shrig94

As a spectator, this is the biggest mass of (young) technical talent that I've ever seen at a hackathon.

It looks like you're a great engineer but not an "idea" dreamer (that's not bad news, since most people aren't).

I think the best you can do to ensure your success is to make sure this is a problem with real demand--a great way to get started, since you're a great engineer, would be to do some software consulting for someone under the premise of you building software for your startup to sell and doing additional custom work for them (IP reasons). This is awesome because you essentially keep the lights on while being assisted by your customer in creating a product that has an actual need; whether that need extends beyond your customer is another story entirely--though, doing this a few times, you'll probably land on something universal.

I am on and off but want to discuss tech with people more. https://twitter.com/shriganeshram

I actually prefer the current design, and here's why:

--navigation: putting the comments button so far to the right, away from the title, makes it annoying to navigate between the two. I often like to open both in new tabs.

--visual complexity: humans understand numbers well, especially hackers. scanning down a page, I can read and understand numbers much more quickly than charts.

While I really think the ideas behind some of your aesthetics in the redesign (like the score meter), I think these take away from the usability of HN. HN is a site mostly visited by HN experts, people who use HN everyday, and, as such, I think navigation, especially quickness, is one of the most important principles in the design of its layout.

I think one of the most helpful classes at MIT for learning the basics of software design is 6.033. Class schedule and readings here: http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/schedule.shtml

In particular, the papers covered topics of software design from failures (like Therac-25) to examples of successfully designed large scale systems (like Map Reduce). I'd highly recommend reading through the papers, most of which can be found via Google search.

There's a redirect back to the home page when clicking on this link.

This wasn't really done right so I'm going to publish this as a link.

I think you've nailed it here. Really, people should work on solving these smaller problems, e.g. make building a responsive website easier, make building single-page web apps easier, rather than "fixing" the web. And people are already making significant progress toward these things! (meteor, react, bootstrap, angular, etc)

at the wearscript hackathon at the media lab right now, this tech is pretty crazy awesome. check it out at wearscript.com

making a pokemon game in real life using go, wearscript, a myo, a pebble, and google glass, along w/ a couple of dead long json files.

Great job, Delian! :)

That's the kind of graph you like to see on demo day.

FlightCar (YCW13) - Cambridge, MA, FULL TIME, INTERNS, REMOTE considered

https://www.flightcar.com

Come join FlightCar and help bring car sharing to airports (the place car sharing makes the most sense!).

We're hiring:

-Python/Django (++ if you're an awesome JS'er or can work some PSDs and AIs)

-iOS/Android (++ if you have Python/Django experience)

Email shri@flightcar.com with a resume/github if you're interested.

This is absolutely awesome. Well done.

FlightCar was rejected on first pass--don't feel bad guys! The reason most startups fail is because the founders give up. So don't give up and keep hustling!

--Shri (Founder, FlightCar)

We're actually just focused on airports. That's half of the market!

Probably our fault for not getting the press involved with the C&D. :)

pg nailed it. In the model you described above, you're still shelling out dollars from your bank account rather than leveraging an under utilized asset of your's.

We're not looking to leave the airport vertical actually. About half of all rental volume takes place at airports.

Thanks! Hopefully, we can change your mind one day. :)

For brand new cars, FlightCar honestly comes out to about even as you mentioned. Though, our ordinary car is an '08 Prius, which has depreciated enough in value (as cars depreciate quickly!) to make our service a definite positive. Also, our utility will probably never really be 100% (Hertz for example is doing a lot to increase their's and is at 65% or so I believe). So your car most likely won't be rented for everyday you're gone.

We do try and make the experience way better than traditional airport parking. We drop you off and pick you up in a town car and we give you free Starbuck's coffee before you fly and after you land! You also don't come home to an outrageous bill!

The C&D is old. It applied to an old model of ours where we operated on airport property which was rather grey. Our current operation with a black car, on the other hand, follows all rules and regulations by the airport and in fact pays the airport on every trip.

We're working on getting a system in place to manage the tolls.

Our renters are vetted with an extensive Driving Record Check, so they're highly unlikely to get a red light/speeding ticket, though it's possible.

Visible damage is covered by our insurance policy as well as liability, and we now take pictures of the cars' interiors and exteriors to keep track of this. Invisible damage is covered by our mechanical damage policy, which owners can make claims from when they notice something happened to their vehicles.

