USER19> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There have been just as comprehensive if not even more comprehensive sensor sets available for a really similar price. It's nothing unique.

As building such boards is quite common, I too have assembled many similar boards for my own use, to monitor both indoors and outdoors air quality although I don't have any external stations to compare my values to but they're "calibrated" according to the same baseline across my setup and it allows me to keep an eye on different types of pollution - different gases, particulates, UV, noise and so on. Would be nice if all these platforms could be tied together.

</comment><comment><USER21> Really looking forward to using this. Our local Council has a few air quality monitors in strategic places and publish the results as open data. However, they are 6 months behind in publishing data and have recently declared a "air quality emergency". They also state "Currently the level of interest in air quality appears to be rising, but this does not seem to translate into interaction between the Council and the local communities".

With an Enviro+ on a portable Pi I'll now be able to get my figures in near real time and ignore the Council.

</comment><comment><USER22> Very similar to Pioneer600, an expansion board for Raspberry Pi. [https://www.waveshare.com/pioneer600.htm](https://www.waveshare.com/pioneer600.htm)

<comment><USER23> A quick look over the Pioneer600, the pressure sensor seems to be the only overlap in the environmental monitoring that the Enviro+ is going for. The Pioneer seems to be a utility board, great for messing around. To me they would serve different purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have been using [https://getawair.com/](https://getawair.com/) (2nd edition) for over 6 months and I can't recommend it enough.

</comment><comment><USER25> Any reason why the particulate matter sensor cannot be used indoors?

<comment><USER13> No, it's just an aspirated dust sensor. No reason you couldn't run it inside. The main reason they suggest outside is so you can contribute to a global air quality database of some kind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ive been thinking about environment plugins for the raspberry pi for school projects to measure polution - so might have a look at this

</comment><comment><USER27> This is amazing. I'm going to add this to a fun weekend project to monitor air quality in my neighborhood.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let us know how you get on!

<comment><USER27> I also passed it along to some contacts in the DC government. I told them this is exactly the kind of stuff they should deploy all over the city to get air quality, and just try it out since it's cheap enough to experiment with!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is the alignment of the connector pads along the edge of the card deliberately not straight?

<comment><USER29> It aids in soldering, as the header you put in stays put straight instead of falling over or bending

<comment><USER28> Nice. I definitely hit that problem, but never thought of that solution!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone know where I can buy one of those displays? Looks amazing for the size and it has a standard connector instead of the weird hot-bar solderable ones on the other small displays I have seen.

<comment><AUTHOR> We sell a breakout here: [https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/0-96-spi-colour- lcd-160x8...](https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/0-96-spi-colour- lcd-160x80-breakout) :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anyone have experience making an enclosure for something like this to use outdoors? Thinking of like a Stephenson screen with a built in solar panel for powering the Pi + Hat.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd suggest breaking out this board to decouple it from rpi, since rpi heats up enough to make temperature readings from attached board inaccurate.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't know anything about Pis, though I've seen one. How does this attach? Does it require soldering?

<comment><USER34> yes/no. it's sized to match the Pi Zero, which by default comes with no headers - so to add this board you'd need to add headers. But many vendors (including OP) offer them pre-soldered, which makes the hardware side "plug the top bit into the bottom bit".

(The zero is positioned as the "barest of bare-bones" to reach its price- point. Many vendors look for value-adds they can offer because there's not much margin on "barest of bare-bones". So "no headers" is one of the ways the manufacturing price was lowered, and "with headers" is one of the value-adds some vendors offer.)

So not to contradict anyone, just to be clear that you're looking for "pre- soldered" or "pre-soldered headers" if that convenience is worth the extra couple of bob to you - to avoid the disappointment of expecting one and receiving the other.

<comment><AUTHOR> This product works with any model of Raspberry Pi - it doesn't have to be a Pi Zero!

The Pi Zero comes in three flavours - the Pi Zero WH includes a pre-soldered header. :-)

<comment><USER34> ah, I didn't realise it was actually coming out of the fab like that now? I could have sworn that at least initially, it was being offered as a value-add service.

Anyway, I should stress it wasn't a criticism - just that if that's their biggest question, they'd probably benefit from being able to tell the bare & WH boards apart.

<comment><AUTHOR> Initially it was, but now there is an official SKU for pre-soldered header. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Are the schematics available?

Looks great!

<comment><AUTHOR> They will be!

<comment><USER35> I just put one on order :)!

Any idea when the PM sensors will be back in stock? I was thinking about grabbing one from elsewhere, but I imagine I need a cable pinout :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully about a week!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is there a case option?

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously for the sensors to work they need to be exposed to air. We have a tutorial coming next week on how to make a low-cost enclosure for use outdoors - is that what you mean?

<comment><USER37> Yeah it'd be great if there was some kind of enclosure and holes / open spaces for the sensors.

Even better if there was a combined case which let you have the Raspberry Zero and this unit in one small thing.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whatever happened to the YC UBI program? - <AUTHOR> There were two blog posts about it in 2016. What happened? <comment><USER2> [https://basicincome.ycr.org/](https://basicincome.ycr.org/)</comment>


Show HN: Keep your teammates informed on Slack - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/reportbot <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, am building this bot for a while. Its a bot automatically shares reports from your favorite services with your team. Interested once can subscribe in the link.</comment>


Examples of really good APIs: helpful or no? - <AUTHOR> Hello smart people!
I'm currently building a visual resource guide to creating and enhancing APIs with common features to improve user adoption and experience. Right now, it is in the form of a blog that is broken down into API related categories, including things like documentation, SDKs, versioning, etc. The format of a single blog post goes something like this: "How company name does use case (e.g. How Stripe does documentation) Each post is highly visual, with several screenshots and a few brief sentences explaining the use case and the value that it provides users.
My question to you all is: what kind of content would you most like to see in terms of API inspiration? If you are someone who builds, modifies, or uses APIs frequently, what would the most useful content look like? Would it be highly visual (screenshots) or highly content oriented (code snippets)? Would you find this product useful at all? Or would you build/modify/use an API the same way regardless of how other companies do theirs?
I am looking for any feedback at all on this idea, even if it's something totally different than the questions that I proposed above. Thank you for your help! <comment><USER2> Check out High Scalability's Real Life Architecture section[1], they have similar articles to what you're describing.

[1] [http://highscalability.com/blog/category/example](http://highscalability.com/blog/category/example)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Would it be highly visual (screenshots) or highly content oriented (code > snippets)?

Both.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know, thanks!</comment></comment>


Drank App – Never wait in a long line at bars again - <AUTHOR> Hello Hacker News,
We wanted to share that we are about to launch our MVP in a couple weeks, and invite all of you to join the waitlist!
Drank allows mobile orders at your favorite bars, breweries, and brewpubs. Never wait in a long line again!  Think Starbucks app meets Untappd, where users can order via their phones, and then walk up to a dedicated express lane to pick up their drink(s).
No more fighting for a bartender's attention!
Let's get hoppin'...
https://dranktab.com/
-Eric <comment><USER2> Nice! Friday beers & happy hour just got better. Getting the bartenders attention can be so frustrating when its packed.

<comment><AUTHOR> There has to be something better! It's almost impossible to get a drink, during Happy Hour in San Francisco.</comment></comment>


Building a Web App in 1 Hour For Promotional Purposes (IsHilarySwankHot.com) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ramamia.com/2009/01/building-web-app-1-hour-promotional-purposes-ishilaryswankhotcom/

<comment><USER2> I think calling this a Web App is a bit generous. It's a poll with 2 options. Have you gotten even a single sign up for the service you are trying to promote? Getting a few thousand people to visit a web page and click a button does not equal business value.

This is a good example of creative thinking, but you should have waited until the experiment ran its course and reported on the results. I'm guessing that the number of sign ups won't be worth the 1 hour spent coding the app. You'd be better off working on something worthwhile and buying some traffic through Adwords.

