Applying to YC actually forces you to think about the things that you need to do to make a project work.
If you keep at it eventually you become more capable, start to find traction on your own, and you find that you've gained most of the skills that you thought you needed something like YC to teach you.
I spent my 20's grasping for something that was just out of reach, and I'm better for it.
If I had to guess why they were rejected I'd say that it's because they're typically:
#1: Consumer focused
#2: Unsexy/unknown markets
Were they wrong to reject them? Probably not. Traditional gaming isn't a market that many take seriously.
I'm still implementing many of the ideas that have been submitted to YC. I'll release the apps and write retrospectives as we push out features in the future.
Ah! My first submission was for w09, I thought that I re-submitted my apps for each of the next cycles, making this my 10th. I'm at 6? Will update the title.
Should have made it: "From someone who has been applying for 5 years"
I've had a mix of of mcu/mikeurbanski accounts online for years, when I finally decided to pick one I settled on mikeurbanski. A rename would be useful, but the two accounts have diverged in the past year.
Unfortunately, and I say this from excruciating experience, this isn't a complete/accurate representation of all M:TG cards.
I spent the summer of 2011 scraping Gather to build out a product catalog and API for a start up that didn't start. I really wish that I had taken the time to put the data out as a torrent.
M:TG has 20 years of strangeness to take into account when creating a data model... And Gatherer has its own issues. For example, the way symbols are represented in card text is inconsistent. (e.g. The tap symbol can be represented as both "ocT" and "{T}", and the representations for mana symbols have evolved inconsistently as well.)
Wizards of the Coast are the only ones who can build this API legally. They hold the copyright on all of the data related to M:TG and I truly wish that they would open up it up so that we, as a people, wouldn't have to spend hundreds of hours recreating the wheel. Poorly. [0]
Fortunately, I stopped what I was doing and started on a board gaming "thingy" with friends instead: http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/
[0]: That isn't to say that the mtgapi.com guys/gals did a shoddy job. It's just a big task that WotC should be forward looking enough to do themselves.
While I have WotC on the line... Why wasn't the D&D 5th Edition SRD hosted on GitHub during development?
Even without counting the two Collector's Edition print runs of the original core set, it's also missing the Anthologies printing, the FNM promo printing and the judge promo printing along with the version that appeared in the Coldsnap theme deck "Kjeldoran Cunning" (which kept the Ice Age art and expansion symbol but put it in the modern card frame).
Meanwhile, this has all of those printings listed:
While I have WotC on the line... Why wasn't the D&D 5th Edition SRD hosted on GitHub during development?
Hell yeah. I'm tempted to contact some of the creators of some of my favorite RPG systems (Jason Bulmahn, Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook), and beg them to agree to make a completely free RPG. Or at least design the core mechanics. I'm thinking maybe some Creative Commons license, which would allow commercial use. Get them to make a bid, as to how much it would cost to have their work-for-hire for however long they estimate it would take to make the Core Rules of this game...
...and then have a Kickstarter, to raise the funds to do it.
And make implementations of the Core Rules in several programming languages, probably JavaScript first (good for the Browser, or for Node.JS), with Reach Goals for other languages...
Let me tell my personal story: I was a DM for D&D 3rd Edition, and I chose to run through Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I had a hard time running it, though, so I made an electronic version of the campaign book. I scanned every single page, I made a wiki on my laptop, one for each NPC. I made a wiki page, with the scanned content for every single monster that showed up. I made wiki pages for every spell (with the scanned content of every spell, right there.) I didn't have to settle for the OGL content, I had the ACTUAL CONTENT FROM THE BOOKS, so my rule-lawyering players couldn't complain that the DM's rules were slightly different from their rules. I made hot-clickable maps, to take me to rooms. I made spreadsheets with every NPC, and their Initiatives, and Hit Points, and any effects on them...
...and now that I've made this thing, for personal use, it would be ILLEGAL for me to share this with anyone.
That sucks.
