Bhathena and other Ziptr staff did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This doesn't sound a whole lot different from any other un-graceful startup shutdowns. Did this service have a lot of users?
Also, is the characterization of Ziptr as an "encryption provider" accurate? Or were they just a secure document storage company? There are a lot of companies that do "document encryption" and "email encryption" for enterprises that are not, as HN privacy enthusiasts understand the term, really crypto products.
That though from Ziptr's 9/24 blog post is unusual: both the ridiculously short time period of 3 days, and the phrase "cannot guarantee."
Also, I find it hard to believe that such a serious serial entrepreneur with such significant backing (approx. $7M) would close up shop so suddenly and unprofessionally. Why burn bridges like this?
Also, if they were concerned about complying with an NSL, why would they offer even 3 days? During those three days, their users would all be surveilled as they pulled their data off the site.
This means the success of your article falls down to the whims of the few people browsing `new' at any given moment. If you're lucky, there are people interested in your topic there; if not, your article might easily fall through the cracks. Moreover, since `new' has a very bad signal to noise ratio, most people do not spend very much time there. I certainly don't! So this means it's even more likely for an article to fall through the cracks there.
For better or worse, this means HN misses out on good articles as they fall through `new' without getting votes. To get anywhere your article needs to be both good and lucky.
That gives a chance. If the community doesn't like it it won't stay up, but it gives you at least a chance.
HN: Lots of false negatives, few persistent false positives.
The twitter notification part broke at some point (I haven't had time to fix it), but the main chart is surprisingly accurate. It shows that it's been a good time to post for the last hour or so, so this submission was very well timed. That other submission was sent at a particularly poor time (about 2 hours ago), when few people were upvoting on the new page.
Timing really does make a big difference.
or
Concerned NSA Quietly Closes Backdoor Company
It appears like this may be a space where we can't make money from the core service.
