skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show, don't tell.

Don't tell me (or pg, or anyone else) that Comet is a cool new technology which will transform the web -- show us something which you can do with it. Lots of people say "hey, I'm cool", but few of them actually are -- until you show us something which your cool new technology can do for us, you fall into the category of unsupported hype.

We were ultimately not given funding, probably because our proposal seemed to be "Look at this cool new technology that will transform the web. We're experts on it." rather than "Here is exactly what we want to make and precisely how we'll make money."

I obviously can't read pg's mind, but I strongly suspect the issue was more that you hadn't convinced him that Comet was useful rather than due to your lack of concrete business model.
Every one of these "seems" like common sense. It sure is nice when someone (especially someone who's been there) articulates them so well. This is definitely bulletin board material. Thank you, Sam!
Computer Science Education: We are training easily replaceable professionals.
I wouldnt want to avoid Mr Blue Blood. He sounds like someone good to have on the team and his kids.
cperciva: on the one hand, you're right -- We didn't convince YC that Comet was a useful technology. But its not a matter of showing versus telling. We showed a few prototypes (http://www.orbited.org/livehelp.html for example) and proved that we could do cool things. The Rejoinder was, "But flash can do that." and we were unprepared for that response. The point of the article is to illustrate that pure html/javascript technology apparently is given no credence in the eyes of YC, an important player in the venture industry.

I clearly think Comet is a useful technology, but then again, I lead development on an open source comet server (Orbited) and I write for www.cometdaily.com. So why doesn't someone more unbiased let me down easy. That is, explain to me why Comet is not a useful technology.
Why would an end-user care about Comet over AJAX?
52

Let's not forget one very important fact that I never see mentioned here...

When I was in college, and then in my 20's, there was NOTHING available like there is today. No microcomputers, no internet, no start-up mentality. (When I say "no", I mean for 99% of us.) When I graduated college, most people had nothing ($48 in the bank and a 6 year old car) and EVERYONE wanted a good job with benefits and a chance for a better life.

I did that and was fortunate to get into IT at the right time in my life.

Fast forward 30 years...

Imagine having written 30,000 programs, implemented 100 major apps, worked with hundreds of great people, and made tons of mistakes and STILL have the same chance at start-up success that everyone else here has. As long as you have an open mind, play nice with others, and take care of yourself, this is a great time for ALL hackers, regardless of age.

I may not run the 100 yard dash as fast as I did in 1978, but my code sure does. I'm having more fun than ever. Can't wait til I make my own, "What do you think of my app?" post.
34, soon to be 35. I've been a Software Engineer for over 13 years and have to say that while it has always been very enjoyable, it was only over the past 4 or so years when I went independent, and focused on startups and what not, that I really found my true happiness. I work from home now and have found that not only am I producing my best work, faster than ever, but I'm happier than ever. This is work? ;)

Eric
http://www.codedevl.com
I think that anyone with a technical background would agree that technologies like comet are useful. But it seems like yc wanted you to differentiate comet from the other approaches.

How would you even make money off comet based widgets or even some kind of platform for making them? The problem is that no one wants to pay for development platforms or pre-built widgets. All of the best stuff in this category is free....django, YUI, jquery, rails, comet blah blah....
If my app is ideal at 24,173 bytes, shame on me if I deploy it using 24,174 bytes.

Some may call that "anal", but I call it "precise".

The only framework that supports this philosophy is my own.
Man Follows GPS Directions into Oncoming Train, Ruins Tracks, Gets $100,000 Bill
A computer consultant learned the hard way that GPS is by no means a perfect navigation technology.
useful to whom?

It's obvious YC likes stuff that is made for what the mass would like to use.

