203 karma · joined March 24, 2007
What does this mean? My thoughts:
1. European users are relatively more jobless (this post http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18996 further validates the claim)
2. European users have fewer options for gratification on the Internet
3. The long tail of second life members as a whole, in particular is skewed in favor of the European long tail. Its either longer or fatter.
The irony is, we are trying to use the spare cycles effectively, such that we can generate better spare cycles in the immediate future.
The recursive nature of this relationship guarantees success to the relentless, I guess, where the quality of the spare cycles keeps getting better.
My friend, up-voted me once each for two separate comments, but my Karma remained the same. As a matter of fact, I observed something similar with the submissions as well. This could imply the following -
1. Karma calculation is not interrupt driven, but its timeout based (I probably hadn't waited long enough!) OR
2. The weight for the comments (/submissions?) could be a function of user Karma, with an average of 0.5 (I probably did wait long enough!) OR
3. My friend's up-voting was suspicious (Highly doubt it!!)
My bet is on 1 and/or 3.
What is the current trend, when it comes to the most preferred development framework? I am sure the open source community has marched forward since Oct 2006.
Or is it the other way round?
Our 'spare cycles' add value because of YC?
If comments were given more weight tending towards that of submissions, people would have trouble moving onto the next submission, in the process of accumulating karma. I am sure YC wants people to add value through new/novel submissions.
Startup News: 150 posts
New: Top 50 posts
Best: Top 50 posts
Couple of questions:
1. Is the Startup News section a combination of New and Best?
2. What about the ones that don't show up under these sections? Are they permanently lost?
KCm = Karma for mth comment
Karma = [SUM(KP1,KP2,..KPn) - n] + ROUND[0.5x(SUM(KC1,KC2...KCm) - m)]
More than anything else, I observed that more importance was given to aesthetics in general by women.
Does this small sample space scale? Can you share your experience?
1. Broadband is seriously ubiquitous, at least where it matters
2. TV shows in Europe are boring
3. People are inherently more lazy, this would mean most users are passive
4. IPTV companies/providers have done a better job marketing the medium
5. Internet activity is increasing for all Web segments in Europe. This could be attributed to 1.
The economics behind this statistic could be debatable. It could be one of many reasons, but there is reason to believe that, that 'reason' could be good enough to consider marketing aggressively in Europe.
Based on these possible inferences, how do you think one should market their Web 2.0 company in Europe? Or should the product/service be such that it doesn't require any special marketing effort in Europe?
Any thoughts on this one?
The incremental effort required to bridge the gap, seems minuscule, especially on the Google scale. One of the possible Google efforts would be, WriteWith getting an irresistible offer from Google. I am sure the founders won't be complaining then!
The point to take home from Paul's response to this question was that, as long as the investors are convinced that the 'hackers' have enough domain knowledge to realize an important need and they have a relevant and popular solution to the problem, then the product/prototype/system should silence the critics/cynics, if any.
Paul used Mark Zuckerberg as an example as a facilitator of 'inter-personal networking' through facebook. The domain here being 'inter-personal networking' ;-) and how much Mark sucks at it!
Go HACKERS!!
The difference here being WriteWith launching after GoogleDocs and it being marketed differently. Looks like WriteWith is creating a niche within collaborative doc editing, by catering to and marketing as a collaborative blogging platform. Brilliant concept! Truly catering to the long tail of bloggers!!
Tag Cloud? - Since this caters to the long tail of users looking for 'interesting' content? eg: flickr
Category tree? - Since this gives more targeted/specific information to users 'looking' for specific information. The categories again could be designed through user generated tags. eg: subreddits, digg
Combination? - Is the 'best of both' a good model?
Or, will a tag-search based model suffice?
Or, does it depend on how domain specific the social content platform is?
Basically, my question is how do you get someone else other than the Founders to work for you without any monetary benefits and just based on promises? Or do any of you take this route at all?
It would probably work to abstract out the IQ of the user from the user himself. This means NOT having an IQ test per se and instead using relevant data mining techniques to measure the knowledge of the user based off of the user's posts and the rating that the user receives. I guess knowledge is a more relevant criteria for most people to read a given post, unless you expect someone to solve/crack a problem, rather than add content.
But, at the same time, if the metric (could call it IQ or KQ??)) can be internalized, and used to group people together and in turn used to attract people falling under a given group, might be valuable. A notion of relative IQ (of groups) would probably be more relevant here. (Creating an e-harmony for people in the same group and cater to their needs based on a given metric)
I also agree that this will apply better in a domain specific platform more than other generic social content platforms, simply because it would be easier to measure a given user metric. So, it needs to be as domain specific as possible.
Is anyone working on this kind of a model? Definitely an interesting problem!!!
I was just thinking about modeling the probability from a startup perspective. Following are the assumptions this model makes -
1. It takes 'n' number of iterations before an idea is a HIT, where n is greater or equal to 1
2. There is a probablity of success associated with each iteration, which implies that there is also a probablity of failure associated with each iteration.. duh!!
Model 1: Using geometric distribution
This is the most conservative and simplistic approach to model success
p(HIT) = Probability of success per iteration
P(SUCCESS) = p(HIT) x (1 - p(HIT))^n
This is simple in the sense that each new iteration does not carry the benefits from the previous iteration
Model 2: Bernoulli's trials based model
This probably is more realistic of the two models
p(HITn) = Probability of success in the nth iteration = P(HITn-1) +/- deltaP
Similarly,
p(~HITn) = Probability of NO success in the nth iteration = P(~HITn-1) +/- (1-deltaP)
where deltaP = Probability of iteration (n-1) increasing/decreasing the probability of success in the nth iteration
P(SUCCESS) = p(HIT0) x p(HIT1) x ... x p(HITn-1) x p(HITn) = 1 - p(~HIT0) x p(~HIT1) x ... x p(~HITn-1) x p(~HITn)
where p(HITn) tends to 1 AND p(~HITn) tends to 0, We need to be deterministic if we have to be optimistic... ;-)
Any thoughts on this??? Do you think this model is right/wrong?? Do you have your own models??? Please do share!!!
Someone said this to me once, "if your professional life kicks ass... u r taking a beating in the personal front." Its not a universal rule, but I am sure a lot of people can relate to it.
Rather than cribbing about having to make a compromise. I think the best bet is to involve your partners as much as possible in discussions about your venture so that they know how important this is for you and how it is in the best interests of the relationship. Go ahead and ask your spouse for suggestions/feedback and keep her in the loop, never leave her in the dark. Share your vision with her. If she does share your vision, then she is going to support you 100%. Then it becomes a non-issue. Its easier said than done, but definitely worth a shot. I am sure Guy would agree with this approach.
In short - "Try to establish a mutually benefitting connection between the two parallel lives."