jhdavids8

Yeah, not too sure why that happened for you. Regardless, I appreciate the props and gave you a vote for it :)

That's not the point of the article. Developers frequently launch a startup and do so bootstrapping it. They can't always afford professional design help (I can personally attest to that). I listed these resources mainly to help that developer pull together a decent looking site, so they can maybe attract investors and subsequently a full-time designer.

Also, I'm very much interested in design. And I by no means think it's a joke. Notice at the end I say this is no substitute for professional design work...it's simply a medium.

Thanks! I added a few to the post and attributed you. I'll be sure to use the icon sites in the future.

Mainly because I came across them from reputable sources (usually from others on the list like Smashing Magazine). Additionally, the list is more aimed towards web apps, so your recommendations wouldn't fit (many thanks though).

With all that, if you don't like the list having things I haven't used, why recommend that I add other sites I haven't used? Not being an ass...just curious

Hmm, if you don't mind me asking, what exactly is happening (I don't have an iPad at my disposal). The site uses Bootstrap heavily, and I just ran it through a CSS3 validator, which brought up no alarming custom CSS errors.

Thanks!

First, over half of people do not use IE8, so not sure where that stat is coming from. Second, not sure I'd call FF or Chrome niche.

Not paying too much attention to IE (IE8 specifically) is a strategy worth doing. It's a pain in the ass to support IE8 and not worth the extra development time in the short term. Plus, not sure if this applies to this startup (I'd say it does), users like those in HN (the majority of whom use FF or Chrome) are the users you want initially to use and support your startup. If they like it, they become quite the dedicated user, which really helps to get your startup off the ground initially. So targeting FF and Chrome users is hardly a bad strategy for release 1. Adding IE8 in the mix is way more frustration than it's worth.

Awesome! So a strategy mentioned to us before is highlight the skip feature, pull in reviews from sites like Yelp, Google, etc, and focus on that. This way, we'd have ratings for each business, displayable via the map in the site, and the skip feature allowing you to focus on trip planning through third party reviews. Something we'll definitely have to consider, although breaking reviews out per service would be so much more helpful in trip planning, IMO

Thanks for the input.

I agree about the images, and it's a definite goal but not an easy one to achieve with the team as small as it is. Some places we'd just have to go visit ourselves and snap pics of, which I actually plan to do eventually.

I'm thrilled you saw the "occurring today" flag honestly, and I'll modify it later. But it's features like that which highlight one of our goals: to provide everything you would ever want to know about a business to you. Google/Yelp take a disconnected approach: a business goes in and can be reviewed for any reason. We aim to know more, specifically what services that business offers, hours of each service, special deals/events going on, etc, all while providing helpful and credible reviews of each service.

So you nailed what I've already argued to many others, which is reviews are relative to you. I completely understand your point, but it's hard to achieve what you desire w/o being intrusive. To highlight relevance, we'd have to get users to fill out a questionnaire about their race, age, interests, etc. This is a possibility down the road I suppose.

That's why I created the 'trust' feature though. If you spot an Indian reviewer, add them to your 'trust' circle. Later on, we can get smart and provide 'trust' recommendations for you, but that's a future feature to tackle.

Also, you're correct, voting reviewers have existed for awhile, but they're hardly highlighted by those sites as important. We feel like by encouraging voting from day 1, we can start a culture where it's widely used. Maybe that's a bit naive, but emphasizing how important it is to site functionality should hopefully encourage use (just like how it's used in Reddit/HN).

Definitely our biggest competitors. We're trying to create a more credible and helpful review site. I liken us to the Rotten Tomatoes for food/entertainment reviews. We encourage quality over quantity with reviews. If you're an IMDB fan instead, then you may choose to stick with Yelp and others.

We break reviews out per service, which I've yet to see anyone else do. And I do indeed think quality is a major concern with sites like Yelp. Their shady filter and questionable business practices have been brought up many time before. Reviewers are held to no accountability, so you'll often see ridiculous 1-star reviews in Yelp.

