skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I call BS on this article.

Fact: Tipd has shown very strong growth. This is true. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tipd.com/?metric=uv

Claim: This growth can be traced to their great "community features" like an inviter, a top domains page, a top ambassadors page and "maintaining focus on community and continuously delivering tools to help them sort through the noise that has become an unfortunate side effect of today's information age."

Problem: If Tipd is so great at community building, why are there only 6 comments across the 15 stories on their front page? And all 6 of these comments are either Techcrunch style "Awesome article!" comments or spam comments promoting some other site.

Community = comments/discussion and they appear to be struggling mightily on that front.

What's more likely is that Tipd is powered by autosubmission scripts scraping feeds they like. That their traffic is all organic, attracted by the financial keywords. And that their comments are left by their own sock puppet accounts as well as financial blog spammers.

I run a social news site myself. These approaches are all very easy and tempting to take to boost traffic and activity. If someone does it, fine, but then don't pitch a phony story to Read Write Web, chalking your growth up to other factors. It hurts the cause by putting false information out there.
Has he convinced you to do all the work and accept all the liabilities while he gets to keep all the profits? If so, he is a savvy business person. Otherwise, not so much.

P.S. Don't let him write the contract.
The story linked in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550719 has some anecdotes about how some of the workers get lured to Dubai and then stuck there. Saudi Arabia (one of the countries I've lived in) did similar things to their working classes.
"The most severe in my opinion is assignment."

Clojure solves this problem by going all the way to the opposite extreme. "No assignment for you." Clojure data structures are immutable, and if you really want to do assignment, you need to explicitly use a ref/var/atom, which means you are going to figure out a way to write your program without assignment if at all possible. Clojure, of course, is designed around functional programming that has many idioms to make assignment-less programming the natural way to do things.

I guess what this means is that Clojure can appeal to Python/Ruby/Perl hackers wanting to learn a different way to think about programming.
My comments were based on market observations: the fact that Friendfeed just isn't growing.

What is your comment based on? Personal conviction?

I'd like to think Friendfeed is necessary, too. But the facts are proving us both wrong.
You might end up having some trademark issues. For example, I could see Amazon not being too happy with the example link http://amazon.twi.bz/a.

The other thing that I see is that for a URL shortener, the above is 22 characters. What about if you were linking to a page here. For example, a link to this page is http://ycombinator.twi.bz/b. That's 27 characters.

If you are going to use a URL shortener (not that I'm suggesting that it is a good idea), why use one that is so verbose (relatively speaking)?

So, I'm not sure that there is a sweet spot here. You have people on one side that will never _ever_ use a URL shortener. On the other side, you have people that want the smallest link possible. There isn't much space in the middle (IMHO).
Step 1) Remove the proposed device from your pocket without altering its current state (don't interrupt playback, or start playing when silent).
Step 2) Operate all of the functions of the device one-handed.

If you can do that, the controls work. If not, punt.
This article is nothing but fluff. The advice is essentially: use widgets, social sharing, and invites - nothing that really has to do with community building. The rest of the article is a giant ad for Tip'd.

If you're really trying to build a community, why not emulate Hacker News? Curate your content, encourage intelligent conversation, and define & enforce your community's culture. I feel like those ideas stretch farther than social news sites and, so far, it has worked.
The flip side for Amazon is that since it's clear that link is going to Amazon you are more likely to click on it which means more business for Amazon.
But what if there are hundreds of developers working on a project, and I need to discover if the bug is caused in my own module or somewhere else? It seems to me that the article was written from the perspective of pet-project programmer who mostly deals with his own code only.
Yes. This will be similar to "committing to a release date" (no matter what) and figuring out ways to achieve the same. We can also draw other parallels like "keep improving" (without incurring long-term debts).
The “Good” Student
I appreciate the hackery and speed with which you implemented this idea born out of HN. That being said, I really, really don't care about another URL shortener.
This will be heresy to some, but I've found it to be true. I don't ever use debuggers, and haven't for years. I examine my code, and use logging to examine my assertions. If I think I know what the problem is, I will write a unit test to prove my assertion.

Doing it this way really makes you think about (and understand) what your code is doing. One of the side-effects of this is that it encourages me to write very small methods. Having small methods makes it easier for me to wrap my brain around what my code is doing.

I read years ago that Linus Torvalds also doesn't use a debugger, relying on debug statements. That was the catalyst for me beginning to do this myself.
I would say references are a good start. If they are respected by their peers and customers that's going to be a good sign. The other thing is obviously their track record. If they've done good things in the past like increase sales x% or launch new initiatives. But do your own research into these matters, your 'truth' means more than what a business person says.

I've had similar concerns and got lucky meeting people through either acquaintances or through work. So before there was ever a business partnership relationship I got to see how the person worked with customers and other coworkers.

