This is something we're debating. If suppose data was to sync with a folder on your Dropbox, we can't guarantee its integrity should you decide to remove or move it, whether accidentally or intentionally. This isn't unsolvable, but definitely something to think about.
> We would like to conclude the post saying that it was not a marketing gimmick from our end. Being hackers ourselves, we just wanted to check if HN algo was vulnerable to such tricks.
There's the photography community and then there's everyone else. For everyone else there's Facebook (don't mind shitty photo quality and management). I'm no fan of Instagram, and even if I was, I wouldn't stop using a DSLR.
I've been with Flickr for years now, am a Pro user, and nothing else comes close for a photography enthusiast. IMHO all it would take is few key redesigns and better mobile apps that would make the photography community really happy to stick with it.
Expectations from software are lower than other products like cars, televisions. A car breaking down in the middle of a drive to work is far more "severe" an incident than Internet Explorer hanging and crashing. Further, software engineering as a field is very very young, with a far lower barrier to entry, resulting in products and processes which are much less evolved and mature compared to other industries. I think these are important factors why software tends to have lower quality bars than cars or physical products.
For films and music the audio data may have too much noise, but TV programmes with low background noise (news, documentary, interview) with available Closed Captions (CC) are good training sources. CC transcripts are enforced by broadcasting regulators so they should be highly accurate.
The big problem with using these sources is the huge vocabulary. Speech recognition works better for smaller vocabularies than bigger.
It would be interesting to diff the original applications and those after the money announcement to gauge the interest and quality. I think quality startups will want to reach a certain level (prototype, proof of concept) and then money will find them. The blanket offer for investment without knowing the startups or prior relationships is a bit too good to be true?
This is one of the crazy things I've come across - one moment there's a call for YC rejects to hang out together, next day there's cash for equity! Since this is an experiment maybe it would help to keep it simple in the original form and leave investment out of it till the end of summer?