The CEO of Whole Foods says eating plant-based 'meats' is unhealthy - <AUTHOR> https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/whole-foods-ceo-john-mackey-plant-based-meat-products-unhealthy-2019-8-1028481335 <comment><USER2> >"If you look at the ingredients, they are super-highly processed foods," Mackey told CNBC. "I don't think eating highly processed foods is healthy. I think people thrive on eating whole foods."

>He added: "As for health, I will not endorse that, and that is about as big a criticism that I will do in public."

Well, okay. He's not saying eating animal-based meat is healthier, which is what a lot of people are actually substituting plant-based meat for. According to Wikipedia at least, CEO John Mackey is also either vegetarian or vegan so probably doesn't endorse eating any kind of meat.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a vegan, but _running 'feed'_ (whatever that is??? which may contain antibiotics, hormones and toxins and water) _through a cow_ makes it 'highly- processed'.

(Another vague term - like 'natural' and 'healthy' and 'organic' \- favored by marketers and which means bupkis.)

In 5 years (having caught up) they'll be assuring us that _their_ plant-based meats are more healthy and natural.</comment>


How to Start an Advertising Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090701/so-you-want-to-start-an-advertising-company.html?dsq=13355020#comment-13355020

<comment><USER2> I ran my own mini-advertising agency during college. They don't take much to start and ended up with a very, very nice salary (middle $100's). I even lived for free for two years exchanging services with collegiate complexes in the area. Here's what I concluded:

1\. Top-notch creative counts for big accounts, but not necessarily local (local small businesses micro-manage)

2\. Great Account Service (people want honesty and good work ethic, bullshit excuses are transparent — you'd be surprised how many designers/freelancers don't get this)

3\. Automate Remedial Tasks (don't waste hours on proposals, revision orders, etc. most of them are the same anyway). The ad agency I left to start my own spent ~$100K+ a year on employees to do this crap. Waste.

I was learning PHP/SQL at the time so I built my own extranet for the business. Wrote a script to generate 6+ page proposals in a matter of minutes. And had a backend system built so I could simply upload images to the FTP and it would categorized and auto-thumbnail for the clients to preview, etc.

Due to the demands of college, I usually contracted initial concepts to freelance designers and then handled most of the revisions, etc. This kept me mentally sane as the initial conceptual process is usually the most draining. When I closed it all down after ~3 years to chase a dream in a video game startup, I had utilized about 20 contractors from all over the world during that period.

</comment><comment><USER3> Inspiring article. Not really a "HOWTO", but the story of an advertising startup; launched 1999, profitable in 2 years, 450k split 7-ways in annual Manhattan salary, etc. Short OK read.</comment>


Startup Riot 2011 accepting apps to present/attend - <AUTHOR> http://startupriot.com

<comment><AUTHOR> 2011 is going to be even bigger and better than 2010. We're taking 50 startups again and we're anticipating 500+ attendees in 2010. As always, no cost to present and we even have a travel fund for selected presenters that need help paying their way. We also screen out service providers so everyone you meet will be someone useful. Initial deadline for apps to present is mid-December. I expect all 50 slots to be gone by the end of December.

<comment><USER2> What sort of service providers aren't allowed? Are you talking about SaaS providers? Do you mean EMT dispatchers aren't allowed? Maybe Comcast has to keep out?

This ad could do with a little more verbosity.

Incidentally, why isn't the "rockstar" fad dead yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Service providers in this context are people who are lawyers, accountants, headhunters, consultants, etc. Sorry for the lack of clarity. That said, these folks can come if they are sponsors but other than that - no entry for them. And this year we'll have an EMT on site. Not that I wanted it but the venue requires it - go figure.

Re: rockstar - we're at a venue that normally has shows for real rockstars so I kinda feel like it's justified. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, just announced that Andrew Warner of Mixergy is the keynote speaker.

<comment><USER3> I want to get together for a drink with HN'ers at the conference. Email me if you'll be there. mail at awarner dot com

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI - we'll likely be doing a pre-party on Tuesday which may be perfect for this and also an after-party on Wednesday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does Startup Riot offer any type of mentoring pre-show assistance? Also, the application states that presenting companies receive a table at the event. What materials are normally used at this event? I have a small startup and am not sure if I can afford a lot of professional sales materials at this time. The application also asks how many people from your company will be attending. Will they receive passes if we are accepted or do they have to apply to attend the event?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try to go point by point.

* pre-show assistance may be available in 2011 for selected presenters. We're thinking of doing a bunch of practice sessions on Monday and Tuesday before the main event.

* re:tables, it really depends on the startup. The main purpose is so that people can easily find you when they want to talk to you. Some startups just show up with themselves and a laptop for demos. That's totally cool. Others bring a big shebang. That's fine too. It totally ranges and usually depends on where they are at in terms of lifecycle. Honestly, this is more about susbtance than style.

* Additional company reps are $30 each although I'm considering of waiving that for the 1st attendee after the presenter (presenter is ALWAYS free to attend of course). We might do more than that but it'll depend on what we can line up in terms of sponsor dollars. Even if we can't, it's only $30 per person. Compared to other so called "inexpensive" events, we're one or more orders of magnitude cheaper. And company reps have an easy time getting approved to attend - we've never barred startup personnel UNLESS they are consultants (like PR firm reps or something) in which case we have a discussion about it.

Hope that long winded answer helps. This stuff should go online in the near future via a FAQ page. You can find the FAQs for 2010 at <http://2010.startupriot.com>

Thanks for the questions!

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the info. I like the idea of the practice sessions - probably since I am new to this and more of a computer person than sales guy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What types of companies are you looking for as presenters? Also, what does a typical presentation consist of - revenue forecasts, market size, product demos, management background, marketing strategy? With just 3 minutes, I'm wondering if we should just present our product and company background or if we should focus more on why you should invest in us.

<comment><AUTHOR> The focus is Internet/software startups. We take startups of all stages from idea stage to post-funded/post-revenue.

There is no "typical" presentation - it should really be centered around what you're trying to get out of the presentation. But personally the most successful I've seen talk almost exclusively about the service/product being offered. The presentation isn't a time to convey everything about what you're doing - it's more about getting people to come and talk to you afterward to learn more.

Hope that helps.

<comment><USER5> It helps. In watching videos from previous years, it did appear to be more product oriented. When selecting companies, what else do you look at? Readiness to take on investors? size of the market? prototype of the product? or is simply based on how interesting the presentation is and how comfortable the speaker is in making it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have an exact formula. I mainly judge if the idea is interesting and if the presentation is compelling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a great event and I would encourage entrepreneurs to attend. I presented at it last year and LOVED IT. I met tons of great entrepreneurs there. The 3 minutes deadline seemed crazy but I think I ended with 25 seconds to spare so I should have slowed down a little bit!

</comment><comment><USER7> someone get ben chestnut from mailchimp there. they're based in ATL, have a startup integration (w/ mailchimp) fund currently going[1], and ben is one smart cookie[2].

[1][http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/mailchimp- launches-1-million-i...](http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/mailchimp- launches-1-million-integration-fund/)

[2]<http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/going-freemium-one-year-later/>

<comment><AUTHOR> MailChimp seems to be pretty involved locally. So you just might see them there... Not that I'm confirming or denying anything. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> ... Why is it called a riot?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because the presentations are fast paced. Each presenter has 3 minutes, 4 slides. It's fast. And it's about changing things compared to "normal" events. To attend it's cheap ($30 to $70) and everyone is pre-screened so we can make sure the _right_ people are in the room (not an army of lawyers, accountants, headhunters, consultants, etc.). It's all about helping entrepreneurs succeed. That shouldn't be different than "normal" events but unfortunately, it is.

<comment><USER2> Sounds like "Startup Races" to me. "Riot" connotes disorganized violence... or anarchy. =\

<comment><USER8> Been every year and it's an extremely well organized and fast paced event. Loaded with a ton of smart and interesting people!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, by disorganized I really meant some parts that are supposed to be "riot"-like. We try to do a fairly well choreographed event so that people know what is going to happen but also have time for random chance meetings to occur that turn into gold for the participants.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: An infinite runner for the command line, because why not - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/smallhadroncollider/ascii-runner <comment><USER2> Semi unrelated -- but nice dotfiles! Been looking for a good example on how to show battery status / system stats.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> BTW, you'll need a Nerd Font for the icons to work: [https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts](https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd- fonts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reminded me of playing Moon Buggy[0] during Gentoo installations ~12-13 years ago.

[0] [https://www.seehuhn.de/pages/moon- buggy](https://www.seehuhn.de/pages/moon-buggy)

</comment><comment><USER4> The example graphic on the page looks choppy as heck. It harkens back to those Tiger handhelds of old.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the GIF rather than the game. It runs at 15 fps, but the GIF is only at 5 FPS. I could make the game run at 60 fps, but I'm not sure it needs it!</comment></comment>


Infographic of who's suing who in mobile - <AUTHOR> http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2010/10/5/1286277620429/mobilelawsuits.png

<comment><USER2> Is it me or does Nokia smell of desperation?</comment>


Dutch answer to Australia's waste crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.sbs.com.au/news/dutch-answer-to-australia-s-waste-crisis <comment><USER2> Australia doesn't have a land fill crisis. It's too big.

To give an idea of how big, we've done the equivalent of exporting the first 1.5m of entire surface area of Holland to China - as iron ore. Then there's the coal exports on top of that. No one has noticed it's gone, and nobody would notice if we filled in the holes created with land fill.

