mysteryleo

I was thinking there'd be a scary monster that would pop out along the way

Weird. I like how hacker news is all text and read it daily.

But I could see my eyes getting bored after a while on tldr. I much prefer this layout http://www.rawsignal.com/

Optimized for fast consumption or just dicking around.

Like this?

http://news.rawsignal.com/default.aspx?mode=1

It is done for each category. I wish the up would do it for all categories at once, because I don't always have time

Talking about this

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

There other ways of blocking crawlers other than robots.txt

I wish google would let me crawl blogger pages for my index. I don't think that is fair that google can index the web, but has created a walled garden for the content they host.

Basically, if you start indexing the web, and some sites are hosted in blogger, google will block your crawler if I remember correctly

What culture is ads?

Dude. This is pretty cool. The stats on the front page are interesting. 104 playing users already

Reminds me of the drudge report.

I made this: http://tech.rawsignal.com

Maybe we can share tips on algos?

not sure about the others, but Groupon opened offices in SV . . .

working on it. Need a good domain name though.

http://jobs.rawsignal.com

I'd be interested to know which firm, and to see the post mortem about why they went out of business first.

http://www.rawsignal.com is made by one

haha thanks. yeah, we built this product for ourselves and friends. it's kind of a passion product that we're constantly working on.

sports was for my brother, but then he wanted college football specifically, so we rolled out this for him: http://collegefb.rawsignal.com/

will we become huge, who knows. who cares really, we love what we do.

wow. that's really insightful. thanks for the post. I guess you're right, there is room for improvement, but . . .

I wonder if the failure rate is higher, because those ideas are common, and everyone tries it. Yeah maybe the same number will succeed, but since everyone and their mom is doing it, it probably won't be you . . . dunno.

Btw, a news site should be on the list too. Even I have one of those: http://tech.rawsignal.com.

wow. that's an entire module in the system. we do several things that analyze feeds and decide if it fits a category. Basically, lots of text analysis and analysis of the web.

We get candidates from people submitting feeds.

btw, I'm not sure if it'll amount to anything big. My hope is someone will find it useful.

for me personally, it's a lot of fun to work on machine learning and algorithms. i had soooo much fun building it.

if anyone has any feedback, let me know.

ok, i put up baseball, basketball, and football:

http://football.rawsignal.com/ http://basketball.rawsignal.com/ http://collegefb.rawsignal.com/ http://baseball.rawsignal.com/

had to refungle some code to speed up our analysis, but it should be working. hope you like it.

sure i can work on that next. what initial categories would rock your world?

also, should i brand each category as its own site, or is the current model ok?

Yeah, we don't have content ourselves, our value add is the ranking and filter service. Also, allowing you to see the conversation across the web.

UGC would be tough, because I'm at a chicken and egg state right now as you pointed out. And crap comments would lead to more crap comments. Imagine if Quora or Hacker News had a comment bot. Sets a bad tone for the future.

i guess there may be a flaw in my initial strategy.

when training my algorithm (and as i make iterations), I compare the results to google news to make sure we're as good if not better. That's why a lot of the initial top-level categories match up pretty closely.

Sports vs sports http://sports.rawsignal.com/ http://news.google.com/news/section?pz=1&cf=all&ned=...

However, once I'm more confident in the algo, I'll let it loose on something more niche, like college football

http://collegefb.rawsignal.com/

that's how we can differentiate from google, but i never realized that having too many options would paralyze people.

maybe if i release each vertical under its own domain . . .

yeah. the algorithm I built takes a little training per topic/vertical, but after the initial training, it just starts learning.

I have a long list of potential topics that the algorithm would be good at. pretty much any sports topic it would kick butt on.

My brother keeps telling me I need to split up sports too. Basically, the initial verticals were to stress out the algorithm to make sure it would work on various concepts and still keep things interesting.

Basically, you could imagine every concept http://alltop.com/ tracks running through my algorithms.

Thanks for the feedback though. That's the kind of information that really helps a hacker getting started.

what are good places to share a link?

The main vertical I'm focused on right now is tech: http://tech.rawsignal.com/

although I built other verticals that seem to be working already. Not sure where to share it that would interest people who like tech.

we're also curious about what marketing techniques you think would be worth our money + what a good message would be to the users.

we'd like to figure out one short sentence where people are like . . . oh i get it.

Thanks il. I'll send you an email about http://www.rawsignal.com

We just took the private beta label off, but are flummoxed with how to get users.