Good luck.
Sublet Avail. ASAP through 12/31. $50 discount/month (postid:390812)
+1

I had similar experience with it a few years ago. Given that the laptops weren't as powerful back then, it was a big pain trying to debug using Venkman but that was the only decent debugger available then (that, and the "alerts")

I heard that it didn't get a lot of attention from mozilla back then. Firbug wouldn't have existed if Venkman wasn't slow and had an easy-to-use UI.
Do you consider releasing the URL mapping database? That would make sense in the context of transparency.
Do you know of any investors similar to YC?
What we did to (not) get into Techstars - Part 2
(Content in a single page) http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-07/th...

In the middle of all the chemical names, this is the only one that stayed

“Start acclimating to uncertainty as a way of life.”

:)
You mean the mapping between twi.bz URLs and the real URLs? Yes, I absolutely plan to release the data. I'm just working on what the best way is, and I wanted to get some feedback.

It's worth knowing that I hacked this together in a two hour session very, very late last night. This is its public debut.

I want to be able to release the mapping and also the trending information.

What format would people prefer?
Start working with them. It becomes immediately apparent. I'm on my second startup, we just raised funds and brought on a VP of marketing, and we did it by telling one guy "congrats you're on the team" and a week later realized that he wasn't the right fit, so told him "goodbye" and then we told another guy "congrats you're in the team" and after a week we all agreed he is totally awesome, and he's still the guy, and we wouldn't have been looking for him if we didn't think of the other guys first week as his job interview.

Also, sales & marketing != biz management
A similar service is DecentURL. It generally has slightly longer URLs, but lets you put your own descriptive string in the link, in addition to adding the target's domain as the link's subdomain.

http://decenturl.com/
Apply to AlphaLab:  $25K and 5mo free office space
If you two people are drowning and they grab onto each other, does that increase their odds of survival?
Feynman on the Arrow of Time
For a company that's extremely close to bankruptcy I was expecting something a bit more exciting and well, reasonable.

I think Segway only selling 2,000 units in the UK since 2002 isn't very good news either.
while(!successful) {
successful = AttemptSuccess();
}
ExploreMarriage();
I agree with that. When working on crappy code that is under the control of other teams (or worse, nobody), I find myself having to use the debugger quite often.

On crappy code that's under full ownership of me or my team, we can (and do) clean up the code and leave the debugger on the shelf.
"I hope the Clojure guys change things."

In many ways, Clojure seems like a deliberate response to each of the common complaints against Lisp.

Lisp is old and moldy. It must be primitive by today's standards.

Hard to call Clojure "old" when it's only been around a couple years.

The exciting languages to learn now are Python, Ruby, Groovy, etc.

Clojure has been very successful at building nerd "street cred." It has latched onto the fascination with functional programming for parallel applications, for one. It also makes use of concise syntax for data structure literals, like Python and Ruby, too. Dynamic, etc. etc.

Lisp is only for artificial intelligence.

Don't think Clojure has this problem.

Lisp is interpreted and slow.
Lisp programs page heavily, so they're even slower.

Clojure gets the performance benefits of running on the highly tuned JVM, with tricks like type hints to get close to Java speeds for critical portions of code. Worst case, you can always drop into Java as your "assembly" language.

The parentheses look weird and hard to manage.

Clojure mixes up () with [] {} to make code easier to mentally parse.

Lisp uses prefix notation for things that every other popular language
does with infix notation, which is just very weird. (And it leads to
more parentheses.)

No change here.

Lisp is too big.
Lisp is too hard to learn.

Clojure is pretty small and doesn't take much time to get started.

Lisp is all about lists and recursion; that's all you do with it.

Some might start to think "Clojure is all about functional programming." Don't know if that's good or bad.

I don't know which implementation to use.

There's only one Clojure implementation.

It isn't "batteries included" (that is, it's not easy to get set up with all the tools and libraries you need).

You get all the libraries written for Java.

I don't like Emacs, and you can't use Lisp without Emacs.

I use Emacs, which is also great for Clojure, so I can't judge how easy it is to program in Clojure without Emacs.

Lisp isn't useful for my career; few potential employers want it.

You might be able to sneak Clojure into a Java shop.
We applied to both YC and AlphaLab last year. We ended up being a part of AlphaLab, and I'm so glad that we did. It's been a great experience so far--lots of great advisors and contacts (who knew that Pittsburgh had so many tech companies?) Also, the terms are considerably better than YC. :)

AlphaLab is now accepting applications for the next cycle and they are very similar to the YC applications, so I thought I'd mention this to everyone. Let me know if you have questions!
ITunes variable pricing nothing to do with “supply and demand”, just greed and stupidity
thats a remarkable service. They take this ugly url: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ [38 characters]
and turn it into this pretty url:
http://youtube.decenturl.com/medieval-help-desk [47 characters]

their "pretty" url is much longer than the original one. What the hell!?
Wouldn't this be a better bet..

http://revengeoftheelectriccar.com/bring-back-the-ev1-press-...
> Nuclear power anyone?

