Hacker News Reader

dkycon Airbnb reportedly raising $1B at $24B valuation

According to CrunchBase, facebook has raised roughly $2.1B totally (including their IPO, which accounted for $1.5B of that). [0]

In 2014, facebook totalled roughly $3B net income [1]. So they made dramatically more money back in the last year than they raised totally and will probably continue to do so.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/facebook/funding-rou...

[1] http://investor.fb.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1326801-14-7&C...

dkycon CloudKit JS

Parse was acquired by facebook more than two years ago (April 2013), so they had to plan it for a long time then.

dkycon How we uncovered the identity of popular spyware makers

Thanks for the story, it was a nice read. However, the answer is at the beginning: The author of the software is exactly the guy he claims to be. Along with photo and an interview in the Forbes Magazine.

Yes, they use all kinds of fake companies for whatever purposes, but there's really no need to entangle it all.

dkycon Amazon launches same day delivery for Prime customers

They actually do something like this: Amazon ships stuff to a logistic center close to you when their machine learning algorithms decide you're likely to buy a specific item shortly.

dkycon Email encryption on Android and iOS becomes easy with the open source app Tutanota

"Swiss Data Security

Our email service safeguards user data with strict privacy protections and our secure datacenter facility hidden inside a Swiss granite mountain."

Now that is comforting.

dkycon Why Today’s Automobile Industry Looks a Lot Like IBM in 1985

The author's point is that by using Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, they hand over control over software and become "commoditized hardware providers", just like IBM and the IBM-clone providers in the 1980s and 1990s.

I consider this argument ridiculous, as the in-car-software controls nowhere near as much of the user experience as the operating system and applications of a personal computer. Today's car builders have their profit margins because of engine design, build quality, exterior design and branding. They don't lose power by outsourcing their software stack. Actually a lot of them already use the same software over their entire model range (f.e. Volkswagen, Ford, BMW all do) and it does not seem to hurt the sales & profits of their top-end models, so the point that software is the crucial buying factor is basically already refuted.

(I think they should rather be afraid of Tesla overtaking them in what actually matters)

dkycon Amazon Home Services

I'm surprised to see this framed so negative. What they do is essentially being the lean huge startup. They launch a product, gather initial feedback, and if it turns out promising (like AWS) they double-down. If it doesn't work, they kill it. I think it's actually nice to see such a rapid-iteration product development done by a company with that many resources and talent.

dkycon Y Combinator Company List

What about "successful private company"?

dkycon YC Stats Winter 2015

Technically Twitch sold for $970m... Maybe he's referring to Quora (they joined YC late-stage)

dkycon YC Stats Winter 2015

They sold for roughly $250m to Salesforce in 2010.

dkycon The programming and engineering skills with the highest salaries

I'm referring to the choice of words. E.g., I never heard anybody call their IDE/Editor/emacs setup casually "integrated developer environment".

dkycon The programming and engineering skills with the highest salaries

"Everyday you sit down, put on your headphones and open your integrated developer environment."

Right there, the first sentence. Hilarious. I think it takes the cake for the quickest sentence that gives away that the author is no programmer himself. (Not that he needed to be to write this article)

dkycon Ask HN: Is it time for a Greatest Hits?

This is an ordered best-of-list of Hacker News "Evergreens", e.g. stories that were originally from a different year:

http://blog.contextly.com/2014/11/hacker-news-evergreen-stor...

dkycon Goodbye MongoDB, Hello PostgreSQL

MongoDB was never about its benchmarking, scaling or sharding abilities. It was about two things:

#1: No schema. If you're prototyping, schemas just slow you down. Maybe that changes as your application matures.

#2: Great drivers. The amount of pain to get a basic CRUD app running with a SQL backend is just too high: push the data from the browser to the server in JSON or XML, validate, convert into database schema, sanitize using prepared statements or stored procedures, and send it off. Compare that with MongoDB: it's just JSON™.

The one thing that killed MongoDB was lack of reliability. Even when you're a startup, you may not lose data. I think MongoDB could have easily dropped 50% of performance & scalability for data security and it would be well off now. It was never intended to be the safe, sane choice for big enterprises.

dkycon Show HN: Make School – College replacement for founders and developers

These types of programs represent a funny trend in the SV tech scene: While workers of every other sector are busy increasing the barrier of entry in order to reduce competition for jobs, every other week some new startup / bootcamp / code school wants to tear down the barriers and provide "CS for the masses". Of course a noble goal, but if it actually works, it also means the end of the privileged, six-figure-entry-salary, 20%-of-your-time-free tech jobs.

dkycon Ask HN: Idea Sunday

Check out Abacus (recent YC company): https://www.abacus.com/

dkycon The Social Radar: What I Did at Y Combinator

Yep, as mentioned at the bottom. "(This post was derived from the talk I gave at Y Combinator's Female Founders Conference in 2015.)"

