Netflix Pulls Plug on Public API - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/16/netflix-api/ <comment><USER2> What the name for when a company seems to have stagnated, based on the lack of change in their front-end, even though you're sure there're engineers diligently toiling away at things?

Netflix's frontend has not have any real improvement in quite a while. "Share on Facebook"? "Kids Mode"? "Watched by Piper Chapman (Orange Is the New Black)"? C'mon!

Where's the Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB integration? Why does their search still have zero options to help you search? Where's Netflix's rendition of A Better Queue or Instant Watcher?

The shutting down of the public API wouldn't be such a big deal if they paid more attention to their frontend. It also seems that Netflix thinks that if they don't bring up the fact that there are movies that aren't on Netflix, we won't notice.

The next company that comes to mind is Craigslist. I _know_ there are engineers there working on hard problems (the scale they operate on is amazing) but in the midst of the current mobile and UX revolution, all they've manged to do is add a frame around the results page so it's easier to search again?

OKCupid is another site that comes to mind where it looks like the front end is just stuck and has stopped progressing.

(Gmail gets a pass because Google just gave up and made Inbox instead.)

<comment><USER3> So? I like Netflix's front-end. So does my daughter, my mother, my mother's mother, my dad (who is terrible with tech), and almost everyone else I know.

Craigslist is much the same, what they have is easy to recognize, very easy to use for both sellers and buyers, and it has been _consistent_.

If it's not broken don't fix it.

<comment><USER2> > So? I like Netflix's front-end. So does my daughter, my mother, my mother's > mother, my dad (who is terrible with tech), and almost everyone else I know.

Not sure what your point is here. I don't particularly like it, I have friends who complain about it, and some of my coworkers (who are great with tech, btw) also dislike it.

Have _none_ of the people you mentioned have ever recognized an actor but have been at a loss for where they've previously seen them? Say, that's not something that Netflix could help with?

The continued existence) of InstantWatcher, CanIStreamIt?, Flixster, Fanhattan, Yidio, proves that there's a not-entirely-satisfied portion of their customer base. Why it seems they're doing nothing to appeal to those users is beyond me.

> Craigslist is much the same, what they have is easy to recognize, very easy > to use for both sellers and buyers, and it has been consistent.

It _is_ consistent, I'll give you that. Sellers ignoring phone calls, not returning voice mails, unreplied emails, listings for things which have already been sold with an irate seller that _does_ pick up but then calls you an idiot for not telepathically knowing the item has been sold, bait-and- switch tactics masquerading as incompetence, the poor quality of listings themselves - that listing in autos for $1 is _definitely_ accurate. Listings gaming the search by cramming half the dictionary at the end of the post. People saying they'll meet you to buy the item and then being an hour late or just completely flaking.

Yeah, that's totally not broken.

> If it's not broken don't fix it.

Back in 2006, smartphones _weren 't_ broken, but I'm sure glad Apple came along and 'fixed' it.

<comment><USER4> > People saying they'll meet you to buy the item and then being an hour late > or just completely flaking.

Clearly a problem with the front-end.

<comment><USER2> Craigslist could have an escrow service for money so as to disincentive not following through, or only staking claim to an item if you're serious about paying for it.

They could have a seller/buyer rating system _cough_ eBay.

I mean, you're not even trying...

<comment><USER5> I think he was trying to point out those aren't UX issues, they're features you wish existed

<comment><USER6> he's not arguing the craigslist UX is _broken_ just that there are lots of areas where it could be _improved_.

> they're features you wish existed

the netflix UX is not broken. it just hasn't changed. yea, we clearly want more features. and netflix should too - getting to the top and then stagnating is _exactly_ what their predecessor did..

just because you're happy with the way things are, doesn't mean it cannot possibly improve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> APIs are something a service offers when it needs help to grow. Once the service gets big, the API goes away, or becomes a pay service.

Google once allowed search queries via a SOAP interface. That's gone. They also dropped RSS feeds. But the API for submitting paid ads, that works. The paid cloud services are fine.

Twitter doesn't like third party Twitter clients any more and will pull the API key of anyone who writes one. A third party client might have a spam ("sponsored tweet") filter.

<comment><USER8> _> APIs are something a service offers when it needs help to grow. Once the service gets big, the API goes away, or becomes a pay service._

I wouldn't phrase it exactly that way. All the examples are of something much more specific: APIs go away when a company embraces an advertising-driven revenue model.

Google offered a SOAP API because back then they weren't an ad company. When they became an ad company the API went away, because you could use it to get Google search results without the ads. Twitter supported third-party clients because back then they weren't an ad company. When they became an ad company the API went away, because you could use it to read tweets without seeing the ads.

Once you decide your company is going to make its money via ads, the strangulation of any channel people can use to get to your service without seeing the ads inevitably follows.

<comment><USER9> I agree that this is the pattern generally, but it doesn't explain Netflix's decision specifically, unless they're secretly planning an ad-based revenue model, which doesn't seem likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's too bad, but the writing has been on the walls for a long time. A close friend of mine had build a great little iOS app a while back designed to let you know when items on your queue were going to be pulled from Netflix instant. After several months of the app being live in the app store, Netflix decided to limit the results to showing either greater than 2 weeks or less than 2 weeks. Eventually, that information was removed from the API altogether, and my friend pulled his app from the store.

From that single anecdotal data point, I had the Netflix API has always been a mess anyway, and poorly documented.

<comment><USER11> What was the app's name? I built the same thing but for Android app about 4 years ago: FixMyQ. It's still a painful use case that I wish they would officially implement, or at least be more transparent about. I always suspected that they didn't/don't want users to focus on movies expiring at all (makes sense). However, rather than educating users as to why this happens, they pulled the info like you mentioned. Such a shame!

<comment><USER10> It was called Queueview. I couldn't find its homepage (in sure it was taken down), but the Facebook page, complete with all the notices about the API changes is here: [https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?v=timeline&filter=1&id=31...](https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?v=timeline&filter=1&id=310709142291577)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I do not understand the backend reason for this (and did not when I saw the announcements about this two years ago): while I can see not wanting to provide a full movie metadata API, having "is this or is this not available on Netflix right now" seems like a really important API to have, one that allows websites people use to browse and find movies to funnel users into Netflix (and seems a natural fit for their very popular affiliate program).

Apple actually provides massive database dumps of everything available in iTunes, for free, to anyone who asks, which is why virtually every music discovery site or app has a "buy this on iTunes" button, not just "a small set of developers whose applications have proven to be the most valuable for many of our members" (which is a quote from the Netflix developer blog earlier this year; you have to pull this from Google Cache now, sadly).

I don't see how "stream/rent this on Netflix" is a bad thing for Netflix (but am totally willing to believe I am not "seeing far enough", because this is not my area of expertise, hence why I am asking this question: I hope to be enlightened ;P). (edit:) I guess maybe for the same reason Uber and Lyft don't want APIs? Because they want to dominate the end user searching and discovery experience as well? But like, even Walmart and Amazon offer APIs... ;P.

<comment><USER13> Netflix is great, don't get me wrong... I wouldn't want to do without them. But at the same time, a large portion of their business model is devoted to making sure that nobody can tell just how little content they have to offer. There is no other explanation for deliberately nerfing their search engine and killing off third-party apps.

If and when Netflix is able to reach fair and reasonable streaming contracts from all of the major studios, I believe the API will come back. Right now, though, it's more of a liability than an asset to them.

<comment><USER14> >But at the same time, a large portion of their business model is devoted to making sure that nobody can tell just how little content they have to offer.

You nailed it.

Netflix is the best thing out there for legal streaming TV and movie content; it's that "legal" part which makes things complicated. Objectively speaking, Netflix clones that pop up but have no qualms about distributing pirated content provide a much better experience for users, because just about everything they want to watch is a click away.

In fact, Netflix's entire UI was designed with this in mind. All the "main" views try to give the impression that there is a _lot_ of content, yet the search functionality is not very visible or easy to find and takes 2 steps to actually use. This seems to be a rule that applies to many applications: when your home page is just a search bar, that often means 80% or more of what the majority of users want is available. When your home page is a directory, or just a flattened spattering of content, you know that user's options are constrained.

Netflix is trying to push customers to use their application as more of a feature listing rather than mislead them into thinking it's a universal "watch whatever you want", because they know people will be disappointed if they think it's the latter (and I would assume A/B testing and metrics have demonstrated this to them empirically). So they go with a model of "here's a bunch of stuff you can choose from, you may not have heard of this show but it's good!" instead of "your own personal streaming media hub".

Obviously one can't fault them for this, since they have to rely on B2B relationships that don't always necessarily provide an excellent value proposition for the partner business and/or are very expensive for Netflix, and they have to obey the law. I'm also hoping they can work out more contracts with more studios.

<comment><USER15> Very true and you seem to be right. The HBO GO app is very much like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In case this wasn't obvious to you, Netflix is not the internet's friend, fun examples include:

\- Browser DRM (making it impossible to produce a fully functional AND open source browser)

\- HDCP-for-sockets (e.g., to replace HTTPS with something they can tie to platform DRM-protected key exchange -- [http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security- layer-m...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-modern- take-on.html))

... and now this.

<comment><USER17> Well, it's either that or they just shut down. With Flash not supported on mobile devices or Linux and same thing with Silverlight, what are the other options for them to stream content in a manner acceptable to the companies licensing their shows to them?

But we've had this debate many times in the past. It's just one of those things that people love to keep bringing up as if it changes anything.

<comment><USER16> So you're not culpable for your actions if you make a deal with the devil, just because it's to keep your business afloat?

