gbelote

When you're ready you should check out Microryza: https://www.microryza.com/

They do crowdfunding for science stuff like this.

This article seems link baity. It doesn't talk about the Snapchat servers not deleting photos, but the Snapchat app storing photos locally in a "hidden folder". It then advertises a $300-$500 service to remove the photos in the hidden folder.

It's a surprise to see my dead startup TutorialTab as #6 in weekly growth! Seems like your algorithm is sensitive to fluctuations in sites with really low Alexa rank (TT is at 13,890,005 right now). FYI!

Right. It can be dangerous if reckless crowdinvesting platforms become prominent. There are already shady platforms out there today, but there are a few forces and barriers to entry that I hope will shape the space into a healthy one:

There's a lot of regulation around being a platform where folks exchange securities (e.g. equity and debt). Someone can't, for example, whip together a website with Stripe over the weekend. The SEC takes this pretty seriously, and because of all the money transfer regulations, it's very hard to move large amounts of money around without playing by the rules. (Heh, I wonder how long before someone tries a bitcoin-based crowdinvesting site. [Don't try this at home!]) This should help limit most of the potentially shady and dangerous platforms.

I think this will also be a space where a few established brands dominate the space, and strong brands and networks will draw strong startups. Without good deal flow, it's going to be real hard to break into the space. Even if you allow anyone to create company profiles and raise money, you still need to draw in investors. I'm sure some people will be suckered in, but I'm skeptical this sort of site will become large enough to create systemic problems. (/knocks on wood)

But that doesn't mean a platform can't establish itself and branch out to allow "wild west" crowdinvesting. Wefunder has plans to expand who can raise money, but we care a ton about doing it responsibly and safely and it'll look somewhat different than what we have today. I won't go into much detail here because some things aren't public yet, and I'm sure every other platform has it's own thoughts and plans about "going mainstream".

Over the next few years I believe people will become more mature about crowd funding thanks to Kickstarter, and I think the skepticism about crowdinvesting and memories from the startup bubble(s?) will be a negative force against too much hype. But there is a danger around a crowdinvested company becoming "the next Facebook" and everyone going bananas about investing in more. There's no sure-fire protection against that. We do our best to educate folks about ways to approach startup investing and the risks involved, and hopefully other platforms will do the same.

I think there'll at least be a lot of visibility into crowdinvesting as a whole. So if things start to get fishy people will talk about it, and the more it's talked about the more folks will (hopefully) be cautious. (Maybe what we need is a crowdsourced SEC to help protect investors ;))

And finally, I think the space will evolve past "Kickstarter with an Invest Button" and the crowd will get better at doing diligence. There will be cases of things getting lots of funding that shouldn't, but that'll happen every now and again.

But who really knows, these are just my personal thoughts and speculations. I'm an optimist and want to believe in a happy crowdinvesting future. :)

These are good concerns. There's a whole bunch of companies trying to move into the crowdinvesting / online VC space, and there's going to be a whole spectrum of platforms and startups trying to get some action.

Sites like Wefunder (disclosure: I'm a cofounder) and FundersClub put a lot of emphasis on vetting, for obvious reasons. You need "A player" startups to draw other "A player" startups, and if your selection of companies for investors to invest in are duds your ecosystem will collapse and everyone will lose money. Vetting helps keep the ecosystem healthy, but note: it's really hard to pick winners, startups are very risky investments, and at the end of the day never invest more than you can afford to lose.

While the JOBS act isn't in effect yet, there are a few protection mechanisms that are meant to avoid the situation you describe. Namely: unaccredited investors can only invest 5% of their income (10% if you make over $100k/yr). This protects you from losing your life savings. Also: unaccredited investors must invest through a crowdinvesting portal, and there are regulations around how those operate (e.g. the funding round must "tip" by hitting a target amount). There's a bit of "wisdom of crowds" that might help protect investors, but it depends on the crowd, how vulnerable crowd investors are to hype, and how good the fundraising platform is at helping crowds discuss/vet startups.

It's my personal belief, however, that simple startup failure will dominate fraud. Startups are hard! Even smart, motivated, well-connected founders fail. The best protection is to diversify your portfolio (e.g. make 25 $1k bets instead of one $25k bet).

It's great to see progress with the SEC and crowdinvesting. Even though we (Wefunder) aren't dependent on the JOBS act and the SEC, it's great for everyone that they're making this grey territory lighter!

