gurgeous

Great point - I will update. For those reading here, BBB stands for the Better Business Bureau. It is a US based nonprofit that tries to collect and address complaints about small businesses. Very well known in the US.

I will have some of this in my "technical factors" chapter coming down the road. I definitely will be evaluating the percentage of SMB websites which use chat clients and various (annoying) marketing tools.

I too am very sensitive to "correlation != causation" and I tried to call it out extensively in the report. I even included a chart at the bottom from the famous Spurious Correlations project... Hopefully nobody gets too carried away with the report.

It's impossible to determine causation at scale, unfortunately. One could argue that business owners who curate great BBB rankings and feature the badge are more likely to instill trust in consumers, which in turn will result in longer time on site and therefore better rankings.

You can read the HTML to see if a particular SEO feature is present. Or there are tools for this. There's some talk in the office about taking my report and turning into a scanner that you could point at any website, which would be an interesting project.

Apologies for the self-promotion but I think this will be interesting to HN. It's an analysis of a huge crawl of 150k small business websites, correlated with google search rankings. This first chapter is focused on SEO. I'm in the midst of writing more chapters to address things like hosting, site speed, wordpress, etc. I'll probably also add some stats like what % of sites use bootstrap, most popular CDN, etc. This thread is a good place to ask me for more data points!

Also see 9forks - https://9forks.com (Austin, Houston, Portland, Seattle). Just a quick side project, but maybe we'll pick it up again someday.

We use rebloom. Works great.

I built this with a friend. This is based on a script that I've used for several years to find great domains for my projects. It mashes words together to build huge numbers of potential domains, then quickly excludes registered domains using a bloom filter.The bloom filter runs on Redis and the thing is amazingly fast, even when checking tens of thousands of domains.

Plus it's just fun and (unlike many tools) rapidly produces tons of viable domain names.

Love this game and the sequel. So innovative.

Fun fact - Jonathan Gay, the creator of Dark Castle, went on to create Flash. If you squint a bit you can see the lineage from Dark Castle leading directly to Flash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay

Do these vulnerabilities suggest that attackers can gain access to your machine by sending an evil font to your browser? I wish this was getting more press/discussion.

What a great story. Help this kid build a few more tunnels:

http://www.gofundme.com/objrxk

Stylus is a CSS processor similar to SASS/Less, but without the punctuation. Last year one or two teams tried it, but this year it seems to have lost ground. :(

I'm the author, along with @patricko. Feel free to chime in with questions here. I'll link to this discussion from the post too.

This is simply not true. Most of the startups here (including mine) run on linux and all the engineers have macs.

I only had access to the Gemfiles. There's a disclaimer line near the top of the post that tries to caveat the Coffeescript/SASS numbers appropriately.

I was surprised to learn that was even allowed! The Rails Rumble allows any Rack-based app, though.

I am the author - this is a detailed analysis of the gems used in the 2013 Rails Rumble. It ends up being a snapshot of gem popularity and trends. A lot of surprises in here, at least for me.

What a great article. I posted the mobile link because the full version was falling off the new page. Here's the full version, complete with nice D3 illustrations from our fellow hackers at the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/education/harvard-case-stu...

The article happens to be about HBS, but I think some of the same lessons can be applied to our startups too.

The entire Apple dev center is down. That makes it impossible to download the iOS or Mac SDKs, including the iOS 7 beta. It's also not possible to provision new devices or update expired certificates. The developer forums are down too, which is somewhat frustrating since that's the only place we can discuss the still-under-NDA iOS 7.

iTunes connect appears to be up.

Apologies for those who posted this earlier. The headline gets more interesting as the outage continues.

I agree completely. I've had to deal with scaling challenges before, most memorably at Urbanspoon. I'm not judging anyone. This stuff is just hard.

As an entrepreneur/engineer my day is already jam packed. We have a tiny, full-stack engineering team here. I really just don't have time to babysit services that suffer from significant downtime. Certainly I could mitigate the issue by distributing our repos to multiple places, self-hosting, etc. but I'd prefer to just use something reliable.

I posted this as a separate thread but maybe I'll ask here. We're dead in the water due to this latest outage. They seem to hit weekly now. I'm considering switching to another provider today.

How does Bitbucket stack up in terms of reliability? Features are sort of irrelevant compared to recurring downtime.

Author here. Sounds like fun, drop me an email (in my profile).

Yes, I recognize that. Perhaps I didn't explain it clearly in the post. Nine of the teams used coffeescript, but only six used therubyracer. What did they use for js if not therubyracer? I'm guessing node.

Edit: 9=>6 per the blog post

I put this together yesterday, with help from the ten winning teams. It's kind of like the occasional HN post that looks at hosting decisions made by YC companies. Maybe I'm just a gems geek, but I find this sort of thing fascinating.

From what I can tell, here are the most popular gems for the ten winners:

  haml (8)
  devise (6)
  coffee (5)
  sass (5)
  pry (5)
  sidekiq (4)
  mysql (4)
  honeybadger (4)
  simple_form (3)
  pusher (3)
  bootstrap (3)

It's pretty clear that haml/coffee/sass are just flat out winning, despite all the handwringing.

I'm an engineer/entrepreneur type guy. Everything else is just by accident.

I'm sure that's a huge part of it. Aspirational vs. functional. Since the app was designed to be in large part aspirational, the new artwork actually matches our intent better than the orange monstrosity.

Inept designer here. Happy to chat.

If you're into this sort of thing you'll probably like my side project, BestSFBooks:

http://bestsfbooks.com

It's basically a Ketchup list of award winners. I'm partially to the PKD award myself.

This works great. Beautiful. Here's mine:

http://www.smore.com/cuhv-dwellable-vacation-rentals