dkycon The Problem with Job Titles

Your interpretation seems like a reasonable scale - however, it is a very vague definition of "0". I'm sure some people want a 0 to mean an actual 0, like a blind developer asked to do UI development.

dkycon The Problem with Job Titles

I think the results have to do with your questioning. For example, I don't want to spend my time testing, but I have to do it if I want to write high quality software. So some people give testing a 0, because it's not something you actively want to do. And others give testing a 5, because they know that whatever job they'll take, they probably have to test their code. I don't really see much difference to the classic self-made bullet-point-list of skills.

dkycon Review of the Model S 85

From what I heard, the Model S 85 with Dual-Drive has a vastly improved interior quality. I agree that the normal Model S is not on par with BMW/Mercedes/etc.

dkycon Show HN: StackHive – Live Web Coding and Visual Styling from the Browser

Really well done and feature-rich. Every web developer has thought about a product like this at some point. However, I don't understand who you're targeting: It's an incredibly feature-rich product, but no clear value proposition. Are you targeting backend developers that can't write HTML/CSS? Are you targeting HTML/CSS-devs that need a better IDE? Are you targeting website optimizers?

Your product seems like a combination of IDE, web-based WYSIYWIG (à la Weebly or Unbounce), SEO/Optimization (Optimizely or VWO), and Chrome Developer Tools. The integration is great from a technical perspective, but I don't see why I as a Web Dev should switch my entire tool chain to your service. The USP is kind of missing.

(I'm also from Germany, and the rendering is kind of slow, as hxseven has mentioned. Not sure if due to connection or client-side JS.)

dkycon Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing (1996)

W: People who have something -
SJ: To sell!
W: To share.
SJ: To sell!

W: You mean publishing?

Funny how the reporter just hears what he wants to hear. Makes me wonder which of the questions asked today will sound like this in 10 years.

dkycon How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

Have been thinking about this for a while with a partner of mine and worked on a prototype, here are some screenshots:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cdbx6e27movkj8q/Contract%20Tags.pn...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/goc2fextcdqb6qn/Contract%20View.pn...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rae05ubbnlgopqi/Add%20Contract.png...

If anyone is interested to chat about this some more, email is in my profile!

dkycon 3D.City – Game built with three.js and sea3d

Butter-smooth on latest Chrome for Mac OS X

dkycon Things I still can't do in November 2014

"Be able to get a $100 MRI. It can be done for this price." [...] Also you may get it for free when you actually need it, if you live in a place with a sane health system (i.e., not the USA)."

As someone who lives in Germany where people pay almost 20% of their salary for non-opt-out health insurance, I'm astonished by people that think a state-forced health insurance gets you free MRIs.

dkycon Ask HN: Do you have some advice on pricing a product?

I think this is bad advice. What you call "BullShit price you pull out of your ass" is called value based pricing. It means pricing your service on the value you bring to the customer, not the amount of work you invested. Because your customer doesn't care! Whether he's a genius coder that threw this together in a weekend, or he's a team of 10 that coded 6 months on this - the customer does not care. If the ROI is higher than the cost, he will buy. If it is not, he won't.

Competition-based pricing only works if the products are completely equal. Like tap water or energy. Most software products are far less equal than programmers think. To us it's all just code. To real customers, even addressing their pain point in clear and concise web copy is worth something, because it saves them time. And that is what you monetize, not the lines of code written.

dkycon Introducing Snapcash

If we are really in a bubble, this video will be one of the things people will point to shaking their heads 5 years from now.

dkycon Introducing Snapcash

The guys at Snapchat seem to be completely crazy. But maybe that's exactly what it takes to succeed in the really weird business of replacing cash payments. No matter what, I'm still lying on the floor laughing. Send money easy, it's all so breezy, Snapchat with Snapcash. Chat any cash amount - straight from your bank account! Send money easy, it's fast and greasy! Snapcash Snapcash Snapcash in Snapchat!

dkycon For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins

Last time the US auctioned off bitcoins, the price was above market price [0]. A VC wanted to buy a large chunk of bitcoins for a company he invests in without driving up the price.

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-01/bitcoin-auction-end...

dkycon Getting Funded, Step 4: Due Diligence

Just the technical bullet points: "block diagram of the product’s components, inputs/outputs to processes in the diagram, internal and external interfaces to the product, languages, frameworks, libraries used, extensibility, portability, openness, standards compliance, scalability, development infrastructure, IDE, Version control, Build tools, Defect tracking systems, Development methodology"

Is this really a normal amount of information investors request from companies? What's the point of knowing all of this? Asking it implies that #1 the company has all this data in place, otherwise it's wasting time getting it together, #2 the investors know better than the founders about architecture, technology and toolsets and #3 a significant amount of times a term sheet is revoked because of trouble with build tools, standard compliance or a "development methodology". I'm feeling the author just listed everything he could think of rather than everything that actually matters.