I've also played around with making computer role playing games, based off of some fantasy role playing game, but most of the "FREE" ones out there, are not available for commercial use, or I'd have to pay a licensing fee.
That sucks.
Ah well, I'm done rambling for now...
One more quick point: I don't begrudge people for making copyrighted, commercial art like games and campaigns. But I think the time for the "Linux" of Fantasy Role Playing Games has come.
I've also dealt with the data and can confirm it's a stunning headache. Try building a search UI around the inconsistencies and you'll go insane. Even Gatherer has issues!
From what I can tell, there's only one or two guys at WotC that come close to understanding the data. With the rest of the organization in mind, I highly doubt WotC will open up their data - the business guys wouldn't understand it. It's a closed-source kind of company.
Wow, just looking at the example card on that makes me realize how ridiculous MTG has gotten in terms of powerful cards. Each edition seems to get closer to a "tap to win game" card.
The dev team learned their lesson from the earlier days[1] and do strict evaluations of cards and interactions before releasing them. The most popular format, "Standard", is played with the last 2 "blocks" (3 sets of card "sets"), and 1 "Core Set". So basically the last 1.5—2 years worth of cards. Those interactions are studied carefully before being released. Very infrequently do you run into something truly overpowered and needing to be banned from the competitive scene.
Not to mention, in the most basic sense, cards like Counterspell[2] will probably never be printed in a Standard playable set, but cards like Cancel[3] will. One being too cheap to cast and being almost game breaking, while the other has its power balanced just right for the cost.
Yeah, after the hellish Tempest/Urza block they really cut back, Mercadian Masques was almost critically under-powered, and they've gotten so much better since that time at providing balance.
If you haven't played in a while, you should check it out again. There's a game[1] now for Steam/Xbox/PS3/Android/iOS to get you back into the swing of things and show you many of the current cards.
The API was just a feature. The actual product was a multi-merchant market place w/ a shipping estimator that was a 1-1 implementation of EasyPost (YC S13).
There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator.
I don't care about karma, "hellbans" seem like a mean waste of a person's time, and the thought of HN as a rolling job interview for "the cool kids table" actively discourages me from participating.
Sure, the "interview" aspect helps them find people who are skillful self-promoters/developers, but honestly, as a user, wouldn't you prefer to keep the self-promotion to a minimum?
When I see my 18th front page "HN: Flavor of the Day - Me Too" or "Lorem Snowden" post, I start to long for the days of pre-Twitter F/OSS "Planets".
Planets where dev, ux, design, and business people came together to talk about what makes technology, projects, and people tick. I learned more about how to treat people and run a project from early to mid-2000 era http://planet.gnome.org/ than anywhere else.
There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.
Wow I just took the time to look up hellban [0] because I always just assumed it's synonymous with permaban. For those too lazy to click the link, it's a ban where you're not informed that you're banned and the content you post is displayed only for you and no one else. That's actually a pretty shitty moderation tactic mainly because it doesn't teach the poster why they made a mistake and it does just waste their time when they could be getting back to being a better user.
Additionally, in the <year time that I've been reading and minimally contributing to HN, I've definitely been disappointed with a trend towards politicization that a lot of people have noted. I'm much happier seeing everyone's static site generators on github than everyone's opinion on Snowden or some other political issue that's related enough to tech to get posted. It strikes me as mission creep for HN to start getting so political. My favorite thing to see on the frontpage is a github repo, not a medium/svbtle article where someone spends two paragraphs telling an anecdote and then one paragraph jumping to a massive generalized conclusion based on that one experience and/or "Lorem Snowden" as you put it. /rant
Hellbans aren't meant to teach people what mistake they made. Downvotes and comments are supposed to do that.
That's why it's a shame that downvoting is so disapproved of among a group of HN users, and it's a shame that people "drive-by downvote".
Hell banning is meant to save time of everyone in the community, and it does a pretty good job of that. There's much less meta commentary about whether banning a user is or isn't fair; and there's less to and fro about what should be a bannable offence. The algorithms do all that stuff.
