Gabriel Weinberg

This is an actually interesting topic (i.e., that Google personalizes search) that is spun in a political context to generate pageviews. In the spin, the interesting element is actually lost, because after introducing the topic, the journalist digs no deeper and gives the audience no greater insight than what they might derive from a better-written headline.

The fact that personalized search applies to political topics is unsurprising and probably reflects that Google is data-driven. The fact that Romney doesn't trigger the same personalization as Obama probably reflects that, until recently, his name was virtually never searched for (relatively).[1]

By introducing Mr. Weinberg, the author gives us hope that we will learn something about the nature of personalized search and its implications, but I think that HNers would be much more satisfied to re-read his blog entries on the topic.[2]

[1] = http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney&geo=US&cmpt=q

[2] = http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/08/how-do-you-completely-de-personalize-google-results.html

I'm not sure exactly why, but I think you both took this a way other than that I intended. I think it is an amazing accomplishment to get to 1M users, and generally makes a great business, which I've written about countless times, e.g. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/paths-to-5m-for-a-startup-founder.html and http://ye.gg/fan.

The depressing part has to do with vision. If you have a truly mass-market consumer app and you believe in it and set out to change the world with it, you should not be satisfied with 1M users. After all, the more users you have the more will experience your vision.

It is depressing because what generally got you to 1M, which can happen rather quickly, generally will not work to get you to 10M (http://ye.gg/magnitude). That's why I suggested to double down on engaged users and organic growth because that is the quickest path to realizing the vision.

Hmmm. I'd just go through all the links here, since Gabe did a great job curating the best stuff online:

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/how-to-learn-about-angelvc-term-sheets.html

I should probably step back from what I said earlier and stress that there's not one canonical set of 'standard terms' - there's just terms that are typical and terms that are rarely or never seen. Unless there's a compelling reason, I'd keep things typical.

I'd also Google and read up on convertible debt, which might be a good option. There are pros and cons to convertible debt, but the associated legal costs of doing convertible debt are generally lower, so a big chunk of the money you're investing won't immediately get eaten up by lawyers. You can't avoid legal bills - whatever route you take, the company will need a lawyer with relevant experience. But you can minimize the cost.

Edit: there appears to be such a project, at least on the crawling side: http://www.commoncrawl.org/

I'd say there's a combination of factors, the first (and most important) being that Google is good enough for most people.

You'd need to coordinate crawling so as not to turn it into a giant DDoS machine; speed will be an issue due to geo distribution, variable hardware and result sets.

Validity and reliability of the data would also be issues, and would probably require several peers to "agree" to consistency, but in a way that does not allow easy gaming of results.

I suppose they're all solvable, though I think there would have to be a powerful incentive to do so. I imagine it'd be quite pricey too for the individual, though perhaps Gabriel Weinberg* could weigh in there.

[*] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/

Very well analysed. And I definitely agree about serendipity. That's a huge concern for me, and one reason why I haven't categorised the Founder's Library section yet. Splitting it into categories like the excellent http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive makes a lot of sense, but it almost completely takes away the serendipitous aspect, which is essential for startup advice.

The article you really should read is often not the one you're looking for. A system that makes it too easy to find what you think you need might paradoxically make it harder to stumble onto what you actually needed.

I also think that almost every great blogger who starts with the first use case ends up posting numerous timeless gems that get lost in the diary format. DaringFireball is, again, the obvious example.

I say all of the following at risk of being wrong. Mentally prefix each sentence with "I'm not sure but".

The ranking system puts together the number of points a story receives and the recency.

Your karma is the total score of your submissions and comments. You get points when other users vote up your stuff, and lose them when they vote you down.

'Saved links' is the collection of stories you've voted up and you've submitted.

noprocrast enables maxvisit and minaway. These three parameters are anti-addiction self-protection: maxvisit limits the length of time you can use the site, minaway specifies how long you have to go away before resuming using it.

Gabriel Weinberg put together an awesome "best-of" FAQ: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

Hope this helps.