<comment><USER18> Let's not be dramatic ("the devil", really?). Are you really saying that no Netflix is better than Netflix with browser DRM? I don't like the Hollywood players either, but it certainly shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that they don't want their content to be trivially copied and distributed outside of their control (read: death grip.) Personally, I'll take the Netflix we can have over no Netflix at all.

<comment><USER16> Ethics aren't ethics if they can be abandoned for simple expediency.

<comment><USER18> I'm not convinced that the "ethics" surrounding content protection are so cut and dry (I'm ignoring malware masked add DRM here as i don't believe or applies). I wish that Hollywood would get with the times. I wish they would give me affordable and reasonable mediums with which to watch their content.

That said, i recognize that it _is_ their content, and i don't think that their methods here make them "bad" or "evil". I think they're dinosaurs who are slow to change and afraid of losing money.

I don't think this is a moral issue, nor do i believe that we have an inaliable right to watch Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones.

<comment><USER16> You don't think that rent seeking is an ethical issue?

<comment><USER18> I do, but I think it goes a level up. It's the political system that needs to change. I fully expect companies to use what means they have available to them in order to improve their business (to a point). I'n also not saying that they don't do anything unethical, I was speaking to the general idea of protecting their investment as it applies to DRM in your browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They announced the retirement 5 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891171)

<comment><USER20> Announced 18 months ago: [http://developer.netflix.com/blog/read/Changes_to_the_Public...](http://developer.netflix.com/blog/read/Changes_to_the_Public_API_Program)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At least these news reminded me that I wanted to pull the plug on the membership for a long time, so I just did that. Not in the protest but because selection (in Canada at least) is abysmal. I wonder how many people relied on 3rd party software to manage and view their Netflix and whether it causeS number of cancellations to be big enough for them to notice.

</comment><comment><USER22> Too bad, since there's basically no way to find what good content Netflix has using their inferior tools. From accounts which are permanently contaminated by kid shows (let your kid watch a few shows, you'll never get anything except cartoons recommended ever again, irreversible, no way to edit or start over) to discovery algorithms that just give you the same five shows (that you've already watched, on Netflix) over and over...

<comment><USER23> > irreversible, no way to edit or start over

As of a few months ago, you can now remove titles from your viewing history.

[http://lifehacker.com/netflix-now-lets-you-delete-films- or-s...](http://lifehacker.com/netflix-now-lets-you-delete-films-or-shows- from-your-ac-1633561640)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So now sort by recommendation ranking is truly gone even via other websites, along with Netflix being eliminated from data search such as apps that help you find where a show is available to watch (legally) across all services?

Wow. I do not get this at all.

I can't quite understand why so many big services avoid obvious features related to ranking and discovery. Is it because they've found that people just burn through their top 10% of recommended content, and then quit the service? This seems hard to believe. Is there some other reason I'm missing?

I've been calling this "value evasion" to refer to obvious features that are consistently avoided by many top web services, and working to understand what the point of hiding that functionality is for a while now. There must be really clear reasoning as to why it's a bad idea, but I have to admit I'm stumped.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does this effect apps on things like smart TVs? I would think there is still a private api for licensed apps?

<comment><USER26> I don't think they use the API in question here. Also I think those might be developed / maintained by Netflix themselves.

<comment><USER27> They have special SDKs

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StCrm572aEs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StCrm572aEs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was planning on using the Netflix API as a movie database for an upcoming webapp of mine. Anyone know any alternative movie database APIs?

<comment><USER20> [http://www.omdbapi.com/](http://www.omdbapi.com/)

[http://developer.rottentomatoes.com/](http://developer.rottentomatoes.com/)

<comment><USER29> +1 on rottentomatoes. easy to get an API key with reasonable rate limits for free, and the API has a decent fuzzy search. (you might have to do some fiddling with the results, but what you're looking for is usually there)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is why I see the trouble with the semantic web. If even large guys like Netflix are unwilling to share their API publicly then semantic web becomes something like a really expensive toy that people with very large pockets can afford or you end up scraping everyone to death. This is why I think strategies like Kimono and Import.io will fail.

<comment><USER31> Unless we move to open public metadata for common needs, with optional private annotations for those who can afford toys.

A possible role model is Apple's support of OpenStreetMap as a defensive response to Google Maps, which has improved the quality of open GIS data.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who is using Jekyll? (+feedback) - <AUTHOR>

Just recently got interested in Jekyll to power my blog pursuits. I've decided to dedicate my efforts to the Jekyll platform.
With that said I'm interested in how many people are actively using Jekyll.
IMO using Jekyll is an uphill battle even though its 3+ years old. There aren't any definitive "quickstart" tutorials or frameworks. Liquid syntax is a pain to use (from a programmer's perspective) and the docs could use a lot more step-by-step direction.
My work will involve addressing these issues with my
ultimate goal being to convince more technical people to contribute their thoughts to the Internet.
Please promote your Jekyll blog here and list any main issues you have with Jekyll. <comment><USER2> I feel your pain with getting setup with Jekyll. I've been using it for a little over a year for my blog that is hosted with Github Pages.

I am pretty happy with my setup (finally) - I've got blog posts and book reviews, but also talk slides generated with Showoff. I use categories in the Front Matter for grouping the three types of content.

The nice part is that now that I've done the setup work, I've had friends and co-workers just fork my blog, clear out the _posts folder and start writing (and hopefully re-style at some point).

My main pain points are around the required dates in the filenames and the lack of documentation/examples for using the Template Data. It would be nice for RSS feeds to be built-in as well.

<https://github.com/swanson/swanson.github.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using jekyll with linode quite successfully. Haven't really had any problems. I did have to make some modifications to the Jekyll source to modify the way it finds posts (I don't like that it only looks for posts that have dates in the filenames). Other than that it's been working quite great!

Here is a full description of how I am using Jekyll:

<http://www.akashkgarg.com/uncat/anatomy.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> I've used Jekyll to build <http://utilise.ca>, a french clone of Daniel Bogan's <http://usesthis.com>. I'm not a big fan of the Liquid template language either.

You can check out the entire source code here: <https://github.com/remiprev/utilise.ca>

</comment><comment><USER5> I use Octopress for my blog <http://nimbupani.com> which uses Jekyll with a bunch of useful plugins and rake files. My notes on porting from Drupal are here <http://nimbupani.com/redesign-notes.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been on Jekyll for a while now for my personal blog, migrated from Blogger. Hosting-wise I'm on S3, which is very simple to setup and very cost effective. I would agree that the easiest way to get started is to essentially copy someone else's setup on Github and then modify what you need.

Blog: <http://www.ohscope.com> and my S3 push setup: <http://www.ohscope.com/2011/02/20/s3-jekyll-deployment/>

</comment><comment><USER7> I recently switched my site[1] over to Jekyll, hosted on GitHub Pages, and am very satisfied. The easiest way to get started is to fork Tom Preston-Werner's Jekyll blog[2], modify the layout as you'd like, and then populate your blog posts. This way, you can jump right in and then learn more about the intricacies of Jekyll as you go.

1: <http://blog.metamorphium.com>

2: <http://tom.preston-werner.com/>

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm using Jekyll on my dedicated server and absolutely love it. I customized it fully too. I added in Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, Readability and Instagram, along with a Konami Code easter egg :P. I then tuned it fully so its very fast. Overall, I am very happy that I am using Jekyll.

My site: <http://robbie.io>

The GitHub repo for my site: <http://github.com/robbiet480/robbie.io>

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://octopress.org/>

octopress is pretty sweet.

rake new_post["title"] and you have a new post.

easy to style as well.

<comment><USER2> I don't know about octopress - I don't get who the customer is. That rake script can be done in like 15 lines of any scripting language (I wrote my own in about 10 minutes). I don't have any issues styling my stock Jekyll blog.

If you are using a static blog site over something like WordPress you are probably technical in nature and can pretty easily setup your own Jekyll site. The only benefit I see personally are the plugins - which you can't even use on Github Pages as far as I know.

IMO octopress is a solution looking for a problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely agree with this. Octopress definitely launched with momentum but it relies on a fork of Jekyll and custom plugins.

This necessarily means GitHub can never merge any developments upstream even if they wanted to since GitHub needs Jekyll for GitHub pages.

My main concern right now is moving _Jekyll_ forward which is a lot more frustrating of a problem since I want to make improvements that will work natively on GitHub pages. My first solution to this will be the use of a lot of javascript =), with the requirement that it degrade gracefully.

Plugin development is still worthwhile since from the replies it seems a good amount of blogs are self-hosted. The trick is to properly separate and advocate the _plugin self-hosted format_ from the _deploy to gitHub super easy quickstart_ format.

<comment><USER2> I can't speak for the self-hosted side of things, but two underutilized features for github hosted Jekyll blogs that I think could be really neat are Pull Requests (for comments, typo corrections, or collaborative blogs i.e. AltDevBlogADay) and the GitHub API (ability to query the files in the repo akin to a SQL database for Wordpress, OAuth with the Github sign in button, and using Javascript to create posts via commits).

The collaborative blog via pull requests seems to align with your mission of getting more technical experts writing on the web - the steps to getting a post published: write it in Markdown and submit a Pull Request. You could have an Editor comment on the post in the pull request, offer suggestions/corrections etc, then merge into the main blog repo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the AltDevBlogADay reference. I hadn't heard of this.

Your suggestions seem spot on. I hadn't thought to incorporate the GitHub api for collaborative features like you outline.

