skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ahh, you're right. I should have said, "you need to expend some energy on optimization and ensuring reliability." I guess I was making the assumption that the software was basically working, but failing under heavy load, which seems to be an optimization problem. I let it be given that the software is correct, but perhaps that is not a safe thing to do.

And I totally agree that Rails et al are great development platforms to get up and running quickly, but when that software begins to fail with increasing traffic, it's time to first reconsider your own code (algorithms and bulletproofiness (as Colbert might say)), and if that doesn't help, to consider rewriting at least parts in something else.

I can't imagine the call stack for a single Rails function call (I'm actually not all that familiar with Rails). At the very least, it might be good to migrate some code from Rails to straight Ruby, and some of the auto-generated stuff to hand-tuned SQL. That's all I was trying to say.
try out adsense or yahoo publishing network. G cares if you mix adsense with other contextual text advertising. banners, text link ads, display ads are all fair game.
What would you do if you realize the market you target is smaller than expected?
Any YCNews folks going to TieCon2007 tomorrow?
That was the purpose of my second paragraph, but maybe I didn't get the point across enough. I don't think Rails is bad, not at all. I think Rails is great for getting projects up and running quickly, and for easily adding to the projects later on. You simply need to expend some energy on optimization (and reliability) once you find yourself growing to sizes that test your current code base. This could involve writing some frequently used code in a low-level language, rewriting a Rails function you're using which does more than you really need into straight Ruby, or reconsidering some of your SQL queries and handwriting some of those that are automatically handled.

All I'm trying to say is that no matter who you are, at some point in the scaling process, you are going to have to revisit your code and make improvements. The great thing about Ruby, Python, Lisp, etc is the ability to throw a bunch of code down and get something running quickly. This code is inherently not optimal, and this is not a bad thing. Once you start to see problems, however, it's time to profile and re-think some of the things you are doing in order to improve your software overall.
I messed up. I thought the audience my startup was targeting is huge. Turns out, it's really small.

If you realize this 8 months after launch, what would you do?
i'll be there both days, checking out the talks and pitching our startup. I would love to meet other young hacker / entrepreneurs as well, should be fun.

check out the event here: http://www.tiecon.org/TiESVHome/HomeView
Y combinator in Ruby
Whats your startup?
UK startups "crippled" by lack of venture funding
Interview with Niklas Zennstrom, founder of Skype, after selling Skype for $2.6Bn to eBay
Listen, I've probably spent more time looking at your website than 99 percent of the people who've clicked on it. Try to understand this:

_I still haven't the first clue what it is you're selling_

Okay? The reason no one is playing with the demos is because the website itself is like unto cerberus the dog of hell, protecting the product from all who draw near.

Have ONE main webpage. Have this contain:

2-3 sentences that explain what the product does, and a use case. Example:

"auto-ebay-1000 is a tool to automate routine tasks performed by ebay sellers. If you have 50 items to sell, auto-ebay-1000 can upload them to ebay, track them, and alert you to bids"

Then have three links:

1) screen shots
2) Demo
3) How to buy

Look at a quasi use case that you have:

Do you feel, Thoughts and ideas come to me at awkward times, unexpected places and not in neat order. I really wish there was an easier way for me to capture them".

...okay. The solution to that "problem" is: Pen and paper. Or a voice recorder. Is Juwo a voice recorder? Okay, fine: But an "unexpected place" is presumably one where I'm not at my computer. See? Your use case doesn't fit.
My headline got magically changed... it was originally "Juwo competitor gets 750k investment." It made a lot more sense to the community than the current headline.
No one admits to buying gifts, but I have a lot of friends with multiple gifts in their profiles. They didn't all come from the initial free one.
Adding to the point you made about rewriting code - it's really easy to write inline C with Ruby. DHH has spoken about how 37signals found some performance "hotspots" with Basecamp (?) and simply dropped down into C and did a line-by-line translation to fix their issues.
Some comments on this thread were upvoted by several sockpuppet accounts at the same IP addr as infirstlive (including angelasimpson and hotstufff). There was also some sockpuppet downvoting of comments disagreeing with them. Seven of the upvotes on the link itself were from the same source. I've manually fixed the scores in a lot of the cases. Sorry, will add more anti-sockpuppet features in June.
No Flickr, no MySpace, no social bookmarking here. The 37signals apps are the only really 2.0-ish thing I'm into. Geez, I don't even have an RSS reader. By all indications I should be the poster child for this stuff, so it doesn't surprise me when I hear that 50% of Americans don't use technology.

