mr_puzzled

Protip : never try to hide your shortcomings. Embrace criticsm and scrutiny. If you do it right, these instances should only help you become a better team and build better products. How you respond to scrutiny pretty much gives an idea of how you handle yourself when the going gets tough, and comments such as these just don't inspire confidence.

Pioneer could do a much better job of presenting the reality : experts are involved in picking the winners and the points earned in the tournament are also taken into account.

Another point I'd like to bring up : the home page says winners get $7000, but the offer page mentions that it's $1000 cash and $6000 worth of shitcoi...sorry, stellar lumens. Maybe there's a pattern here? Misleading marketing material that we typically expect from tone deaf big corps, does not inspire confidence in the team behind pioneer.

Another point : for some reason they see the need to display the age and country of the participant. Like, if you know anything about hackers, it's that they greatly value privacy. That's pretty much the only reason that kept me from participating when it launched and now I have zero interest even if personal details were not displayed publicly.

> I am more than willing to set up some time to chat with you 1:1 if you have any more questions.

That's very kind of you to offer! Can I send over a few questions over email closer to the time I'll be applying? I don't see an email address in your profile, can you post your email id here? Thanks.

I am interested in working at Gitlab as a software engineer and will be applying approximately 6 months from now. Do you have specific suggestions on how I can improve my chances of landing a position? I had the following in mind :

- Start contributing non-trivial patches to the community edition

- showcase my skills through side projects which will be rails webapps

- brush up on my CS fundamentals for the interview

From the outside, the bar seems quite high, I remember coming across a tweet mentioning 20,000 applications over the past few months. Any other suggestions on how I can improve my chances? And how long does the hiring process take from my application to accepted/rejected? Thanks.

What's your policy on employees' side projects? Let's say I want to work on a side project and one day hope to turn it into a business (and get into YC), do you allow me to retain intellectual property for the side project which is of course unrelated to my gitlab work?

This article is terrible. It tries so hard to paint Pinker as some sort of evil guy with the main argument being (what seems to me) how Pinker unintentionally helped Epsein a long time ago. They think somehow bringing in unrelated criticism of Pinker's work helps their case? Ridiculous.

To be very clear : Epstein is obviously guilty of some horible crimes. Pinker, seems like he crossed paths with Epstein and now people are out to get him.

Is this true? If it is I think it should be an optional step. Can someone else confirm this since I didn't start the application process step.

Edit : I just went through the signup process with this account and I did not come across the personal video requirement. Where did you come across it?

Startup school mods : can you please delete my startup school application, I was testing out the signup flow. Sorry for the trouble.

A couple ideas/suggestions/questions to the Work at a Startup team:

- One of the reasons people join startups is when they want to start one someday. While California has great protections for people to retain IP as long as it's not directly in conflict with their employer's line of work, the rest of the world is not so lucky. How about requiring all your portfolio companies to be explicitly side project friendly by adopting something like Github's IP agreement. Keep it simple : allow employees to work on their side projects on their own time using their own resources and as long as it's not directly competing, it's all good. This seems to be the implicit understanding already, but make it formal and set a good example for the industry to follow. More Context : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13142327

- Any chance of expanding this to international remote workers? There are obvious legal challenges to hiring someone from a different jurisdiction, but maybe you can start out with simpler solutions like a having a standard legal template by hiring international remote workers as contractors which greatly simplifies the paperwork?

How does firefox manage to play drm content? Maybe OP could use firefox's approach? Someone mentioned below that redistributing is not allowed, but downloading at runtime is ok. Not sure about it, but if anyone knows about this, please explain it to the rest of us.

I have domains on namecheap and would like to transfer to CF. Does the transfer process involve disabling whois, temporarily exposing my personal details to the internet?

Has Keybase lost it's way? I thought they were onto something cool and maybe could explore an enterprise play with private chats, filesharing and git for teams or something like that. Basically make money by selling to teams. But Keybase seems to have stagnated, existing apps are still quite buggy, not enough new developments recently. The facepalm moment for me was when they announced they were supported by the Stellar foundation. I lost all hope then and there. I get that you guys are buddies with the Stellar folk, you think Stellar is cool etc but an objective analysis leads to only one answer : don't do it you'll regret. Maybe add it as a feature (stellar integration) but don't go all in. Speaking of Stellar, still no integration after 1 year?? Focus on what you have and start making money. So, what went wrong malgorithms?

(Sorry if this sounds harsh or rude, there's no point in sugar coating the truth. Hopefully the keybase teams reads this criticism and does a little soul searching.)

First off, I'm rooting for Purism since they focus on hardware for running linux distros. But, what concerns me is that they don't seem to acknowledge that parts of the system contain proprietary software.

- Coreboot iirc requires binary blobs. Libreboot is truly FOSS, but only works on ancient cpus

- ME can't actually be disabled completely according to Qubes OS founder Joanna.

I think it's crucial to also talk about the limitations of the system.

I am in a somewhat similar position : I want to build a linux distro powered phone (postmarketos and/or ubports should be able to boot), and I have no idea where to start. Maybe I'll start by booting up the OS on a raspberry pi and get all the components working on a brick sized prototype and then see if it's possible to use the pi compute module to use as a base for the phone. Any ideas/suggestions are welcome.

Can you share a link to your project?

That's amazing, best of luck. Will the revenue info be public? Are the current subscriptions close to replacing what you were making at your fulltime job? Hopefully sustainability is not far off and I look forward to the day when you can hire other prominent contributors such as emersion.