I had an idea for a reputation system backed by GitHub auth. Basically any githubber can upvote an article as a kind of endorsement. The idea being that a reader can trust the source content a bit more knowing it has x upvotes or what not. It's just an idea at this point and would have to work with a lot of javascript/jsonp/widget stuff going on.

But back to your collaboration suggestions, yes definitely something I'm writing down! Hopefully working _with_ native GitHub integration will spur more adoption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can do really nice things with jekyll for example developmentseed website [<http://developmentseed.org/>]. You can check a post about it [http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/09/09/jekyll-github- pag...](http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/09/09/jekyll-github-pages/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I used jekyll to build zv.github.com and I also hate Liquid. Markdown is the ticket. The source is of course available on github.</comment>


Y Combinator Is Boot Camp for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/ff_ycombinator/all/1

<comment><USER2> Steven Levy put a ridiculous amount of time and effort into researching this article, and I think it shows. He _really_ immersed himself into the whole experience--for months! In some ways, it felt like he was a part of the class, working alongside us as we worked to build our companies.

This kind of real journalism is something that I didn't think existed any more, at least not in the tech world. But after watching him work, and seeing his process, I think it's just a damn shame how rare his kind of journalism is.

Didn't mean for this to turn into a puff comment, but I have to admit the whole production was quite impressive.

<comment><USER3> I couldn't speak any more highly of Steven Levy's writing as well. He wrote a story for Newsweek during our batch: [http://www.newsweek.com/2007/05/20/meet- the-next-billionaire...](http://www.newsweek.com/2007/05/20/meet-the-next- billionaires.html)

The feeling was very similar. Having experienced all of the time he put into it, how he listened to all of our seemingly pedestrian stories and masterfully wove an eloquent story line out of mere tidbits -- it's a pretty awesome experience.

He's one of the best writers around and one of the last bastions of true, old- fashioned journalism in the tech world.

<comment><USER4> Glenn Chapman of AFP is another great old-school journalist who focuses on tech. Well researched, concise, balanced - as good wire stories should be.

<http://google.com/news?q=author:Glenn+Chapman>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Makes me wish someone was doing a YC documentary.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a YC hopeful, this article really helped me to understand what really goes on during the three months. It's inspiring to hear stories about companies who pivot right before Demo Day and actually receive help with their ideas from PG. I'm just starting to learn about the difficulties of running a startup. We're really lucky to have guys like PG out their who are truly interested in innovation and not just the money. This article proves his dedication to the industry and to all of the people who are working so hard to get to the top. My day = motivated.

</comment><comment><USER7> I know it's cliche, but what I got most from this article is that traction matters most.

Growth is the lifeblood of the industry.

To get that, you have to make something people want.

Everything else is pretty insignificant.

Simple, but not easy.

</comment><comment><USER8> Heh, I'm the "Greece" in that article.

</comment><comment><USER9> For a relatively brief piece on YC I think it was very accurate, capturing the significance of YC, the experience of the founders, and the general excited feeling all around that imbues YC. Obviously it's for a more general audience so probably contains nothing much new content-wise for HN readers but is interesting to see it all put together.

This is something I'll email my dad, who when I mentioned I mentioned I applied for an incubator asked "What do you need office space for?"

</comment><comment><USER10> _The Viral Me_ is another long article profiling Y Combinator from December 2010.

[http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201012/viral- me-s...](http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201012/viral-me-silicon- valley-social-networking-devin-friedman?printable=true)

</comment><comment><USER11> Ummm needs to be corrected: LikeALittle: A slick iPad-based app for doctors that collects all of a patient's chart info in one place. The application has gotten raves from the physicians who have tried it so far.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm all for promoting entrepreneurship but it'd be nice to highlight those who actually make money and care about building businesses too, rather than celebrating simply taking investor's money and spending it.

<comment><USER13> Plenty of YC companies make money. If you are referring specifically to the ones in the article, many of them are in the initial stages of building the company. Unless you are a consulting company it is not easy to make money from day 0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess we will all agree that there is an outrageous error in the article. It should not be 'Terminator itself', but 'Terminator himself' rather, shouldn't it?

</comment><comment><USER15> Some part of me really thought that a "Y Combinator is so great" article can't be more interesting to HN people then understanding Fourier Transformation or discussing the development of ML research.

Maybe I'm just too naive. Thanks for that lesson.

<comment><USER16> And people down voted you for this! Sigh!

<comment><USER15> Probably people expect that I say something bad about this article, where my comment wasn't about the article at all.

But hey. That was the result I expected and I happily pay the price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Please. Someone who has actually been to boot camp debunk this ridiculous metaphor.

<comment><USER18> Boot Camp : Military :: Y Combinator : Startups

a·nal·o·gy/əˈnaləjē/ Noun 1\. A comparison between two things, typically on the basis of their structure and for the purpose of explanation or clarification.

Should the readers of Wired not be familiar with Y Combinator, the analogy implied in the article's title should actually give them a good idea of what YC is all about.

I don't think anyone (or at least many) will take the analogy literally and expect to see photos of YC founders going through the rigors of military boot camp. Instead, I bet most people who read that title will get the comparison right off the bat: Y Combinator is a short, intensive, exhaustive program focused on preparing new founders to be more successful in the business world. Just as military boot camp is a short, intensive, exhaustive program focused on preparing new recruits to be more successful on the battlefield.</comment></comment>


Yes, Blockchain Is Going to Change the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.eshioji.co.uk/2016/06/yes-blockchain-is-going-to-change-world.html <comment><USER2> I've been following this technology for a few years, but never got involved in it because it does not solve any problem I have (although it may, or may not, solve others, never seen it solve any real world problem so far).

First, the bitcoin was going to change the world, then well nevermind, it's not the bitcoin, it's all about the blockchain. Then well, nevermind, it's not the blockchain, it's the DAO. Then, well wait, the DAO has it's own problems, but wait, it's going to be fixed and then it'll take the world over.

Is there any end to this?</comment>


Philippines: Children risk death diving for gold - <AUTHOR> https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/09/29/philippines-children-risk-death-dig-and-dive-gold <comment><AUTHOR> Gold is in all of our electronic devices. There doesn't appear to be any way to tell if my devices use clean gold or if they're full gold mined and processed by children in dangerous conditions.</comment>


Show HN: Visual Studio Code for Chromebooks and Raspberry Pi (Native ARM/ARM64) - <AUTHOR> https://headmelted.com/visual-studio-code-for-arm64-67c19625ba2c <comment><USER2> Nice.

I was already impressed to see VSC embedded in websites.</comment>


The importance of sleep in a startup - <AUTHOR> http://leostartsup.com/2012/02/the-importance-of-sleep-in-a-startup/ <comment><USER2> On a similar note, the importance of taking breaks where you're doing something _TOTALLY_ different is incredibly crucial. By this, I do not mean playing a quick game of angry birds.

If you're coding, writing, doing research based tasks or basically anything where you're at a computer or in a book, the difference going for a walk makes is incredible. It's taken me about 4 years to accept that even the hardest problems sometimes fall into place during a shower, while walking to get a coffee or just through going somewhere physically different and talking through the problem to yourself - no pen, paper or screens allowed.

I don't get too much out of breaks every 45 minutes, and when things are going well am happy to work 2,3 even 10 hours straight, but if I've been stuck on something for more than 20 minutes 9 times out of 10 if I leave and come back I can solve it pretty much instantly. It's like a reset button to my mental state, and I'm always pleasantly surprised with the result.

<comment><USER3> My favorite example of this is Archimedes. When someone touts the virtues of being at your desk without turning your head away from the monitor and lifting your hands off the keyboard I usually ask "where was Archimedes when he had his "Eureka!" moment?".

<comment><USER4> To be fair, the story actually shows me was doing something related to his study when he made his discovery. In a bathtub that was too full, he found that physical objects cause water displacement. He wasn't planning on making a breakthrough, but it didn't just come to him out of the blue.

Point still stands, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In order to squeeze every bit of productivity out of my day, I've experimented with several different sleeping patterns, including but not limited to polyphasic sleeping (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep>).

In my experiments, I've come to realize that nothing comes close to optimal sleeping patterns than letting your body decide for itself. Depending on the activities you engage in through out the day, the body may need fluctuating amounts of rest. I don't think that one needs a consistent amount every day. A lot depends on the activities you have been involved in as well as your mental and physical state. Sleeping too little however, which seems to be the goal of many polyphasic sleepers is great if you are mostly performing mundane activities. However, ample sleep is essential for doing any kind of creative work.

The human body is extremely good at picking how much rest it needs. If you can afford to, follow your body clock instead of an alarm clock and sleep when you feel tired. Over the years, I find that naturally we are bi-phasic sleepers, requiring a long rest at night and then a short nap in the afternoon.

<comment><USER6> So you believe it's best to wait until you're quite tired and then go to bed with no alarm?

<comment><USER7> This is exactly what I've been doing for about three months now. I quit my 9-to-5 to work on a then side-project full-time. Being outside the structure of a corporate work-environment, I started doing this and it's been the most productive time of my life to date.

When I'm always fully rested and have 10-ish hour blocks of uninterrupted time to work, I get way more done. The only problem is my sleep cycle doesn't always line up with the celestial day. My guess is that's due to two things: 1) artificial light, and 2) I'm fairly sedentary while working and I don't workout, so I tire more slowly than I would if I was doing something more active. So, I've found I settle into 24-30 hour cycle, which results in some ridiculous sleep/wake times.

Thankfully, I have the freedom to do this and it works great for me. If you can swing it, I suggest trying it for a month or so.

