Compelling read on the author's journey toward a new life and a new reality. Her first-hand depictions of short-term memory loss, aphasia and other consequences were especially illuminating.
One out of every five apps gets rejected for either “more information needed” or “did not comply with terms in the Developer Program License Agreement" which is almost as bad as not providing a reason at all.
Still, I applaud Apple for taking a (small) step forward in terms of transparency.
It was a "science fair" style expo, where all of the completed hacks were on display with one person from each team demoing--essentially over and over again for hours.
Judges came around to review and score everyone (every team had multiple judges stop by), and a shortlist of hacks made it to the final round where it was more of a traditional pitch-off, with different judges.
> There's a huge difference between providing an outlet for startup founders to commiserate with each other and providing an outlet for individuals who believe they're suffering from depression to obtain support. Again, it's hard to criticize well-intentioned efforts, but my (hopefully) constructive criticism is that you seem to be blurring the lines. You can build a useful founder support network without focusing on depression.
We're definitely on the same page and our goal is to do the former rather than the latter. Describing it as a founder depression product was ultimately incorrect and we're moving away from that description here at YC Hacks. I definitely appreciate the distinction and your constructive criticism.
> Easily said, but harder to enforce. Case in point: one of the services you're considering using, 7 Cups of Tea, is positioned as an online counseling/therapy portal.
Also a great observation -- with regard to 7 Cups of Tea, the company is an inspiration point but we are not using them and we don't believe our service is competitive to their offering.
Hi there, I'm on the YC Hacks team working on this. I agree that "founder depression" is somewhat vague and potentially confusing in describing what we're doing. The intent is simply to anonymously connect people who are going through similar situations, whether positive or negative, in order to edify and support one another.
Based on both anecdotal evidence and recent articles, it seems as though people in the startup community often don't have many compassionate outlets they can leverage to talk to others who are either going through something similar or have gone through something similar before. By finding someone relatable to share experiences or learnings, they can release some of the pent-up emotion or frustration that they have and be able to move forward.
Furthermore, this is not designed to replace working with a mental health professional--not in the slightest! This is more purpose-built around finding peers who have the right context to really understand or comment on what you're going through and empathize. This isn't meant to be a counseling service.
"If officially confirmed, Berman’s death would make him the third Downtown Project figure to have died suddenly in the last 18 months, following the deaths of Ecomom’s Jody Sherman in 2013 and Downtown Project employee Ovik Banerjee earlier this year. Sherman and Banerjee‘s deaths were both ruled suicides."
It just points out where to click to put a bookmark icon on the homescreen (and I believe this is specific to iPhone/Safari given position of the icon relative to the screen).
It doesn't create an icon automatically for a user, but it's certainly helpful for those who don't know how to do it.
I think your point about rapid distribution and iteration is the most compelling reason.
Anecdotally, I've heard from a number of engineers and technical leads working on mobile-first startups that they started out by building HTML5 mobile apps and driving traffic to it (vs. native first) to better understand what users want before starting native application development from a test-learn-iterate standpoint.
Being able to make rapid changes based on user behavior and feedback significantly de-risks the chance of "missing the target" at the outset.
We are waiving our service fees, but we're also asking our hosts in affected areas to lower pricing on their listings.
The goal is for both Airbnb and the Airbnb community to come together to help those impacted. It's not just waiving the fees that will help, but also hosts opening up their homes to those displaced.
I work for Airbnb and was involved in the discussions leading up to our decision to waive fees and generally reach out to our community to help those affected and displaced by Sandy.
This was 100% due to our concern for the community and the stories coming out of the East Coast about all those impacted. We all came together--multiple departments across the company--and rallied quickly to make this happen.