But I don't doubt the Dutch would notice if the top 1.5m of their home country was replaced with land fill, which goes some way to explaining the efforts they go to to avoid creating it.

Import Dutch waste manager techniques into Australia sounds about as useful as the Dutch importing Australian water preservation techniques into Holland.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you prepare for technical interviews? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I don't.

<comment><USER3> Damnit. You got here first.

We do technical interviews but it is more of a conversation about an existing issue or problem in the company. We talk about it like the candidate is a consultant.

Our expectation is that they will ask questions for clarity, probe, and challenge any decisions or architectures chosen to date.

Then they offer an insight, opinion, or story as to how they have solved similar problems in the past.</comment></comment>


Amazon removes the database scaling wall - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/12/15/amazonRemovesTheDatabaseSc.html

<comment><USER2> The point Dave missed is that Google for example doesn't really want to open its infrastructure to outside users, they consider their infrastructure and scaling ability to be a key competitive advantage.

They want the walls in place, the walls limits the list of their potential competitors in their key market of search.

The problem is that once one big player releases a service or technology that start leveling the playing field, your only choices are to join the band wagon or be left behind.

<comment><USER3> That's true to a degree. However, Google also follows the mantra, "what's good for the Internet is good for Google." For example, they provide the monetization system (ads) to ask.com, which is a direct competitor. Why not also provide compute clusters?

I think Google and Microsoft are asleep at the wheel while Amazon is forging ahead becoming the leading provider of internet infrastructure for the next generation of startups.</comment></comment>


Elephant - Persistent Key-Value store with Full Text Search - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kennethreitz/elephant <comment><USER2> Seems cool, but the name should be changed. There is already an open source tool called ElephantDB created my Nathan Marz (Clojure, Big Data, Hadoop guru)

Not trying to be a jerk, I'm just sure that if this were my creation I would want people to let me know if I was potentially walking into brand confusion.

<comment><USER3> There is also this, <http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wah. I was hoping for something more interesting than S3 for persistence of the key / values...as kenneth seems to have very novel and interesting takes on things.

<comment><USER5> Unless I'm mistaken, it's using ElasticSearch, not S3. It's, effectively, a niche ElasticSearch API tailored to key/value storage.

<comment><USER6> Elastic for the searching, but S3 for the persistence it appears. AWS credentials are even "expected" per the readme.

<comment><USER5> Ah... thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This basically defines an API for key-value storage. You could actually write an adapter for MySQL using full text search and MyISAM tables. You wouldn't want to, but you get what I'm saying.

I was expecting something like a Solr or an ElasticSearch, but this is more an application that limits what you can get out of a more powerful backend. I don't see why I would want that other than to encourage devs to become experts on a key-value store instead of learning the more complex internals. That's pretty much shooting yourself in the foot in terms of extensibility and flexibility. Better to know ElasticSearch and use it as a KV store than the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very neat idea. I was thinking of something like this to help me offload some of my content from MongoDB to S3 but was stuck on how to make an efficient search.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very cool, would be great to outline why one would use something like as opposed to say Riak.

<comment><USER10> To run Riak in production you need 5 servers.

Here all you need it S3(scales indefinitely) + 1 elasticache instance.

<comment><USER11> Why 5? We have a riak cluster running of 3.

<comment><USER10> "Here at Basho we want to make sure that your Riak implementations are set up from the beginning to succeed. While you can use the Riak Fast Track to quickly set up a 3-node dev/test environment, we recommend that all production deployments use a minimum of 5 nodes, ensuring you benefit from the architectural principles that underpin Riak's availability, fault-tolerance and scaling properties."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Neat and I love the name! Who said elephants can't be agile & fast?

<comment><USER13> Biologists? Physicists? I don't know, who?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As always Kenneth Reitz did an awesome job.</comment>


Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev? - <AUTHOR> I've been trying to get a job for the past 3 months, then I got accepted into a startup accelerator, my team promised to share the money they got with me, but backed out of that, and now I'm about to lose everything.<p>I've tried a crowdfunding campaign, and I'm willing to build a full MVP for $3k if anyone has an idea for an app. My stack is Laravel MVC, I can also help deploy it on linode, cloud, shared hosting, wherever. <comment><USER2> Resume:

* Starting with "Greetings" makes me think of the nerd from The Simpsons.

* "KICKASS" really?

* Terrible attention to detail: Geocities not capitalized, no space between popular and the open parenthesis, "I've Spent" capitalization, random use of present tense in job descriptions, the first entry under My Services is blank, etc.

* Irrelevant information. Massage therapy?

Strip all that down and write in a dry, active voice. I want to know what you're good at _immediately_. I don't want to wade through a wall of conversational text.

Why is there a photo at all? If you're going to have a photo, make it look good. If you're going to put on a collared shirt and tie, it should fit close to your neck rather than having a fist-width of space in there.

<comment><USER3> Also, the resume says that you were Marketing Director somewhere, and that you were CTO at a company with 2000 employees. Is that actually true? If not, why are you trying to imply it? That's the type of bullshit on a resume that's very easy to see through, and makes people lose trust immediately.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is true, I handled the entire tech stack for a company with 2000+ insurance agents. I single-handedly did all the networking, pc troubleshooting, wordpress installs/design, sugarCRM integrations, ppc ads, seo, content writing, etc..

<comment><USER3> I personally wouldn't call that position CTO. I prefer to use the C-positions for people who manage others, i.e. who set out the vision and direction, not the ones actually performing all of the lower-level work.

But your opinion is, of course, yours. I would suggest being more specific on these jobs either way, so that people like me will not be scared off on their first read of the job titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're on the brink of homelessness, there's something amiss that's deeper than will be fixed by a "startup accelerator" gig, "crowdfunding campaign", or desperation lowball contract to build an "app MVP".

Your resume is scattered in tone and content, and inconsistently formatted: it's a bad audition for a detail-oriented solo-web-dev project. Your prior HN posts suggest a roller coaster of cash problems plus unrealistic hopes over just the last 30 days.

This suggests to me you're a bit too panicked to be planning properly. You may need someone friendly or professional to talk to, locally, as much or more than a job.

You should be seeking stability in your living and working situation above all else, so that you can regain perspective. That means avoiding solo freelancing, long-shot startup ideas, or quick money-raisers. Seek a simpler job, where you go into an office and are surrounded by a larger collaborating team, and your minimal basic needs are met. Do that for _at least_ 6 months to a year to regain a non-panicked perspective.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's my end goal--especially since I have tons of solo experience, and less of a structured office /team environment where you learn different workflows, and more agile ways of doing business. I know how to create milestones and a roadmap for an MVP, and do sprints, but teams that have been doing it longer and follow better practices could help me learn a lot--and I'm WAY more interested in LEARNING and becoming an awesome dev than I am in payment--I need to pay the bills, but I'd settle for 40k in order to get more experience under my belt --especially inside a team, some sort of apprenticeship/internship.

<comment><USER5> Lots of people have offered you specific and constructive advice, both in this thread and in a similar one from a couple of months ago [1]. You could have incorporated most of the suggestions in only a couple of hours. Yet as of this writing, your resume remains just as sloppy and unprofessional as before. Your personal website still broadcasts blatant dishonesty to anyone who cares to look.

Unless you're fortunate enough to stumble upon a web development shop with no internet connection, it's unlikely that you're going to be hired in the role you're hoping for. Since panhandling doesn't quite seem to be working out either [2], you may want to start thinking about taking any honest work you can find. Your opportunities will surely improve once you have grown up a bit. Good luck.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7588059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7588059) [2] [https://twitter.com/patrickcurl](https://twitter.com/patrickcurl)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pull out stuff like this from your resume webpage:

"Am I an expert? Nah - But I know where to get free access to developers, and devops, when I hit the inevitable brick wall(IRC CHAT) and I'm always focused on learning how things work."

Don't give people reasons not to hire you. Take that off, make the page about why you're awesome, not why I shouldn't hire you.

Also there are grammatical errors on the page, which don't look good. If you want I can proof read it for you. I'm (edit: not) the greatest at that, but I'll see if my wife can help. Also your resume... it looks cool but I found it super confusing to read. Recruiters often times are looking through massive piles of resumes, whatever you can do to make it easier to see why you're awesome you should do.

Finally if you are about to be homeless look into any emergency shelters in the area. I used to work in affordable housing it can be a wait sometimes to get into a shelter. I wish I could help more. Let me do some research tonight.

<comment><USER7> [edited to be less of an asshole]

I could help you identify comma splices, sentence fragments, incomplete sentences, unnecessary use of ellipses, introductory clauses, and run-on sentences.

<comment><USER6> Wow. That typo made me out to be the biggest dick. I meant I'm not the greatest at that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To the point - if you are in real trouble of losing the roof over your head, contact your friends/family immediately to organise either a short term loan to cover costs for a little while or to stay with them for a short while. Remove that concern from the table.

Once you have that sorted, your interview approach will probably relax a bit, as I am guessing it might be coming across to potential recruiters/employers as "help - need job now!" \- whilst in a perverse kind of way, most employers seem to give preference to those that don't even need the job but are tempted to change. Make sure you play it cool, calm, professional.

