alexl

Wow, we reached the limit of the sausage string. I have to reply to my own comment :)

I still believe I can do it "alone," i.e. with just that other guy. I'm just gonna go get the needed money elsewhere and forget about Y Combinator. That blog post or whatever you want to call it, is my opinion on them.

Yeah, but that whole single founder thing is so messed up. They don't really send you the message that they rarely take single founders on board. You have to find horror stories on the net. One of them is about a guy who had two other co-founders or so, but those couldn't just move for three months. They had families and lives. So the guy moves to SF and they tell him "we really hate single founders." So, if the other co-founders are not there, it's like they don't exist at all. I do have a guy, an engineer who would do a lot of the required work, but moving him to the US is an idea from another planet. He is part of the team. There's no doubt about that. He just doesn't want to be a legal co-owner. He doesn't want that responsibility. He's also much older than me and has a different perspective. But Y Combinator, suffering from ADHD, won't have the patience to consider all that. That was kinda my whole point. I'm still not sure you got it.

My point exactly - again! "They are more comfortable in that area" means "they don't actually invest outside that area." I feel I could have saved some time if I knew this before I applied for the first time.

But yeah, I get it, you can't conceive them ever being wrong, for some reason. I have nothing against that, it's an opinion and it's as personal as a haircut.

Well, I don't live in The Valley. Not in the US, actually. I thought it would be reasonable to assume that people calling themselves investors would look at anything. Right now it looks like that guy from Mountain View was right: if the iPhone's popular, everyone's doing something related to the iPhone. Which is fine, as it's their choice. But it seems that if you utter the word Blackberry, you get fined or arrested for disturbing public order. And if you even think of Nokia, Gov. A. Schwarzenegger himself will punch you in the throat.

Okay, I didn't know that. I will remember it next time I have to deal with such people. Good to know.

What I think is obviously missing? Simple, Y Combinator's main page displaying a huge banner that says "we don't care about anything non-software, go away." It would have warned me right from the start. They never explicitly say it, they just heavily hint at it (e.g. they ask for your github ID, which you don't need unless you do some sort of coding) and I'm here to say quit hinting and just admit it out loud. But I believe that's also typical - what we hint at, it's actually an axiom. What we recommend, it's actually required. I believe that's not right. Simple as that. No hard feelings.

I sincerely hope that you did get the point - that was a "kamikaze" application not meant to get me in, but meant to get them out of their self righteous loop! You appear to not have read the whole thing. Okay, you didn't have to, of course. But you completely proved my point: that's what they also do. This is why I tried my best to get their attention woken up at least for this one application. Maybe they'll start waking up before reading other applications in the future, as well! I believe they never got the point that this is not a programming-centered idea. Not a software startup at all. I want to make hardware, to put it shortly.

Not meaning to brag, but I applied for another incubator as well, and got to the last stage. I was dumped there, but they did say I came across as technically strong and with relevant and solid experience. Among their tests was a programming test. I sent two e-mails explaining how I'm not a coder but how I'm not supposed to be one. And they passed me to the next stage.

Again, I think you proved the point I was trying to make with Y Combinator flawlessly. Not as an offence to you, though.

And yes, I understand that you weren't trying to bash me but to help me instead. Thanks for that.

I got rejected twice. However, I have a different idea for a startup. Non web startup, not based on coding. Based on the fact that I never even got a reason why I was rejected, I thought I'd apply differently this time. Saved my application in a file and then posted it here:

http://thypope.posterous.com/my-latest-y-combinator-applicat...

Tried to make them think. I believe they're in a loop of... self-indulgence, really. Since I think they do their best to stay the $#@! away from taking risks with any "unorthodox" ideas.

I posted my entire application here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2361753

I find it sooooooo ironic that I'm stumbling upon this post now. I just published my last YC submission and then posted it here on HN. You might want to read it, opaas :)

(if you think it's spam, just don't click the link, okay? :))

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2361753

Absolutely not :) I was just trying to get them to think more about what they're doing. Then I thought others might want to read the thing. It's that simple.

It isn't. And I'm not bitter or frustrated, either :)

Nope :)

Nice. Gonna brush up the resume a little bit and then apply for Junior IT Support Specialist. I mean, I know this is HN but the guys who know almost everything else besides programming are very often ignored completely here.

How about competent beta testers, or sysadmins like someone else said here?

