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What's in a name? Serious or fun? | arvernus: I'd recommend to register both domains for a few bucks and ask again with naming the actual working titles.I think I personally would prefer the serious name.For your logo: we got ours from http://www.designcontest.net/ - you pay $150 (or as much more as you like to) plus I think about $20 fee and describe wh... |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | neilk: There's nothing wrong with the dating services. The people are broken.People lie. Solve that one and you may have something. (True.com tried to do this.)Also, most dating sites act as a sort of amplification for the user's dating filters and skill at attracting interest. However, I believe that most people are l... |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | jamongkad: Hmmm to be honest nothing screams "Plan B" more than a dating site. Honestly I have never used the service because most of the women I date are from referrals from friends and family. So there's that element of trust right there. Made me feel safer! Maybe if you could build dating site that applies that elem... |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | Anon84: As my data structures professor would say: "Bipartite matching is a hard problem, specially when it involves women!"Seriously, though...IMHO the most successful dating site would probably start off as a Linked In like social network, where you could have matches based on the people you know. Matching algorithms... |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | dusklight: The biggest problem is that the incentive of the dating site is to make money, not to help people get together. If your service is really good at getting people together, boom! There goes your userbase as they all hook up and log off.Financially speaking it is better to give users the ILLUSION of someone out... |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | aston: I used to work at OkCupid. I could talk to you at length about the ups and downs and ins and outs of online dating, but the moral of the story I gleaned from my time there can be summed up pretty easily:People just want a ton of attractive/dateable people within a keyboard's reach, and if your site does any filt... |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | vaksel: how about the simple fact that it doesn't work?1) In the real world, you compete for the woman's attention only with people she sees throughout her day. Out of which maybe 5 will initiate a conversation.On the net, same woman, you are competing with every single guy within 50 miles. Out of which almost every si... |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | notdarkyet: I think the key to a successful dating site is both privacy and safety. Women want to know that they are not going to get raped or be caught off guard with someone who has obviously lied about themselves. If you could establish a method that would allow people to feel secure with the site, it could go mil... |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | nycfam: dating sites are too complicating. Most of the dating sites which I have seen lately make me sick to be honest. How can I find a match in the middle of a smog? I want less complex and more fun. Illuminate the complexity and you'll reach your goal. |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | kingkongrevenge: Dating sites are a stupid idea in the first place. Your system or algorithm cannot ever hope to compete with 30 seconds of face to face interaction, ideally with that first meeting occurring by way of mutual friends.Sorry, but building a better dating web site is trying to drive a nail with a screw dr... |
API Design? | cmer: Here's the podcast of a talk I (and many others) gave on APIs at South by Southwest. I think it provides some great guidelines.http://blog.carlmercier.com/2008/06/17/podcast-building-deve... |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | froo: Channeling PG for a moment: Make something people want.I think that on the whole, most dating sites are more concerned with figuring out how to make a buck off someone than what their users want.If you use Wordtrackers keyword tool which people normally use for SEO purposes and type in "dating"... 4 out of the to... |
How do you know if you're any good? | jacobbijani: Whenever I find an open source project thats written in a language I understand, I usually take awhile to explore the web code repository and see what kind of structure they have setup and how their code is interacting.I don't know of any qualifiers that separate good from bad, but if you follow basic codi... |
What's in a name? Serious or fun? | alex_c: For logos, you can try running a contest on a site like worth1000.com (there are other similar sites, but that's the one we used). You get a lot of choices for only a couple hundred bucks, and you can always work with the artist to refine your top choice.edit: didn't see the comment above before I posted. |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | time_management: These websites exist to solve people's problems in dating, and dating problems are like depression in that there are so many causes that it's impossible to find a single cure.The bureaucratic categories that people have to box themselves into for many of these websites are not very useful. For example,... |
How do you know if you're any good? | amarcus: Does the code do what it's suppose to?
Is it maintainable?
