Of all the times I've seen Internet votes made to have a real-world value, the bad parts of this contest were among the mildest of potentially bad outcomes there could be. Went better than expected honestly.
Question to YC - how representative are these, as a sample of the applications YC typically sees? I've always wondered what YC's raw unfiltered application sets look like. Is this more or less skewed in any atypical ways?
Your degree in anthropology blesses us all with your judgment—here I was thinking I might not understand the underlying research correctly. This community is the best!
I'm sure. Don't get me wrong, it's very very helpful. However, most of the startup life is keeping your head down and working. I can fly to SV at any point, but setting up a team in Pakistan + office space + utilities is only a fraction of 1 programmer being paid in SV.
At such an early stage, survival is all we're focused on. The moment we can afford SV, we'll jump right on over!
That's awesome. I hear a lot here in Canada (as a foreigner here) about the efforts they made decades ago to build an educated workforce for the information economy and a local tech industry. It did great things here and I have to imagine it's great for Pakistan. There are strong engineers and digital artists coming from Pakistan, and in the long term they should be able to stay and have a great career at home.
Yes, the FROM spoofs your name so that the person will believe it's being sent directly from you in most email clients, and the Reply-to goes directly to your email. These are the email headers:
Edit: Oh cool, Hackernews still has this account rank-banned so the comments always stay at the bottom of the page no matter how many upvotes they get.
So happy that I'm not the only one who was extremely surprised and upset about Angel List's impersonation tactics.
In my experience, 100% of the people who received this impersonation email that angel.co sent, thought it was written by me. If the system wants to send a message on my behalf, it must AT LEAST show me what would be sent with my signature on it, and allow me to confirm or cancel any email that's signed with my full name before it's sent. Angel List is sending out emails with your signature and other impersonation tricks, totally behind your back.
I've had people impersonate emails from me in the past as well. Even if the emails aren't offensive, just the idea that someone else now thinks they have my permission to send whatever they want to, while impersonating me behind my back makes me feel extremely uneasy.
Here's the impersonation email they send to cofounders when they're added to a profile. As you can see, signing the email with the user's full name, as if the user had written the letter, is a clear impersonation that the user never consents to.
FROM: <MY_FULL_NAME> <team@angel.co>
Hi <RECEIVER_NAME>,
I'm building an AngelList profile for <PROJECT_NAME> and need your help.
Can you do me a favor and confirm that you're a founder by clicking here:
https://angel.co/l/54223434234234583948593475
This is important to us; confirming that you're a founder will help us build our profile.
Thanks,
<MY_FULL_NAME>
P.S. If you would like to visit our profile first, go here: https://angel.co/<PROJECT_NAME>
In the past couple of weeks I began signing my emails with PGP. Those who are technically inclined can ensure that I sent it, and those not would be a little more suspicious of an automated looking email without a random string of characters at the end.
Did people want to tell their friends? Yes, but not because they loved the product. Because they wanted to be seen as cutting edge.
Most of the product hunt/tech crunch circle jerk is stuff like this. Lots of fluff with short-term spikes but little long term retention because the product doesn't solve a real need.
I'd say they're different, but definitely not orthogonal. NPS asks if you'd recommend the product, retention is how long you stick around after first use. Both metrics embed the user's affinity for the product (which is the underlying thing sama's saying to measure and improve).
I've got to wonder to what degree this approach is really hiding the "real" language in a higher-level encoding.
E.g. you can write english in morse code, but the combination of those dots and dashes is where the "real" language is, instead of the dots and dashes themselves...
> hiding the "real" language in a higher-level encoding
Exactly. In the middle of the article they discuss coming up with an expression to mean "car". Of the many word combinations one might choose (they go with "tomo tawa"), one of them would have to emerge as the standard way to say "car", otherwise effective communication would not really be possible. But at that point you've just created a new word. "Tomo tawa" no longer means anything that combination of words might possibly mean - it means car.
I'd suggest there's a certain irreducible vocabulary, and its size is going to be the same no matter how many base words are used to compose it.
Basically, exactly what happens with compounds like <black> + <bird> => <blackbird> -- blackbirds are a specific sub-category of "black birds", not just any bird with black feathers.
And it's completely analogous to every other language where we come up with words by combining "auto" and "mobile". It would be challenging to determine what an automobile was from just the word and it would be almost impossible to recreate the word had you just been given the object and asked to come up with one. Might as well say that English is a language with 26 words.
Though I imagine this makes spelling and pronunciation easier to remember.
It's not really the same thing. Morse code is basically a different way to write or say letters. If you reverse the morse code, you get letters, then you have a message written in English, German, Spanish, Esperanto... (or even in Arabic or Korean, if you transliterate the original message in latin alphabet).
