geoffschmidt

One of the most valuable things about YC is the pressure it puts on a startup: focus or perish, excellence or death. I've really seen this bring out the best in people, including myself. I think that reducing the "free" c-note from $150k to $80k will increase the pressure a little bit, that entrepreneurs will rise to the challenge, and that the overall outcomes will actually be better. Accountability closes the feedback loop and results in faster learning.

As for (2), potential investors say a lot of things that just make you feel terrible. The best response is to dig into them and try to figure out if there is any truth in the criticism, make any adjustments you can, and keep pushing ahead.

One option is for-pay medical studies, especially if you live near the right kind of clinic or university. Googling "medical research for pay" might give you some starting points. I have never done it myself but it is a real thing. (EDIT: http://brokelyn.com/human-guinea-pig/)

In particular sleep studies can pay thousands of dollars (in exchange for living in a lab for a week or two) but the lead time might be too long for you, eg https://sleep.med.harvard.edu/research/recruitment

Also, you might try being a provider on services like Exec, Lyft, or Taskrabbit.

I think what you're missing is that network effects ("standardization") have intrinsic value. Is it "stealing" when that value accrues to its creator? It is true that it can lead to anticompetitive behavior and eventually dated, mediocre products, but I think that's a secondary phenomenon.

Microsoft is a business built entirely on network effects -- both their operating system business (everyone developed for Windows because it had all the users; it had all of the users because it had the most applications) and their office suite business (Office was taught in community colleges because it made you desirable to the maximum number of employers; businesses standardized on it because it was easy to hire workers that already knew it, and because they could exchange files with other businesses.)

Microsoft enriched itself enormously through network effects -- and I would argue, enriched society as well, compared to an alternate timeline where operating systems and application software were fragmented and software and skills were not portable. Though I do wish they'd done a better job with the win32 API.

It's Scheme that has continuations and TCO (guaranteed by the spec) -- Common Lisp has neither, I believe.

Because HN actually has the best content, it doesn't have to do any of the other things you mention to get users. So it can focus on the thing that really matters, which is the value that users get from the site, which in the case of HN has nothing to do with graphic design or trend-following social features.

If something is low quality, but many people use it anyway, that means that there is a part of it that is truly world class.

This sounds like a company that would have benefited from a program like YC. It would have given them a peer group of entrepreneurs that would have pressured them to keep shipping product, filled in some of the totally understandable gaps in their knowledge (for example around engineering management and best way to time their Series A), and kept their success in context (just about everyone feels like a little fish next to Dropbox and Airbnb, and little fish swim harder.) If they'd had these things two years ago they might be in a very different position today.

He is famous for some other things too, like xemacs, xscreensaver, and DNA Lounge.

I totally got sound out of Pokemon Red! It was pretty choppy but I think that's because my Macbook Air can't quite manage to run the game at full realtime.

If true, this has an interesting implication - if our parent universe bothers to do it, it probably means they get useful information from it. That means that the recursion eventually terminates, that eventually in some great great grandchild universe they are able to produce the seed of the answer to whatever the original question was, rather than start another simulation.

You're misrepresenting reitzensteinm's position, which he put clearly: "I don't disagree with the direction of your sentiment, just the magnitude of the word you are using." His comment certainly seems to have been made in good faith even if you disagree with it.

Your tone on other hand is combative and patronizing. The HN guidelines say "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names," and "Be civil."

I tend to agree with reitzensteinm that we in Silicon Valley should remember how good we have it compared to the rest of the world. Our fortune comes not only from hard work and talent, but from being born in the right decade in a prosperous country.

Sure, if you believe there are network effects to geography, then you can predict that there would be a Silicon Valley somewhere in the world.

But why did it end up being in Northern California? Do you think that was pure accident? Could it have as easily been Tokyo? Frankfurt? Tehran? Oxford?

> "we were told there was money :("

People invest in services like Twitter knowing that there is a chance that they might not be monetizable, but believing that if they turn out to be, then the payoff will be enormous. So the expectation value of the return is still high.

Let's say I give you a box and tell you that inside is a social media company. You know that the achievable revenue per user could be anywhere from, what, a penny a month to a dollar a month -- two orders of magnitude of variability. You know that the achievable audience could be anywhere from, say, 10 thousand users to 1 billion users -- five orders of magnitude.

So if you want to determine how much you would pay for the contents of the box, you should try to learn about the potential audience rather than the potential revenue per user, because the former completely dominates the latter in the expected value computation.

Put another way -- how much would you pay to flip a coin where heads you get a billion dollars, and tails you get nothing? If you're allowed to purchase more than one coin flip, and the coin flips aren't too correlated, and you have access to efficient capital markets, probably close to half a billion dollars, am I right? :)

You're simply wrong. Earlier this year I did the full tour of Sand Hill Road and ultimately raised an A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, considered by many entrepreneurs to be the "top" fund today (whatever that means). The top funds tend to have strikingly competent and professional admins. I don't know who you've pitched, but I don't see any particular evidence of your claim about youth and beauty.