I'd say YC probably choose to interview you mostly because you seemed to have talent. Maybe if you had displayed more flexibility on doing maybe other things maybe YC would not have rejected you.
I did look at Comet when it was mentioned here a while ago and my general reaction was that it was total overkill for most applications. It's worth remembering that the so called 'Push Technology' of the 1990s (such as PointCast) was doing a straight HTTP GET at regular intervals, the only push was that the user didn't push a button for an update. Now in the noughties we're doing similar stuff in the background with XHR polling from timers.

If what you really want to do is _real time_ pushing of data to the client then you need to come up with a really compelling situation in which that's needed. The current Comet proposal seems as you say somewhere on your blog "a big hack". What it really needs is simplicity. Tell me how this is better than polling using XHR.

In fact, if you want to excite me then give me a chunk of Javascript that as the following methods:

stream_to_me( url, callback )

I call this, it returns to me immediately. It handles a background connection to url and streams data off it using standard HTTP (perhaps it's holding a connection open, perhaps it's polling, user shouldn't care and should be transparent to the remote web server).

When it's got a complete chunk of data (perhaps it's a complete piece of XML) it calls callback with the chunk.

That would be compelling to me because I could just include that little library and then get async. callbacks with data coming 'live' from my server.
I was kinda shocked back in business school to learn that the age of an entrepreneur is a significant factor in success - the older you are the more likely you are to succeed. The explanation was that you have more contacts, more experience, and more money.
That being said, there's probably no better way to increase your chances of success than failing miserably, preferably several times.
The canonical example is Ray Kroc, who took over a little company called "McDonalds" starting at age 53.
47, co-founder, digg.com.
HD DVD To Join Deadpool
+1. That's the really important, bottom line question, and I don't see it answered anywhere.
Why Yahoo Life Needs AIM To Succeed; Is My 2008 Prediction Coming True?
Nothing is really ever about technology; it's about its application. And no one is willing to pay their time/effort/etc. to a new technology unless it has seriously significant advantages. So what is the application that Comet provides that is a killer?
I don't get it - they're beat by South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, yet they're copying India.
Framing it in terms of useful technology or not is kind of missing the point. AJAX is good enough, or at least almost all developers out there think so.

What are you planning to do? Make something for end users, or a tool kit for developers?

Either way, you've got to bring some real value to the table. Cleaner code or xy% reduced bandwidth isn't going to cut it. You have to have concrete benefits. What does this technology enable that wasn't possible before?

If you can answer that question, you're good to go. If you can't, no ammount of justification or 'developer education' will save you.
Agreed. Perhaps his children would be interested in internships and could be a valuable addition to the team.
I just turned 40 as well. Over the hill? I don't think so...I'm learning as much now as I was at 25. I've never been involved in a startup. I spent a few years as a sysadmin, then got out of the business to become a cartographer. I'm interested in technologies surrounding GPS and GIS.

I learned about computing on a TRS-80 and the Commodore 64; when I got to college it was VAX and Digital UNIX. I started with BASIC and C and I'm learning Python and Ruby.
Example if GMail used Comet, your Inbox would get updated the second you got a new mail instead of every x minutes.

You can achieve something close to it by using very insistent polling but this causes an unreasonable load on the server. Whereas with push technology you can get live updates without this unnecessary load.

How is that for a compelling argument?
Actually, I once heard a great Stanford podcast in which a gerontologist talked about how the mind changes as you age, and one of her points is that the elderly tend to be fairly happy with their lives.

It's worth remembering that, while you may look at a 70-year-old and think "I could never live like that", that's largely because your mind is not seventy years old yet. The good -- and scarcely surprising -- news is that old people seem to be fairly happy doing the things old people do.