<comment><USER8> I do the same, sleep when I'm tired and have the problem of sometimes having to match my sleep/day to being awake at specific times for one off things and sometimes that throws me off productivity. I have also found that I too in general do 24-30 hour days, I'd say the average is 18 hours awake and 10 hours asleep, although I've done as much as 34 awake and 16 asleep.

I've been doing this for over a year now and I think it's hugely beneficial for me, although within a month I'm moving to working from an office so I'll be trying standard 9 - 5 (I think, unless I'm allowed freedom!) so it will be interesting to compare. Personally I think structure is good for me, although the freedom is great I can find myself wasting 2 days without doing anything productive... definitely something everyone should try anyway

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's relatively well-documented that sleep deprivation has effects similar to those of alcohol intoxication, but coming in to work drunk is a firing offense, while working to the point of sleep deprivation is regarded as heroic. Of course, these aren't quite the same, but I still wish the idea that your dedication is measured by your level of self-destructive sleep habits weren't so prevalent in the tech industry.

<comment><USER10> Your comment is so true. I currently live in Japan and I see all the sleep deprived Japanese going about their jobs in the laboratory, sleeping in the desk or dozing off while trying to work.

I had a talk with them trying to ask them if they realize that better sleep would make them more productive and also improve their overall health but their belief seems to be as you say. They think it's heroic to stay up late working and as a consequence be a zombie next day.

And once you start this it's a vicious cycle that is pretty hard to stop. Nothing can increase productivity and mental stability like a good night's sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Many people have difficulty going to sleep even though they are tired. There are many reasons for insomnia. When the mind is too active, we have a hard time going to sleep or even if we do go to sleep, we are restless and do not sleep deeply. There are many theories and opinions about how much sleep a person needs and it certainly varies according to state of health, activity and circumstances. But most of us would agree that the deeper and more peaceful the sleep, the more rested we feel the next morning. <http://www.kundaliniyoga.org/kyt16.html>

</comment><comment><USER12> Very interesting connection between Parkinson's Law and one's energy levels. Based on my own experience, I'd have to agree. I dislike having to come into the office after 5-6 hours of sleep just to show my face, spending the rest of the day working at a snail pace while phasing out every 10 minutes.

I wish our work culture would allow us to come in late when we had something prevent us from getting adequate sleep.

</comment><comment><USER13> Leo's very good at publishing stuff that HN likes.

I think your attitude to sleep changes as you age. When I was a teenager, all- nighters were tiring but after a night's sleep I'd be back to normal.

These days, it takes me a week to recover from an all-nighter.

The thing that really got me thinking about sleep as a precious resource was being diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnoea. I was getting to the point where I was sleeping for 14 hours and waking up exhausted.

The year I got a CPAP machine, my grade average jumped from credit to distinction.

<comment><USER14> _The thing that really got me thinking about sleep as a precious resource was being diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnoea. I was getting to the point where I was sleeping for 14 hours and waking up exhausted._

I often wonder about sleep apnea, I need a lot of sleep and have limited energy, nothing drastic but still noticeable compared to others. But I tend to think I don't have it, since in the morning I usually remember having long dreams - and sleep apnea is supposed to interrupt your sleep frequently. Were you able to observe new patterns in your sleep once you started using a CPAP machine?

<comment><USER15> Firstly, if you have any suspicion of having sleep apnea, I highly recommend getting a sleep study[0] done. I was diagnosed with a moderate case of obstructive sleep apnea after suffering from it for several years. I feel fortunate to have discovered and treated it at a fairly young age since it results general misery and is believed to cause heart attacks and strokes if left untreated.

I found no noticeable difference in my ability to recall dreams from the night before, or the length of dreams I experienced between using CPAP or not.

With regard to sleep patterns, the results from CPAP were immediately noticeable. I found that CPAP allowed me to go from a zombie that needed 12 or more hours of sleep per night to one that only needed about 4. This was not better. Despite really enjoying the extra 8 hours of "waking" time I had each day I was still tired all the time and thus made little use of the extra hours. I now sleep between 7 and 8 hours per night, I feel great and I am way more productive.

[0]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysomnography>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't believe some people are willing to sacrifice sleep for a long periods of time in order to "do startups". The sad thing is that we even have to discuss if it is bad or not?

</comment><comment><USER17> Researchers that studied sleep for decades are now coming up with different suggestions than what Leo suggests. When people don't get enough sleep, they will die early. When people get too much sleep, they'll also die early. Recent studies show that probably 7 hours should be the maximum.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wouldn't it be great if there was a branch of science that looked at how different people respond to sleep over time rather than some guy making personal assertions with anecdotal evidence?

</comment><comment><USER19> I've lost the reference, but I understand that performing musicians find they need more sleep than than most people, with 9-10 hours a night being entirely normal.

This suggests that sleep has less to do with recovery from physical exertion, and more to do with the ability to sustain intense mental focus for extended periods - especially when that focus is being used to create and perfect something that demands comprehension of a complex whole.

<comment><USER7> Understand, too, that the work schedule of musicians are different from most. Shifting the working day into the evening and after dark, plus ubiquitous artificial light probably alter sleep habits just as much as the nature of the work.</comment></comment>


New parallax site I just launched with/for PiXLMiX - <AUTHOR> http://www.pixlmix.com/

<comment><USER2> amazing!

<comment><AUTHOR> i know who this is. haha, thank you =)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: remote collaboration setup 2013 - <AUTHOR>

HN, how do you make remote collaboration work?<p>Which tools do you use for:<p>* planning / scheduling<p>* real-time note-taking/drawing<p>* chat / voip / video chat<p>* file sharing<p>* Software prototyping / mockups / wireframes <comment><AUTHOR> My team of two uses Trello, Skype, Sketchpad.io and Balsamiq (desktop).

What we really need is a solution that can act as a whiteboard where many users can draw and write at the same time.</comment>


Phantom Types in Rust - <AUTHOR> http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2013/08/15/phantom_types_in_rust.html

<comment><USER2> Phantom types are used frequently in Haskell to really great effect. Perhaps the most well-known example is the ST monad which allows you to do mutable, destructive updates in a "pure" fashion by containing them all within a narrow region. From outside of that region, the effects are invisible and referentially transparent. This is great for embedding your favorite iterative/mutable algorithm in a pure program.

Phantom types along with quantified type erasure allow the compiler to force these impure regions to be contained. They disallow sharing of variables or results between ST monad invocations statically.

To do so, most operations are polymorphic in the phantom variable. So something like `get (put x box)` is of type `ST s Int` for an `x :: Int`. The `s` corresponds to whichever ST region this action gets run within.

Running ST looks like `runST :: (forall s. ST s a) -> a` which means that the ST action you give to ST must be completely naive in its choice of region. Another way of thinking about it is that the `s` parameter is chosen adversarially by the compiler so that only ST actions which are able to be run in any region are allowed to be run at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> I loved this blog. BluishCoder was my goto for Factor articles when I was learning about Factor. At least I thought it was. Browsing the titles under the Factor tag, I don't find one article I recognize, and all of the links I've tried clicking through wind up at nginx 404.

Sadly! Books and their covers... I'm sure they were good.

I did find the article I was thinking of, but today keyword search has failed me. I was looking for "monotonically increasing timers" and the correct search was "fast now"

[http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2011/03/fast-now.html](http://re- factor.blogspot.com/2011/03/fast-now.html)

Chris D, are you here reading comments? Can you bring back your Factor articles?

<comment><USER4> Yes, it's unfortunate that I lost a bunch of articles in a drive corruption on linode: [http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2013/04/03/parts-of-this-site- tempo...](http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2013/04/03/parts-of-this-site-temporarily- down.html)

I've been going through archive.org recovering posts when I can. I do have a bunch of the factor articles in my project that produces a PDF from them: [https://github.com/doublec/factor- articles](https://github.com/doublec/factor-articles)

<comment><USER3> Thanks very much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (I don't know Rust)

So I assume the compiler infers the type of `TI(1)` as `T<int>` and `TS(~"Hello")` as `T<~string>` because ...?

What if you defined:

        enum T<A> {
          TX(int, ~string),
          TY(~string, int)
        }

What's the inferred type of `TX(1, ~"a")`?

<comment><USER6> No, the compiler doesn't infer the types quite like you're imagining. It is possible, depending on usage, to have TI(1) of type T<~str>, or TS(~"Hello") of type T<int>. The following is actually _still legal_ in the first example, and will result in a runtime error:

        let a = TI(1);
        let b = TS(~"foo");
        let z = concat(a, b);

The reason is that the Rust compiler is trying to work out the types for you. In this case, it sees that concat requires two T<~str>s and infers logically that both a and b must have the type T<~str>... even though one of them was created with TI.

If you look at the example with a compile error, you'll notice that the two things being concatenated which result in the error were themselves the results of calls to `plus` and `concatenate`, which are guaranteed to produce T<int> and T<~string>. You could also guide the compiler by providing the types manually

        let a : T<int>  = TI(1);
        let b : T<~str> = TS(~"foo");
        /* now this produces a compile-time error */
        let z = concat(a, b);

Or by writing wrapper functions over the constructors

        fn makeTI(i : int) -> T<int> { TI(i) }
        fn makeTS(s : ~str) -> T<~str> { TS(s) }
        ...
        let a = makeTI(1);
        let b = makeTS(~"foo");
        /* this also now produces a compile-time error */
        let z = concat(a, b);

Other languages with phantom types use something called Generalized Algebraic Data types (GADTs) which—to handwave a bit—are something like the latter solution, except built directly into the data type constructors (rather than manually writing those extra functions).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does the compiler know that TI(1) is of type T<int>, and TS("foobar") is T<~string>? Does it infer the type of the enum constructors from their arguments? Does that mean the arities must be the same?

