asif

Build the best API you know how to build and ask questions later. If your business is doing well, then supporting your API forever is a high quality problem.

I'm a co-founder and chief architect at NewsCred. I'd love to have a chat with your friend. He can email me at asif AT newscred DOT com.

With absolutely no disrespect intended, "you have to try it to get it" isn't a very compelling pitch to get a potential user on board. There are just too many things out there that one could try. There must be a way that you could describe the service more explicitly.

I couldn't figure out from the website exactly what Yobongo is. Can someone help me out?

I wonder if I'd get in trouble if my girlfriend caught me using this...

What would the alternative be? Require all students to pay their own way, thereby disincentivizing parents to work hard and save for their children's college education?

On the other hand, there are a lot of intangible benefits to be had by paying your own way through college; benefits that will never be recognized by those born with a silver spoon in their mouths.

In other words, I don't see this as a fundamental problem. It's just the way it is.

I'm at a loss for words. Thinking back about Dan and the three months we spent together in YC, there were so many things this guy did right. Both as an entrepreneur and a human being, he was a role model for me. The world is truly a poorer place without him.

I agree. I think it is the natural place to have a to-do list. I also don't really like the Remember the Milk add-on. I usually don't think of to-dos as thing that are associated with a particular day. They are just a laundry list of things that need to get done. It would be nice to see the to-dos in the context of what my schedule looks like for the day (i.e. My Google calendar).

Disagree. There are certain industry where the argument holds true; investment banking for example (you're likely a sucker if the only way an investment bank will give you an internship is if you work for free). But there must be some industries out there where the market rate for an intern is literally "valuable experience". You could ask a bunch of people that worked in jobs like this, after the fact, if they were happy with what they got out of the experience (i.e., did it help you get a real job later on), and I wouldn't be surprised if the yes/no ratio was similar to those with paid internships. My supporting evidence for this assertion is that the practice is widely taking place today. Certainly it would have been exposed as a fraud and a ripoff by now, if that were the case.

Whatever you guys are making, if it kicks ass, nobody will care about this nonsense. You certainly have the attention of the HN community now, so don't waste it. It's time to stop fucking up.

Is it too late to jump on top of the pile?

Holla!

We've been using yahoo for 5 or 6 years now and we're just used to it. I think it costs about $10/season and given how seriously we take this thing, it doesn't feel like a lot of money.

Incidentally, we tried to run a league on fleaflicker last year (for free) in parallel with the yahoo league, and the experience was severely lacking.

Fantasy football real-time stats on Yahoo!

By that logic, you could justify absolutely anything.

I'm not sure what I would do, but I know what Jack Bauer would do. He would eat the pirates.

Ha. Thanks for pointing that out. Perhaps I instinctively avoid blanket generalizations so as to avoid the criticism that I am currently unleashing on this article.

I concede that HN is not the place to solicit legal advice. The level of trust that I was referring to most likely does not exist between users of this site.

Nonetheless, I believe it is incorrect to state that one would be putting one's self in harms way by discussing legal matters with a non-lawyer, as the article implies.

Here's an example: My neighbor has a large tree bordering my yard, from which a branch is hanging over the fence and interfering with my shit. Is it legal for me to chop the branch? Maybe in some jurisdictions, but who knows? Should I call a lawyer right away? Let me see what my wife thinks.

Me: "Hey honey, what should I do about this branch? Should I call a lawyer?"

Honey: "A lawyer?!?!? For God's sake why would you do that? That's just Ethel's tree. Just cut the damn thing down."

-- or --

"Umm, Johnny Cochrane, Jr. lives there. Call five lawyers."

I can, without hesitation, proclaim that eating children is categorically wrong.

I can't seem to get this thing to figure out where I'm actually looking. Isn't that the point of "eye-tracking"? It is pretty good at figuring out where my eyes are located on my face, but that isn't very valuable information.

Has anyone else had any success?

Black and white statements such as this are almost always wrong. While I would never trust a non-lawyer's legal advice over a lawyer's legal advice, there could certainly exist a person in the world whom I trust more than any given lawyer, that also has an experience pertinent to my situation. You'd be foolish to bypass that person's opinion. Just take it with the knowledge that that person isn't a lawyer.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to claim that it was easy to make a truly well-functioning search engine (i.e. Google). More that it's pretty easy to index a bunch of pages and return non-relevant results. While scaling is not a trivial problem, $33mm in capital should be enough to buy the expertise required to solve it. It's not a problem that hasn't been solved before. Of course Cuil might one day be better than Google, just like Company X might one day be better than Google.

The point is that they aren't there today so it is completely bizarre in my mind that they would come out guns-a-blazin' with these huge claims. How do we even know that they have a faster index generator than Google? What does this self-reported 130 billion page number even mean? Just that they have downloaded that many pages? It doesn't seem like they have indexed them all, properly anyway.

Perhaps my sarcasm was not communicated properly. In any case, I'll pass on this one.

It's not very difficult to make a functional search engine. With the amount of resources cuil had, all you would have to do is provision a few thousand servers and deploy a nutch cluster on them.

Then you pair random images with random search results. Voila, you have cuil.

The criticism is duly applied as Cuil made the claim that they would be better than Google at the same game. Powerset never made such a claim. The people who criticized it didn't have an understanding about what it was actually trying to do.

We're certainly beating a dead horse here, but I just can't get over how bad it is. I keep trying different searches and I keep getting astonished at how off the results are. Did they run any test queries at all? I'm calling conspiracy on this one. Something is up.

The broad generalizations in Dewar's opinions are unhelpful. If you want to write software for military airplanes, then you should go ahead and learn Ada (whatever that is). If you want to build applications for the web or for "low-tech" enterprise, then you'll probably be better off learning Ruby, Python, Java et al. Both are perfectly viable ways of making a living and there is plenty of demand for both types of programmers.

You might be able to use it instead of Viagra(R).