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colinsidoti

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stackoverflow.com 7y ago

Is it unsafe for the JavaScript client to set the CSRF token?

colinsidoti
1pts0
www.communityquarters.com 9y ago

Community Quarters (2-month “remote year” within the US)

colinsidoti
1pts0
www.tnooz.com 10y ago

Google convenes meeting of travel brands to ease tensions

colinsidoti
2pts0
www.charitweet.com 11y ago

Show HN: Donate to Charity with a Tweet

colinsidoti
1pts0
www.projectmeadow.com 13y ago

Entrepreneurs Beware? The Convertible Debt Provision You Need To Know About

colinsidoti
6pts1
www.projectmeadow.com 13y ago

Ask HN: Feedback for our Chromebook competitor

colinsidoti
13pts9
blog.kangacruise.com 13y ago

Innovation in the Cruise Industry... Where is it?

colinsidoti
1pts0
blog.kangacruise.com 13y ago

Perfecting the DateRange Picker

colinsidoti
8pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Tell HN: Zerigo DNS seems to be down

colinsidoti
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

FYI: Facebook is breaking shared links

colinsidoti
10pts3
www.independent.co.uk 14y ago

Italian court rules MMR Vaccine caused Autism

colinsidoti
1pts0
www.kangacruise.com 14y ago

Show HN: I launched a Cruise Travel Agency

colinsidoti
2pts0
colinsidoti.com 14y ago

Hey WePay Please Build This?

colinsidoti
1pts0
colinsidoti.com 14y ago

The Facebook Phone Isn’t Dumb, You Just Don’t Get It.

colinsidoti
1pts1
colinsidoti.com 14y ago

Dear Mark Zuckerberg (Re: Facebook Phone)

colinsidoti
5pts1
colinsidoti.com 14y ago

Creating a Javascript Templating Engine

colinsidoti
5pts3
colinsidoti.com 14y ago

How To: Direct Communication Between iMessage and BBM

colinsidoti
2pts0
colinsidoti.com 14y ago

Human Hamster Wheels for a Healthier America

colinsidoti
1pts0
colinsidoti.com 14y ago

How and Why I Ran a Group Messaging Startup with 10 Android Phones

colinsidoti
7pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

What if your Karma was Currency?

colinsidoti
7pts6
colinsidoti.com 15y ago

Why dropping out of MIT with No Plan was Worth It for me

colinsidoti
8pts0
sidaza.posterous.com 15y ago

Group Messaging Startup hits 10,000 Messages in 6 Days

colinsidoti
7pts5
sidaza.posterous.com 15y ago

Sidaza solves Group Messaging's biggest problems

colinsidoti
1pts0
www.sidaza.com 15y ago

Show HN: My New Group Messaging Startup - SMS and MMS for Any Phone

colinsidoti
4pts1
miter.mit.edu 15y ago

Four Missing Steps to Pricing Like a Pro

colinsidoti
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Funding a project with launch expenses

colinsidoti
2pts1
ivolo.mit.edu 15y ago

Twilio Contest Finalist Translates Languages via SMS to Voice

colinsidoti
38pts1
colinsidoti.com 15y ago

Did social games kill Facebook’s social graph?

colinsidoti
36pts18
burrowscode.wordpress.com 15y ago

Executing Tweets

colinsidoti
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

On PGs Talk: Super Angels Selling Fast

colinsidoti
6pts10
Netlify Dev 7 years ago

This is exciting news.

How do you see `netlify dev` comparing to `firebase serve`? The `--live` feature sounds great and I can imagine the config variables are handled better, but otherwise I'm anticipating a similar experience. Is that correct or am I missing something core?

To add an interesting layer, financial institutions are investing in these solutions. Goldman previously invested in Plaid, and Fidelity invested in Quovo which takes a similar approach.

At some point I think it's on the banks to offer OAuth APIs, then Plaid can swap out one-by-one (if it hasn't already started).

Nylas is facing the same challenge in the email space. They have oauth for gmail, but user/pass for Exchange/SMTP.

I love content like this. I've found my knowledge becomes more specialized as I age, and content like this gives me an opportunity to grok other specialities with relative ease.

For whatever reason (I'm a software engineer), I particularly enjoy content about everyday physical goods. Knife steel has just been added to my bookmark list, but here are a couple more I think are worth sharing:

Making the ideal wool fabric for outerwear: https://weatherwool.com/pages/the-weatherwool-difference

Choosing the ideal card-holding material for leather wallets: https://ashlandleather.com/blogs/inside-ashland/johnny-the-f...

The grades and quality of Panama Hats: https://www.brentblack.com/panama-hat-grades-explained.html

I like this, but that's probably because I buy 5 pizzas or so fairly frequently and hate choosing the toppings.

