blakeeb

Ad hominem only detracts from your otherwise valid observations. Be careful with how you phrase your opinions. "obvious even to a child"

Really appreciate the feedback. You're absolutely correct about the recruiting angle.

Hackathons are a great co-founder dating process until the idea gets pregnant.

Team member here. Coded this in four days on a roadtrip... We're excited to hear the HN community's feedback on this iteration, and the overall concept of raising bounties which are released to charity.

We're also really excited to shower at some point.

Software Engineer at SpaceX here. Exits like WhatsApp not only cost more than space exploration, but also make recruiting much more difficult for many companies.

Our best engineers are very entrepreneurial. They don't hesitate to tackle massive challenges, often without even being asked. When a large exit occurs, it's an unfortunate siren call: "you could be making billions, writing way less complicated code."

Why am I taking a salary somewhere when some guy just made billions in four years? Did he have to worry about loss of human life if his code failed?

I make my own internal siren shut up by being a complete space geek, but rockets are not always as intriguing to prime candidates in the recruiting pipeline.

It's time for a reality check.

How many people actually exit with this level of success? Why is enabling our species to be interplanetary often a harder sell than the prospect of trading years of your life for a small chance that you might exit with a few billion dollars?

Greed. It's terrifying how much it prevails in our startup culture.

The size of one's exit is far less important than the impact of one's technology on the world.

Hack things that make the world better (or other worlds). If riches come as a result, great, but our startup culture's emphasis on valuation over innovation is, in my opinion, our achilles' heel.

(My views are completely personal opinions and do not reflect the views of the company. I love our startup culture and am proud to be a part of it, but I'm convinced that when I look back I will clearly view the code I've written here to be way more important for humanity's progress than the code I've written for entrepreneurs' selfish attempts at billion dollar exits)

To anyone with doubts about going on-record about your support for Edward Snowden: This is precisely why you MUST sign it. Your nervousness in expressing an opinion different from your government's will only compound if a true surveillance state matures.

Let's stand up quickly for this hero before it's too late.

Your nervousness is NOTHING compared to what he felt while deciding whether or not to release this. Share his burden.

Reticulating Splines!! Amazing Maxis reference, I'm sold.

Wow - any idea on why this disappeared from the front page? It's only received more votes since my last refresh here... perhaps YC is moderating to mute drama from HN? Not a bad idea really... HN != lynchmob

I'll decommission 10% of my botnet if you remove 10% of your followers.

Are you sure? I'd presume their API cluster is hosted independently from their public website... unless Anonymous did their research and knows their API hostnames.

+1. I'd love to see more grace in our industry. This is an overreaction on all fronts. People make mistakes. Let's rewind & keep hacking cool stuff together instead of DDoSing each other.

We're deploying troll-proofs by the minute. We went live with this as an MVP. GhostOps are on their way, sticking to agile CD style for this.

Hey Fauntleroy - I'm one of the devs on the bus, trying not to get carsick while responding to all of these posts!

We want to bring the fun of anonymous IRC group chat to the next generation. It might not seem fun to you, but do you use SnapChat or GroupMe?

I guarantee it will take more than three days to perfect, but thanks for your comments! :)

Context: we met each other, then built it in three days on a bus from SF->Austin. We're working on it!

We want to bring the fun of anonymous IRC group chat to the next generation.

I guarantee it will take more than three days to perfect, but thanks for your comments! :)

We're bringing back the fun of it. I practically grew up in IRC rooms, and miss the anonymous-ish freedom of expression it provided.

We want ghostpost to be the mobile generation's IRC. Fun, anonymous, topical chat.

Hey all - I'm Blake, one of the devs on the team. We met each other & built this in three days. We missed IRC's concepts of group anonymity and self-expression, wanted to bring it to the mobile generation.

It's built with JS + Firebase.

Social networks are crap. People don't speak freely, care way too much about their brand & self promotion. So, we wanted a quick simple way to have brandless, anonymous communication.

Feel free to ask us questions in this thread!

How have you been successful?

I'm a fan of Think Coffee, and Ace Hotel's lobby

Oops just noticed this comment. See my other comment (wkhtmltoimage is part of the package, allows you to render HTML+CSS into PNG, compile into x64 and place binary in your git repo directory to use on heroku)

Tip: wkhtmltoimage is part of the package, allows you to render HTML+CSS into PNG.

I used this for a project which needed a CSS powered image builder, which created sharable images:

Builder: http://circlek-flugtag.heroku.com/entries/shipomatic Thumbnails: http://circlek-flugtag.heroku.com/entries

Sounds like less of a war story and more of a fatal leadership mistake. There was no "war" - Rather than inspiring his team, he gave a frantic ultimatum.

Sadly ironic name, hopefully he can pull it together.