I wish I could provide you with a link to that lecture. Heck, I wish I could find it again myself -- maybe this summary would be less vague, then. But Stanford's "iTunes U" has got to be one of the worst-designed pieces of information technology I've ever seen: you can't Google the damned thing, and once you do find something I have no idea how to link to it. You can Google up plenty of flames: see here: http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/022052.php
Correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't "Comet" been around for ages? - the only change is that someone has put a catchy name to it. Or is it something more than using iframes to keep a connection open to the server and stream live data over that connection?
Approaching 37.
How to Design Software With Bad Requirements
All software developers have customers; the end users. Even if they are just the people in the department next door, they are the people who drive our work. Ultimately, it's our job to deliver what they want, not we believe to be what they want. Sometimes that's a tough fact to face.
Our startup is in the merchant account services industry.
Gotta give two thumbs up to that first point. I completely underestimated how emotional I am, and how much that interfered with my work.
The fact that this article doesn't even consider the widgets themselves to be the reason for the rejection probably sums it up. Your customers don't care what you're using to poll. While it might be true that Comet will enable someone to develop really good 'live' web applications it doesn't sound like it will be you, you're too caught up in Comet itself.
We do have a blog and are posting nearly daily. I see our blog as being the absolute minimum. It's something we have to do, but it's not going to be enough. Good suggestion, though. It's a good start.
OpenVZ joins forces with Ubuntu
That's a great argument. Could even be a show stopper under certain conditions.

Next stupid question(s):

Even though I've written quite of bit of AJAX (Javascript / PHP / MySQL), I have not yet committed to any technology for my release 1.0.

If I wanted to put together a prototype using Comet instead of AJAX, how would you suggest I proceed?

Also, from a business point of view, what are the major pros & cons of comet vs ajax? (hosting, finding help, etc.)
I don't remember where I got the following snippet from so if someone knows, please point it out so that I can give them credit.

How many mongrels?

Here's a simple formula to follow:

A. Take the (average or median) request time, in seconds. Say, 0.250 seconds (250ms)

B. How many requests do you want to handle at peak? (e.g. 10,000 a minute, 166 a second)

C. Multiply A x B : 0.250 * 166 = 41.5

So you need about 40 mongrels to handle the load. At about 60MB per listener, that's 2.4GB of RAM, plus a bit of room for leakiness and swapping. Ezra at Engine Yard suggests "about 10 dogs per CPU core", which means that if we have a 4-core opteron box with 3GB of RAM, then this is possible on one box.

Your mileage will vary, which means, if the box is lagging, remove a few mongrels.
I think PG probably knows exactly what Comet is. I also think his question: "aren't all web pages real-time?" was most likely a loaded one.

If I were interviewing you, you bet I'd ask something similar. I'd want to find out if you grasp the implications of using Comet as your company's technical backbone.
I'm 39 (for two more weeks anyway)
Gmail does use comet. For the chat.
There is no "comet vs. ajax" dichotomy. Comet employs ajax as a means to interpret data pushed from the server. If your application needs asynchronous, live updates, then you need Comet or Flash. If you use Comet, you'll undoubtedly be using Ajax as well.
It wasn't working for me yesterday as well, but it looks like all is well again.

However, one thing that I've gotten used to with sites using textareas meant for copying and pasting is that when you click in the box it automatically selects all of the text for you, eliminating the need for any scrolling. For sites like yours whose success is based not only on its usefulness but also the small amount of time needed to get started, minor shortcuts like that can dramatically change the overall user experience if you can make your set up as painless as possible.
It's not.

Your most compelling argument would be something like "GMail would be 10x as popular with sub-second client updates and Comet would make that possible with the existing resources."

Note that the premise is clearly false - GMail would not be significantly more popular with subsecond client updates. That leaves you arguing that push would save resources but I'd guess that the current polling intervals are such that 10% is spent on them, which limits the benefits to 10%.

You need to show that comet enables valuable new apps, makes existing apps significantly more valuable to users, or makes it easier to produce new apps. And, even if you do, you're not going to make much money.

Note the weasel word "most" - your best argument isn't all that good. Your users, the app writers, are going to make far more money.
Sounds like focusing on technology, rather than a clear problem that you have a solution to.

