maryrosecook

Very elegant. It's like the soundtrack to my, um, friends' lives.

Little fold-outs that reveal the text that accompanied each post/mp3 would be handy. Also, being able to save tumbltapes to a favourites list would be nice.

A couple of little bugs. First, it had the same track three times in the playlist, possibly because of multiple edits to a single post. Second, it didn't do a perfect job on extracting the band and track names on some of the songs. Both these bugs are demonstrated here: http://www.tumbltape.com/audiographical

Really good work.

Recommendations come from a number of sources, some good, some evidently not so good. However, the bad sources will get slowly suppressed as the site gets more user feedback.

I'm working real hard on the algorithm right now to get the cream floating to the top sooner, and people's comments on HN have been really helpful.

Thanks very much.

Yep, you've made a good point. Billie Holiday -> Iron Maiden != good recommendation. That sort of insanity will be filtered out as more music taste data is collected from users.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

The practice of charging more for the media than the device is not uncommon. Example: Polaroid.

My understanding is that both this site's community and the TechCrunch writers view HN as a geek ghetto. Thus, putting your site up here for feedback isn't really announcing or launching it. It's more akin to demoing to friends and family to get feedback.

There is a tiny bit more information on the Muxtape blog: http://muxtape.tumblr.com/post/46472068

Yep, tried this already. Really liked it. Would love to hear more about how it works.

The test you propose isn't entirely valid. If the "winning" teams who don't get funded by YC are told they "won", that would affect their control status because they would get a big boost in confidence. If they aren't told, again their confidence would get affected, but this time negatively.

Do you hang out together outside work?

Minimalist look is such a good choice for this - the images are the focus.

Small bug: signed up, got redirected to my profile and the email address field was blank.

Bookmark is ace. I want to add my own titles, though. And have a back-up upload form in case the bookmark doesn't work.

What are your thoughts on filtering for the front page?

Most of the plans I have are, indeed, based on GET commands. However, I do have ideas around post commands e.g. sending back an assessment of the quality of a recommendation.

Yes, an RSS feed of recommendations is definitely in the works.

Yes, I guess you're right that the simpler functions are straightforward to APIze.

I think I agree with the people saying it can be good to develop your API in tandem with your app. However, I think that developing the API first leaves one in danger of being perfectionist and stops one adhering to ancient proverb, "Just fucking ship."

Yep, I see what you mean that most usefulness to the most people is most important.

However, I'm not really too worried about artists missing from the index. I am building up the list of included artists very slowly because I only use information sources that I think provide useful recommendations. Thus, the artists that are pulled into the index is somewhat random. The comprehensiveness will grow over time.

This is an excellent point. Thinking about the API has led to several ideas for more community-driven features.

Working on a music recommendation service for which an API is quite high up the feature list. Email me at maryrosecook [at] gmail [dot] com

Most sites do recommendations as a big Venn diagram. If my_upvoted_items intersection your_upvoted_items > x then recommend me your_upvoted_items union my_upvoted_items(complement).

I don't think this is a great approach. If you and I have similar tastes, chances are that I have intentionally avoided the things that you like but that I have not voted on.

I'm working on a music recommendation site that, I hope, will avoid this problem.

e.g. A replacement for all the torch applications that is just a blank web page.

I think the matchmaker idea is good. Many people have thought, "Man, I just know that those two of my friends would be great together." And I like the way you let people sign up their friends.

However, I'm not so sure about the dating on Twitter thing. I think people want to do their dating in private. This is why dating applications on Facebook are not doing that great. People have a hard enough time plucking up the courage to ask out the object of their affection. Letting a bunch of other people know about it as well would be way too embarassing.

I knocked something up along those iines a few months ago: http://tweviews.com

Hammers and word processors have a much lesser legacy impact upon building and writing than software does upon making web sites and applications. If you choose wrong with the former, you can very easily change your mind and avoid having to redo anything. The same is definitely not true of the latter.

