jjb123

Sorry, didn't mean for my comments to be misleading. The context was that if the number of robberies and muggings are reduced in that neighborhood from 60 per week to say 50 or cut in half to 30, then fewer police resources are needed for responding to calls for robberies and muggings in that neighborhood and more resources can be spent towards preventative police patrolling throughout Oakland.

I used the comments section of the article to further clarify some of my/our views on this topic if you're interested.

very few of my friends actively use twitter, it feels like there was a six month window there when many of them did, then instagram came onto the scene. It kind of felt like both services became mainstream (my friend base) at about the same time.

Thank you (co-founder of crowdtilt here). And yes, our view has basically been that we want to build the most open and accessible crowdfunding tools for the entire web/world. Crowdtilt.com might be for medium size campaigns, Crowdhoster (built by us and powered by our API) is for large-scale ones like Soylent, and now with our mobile app, we want to see if people will want to take the mechanics of crowdfunding models and want to go small with them.

If Crowdhoster is like the wordpress (hostable, customizable, open-source), then the Crowdtilt app type of campaigns (launched from the app, at least) is like the twitter of crowdfunding, or perhaps more appropriately, for anytime a group would interact around a small, casual financial objective. There's no guarantee the behavior will become our primary creation driver, of course, but as devs, it's exciting to try and take something as conventionally complex as crowdfunding/fundraising/pooling money with a group and simplify it down to something easy to digest in a mobile experience. If you download the app and have any suggestions or feedback on our approach to tackle this problem, would love to hear it at jb@crowdtilt.com. And another lens to view our approach toward mobile is this - 7/8ths of the world will never own a computer. Like, ever.

Out of curiosity, why did you choose the words "still kind of atheist"?

Stay tuned.

One thing I've realized as we've gone from a group of friends to a company is that my 'to-do' list is constantly edited with items simply removed at the beginning or end of a day. I put things on there all the time thinking they're important, but once a day, I will re-assess and take certain things off so that the list does not bury itself/become meaningless. Productivity in my life seems to be a function of pragmatism and de-cluttering (both physical and mental).

The self is such a critical over-looked aspect for doctors that are primed to think of everything as a physical, chemical, medicinal equation when it is often so much more than that.

Great example, indeed. We've been seeing a few pop up recently, and with a lot of our team coming from Rackspace/OpenStack, it's been fun to see the application used like this :)

Although YC advocates talking to users, few founders use HN to talk to users/potential users - so I'd love to use this opportunity to get feedback on the viability of crowdfunding for smaller open source projects on a platform like Crowdtilt... Is it worth exploring features for (a 'tilt'or bounty once the community feels it's been completed sufficiently, etc)?

does anyone know if you can just ask them if they are a cop; with them having to respond truthfully? or is this just idiotic folklore that i've somehow heard.

"Have all the right things fall into place..." is a misconception that is actually far from the truth in my opinion. Most successful startups win because they go after SUCH a large market that they're able to be quite wrong about a lot, but they're right about a few key things (one of which is often thinking it's a massive market when others don't).

was just wanting something like this about a month ago. well done guys.

who says the t-shirt you wear is/should be for the benefit of the random guy on the street?

It was effective; in getting more press because of the cute little anecdote. Which is the reason they did it anyhow. I would imagine that what a company has on its walls has never materially affected its future.

You can use Crowdtilt for it :)

We'd love to help, and if it's for open source - use this promo code, and we'll waive the Crowdtilt fee: ctdevs123

Samstave, I agree with this ^. Can't imagine the emotional stress, and writing a note under such stress can easily make you do/say strange things. And as strange as it was to read, this could very well be the case.

It's not the mentioning that seems off; it's that it reads like a teaser, not therapy.

I can totally understand if it's his therapy, it would likely be mine... That doesn't answer the confusion in a teaser of a big work/unrelated announcement being in there though.

Am I the only one that was confused about that last line of "already working on something new and hope to announce that in February"...

He's gone through something as traumatic as a lawsuit, a resignation, potential for trial, potential embarrassment of family, friends, colleagues all in the last two weeks... And his sign-off is that he has, in the midst of it all, already begun to work on a new startup?

As someone that has had a sibling take her own life, and another that has had suicidal thoughts frequently, this article was extremely helpful in seeing the cognitive layers beyond the emotional layers. Pretty eye-opening. I wonder if the cognitive destruction would prevent a person from even realizing they're experiencing cognitive destruction (eg, after reading an article like this)?

What gets made is what people want.

We didn't get flying cars at $250,000/car. We got 140 characters for free because that's what people wanted. We didn't get hoverboards, not for lack of technology, but it just turned out that we wanted to search the world's knowledge with Google.

We're frogs in boiling water, not knowing just how innovative we're becoming as a people. And sci-fi writers are just bad (or as bad as typical entrepreneurs) at guessing what people want.

Don't mean to seem skeptical, but I doubt this approach comes across as "genuinely interested."

The landscape in total may have changed, but in my opinion, it seems the theme of success stories hasn't changed that much... Groupon had humble beginnings, chatroullette was completely lacking in design, and reddit is seeing it's heyday as we speak. Their perceived lack of design didn't seem to preclude them from incredible/almost unparalleled growth (and all were in the last two years).

Email us at internships [@] crowdtilt.com. There may be a unique opportunity to do something remotely with our API (just launched to the public this week).

Project creators/campaign administrators must use wepsy to set up their merchant account. So, that is indeed not false (completely or otherwise).

it's funny you should say that...

we'd love to see that too. as well as uber here in sf. like my co-founder said here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912389), we'd love to see people build all kinds of things like crowdfunding-as-a-service (think kickstarter meets wordpress).

whether it's a feature in a current app like exec/taskrabbit or it's own app like a dinner-bill splitting mobile app (take a picture of the receipt, ocr, text it out, everyone's charged once the total is reached or exceeded, etc) the api was built to help any time groups and money interact... and we hope this renders the ideas devs come up with endless.

Among other things: One, wepay isn't international. Two, you have to send users off your site to use it. Three, you can't plug in your own credit card processing if you use wepay (you have to use theirs).

Additionally, their api doesn't provide the tools for the collaboration side of things (messaging, invites, sharing, comments/nested comments, reward tiers, tilting mechanism, etc). Think of this api as a layer above credit card processing (so you get to choose whichever processor you like or already use, thus not disrupting your current flow of funds and you get to keep the branding/UI/UX, the users, the user data, and the credit card processing data, etc - all important things if you're, say, hotels.com).

(disclosure: I'm one of the crowdtilt founders)

"take your job seriously and yourself lightly." -herb kelleher

this. this is what a status page should be.

>Doesn’t FB realize that is far easier for a user to opt-out of a feed by unliking a brand/person/page that has done a poor job of communication than it is to mess with all the account settings or for them to try to tweak their algorithm all the time to try to guess what people want?

Cuban's doubts of the efficacy of edgerank (or perhaps his doubts stemming from not knowing the purpose of edgerank) comes from him not really knowing facebook from the perspective of a consumer/user and only knowing it primarily as a broadcast tool (I've seen his posts - he's only there to broadcast). But before, I defend edgerank/facebook on this, it should be acknowledged that this guy and many like him (broadcaster for their brands) are the ones that pay the bills - and it will be interesting to see who Facebook begins to cater more to over the next few years... because advertisers' and users' interests, despite what facebook wants us to believe, will likely always be at odds with each other.