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2015
1237

Startup Metrics

We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company. Sometimes, however, the metrics may not be the best gauge of what’s actually…

1245

Tarsnap exploit bounty

Most bugs are straightforward, but occasionally one comes up which is not so clear in its impact. Such is the case with a bug which is fixed in tarsnap 1.0.36 . This bug causes the NUL string termination byte to overflow the heap-allocated buffer used for paths of objects examined as tarsnap traverses a directory…

1253

Debugging Lisp, Part 5

This post is for all of the miscellaneous features that arent large enough to get their own individual posts. If you havent read all of them, here are the links to the previous posts on recompilation, inspection, class redefinition, and restarts. One somewhat obscure tool for debugging is SBCLs trace. SBCLs trace goes…

1256

The Post-YC Slump

At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a...

1260

Lessons Learned from Reading Post Mortems

I love reading postmortems. They're educational, but unlike most educational docs, they tell an entertaining story. I've spent a decent chunk of time reading postmortems at both Google and Microsoft. I haven't done any kind of formal analysis on the most common causes of bad failures (yet), but there are a handful of…