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Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?

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121–130 of 288 posts

Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?

#121
post #66

Edit: This may have come across as too terse to pass the not-just-civil-but-nice test so I've added more explanation to my choices I wasn't following the initial wave of submissions so here's my fresh-eyes take on the finalists. I'd particularly like to see other people's assessments of the whole field (vs individual submissions) Not Ambitious Enough: These are in competitive spaces -- even if they delivered on their…

Too Ambitious: Brodlist Just for clarification, Brodlist is finishing its Alpha version. The money would get it into Beta, and the YCF advice would get it out of Beta. It would be too ambitious if it was just starting, but it's finishing.

Obviously I have zero experience with your product or how technically capable your team is, but stating that a new database is "finishing" is naive.

Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?

#122
post #22

How many can we vote for? I voted for 3 of them total (voting as I was reading through), but now I wonder whether only the first one will count.

Vote for all applications you approve of ("approval voting"). The only wasted ballots are no votes and all votes.

Awesome. It's rare for decisions like this to be decided by a sane voting system. People often use at-Large Plurality Voting, where you can only vote for as many candidates as there are winners. This is horrendously bad because it's vulnerable to vote splitting.

Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?

#125

How does cadwolf compare to onshape?

Onshape is a web based CAD system. Aside from the fact that it is web based, it is no different than any other CAD system. CADWOLF is a proposal to do engineering completely differently. It will have a CAD system that is indeed web based, but that CAD will be linked to the mathematics that define the system. In other words, right now an engineer designs his stuff in Excel/Matlab/etc, documents the results in Word or PDF and then does a CAD model in ProE/Catia/Onshape. None of those things are linked.

CADWOLF will link all of these things. This will change the amount of time it takes to design/redesign large systems from months for several engineers to seconds on a computer. It will let managers pull down and see real time information on weight/status/cost, and a number of other parameters.

Onshape can be used as one facet of engineering. CADWOLF will redefine the engineering workflow.

Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?

#127
post #66

Edit: This may have come across as too terse to pass the not-just-civil-but-nice test so I've added more explanation to my choices I wasn't following the initial wave of submissions so here's my fresh-eyes take on the finalists. I'd particularly like to see other people's assessments of the whole field (vs individual submissions) Not Ambitious Enough: These are in competitive spaces -- even if they delivered on their…

Customers can save a lot more than dollars a month on utility bills.

After my freshman year, I interned at a small company in Texas that had the same business model as Utiliz. Send us your bill, we analyze your usage data and get you on the best plan. You split the savings with us.

Do NOT underestimate the energy bills in Texas... The average prices I saw were ~ $800. Obviously this was a luxury market, but your perception that people are spending 80-150 on energy is completey wrong. Not only that, but they are often far overspending from what they need to.

The problem with electricity deregulation is that every company is selling and reselling the same service, often even from the same plants. So the only differences are superficial pricing and marketing differences. Two customers living a mile apart, in similar size houses, using similar amounts of electricity, might be paying drastically different amounts of money.

When I got there, the processes were all manual... but I automated a bunch of it. The whole business is very automate-able, as it's just a matter of parsing .pdf electricity bills and comparing prices on the homepage.

Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?

#128
CADWOLF is not CAD software in the browser. CADWOLF is an completely new way of doing engineering that links CAD to the background mathematics and a part tree. CAD is one future component, but what we propose is drastically different from standard CAD systems. The tagline should be either "A web based mathematics and engineering platform" or "Intelligent Engineering"

Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?

#129
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too Ambitious: Brodlist Just for clarification, Brodlist is finishing its Alpha version. The money would get it into Beta, and the YCF advice would get it out of Beta. It would be too ambitious if it was just starting, but it's finishing.

Obviously I have zero experience with your product or how technically capable your team is, but stating that a new database is "finishing" is naive.

The core is finished. There's work to do productizing it, but it's mechanical. There's nothing naive about it.

Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?

#130

CADWOLF is not CAD software in the browser. CADWOLF is an completely new way of doing engineering that links CAD to the background mathematics and a part tree. CAD is one future component, but what we propose is drastically different from standard CAD systems. The tagline should be either "A web based mathematics and engineering platform" or "Intelligent Engineering"

How does your platform handle version control? I can imagine it would be a big clusterf* if you auto propagated any values through an entire project right away and breakages occurred. Is there versioning? Is it git based? If there isn't version control, is this an issue you're tackling?
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