So the basic premise of your writeup is you are trying to judge how smart people are based on what they submit to this site and the content of their comments. I am not so sure I agree with that. It seems to me that starting a company requires dedication, technical smarts and technical vision. All that a good comment or submission tells you is that the submitter spends a lot of time surfing the web and is articulate. Unless you have solid reasons to believe that the two sets of qualities are strongly correlated, I am not so sure you should be even consider using this as a metric. Having worked in Silicon Valley for some time now, I can say that some of the smartest people around here have inadequate language (and by implication -- commenting) skills. Quality of people's resumes are likely to provide a stronger indicator.
Why we made this site
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: Why we made this site
#32Please, may we have a mashable feed of some sort? RSS probably wouldn't work, but a JSON object would....
Re: Why we made this site
#33So the basic premise of your writeup is you are trying to judge how smart people are based on what they submit to this site and the content of their comments. I am not so sure I agree with that. It seems to me that starting a company requires dedication, technical smarts and technical vision. All that a good comment or submission tells you is that the submitter spends a lot of time surfing the web and is articulate.…
I hope we can tell the difference between people who are smart and those who are merely articulate.
(We all have a lot of experience dealing with hackers, after all.)
Re: Why we made this site
#34Thanks for the rationale. I'm most interested in the ARC aspect of the site.
OK, here's the question, pg, is this site actually running on a lightweight webserver written in ARC, or did you tie ARC into apache or something for the application logic and storage? Or did you use ARC as a markup language? Just curious.
The server's written in Arc too. I wanted to learn how to write one.
Re: Why we made this site
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I know. The site is at least simple and functional, but we should (and will) make it look better soon.
Please don't. I vote for the simple, straightforward design you currently have.
We won't clutter it up. Look how minimal the YC site itself is.
Re: Why we made this site
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, here's the question, pg, is this site actually running on a lightweight webserver written in ARC, or did you tie ARC into apache or something for the application logic and storage? Or did you use ARC as a markup language? Just curious.
The server's written in Arc too. I wanted to learn how to write one.
in that case, I _am_ excited about Arc's progress ;)
Re: Why we made this site
#37So the basic premise of your writeup is you are trying to judge how smart people are based on what they submit to this site and the content of their comments. I am not so sure I agree with that. It seems to me that starting a company requires dedication, technical smarts and technical vision. All that a good comment or submission tells you is that the submitter spends a lot of time surfing the web and is articulate.…
Interesting. Perhaps they should be performing traffic analysis to see who's busy, and who's not?
I love to debate (reddit has saved my wife a regular earful), but I can't imagine surfing when I'm really "in the zone". I tend to do more directed documentation queries and explicitly avoid sites like reddit where I'm likely to become mired.
So yeah, for me posting frequency is inversely correlated with how busy I am. On the other hand, all of that reading, researching and debating generates a lot of new ideas.
Re: Why we made this site
#38So the basic premise of your writeup is you are trying to judge how smart people are based on what they submit to this site and the content of their comments. I am not so sure I agree with that. It seems to me that starting a company requires dedication, technical smarts and technical vision. All that a good comment or submission tells you is that the submitter spends a lot of time surfing the web and is articulate.…
I hope we can tell the difference between people who are smart and those who are merely articulate. (We all have a lot of experience dealing with hackers, after all.)
I think the problem is that there are a lot of very smart people who are good at talking and generating ideas, but not so good at implementation.
If they're not regularly "going dark", they may not have the focus to succeed at a startup.
Re: Why we made this site
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making the site invite-only would be the opposite of what we want. One of the goals of this site is to discover smart people we might not otherwise notice when they apply for funding. Doing things through connections works well in the VC world. Because of the large investments they make, they're more conservative. But in the seed funding business you need to be aggressively democratic.
Maybe you should make it so you don't have to log in to read comments? Some people might not realize how easy it is to create an account...
That was a bug, not a design choice; I just fixed it.
Re: Why we made this site
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, here's the question, pg, is this site actually running on a lightweight webserver written in ARC, or did you tie ARC into apache or something for the application logic and storage? Or did you use ARC as a markup language? Just curious.
The server's written in Arc too. I wanted to learn how to write one.
Can you tell us what kind of editor you're using to write Arc (and Arc code).
Is Arc suited to writing its own IDE?