sajithw

It's been built before. Many times. Mostly for chemists though. However, it's never been done in a way that's integrated with the actual tools scientists use to design experiments and analyze data, so you end up with a bunch of data silos. If you ask a scientist whether they can search all of the work and associated context/data that has ever been done in their lab from one location, the answer is almost always no. We are trying to fix that.

It's really technically challenging - life sciences is so broad so you end up with lots of surface area in your product. The "apps" we provide for manipulating the primitives in biology (e.g. DNA) are huge products just by themselves.

  http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

  30. Startups for startups. The increasing number of 
  startups is itself an opportunity for startups. We're one; 
  TechCrunch is another. What other new things can you do?

"EDIT: Same goes for id, Valve and other game studios - you see sometimes it's better to have the best engineers and researchers take their time, let them develop and mature the technology they're working on and build something long-lasting that affects millions of people."

Game studios take time because game releases used to be all or nothing. There were no second chances.

I can't comment on id, but the entire reason Valve built Steam was to speed up distribution and release updates incrementally (the previous patching system sucked). It went from idea to inception in about a year. It was also buggy as hell when it was first released. Now developers can easily release additional content and make game play changes after a game is initially launched.

I find the name distasteful. Would you be comfortable releasing an app called jesuslists? Same idea.

Edit: I never was really arguing against this (just that near perfect notion). There's a big difference between near-perfect and bad.

I'll agree that the more stellar applicants do tend to have high SAT scores but that's also in part because they are a) stellar and b) the SAT is a trivial test. I still disagree that SAT is a cutoff or benchmark. I highly doubt the admissions committee sees a 600 and throws the student out before reading the rest of their application to look for things that stand out. That said, there are tons of students with 800s that don't stand out at all and get weeded out.

Exceptional candidates will be exceptional regardless of their standardized testing scores.

Edit: Not trying to say that they admit all the exceptional people either. I'm absolutely positive plenty of people get screwed by the limited number of slots despite being more than qualified.

College admissions is a game. I currently go to MIT and it's definitely more meritocratic than many other institutions of similar "prestige" but it's not an exception.

  High school students today optimize their grades and SATs   
  and after school activities. They speak French and  
  Chinese, play piano and paint abstract art.  They dance  
  around and play hockey and act like they help homeless 
  people.

On the other hand this stereotype arose from an era where admissions committees were trying to create a class of well-rounded students. It still occurs to some degree. However, things are trending towards creating a well-rounded class instead (lots of highly specialized students).

Awesome site though.

Edit: It's up, see my above comment.

We're also looking at opening our scrimmage server up to the public this month if there are enough people who want the intellectual fulfillment of competing :)

Edit: Created a small mailing list. Feel free to sign up if you want to be updated when we decide to launch an open tournament (towards the end of the month, most likely).

http://mitpokerbots.com/interest

I've also noticed every investment site (understandably) has no student options (i.e. no salary ranges below 30k, no way to say I expect to be making $x once I graduate and play around with it). It'd be cool if someone paid attention to us since some of us do invest, but I can understand the neglect at the same time.

- Simple/clean interface

- Gossip scraping and integration into the stream

- The discussions!

Dislikes:

- Medal system isn't that compelling to me

- Streaming is pretty limited. But I assume this is due to the scarcity of legal streaming sites.

- Suggest me some shows? Maybe stuff that people who watch the shows I do are raving about?

- I constantly find myself going to Wikipedia for show information (e.g. actor names/bios/pics, etc.) -- can you scrape some of this and give me a slick way to consume it?

Overall, it's a neat site. Summer TV is always a little lackluster so I think I'll be a bit more engaged in the fall when prime time picks up some steam. Of course, I'm assuming with a bigger user base there might be a way to reward users with exclusive content which would definitely compel my active usage of this site.

- Increase teacher salaries and promote the hiring of teachers with advanced degrees.

- Let people fail. Stop holding hands as much. On that note, stop catering to the lower end of the curve and holding back the smarter students. Set the standards high if not impossibly high so we can raise the definition of average.

- This one is a pipe dream: more specialized science and math schools. There are about a dozen or more sprinkled through the nation. I attended one for high school and it happened to be residential (and totally state funded). Seriously life changing.

Working for free is a great way to build your portfolio of projects and get some "experience" to put on your resume. Go find a startup or small business and basically tell them you can build stuff for them for free for a month. After that period, if they like you then they need to hire you full-time.

However, I do agree there is a fine line between doing this for portfolio/resume building and being used for bitch work.

Also, organic startups have a much better chance of succeeding so building a rich knowledge base in a subject that interests you is your best path to success rather than picking the degree path that may be most relevant to entrepreneurship. That being said, it may be helpful to ask people what their undergraduate education experience was like (classes/books that really influenced them, projects they worked on, etc.) and pick up a few ideas regarding where to begin?