An online community focused on quality, thought-provoking conversations about a broad range of interests. It's a significantly different experience from other online communities:
-Most members choose to use their real identities on the site, and this information is only available to other members.
-Each member pays a small subscription fee, which helps keep out trolls and spammers. The fee also pays for moderators and serves as our members' commitment to quality and respect.
-Discoverboard doesn't display ads to subscribers or sell their data.
Full disclosure: I work for discoverboard. We would be very interested in hearing your thoughts about it. I've also created an invite code for free trials for people on this thread: https://discoverboard.com/code/HN
What has he done? I haven't heard of him outside of YC. Wikipedia lists Loopt, then YCombinator. If Loopt had failed, would things be significantly different?
(I don't mean this in a rude way, just curious. He's obviously exception in some way if YC selected him as president.)
I have no direct or personal knowledge of him, but he comes across as extremely smart, ambitious, and well-intentioned in his writing and in profiles of him. Here is one I read this week that I thought was an interesting portrayal: http://www.fastcompany.com/3044282/the-y-combinator-chronicl...
I didn't realize there was so much angst directed towards Sam Altman here. I think there is an unfortunate feeling that he was just ordained by PG, and doesn't deserve what he has. I sincerely doubt that's the case.
Regardless of his previous record, he's already been doing an impressive job growing YC. Sure, some of this is the result of pre-existing path dependency and network effects, but do you really think that Sam didn't have anything to do with it?
-The YC companies funded since he has taken over have gotten more ambitious.
-The 'How to Start a Startup' class was a huge success, and provided a fantastic knowledge base to the greater startup community.
-The number of applications to YC has increased dramatically, particularly from under-represented areas.
-He's personally funded interesting companies, including leading an innovative round for Reddit that set aside shares for the community itself.
An online community focused on quality, thought-provoking conversations about a broad range of interests. It's a significantly different experience from other online communities:
-Most members choose to use their real identities on the site, and this information is only available to other members.
-Each member pays a small subscription fee, which helps keep out trolls and spammers. The fee also pays for moderators and serves as our members' commitment to quality and respect.
-Discoverboard doesn't display ads to subscribers or sell their data.
Full disclosure: I work for discoverboard. We would be very interested in hearing your thoughts about it. I also just created an invite code for free trials for people on this thread: https://discoverboard.com/code/HN
I've been wanting something like this for a while. But it looks like your implementation is not that great.
- Using your real identity is an extremely bad idea. Write something stupid once and it will haunt you forever. People will speak their mind only when protected by anonymity.
- The topics and replies seem pretentious. Most likely because of the real identity thing. Everybody just tries to sound smart, eloquent and philosophical.
- Unless you have some truly smart people initiating ideas and discussions, it's just the topic of the day kind of thing. It gets boring pretty fast.
Jonathan from discoverboard here. There are a few things that make discoverboard different from other online communities:
-Most members choose to use their real identities on the site, and this information is only available to other members.
-Each member pays a small subscription fee, which helps keep out trolls and spammers. The fee also pays for moderators and serves as our members' commitment to quality and respect.
-We will never display ads to our subscribers or sell their data.
This structure has allowed us to build a community with an increased level of discourse.
We (the founders) are long-time HN users who still feel like there is a lot of room for improvement in online communities. Since graduating from college, we have missed the meaningful conversations with friends and professors that defined our education. While HN is great for tech-focused discussion, we wanted broader conversations.
Because HN is both familiar with the online community space and gives good feedback on startups, we are very interested in your thoughts. At this point, the community has hundreds of members and is continuing to grow, primarily through personal referrals.
Where, and how, do you think we should go from here?
I'm not sure this is the answer, but it seems likely that you can more efficiently reflect energy back into the atmosphere than you can convert it via a solar panel and then use that energy through air conditioning to cool down the space.
Instead of having to go through the whole process of conversion from sunlight to electricity via a solar panel to cooling via an air conditioner, you can just reflect most of the energy that's heating up the building in the first place.
One thing I didn't think of is, if this was really cheap to buy AND install it'd work. Solar panels and inverters are currently not economical else they be 100%ish on all roofs. If this cost little, obviously it'd be a break through.
But reading the nature article which tries to get into this I'm not convinced it's that cheap or will work better than solar panels.
A related question might be: where will mobile apps be in 5 years?
Hopefully, the answer is that web standards will evolve to allow HTML+JS to do things currently only possible in mobile apps. This would mirror the original transition of desktop apps to web apps, and would have positive implications for the internet by bringing mobile users back to webpages (though I wouldn't count on it being done in 5 years).
I was shopping for phones today and physically they're all bigger than my almost five year old iPhone 4. The user interfaces are essentially the same as on my iPhone or my even older G1.
I did see a curved smartphone for the first time though, so I predict in 5 years phones will be semicircular, about 40% larger than they are today, and have slightly faster graphics.
Going totally off topic here, but if you're willing to try something different than iOS then have a look at the Sony Xperia Z3 compact. Small (by todays huge standards) but packs a good punch in specs :)
An online community focused on quality, thought-provoking conversations about a broad range of interests. It's a significantly different experience from other online communities:
-Most members choose to use their real identities on the site, and this information is only available to other members.
-Each member pays a small subscription fee, which helps keep out trolls and spammers. The fee also pays for moderators and serves as our members' commitment to quality and respect.
-Discoverboard doesn't display ads to subscribers or sell their data.
Full disclosure: I work for discoverboard. We would be very interested in hearing your thoughts about it. I've also created an invite code for free trials for people on this thread: https://discoverboard.com/code/HN