flipside

He's making a point since this is such a frequently overlooked issue. By raising awareness, other companies and startups are less likely to make this mistake.

Personally I think a hybrid tier system is the best, simplest compromise.

1. Comments with 1 point stay as they are. 2. Comments with 2-9 points are marked as moderately popular. 3. Comments with 10+ points that are marked as very popular. 4. Comments with <1 points are treated the same as they are now.

Comment score tiers could be color coded or use any other marker to identify their popularity range. Hopefully this would keep things fuzzy enough that people don't fight over points while still making it easy enough to scan comments quickly.

Love the site, I think it has a lot of potential. I'll be in touch through email.

Speaking from personal experience, depression definitely forced me to face my problems and thoroughly analyze them. The focus depression generates is pretty impressive, even the things I'd distract myself with would often take on the feeling of a search for a missing puzzle piece, like the key to making sense of all my sorrows was just out of reach.

Shifting ones mental perspective is not trivial, and probably essential for overcoming certain types of depressions. In the end I was finally able to notice the blind spot in my mind that I'd been avoiding, and from there take a different path that led me to peace and happiness. It took a lot of effort and insight to get to that point so I for one firmly believe depression has its uses.

You forgot the last step, he has to raise his son to do all those things too.

This closes the loop to create the "asian circle of life".

I wouldn't say that, it could just be your application was so clear that they could easily extract all the information they needed.

That being said, we had to answer a follow-up question since we made a lot of outlandish claims for what our technology could do without explaining how. In our case, the how is not obvious at all, hence the follow-up, but if yours is, than I wouldn't read into it.

Best of luck!

Rather than "stealth mode", "low profile mode" is best for companies in a market that might attract a lot of attention. The most important thing is to balance the need for attention to fuel growth against the risk of inspiring competitors.

In other words, don't hype your startup if it will do more harm than good. Patience is a virtue for a reason.

If I had a way to improve the quality of HN but that would require a complete overhaul of the voting system, extensive testing, and slightly more work by 5%-20% of users, do you think people would go for it?

My feeling is that things aren't bad enough for radical change here yet, but if the right 5% are, it might be possible.

A painful but necessary decision for twitter, I know they need to monetize their service but alienating users in a way that becomes a meme is the wrong way to go.

I fully expect some version of #dickbar to be back someday once they've worked out the technology for showing relevant updates, they just tried to implement it before its time.

I guarantee you that by next year there will be a way to do this right.

$41 million might justify the tech, but they better blow a large chunk of that on some people with a clue on how to launch a product.

Just saying you'll have tens of millions of users in 3 months doesn't make it so.

September, huh? Well, if we get into YC, we'll definitely have something up by then. Good to know we have some real competition.

Hmm, now you got me wondering if there's another way to go about this because our strategy is pretty unique...

No matter how I look at this, it doesn't strike me as anything new or special.

Sure, it's sort of a useful feature, but it's also a clear admission that Facebook couldn't figure out how to leverage their user base to get good answers. Polling your friends? Yawn

Crowdsourcing is still a very young technology and it isn't well understood how to make the most of it. Personally, I'm really glad that Facebook didn't see the same opportunity for Questions that I do, now if only they stay clueless for another year...

So here's the short version of how I got my hustle. My life used to suck in the sense that I wasn't living the life I wanted. I wasn't good at lying to myself, I knew something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what it was. After months and months of soul searching, I finally figured out what was truly important to me. I realigned my life in this new direction and all that pent up energy caused things to just take off.

If you try to hustle through a wall, it feels like you're standing still, but once you try hustling around or over it, things start to move. I'd say identifying your wall is the hard part, but getting around it ain't no picnic either. That being said, nothing compares to running free on the other side.

Looking forward to it! Hoping we get a great turnout!

Hustle is essential, and speaking as someone who didn't used to have any, without it, you're just relying on luck.

No doubt it's better to be lucky than good, but it's even better to be good at being lucky. Hustle hard enough and you make your own luck.