Yep - we (Wefunder) already have a broker dealer partnership and one of my cofounders has taken the Series 7.

This makes me wonder if there's a perception issue: many of the companies are doing very well and delivered solid presentations, so no one really looks "10x" ahead of the rest. Especially since each company gets only 2:30 and many share the same structure. "This is what we do. Look, we have awesome traction. And we're making a bunch of money. And our growth is very healthy. There's a big potential market to capture. And this is how we see ourselves changing the world." And on top of that, you don't get a very strong sense of product and user experience within that narrow timeframe, sitting in an audience of a few hundred.

My guess is that if the quality distribution was more like what an angel/vc sees outside of YC, it'd be more obvious that that there are some amazing companies in the W13 batch.

It's not because YC companies are in stealth, but announcing you're a part of YC is a newsworthy event, and that can be used tactically in coordination with something else. For example, launching a new product or campaign.

You might find something internationally, but in the US there isn't anything on my radar.

It's technically possible, we used state law ourselves to dogfood from unaccredited investors, but there are a number of issues that make it too much of a legal headache to be worthwhile. We explored this avenue last fall, and found it to create an adverse selection scenario (i.e. strong companies don't want to deal with it because they can raise money traditionally).

Maybe someone will try it, but the issue is that it puts the companies who raise money at risk - not the platform. I'd be skeptical about investing in companies raising money on such platforms, but I have obvious bias - I'm a cofounder of Wefunder. :)

However note: once Title III of the JOBS act takes effect, the unaccredited investor landscape will change dramatically.

Cofounder here. We hide the identities of the companies for regulatory purposes (complying with current general solicitation rules). We can talk about general things, and if you do some light research you can probably figure out who's raising. But we don't blatantly say "Company X is Raising Money".

Haha - maybe we'll do something like that for the next batch, we'll see!

We do have a few batchmates on our platform, you can always create your own index and invest in all of them. :) (Unfortunately due to regulations we can't publicly say who they are, and viewing/investing is limited to accredited investors only... for now!)

This post is great. Having been through YC and TechStars (separate companies) and founding a crowdinvesting platform, it seems to me that early stage investing is very much about who you are and the relationships you've built. You can raise money and survive without significant traction a priori.

What's interesting to me is how the barrier for investing is being lowered (e.g. JOBS act) and how that's going to impact the dynamic of raising money. Startups are going to be able to find people in their industry who grok what they're doing (e.g. their customers) and raise small amounts of money from many people. It's going to be easier for investors to make more small bets ($1k instead of $50k), so I think the need for obvious traction early on (graphs going "up and to the right") is going to keep decreasing and it's going to be more about speaking to a niche of investors in your space and being great with product and communication.

Kickstarter sucks at preorders because (a) people use them for preorders and (b) they don't embrace the fact people use them for preorders. Why does it matter what they say in a blog post? Swish is reacting to how they see some people _use_ Kickstarter.

And what's wrong about having a place to discover cool things you can pre-order? I pre-ordered a Pocket Monkey on Swish a few months ago. It came this week and it's awesome.

I'm seeing an indefinite "Loading: Soundfont..." spinner. Looking at the console, it looks like a few assets take a long time to download and then fail before finishing. Could it be your server is serving assets itself and killing the connection after ~10s?

Thanks for the feedback, anateus (and everyone else). I made a few quick tweaks to the page that hopefully makes it feel less like their homepage. Let me know what you think.

We want to be careful about making our branding too strong, because this post is about Wevorce, not Wefunder. In the future we'll put more design cycles into separating the Startup of the Week brand from our own, while keeping the featured startup front-and-center.

This actually isn't the homepage of Wevorce, which you can find here: http://wevorce.com/

We (Wefunder) are featuring Wevorce as startup of the week. We focus on the founders because we love the team and want to present the company from their angle.

We should probably do a better job of clearly separating the Wefunder and Wevorce brands.

Divorce is one of the most stressful events that can happen in your life, as a kid or as a spouse. It's great to see companies like Wevorce work towards solving real and important problems.

I would love to read that book - I've always found domain negotiation fascinating.

It is unfortunate that the SEC is moving slowly with this.

One thing to be careful with state law is that you still need to be mindful of general solicitation regulations. Right now it's illegal to publicly announce that you're actively raising money. If leaked to the press it could shut down your whole round, perhaps worse.

