sethjohn

It's not much of a distinction mathematically, but it's an important distinction in emphasis. Saying something is growing exponentially does imply that it will just keep on growing, at least for a long while. Saying growth is sigmoidal emphasizes the eventual slowdown.

Talking about "exponential growth" often leads people into unrealistic hyperbole. Of course, by "people" I mean marketers, investment advisors, and headline writers at Business Week...not us rational computer scientists!

It updates the word list underneath the search bar with every letter typed...at full speed typing. Since typing speed pretty much defines the maximum data input speed, I think that qualifies as 'incredibly fast'.

I just typed in 'quotidian' to both apps. (It came up this weekend.)

Definr is very fast. It looks up words faster than I type so that the list of words at the bottom updates with each new letter. With IWS, I had to pause mid-word for a half-second in order to get an updated list. By the time I got a choice of words with IWS, I had finished typing and already made a typo.

Also, the interface for Definr is much more friendly looking and simple. Definr gives you the complete definition on the main page, instead of links to other definitions. And Definr is an easy name.

Sorry, but I liked Definr much better.

I've been thinking a lot about the 10x rule recently. There was a post on YCnews a few weeks ago suggesting that the real success rate was much closr to 50%.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74562

At a panel of Boston-area VCs I attended, each of them said they had no idea where the mythical 10x number came from and that their success rate was closer to 50-90%. I seem to remember YC suggesting the sucess rate was much higher than 10%.

Granted a lot of these 'successes' are companies that are barely managing to stay in business...but they haven't gone bust either. Maybe a better way to look at the situation is that the VCs want to keep as many companies above water as possible in hopes that some smaller percentage will be a huge hit.

Bottom line, I don't think the goals of VCs and entrepeneurs are really as divergent as the 10x factor suggests.

Peer-reviewed studies come to concrete conclusions such as "Ice volume in antarctica has decreased an estimated X% in the last X years." or "CO2 levels in the atmosphere have increased X ppm in the atmosphere at Mauna Loa observatory." rather than sweeping statements such as "global warming is real".

There are admittedly some real cranks among the global warming skeptics, but I thought the arguments discussed in this article were intelligent, rational, and well-spoken.

Both the National Academy of Sciences and the IPCC are essentially political organizations (in the sense that their purpose is to inform policy, I don't mean to suggest that they are partisan) and what they say should not be conflated with the scientific literature on climate change.

Scientists are working very hard to understand past and future climate change, but it is an incredibly complex problem. (For analogy, can political scientists predict who will be elected president in 2012?...it's possible to make some good guesses but there are a lot of factors and it's hard to know what will happen.)

Sure, there is general agreement on some points and organizations such as the IPCC are doing a noble job of trying to synthesize the mountains of complex science into a few simple statements, but I think you are drastically oversiplifying the case when you say that

"99.99% of the world's scientists, based on careful interpretation of many thousands of peer-reviewed studies, agree that global warming is real, and is caused by human activity. A vanishingly small handful of scientists happen to disagree with this assessment, based mostly upon their opinion and politics."

There are really a couple of separate issues here. First, it is important to distinguish between the general scientific agreement about past climate changes and the greater confusion about the probability of future climate changes. One of the main reasons why there is such broad agreement among the community is that scientists have tended to focus on the answerable questions such as "has the earth been getting warmer over the last X years" rather than the thornier question of "what caused the earth to get warmer" and "will the earth continue to get warmer." Very few scientific papers have been written that make predictions on the question of future climate.

It is also important to remember that while there is generally scientific consensus that global warming is "probably" happening (whatever that means!) or that it is "probably" caused by humans, there is a great deal of uncertaintly about exactly what the probabilities are. If you could get all scientists to agree that there was about a 71% chance that the next century would be warmer, does that count as "scientific consensus that climate change is likely"?

It is not true that there is overwhelming scientific consensus about the probability of climate change. While I would agree that most scientists think that it is most likely that "global warming is real", there is a great deal of uncertainty among even the worlds leading climate scientists about the probability of global warming.

A few years ago I ran a betting game among students and faculty in the MIT climate program, the idea was to develop some feeling for the 'community consensus' of the likelyhood of global warming. The conclusion: ~71% chance of global warming over the next century.

http://www.sethjohn.com/PAOC%20CFM/slide1.html

I heard the founder of Active.com give a talk a few months ago. It turns out that their main source of revenue isn't the registration fees, it's the T-shirts that they sell to race participants!

Unfortunately, that suggests Active.com could easily lower or eliminate the $3 charge to drive competitors out of the marketplace.

I wonder what a 50% failure rate says about the level of success among the remaining companies. Traditional conventional wisdom was that only 10% of startups suceeded, but they succeeded spectacularly (more than 10x return on investment).

Does this imply that a lot of "successful" companies are generating very modest returns on investment?

I wouldn't count on it! ;)

My sense is that apple is much more concerned with keeping the iPhones 100% trouble-free for the 99% of people who don't want to do anything more than make calls and check e-mail than with providing development freedom for the 1% of people who are excited to start hacking their phone. (Or even just to start adding new widgets).

