5 ms·

This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it?

by jpkeisala 7y ago

brianlweiner 7y ago
Seems like it ... my experience with Algolia was fairly lukewarm -- it seemed expensive for the capabilities offered.
- garry 7y ago
  I think this is one of the fundamental quandaries of many services that sell to developers. There's always a way to roll it yourself such that the cost in money is low but the cost in time is high. For me, I just don't have enough time in the day (parenthood + day job as an investor) so when I do code, I am looking for a lot of leverage, and I'm willing to trade off a monthly fee for it since it's like licensing software that lets me get something done a lot faster. Most cloud services are like this: You could do it yourself, but when you compare it to hiring more people on your team, you should use a cloud service. The upside to this is that a lot of startups are going to be able to get a lot more leverage through building on top of services like Algolia. I mean, this is really the AWS strategy in a nutshell, isn't it?
- RHSeeger 7y ago
  I would agree on your point here, in some ways. Algolia is a limited search; there's a lot of things you can't do on the fly (that you can in, say, SOLR). However, the onboarding (as noted) is pretty good. It's really easy to get started using it. The learning curve is much lower and so, too, are the capabilities. If you don't need those extra capabilities, you just need to get search available, it might be the right thing.
  - garry 7y ago
    Oh yes, low bar for sure. The challenge is to get it to be a high ceiling.
jackson1442 7y ago
Yes, though it definitely raises some valid points. If I'm picking between a few services, I'm usually going to go for the one with the best docs and onboarding experience. That seems like a given, but a lot of companies are severely lacking in those departments.
capableweb 7y ago
Hosted by Garry Tan, Cofounder of Posthaven where the Masterclass is hosted and Managing Partner at Initialized Capital, who also just happens to have Algolia in their portfolio. Go figure.
- garry 7y ago
  Trying to be helpful. If there are things you would rather see, happy to try to throw that on my YouTube channel too!
- localcrisis 7y ago
  As a VC, marketing is part of the job. Perhaps the most important part of the job. Getting LPs to invest in your fund encourages strong personal brand building. Getting startups to want _you_ to invest versus others—and for many "great looking" deals (the ones you want), the company has options—requires strong personal brand building. In the medium term incentives are less towards being good at helping companies. You have to do enough good marketing to get founders to sign on the dotted line. After that, if they don't like you or are "bleh" on you, there's nothing they can do about it. What's done is done. By the time you've fully deployed the capital in your fund (2–3 years, excluding reserves for follow-on), you're raising your next fund. That's _far_ too short of a time span to know what the results will be for Fund I. What does it take? Good marketing. It's not a coincidence, then, that successful funds revolve around good, or at the very least incessant, self-marketers. Garry has appeared numerous times on @VCBrags (and has, funnily enough, blocked them.)
  - garry 7y ago
    For me, all I'm really trying to do is lift up stories and experiences that I think are superlative and noteworthy, with the hope that it helps more of those things exist. This is helpful feedback for me in that if this feels too much like advertising, I'm not doing a good enough job there. Sorry about that.
bartkappenburg 7y ago
And an YC company, which maybe explains the #1 position out of the blue (but maybe I’m way too cynical)
- 7777fps 7y ago
  It's not cynical, it's open and clear if you track HN story positions that a large part of rankings are not organic. In the past HN were more open about that fact than they are now.
  - dang 7y ago
    I've posted tens of thousands of comments explaining how we moderate HN, and can tell you that we're more open than ever, so I'm not sure where you got that.
    - 7777fps 7y ago
      It is clear that some stories are boosted up, and some are boosted down, and it is not clear the process those get chosen. It may be that "you find them interesting is enough", and it's your site so this is not a complaint, but it is not a transparent process because despite "thousands of comments" there is little documentation or explained policies. We know there's an "anti flame war" trigger on the down side, but of more interest is what causes stories to jump hundreds of spots and that has never been well explained to my knowledge. (Or perhaps it has but I haven't been to read such an explanation).
      - dang 7y ago
        Trying to write comprehensive policies would end up interesting only the sorts of users who like policies, including the sort who will raise objections no matter what we do. The more policy we produce, the more objections and meta concerns they will raise, so to go down that road would be to perform a DoS attack on ourselves. It would suck limited resources away from things we can do to improve HN for the community as a whole, instead of just a vocal, litigious few. Since we're going to get criticized from this angle no matter what we do, we may as well take our lumps up front. If that sounds harsh, I'm sorry—it's mostly because policy-writing is the last thing my soul cares to do, and the bureaucratic parts of this job make me grumpy. HN has always been curated, and that involves human judgment and interpretation—there's no way around that, no way to spell it out, and certainly no way to formalize it. As far as I can tell, the community is somewhere between fine-with-that and prefers-it-that-way. But we're fully open to answering questions. I spend hours each day doing that, in threads and by email. There's basically nothing people ask about HN that we don't answer. Before someone objects to "basically", I'm throwing that in because there are always corner cases (e.g., a question we can't answer because it would compromise some other user). You can't run a site this complicated without inconsistency. But the principles we practice are deeply about openness and satisfying curiosity. As for stories "jumping hundreds of spots", if you mean jumping up, that's the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). If you mean jumping down, it's some combination of software penalties and/or user flags and/or moderation downweights. Most often it's user flags.
garry 7y ago
Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund. But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well. Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience. I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical.
- throwaway3157 7y ago
  > Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund. But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well. Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience. I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical. You didn't answer OP's question, which was: > This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it? Reflecting on your answer, you appear to be advertising for Algolia as well. It's a nice product, but the impression I get is that OP is right -- this post is an advertisement.
  - lnanek2 7y ago
    It's certainly advertising, but he did seem to offer some extra role of: > wanting to point to things that work well Which is more inline with normal HN content. Pointing to some technical thing which works well we can integrate into our coding/startups/etc.. In this case it happens to be a non-open source subscription business replacement for coding your own search, so it's very commercial, of course, but paid off the shelf solutions are technically an alternative to coding your own search with open source stuff.

