
Apply HN: TheyMadeThat – Non-Spammy Linkedin + IMDB - chaostheory
Problem:<p>1. The traditional resume is out of date. Digitizing it and overlaying a social network on top helps, but underneath it&#x27;s still an old resume. So what&#x27;s the problem with the traditional resume? The traditional resumes focus too much on job titles and the companies that gave you those job titles. It just doesn&#x27;t convey what you actually did well enough.<p>2. People don&#x27;t get credit for their work. What do we mean by that? Is everyone still willing to believe that only Steve Jobs and Jony Ive developed the iPhone? What about the hundreds of other engineers, designers, and executives behind it?<p>Enter TheyMadeThat:<p>We solve both problems by:<p>a. Focusing on your work instead of your tenure - even your kids (HR &amp; recruiters) can more easily understand what you do:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theymadethat.com&#x2F;people&#x2F;tony-fadell" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theymadethat.com&#x2F;people&#x2F;tony-fadell</a><p>b. By giving your work their own profiles, with important details such as history and evolution:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theymadethat.com&#x2F;things&#x2F;nest-learning-thermostat" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theymadethat.com&#x2F;things&#x2F;nest-learning-thermostat</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theymadethat.com&#x2F;things&#x2F;apple-macintosh" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theymadethat.com&#x2F;things&#x2F;apple-macintosh</a><p>To reduce the noise and spam; unlike LinkedIn, your social network on TheyMadeThat is simply the people that you have directly worked with on a project. It doesn&#x27;t matter if they worked at the same company as you, if you didn&#x27;t work with them on something then they&#x27;re not part of your network. Most importantly we are not going to spam you about whether or not you know &#x27;yet another random person&#x27;.<p>Feel free to test drive our alpha: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theymadethat.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theymadethat.com</a><p>(Just please don&#x27;t delete any data or add garbage data to our site. Yes we have database backups as well as version history for everything but we&#x27;d rather not have to roll anything back, since we already have mountains of other work to do.)
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lemonherb
This looks nice and clean. However, I don't think there is enough information
about the projects a person had worked on. For example, if you search "IBM
Research," one project that comes up is Watson. Two people are associated with
it, and there is a general description about each person that sounds like it
came out of their bio pages. If I was looking to recruit someone, I would like
to know a little bit more about what he did for that project, rather than a
broad description about machine learning. Linkedin provided a much better
description of his role with the Watson project.

Also, I assume this is because the page is still in its early stages, but the
page was out of data. One of the persons in question has moved on from IBM
Research to another company. This leads me to my second question - is every
piece of information on the page entered by the user or do you have some
crawler that finds relevant information for each person and adds it
automatically? Some type of big data analytics algorithm (graphs or tensor
decomposition algorithms maybe) would probably be useful in gathering
information so that each person only needs to edit rather than add information
for himself one by one. (e.g., google scholar page)

~~~
chaostheory
Yes, data is something that we're really lacking at the moment. Ideally as
time passes, our users will enter it themselves. However for now to
simultaneously perform both QA and UX testing, we're manually entering the
data ourselves. This is also really more to have data for demonstrating and
showing people the platform as opposed to just writing about it.

As for project data, just like LinkedIn people are free to more or less
information for their projects. I'm assuming that people who aren't as well
known will be entering a better description than people who are well known.
We'll see once we formally launch.

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capalbc
I like the simplification around the three central entities (things, people,
organizations). The site seems clean and professional. I think it would be
really helpful if you had a LinkedIn OAuth setup to allow users to import
their prior "organizations" into your site. That way they would just have give
details to the "things" they've worked on (if they hadn't yet been entered by
a prior user).

~~~
chaostheory
Yeah once we have the basic features fully working, we'll probably move on to
adding features focusing on convenience

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mdorazio
As a consultant (and this situation is very similar for the growing army of
contractors out there), it's very difficult to be able to even say
specifically what you have made for clients due to NDAs and other legal
obligations. I do like this concept, though, for the less-restricted employees
out there.