Yes please. You can build the plant in my backyard, I'll donate the land.
did you get accepted into YC and went for AlphaLab instead?
The Four Color Theorem And Algorithm
It's definitely answerable in an interview situation. Some people should be able to answer it, no problemo, in a minute or two.
Great to hear that you also plan to release the trending information. For the URL->twi.bz mapping I would opt for a simple text file with a mapping per line.
The moment you admit to "optional extras", you've already lost the war.
Dubai has its problems, but it is far better than many other countries where the natural resources are exploited for the benefit of a select few and the masses are left in extreme poverty. They are smart enough to have figured out a way to shrink a 100 year development cycle to 30 years without massive oil resources. I am sure they will figure out a way out of their current challenges as well.
Now wait a second... Hacker News works for all the reasons you listed but also for another, very important reason that you left out: it isn't trying to sell us anything. Not to defend the article but you just can't blatantly say, "If you just do what Hacker News does, you'll have a great community!" It's not that easy. There are different types of communities, different expectations of users, etc. There is no One Size Fits All in this arena.
Yep, adding information often means adding space.

On the other hand, you can shorten http://www.amazon.com/Depends-What-Youre-At/dp/B001DQF7VW/re... [109 characters] to http://amazon.decenturl.com/depends [37 characters], which adds information and also saves space.
Can you add an way to call as an api? Something like:

http://twi.bz/api?url=http://tinyurl.com that returns nothing but the shortened url (or the original if it was shorter)? (Much like tinyurl does here: http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=http://twi.bz)

Then I could use it with TwitterFox!

Small thing, but on the index page:

"Half that length of a Twitter message"

Think you mean 'the' instead of 'that'

Also, when I shorten a URL, it'd be handy to have the new url as a link in addition to a text box, because then I can right click on it and 'Copy Link Location', which is slightly less effort than highlighting and copying. (I know, but I'm uber lazy.)

Nice idea!
Whatever the article mentions is more or less accurate. Also it's the same anywhere else in the Middle East. I've a friend (Indian origin) who grew up in the Middle East. He has lived in Dubai and Muscat (Oman). His father worked as a finance manager for an American cola company (hint: it's not Coca-Cola).

Roughly this is how the society is organized:

1) Arabs - first-class citizens - dumb, don't like to work, but often hold 'mudira'/'manager' positions in companies. They don't have college degrees but they hold senior-level positions in companies and are uber-slackers :)

2) Western expats - they get paid huge expat salaries and in general live in a world of their own (read: huge gated communities where typical restrictions in a Muslim country don't apply - alcohol, women, etc). There's very minimal interaction between them and the Arabs, or the Indians, or the Filipinos.

3) Educated immigrants from poorer countries (mostly from Indian sub-continent) - They do most of the work which their Arab bosses are not interested in doing or incapable of doing.

4) Construction workers/other physical labour - mostly immigrant workers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and other poor countries.

The western world seems to acknowledge this problem finally when their people are starting to suffer due to the economic crisis. This is how Middle East works and it has been like this for a long long time.

Middle-east is one place I won't move to even if Google offered me a job there.
well what is his plan to market your product when you finish.

this reminds me of this post I read a while ago, hacker started a startup...it took off, so he decided to hire a sales guy to take it to the next level. The guy was "awesome", a genius at sales or so it seemed. Well he hired him, gave him some equity(I think), and then sat and waited for $$$ to roll in. Well it turned out the guy was just a big bullshit artist and didn't really know anything
There are tons of these. They're the same ones that NIN is using. Youtube, Wordpress, Feedburner, Facebook, etc... The rarity is a musician with the tech savvy (or the money to hire the tech savvy) to pull it off.
What exactly were you expecting from a 90-day quick-turn project?

The unit shown is a prototype, where the final version would be a little more polished and practical.
Thanks. It was getting really late last night :-)

Working on an API tonight...
Its interesting to see who they choose in the end. 20 companies is a pretty high number to get them all right.
Anyway, keep going and maybe when the summer ends you will have better chances of further funding than any of the TS (or YC or ...)companies!
In the UK they can't legally be used on pavements which restricts their usefulness.
David's feedback doesn't say why you were rejected. I'd have found that a kick in the guts if I'd actually met and had a dialog with our investors.

With our YC application (we were rejected) we got x2 recommendations from previous YC founders, had other investors in this or the next round of funding, had an online demo, had users on said demo, and had a team of hackers/designers + various other things that we thought might add value to our application.

