Hacker News Reader

terryjsmithon Ask HN: Review my startup - Jaxified

Thanks! We've thought about offering a free plan and might still do so in the future, but for now we're laser focused on making it as easy to try it out yourself and possible. No verification, no e-mail confirmation, etc.

As you noted, you can also add other blogs that aren't specifically your own to compare. We've tried a number of things to make sure it's active up front but it's certainly something we're still working to improve. Thanks for checking it out!

terryjsmithon Ask HN: Review my startup - Jaxified

Thanks for the feedback. I've been constantly tweaking the black/blue and will obviously need to keep tweaking to find a better fit. And I will definitely add some hover states!

I have definitely struggled with the product's core value prop. Our biggest advantage over insights is that it's near real time, and is provided over time by post. We also allow you to track other blogs that are not your own for comparison. I will go back and make sure that that point is made more of a focus. Thanks again for your feedback!

terryjsmithon Ask HN: Review my startup - Jaxified

Thanks for taking a look! I'll be posting a post on Monday on our blog about how it went from a weekend project to 7 months of work, but I'm really excited to show this off. I'm here to answer any questions or concerns you might have.

terryjsmithon BlackBerry Messenger will launch on Android and iOS

Yup, that sounds consistent with what I've heard, but I think he's taking the wrong strategy. He's playing RIM's game and they can crush him in legal fees and process; he needs to make this a PR issue and he's in a good position to do that.

terryjsmithon BlackBerry Messenger will launch on Android and iOS

Agreed. The guy running Kik seems to be quite timid from what I've heard from friends and doesn't want to burn any bridges at RIM since he interned/worked there. What he needs to do now is get some hard evidence of this and start screaming David and Goliath and anti-competitive motive.

terryjsmithon Techmeme vs Hacker News

This. HN often has discussions about an article here because of the community and the calibre (as opposed to HN members on the site itself), while Techmeme relies on the inherent "conversational" properties of blogs themselves.

terryjsmithon Ask/Offer HN: Anyone wants to connect?

Hear, hear! I'd love to hear from and bounce ideas off other HNers on chat.

Skype: ternaryworks

GTalk: tj.hackin.smith

terryjsmithon Getting Web Scale with PHP & Memcached

The term "web scale" needs to go away; it just doesn't make sense. No one site will ever need to be "web scale" by its definition since it's highly unlikely one site will get all of the web's traffic. The term could only apply to a crawler or something similar that actually consumes the whole web. Your website will either scale or it won't and there are various levels of magnitude, but the term "web scale" is confusing and buzzwordy.

terryjsmithon Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

Sure, the question is how you differentiate those actions. Some one typed in [x] and then clicked [y] could certainly be generic, but that would be a massive amount of data to crunch and would require a significant amount of congruency to be enough to modify the Bing algorithm.

How would it differentiate between a form submission and a search? And if it's not and still sending all of that data back to MS, that's far more disconcerting than them just watching me on Google.

It's certainly more believable that the sites were either targeted or were extracted from massive amounts of data for this purpose.

terryjsmithon Microsoft: 'We do not copy Google's results'

Obviously this depends highly on your definition of "copy". They presumably do not scrape Google's answers, but using user behavior patterns targeting search sites (or tracking all user data but analyzing the search segment) and what people clicked is just as bad.

terryjsmithon Quora Blocks Startup Search Engines

I think they just mean that it's a whole site/domain action; that you can't change crawl rate for a sub-directory based site ala Wordpress MU/Multisite with directories.

terryjsmithon Quora Blocks Startup Search Engines

Speaking from experience, this is why robots.txt files don't work; they've become anti-competitive in nature. If you actually build code to obey them you get locked out of actual sites, while the real scrapers you don't want don't listen to robots.txt anyways.

If a site really doesn't want you there, they can block you at the IP/User-Agent level, which is what Quora will end up doing.

terryjsmithon Airbnb (YC W09) Grew 800% in 2010

Finally, they're gonna be huge! [1]

[1] http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383

terryjsmithon DropQuest 2011

They have to have a user to reward with extra storage for each step, though admittedly they could've offered a "challenge" track with the ability to sign up once you're engaged.

terryjsmithon Who vomited on Mashable's layout?

The single post page looks much better/more thought out than the front page. The front page lacks flow; there's no differentiation between the sidebar and the content and I'm not quite sure where to look first, next, etc.

terryjsmithon Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

If the MLA says one space then it has changed since I was in school (~10 years ago). We were always told to use a double space at the end of a sentence and while he links to the Chicago MLA, the actual MLA website also eludes to the fact that it used to be two spaces: http://www.mla.org/style_faq3.

terryjsmithon My Facebook Interview Experience

These questions seem to be levelled directly at students; I would be curious if they asked the same questions to someone with more experience. These seemingly have very little to do with the day-to-day development of the site.

