Tell HN: Kevin and I are doing HN office hours Friday from 11 am to 1 pm PDT | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Kevin and I are doing HN office hours Friday from 11 am to 1 pm PDT

143 pointssama46 comments

Kevin and I are going to try doing online office hours on HN this Friday.

We'll create a thread at 9 am PDT, and interested companies (or people) can submit a top-level comment with a brief overview of what they're working on and a first question. Then we'll let HN vote on the projects, and do office hours via back-and-forth comments with the top 5 companies as of 11 am.

You can ask about anything you want related to your startup, but the way office hours work at YC is we try to identify the biggest problem you're currently facing and then brainstorm things you can try.

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Having an open dialogue that can be referenced like this will provide an amazing resource. This will help people outside of those companies facing similar or tangential issues. Thanks!

> Then we'll let HN vote on the projects

You mean vote on the top-level comment submissions? That's not a good idea because comment ranking is influenced heavily by time of submission (more recent comments appear at top, so it would be smarter for startups to submit later and also it means order will not correspond to upvotes), and, more importantly, comment scores are not visible.

it's okay, just give it a shot. What's the worst that can happen? (hint: We'll get smart advices from Kevin and Sam anyway)

There's potential for confusion and missed information (e.g the Top 5 submissions are not at the top of the story thread, due to how ranking works, so it may be difficult to find sama/kevin's comments). Although a summary thread of sama/kevin's responses afterward should fix it.

Obviously I don't disapprove of the office hours, but it's always good to raise questions and concerns.

With HN being architected the way it is (in LISP) it might be possible for them to implement a different ranking system for a specific thread. I know pg has talked about hacking HN from a repl before.

Probably more effort than YC planned to put in though.

Really? HN is implemented in Lisp? Wow. Never knew that. You have any links that talk anything about this?

This sounds interesting.

Here's a mirror of an old version of the source: https://github.com/wting/hackernews

It's tightly knit to pg's Lisp dialect called Arc which attracted much fanfare years ago, but has since went off the radar.

We'll rank the thread by points, not time-based rank. We won't do that until Sam and Kevin are ready to start, though. Otherwise it would be even more time-sensitive.

That works :) thanks!

What is an office hour? I feel like this post wasn't meant for me.

A discussion and feedback session. Sometimes these sessions are held in public to help others who are facing similar problems.

I see. I've never heard that term (except as saying when a business is open). Where does it originate in this context?

Not sure. Most likely in the context of professional consultation.

No, it's a reference to college/university where the professor is available at certain scheduled times (e.g. Tuesday from 12-2 and MWF from 10:30-11:30), and students are free to drop by without an appointment to ask questions about assignments, material, etc.

The context I'm familiar with is university professor/tutor office hours, being the hours you can come by outside of class to ask questions about your coursework. That also seems to be the most similar to how it's used here.

Professors often hold office hours so students can stop by their desk and ask questions or have discussions outside of th class.

In US universities, where professors have to balance teaching and research, they hold "office hours" - hours during the day in which they're in their office, with the door open, and students can come in to ask questions, request help, etc.

Ah, thanks! I've never been, so it was an unfamiliar concept.

It's like in the university where you could drop by at your professor's office to discuss on topics or problems. This [0] should give you a better idea.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syoqjYLDs48

Office hours in YC context: http://www.ycombinator.com/atyc/#officehours

I'm sure we'll see more pitches trying to get attention than real questions to specific problems. Let's try to keep it useful for everyone! It's a great idea and I want to thank you in advance for taking the time to help others even not being part of YC. Another positive point against many other "top" accelerators.

> I'm sure we'll see more pitches trying to get attention than real questions to specific problems.

Hopefully the community will take care of this, by upvoting real questions and specific problems.

Wowwww... This is an insane level of commitment on a public forum like this. (With its current levels of readership.) I'm impressed.

Especially since many interesting office hour questions and answers are the kinds of things that anyone who isn't currently (or has never) run a startup would kind of react negatively to seeing in public. (There are some prime examples of people who have no experience with, but very strong opinions about, startups.).

People's conceptions about startups are so different from what it's like to actually build one, I almost suggest that other past and present founders answer some of the the questions that get posed (i.e. others also reply to comments) besides letting Kevin and Sam do so - not to dilute the signal, but to increase it. I wonder if this could be made official, with mail to YC companies that they are welcome to chime in!

I agree its really great of them, you can watch office hour sessions on youtube from the Startup School that YC runs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syoqjYLDs48

Hi Kevin, a great initiative. I am an entrepreneur from India, running the portal www.Halla.in. The idea is to create a platform for individuals to express their talent and emotions. We run photo contests on general themes like rains, city street, back to school etc. and let users post their entries to get voted as the best. Over the past 12 months, we have run over 100+ contests with an average of 70+ entries per contest and have over 7000 registered users. Being bootstrapped startup, the value of prizes are limited. Customers adore our concept by giving good reviews and feedback.

Question:

We are trying to scale to next level, however we face challenges in getting companies to sponsor these contests. How can we scale?

Is this only for technical startups or in industries that you and Kevin specialize in?

We'll do our best to help any startup.

Have you guys started?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9785533

We(tryfuel.com) are working on quantifying nutrition and personalizing it so people can eat healthy and understand how their bodies respond to diet. We have traction and very sticky product. We are raising our seed round.

The biggest problem we are having is finding angels who will not only lead this round but help in future rounds with introductions to VCs and serve as social proof. Any ideas on how to solve this?

  We'll create a thread at 9 am PDT, and interested companies (or people) 
  can submit a top-level comment

Don't forget to add it to the open-office thread on friday.

Will do thank you.

I'm working on www.seeflo.com It still has some glitches but the start of the application is there. My biggest problem right now is finding my audience.

Please post this in the thread on Friday. This one is just to let people know we'll be doing this.

Ahh ok, will do

First load of your page took a very long time for me. I think you'll have a very high bounce rate until you get your static page load times under control.

Interesting.. It's very fast here. it's hosted in the EU.. So that might mak a difference (though I'd say only 100Kb)

Loaded fine for me (Canada).

It's fast enough here in Germany as well. (Any lag probably due to my limping computer.)

According to the first site testing tool I found (https://www.dotcom-tools.com/website-speed-test.aspx), there's a clear delay when accessing from outside Europe or Canada. Less than 2s to Frankfurt and London, but 5-6 for the US and 11+ to Australia.

I looked into it. Gzip compression was off, even though it was configured in nginx.

Highlightjs was included in my main javascript, while I only need it for the instructions to highlight some html/js/ruby/php. It's a whopping 100kb by itself.

I moved this to the instructions page, and I'm using cloudfront now as a CDN.

www.webpagetest.org is your friend. Test from servers around the world.

We ( www.helpingfaceless.com ) are trying to help vulnerable children using technology and create a viable business model around it.

Short term : Create basic infrastructure for data collection and reporting, manage in cloud, and charge small subscription fee for it.

Long term : Combat child trafficking using face recognition technology and data analytics.

we use B.O.T ( build operate transform ) process to build the infrastructure for organizations and law enforcement agencies .

Biggest problems we are facing : 1. Lack of impact investment 2. Long Sales cycle

That's a neat idea and I'm always glad to see companies working on tech that will protect little kids! Please don't forget to add this to the thread on Friday morning - they will post it at 0900 PDT.

Good luck with your startup!

Thanks man. Sorry I jumped the gun and posted way earlier :)

That website has a burger menu icon. That icon does nothing. (Chrome, iOS).

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