That's not why I'm downvoting you though. I'm downvoting you because you used the phrase "past her best" to refer to women that you don't find attractive. The time when that kind of language was acceptable in our industry has long passed (actually it was never acceptable, only tolerated.) This is a topic that is frequently discussed on HN, and as a HN reader of over a year, you have no excuse for not being on notice.

No, it is defInitely not possible. If it were, you could do it over and over again and compress any file down to an arbitrarily small size. Two things to search for are "pigeonhole principle" and "kolmogerov complexity."

Essentially the problem is that any encoding of a string either preserves the length of all possible inputs, or shortens some inputs and lengthens others, or lengthens all inputs. There is no encoding that shortens all strings because of the pigeonhole principle. To apply this to the challenge, see that the challenge is to encode the string as a program that when executed produces the string. Just because the encoding language is Turing complete does not mean that it can evade the pigeonhole principle.

To dig in a little further, when we say base N, we mean that we are expressing an integer as a sum of the values N^i (for i being every nonnegative integer), each multiplied by a weight that is an integer between 0 and N-1 inclusive.

Why do we do this? Because every integer has exactly one unique representation in this system. We could have picked any values we wanted for the places (rather than N^i) but unless we pick carefully, either some numbers aren't representable, or some numbers have multiple representations.

Base one has a problem right from the start, which is that 1^i = 1 for any value of i - when all places have the same place value, numbers aren't going to have a unique representation. The other problem is that the only number you can write in base one is zero, because the only possible weight (the only integer between 0 and N-1) is 0.

When you write 1111 = 4 you are sneakily using the length of the number on the page to encode the value. The length of the number on the page isn't supposed to matter. In base 10, 17 = 017 = 0017 = 00017.

But surely that's not the way it works in any other base. In any other base there is a digit '0' such that:

0 = 00 = 000 = 0000 = the number of apples I have if I don't have any.

Really? How do I write zero in your system? (as in the number of apples I have if I have none at all)

If octal uses the digits 0-7, and binary uses the digits 0-1, then shouldn't base one use only the digit 0?

You're right, saying that you were whining was out of line and I apologize for it. It is what I would say to my real-life friends to challenge them, but it is not appropriate with someone I don't know well and in any event it is not appropriate on Hacker News.

However, I hope you understand why I had that reaction. It is because you complained about how hard it is to get ideas like yours heard (and certainly "complaint" is a fair word for what you have written) rather than taking it as your responsibility to find a solution. I do take some offense at that, because I have some close friends that have worked very hard to become academically established so that they can find collaborators and get their ideas disseminated. You don't seem to value this work, or you consider it not worth your time. Rather than do it you are content to leave your work to "internet archaeologists" of a "more scientific" era.

Actually I agree with you that it's difficult to get revolutionary ideas heard (let alone funded), and that members of the scientific establishment sometimes go out of their way to stifle ideas that could threaten the theories on which they have built their careers. And today I think many professional academics would agree with you also. It's always been this way. What I admire is people who take this difficult terrain as a given and find a way to get to their destination anyway. These are the people that have driven human understanding forward. Of course it's hard, but it's an acknowledged part of the job description.

In fact, that (and your other parenthetical about how having worked on something for 10 years doesn't mean it's valuable) is why I took the time to reply to you above.

I understand that frustration can be hard to deal with but this attitude really doesn't advance your cause. No one likes to talk to whiny emo people. (Except at goth clubs where it can be kind of fun.)

You sound like a nice guy who has been working hard (though I think it's unlikely that you've legitimately "solved five outstanding problems in physics") and I would like to help you. I will try:

You have a problem, which is that most of the people who make claims like yours are cranks, which I'll define as "people who are emotionally committed to valueless ideas and with whom it is essentially impossible to have a productive conversation, and who are unaware that they are a crank." And most of the people who "could expertly read your papers" have had their time wasted by crank after crank, and gotten tired of it, so they have developed defenses. It's like the spam filter you probably use on your inbox. Maybe you really were given a lot of money by a stranger in Nigeria. It's barely conceivable, and if it's true, it could be very valuable to you. But you filter out such claims because (1) they are so unlikely to be true that the expected value of reading them is still negative, (2) you really have no choice in any event, because you get so many that if you read them all you wouldn't get anything else done.

Compounding your problem is that ideas like yours take a long time and a lot of effort to evaluate. For example, it's hard to understand general relativity - one has to commit some serious energy to it. If your ideas are right, they probably also take a lot of effort to evaluate. Here's the problem: you are not entitled to demand that effort of other people. Food, shelter, freedom, and medical care might be part of your birthright as a human being (though some disagree even as to that) but the right to have experts study your theories is definitely not included in that birthright. You're asking them to take time off from their own pursuits (like their own research, or spending time with their kids) to work on your pursuit. They might do it for a friend, or they might do it because they're curious, or they might do it because they think it could be valuable to them. But you're not entitled to it -- you have to figure out how to get them interested. The ball's in your court on that one.

