
There's food for thought at Justin.tv (Inside the YScraper) - pg
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/08/BUGKNP3USS1.DTL&hw=justin+tv&sn=001&sc=1000
======
supahfly_remix
Ycombinator and its progeny are getting an amazing amount of PR these days.
It's certainly part of the Web2.0 zeitgeist now. Did you see the list of
startups at the end of the article in the "Yscraper"? pg had an essay on this
PR placement. I wonder which firm handles Y's PR.

After justin.tv has gone bust, its value will have been how much attention YC
has received because of it. Kind of like a loss-leader for YC's stable of
startups.

~~~
pg
We don't have a PR firm. I think that reporter was introduced to the
Justin.TVs by another YC startup. That's probably the reason there's so much
press: each startup introduces reporters to the other YC startups. There are
now 39 of them, so that's a lot of introducing.

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celoyd
This is sad. I've always thought of cooking as an ordinary hacker passtime,
like juggling or reading. Many of the coolest nerds I've hung out with are
borderline foodies, though constrained by time and money, and nearly all are
on the healthy side of Ayers's split.

If the article isn't misleading, I wonder what's going on. Are the YC guys
just too busy? But they have time to shop (they just shop badly) and cooking
catalyses productive conversations. Did they never learn to cook? But they
must have parents, and the internet has a million recipes. Is there an obvious
reason why food-oblivious people would end up at YC?

~~~
randallsquared
My stereotype is exactly the opposite: hackers and nerds are going to be
malnourished or overweight, but less likely to be of healthy proportions. I'm
certainly well overweight myself.

I'd be intrigued to hear what "they must have parents" might have to do with
it. :)

~~~
celoyd
I'm a little overweight too, but I think it's because I eat too much, not
because I eat junk. And, at the risk of mapping "hackers and Xers" over every
X in sight, I think jward is right: cooking feels noticeably like coding.

Maybe I'm just from Mars (i.e., not suburbia) again, but from what I've seen
most parents who can afford to let their kids be nerds also teach them what a
kitchen is for. This can be as passive as not making breakfast when they wake
up at three on a summer afternoon. My mom never sat me down and said "this is
how you make an omelette" or whatever, but she made the information available
and I learned it because it was useful.

It's not that people who can't cook must have bad parents, it's just that when
you see lot of them in one place you start wondering why.

~~~
randallsquared
Here's a thought. You say cooking feels like coding to you. It doesn't at all
to me. One major difference for me is that when you make a change while
coding, you can see instantly what the difference is; there's no delay. In
cooking, you often have to wait for minutes after a change to see if it was a
good change. But after thinking about that, it dawns on me that cooking _is_
like coding, if you're using a language that requires a separate compile step.
I've always avoided those languages (all my experience is in interpreted
languages, except for CL, which still has no requirement for a length compile
step).

Anyway, less fancifully, I think there's a culture difference, here. If you
grew up in a house where there was always a hundred things you could nuke for
breakfast, why would you ever learn to cook unless you were especially
interested in one dish that had to be cooked?

Lastly, I was a nerd when growing up, and we were pretty much the poorest
people in the trailer park. My father knew how to cook hamburger helper and
most anything else with instructions on the box or can, but I cook far more
than he did when I was growing up. There's still always a strong temptation to
just grab a bag of chips instead of making a meal, but my wife gets unhappy if
I do that more than once or twice a week. :)

------
amichail
I think applied justin.tv would be compelling. That is, people would broadcast
their life for a specific purpose, such as finding a job, date, etc.

~~~
timg
I don't watch television, and I know many of you don't... but isn't this
exactly what reality TV has been doing? Not that this idea doesn't have a lot
of potential yet.

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whacked_new
Holy. I don't really get it. If the weeblies save up on ice cream they can at
least buy some uh... healthier food. The fats and lactates in ice cream don't
seem anything like brain food. Somehow I find it less of a break of
concentration than an irresponsible disregard for one's own health.

~~~
drusenko
our "lack of healthy food" was a bit overplayed for the article :). we don't
quite eat "gourmet-style", but it's not bad, either. dan made some interesting
spaghetti/chicken combination tonight, and we don't eat any junk food, or much
frozen food...

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aston
If it's 'the Yscraper' (and not 'the Yscaper'), that article's got a couple
typos. If it's 'the Yscaper'...I don't really get it.

~~~
yaacovtp
"With its expansive views of the San Francisco Bay and sky-high electricity
usage included in the rent, that high-rise is now dubbed the "Yscaper""

Skyscraper - Yscraper, home to six ycombinator startups.

~~~
aston
Like I said, Yscraper makes sense. The article says "scaper."

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Tichy
Maybe Y-Combinator should include a session on nutrition in their schedule?
;-)