Next, don't provide any obvious reasons for your resume/application to be quicksorted to /dev/null. Remove any photos, non-related qualifications, make sure all the dates line up, account for any gaps (i.e. training and consulting for example), double and treble check spelling and grammar, and unlike my post here - keep it short and to the point! :-)

Ask a trusted friend/colleague to interview you. Ask them to be hard, but fair. Ask them to interview you with an eye on your personal communication skills, and on your technical abilities. Ask them for honest feedback. Do not get down hearted if you hear some constructive comments. Make sure it is constructive, not destructive though! Make points to work on your interview and technical skills, then redo the interview again a few days later to see how it improves.

Finally, good luck. Remember - you are selling yourself on how you can solve the business problems and add value. The technical skills are just tools you leverage to achieve that. You are more than a bag of skills, and you need to get that message across.

</comment><comment><USER9> Please don't be put off by the harsh tone of this essay. It's important information and based on this post and the resume linked in your HN profile ([http://resume.patrickcurl.com/](http://resume.patrickcurl.com/)), I think you would benefit from reading it: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont- call-yourself-a-pro...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call- yourself-a-programmer/)

<comment><USER10> Every time I read how most professionals out there simply make a living by bluffing and cheating, I die a little inside.

<comment><USER9> I'm confused. What part of this is about bluffing or cheating?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You could remove the Certificate in Massage Therapy from your CV

<comment><USER12> Don't know why this was downvoted. You should make your resume as to-the-point as possible, even keeping a spreadsheet of different versions of pieces of information to more easily taylor it to the job in question. Unless your intention it to work with something, drop it from the CV. Recruiters don't like anything unexpected. Don't surprise them.

Keep it objective. They don't care you think you are a kickass Rails developer and they will not react positively to what they can interpret as a big ego.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hey, gremlinsinc..

There's a book to read "Winning Through Intimidation" by Rbert J. Ringer.

It is not a book about how to intimidate people, it's about not being intimidated by people.

One of the chapters addresses the issue of "promises".

We have an Algerian proverb that says "Ti9a fil wati9a". Meaning: Trust lies in the document. Which means: Make it clear, black on white, on a document.. Meaning: Get a lawyer. Meaning also: The only lawyer you have is the one _you_ pay. (Don't assume the company lawyer is yours).

I was a kid when my brother had a company and built buildings based on word. Once he had a deal with some old man, very respectable and well known figure. I asked him why they didn't sign a contract and he said that the man is honorable, and I asked "What if he changes". He smiled to the child I was. He eventually got screwed by this very honorable man.

A lawyer also serves as a dissuasive measure taking out the sign on your forehead saying "I'm a pigeon".

Also, try oil or oil services companies. The pay is good (you're basically taken care of completely) and you don't need cutting edge tech. They also like to hire Junior people (they're like one of the few who actually massively hire people without experience because turnover is huge).

</comment><comment><USER14> I would like to say this in the nicest, most hopeful-for-your-future-potential way possible: Everybody can see through your bullshit.

I think most people aren't sure _what_ you're being dishonest about, but they can tell that there's something up.

Real software employers will generally not hire anyone that they can smell a lot of dishonesty on, because they have to put a lot of trust in you. Besides your impact on their company through your contributions, you're usually given access to a lot of sensitive information.

I can empathize with you because I'm pretty sure you came from a poor background, and that's the only culture you're really aware of. I did too, and I would like it if it was a lot easier for poor people to make a living in tech.

Unfortunately you can't make a successful career as a bullshitter. Some people can, but that isn't your strong point. You have to understand someone's culture better than they understand it to be a good bullshitter, and you don't understand buisness culture well enough to do it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Bluntly, I would say you need to corporateize it up.

All the advice here is good.

Also, it's cool that you wrote your own framework, but right now, the jobs that map to your skills are Wordpress and Rails jobs. Your framework is an example of your capabilities.

You're a Rails/Wordpress developer, X years of Rails experience, Y years in the computer industry. You have Z academic experience relating to the field.

Your code examples probably should be on github.

Understand that making your representation quirky does you no good unless the hiring manager wants quirky. I've not met one who wants that yet.

You need to be precise, clear, lucid, humble, and confident. Clearly express what you're good at, and don't focus on the weak areas.

For your resume, take a look at Rands' "A Glimpse and a Hook".

Most Rails developers are finding its a VERY hot field, so I would encourage you to introspect as to why that isn't the case with you. Maybe attend Toastmasters or something?

Good luck.

<comment><USER16> As far as I can tell, he didn't write his own framework.

By "my framework" he means "the one I know".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You say you have been attempting to get a job for the past 3 months. Over the past week, what activities, specifically, have you done to get a job? Have you been to interviews? How many? How did they go? Were there any questions you were unable to answer? Was there any particularly difficult part of the interview?

Did you not attend interviews in the last week? In the alternative, have you lined up interviews? How many?

Did you not line up any interviews in the last week? In the alternative, have you identified people with the authority to hire Ruby on Rails engineers? How many? By what process are you identifying them? After identifying them, what compelling offer are you making them? Since most people with hiring authority are in the toughest market ever for people attempting to hire developers with experience shipping applications, they should be willing to take coffee dates with you.

You will not get most of your leads for coffee dates through your resume. In fact, if you could take your resume off the Internet, that would probably be in your favor. It does not currently suggest that you are going to be a successful candidate for a white collar position. You should not put your resume back on the Internet until it highlights your professional accomplishments. When put your resume back on the Internet, it will be absolutely devoid of errors in spelling, punctuation, word choice, professional tone, and grammar.

You mention that you have previous experience with SEO, social media, and shipping applications. You should be comfortable with discussing specific successes which you have had with this. If you do not have specific successes which you can talk about, do not mention SEO/social media/etc, and instead focus on the fact that you have successfully shipped applications. In the current environment, years of experience with successfully shipping commercial applications makes you substantially more experienced than the bar for junior developers.

If you actually have made people money with SEO and you can also code, you should know that your skill set is _white hot_ right now. You should be contacting people whose businesses would benefit from that combination of skills, tell them how they would benefit in a similar fashion as other people you have worked with by having you implement _brief sketch goes here_ , and then attempting to convince them to hire you.

When you are speaking to people in the industry, do not mention the words "homeless", "inexperienced", "spaghetti", or anything else which suggests that you are desperate for a job. You are not desperate for a job. You are a white collar professional with a skillset which is in incredible demand at the moment. You should carry yourself like that.

<comment><USER5> > _In fact, if you could take your resume off the Internet, that would > probably be in your favor._

Please seriously consider taking down your personal website as well. In five minutes of glancing through your blog entries I found too many glaring "do not hire" flags to mention here. You seem like a decent sort of person, and I mean this with all due respect. Good luck in your search.

<comment><USER18> When I'm hiring, attention to detail is huge, particularly on the technical side of things.

The very first image on the personal site shows badly aligned PHP code (the if statement isn't aligned with the assignment above it). I wouldn't be able to make it past that if I had a stack of 20 resumes to whittle down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reword your resume (especially this part: "I've Spent a good decade just doing mostly freelance work, and installing apps") - otherwise it sounds like you're really good at installing/configuring stuff other people have written.

Also remove the $70K Salary Requirement.

<comment><USER19> On your LinkedIn profile you have written the salary requirement as "65,0000" (with four zeros). As others have recommended, I highly recommend having some people proof-read your resume / profiles, and following all the advice you've received here.

<comment><USER20> And the (downloadable) resume, it says 60000.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Those stars on your skills section... I don't like to see ratings like that in general, but if you're going to put 5 out of 5 on something, be prepared to be called out on it. I'd expect you to have total expert knowledge of Bootstrap and Lavarel and Wordpress.

There's nothing I'd give myself a 5 out of 5 on after my 20 years of work.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. If I put myself down as an expert on something I would want to be prepared to give a complete run down of the internal workings, important design decisions that drove the implementation, etc. For example if I wanted to say I was an expert in C++ I would have to ask myself, do I really know as much about C++ as Bjarne Stroustrup, Scott Meyers, etc?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you can't find any work as a junior web dev at any salary then you're possibly doing something wrong with your resume or interview. It's impossible to give feedback on that without more info.

<comment><USER24> "you're possibly doing something wrong with your resume or interview"

i love this cult of personality viewpoint in favor of conformity.

<comment><USER25> It's not about conformity, it's about quality. His website at [http://resume.patrickcurl.com/](http://resume.patrickcurl.com/) is buggy and doesn't have a consistent look, feel, or writing style. Seeing as building websites for people is the work he wants to be doing, that's a pretty objective kind of metric to look at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Simplify and get to the point. Here's a template: [http://cl.ly/Vvjx](http://cl.ly/Vvjx).

<comment><USER27> thanks for sharing, love the simplicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Most of the other advice here is shit. This advice will get you a job. Serious. It works.

      1. Make a list of local places you might want to work.
      2. Print out resumes.
      3. Go to the office, and hand resume over to front desk.

In person say - "I would like to apply for a job. Here is my resume."

 _Top of your resume_ , put evidence you can do the job.

"These projects prove that I can do the job:

      1. Launched project using php.  http://1.example.com/
      2. Made Y for client doing X.  http://2.example.com/
      3. Shipped X. http://3.example.com/

I am a very hard worker.

"

\-- You will get call backs, and interviews on the spot at some of the places. No one else is doing this. --

I'm not going to wish you luck. Since I know after reading this, you will get off your arse and make it happen.

Now. Get going!

</comment><comment><USER29> I know plenty of people hate on freelancing sites, and they certainly aren't ideal, but...

