I'm sorry, but can we stop calling these startups?
Companies like Twitter, eBay, GitHub, Mozilla, Netflix and Atlassian are past the startup stage by now. Many of them have been market leaders for years.
Calling Intuit a startup isn't even stretching it anymore. They're 30 years old and have a revenue of over $4B.
I realize HN thinks startups are sexy, but these have no business being labeled startups. If Intuit is a startup, what does it take to be a called a mature company?
I realize HN thinks startups are sexy, but these have no business being labeled startups. If Intuit is a startup, what does it take to be a called a mature company?
-------
2 decades after the IPO should be the cutoff point. After that, you're "mature"; before that, you're still considered a 'scrappy startup' which might fold at any moment without the day to day pivoting of the charismatic founders in their garage. ;)
I think that sometime in the mid- to late 90s, when there was an explosive land grab on the Web and every Web-based company was a new startup because the Web itself was a new startup, the word startup ended up meaning Web-based company to a lot of people.
I don't want to pick on you because there might be a place for your comment but it's not at the top; we need to stop voting these to that position (I'm not encouraging down-votes).
Firstly, sspiff isn't dismissing the article. sspiff is making a meta-comment about the article's choices in presenting itself.
Secondly, if it shouldn't be at the top, what should be? I think you are looking at spiff's comment in a vacuum and saying, "This is not platinum-quality comment material!". But there isn't any platinum-quality comment in this page of comments yet. You can't upvote the rightful comment to the top if it doesn't exist yet.
I'll concede that this wasn't the best place to make the point (I'll make it again, along with others, including PG). Perhaps I did look at spiff's comment in a vacuum and took advantage of this post being near the top of HN, but this is something that bothers me and clearly does PG, too. Yes, there are not any "platinum-quality comments" but let's remember that this is a recurring problem and that I'm not trying to pick on sspiff.
While it is not outright dismissal, it is dismissive in nature, and again, my primary issue is with voting, not necessarily the comment. I think we could still ask, quoting PG, "Yeah, we know that [Intuit isn't a startup]. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article?"
[and now it's getting down-votes after your comment despite PG making it clear time and time again that this is a major problem for HN]
I think we could still ask, quoting PG, "Yeah, we know that [Intuit isn't a startup]. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article?"
-----------
For the time being, yes, it is. And given that it wasn't an article being linked to, but a site that included ebay and intuit under the banner of "startups", yes, this might be the most interesting point of the site people want to discuss.
It's a hypothetical not a question of the present state of things but either way, I disagree. Rachel's comment [1] (I understand it wasn't present when I made my first comment), while terse, is more interesting, more likely to foster interesting discussion and doesn't have the dreaded HN "middlebrow dismissal". And I have no doubt HN can come up with much, much better. The point being, it became a "magnet for upvotes" and nothing better ever had a chance to reach the top to encourage more interesting discussion.
> but a site that included ebay and intuit under the banner of "startups", yes, this might be the most interesting point of the site people want to discuss.
That's unfortunate; I've found HN to be a place to find great tangentially related discussion to otherwise uninteresting posts. That doesn't happen by accident; we need to foster it.
rachelbythebay's comment is an interesting choice. The core idea could make for an excellent launching point of discussion, but worded so tersely it comes off as very dismissive, which is exactly what you are trying to rally against.
it became a "magnet for upvotes" and nothing better ever had a chance to reach the top to encourage more interesting discussion.
This is an interesting way to think of it. I think we could agree that the most valuable comments will not necessarily appear until the article has aged a bit. Clearly HN tries to combat this by moving certain new comments to the top for a little while, but perhaps something more dramatic is needed. Perhaps for a certain period in the thread's life, for example, distribute comments with positive scores using some random seed such that higher rated comments will generally be near the top to avoid wading through a morass of poor quality, but any one (positive-scored) comment might be at the top for any given refresh.
P.S. I don't think you deserve the downvotes you are getting. I obviously don't exactly agree with you, which is why we are having this discussion, but I think you raise valid concerns and make them in a reasoned and articulate manner.
It's very easy to make a quick, correct, point that avoids discussing any of the content of the article. That comment will get upvotes, and will be top of the list, and will continue to get upvotes, and thus will stay near the top of the list. It self-perpetuates.
