LukeWalsh

I'm fairly young but my experiences with open offices have been that they are more distracting, but it's possibile to minimize the distractions with headphones. It's difficult for me to listen to music while working so I use coffitivity which pipes in background noise from coffee shops. It sounds like hustle and bustle, but you can never actually latch on to a conversation since there are none.

When I worked in a private office I found it hard to stay motivated. This is in contrast to an open office when I can look at the people around me all working hard on the same problem. It makes me feel motivated to keep working.

Silicon Valley Corporations are blocking this because they want a blanket law for punishing terms of service violations: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/silicon-valley-is-stonewall...

"Under the current CFAA, lying about your age is as criminally punishable as stealing someone’s credit card information."

The solution to this needs to come from the leaders in Silicon Valley.

My favorite quote:

"Snapchat? What do I know about snapchat, we didn't fund them. How about another question."

I think another perspective is that credit card support is a good back compatible solution. If people are using their devices to store payment information then it's not very far fetched to imagine other types of wallets/credit replacing visa/mastercard/etc.

Glad they finally got rid of that hideous header on the homepage

You already do this every time you scroll, it's no more RSI-inducing than viewing a standard webpage

It's going to be really interesting to see what intersections look like once we no longer allow human drivers behind the wheel. We can only hope this will happen during our lifetime.

I think it's also a great deal for first time founders and people who aren't all that familiar with startup funding. $120k for 7% is a lot clearer than $17k + $80k for 7% + converted shares no cap no discount.

I also think this is great news for what it will force other accelerators to do. Many people out there claim to copy YC's model with much less friendly terms on the convertible note. This puts everything out in the open if they want to keep up.

I'm aware. I've started a company in school and my team is interviewing for this batch. The company came out of an idea for a product, and YC seems like a way to accelerate our growth.

At the end of the day I'm going to work on this but there are two scenarios, one where my parents approve of my life decisions and one where they don't. Even though I might not always agree with them I think that even failed startup founders (for reasons you mentioned) are more likely to start more companies because they have gained valuable experience.

[edit] Thanks for the advice!

I'm trying to help my parents understand why Y Combinator is worthwhile even if I fail, not only because it is more relevant to what I want to do (start a company) but also because it would allow me to gain skills that could be useful at a company even if I did fail. Because I very well might need to work at a company if I failed in order to make money to try again.

I agree completely. I'm curious how recruiters view it because my parents think the risk is so much that they adamantly advised me against applying to YC (and still adamantly oppose me interviewing). I'm interested in starting a company in its own rite because I feel like I can contribute more when I am self directed, however it would strengthen my argument to have any evidence showing that even if I fail it won't be a waste of time (which I know it won't be).

That's not the motivation for the question at all

This is something I'm 100% behind. As a developer who works integrating with point of sales systems this is an industry ripe for disruption. The pain of integrating is killing innovation in retail. Whether it will be open source or someone like square I look forward to an industry standard in the future.

I'm hoping this has to do with a change in policy in regards to these types of issues, but I'm skeptical. It could just be an anomaly.

We need a major tech company like Apple to take a stand against these types of lawsuits before we will see any real policy change.

I think it's odd that tech people are comparing this to the Big Bang theory. Big Bang theory dumbs down all of the jokes at the expense of not conveying a genuine culture. This is why it is massively successful in the general population and regected by geeks.

Silicon Valley seems to be the opposite at least based on the first episode. There are at least 4x as many subtle tech memes as there are jokes.

Personally I really like the Lego NXT sets. All three of my younger brothers had the opportunity to use them through after school programs and it was a great introduction to simple programming.

I guess the disadvantage is the higher price point.

There's only one "unbreakable" encryption, and that's a pair of one time pads with truly random data as long as the message itself.

http://www.pro-technix.com/information/crypto/pages/vernam_b...

> If you don’t know where to begin here’s a good rule: only target colleges that admit less than 30% of applicants. That will give you a head start on being selective, especially if you have limited spots available in your program.

I personally think this is silly. If you want to be selective just focus on applicants who actually build things. If you look at collegiate hackathons at places like university of michigan, UIUC, or Purdue it's clear that there is a lot of talent in the midwest. Just because someone wasn't born on a coast or with a connection to an ivy league school doesn't mean they don't make a cut for selectiveness.

I really hate when people default to percentages to display data for incredibly small sample sizes. I know by the very nature of the data there is not that much individual information available but the sample size is 41 companies. Really?

Comments become more gray and slightly less readable as they accumulate down votes. If you're using something that scrapes the site you might not be able to see it but it's visible on the main news.ycombinator.com site.

She's also 12 though. I think it's perfectly fine to have hobbies that aren't programming. I for one wasn't "in love" with programming when I was 12, I hadn't even been exposed to it. Seeing how people work in career paths she may not even know exists could be incredibly valuable, I know it would have been for me.

I think a real test for drivers education would be a start. I took my test in Kansas and it involved turning left, turning right, changing a lane, and stopping at a stoplight. The entire test took less than 3 minutes.

This is somewhat alarming. What about just making sure people are able to responsibly operate their vehicle? For me I feel comfortable using mirrors to back up, I've never felt like a camera was necessary. I've driven cars with backup cameras before but typically just use the rear view mirror or turn my head.

Maybe others don't feel this way, thoughts?

So far the best luck I've had is googling landmarks (eiffel tower, white house, grand canyon, etc.). Will be interesting to see the compiled list of where they are all located once people start finding more of them.

The biggest thing that stuck out to me was how long some of your answers were. Everyone seems to always point to Drew's application with all of the short concise answers but it looks like thats not the only way to put together a winning app!

SELECT * FROM HIDE_FROM_AMERICANS; ?

Of all the spin offs that have been posted here this one is my favorite. Very little of the original strategy carries over, it's almost an entirely new puzzle.

Very creative, well done!

Let's not turn this entire thing in to a witch hunt. It's more important to learn from the mistakes of others than for us to burn her at the stake.

Since you won't be in interviews, would you share any domain/naming ideas for our startup? I'll email you our pitch deck if you'd look at it for 30 seconds. :)

This is a good review but I think claims to be much more authoritative than it really is. This is based on a single data point and extrapolates to a wild conclusion. I'm all for quantification but the massive comparison table and assertion that prices are higher on various platforms is absurd after only one test.