<comment><USER3> You're arguing semantics. Call it a novelty, a web app, website, or just a promotional tool. Even in the post, I say that it's a stupid, silly, and catchy pop culture thing. We're not trying to take on the world with ishilaryswankhot.com. Just creating a little bit of buzz, and most importantly _enjoying ourselves_. Mark enjoyed coding the app. I'm enjoying doing some of the promoting (we just had film.com write it up). You can't put a "per hour" price on that enjoyment. For the love of the game fellas, never forget that.

<comment><USER4> "You're arguing semantics."

Not really. It helps a discussion of people have a common understanding of terms.

<comment><USER5> What do you think "semantics" means?

<comment><USER6> If the grandparent post is an adequate definition of "semantics," then I, personally, see no reason _not_ to make an argument based upon it. What's wrong with "arguing semantics" such that it's become a derogatory phrase? I mean, it's nothing to base a logical or moral or legal argument upon, but it's interesting in its own right on an philosophical level (similar to how "grammar nazi-ism" is interesting to linguists.)

Taking it a bit further, this phrase, and many others like it, belie the difference between a traditional chronological conversation, and the multithreaded conversation possible on the web. When you can branch off in different directions _at the same time_ , without losing focus on any individual branch, there's no longer a reason to keep "on message" or "to the argument at hand"--both statements on- and off-topic can be expressed with equal exposure, and without anyone being distracted from one by the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's great that you got it up and running so fast, and it's noteworthy the way your marketing it. I like the concept of a "microwebsite" ... they've been popping up all over the place recently ... but I don't like how they are inextricably linked to a blog post about how "this is the way to do it" and "simplicity is key" and all of this other stuff, as if the OP believes he is God's gift to the internet.

"Stop bloating your shit, and you'll be able to do shit fast" -- I'll keep that in mind next time I have an idea that requires two buttons on a webpage. Hopefully I'll manage.

Finally, there is really nothing new about this, other than how timely it was put out. Other than that, it's clearly a gimmick that I wouldn't be too proud of. Imagine if I created a site that said "click here to win a free 6-pack of beer" and then went on in a blog post about how "people like the idea of getting free stuff" and "what people like better, though, is getting free stuff _with minimal effort_." And then going on and on about it, as if I'm the expert.

I don't know why I'm being so harsh.. this is just what's coming to mind. It's nothing personal, I just don't like this gimmicky stuff, I guess :)

<comment><USER3> Ha, many thanks for the praises in the beginning. Yeah, ive probably read a bit too much hn + SvN lately. I've got a ton to learn. That's why I come here.

Yeah, it's hard to bloat a 2 button web app up. When I talk about not bloating shit, I mean your overall frame of mind. If youre all about making things complicated, too many features, and a bureaucracy, I doubt you'd be in the mindset to make a simple web app. It's not about capability, it's about clarity.

It's gimmicky, it's fun, and people enjoy it. We've already reaped some pretty damn cool benefits from it (users to ramamia, coverage on the site, and contacts). Like i said in a comment earlier, it's okay to make something out of enjoyment. I think that's my favorite part about the web, you can put something together in an hour for shits and giggles just because you want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a similar experience building songerize.com (since sold/redesigned). I had built some MP3-finding code off of the SeeqPod API for another site, and on a whim decided to make a UI for it. A few weeks later, it spontaneously got covered on Lifehacker, Mashable, CNet, etc, all in one day, with essentially no promotion on my part. Strange how the things that take the least work can get the best results.

</comment><comment><USER9> Promotion needs to be supportive of the product or at least related - a hot- or-not site isn't appropriate for a site who's target market is family.

<comment><USER3> I think that's the one negative thing we found. We found it better to take the shot, than not take it though. It's also a pretty fun exercise in app building + PR / buzz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My friend built postcard.fm in a day, and got on lifehacker. It helped promote the real business, www.thenextbigsound.com

It works.

<comment><USER11> I know those guys. Northwestern University, go!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool.

Looks like the cookie the only thing from keeping people from voting more than once.

To everyone here:

How else could you keep people from vote bombing low friction (no required login) sites like this one?

Does it even matter in this case?

Why the hell are people voting NO?

<comment><AUTHOR> We just dealt with one guy that just voted 2800 times from the same IP. Deleted the rows, and made it one vote per IP.

It works because to see a Yes/No it depends on if you have the cookie set, but to actually vote it checks the IP.

So if someone legitimately votes from a multi-user IP that already was used to vote, it'll show a Yes/No, get sent to the vote page, but won't go in–but it'll seem like it did :)

<comment><USER13> Seems like that could seriously skew the results ... I'd imagine a lot of people are _trying_ to vote from behind home/small office routers.

<comment><USER14> Forest for the trees. This is primarily an advertisement, not an application. Accuracy doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Throw in a disqus widget so people can state their case à la the show.

</comment><comment><USER16> I make a pretty penny designing polls and other landing pages for my clients. Polls are mostly effective on the 'less educated' and 'younger' demographics because most people worth their weight in anything know that it's just a pre- sell on someone's service (usually a scamming affiliate deal for ring tones or acai berry diet pills--which still makes some people millionaires).

Sure, you can create a gimmick similar to this one, but eventually people will want to see the real meat that tells them you can be trusted. If you want sign-ups there are _definitely_ better ways on a per-hour or per-dollar invested basis. But it can be fun every once in a while. Just be careful it won't cut some of your reputation as a worthwhile company away.

</comment><comment><USER17> nice job mark & jason -- clever & well executed.

that said, it's the marketing equivalent of a lottery ticket; stunts can be huge (for example, our critical mass at dropbox came from one carefully- crafted digg post) but only if they're aligned with the target audience (which probably isn't the case with hilary swank & family social networking)

<comment><USER18> Hah I remember seeing that and thinking "these guys really know what they're doing".

 _Dropbox (GDrive Killer) finally launches, plus Linux+iPhone!_

[http://m.digg.com/software/Dropbox_GDrive_Killer_finally_lau...](http://m.digg.com/software/Dropbox_GDrive_Killer_finally_launches_plus_Linux_iPhone)

And yes I dugg it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> <http://dnsthru.com> Built in few hours to have quick access to dns lookups. If anyone has ideas how to improve it, more than welcome to contribute :)

<comment><USER20> Looks cool.

The links in A,CNAME etc was confusing, I thought it was more like a search option. i.e to list only CNAME record etc(just like search web,images)

The report bugs/features should ideally be a form. Its very frustrating when clicking on that starts to open a mail client.

Otherwise looks good, pretty fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You guys should spam a link on Hulu within comments for this Office episode. Keep the buzz going.

</comment><comment><USER22> +1 for The Office (and the site is great, too!)

</comment><comment><USER23> I like quick projects like that. I put together <http://isthemarketdown.com> in 3 hours, but I haven't spent much time promoting it.

The twit this button is a good idea.

<comment><USER24> Ok, I'm really curious... how much money do you make on that?

<comment><USER23> It's only been up for 3 days and it hasn't gotten much traffic. I haven't made back the cost of the domain yet. Each click on those ads is a good amount though so I can see breaking even soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if you could build a business around watching TV for potential fads and making one off sites like this as quickly as possible with adwords slapped on. Think it'd be lucrative?

</comment><comment><USER26> What about abstracting out the personal details so you can have something like "KellyClarkson.hotornot.com"

That way you can use one domain for all your polling.

</comment><comment><USER27> Maybe it needed more unit tests.

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_IF in /home/1874/domains/ishilaryswankhot.com/html/vote.php on line 11

<comment><AUTHOR> Just fixed it. Problem when pushing a quick fix. I've been programming Rails for the past few months instead of PHP. Damn semicolons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It seems like the 1 hour to build the web app is sort of irrelevant compared to the hours and hours of emailing and promotion you have to do.