Say something like:

enum Node<A> { StringNode(Node, Node, ~string) IntNode(Node, Node, int) VoidNode(Node, Node) }

Is there any way of declaring that StringNode gives you Node<~string>, and IntNode gives Node<int>?

<comment><USER2> I'm not really sure of Rust's semantics, but this sort of thing is achieved using GADTs in Haskell. They look like this

        data T a where
          TI :: Int    -> T Int
          TS :: String -> T String

which lets you reflect a value up into its type. Something similar but more implicit seems to be going on with that Rust example.

Another method is kind of a hack: unify the type variable with an unused argument. This looks like

        data T a b = T b              -- we want to find a way to choose a

        setA :: a -> T a b -> T a b
        setA _ t = t                  -- Just returns the second argument
                                      -- BUT tells the compiler the `a` type unifies
                                      -- with the type of the first argument

        > :t setA Int (T "foo")
        setA Int (T "foo") :: T Int String

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone here know why they call those structures Enums rather than Unions?

<comment><USER9> It's rather infuriating. An Enum is supposed to be just a Union of nullary constructors. What they're doing here is using the word Enum when they really ought to mean Union.

This sort of overloading of language happens all over the place in programming and it leads to endless confusion. I find it extremely frustrating but what can I do about it?

<comment><USER10> I was put off slightly at first by the name as well, not so much now. It _is_ a generalization of the enums from the C languages.

Also Enum seems a good name because they represent fixed alternatives that may be (finitely) enumerated (We're saying "Let me _enumerate_ the alternatives that this type may hold."). Whereas "union" seems to speak to its underlying implementation (which may or may not hold) as a tagged, overlapping union. Ie. that usage of union says much less about the intended semantics and is more of a possible implementation detail. Otherwise if you look at the actual meaning of "union" it doesn't seem to fit really. Maybe "sum" might be closer but again that's leaning towards the theoretical, and in that case you'd probably then need to rename struct to become "product" for symmetry.

<comment><USER9> Hey, I'd be all for having them called sum and product types. But then why not go full out and have (generalized) algebraic data types?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do I need to know to move to Berlin? - <AUTHOR>

Per the thread earlier today Berlin has fantastic bones for building companies - talent, culture, cheap living costs, an international culture and access to the outside world.
Presuming you'r building a team from scratch, or expanding from North America. What are the things you'd need to know to move to Berlin?
Where do people want to live? Where to locate offices? Where do you find good talent? What are the legal steps to do so? Any pitfalls to avoid? Others should feel free to jump on this.
Here's hacker news' chance to package up everything you need to know to settle in Berlin. <comment><USER2> Berlin isn't a great place to hire developers:

1) Employees get lots more legal rights in Germany compared to the US. I don't know if this is the case among startups but certainly at larger german companies I've seen the programmers are unionized. So when you don't get that next round of funding and are forced to reduce headcount you'll pretty much have to fire the employees in the US office before you can fire the ones in the Berlin office.

2) Berlin in particular has a talent crunch, there aren't enough developers for the companies already there. Many of the top-tier developers are drawn to Frankfurt where the large companies are based (i.e where the money is). Many tech companies in Berlin resort to importing developers from elsewhere in the EU.

<comment><USER3> Re 2) Hiring in Berlin is indeed difficult. There's a great influx of talented developers from southern Europe though, and as long as your employees come from within the EU hiring them is not a problem.

Re 1) Not entirely true for startups - most developers joining startups know what they're at and are not unionized; still you can't fire people at will. Typically this problem is solved by limiting contracts to a couple of months and extending as long as there is money left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You aren't encouraged to go to Berlin, as you can see, but there are other good choices in the EU. Romania can be an interesting place for a startup:

1\. Good conditions to hire programmers (100% tax exemption for that kind of employees).

2\. This is one of the main sources which supplies Berlin (and others) with programmers, so you may fight for the same programmers elsewhere, but you also may get them cheaply in their own cradle.

3\. Cheaper living costs - this being also one of the reasons why you'd get those developers cheaper.

4\. Good tech infrastructure. For example you'll find there one of the most competitive offers in the world for Internet connection, both in costs and quality (speed and bandwidth).

</comment><comment><USER5> German.

</comment><comment><USER6> Easy enough to get jobs in Berlin just by searching for start ups and contacting them directly. As long as you have some IT skills many companies are willing to offer jobs on the condition you promise to try and learn German. If cash is your motivation perhaps Berlin isn't the best option, but as a place to live life it most definitely worked for me.</comment>


Strong Typing Is for People with Weak Memories - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/strong-typing-is-for-people-with-weak-memories-8d002436649e <comment> java-man a voice of reason indeed</comment>


Ask HN: Should I invest in the Facebook IPO? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> For every investment you make, you need to know what you would consider as a fair return on that investment and when you would call it quits.

As an outsider watching all the action FB is not a fair price or undervalued stock based on what they are currently delivering. So you need to know what is your risk appetite and how long you want to stay invested.

Short term I do not see FB share providing tremendous value (except the volatility that may be there).

Long term you need to bet on certain things they could do right and if you can stay invested for a long time trusting that a bunch of smart folks will figure out something of value.

how are they going to leverage their user base to venture into newer forms of search on various new devices?

What will their mobile strategy be? Will they acquire companies, say, the second biggest player in mobile ads space after google?

Would they venture into FB phone (may be of tremendous value considering it fits into their social portfolio)?

So it is a lot of ifs & buts similar to any other startup investment, except that they are not a startup anymore and they are going to have truck loads of money to execute.

FWIW, these are points I would consider before investing in FB. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's always hard with tech companies because it's difficult to judge whether or not they're being priced fairly. So much of their value is based on the income in the future and their projected growth rate. I think at this point, its more important to decide whether or not there's a bubble here in the tech industry. With Groupon's lackluster results, Netflix getting killed, Pandora's volatility, I'd be a bit wary. If things do go wrong and the bubble busts, it'll be a long time until you can make a profit with facebook stock.

Also, the Greek debt crisis is another factor to think about. It seems like they have come to an 'agreement', sort of, as of right now. But things are still very much uncertain. Analysts are expecting things to smooth out, which is reflected in the prices, but if they don't, the world economy will tank. When it does, money will flock to the defensive stocks (consumer staples, healthcare, utilities), and money will funnel out of the cyclical ones (tech, heavy equipment, etc)

</comment><comment><USER4> Most likely you won't be able to get in the IPO so the question is whether or not you should buy FB stock once it's public. I'd say probably not immediately. My guess is that the stock is going to sky rocket the first few days (weeks?) and then people will cash out. That's when you should buy.

Then again, if you can get in this round, I'd buy.

</comment><comment><USER5> My rule of thumb is to invest in companies that make products that many people use. Look around you, how many people use FB?

<comment><USER6> It's imprudent to decouple popularity from price. Would you invest in Facebook a $200b valuation? $500b? Popularity is already priced in by the market.

To invest, you need to have a fundamental belief about the long term prospects of the company above that of the market. I think better answers would be "I think Facebook is a $150b company, so yes" or "I am 50% more bullish on Facebook than the market" or "I think I will be able to sell to people in the future who will be 50% more bullish on Facebook at that time."

<comment><USER5> If anyone just blindly put money into a company, they're just as well flip a coin. One has to do due diligent and weight the risk versus reward. And even after putting money into a company, one must constantly evaluate its performance. Using popularity to narrow down the prospective targets is just the first step.</comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News bans Google and all other search engines - <AUTHOR> http://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt Looks like news.ycombinator.com is rejecting all search engine robots with "User-Agent: * Disallow: /".  This is unfortuante, I often do site: searches to find old threads here.  esp since news.ycombinator.com doesn't have its own site search, this is the only way to find old threads.<p>pg, what's up? <comment><USER3> Don't worry, it doesn't mean anything. The software for ranking applications runs on the same server, and it is horribly inefficient (something 4 people use every 6 months doesn't tend to get optimized much). This weekend all of us were reading applications at the same time, and the system was getting so slow that I banned crawlers for a bit to buy us some margin. (Traffic from crawlers is much more expensive for us than traffic from human users, because it interacts badly with lazy item loading.) We only finished reading applications an hour before I had to leave for SXSW, so I forgot to set robots.txt back to the normal one, but I just did now.

<comment><USER4> Dude, why not just get yourself another server?

<comment><USER5> "something 4 people use every 6 months doesn't tend to get optimized much"

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but the usual case is still to throw stuff like that on a spare "random odds and ends go here" server, not a production one whose performance/responsiveness you care about.

<comment><USER7> It likely has a dependency on HN: looking up users, karma, etc., which is just simpler to do on the same machine.

<comment><USER8> Ranking applications by HN karma? I hope not.

<comment><USER9> They've been clear that they do look at your HN posts and comments, etc.

It may or may not be used for ranking in specific, but it's definitely used and they've always been upfront about that when asked.

<comment><USER10> Also, they use hacker news to communicate to applicants. I applied a while back, and one day while browsing I got a message through HN, something like "pg has a question for you" in the header bar. Clicking through is the question, and place to put the answer.

Basically, there's a whole messaging system in hacker news that most people don't see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What does this mean for <http://www.searchyc.com>? Will it stop too? (Afterall, it must be a bot too, and a robots.txt like this implies that no bots /should/ scrape the site.) Or will it be allowed?

