synnik

While I'm the first one to point out that Western medical doctors do not know everything, this is going too far in the opposite direction. Crowdsourcing your health without any credentials behind the answers? Sounds really sketchy to me...

Looks fine, but as a potential customer, my main question is not answered:

Why should I stop using SugarSync in favor of you?

Solar composting outhouses? Just like already exist in some campgrounds?

Is this really a problem that needs a new solution?

Also, be aware that it is OK to bomb an interview. The point of interviewing is to find a match. If you and the company do not have a cultural fit, it is better to find out and both go your own ways. So I recommend above all to simply be yourself.

But who are you targeting as your audience? Just HN? Really??

The comments clearly show that even a portion of HN is offended. And doesn't every single startup want the largest audience possible?

It seems horribly short-sighted to make decisions based on what HN thinks.

I think you are being unrealistic about acquisition. I hear way too many discussions on HN about monetizing your products, and people looking for their big exit/payday. People are not going to give up their exit plan because of an idealistic "code of ethics" for their users.

Oh, be serious. I still use my @hotmail.com account extensively. I've had it since before MS bought it, so I think it is more a sign of my longevity online than anything else. Most professional software engineers that I know feel the same way. My experience is that people who judge you by your email tend to be very young and inexperienced software folk.

The difference is the impact it will have on our society. Isolated cases of illegal actions, to support the greater good, do have their place. But praising it to the world is going to play on others' emotions, encouraging them to do the same in the future. It is a slippery slope. People will be doing it for the attention in the future, not for the greater good.

And there ARE legal actions that can be taken in these scenarios. The worldwide praise of this act will encourage people to not even look for legal alternatives. Vigilante justice will prevail, and over time that damages the greater good.

When did I ever say anything about standing by?

I am not chiding him for acting. I am chiding people for praising his actions.

Report the incident to people with authority to act on it. Law Enforcement, his ISP, his data provider... anyone really, who has a legal right to stop the behavior.

Responding to one illegal action with another illegal action is not exactly praiseworthy in my book.

Agreed.

My startup is very atypical for HN (Renewable energy, so we do multi-million dollar research projects, deploy equipment that costs from 2-100 million, and our seed round is looking like we are going to close at about 150 million dollars.)

Despite the vast difference in scale between what I do and what most startups on this board do, I'm still looking to run the IT side of the business the same - cloud-based, using the latest tools that this crowd and others deploy, running a lean shop, etc.

I am still deciding whether Google is the right answer, or box.net or Podio, or others... But we definitely will not be installing Microsoft's solutions.

I'll buy that IF you can tell me what innovations in 1961 were affecting the general public, and who was driving them.

I rather suspect cultural memory is short-term.

You also inadvertently prove a more subtle point of internships. Employees who offer the greatest value are ones who are engaged with the company and want to be part of it. If someone doesn't think enough of us to want to go through the trouble of an internship, and think working for us is absurd, then they would not have been a good fit anyway. No loss to us if they don't work with us.

"There is no good way to put comments into GUI."

Maybe he hasn't seen any, but this seems a harsh conclusion. Whoever wrote the GUI could track history of changes, make comments required, and show it in the GUI.

There is a vast difference between "there is no way", and "I haven't seen it done right"

11. Learn how the entire stack works. I see way too many people coding around problems that could be solved at the server level, the network layer, etc.

Wow. We hire almost every intern that works for us, unless they suck. Internships are also normally done pre-graduation from college. It is not a job, it is in exchange for college credit. We hire the day they graduate.

But it is also up to the intern to decide whether or not our internship is right for them. A overgeneralized diatribe like the one posted is aiming to get people to not intern at all, whereas the appropriate act would be to critically evaluate your options, and make an informed decision about each specific company.

It is not "my method". Just an explanation of why the law seems intuitive to me. I expected everyone to extrapolate out from my examples for other ending points, and which point, yes, the % for the digit of "1" would drop, and approach that 30% rate.

I just selected end points to illustrate the concept. I think this place is getting a little too literal. :)

Why is this not common sense?

For the numbers 1-19, more than half of them start with 1. For the numbers 1-199, more than half of them start with one.

Change the examples to 1-299, 1-399, etc, and you'll get percentages of all digits matching Benford's law.

But suburbs are also taking themselves back. Many suburbs have been working to bring the jobs (and taxes) back into themselves. They also have their own utilities and water supplies, and clearly the shopping is there. The biggest gap is food, and cities aren't going to fare any better than suburbs if our transportation industry gets disrupted.

Because the bottleneck is not the trains, it is the rails. The tracks themselves are privately owned by freight railroads. To truly make high-speed rail will require a new era of track building.

... and that is exactly how funding would have to work -- tied to an ongoing organization's operations. Academia has their endowments and perma-fundraising. Religions have donations and tithing. This effort would need an analogous long term funding source.

My first thought is that if 1% of all renewable energy revenue was sent to this effort, it would provide potentially massive funding as renewable energy grows. I don't know how to convince the greedy energy folk to give up 1%, but it sure sounds nice.

The problem I see with this complaint is what "End of Life" means in corporate IT. What it boils down to in practical terms is that the vendor no longer is available for support calls.

We continue to run many EOL apps because of these kinds of issues -- we know the apps are stable for our usage of them, and it is a low risk that we would have needed vendor support anyway. We make an explicit decision to accept that risk

So this is technical impact, but really it is a risk management issue.

1) Give them your email.

2) They tell you, "Want an invite? Invite more friends!"

Even for a legitimate product, this approach makes it feel like a scam.

In short, the founder of the business has developed new hydro-kinetic generators that have higher efficiencies than the existing technologies. So they can generate power from a slower-moving river. The generators can be placed in standalone deployments, creating their own local grid. They also can be attached to existing grids to augment the current systems.

As I am just helping to organize it all, and not the founder nor the inventor, I'm not comfortable getting into too many details, but if anyone really does have a sincere interest (especially if interested in investing), let me know. I'll get you in touch with the guy in charge...

Just in the last week, I started informally helping a renewable energy startup, as they move from testing their new generators into seeking funding to deploy them across South America.

We've got one built, being put in place in the Amazon right now, and have plans to deploy 50 more installations over the next 1-2 years.

Our stated intent and goal is to bring sustainable energy to 3rd world countries, with minimal environmental impact.

I am a software developer in the energy industry. So whether or not that is Computer Science is up for debate. I do need to have my skills up on the technology in use, and I most definitely need to have a solid understanding of technology. But I do not need to know the latest and greatest flavors of it.

It is always dangerous to assume what answers are desired by an interviewer. Interviews are not just to get the job - it is to determine whether or not you would even want the job in the first place.

So in this particular case, I would answer something about how I have taught my kids multiple languages, taught them kung fu, helped them to develop their own hobbies and become their own people, while at the same time working with local non-profits on renewable energy technologies.

If they do not like that answer and would have preferred a list of open source/weekend projects, it is probably not a place I would have fit in anyway.

When one person drives the platform strategy, and it is opinion-driven, then conflict like this is inevitable. You either agree or you don't, and if DHH changes his mind, you might changes yours, too.

I don't think it is a statement on the platform at all - just a repercussion of one of its tenets.