sam_in_nyc

And, yet, I'm still at a loss as to why it is unreasonable to think that there could be different generic e-mails sent out to different groups.

>>If they're prepared to fund 1,000 companies they think are _really_ likely to make it, I think that implies there's no need for strata.

Only if every company not accepted was rejected for precisely the same reason, and this reason could not at all be broken down at all. Do you think that is likely?

Perhaps somebody could list out all of the YC philosophies of acceptance, and every type of generic e-mail that wouldn't make sense to send; then we could use deduction to solve this mystery of no stratified rejection e-mails.

All I set out to do was test the hypothesis: Were there different rejection letters sent, because it seems pretty reasonable that there would be. Maybe some letters would contain feedback, albeit generic? After all, they need to make a conscientious decision to accept/deny, why not have a few reasons for denying? I even proposed a method to test out this hypothesis.

Thank you to everyone who did the MD5 to verify that there was only 1 type of e-mail sent. That's what I was looking for.

But when I get in return, and not just on this thread, are people talking about the YC acceptance process as if they are part of YC, or (in this case) paraphrasing the fucking rejection letter or YC application notes, I find that to be really annoying. I can read and understand things myself. It would be a disservice to myself if I didn't express that annoyance.

That's the significant thing I'm adding to the discussion, so please respond to that, rather than trying to disprove some other minor point I'm not even trying to make.

If I sound like I'm pissed, it's because I am. This happens all the fucking time on HN, and the snarky replies are the ones that get upvoted.

Without the video it's very difficult to explain. If you care to go back, follow instructions in the "get started" box on the upper right.

I don't see any room for argument here: the lack of feedback is a loss of information.

  1) After you add the bookmarklet, open it on any webpage.
  2) Highlight text, and it fills it in.
  3) Click the window button the right of an menu item to open it in a floaty window
  4) Go to the Dashler menu, and you can create your own "Live Bookmarks" based on the page you are at.
  5) I'm taking it down at the end of the night.

I was just hoping they could provide feedback, since I assume they make a conscientious decision about each application.

They are no longer posting their numbers, so don't ask.

Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9066

And, obviously, if I got feedback, I could always ignore it and be in the same position as I am now. I'd rather have more information than less.

Mine started with "We're sorry" and ended with "Y Combinator Staff" and has the following MD5: f459a7d636ac85cdcd680b135bcfc521

Edit: easy multi-line md5 here: http://www.webhost.org/widgets/md5encrypter

I wish they would have included some feedback.

When Apple announced Intel support, I thought for sure this was a technical move so that they could eventually become an OS and software company, in additional to a computer/electronics company. I was expecting them, within a year, to have a standalone version of OSX compatible with most hardware configurations.

They stand to make a killing if they officially ship an OS which supports non-Apple hardware. Hell, if I were any hardware vendor, I'd gladly work with them to be one of the first official compatible hardware vendors. Even if there were only a handful of Apple-supported hardware components, they'd made a killing once people start building and selling Apple computers themselves.

By the way, whatever happened to that (non-Apple) business that was building computers with OSX on it?

And, also, I agree.. URL shorteners suck. At least improve user experience by showing the original URL in the title attribute.

But if I did see a balance for millions, being a hacker, I certainly would have invested every dollar of it into some highly volatile and ridiculous stock. I wouldn't expect it to execute.

My questions are the same. How could they even think of doing such a stupid prank.. and then on top of that, allowing it to execute. Two orders of magnitude stupid.

I think the SEC should investigate, because it looked like on the morning of April 1st, Zecco had $1m+ per user on margin. There's no way they could have actually had that cash on hand if people did an "investment run." This really could have put Zecco under, and made a mess for whoever is backing them, and the FDIC.

Disclosure: I hardly know anything about finance.

* I often don't vote

* to see how, exactly, the community feels about it

* to see if I should actually read it

* to get a feel for the story's exposure (more votes, more eyeballs)

This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the first point... I don't want to have to vote on each comment to reap the benefits of the other items on the list.

The second item on the list allows me to have the "blink" effect. By taking in the vote #'s of hundreds or thousands of comments, I just get a "feel" for what HN likes and dislikes. To me, that's it's important.

I think something in between would be a color-coded and/or normalized indicator of each comment's popularity. Kind of like how the grayed out text is more intense for more downvoted comments... upvoted comments could have some indicator of how popular they are.

If normalized, it would show how popular they are, but only relative to other comments with the same parent as them.

Just my $.02

In this case, what incentive do you have to keep the idea to yourself, and not tell/hint at it to a funded startup?

I also could imagine some pretty terrible things happening to Twitter... like, for example, the site displaying "FUCK OFF" on every page load, forever.

I always thought URL shortening was just to make the HREF short... not the source HTML.

I still think getting positive publicity about a product makes that product more likely to succeed, and that there's not much harm in being a media darling.

* It takes bandwidth

* It's (presumably) before a pageload, and is blocking... the latency to load the original URL to get the "link" gets added to the consumer's pageload time.

* Now you have to deal with "timeouts"

Ideally, "link" should be used by the browser, and not the web service. By the way, other such auto-discovery systems are OpenSearch (first proposed by Amazon, and is pretty widely adopted) and FavIcon.

At any rate, I think tinyurl, and bit.ly, etc, are a pretty fast and easy solution at this point. They should improve their services by including a "title" attribute to the link they give you, which says the URL and/or page title it's going to.

I guess the lesson is: A company's reputation, especially with the media, has a huge influence on the success of their products. So, try to be a media darling like Google or Apple.

Anybody going to this?