Reality Platforms | Software Engineer (hire #1) | Full Remote (current team in USA)
Hey HN! I'm the former director of YC's Startup School and am now working on my own startup called Reality Platforms.
We're building a community-collected and community-owned alternative to Google Street View. There's a lot of latent demand for a comprehensive street view dataset that isn't tied to Google (which is a competitor to many of the potential users of street-view data). In the last few years consumer smartphones have gotten good enough to make them a viable means of collection, so we'll be relying on a community of "reality miners" to gather the imagery.
The project uses cryptocurrency to track the distributed ownership of the dataset and pay out individual collectors when their data is accessed. But unlike many crypto projects which are just dressed-up Ponzi schemes, we have a solid, long-term business model!
We just closed a $6M seed round and are looking to hire our first engineers. We have very strong compensation with both salary and equity.
If you're interested or just want to find out more, please email me! [email protected]
Reality Platforms | Software Engineer (hire #1) | Full Remote (current team in USA)
Hey HN! I'm the former director of YC's Startup School and am now working on my own startup called Reality Platforms.
We're building a community-collected and community-owned alternative to Google Street View. There's a lot of latent demand for a comprehensive street view dataset that isn't tied to Google (which is a competitor to many of the potential users of street-view data). In the last few years consumer smartphones have gotten good enough to make them a viable means of collection, so we'll be relying on a community of "reality miners" to gather the imagery.
The project uses cryptocurrency to track the distributed ownership of the dataset and pay out individual collectors when their data is accessed. But unlike many crypto projects which are just dressed-up Ponzi schemes, we have a solid, long-term business model!
We just closed a $6M seed round and are looking to hire our first engineers. We have very strong compensation with both salary and equity.
If you're interested or just want to find out more, please email me! [email protected]
You'll need to start again, because the way we're tracking things changed. That said, if you've been submitting updates consistently those will count towards certification, and if you go through and mark all the content you already viewed as complete you'll be most of the way there already.
Totally. We're making some early moves in this direction with a private forum channel for companies that self-identify as growth stage, but we'd like to take this a lot further.
We aren't currently evaluating companies for grants, but are likely to restart a version of that program later in the year. If and when we do, founders that participate in the program starting now will be eligible!
Yes, we want to make accountability MUCH better, particularly for solo founders who can have a harder time staying motivated without someone else to bounce things off of.
Don't have changes related to that in the current relaunch yet, but it's on the roadmap.
Yes, we've reworked the matching algorithm! You can see the criteria we use for forming matches at the bottom of the weekly update when you sign up.
That said, it still isn't perfect and we have more work planned in that area. We also dropped the requirement for group sessions from 6 to 1 so that folks who don't find them a valuable use of time don't need to keep doing them!
Initial expectations: we expected Startup School to be very popular with founders, and in the long term also hopefully encourage more founders to apply to YC's core program. It modestly exceeded our expectations on the former (we've seen over 100k users sign up in the last two years), and has vastly exceeded expectations on the latter. Concretely, in the latest YC core batch 44% of founders are Startup School alums. That's a far higher percentage than we were expecting at this point!
In 2030: no idea! Directionally though, I'd like to migrate all the "scalable" parts of YC (1-to-many lectures/writing, investor/founder matching, community, accountability) to Startup School where they'll be freely available to everyone, while leaving the unscalable parts (eg. 1-to-1 advice with partners, big checks) in the core program.
Hey folks, really excited about this change. I’ve been wanting to make Startup School a continuous program for years, but it took a while to get all the right pieces in place. Here to answer any questions you may have!
It was counting down from 6 months. I think it had got down to about 3 weeks before this announcement came. The countdown was originally set based on a comment that vjeux made in a blog post when React Native for iOS was released, where he asked for 6 months of patience from the community before releasing the Android version. the reactnativeandroid.com website wasn't exactly the most patient reaction, but count me among those who are glad that it served to motivate the team to get their great work out the door. :)
I have a fair amount of experience developing native Android apps in Java, and have an app for work that I'm developing/maintaining right now. I've also used React in a couple of medium-sized web apps.
I'm extremely excited about the possibility of developing future functionality for our Android app using React Native. It's not about the language (I find using dynamically typed languages for large systems frustrating, despite how expressive they can be) or even the iOS/web reusability for me -- it's the fact that the React way of seeing the world just makes so much sense. Describing views as a (pure, as long as you're careful) function of state feels so clean to me.
Chrome used to take you to the apps page on a new tab by default, which was really convenient. Several releases ago they replaced that default with an utterly redundant search bar on new tab pages for reasons I can't begin to understand. Anyway, you can just go to chrome://apps and bookmark that page.