That said, I'd prefer roulette on their medium pizzas that seem to be on sale perpetually. That with a modest upcharge and I might use it.

Interesting to see Rails simultaneously embracing React with the Webpacker gem while also trying to offer a better solution in Turbolinks + Stimulus.

DHH's complaints here about React (and Redux especially) resonate with me, but I have a hard time believing a React-less approach is the best solution. I'd rather Rails roll its own enhancement of Redux - and perhaps CSS management - alongside a handful of component generators that make everything from "Javascript sprinkles" to SPAs easier to manage in Rails.

I may be mistaken, but I think the meat of this will be in post 2?

It sounds like your taking React's render() and replacing it with ERB. But, how are you giving the ERB file access to state and props?

I suppose if it's done well, this would make it easier for Rails devs to adopt single page apps. It sounds like you're abstracting away a lot of React and creating a Rails-ier API to it.

I believe the 3% could still be shouldered by the business, if I'm swiping with them. Venmo would just be sitting in the middle of the transaction so they can prompt me to charge my friends.

I think this is possible with Marqeta today: www.marqeta.com

Front-End Engineer - Full time or contract

We are looking for a talented front-end engineer with experience in Javascript, HTML, and CSS3 (JQuery and/or React a plus). Initial engagement would be for two months, but you can consider this as a direct audition for a full-time position as a Lead Front-End Engineer.

You will report directly to the CTO, who is an experienced engineer focused on technical architecture, product management, and back-end development. You will turn our strong product vision first into living, breathing prototypes and finished products.. You recognize that you are joining a young startup, and sometimes that means being flexible with development priorities, and ready to compromise on perfection if necessary.

As our first full-time Front-End Engineer, we expect you to bring a passion for understanding our customer and delivering a superior experience for them. This is an ideal role for you if you are an experienced engineer who is eager to test yourself against the hardest front-end problem in the world (making people care about financial planning). We are heavily focused on consumer engagement and view our front-end experience as the most critical differentiation for the business. We are building a top-tier engineering team that will help us revolutionize the financial advice industry--you can expect to work alongside a team that is as talented and hard-working as you are.

About Harbor

Harbor is improving America's retirement security. We are building software to make high-quality financial planning accessible and affordable to the 65% of Americans who are not receiving any today.

We provide our users with a beautiful, online experience to design a financial plan that would cost thousands of dollars from a professional advisor. To enable that, we are developing a financial planning platform that is automated (where possible), intuitive, and educational to use. We are maniacally focused on making it easier for the average American to actually think about their finances, and are building a best-in-industry user experience to achieve that.

We are an early-stage start-up with a powerful mission and a small but high-calibre founding team: 3 co-founders educated at Harvard and MIT, extensive professional experience in financial services, management consulting, and engineering, and are one of 10 teams in the Techstars Chicago accelerator program.

Note: following the program's completion in October, we will relocate to Boston, New York, or San Francisco, depending on what's best for the business.

If interested, please contact colin@harborpension.com with your resume and a little about yourself.

Head of Engineering - Full Time

We are committed to building a top-tier engineering team that will help us revolutionize the financial advice industry. As Head of Engineering, leading this team and the development of our technology will be your primary responsibility. You will ensure our software remains scalable and stable as usage grows and our product iterates, expands, and improves.

You will report directly to the CTO, who is also responsible for product management and technical recruiting. You will work with the CTO to identify personnel and other engineering needs as they come up.

You are an experienced technical leader and engineer, and have worked in both ideal and non-ideal environments. You recognize that you are joining a young startup, and sometimes that means choosing good over great.

You are ultimately responsible for taking command over the engineering team, the code architecture, and the technologies in use. By the end of the year, you are likely to be overseeing at least 2 additional full-time engineers.

About Harbor

Harbor is improving America's retirement security. We are building software to make high-quality financial planning accessible and affordable to the 65% of Americans who are not receiving any today.

We provide our users with a beautiful, online experience to design a financial plan that would cost thousands of dollars from a professional advisor. To enable that, we are developing a financial planning platform that is automated (where possible), intuitive, and educational to use. We are maniacally focused on making it easier for the average American to actually think about their finances, and are building a best-in-industry user experience to achieve that.

We are an early-stage start-up with a powerful mission and a small but high-calibre founding team: 3 co-founders educated at Harvard and MIT, extensive professional experience in financial services, management consulting, and engineering, and are one of 10 teams in the Techstars Chicago accelerator program.

Note: following the program's completion in October, we will relocate to Boston, New York, or San Francisco, depending on what's best for the business.

If interested, please contact colin@harborpension.com with your resume and a little about yourself.

