Hacker News Reader

siong1987on Why Toys?

This is a really good post but it is disappointing that nowhere in the post it mentions Chris Dixon's post on this: http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...

siong1987on Byzantium Hard Fork Announcement

This isn't something that is forced. All of these are planned from the beginning. Frontier -> Homestead -> Metropolis -> Serenity.

siong1987on Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

This isn't correct, you can actually fund the Filecoin ICO with cash(USD), BTC, and also ETH[1] as long as you are an accredited investor.

1. https://coinlist.co/static/media/How-to-Invest.0a9f70b4.pdf

siong1987on SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

Hi Aaron, sorry to hear that :(

Prefer(https://prefer.com) is looking at hiring both frontend engineer and product designer in both NY and SF. We are a Benchmark-backed company working on rebuilding the service professional marketplace.

Feel free to reach out, my email is siong [at] prefer [dot] com.

siong1987on Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

Where do you get that 10% from?

From the article...

"Google doesn’t break out revenues from its cloud infrastructure, choosing to lump it in with other non-advertising businesses like hardware and Google Play sales. But that segment totaled $3.4 billion in sales in the most recent quarter."

Assuming that all $3.4 billion is for cloud revenue last quarter, that is still less than 10% for last quarter ($400m/4 = $100m).

siong1987on Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

isn't that funded?

siong1987on Japanese writing system basics

you are right: http://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translat...

siong1987on Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

For Authentication, it will be cool to have something like Twitter Digits(https://get.digits.com/) or Facebook Account Kit(https://developers.facebook.com/docs/accountkit), which is basically SMS authentication without password.

siong1987on Introducing DGit

http://githubengineering.com/counting-objects/

Under "Your own fork of Rails", you will see how it actually works. The answer to your question is "no, they don't store 3 copies of the same repo".

siong1987on Venmo Five Years Ago

Yes, Square Cash is beautiful but I don't agree with you that the app is elegant and effortless.

3 annoying parts about the app:

- lack of built-in calculator, the Venmo's bulit-in calculator makes it really easy to calculate the split between friends.

- constant prompt for security code in order to pay someone.

- expired requests, there should be a way for me to see all the requests instead of going to each friend page to see the request.

siong1987on YC Research

How liquid YC equity is?

I assume that by getting google stock, someone can sell them easily in the public market. But how does it work with YC equity?

siong1987on Google Fiber Austin

MonkeyBrains is currently offering Gigabit wireless in SF[1] on Indiegogo, $2500 setup fees and $30 monthly. estimated delivery date is early February next year.

1: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gigabit-wireless-to-the-h...

siong1987on The New GitHub Issues

just one quick feedback - it will be awesome if the whole bar is clickable instead of just the title of the issue.

siong1987on Y Combinator Reaches Farther Beyond Silicon Valley

YC will try to help on this as much as possible. We have a YC-International mailing list for international founders who have to deal with visa problem. In most cases, one or more founders who were from the previous batches will be able to help because they were in the same situation before.

There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution for this. Once you are accepted, it helps to reach out to the mailing list(or other sources) to figure this out as soon as possible.

I was in the summer 09 batch, thing may have changed since then.

siong1987on How to make fake data look meaningful

You didn't actually clean up the data that you have tho.

Another flaw of your analysis is that you didn't look at where the founders went to school for their undergraduate/graduate(this probably doesn't matter).

I opened up the CSV and searched for "Urbana"(UIUC, where I went to school for) and counted 28 founders. In fact, some "University of Illinois" should match to UIUC too but I ignored those (for example, ZocDoc CTO).

siong1987on HN Notify

I created HNMention (http://www.hnmention.com/) a while back.

It will notify you when someone mentions you in comment like how mention works on Twitter (@username).

siong1987on Cloudup acquired by Automattic

It took a while. CloudUp was a pivot from LearnBoost which was a product that they had been running for years.

siong1987on Webhooks Are Magic

There isn't a standard way of authenticating the incoming notification yet. I like how Mailgun is doing it, to verify the webhook is originating from Mailgun you need to:

  * Concatenate timestamp and token values.
  * Encode the resulting string with the HMAC algorithm (using your API Key as a key and SHA256 digest mode).
  * Compare the resulting hexdigest to the signature.
  * Optionally, you can check if the timestamp is not too far from the current time.

So, you essentially get 3 extra parameters from your webhook, `timestamp`, `token` and `signature`. Obviously, the API key is the shared secret here between your app and Mailgun.

siong1987on Formance.js – Library for formatting and validating form fields

There is the jQuery Plugin Registry (http://plugins.jquery.com/). There aren't many people using it tho.

There is also a really simple guideline to publish your plugin there: http://plugins.jquery.com/docs/publish/

Currently, there is no way to review which plugin is better. But at least it shows the number of watchers for each plugin, which can be an okay indicator whether a plugin is good or bad.

siong1987on English has been my pain for 15 years

Not just Italian, same applies to Mandarin too.

Mandarin speakers from different regions (Hong Kong, Taiwan, different parts of China, Malaysia, Singapore) speak in different accents but we usually don't have problem understanding each other (yeah, sometimes we make fun of the different accents).

siong1987on When An Accidental Feature Becomes Your Entire Business

The first Airbnb room was the founders' pad in SF.

Yeah, they are the first people to help out and organize trips for their customers, but I can see this eventually becomes a marketplace for other travel agents to use.

siong1987on My experience at a YC startup

Most(probably all) early startups are in chaos.

Growth solves all problems. If the startup mentioned in the post had a healthy/steady growth, no one would have complained and the OP would still have stayed with the startup.

If you are looking to join a startup, join one that with explosive growth. "Get on a rocket ship.", Eric Schmidt to Sheryl Sandberg[1], early Google.

1: http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandbergs-full-hbs-spe...

siong1987on Mattermark Weekly #9 - All Eyes on Mobile

"Edmodo - digital social magazine curated by your friends"

I guess it is a mistake. But that is definitely not what Edmodo is doing.

siong1987on How Stripe Builds their Software

pg's advice on doing things that don't scale isn't new. He told us the same thing when I was in the YC S09 batch (4 years ago).

So, with 4 years (maybe more) of data, I am sure that the advice works really well for most YC startups. And, that's probably why pg decided to wrote an essay about it.

siong1987on Mruby – Ruby in your browser

Since this project depends on webruby and webruby uses emscripten, it could get close to 2x native performance in browser(only firefox nightly) because of the awesome asm.js support.

I am a big supporter of asm.js after reading John Resig's post on it(http://ejohn.org/blog/asmjs-javascript-compile-target/).

siong1987on 500 requests/s with Ruby on Rails 4 on a 5$ / month server

That's less than 1 request/second. Rails should be fine even without caching.

siong1987on Wednesday Night’s Human Matchmakers Take Some Of The Work Out Of Online Dating

We are aware of that. Our matchmaker will get more information from the user if it is necessary.

siong1987on Wednesday Night’s Human Matchmakers Take Some Of The Work Out Of Online Dating

Hi anonymoushn, we don't reveal your FB information to anyone publicly, only the matchmaker who is assigned to you will be able to look at your FB information.

Obviously, those information are used to help our matchmaker make better match for you.

siong1987on Rails 4.0: Release Candidate 1 released

Weird. Now, I have to manually configure my database.yml in order to make it work on Heroku. Btw, I upgraded from 4.0.0.beta1 to 4.0.0.rc1.

4.0.0.beta1 works fine on Heroku but I keep running into ActiveRecord problem after upgrading to 4.0.0.rc1.