It's disappointing for those of us who like fun, but probably a good business decision. Suits have a lot more money to spend on phones than kids and hackers, and reliability is very important to them.

Sure, but you wind up with the monetary policy that the president wants, not the monetary policy that you would get by democratic vote. (Though perhaps the analogy with the Fed is a little akward because monetary policy is something most policy makers agree on, not a matter of contested opinion.)

With weighted voting, the stories that wind up on YC news will closely reflect the desires of the editors. That's fine, but it's not a democracy. It's more like a benevolent dictatorship! (very benevolent ;)

...and there are many places where they can get and discuss information about science. I'm sure many hackers are also interested in xbox360 and Ron Paul, but that doesn't mean they are good fodder for discussion as 'hacker news'.

I understand that you are trying to broaden the purview of YC news, but my personal preference is for a more focused site.

It does seem like a "weighted" voting system defeats the purpose of having a voting system at all. What's the point of asking everyone to give their opinions if the only opinions that will matter are those that conform to the opinions of the editors!?

Of course, in truth I might be quite happy with this system. I've liked what the editors have let through so far (though last few days less so) and I would probably rather read what they suggest than what the "group" suggests.

This is unhelpful on a message board devoted to internet startups (not to mention mysoginistic and probably fake).

I've noticed the same thing about top-tier chemists. Grad schools tend to have a good mix of Ivy kids and others, but the most brilliant scientists always seem to come from some mid-level state university or a little liberal arts college.

Success at the highest levels of scientific research takes an odd mix of creativity, intuition, and intellegence that has little to do with academic success in high school or undergrad.

Great article. The limit doesn't seem to be in the algorithm (as this article makes clear), it's the ability of a 1 through 5 star system to accurately reflect a person's feelings about a movie.

While algorithms for predicting your upcoming ratings based on your previous ratings may not be able to improve...surely there are some creative ways to re-think the entire system:

Two obvious approaches would be to rate on multiple scales (funniness, intellectual weight, 'light'-ness, etc.), and to include a comment-tracking system alongside the simple rating system to provide a better more complex picture of the film (as Reddit, and YCnews do).

I appreciate your sarcastic humor.

Paul's essays on entrepeneurialism are incredible, but this one seemed really sophomoric to me. (e.g. about as intellectually complex as the other stoned conversations I could have had after watching Fight Club!)

My problem was that I knew I wanted to search, and I knew that workarounds had been posted...but I couldn't figure out how to search through YCnews to find the searchers!

Especially upon re-reading the article, it looks to me as though the reporter (no doubt trying to present 'both sides of the story') began a paragraph with "But the limits of Y Combinator's model remain unclear" and then shoehorned in Seth Levine's comments without much regard to what he was really saying.

My sense is that the people in charge of Facebook are happy to take big risks with their company, and I don't see why they shouldn't.

Whether the company sells now for $6 billion or tanks and sells for $600 million in a few years, they'll have a lifetime of riches. With money a less important consideration, the question becomes which would be a more interesting activity for the next decade: Building a globally powerful company that fundamentally changes how the internet game is played...or becoming idly rich?

Financial risk/benefit calculations are much different for an individual than they are for a large corporation.

Hmm, did the auction start before the TC article, or after?.

Seems like an incredible steal right now at $7500 with such a positive TechCrunch writeup and all the associated buzz that is sure to follow. I wonder where the bidding will end...$100K?

UG Ad broker. Advertisers list parameters, users make ads, track each viewing via YouTube, etc. to pay the creators.

If advertisers really like the content, let them buy it whole.

Just because they spent the whole time asking you about your idea doesn't neccessarily mean they were mostly interested in your idea...getting someone to talk about their prototype is probably a much better way to guage who they are and how they think than asking "Who are you?, and how do you think?"

Of course I wasn't there, so I don't really know what happened.

I think it's also much easier to zing off a facile negative comment. Forcing yourself to write something positive (or at least non-negative) helps me focus on writing something truly insightful.

Even more exciting than the possibility of switching from ATT to Verizon will be in 15 years when wireless is everywhere and the iPhone runs by VOIP.

That's how they'll really take over the wireless industry.

Paul seems to have a negtive attitude towards every one of the recent crop of YC clones. (Of course, perhaps I'm simply misjuding his tone due to insufficient use of emoticons! ;)

Is he worried they will crowd the marketplace and diminish the success rate of YC companies? Does he think they are so poorly constructed that they will harm the young people who get involved? Or is it just a spirit of competetiveness?

That's pretty much the point of voting, only the relevant stories appear on the front page.

Good voting practices are probably more important than good posting practices. Unless, I suppose, the number of stories posted gets so large that people stop looking through the "new" page occasionally to vote up the good stuff.

If you want to be a good samaritan, you can routinely check the new stories to up-mod (sp?) the good stories.

Interesting to see growth that is both slow and consistent. I always figure websites are either exploding or imploding. Do many sites grow this slowly, or is there something unique about YC news?

I'll give it a try. Thanks.