ibdthor

I think they're onto one of the next big models: democratizing knowledge that's been traditionally gatekept, hard to reach, understand, or make decisions with. I'm fascinated to see where products like this end up.

The blog posts might get a little long if we prefaced all of them with a description of Light Table, but hopefully lighttable.com can provide you with all the information you're looking for :)

You are definitely correct that some of the aversion is a knee jerk reaction and misunderstanding, but that aside, the MIT license is very end user friendly, more understood than the GPL, and more permissive to the end user, plus we kept hearing from folks that that's what they wanted, so we switched.

We were hearing concerns that the CA was worded in our favor and was one-way, in that people could contribute and we could take their work and commercialize it down the road without open sourcing it.

I know Chris already responded to some of your concerns, but I'd like to weigh in briefly as well.

> By bringing investors on board, and promising Hacker News they're going to change the world

a16z constitutes the majority of our investment, and Chris Dixon at a16z is rather well equipped to help us tackle this problem. It has also given us access to a rather impressive network of very smart people who can help us. Yes, there is a trade-off in that our investors have a say in what we do, but given the small number of investors, and who they are individually, there is a low probability of micromanagement from them. Secondly, we never promised Hacker News that we're going to change the world; we said we have some ambitious ideas, and that we wanted to pursue them. Might they change the world? Sure. Might we also die trying? Absolutely. That's a risk inherent to... well, everything. Certainly a lot of things worth doing.

> The fact that the LT team is giving up on Light Table/I think the LT team should have worked themselves into a crying, bleeding, starving mess

The last time we had office hours with pg about LT, we didn't exactly leave with a warm fuzzy feeling about continuing work on the project. But we did, for another year, spending the remainder of the Kickstarter money and approaching the end of the runway, staying as lean as possible, and continuing to develop a product that pg, James Lindenbaum, et al, all regarded as a nonviable business. We may have to agree to disagree on how plausible it is to make an open source IDE a commercial success, but there was plenty of crying and bleeding before we came to work on Eve.

At that point, it became what Jamie aptly described as a matter of return on effort. There isn't much sensibility in spending countless hours to solve the wrong problem, and running out of money didn't strike us as the optimal way to continue working on a problem we genuinely cared about. Instead, once LT became open source, we forged ahead into an area that Chris Dixon called a "Vietnam" of software, and while Eve may be particularly difficult, it brought us new funds precisely so we don't have to give up.

> I truly hope they succeed

Thank you, so do we :)

This is absolutely spot-on correct. Your life is so far from set in stone at age 21 that you won't believe how different 21 is from even age 25, just a few years down the road. The grass will always seem a bit greener elsewhere, but that's human nature, especially when you've just graduated college. When I graduated, I had a top notch degree (like it matters), but I didn't even have a good job that paid the bills easily. It was what I thought I really wanted to work in, what I thought I should be doing, so I took a huge pay cut to be a low-level researcher. I was so jealous of my friends who graduated and took a "boring job" that paid triple what mine did, who got benefits and bonuses, and did exactly what @anigbrowl said - they banked money for a few years and it set them up for so much success. They fostered their own interests on the side, paid off any debt or loans they had, got cars or houses, and saved up their money. Without fail, all of those friends found jobs they enjoyed far more (some of them through connections at that boring job they didn't like in the first place), jobs that let them have a greater impact on the world, and jobs that were more in line with their interests as they evolved through their 20s. And again without fail, none of them accurately predicted the direction their lives and passions would go from the time they were 21 until now.

I did the same thing, but without the added benefit of making any money like you're doing now. I had such a strong notion of what I wanted to do, and as I spent more time messing around with ideas in my spare time and learning more about what I wanted for myself, those notions changed so radically that I went from stem cell research to IDEs in a matter of years. The thing that helped me the most were the people around me. I was able to talk out all my thoughts and worries and anxieties. I was able to share in other people's interests and passions to see if maybe those were mine too. It made me feel like I wasn't alone, like things weren't hopeless, and like I had the potential to be extraordinary if I wanted to be. Ultimately the things that have truly begun to define my life came from utterly unexpected places, and almost entirely from the cast of friends and family around me.

Hang in there, the path gets clearer.

Manpower is an issue, but we've gotten a lot of requests for Ruby in the future. When and where Ruby support will come is still unknown, but do know that we hear you! :)

Not to be that guy, but on the Overview page for Patients & Caregivers, in the picture with the two women, it says "treatment regime" - I believe it should be "treatment regimen".

Tastefully borrowed from it :). It happens to be a pretty darn good question - it's a good place to talk about an accomplishment, and provides some insight into the intelligence, creativity, and personality of the person who answers it.

Amusing, that this thread pops up the day after the "Why I hate HN"/"How to Fix HN" discussion. The 50% of this thread about sexism is a bit off-topic, and about another 25% is claiming the application process is broken or that beer equates to a bribe. I feel like this would have been more valuable if people had simply taken it as a lesson for success through tenacity. Here's what I take away from this: delivering the beer made the YC partners realize that Instacart was already up and running with a functional app, at which point it became a quasi-Pascal's Wager - if Instacart busts, it busts, but it looks like it could pay off big already, so why not bet on it? This is similar to how we got into YC with Light Table. Our initial application for a completely different idea didn't even get an interview, but when we applied late with numbers from Kickstarter to back us, it was a different story. I would wager that for a late application to be successful, the founders have to show a certain above-average mettle, but must also have some demonstrative additional value (like a functional app that can deliver a six pack in 30 minutes) that makes YC take the risk of a late acceptance.

The talk begins at 1:40 PDT, by the way.

We will :)

I agree with the funnel analogy, but I would like to point out that this release was an upgrade of the existing playground. Our purpose here was certainly not to feel exclusive or to narrow the funnel, it was to add certain features to the playground that had been requested by a large portion of our users. These playground updates are very early alpha testing - the goal is to have frequent updates to test many different features so when v1.0.0 drops, the funnel will be as wide as possible.

For awhile now though, there's been a $15 tier, and currently only 3 backers have chosen that option. Given the cost ineffectiveness of a t-shirt, particularly at a low price like $15, other than Chris' eternal gratitude, what sort of recompense would people want for that level of support? Almost 30 times the number of people went for the $100 beta access level, and only slightly fewer went for the $50 license, so apparently it's popular enough, but what's the best way to get support at a $10 or $15 level?

What I find most striking about this map is that it is eerily similar to maps of distance from or concentration of supermarkets in the US, which are fairly commonly used after Ravenstein's human mobility studies to track things like urban expansion. Simply put, this map would suggest to me that McDonald's has become so entrenched that it actually serves as a reliable landmark for human evolutionary and sociological studies. Which is frightening.