Yes, Uncov is Back | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Uncov is Back

uncov.com

I really can't see the fun in bashing people or their work. Especially not by somebody that produces something that's at least as crappy as the products they bash (the team behind uncov have created pressflip.com).

Indeed, Uncov went dark a several weeks before PressFlip launched, and now several more weeks later it's back... coincidence?

In other words, Pressflip/Persai is failing so they want to have at least one successful website.

aka Building a startup is a lot harder than making fun of others startups.

I never thought it was funny, but those who did may not like it so much in a bad economy. It won't be amusing to hear someone always being negative when all the other news is negative already.

Uncov is hilarious mostly when it's exposing just how ridiculous and stupid a lot of the start-up scene is. Dziuba is pretty damn smart, and he makes a lot of good points, and it serves as a great counter to a lot of the TechCrunch-wannabe bloggers out there. I've always enjoyed reading it, and I don't see why a grim economy would make it less funny.

I think it makes things more fun now that his startup, pressflip, is launched.

Yeah. Although I disagree with the criticism people have given Pressflip. Ted was pretty honest about what he wanted to make: something that did one small thing very well. And, from my testing of it, it does its job very well, and people criticize it for doing one small thing.

Is it really better than Google Alerts?

I think the problem with this kind of services is that you want to follow a topic, but the information out there is still too much and there is too much redundancy. Does Pressflip solve this somehow?

It's better than Google Alerts, to some extent. It's good if you really want to eliminate all the noise. "Flipping" a story does help make the stream more selective in what it reports to you.

During my use of it, I noticed it was missing sources especially compared to Google Alerts. Have you noticed this?

It is very clearly a better feedback than Google ever gets.

BTW I don't think it does a "small thing". It is not a smaller problem than search itself.

I think the most natural UI for this are feeds though (not email like Google Alerts and not a standalone site like Pressflip).

Or Backtype? My searches on press flip didn't have a lot of the stuff Google Alerts picked up.

Well they've lost their moral high ground. PressFlip wasn't a particularly great idea, and no one really noticed it.

Who's going to take them seriously when they try and rail on anyone now? Every single comment is going to be, "What ever happened to pressflip? OH YES, I REMEMBER" and then a failmacro image inserted.

I can't see it going well.

Nobody noticed it, but it did what it wanted to do well. I honestly doubt Dziuba thought he had a smash hit with PressFlip. He just wanted something that did what it did well. (If he thought otherwise, then I agree with you wholeheartedly.)

And Uncov commenters always sucked. I just ignored them after a little while.

Dziuba is pretty damn smart

I've never seen any sign of this. Can you give me an example of something especially insightful that he wrote?

what's even sadder is that the uncov kids can't handle criticism.

when i clicked through this morning, there was a user-submitted, reasonably well-written rant against the uncov guys, along with some back-and-forth in the comments. it's gone now.

I know I'm going to hell and it's too negative and it hurts peoples' feelings, but I'll be honest: I like the writing. I'll keep reading if he keeps posting.

The writing wouldn't bother me if he had a point to make. The fact that he's usually about as insightful as a pancake is what bothers me. And I can at least eat the pancake after failing at get something intellectual out of it. It's not that he's offensive. It's that he's offensive and (wrong|obvious).

Yes, his search engine failed spectacularly. Back to trampling other people's ideas.

I like Uncov. What I like is that Ted's putting himself in the same space as Arrington, VWag, RWW, ArsTechnica, etc, except he gets into the technical details a bit more, because he can.

And you know, it's true that trashing other people's stuff is easy......so long as you do it anonymously.

Ted's putting his name on this stuff...there's nothing easy about that. Respect that at least.

Yeah. That's what drew me in to Uncov in the first place: Ted's ability to actually understand the technology behind some startups that really did things piss-awful. I liked that somebody was pointing out how bad some of the code behind these things was. Meebo in particular.

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