If you are desperate for cash and have some skills, maybe try to pick up some ~$500-1000 jobs on:

Freelancer.com, Guru.com, Elance.com, Odesk, etc.

<comment><USER30> Agreed. It is often a race to the bottom against programmers in a third world country with very little living costs, you are often lucky to get $40/hr until you have references and a good portfolio, but it can bring in enough to eat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wouldn't say KICKASS in the first sentence of your "About me" blurb

</comment><comment><USER32> You should probably say where you live if you are looking for a job. Also, if they said they would give you a particular portion of some pile of money as compensation, you might consider suing them for wage theft.

Also, why are you "evil"?

<comment><USER33> Being an "evil coder" is just an expression that means they do pretty crazy things in their code that others might find questionable, but presumably having the skill to pull it off without causing bugs.

<comment><USER32> Huh. I've never heard that term before. Now that I know the definition...I'm skeptical I would want to read that person's code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I realize this advice may not address your immediate needs, but if you don't have paying projects, stay busy. Github is your new resume. Try to stay active on Github when you have downtime.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sorry to hear that. I have heard that in big companies resumes are filtered via keywords. Since, your resume is non-keyword based, you are not getting the opportunity which you deserve.

</comment><comment><USER35> A resume is what jobs you've had and how well you've done them. Reading yours it looks like you've had a lot of short term jobs - and a long stretch of unemployment between 03 and 06.

There's nothing on there about what you've achieved, what your responsibilities were in any of them. Nada.

And the guesses that can be made about why you've had so many jobs, and how you've been working for multiple companies at the same time, are unlikely to be complimentary.

</comment><comment><USER36> The number one way you can improve your chances of getting a job is to send out more applications. How many have you sent in the last three months?

</comment><comment><USER37> A lot of people already mentioned the problems with your resume, so I won't mention that again.

Where are you located? I haven't worked w/ PHP for 8 years and I'm really not sure what the market looks like but learning other newer technologies such as Rails could potentially make a much big market available to you.

I know in the Bay Area, Jr Rails engineers are in super high demand.

<comment><USER38> He's located near Salt Lake City, Utah.

He's also a Ruby on rails developer looking at his resume: resume.patrickcurl.com

I am a PHP developer currently, and I don't mind switch over between languages (Java/Python/Ruby), but I do think that the market is bigger for PHP developers vs Ruby. (not sure about the bay area although, it could be different there).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You say "I was willing to interview/learn more Rails" \- yet your resume has the cringe-worthy statement "If you made it to this page, it probably means you need a KICKASS Ruby on Rails developer"?

You need to edit/improve your "online presence" IMMEDIATELY - the longer these bad examples of your work stay online, the more chance is that someone will see them. Start going through the suggestions already provided here for edits and improvements and make changes as soon as possible.

As someone else already said, people can see through your BS. Honesty about your experience and actual skill level will make a bigger impression than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER39> I can't figure out where you are. Will post this link in case it is at all relevant:

[http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/](http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Red flag for me.

You have been doing this for a decade...and still consider yourself junior?

<comment><USER40> I realized I should have expounded a bit to actually make why this is a red flag a little more apparent.

A 'normal' year of work nets you 2080 hours of work. Thats 52 40 hours weeks.

Mastery of a given topic matter is considered to be around 10,000 hours of work. At that rate, if you have worked a 40 hour job doing something, for 5 years, you should have mastered most of the skills. When I see 'junior' developer, I am used to it being a developer with less than 3 years of experience. I hire people like this, but only for specific needs. My expectations are inline with their experience, and I look at their past work history to get an idea of what level I should expect them to perform at.

Not all people doing technical hiring are that fair minded though. There are many that will see junior, and will move on, because they need someone with more team skills, or skills in architecture, large application development, etc, that they do not expect to see from 'junior' developers.

If someone tells me they have been working on web development related tasks for ten years, but consider themselves junior, then I worry that they have not applied themselves, or stuck to the same job long enough to actually improve their skills, etc. THESE worries...are why I wouldn't hire them. I would have concerns around their ability to grow and learn within my organization, and whether or not the time and money I would pour into their training would pay off in the future with a well skilled and well rounded member on my team, rather than another trip to the well of talent for another junior developer to try to help 'level up' to a different role.

<comment><USER41> That's a huge red flag for me too. You've been doing spaghetti code for years and now you're trying to quit?

Don't say that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Freelance and stay on Github as others suggested. Also its a good idea to get into some local user groups which can lead to job opportunities in the future.

<comment><USER30> Definitely. I know the NYC iOS meetup has people advertising gigs or looking for work every session, and even more get made just networking in the bars afterwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've got nothing more to add to the fantastic advice given here, but can I just say a huge congrats on your weight loss! Keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER44> As a lot of people have already commented on your website, I'm going to focus on the resume you have to download (which I assume is the one you submit to potential jobs).

First, it's incredibly confusing. You have useless information and the relevant information is spread out into a dozen boxes.

1\. You don't need to list that you're a male. (I'd also argue you don't need your d.o.b)

2\. You don't need the professional area. If you're submitting the resume, the employer already knows what sector you're in. If someone stumbles across the resume, your experience and skills should make it clear what you can do. The box takes up space and it typecasts you.

3\. If they see your resume, you're definitely looking for a job. You don't need a whole box to say it.

4\. Don't put a salary requirement. Forgetting some people's taboo about explicitly discussing salary, it can only hurt you. Why would any one pay you 80k if you're telling them that they can pay you 60k.

5\. The timeline is useless. First, it stops you from providing extra context (I have no idea what Sherman Curl LLC is.) Second, it highlights the 3.5 year gap between Massage Therapist and the rest of your work. It's better to elaborate on a few relevant jobs then to list every thing you've ever done.

6\. You don't use the legend on the bottom of the timeline, it just tells me you used resumup. I'm beating a dead horse, but your website should have the visual resume, not the downloadable pdf. Your downloaded resume should just be your relevant information.

7\. You say you have a diploma but you do not say what you got it in or where it's from. That whole box is useless.

8\. Hobbies in general are extraneous, yours are especially since none of them are close to notable or unique (although they're a lot of fun.) I also have no idea what electronic hobbies are.

9\. The language box has nothing in it.

10\. Personality traits aren't binary and, as an employer, I'd probably want to make those judgements myself. Your skills and experience are more important.

11\. The skills graphs are confusing. I don't want to spend time trying to understand things that could be put in a list format. Finally, you don't fill all of the form boxes in the skill chart.

12\. Your url is your resume, which has the same information I'm looking at. I normally would reccomend linking to your homepage, but since you're doing multi-level-marketing on it, I'm not sure where you want the link to point, maybe github.

I think this is harsher then I intended, but it's important for your first impression (your resume) to be a good one.

TL:DR: Your downloadable resume, even more then your digital one, should strictly be relevant information about your name, email, skills and experience.

</comment><comment><USER45> "Certificate in Massage Therapy Utah College of Massage Therapy"

This is the very first line of your resume ??!!! Are you trolling ?

</comment><comment><USER38> "Am I an expert? Nah"

Don't tell that on your resume.

</comment><comment><USER46> reach out to me at firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/10/27/stop-using-microsoft-edge-to-download-chrome-unless-you-want-malware/ <comment><USER2> I mentioned this in a comment over a year ago in a story about paint.net.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14338174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14338174)

> _The Bing search engine is about as bad. A close friend used IE to get > Google Chrome. They clicked the first result and luckily I was able to stop > them before starting the install on some crapware.

So I asked them to be careful to ensure the download site is correct and left them to it.

I came back to find they had downloaded some other crapware.

I checked the search results. The ENTIRE first one and a half page of results were advertisements for versions of crapware which may or may not have been Chromium or Chrome lookalikes with lots of malware._

<comment><USER3> This is exacltly what you would get if you'd deliberately moved all links to the legitimate site way down. Maybe because it's your competition?

<comment><USER4> Or if Bing was more susceptible to spam and abuse than Google

<comment><USER5> Well after Bing got busted for scraping Google's results, they had to scramble to implement their own terrible search algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Call me paranoid, but every time I install software on Windows [1] I do the following dance:

1\. Search for the name of the software on Google [2].

2\. Open link to software in separate tab.

3\. Open Wikipedia link (usually on the same SERP) for software in separate tab.

4\. Compare domain name from direct link with the domain name from the Wikipedia article.

5\. Open another tab and type domain name manually.

6\. Find download link manually on domain[3].

I do this since a family member got burned badly by a malicious OpenOffice install many years ago.

[1] _Sometimes I do it on Mac too, because the App Store has it 's own issues (e.g. upgrades are often cheaper if you buy software directly). On any other system I use the package manager. All of this makes the effort bearable because I only have to do it rarely._

[2] _I 'm usually on DuckDuckGo, but for this I always used Google. The reason is that I had hope that they'd remove malicious results quicker. It's manual work after all and Google has more resources. This whole thread makes me doubt though._

[3] _I 'd do this anyway because I usually don't want to install the version that is automatically suggested, but decide myself which specific version I want to install. Most of the time the reason is the language._

<comment><USER7> Disclaimer: I'm the author/maintainer for AppGet [0].

What you explained here is one of the main selling points (as in convincing, appget is completely free) for appget.

AppGet pretty much automates what you explained here and more.

We automatically download and validate SHA256 of downloads (We have a strict policy of only allowing releases from the official source)

All package info that is used to install applications are fully public in our GitHub repository [1] (think homebrew)

Also, for less tech-savvy users, they can install applications through our gallery e.g. [https://appget.net/packages/i/chrome](https://appget.net/packages/i/chrome) using appget as long as they have appget installed on the machine.