<comment><USER12> That was my immediate question too. In addition to searchyc, we lose every other HN mash-up present and future.

Maybe this will finally bring about an HN API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's pretty disappointing. I'd love to hear an official explanation of why this choice was made.

<comment><USER14> I quite agree. I use Google to search HN. I just used it the other day, because I didn't remember this one guy's startup or username, but I knew it involved family websites. I was able to find it after a bit of search-fu. I am sad to see that HN won't be indexed by Google anymore. :(

<comment><USER15> One way to search news.ycombinator is to visit searchyc.com

<comment><USER16> Unless they're obeying robots.txt, which they probably should be

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> i just googled this: [http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+Hac...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+Hacker+News+bans+Google+and+all+other+search+engines)

and found this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=165279>

one of the top replies:

 _My vote is to constrain growth as much as possible, at least that which comes from stupid sources. Smart hackers will find this site just fine without Yahoo or MSN, probably even Google. As "evil" as blocking sites and crawlers may sound, I think these types of measures will be necessary to preserve the quality of content here. Whatever actions further that objective have my vote._

<comment><USER18> ugh

perhaps smart hackers shouldn't block everything out like this without any discretion whatsoever?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Will this break Google Reader and other RSS readers from legitimately using the RSS feed here? After all, Google Reader uses a bot to read the feed and allows us to search it from within their app.. much like their search engine does with regular pages :-) (That is, "web robots" aren't just spiders.)

Also things like <http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/> and <http://hnsort.com/> become less legitimate due to this. If the reason is to reduce the SEO benefits of getting a link on HN, just "nofollow" everything instead..

(Update: Googling on this topic brought up a page of my own where a Google Reader engineer explained how Google Reader deals with robots.txt - [http://www.petercooper.co.uk/google-reader-ignores- robottxt-...](http://www.petercooper.co.uk/google-reader-ignores-robottxt- rules-51.html) \- though their definition of Web robot is far from universal)

</comment><comment><USER20> This makes me sad. I often do site:news.ycombinator.com google searches for key topics.

<comment><USER21> I do exactly the same thing at least once a day. I can always remember just a snippet of the post or subject I want to find and that type of query always gets me what I want. I just used it today to find the YC company who is doing the journalism stuff so I could send the link to my nephew.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does that also kill Search YC?

What about the "official" HNSearch (<http://www.webmynd.com/html/hackernews.html> )?

<comment><USER23> The 'official' HNSearch is completely useless for anyone who would ever want to search HN. It's a Firefox Extension (!) that adds a 400px sidebar to your google search results pages showing site: searches along with an extra adsense ad. It's less useless than the 5 IE toolbars your annoying relatives live with, but just as obnoxious.

I just installed it again for a laugh, and it actually redirects to searchyc.com results when you click on its "Hacker News" header — even though pg staunchly refuses to ever link to searchyc. I made fun of him for it at his party before Startup School and he tried to laugh it off with "they're a YC company!" as if that weren't obvious on the face of it.

<comment><USER24> What's pg's problem with SearchYC? It's incredibly useful.

<comment><USER25> That it competes with webmynd ?

It is a clear conflict of interest, HN should simply get the best search available, so the 'funded' webmynd guys should get off their butts and fix it or HN should support searchyc.

<comment><USER24> I thought Webmynd was a browser plugin. I've never even _considered_ using it for HN search.

<comment><USER25> It is. Check the link at the bottom of every HN page:

<http://www.webmynd.com/html/hackernews.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If this is an anti-spam measure, I expect it will be about as effective as "no follow" was. There's still plenty of good reasons for spammers to submit crap. RSS and Twitter syndication of links, for example.

On the other hand, if the goal is to push HN back into semi-obscurity by making it harder to find, it might work.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this permanent?

HN is a good source of google juice for interesting new startups, and it would be a shame to see that go away...

<comment><USER12> That's probably the main issue. HN's authority and DoFollow'd links make it a prime target for linkspam.

There's a lot of reasons I'm bummed about this, but I have to say: startups missing out on free PageRank is not one of them.

<comment><USER28> The links are nofollow'd now.

edit: Oh wait, seems that only comment links are nofollow'd.

<comment><USER29> Actually some of the links are nofollowed until it hits a karma threshold. Not sure of the value but it seems that a story with >50 votes is not currently nofollowed.

<comment><USER30> It seems that a lot is going on - in secret. Example: I just discovered that if I reload the page my votes for comments get rolled back.

<comment><USER23> It wasn't rolled back: it was never counted.

There's a disenfranchisement heuristic that causes your votes to be recorded (can't vote again) but not counted. It usually persists for about a day. I think it's supposed to kill voting rings but its behavior is pretty odd.

The number in your browser gets incremented or decremented client-side independently of reality — it's doing a blind GET request by pre-fetching an 'image', not making an XHR POST and getting the new karma value in the response. Like a lot of things in Arc, it's just poor HTTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone know why HN decided to disallow search engines? It's certainly up to the website owner to decide, but there are good ways to (say) reduce the load on the web server without blocking search engines entirely.

<comment><USER32> The HN code keeps everything in memory (lazily loaded from disk). If every search engine and me-too crawler out there hits every page, you constantly have the entire HN corpus in memory. I assume the memory overload is what leads to the site being slow and unreliable. I don't know if the arc code has any LRU scheme or if everything sticks around until the server falls over.

HN just needs a super simple caching proxy in front of it to reduce load on the app server. Alternatively, just generate static pages for all topics older than 5 days.

Will sysadmin for YC dinner invites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I noticed that the other day while playing around with the YQL console - <USER2> obeys robots.txt, so the Hacker News data table doesn't work any more.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm interested in the justification for this, but I'm happy about it. I'm actually uncomfortable with how high Hacker News comments score on Google.

<comment><USER34> Please enlighten me as to why you are "uncomfortable with how high Hacker News comments score on Google." I mean it sincerely, I'd like to know because I have no clue why that is an issue?

<comment><USER24> Talking to people in a relatively small forum like Hacker News: totally comfortable.

Talking with the entire world by having my comments associated in ways I don't expect with keywords: less comfortable.

<comment><USER34> Thank you and that makes total sense. Point and case?:

I googled an executive of a company that was looking to do business with me. I came across some google groups discussions that he was part of from a couple years ago... and let's just say the material would be a dream for someone with a vendetta against the person.

Thanks for the perspective!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Everyone RELAX. There's probably a good explanation for this, maybe it was even an (easily correctable) accident. Give Paul a chance to respond before raising the pitchforks, okay?

</comment><comment><USER26> It appears to have been changed, just seconds ago. Now it reads:

      User-Agent: *
      Disallow: /x?
      Disallow: /vote?
      Disallow: /reply?
      Disallow: /submitted?
      Disallow: /threads?

<comment><USER31> That seems like a nice middle ground--it should save server load, but search engines can still get to useful content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I guess that might have to do with load these search engines generate. Previosly in a thread we checked that comments posted in HN appear in google search after a minute of posting. That should create a good amount of load on HN. Multiply it for all the search engines in the wild, and PG probably have decided blocking those woun't do any harm. My guesss. Could be wrong, or it might be temporary or a mistake.

</comment><comment><USER37> What is the reason for this?

<comment><USER38> Probably to stop linkspam?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's unfortunate because I often use site: to find old threads on ycombinator. especially since news.ycombinator.com doesn't have its own search facility, external search engines are the old way to comb through old posts here.

<comment><USER39> <http://www.searchyc.com/> still exists, but it's up in the air if they will continue.

<comment><USER40> Not unless pg replies to this with "Please stop".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Well, at least my profile on HN will no longer be the first result for a Google search for my username (it can now revert to some blog that's not mine). But I really wish HN were searchable; I try to find insight on the comment threads here all the time.

</comment><comment><USER42> The robots page is returning the mime-type text/html instead of text/plain

</comment><comment><USER43> Whoa there, everything important is still crawlable and indexable. Here's what robots.txt says right now:

      User-Agent: * Disallow: /x? Disallow: /vote? Disallow: /reply? Disallow: /submitted? Disallow: /threads?

This just disallows those pages... not the home page, and not the /item? action (note the url of this page).

<comment><USER44> It used to just disallow all. PG must be changing it as we speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Looks like the Readable Feeds stuff is still working. Not sure how this will effect it in the future.

<http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/>

</comment><comment><USER46> Truth be told: On various occasions the site: operator on Google came in handy for me to dig out some nugget of information from the archives of HN.

I can't await to hear the reason behind that decision.

</comment><comment><USER47> So is SearchYC done, or do they use a scraper not a crawler?

<comment><USER48> What's the difference?

<comment><USER47> In my mind legitimate crawlers are large engineered programs that respect robots.txt, whereas a scraper might just be a Perl script some dude wrote to check a website for updates periodically. Technically I suppose they all should probably respect robots.txt, but in my experience something you think of as a scraper rarely does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'd like to understand why this decision has been made, as well as why the explanation has been delayed (or will not be given at all) directly from the source.

</comment><comment><USER50> Didn't I read here that the MSN bot refuses to obey the robots.txt file? Maybe I'll have to search HN with it.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think this is still on the front page because people want it to stay this way.

</comment><comment><USER52> I think that it's brilliant. Short term it gets publicity and drives people to the group who are curious.

Long term PG signs a deal with Bing to be the exclusive search engine for Hacker News that pays for the servers and bandwidth.

Down mod me if you will but it's simply brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER53> surprised no-one has suggested that this is to improve performance. this place can be very slow sometimes, and blocking robots can reduce load.