What I'm trying to do is figure out stuff I would actually use, and build that.
never mind what's my startup. what would you do? would you continue or would you do a kiko?
No hate,
I already got a coverage by national press for a software that needed 2 hours of work.
Can you explain a bit more why you found it hopeless?
The larger questions are:

1) How targeted is my audience?
2) How well can I describe my audience?
3) How many ads do I need to sell to justify the costs associated with selling ads (ad server, cost/time of setting up the ad server, salesperson, etc)?

"Getting" advertisers is an active process (i.e. sales) for most publications (online and offline).
Is this your site?

http://organontech.wordpress.com/

Every post says, "This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:"

I must say, I'm puzzled.
Web 2.0 firms face unusual problem: too many customers
What I found most interesting there is that, if the 100% annual growth continues, Ruby will overtake Java in a little over a year, and become the most popular language (based on books sold) shortly after that.

Of course, it looks like ruby is slowing down, so that might not ever happen.
Shouldn't you ask your advertisers that question? Sorry, not meaning to be snarky, but you do see where I'm getting at here right?
I'm scared of what the demo will do to my machine.
Go to a website with a design you like and then bite the source code. That's a good way to start learning how to design.
If it can be targeted to another market group, do so. If you make, say, tensor analysis software, then your capacity to go after another group is dubious. In this case, it may make sense to go upstream. That is, find out what your customers would use the tensor analysis software for, and offer that service or make that product for your customer's customers.

And now for the best option of all, FAIL!

You and your startup team were mistaken about something as fundamental as the size of the market you were targeting. Please ponder that fact seriously. Why were you mistaken? Emotional attachment to an idea? "Irrational Exuberance"? Is there reason to believe that decisions taken from this point on will be based upon more factual foundations? Sober answers to all of these questions sound good in interviews for new jobs. Sober answers to these questions sound like music to the ears of Venture Capitalists or Angels when one is starting up a new venture.

Fail fast and learn.

Then demonstrate that you did so.
SEO, post comments on blogs dealing with your target market, make your link the signature of your emails, write a blog, exchange links and ads with another site. Put up an open source version an Sourceforge.net or other open source repositories, post a version on download.com etc.
I forgot my laptop at home and had the most productive day ever
My short-handed response would be that you need about 200,000 or more uniques per month before it becomes meaningful to advertisers. There are sites with less traffic that get targeted ads, but if you're talking about doing something other than AdSense, you really need to be at 200k+ to get meaningful traction in my opinion. Meaingful in my mind is getting more than $5,000 p/month in revenue, btw.
That's a terrific blog entry. I've argued with my parents before about summer jobs in College. I think I'd have performed a lot better during the fall semester if I'd been able to take the summer vacations as free time, rather than spending 8 hours a day working in an office.

I'd recommend internships, if you can get one, even if it means spending a lot of time working. But grunt jobs suck and part of me really regrets the amount of time and energy it wasted during my college summers.
This realization comes from insights of our startup and our competitors. Collectively, it is pittance.
This would actually be a good idea to do about once every 2 weeks or once a month. Anyone else do this?
Could anybody suggest good articles on how to pitch an idea to a potential co-founder to get him/her on a team?
Depends on how lucrative your users are to advertisers.

If your newsletter was read by 100 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, I doubt you would have a hard time finding advertisers.

Social network "junk traffic" is not particularly valuable. You would need millions of page views just to get in the door of major media buyers.