I am curious how you would see this working for something like finance or
accounting, though. There are many jobs where you don't produce visible
projects that you can point to, but your work has nonetheless been of high
value to your employers.

~~~
chaostheory
This is a good question and before I continue IANAL, and anything in my
response could be inaccurate.

This is one example:

[http://www.theymadethat.com/people/ryan-
porter](http://www.theymadethat.com/people/ryan-porter)

In particular click on the 'AMA Capital Automated Trading System' project and
projects related to 'Palantir Metropolis'. Both products are sensitive in
nature and unlike say a Netflix platform, you can't provide as much detail
since you can't provide trade secrets or classified information. However as
hopefully shown in the link it's still possible to provide a really high level
overview that gives a gist of the work you accomplished.

Here's another incomplete example:
[http://www.theymadethat.com/people/margaret-
hamilton](http://www.theymadethat.com/people/margaret-hamilton)

Look at the 'NORAD Semi-Automatic Ground Environment' project. Another way to
get around this is to simple list your involvement in building something but
not provide any details of your work.

Still, there may be situations where you can never list your work (and we do
comply with DCMA requests). Unfortunately, TheyMadeThat just isn't a magic
bullet for every project and person's work situation.

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ninerwp
What sort of QA function is there? How much trust in the data can we have? Can
I claim to be the _real_ genius behind Unix, or will someone catch me?
Reckless exaggerations in resumes aren't uncommon....

~~~
chaostheory
Good question. How trust worthy is LinkedIn? Does LinkedIn verify the data
people enter? I could be wrong but I don't think they verify data either.

"Can I claim to be the real genius behind Unix, or will someone catch me?"

You can initially, but unless there's proof we'll probably add an 'unverified'
tag to your submissions that are related to really well known items like
'unix' and other modern marvel.

It is definitely a known issue, most of the industry, that we'll be tackling
more in the coming months.

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gkop
How does this compare to [https://makerbase.co](https://makerbase.co) ?

~~~
chaostheory
The main difference is the (optional) level of detail that TheyMadeThat has
over Makerbase:

[https://makerbase.co/m/171236/janl](https://makerbase.co/m/171236/janl)

[http://www.theymadethat.com/people/jan-
lehnardt](http://www.theymadethat.com/people/jan-lehnardt)

There's more than just his picture and a listing of what he's built.

This gets really apparent once you dig down into the details of what he's
built:

[https://makerbase.co/p/38o67a/couchdb](https://makerbase.co/p/38o67a/couchdb)

[http://www.theymadethat.com/things/apache-
couchdb](http://www.theymadethat.com/things/apache-couchdb)

[https://makerbase.co/p/uz051b/couchbase](https://makerbase.co/p/uz051b/couchbase)

[http://www.theymadethat.com/things/couchbase-
server](http://www.theymadethat.com/things/couchbase-server)

Unlike Makerbase which just features a sentence, a picture, and a list of
people; TheyMadethat has version / evolution history as well as predecessors
and successors (of the thing).

There's more that I'll try to show later, like additional details that people
can enter on a project by project basis that is unique per person.

------
ryporter
You have some nice ideas on how to improve on LinkedIn. However, you're not
offering functionality which is fundamentally different. Thus, I strongly
doubt that you'll be able to overcome network effects.

In my opinion, you need to come up with a unique "hook", a feature unlike
anything offered elsewhere. The hook will bring in new customers, and they'll
stay for the better experience.

~~~
chaostheory
This is you on LinkedIn:
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanwporter](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanwporter)

This is you on TheyMadeThat: [http://www.theymadethat.com/people/ryan-
porter](http://www.theymadethat.com/people/ryan-porter)

[http://www.theymadethat.com/things/emobie](http://www.theymadethat.com/things/emobie)

~~~
ryporter
I thought your first response was a bit confrontational, but this one was very
effective. Point taken. :)

~~~
chaostheory
I didn't mind that you said that we'll probably fail; I hear it a lot.
Specifically your point about not being able to overcome LinkedIn's current
network effect is valid, especially when one of our goals was to try really
hard to not spam our users and their contacts. However, when you mentioned
that we were fundamentally the same as LinkedIn, I mistook your comment as a
troll given that I've provided examples in my post.

"In my opinion, you need to come up with a unique 'hook', a feature unlike
anything offered elsewhere."

Depending on how much information you enter or for how long you explore our
site, we do have a hook. It's related to giants.

------
mchau
why do you need this instead of wikipedia?

~~~
chaostheory
So from a feature point of view, Wikipedia's strength is that it's super
flexible, which is needed given the huge range of topics that it covers.
However the weakness with the wiki format stems from this freedom. Even for
pages within the same topic, you will get wildly inconsistent formatting which
also leads to inconsistent content e.g. For some notable people, authors will
include their education but not for other notable people even when the data is
available.

Another problem with Wikipedia is its notability threshold, meaning you have
to be famous enough in order to deserve your own entry on Wikipedia. Most
people just don't meet this requirement.