Basically, we want to form a unique review site, one that knows intimate details on a business and one that provides extremely helpful reviews.

Definitely a concern, as reviews likely have less exposure than something like Reddit and HN posts.

We have a few strategies in mind where users will either earn votes or have limited votes available. For example, users could only vote when above a certain wisdom score and/or could only vote, say, 10 times a day. These are strategies we'll have to emperiment with.

Skipping is a fun feature I added to try to evolve into a social feature. Many users use review sites to plan trips, so we added this. Basically, you 'skip' to any number of places you like, which forms a sort of itinerary with directions and ETAs. In the future, we'd love to expand this feature a bit, allowing users to share their 'skips' with friends,or possibly even advertise public and/or private skips (think of a bar crawl for example).

Clickable links: Landing page: http://skipscotch.com

Live demo: http://skipscotch.com/home/underdev

> Your review will be decorated with an Amazon-style "This review was helpful" thumbs up / thumbs down button; and, the more helpful reviews you leave, the more weight your later reviews will be given

This is exactly what I've been thinking for the past 6 months. There's no reason the rating given to a business should be the generic average of reviews provided. A weighted average considering various realistic factors would provide a much more representative rating for a business.

I hate to do this sort of self-marketing, but issues like these are exactly what I'm trying to solve with my startup (skipscotch.com).

Very interesting idea about gaming the review platform. I'm trying to game it a bit, but the idea where reading reviews require credits you earn by writing reviews is a interesting concept. I just wonder how much of an audience you would be limiting from your platform by implementing it. I suppose you could allow anyone to view ratings, but actually reading reviews would require credits.

I highly doubt Yelp pays people to review...anymore. They did when they first launched (they've admitted to this), but with their brand recognition now, paying people to review would be a giant waste of money. That being said, they haven't reached profitability yet, so who knows, maybe they are making this bad decision.

Yeah, archive was misspelled. The actual URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/jotly-...

Fantastic. I just sent the email. I'll be on the lookout for Sunspot 1.4 and its improvements in geo search. Thanks!

I contemplated websolr recently but went with IndexTank simply due to the free storage they provided. It's nice to test out the service in dev mode to see if it's a good fit before committing to paying for it. Any chance Websolr offers an option like this down the road?

Plus, Solr just seemed to struggle with geo search. I used Sunspot as my search interface and had to specify a minimum precision of 6 (supposedly a 6+ mile bounding box) to get any results, even those that were less than a mile away. I know Solr uses geohashing, but it just appeared wildly inaccurate...at least for me.

My bad. I'm new to the east coast (been here a little over a year) and PG said something like this was YC's first NYC event at YCNYC, so I reached an incorrect conclusion. Should have said something like this was their first time back in awhile I suppose.

I largely agree...it can be good for users but can also scale back the innovation in that market due to Google's reach. A brand like Google can get to so many more users than a startup can. I'm amazed quite often by the number of people who don't know what Dropbox is. Yet, when Google enters this market, it'll be those people discovering GDrive and thinking "This is awesome! Why haven't I seen this before!" Competition drives innovation, definitely. Question is, who can innovate quicker and expand their market more rapidly, a startup or Google. Google has resources a startup does not. And for that, Google can often get to a controlling stake in the market, thereby controlling the innovation and halting that of the original business.

"Google 'should stand for a beauty, technological purity of innovation and things that are important to people,' he said. It should also be a trusted brand, he said."

I love this statement, I just hope Google means it. I have a feeling Page does, as you never hear other big tech CEOs speak like this, but the "innovation" and "trusted brand" bits are debatable. Yes, Google is extremely innovative, but they show time and time again they're not above copycatting others' innovations, a concerning thing especially for startups. If you reach a point, it's either sell to Google or Google will enter the market and become your competitor (Dropbox is next up apparently). That's neither innovative or trusted.