If executed well, we're a lot more convenient than the third party lots and even more convenient than airport owned long term parking. (EDIT: So we think the value of $10/day is quite low--it's more like an $18/day value (airport long term parking price), plus the cost of an extensive exterior and interior cleaning and the time benefits--we want FlightCar to be a free and magical experience. That's our goal.)

We really messed up Edward's experience and as a result ruined the entire value proposition.

Generally speaking, your car is very unlikely rented for every day of your trip and even more unlikely to have its miles maxed out (and if they went over, you're being compensated for $.35/mile).

We're aiming to be the industry leader when it comes to service in airport parking. We provide free Starbucks coffee to every parker and renter along with bottled water and our black car service. We also clean the cars inside and outside quite thoroughly so that owners come back to a car in a condition better than they left it. We've been able to clean off exterior scratches and clean out heaps of pet hair and everything in between.

We wouldn't be working on this if we didn't think it was a positive return for both sides of the marketplace. We really believe that having two garages at the airport, one with cars accruing parking charges and one with cars being rented for insane prices is incredibly inefficient, and we want to help consumers by changing that.

We're working on improving our user experience and benefits to parkers (non-cash), so please feel free to email me, shri@flightcar.com, if you have any great ideas on how to sweeten the deal for the parkers!

Cheers, Shri

Thanks Ed, I appreciate that.

Looking forward to hearing back from you tonight. Would love to take you to lunch (on me), if you have time, and hear you out on improving the process.

Cheers, Shri

Hey Edward,

First, thanks for the feedback. We're working in an industry plagued with poor customer service, and we want to differentiate ourselves to those parking and renting with FlightCar by providing a better experience than they can get anywhere else.

We are sorry for failing to deliver a reliable service. Feel free to email me directly, shri@flightcar.com, and let me know how we can fix this. I'll outline below on some things we've already implemented and others that we are working on fixing and will implement soon and what we've done to make sure no one has an experience like your's again.

Car pictures: We started taking pictures of all cars at every handoff. Unfortunately, your car was dropped off a few days before we started this practice, but it's now standard protocol.

Driving record checks: We've had these in place all along. We obtain a driving record from each renter's local dmv to make sure that their driving history doesn't indicate that they're at risk of damaging an owner's vehicle.

Concerning tolls: We're working on a system to manage and capture tolls so that vehicle owners no longer face this problem.

Phone call and wait time: I honestly don't know what happened when you had no response on our phone line. I've heard from other customers that they have had difficulty reaching an operator as well, so we are looking into changing our phone system provider asap. Your experience was definitely the exception. I'm so sorry about that.

Your stuff being placed in the car: The garbage bag situation is utterly unacceptable. This is not the standard practice by any means and we've already spoken to the employee who handled your items and made it clear that what happened will never happen again.

What we are doing now: Rujul, my cofounder, has printed your blog post and handed it to each member of our staff and made sure that all of our staff realizes that what had happened was unacceptable and understands what we need to do to fix it.

Once again, I apologize for your terrible experience and do let me know how we can fix it.

Sincerely, Shri

Hey great job,

the images load quite slowly, so I'd compress them, but it looks great nevertheless!

We do an MVR check--not the same as a background check, but we do double check identities as we have physical hand-offs. Its good to note that the MVR assures that they're a relatively good driver, and that our theft, collision, and liability insurances will kick in if anything goes wrong.

Thanks for the kind comment! We really do believe it's all about the customer in this industry plagued with terrible stories of HR gone wrong. :)

I lost 40 pounds of body fat in 3 months by not eating carbohydrates, and eating an over 2000 calorie high fat diet. I think that losing 30 lbs of body fat the normal way isn't that extraordinary. I think what I did by hacking the system was more so extraordinary.

I just personally made this decision and here is what I think:

Quitting school is a hard decision. And I am only leaving knowing that I have the safety net of being able to go back to school in the case that things work out.

Having that safety net makes me feel a lot more comfortable. And with that net, I was able to make the choice when I realized that other people who were not biased and had no reason to comfort me believed in my idea and my team; here, those people were an accelerator. Had I not been accepted into the accelerator, I probably would have left upon completion of an MVP, seeing that I had unbiased users.

To summarize, I personally left when I felt that I could confirm with an unbiased source that I wasn't bluffing myself, that the product I'm developing can succeed and has value.