</comment><comment><USER29> Take the caps out of the URL and look again...

</comment><comment><USER30> It's cool, it's gimmicky, I think she's hot but I think that blog post was a bit over the top.

</comment><comment><USER31> Could have sent this to a simple zipcode ad and prolly made some money....

</comment><comment><USER32> Ladies and gentlemen, even though the penis was fake, I kept expecting a second plot twist where we found out that Hillary Swank actually was a boy...

</comment><comment><USER33> How do I see the results? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> it should show you after you vote. have you voted already though?

<comment><USER33> It just shows me a blank page.

<comment><USER3> hey, should be fixed. dealt with same ips and cookies,etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Disabling the back button is not cool.

</comment><comment><USER35> It needs a forum.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is a great idea. You should do this for more celebrities.</comment>


Syria secretly sentenced free software developer Bassel Khartabil to death - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2015/11/20/assad-government-secretly-sent.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussion of original source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10560781](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10560781)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was wondering what he did exactly, but didn't find much. According to a French site [0] he was charged with "spying for an enemy of the state".

[0] [https://fr.globalvoices.org/2015/10/03/190898/](https://fr.globalvoices.org/2015/10/03/190898/)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's sad that you often see this overreaction on both sides of a conflict. You mete out disproportionate punishment that outrages people who would have otherwise stood on the sidelines drawing them into the conflict as well. Not to make light of the situation but it's much like the _Streisand Effect_ with much higher stakes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect)

</comment><comment><USER5> Another great piece written by Bassel's friend Henry Oh (SV entrepreneur): [https://www.birgitterasine.com/works/books/visionary/stories...](https://www.birgitterasine.com/works/books/visionary/stories/henry- oh)

</comment><comment><USER6> Very sad the state of world affairs we find each day in our news.

<comment><USER7> That's kind of how news works. It does whatever it can to grab our attention and keep us as long as possible. So it shouldn't be surprising when we read a news article and feel the way the article intended for us to feel. The way I work around this is by just not reading news articles unless they have to do with some programming concept I'm interested in learning more about. Hence my being at HN more often than reddit.

<comment><USER8> Totally agree with you. Hacker news is pretty satisfying for me, but I have many other interests. I think there is tons of potential for news outlets that don't just dredge the horror...

Open to non tech suggestions (ars, crunch i can find myself thanks)...

<comment><USER9> I like timeline.com and nextdraft.com a lot. They both have apps for iOS.

<comment><USER8> thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why We Need Poetry Technology - <AUTHOR> http://thecombedthunderclap.blogspot.com/2015/03/why-we-need-poetry-technology.html

<comment><USER2> I'd like to thank the author for posting this. I spent two years of my BA trying just this sort of thing, recombining text programmatically to produce new work. I traced the history of found art, discovered Goldsmith, and took up programming in my spare time just to pursue this. The first program I ever wrote was a shoddy PHP implementation of MegaHAL: Markov chains and so on, stitching together bits of Twitter fluff. I got a lot of blank stares when I stood up to present in class, and I gave up on procedural poetry -- and poetry in general, really -- after I graduated, thinking that it was just too flimsy an idea for people to accept. I am very, very glad to see that I am not -- or was not -- alone in my thinking. Thanks a lot, thundercomb.

<comment><AUTHOR> you're most welcome. hearing this encourages me to continue on my journey, to tinker and explore. thank you for the feedback. it sounds like you had fun, and perhaps you could pick it up again... there's certainly a shortage of people exploring the field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm a little skeptical about whether poetry science/technology will _take_ , largely because the literature community is going to be suspicious of the last half of your terms, and the tech/science communities will be suspicious of the first. :)

That said, it's nascent, and it may be a while before terms, norms and practices settle. I completed my MFA in 2012 with a thesis I'd call computational poetry or computational literature. Goldsmith as you mention is trying to float uncreative writing--which I think is a decent-enough broad term that covers a lot of territory, but I suspect it, too, won't find much purchase outside of literary circles.

I'm happy to get this chance to discover a number of your projects, particularly the PoetryDB. You may already know this, but I also wanted to point out that the field of computational literary criticism and analysis are also building steam, and you may want to think of your DB/API in terms of both a creative service for computational poets, and a service to computational literary critics.

You may want to see work by Franco Moretti for a starting point here if you aren't familiar (particularly "Graphs Maps Trees", and "Distant Reading"). There's a nice review for starters in Wired from a few years ago. Moretti himself laments the lack of shared tools and resources (well--let's be honest, _everyone_ doing this is lamenting it) when it comes to machine-readable texts and analysis.

Thanks for posting.

<comment><AUTHOR> while researching the blog post it crossed my mind that a technology capable of judging aesthetic value may also therefore be capable of recognising when it (or a sister technology) has generated poetry / literature that has aesthetic value. in other words they are complementary. i was only incidentally aware of the computational literary criticism movement, so obviously this will now inform my continuing research. thanks very much for that, and for the pointers.

it's true what you say, there is a danger of isolation from both communities. i'm optimistic though. the traditional divide between science and humanities (with computation leaning towards the former) is, in many ways, a false dichotomy.

i hope over time to demonstrate why this is so.

<comment><USER3> When it comes to actually quantifying value things are still pretty crude as far as I've seen. I can't recall seeing much that is this aspirational yet. There's an interesting site/paper from 2013 ([http://poetryassessor.com/poetry/](http://poetryassessor.com/poetry/)) which attempts to rate a subset of poems on a amateur-to-professional scale.

Concepts like "amateur" and "professional" and aesthetic value are slippery even for those of us who really enjoy poetry. It's worth realizing that aesthetic judgement can break down into a number of sub-tasks, most of which take for granted that we mean something like, "evaluate whether or not it is statistically likely that a blood-and-bones human will like this poem."

I think that may be a trap. I think I'm far more interested in what poetry the computer finds interesting than in what poetry the computer thinks I will find interesting. The analogue in human experience is the difference between a poet writing poems they think their audience (be it end readers, or the slush readers at a given journal) will like, and a poet writing poems _they themselves_ find interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I tend to agree with you on both counts … Quantitative and statistical approaches are unlikely to uncover poetic aesthetics by themselves. If economics has turned out to be hard to predict, after more than a century of quantitative efforts in that direction, I don't hold out much hope for poetry or literature in general. I was thinking more along the lines of machine learning and language learning as starting points. On the second point, this is quite an exciting view to take in my opinion. The far end of the spectrum is that we begin to see AI as "subjects" in their own right. Not necessarily "flesh-and-bones" subjects who are human-like, but different entities with their own possibilities, and yet capable of interfacing with humans. Would we find their aesthetic tastes understandable? Could we learn to love it?

<comment><USER3> The reason my interest is in "what they find interesting" is because so much of poetry is surprise. We rarely praise a poem that uses the words we expect right where we expect them, and ended up right where we thought it would. (aside: check your twitter mentions, please?)

It seems at least plausible to me that non-human agents could be Good For Poetry as long as we can clear a very specific hurdle. The hurdle is the fact that most people see art as something an artist--a human full of agency and intentionality--makes to communicate or share beauty. Obliquely, I think this definitional hurdle is a big part of why many struggle to find value in art produced from modernism on. I offered up this alternative definition of art (in the context of whether software can be art) in another thread a few weeks ago:

Art is something--a sort of significance--we experience, and not really something we make. When we say we're "making art", we're making an object or giving a performance that we hope will induce others to have the experience of art. In reality, "making art" is an interpretative process; art, like love, is an experience--not an object.

