HP Exits Tablets, Spins Off PCs, Keeps and will license WebOS - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576516403053718850.html

<comment><USER2> Why on earth would Autonomy want to get into the PC business?

I don't think they are big enough to leverage their enterprise customers into buying hardware from them.</comment>


Try Windows Azure for free for 3 months (no credit card) - <AUTHOR> http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial Earlier they used to ask for a credit card, but it does not now. I am myself going to try the SQL Azure and AppFabric ServiceBus (pubnhub) features. <comment><USER2> Title says "(no credit card)" but linked-to page says:

A Windows Live ID and credit card are required for proof of identity.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Actually it does require a credit card but I am not able to edit the post to correct it.</comment>


USA needs more effective flu shots, experts say - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/11/flu-strains-vaccine/1827677/

<comment><USER2> From what little I know about "herd immunity" it would seem a bare minimum requires 75% efficacy of the vaccine with 100% vaccination.

Since this flu vaccine is only 62% effective, I come to the conclusion that there is no herd immunity effect for flu, even if somehow everyone got the flu shot.

(am willing to be corrected if I am wrong)

</comment><comment><USER3> What we really need is a more efficient process for producing vaccine once a flu strain has been identified. No more guessing. Observe and react.

</comment><comment><USER4> USA needs to grow a F __ __ __concience. (sorry for swearing)</comment>


ScratchBack: Hahaha What The F*ck? - <AUTHOR> http://www.uncov.com/2007/11/1/scratchback-hahaha-what-the-fuck <comment><USER2> "PHP will probably do OK here, all it needs to do is spit out some JavaScript, but anyone who has coded in it knows the vast potential for fail[sic] it presents."

Now _that's_ a compelling argument.

</comment><comment><USER3> My pagerank went up and was standardized on all of the pages. One page was a 3/10 another was 4/10 and some had no pagerank, now they are all 5/10.

<comment><USER4> You're saying you installed the Scratchback widget and your Pagerank went up? I thought it was all nofollow links. What do you think happened?

<comment><USER3> No I meant with the pagerank change not the scratchback thing. Although the scratchback thing looks interesting.</comment></comment></comment>


107 Beta Invites left  - <AUTHOR> http://slimsurveys.com/?107-invites

<comment><USER2> Just signed up, it looks interesting and is something I will need really soon, thanks!

BTW really nice design

</comment><comment><USER3> Count seems fake

<comment><USER2> Yes, I saw that too, but now it says 90, maybe it is hardcoded and updated manually? weird...</comment></comment>


Kopia Hits v0.5 – Encrypted, Deduplicated, and Compressed Backups - <AUTHOR> https://kopia.io/ <comment><USER2> I love this, I was deciding between restic, duplicati, bup, duplicacy, borg, duplicity, but I was not satisfied, this app seems to bring all the beautiful options of those apps into one app.

here are my cons about those apps:

restic : no gui, but I love it

duplicati : only web ui and difficult to navigate snapshots, but I love it

bup : no gui, python, but I love it

duplicacy: paid gui

borg: could not build it in windows

Thank you for sharing this excellent app

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Kopia announced the 0.5 release of Kopia! This is a big milestone on the way to an upcoming 1.0 release. Apart from pluggable compression, deduplication, and encryption, this release includes expanded object storage support and an easy-to-use UI. Feedback welcome!</comment>


You're being secretly tracked with facial recognition, even in church - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/154199/facial-recognition-no-rules/

<comment><USER2> Yes, obnoxious. But 30 churches? A couple of years ago, I cam up with an estimate of 30 churches (and two synagogues and two Buddhist temples) along 16th St, NW, in the roughly six miles between the White House and the Maryland line. It's a bit rash to say "even in church" if there are 30 churches in the whole of the US doing this.</comment>


HSTS Super Cookies - <AUTHOR> http://www.radicalresearch.co.uk/lab/hstssupercookies/ <comment><USER2> This privacy risk is actually documented in the official HSTS specification, section 16.9 of

[https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6797.txt](https://www.rfc- editor.org/rfc/rfc6797.txt)

However, the spec doesn't propose a mitigation for it. I'm afraid many new security policy mechanisms can actually be used to track users or devices this way, because you can experiment to see whether the browser has heard about a particular security policy by observing its behavior when you ask it to violate the policy. If you tell different devices about different policies, their behavior will be different (as if you told different kids who were going to visit a park about different rules for how to behave in the park, and then observed who obeyed and who violated which rules as a way of identifying individual kids).

