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arihelgasonon What Trump means for tech

I'm surprised there's no mention of his first 100 days pledge to "announce our withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership" - something that the EFF has been lobbying for.

https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

arihelgasonon Push API – W3C Working Draft

Any word on when browsers other than Safari will be supporting push notifications?

arihelgasonon Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

This also applies to professional growth. People often have a hard time receiving negative feedback because they experience it as an attack on their identity/ego rather than as an opportunity to learn.

The ability to take feedback constructively is probably one of the most important traits to hire for.

arihelgasonon NHS staff should code - Kelsey

This rings true with my experience.

I met a senior NHS physician who built a very useful and simple mobile information service to improve access to certain services. My understanding was that he funded it himself with help from sponsors and had to do it entirely outside the NHS system.

It probably cost 1/10th of what it would have cost if it had been done through the NHS.

Not to mention that NHS computers are still running IE6 and heavily locked down, making it a poor development environment. Tim Kelsey can encourage NHS staff to code, but the infrastructure to do anything meaningful with that inside the system isn't there.

This is the service: http://sxt.org.uk

arihelgasonon Coinbase (YC S12) seeks to bring Bitcoin to the masses

Good point. And if you sign up to Coinbase anonymously and acquire BTC reasonably anonymously any data that gets subpoenaed is worthless.

arihelgasonon Coinbase (YC S12) seeks to bring Bitcoin to the masses

BTC transactions are all public in the blockchain so they're not as anonymous as many think.

But as for preventing your identity from being linked to your BTC wallet? There's probably no way to prevent that if the service provider is under US jurisdiction.

arihelgasonon Just say No to brainteaser questions at interviews

Do you want people who bullshit with little or no relevant data or people who will admit when they don't know something and try to figure it out?

I'd say the latter.

It's frustrating to work with people who pretend they know more than they do rather than asking for help.

arihelgasonon Space Quest creators create kickstarter for a new Space Adventure

A comparable project, the Leisure Suit Larry remake, also had a $500,000 cut-off. It ended up raising over $650,000 so it doesn't look far-fetched.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leisuresuitlarry/make-le...

arihelgasonon Colourlovers Buys Forrst

You're forgetting software sales (ColorSchemer), t-shirt sales and fabric printing.

arihelgasonon All of Iceland's public administrations moving towards open source

This point regarding education is interesting:

free and open-source software provides teaching opportunities that do not exist with proprietary software, since the background functions of free and open-source software, including its characteristics and programming, can be revealed to students. In these respects, free and open-source software is better suited to arousing interest in computer programming and information technology than proprietary software, where its use is all that can be taught.

The other points from the report:

1. When purchasing new software, free and open-source software and proprietary software are to be considered on an equal footing, with the object of always selecting the most favourable purchase.

2. Every endeavour shall be made to choose software based on open standards, regardless of whether the software in question is standard or bespoke (custom-designed). Generally, software which is free for anyone to use is also typified by open standards.

3. Public bodies shall endeavour to avoid any undue dependence on particular software manufacturers or service providers. The utilisation of free and open-source software is one means of this.

4. One goal for bespoke (custom-designed) software financed by public bodies, including software for research and development projects, should be its reusability. Keeping the software free and open-source is one way to achieve reusability. Strategies shall be devised at the outset of such projects for ensuring reuse of the software.

5. Students in Icelandic educational institutions shall be given the opportunity of learning about and using free and open-source software on a par with proprietary software

arihelgasonon Do Not Start A Startup: Or, What I Learned At Startup School 2011

That judgement looks like it's based on a very brief conversation with one of the founders. Carr seems to dislike his attitude more than anything.

Hardly a convincing condemnation of what Likealittle are doing.

arihelgasonon Isaac Asimov on Security Theatre.

People who have been working seriously on robotics in recent years probably have a strong sense of what's hard and what's easier.

arihelgasonon Getting Rich From Others Was Never Easier

Because their advertising overpriced? Surely it's easy enough for advertisers to monitor results. Curious why there's this perception.

arihelgasonon Ask HN: What documentaries are worth watching?

