hillis

Discoverboard ( https://discoverboard.com ):

An online community focused on quality, thought-provoking conversations about a broad range of interests. It's a significantly different experience from other online communities:

-Most members choose to use their real identities on the site, and this information is only available to other members.

-Each member pays a small subscription fee, which helps keep out trolls and spammers. The fee also pays for moderators and serves as our members' commitment to quality and respect.

-Discoverboard doesn't display ads to subscribers or sell their data.

Full disclosure: I work for discoverboard. We would be very interested in hearing your thoughts about it. I've also created an invite code for free trials for people on this thread: https://discoverboard.com/code/HN

I have no direct or personal knowledge of him, but he comes across as extremely smart, ambitious, and well-intentioned in his writing and in profiles of him. Here is one I read this week that I thought was an interesting portrayal: http://www.fastcompany.com/3044282/the-y-combinator-chronicl...

I didn't realize there was so much angst directed towards Sam Altman here. I think there is an unfortunate feeling that he was just ordained by PG, and doesn't deserve what he has. I sincerely doubt that's the case.

Regardless of his previous record, he's already been doing an impressive job growing YC. Sure, some of this is the result of pre-existing path dependency and network effects, but do you really think that Sam didn't have anything to do with it?

-The YC companies funded since he has taken over have gotten more ambitious.

-The 'How to Start a Startup' class was a huge success, and provided a fantastic knowledge base to the greater startup community.

-The number of applications to YC has increased dramatically, particularly from under-represented areas.

-He's personally funded interesting companies, including leading an innovative round for Reddit that set aside shares for the community itself.

...and he seems to be just getting started.

If you are Sam Altman, yes, I think you can give advice at 30. The man's experience may be short, but I'd imagine it is unbelievably dense.

Discoverboard ( https://discoverboard.com ):

An online community focused on quality, thought-provoking conversations about a broad range of interests. It's a significantly different experience from other online communities:

-Most members choose to use their real identities on the site, and this information is only available to other members.

-Each member pays a small subscription fee, which helps keep out trolls and spammers. The fee also pays for moderators and serves as our members' commitment to quality and respect.

-Discoverboard doesn't display ads to subscribers or sell their data.

Full disclosure: I work for discoverboard. We would be very interested in hearing your thoughts about it. I also just created an invite code for free trials for people on this thread: https://discoverboard.com/code/HN

Jonathan from discoverboard here. There are a few things that make discoverboard different from other online communities:

-Most members choose to use their real identities on the site, and this information is only available to other members.

-Each member pays a small subscription fee, which helps keep out trolls and spammers. The fee also pays for moderators and serves as our members' commitment to quality and respect.

-We will never display ads to our subscribers or sell their data.

This structure has allowed us to build a community with an increased level of discourse.

We (the founders) are long-time HN users who still feel like there is a lot of room for improvement in online communities. Since graduating from college, we have missed the meaningful conversations with friends and professors that defined our education. While HN is great for tech-focused discussion, we wanted broader conversations.

Because HN is both familiar with the online community space and gives good feedback on startups, we are very interested in your thoughts. At this point, the community has hundreds of members and is continuing to grow, primarily through personal referrals.

Where, and how, do you think we should go from here?

From my perspective, Sam's essays have really been improving in quality.

Some of his early ones felt like they were searching for a voice and/or trying to force the essay before it was fully incubated.

This one feels like a breakthrough. Well written, interesting premise, explores the topic in a meandering but targeted way.

I'm not sure this is the answer, but it seems likely that you can more efficiently reflect energy back into the atmosphere than you can convert it via a solar panel and then use that energy through air conditioning to cool down the space.

Instead of having to go through the whole process of conversion from sunlight to electricity via a solar panel to cooling via an air conditioner, you can just reflect most of the energy that's heating up the building in the first place.

The website you're describing already exists. In fact, you just posted on it.

A related question might be: where will mobile apps be in 5 years?

Hopefully, the answer is that web standards will evolve to allow HTML+JS to do things currently only possible in mobile apps. This would mirror the original transition of desktop apps to web apps, and would have positive implications for the internet by bringing mobile users back to webpages (though I wouldn't count on it being done in 5 years).