This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it?

brianlweiner 7y ago

Seems like it ... my experience with Algolia was fairly lukewarm -- it seemed expensive for the capabilities offered.

garry 7y ago
I think this is one of the fundamental quandaries of many services that sell to developers. There's always a way to roll it yourself such that the cost in money is low but the cost in time is high. For me, I just don't have enough time in the day (parenthood + day job as an investor) so when I do code, I am looking for a lot of leverage, and I'm willing to trade off a monthly fee for it since it's like licensing software that lets me get something done a lot faster. Most cloud services are like this: You could do it yourself, but when you compare it to hiring more people on your team, you should use a cloud service. The upside to this is that a lot of startups are going to be able to get a lot more leverage through building on top of services like Algolia. I mean, this is really the AWS strategy in a nutshell, isn't it?
RHSeeger 7y ago
I would agree on your point here, in some ways. Algolia is a limited search; there's a lot of things you can't do on the fly (that you can in, say, SOLR). However, the onboarding (as noted) is pretty good. It's really easy to get started using it. The learning curve is much lower and so, too, are the capabilities. If you don't need those extra capabilities, you just need to get search available, it might be the right thing.
- garry 7y ago
  Oh yes, low bar for sure. The challenge is to get it to be a high ceiling.

jackson1442 7y ago

Yes, though it definitely raises some valid points. If I'm picking between a few services, I'm usually going to go for the one with the best docs and onboarding experience. That seems like a given, but a lot of companies are severely lacking in those departments.

capableweb 7y ago

Hosted by Garry Tan, Cofounder of Posthaven where the Masterclass is hosted and Managing Partner at Initialized Capital, who also just happens to have Algolia in their portfolio. Go figure.