For example, you can also get tracking out of public key pinning, by selectively pinning certs for some subdomains and not others, and then seeing which subresources are successfully loaded when you present a huge number of pin violations. (I think that's also documented in the HPKP spec.)

<comment><USER2> The HPKP tracking problem is described in section 5

[https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-websec-key- pinni...](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-websec-key- pinning/?include_text=1)

which also includes another description of this HSTS problem.

<comment> f- We also have a pretty comprehensive discussion of this and many other vectors in:

[http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/client- identi...](http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/client- identification-mechanisms)

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I didn't know about that article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Firefox stores HSTS entries in a SQLite database, which you can query by running:

      echo "SELECT * FROM moz_hosts WHERE type='sts/use';" | sqlite3 permissions.sqlite

from inside your profile directory.

To clear HSTS entries (which the "Clear recent history" UI does _not_ delete), you can do:

      echo "DELETE FROM moz_hosts WHERE type='sts/use';" | sqlite3 permissions.sqlite

I've been periodically monitoring this database for HSTS supercookies over the last couple years and have yet to see any in the wild.

<comment><USER4> They were recently moved to the SiteSecurityServiceState.txt file: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775370](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775370)

<comment><USER3> Good grief. They've replaced a SQLite database with a text file that's loaded into an in-memory hash table because "adoption of HSTS is not very widespread yet" so "using any kind of off-the-shelf database to store this would be inefficient and overly complex." This required a patch that took over a year to review, during which time issues were raised with the text file parser they had to write from scratch. Loading the whole table into memory has clear DoS implications, so they're limiting the table to 1024 entries (making the use of a hash table rather silly), with an eviction strategy[1] that is going to favor older entries and effectively prevent newer entries from being added.

[1] [https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla- aurora/rev/b339d53f9...](https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla- aurora/rev/b339d53f95f2#l1.421)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The impact is that it's possible for a site to track you even if you choose > to use "incognito" or "private" browsing features in an effort to avoid such > tracking.

I've always thought that (despite user hopes) the point of 'private' browsing was explicitly and only to avoid leaving traces on the _user 's_ computer anyway. (For example, I used it when shopping for Christmas presents.) The Firefox new private window has a warning to this effect:

> While this computer won't have a record of your browsing history, your > employer or internet service provider can still track the pages you visit.

<comment><USER6> Many people use it to spawn what is effectively a "guest session" in which they can log into some site with account B when they're already normally logged in with account A, without having to log out of account A. Or, similarly, to temporarily deactivate such things as Google's per-user search results personalization. Sites that leak credentials into such "guest sessions" break their usage for such purposes. (In fact, since in Chrome incognito windows are just a special case of user profile switching, HSTS probably leaks credentials _between user profiles_ as well, completely mooting the point of them.)

<comment><USER7> I don't think HSTS _completely_ moots user profiles. Most "good" sites are not going to be storing session data encoded as HSTS timestamps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >However, unlike cookies, existing HSTS flags are still shared with sites when using "incognito" or "private" windows.

fwiw, though Firefox is listed in there as "leaks across private mode", I get an entirely new ID when I open a private window. v34.0.5

<comment><USER9> again FWIW, Chrome v39.0.2171.95 on OSX leaks

</comment></comment><comment> ryan-c This has been known for quite a while. I managed to find a case where HSTS allowed information leakage between private/non-private frames within the same browser in Firefox, but I think that's been fixed.

In general, the browser vendors seem to think that HSTS is worth the potential privacy leak. I've also heard some people say they're monitoring to see if anyone does it and will respond if it becomes a problem.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm actually pretty irritated that this researcher makes it out as an iOS thing only, it feels like he/she just didn't care to try on anything other than the device they had in front of them.

Chrome on Android behaves the same way the researcher described (fingerprinting works in Incognito tabs), but Chrome, Opera, Firefox, and IE on Windows all get different IDs.

<comment><USER11> I got the same ID on Chrome on Windows.

<comment><USER10> Uh-oh, looks like I made a mistake. I get the same behavior on Chrome on Windows too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a nice survey paper from 2012 that lists dozens of supercookie vectors, including HSTS.

[https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/files/publication/files/tracki...](https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/files/publication/files/trackingsurvey12.pdf)

FTA: "A website can encode a globally unique pseudonymous device identifier into any stateful web technology so long as it persists at least log2 n bits, where n is the number of Internet-connected devices (presently roughly 5 billion, requiring 33 bits)."