We didn't get in and have no idea why. The difference is our process was all part of our startup making a demo? networking with other founders? getting users?

I walked away from YC pondering why we were rejected, but reassured that we didn't waste our time - because most of the things we were going to do either way.

If I'd spent more than an hour talking to an investor I'd want a reason (and therefore value) as to why they walked away.
The weird thing is they think they have done it:

"Our satellite is transmitting the immortal revolutionary paeans The Song of General Kim Il Sung
and The Song of General Kim Jong-il as well as measured information to the earth," the Korean Central News
Agency reported.
oh and hurrah: "As Innovation Works utilizes funds from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, each company receiving funding is expected to maintain a significant presence in Pennsylvania after the program"
Before i learned scheme(I don't know CL), i didn't know how to write python. I knew how to write python syntax, but had no idea how to write code that doesn't suck. I still write bad code, but at least i know when its bad and i need to change it. Scheme thought me how to spot ugly code. I still use for and while loops(recursion is expensive in python, and you shouldn't write scheme in python) but i learned to write small and simple functions and combine them in smart ways(list comprehensions, maps, filters, decorators...). I guess i knew that from reading about the unix philosophy, but it took me to see it in code to understand it. So learning scheme might help you to be a better programmer, or it might screw you up and you end up writing stuff like this http://www.pick.ucam.org/~ptc24/yvfc.html

p.s. I've never written anything longer than a textbook exercise in scheme, so i don't know if you can actually write real stuff in this(or how hard it is) but playing with it is really fun, you should to it just for that.
YC has more success than you.

Yes and no. They had a number of exits, but most of their startups didn't get anywhere. The thing is that investors are more or less shooting in the dark. Sure some might have a slightly better success ratio, but even the top investors pass on sure things all the time
This is one of the strangest contradictions in some Muslim countries. And a fundamental reason it exists is because people are too uncomfortable to talk/think about it. It does not help either that their are not too many mediums for those interested to discuss, except for maybe on the internet.
2008 Finalists: America's Best Young Entrepreneurs
Monetize The Long Tail of Search
Rhomobile - crossplatform smartphone dev - anyone tried this?
But Libertarians and even Anarcho-Capitalists don't differentiate between a market for labour and a market for good and services.
It is very hard. A few warning signs I have noticed over the years:

- Superficial knowledge, but claim they know the field. When you dig deeper you find knowledge lacking. Wikipedia can help uncover this sometimes, amazingly.

- Do not read new business books.

- Haven't heard of "classic" books in the business world,
e.g. good to great, crossing the chasm etc

- Business model based on a poor understanding of technology (e.g. "User generated content but restricted access site")

- No track record

- 50 years old and not rich.

- Afraid to execute (give them a hard task to complete which they could fail at and it won't get done).

- I'm always right about stuff I know nothing about syndrome. You want a partner who is complementary; he should be able to recognise what you bring to the table and should defer to you when he doesn't know.

Good luck!
AP Becomes “Bad Cop” To “Protect” Newspaper Content Against “Misappropriation”
And a more scientific approach(Compared to FUD) http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/07/global_warming_and_so...
Nope, but I'm glad that it worked out the way that it did. AlphaLab has been a really great program so far, and the benefits of YCombinator over AlphaLab (ie, exposure to Silicon Valley folk) are not really that important to us. Pittsburgh has a surprisingly strong tech and entrepreneurial community.
GM and Segway announce two-wheeled urban transport vehicle
I think a lot of us get our rejection letters and sit there scratching our heads. We did everything right and still got turned down.

My goal with these posts was to provide a benchmark and hopefully keep my and others' hopes in check. No matter how good you are, you're still a long-shot with these things. When working on your application in a vacuum, you start to feel so confident, and that makes the blow harder to bear.
I guess that explains a lot. My wife is Moroccan and she was telling me about gangs of boys preying on other boys sexually. I was thinking man that's fucked up. Who would ever do that but the most twisted, devious minds. Apparently this is common knowledge but unspoken of. Being openly gay is frowned upon.

If you ever see the movie "The Kite Runner" they have a scene where one of the two boys is chased down by the gang of teenagers. Later on his son is also being molested by the same guys, now adults.
Not every usage for url shorteners is for twitter. I personally don't use twitter, but when I send long links to my mother via e-mail, she has trouble unless I use a url shrinking service. I'd much prefer one that shows the domain outside of extremely space constricted environments.
Are URL shorteners the new "hello world" app?
Jim Collins: How to Thrive in 2009
Hah, totally.

Deals fall through.

Applications do too, who knew?
This link: http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2242/another-failure
shows the splash-down site. And they have an amusing (to me anyway) interpretation of that remark.