Adsense is a different story - you don't need page views to get started.
30 Scripts For Galleries, Slideshows and Lightboxes | Smashing Magazine
ask PG. perhaps he did? maybe he doesnt like juwo.
You are actually welcome to use other contextual advertising networks as long as you clearly distinguish Google Ads from Other Networks Ads. This is easier than it sounds, as the standard AdSense unit has an "ads by google" image
meaning, you will need to contact and gain compliance with carriers. this could be a very substantial barrier. how do you plan to overcome this?
--hopefully you don't take this negatively, i'm curious what you come up with :)
Whether your talking to a potential co-founder, or an AI, the game is the same- You want to convince them that you can do great things together, if only you had a little help.

You want them to believe that the goal is achievable, and the rewards are worth it. You want them excited.

No one will ever invest in your idea. Make it both of yours.

-Colin
This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. Thanks for the good concrete example (most of what I said was hand-waving :-).
Are Paul Graham and professional golfer Phil Mickelson long lost twins? (something fun for today)
Sorry about that - it is our site, but we're still finalizing the copy. We'll have it available in the very near future.
How to use "Web 2.0" in your company (features Inkling, a YC startup)
The time we spent moving paper around to implement lean outweighed the benefits (One issue also was a team member in Europe, but that was not the major problem with using analog methods). Once we went to a program driven database system, we immediately started realizing large productivity gains. We're at about 35% higher efficiency with far better quality now, and hope to hit the 50% mark once the system is complete in the next few weeks.
I've worked some kind of job at all times since I was 16. Painting houses, cashier at a grocery store, retail stores, lab consultant, summer research, internships, and now job job job. No long breaks. Just work.

I spent my teens and college years thinking the kids who traveled all summer were idiots. That they weren't contributing to society. Now I'm 27 and wishing I had taken a break.. Done something because I wanted to, not because it was "what you did". I thought that being a "year behind" would be disastrous for my career. Well guess what.. 1 year is nothing when you have to work for 50 more.

If you are young and able to just LIVE... do it. If living is working on your own startup, do it. If it's building a working replica of a PDP machine out of legos, do it. Just get out there. There's plenty of time for work.
Perhaps you could grow it? How do you define "target audience"?
If you are failing anyway, you might as well tell us?
Make sure you check your junk mail folder for your invite code. We sent them out to about half the list today.
there are several services here (and I'm sure in other countries too) where you have a web page and can send messages for more or less money. look for "send sms" on Google and I'm sure you'll find some. The carrier may offer a web based service to which you can connect and send messages to.
Sending sms from a web page is nothing new, not paying for it is :). Try to understand the idea of giving stuff for free to your users. The number of the users will increase exponentially (well, depending on the service you're giving) .
Jogging Over a Distance - A Novel Use of Consumer Electronics
Why 3 equal co-founders might not be a great idea
google white paper on malware: present in 1/10 of websites
we do http://teenwag.com on a macbook pro
If you spend all your time doing $X it's a good idea to take a break from doing $X every once in a while.
I heard projected revenue on gifts is like $17m for this year? I'll try to find a link to back me up.
Agreed. And it's nothing more than trolling to suggest that this has anything to do with PHP or Rails (especially based on the evidence given).
http://www.teenwag.com/ this is faster than twitter and jaiku and runs on erlang and python
PHP style variables. Always fun.
I second this submission. I'd like to know the mean/mode/median of (karam/# submissions) for example.
Some interesting observations, but only one side of the story. We need to know about all the start-ups that failed, and details of who was at the helm.

Perhaps the under-40 crowd is over-represented because there are far more attempts.

Looking the the winners tells us nothing about the losers.
worse, I wiped out my savings. (http://juwo-works.blogspot.com/2007/03/i-need-your-advice-startup-failing.html)

No cofounders, nor investors, nor users. That is the frank truth.
Interesting to see how various people chose to define "Web 2.0".
python and erlang for http://teenwag.com
no way is the wrong way http://teenwag.com
AFAIK Veotag can be used for just one thing - annotate with text, a broadcast video clip - that is why they have one simple line.