Is it scalable?If you answered Yes to all the above...then you are doing fine. |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | mdakin: Semirecently got out of a long relationship. So long that I was basically a kid when it started and if there was such a thing as a dating site on the Internet at the time I knew nothing about it.I've not tried any dating sites. Why?1. The factors that attract me to a girl are difficult to quantify and encode... |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | MaysonL: Here's an interesting idea for a (niche) dating site:One for people who spend more time reading books than watching tv or movies. |
How do you know if you're any good? | antiform: You know you're good when somebody who actually uses what you wrote tells you that they love what you've done. It could be somebody in your target audience, the person who takes over your project, or even yourself for a personal project, but for me, that's the moment when you've arrived.You can obsess about d... |
Avg studio apartment rental in the bay area | evgen: You might want to specify approximately where you will be working. There are directional traffic flows that make some areas easier options if you happen to be doing the reverse of the standard commute, and some places that become cheaper options if you are working on the penninsula or in the south bay vs. worki... |
API Design? | rsa: Here's a video from Joshua Bloch
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design |
How do you know if you're any good? | saurabh: You know you're good when you realize what you have built is crap and start improving it. |
What's in a name? Serious or fun? | ScottWhigham: Why not run Google ads for both for 48 hours and then compare the click throughs? Let the market suggest to you which they prefer.==============================Ad 1:MacHeist Can HelpSave time, money, frustrationOnline help - Just $39.95------------Ad 2:
SunshinePuppy Can HelpSave time, money, frustrationO... |
iPhone alternatives? | TomW: The E61i replacement the Nokia E71 sounds like it matches your needs (mostly) I think it's not quite out yet but very soon. |
iPhone alternatives? | ScottWhigham: I like my Blackberry 8830 |
What's wrong with all those dating sites? | pavelludiq: Here are my thoughts on the topic.First in the real world people don't go around with profile info printed on their shirts, and mathematically filtering people based on that information. People in the real world interact and exchange information differently from what most dating sites do. I have a few onlin... |
API Design? | sh1mmer: Read the O'Reilly RESTful Web Services book. It's a great explanation of why REST is good, and has a bunch of design patterns for the major pit falls.You could also look at some of the tricks we use at Yahoo. One thing I think is important is the way we handle JSON (http://developer.yahoo.com/common/json.html)... |
iPhone alternatives? | icey: I've heard decent things about the Nokia N95, but I'm not sure how it is with regards to battery life. |
Any HN meetups in Greater Boston Area? WebInno anyone? | JayNeely: There's nothing HN specific, but there's an OpenCoffee group for startup-types that meets Wednesday mornings, 9:00 AM, at Andala Coffeehouse in Central Square (Cambridge). Good crowd and good discussion there.Lots of good stuff on Meetup.com, and you can find a ton of tech-related networking events on: http:/... |
Any HN meetups in Greater Boston Area? WebInno anyone? | dangrover: One time I was coding at the 1369 Coffeehouse in Central Square, and some guy came by and asked if I was there for the Hacker News meetup. I said I wasn't, but that I'd be quite interested. I'm not sure who organized that or if they have plans on organizing more. Any clues? |
Any HN meetups in Greater Boston Area? WebInno anyone? | chip: See previous discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217274Hope to meet everyone at WebInno. |
Any HN meetups in Greater Boston Area? WebInno anyone? | sanj: I'll be presenting at Webinno! |
What's Your Favorite iPhone App (new or JB)? | babul: Liking http://www.tapulous.com, and their business model too. |
Which social network to develop apps for ? | j2d2: any of them. Just get started. |
Thoughts on grad school? (CS PhD) | lbrandy: Just FYI, I have an MS in EE and I work at a pattern-rec startup. So, no PhD not really required to get a job in that field. That being said, having a PhD helps alot if you want to take on the 'scientist' role right off the bat (for example, my job duties have included things like optimizing the algorithm both... |
Thoughts on grad school? (CS PhD) | Rod: Have you read this?"Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science", by Mor Harchol-Balter ( http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf )It's quite good. Since you have been in grad school already, many of the things won't be news to you.I would say that the fact that you left grad school for a Wall Street ... |
Thoughts on grad school? (CS PhD) | jmount: Given my experience (CS PhD. CMU) I would say that you are likely a very good candidate. The PhD you left was pure-math (not CS) so I don't think it counts much against you. You have lots of plusses (analytic and work experience) and the best thing would be to be very articulate about what you want to do (at ... |
Thoughts on grad school? (CS PhD) | bentoner: 2. Especially since you have a pure math background, you could work on SAGE (http://sagemath.org). The people there (mostly academics) are very friendly and open, and you should be able to find something with an AI flavour (e.g., automated empirical optimization of software, as is done in ATLAS http://math-at... |