[0] [https://appget.net](https://appget.net)

[1] [https://github.com/appget/appget.packages/tree/master/manife...](https://github.com/appget/appget.packages/tree/master/manifests)

<comment><USER8> I use Chocolatey right now. Are there any particular advantages that AppGet offers over Chocolatey?

<comment><USER7> There are a few :)

AppGet doesn't use custom scripts on install; everything is defined by data (YAML files). The client uses the data in the manifest and knows how to deal with different installers. This alone makes appget more secure; if you trust the client (it's opensource and managed by the core team) you don't blindly run a PowerShell script as admin on your machine.

Also, adding/updating packages is trivial since all you need to do is update/create a very simple YAML file. Another benefit is we can upgrade the client to better deal with let's say MSI installers, and none of the manifests need to be updated since all the logic is in the client, the manifest only needs to identify itself as MSI.

This also means you can install an app in different interactivity levels, Silent (everything happens in the background), Passive (you see the installer and progress, but you don't have to click next or do anything) or Interactive (appget downloads and validates the installer and just launches it for you, but you can run through the installer and customized it as you see fit)

Our packages are more up-to-date. We have a crawler that checks for updates on regular bases, we use GitHub api, and check vendor sites constantly (over 500K of check events per day). Trivial updates are automatically pushed to the repository, For non-trivial ones the bot automatically creates a pull-request on GitHub to be reviewed by a human. Most cases we pickup updated releases for apps within hours.

AppGet can list, upgrade and uninstall apps that aren't even installed using appget. We check windows installer database as the source of truth. You can download appget right now, run "appget outdated" and I guarantee it'll find outdated apps for you.

I'm sure there are more things, this question comes up a lot, so I'm gonna spend some time and add a page to the documentation just for this.

<comment><USER5> Chocolatey completely turned me off from Windows package managers. I'm sure you're familiar with all of the sore points that make it more hassle than it's worth.

But your description of AppGet has convinced me to try it out. Thank you!

Edit: There seems to be no obvious way to globally set the install location for apps. This is critical for my setup, I don't install apps in Program Files, because my Windows partition is lean and on an ssd that is shared with other VMs. Apps are installed in another drive location. Is there any way to do this currently?

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the feedback, right now there is no global way to set this. However, I just created a GitHub issue for it [https://github.com/appget/appget/issues/14](https://github.com/appget/appget/issues/14)

In the meantime, what you can do as a workaround, is to use `-i` param when installing apps to launch the installer in interactive mode. That will let you run through the installer and customize everything including the install location. I know it's not ideal, but if you want to use appget to automatically download, validate the installers and check for outdated apps, it might be a reasonable work-around.

<comment><USER5> Still a good enough workaround to leverage the benefits of the trusted repository. Thanks for the tip! Definitely interested in seeing #14 get addressed :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember when several years ago I typed "download Flash" in Russian Google, there were non-official sites in top results. Now Adobe's site is the first result.

Also I tried to experiment a little. If I type "download flash player" in Russian, official Adobe site is only on the 3rd position [1]. The first and second results are "adobe-flash-player.ru.softonic.com".

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C+%D1%84%D0%BB%D0%B5%D1%88+%D0%BF%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B5%D1%80&btnG=%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BA&gbv=1)

<comment><USER10> I always hate this Softnic crap. Softonic and Pinterest are cancers in SERPs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The title of this article is deceptive clickbait.[1] The problem has nothing to do with the Edge browser, it has to do with search results returned by Bing, which happens to be Edge's default search engine. If you have a new Windows 10 PC and want to download Chrome, how else could you do it besides "using Microsoft Edge to download Chrome"? So "stop using Edge to download Chrome" is not useful advice. Better advice would be to check the URL and certificate information before downloading anything from any site.

And the problem seems to have been fixed. When I search for _chrome download_ on Bing, the top result is [https://www.google.com/chrome](https://www.google.com/chrome).

[1] Successful clickbait, too. Writing an article with "download Chrome" in the title apparently got them the top spot in Bing's "News about Chrome Download", so anyone who searches for "chrome download" will see this article near the top of the search results page. Very clever.

<comment><USER12> > If you have a new Windows 10 PC and want to download Chrome, how else could > you do it besides "using Microsoft Edge to download Chrome"?

Simply visit Google.com, Gmail, Youtube or any other Google-site and await the Chrome-spam 100% guaranteed to appear in any browser not Chrome.

My favorite one: "Upgrade your browser". Not misleading at all, eh? How about "no"?

<comment><USER13> This is a tangent/pile-on, but this is not the only dark pattern google engages in. I absolutely do not want YouTube Red. Any software that respects the user would let you dismiss the offer with an option for "do not ask me again." And yet, because the software is not respecting the user, YouTube asks me ad nauseum if I want to upgrade to YouTube Red. No. I do not. But I don't get an option for no. There is something like "yes" and "maybe later." No google. My answer is no. Please respect me enough to let me make that choice.

<comment><USER14> Would you like to try YouTube Red for 30 days?

<comment><USER15> No thanks (again and again) :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> FWIW Google also returns malicious chrome ads. My father had a brand new laptop and the first thing he did was to google chrome. He got a bunch or malware by clicking on the first link.

<comment><USER17> There was a short time about seven years ago when Google was returning a malicious link for Blizard's BattleNet. Had my WoW creds stolen and I wasn't what you would call naive on a computer.

<comment><USER18> That sucks.

I know it's a tired point, but it nevertheless amuses me that someone would _search_ for BattleNet. The name is literally the domain name: battle.net.

<comment><USER16> This is not a very clever point. Plenty of things used to be caller "somethingnet" in order to advertise their ties with the internet. It was never about a tld. Kind of like how having "block" or "chain" in your app's name makes you "cool" nowadays.

<comment><USER19> I wonder if it was to associate with the internet or with Microsoft branding.

Microsoft went apeshit and called all their products .NET in the early 2000s. The branding was all over the place so I could see how calling your product *net might get you installs by association.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Unfortunately the problem is not with Bing alone. There are multiple ad networks including admob owned by google, who will serve a url, or sometimes a script for an ad. That is unfortunately just how advertising works.

The industry never matured (to handle spam, malicious content or fraud) thanks to the Duopoly of Fb and Google, and even the biggest players are not immune to these issues as the onus is on the user to not to click on ads that offer to upgrade browsers, or any system software through ads.

It is the same systems that served malicious election results, the same systems that contributed to the echo chambers that impacted recent elections.

<comment><USER21> Ironically, this should have been an opportunity for Bing to differentiate themselves:

Create a "safe" ad network that is not a vector for drive-by downloads or privacy violations, and go after publishers that are being hurt by ad blockers or experiencing reputation damage from security breaches.

<comment><USER22> Given the cutthroat short term metrics these companies' employees operate under, do you really think such strategic thinking would have ever been incentivized? It's a question whether any salutary effects can even be reliably defined and measured to justify such a project to your boss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Explanation for the spoofed domain name: [https://twitter.com/sephr/status/1055751684146655232](https://twitter.com/sephr/status/1055751684146655232)

Bing can easily fix this domain spoofing vulnerability. I've reported this vulnerability to MSRC previously but received no response.

This is also why open redirects can be so dangerous. Even if this domain spoofing vulnerability is fixed on Bing's end attackers can abuse open redirects to achieve the same result.

<comment><USER24> I don't think they will fix the underlying issue now. I've had the same issue ( literally trying to download chrome) in 2014. Now that they have public pushback they will fix just this ad placement.

I wonder what makes them think this is acceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The argument to ditch Windows felt kind of shoehorned in.

If Bing is returning malicious search results, that's a reason to stop using the search engine, _not the whole OS_. The October update fiasco is a reason to stop using Windows. These are separate issues in separate projects made by separate teams, happening at separate times.

The implication is that everything MSoft touches is insecure or otherwise out to get me is weakly supported. It may or may not be true, but a quick toss in of one data point about how Windows is bad and oh by the way Ubuntu is better isn't convincing.

</comment><comment><USER26> The issue here is a broken functionality that I've reported on before with Google Ads which Bing mirrors: Allowing advertisers to lie about the destination URL of their ads.

Here's a screenshot of the same exploit on Google: [https://plus.google.com/u/0/115181074626403443464/posts/fSPm...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/115181074626403443464/posts/fSPmYYLu2pH) (The included hijack was blocked as a malicious site on Edge, but wasn't on Chrome.)

Ads should always be forced to display in the URL text the actual URL the ad directs the browser to. Maybe as a side bonus, less tracking URLs will get used to keep it looking cleaner.

</comment><comment><USER27> I never quite understood the appeal of giving some unknown third-party the right to put links and text and javascript onto your site.

It might be labour intensive to have human eyes on every ad that is sold when you're at Google, or even Bing, scale. But it seems a little bit too hands- off, and irresponsible, to take money without vetting the input and then letting every scammer get into that very "blessed" and visible top spot of a search page.

If you want something done right, do it yourself. You can't expect scammers to not to be scamming.

<comment><USER28> I spent some time trying to understand googles ads and seo structure for a project, as a sysadmin. My conclusion was the reason greyhat and blackhat techniques werent dealt with was because they make too much money from it... I wrote a big report on it, but that was the gist. Im sure the same is true of MS et al.

<comment><USER29> If the report is public, would you link it?