<comment><USER54> That's not a legitimate reason to ban google. You can always (using google's webmaster tools) throttle their indexing. Or you can use search-engine specific lines in robots.txt (Bing anyone?) to ban misbehaving bots.

The only reason to do this is if you don't want your site indexed by google. Which I really can't think of a legitimate reason to do so.

<comment><USER53> true, but it's a busy time for yc. maybe this was just a stop-gap measure? when did it start?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> not strictly true (read the code), but of all the sites I know, HN is best poised to implement their own search and drop Google. go for it!

</comment><comment><USER56> That notwithstanding, if you go to Google.com, type hacker news into the search box and click "I'm Feeling Lucky" you will find yourself at a familiar web page. ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Google indexes robots banned sites based on links. But notice that the snippet is gone. Google also won't be able to index HN posts and comments anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I just searched in google and is not blocked

</comment><comment><USER58> Very lame.

</comment><comment><USER59> _very_ interesting

<comment><USER59> the way i see it, they're going to have to put up a loginwall to stop crawlers...and then we'll just crawl back in anyway...

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> This is horrible. Now what's a talentless, middle-aged career software engineer with hopeless dreams of entrepreneurship going to do with his time?

</comment><comment><USER61> i really enjoyed that the news item linked to the robots.txt file :) it's nerdy, it's short, it's clear and concise, all in one :)

</comment><comment><USER62> This is fantastic! No more spam links.

</comment><comment><USER63> Bye bye HN...it was good to know you.</comment>


You're on the Wrong Side of the Net Neutrality Debate - <AUTHOR> https://www.subverter.co/2017/02/28/youre-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-net-neutrality-debate/ <comment><USER2> _We 've established that monopolies can't exist – or at least not for very long – unless there is government meddling first._

Great, let's get rid of whatever government meddling caused these artificial monopolies first, _then_ get rid of the consumer protections. Since the "let's get rid of red tape" never proceeds in the order it would take to actually rid us of these troublesome monopolies, but only reduces consumer protection, I have to hold the opinion that the "get rid of red tape" and "government meddling causes monopolies" positions are just persiflage, put out by the monopolists themselves.</comment>


Learning Modern OpenGL - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/771225/Learning-Modern-OpenGL

<comment><USER2> I appreciate efforts like this. But in many ways (that aren't their fault!) they annoy me.

I've been using and/or teaching GL pretty much since it came out. And every new version makes it more difficult to learn. Once upon a time you did a few glVertex and glColor calls, set up transformations, and maybe some materials and lights, and there you were. If you wanted to be _really_ cool, then you used a texture. Nowadays even a Hello World is supposed to manage various buffer objects that interact in complicated ways, and to include code in multiple programming languages, at least one of which is never used outside of graphics.

So I'm a rebel. I still teach immediate mode. I'm well aware that this is The Wrong Way (tm), but my goodness, you can't throw profiles and buffer objects at people before they've even successfully animated a polygon.

I've had great fun with OpenGL through the years, and I still do, but I wish the people in charge of the standard would give some thought to beginners and the increasingly awful learning curve.

<comment><USER3> > So I'm a rebel. I still teach immediate mode. I'm well aware that this is > The Wrong Way (tm), but my goodness, you can't throw profiles and buffer > objects at people before they've even successfully animated a polygon.

OpenGL is a fairly low-level API. If your students just want to get something animating on screen without having to dive too deep then surely there are many libraries/engines built on top of OpenGL that will allow that.

On the other hand, if your students are learning OpenGL to write such libraries/engines on their own then what is the point of leading them into a dead end?

<comment><USER2> > If your students just want to get something animating on screen without > having to dive too deep then surely there are many libraries/engines built > on top of OpenGL that will allow that.

The reason my students are learning graphics programming vary with the student. Some just like making pretty pictures. Some are thinking of themselves as future game-engine writers. And of course, this being a university degree program, many of them just want to pick up some elective credit so that they can graduate. So I take a more short-term view. I teach low-ish level graphics programming so that my students will know low-ish level graphics programming. What they do with it after that is up to them.

> ... what is the point of leading them into a dead end?

That's a good question -- one I've had to give substantial thought to.

There are really three aspects to VBOs/EBOs.

(1) Capabilities of the graphics system and the data it needs. We are dealing with a system that can render (for example) triangles arranged in strips, specified via 3-D vertex positions and other attributes.

(2) Data format. Arrays of attribute values.

(3) Storage management. Buffer objects.

If I do VBOs from day one, then I am introducing these three aspects all at once. It's tough to catch that they really are separate ideas; the concepts get all jumbled up, and understanding suffers.

OTOH, if I start with immediate mode, then I can focus on the capabilities of the graphics system. What can it do, what information does it need from us, and how do we figure out that information. This is important stuff; it's good to learn issue (1) well without having to worry about the others.

Students also get some quick success. They can write code to do interactive 3-D animation without having to worry about issues (2) and (3).

So then I move to vertex/element arrays, focusing on issue (2).

Lastly, buffer objects, and issue (3) is done.

Yes, some people would call it a waste of time to talk about immediate mode. But even ignoring the above arguments, I can cover immediate mode in an hour, complete with a functioning demo written nearly from scratch. If that's wasted time, then it isn't very much wasted time.

<comment><USER4> >Some just like making pretty pictures. Some are thinking of themselves as future game-engine writers.

Both of these students will learn more using a framework or game engine than immediate mode OpenGL.

> I teach low-ish level graphics programming so that my students will know > low-ish level graphics programming.

What you're teaching isn't the real graphics pipeline anymore or even an abstraction of it. It's limited high level graphics programming that both doesn't teach how modern high level graphics work is done and doesn't teach fundamentals either. You're really just teaching how to write code for 90s fixed function APIs. I agree that it is a valid stepping stone (many of us started there), but I think there are much better options now than there were 15 years ago. Anyway, OpenGL is not an educational library and making the lives of educators easier should not be a concern of Khronos (or anyone). As an educator you can always build your own framework that has the appropriate level of "low-ish" levelness but holds the students hands enough to not confuse them, if you don't feel that current options are sufficient.

<comment><USER5> > I think there are much better options now than there were 15 years ago.

What are these? (Honest question. I am aelf-taught, first in immediate mode so tend to agree with parent comment that this is a sensible approach. If there's a better way of understanding the pipeline than starting this way - I don't know it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good overview article, but for a better deep dive into modern OpenGL and 3D graphics in general check out the (free) book at [http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/](http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/) This is a fantastic resource that describes the theory and practical knowledge of using OpenGL today, like how to set up the programmable pipeline, write shaders, etc.

<comment><USER7> The History section is well worth reading standalone, as well.

Absolutely fascinating to get stories on the development of Hardware T&L, programmable shaders, the classic ATi/nVidia competition, et cetera.

[http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/History%20of%20Graphics%20...](http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/History%20of%20Graphics%20Hardware.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OpenGL has been a huge wall for me. I always learn only to forget it. Remembering its quirks is almost impossible, and the recent articles about how inconsistently implemented it is (drivers, vendors, specs..) and how useless the extensions are claimed to be discourage even further.

<comment><USER9> Given the amount of cruft OpenGL currently carries, the massive changes (read: rewrite) that will require for it to be a sane modern graphics API and the fact that several Khronos members that would probably not want any significant changes to the API (CAD companies, for example), wouldn't it make sense for the industry to dump OpenGL like yesterday's paper and converge behind a new, modern API? For example, AMD's Mantle.

<comment><USER10> No, that would make no sense whatsoever. You seem to be somewhat misinformed about GL...

* OpenGL core profile is quite clean and lean. Both apple and intel have already decided not to implement OpenGL compatibility (where all the cruft sits). There are still a few things that can and should be cleaned up, but it's pretty great already.

* Adding an additional API means there will be YET another thing vendors have to support and will be able to screw up, in addition to the already existing plethora of APIs: GL, D3D, DDX/GDI, OpenCL, VDPAU [or something like it], CUDA [or something like it], OpenMAX, Mantle. OpenVG, ... -- nobody is going to drop OpenGL or D3D for something like mantle, because that'd instantly lose you all your customers. Not even AMD.

* AMDs mantle (which is, as far as we know, just a specific thing to their cards and not even portable to any other cards) is not an attempt to make things more stable, but an attempt by AMD to gain more control over the market (something they are in a good position to attempt right now, as they have control of the console market) and to push into the direction of a low-level interface that is strongly tied to their hardware model. Mantle as an API is (as far as we know) even lower-level than GL and D3D, and hence not very suited for most programmers and applications -- there are a lot more things you can do wrong with it.

Don't believe all the FUD you read on hackernews. The main issue with OpenGL right now is that some vendors are doing a shitty job at it, which is mainly due to the heavy influence microsoft had on the gaming industry for a long time. GL is now making a major comeback due to linux, apple and mobile platforms gaining popularity, which will help rectify these issues over time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mantle is also not that important on Consoles - there you have thin driver layer, so Mantle would not help that much. Probably it will disappear in some years/months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've used Pyglet[1] to experiment and learn OpenGL using Python, although it needed some hacking to open up the 4.3 API on OS X (which only arrived at that version with Mavericks, having been stuck in a sad state for many years).

Also, not even a mention of the OpenGL Red Book[2]?

[1] [http://www.pyglet.org/](http://www.pyglet.org/)

[2] [http://www.opengl-redbook.com/](http://www.opengl-redbook.com/)

<comment><USER12> 4.3 on OSX? Do you mean 4.1?

I recently jumped to mac, and have been using OpenGL for a long time under Windows.

The best I can get is an OpenGL 4.1 context on an up to date Macbook Pro (May 2014).

