ahulak

I think MCPs that can provide monetized content (for example bankrates or insurance quotes), will provide business value, but, like APIs, there will be compliance requirements as to how information is displayed on the front end. Getting access or credentials to the MCP will require completing this approval process.

That said, this only makes sense if the data provided by the API is proprietary in some way. If its free or open source data, being the mcp provider likely won't provide much business value aside from the insight as to what the LLMs/users are searching for.

The Mouse Driver Chronicles

Not totally game changing, but a great story that can help keep you motivated!

What exactly makes this privacy first?

Ability to accept payments is a feature, but no one would say Stripe wasn't a startup that's now grown into a large company.

Features can be viable startups if they provide enough value and hard enough to replicate.

Is there a reason you’d rather do this than live in a fully furnished rental?

This sums it up quite nicely. What is worse? The vaccine or covid?

Something that resonated with me... Which do you think is more likely to have a significant negative effect on your health? These vaccines or COVID?

We have plenty of reason to believe these vaccines will be effective with minimal adverse effects (including the relatively small study of 40k individuals).

Conversely, we have definitive proof that in the best case COVID can be asymptomatic and/or a nasty, but survivable, virus. At its worst, it kills you or leaves you with long-lasting health issues that we don't yet fully understand.

Personally, I'll take my chances with the vaccine. My biggest fear isn't adverse reactions, but rather lack of efficacy.

Honestly, while it's not perfect, javascript will likely give you most bang for your buck. You can use it client side as well as server side. It's not the perfect tool for every situation, but you certainly won't regret knowing it.

That's all there is to it.

Assets - Liabilities = Net Worth

Interest rate arbitrage. If you have $2M liquid net worth, you have access to investments that will perform much better than the ~4% you're likely paying on your mortgage. If I can make 6% on $400k vs the 4% I'm paying on said mortgage, why wouldn't I pocket that extra 2%?

How would you compare yourself to CrowdFlower or CrowdSource?

There are ~100M homes, ~3k counties, ~27k zipcodes, and ~300k neighborhoods and subdivisions that all have different market dynamics. A sample size of 9 make this analysis completely meaningless.

Equally important, is that the author of this article doesn't appear to know much about how the real estate data industry works (especially in regards to market trends and how they are used to generate the Automated Valuation Models (AVMs for short). A bit surprising given the nature of the business he is representing.

The Zestimate is one of a handful of Automated Valuation Models (AVMs in industry speak) - it's the only one with a consumer-facing brand, and as a result sees the most scrutiny despite the fact that the other AVMs on the market are the ones actually used by the banks during the appraisal process.

If you think the Zestimate is bad, you should see some of the other commercial AVMs.

The reality is that creating an automated valuation for the ~100M properties in the US is an incredibly difficult task given the availability of data (or lack thereof!). Zillow does a pretty darn good job and has a bit of a data advantage given its incredibly high coverage of for sale listings (though they lack the experience - some firms have been producting AVMs for decades!).

Another thing to note, is that AVMs (like any statistical model), usually aim for a sweet spot that covers as many homes as possible. As a result, ultra high-end properties are often incorrectly valued. E.g. that $25M mansion down the street will be very hard for the model to price. Additionally, certain luxury features, like say, a tennis court, are almost impossible to incorporate into these models on a national scale.

This post reminded me how much I miss Turntable.fm :(

Very cool - thanks for the answer!

How do you plan on gaining national coverage of listings? Between the agents, brokers, aggregators, and MLSs the data supply chain is incredibly fragmented. Securing access to all of this data is an incredibly time intensive process that requires a LOT of relationship building. Unless of course you try to go the 'redfin' route and become a licensed brokerage in every state... but then.. you lose your edge and you're essentially competing with Redfin.

How do you plan on getting all of that listing data?

Otherwise, very cool idea - just trying to figure out how you plan to overcome that.

Very cool site, I can see this being pretty darn interesting. Things I would like to see (but I am only one person!)

1. Mobile interface (I hate to be that guy, but this would be awesome as a native app for those travelers) 2. Widgetized! Most travel bloggers want this on their own site. 3. Ability to map out a journey (as opposed to placing destinations on a map). I think a lot of travelers really take pride in the route they take and how they get from place to place (eg a motorcycle ride down the coast of Vietnam, or a boat ride across the mediterranean, etc)

There is a bug that presents the "You have unsaved changes, are you sure want to navigate away from this page?" in an infinite loop. The only way I could leave the page was by forcing chrome to quit via my task manager.

Otherwise, seems pretty cool.. definitely on par with other in browser website designers.

