Check out Sermo - it's been around since 2006 or so and has an iPhone app that lets docs take a picture and get crowd-sourced advice. www.sermo.com

Isn't it just for medical professionals?

Google invites used as a ploy for registrations. Great job, guys.

Is it just me...or is this a little over-the-top? This essay makes PG out to be the second coming of Christ. YCombinator is great...but it's not the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Keep building your product and pounding the pavement. As Coach K would say...next play.

I wouldn't want to elevate PG as a demigod. Yet upon rejection this was, in many ways, how I felt. This essay comes from an analysis of these feelings. The understanding I came to later represents how I now see things. I'm proud to say we are moving on. But I'd hoped to share my experience, for others currently going through rejection, and for future, aspiring entrepreneurs.

I have been an entrepreneur for the last fifteen years and in retrospect, the two things that are hardest to learn are the following ...

1) How to embrace rejection ... not just accept it but embrace it. Most smart engineers prefer to avoid rejection by spending more time on developing technology or products and they want to get it as perfect as possible before presenting it to a potential user or customer for critique. This is wrong. Get over rejection. Embrace it. Do it early. Any chance you can, get in front of people who are not your family or your friends and get real feedback. You don't learn anything from positive feedback. Your learn a whole lot more from negative feedback.

2) How to develop a sensitivity to other people's inconvenience. For everything that is new, there will always be early adopters. It is easy to let initial success gets to your head. But to going beyond the initial veneer, your product or services have to simplify people's life, not just the smart or motivated people, but the normal and lazy people.

As my base jumping friend told me once, after about 500 jumps, you will start to realize how cold it is up there. This is just the beginning. Suck it up.

> Your learn a whole lot more from negative feedback.

Negative feedback can be more honest. In every criticism (especially if it's someone who you don't have an existing relationship with), there is usually a nugget of truth.

"If you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig"

I agree. In startups, there is no worse experience than putting lipstick on a pig. Not only is it a big waste of effort, but it annoys the crap out of the pig.

In high school, I got rejected by McDonalds, Taco Bell, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. I really wanted a job at one of those places for money for recording equipment for my band. They all rejected me.

I finally got a job at Roy Rogers after a year of searching, and the rest is history. I got over the rejections, and you can too. Of course it's pretty funny looking back, but only given the proper perspective. You have to look at things for what they are.

I thought pg was god-like for quite a while. And then I came out for the first Silicon Valley Startup School and met him the day before. He was wearing a necklace with a diamond-encrusted "PG" pendant. At that moment, I knew he was merely human.

> He was wearing a necklace with a diamond-encrusted "PG" pendant. At that moment, I knew he was merely human.

Because he has a sense of irony?

Umm...I guess? But now I'm doubting my own humanity, or yours, because one of us clearly lacks humor.

"Worry is the misuse of imagination". Keep moving forward, individuals like you are moving me towards the tipping point of venturing and executing ideas of my own

"This essay makes PG out to be the second coming of Christ."

Despite the hyperbole, I'd argue that a lot of HN users and YC alums express similar sentiments.

FWIW, I've met a lot of people who are similarly worshiped, and PG handles it better than most.

PG is like a tuning fork for the latent change-the-world/entrepreneur/hacker/idealist/realist wavelengths in us

yeah, one of things I find discomfiting is the occasional bouts of fanboyism that I see on the part of some folks here. Respect and occasional admiration are all well and good, but this is article is an excellent over the top example.

YC != 42?

Obviously, YC == 5943

If you want an upvote, you'll have to show your work... ;)

man ascii ;)

Still haven't shown your work... did you remember to assign the numerical values of the string "YC" to the integer variable YC?

And did you remember to test against 0x5943, rather than 5943?

And did you take Endianness into account? ;-)

I guess I could do all that (truth be told, my C's a bit rusty for a prompt answer).

How 'bout:

  $echo -n "YC" > foo
  $hd foo
  00000000  59 43                                             |YC|
  00000002

Yeah, I know, perhaps 4359 might be better.

(UPDATE: fixed code spacing)

:-D

    printf("%hx", *(unsigned short *)"YC");

...works on big endian machines. this works everywhere:

    printf("%hx", htons(*(unsigned short *)"YC"));

I was going to do a similar site like this last summer but decided not to. I'm looking to ditch the domain CoFoundMe.com for cheap if you're interested.

This is great...thanks for the link!

Navigenics (http://www.navigenics.com) is a KPCB-funded biotech that does something similar.

Uhmmm...check the source code.

duh

that's pretty pathetic. At least bury the 'puzzle' in a css or js file so that it's not the first thing you see.

I'm kind of confused about what the three of you are talking about. Yes, the clue to the puzzle is in the source code; I think that's where they were going with "embedded". "an hour" might be an extreme upper bound, but it's not like getting from the page source to the answer was instantly obvious or trivial. "pathetic" is definitely way over the top.

it's not really meant to be a hard puzzle, per se (that would be pointless and a waste of time). it's just intended not to be really really easy, and useful enough for us to say "this could be a good candidate" based on getting the correct answer.

the fact that you're using firebug, know some basic concepts, can debug javascript and can formulate your own POST requests puts you above quite a few of the applicants we've seen.

you failed the puzzle

Do we really need an app that helps spread gossip? I admit I haven't installed it and only took a tertiary glance at it...but if it does what it looks like, I think you should use your talents for Good and not for Evil :-)

Perhaps not, but I don't really expect the app to take off anyway. Just needed a simple idea to implement and get familiar with the facebook api and fbml.

That said, it seems the only apps that do take off on facebook are uninspired concepts such as Vampires, Zombies and KissMe.

Does anything not mediocre ever take off on large social sites?

The better question is why?

That's a good question. I think we'll eventually see useful apps take off on social sites. The viral features of the Facebook API, namely integrating with the News Feed, have only been available since around March.

I think the ratio of useful to frivolous users of the Facebook API was much better before the new features came out. Before, the only useful thing you could do was pull down people's friend relationships from Facebook. This alone was extremely useful if you were already building something that had some substance to it.

Now, most of the apps you see are from people who are trying to capitalize on the viral featues of the API to sell ads. Instead of apps being valued for their utility, they're valued for their ability to convince users to invite all of their friends.

Eventually, the hype will die down, and some of the useful applications of the Facebook API will begin to become more prominent. Even now, I only get invitations to sill apps like Vampires and Zombies from one or two of my friends. As Facebook users begin to show more ability to discriminate based on quality, we'll see more people take advantage of the freely accessible social graph to actually do cool things.

Not one for me personally but I think it might turn out to be very sucessful. All the best with it.

Just a clarification...Steve graduated.

MicroPlace.com just launched the other day and apparently actually allows you to charge a nominal interest rate so you can get a return on the loan. The point isn't to make oodles of money off of developing world entrepreneurs, but it is a slightly more attractive offer than Kiva's 0% interest loan. If you so decided, the interest you generate from MicroPlace could get then go back into another loan so the cycle continues again. Rinse, lather, repeat.