(I hope that didnt sound arrogant).
It wont do anything, I promise. At worst, it may hang the machine.

Your files are untouched - only juwo files and config files are written.

You can uninstall using Add|Remove Programs
Jakob Nielsen Sounds Off About Web 2.0... Again!
While having the right cofounders substantially increases your chances of success compared to going solo, having the wrong cofounders can do just the opposite.

Tricky to find the right ones, critical but tricky.
They didn't give many concrete examples of adding value other than the advertising company, and Google.

But I think another example would be iTunes (no one else brings music to your ear as well). If that service went away, that would cause people pain.
yeah, I've been hacking Drupal all week. I actually don't really care for PHP style.
_consider keeping a controlling voting interest in the company_

Not sure why this would ever be in question. Giving 1/3 of a company to a stranger is frankly inconceivable to me.

Well, on the bright side, they're working for _you_ now, since you still own a large chunk of it.
Acquisitions:  "out of control... there's more action right now than during the boom."
A Tale of Two OSes: Vista vs. Mac OS X
I will be there too, not attending e-bazaar though :-(

My goal is to meet the right people AND get some candid yet valuable feedback for our startup. Hoping for some divine intervention ;-)
G cares if you mix adsense with other contextual text advertising. banners, text link ads, display ads are all fair game.

Did you mean "does not care"? Being "all fair game" implies that you mean that Google does not care.
I think this is a really important point. Here:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=twitter.com&site1=jaiku.com&site2=&site3=&site4=&y=r&z=1&h=300&w=610&range=6m&size=Medium&url=twitter.com
http://snapshot.compete.com/twitter.com+jaiku.com

If you believe the public stats, Jaiku is 6x-15x smaller that Twitter.
contextual text advertising is different from {banners, (non-contextual) text link ads, display ads}
I try to spend two weeks out of each year without computers or the internet - usually one week off for every six months on. That may sound like a lot, but in practice it hardly matters because I spend such a huge % of all my other time on here, and it is very possible to get work done without a computer. I find that I get many of my best ideas when I'm forced to take a step back and live in the non-tech world for awhile.
The problem is, juwo is a new concept.
Also it can do about 5-8 different things.
So there are about 13 use cases with demos listed.

How can I simplify further?
I have tried my best.

I would like to discuss further your points.

0) Do you see the links to the screenshots? I didnt want to list them in the main page because
that's another 300K in 3 images. Plus they take up a lot of space.

1) Pen and paper
"There are problems with voice recorder, writing, and typing" (
http://juwo.com/details.html#Record)
problem with writing? you cant get it into the computer.

"Your use case doesn't fit"
When juwo is ported to a PDA, it will.
Andrew Chen: How does the online ad gold rush impact your Web 2.0 site?
TODO:
posting comments on blogs.
link exchanging, shall do.

blog: juwo-works.blogspot.com
cnet/download.com: tried; they cannot host Java Web Start.

Questionable - open source? (forget about profit from it)
Sam Odio is a good guy on this web site.
He encourages people.
I like him.

(Sam, Why sell Iraqi Dinars, of all things? Come and sell juwo for me - you'll make more money that way).
The Uncanny Valley of User Interface Design
text me at 707 4 77 3990 or email if you would like to meetup, I'm basically looking to accomplish the same things there.
Well after a month of sacrificing all my free time... this is what i came up with
I thought id share with you guys... feedback is very much appreciated... Im taking the weekend off

http://www.theother9to5.com/
think reddit for events
The shortest private beta ever
Guy Kawasaki gets zinged
For the record my use of a leading search engine's advertising programme leads to about 1c per page view for me.
snore 1998 called. They want their blogger back.