Comet technology (If you want to call it that) is fantastic. I wrote http://www.mibbit.com using the techniques, and you can bet it loads a lot faster than flash/java applet/anything else.
Also these days with browsers on far more platforms, you're not guaranteed flash support. (Not to mention it being proprietary/slow/etc)

Focusing on comet though seems like saying "I want to do a web2.0 startup" or "an AJAX startup". They're all just buzzwords with little substance.

Does look like you've got a great system, just need the killer app now :)
I think you're exactly right. We thought our expertise was valuable, but what YC wanted was a business, not technical expertise alone.
Image Processing in Common Lisp with ch-image
I haven't looked up comet into detail, but I suppose it is using Server Push, which was described in the first CGI book I ever read, 13 years ago. There is the problem of realtime updates with AJAX, and of course that Server Push odditiy has come to mind several times when I discussed it with friends. Maybe if Comet pulled it off in a proper way, it could be rather cool. However, ultimately it would also be a hack of sorts, which gives me an uneasy feeling about basing my business on it.

Sorry for the uninformed blabbling, I just wanted to challenge the "community has never heard about it" stuff - at least I have heard about it, sort of, but I did not yet consider it the next killer application.
I think to be one of the principle developers at a start-up, you need to do better than feeling like your "skills are lesser than a huge community of people working together".

IMHO, the two/three primary developers at a start-up should be able to code up a new framework that better meets their needs (though possibly less total features) in less time and with fewer bugs than a huge community. It shouldn't even be a close race. Also, by developing their own framework they will know exactly what parts suck and still need work and be better able to support it at launch.
42, and it feels good :)
We don't know that the folks in startup A learned anythinguseful. We also don't know that A's processes or paperwork can provide any benefit to startup B, let alone if A is willing to sell for a lower price than B can get them from elsewhere.

If A's processes and paperwork are valuable to other startups, A should be selling them itself. (B has a biz, and it's not processes and paperwork.)
you can find a half updated list on the wikipedia page for ycombinator.
I'm over 30. I don't have plans for a startup anytime soon... but I love the comments in this thread. They let me know it's still possible!

And I haven't ruled it out...
Golden rule of web caching | Tips for high performance sites
I don't know, I've read Atwood for years and he pretty much thinks there are the 80% of developers that don't really care about computers, the 19% that do care, program for fun, and read computer books/blogs (he puts himself here), and 1% that are the elite wizards that create new languages, run the best OSS projects, drive new standards, etc. I don't think he's critical of these elite developers, just observing their nature.
Why Hasn't OpenID Caught On?
34. I'm a career changer. I'm getting bored of being a ER/Critical care nurse. :)

So, I'm finishing a CS degree this summer, and I'll be working on startups full-time while working as an ER nurse part time. It's not a bad way to boot strap, really.
Same here. Got into computers with an IBM PCjr (ha they sucked) and wrote my first programs in BASIC and Pascal. Took a sabbatical from computers that took a little longer than expected and got back into them around 1998.

Since then, I went back to school and eventually got an MSCS. Still working on picking up new skills in parallel with my current job (which is all Java/J2EE).
Because most that do catch on take a while, and some good things never do.

Mostly, people don't have a problem with using a username/insecure password. They want stuff and don't care much about security. Although I agree that if Google, Yahoo, MySpace, or one of the other humongous sites accepted it, that would spread the word much faster outside of the geek echo chamber.
Since SEO and organic search favors older links, I started the blog for my startup before I even started coding! I'm still very early on so I can't report any results, but if you write blog entries that are more useful than anything else, people will find them. But it takes time and LOTS of writing (see Paul Graham, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, Reg Braithwaite, etc). Little mediocre posts get quickly lost and forgotten because they're not worth pointing out (see Steve Yegge's latest post).

