Hacker News: jelpern

New comment by jelpern in "Vulnerabilities in 45 Open Source Projects (vLLM, Langfuse, Phase, NocoDB)"

jelpern — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:51:08 +0000

I am evaluating AI tools. How should I use this research to interpret a tool's vulnerability profile as part of the selection process? Using LangFuse as an example, since that is one of the tools I'm considering: this project has four vulnerabilities—is that a red flag, or does the maintainers' response determine whether it's acceptable? What metrics should I weigh: vulnerability count, severity, response time, remediation rate, how maintainers classify risk? I see LangFuse marked two as acceptable risks and apparently didn't respond to V4. How should I weigh these factors when deciding whether to adopt a tool?

New comment by jelpern in "Peepeth: Unstoppable Microblogging"

jelpern — Sat, 14 Apr 2018 02:26:04 +0000

Technically "microblogging" is the generic term for Twitter's service, as I'm sure you know, but given how quickly they dominated the space it's a bit obscure (like saying "ice pop" for a Popsicle). I'm curious about the polarizing. I've never seen the word used that way before; does it refer to screening certain types out, or to attracting only certain types in? Is the idea to avoid the misogynist and alt right types who have ruined Twitter for a lot of people?

The Data Network Effect of Transit Navigation Apps

jelpern — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 23:59:38 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/jordan-writes-about-cities/navigation-apps-data-network-effect-ecad0a78ec1d

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14493495

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jelpern in "Starcity turning commercial buildings into group housing"

jelpern — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 23:00:32 +0000

Jon - really enjoyed failing to stump you the other day at the Urban.Us dinner and love what you are doing. Question: "The target tenant earns between $50,000 and $100,000 — the teachers, restaurant servers, police officers and entry-level tech workers who struggle to afford the $2,700 studios or $3,500 one-bedrooms popping up on Rincon Hill or Mission Bay."

Do teachers - let alone restaurant servers - in SF make >$50k?

Ask HN: What is a YC Research interview like?

jelpern — Wed, 17 Aug 2016 14:01:53 +0000

Has anyone done a YCR interview that can share what it was like? I got an email this week that said it's a 5-minute Skype call, with no further context. What can you do in a 5 minutes? I have a pretty good sense of how the 10 minute YC "core" interviews work based on the many blog posts about them and a few friends who have gone through the program, but I can't find anything about YCR.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12304725

Points: 9

# Comments: 2

New comment by jelpern in "Places to Start Acquiring Users"

jelpern — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:47:08 +0000

Spam does not mean unsolicited marketing. Door-to-door sales, direct mail, telemarketing, billboards - even the guy who in every tourist trap in the world who begs you to come eat at his restaurant - are all unsolicited marketing, but not spam. Spam refers to bulk-generated, unsolicited marketing over electronic mediums.

The distinction is important, because in non-electronic mediums, the conversion threshold for unsolicited marketing is high enough that the market more or less self-regulates. Email, or electronic mediums broadly, became a new territory because the CPM of unsolicited messages effectively went to zero, meaning all but the lowest conversion rates would generate positive ROI.

As such, sending strangers unsolicited messages about new services over email, twitter, etc is legit, as long as you are doing so manually and are not deceiving them. I have no idea what the AirBNB folks did, but I suspect that it was manual.

For a graphical illustration of the history of the word spam, check out this google ngram search: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=spam%2Cjunk+mai.... I started it at 1930 b/c I thought it was kind of fun to see the spike around the time that Hormel introduced the other sort of Spam.

New comment by jelpern in "Places to Start Acquiring Users"

jelpern — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:11:45 +0000

I've worked with teams at Lean Startup Machine who have done this, but you have to be careful not to get shut down by Twitter as a spammer. I like how dools did it: only targeting people with the hashtag, and writing personalized messages. Think of it from their perspective: if you received this tweet, would you flag the user as spam?

New comment by jelpern in "An Amazon Engineer Had a Little Idea That Turned Into a Billion-Dollar Business"

jelpern — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 08:15:54 +0000

I agree that this was egregious. I wonder if they wrote this headline as linkbait despite knowing that they didn't have the guy's name.

New comment by jelpern in "An Amazon Engineer Had a Little Idea That Turned Into a Billion-Dollar Business"

jelpern — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 08:14:35 +0000

It's very hard for media - even specialist media - to be as well versed in the technical knowledge of the practitioner. You see it all the time in financial journalism as well where people through around large numbers that are grossly distorted from reality. If the journalists were as good at the technical aspects of what they covered as the practitioners, they would be making a lot more money as practitioners (see for example Michael Arrington, or Michael Moritz before him). Celebrity journalists such as Michael Lewis or Tom Wolfe might be excepted from this rule, although even Andrew Ross Sorkin makes a lot of financial errors in his writing. Dan Primack is one of the few financial journalists who puts so much energy into understanding what he covers to get it right, yet loves the beat so much that he doesn't seem to be interested in becoming a money manager any time soon. I've digressed a bit towards financial journalism, but tech journalism and other journalistic areas in which technical knowledge is required suffer from similar problems.

New comment by jelpern in "How to get to YC interview - Insider's Guide to YC W13 Application"

jelpern — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:32:48 +0000

If I recall correctly from my AP Journalism class a billion years ago, mainstream journalists - we didn't have such a distinction then but I'm imagining that would be the equivalent - are taught to write at a 6th or 7th grade level. Of course the site just rated the above at 18.2. I'm going to have to work on this.

New comment by jelpern in "Y Combinator Founder Paul Graham Issues New Warning to Start-ups"

jelpern — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 04:50:54 +0000

The founders in YC are hardly naive innocents who are undervaluing their startups. A) the empirical evidence shows that they get the highest valuations for their seed rounds; and b) the current conversation explicitly addresses the case where they already have an offer with a cap 2x that what Google Ventures is offering.

New comment by jelpern in "Want a Ticket to eCommerce Hackathon? First You’ll Have to Solve a Puzzle"

jelpern — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:41:15 +0000

Etsy is considered to have one of the top engineering teams in NY - their CEO was originally brought in as CTO to solve what was at the time a technology mess - and they have a strong engineering culture. Dwolla is hungry to get developers to use their platform, and Alex and the NY team were a key part of organizing AngelHack NY. I imagine b/w the two of them they will do a good job.