The point is that software most certainly induces people to have the art- experience, both intentionally and unintentionally. It's probably less common for source code to induce the art-experience (intentionally or not), but I suspect this too happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> i like your definition of art as an experience; and the creation of art, then, as the communication of experience. there are many different types of experience, which accounts for the diversity of art.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me very much of a fantastic old program, [http://westbury.on- rev.com/JanusNode/](http://westbury.on-rev.com/JanusNode/)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, i hadn't heard of JanusNode before. considering how long it's been around, i'm surprised - i do believe it deserves more recognition. a cursory play with its functionality suggests it's going to be interesting to explore. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does this (poetry technology) differ from electronic poetry[0]? There must be some degree of overlap. PoetryDB sounds fascinating, could you go into more detail? I was tinkering with an electronic poetry publishing platform which I called Poetify[1] but I didn't get too far. It requires Ruby 1.8 and Camping so it's a bit quirky.

I have been mulling the idea of a standardised electronic poetry markup (PoetryML) for some time, this would facilitate openness, sharing and innovation in the field. Of course, it's not an easy task to come up with a file format that encompasses all this experimentation. I have some concrete thoughts on the matter and a small bit of working code...

My friend and colleague, Giovanna Di Rosario, recently wrote this dissertation, _Electronic Poetry: Understanding Poetry in the Digital Environment_ [2]. Great to see a fellow HNer into this deeply interesting field.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_poetry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_poetry)

[1] [https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine](https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine)

[2] [http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/electronic-poetry- underst...](http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/electronic-poetry- understanding-poetry-digital-environment)

<comment><AUTHOR> PoetryDB is intended to be a database of poetry consumable via an API. You can try it out at [http://poetrydb.org](http://poetrydb.org). The API is documented on github at [https://github.com/thundercomb/poetrydb](https://github.com/thundercomb/poetrydb).

There is definitely overlap between Digital Poetry and Poetry Technology. However as the name suggests, Poetry Technology is more than the resulting instances of poetry. It is as much, if not more, about the technological process and mediation.

Digital Poetry is perhaps more apt as a marketing label to a consumer (just as we might say, "I like listening to electronic music"). From the point of view of a practitioner, my objection to Digital Poetry as a label is that it is two dimensional, and casts poetry technology as a variant of existing poetry, whereas this is misleading.

Digital Poetry, unfairly or not, is not on the whole viewed too seriously by the literary establishment. It is considered to be gimmicky and perhaps even a failed attempt to achieve "serious" or mainstream literary work. Poetry Technology aims to set that right, by drawing attention to the technology, the process, the body of knowledge that it draws from, the theory that can inform the practice and application, the potential works that could be created. It is much more than a label.

 __*

Your markup project sounds intriguing. Would love to keep in touch to hear how it progresses, do you have a preferred way of being contacted?

I also tried the poetify weblink but the website doesn't seem to be running at present.

Thanks for the links.

<comment><USER5> > I also tried the poetify weblink but the website doesn't seem to be running > at present.

I know :( I upgraded Ruby past 1.8 and broke my own app :( but the code is there for you to have a gander at and the README gets at what I was trying to do.

> Your markup project sounds intriguing. Would love to keep in touch to hear > how it progresses, do you have a preferred way of being contacted?

Your database of poetry consumable via an API sounds intriguing. I would love to keep in touch to hear how it progresses! Would this be able to support a poetry sharing social network of authors, followers, and readers?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting suggesting. There is no reason that the API can't be extended to accept posts of actual new poems. The reason this hasn't been done is largely practical, because I'd have to tackle the security and authentication side, and probably put in place some moderation too. A truly multi-tenanted social database, where people can share their content or keep it private as the case may be, sounds intriguing. However this would be a much larger undertaking. The current incarnation of PoetryDB had a somewhat simpler, less "social", aim.

 __*

Thanks again for drawing my attention to ELMCIP, it looks like a treasure trove of learning in Electronic Literature. I tried to access the full text of Giovanna's thesis, but unfortunately the link seems to be broken.

PS: Wrt your earlier question, I don't mean to sound hung up about labels, and what to call such and such. This tends to be a futile exercise anyway, as to what will be taken up in popular usage. What I do think is worth reiterating is that poetry technology in particular tries to shift attention away from digital poetry as simply "poetry in another medium", and moves "lower down the stack" to investigate and clarify the real material and symbolic grounds that give rise to digital poetry / electronic literature. This material and symbolic ground is necessarily a combination of the new aspect, namely information technology at large, text processing technologies, program language techniques, data science, and the specific methods that can be applied to language learning and pseudo language learning, etc. ; as well as the traditional and ongoing aspect, namely the body of poetry since the dawn of civilisation, the literary criticisms and appraisals that took shape around it, formal understandings of poetics, etc. In other words poetry technology is about bringing together two considerable traditions in their own right (one new, one old). The danger, at least from the mainstream point of view, has been to see this as gimmicky, a recurring flirtation. Poetry technology is saying there's more to it, they're in a relationship now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Dear Article One – Easy Civic Engagement - <AUTHOR> https://www.deararticleone.com/ <comment><USER2> Very cool idea. Certainly makes it easier to engage with our politicians, hopefully in a more meaningful way.

They place a lot more weight on letters than clicks on an online poll.

I could see something like this being very helpful for NGOs focused on lobbying on behalf of their constituents e.g., they could pre-pay for a certain number of letters to be sent out, provide a coupon code and a sample/fill-in-the-blank letter to their members, then the members could, in seconds, send out an email to all of their reps. This could be a powerful tool.

Also, nice UX and love the price transparency. Doing this as a 501(c)3 is also a nice touch. Bravo

</comment><comment><USER3> Great idea, I would use it.</comment>


An Engineer's Guide to Bandwidth - <AUTHOR> http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/10/a_engineers_gui.html <comment><USER2> <useless but informative gripe>

An actual engineer would know bandwidth isn't something measured in bits per second.

Technically, bandwidth is the width of a band of frequencies. For example, the bandwidth between 3 GHz and 4 GHz is 1 GHz. The bandwidth of an 802.11 channel is 22 MHz.

Obviously it's a lost cause trying to stop everyone from using "bandwidth" to mean throughput or a data rate. Don't get me started on people using bandwidth to mean how much work they can handle either: "I don't have the bandwidth to handle another project, you better give it to somebody else."

</useless but informative gripe>

<comment> a-priori There's this wonderful property that all human languages have, polysemy, which gives them the ability to give one word multiple related meanings. I'm sure there are examples in English...

<comment><USER3> Except that engineers are supposed to use precise, unambiguous language. I blame the computer guys for knowing jack of signal processing / communications theory and misusing the technical terms due to plain ignorance. It wouldn't be so bad if the ignorant fools in question weren't so arrogant...

<comment><USER4> I agree with that arrogant part. I think also though, it does get annoying when people know full well what you are talking about, but then interject with some clarification or correction or disambiguation that really wasn't necessary.

The problem is that sort of interjection ruins the conversation and interrupts the communication of ideas that are bigger than the individual words that comprise them.

<comment><USER3> It also gets annoying when people discuss things and in the end discover they are talking about different things, you know. When a networks guy talks about bandwidth, he might refer to bit rate or channel capacity, but for an RF engineer, bandwidth is measured in Hertz. Interrupting the commnunication of ideas is bad, but communicating imprecise ideas is close to useless.

<comment> a-priori So the onus is on you to make yourself clear in spite of the ambiguity (a simple way would be to mention a unit early in the conversation). Really, the terminology isn't going to change no matter how much noise you make, so it would be worthwhile to save yourself the effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the point about keeping the HTTP GET or POST request in a single packet to avoid the round trip from TCP slow start.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why is he using 1460 as the packet size? He says that it's 1500 minus the packet overhead, but I've always seen MTU as 1492 (I could be recalling incorrectly here). In any case, MTU changes as you travel over various networks with various settings, using various technologies (ethernet,wireless,fiber,etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> MTU is the maximum Ethernet v2 packet size (1500); MSS is the "payload" it can carry (1460). If you see 1492 for your MTU, you are maybe using Point to Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) which chomps another 8 bytes.