I get that this is an issue that bothers PG. I also get that this particular comment you're singling out might be an example of it, but I'm not sure. However, I'm not convinced that every instance that looks like the alleged problem is really a problem in itself and, perhaps I am in a minority, do not believe this sort of thing is the downfall of HN.
For me, I think the issues that make discussions go "downhill" are less to do with criticism and much more to do with prevalence of group-think. I don't think the prevailing wisdom that pointing out fundamental errors of facts of faulty arguments is a bad thing, even if they are not the main point of the article. I think there is edifying value in such criticism. Now, it is true that an article may have value beyond it's minor or major inherent fallacies and errors. Criticism is not censorship and it does not prevent others from reading and discussing other parts of an article if they are interesting and fodder for good conversation. Nevertheless, I don't think being overly generous or charitable necessarily the best method or should be enforced via an algorithm or community brow beating. No one wants inane Reddit conversations but I don't think most want sterile group-think or hug sessions either.
HN has all kinds of users with different backgrounds and some users are very knowledgeable and critical and we can learn a lot of have great discussion regarding the criticism as the more traditionally positive style conversations. If we eliminated this sort of discussion from HN, I think it would make things much worse than better, Valley group-think would rule the day. One thing I think users that come to HN expect is good information either in the articles or to find the proper information in the comments. If we let erroneous information stand because of we want to be nice or follow Atwood's "ruthlessly civil" or whatever the hell his ideology is, I think we would less a great benefit of HN discussions and users, particularly less experienced ones, would be worse off. If I'm new, and I see an HN submission that says eBay and Netflix are startups and that clearly is a significant part of the article and as well there are many comments on HN, but with no contention of that issue anywhere to be found, I may well think that the community consensus is that eBay is a startup.
On other articles that get submitted, I may conclude that the smart people on HN think all manner of pseudoscience and homeopathy are generally accepted, if I wasn't aware of there being new a impetus to avoid criticism.
>Is your problem that the hearty self congratulation mutual admiration society on Hacker News (now there's a middlebrow dismissal!) thinks that something you like isn't as new and shiny as something you don't care about?
(oddly enough I think that article is relevant to the original topic)
I think that comment is somewhat unfair to HN but if we are not careful and are to act to hastily toward criticism we may just end up with a "mutual admiration society." Let's no do that. :)
Great idea, but kind of disappointed in the data. For a site called leanstack, I don't see any of the used stack. What DB they're using, which framework, etc.
for example, I know Instagram uses python, redis and Postgres. Pinterest python/django but moving to flask and using MySQL. But I'm curious to know about other sites.
Same; I don't associate "stack" with cloud services / SaaS / etc. While I did learn about a few services I didn't know about that seem quite useful, it wasn't what I expected.
Would be interesting to see a recursive descent (probably wrong term, my swedish is getting in the way) of this; Twitter uses Pingdom, now I want to click on Pingdom to see what they use.
Also, a graph with dependencies between these companies would be cool to see. Security companies might want to give the node with most edges a call or two.
What kind of things are you running there? I have some small not so important sites on NearlyFreeSpeech and have been happy -- would be nice to hear about their limits.
Of the four major sites that I've personally worked on, built with was wrong on them all. Two of the four I expected because it's using Javascript to hit a API and I think that would likely be much more difficult to guess correctly. What I didn't expect was that they would all be reported as using php when none of them do. Sure it's a really small sample set and I bet overall they are doing fine but I thought it worth mentioning.
It's especially misleading because "services" like Amazon RDS and the provisioning systems offered by the big IAAS providers are listed and the self-hosted (+- open source) alternatives don't get mentioned.
We are working on something similar at StartHQ. In addition to listing which services any given company uses, we've also been thinking of listing the technologies the services themselves use, e.g. https://starthq.com/apps/?technology=mongodb
The ability to view a company's stack changes over time might prove more useful. For example, what stack did Company X use to get to 10k users, 100k users etc.
Given enough accurate data then it may be possible for a visitor to predict any performance bottlenecks that a technology may enforce over time and what technologies to use to mitigate said problems.
But that's only part of the picture. It's also important to consider how much effort they need to expend to do so, and how many resources are consumed in the process.
Truly good developers will know to discard poor tools in favor of better ones, and will be eager to do so. They don't have emotional attachments to, say, Ruby on Rails or MongoDB, or some other piece of software or service. Once the tool becomes insufficient, it's gone. In many cases, this is obvious right away, so the tool isn't even used in the first place.
