railsjedi

Hey, great feedback! Yeah, we've changed around the intro copy. Also updated the HN Follow button css. Thanks!

Good point. I'm fully immersed in the current bay area bubble so I sometimes lose perspective.

Just added Toronto to the RSVP list.

We'll put up an RSVP page soon that shows what the counts are for each city.

Yep, definitely

Sure, as long as it's only a week, that's fine. Definitely gotta ship something the previous and next weeks though.

Looking forward to having you!

Fixed. Thanks for the tips!

We've got some interesting ideas here. From the mentors we've talk to already, a lot of them love the fact that they can start by offering "micro-mentorship". Giving startups advice with just 1 hour a week time commitment (split into 15 min chunks per startup they help). And they can do it from the comfort of their home.

That'll require a bit of curation by the nReduce team so the mentors only see the valid, honest questions submitted. But we're working on a way to manage that workload (between the nReduce partners and moderators).

What mentors get out of it is being exposed to lots of early stage startups and possibly find some great teams that they enjoy working with and can step in as official advisory roles if there's a fit.

Yep. If you can ship every week, maintain a fulltime job, and not go completely bonkers in 12 weeks we'd love to have you! :)

That's the "fun" version of functionality :) Fixed now

Really? I've found companies usually prefer it over quitting. Financially it may not be an option though, that I can understand.

Yep, we'll see how it goes. We're hoping to have more batches!

Yep, just go to http://s12.nreduce.com/startup/edit. Let us know if you have any issues editing your team profile.

Thanks!

Yep, if you can ship every week we'll take you. Take a leave of absence at your job and see if you can build something amazing this summer.

Ease of implementation mainly. Plus one less email/password to have to worry about. And what founder doesn't have a twitter account, it's sort of as essential as email at this point.

We won't post tweets. We added write permission so we could help organize groups together. Twitter doesn't really make it easy to choose exactly what permission you want to pick. It's write all or nothing.

Oops, boneheaded mistake. Fixed now, thanks! :)

Well, I was in high school in 1999. Very sad to have missed the previous generation of nerf time fun.

Cool, thanks a ton for your feedback!

Maybe I live in a bubble (downtown SF), but it seems the best devs I've ever worked with on open source and consulting project tend to have a pretty weird (maybe immature) sense of humor. In most early stage startup offices here, it's not weird to see grown men (and brilliant devs) run around the office and shoot nerf guns at each other.

Sure, email us anytime at contact@nreduce.com

Key phrase is "alternative to".

About attracting bozos... maybe we will. We think that instead of trying to weed out the bozos, let everyone in and see how well they perform. If a "bozo" can ship and gain traction with their product, then they aren't bozos are they? But if the bozos flake out, that's ok too. What will be left is the "elites".

Yeah, we're joking around with marketing on our site. We figure it's better than being ultra serious. But I'm sure there's a balance that we're going to need to eventually get to.

It's true. We messed up the capitalization

η-reduce is the correct name. Ah well, N Reduce looks a bit nicer so we went with it :)

100% likelihood of being accepted. We accept everyone who can ship products.

I'm sort of with PG on this one though. I've tried to do startups alone in the past. It's such an insane amount of work, stress, and pressure that doing it alone is quite a challenge.

But if you think you can do it, we'd love to have you!

Can use the following link to sign up: http://nreduce.com/#signup

Sorry about the super cute hipster homepage :) We're cleaning it up and making it a bit better organized.

Thanks for the support!

Doesn't really matter. Our goal was to get some early attention. Once we build the community up we can change the name and turn it into something real.

Right now it's just an idea and the only platform we had to generate the sufficient early interest was a ridiculous name and launch.

Haha, great little parody.

Timing of it may have something to do with our little stunt yesterday: http://ncombinator.com

We figured we'd err on the side of humor. Rather that than take ourselves too seriously.

Startups are damn hard. A support network needs to be fun, not a drag.

Good feedback. I'll tone down the rhetoric. I'm absolutely not opposed to business guys. Just teams entirely composed of business guys "looking for a technical cofounder".

Right now it is a glorified meetup and support network. But it's also a "pact". Join and ship every week. Formalizing that and bringing together people who can uphold it is something I greatly desire and that's why I want NCombinator to exist and be successful.

We're very open to suggestions on how to make it better though. Had to start somewhere.

lol, sure. it goes from #1 to #110 in 1min?

It's ok. Don't worry, be happy!

We didnt post the second one. Someone else did because the first one got banned.

But... they start with totally different letters :)

Just kidding. The name is going to change, but the idea will remain intact.

We got booted. Apparently YC is not amused with our idea.