Can you give me a tl;dr of what you are referring to. Links to articles would be great too!

Hi Sam! Can you please interact a little more with the HN community? I realize you are an extremely busy man, but drop in here once in a while and just...comment. Not to stir up a hornet's nest, but weighing in on YC related news once in a while is not a bad idea. Eg- No doubt you and YC are well intentioned people and the YC china move, while controversial, is probably a reasonable move. A private company can only do so much when dealing with powerful nations, and as long as you are not directly aiding governments do all the controversial things you hear about in the news, that's about as good as you can do. What was disappointing for me was this: YC is starting to feel just like any other big company, staying silent on controversial topics and not responding to criticism. I'm starting to feel like there's a disconnect between the community and the company. This makes me sad since YC was pretty much the opposite of what big companies stand for. My advice : be open, respond to criticism, don't stay silent on touchy topics, encourage YC staff to share their opinions on controversial topics. It's ok if your own staff don't agree with you, it's ok to agree to disagree. In short : don't become just another big company. Please note that this comment was made in good faith and please remain respectful in the comments.

I should have worded it differently: what I was trying to ask was - publicly traded companies by definition have to keep growing and have the "we have to keep growing" mindset, and this often negatively impacts the products eg- facebook showing ads way too often, collecting more user data and it's parly driven by the desire to keep growing and earning more ad dollars. Fb is a perfect example of a product going downhill as it grows. Are there companies which continue to make products loved by users even though they have the "we have to keep growing" mindset? One example was Apple, but they are starting to faulter, increasing prices way too much. Some gaming studios are publicly traded and seem to be doing fine. The WWE company also seems to be doing fine. I'm looking for such examples but companies which have been around longer than that.

Reposting my question :

So let's stay I start a startup, grow and manage to take it public, what happens next? Is the company expected to keep growing indefinitely? What happens if growth is stagnant, but the company is profitable?

I also hear about the mid-life and late stage of companies. Can you explain what these terms mean and how being in these stages affects the company?

Are there any good examples of publicly traded companies which have lasted a long time (more than a few decades) with minimal impact of the "we have to keep growing" mindset?

Finally, what are the pros and cons of being private without vc funding and being a public company?

And what role does VC play in the broader economy? Does it manage eg pension money? Are there good resources to understand the lifecycle of VC funded companies and what role VC plays in the broader ecocomy?

Just curious, how does the godot engine compare to Unity and UE4? Is it suitable for AAA studios or are there any major pieces missing?

> So, we built the web’s first video meme generator. Within weeks, Kapwing had hundreds of meme creators using the website daily thanks to the magic of SEO.

I want to learn this magic too! OP can you give us a brief overview about your SEO strategy?

Does the root cause of all these problems with quora come down to being vc funded and needing high revenue numbers and growth rates? Imagine quora was a site driven by the community...

It's a conundrum, only a vc funded site can reach such scale, have great growth etc but when the time for monetization comes, everything starts going downhill. A site driven by a foundation for example, rarely ever gets to any sort of scale. How can this problem be solved?

Thanks for the explanation. Follow up question : how did you implement the signed cookies part?

Thanks for that, great read.

I think for my use case going with s3 will be easier and better for security. So how do I actually do it? Let users directly upload to s3 and have a lambda function call my server to store the url? If the image file is maliciously crafted, how does using s3 help, especially when serving the content? How can I set the headers when serving images from s3? And is there a way to identify that a specific user uploaded this file, so that I can have rate limiting? Is it possible to generate a signature or something to identify a user that I can decode server side to say "ok, this user uploaded the file and he is who he says he is". Maybe sign using the cookie that django sets for each user?

Somewhat related : are there any guides/tutorials about how to do secure file uploads in webapps and how to avoid obvious security pitfalls?

Reading the Django docs https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/topics/security/#user-... , specifically,

>Django’s media upload handling poses some vulnerabilities when that media is served in ways that do not follow security best practices. Specifically, an HTML file can be uploaded as an image if that file contains a valid PNG header followed by malicious HTML. This file will pass verification of the library that Django uses for ImageField image processing (Pillow). When this file is subsequently displayed to a user, it may be displayed as HTML depending on the type and configuration of your web server.

is a little concerning. They recommend serving images from a different domain and whitelist file types. Is that enough? Anything else needs to be done to improve security? Does handling uploads alone give attackers an RCE oppurtunity or is it safe to handle files in the server and then upload to aws s3?

Did you guys apply to YC this cycle?

If I signup as a developer, how easy/hard would it be to find a gig? I assume the supply of good developers is not an issue so finding work would be hard.

Does YC sponsor h1b visas for people not authorized to work in the US?

Another point : the privacy policy could be improved. Specifically, sharing of applicant data with 3rd parties. I don't want that at all. When I submit an application, I expect only Pioneer will have access to it. If you want to send marketing emails to applicants that's fine, but sharing applicant info with 3rd parties is not cool. Keep it simple like YC's no bs approach. Thanks.

Feedback to the pioneer team :

- remove the country and age columns in the leaderboard page. There's no need for it to be public...privacy.

- we still don't know what the experience of going through the program will be like, maybe have a few people write about their experience?

Questions : - how's the security of the backend used to collect all the info? A simple page going over what you do to secure applicant data will be reassuring.

- how many people applied and how many did you fund?

While these may not seem important to the general public, I'm pretty sure the average HN user cares about it. As some anecdata : this is basically why I have not put in an application.

Thanks