</comment><comment><USER13> I have Chromium set to delete browsing data on close. The HSTS Cookie survives that. Manually deleting browsing data kills it.

<comment><USER14> That would somehome indicate to me (without having looked at the code), that this has been implemented like this on purpose.

<comment><USER2> The basic background problem is that in the "normal" case, HSTS is a security and privacy protection rather than a tracking mechanism. That's why one would typically want it to persist as much as possible. But it has the potential for tracking effects too (as this project demonstrates). I guess the current browser behavior is indeed an attempt to project user intentions based on that.

<comment><USER14> My point was the subtle difference between automated data clean at end of browsing session and the reported manual action. Nothing else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems Chrome has addressed the issue with incognito mode - if you open the page in incognito mode you get a different code.

<comment><USER16> Not for me. Mac OS X 10.10.1, Chrome 39.0.2171.95. I get the same code even in incognito mode.

<comment><USER17> Well _that 's_ interesting. This may shed light on some of the seemingly conflicting results. On Mac OS X 10.10.1, Chrome 41.0.2264.2 (Canary):

Steps:

1\. Open browser, open [1] in new tab. Get code X.

2\. Open [1] in new incognito window. Get code Y.

3\. Reload that incognito window. Get code Y.

4\. Close incognito window.

5\. Open [1] in second new incognito window. _Get code X._

Subsequent iterations of opening/closing regular and incognito windows and/or restarting Chrome all yielded code X.

[1] [http://www.radicalresearch.co.uk/lab/hstssupercookies/](http://www.radicalresearch.co.uk/lab/hstssupercookies/)

<comment><USER18> Perhaps you started (2) before (1) finished?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not quite sure if I wouldn't _expect_ the incognito mode to respect HSTS. I'd think that you would use incognito mode for ~sensitive~ tasks.

Defaulting to https due to a known HSTS flag seems good in this case, otherwise every incognito session would start out blank, right? (I'm ignoring the white list from the browser vendor)

</comment><comment><USER20> It sounds like HTTPS Everywhere is overlapping functionality with HSTS. Is there some way that HTTPS Everywhere could just inject HSTS rules rather than looking up every URL and rewriting it before sending a request?

<comment><USER21> HSTS can only change the protocol, while HTTPS everywhere can do more complex rewritings. So what you propose could only work in a very limited set of use cases among those handled by the plugin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It seems like the main use case for HSTS is with the site being requested by the user in the URI bar, for protecting cookies and login credentials associated with that domain.

It does not seem like there's a major use-case for secondary resources: images, css, javascript, etc loaded on the page itself, and which serve as the vector in this attack. Such resources must be requested via https on a https site itself anyways.

So, wouldn't it be better to just restrict the usage of HSTS protocol overrides to just the main domain being requested by the user in the URI bar?

</comment><comment><USER23> In Firefox 34.0 on OS X, both Incognito Mode and clearing history from the past hour appeared to defeat this attack.

</comment><comment><USER24> Worked a charm on my iPad between regular and incognito mode. Fascinating, and a bit unfortunate.

</comment><comment><USER25> Am I right to understand that this can even be a server side cookie, i.e. that it can't even be killed by disabling javascript (since the server can tell if there was a redirect)?

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow, can't get it to go away on Firefox 33.0 Ubuntu. I was able to clear it by manually deleting the info from the permissions.sqlite3 database as described by agwa.

Very clever!

<comment><USER27> Under History > Clear Recent History, make sure "Site Preferences" is also checked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Using Firefox 34.0 on Ubuntu, I get a different code in the private browsing window. No add-ons are enabled.

<comment><USER29> It's targeted to iOS devices, so that is not very surprising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> imho it's not reasonable to perform dozens of http requests in order to create a device fingerprint. especially on mobile networks this will require a lot of time until all requests are through.

<comment><USER24> If it happens out of band of the page doing anything else, the time required won't matter much, especially given the value of a truly persistent tracking cookie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Poses no problem to Firefox 34 on GNU.