</comment></comment><comment> rm-rf The referenced link is far more interesting than the resulting discussion.

For persons who are designing web applications, the post outlines considerations that are not generally known or well understood. Some considerations, such as managing the number of round trips also apply to app<->database connections.

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't the proper term "throughput"?

<comment><USER8> Yes, but it's too late to change (see seiji's downvoted comment below).</comment></comment>


Goodbye Froogle, Hello Google Product Search! - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/070418-202109.php <comment><USER2> Honestly, I have never been able to find a good price using Froogle. What is the point if I search for "cross pen model No##" and it turns up thousands of links? (as I recently did when I wanted to buy it for a gift).

<comment><USER3> Froogle/PS is nice to find things that you can buy quickly using Google Checkout. If I don't care about price, but do care about keeping my CC safe/buying something quick, I usually use Amazon or Froogle.</comment></comment>


JobFunnel, a job website search aggregator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/PaulMcInnis/JobFunnel <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, a job search aggregator assumes that companies religiously post new jobs. The reality is when a company wants to hire it 'may' post a job to cover it butt in case of an EEO complaint. Mostly they have internal candidates, internally referred candidates, retained recruiters, applicants from career website who all rank above an external job site. My guess is a very low percentage of jobs actually get filled by job aggegator sites. imho The number of applicants from these sites is just too much, far less qualified and trusted compared to other sources.

<comment><USER3> Oh man, I love how this works. Everyone's time gets wasted, and then the applicant gets the shaft and a bullshit excuse.

Either companies shouldn't be required to post publicly with the intent of hiring internally or an employee getting a referral kickback, or something needs to be figured out where the applicants aren't taken advantage of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At [https://remoteleaf.com](https://remoteleaf.com), we have been doing this manually to curate remote jobs.

I spend more than 6 hours daily searching for, screening, verifying and filtering hundreds of remote jobs. So it can save you time, energy, and frustration – and hopefully, help you find a job faster

I'll check out this tool at least for the scrapping part.

<comment><USER5> When I look at your signup form I can't really find my profession. I had this problem for a while now but maybe I should simply ask: I do industrial software engineering (in my case in automotive) that targets a mixture of embedded, desktop and server environments. This is done mostly in C/C++ with some Python, Shell and maybe Rust. What is the proper profession name for me? Is this a full stack engineer? Not likely from what I've seen but I really don't know

<comment><USER4> I agree and I'm not sure either. Maybe if you are interested I can modify your category in the backend and set it to a custom one and start sending your C/C++/Embedded development remote jobs.

<comment><USER6> I just took a look. Nice looking site, by the way :-)

I have the same issue at signup as the GP - I find myself rather unsure what categories make sense for me on your signup page.

Similar to the GP, a mixture of embedded, servers, and webdev, except I wouldn't say I do just industrial. Feel free to look at my LinkedIn profile (the link is in my HN profile) if you think it could give you some ideas for additional categories on your signup page.

<comment><USER4> Based on your skills, I would suggest choosing the Javascript and System/Devops categories.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for that! Armed with the advice I'll take another look.

Though I think that, on the face of it, completely leaves out my interest in compilers, programming languages and toolchains, and in kernels/devices/embedded systems, which are a big part of my work in practice.

Maybe the "System" in "System/Devops" covers that, but those two are a peculiar match: I've might quite a few devops workers who consider software development to be slightly outside their knowledge, and something like C or C++ programming to be "very advanced". I find it peculiar that anyone can do devops without being a competent programmer but hey, it takes all sorts!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyway I can automate applying for a job now. That would be the ultimate tool to complement this.

<comment><USER8> This wouldnt be that hard to do, but is it illegal to automate those submissions?

<comment><USER9> May not be illegal, but all platforms don't like it. And it's only a problem that needs solving because the internet is full of shit content.

There are N amount of job postings, but recruiters and other "middle-men" have made it so that there are N * X * Y places a candidate has to apply to.

Where X are the amount of recruiters and Y are the recruitment platforms/boards.

They literally take their clients' requirements, shuffle them around, repackage them, adding editorial fluff and then post them to Y amount of platforms. This is information warfare and we are losing the battle.

This is the net-consequence of all the "distributed" effects we've been wanting for years. Instead, there should be _one_ database. Or at the very least an identifiable entity even if you want to repackage something. I.e. each one of these postings needs to have an agreed UID for employer, employer's job posting, recruiter, and the type of roles it applies to. We need more structure to the data, not less and more distribution across the greater internet.

That is why they don't like scrapers, because they lead to consolidation, aggregation or deduplication of data that has been needlessly duplicated in order to confuse and obfuscate.

On a side, tech-related note, this is the same reason why I hate microservices architectures: a good chunk of them distribute and duplicate pieces of data.

<comment><USER8> I think it would be messy, but doable, to build a one application platform that is tailored to individual websites behind the scenes. It knows how to input the information, checks the boxes, and then collates the responses and makes applications easy to track. Actually kind of curious why this doesnt exist

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was always under the impression job sites don't like to be scraped. What are the risks in using a tool like this? I would suspect possibly getting your ip banned.

<comment><USER11> As always, consult a lawyer.

But, my understanding is that you are allowed to scrape sites as long as you don't impact their ability to deliver the site to other users. In other words, don't DDoS them. Sites tried to ban scraping but last I remember seeing it was not enforceable unless it was done at high rates or maliciously.

As for content, certain things like recipes aren't protected content because they are "listings of ingredients". I can imagine a job opening / title might follow that same logic, maybe the job requirements and benefits as well.

What is protected is the way it's presented and organized. So if you have the same jobs with the same filters and same layout you might be exposing yourself to trouble. You have to make changes in the way it's presented, which for copyright law is changing 50% or more.

So if you're scraping a job site and only showing remote jobs or jobs in a certain skill set, or you're showing the job along with some stats about the company you're probably in a safe spot. But again, if you want to make a business out of it it's probably good to talk to a lawyer first.

<comment><USER12> I don't think the question was: "is it legal to scrape", rather: "do they like to be scraped". If they wanted to, I'm sure they could make scraping harder (more annoying). Which, I suppose, thus comes down to: is being aggregated a net plus or minus for their business. Probably "it depends" on what the aggregator does with the data. So, just to get this pun in: it then comes down to: is being aggregated a net plus or minus, IN AGGREGATE.

<comment><USER11> Then no, very few for profit companies like to be scraped.

It would be easier for them to provide an RSS feed or a free API if they wanted to share their data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Somewhat related freecodecamp.org had a video for aggregating job results with a filter [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lauywdXKEXI&t=196s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lauywdXKEXI&t=196s)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is essentially what large job sites like Indeed do themselves, but they have entire teams maintaining the scraping pipeline. I've worked for one of their competitors.

<comment><USER15> One pet peeve I have with sites like indeed is all of the subterfuge that goes on. For instance, the half-assed sort by date feature. Indeed adds in month old sponsored postings with new postings, and often repeats those old postings on consecutive pages. Many sites also shamelessly reset their posting dates so that nothing is ever more than a week old.

Stripping away the middleman's ability to manipulate the presentation of search results is the most attractive feature here, in my opinion.

<comment><USER6> One thing a multi-site scraping aggregator could do would be detect listings that have been re-posted with just a date change, and show the _real_ amount of time the ad has been up, alongside how long it's been most recently refreshed.

It would be interesting to search for ads that were posted a long time ago and are still unfilled.

And it would be intersting to see how that add "posted 12 hours ago" is the same one that was posted 6 months ago and is currently being posted by 5 different recruiters with almost identical wording apart from their boilerplate.