Seems like the OP's post stems from just being over-critical (seems like he really wanted to find issues with the event), as well as expecting a bit too much from the event...almost too much to really live up to.

While nothing presented was especially groundbreaking, I'm just happy YC decided to venture to the east coast. That in itself is better than nothing. It's their first event over here, and a decent one at that. As for next time, the OP's request of getting MBAs to wear ties and developers to wear black shirts is a bit opposite of startup atmosphere. Dress codes are kind of frowned upon. Plus, if you did that, it'd turn into a high school dance with ties on one side and black shirts on the other.

Oh, and if PG and company would have spent a good amount of time on "YC, the school, their process" I think there would have been a large amount of disappointed folk. Why go to a YC event of you don't know what YC is? I'd speculate most there were quite familiar with YC and its process and were looking more for startup advice, similar to the stuff given.

Nope. I'm here now. Alex Polvi is taking Q&A now

Agreed. I went to a state college not at all respected for software engineering graduates and Google got ahold of me this summer asking if I had interest working for them (I declined). Google could (largely) care less what school you went to. Your work, what you do after school, should speak to your talents and if they only want the elite based on your post-college work, well then good for them. Why would they hire you when your history yells "I'M MEDIOCRE!" You have to prove yourself beforehand. Oh, and if the job posting has the statement "if you plan to become [an expert in distributed computing]", I'd say that's far from saying only the elite will be considered.

Anyway, the post is largely silly. The OP goes into a rant on "I don't care about any of what Google does", then mentions Google+ and MapReduce. Yes, that's all Google has going on these days. Saying Google can't keep up with the world when Amazon can is beyond ridiculous. Hell, Google has defined a large part of the modern world and continues to expand on that. Honestly, I'm a larger fan of Amazon than Google, but Amazon IS TRYING to catch up to Google and only dabbles in a small percentage of what Google does. The OP only points out a few features that Amazon has that Google doesn't (or at least doesn't offer openly and freely to all). Going past that, Google's offerings extend so much farther than Amazon's that it's hard to even begin listing them. Want a 3D representation of the entire world? Google has you covered. You could make those statements for pages.

Why do we even argue about this silliness?

Ha, I can take the criticism just fine man. I can also defend my writing, which is all I'm doing.

And no, I definitely don't think my post was top-quality writing or analysis. It was my second blog post, so I'm far from those labels. However, I'd place it a notch above a fifth-grader.

Jesus dude, do you work for Yelp? So damn angry over an article that mostly states the breakdown of Yelp's filtered reviews.

Notice I said "I wouldn't be shocked" twice, not "I know for a fact that". I not once said that was the way it was, I simply said I thought it to be a decent possibility.

And this isn't worthy of HN? It reads like it was written by a fifth grader? It's number one on HN right now. Did I do something to you at one time in the past? If so, I sincerely apologize for ever wronging you.

Unsubstantiated complaints? I simply wrote what I saw, besides a few opinions here and there. And I know a lot of people do indeed dislike Yelp, but like some other sites with huge user bases, there's little other options to turn to, so you're stuck with using Yelp. I actually use Yelp quite a bit myself.

Anyway, the evidence is clear for there to be good reason to hate on Yelp (see my article). But like you said, there's also good reason to hate on clueless reviewers. Why can't we do both until either issue is fixed?

The first word wasn't the difficult one, it was the last word (it's even tougher to decipher when zoomed in for normal view. Zoomed out, it appears more like 'Law'). I agree though, I know the service probably isn't tied to Yelp, I just found it weird that I had to decipher a blob of ink on page 52.

Anyone find it weird that Yelp makes you pass a reCaptcha when trying to look at filtered reviews? Clearly you can look at unfiltered reviews without this. It's almost like Yelp is yelling "Don't look at these reviews....please!"

I completely realize that. My point was to show how easy it was to make that critique with such an over-simplification, which was chetan's point as well.