I dislike the idea of hellbans just because it is invisible to the non-banned community, and they are unaware of how they are being "shaped." I think I've seen it happen on a "maker" blog where the comment wasn't really negative, but just not positive enough. In that case the moderator was trying to maintain a "very positive" environment. Pernicious.
You can turn on show dead and see the hellbanned comments. Most of the time it's justified. The only occasions I've ever made the effort to contact someone and tell them they're hellbanned was after the girls in tech fiasco 6 months back, I thought the comment that banned him was just a bit stupid & misunderstood. And the rest of his comments really good.
So there are some of us keeping and eye on the 'shaping' and you can too if you want.
There's actually some amazing comments by a crazy guy who's written an OS dedicated to god, it's pretty insane and yet incredibly impressive at the same time.
That's very good that "show dead" shows hellbanned, and all I could ask for. And it's not like I was worried about HN specifically, more the ability of smaller, more focused sites to self-AstroTurf by omission.
That's true of moderation in general though - it's pernicious because it conceals from the community what exactly is being concealed from the community. I've seen this become a problem on sites as diverse as Groklaw, Jezebel, the Adafruit blog, and a number of other places.
HN is relatively transparent in that it has showdead. On most websites there's no way of telling what's missing.
It'd be interesting to see upvotes given only to users who've gotten X karma and downvotes being given to users who've gotten Y (Y>X) karma (the way downvotes are implemented now). it would likely encourage people to really browse the comments rather than just assume whatever's at the top is what they must agree with to survive. doubt this would ever work in practice but it's an interesting thought experiment at the least.
> There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.
Sure, the starts of these things are always great because they have a tight focus. But then they expand, and people post shallowly & intensely interesting stuff, and other people upvote it, and then the community dies.
There's probably a secret HN somewhere, doing better than real HN.
You know, there's always been a very simple solution to "but then they expand"--just cap your userbase.
It's almost like HN is so exposed to web services going for exponential-hockey-stick-viral-growth, that they forget that you can intentionally avoid that curve if you like.
Like Malda said in the submission article: That doesn't make the graph go up and right.
It would be interesting to try that approach out, though. I would think a $5 fee would cap it for you — naturally raising the cap only when the industry your site focuses on grows as well.
This is how private torrent trackers try to keep their content quality high and, for the most part, it seems to work relatively well actually. Obviously it's not the same for a social news site necessarily.
> There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator.
These days I think Y Combinator is the one thing that keeps Hacker News from falling too far off track. Reddit is a good example of a website with a purely agnostic mission goal, and it's changed to a more mainstream audience over time. Since YC uses HN as a promotional platform, the audience here will typically remain rooted to a specific culture.
We've made the decision to run our company like a free software project and have been actively ignoring buyout/funding offers since before we launched.
We'll keep applying to YC, but, considering they didn't even read our last application, I'd say it's a fair bet that we'll get to keep running our company our way for the foreseeable future.
What? I'm pretty sure it's non confirmed. It's basically just nerdy banter (like Dracula vs Hulk).
They base their assumption on the fact that movies contain models from other movies, when those are merely Easter eggs. It's like saying MSFT wanted to turn accountants into pilots for 9/11 by including a flight simulator into it. It breaks down under scrutiny.
There was a Quora by a Pixar employee (who did distance himself from Pixar, so not official statement) comment on that. I'll paste info here because Quora sucks:
It's a wonderful example of how, given a sufficiently large dataset,
one can cherry-pick what one needs to construct almost any narrative.
My daughter broke the time line, though, by pointing out
that Heimlich has a cameo in Toy Story 2. I do want to
give the author props for inventing the idea of the
Monsters Inc. doors being time portals. It doesn't really
work, but it's witty.
As in the case of Andy's father the real reason Pixar
films contain references to other Pixar films is rather
mundane. It's only because somebody thought it would be
funny and the director agreed. In the cases of things like
John Ratzenberger's voice and the Pizza Planet Truck,
it's tradition and a challenge.
http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/shut-up-sit-down