Totally understand. The online component makes it challenging for a lot of folks. Fortunately this new version requires less in the way of constant online support, and we're definitely considering developing an offline-only version of this new app in the future.
Wow, I'm really sorry to hear that. We absolutely don't support that use case, and especially with this version, it's pretty hard to measure with that kind of exactness in a way that could be used for that kind of abuse. Honestly - this kind of thing really motivated us to make these changes with this new version. It's pretty clear to us that productivity has less to do with time in seats and more to do with balance.
We're totally aware of this and although we've tried our best in the past to avoid this scenario with the privacy of individuals in mind, it was unfortunate that bosses made their employees do this. This version is much harder to abuse that way, the reports are designed to be less exact and more of a guide to help the individual achieve balance, not to generate reports to be used to track productivity.
Thinking as a founder/hacker - it's totally fine. Fixing those errors would have no effect on the user experience. There are no viewers that aren't using the site because of those errors. Fixing them would take time that can be more valuably spent elsewhere.
it's not a "diet" it's a food (see this: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=507) Also humans had been living in caves and stick houses for 100+k years but now most of us have improved on those inventions.
It absolutely is. If I were running an event like PAX, I wouldn't want someone like that ruining the perception of the quality of my event. Event organizers are on the hook to curate the quality of their associated partners.
Yeah, I admit, the carfax analogy is not the best one. We don't really use it anywhere on our site - mostly because it's not really accurate. Your wording is much better and truer to what we're building. Can I use it? :)
In fact, the opposite is true. Every single employer we talked to wanted their concerns address that they would be perceived as invading people's privacy by having them introduced through us. In the end, employers are recruiting you. If you're turned off by the way they're doing it, they lose.
Totally understand your concern here. I can assure you recruiters will never see the data you don't show them yourself. It's part of our core values for this project. Hell, I wouldn't want to show recruiters my data without removing some things or highlighting others. That's why we launched with the ability to create your own profile. That's the only thing anyone can ever see of your data, and you have full control over it.
Hey guys, I just wanted to say that we really did consider the HN crowd when we made this. PG and I had a conversation where it became clear that the core of this project needs to be don't offend HN. Check out the bottom of this page: http://rescuetime.com/intros and our faq: http://rescuetime.com/profiles/faq
We realize that the whole point of this breaks down if it ventures into the creepy side. We'd rather do something creatively useful and beneficial for our users with their data they're trusting us with.
I wrote this in a comment on our blog, but I'll copy it here too:
If you find yourself thinking, “Thank you, Buzz Killington,” let me just add that the average time our most productive users spend on work related tasks per day is 3 hours(!). So if you put in your 3-4 hours of productive time, go nuts on that guitar doodle. We also show that if you work too many hours straight in a row you’ll have a down week next week. But all of that is for a future blog post.
Also, we were really careful to make sure no where in the blog post we claim that it ate up productivity. Just that it consumed time from something else. People must have guilty consciences. ;)
It makes me wonder what kinds of underserved markets there might be for apps for women, because "gals hate to do X." Wait, that probably wouldn't go over very well. :)
It's not easy to game in that a lot of the data relies on proportionate comparisons (i.e. time spent in .py files vs. time spent in .java files or on IM). Not only that, but there'll be a level of human interaction involved. If we were going to vouch for a candidate, I'd want to at least look at why we were vouching for them myself, or have someone else audit that conclusion. At this point we're pretty familiar with (and have a lot of reference points for) what a real human usage profile looks like. To your point about the lines of code problem, really the only thing we can do is provide a filtered list of people who we'd be sure spent a certain amount of their time in the technology areas companies are looking to hire in.
You make good points. This process would always be a two-way street, though. Nobody would ever be able to land a job just by having an interesting RescueTime profile. And I'd argue that, for some jobs, coming up with a way to hack this system would be more than enough justification for hiring that person. :)
Good points. Some of the thinking behind this is inspired by an old site I worked on in 2006 which let you pick tags that represented your skills. This is better because you don't have to pick, we should be able to derive them. That project was engineering focused because that's what we knew best. This is definitely going to start that way since we can manually check that any results make sense.
While this may have been true initially, over the years this is no longer the case. Especially as we have grown adoption of our business offering, which caters to teams inside a broad range of companies and worker types.
As we went from the early adopter crowd to the broader population, you would expect to see MS Office trending up as a whole.
I guess I'm confused why it seems Facebook wants to compete with Twitter in this regard. I don't think fb users have asked for the option to publish their information more privately, so why is it a priority? It feels more to me like fb is moving more toward "make something we can sell" than "make something people want."
I apologize. It's been a hectic morning and I took a few things personally when I shouldn't have. I'm going to take a breather and stop commenting for a while. :)
I deleted my above comment because it was redundant to Tony's.
I think you're misinterpreting. We're not badly reacting to criticism, it's just surprising seeing that the tone here has seemingly changed from being one that used to be receptive to and encouraging of rapid progress and user-driven product development. The reason we launched these features to the broad audience was so they could be used and we could have feedback submitted. The reason I posted the blog post here is because this community is one that likes to try out the cutting edge things that are out there and frequently tend to post useful feedback.
I felt like the tone of the earliest comments was overly harsh, considering the above. This was always intended to be a soft-launch. I thought it would be a good idea to involve the HN community in it. Sincere apologies if this wasn't communicated better. Lesson learned.
Please, we want your involvement and your feedback, but in no way was this launched prematurely. This is the way we've always operated and we're proud of the product we've been able to develop because of it.
If you read the post it mentions that apps like self control are imperfect because you have to keep telling it which sites to block. RescueTime has a huge part of the internet already categorized and scored as distracting or not and lets you tune those settings in broad strokes - so if you go to a site you've never even heard of, if it's a distracting site you'll be blocked without having to have entered it.
Journalism still baffles me. It seems all too regular that important details are carelessly reported incorrectly.
"then house those startups for a short period of time."
This is commonly misreported and so easily gotten right since everyone at YC points out this is not true.
"strategic input from the Y Combinator team (Graham and his wife)"
Overlooking Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris is understandable I suppose since they're not always around as much as pg and Jessica but, really? They left out 2 of the 4 people heading YC? They couldn't just, you know, look at the "people" page on ycombinator.com?
I would say the friend component often overlaps with people you already know are really great to work with. Many of my best friends are people who I've had the most positive experiences working with on the job. One of the most important things to have in co-founders (especially bootstrapped ones, I suppose) is trust in them to stick it out and not let you down. While it may be risky to go into a difficult situation with friends, at least you're much more sure you can probably rely on them and know what they're capable of.
I really don't think this is at all a fair or even correct statement. For one (and this should be obvious), FuckedCompany didn't report on emerging startups, just ones that were failing. Another thing is (and I feel this is pretty obvious too), I'm not surprised to see more posts about companies in trouble than ones succeeding in the first place (most companies don't succeed), and in an economic downturn this is even less surprising. What would be surprising to me would be to not hear about companies failing after having had years of reporting of emerging new startups.