Unwritten rules are the most fun to break imo. They can also be the hardest because most people don't realize they are there.

Awesome write-up, gonna review our application one more time to make sure we hit all those points. Thanks!

I would totally be open to the possibility of selling my company someday, it's just that they would have to be just as crazy as me to take me up on my terms. Not everything revolves around $$$.

Change in perspective: check, fundamentally even

Insight from weak associations: check, from more sources than I can easily count

Tight mental framework: getting there as fast as I can

Hardware and software in the brain: check, dots have been connected

Thoughts are things: vision, check; reality, in progress

Path to genius: check for eureka moment from plug and play

Genius?: TBD

Cofounders that have known each other longer split up all the time, mostly because their relationship was never tested in that way.

We are actively working on building a relationship that can survive the startup process and if not, we're trying to find that out sooner rather than later. I guess we'll just have to do our best to explain that in the application/video.

If the cofounders have only known each other for about 1 month, what can we do to reassure YC we'll work well together?

Would evidence of some random (yet to be done) side project help? Good chemistry in the video? Anecdotal evidence that we've built up trust and a good relationship? Good legal framework?

We are still actively building a larger team of course but these things take time. This is the only part of the application that worries me. =)

I'm glad I read this because these concepts can also be applied for gamification to boost user engagement. I was already planning on using some game mechanics, but the ones mentioned in the article are subtly executed which should provide for a more seamless integration.

I'm placing my money on company X, you know, that company that's barely a twinkle in anybody's eye but will grow up to dominate the web 3.0 landscape.

In 5 years, I'll bet you'll see Facebook and Google teaming up against X, how crazy a prediction is that?

Clearly it's time to disrupt the commenting system of HN.

Building up my network is exactly what I'm focusing on right now, because when I came up with the idea, I quickly realized nobody I knew could directly help me and what I want to do is going to require a solid team. I figure I'll spend another few weeks or so on hardcore networking (YC deadline, coincidence?) and then shift over to really building the product.

One of the nice things for me is that entrepreneurs/engineers also count as potential customers/users so I'm still advancing my cause this way. By not being shy about what I'm trying to do, I've gotten a lot of genuine interest and useful feedback.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that network effects are a major component of my momentum right now and that even though a focus on developing the product is good, building a good team quickly and finding the right support are worth the upfront investment.

This article encapsulated one of my strengths, the difficulty of focusing exclusively on any one thing. As an individual that has always been somewhat easily distracted, I've learned to take advantage of this by always staying on the lookout for new opportunities each time my attention shifts. My startup idea was born from piecing together many different insights into one new idea.

Reading this article made me really happy that... ooooh, shiny!

Crowd sourcing operates by certain rules, many of which aren't well understood.

With some luck, I'll have a working version of W3 version of crowd sourcing up and running within a year, which will hopefully solve some of the problems mentioned here.

The approach I'm taking is to make myself invaluable to the project.

At first, like you, I was scared that anybody could copy it and do it themselves, but after revealing my idea to others, I realized they didn't "get it" like I did. Every idea has subtleties, even something like Groupon which has been copied to death.

I've spent hundreds of hours on improving my understanding of the problem I'm trying to solve. Now I have the confidence that anyone smart enough to help me execute will also see the value of working with me and not against me.

The key is to make sure everyone's interests are aligned, that's how you build a real team. It's not what you've done in the past that counts (idea), it's what you'll do in the future (execution).

A cure for aging terrifies me, my gut tells me that it would be the end of homo sapiens.

Think about it, do you really think all higher order life has this "defect" for no reason? Without aging, the youth would be at an eternal disadvantage in society. The rush to have children would all but disappear without a biological clock. Evolutionarily speaking, a cure for aging is a dead end.

That said, i could easily see it happening, so like I said, I'm terrified.

For the record, I check my sanity daily and always get the same result: Yes, I'm crazy, but not completely.