<comment><USER28> Its not, sorry, I dont even have a personal copy, but it could be worth redoing it publicly on my own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Bing makes it clear when a site is promoted by prepending "ad" to the search result. Other search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Google do the same.

It is near impossible for Bing to manually review every advert so perhaps it would be beneficial for search engines to provide a way for users to report rouge promoted links, similar to how YouTube allows you to report its sidebar ads.

<comment><USER31> > It is near impossible for Bing to manually review every advert

Why? Are there hundreds of ad campaigns being created per second?

<comment><USER30> It would be possible to handle the quantity of ad campaigns, but not without false positives or missed fraudulent ads.

If you paid a person or a team of people to remove adverts promoting fake websites, the person reviewing the advert would have to understand the product being sold, the company selling the product and the companies real website. For Chrome this may be easy, but for more obscure projects such as a cryptocurrency wallet or email client it'd be hard for a person to distinguish between real and fake continually over the course of an 8 hour work day.

People who are searching for a product already understand that context and so will be able to make a less erroneous judgement on whether a promoted link is real or fake.

<comment><USER32> > _It would be possible to handle the quantity of ad campaigns, but not > without false positives or missed fraudulent ads._

That calculus applies to just about everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's possible to install Google Chrome on a Windows box with chocolatey, the Windows answer to apt and brew.

But, still, Microsoft's browsers still aren't good. In my workplace (where we do some complex cross-browser work) they're an enormous nuisance to development and QA. I wish Edge were far better than IE, but they're both quirky. Firefox and Google Chrome ordinarily work predictably. Safari has a few quirks, Edge is really quirky, and IE is a narrow gauge steam train, all different.

Why doesn't Redmond stop throwing good money after bad and just license Firefox? Are they stuck in the sunk-cost fallacy?

<comment><USER34> Chocolatey is very handy but has a few warts. It can't tell if the underlying app has self-updated. When Chrome autoupdates after choco install, the next time you run a choco upgrade, it will unnecessarily upgrade Chrome again.

<comment><USER7> take a look at appget, we use windows itself as the source of truth. so even if an app self updates, or you have installed the app manually or even using chocolate, appget will know the _currently_ installed version.

also, we don't run some random PowerShell script written by god-knows-who on your machine. All installs are driven by pure data, so the only thing you need to trust is the appget client itself.

e.g. [https://github.com/appget/appget.packages/blob/master/manife...](https://github.com/appget/appget.packages/blob/master/manifests/slack/slack.yaml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Perhaps since MS makes only a tiny minority of their income from ads they can ship an effective adblocker with their default browser. It could be great opportunity to lead the market in a customer friendly way.

<comment><USER36> All of bing's revenue comes from ads. Somehow I don't think Microsoft is planning on disabling bing ads in the Windows default browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Bing is likely to return spam and scams on any search. There is no conspiracy against Chrome.

<comment><USER38> Incidentally, the relative lack of filtering/censorship also means I've had far more luck "Binging" obscure/fringe/questionable-content sites than with Google. I suppose them receiving fewer DMCA takedowns also contributes.

<comment><USER37> I guess there is an upside to everything. I would definitely use bing if I wanted to compile a list of scammers or something along these lines

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Have to say, I was looking for a way to get away from Google, and I found that Duckduckgo's results didn't work for me. Bing, though, does the job nicely.

<comment><USER40> +1 here. I switched to Bing back in April when a Google algorithm update really trashed Google's results for me (it felt like I'd suddenly gone back to the days of Altavista & HotBot). At first my switch to Bing was out of spite, but 6 months later I'm still using Bing & I love it. I really like how it breaks out code snippets for StackOverflow results, for instance.

So it's frustrating to see Bing hurt their reputation with something as stupid as this. If Microsoft want more people to switch, they've got to be at 100% in all areas, they can't afford to let Bing Ads ruin the whole service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> .. and that's why running an ad-blocker these days is not even a moral question; It's proper hygiene. I don't eat without washing my hands first, and I don't browse without an ad blocker.

<comment><USER42> I'm with you on that, but in this specific case people are using Edge exactly once on a new machine in order to download Google Chrome. It's reasonable to assume they aren't going to bother installing an ad blocker on Edge for this use.

<comment><USER43> Pretty sure malwarebytes would catch this. Or any AV.

Malware like this targets the lowest hanging fruit I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Using browsers to download software should never have become the standard practice...

Linux got it right with the built-in package repositories. Unfortunately Windows and Mac have never really adopted the super-easy "apt install this" style.

<comment><USER45> Yeah, I mean obviously what the average users wants it to have to type in apt get commands and finding the slug to get the right package instead of clicking a link. Very intuitive.

You know how Google & Firefox could easily help fix this? List their browsers in the Mac and Windows Store.

<comment><USER46> Browsers are banned from the Windows Store. For 'security' reasons.

It's tricky to get win32 apps in general into it, too.

<comment><USER45> No they aren't, the UC Browser is listed in the Windows store (third most popular mobile browser in the world,) along with some others. Microsoft has been very willing to help companies list Win32 apps in the Windows store, especially large ones.

<comment><USER46> Interesting. But I think UC Browser is special by being sort of a thin client. The store policy is quite clear: "Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate HTML and JavaScript engines provided by the Windows Platform."

For general win32 apps I do think the situation has improved since I last looked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> _Ads considered harmful._

</comment><comment><USER48> For the all the shit Google taking lately, we should give them a big shoutout when their own cloud pages and other product pages rank way down in their own Google search ranking.

</comment><comment><USER49> It looks like they've fixed it but a few months ago I googled "Microsoft Customer Support" and the top results were all to obvious scam sites.

</comment><comment><USER50> I often dig into phishing and malware spam I receive, reporting it to the abuse@ address for the sending network, and reporting any links hosting malware.

I frequently come across malware hosted on onedrive and I've stopped bothering to try to report it, its still there months later and I've never received a response from Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER51> It always used to be fun to count how many malware sites appeared before the real one when you searched for "download vlc" with yahoo. They've fixed that one now, but in 2017 it was still definitely a problem.

</comment><comment><USER52> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-U7a04GTpk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-U7a04GTpk)

</comment><comment><USER53> I usually use ninite to set up first time downloads, it's great because you can just run it again every couple weeks to make sure all your software is up to date.

It avoids using malicious options accidentally and it also means I don't need to go through each installer. Plus I can just send the file to friends and family when they get a new comp.

edit: just wondering why people disagree with this idea?

</comment><comment><USER54> This is another reason why the ad business is flawed.

</comment><comment><USER55> The real problem here is that a system allows users to install unsigned software.

<comment><USER56> From the article: >>> The download itself is called "ChromeSetup.exe," but examining the digital signature reveals "Alpha Criteria Ltd." >>>

It was signed, but most users won't catch that it's signed by the wrong party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This has been happening for so long that it's hard to believe Microsoft is not aware of it.

<comment><USER26> Given the malware Google's ads also ship, which Googlers here on HN have tried to have removed only to return an hour later, suffice to say malicious ads are an industry pervasive problem, and the solution is to kill the online advertising market. Aggressively.

In fact, when I tried to look for a specific class of malicious ads (looking for "mapquest") recently, DuckDuckGo was even as bad as Google, it was Bing who gave the least malicious results. But obviously they've failed here.

Automated advertising platforms have been overrun by malware and no automated solutions are going to fix it.

<comment><USER44> Nowadays it's impossible to support the creators you enjoy online by whitelisting ads without exposing your device to multiple megabytes of untrusted, vulnerability-filled JS and iFrames with links off to malware sites.

I think that the sponsorship model many YouTubers use these days works really well, because there isn't any code involved that I have to run.

<comment><USER58> I don't remember "untrusted JS" being any sort of problem in the last, say, 10 years?

Now I'm sure you can dig up some vulnerabilities, and a select few of them may even had (remote) exploits. But I've never run into any problems, and I'm not especially careful, have been around the seedy underbelly of the web, and don't run any anti-virus. Just not clicking on any .exe that suddenly downloads seems to be enough. Being on MacOS rather than Windows may also help, although as far as I can tell, security on Windows today is also far far better than it was a decade or so ago.

Considering all that, I can't shake the suspicion that people complaining about JS vulnerabilities to defend their use of ad blockers are just searching for justification.

<comment><USER59> Not "JS vulnerabilities", but things that waste memory & cpu cycles and in worst case exploit your PC for things like bitcoin mining.

Also consider that most browser vulnerabilities -- not "JS vulnerabilities" \-- are virtually impossible to exploit without JS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> This one is especially bad, but there's a major problem in general. I have to constantly warn people not to "google" for printer drivers or video drivers, etc, because the links they'll get from any search engine are almost certain to be malware.

</comment><comment><USER43> I am always amazed people actually fall for these.

</comment><comment><USER61> Microsoft back to its old tricks, I see.

</comment><comment><USER62> Too bad Edge doesn't support Safe Browsing mode. IIRC the API is publicly available too; MS doesn't want to swallow its pride and implement a client for it.

</comment><comment><USER35> So basically Microsoft's browser isn't even safe to use temporarily to download a real browser. In 2018 can we stop pretending that any web browser is a safe effective way to acquire any software. While it can be done people have been consistently getting pwned for decades now.

Software should be distributed via apps stores. Preferably vetted lists as opposed to free for alls you can post malware to for $25.

Linux has been doing this correctly for a long time. Any time you guys at Microsoft want to rip this off properly would be absolutely fantastic.

