YC applicants: In case there needs to be some explanation as to why to allow or discourage this, maybe we can give some explicit rationale here. Why did some of you guys share your submissions and how does it benefit you as a YC applicant? What problem is this solving? I could guess some of the reasons, satisfy curiosity, inspire, a sense of community, relieving some anxiety, exposing some common valuable information ( no one got a YC response yet), etc. danielsiders: what is the story in setting this up?
We were curious about the field at large, independent of being applicants. Tired of relying on pg/yc to share aggregate data. We're hackers, we like raw data.
I'm upvoting partly because it seems a cool idea, but partly because I'm scientifically interested in what'll happen to goog docs with multiple concurrent users; valuable for knowing how it responds re using in live environments for user feedback.
Maybe have RMS implemented in a way similar to the Ask HN section: they get a penalty, but also a dedicated namespace where people can up-vote them inside the HN voting system.
This is as close you will get to using HN as an online interface in order to rank the entries in this spreadsheet.
I highly encourage sharing your ideas. The YC application deadline is well past us, and I'm curious about who and what was submitted. I really like the transparancy of this idea, and after the hours we all put into our applications, it's nice to see the outcome, wether you get accepted to YC11 or not.
Ooops. Sorry about making a reaaaaaally really tall table cell there. I actually used the same texts I used for the Ycombinator submission. If you could make the cells slightly wider, please, the text would fit better and not make the entry all over people's screens.
Has anybody received the rejection letter very soon after posting their submission in that table? I got it the next day. I don't even know if there were 24 hours between the two events :)
Sorry, seems there are too many destructive people. If you can find a way to control input, please let us know. We would be more than happy to provide input.
Agreed, but I'm not sure if they'll be able to keep at it
I looked at building something similar a while back but found most of the big retailers (Amazon, eBay) prohibited you from storing historical price data. Unless that's changed I'm not sure their approach is going to be feasible in the long term.
Camel was one of the first for Amazon shopobot just looks to be a copy of the same idea. Look at how much price history camel has. It goes back over 3 years for some stuff.
it seems that people have a lot of fun in that list. I'm thinking that idea is not bad, and writing down your startup there is open you up to people "in same boat", allow you to collaborate and gang up to make combined projects. Therefore it is not relevant to YC W11.
The line seems blurry. On the one hand, I'm all for people who want to share their information being able to throw it up - the more feedback the better, right? And it builds a sense of community that can last long past this YC decision. On the other hand, there's no real way of "opting out" of an unmoderated list like this; someone could easily post your application without your permission, and once that information is public, there's no real way to keep someone from putting it back on the list once you delete it.
It almost feels like there should be a "make public" option on the application itself, where applications who opt in can push their application onto HN somewhere, and people are free to comment on it in a sanctioned way. I've seen that done with grant programs with some success. Just thinking aloud here.
It was kind of a rhetorical question. The process clearly encouraged rebellious behavior. Though I don't think this really qualifies as such. We're entrepreneurs. We network. We promote. This is what we do.
I upvoted you to get your attention, but comments like these are usually frowned upon here on HN. The general rule is that a comment should have some kind of substance to it, rather than simple agreement.
View the Results: https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Ataf_IejHzNydFZkT2Q...
This is the harder-to-troll version, which i'll be posting on HN shortly.