There is a continuum between a basic tool and a medium. Hammers and word processors are basic tools. The basic tool of hacking is the word processor. A piece of software, or programming language, is much further along that continuum. A better simile for software and websites might be, "I want to construct a place for people to live. What kind of building should I design?"

The fall in luxury spending is not to blame for Starbucks's troubles. In fact, spending on low cost, luxury items goes up in a recession. For example, the revenues of posh cosmetics companies generally increases in a recession. This is because people cannot afford to buy a high-price product like a new car, but they still want the post-spending feel-good factor so they buy a lower-priced luxury-brand lipstick instead.

The simile is imperfect.

Driving a manual car, rather than an automatic, teaches you nothing about cars, possibly bar the fact that they have gears. Even that is tenuous: the interaction between the clutch, stick and accelerator is a very abstracted interface to the actual drive mechanism of a car. Manually changing gear is just an extra dexterity skill to learn.

And the opinion is out of date.

The "learning x will make you a better programmer" argument has been made before. However, last time, x was Lisp. This makes sense, because in that case you're sacrificing performance to gain better tools to problem solve. But, in this article, the argument is that learning C++ teaches you about computing basics - memory allocation, storage, retrieval etc. But these things just aren't that relevant anymore. Problem solving tools are generally useful. Technical details are specifically useful, and thus less enriching.

Yes, it is a small niche at the moment, but there is no reason that the world economy can't shift to comprise many more startups and fewer crappy desk jobs. Paul Graham has argued eloquently for this (e.g. http://paulgraham.com/boss.html).

A site like this will live or die by the community. If Startuply can gather a group of clever hackers around their site, startups would gladly pay to advertise jobs to them. (You can see the site trying to sow the community seeds with their startup news section.)

Hijacking the HN community would be a tremendous step in this direction, which means the YC funding should be a big boost to Startuply.

Matt says built a great product first, scale second.

It is true that people will put up with horrendous site performance if they really need what the site provides. And MySpace and Twitter are good examples. However, I think that only a certain class of sites can rely on this user behaviour: ones that involve a social contract.

If I can't retrieve a message on MySpace for a few hours because the site is down, or if I can't get to Twitter all day, I don't keep persisting because I need that message or those @reply tweets. I do it because I don't want to appear rude and I don't want to be out of the loop. The people I know on MySpace and Twitter are real people, not just internet people. Thus, if I don't reply, it hurts my social relationships.

I've come to value structuring an argument so that it mimics the process of reaching the conclusion.

For example, I might write an essay on gender. When I start, I might think that there are two genders: male and female. By the end, I might have concluded that gender is meaningless. If I stopped there, my essay would be: gender is meaningless because a, b and c.

However, I find it more interesting to rewrite and end up with a journey through my abandoned conclusions. This allows the reader to reason along with me as they read, thus strengthening my conclusion. For example:

1. There are two genders: male and female because a and b.

2. a and b are faulty because c and d. Gender as a continuum between male and female fits with c and d.

3. c and d are unsound because e and f and g. Gender as a vector of n points on n continuums might work.

4. ...

Potential, Ariel Schrag. An autobiographical comic book written by a straight/bi/lesbian/queer girl about her junior year of high school. Totally changed my ideas about honesty in writing. http://www.amazon.com/Potential-Ariel-Schrag/dp/094315104X

The Eighteenth Emergency, Betsy Byars. Re-read this when I was an adult and realised how brilliantly Byars does dialogue, and how she builds the whole millieu around it. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eighteenth-Emergency-Betsy-Byars/dp/...

Goodbye To Berlin, Christopher Isherwood. A memoir of Isherwood's time in pre-Nazi Germany. The most beautiful prose I have ever read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_to_Berlin

I see them as a sort of FriendFeed that is focused purely on blog comments. I, for one, would be interested in following some people's commenting activity around the web.

How could they make money besides advertising? The WordPress guys or the Six Apart guys might pay for spam-free comments.