Perhaps YC could pay people to take a 4-12 week startup school, in which group projects were heavily encouraged. If a company was formed out of the school, YC would get the right to invest at the standard investment terms.
If there was a YC/HN supported cofounder matching program, I'm guessing it would have a lot more success than other attempts that have popped up. However, some important qualities of a good cofounder match are hard to quantify and require serious (and often confrontational) interaction.
Perhaps if YC let individuals apply without an idea to a loosely structured hackathon/conference, some good relationships would form. YC could fund the whole thing, and take a small stake in any resulting companies. Though, that's a little bit legally murky, so some consideration would need to be put into the means by which YC would benefit.
I did apply for the YC summer batch 2016, and for the YC fellowship through "Apply HN". I wasn't selected but someone saw my application and contacted me to become my cofounder. It didn't end up working out but I can see how public applications can be a way to meet cofounders.
This is one of those situations in which incremental improvements in technology add up enough that they enable some pretty amazing applications. Very cool.
Aside from the 3d printing, this is possible largely because of huge advancements in immune-inert implantable materials and anti-biofouling coatings. I think we're ready to see this sort of thing become the norm very very quickly.
Material science is behind lots of advances in the `cooler' technologies. (And better numerics are behind lots of advances in the `cooler' parts of computing.)
This claims that the network makes twitter, not the 140 character limit. Well, it was that 140 character limit made the network in the first place.
The author describes reasons why the 140 character limit is a problem (e.g. you can't have long conversations), in which they absolutely miss the point. Twitter is not meant to solve all of your communication needs. The 140 character limit allows Twitter to be a reliable source of quick bits of information - you can dive deeper if you want, but it's a great cursory overview.
Tools don't have to solve every problem. They can (and probably should) solve one specific problem really well. Twitter does that.
Twitter is a feed, like RSS and co, but centralized thus without the need to maintain one's own blog.
So yes it is not meant to be used as a conversation tool. Its biggest problem is in my opinion is curation. If I follow someone on twitter because he tweets about Javascript or Web Security, I don't want to hear about the toys he bought for his babies, his vacations or any activities unrelated to the subject that made me follow that person. Twitter needs some kind of a channel system, hashtags are a poor way to filter tweets. Too much noise.
That's basically why I stopped using it and went back to RSS. If common people understood how RSS works, they would not need twitter.
Shameless plug: you're pinpointing one of the reasons that made us start tree.
The gist of it: you follow people within categories so as to only get exposed to content that matters to you (tightly integrated with a bookmarking side and chrome extension).
We have conducted our closed-beta for 4 months now, only in Estonia, but we're launching really soon.
If you want more informations, feel free to reach out (contact in my profile).
One small nit pick: this is exactly what he's saying he doesn't want. He wants a way to be able to filter out content based on topic, not based on users. Putting a user in a category doesn't magically filter their baby pictures out of their discussion of algorithmic filters. Maybe automatic topic tagging? Combine that with being able to put topics on an ignore list and you would have my interest in a hurry.
Following that user in "web development" instead of "everything" (a la twitter) will solve his issue. You follow people within categories, you don't associate people with categories.
I probably didn't phrase it correctly, I stand corrected.
When you share or save something on tree, you have to choose one of the 20 categories: tech, business, news&society, art&design, music, etc... In turn, people will see that you shared in X or Y and can decide to follow you exclusively in this X or Y category. Your feed is actually a multi-feed (depending on how many categories you decided to follow people in, up to 20).
Twitter is a two way protocol if you like. It's not like rss a one way street.
The idea that it was meant for something is not really very useful. Twitter is meant to be whatever makes them survive even if they have to pivot away to something completely different.
The 140 character limit allows Twitter to be a reliable source of quick bits of information - you can dive deeper if you want, but it's a great cursory overview.
That quick bit of information lights up our dopamine receptors like nothing else. It's designed to be addictive. Diving in deeper is difficult and time consuming. For example, I find following conversation threads on twitter to be impossible. I suspect this is by design. It wouldn't be that difficult to design twitter so whole threads are easily readable. But reading and following whole threads isn't as addictive. The preferred method of consuming twitter seems to be following a large number of people and/or hashtags. This results in disjointed bits of somewhat related information being streamed to you at a high rate of fire. Like a news ticker on steroids.
Network aside, I thought the debate originally arose from the fact that few are sure about which problem twitter currently tries to solve.
I'm not a twitter power user but I have the feeling that if they keep solving just this problem Facebook/reddit will soon absorb what Twitter makes great for me. (Which means: the network)
This isn't going to be a problem you can solve with a quick question on HN. You need to sit down with someone with a list of project goals and a budget. I'm happy to chat, because I know how frustrating it can be from your side of things. My email is in my profile.
I'd be really surprised if someone isn't already hard at work on an iOS app that uses this tech. The scalability is of course a problem, but I'd pay 50 cents per photo (assuming I got a small preview of it first) or something of that order to support the costs.
Since the upgrade, I'm just getting "Connecting to react...If this is React Native, you need to interact with the app (just tap the screen) in order to establish the bridge." when I try to load the dev tools.
EDIT: Apparently the tools don't work for local dev. Just hosted the files behind a python simple httpserver.
In chrome://extensions there is an option that lets you give chrome extension to content served from the file:// protocol - maybe that's what you need?