Has anybody received the rejection letter very soon after posting their submission in that table? I got it the next day. I don't even know if there were 24 hours between the two events :)

Exactly. Especially since the vast majority of investors I asked replied "No! No! No! I can't... la la-la-la-la-la-la laa-laa la-la-la"

Just like in Eddie Izzard's Dress to Kill, if I may :)

That should be easy - store just the graph, not the actual values :)

I'm afraid I like Shopobot more. Camel is waaaaay too crowded, just like the myriad of other price aggregators. Just too much on the same page.

Ooops. Sorry about making a reaaaaaally really tall table cell there. I actually used the same texts I used for the Ycombinator submission. If you could make the cells slightly wider, please, the text would fit better and not make the entry all over people's screens.

Don't be sorry for what you think. I did think that you were a bit harsh on the theme of HN, though. It's clearly for smart, educated people who want to find out the interesting things from the gazillions of information bits that they consider useless. I refuse to think that the target audience of HN doesn't want to see something funny every now and then, but then again not every "fail" video of people tripping and falling on the floor is funny for them.

This article is nice because it comes up with concepts like soul-flesh-computer interface cards and software (and their brand names!) and makes the reader think that there's a whole world of zombie-modding out there.

It may not be an article on quantum computing, but it's not dumb, either.

Wow. Excuse me for sharing something I found enjoyable. This type of "article" shows you a creative approach on something, in this case it's creative speculative fiction. It may or may not increase your creativity, but it can be considered "food for thought." It's not exactly a video from the College Humor website. But I assume HN is strictly for objective, impartial and purely informative links?

I would think it's humor in the form of speculative fiction. The humor would be pointing at the fact that you can install Linux on mostly anything. Never forget that you can install it on a Commodore 64. I think that's why the author made it. Maybe some sort of ironic pat on the back for the Linux OS because it is so flexible and portable?

Yes, simple as in "sureshot" :) Also, keep in mind that you only have to design the hardware once and only the content you sell is different. Debugging the hardware isn't something you do with every DVD/BluRay release.

Well, tube sites have ads going to dating sites. Dump the porn, click here to find someone and screw each other's brains out. Tube sites will always have someone buying ad space. The solution, if you ask me, is interactivity. Wanna know what it's like to do it with pornstar X? Buy the interactive DVD. That's impossible to rip on tube sites. Even a dvdrip torrent is useless because it destroys the interactivity.

Making sure everyone buys and does not pirate? Simple, offer some sort of hardware enhancing interactivity. Without it it's not fun anymore. There you go - torrents, tube sites, anything is down the toilet. Maybe there will be a new problem, people who clone the equipments and sell them cheaper, but that's already a different story.

You know what I think is hillarious? Let's say Nike is an official sponsor for whatever event. Let's say I go there with a different brand of sneakers, underwear, pants...everything!

What are they going to do? Strip down! You are wearing a non-Nike pair of undies! REMOVE THEM AT ONCE! Your shoes are staying with us! They are NOT NIKE!

And then comes the other hilllarious part. The mobile phone. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Apple, Motorola and such are probably always sponsors everywhere. What if I get some obscure brand of mobile phone - Alcatel and Sagem are two easy examples, but think REALLY obscure:

BenQ, Sharp, NEC, Sendo, Pantech, Innostream, VK Mobile, Xcute, Haier, Bird, Eten, Qtek, iMate, WND or Mitac...

Actually, I think people will make a purpose out of going there with the wrong items. Saying loud and clear that people are supposed to "preserve the monopoly" and "stop people carrying non-sponsor items" will really top people's bull!@#$ meters. They might organize groups of such people.

After all, no matter how private it is and how much money sponsors put into it, the audience paid for the ticket. That means they have the same rights before the check-in gate and after it.

This is probably long past the old purpose of the Olympics. It's probably about luring people into forceful submission to corporate fascism. I might be wrong, though. I mean maybe the police won't "police" people into obedience toward corporate interests. I wouldn't know.

Doesn't work so well. I think the guy there wanted to tell me something, but I could only hear his words VERY slow. Like a magnetic audio tape played back at much less than the normal speed.

Then again, who knows how far apart we were from each other, both geographically and from the point of view of the connection.

Thanks a bunch for this. Now I have to e-mail it to so many people who are vulnerable to the "shiny and made by Apple" paradigm. "Slim" is unfortunately more important than "better performing."