So, you need to stop whining and develop the social skills that are necessary for a successful career in science. I am not a professional scientist, but many of my college friends are, and I have watched them struggle over the last decade to develop their social skills and their connections so that they can get their ideas understood and taken seriously. For some of them that's harder than their actual research -- but there's not much choice. It's part and parcel of the work. A researcher has two jobs, coming up with valuable ideas, and then getting other people interested in those ideas.

I wish I had some specific advice for you but I don't really know how it works in physics. But I'm sure that if you're really smart enough to solve "five outstanding problems in physics" then you'll be able to figure it if you apply yourself. A good first step might be to go to some physics conferences, meet some people who practice in your field, and befriend them. Show a lot of interest in their research, let them talk about it, ask intelligent questions (it's flattering when people do that.) Don't mention your own research - be vague ("oh, I've been interested in this aspect of gravitation too, which is why I'm so curious about your ideas.") Try to find small ways to help out the people you meet. If you do this for a while, you will eventually make some friends, or at least professional contacts. Then you will at least be able to ask them to take a serious look at your ideas. ("Hey, I wonder if you could help me out with something. I've had some ideas about [unsolved problem] and I know that you're an expert in it - it's always your name that comes up when I ask around. I'd love to get your opinion. Is there a time that we could chat for 15 or 20 minutes?") At least, that's what I'd do if I didn't have any contacts in a field, and needed to make some.

The story addressed this at length. Actually, the student evaluations were an excellent predictor of test score gains.

Re downvotes -- using periods like that for emphasis (in the first line of your post) is like typing your message in all caps for emphasis. It makes your argument harder to read, but it doesn't make it more persuasive. And it makes people not really want to talk with you -- you're signaling that you're not going to engage them intellectually, you're just going to get offended and shout at them if they disagree with you.

Also, arguably unlike social media, it requires domain expertise that many potential founders do not have.

I think it's money well spent. Facebook is one of the principle belligerent powers in the War for Talent. They're going to lose some ground in that war after the IPO. A stunning campus could help minimize that loss.

tl;dr determination, creativity, and a good product demo.

If you copy those things, you'll have a good chance of getting into YC.

If you copy "Send Garry Tan beer," you'll look like "the guy that didn't have any original ideas, so he copied Apoorva" :)

I love Hackpad! Just about all Meteor API designs, emails, and blog posts start life as Hackpads.

> Why even bother delivering this half-baked solution?

Because we used it for our funding announcement at the end of last month -- a full press cycle, where the Andreessen Horowitz and Matrix Partners press machine pushed our story out to all of the tech blogs, with all of the traffic that that implies -- and not only did it work fine, it got us to #1 on Google for "meteor." Above, you know, actual meteors :)

It works fine for us as a stopgap measure and we wanted to share it with others. We put it in a optional smart package that isn't included in new projects by default.

We're near the end of a major rewrite of Meteor's page update engine. You can see the latest progress on the 'spark' branch. One thing that happened during this rewrite was the conversion of Meteor's templating to be 100% string-based. Check it out: go to meteor.com/faq, open your browser console, and evaluate "Template.faq()".

This means that the server can render the templates for your app without having a DOM implementation of any kind (much less a headless client.) 'spiderable' doesn't do this yet, but it will by Meteor 1.0 (if 1.0 even has a separate package.)

For the record, the ratio of our investment in auth and accounts, to our investment in Spark, is about 2:1.

Two other issues that seem to come up in the bay area are "culture fit" (which is sometimes a euphemism for "we want to have fun at work and it doesn't sound very fun to hang out with someone who is old") and "trajectory" (which is a euphemism for "if you were really an A player, you'd have a senior role by now; since you don't, there must be something wrong with you, even if we can't figure out precisely what it is in an interview.") That you've just started out should logically eliminate the second concern, but it doesn't really, since it's a stereotype and people are not rational about stereotypes.

It's probably best to avoid companies that think about hiring in the way that they'd think about selecting frat pledges, in favor of companies that think about hiring in terms of increasing their capacity to get work done. But if you really wanted to get a job at the former kind of company, my advice is (1) try to build a rapport with your interviewers somehow, so that they look up to you and think you're cool, rather than pity you for being old and wanting to be let into their treehouse, (2) contextualize yourself as having gotten really excited about programming all of a sudden, after a few decades of kicking ass in other fields, and then having made a lot of progress in programming very quickly. That's something that anyone can respect.

I can second this for sure -- they have a combination of intelligence, business ability, and product sense that is incredibly rare. I've twice missed the opportunity to work with Nate, and I hope I'll get a third shot someday. They are also some of the most determined people I've ever met.

I think Derby is really cool, especially the synchronization and conflict resolution model. Though we've made some different choices with Meteor, I think there are many people that will like Derby's direction. Everyone benefits when there are multiple choices.