But state law without general solicitation can still be useful - at Wefunder we raised a crowd round from accredited and unaccredited investors on our platform using blue sky law. It's not for every company and comes with a few awkward restrictions, like only being able to accept investors in certain states and having investor limits. If anyone's interested in doing something similar, we talk about it on our blog [1] and are happy to share our legal docs which are VC friendly (for if/when you get to that Series A).

[1] https://wefunder.com/post/16-how-to-legally-crowd-invest-now

But that is an overreaction. The find_by_* dynamic handlers have always accepted strings and integers, by design. What's insecure about User.find_by_id("27")?

What people seem to be reacting to is the idea that User.find_by_id(params[:id]) is exploitable because you can coerce params[:id] into a hash instead of a string (by using a query string like ?id[select]=some_thing_here instead of ?id=27). True, but what most people here are overlooking is that User.find_by_id actually rejects these hashes because their keys are strings and not symbols. Try it out.

This vulnerability can be coupled with other vulnerabilities (like having someone's session secret, which is a much worse vulnerability IMO), but people are talking about it as if you can do something nasty with it by itself alone. That's why it's an overreaction.

Some don't - they use the honor system. I think that's a reasonable choice depending on the spirit and intent of the hackathon. If your goal is to get a bunch of great people together to work on cool things, with a token contest prize and bragging rights, then worrying about cheaters probably isn't at the top of your "things to worry about" list.

If you do care about that, there are a couple ways you could structure the hackathon to eliminate some cheating (but a smart, talented, determined hacker probably can thwart them). Things like requiring submission of source code (then look at the git logs. what are the dates? are the first commits huge piles of work?) or structuring the contest around an unknown that gets revealed when it starts, like a theme (e.g. music-based apps).

It's probably tough to measure. I imagine most of the bottlenecking comes from communicating with external entities, which may not scale well by adding more Stripers to the task. I would be surprised if they could just pull a developer aside and say "Joe, you're off feature X. Go call up Canada and make things happen!"

While they probably don't feel external pressure due to lack of competition, I doubt they're hotdoggin' it because they are leaving money on the table.

Performance is more dominated by latency than file size, and folks usually care about this more for page load time of a page than bandwidth cost. CDNs are usually better than hosting on your server directly, because they have better latency properties (many CDN endpoints which are more likely to be "closer" to the end user).

The advantage of sharing a CDN (as opposed to every site having it's own) is caching. If I visit website-a.com and they include jquery.js from cdnjs.com then I visit website-b.com that also uses the same file, I don't have to download it twice and website-b.com loads faster than if it served that file itself. That's the big win, IMO, but unfortunately depends on cdnjs having a high density of use. Even still, if you can shave a 100ms of the loading of your page that can matter.

Looking at the source, he uses jQuery under the hood for (at least) element manipulation, event handling, and the ui-slider. So the effort is non-trivial, although it probably wouldn't be too difficult for someone to rewrite it if motivated.

Nice work + demo, btw.

If you're a fan of Settlers of Catan, my previous startup built a clone with integrated video chat: http://gameroom.io/

Our goal was to build a social place around board games and video chat. The video chat was to make it feel like you were with the other people, in the same room. We fell short in a few ways, but it's still live if you want to play with friends!

It'd be nice to have an explicit "save" link for stories and comments. I know that every story I upvote gets saved (and can be retrieved via my profile), but I'd like to be able to save things I find interesting w/o giving it an upvote/endorsement (and for users who aren't aware of upvotes getting saved in this way).

> Time to stop using Skype

Eh, I don't see it as that big of a deal. They're providing a free service, it looks like it's only there when you're not video chatting, it uses real estate that isn't already used, and (at least the first version) only allows silent, non-expanding ads.

I think the potential relationship between Dunbar's number and online communities is interesting - I had never thought about it that way before. But certainly online communities don't break down after a few hundred people. Why must everyone know everyone else for a community to remain high quality? Or closer to the original question, why do you think communities degrade after everyone doesn't know everyone else?

This has been true in my experience. I'm not sure if this approach is always better, but over time I've been gradually reducing carb intake and what used to feel impossible without being miserable (50-60 net carbs/day) is now painless.

However with the gradual approach, you probably won't get that dramatic shedding of weight some people talk about. I don't care about that, personally, because I get enough satisfaction out of steady progress and make a game out of optimizing my diet with delicious yet low/moderate carb food.