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Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch

#51

Post by addcn »

appdrag wrote: post #18
jboggan wrote: post #17

Has anyone used Optic yet? I'm not a Javascript developer but I'm interested in the concept.

It's seems very interesting, but to be honest after watching the demo video, most of the thing "automated" (I don't see any AI here) are related to poor practices... Some other features seems interesting, let's see how the product evolve.

Hey, founder here, thanks for checking us out. The demo video is a couple months old and since then we've gotten much closer to figuring out the best use cases after talking to users. Do you have any suggestions on the use cases you'd like to see the 'interesting features' put towards?

This is definitely the kind of product that takes several iterations to get right so thank you for following our journey.

Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch

#53

Post by Shank »

reikonomusha wrote: post #10

CSPA [1] sounded interesting, and is something similar to what I’ve been wanting to do, but after looking at the sample exam, I was pretty disappointed. I thought it would be about computer science and engineering fundamentals. It has some of that (e.g., representation of integers, memory access speeds, etc.) but I also noticed it’s full of completely inessential things, like escaping XHTML, identifying valid JSON pa…

I concur with this sentiment. I was just doing the hiring loop and came to the conclusion that taking CSPA would have been a total waste of my time. I don’t know how many companies would value the data after looking at the example questions, but I almost find it to be a good signal that I shouldn’t apply to companies that use it.

A standardized assessment is literally the farthest thing from what happens in real world programming. In contrast, the Triplebyte interview questions focus heavily on what an engineer actually does day to day. When I completed Triplebyte, I was pleasantly surprised at how well orientated the assessment was. CSPA just looked plain insane in comparison.

Even the time commitments are a good contrast. Triplebyte’s commitment on the quiz side is about 30 minutes, and the final interview is a couple hours. CSPA is five hours.

Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch

#54

Post by wsul »

lefstathiou wrote: post #3

Nice batch. I think the concept federacy is tackling has huge potential. We lose a lot of sleep thinking about security and I like the idea of being able to tap a hive mind to help us plug security gaps our team is unaware of (and we would pay a lot for it).

Appreciate the kind words! Reaching out now -- would love to get you into our beta and work from any of your feedback. Finsight seems like a perfect use case and we're excited to dig in.

Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch

#56

Post by [deleted] »

chiefofgxbxl wrote: post #6

Cool batch, particularly LemonBox which provides personalized vitamin packs to buyers in China. There's a huge user base right there, and I imagine the U.S. market is largely saturated / competitive already. I must respectfully express my concern over: "Grabb-it Inc. turns rideshare cars into digital billboards." There's probably a market for it as online advertisers face an uncertain future with possible regulation,…

[deleted]

Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch

#58

Post by MediumD »

addcn wrote: post #42
AriaMinaei wrote: post #36

Optic [0] caught my eye. They seem to have made possible a new kind of abstraction in code. Something that's different from both functions and macros. It's a kind of abstraction that can be arbitrarily customized at each call site, yet retain its identity across all of them. Example: foo = do_a() bar = do_b(foo) Example 2: foo = do_a() bar = do_z(foo) baz = do_b(bar) Example 3: foo = do_a() bar = foo + 10 baz = do_b(…

Hey -- thanks for checking us out! You're definitely understanding the premise of our parser. It evaluates a regex-like set of rules on an AST tree to match different forms of code. These rules can be recursive as you can see in the first example of our home page [0]. In that example Optic matches an express js route and the headers, parameters and responses inside it. The result is a nice json object with shape {met…

I was really fascinated by this as well. I think it's a great idea. Where does the 15 hours/per developer/per week come from. Couldn't find more information about that anywhere on your website.

Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch

#59

Post by pazimzadeh »

UncleEntity wrote: post #29

> Synvivia develops biomolecular ON-OFF switches to make synthetic biology safe for use outside of the laboratory. Yep...then the on-off switch jumps species and the only way to survive is to consume a particular (patent pending) brand of parsnip which can't be grown from seed. Pretty much the only place I could reasonably be accused of being a luddite is in releasing GM organisms into the wild.

I definitely agree about the wild. But what about designing gut bacteria that target parasites in your poop? Amongst many other possibilities.

You can use oxygen, temperature, and light-sensitive gene promoters and toxin-antitoxin plasmids to make ON-OFF switches that would hobble bacterial replication in the wild.

It's a tough problem, and my guess is you'd want to use several of these switches together. There's no guarantee that stressed bacteria will 'run' your programs. And you're right that the gene could move horizontally, so you'd have to be very clever with your kill switches, and keep up with evolution.

Apart from the last resort of antibiotics, you can also selectively deplete particular bacteria from your poop using adhesion inhibitors such as mannosides and galactosides (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5654549/ - research from my lab).

Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch

#60

Post by addcn »

MediumD wrote: post #58
addcn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey -- thanks for checking us out! You're definitely understanding the premise of our parser. It evaluates a regex-like set of rules on an AST tree to match different forms of code. These rules can be recursive as you can see in the first example of our home page [0]. In that example Optic matches an express js route and the headers, parameters and responses inside it. The result is a nice json object with shape {met…

I was really fascinated by this as well. I think it's a great idea. Where does the 15 hours/per developer/per week come from. Couldn't find more information about that anywhere on your website.

Before I started Optic I watched 20 developers code for 1 day each. I kept logs of what they were working on and asked people to rate how they felt throughout the process. The 15/hrs/wk is a rough estimate of what we could automate. Our most avid users over the last month self report a little less but I think once we add better support for a few more things we’ll catch up.

I never thought to publish those results. Sounds like something people would be interested in?

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