westside1506

6 ms·

1.
by westside1506 17y ago
Our service, 80legs, will let you easily do this. We let you specify seed links, how deep you want to crawl, and control many other aspects of the crawl. By default, we control the hard bits, like redirects and spider traps, but if you wa
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by westside1506 17y ago
We actually have a surprising number of customers come to us at 80legs wanting to crawl google search results. I don't think most of them are trying to reverse engineer google or anything like that. Most probably just want a fast way to f
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Google: Own your Internet connection(fora.tv)
1 points by westside1506 17y ago|0 comments
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by westside1506 17y ago
Great question. We've actually done a lot of work on this to ensure that there isn't a problem with running the code on various people's machines. First, Plura actually runs the processPage() function in the restricted java sandbox so ther
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by westside1506 17y ago
There's certainly no problem with individual users doing it. Just contact Plura through the web form at http://pluraprocessing.com/contact.php . Alternatively, you can use one of our affiliates to raise money for charity (not related to o
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by westside1506 17y ago
Our service actually allows you to push your code into the system rather than trying to pull back all of the page contents. So, you end up running your semantic analysis, image analysis, or whatever you want to do on our grid. Very specif
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by westside1506 17y ago
Thanks, we will work on the wording. Just for clarity, we actually do custom crawls based on your needs. If you need to access one million pages, you tell us how to get to them and pay us $2 plus any time you spend processing those pages.
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by westside1506 17y ago
Thanks for the nice comments luckystrike. We had a great time at the Web 2.0 Expo and we've been overwhelmed by all the interest in our service. We're pretty hopeful that we've built something that people want. :)
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by westside1506 17y ago
Plura affiliates actually accept responsibility for getting the permission of their users. Plura encourages disclosure and has found that it is actually very well received by the users once it is explained. It always works our better for
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by westside1506 17y ago
Hi guys. We were actually about to do an "Ask HN: Review our startup" post, but I guess someone beat us to it. So, please review our startup. :) We are launching the beta today to a handful of users and will be letting in more and more us
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by westside1506 18y ago
Does this technology work using both images simultaneously? Or could lots of images be pre-processed individually into something that allowed a cheaper comparison? Just to try to explain the question better, here's an example. Let's say I
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by westside1506 18y ago
My angel group uses Angelsoft to organize the deals we receive from startups. I believe we pay Angelsoft for the privilege and get to use their tools to discuss and evaluate the deals that come our way. It is useful. There is also tons of
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by westside1506 18y ago
Very cool algorithm demo. How well would this compare to a very extreme JPEG compression? Also, I'm not an image compression expert, but I wonder if you could use this technique as a pre-pass before a more standard image compression algori
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by westside1506 18y ago
Interesting concept, but this is not designed to find where your content has been copied onto other sites/blogs. That would be an cool service.
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by westside1506 18y ago
Wow, I just saw this. I was an early lender on Prosper to the tune of $15k. I "invested" it over a couple of months in about 100 different loans. I was considering it a test before investing considerably more. Well, the test didn't go wel
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by westside1506 18y ago
No, it does not have to be a game. We're just focusing our initial affiliate marketing on games because of the higher engagement. The type of sites you mention will work well too. Send us a note through the Contact Us page on the website a
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by westside1506 18y ago
Yep, we'd love to find a way for it to work. If you have any ideas, let us know. :)
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by westside1506 18y ago
The apps that we're running right now control it pretty well using a sneaky trick. We can't get much computer information from java in an unsigned app, so we measure how long each sub-part of a work unit has taken and sleep an appropriate
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by westside1506 18y ago
These are all very good questions and we certainly know that we're not the first company to do grid computing on PCs. :) First, $1500/node-year (or even $200/node-year) comes to a very substantial amount of money for our target customers.
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by westside1506 18y ago
Good question. There really isn't anything that stops someone from reading and trying to interpret the byte code. There is some protection in the fact that you never know what type of work unit is happening at a given time. The algorithms
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by westside1506 18y ago
Oh, and most developers use 50% so far. We have a download app that affiliates can distribute too if they want to. We can set that to run at different numbers when idle and in use. For example, I have mine set to 100% when I'm not using
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by westside1506 18y ago
No, we tried to do this, but we can't run Plura in Adobe AIR. AIR uses Webkit for its browser, but Adobe has removed support for browser plugins, including Java.
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by westside1506 18y ago
Great! Fill out the form on the website and we'll get you signed up in the private beta.
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by westside1506 18y ago
Here's an example: http://pluraprocessing.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/example-appl...
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by westside1506 18y ago
We put it in terms of average simultaneous users because that's the way a lot of affiliates think. They say, we have an average of N people playing the game at any given time. For websites and other affiliate types, we say we pay $15/MWU (
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by westside1506 18y ago
Yes and no. We have created a signed applet capability in the Plura infrastructure, but we have not pushed this out yet. In the future, if an affiliate chooses, he can request work units for a signed applet that would allow them to make h
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by westside1506 18y ago
Yes, we are definitely interested in other sites too. Our main page is pretty generic, but we decided to do a special pitch to game developers for exactly the reasons you state.
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by westside1506 18y ago
Yep, we quite aware of all of these issues. My background is in HPC and my previous company was a successful exit to a major oilfield services firm. My software and its descendants are used on nearly 100,000 CPUs. We are definitely focuse
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by westside1506 18y ago
Thanks. We are really focused on this as well. :) Here's a blog post we wrote comparing us to Amazon's EC2 for HPC apps: http://pluraprocessing.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/comparing-pl... . Our numbers should be very compelling for certai
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by westside1506 18y ago
Thanks for the comments. We really try to be above board, include it in TOS, and encourage disclosure to the users. I mentioned this in another response, but we even have some affiliates that do some sort of opt-out procedure. Our hope is

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