Riot On - a very entertaining and well produced story of dotcom bubble madness http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427783/

arihelgasonon Poll: Best way for startups to find awesome developers?

I'm partial to Hackruiter (http://www.hackruiter.com). Recruitment done by engineers for engineers.

arihelgasonon Union Square Ventures Leads $3 Million Round in Moot's Startup, Canvas

That's the big use case right now. A more flexible version of http://www.quickmeme.com - though I'm sure users will come up with other cool uses in the coming months.

arihelgasonon How to Raise an Entrepreneur

He probably means asmallworld.net - an invitation only social network for internationally minded people

arihelgasonon My experience outsourcing manufacturing to China

Alibaba is a very mixed bag.

I recommend using Panjiva.com to do some diligence on suppliers before committing. You can see who else they're supplying in the US, historical data (ie. are they doing more or less US business?) and even pull credit records and other data.

It's not failsafe but you'll get a much more complete picture of a supplier than with Alibaba.

arihelgasonon The traveling German carpenters

Exactly.

Economic activity centered on agriculture where efficiency increases were minuscule. Because of this economic activity did not grow much.

See this diagram for an idea of just how little growth there was:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_GDP_Capita_1-2003_A....

arihelgasonon Fowndr: private network for startups, now live and handing out invites

I don't think you can be a part of too many networks

Sure you can.

The opportunity cost is being part of a network that you get more out of. Or building/maintaining your personal network. Or working on something productive.

arihelgasonon When should you start a startup?

Good post. I did my first startup straight out of college, which was great for a couple of reasons.

- I was used to living off very little. I didn't develop expensive tastes fueled by a regular paycheck. It helped that I could live at home while bootstrapping. My opportunity cost was getting an entry level job somewhere for decent pay.

- I was used to managing my own time and being disciplined about work schedules. This was helped by attending university in the UK where we had 6 hours' obligatory classes per week or less. The rest was optional lectures and self study time.

arihelgasonon Elite colleges lower women's wages

It would also be interesting to see this segmented by employment sector.

Anecdotally, more women than men who graduated from my university in subjects with higher earning potential went on to lower paying careers in the art world and other creative fields.

arihelgasonon If you own the infrastructure you get to charge rent

Good analysis, though I'd point out that Modcloth is not strictly speaking an infrastructure business.

Modcloth is closer to the traditional retail model. They buy inventory and sell it. Their innovation is in getting user feedback before committing to holding inventory.

What we're doing at Fabricly is building an infrastructure business, with a distribution and production network for fashion designers.

arihelgasonon The Crowdsourcing Debate: Egalitarian or Evil?

Who says being egalitarian and being evil are mutually exclusive?

arihelgasonon Brutal New York - 1965/95

Apparently the KGB tried to recruit the photographer, Jacob Holdt. He then tried to stop his book being used for propaganda. That probably didn't stop it from happening, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Holdt

arihelgasonon Y Combinator’s Paul Graham On The $150K Per Start-Up Offer

They have pro-rata rights on the next round. This means that they can follow the investment in subsequent rounds if the company is successful.

This completely changes the economics.

arihelgasonon Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

Not necessarily. The businesses have been on very different trajectories.

arihelgasonon U.S. warns Ottawa of WikiLeak release

After Tony Blair had the Freedom of Information Act passed in the UK (2000), more discussions took place off the record and ministers began to avoid writing down minutes for meetings.

arihelgasonon SSH Commands / Tricks

This is really useful. And if you do

  ssh -ND 9999

it doesn't open a shell.

This may stop you from accidentally shutting down your tunnel thinking it's just another ssh session.

arihelgasonon Fabricly (YC W10) launches threadless for fashion and raises money

Yes. We pivoted - here's a writeup about why we pivoted

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Fabricly-com-change-their-busin...