Also when is Nielsen going to get with the program and an add RSS feed?
One of the nice features in Common Lisp is the ability to optionally declare types on objects to make them static. This is very convenient when you want to optimize something on-the-fly; just find the bottleneck and add a type declarator to it. This can go a long way before you drop into C.
So it's 2000, you've created a great MP3 player that runs on a Mac and...
From the article:

"The meeting fully booked with Apple, I contacted the AOL executives Ã¢ÂÂ whom we were still deep in negotiations with Ã¢ÂÂ so they could be involved. It only seemed fair; they came to us first, and maybe this Apple meeting would make them want to snatch us up all the quicker. Except, their schedules were booked. They couldn't make it Ã¢ÂÂ at all. Those crazy business people, I tell you! All those Palm Pilots and not a pixel of free time on the calendaring screen.

Thus, I had to cancel the meeting with Apple. AOL couldn't make it, I said. Maybe we can reschedule?

The meeting with Apple never took place. Hmm.. I wonder what it was all about?"

My jaw dropped at that point. Later in the article:

""You guys remember the last time we tried to meet with you? It was actually because we wanted you guys to make iTunes," explained Phil."

Now that's just painful.
Where a Bill becomes a Law -- like Google Map's driving directions but for tracking federal legislation
So you've got 2500 unique visitors this month doing 50k page views. general, social network traffic might generate $1-2 cpm so that's $100/month in revenue.

if you have a high value niche with targeted, quantifiable traffic you can get that maybe as high as $50/cpm on a well marketed site (read: you have ad sales people or you're cramming the site with ad channels.)

This guy
http://www.johnchow.com/make-money-on-the-internet-april-2007/
has grown his blog to 250,000 page views, crammed it with every kind of contextual ad you can think of, is a compelling writer with great content. He's at $50/cpm. Of that, 40% comes from a pay-per-post ReviewMe ad thing, so his ads are generating about $30cpm.

So you can put adsense on the page, but you won't make any money. and you're a ways off from doing banner ads.
I love the idea.
New startup esyshopping is working on local shopping search
The Truth About Evite -- A diatribe from the founder of Socializr and Friendster
I tried searching tonight in Denver and it returned Boston results. Might also want the front page to start with most popular or something since it started really empty. I think the black and dark colors make it a little hard to read. Cool idea and could really work if you got a group of friends all using it to meet up and decide what is cool any given night.

Just my initial thoughts / 2 cents.
Phrase: "tonight in st louis"

1.	[vote up]	this is a test
Venu (Boston) on May 17, 2007 (tonight), posted by twism 2 weeks ago
2 points | 8 comments

2.	[vote up]	twest
The Rack (Boston) on May 17, 2007 (tonight), posted by twism 6 days ago
1 point | 7 comments

Whoops..
with most popular or something since it started really empty.

I agree - put the most popular or upcoming on the main page. This is especially important at the beginning, when the majority of search queries will return empty results.
Interesting data. My first reaction was that lisp and scheme are still underutilized and underappreciated.

But then, the metrics he's using wouldn't count downloads of the PLT books, or Shriram Krishnamurthi's Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation, and it's not clear SICP or EOPL would be counted as Scheme books in their reckoning.

And that's assuming you accept popularity as a useful metric.
Oops, it looks like this is a dupe - URL threw me off:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=22647
I think the main difference is that Veotag is a web application. They host the videos online and you can browse them like Youtube.

While your product has more functionality, it's difficult to get running because it requires Java. I think the social or "Web 2.0" aspects of Veotag makes it somewhat more useful.
5 reasons not to partner with an "idea guy"
Please consider supporting OpenID logins.
$2000 covers your expenses for two months?! Man, I wish it were that easy for me
I like the idea. It's simple and to the point.

You should also check out going.com (formerly heyletsgo.com). They are a Boston-based startup that has about 90k users. Going.com is a social network, but they try to get you out to events. I know this site started by using research from MIT's Media Lab to find events automatically. This might be worth checking out because all you need to do know is (a) seed the site with events and (b) get users.