<comment><USER44> The scariest thing about this example is that the green "URL" below the ad says "www.google.com". Who thought it would be a good idea to allow advertisers to fake the URL like that?

Unless it's an IDN homograph attack?</comment></comment>


Dead Man's Switch - <AUTHOR> http://beta.deadmansswitch.net/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, but potentially disastrous, depending on your email contents, if the company messes up.

For this, I'd rather have a lawyer, a safe, a bank box... Anything that would end up dealing with my friends and family if I died.

<comment><USER3> I concur, with the following additional reasons. First, depending on what you meant by "mess up": there's a chance they're not trustworthy (would read something you don't want read), and there's also a chance they screw up (and lose what you want sent - or send it when it shouldn't be sent).

Perhaps an even bigger thing for me is that an email seems so... off-hand, informal. I think if a friend/relative/etc died and an email was automatically sent to me from them I would feel a lot less... less something, can't quite think of the word, than if I got a properly written letter. Less sentimental I guess, less appreciative of it.

<comment><USER4> Hey guys, I read the entire frontpage and somehow missed this story: I made Dead Man's Switch, and the beta is the second iteration, hosted on GAE. I certainly didn't expect it to be HNed so early.

These are all valid concerns. This isn't meant to replace wills or lawyers, it's just something to tell your friends to maybe look for you in the mountains if you don't respond in X days.

Some people also had the idea of using it to monitor infirm/elderly people, so I wrote this second version to hopefully have more flexibility to interface with phone/sms/etc.

I'll be glad to answer any questions you may have!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to spring this on you, but it looked interesting and I figured HN would dig it. Hopefully you're getting some good feedback though.

<comment><USER4> I am, thanks! Luckily everything is going fine so far, and GAE is a champ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We've been working on a product very similar to this for a long time. Traction is difficult, and few people respond well to fear mongering and/or premeditative thoughts that their life may be in danger. In addition, top of mind is also a challenge because the nature of an emergency creates an overload of emotion and therefore often confusion.

The social venture fund I work for provides this product for free because we service underserved and often low-income people in high crime areas around the world. Unfortunately we haven't made the product itself more accessible but we are working on an Android app that will function on some of the cheapest Android phones.

<http://www.buddyguard.org>

</comment><comment><USER6> I've actually been looking for this for a long time. I like to travel around and often wonder what will happen to my digital legacy (code, internet bank accounts, subscriptions to all kinds of things, scanned documents). My previous solution was to e-mail an encrypted file to my parents and give them the password to it on a note, which was then put in the safe. I'll try the site but I'm a bit wary of whether or not it actually works. After all, if you disappear off the face of the planet then you won't be able to check that it actually works.

Edit: it also seems like a perfect target for hacking, as people may write information there that evil people could profit from greatly.

<comment><USER4> I would recommend that everyone encrypts the emails that go on the service, as obviously we can't do it ourselves (we have to actually be able to read them to send them out!).

<comment><USER7> I guess you create an email, encrypt it with a 2048 bit AES key. And set it up to mail to your 'back up'.

Then you go and create 32 throw away email accounts and have each of them running their own aliveness test on a TOR proxy which is mailing you their queries.

When you go 'off line' the 32 mail their part of the key to the recipient, DMS mails them the main letter. :-)

Not a serious suggestion but it would be fun as a plot device in some cyber fiction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something similar could be constructed using Shamir's Secret Sharing (for example) [1], where the involved parties would have to communicate (and thus know each other) to retrieve the secret from their parts. The linked service surely is easier to handle but such a scheme would not depend on any trusted host (except yourself as you know the secret and share the parts). Possibly a combination of both would be great, to ease the communication issue and still keep security high.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing>

<comment><USER9> I'm a little unclear on what problem you're trying to solve. Are you saying you should wait for a second place to set up such a service, sign up for both, and use a simple secret sharing scheme[1] to ensure that only once both go out does anyone know the original message? Or does that not solve the problem you were talking about?

[1]Which in this case would probably just be -- since in this case you don't want it to be reconstructible without all the pieces, and there's not much need for there to be more than 2 -- picking a random string of bits, sending that to one and the XOR with the original to the other.

<comment><USER10> Here's how it would work: You decide how many different friends and family you are going to send your secret message to, and how many of them will need to agree to unlock the message together. Let's say you pick 15 recipients and 8 need to agree. Then ANY 8 of the 15 messages can be combined to decrypt the secret.

No 3rd party service needed at all.

Couldn't you encrypt the results again with different numbers? So you could do interesting things like 'my wife AND (any 3 of 50 others)'

<comment><USER8> 'my wife AND (3 of 50)'

You could take k=54 and give your wife 51 keys.

<comment><USER9> Works for this simple case, but I think iterating the procedure is more general. For instance, suppose there are 6 people -- A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, and you want it to be recoverable given any 2 of the A group and any 2 of the B group; I'm pretty sure that can't be handled with a solution like the above.

<comment><USER8> I think your right. One (k,n)=(2,3) scheme for each group to unlock the (2,2)-scheme for the secret.

And the wife just needs to remember one key this way...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A cousin passed away few years back with cancer. It wasn't sudden but wasn't expected either. (He was 37 and responding well to treatment). His wife was completely uninterested with regards to finances and bills.

He was quite meticulous and wrote down every single account he owned, details like account number, login, password in an excel spreadsheet. It was a lot of help for her.

I worry about security of such a system. I also worry about security of online services for using such a system. I also worry if my wife would be able to locate that file.

Are there any schemes that work for you?

<comment><USER12> Well, the best thing would be to write up all that, print it out, and put it in the same safe-deposit box that holds your will. Of all the storage media we have, paper is still the best proven for long-term retrieval.

<comment><USER13> Never, never put your will into a safe-deposit box. That cannot be opened after you die until you have an executor. Which happens after the will is found.

Just make a couple copies, leave on in your desk, in your office, in your bedside table, with your lawyer. They are not secret documents, not something you have to lock up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are a surprising number of services that do this. No one seems to have gotten any traction though. We decided to make it a video service instead of an email service.

We're actually launching our version this friday. If you read this after Aug 19th, it will be at <http://senotable.com> but right now it's at <http://beta.senotable.com>. Bugs are basically worked out now if you want to check it out. We'll probably advertise the launch on HN Saturday.

</comment><comment><USER15> It would be cool if this service could monitor your Twitter/Facebook/etc for signs of life to cut down on the link-clicking required, and to add more resilience in the case of spam filtering.

<comment><USER4> That's a very good idea! I'll see if I can have some basic Twitter integration soon.

<comment><USER16> Might also be nice to have a very simple push notification enabled mobile app for active reminders in addition to passive checks via Twitter. It'll be way less actions from a user's point of view compared to email when on the go.

<comment><USER4> Ah, very good idea. It'll be simple to make, too, which is good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been thinking about this a bit after the shootings in Norway, and the deadly earthquake in my city a few months ago. I think that I have two requirements in order to be able to die happily: that I have said everything I need to say, and that other people can understand me (think 'speaker for the dead', so that people can understand what was important to me and what I believed in). I have many things I want to do before I die, but if these two needs are provided for, I can honestly die without regret. Everything else is just dependent on me living out my convictions.

Certainly we should regularly tell people that we love them, that they are important to us, etc, but I think being able to say a final goodbye is an entirely different thing. I hope my brother understands how much of a role model he is to me (and I will try to make sure he does know), but even so I would appreciate the chance to say so, one last time. My parents know I love them, but I think they would treasure a post-mortem letter saying exactly that.

However, I agree with everyone who pointed out that emails are a bit impersonal. I would prefer to be able to hand-write letters, and have them automatically posted via regular mail. I think that would be a pleasant surprise.

</comment><comment><USER18> This seems scary. The risk of the confirmation emails being interpreted as spam or not seen is just way too high.

Due to the sensitivity of the information being sent out, there is zero margin for error. Even an after death personal message is pretty hefty if it's a false positive.

I would much rather prefer a service that requires my family to get to the info from a will or lawyer to gain access to my sensitive info.

I'd be interested to hear about the business model to this.

<comment><USER19> Whitelist them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've often entertained the idea of creating a piece of software to tend to certain things after my passing, beyond just sending out a batch of emails. It could reply to emails with canned responses for certain people, even a little AI to respond to questions. Sounds pretty narcissistic now that I think about it. Who really wants to be pestered with emails from dead people?

<comment><USER21> check out the Daemon and Freedom books..... along those lines, just 1000x more so. <http://thedaemon.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Better idea: Live your life in such a way that you have no regrets. Tell people how you feel, when you feel. Don't burn bridges.

<comment><USER23> Non-sequitur.

To the contrary, it may ensure bridges are there when you aren't, and may tell people how you feel when you're not around to.

Example: there are a lot of people whom I care about, but who - with no ill will involved - we've drifted off in our own directions as life tends to. We have vague contact info, and lacking that have mutual friends who can pass things on if need be. Come my demise, I may want a mass-emailing to thank them, ask for casual assistance for my dependents, and generally give a warm farewell. When I went in for heart surgery, I let one of the group know, in case it didn't turn out well; going in wasn't enough to warrant interrupting everyone and writing paper letters, but if I didn't come out someone needed to spread the word ("Hey, remember Carl? he's gone now, but says 'hi, thanks for the memories'"). Not worth printing up stacks of physical letters and burdening someone with putting then-required postage etc., but makes it easy to let people know how you feel when it's too much overhead all around now (hey, that's a big reason why people hate Facebook: too many updates), but when it is important to do so is exactly when you can't.

