Hacker News Reader

soyapion Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

The deserving 4,000 startups are not getting a devalued experience. They will still have an advisor in groups of 25 startups. The remaining ~11,000 won't have an advisor (at least not yet).

And innovators always make mistakes. YC has actually admitted to being "always slightly broken" https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/14/y-combinator-is-zeroing-in...

soyapion Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

I went to bed after the false acceptance email and had a beautiful sleep! Woke to the kinda bad news and then the acceptance but no advisor email. What a roller coaster!

soyapion Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

I'm sure some future unicorns from Team 2nd chance will have a super awesome story to tell in 10 years.

Thanks YC (and the bug) for considering to support us. Giving everyone a chance is actually a YC-ish move.

soyapion YC Startup School 2018: a free, 10-week, online course

Apparently, you can update your application before the deadline, Aug 13th.

soyapion Poll: What is your primary operating system

Did anyone regularly using OSX, Windows and/or Linux vote OSX just because it was listed first?

soyapion Poll: Where do you work (geographically)?

Lilongwe, Malawi, Africa

soyapion Poll: Where do you work (physically)?

Day-job work at office; Part-time startup work at home without a distinct office. Since day-job has more hours/day, i voted "An office (not a home)"

soyapion How to Start a Successful Bootstrapped Web App Business (12 hours of audio)

On the other had, you don't have to listen to the podcasts in one session or one day.

soyapion Can Africa produce a Google, Facebook or Microsoft?

I don't think hunger and war are a major problem to hackers actually. I thik war-tone countries are a minority in Africa and only affect rural people who are a majority and obviously non-hackers. I'm a hacker in Malawi and have never experienced war or hunger but that's because I'm a minority living in city.

Internet connection yes. Most hackers in Africa have internet access at work only where they work on custom enterprise software or general IT (non-programming) jobs and have to code hacker-interesting stuff off-line at home (if they have a computer) or evenings and weekends at work.

soyapion Can Africa produce a Google, Facebook or Microsoft?

I think it's possible and more likely so in a niche specific to developing countries like Malaria/HIV software, low-bandwith solutions, etc.

Otherwise it's much easier to produce a 37signals, just like everywhere else, I guess.

Disclaimer: I'm an African in Africa. In my day-job, I work for a non-profit developing a Rails application for managing delivery for HIV medication (baobabhealth.org)

soyapion Ask YC: What are you working on right now?

Polishing up my Facebook Cross Number Puzzle app http://apps.facebook.com/xnumber_puzzle before submitting to FB App Directory

soyapion How to Disagree

Impressed to see that no-one here is suggesting a Disagreement Hierarchy: DHH.

And no I didn't.