In all seriousness, I would PAY to see this.
I would pay extra if you add hosted graph widgets that empirically conclude the largest reciprocal relation between valuation and an IIS/MSSQL stack.
I assumed you would pull the javascript embedded in the target sites along with DNS records to see what services they are using. But where do you get Anyperks data from? Are you manually adding this? [EDIT to make more PC]
OK. But why did I get a down vote for that? My point is there are probably more optimal ways to add the data than manually gathering it. Nice effort though, of course.
You like to point fingers, eh? Is my name pg? I have no idea why.
I will take a gander however and assume someone didn't like what was presumably a rhetorical and pretentious response.
I do though agree. As to your first response, a quick right click will show that the site is made with Wordpress. The lack of formatting for the stack grids suggests it MAY be a plugin from which this is being retrieved; nevertheless with the choice of Wordpress, I am doubtful.
Perhaps I don't understand the hn culture, is suggesting ways to do something more efficiently against the rules of Show HN? And if whoever keeps downvoting me wants to discourage me from making similar comments, how about explaining what is wrong with my comment? Instead of anonymously downvoting it.
This is great insight tool for marketers/business developers. Why did you choose to make this information public? How did you curate all the products/services of all these startups?
Cool info, but the presentation could use some help. The pageloads to view companies are slow, and once they show up, the grid of technologies is not the most thoughtful way to organize the data. It's not clear to me whether order has any meaning.
There's got to be a better way to categorize the technologies used. Perhaps separating the core web request stack and from the support components would be a start. Some aggregate information across all of the companies would be useful as well.
I would love to see someone do a sort of trade deficit analysis to see how many products one of these companies uses versus how many other companies use them on this site. Obviously everyone will have far more export than import but perhaps the ratio would provide some interesting insight into how a company operates or how competitive their industry is.
It would just be a fun fishing expeditions with the data.
I usually make more sure than 'most of x is y' before I claim certain things. This is just hipsterism. Ebay, LinkedIn, Mozilla? Are you kidding?
While in New York I went to some networking events where people said 'I work for a startup', 'How long have you guys been around?', '4 years', 'That doesn't really sound like a startup.', 'I know, but we FEEL like a startup.'... A*holes.
He said many. I agree with him: Intuit, Twitter, eBay, GitHub, Mozilla, Netflix and Atlassian are hardly startups. And this list is by no means exhaustive.
Sure, many others may be startups, perhaps even most. But since when do we generalize away ~30% of some population. That's not very scientific. I can't think of many scenario's where this would be acceptable.
Pretty cool showcase-style site; I could easily see finding a service here that I didn't know everyone else was using. Every software company starting out really should look through these services and others like them, just see if there's something interesting.
BTW -- Unicode fail at: "99designs is the world’s largest..." and other places. Check your page's UTF-8 support.
And pngslim turns some of them into 3-5 KB files without changing even a pixel... by the time I saw more than a white blank screen, it had already downloaded 2 megabytes, with no end in sight. That's just nuts.
Everyone, always: If you make websites on a super fast connection, get a proxy (or VM) to simulate a slow connection...! You will learn a lot of things which will become easy habits quickly, and then you can turn off the proxy (turn it on again occasionally).
The 'Submit Your Startup' form doesn't validate because there's no way to say no to the 'Is this a cloud service intended for developers?' field (because it's a checkbox rather than radio buttons).
This is pretty cool. There was a service a while back which seems to have died called weusethis. It also had interviews with the engineers at the startups detailing how they used their tech stacks.
This is similar in spirit to weusethat.com (itself modeled after usesthis.com), which I really liked but they stopped updating the content mid-past-december. Hopefully leanstack continues.
Hey yonasb this is really cool, if you'd like to automate it a bit let me know we've got an API for this (api.builtwith.com) and we've got free attribution version that you could use.
Many comments here are focusing on negative stuff, so I wanted to say congrats, I find this website incredibly interesting and useful! I learned a lot browsing through it!
Companies like Twitter, eBay, GitHub, Mozilla, Netflix and Atlassian are past the startup stage by now. Many of them have been market leaders for years.
Calling Intuit a startup isn't even stretching it anymore. They're 30 years old and have a revenue of over $4B.
I realize HN thinks startups are sexy, but these have no business being labeled startups. If Intuit is a startup, what does it take to be a called a mature company?