garry 7y ago
Trying to be helpful. If there are things you would rather see, happy to try to throw that on my YouTube channel too!
localcrisis 7y ago
As a VC, marketing is part of the job. Perhaps the most important part of the job. Getting LPs to invest in your fund encourages strong personal brand building. Getting startups to want _you_ to invest versus others—and for many "great looking" deals (the ones you want), the company has options—requires strong personal brand building. In the medium term incentives are less towards being good at helping companies. You have to do enough good marketing to get founders to sign on the dotted line. After that, if they don't like you or are "bleh" on you, there's nothing they can do about it. What's done is done. By the time you've fully deployed the capital in your fund (2–3 years, excluding reserves for follow-on), you're raising your next fund. That's _far_ too short of a time span to know what the results will be for Fund I. What does it take? Good marketing. It's not a coincidence, then, that successful funds revolve around good, or at the very least incessant, self-marketers. Garry has appeared numerous times on @VCBrags (and has, funnily enough, blocked them.)
- garry 7y ago
  For me, all I'm really trying to do is lift up stories and experiences that I think are superlative and noteworthy, with the hope that it helps more of those things exist. This is helpful feedback for me in that if this feels too much like advertising, I'm not doing a good enough job there. Sorry about that.

bartkappenburg 7y ago

And an YC company, which maybe explains the #1 position out of the blue (but maybe I’m way too cynical)

7777fps 7y ago
It's not cynical, it's open and clear if you track HN story positions that a large part of rankings are not organic. In the past HN were more open about that fact than they are now.
- dang 7y ago
  I've posted tens of thousands of comments explaining how we moderate HN, and can tell you that we're more open than ever, so I'm not sure where you got that.
  - 7777fps 7y ago
    It is clear that some stories are boosted up, and some are boosted down, and it is not clear the process those get chosen. It may be that "you find them interesting is enough", and it's your site so this is not a complaint, but it is not a transparent process because despite "thousands of comments" there is little documentation or explained policies. We know there's an "anti flame war" trigger on the down side, but of more interest is what causes stories to jump hundreds of spots and that has never been well explained to my knowledge. (Or perhaps it has but I haven't been to read such an explanation).
    - dang 7y ago
      Trying to write comprehensive policies would end up interesting only the sorts of users who like policies, including the sort who will raise objections no matter what we do. The more policy we produce, the more objections and meta concerns they will raise, so to go down that road would be to perform a DoS attack on ourselves. It would suck limited resources away from things we can do to improve HN for the community as a whole, instead of just a vocal, litigious few. Since we're going to get criticized from this angle no matter what we do, we may as well take our lumps up front. If that sounds harsh, I'm sorry—it's mostly because policy-writing is the last thing my soul cares to do, and the bureaucratic parts of this job make me grumpy. HN has always been curated, and that involves human judgment and interpretation—there's no way around that, no way to spell it out, and certainly no way to formalize it. As far as I can tell, the community is somewhere between fine-with-that and prefers-it-that-way. But we're fully open to answering questions. I spend hours each day doing that, in threads and by email. There's basically nothing people ask about HN that we don't answer. Before someone objects to "basically", I'm throwing that in because there are always corner cases (e.g., a question we can't answer because it would compromise some other user). You can't run a site this complicated without inconsistency. But the principles we practice are deeply about openness and satisfying curiosity. As for stories "jumping hundreds of spots", if you mean jumping up, that's the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). If you mean jumping down, it's some combination of software penalties and/or user flags and/or moderation downweights. Most often it's user flags.

garry 7y ago

Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund. But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well. Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience. I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical.

throwaway3157 7y ago
> Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund. But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well. Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience. I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical. You didn't answer OP's question, which was: > This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it? Reflecting on your answer, you appear to be advertising for Algolia as well. It's a nice product, but the impression I get is that OP is right -- this post is an advertisement.
- lnanek2 7y ago
  It's certainly advertising, but he did seem to offer some extra role of: > wanting to point to things that work well Which is more inline with normal HN content. Pointing to some technical thing which works well we can integrate into our coding/startups/etc.. In this case it happens to be a non-open source subscription business replacement for coding your own search, so it's very commercial, of course, but paid off the shelf solutions are technically an alternative to coding your own search with open source stuff.