</comment><comment><USER32> firefox private browsing breaks it</comment>


Seabiscuit and "The money problem" - <AUTHOR>

Hello world!
I'm not exactly sure the right way to approach this, I've never been much for doing things in an orthodox way, so I'll just be straightforward about it. I need to find an investor.
I believe that I have all of the necessary ingredients to be successful at what I'm trying to accomplish, but I realize that I need others to believe in me to help me to achieve my potential; few people ever get there alone.
I hear prominent figures say that they invest in the people more than the ideas and I wonder how true that is. Do you care more about me or my actual startup? In this case I think both are awesome, so maybe it's your lucky day (or mine).
So, yes, I've got a startup. That's a lie, I've got two startups, but one is my baby. We'll get back to that later, for now I want to talk about who I am and why I am writing this.
Maybe I suffer from the Dunning–Kruger effect, but I think I might be just the right mix of crazy, creative, and calculated to accomplish something fairly impressive.
I'm a developer / programmer / sysadmin / hacker with a pretty impressive skill set, but I also have an artistic sense and graphic design background. I'm also very well read in literature, science, and philosophy and am possessed by an insatiable thirst for knowledge and experience. I am equally exposed to the arts and sciences.
I probably don't look very good on paper. In fact, I probably look pretty bad on paper. When I was slightly younger (and quite a bit more stupid) I would have conjured up some inspired sophistry to explain away my mistakes, or I would have tried to blame my lousy circumstances on someone else, but I'm past that kind of nonsense now. I'm old enough to know better. Not too old, though. I'm three years younger than Jack Dorsey and three years older than Mark Zuckerberg, so I think I'm sitting in a cultural sweet spot. I'm wise enough to accept that don't know everything, but experienced enough to trust myself when it counts. I'm confident in my judgment and abilities, but not to the point of arrogance and closed-mindedness. I've read that fools surround themselves with idiots so that they will feel superiority, but the clever surround themselves with the wise so that they gain wisdom. That's not a useless maxim if you ask me.
Paul Graham said: "So who should start a startup? Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life."
That's me. Of course, there are a million people who fit that description. Who am I kidding? Probably a few million...
So why me? Why am I worth someone's time and resources? Great question. Let's start at the beginning.
As I led with, I probably don't look very good on paper. Based on what the "paper" trail says, I come off as a bad bet. I owe some personal debts, my credit isn't exactly superb, and there are a few other little complications I'll be happy to elaborate on if your curiosity can't contain itself by the time you finish reading this message in a bottle.
Where were we? Oh yes, I'm a bad bet. Not a confidence inspiring statement, I'm aware, so let's fix that.
Seabiscuit was a bad bet, too, and that's me... I'm Seabiscuit. One day I'm limping along looking pathetic and broken and you think I'll never walk again, much less race. Yet, here I am, running... fast.
I've made some less-than-stellar choices in the past, but I've learned incredibly valuable lessons from those mistakes. They were always born out of emotion, confusion, or desperation; never out of malice, spite, or envy. They unexceptionally occurred whenever I was following my heart instead of my head, as I was always encouraged to do as a child. I've learned that I need to take more precise and calculated risks and follow my intuition rather than take wild risks and follow my desire. That's all very vague and ambiguous, I know, but it's important for me to convey that I am somewhat self-actualized in that regard. I'm at peace with where I stand and I am a forward-thinking person; it's an important characteristic of who I've become and who I intend to continue being.
Most of my issues were always self-induced, such as quitting jobs that I couldn't stand even when it wasn't a financially stable thing to do, or spiraling out of control when a relationship would end and then relinquishing any shared assets, bank accounts, vehicle, etc, or running away from home as a teenager. I would always respond to situations without proper emotional intelligence, a skill I've acquired and begun to master in recent years. I've also developed an incredibly humanistic and empathetic side as my emotions have matured.
My repeated and intentional detachment from material possessions coupled with my inability to submit to the complacency of "the norm" and a regular job has only fueled my creative and entrepreneurial spirits. I don't have a burning desire to fill my pockets with dollar bills, but a fire does rage inside to build a successful business and to, as Paul Graham put it, "solve the money problem". Which brings us to ambition and motivation...
Why do I want financial flexibility? Why do I need money if I don't care about things? Why am I writing this? Why am I driven? How driven am I?
Good questions.
I want to enjoy my life. I want to help others. I want to do something with my life, something positive. I want to leave something in the world that wasn't here when I arrived. I want to contribute and make a difference. I want to do something that matters.
I have a family (not a wife and kids or anything, but immediate family, parents, sisters, brother, nieces and nephews) who really need some help and breaks in their lives. I've done all I can to help them at every turn, given my parents money that I simply did not have, given up my rent to help them keep food on the table and pay heating bills, etc. I've supported them as much as I can when I've been thriving, but I've always been torn between keeping a job that destroys my soul just to provide some help vs. trying to succeed on a larger scale and making things easier in the long run rather than day-to-day. I won't go into the details of my various family concerns (health problems and bills, lack of economic opportunities, etc) but I have more than enough reasons to push myself to the limit. It consumes me that they are not taken care of and that they struggle the way that they do. I must help. I know now that what I need to do is live as close to the metal as I can for now and put off helping them as much as I can until I am financially secure. This means building my company and resolving my personal financial issues so that I can focus on my work without financial stress and distractions.
I have a tremendous work ethic that I wish could be applied to something I really care about.
I am tired of worrying about how I will survive and how I will make enough money to take care of everything and still find time to work on my businesses. I want to know that what I'm supposed to be focusing on is my business.
My biggest downfall in pursuit of that goal has been that I've never really tried wholeheartedly at anything worth doing. I don't mean that I haven't put enormous amounts effort into things, because I've definitely done that (studying, learning, programming, art, music, reading, preparing myself, etc), but I've never before had something that I cared so much about that I actually wanted to (or have been able to) devote all of my time to making it grow and succeed. I've wanted to have something that I was that passionate about, but I always found myself busy working on someone else's project or at someone else's company, usually doing something that disagreed with my personal philosophies and tastes. I'd quickly burn out and become uninspired and leave behind the mind-killer to go dive into my own creative development (music, writing, code, etc). I've had ideas, companies, little startups here and there, but nothing I ever had the time and resources to really make succeed. I've never been able to find someone who can get as excited as I can about something and then believe enough in it to actually follow through and manifest the idea. I finally have that now. I need to be able to build upon my existing product and I need to be able to get good people involved.