<comment><USER11> You're right, it was 4.1 - it's been a while :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Jamie King has great videos on OpenGL, among other things, on his YouTube channel. It looks like it was last updated 8 months ago with 99 videos spanning 14 hours. His commentary is awesome, so you will stay entertained.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRwVmtr- pp06qT6ckboaO...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRwVmtr- pp06qT6ckboaOhnm9FxmzHpbY)

</comment><comment><USER14> very well put together for those who are looking to actually learn OpenGL.

Many people have a romanticized view of OpenGL, whereas in fact it is very very hard and confusing.

For beginner teaching purposes, basically any other graphic library is preferable, and can still teach the same core design philosophies that OpenGL uses.

For students / learners who know what OpenGL is, have maybe played around with the Hello World examples online, and want to really delve into the depths of OGL, this is a very good guide.

</comment><comment><USER15> I understand what/how to do VBO's but I don't know how to link it with game dev. If I have a HUD, entities, effects, terrain, do I have one VBO to handle all that data (and update it in my game loop)? Or should I split the VBO's into HUD/entities/effects/terrain/etc?</comment>


Amazon to open office in Minneapolis - <AUTHOR> http://www.startribune.com/amazon-to-open-tech-office-in-downtown-minneapolis/382322341/ <comment><AUTHOR> Target and Best Buy are both headquertered in Minneapolis. Seems like this is less about finding new talent and more about disrupting Target and Best Buy by pilfering their best developers.</comment>


Court OKs Barring High IQs for Cops - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95836&page=1#.TwOAzyNWr4X <comment><USER2> I could understand this if the job was something like assembly line worker, where there might be no potential upward job growth, but for cops can't they advance from street cop to detective?

I'd think you'd want detectives to be as smart as possible.

</comment><comment><USER3> ABC routes you through their incredibly annoying pitch for their iPad app if you want to read this on an iPad, and even if you can figure out what to click to Just Let Me Read The Fucking Article, they then pop you into an iPad "optimized" version, leaving you with a link that you can't confidently share with anyone or post to social media.

ABC, please, for the love of God, stop doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER2> Already submitted yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3418080>

Can someone explain why that one did not make it onto the RSS feed, but this later one did?

</comment><comment><USER4> The PD in question also bars people who fall below a given test result threshold.

They seem to seek a "sweetspot" where they're smart enough to be valuable additions to the force and not be easily outsmarted by a average people but not so smart they grow bored and quit thus costing the dept time and money.

<comment><USER5> While I, too, found that part intriguing, the article mentions that the guy has been working as a prison guard since being rejected. Could be that he just wanted to make money by being a police officer and that department missed out on a great hire. Not to mention the fact that the nature of the work can definitely change as long as they're promoting from within.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Obligatory canonical SciFi on these matters:

'Examination Day', Henry Slesar

[http://www.thebostonbachelor.com/2008/examination-day-by- hen...](http://www.thebostonbachelor.com/2008/examination-day-by-henry- seslar/)

'Harrison Bergeron', Kurt Vonnegut

<http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html></comment>


Facebook/Google engineers who dont demand a 1/18 SOPA blackout should be ashamed - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> No, Facebook/Google engineers should consider their actions carefully and do what they think is right. In fact everyone should. I'm happy to oppose SOPA but I'm not joining a mob.

<comment><AUTHOR> Look. I am personally against mob mentality in most scenarios, but given the current circumstances I honestly believe that the formation of a mob aligned in opposition to this bill is exactly what is required. Due to this issue's nebulous technical nature the folks in charge and the general population have an unconscionably limited perspective and there is little to no real awareness of the proposed act or its potential consequences in the collective consciousness. SOPA should be immediately halted with extreme prejudice and the real issues should be thoroughly reconsidered in an open forum with policy makers, entrepreneurs, experts, and citizens working together to create a legitimate policy that is levelheaded and forward thinking. Beyond the minority of us who are actually clued in to the guts of SOPA and it's consequences there is no genuine geography of dissent. Shame. In other words... Aunt Trish needs to have a day without facebook so everyone will start actually talking about this stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> No, they should be patted on the back for not being rash.

A SOPA blackout by Facebook/Google would show just how much political influence they have when they decide to abuse their position. Once that's made clear governments around the world would quickly act to remove that power by various new laws and regulations destroying both companies.

<comment><USER4> "various new laws and regulations destroying both companies"

... and SOPA is the first of those.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Kevin and I are doing HN office hours Friday from 11 am to 1 pm PDT - <AUTHOR> Kevin and I are going to try doing online office hours on HN this Friday.
We'll create a thread at 9 am PDT, and interested companies (or people) can submit a top-level comment with a brief overview of what they're working on and a first question.  Then we'll let HN vote on the projects, and do office hours via back-and-forth comments with the top 5 companies as of 11 am.
You can ask about anything you want related to your startup, but the way office hours work at YC is we try to identify the biggest problem you're currently facing and then brainstorm things you can try. <comment><USER2> Having an open dialogue that can be referenced like this will provide an amazing resource. This will help people outside of those companies facing similar or tangential issues. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> > _Then we 'll let HN vote on the projects_

You mean vote on the top-level comment submissions? That's not a good idea because comment ranking is influenced heavily by time of submission (more recent comments appear at top, so it would be smarter for startups to submit later and also it means order will not correspond to upvotes), and, more importantly, _comment scores are not visible._

<comment><USER4> We'll rank the thread by points, not time-based rank. We won't do that until Sam and Kevin are ready to start, though. Otherwise it would be even more time-sensitive.

<comment><USER3> That works :) thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is an office hour? I feel like this post wasn't meant for me.

<comment><USER6> A discussion and feedback session. Sometimes these sessions are held in public to help others who are facing similar problems.

<comment><USER5> I see. I've never heard that term (except as saying when a business is open). Where does it originate in this context?

<comment><USER7> In US universities, where professors have to balance teaching and research, they hold "office hours" \- hours during the day in which they're in their office, with the door open, and students can come in to ask questions, request help, etc.

<comment><USER5> Ah, thanks! I've never been, so it was an unfamiliar concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sure we'll see more pitches trying to get attention than real questions to specific problems. Let's try to keep it useful for everyone! It's a great idea and I want to thank you in advance for taking the time to help others even not being part of YC. Another positive point against many other "top" accelerators.

<comment><USER4> > I'm sure we'll see more pitches trying to get attention than real questions > to specific problems.

Hopefully the community will take care of this, by upvoting real questions and specific problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wowwww... This is an insane level of commitment on a public forum like this. (With its current levels of readership.) I'm impressed.

Especially since many interesting office hour questions and answers are the kinds of things that anyone who isn't currently (or has never) run a startup would kind of react negatively to seeing in public. (There are some prime examples of people who have no experience with, but very strong opinions about, startups.).

People's conceptions about startups are so different from what it's like to actually build one, I almost suggest that other past and present founders answer some of the the questions that get posed (i.e. others also reply to comments) besides letting Kevin and Sam do so - not to dilute the signal, but to increase it. I wonder if this could be made official, with mail to YC companies that they are welcome to chime in!

<comment><USER10> I agree its really great of them, you can watch office hour sessions on youtube from the Startup School that YC runs [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syoqjYLDs48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syoqjYLDs48)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi Kevin, a great initiative. I am an entrepreneur from India, running the portal www.Halla.in. The idea is to create a platform for individuals to express their talent and emotions. We run photo contests on general themes like rains, city street, back to school etc. and let users post their entries to get voted as the best. Over the past 12 months, we have run over 100+ contests with an average of 70+ entries per contest and have over 7000 registered users. Being bootstrapped startup, the value of prizes are limited. Customers adore our concept by giving good reviews and feedback.

Question:

We are trying to scale to next level, however we face challenges in getting companies to sponsor these contests. How can we scale?

</comment><comment><USER12> Is this only for technical startups or in industries that you and Kevin specialize in?

<comment><USER13> We'll do our best to help any startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Have you guys started?

<comment><USER13> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9785533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9785533)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> We(tryfuel.com) are working on quantifying nutrition and personalizing it so people can eat healthy and understand how their bodies respond to diet. We have traction and very sticky product. We are raising our seed round.

The biggest problem we are having is finding angels who will not only lead this round but help in future rounds with introductions to VCs and serve as social proof. Any ideas on how to solve this?

<comment><USER16>
      We'll create a thread at 9 am PDT, and interested companies (or people)
      can submit a top-level comment

Don't forget to add it to the open-office thread on friday.

<comment><USER15> Will do thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm working on www.seeflo.com It still has some glitches but the start of the application is there. My biggest problem right now is finding my audience.

<comment><USER4> Please post this in the thread on Friday. This one is just to let people know we'll be doing this.

<comment><USER17> Ahh ok, will do

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We ( www.helpingfaceless.com ) are trying to help vulnerable children using technology and create a viable business model around it.

Short term : Create basic infrastructure for data collection and reporting, manage in cloud, and charge small subscription fee for it.

Long term : Combat child trafficking using face recognition technology and data analytics.

we use B.O.T ( build operate transform ) process to build the infrastructure for organizations and law enforcement agencies .

Biggest problems we are facing : 1\. Lack of impact investment 2\. Long Sales cycle

<comment><USER19> That's a neat idea and I'm always glad to see companies working on tech that will protect little kids! Please don't forget to add this to the thread on Friday morning - they will post it at 0900 PDT.

Good luck with your startup!

<comment><USER18> Thanks man. Sorry I jumped the gun and posted way earlier :)</comment></comment></comment>