garry

Actually Triplebyte has been getting jobs for good hackers without credentials. That’s the opposite of what you are thinking: tech bros are from central casting and have high powered CS degrees.

Many Triplebyte alums have no degree or no formal CS training yet the test shows they are among the top software engineers in the world and deserve high salaried jobs.

I got to know Nathan 10 years ago when he was working at my YC batchmate's startup Backtype. He created Apache Storm previously, and now with Red Planet Labs, he's made something incredibly elegant - when I saw it, it was clear to me this would be the backend to end all backends. There are some very powerful abstractions here that will make developers a lot more powerful.

He's hiring and this is probably the best pure opportunity to write code that will touch a lot of people. Talk to Nathan!

Hi, lead investor in this round here. Instacart is actually also an Initialized portfolio company and I funded Apoorva while I was a partner at Y Combinator. We think these technologies are both very complementary — either way, retailers need options to fight against Amazon. They can't hire world-class engineers but Instacart and Standard Cognition sure can.

Hi, I'm the lead investor in this round for Standard Cognition. From what we can tell, Amazon has actually over-invested in sensor technology that results in expensive reconfiguration of shelves and stores. It works for Amazon since they are building stores from scratch, but existing retail partners don't want to put that kind of capital into reconfiguration.

This is where a camera-only approach really shines, which is why the team has gotten so much adoption from retailers. This tech is literally the way incumbents can fight back against Amazon's encroachment.

This is extremely valuable feedback and worth strongly considering.

When the iPhone came out, it didn't support apps - just built-in features like Mail and Mobile Safari. I agree with you that an app store for Helm could be valuable.

Well the point is that if you trust a cloud provider, you don't own your email because Google owns it too. They have it all, in plaintext.

The design actually allows for server stacking when you need more compute or storage. It does fully passive cooling with no fan.

The device talks to an AWS EC2 proxy IP that Helm makes sure isn't on an IP blacklist. All traffic that goes through that is TLS encrypted using Lets Encrypt keys.

If you want to truly control your data, you've got to control your hardware too. See: Lavabit.

Stolen? The data is secure - keys are stored in secure enclave, and storage is encrypted.

Down? There's continuity of service if you have a 2nd box online, and it's as easy to restore from a live backup as an iPhone from iCloud.

Email is the first app, and there will be more.

Oh that's the actual legal name of the company that created Helm.

It matters as long as Helm as a company is not compromised. This is true of Apple devices too, and when pushed, they stood up.

If I have a Helm device and you have a Helm device, and we both use iPhones, that's a pretty good scenario. All the devices are trusted and run signed audited code, and my email passes from my iPhone to yours purely encrypted at every stage, with no intermediaries having access to the plaintext.

And neither of us have to change apps or behavior.

This is pretty good.

Helm was built specifically for you. I know because I had to run dozens of mail servers myself for email-to-blog platform Posterous, my startup 10 years ago. It was terrible.

I've been up and running with Helm for the past month on my garrytan.com email domain and it's been zero maintenance.

An upcoming release should have continuity of service with a 2nd box, which is not a perfect solution I realize.

I'm easy to find on the internet. me@garrytan.com

This is a valuable and useful criticism and we're going to talk about this at our next board meeting.

How do you know who to trust? You surely have to trust someone. It feels generally true that we can trust Apple since we pay them for hardware and their ongoing business interest is in protecting their revenue streams through their hardware and iOS app store, which means you are aligned.

Generally for Helm that's a good case. That's why we charge money for this hardware and software: it aligns interest.

Free cloud services are not truly free and that's what most people seem to be OK with... but not all people.

This is the classic trade-off. Open source software you can read the code but usability suffers. For the people on HN, most people can run their own servers, but for normal people that's not an option.

Apple has managed to create a computing environment that is highly usable for normal people. This is what Helm is trying to do too.