I very recently ended a 5-year relationship and for the first time have had an appropriate emotional response to the situation. I've focused on my work, my clients, my own companies, my networks and relationships and the outcome has been very positive. I am now completely free of being tied down to a particular place and I am no longer subject to normal relationship distractions. ALL OF MY TIME CAN FINALLY BE DEDICATED TO MY COMPANY AND I AM READY TO DO THAT. I CAN FOCUS COMPLETELY ON BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS AND AM VERY MOTIVATED TO DO SO! I have so much built up passion ready to let loose it is unreal. I am ready to pour myself into this.
I have a myriad of clients that I consult and develop for (government and commercial), I am part of a great open source development team, I have two startups of my own, and was just offered the CTO and lead developer position at a funded startup that is building a mobile gaming platform. I want to work on my own projects, but some of the other opportunities are making it too lucrative not to consider them. If I go that route I will be falling right back into working on someone else's dream instead of mine. I don't want to do that again.
I have been an entrepreneur for as long as I can remember. I started on my first paper route when I was 10 years old. I woke up at 3 a.m. every day before school and on the weekends to stuff and wrap over 200 newspapers to deliver all over the small midwestern town I grew up in. I delivered newspapers before and after school for 5 years, through all kinds of weather, reading the newspaper every day as I delivered it. I was responsible for purchasing newspapers from the publishers, collecting payments from my customers, and handling the financial balancing act. There was once a contest to sell newspaper subscriptions all over the area that I lived in. The winner was awarded a $200 gift certificate to the a mall in addition to being entered into the "Newspaper Carrier Of The Year" competition. I sold 200+ subscriptions all over the region and won the contest.
In high school I started my first web company with two other students while I was already working at a web consulting firm as a developer after school and on the weekends and also at the technology services center for the school district I attended.
After high school I moved to California and joined as the CTO of a startup hosting company that also gave me equity, but because of a bad business deal and trusting the wrong friend I didn't receive any financial payout when the company was sold. Lesson learned about people, business, money, and contracts.
After that experience I bounced around a few companies, usually clashing with the people who ran the place because their goals never corresponded with mine. Most places I worked were stagnant and comfortable and inspired no ambition, drive, or loyalty. They were jobs. I am not a job person. They always lacked culture. I am a work person, just not a job person.
I caused a little trouble in my 20s, learned a lot of life lessons, opened my eyes and ears and started to grow up.
I've spent the last 3 and a half years building two companies, one on top of the other. One is a PAAS (Platform as a Service) and the other is a typical kind of startup (built on top of the PAAS), but it's the one I'm most excited about and have put the most effort into. It's fully developed far past prototype, has users, but is stealth-ish at the moment. I have an amazing network of people ready to help me and promote it and develop it further. I have a vision and high standards and want to do so much more with it than is already built but lack the resources. I keep seeing companies get ridiculous amounts of funding or being purchased for huge sums; I don't need anything close to those numbers! I don't know how some of these people can blow throughs o much money and have so little to show for it. It baffles me.
So... here I am.
I'd rather not spend my days making tedious changes to minutia at the request of clients and bosses. I'd rather do something interesting that inspires me to solves problems using creativity with a group of clever and awesome people.
I consult nearly full-time right now and spend my other waking hours working on my open source projects and my own companies, often skipping sleep. I want to spend much more time on my own stuff, but that's simply not possible when I have to worry about my financial situation and do work for others.
I don't want a mansion or a yacht, I just want to work on positive things, take care of my family, build more things, and make a difference.
I have my finger on the pulse of culture, business, industry, art, society, and a lot of other things. I read Hacker News and read and watch everything I possibly can that might give me helpful insights.
I keep seeing how being a risk taker with a mind of your own is a big plus for founders. Well, look no further. I saw what Peter Thiel said about "Founder as Victim, Founder as God".
I'm passionate, motivated, capable, aware, insightful, open-minded and eager.
I know the Silicon Valley names, I know who the big players are, who the go to guys are, but I'm not sure that's the game I want to play.
I own 100% of one of my startups and 50% of the other (the more exciting one). The other founder (non-technical) is open to a buyout, although I don't have the resources to do that myself. They are also willing to stay involved under the right circumstances. I'd prefer to run things completely autonomously, but I'm flexible. The other founder is willing to let me make all creative, technical, and financial decisions; they only want their ownership for now (unless I can buy them out). The company is incorporated in Delaware and is in good standing and is set up as a California foreign corporation. The company name / domain name is trademarked and the concept and execution are quite good. We've been offered a somewhat reasonable investment a couple of times, but I wasn't happy with the conditions. I completely believe in the idea, the execution, and the possibility of its success, now it's time for me to find someone else who does too.
Hopefully I will find someone who can appreciate that while I have a vision and a goal, I lack some of the more annoying pretenses. I don't feel entitled to anything.
If you want to know the specifics of my companies and have an interest in possibly getting involved with me in some capacity (even just to give me advice or ask questions) then respond to me and I'll send you the details. You can email me privately at firstname.lastname@example.com (I created an account just for this)
I'll also send along a more detailed summary of my own skills and experience.
I'm not looking for someone who wants to see what my companies are and then go talk about them on the internet or something just yet, I'm looking for someone serious to get involved and provide what I need to help me continue to build something real and substantial that we can both benefit from.
For once in my life I would like to not have to worry so much about things that I care so little about.
Bet on Seabiscuit, he's going to win this race. I do not give up.
<comment>----
"If"
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
--
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
--
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son! </comment><comment><USER2> Sounds sort of like an elevator pitch, but more directed towards you than the startup. I guess that's what we expect, focusing on the people behind the startup instead of a mix of both.

