ithayer

Thanks for checking us out - I'm really sorry about that. We are dealing with issues with some of our backend service providers. One of the difficulties of a financial site such as this is that the data which comes back is not very well normalized nor homogeneous, and we are seeing issues and response types which we have never seen before. Please send an email to support@readyforzero.com and we will track your issue. Thanks guys!

Hey there, thanks for the comment!

You are absolutely right that there were about 1.5M bankruptcy filings last year [this number is growing (1)]. Note that we haven't made any claims about the ordering on the graphic, but bankruptcy is an option which is often under-considered, because people are scared of it, and driven by FUD to pursue other options which often have lower success rates.

Rod and I have learned a tremendous amount about debt since founding this company. We have heard every possible misconception from people who are not in debt, such as

- "people don't care about paying debt off as much as weight loss because it's not visible" - "only dumb people get in debt" - "people should just stop shopping and pay off their cards"

The list goes on. What we have learned from speaking with dozens (now probably hundreds) is that there is no "typical" debtor. People that have reached out to us vary in age, sex, location, education level, stress level, income, employment, height, weight, hacker cred, skin color, and so on. The number of people in this situation in the US number in the millions. The statement "Don't most of them just pay it off" trivializes situational problems which are extremely diverse and complex. And "take a long time" it does - people that are either not financially educated or unable to pay off their debt can live in a steady state of repayment, paying a perpetual existence tax to banks. This should not be the state of the world!

(1) http://www.uscourts.gov/News/NewsView/10-11-08/Bankruptcy_Fi...

Hey, this is one of the founders of Ready for Zero (recently featured on HN). We have a simple webapp idea that might be fun to do on the side. If you're interested, mail me at nacho _at_ readyforzero _dot_com.

Of course this data is presented in hindsight. If expected value of a return on a company is the probability it's the next G times the percent you own:

E[Return] ~= E[Company] X %Owned

And

E[Company] = P(Company=NextGoogle) X Value(NextGoogle)

If you invest in a portfolio of companies, then you'd try to control the things you can:

1) P(NextGoogle): Impossible to estimate, look for good founders

2) Value(NextGoogle): maximize this (look for big markets)

3) %Owned: maximize this

Note that YC does (1) and (3). I would argue they don't do (2) at all. Noone thought AirBnb would be as big as it is, but they're crushing it.

Well, we're working on becoming a "known" party, which is why we're starting to engage people early. We appreciate open dialog.

Great pickup on the stamps. We've paid for and been approved by the services. For A/B testing the signup page, some users are directed to a service where we cannot link them. Our site hosts them properly.

Everytime one of these posts is born, a node.js article falls off the front page.

That was the first thing you told us when we walked into our YC interview.

Try an iphone app like "Sleep Cycle". It's worked just as well for me as the $150 "SleepTracker Pro" I bought a few years ago. Arguably better since the iphone app provides nice graphs and soothing wakeup music.

Does it work? I do feel like both the app and the watch nudge me awake at the right time, but you need to be disciplined enough to actually get up and make use of an unexpected 15-30 minutes in the morning.

I commuted to Google for 4 years. Even with the bus it was tough. I was the same though, living in the valley is not really an option, and I'm glad I didn't.

Some advice:

- live as close as possible to the highway or caltrain. this means soma, potrero, the mission, or noe valley.

- negotiate at least 1 work from home day. friday is the best. (although wednesdays are usually easiest to ask for first)

- work off peak.

It's possible to get your average commute to about 45 minutes, which isn't so bad (still gets old though).

Agreed. I put up a side project at http://beta.crunch3.com, which was an RSS-on-twitter concept. The interface is "slidey", similar to Pulse, but it gets relevant feeds from twitter, and takes screenshots like Google Fast Flip. I didn't continue development on it, so it's a little slow & the server will probably melt.

Thanks for the insightful comment. You hit the nail on the head - we're not interested in building another wiki (as you mentioned, we haven't seen one we've liked). We're just trying to think about whether it's possible to solve the problem in a simpler way.

I struggled with a something very similar (complete inability to work, not knowing what makes me happy), a few things I learned seem relevant: 1) Don't assume what other people are thinking or feeling (about anything, but in this case, many other people do go through similar things) 2) Happiness and fulfillment has a lot to do with expectations (intrinsic as well as external). Understand what those are and where they come from. 3) Talk to people, read, and if that's not enough, get help (seems like you're doing that). You'll probably learn something about yourself.

I can recommend "The Feeling Good Handbook" by David Burns (Stanford), which is about cognitive therapy [also described in other places]. It may not be exactly accurate for your situation, and those types of books may sound silly (I thought so before reading it), but I've found some of the techniques useful.

Nice technique. Another idea might be to select some standard text (eg: some news article) that you predetermine, and run it through several online translators, and compare what you get back from the humans to those. You might also include a 'turing test' sentence in there like: "obama talked to the bushes about their time in office".

Do you mind sharing what kind of app you're trying to localize (iphone, web, etc)?

interesting! What type of data are you translating (iphone app text, webapp text, etc)? Can you elaborate on your experience with mechanical turk? What did you notice to be the major problems/inconveniences?