Before I offer any critical feedback, I want to first say that the first line of code I ever wrote, my "Hello world", was on Codecademy almost immediately after you launched. Since then I've learned how to use programming not only at my job (as a product manager at a web startup), but also to develop full web apps using several of the popular frameworks (flask, django, rails). I credit Codecademy for breaking down the initial barrier to entry (what is control flow, how do you tell a computer what to do, etc). I am a huge fan, but I think there are a few ways you guys could improve.

1) Put the courses into perspective as part of the onboarding process. Why do I need to learn HTML, CSS, JS, or Python? Most people who want to learn have no clue how everything fits together. If you can provide a high level guide as to how and why someone should work through specific codecademy courses you will likely increase satisfaction and completion of courses (just a hypothesis, but this is the most common criticism I hear).

2) I wish codecademy would cover database basics. What is SQL? How should you think about storing data? Until I started researching outside of Codecademy it hadn't even occurred to me that storing and structuring data was a huge part of creating useful applications (I was totally nontechnical). This is the largest hole in terms of actual content.

3) Your classes are already great at teaching newbies the syntax. The big missing component (as some have pointed out), is turning this syntax into real world solutions for real world problems. How do you get past this? You have to break into an area that you aren't comfortable in: Content Production. Unless you can come up with a way to show people how to create and run scripts on their local computer (or maybe a remote server?) through the browser this will continue to be a pitfall of the Codecademy experience. There is probably the potential for you to create some new software that does this (maybe a desktop app), but if you took a codeschool or treehouse approach, only for this stage of the learning, you would be able to truly offer an end to end solution. In your case video content scales just as well as the software. If you were to combine your superior browser interface with high quality video production you would be in a fantastic position to win the "Learn to code online" market. This sets you up with not only a differentiated product offering (your interface is the best), but a future revenue stream. Both of the aforementioned companies are making some serious cash... And thats without even mentioned the real juggernaut (Lynda).

Overall I love the product and think there is a lot of potential. If you have any questions or any of my points require clarification please feel free to shoot me an email (in profile).

Best of luck!

The common problem with hackathons is that you usually don't get to vet your team members/co-founders very well. Building a is a marathon not a sprint, so it's best to make sure your co-founders are really people you want to spend a TON of time with.

Also, transacting $5000 is good, but you probably shouldn't quit your job until you can prove that its replicable and profitable (or at least sustainable).

To be perfectly honest, your phrasing made it sound like you had generated $5k in revenue, in which case quitting would probably be a good idea. $5000 in contingent donations is a whole different animal. If I were you, I would keep working on it during nights and weekends in order to test whether it will continue to gain traction.

I came here to say the same thing. We use to rip through anywhere from ~100M-3B rows of data every day.. updates to this dataset are time sensitive so we use it to finish the job as quickly as possible.

As someone who first got into SEO about a year before panda and penguin rolled out.. I have to admit, SEO has changed ALOT and Jill hits the nail on the head. Easy keyword related SEO tactics no longer work, Hummingbird has made sure of it..

It makes perfect sense if you break it down over the years...

1) Spammers found out they could manipulate rankings with the meta keywords tag.. shortly after, google started to ignore these keyword tags..

2) Spammers found out they could manipulate ranking with the meta description.. shortly after, google stopped using this description to rank sites..

3) Spammers realized they could build artificial link profiles, so google had to get smarter and started incorporated social metrics and became smarter about how they attributed value to links..

4) etc etc etc

It goes on and one, but basically, the only way google will ever be able to defeat spammers is to create an algorithm that is so smart it actually understands not only what the user wants, but also all of the content in its index.. it has to go much deeper than a simple keyword match - it has to parse out the intent of the searcher as well as the meaning of its content.

The tagline for show HN sounds really interesting, but going to your site makes it very clear that you don't understand how the lead market actually works. People don't pay for "hours of research", they pay for the contact info of a person who has demonstrated that they are in market and ready to make a purchase decision. It's not clear that the leads you provide are in market - from the sounds of it, you're just creating a list of prospects? That could be interesting, but prospecting is very easy to outsource and there are already several companies (data.com, jigsaw, etc) already have a very robust database of prospects for a lot less than $800 a month. I don't want to rain on your parade, but I think you need to really deeply evaluate your product/market fit.

I live in SB, I currently work at FindTheBest.com (a startup/growth company in the area) so I stay pretty busy with that. I'm always looking for cool projects for the weekends though!

Looks like we have them in a separate part of the site (http://ca-high-school-ratings.findthebest.com/) I'll be the first to admit we should have these joined into one another.. I'll have to bug that PM about it

We've done a similar thing with data over at FindTheBest, except we aggregated it with the rest of the US

http://public-schools.findthebest.com

Same idea, although a bit more mature in dev

Also valuable to the surfing community.. nice work. I've been playing with NOAA data for personal forecasting for a while.. great to see it used in a commercial product other than surfline..

I've used them for a few personal projects. I've loved everything so far.