And it would also be interesting to see the different salaries/ranges that are mentioned on different copies of the same ad. I've noticed different recruiters sometimes post the same ad, but with a different salary ceiling. Guess which number I'd like to have when negotiating... And if I see a job whose salary has been creeping up for a few months, that's an interesting trend too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome to see in the screenshot that this is from somebody in Kitchener- Waterloo!

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how this would be if it was backed by Elasticsearch.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very cool OP!</comment>


Hints, tips and cheats to better datamining  - <AUTHOR> http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/hints-tips-and-cheats-to-better-datamining/ <comment><USER2> Good stuff</comment>


Ask HN: What's your most useful Kanban system for small software teams? - <AUTHOR> As a small software team we started using Kanban with Trello a while ago using a relatively simple structure. It seems simple enough in the beginning, but we quickly end up abandoning a chaotic ship and falling back to even more chaotic slack chats to solve multiple projects.
But I like the idea of kanban in general, I want to check out what kind of systems work best for you (kanban system and workflow).
A few pain points: - Where to collect feature ideas and bug reports, without making too much noise? - Where to put stuff, which is not immediately required? - Where to put the burning stuff, which needs attention without rating everything as "important"? - What to do with those cards, which never seem to get done? - How to write a "good" card, easy to scan?
One simple example we are using is:
Backlog -> Collection of features, may or may not do Buffer -> Planned features, want do Doing -> Currently implementing features Test & Review -> Implemented and needs testing Done -> Implemented and tested Trash -> Not relevant anymore
Then once a month or so we archive whatever is left in done and trash another template, which worked for us:
Later -> Planned for some time later Soon -> Planned soon, when current tasks are finished Doing Now -> Currently implementing Done -> Implemented and tested Inbox (for Review) -> Feature collection Trash -> not relevant anymore
"Inbox" gets every feature suggestion, internally and externally via feedback from users. We then review it once a week and move it to Later, if we decide to do it. But only, if there is not too much in Later already. Then gradually they move from Later -> Soon -> Doing Now. And again whatever is in Done and Trash is archived once a week or month.
What systems and workflows work for you? <comment><USER2> Besides what others have commented, I'd like to point some more metrics that help you model your board:

\- Task classes.

\- Lead time.

\- Cycle time.

\- Number of backward movements for any list.

\- Cumulative card evolution.

There are some good books about this subject:

\- David J. Anderson's Kanban ([https://www.amazon.com/Kanban-Successful- Evolutionary-Techno...](https://www.amazon.com/Kanban-Successful-Evolutionary- Technology- Business/dp/0984521402/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490549174&sr=1-1&keywords=kanban+david+anderson))

\- Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability: An Introduction ([https://www.amazon.com/Actionable-Agile-Metrics- Predictabili...](https://www.amazon.com/Actionable-Agile-Metrics- Predictability-Introduction/dp/098643633X))

Shameless plug: checkout my personal project DjangoTrelloStats that measures these metrics for you: [https://github.com/diegojromerolopez/django-trello- stats](https://github.com/diegojromerolopez/django-trello-stats) (include a somewhat Trello synchronization tool).

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, never thought of metrics/stats tracking in Trello! Just had a quick look at the GitHub, does it also work under macOS? I saw Linux `sudo apt-get install` setup commands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A few things here:

1\. in Kanban it is very important to have limits for the number of cards you have in every column. I find that a column becomes useless if there is more than 10-12 cards.

2\. given #1, forget about your "Backlog" column, it shouldn't be in the same daily view that covers the validated features you know you will build or things you're working on now. You may even want to take the radical step of not keeping feature requests at all- you'll find that the important ones come up again and again, and if they don't, then they're not important.

3\. I would suggest that your "Buffer" column contain only a prioritized set of features that you know you'll actually build because you've already validated them or are lightweight "this is what we're building to validate hypothesis/idea X" tasks. Once again, don't have too many cards here- having too many cards is difficult to prioritize.

Let me know if you want any more help, I love working on process problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tips! A card limit is something I just discovered recently and a great suggestion.

I also like the idea of having the feature requests in a different view or even different system. I used to collect all features and bugs inside a note- taking app on my mac.

This worked well until I hit 100 or so items. It's true, the important things come up again and again, but sometimes it's a small group of very noisy users, which skew the true numbers. Or it comes from people using your trial, who are not your ideal customers. So I would like to track how many and which users are requesting something. Just to avoid biases and loud users with their edge- cases. What's your experience with this?

Regarding the kanban columns. You know other column systems and workflows, which are maybe more suitable?

Another point we missed out earlier is to review the cards and throw away stale ones.

<comment><USER3> I think you have to always be focused on whatever top level goal/metric/OKR you're currently focused on and then define and test hypotheses that you think will get you to there in the fastest way possible. Think of it this way, if your current goal is to improve metric X by Y % then you should only be focused on ideas, hypotheses and feedback that can get you there, ignore everything else.

In terms of columns, I like simplicity: Backlog -> Development -> Test -> Done

Depending on your workflows, between "Test" and "Done" you can have a "To Be Deployed" column.

This assumes that all features in the Backlog have been validated. My process there is:

OKR (metric) -> Hypothesis (how will I meet this OKR?) -> Assumptions (what risky assumptions am I making in the hypothesis?) -> Experiment design (how can I prove/disprove the assumption?) -> Experiment -> review outcome and either discard the hypothesis or build it out to production level. In this workflow, items make it into the Backlog at the Experiment and "build out" stages. So you come up with an experiment that may require engineering effort, that's a card in your backlog. Your experiment validates your hypothesis, so you want to put more resources into the hypothesis, so that creates more cards to fully build out the feature.

edit: I always liked this post by UserVoice because it shows you how far you can take these things, I wouldn't necessarily use their workflow, but it is interesting: [https://community.uservoice.com/blog/trello-google-docs- prod...](https://community.uservoice.com/blog/trello-google-docs-product- management/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link! Loved the point about capturing user stories:

> Good specs tell the (customer) and business story rather than act as an > implementation recipe

Reading about the pain of the customer in his own words vs working on some feature description is so much better (first point is better). This gives the whole thing a purpose and doesn't feel like an arbitrary, invalidated idea.

About the metrics. Sorry, I think I used the wrong word here. I mean some prioritization scoring, such as impact & effort of a feature or bug to make cards more comparable. I tried that once, but found that most of the time you already know which points seem to be high impact and low effort. Not sure, if one should score and then strictly follow the descending list of items.

Edit: Or you start working on something, which is supposed to be high effort, but after re-reading the customer stories, you find a way more efficient and easier way to implement the requested functionality. Then the priority was incorrect the whole time.

<comment><USER3> Regarding scoring- in the ideal scenario, you're always working on cards that are most aligned with your top line goals, so you always want to be prioritizing based on your goals.

For level of effort scoring, we just use a 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 system. Where 8 is too big to estimate and 1 is an hour or so. What happens if you misestimate? Unless something goes from 5 to 8, then it really doesn't matter because you should always be working on what's most important. If something goes from a 1 to a 5 and some commitment can't be met, then you must reduce the scope of the card or change the commitment. Don't waste too much time on the scoring, it isn't an exact science- spend more time ensuring you're working on the right things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok understood. We mostly don't use any estimates. Neither effort, nor time.

I have changed our boards to the main recommendations so far and now I hit some wall. Our QC is testing away a new internal release and getting back with the issues. But they create a new card in the "Test" list containing a check list with all the potential bugs they found, around 10-12 items.

Should they rather create single cards for each issue and push it into the inbox? I feel somehow its going against the system to summarize a dozen points in a kind of "Test Report Card".

<comment><USER3> Typically bugs should go on an individual card. Yes, that will create many cards, but if they're small, then they'll be fixed quickly.

