mongojunction

I applied to YC with this idea more than 9 times. I guess I'm just a loser

Good luck with your business. it's really awesome you were able to get through to them that this is a huge business

Being ignorant didn't make you a prima donna tho, as above says.

Also, they have to have some clue about the domain, because the domain is their own problem and they're writing a solution for it. So I don't think we can really just someone as not having any clue about their own engineering challenges.... especially if they're working solutions to them....

Antirez said literally he didn't know about existing solutions when he went to write redis, and he and redis are awesome. nothing bad about that

but I get your point about bad solutions are bad but that's sort of a tautology, doesn't add much value, and who are we to judge someone else's solutions are bad we don't know everything about their use case.

Again... even if we can say that you choosing someone else's technology for your problem is not a good solution we just can't criticize the author because it's your responsibility what you choose. so I just don't think it's valid to criticize the author

I think it's wrong to try to push the responsibility for other people's choices to use something or not to the person who creates that thing. And it's also very contradictory to another aspect of hacker or engineering culture which is like... someone can create a amazing free security service and then that service can be used in deplorable ways by criminals but almost nobody in this scene will admonish the creator because they realize that the creator is not responsible for how people choose to use that creation. not to mention that exact sentiments is basically universally expressed in every license that exists. so I really think it's embarrassing how such supposed criticism passes on these forums without being you know immediately dismissed as ridiculous.

It is also impractical to expect the Creator to anticipate all the use cases and potential benefits and pitfalls that people might find in those different use cases and express them.

Second it's fundamentally a violation of a boundary about choices. The people who make the choice to adopt software or not are the ones who are responsible for the technical debt or credit they allocate by making that choice.

Instead of criticizing creators for not adequately disclaiming their new products because of a hypothetical or real harm that is incurred because people choosing that, you should criticize the people selecting things for being irresponsible with the projects they are responsible for.

If your evaluation of a project is simply based on reading the readme at a superficial level then it's nobody else's fault but yours if you end up with problems with the tech that you choose.

I'm not saying you're being mean here I think this is just a misguided attempt to try to avoid technical debt but it doesn't focus on an effective way to do that. What I feel is disappointing is how this sort of criticism is often leveled at new projects as a way to dismiss or I think unfairly criticize these creations and their authors, maybe as form of "concern trolling." if I understand that term correctly.

Like, "don't use this new project in production" is sort of a tautology of "be careful about any tech that you choose that it's suitable for your use case", which is pretty obvious and I think low value thing to say, but it's often said about new projects in a way that suggests "this project is terrible and the author is bad for suggesting that people even think about using this". which I think is very toxic to a culture of creation, invention and tinkering and it's disrespectful of people who put in the effort to make something. it also encourages something which I think is harmful which is the need to think "I need to make this project perfect and bulletproof before I even think of releasing it" which I think means there's a lot of projects that could have benefited if they were appreciated at the small flame level, but maybe people are discouraged from putting them out there because of this sort of misused criticism.

even though I'm not really a fan of his I think Paul Graham said something about this point regarding startups that's like a startup is like an idea that's just being born and it's very fragile so you have to kind of protect it but it can grow into something really amazing.

That sounds like it comes from some specific experience you had... but it's pretty uncalled for to apply it so confidently to someone you don't know. Don't be mean, right?

Actually, another view is that there's nothing wrong with tinkering and DIY. Perl, JS, Redis all came from people hacking their own solutions (as far as I know).

Also, many big software orgs build extensive internal tools themselves.

Plus, making your own stuff is a lot of fun. You should try it sometime (if you haven't already) :)

You'd expect her to be well informed... she's a Colonel with 3400 hours in high performance jets.

I didn't know there were women pilots and colonels flying these craft. The only clear idea about high profile women in the services was them being accepted into marines.

This was so cool!

a distributed way to map and collect the data structure on the web crowdsourced from a community of people not only passionate about mapping out the structure of app HTML and how it corresponds to data types, but also people who want to collect and use that data.

the data can be used for anything from competition and pricing analysis, to dashboards, to creating automatic RSS feeds of anything.

it just seems that being able to unlock the late and value of all of the information the structured information on the web which is presented only in a semi-structured form but with the addition of human labor could be so it's machine usable could unlock so much value.

but I've been pitching VCS and y combinator on this idea for the last six or seven years and not so much as a peep of interest so it seems that this idea doesn't possess a way to create a lot of money but I do believe it's very valuable.