SEO prominence comes not from what words you put in your posts but from content good enough that other people link to you. Become prominent! (there, that's enough armchair quarterbacking)
"Only those who continue to change remain my kin" - Nietzsche.
There are no hard and fast rules - just do what makes you happy. If having a family will make you happy, just do it! That's what I did, I'm 27 with 2 kids (and struggling to find time for my side projects) and it works great for me. If you want a wealthy family, then you're better off waiting, because not only do kids cost (primarily for the bigger house/apt in neighborhood with schools), they take time away from working longer to make more $$. But the right answer depends on you.

But if the goal is to have successful startups, then live cheap, start young, and try and many times as you can endure! A 40 year old who has already done 10 startups is probably a lot more likely to succeed than one who hasn't done any.
I've always wanted to be able to run terminal-style applications in a web page without polling. Can Comet do that reliably?
Yes try the telnet app at http://www.mibbit.com
Geeks.com hacked, Customer Data Stolen
We don't look for business expertise so much as the raw materials that go into it. E.g. the judgement to realize that publishing (supposedly) verbatim quotes from your YC interview on the web would cause any future investor to think twice before talking to you.
Because the intersection of the sets of people who (a) sign up for more than two websites a year; (b) know and care enough about security to avoid just using the same password on every site; (c) think it's much easier to use OpenID than to just use the "email forgotten password" link; and (d) aren't just using 1passwd or some other password-caching program is apparently really small.

Of course, that's just one of the reasons.
Yes, or he misunderstood the question about real-time. If PG doesn't know about Comet, he surely knows about Ajax, and so he surely is aware on how most web pages aren't real-time.
The "Halloween documents" (I and II) by Vinod Valloppillil and Josh Cohen were talking about it the previous year: they were written and leaked in 1998.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/
Revenue/User in Social Networks
I saw this comment at:

http://tristateventuresblog.com/2007/10/25/microsoft-facebook-aoltime-warner/

No social network has been able to surpass the $3/user/year mark. Facebook has a shot at it though, they need to do a lot of work and I think could double it to $6 per user per year. Myspace i believe is around $5/user/year now. It takes years and luck to go beyond $3. I don't know why but that's been the magic number. And that's in a popular network, smaller networks generate less revenue. Myspace was at $3/user/year in revenue when they were acquired. Facebook's value is users actually like being on facebook. Facebook needs a social search engine and email platform though.

Comments?
I agree. I'm surprised YC didn't suggest building some consumer facing app that makes use of your comet stuff. There are many application areas that could benefit from real-time capabilities.

Also, Paul has talked about how turning a luxury into a commodity is usually a good recipe for success. Most real-time applications are very expensive and use lame desktop client/server architectures. Imagine something web-based and free that does the same thing.
Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires
Not sure if I would hire him as a Java Developer, though. How familiar is he with the latest Java Frameworks?
I wish VCs were so varied...

Actually Mr. IRR doesn't sound like someone to avoid. If I were a founder I'd be pretty excited about getting funding from someone whose previous investments had yielded 30 IPOs.
Thanks Sam! As usual, excellent advice. Though it seems like common sense, you'd be surprised how hard this advice might be to follow. Especially the last one.
I hate using these buzz words, but comet allows the user to get data as soon as they should get it.
It's a technique that's been propelled to 'buzzword' status, when it probably shouldn't have been.

It'll certainly completely change how websites work though, making them far more responsive and interactive.
Ramaze: a Ruby framework that will amaze
The Best and Worst in Business and Entrepreneurship
What better way to re-evaluate the end of the year, get caught up on what you missed, learn from what worked and what didn't, and prepare for 2008?
Undergraduate programming
32 here
Paul, its important that the Comet community understands how little mindshare we have. If you hadn't heard of the technology after reading thousands of startup ideas, then what chance do we have? Thats compelling enough reason to post what I remember of the conversation. I sincerely doubt my article would make other investors nervous. The interview contents don't reflect poorly on YC, they reflects poorly on our (my partners and I) ideas and the entire Comet community.
The logical conclusion of MySpace layout cacophony -- from one of my favorite bands
Some sentence constructs you're "gonna want to avoid!"