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raghus

3,383 karma · joined February 23, 2007

https://www.raghusrinivasan.com
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raghus··on Fliggo Lets You Build Your Own YouTube [YC S08]
Is there a reason that some of the companies you fund, like Clustrix, are not mentioned at http://ycombinator.com/faq.html ?
raghus··on Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: Things We Learned the Hard Way (by Posterous S08)
I'm 'stuck' on backgroundrb too. Until now I thought it was the default and best way to run processes in the b/g for a Rails site.

I'm eager to see if anyone else can recommend alternatives that they've had good experiences with.

raghus··on The Anatomy of a Tweet: Twitter Gets a Style Guide
I find it strangely fascinating that someone wrote a book about how to write 140 characters.
raghus··on How The World Almost Came To An End At 2PM On September 18
On Sep 26, President Bush said "We got a big problem" http://blog.mint.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/visualg...
raghus··on I reject your rejection
Hmm... I wonder if pg is going to start getting emails/calls after the next YC cycle asking how to remedy the the Bs in unsuccessful applications.

Or maybe he already does...

raghus··on Facebook Opens Status API, Say Goodbye to Twitter
Just because X has Y's functionality now doesn't imply that X will overtake/kill/get people to say goodbye to Y
raghus··on Ma.gnolia.com crashes hard -- no backups?
Early on the West-coast morning of Friday, January 31st, - poor guys must be frazzled. Jan 31 is Saturday.
raghus··on Netflix profit up 45% in Q4, nears 10 million total subscribers
For other Netflixers around here: please try out a service I created: http://feedflix.com
raghus··on How the fuck is trim in Python?
I’ve been feeling lazy lately so go ahead and implement this if you want. Should be an useful tool.

There's no such site now. He wants someone to write this because he thinks it will be useful

raghus··on Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart
If "crappy design" is the only negative comment your site gets, you know you are on your way to big bucks"

I get that quite a bit. Yay! then, I guess?

raghus··on You Will Probably Fail in a Boring and Project-specific Way
"That would be boring," she told me, "it's always they same thing: they just stop working on it."

Isn't that like saying "Everybody dies the same way - their heart stops beating." Yes, but there are many, many ways to die.

raghus··on Don't Bet on Moore Saving Your Ass
Zuckerberg's Law?
raghus··on Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?
I asked Slicehost and they say that because of the way they currently do backups, they can't guarantee that backups of slices larger than 2GB will get done in a reasonable amount of time
raghus··on Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?
I use and recommend Slicehost.

I'll tweak just one thing and that is that SH offers backups only for slices upto 2GB - for the 4/8/15G slices, there is no backup option. I am not sure why though.

raghus··on Cuil Fail: Traffic Nearly Hits Rock Bottom
What's your reference for saying that live.com can hardly get any traffic?

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=lang&lang... has them at #4 (which seems unbelievable but definitely past the bar of very high traffic sites)

raghus··on Get the Most Out of Your Netflix Account with FeedFlix
Thanks answerly. Email alerts are Opt-In. You sign up and say 'send me an alert every $dayfoweek when I've kept movies for longer than $days'. Your pro-active alert idea is good as well. I'll look into that too.
raghus··on Get the Most Out of Your Netflix Account with FeedFlix
My site FeedFlix (http://feedflix.com) just got written up on Mashable! I'd like to hear feedback from HN folks as well.
raghus··on Youporn.com traffic cut in half since June - anyone know why?
People are coding more?
raghus··on Ask HN: Review my website, please.
I agree with nickh. Darker should be more popular. Look at your Google Analytics chart: dark green means more visitors than light green. White means no data/no info. So that's a more natural gradation.
raghus··on Is OpenID Too Confusing?
When I join a Google Group, Google asks me "What nickname do you want people in this group to see?". I pick something and I'm in. End of story.

Why can't I do this with every other site? I'd like to be able to go to foobar.com, click on Register and be taken to a Google page where Google says "What nickname do you want foobar.com to see?". The default is my gmail username but I can change it. I'm in. Foobar doesn't see my email address or a password or my address book contacts or anything else. Can people poke holes in this suggestion?

I think Joe the Plumber would love such a scheme.

raghus··on Nerd library to end all nerd libraries
Am I the only one who thought of a programming rather than an actual library?
raghus··on Project 10^100
Here's an idea for Google. I don't very much care exactly how they implement it but here's the outline:

1) Let various non-profits like the Red Cross or the Susan Komen Foundation etc. register as 'Recipients' with Google's AdSense program

2) Let website publishers who are (perennially) stuck with sub $100 earnings nominate one of these organizations to receive their AdSense balance- whether it is $0.25 or $99.

Bingo! All that money that Google is sitting on gets put to work immediately for worthy causes. Even if Google pays these orgs only when the total exceeds $100, this would help a ton of people around the world.

raghus··on Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months
Several CNN anchors now have Twitter accounts and encourage users to ping them with questions or info. Once the big guys like Larry King or Wolf Blitzer start promoting their Twitter streams, Twitter growth will be explosive.
raghus··on 5 Reasons to Move Your Startup Out of Silicon Valley
IE6:IE7 :: MS Office:GDocs is not the best analogy. Lots of people stick with IE6 rather than go to IE7(or FF or Chrome or..) because, for what they do, IE6 is 'ok'. I'll hazard a guess that lots of average web users don't even care about tabs leave alone CSS implementation details. And so, IE6 is 'ok'.

One could argue that MS Office 'sucks' just by costing more than GDocs which is free. If Google wasn't so opaque about what their plan for GDocs is... maybe they should go at it more whole-heartedly and promote it and then see what happens.

raghus··on 5 Reasons to Move Your Startup Out of Silicon Valley
Ok, fair enough.
raghus··on 5 Reasons to Move Your Startup Out of Silicon Valley
Once Google feels comfortable enough with Docs that they put a little link to it on Google.com below the search box (like they did with Chrome for example), what do you think that percentage will be after a few months?
raghus··on Announcing The TechCrunch50 Finalists
Do you think a social news site for birdwatching would be a hot acquisition target? or get a few million funding? or turnover millions in revenue? - I have no idea. You might be right after all. I do think that if well executed, it is in the category of something people (birders) want.

When I was into it, I bought a few books, a nice pair of binoculars, took a trip to a National Park in the north of India in the middle of winter and often woke up at daybreak to watch birds. That last thing required real commitment. I guess we'll leave it at that.

raghus··on Announcing The TechCrunch50 Finalists
I certainly don't mean to say you're even remotely 'stupid'. It's just that I've been a birder so I know that this is an enthusiastic group and wanted to share that perspective.

As for what they buy, they do buy a bunch of things like books, binos, recorders, clothes, travel to those places etc. etc.

I have no idea if this particular TC50 company will execute well. And even if they do, whether they'll make any money at all. But you seemed to be questioning the very premise of such a site and I think you should reconsider that. Birding is not that small a niche within a niche... Perhaps a site for Latvian poetry that was written after the Soviet Occupation but before Gorbachev - that's a niche! Not birdwatching.

raghus··on Announcing The TechCrunch50 Finalists
Why, do you find that very surprising? I've done some birding on and off and I know that many birders are very passionate about what they do and would love to sync up and go to a particular spot where some rare bird has been sighted - and what better way than some website/social network kind of thingy to keep up-to-date and share stories and photos?
raghus··on How Many Reviewers Should Be in the Kitchen? - Yelp vs. Zagat
Google seems to link to TripAdvisor reviews in most cases
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