Any HN meetups in Greater Boston Area? WebInno anyone? | wbond: While not HN specific, there are a few regular web meetups north of Boston. North Shore Web Geeks (http://northshorewebgeeks.com/) in Newburyport happens the third Thursday of every month. Build Guild (http://www.buildguild.org/) in Salem happens the second Tuesday of every month. |
Which social network to develop apps for ? | SingAlong: Get started with OpenSocial. Orkut, Hi5 and MySpace support it. Its just plain javascript and easy. So start here. Ofcourse, you will need small tweaks when running your app on different containers. Containers in simpler words mean sites.Then do it for Facebook. Then your app will also run on Bebo with very ... |
Thoughts on grad school? (CS PhD) | DaniFong: I can show that you don't need to finish a PhD in AI to do research and create AI to solve problems people have never before successfully approached. I've done it myself (though unfortunately most of it is locked behind a walled garden of IP).If this is a course you're interested in, here's what I suggest.1) ... |
Thoughts on grad school? (CS PhD) | Hoff: Or find an AI problem that interests you and that can interest a customer base, solve it, and bootstrap a business.Make your own path. |
Which social network to develop apps for ? | phil_KartMe: What is your business goal for the app? If its customer adoption, what customers do you want to start with and which do you want to attract? I'll probably start on Facebook as it is most used by my existing and target users |
Thoughts on grad school? (CS PhD) | ahsonwardak: My friend, I think you're more than set to get into CS grad school. Though please understand, the PhD enterpreneurs are few and far between. Most PhD students in CS and engineering don't understand how to develop their own great ideas, and they don't want to. PhD's are mostly for academics. Exceptions ... |
What is the best online marketing strategy you found? | brm: Build something exceptional and be authentic while telling everyone you can find about it. |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | xlnt: Don't try to. Users shouldn't give out passwords like that to anyone. |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | benjamincanfly: I rarely give my password out in that way, and only ever if it's a well-known service. It's foolish to do; that implies that it's foolish to require. |
Thoughts on grad school? (CS PhD) | hsu: I can help answer #2 and #3.#2. I received an NSF fellowship in grad school with 6 months of research experience. The experience probably helped, but getting an NSF is a long shot no matter what. I know of other students with similar qualifications who didn't get it.#3. The prestige of your grad school matters i... |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | bjclark: Why not allow them to create an account without giving you that information? Then they can get into the app and see that it's legit.Also, user testimonials might go a long way towards building some trust. |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | bigbang: Use OAuth. Redirect user's to google or yahoo's site. |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | kilowatt: We put a detailed explanation on our wiki in layman's terms about how we only store hashed versions of your passwords--so that even if our systems were compromised, your data would stay safe. If you stress transparency, then the users who care enough to go looking will find that reassurance. |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | Kilimanjaro: Only a fool would give away personal info like that.Most social sites trick you into giving away that info when you sign up in order to spam everybody in your contact list.I really don't know how Mint (financial) can get away with such sensitive banking information. Beats me. |
What is the best online marketing strategy you found? | zacharye: That question is way too broad. What are you selling and to whom? What are your goals - brand awareness, memebership boost, etc?There is no one solution for every company and every product; web-based or otherwise. [oversimplified:] I wouldn't recommend a racy viral YouTube campaign to a company selling a revo... |
What is the best online marketing strategy you found? | vaksel: build something that your users will tell all their friends about |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | rw: Use SSL for every page. |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | jrockway: Google lets users log into other sites with their Google Account, there's an API for that. So just use the service that's already available; then the users don't have to trust you.ClickPass bottles this all up into one convenient service, so why not use that? |
What is the best online marketing strategy you found? | pierrefar: The one routed in perseverance to serve your users the best. Serve them, and they'll tell everyone else and do the marketing for you.If you think about it, it's actually easier to reach and convince your users than to get new users... |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | Prrometheus: Put a little yellow lock icon somewhere on the screen. I used to know a sleezy internet marketer who swore that it makes people trust you. |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | wallflower: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-psychology-of-cupholder... |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | ajkirwin: You can't. And don't use market penetration of OpenID or ClickPass as an excuse. It's the old chicken and egg problem."People don't use it yet, so I won't implement it!"
