govindkabra31

The alarm band is a great one.. I put my phone in vibrate mode in my pocket for that, but of course, not ideal.

agree with your reasoning. (though you probably should edit "randomly" part; those choices were handpicked, not randomly)

+1, that's inspiring! Totally helped me understand on how all this innovation came about here.

will this work on adium?

very well said!

This is great.. why dont you pursue further? Looks like some of it is coming from 4sq api, I can help you there if you are stuck.

Kudos on working on it, and hope you find time to continue building on it. One specific feature that will make it so much easier is if there was a way to bootstrap your list. May be display top tourist locations to start with.. you can also search for tiplists on foursquare to give user starting point. Not sure if you already do that, and I just couldnt figure out..

People grossly underestimate time it takes to figure out what to build, how to design UX, which APIs to use, how the workflow works. And all the inspiration that goes into coming up with something new.

Sure, if you are given a working website, and you were to replicate exact copy of it, you can do it far faster

(still not sure about 1 hour estimate-- show us if you really mean it).

You should explore other opportunities, if you feel that way for your current work place.

I think this is amazing.. a huge problem all around and a very clever solution. Surveys are broken, putting the feature on site and testing who clicks on it-- so good!! Engineers all over the world thank you!!

Any thoughts on how to do this for "non-button" content features? Like say, do our users want to see product images in the search result page?

he noted in his article, that he checked for that.. startup was growing 100% mom, he was told.

There were no other posts.. this was the first and only post on that site.

I had the tab open, posted the text in a comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6170145

I had an open tab, just posted the text on this comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6170145

just posted the text in a comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6170145

Here is the original text of the article, since it has been taken down now.

My experience at a YC startup

This story needs to be told. I am an engineer turned business guy who recently left a cozy job at a top-tier tech company and joined a YC start-up. Needless to say I took a huge pay cut and a big risk. I talked extensively to one of the co-founders and he/she did an amazing job of selling me the opportunity. I got the sense that VCs were lining up for Series A (it was still early stage) and the company had amazing growth curve (numbers like growing 100% Mom etc.). Once i joined the startup, to my horror, I discovered a few things:

    The company tried to raise Series A earlier and failed. 
    The numbers that were shared were not entirely true. It was kind of half-truth and part of the marketing pitch to VCs.
    The leadership was struggling with the vision of the company. It was pulled in many directions - sometimes ad-hoc based on customer feedback or angel advice.
    The culture was bad. Engineers were constantly told what to do. 
    The quality of the people were much lower vs my previous company.

One of the first things I did was steer the company in the right direction from a strategy perspective. I constantly butted head with one of the founders but my strategies were clearly impacting the revenue numbers. For example one of the tactics doubled the weekly revenue. I wanted to have a significant impact so I was constantly asking the founders to work on the long-term vision and culture for the company. I also told them that VCs invested in talent and not the idea.

Then another round of raising Series A started. The “nos" started piling up. Our last hope said “no" 2 weeks back. And then I was asked to leave last week (though I was already planning to leave). I think they got what they needed out of me and now the first person to go would be the business guy (along with some other engineers and business folks). Actually the team is paying for the incompetence of the founding team.

I would add the disclaimer that my experience may not be reflective of every single YC startup. But I don’t want you to make the same mistake so this is my piece of advice before you join an early-stage startup:

    YC doesn’t necessarily mean sure shot success. Paul Graham is a human and bound to make mistakes.
    Talk to as many team members as possible before joining. Try to gauge culture by visiting the office quite often. 
    Preferably join a startup where you know the people.
    If you don’t know the people, work part-time for some time before making a decision.
    Ignore marketing pitches by founders.
    Go for post Series-A. VCs have already done the vetting for you.

I just heard they are planning to raise more money via AngelList or FundersClub (not listed yet). If you are an individual investor, do your due diligence before investing via AngelList or FundersClub - don’t invest blindly.

Some tips I learned from my commute from south bay <--> SF for two years.

- Take caltrain for normal days. Drive for days with evening events. Trains are far slower in off peak hours.

- Use a bike for station to home/office. Bart or VTA are shit.

- Get up early, use bullet train (last one leaves Mt View ~8am)

- Use a data plan on train to catch up on emails, code reviews, etc. Or type up some code that you can finish up compiling debugging when in office.

I probably would prefer this commute over 30minute drive within south bay.

coops, great writeup!! Can you share some tips for load testing features that are going to incur lots of writes (e.g., likes) that can't be tested in dark test.

how do you deal with sharded mongo clusters?