This is more of an art than a science, experiment with different approaches, read about how others are doing things and modify to match your own process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, this make sense!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We do pretty much the same on our team with only items for the current and next release on the board. All other items that might be done are on a backlog board with lists for bugs and features by priority. We build a new release from that board.

So, left to right on the main board: Inbox, v.nextNext, v.next, In process, Review Requested, In Testing, Done.next, Done.nextNext

Done lists get moved to a "Releases" board when the version is released.

Inbox is triaged once per week to somewhere on the Backlog board or to a current release only if it's urgent or a regression introduced by those releases (like the bug was found in a beta)

The key to using Kanban, IMO, is to keep the number of cards pretty low. Use a pull to bring cards on when lists get empty -- do not just keep adding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I can see a bit different approach in your workflow, which I like. In our lists, we don't track specific releases, the cards are just continuously moving up the chain. In your approach you are tracking releases separately from the backlog.

I think the last part you mention, to keep a card limit, is what broke our system from time to time. And the reviewing is probably very important, so stale cards are not kept around for no reason.

Is there a special way you organize your backlog board? Such as sorting it in themes of your application, urgency, etc? And do you keep track, if it was an external user request (and from how many) vs internal request (your own ideas) or other metrics? Do you find attaching estimates help, such as effort + impact?

<comment><USER4> > Is there a special way you organize your backlog board?

One list for each priority/case-type pair, so High-bug, Medium-bug, ... High- Feature, Medium-Feature, etc'

> ... external user request

If support made the card, they attach the case. No reporting on this though, it's mostly for followup -- when the card is moved to a Done, we can let the customer know what release it will be in.

> estimates

We do a very high-level estimate bucket. Mostly to size the release.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the idea of attaching the case. Not only for following up, but also for reading the whole reason why something should be implemented and it shows the developers that there is a real person with a real pain behind it. Furthermore reading the original case sometimes helps in finding more efficient solutions.

> high-level estimate bucket

How does this bucket look like? Something like: `within 6 months`, `3 months`, `this month` or kind of effort oriented like `high effort` (takes long), `medium effort`, `low effort` (quickly implemented)?

<comment><USER4> Effort and in days. Cards that are more than 10 days get broken down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is how we manage workflow in our 5-person team:

// Slack // general discussions, brainstorm, clarifying

// Agora (agora.co) // capture ideas on slack using a slash command

// Gitlab // we export ideas from the Agora web interface, using the Board view (similar to Trello/kanban)

We organize our board on Gitlab based on these columns: Backlog > Sprint (for the week) > Development (in progress) > Pull Request > Merged > Test > Prod > Done

Hope that's helpful!

</comment><comment><USER6> These are the concepts I associate with Kanban:

\- _Sprints /Cycles_:

A period of time, usually 2 weeks, where the scope of work is fixed.

\- _In Progress List_

A column of things actively being worked on.

\- _Backlog w /Work-in-Progress Limit_:

The backlog is a prioritized list of everything you are going to tackle _in the current cycle_.

Some people would argue that if you don't have a work-in-progress limit, you aren't really doing Kanban (maybe you'd call it a Scrum board or something else instead). Estimate-aware tools like Pivotal Tracker and JIRA enforce this by having you set a "point velocity" for your team and requiring story point estimates for every feature. The cycle backlog automatically overflows into the next cycle when you exceed the velocity.

\- _Icebox_ :

An _unprioritized_ list of features from which you draw to create the backlog at the start of a cycle. Pivotal calls it the Icebox; in GitHub/GitLab it's the main issues list; in JIRA it's wherever you set up your board to "pull" issues. In less-structured tools like Trello you have to decide where to keep this list; you might make a separate board to keep track of things needing validation, needing designs, etc. and pull them into the backlog periodically.

The general idea of Agile is to keep this list short.

\- _Done /Ready_

A place to keep delivered tasks.

        </comment><comment>--

From personal experience there a few things that help keep a Kanban system under control:

\- Specific, deliverable tasks. Tasks should be deliverable as a chunk. Group subtasks into things that are delivered together (reviewed, tested, deployed). A card should never be resurrected from the Done pile once it's there. Use epics, tags, or labels to keep track of related cards if needed.

\- Tasks should have clear acceptance criteria so they can be reviewed swiftly and developers can move onto the next item on the backlog. Fuzzy criteria lead to back-and-forth and context-switching which hurt productivity.

\-- Automated testing, code coverage checkers, and linting speed up review.

\-- Feature flags make it easy to break up large projects into independently- mergeable chunks, which improves task transparency.

\- Track bugs in a separate project/column than your Icebox, but make sure they are added to the in-progress column when addressed. Make it easy for non- devs at your company to add bugs to the list and aggressively dedupe.

\- Have some way of indicating task state beyond using columns for everything. Every tool provides tags; some have options more tailored at dev teams. Here are some things that you might want to track:

      -- Review wanted
      -- Accepted/Rejected
      -- Blocked (ideally, with a link to the blocker)
      -- Needs design
      -- Bug vs Feature
      -- Story points/weight
      -- Priority (for bugs)

\- Prefer tools that let you easily assign tasks right from the board view, especially to _yourself_. GitHub-based tools are really bad at this for some reason and require lots of clicks to assign people. Asana and Pivotal are good at this.

I suggest at least playing around with Pivotal Tracker to get a sense of what a very opinionated Agile/Kanban process looks like. You could keep using it or take some of the lessons back to Trello, Asana, JIRA, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

> Backlog w/Work-in-Progress Limit:

I think the limitation of items insides lists and having cycles with limits is a good point. Often I feel overwhelmed by the amount of ideas we have. I feel most things will never be implemented and just add to the noise. It surely "looks" good (having many cards), if you present it with many different colors and images. But it really doesn't help to sort things out and do the most impactful first.

> Icebox

I like the idea of the Icebox. I guess thats similar to the "inbox" concept, where you throw in unvalidated requests, ideas, reports, etc.

> Tagging

Internally I once suggested we should tag by impact and effort score (reddish tones for impact and blueish for effort), but this escalated quite quickly into a rainbow of cards, just adding to the clutter. And it feels like our product manager decides entirely from his gut feeling. Maybe tagging is just noisy in Trello.

What's your experience, can you "over-tag" cards? Does it need a limit? Or does it work better in say Pivotal Tracker?

<comment><USER6> The tags you are describing are useful for planning but they become noise for developers in their day-to-day interactions with the board. Maybe you could use a custom field on your cards or a bracket [3] notation for effort? You could replace the impact tag by stack-ranking your cards in your Inbox/Icebox project.

In general, I prefer to use tags to highlight actionable things like "this is a high priority bug" or "this is ready to deploy" or "this is blocked" more than categorization, which can be better accomplished with separate boards. If your system has the concept of "epics" to group issues, that's a plus as well.

PS you might want to take a look at this article if you're having difficulty prioritizing things: [https://medium.com/startup-grind/ruthless- prioritization-e42...](https://medium.com/startup-grind/ruthless- prioritization-e4256e3520a9#.tummgadw8)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that's much better and thanks for the article!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Disney IT workers allege discrimination in lawsuit over replacements from India - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-disney-workers-discrimination-lawsuit-20161214-story.html <comment><USER2> This was encouraging to read after just applying to a few IT internships with Disney. /s</comment>


Why software projects go wrong - <AUTHOR> http://lrvick.net/blog/why_software_projects_go_wrong/

<comment><USER2> here is a link to the post

something seems to go wrong with the github pages he uses

[https://github.com/lrvick/lrvick/blob/master/posts/201201102...](https://github.com/lrvick/lrvick/blob/master/posts/20120110213942-Why_software_projects_go_wrong.md)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. Strange. For some reason DNS is misbehaving from some locations. I'll need to look into this...

</comment><comment><USER3> so, is this a joke i'm not getting?

