konsl

Today, the best way to compete is to focus on cooperation, not competition. The behavior you're admiring isn't very effective when looking to cooperate with others.

According to Nivi, anything above $500K is Series A country: http://venturehacks.com/articles/seed-valuation

Great work guys -- looking fwd to the coming features

There will be a short delay.

We've had a few requests for a solution to this so we'll be looking at it soon.

Thanks for the comment.

I'm definitely going to try to make it to this.

call the NY shop

You can still undercut competitor pricing with freemium; with an all-free model, your "competitive weapon" is to out innovate and maximize the potential for value creation.

Founders should always be networking.

I thought most VCs refer to start-ups/companies as "deals" ;)

I'd much rather be called a "deal" than a "project" -- the former implies that someone's investing in your start-up; the latter is just demeaning.

It's up now -- sorry about that

You said bad things about us? :(

thanks!

eh? Daniel and Le Bernardin are pretty damn good -- both have more than one michelin star

Sorry -- Alerts require you to be a registered user so we can deliver them to a verified e-mail address. If you don't want to sign-up, you can perform searches and subscribe to results via RSS.

We thought it would be cool if we carried an alert through the sign-up process and added it afterwards. I guess we didn't realize how confusing it would be when the registration was complete. We'll be making this a lot more clear; thanks for the feedback.

The page you're viewing (the Dashboard) allows you to:

- View comments by people you're following (/home)

- View alerts you've subscribed to (/home/alerts)

- View comments shared by people you're following (/home/shared)

We're going to revisit that welcome msg; for now, you should visit http://www.backtype.com/home/alerts to find your alert and subscribe to more. Alternatively, you can perform searches on http://www.backtype.com/comments and subscribe to them from the results page.

Thanks again.

We haven't done any Twitter integration yet. We are going to add a button to tweet a comment, but we aren't doing digests. If you want to push a digest to twitter, you can link your comments feed from BackType to: http://twitterfeed.com/

We'll be releasing an API soon so that the apps/tools/etc we don't build can still be built.

I'm aware of the Plagiarism Today post as I exchanged e-mails with its author. I didn't link it because it contains inaccuracies (especially wrt SEO, etc).

Individual comments make up a very small percentage of a page's content, so what we're doing is more similar to Google than you suggest (they also index your comments -- search for them). We display excerpts of pages; we attribute them liberally. A search result on Google leads you to the full page of content; a search result on BackType leads you to a full page of content. We index content for purposes of discovery i.e. search.

== Fair use

Also, it's pretty obvious that we're not in competition with content publishers, and we provide a very effective way to prohibit BackType from indexing comments.

Hi Brian,

We try to respond to every single e-mail we get; not sure how yours was missed. I apologize.

We've talked about our policy on re-publishing comments in a few places:

- http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/08/30/five-questions-withb...

- http://blog.backtype.com/2008/08/on-republishing-comments/

- etc

In summary: what BackType is doing is very similar to other search engines. We make every effort to provide content publishers with familiar methods to restrict BackType from indexing their site's content: http://www.backtype.com/faq#q14

We're trying to be as transparent as possible. We attribute comments to their authors so they can be rewarded for the thoughts and insights they share in comments across the web. Additionally, BackType is already becoming a recognized source of traffic for publishers and we want that to continue.

Glad you're enjoying it. Clickpass is awesome indeed, but there are a couple things we need to fix. Thanks for spotting that.

An API is one of our top priorities.

FYI Everyone can add their Hacker News comments to their profiles too -- add http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=YOUR_USERNAME to the list of websites on your account page. Alternatively, you could just do a people search for your username and claim it from there.

lol

Thanks for the interest -- we'll be launching soon so keep a lookout on HN

As long as you're diligent, it's not that difficult to deliver e-mail successfully. It really depends on what kind of e-mail you're sending and how frequently you send it. That being said, monitoring bounces, watching junk mail reporting programs, etc can quickly become a full-time job.

The answer isn't do to one or the other -- it depends on the situation.

Just some custom wrapper for PHP's mail() using QMAIL.

Unfortunately, now we're on EC2 and there's no way to pass reverse DNS lookups on e-mail originating from an instance. That's bad.

Looked through many third-party solutions, but they are expensive and impose artificial limitations, so we're basically going to get another machine outside of EC2 and use that.

Delivering e-mail reliably does have a slight learning curve, but it's really not worth it to go third-party unless you're sending heavy HTML newsletter type e-mails to hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Knowledge of e-mail and the issues surrounding its successful delivery is knowledge you can carry from project to project or start-up to start-up, so it's not such a bad idea.

"Hyper-advertising"?

Scary.

Under a B-1 visa, you're not allowed to work for a US company or receive any money while you're in the US. Since YC is a program that clearly intends to fund a US company of yours, it's no surprise that you were put under additional scrutiny. The border officials were just doing their job.

YUI is great, but it won't remove trailing semi-colons in CSS. I've found YUI gives the best compression -- I used to use dojo shrinksafe.

Try this to compare: http://compressorrater.thruhere.net/

RHEL -- wanted Linux and our host doesn't offer many other variants. OS X on dev though ;)

This is for prototype/scriptaculous (not jQuery) but I thought I'd let you know anyway:

http://www.knallgrau.at/code/colorpicker

I use it on my web app; Twitter also uses it.