There's food for thought at Justin.tv (Inside the YScraper) | Hacker News Reader

There's food for thought at Justin.tv (Inside the YScraper)

sfgate.com

27 pointspg16 comments

Ycombinator and its progeny are getting an amazing amount of PR these days. It's certainly part of the Web2.0 zeitgeist now. Did you see the list of startups at the end of the article in the "Yscraper"? pg had an essay on this PR placement. I wonder which firm handles Y's PR.

After justin.tv has gone bust, its value will have been how much attention YC has received because of it. Kind of like a loss-leader for YC's stable of startups.

justin.tv will go anything but bust.

We don't have a PR firm. I think that reporter was introduced to the Justin.TVs by another YC startup. That's probably the reason there's so much press: each startup introduces reporters to the other YC startups. There are now 39 of them, so that's a lot of introducing.

This is sad. I've always thought of cooking as an ordinary hacker passtime, like juggling or reading. Many of the coolest nerds I've hung out with are borderline foodies, though constrained by time and money, and nearly all are on the healthy side of Ayers's split.

If the article isn't misleading, I wonder what's going on. Are the YC guys just too busy? But they have time to shop (they just shop badly) and cooking catalyses productive conversations. Did they never learn to cook? But they must have parents, and the internet has a million recipes. Is there an obvious reason why food-oblivious people would end up at YC?

My stereotype is exactly the opposite: hackers and nerds are going to be malnourished or overweight, but less likely to be of healthy proportions. I'm certainly well overweight myself.

I'd be intrigued to hear what "they must have parents" might have to do with it. :)

I'm a little overweight too, but I think it's because I eat too much, not because I eat junk. And, at the risk of mapping "hackers and Xers" over every X in sight, I think jward is right: cooking feels noticeably like coding.

Maybe I'm just from Mars (i.e., not suburbia) again, but from what I've seen most parents who can afford to let their kids be nerds also teach them what a kitchen is for. This can be as passive as not making breakfast when they wake up at three on a summer afternoon. My mom never sat me down and said "this is how you make an omelette" or whatever, but she made the information available and I learned it because it was useful.

It's not that people who can't cook must have bad parents, it's just that when you see lot of them in one place you start wondering why.

Here's a thought. You say cooking feels like coding to you. It doesn't at all to me. One major difference for me is that when you make a change while coding, you can see instantly what the difference is; there's no delay. In cooking, you often have to wait for minutes after a change to see if it was a good change. But after thinking about that, it dawns on me that cooking is like coding, if you're using a language that requires a separate compile step. I've always avoided those languages (all my experience is in interpreted languages, except for CL, which still has no requirement for a length compile step).

Anyway, less fancifully, I think there's a culture difference, here. If you grew up in a house where there was always a hundred things you could nuke for breakfast, why would you ever learn to cook unless you were especially interested in one dish that had to be cooked?

Lastly, I was a nerd when growing up, and we were pretty much the poorest people in the trailer park. My father knew how to cook hamburger helper and most anything else with instructions on the box or can, but I cook far more than he did when I was growing up. There's still always a strong temptation to just grab a bag of chips instead of making a meal, but my wife gets unhappy if I do that more than once or twice a week. :)

You would really be surprised how many people don't know how to do certain things. I spent one year working as a floor coordinator (RA to most people) in the dorm and it boggled me. I don't know why, and I don't blame them for it, but things I took for granted like knowing how to do laundry or cook were not skills known by the majority.

On the subject of food in particular, I love to cook. I've held down two cooking jobs, and one of my plans for after I become a startup millionaire is to open a restaurant. Cooking is a lot like hacking. You build up from very simple frameworks, experimenting as you go. Also like coding, if you've never tried it, it looks scary and foreign. Have confidence and just do it.

I think applied justin.tv would be compelling. That is, people would broadcast their life for a specific purpose, such as finding a job, date, etc.

I don't watch television, and I know many of you don't... but isn't this exactly what reality TV has been doing? Not that this idea doesn't have a lot of potential yet.

Holy. I don't really get it. If the weeblies save up on ice cream they can at least buy some uh... healthier food. The fats and lactates in ice cream don't seem anything like brain food. Somehow I find it less of a break of concentration than an irresponsible disregard for one's own health.

our "lack of healthy food" was a bit overplayed for the article :). we don't quite eat "gourmet-style", but it's not bad, either. dan made some interesting spaghetti/chicken combination tonight, and we don't eat any junk food, or much frozen food...

If it's 'the Yscraper' (and not 'the Yscaper'), that article's got a couple typos. If it's 'the Yscaper'...I don't really get it.

"With its expansive views of the San Francisco Bay and sky-high electricity usage included in the rent, that high-rise is now dubbed the "Yscaper""

Skyscraper - Yscraper, home to six ycombinator startups.

Like I said, Yscraper makes sense. The article says "scaper."

Maybe Y-Combinator should include a session on nutrition in their schedule? ;-)

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