One key principle for Helm is that you always hold your encryption keys to all your data— Helm and outside parties should never get access to that. So the backups are encrypted, and the Helm device itself stores your data in an encrypted fashion on its storage, and has a secure enclave such that those keys never enter user memory space.

Hosted services like protonmail (great option) support some key management but that's rare. Most everyone stores all your data in the clear, and that sets you up for Facebook-style hacks where people just steal a database en masse, and/or leave you open to warrantless wiretap which has been a problem for email services broadly in the past.

I want to point out that email is just the first part of what Helm wants to do. What is super valuable is that Helm can run its own software and add things like distributed anonymized VPN, or file sharing, and these things are all federated in a way that wasn't possible before.

Not everyone is going to care about this, but enough people should. People reading this thread should care: decentralization and federation of this sort is the way we maintain an open Internet. You can take down individual nodes but you can't take down millions of them. That's the ultimate goal of Helm.

Remember, there's no such thing as a cloud, it's just someone else's computer.

I agree with you absolutely here. Yes, literally Helm does this: encrypted automatic backups.

I believe multiple devices are in the roadmap... I know because I ordered a 2nd one for my office so I would have self-backup and instant recovery.

Developers and devops folks can certainly do this, I know I have had to do that before for my production data.

Part of the point (and the impressive software that has been built here) is that backups happen transparently, and if anything ever happens to the Helm you can get another one and get back up and running by restoring from online backups. It's the same principle: things can happen to your iPhone but you can get up and running with a new one easily.

Because with Helm only you hold the encryption keys.

I've been running my email on Helm for the past month with no dropouts of service - it's worked with no issues this whole time, and we use Comcast in SF, so it's not the best upstream there is.

I'm the first and biggest investor in Helm and I'm on the board. I created email-based Posterous previously (YC funded) and was a YC partner for 5 years. I funded this team because they're high integrity software engineers first, and we built this out of need— a company like this needs to exist because for this to work, you need both great user experience as well as great software.

Helm actually solves this exactly - they already have continuity of service coming in the pipeline, and the product as-it-ships will support encrypted backup/restore out of box, similar to how your iPhone supports iCloud backup.

I've run my own mail servers for Posterous before and it was probably 2 to 10 hours a month of maintenance, software updates, etc. And that's not something normals can do.

The company itself is run by folks who are committed to running this as a sustainable long term business that takes are of its customers and is super responsive to the community. As a board member I promise you we'll do that.

Actually I am an engineer, as is Vince and Brett in our partnership. Brett and I implemented much of the software that runs YC today including the application process and the internal social network.

I found out about Y Combinator through HN in 2007. The big thing I learned from PG's essays and the links on HN were that I could start a company myself, and that there were lots of smart people like me who had done it and were going to do it. It gave me the confidence to quit and start working on something.

The next year I applied and got in with my startup Posterous. We built that to a Top 250 Quantcast site, and Twitter ended up buying it. In 2011 I joined Y Combinator as a designer in residence, then investing partner through 2015. In 2015, I started a $125M Seed VC fund (Initialized Capital) with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, who interviewed me in 2008 to get into YC.

So I literally wouldn't have done any of those things and probably would have stayed on at Palantir as a software engineer in 2007 if I had never seen Hacker News.

Startups certainly die because their shoelaces are untied, which is what getting tripped up on financial accounting is like. But you don’t see champion marathoners going to shoelace-tying workshops with the hope it will help them win races.

Finance is important but product, engineering, and marketing are far more essential to making something people want, and that is why YC and the best incubators spend most of their time on that.

I was that YC partner. The beer was very good. 21st Amendment Stout.

Fun fact: Veblen died on Sand Hill Road.

Software costs money — great software makes your life easier and lets you do things by clicking checkboxes instead of spending half your week in server config. Half a week of an engineer (or founder) working on a thing is on the order of thousands of dollars.

So as with all software, yes, you can roll it yourself with other things, if you assume your time is worth zero. But we all know that is not true.