Harbor | Front End, Back End | Chicago | https://harborpension.com

Harbor is bringing back the pension (or something like it). We make it easy to build a retirement portfolio that incorporates guaranteed lifetime income, because we think that's the best way for every American to build a secure retirement.

We're hiring developers to join us for Techstars in Chicago this summer. Remote and/or Interns are ok.

Front End - We need a Javscript developer to take ownership over our front end codebase. It's currently built with jQuery, though we're strongly considering a move to React.

Back End - Ruby on Rails - Help develop the architecture for our own tools, as well as build out integrations to our financial partners.

Please contact colin@harborpension.com for more details.

The Tech Pledge 9 years ago

Does this pledge deliberately avoid internal matters like employee wages/benefits, HR dealings, etc?

To me, the Kapor's are effectively claiming Uber has breached their trust.

They also indicate they have been a "team player" during prior incidents: "As early investors in Uber, starting in 2010, we have tried for years to work behind the scenes to exert a constructive influence on company culture. When Uber has come under public criticism, we have been available to make suggestions, and have been publicly supportive, in the hope that the leadership would take the necessary steps to make the changes needed to bring about real change."

So it's hard for me to fault them here.

For the sake of more thought provocation, what do you think about YC's "Founder Ethics" rules, and how would you want YC to respond if Uber were a YC company? http://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/

I really like the idea of a pledge for founders but worry about the particular features available here.

The biggest red flag for me is that Founder's Pledge is touted as "completely free," but makes no mention of investment options being available for your assets.

So, while it may not be deducting an administrative fee, keeping your charitable assets with them is akin to leaving your 401(k) assets in cash, which will normally result in you having less funds to donate than if you had used a traditional Donor Advised Fund.

Unless a founder plans on distributing all of their charitable assets immediately (which I believe is atypical), I hope Founder's Pledge discloses that it may be in their best interest to transfer their funds to a Fidelity Charitable or Schwab Charitable DAF where assets can grow.

"We trade an order of magnitude reduction in the number of gaps for a roughly 5% decrease in the average meeting score."

I wonder if the investors would make this tradeoff if given the choice. Was this an instinctive call or is there data behind it?

This is interesting.

I wonder what you feel companies should do in the event of a strong pivot: reincorporate or retain their cap table?

Based solely on this post, it seems beneficial to reincorporate in order to retain an undiluted cap table.

However, that seems contradictory to YC's thesis of investing in teams instead of ideas. If a team's first idea isn't successful, I imagine YC would want to retain its stake in whatever their new venture is.

Also - is there any chance you've previously used pre-accelerators as a positive indication? "Letting up" on your standard assessment of a team simply because they had gone through a pre-accelerator could also explain this trend.

PayPal.Me 11 years ago

Ahh I tried doing this with Stripe and Stripe Checkout on StripePal.com but they wouldn't let me do it because money services businesses aren't allowed :(

I really like this concept though. If I wasn't paranoid about frozen assets I would be happy to use it.

Any lefties here? I'm a lefty and feel stuck with the basic ballpoint because any other pen I try ends up with everything smudged. Not sure if that's just poor form on my part.

I found this really interesting. I would love to know more about the business relationship between the MLB, the teams, and BAM. On the surface, this reads like the MLB simply took some huge bets that paid off: 1) $120MM in funding, 2) control over ticketing, and 3) perhaps most shockingly, not giving up on the team despite some expensive, early failures.

I imagine there was quite a bit more adversity than the story hints, though.

Good for the MLB. I'm not used to reading about high-value tech companies spinning out of incumbents.

University's seem to have some ulterior motive in the way they approach Title IX complaints. There are several cases - this one included - where the OCR's Title IX guidance says to do one thing, but the university seems to do something completely differently.

The original 1972 document is useless to read. The OCR wrote revised guidance in 2001, and further clarified in an April 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter. These documents are both very clearly written.

2001: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/shguide.html 2011: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-...

The coordinator's job here, IMO, should have been clearcut. The 2001 Guidance explains that his or her first task would be to determine whether the OPs conduct denied a student's ability to participate in or benefit from the program:

In assessing sexually harassing conduct, it is important for schools to recognize that two distinct issues are considered. The first issue is whether, considering the types of harassment discussed in the following section, the conduct denies or limits a student's ability to participate in or benefit from the program based on sex.' If it does, the second issue is the nature of the school's responsibility to address that conduct. As discussed in a following section, this issue depends in part on the identity of the harasser and the context in which the harassment occurred.

