151–160 of 300 posts
If upvotes are the most important metric, then vote counts should be hidden to viewers at least prior to their voting. This prevents the situation we have here with news articles where an initial small/fast scurry of upvotes is the only way to capture the attention of the larger audience. In this situation the first few votes likely have far more influence than they should.
Truth is, I'd start writing code to copy any idea that I was totally blown away by, and I don't need any funding to start doing that. Putting your idea right there in front of some pretty fast moving programmers has to be something people would think twice about. Having said that, it's hard to imagine an idea being sufficiently compelling to start writing code to implement it immediately. The only ideas that really b…
There just aren't that many people out there who are willing and capable of doing the hard work it takes to bring something --anything-- to the point where it usable. Those who are have their own projects already, which they won't abandon based on a forum post. And if they do, they're going to abandon this new project the moment they read about an even cooler idea. Besides, ideas grow and take on a life of their own…
As I say, there's not many ideas that seem inspiring, and as you rightly point out, I'm committed to my own foolish ideas.
Ranking by upvotes/comments seems highly problematic, even with HN's antibrigade features. A) There are many external factors that can implicitly cap the number of upvotes/comments. (time submitted, amount of competition, etc.) HN has repost rules to alleviate this problem: would Apply HN posts be able to repost too? B) Not to mention that it encourages sockpuppet voting/commenting, especially since there is a high r…
B is tough. Would be interesting to see the sum of the karma of all users who upvote a single one. Another thing to watch would be the mean user karma of all votes. A bunch of low-karma vote stuffing would actually bring a post down. If you can get a ton of massive karma users to upvote and game this, maybe you should just get in by default?
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I mentioned this from the early days of HN, and it's in the guidelines: "don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation." is a great rule for most people. Imagine yourself saying your comment to someone you don't know. Does it sound ok?
I assume most times people submit a "Show HN" (or now "Apply HN") that, if not explicitly stated, there's an implicit "and please give me feedback" tacked on to the end. Sometimes feedback can be blunt and, to someone emotionally invested in the site / product, it may appear brutal. While feedback on someone's work should certainly not be mean-spirited, I don't think one should need to go out of their way to dress up…
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For the sake of discussion, I'll offer a counterargument. Be Nice is a good goal for Apply HN since it promotes civil discussion and stops the threads from devolving into semantic "lol no https u suck" that some Show HN threads tend to devolve into. Users are not nice . They don't comment on HN or Twitter, they just stop using it without fanfare. And what determine a startup's success in the real world is if people w…
> "Be Nice" may dissuade commenters/potential customers from pointing out legitimate, immediate flaws. I don't think HN users are going to have trouble doing that, but there are different ways to do it, and the nicer ways have the critical property of opening the discussion further instead of shutting it down. We HN users are used to thinking of ourselves as the scrappy underdog, calling out incorrectness and badness…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There just aren't that many people out there who are willing and capable of doing the hard work it takes to bring something --anything-- to the point where it usable. Those who are have their own projects already, which they won't abandon based on a forum post. And if they do, they're going to abandon this new project the moment they read about an even cooler idea. Besides, ideas grow and take on a life of their own…
>>what's stopping you As I say, there's not many ideas that seem inspiring, and as you rightly point out, I'm committed to my own foolish ideas.
Hey everyone! I manage and run the Fellowship program at YC. I just want to build on top of what Dan wrote about being nice. We’re not asking you to do this because we think it’s good manners. We actually believe it’s the right way to think and act like the best investors. It’s easy to form some really bad habits when you sit in a position of power to judge the potential of a person, a team, an idea and their executi…
As much as I'd love to hold power over other mortals, I'll have to recuse myself here. I publicly made fun of Drew Houston and gang when they started and again when they reportedly rejected Apple's advances. Without a crystal ball, it just feels like we're just betting here. Are we betting on the viability of a product or idea? Are we betting on the founders? Are we betting on the team's ability to deliver? So many q…
One advantage HN has is more time to think. HNers will look at a much smaller stack of applications, and won't be restricted by the brief interview format YC has.
we're already seeing quite a few Apply HNs, so we'll add a link for those a la /ask and /show Quick poll for the community here: I run Hacker News Daily ( http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ ) which many people know about; but also Ask HN Weekly ( http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-ask/ ) and Show HN Weekly ( http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-show/ ). In each case the methodology is the same: The 10 highest-sco…