<comment><USER13> I'm thinking the parent comment was still right. Why not say those things now? Its not 'interrupting everyone', its keeping in contact. Its important to do that now, especially if you haven't in a while.

<comment><USER23> When you're talking about upwards of 1000 people, it becomes an interruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's one hell of an SLA to commit to.

</comment><comment><USER25> I remember a service like this at least 6 years ago, possibly much longer - would be interesting to see if they are still around and if they ever had to "activate" for anyone.

<comment><USER4> This service has been around since 2006, probably earlier (I can't remember when I first built it), so this might be the same one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I always wondered why aggrieved FBI / CIA agents don't use this type of service to mail out their uncensored memoirs to 100 different newspapers & underground conspiracy nuts.

Obviously this site is a huge target for government organizations who have a lot of secrets - whenever a service like this springs up I bet the first order of business is for someone to install a permanent tap on it, and a way to block the emails if need be.

</comment><comment><USER27> Perfect, right up to the point Google kills my account for using my nickname (yes, hyperbolic and no longer accurate, but the point holds).

<comment><USER28> This doesn't use Google Accounts, it's a standard form. You just need to trust DMS, not anyone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What if my email provider, let's call it @MySuperAwesomeEmailProvider.com just goes out of business and decided to stop the service. Then I can't answer to the emails you will "life-ping" me with. And I won't even be able to change my email address on your system because I would have lost my account password. And then the next day, I don't think I would be able to go out.

<comment><USER4> You can just send us an email and prove that you own the account and we'll change your email for you, it's not that big a problem.

<comment><USER29> Do you have a policy for how users can _prove_ that they are who they're claiming to be ? Can you handle having _too_many_ users under the terms of that policy ?

<comment><USER4> The only proof we have is the email validation, but the service doesn't claim to actually be a will. It's more about emailing your friends or family one last time.

I don't understand the question about too many users, can you clarify?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I like the idea of having a service like this. However, I am worried about having one centralized service for this kind of thing. Interested parties, like certain government agencies will have a high interest in hacking it. I hope no one who really needs a dead man's switch as an insurance will use this service, if it ever get's big.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think I've seen services like this before, and either way would rather get a physical person/company with some recourse for acting incorrectly to do it.

But, take a look at the favicon. The broken lemniscate is bizarrely poignant/morbid for a 16*16 pixel square. Neat design.

<comment><USER4> That's the company logo, I didn't get around to changing it yet:

<http://www.stochastictechnologies.com/>

I hadn't noticed how well it fits until you pointed it out, I think I'll keep it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've been working on a similar concept for a while too. I can only hope that mine turns out better (not that this one is bad - rather, if this one is better than mine, then mine is pretty useless!)

</comment><comment><USER33> A way to deal with the issue of it accidentally triggering, as well as get quicker triggers, is to provide a list of family/friends that can verify your non-existence.

</comment><comment><USER34> Sounds like an interesting idea. But, like others, I am skeptical relying on a "beta labeled" web service to handle this for me.

<comment><USER35> The beta is for a "new and improved" version. If you remove beta from the address, you can access the current let's-call-it "stable" version.

I played around with this a while ago. Didn't think the way it's implemented solves the problem as I perceive it. (Plus, the risk of these confirmation emails ending up in spam felt a bit like a downer.)

<comment><USER4> I want to eventually integrate Twilio so it can call you and have you enter a PIN to check in, rather than email, or something to that effect (maybe reply to an SMS?).

That's for a bit further ahead, though.

<comment><USER35> The twilio thing sounds like a good idea. Given the mechanics, the more means of communication you have, the better you're protected against false positives.

I'm still a bit unsure about the part where "you're responsible for asserting that you're still alive." I'd like break it down to its basic premises and see if they actually make sense. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I would never trust my last words to a web service. Instead I have a 'So Long and Thanks for all the Fish' letter in my safe.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is the start of an entertaining thriller. Someone should be working on the movie rights.

<comment><USER38> There was already a book named Daemon that uses similar concepts. I highly recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I hope they process bouncebacks and disable the service for the bounced user.

<comment><USER4> We don't, because your account might have been canceled at your death, so disabling your DMS account would be the last thing you wanted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> How do they make money? Targeted ads? Cemetery plots? Tombstones?

<comment><USER4> The first version didn't, it was just for fun. The second will include a paid account with more features, such as custom sending intervals, phone integration, etc.</comment></comment>


Google Code Jam 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://codejam.withgoogle.com/2018/ <comment><AUTHOR> The qualifying round starts this Friday at 4pm Pacific time, and registration is still open.</comment>


Munch On Me (YC S11) Helps You Discover Tasty Dishes - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/08/10/munch-on-me/

<comment><USER2> Fukime, Leaky and now "Munch On Me"?

Seriously? Is there a way to have a "ask your mom/dad/sister/girlfriend/wife what they think of your name" class before domains are registered?

Branding matters.

<comment><USER3> Now that you've mentioned this fact, I'm more interested in trying out these services.

<comment><USER2> Kind of how I remember the name Shwowp for how horrible it is, but have to Google "tara hunts startup" to find Buyosphere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _On the flip side, restaurants that are tired of the daily deal model may find Munch on Me to be a more enticing option. This is because Munch on Me's core userbase consists of foodies, rather than bargain hunters. These are the type of people who are more likely to become repeat customers._

Why would the userbase consist of foodies and not bargain hunters? If anything, won't it consist of bargain hunting foodies?

<comment><USER5> Is it bad if we're both?

=]

<comment><AUTHOR> A survey of our merchants have shown that ~75% of people who come in buy another dish. We spoke to our users and many are repeat users of Munch On Me (daily and weekly).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> seriously, they named it "munch on me"? nothing double meaning came to mind when they were thinking about that name?

<comment><USER7> That was my first thought too. We're mostly adults here, but the name is seriously terrible. Please, please change it.

<comment><USER8> Must be flying over my head; what's so awful about it?

<comment><USER9> I believe they're referring to [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=carpet+munchi...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=carpet+munching)

<comment><USER8> That's what I figured. Do not get that in my head at all when I think of "munch on me".

<comment><USER9> I didn't really think of it either until it was hinted at, to be honest.

<comment><USER10> Likely a cultural thing. I imagine it would have stronger connotations in British/Australian context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The title of this post would probably make more sense as "Munch On Me (YC S11) Helps You Discover Tasty Dishes With Daily Deals".

<comment><AUTHOR> Good one - changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When Startups pick a name, they should think about 5 years from now not about if it sounds cool at the moment or is provocative.

A controversial name can help you in the beginning, but it can kill you branding in the longterm. (Exception: For some brands a controversial name can work, but then the whole brand has to go along)

If you pick a name like this one, you have to have the balls to build a brand and company that is controversial and provocative in every little detail.

</comment><comment> johnx123-up <http://builtwith.com/munchonme.com>

Can you elaborate why did you choose nginx + Varnish?

</comment><comment><USER13> Techcrunch didn't want it?

<comment><AUTHOR> We were on TC previously: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/27/munch-on-me-is-a- groupon-fo...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/27/munch-on-me-is-a-groupon-for- food-done-right/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is pretty awesome. Food's the main reason I follow Groupon et al.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ideas:

1) Add ratings for each dish, will help me decide what to buy.

2) It actually looks like each of the items on your side is not a dish, but a deal. So if the same dish is on sale in a week, it will be a separate item, correct? If that's the case, I would change it.

3) Add names for dishes on the left hand side. Right now the only way to find out what I'm looking at is to click on it, which loads a new page.

4) Add a filter (right hand side) by type - vegetarian, dessert, etc.

<comment><USER16> Duly noted. We're hackin' hard over here!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are there deals for NYC yet?

<comment><USER16> Not yet, but if you go to the NYC page you can sign up for an email update for when we do arrive. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Legal risk of signing up on a competitor's website? - <AUTHOR>

If you are developing a new application and exploring the competition in your market, is there a legal risk of signing up on the competitor's website and agreeing to the terms of service (especially relating to ownership of intellectual property)? <comment><USER2> I can't see how. You're not scraping, not stealing code, not doing anything. You're just checking them out (and they will likely check you out).

Auto companies tear down each others cars. Tech companies tear down each others products. Grocery stores check out each others prices.

and so and so on.

None of them steal. Just poke, prod, look, and learn. Then apply to their own if it's suitable.

I have never seen a Non-compete clause in any TOS.

<comment><USER2> Just to add to this; Seems My____ (the site formerly known as MySpace) ripped off a stealth start-up called pintrist.

<http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/27/myspace-pinterest/>

This goes a bit beyond what you're talking about as it's not just checking it out but blatantly imitating. That said, the fallout is likely to come down on My_____, at least amongst the technorati.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've looked at several competing services. I look for screen shots, videos, test accounts and finally a real account.

Just keep in mind that you don't want to be too focused on what your competition is doing. Its ok to check them out, but focus on your customers. They are the ones that really matter.

</comment><comment><USER4> I imagine that would depend on what the terms of service says.

<comment><USER5> ...and whether any applicable language is enforceable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an aside non-competes are worthless unless you include 'consideration'. What this means is that you offer something of value to someone in exchange 'in consideration' for not working for a competing firm. From personal experience with a good lawyer non-competes without consideration aren't worth the paper they are written on.</comment>