The complainant's made a crafty argument for how the OpEd limited their educational experience, but their argument is also specifically excluded in the "First Amendment" section of the 2001 Guidance:

In cases of alleged harassment, the protections of the First Amendment must be considered if issues of speech or expression are involved. [112] Free speech rights apply in the classroom (e.g., classroom lectures and discussions) [113] and in all other education programs and activities of public schools (e.g., public meetings and speakers on campus; campus debates, school plays and other cultural events [114]; and student newspapers, journals, and other publications [115]). In addition, First Amendment rights apply to the speech of students and teachers. [116]

Title IX is intended to protect students from sex discrimination, not to regulate the content of speech. OCR recognizes that the offensiveness of a particular expression as perceived by some students, standing alone, is not a legally sufficient basis to establish a sexually hostile environment under Title IX. [117] In order to establish a violation of Title IX, the harassment must be sufficiently serious to deny or limit a student's ability to participate in or benefit from the education program. [118]

Moreover, in regulating the conduct of its students and its faculty to prevent or redress discrimination prohibited by Title IX (e.g., in responding to harassment that is sufficiently serious as to create a hostile environment), a school must formulate, interpret, and apply its rules so as to protect academic freedom and free speech rights. For instance, while the First Amendment may prohibit a school from restricting the right of students to express opinions about one sex that may be considered derogatory, the school can take steps to denounce those opinions and ensure that competing views are heard. The age of the students involved and the location or forum may affect how the school can respond consistently with the First Amendment.

Unless there's more to the complaint than the OP reveals, this should never have been investigated.

I would love to know if there's been new precedent set since 2011 that would make the university's response here seem more appropriate. Does anyone know?

Err, I certainly didn't mean to be raising any middle fingers. I've just always thought it was weird Stripe doesn't have a lightweight payment page, considering how simple it was to build this with Stripe Checkout and their automatic email receipts.

I've been sitting on this idea for almost three years, and with time it got so easy to build that I finally took a few weekends out. Here's a post from back when I'd have to build out the checkout experience and receipts myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4507050

I'll have to look deeper into this trademark issue though. Anyone have any alternative name ideas?

Hey - I recognize you from Stripe IRC

This is the interpretation I'm hoping for. I am indeed using "the old connect way" (assuming you mean charging directly instead of through the platform). I wonder if taking a fee has an effect, though.

I pushed a question through to Stripe support. Will update here when I find out.

Tesla Energy 11 years ago

It's hard to wrap your head around all the challenges in energy. If you're REALLY good at it you can find some incredible arbitrage opportunities...see Enron.

Consider the power output characteristics of some common energy sources:

Gas, Nuclear, Hydro, Wind, Solar

Our "sustainable" sources of power - hydro, wind, and solar - are also the ones with the most irregular and unpredictable power output. This creates a problem, because even if there was enough cumulative power output from sustainable sources today, it most likely wouldn't align with our usage schedule.

So there are two solutions: 1) find a way to map the sustainable power output to our usage 2) find a way to store energy

Today, our most readily available form of energy storage is gas. We just put it in a container and burn it when we need to. "Spin it up," if you will.

An alternative to gas is a crazy network of Powerwalls. The hope is that, eventually, instead of spinning up gas turbines during peak demand, we can just draw from our Powerwall.

There was another alternative on HN recently. Basically a super-deep hole in the ground with super heavy object falling into it, but suspended by a rope. You run a motor to lift the object during off-peak hours, then let it fall and spin a generator during peak hours. I can't find it right now but I remember thinking they had a great name.

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That said, power output is only part of the problem. If you're looking to factor the potential disappearance of arbitrage opportunities into your buying decision, you also need to consider the time until regulatory changes allow for perfect pricing, and the time until these Powerwalls have precise enough information to decide exactly when to draw from the grid versus the battery.

tl;dr: "quickly" is probably optimistic. We're a long ways away from economies of scale.

Tesla Energy 11 years ago

One thing that might go overlooked: Load shifting could, in theory, lower electric bills such that there's ROI without solar panels.

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Edit for why: On-demand power is expensive. "Spinning up" additional power during the day is more expensive than having certain types of power generation running all the time. In theory, pumping power into a battery at night during non-peak hours will cost less than consuming directly off the grid during the day.

I'm forgetting all the details of energy economics, but IIRC there would also be far less emissions by having consistent load on the grid all day long. Something about the ones we "spin up" also being the worst for the environment.

Stripe Connect v2 11 years ago

"like paying out a caterer for your office lunch"

Pretty much. But it's a little hard to envision at that scale.

Think instead about a large company with a set of approved vendors. Execs submit purchase orders to the vendors. The vendors get paid out by check.

Instead, you can payout the vendors through Stripe.

Edit: As I think about this more, I don't think it should be free from my own account, but it's hard to reason what ACH pricing should be. I can send an automated check for $1.50 with Lob today.