"People aren't using it because no-one is implementing it!"And like hell I am giving the passwords to any of my mail accounts or anything, T... |
What is the best online marketing strategy you found? | fallentimes: I know everyone is going to describe building something people want or building something that is easy to use or excellent. And this, of course, is the best strategy as it encourages word of mouth marketing (free and effective) and has a wonderful product to fall back on (i.e. it isn't vaporware).However, ... |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | tptacek: There's nothing you could do that would make me give you my Google password. |
ASK HN: What do you do to make your users feel safe on your site? | paulirish: As for contacts and the address book:
+ http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/+ http://developer.yahoo.com/addressbook/+ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb463989.aspxStop using the password anti-pattern (http://adactio.com/journal/1357)Facebook has a nice auth flow that http://www.billmonk.com uses. I... |
What is the best online marketing strategy you found? | breck: In my experience, from best to ok:1. AdWords. AdWords is a no brainer. Find out the average revenue per visitor from AdWords and set your CPC below this. Instant profits(after some trial and error). The great thing about AdWords is you can get visitors and feedback within hours. You can launch a site in a day an... |
What is the best online marketing strategy you found? | prateekdayal: I have found for my kind of business (www.Muziboo.com in music space) that widgets that users put on their blogs drives good traffic back to the website. In some ways widgets is like WOM .. if your friend puts one, you get a feeling that he/she would have done some research abt the site |
How to monetize an algorithm? | rw: Google built an application out of theirs, and monetized it. Their search engine could also just have been a proof-of-concept, used as a demo in selling PageRank to another firm.You should investigate patents (preferably with a patent attorney), and figure out just how easy it would be to reverse-engineer your algo... |
How to monetize an algorithm? | mlinsey: Not sure where to begin here without knowing anything about what you're "algorithm" is about, what it would be used for, etc.If you've created something useful, why not build a business on top of it yourself?If you don't want to do that, I suppose you could patent your algorithm and then grant licenses to use ... |
How to monetize an algorithm? | jerry5: SingAlong, I think both commenters are right. To put it in more explicit terms: You can't sell the algorithm, you can only sell its output. I.e. Google has an algorithm to determine the relevance of a web page to a search result, but what they are selling you is the output, i.e. the relevance for a given combin... |
How to monetize an algorithm? | marcus: Of course you can monetize it without revealing the algorithm, just expose an API.The questions you need to ask yourself is what are the advantages of your algorithm in comparison to known algorithms for tackling the same type of tasks, which companies use algorithms to accomplish these tasks and what is the mo... |
How to monetize an algorithm? | gaius: If you really can do natural language parsing that well, the most upside is in starting your own search engine. |
How to monetize an algorithm? | bprater: Create a proof of concept and make it publicly available. |
How to monetize an algorithm? | snowbird122: If you REALLY believe in the value of this algorithm, I would think the best way to monetize it would be to put it to commercial use. The usual reason to license is because implementation requires too much capital. Algorithm commercialization is cheap. |
How to monetize an algorithm? | gtani: Do a literature search (I'll try to find mine), whether you have a effective /original named entity recognition algo, how scalable and domain-specific it is. This is also referred to, or covered in related research, as anaphora or antecedent resolution and co-reference / record linkage / deduplication. sounds ... |
How to monetize an algorithm? | Neoryder: Question is what do you really want out of life.Is it good enough to be the basis of a company?
Are you daring enough to start a company?
These are some questions you have to answer.I think the best way is to demo this by starting a free service. If its good enough and meets people's needs you people will go... |
Ask HN:Do you believe Natural Language Search will become bigger than Keyword Search? | breck: No. The way search works nowadays is basically natural language search. You just leave out the articles and keep things concise.Why would I want to type "What is the temperature in Boston?" when I can just type "boston temperature"? |
Ask HN:Do you believe Natural Language Search will become bigger than Keyword Search? | SingAlong: Do you mean a search engine that does natural language parsing in its backend?If yes, then problem currently exists, i.e: when i search for python, i get the results relating to computer language than snakes. So a search engine that does natural language parsing can solve this. But its tough to beat big bran... |
Ask HN:Do you believe Natural Language Search will become bigger than Keyword Search? | lacker: I hope natural language interfaces eventually work. Not just for web search as we use it today, for all sorts of things. Think how great Hacker News would be if you could search for[well written articles about concurrent programming, written by people who actually know what they're talking about]Just try to get... |
What features for an EC2 iPhone app? | yourabi: I don't think managing EC2 in isolation I think at a minimum you would need a basic S3 browser as well (for browsing/selecting custom AMIs)) SSH Client
) Public AMI browser
*) (Obviously) Ability to launch / shutdown instancesI'm sure there is a lot of stuff I'm not thinking about... |
How many Tabs/Windows open on average? | pjackson: When I'm in the zone, I have two browser tabs and dozens of editor tabs.When I'm shaving yaks, I have one editor tab and 10 browser tabs. |
What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup? | coglethorpe: It turns out that my problems with the startup had nothing to do with the technology and quite a bit to do with human and business factors.What I learned:1. Get a partner you can count on.2. Don't take side jobs while doing a startup. Eliminate any distractions you can. If you can afford to ditch your da... |
What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup? | azharcs: One of the biggest lessons i have learned is you need a very good and dedicated partners. You will find lot of people who want to be partners who will stay with you during good times but go away when times get tougher. Find people who believe in Not giving up and who can work hard.