But where's your execution? Talking the talk is great, but showing people what you've done is better. Less vague, more concrete. In fact, this is entirely about why we should bet on you, not your company.

I'm sure you can sell this idea (whatever it may be) to someone and get some investments, but I figure HN is a bit more sophisticated than that. Do tell, why do you deserve this funding over someone else who has products to show for themselves?

It doesn't help that you don't have any karma here. You just popped out of the blue today, eh. Or a throwaway, I don't know. I know I don't have karma either, but I'm not trying to sell.

I'm just passing by.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. This is a throwaway account because I'm trying to be somewhat discreet about this approach. I don't want my business to be _publicly_ attached to my personal appeal; I'm trying not to directly prostitute it. I thought that might seem kind of desperate and/or tacky. As far as the "why do you deserve this funding" part of your question, I did attempt to answer that in my post, illustrating that I'm willing to work to the bone to be successful. In addition to that, I do have a live and working product to show for myself, I just didn't want to seem cheap and post it here as a link.

Thanks again for your thoughts.</comment></comment>


Exam anxiety: how remote test-proctoring is creeping students out - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21232777/examity-remote-test-proctoring-online-class-education <comment><USER2> While I was lucky enough to not need Examity during my undergrad at one of the universities in this article, I heard many complaints from my peers about it, and everyone echoes the view that it increases test anxiety FAR more than an in-person, in-classroom test. I have even heard of friends getting "flagged" for having pets in the room. If the proctor hears background noise, or if you move your head "suspiciously" to one side, you might be accused of cheating.

I know it's a difficult problem to solve, but I think instructors should focus on creating assessments that don't need to be proctored. Maybe focus more on essays, practical applications, or projects? Examity in some ways strikes me as a crutch for teachers who don't want to put in the effort to adjust their assessments to a new environment.</comment>