shimon

64 ms·

271.
by shimon 13y ago
How does the volatility of BTC make it desirable for merchants to accept it? Either they hold BTC and are exposed to the volatility, or they convert to a fiat currency and are exposed to some transaction fees. Perhaps the transaction fees t
272.
by shimon 14y ago
Odd: there's a major deviation among two counties that are both in metro Boston. The counties are Suffolk, MA (covers Boston and some towns South but not Cambridge, where the major tech cluster is) and Middlesex, MA (Cambridge & some to
273.
by shimon 14y ago
Aaron was a unique, inspiring, and puzzling individual. I knew him only a little, but I always knew that whenever I heard his name it would be in the context of an ambitious and bold new adventure. It's truly tragic loss for the tech commun
274.
by shimon 14y ago
Technically if a company were to dissolve, its assets would belong to shareholders (investors, founders, YC, etc.). In practice, though, it's rare for everyone to agree to dissolution while there's still money in the bank. Instead, you have
275.
by shimon 14y ago
You're clearly waiting for someone to put this link into the thread: http://www.overnightbuses.com/
276.
by shimon 14y ago
Unlikely but not impossible. Note that the substring does NOT need to repeat in the uncompressed file; it just needs to be possible to say "copy bytes X through Y of /bin/ls here" in fewer than Y-X bytes. I'd love to know what the odds real
277.
by shimon 14y ago
Why is this an invalid approach? If you have an agreed-upon OS installation, you've got at least several hundred megabytes of binary data from which you can extract sequences for a lookup dictionary. To compress, you locate largest substrin
278.
by shimon 14y ago
Minecraft maybe didn't set out to be a startup, but it achieved all the growth goals of one, and it's certainly fair to call it one now, isn't it? Games like Diablo and BG are actually run in a fashion closer to movies than startups. A game
279.
by shimon 14y ago
Ask yourself: what's the most important thing a user of this product can do? Pick one thing. It might be "sign up", or it might something way more specific like "run a report" or "receive a fax". Drive growth in that thing.
280.
by shimon 14y ago
Of course, but then you'd be subject to restrictions on where you can use a moped. Depending on where you are, this would likely rule out bike lanes, sidewalks, etc. and thus make the bike less useful. Enforcement is highly variable, though
281.
by shimon 14y ago
This is an important effort with a powerful effect on the Boston tech scene. This and similar outreach efforts (like the Python workshops) have increased diversity not just in the Python and Ruby groups, but more broadly in all tech groups.
282.
by shimon 14y ago
This looks well done. Congratulations on building a cool product! A word of caution on this as a business, though: this is going to be brutal. You're selling a service that every competent web developer can build. You can save them time --
283.
by shimon 14y ago
AdBlock Prius
284.
by shimon 14y ago
You're just describing successful PR, and also describing company performance that you're not happy about. The relation between those two things is not always strong. But as long as it's not actual fraud, figuring out how to get people with
285.
by shimon 14y ago
Can a YC-accepted startup confirm that it's possible to drive a PG interview? In my experience we had a story and demo but these were immediately declined in favor of PG-driven questions. I'm trying to figure out if I could have driven -- p
286.
Pageguide.js: unobtrusive in-page help/guidance/walkthroughs(tracelytics.com)
2 points by shimon 14y ago|0 comments
287.
by shimon 15y ago
Doesn't work, because of cross-domain security policies. Javascript running in http://malicious-site wouldn't be able to read the CSRF protection token in the fund transfer form on http://bank . So the submission wouldn't have the correc
288.
by shimon 15y ago
I'm a paying customer of Mixpanel. I like Flow. My biggest request is the same as the biggest request for the rest of Mixpanel: remove the wall between page views and other events. A flow of pages is nice but a flow of events might really t
289.
by shimon 15y ago
Theoretically this is illegal. In practice, it's hard to draw a sharp line between "plaintiff actually feels his patent should apply here" and "plaintiff doesn't honestly believe his patent applies, but is using the courts as an anticompeti
290.
by shimon 15y ago
Is it really plausible that Google would agree to a partnership and provide payment to a false Mocality representative without even speaking to the Mocality CEO? We can't rule this out without more knowledge of the case, but it seems very f
291.
by shimon 15y ago
I installed CyanogenMod after the CarrierIQ story broke. It wasn't trivial but there were good instructions for my exact model of phone. CyanogenMod is an improvement over the stock HTC Sense-based firmware: more customizable, better batter
292.
by shimon 15y ago
The 20k figure is an approximate circumference of the Earth.
293.
by shimon 15y ago
You'd be challenged to demonstrate your ability to actually ship software. If you don't have a network of people who have worked with you and can vouch for you, you'll have trouble getting well-paying gigs. You'd likely end up starting with
294.
by shimon 15y ago
Depends on your definition of terrorism. Here's mine: an act of terrorism is an attack designed to elicit a reaction massively disproportionate to the damage directly caused, typically perpetrated by a non-state actor. This is why terrorist
295.
by shimon 15y ago
I strongly recommend the "Tree Style Tab" extension for Firefox. It give you a vertical tab bar and makes 20-50 tabs per window pretty manageable.
296.
by shimon 15y ago
Would you rather hear the music of a thousand mediocre musicians or four great ones? I'm not trying to draw an analogy between musicians and hackers -- just providing an example to show that productivity ratios vary hugely depending on the
297.
by shimon 15y ago
Don't these contracts typically require termination with cause in order to interrupt vesting? Not that that's a perfect solution, but it should at least make these more blatant acts a bit easier to pursue in court.
298.
by shimon 15y ago
Ah, thank you. Beta is a coefficient of index performance, not just a measure of more or less correlation. So high beta would mean that when the startup market does well you do awesome. You'd also tank when there's a bust, but because YC's
299.
by shimon 15y ago
Good idea. I wonder if there's some way YC could survey these people without offending everyone. Maybe offer a 30min advisory session (to known YC post-interview rejects) in return for filling out a survey indicating their current status?
300.
by shimon 15y ago
Terminology question: In footnote 1 it says "We're looking for companies with high beta. E.g. we're ok funding groups for whom the likelihood of failure is high but for whom success, if it happens, will be big." I'm not sure what

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