I would much prefer to see a sample of data they work with anonymized and being asked to come up with a creative solution to a specific problem.

terryjsmithon Ask HN: Review my side project

Awesome. If you do some long tail SEO and set up a blog, capturing any of the current interest in the "Four Hour Body" craze going on right now could be a boon; you could potentially capitalize on people who haven't even read the book by marketing it as a "key component" if that's true (again, having not read the book).

terryjsmithon Ask HN: Review my side project

My first thought on entering the site was "What is PAGG?" I'm not sure if you're just targeting people who have read the book specifically, but even renaming your "What does the PAGG stack consist of?" to "What is the PAGG stack?"/"What is PAGG?" or adding a page and a link (I'm envisioning a "What is PAGG Stack?" link up by the cart) that describe the basics would be super helpful.

terryjsmithon A Goldman Unit Is Said to Have Rejected Facebook

Mark stated at Startup School that Facebook hasn't posted huge profits (if any) because they continue to invest almost everything back in for as long as they can [1]. Whether that's true or not remains to be seen, but I think it's fair to say that if/when Facebook chooses to turn more of a profit than they are currently, they can/will.

[1] http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178321

terryjsmithon Ask HN: Who launched something in December?

http://www.thumbomatic.com/

An API based website thumbnail service with Amazon like pricing and without random or account based size restrictions.

terryjsmithon Ask HN: What are your 2011 resolutions?

Make enough money from web services (and minimal consulting) to live off of.

terryjsmithon Why is P3P not used more?

Facebook has a decent explanation for why they do not use P3P in the headers for their Like buttons:

P3P CP="Facebook does not have a P3P policy. Learn why here: http://fb.me/p3p (URL redirects to http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=p3p).

terryjsmithon Skype brief post-mortem

Sure, so there were a lot of them that we compiled, here are the ones and topics I remember.

Protocol: we used a custom psuedo-TCP protocol built on UDP based on libjingle from Google (used in Google Talk): http://code.google.com/apis/talk/libjingle/file_share.html. Libjingle's filesharing itself was a decent resource for learning some P2P stuff as well.

NATing and routing: we used Skype's UDP hole punching: http://www.h-online.com/security/features/How-Skype-Co-get-r....

Skype configures each install to be a supernode by default and then disables it based on certain criteria (low speeds, behind a NAT/firewall, etc.). Discovery of other network nodes is an entire subject unto itself and a lot of other network discovery protocols are well documented; our system used a central server to track up-time statistically and map clients to one another based on finding a good fit. Happy to answer any questions here or at my e-mail address in profile.

terryjsmithon Skype brief post-mortem

Correct, it will stop serving requests (ignore the rest), but the end result is no different (in fact I imagine this is exactly what's happening). That system is dead to the world. According to Wikipedia in Q3 2009 [1] Skype has over 500 million users (Q1 2009 says 42M active at any time); any super node that is processing a thousand requests and then dies (or only processes one request a second) isn't helping anyone.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype#Usage_and_traffic

terryjsmithon Skype brief post-mortem

Absolutely. We designed a P2P file system a few years ago and actually gleaned a good number of tricks from Skype for dealing with NATs and constructing your network in general. Dropbox (and many others I'm sure) have all said the same thing: you need to design your system to function in the most hostile conditions you can think of; for Skype this seems especially devastating because so many components are beyond their control.

terryjsmithon Skype brief post-mortem

I'm just relaying my experience with P2P network design and with system-wide failures. I agree with you that gradual discovery is possible, but I doubt that's the best case scenario for them depending on how long it takes. They have the worst of both world: if it's slow, their users are going to be extremely frustrated, but if their clients are very quick to discover new nodes, the possibility of them getting swamped is still very real. The status update doesn't talk about their deployment strategy at all so I don't think we can make assumptions; either way has it's own potentially serious issues.

terryjsmithon Skype brief post-mortem

This article is a little old now but I imagine the basic technique is still the same:

http://www.h-online.com/security/features/How-Skype-Co-get-r...

As I understand it, for corporate firewalls or routers/firewalls configured to not allow "hole punching", Skype will use the supernode as a relay for all communications.

terryjsmithon Skype brief post-mortem

It handling 1% of connections would assume that the network was the bottleneck. You are much more likely to use up the CPU, RAM, or other resources before hitting the maximum number of available sockets. In which case things are swapping or waiting for available CPU time and each individual requests becomes seconds or tens of seconds to get handled. For all intents and purposes, that machine is dead.

As to your second point, I think you are right. I assume that is what the mega-supernode is: a network of machines who's resources are as high as can be to handle all of the connections and try to beat the bottlenecks.

terryjsmithon Skype brief post-mortem

That's a lot easier when it's your network. Skype is obviously designed to be used in "hostile" environments; super nodes are likely expected to go away and come back on a regular basis. Likewise, I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation that there will be a given number of nodes online at any given time.

If they all disappear, I doubt there's a contingency plan for that.