The other part of Start Up f... |
What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup? | haasted: I'll add to the "partner warning". It's incredibly important to pick the right people!I worked at a startup where one of the two partners was really good during the "garage phase", i.e. just two guys hacking away on a prototype. When the company grew, and developers were added to help out, it turned out that h... |
What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup? | wallflower: I have read thousands of News.YC comments - and your story about failure is one of the best in my opinion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121413 |
What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup? | auston: I never had my own "startup" per se, but I did start a web business right out of high school, what I learned from that:1. Don't give up easily. I had like 5k in revenue per month out of the gate and I shut it down... which leads me too...2. Manage your money well. I mostly couldn't manage the business by myself... |
What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup? | tstegart: Know when to quit. Sometimes the business just isn't there, but you're in denial. In the end you just run yourself into the ground and it take a long, long time to recover. |
A stealth project disrupted | icey: There is more than one competitor (scroll down to the bottom of the article you linked and you can see a few more).On one hand, it's validation that it's a good idea. On the other, you have to be convinced that your execution can be better. |
A stealth project disrupted | coglethorpe: "So what should I do now? Keep on pursuing this idea of my knowing that there is another well-funded startup that has a 2 year head start ahead of me? Drop the idea, and think about the second on my list?"That depends. Is it a big market? Every Coke has a Pepsi, you know and every Nike has a Rebock and A... |
A stealth project disrupted | mechanical_fish: This is awesome news. Read this:http://www.ericsink.com/Choose_Your_Competition.htmlThe big problem with avoiding competition is that you are also avoiding customers. The existence of a competitor indicates the existence of paying customers. If you can't find anyone who is making money with your idea, ... |
A stealth project disrupted | prakash: All you need is paying customers, don't worry about competition.Also, using your current idea, think about a generalized version of your idea or one that focuses, say only on the financial vertical. |
What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup? | edw519: Be careful not to each too much of your own dog food.Almost every time I ever built anything, I thought, "I can build a tool to build it next time."Be careful. The next thing you know, you could be spending all your time building tools for yourself and forgetting who the user really is. |
What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup? | alex_c: Technically not a "failure" lesson, but the most universal thing I've learned so far: there is a LOT of startup advice out there, some of it contradictory, which makes sense when you read it... but you don't TRULY understand until you experience it. Which in some cases might be too late :p |
A stealth project disrupted | brk: My random thoughts:Many people talk about "first mover advantage", although often times large companies like Microsoft, Google, etc., prove that there is a larger argument for second or third (or n) mover advantage.Not to be too harsh, but I doubt many (if any) of us here have ever had a truly unique idea. The fa... |
A stealth project disrupted | run4yourlives: Keep going. Competition only proves to validate the worthiness of the idea. Is there only one car manufacturer? Telephone utility? Clothing Store?Of course not. |
Is there a NYC AI startup job list anywhere? | donna: touch base with me.. donna {at} genuus dot com |
What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup? | cmos: A friend and I were talking about how scotch is made. We know nothing about scotch except that a popular kind is aged for 10 years before being bottled and sold.So, in theory, it would take 10 years before you knew if it was a good batch or not. You might be able to tell sooner, but you'd have to know what it s... |
Is there a NYC AI startup job list anywhere? | mechanical_fish: Boston is a wonderful town. You can bond with all the former New Yorkers -- just talk about how annoying it is that the trains stop running at 1am and the conversation will be off and running. Don't bring up the Yankees. ;)I know that isn't a useful suggestion, but I don't know much about NYC.You know ... |
Is there a NYC AI startup job list anywhere? | dpapathanasiou: VCs usually list job openings at their portfolio companies, so for NYC, check out the Union Square Ventures jobs page (http://www.unionsquareventures.com/jobboard.html).Silicon Alley Insider also has a jobs page with some startups listed (http://jobs.alleyinsider.com/).And you can use "Reg D" to find ou... |
Is there a NYC AI startup job list anywhere? | dangoldin: I'm in the same boat so if you want to talk, you can email me at dangoldin at gmail |
Is there a NYC AI startup job list anywhere? | ecommercematt: My contact info is in my profile. Be in touch. |
Is there a NYC AI startup job list anywhere? | kobs: This list may be useful... http://lispjobs.wordpress.com/category/ai/ |
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