amaranand

And the people who are employed by tiny companies get paid in only cash, and also do not pay their taxes.

I will admit that "no one" is an exaggeration, but India is one of the worst countries I could think of to try and start a product that helps people figure out their taxes.

Honestly, no one pays taxes in India. Your product has no market. I can speak at length about this, but it's part of the reason real estate values in India increase by 30% year over year. Everyone hides their black money in real estate investments.

Thanks for putting this together. It was super helpful.

Another question that kind of sticks out as a wild card is:

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

Unfortunately, you don't really talk about it in the how-to. Is this not that important of a question for you? Is it just an opportunity to get a sense of the applicants personality? In general what are you trying to evaluate with this question?

I think my situation is pretty different from the one in the other thread. My team and I have put 3-4 months of actual code in our last project. Last project we got a working (albeit slightly buggy)prototype working of a pretty technical (hard) project.

When it came time for the stretch run to add polish and really get the project stable, we lost focus and motivation.

Unfortunate really, but I want to avoid the situation in the future

Out of curiosity, why the disdain for Facebook?

It seems like they put in a ton of work to prevent one person, Robert Scoble, from 'gaming' the system and having his sub-optimal answers go to the top. (As implied by original link and the SV drama-fest of the past couple weeks)

I think this is interesting for two reasons.

1) Based on the post by Adam D'Angelo, I don't think the changes will cause Robert Scoble's sub-optimal answers to be placed lower on the page. Scoble's past answers are interpreted to be 'high quality' by an algorithm because they get so many up votes. Every answer he posts from now on, will get a higher 'quality score' because of all the upvotes he has already included (See: "Answers written by users who have written good answers in the past will be ranked higher.")

2) This seems like a ton of work to battle the habits of one extremely unique user. It strikes me that Quora's resources could have been better used by controlling the spam caused by the social media crowd infestation (i.e astro-turfers). Or by encouraging more experts from fields other than SV start-ups to join and contribute at a high level.

Having been extremely harsh to Quora so far, I do really like that "A vote from a user who has written good answers in the past carries more weight (both upvotes and downvotes)" And this change will admittedly knock down Scoble's answers a bit.