<comment><USER4> Well - I'm sure _some_ projects fail because of stuff like this...</comment></comment>


Deciding not to use Bitcoin - a casino startup's perspective - <AUTHOR> http://www.casinomeister.com/forums/blogs/jstrike/235-letting-go-bitcoin.html

<comment><USER2> The 1000 limit is for those that have not provided their identification to the exchange. If you provide your id, you can raise the limits substantially. Understandable, any company that transfers large amounts of money have to abide by KYC laws (know your customer).

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. There is nested gambling in this story. The first is actually gambling in the casino, and then the gambling on the value of the currency being used.</comment>


Netflix Open Connect Content Delivery Network - <AUTHOR> https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect

<comment><USER2> I see why they only want to supply the hardware for ASN's with 5Gbps traffic, however that's only going to be a small number of ISP's.

Akamai and Google (GGC) offer caches for free on networks with <1Gbps peak traffic.

If they cant support the cost of caches for networks under 5Gbps, may be they could allow the ISP to supply hardware and Netflix just support the software?</comment>


The Sorry State of Technology Education (how to get more startups) - <AUTHOR> http://dpn.name/index.php/2007/10/18/the-sorry-state-of-technology-education/ There were lots of people with good ideas at the Symposium, and many of them have some good business background to help them get to market, but one huge problem was the lack of technical skills available to take these things to market. There literally aren't enough entrepreneurial programmers being put in contact with these young innovators! <comment><AUTHOR> Blatant self promotion here. I got ripped a new one when someone else posted this to reddit, so gimme what you got :)</comment>


Building a Mail App with Swift - <AUTHOR> https://www.inboxapp.com/blog/inbox-and-swift

<comment><USER2> Hi HN—author of the post here! Feel free to check out the source to our Swift example on Github and explore the iOS SDK. Happy to answer questions - [https://github.com/inboxapp/inbox- ios/tree/master/InboxExamp...](https://github.com/inboxapp/inbox- ios/tree/master/InboxExamples/SwiftEightBall)

<comment><USER3> Can you explain the appeal of Swift? Geninuely curious

<comment><USER4> It's fun compared to Obj-C

<comment><USER5> /thread</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hors – program howdoi which implemented in rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/WindSoilder/hors <comment><AUTHOR> I hope the program can be funny and useful.

Something about rust:

I love rust programming language very much. And I'm trying to implement something. During the implementation, I found that rust's compiler is very powerful, and it help us catch many error in the run time. So we will not expose too much Runtime Error.

What I learn about is that when we got problem earlier, less time we will waste. In this level, I like it very much. But rust have many concept (Especially something like lifetime, Box). It still makes me confused :( But I think it's very interesting.

Please don't hesitate to tell if you see any bad code or any better way to do something.</comment>


New business uses your Facebook data to determine how risky you are - <AUTHOR> https://illuminus.io

<comment><USER2> Bloody creepy.

<comment><USER3> uhm, how is this legal?

<comment><USER4> It's satire.</comment></comment></comment>


LambdaPi – a Lisp OS for Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://gitorious.org/lambdapi <comment><USER2> I got into computers and programming during the era when several of the more popular microcomputers booted up directly to the BASIC prompt. Perhaps out of nostalgia, I've always had an interest in little computers that blur the distinction between programming language and operating system.

So, I'll keep an eye on this project, and maybe it'll spur me to give Lisp one more chance.

<comment><USER3> I'm interested in this too. What I've been wanting is a single chip solution.

I've designed various systems based on arm7 chips, but my naive lisp implementations barely fit any usable system into the onboard RAM (~90k).

I've been waiting for atmel or someone to put something like 1MB or so on chip, but the market for such devices isn't there.

FORTH seems better able to fit and has a little better fundamental underpinnings than BASIC.

<comment><USER4> The STM32F429 Discovery board [1] has 2MB of Flash and 256KB of internal RAM. It also looks like it has 64 Mb of SDRAM which might be what your looking for. We have an engineer where I work who is trying to get mRuby up and running on one. It has tons of memory for a Cortex-M part/board

[1] - [http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF259...](http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF259090)

<comment><USER3> That's definitely more like it. 256k is a reasonable chunk. Although at $20 and 144LQFP, it's a pricey and kind of chunky part. It exists though which is nice.

How does mRuby do GC; does it ref count? I don't think lisps could really afford to be ref counted, unless you pool the cons cells into groups that are ref counted. My implementation was a dual semispace collector which didn't help matters wrt space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It appears to be based on Chibi scheme which is Alex Shinn's embeddable scheme that was chosen as the reference for R7RS small.

[https://code.google.com/p/chibi-scheme/](https://code.google.com/p/chibi- scheme/)

</comment><comment><USER6> So is this a derivation of scheme, or an actual implementation of a given scheme spec? Would be very useful as an on-the-go tool for those of us on SICP treks if it's an actual implementation of MIT scheme.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great idea!

We need more people experimenting with alternative OS ideas, some of them sadly lost, and less UNIX clones.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's a Scheme for a number of ARM micros, including the much more resource- constrained Cortex-M variants:

[http://armpit.sourceforge.net/](http://armpit.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER9> Sure...but that isn't an OS.

<comment><USER8> It'll give you a REPL on the bare metal... it's a /very/ minimal OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Last commit was June 13th, 2012, so it appears to be dead.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps it is feature-complete. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've kept an eye on this for over a year now. Has there been more updates lately because as far as I've seen the main author has moved on :(

</comment><comment><USER13> very interesting. i wonder if they have access to the gpios already. would love to try to connect it to my logipi fpga board and shell out complex computations to that.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can't wait to try it

</comment><comment><USER15> I think you meant to say "Lisp OS" in the headline. Nice post otherwise. Thanks!</comment>


Where Have All the Bold VCs Gone? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/15/where-have-all-the-bold-vcs-gone/

<comment><USER2> It seems like news.yc really influences the conversation on tech blogs. I see a lot of blog posts on techmeme that seem to be in response to "Ask YC" submissions. Has any one else been noticing this?

<comment><USER3> Yeah. So has Michael Arrington, which is why he calls news.yc "small but influential."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to think VCs were in the "encouraging & profiting from innovation" business. They're not. They're really in the "let's find the least risky deals and put money in them" business.

I used to think good VCs were those who identified the huge successes before everyone else did. Instead, good VCs are just the ones who get access to deals before the ordinary VCs.

</comment><comment><USER5> all the press must be a boon for both YC and its founders/start-ups

</comment><comment><USER6> This is becoming a house of mirrors.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good article, but why that title?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because of all the mentions between the (2) parties [http://www.google.com/search?q=techcrunch+site%3Anews.ycombi...](http://www.google.com/search?q=techcrunch+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en- US:official&client=firefox-a)

specifically this post

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145316>

and

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=146604>

<comment><USER7> That's cool . . . wasn't trying to be a jerk, just genuinely curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> PG; Did you modify my title for me......? its better anyways..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> scathing?

</comment><comment><USER9> Gone? That presupposes they used to be there, but left.

No, it's always been like this, modulo the foolhardy dot-com bubble.

The thing is, there are two types of potentially successful start-ups. The first kind is start-ups that have the talent and capability but who, if they don't get a helping hand, will quietly fizzle out.

My impression is a lot of YC groups are like this; getting into YC determines whether they _go for it_ or just stay in school, for example. If Reddit didn't get in, would they be millionaires now? The risk here isn't YC missing the boat, but the boat never departing in the first place.

The second type is the start-up where they are _going_ and you had better get on board or get out of the way. Steve Jobs personifies this approach. Jobs would beguile, needle, browbeat, or otherwise force the issue or pressure anyone he needed to get things done.

Ironically some VC successes aren't based on their BOLD choices so much as being strong-armed into getting over their risk aversion by someone like Jobs.</comment>