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Stories from March 11, 2008
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1.Bringing OpenID To The Masses: Clickpass (YC summer 07) (techcrunch.com)
87 points by immad on March 11, 2008 | 37 comments
2.HTTP-Headers Status Diagram (thoughtpad.net)
59 points by luccastera on March 11, 2008 | 6 comments
3.Ask PG: What's the traffic effect here from the TechCrunch mention?
49 points by robg on March 11, 2008 | 22 comments
4."Algorithms for programmers" full text (jjj.de)
44 points by raju on March 11, 2008 | 3 comments
5.An iPhone interface for Hacker News (buxfer.com)
45 points by ashu on March 11, 2008 | 17 comments
6.Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
42 points by ericb on March 11, 2008 | 84 comments
7.Ask YC: Voting Karma
36 points by tel on March 11, 2008 | 30 comments
8.Who do the Y Combinator companies go to for design?
36 points by mhidalgo on March 11, 2008 | 21 comments
9.A Python cheat sheet for those of us who do (coffeeghost.net)
35 points by bdfh42 on March 11, 2008 | 11 comments
10.Widescreen Monitors Can Save Companies $8,600 Per Employee, Per Year (cio.com)
34 points by AZA43 on March 11, 2008 | 12 comments
11.Founder salaries after an acquisition: how much?
31 points by os111 on March 11, 2008 | 17 comments
12.Marvin Minsky: What makes Mathematics hard to learn? (laptop.org)
29 points by hhm on March 11, 2008 | 10 comments
13.20% Of Valley Startups Can’t Get To Their Cash (techcrunch.com)
31 points by jmorin007 on March 11, 2008 | 11 comments
14.Ask YC: What is your favourite paradox?
30 points by moog on March 11, 2008 | 65 comments

In fact it was a design flaw, though not in the server.

The code for checking whether a username was taken was inefficient, so it was taking a huge amount of time to create a new account. The culprit was this line:

  (some [is dcuser (downcase _)] (keys hpasswords*))
The reason the TechCrunch post slowed the site down so much was not the traffic per se but the number of those visitors who were creating new accounts. I pasted a fix into the repl, so the site should be faster now.

Thanks to Rtm for narrowing the problem down to account creation.


We got 14k unique ips yesterday, which without TC would have been 10k. The effect of the spike was diminished by being spread over 2 days, because we use GMT days for stats.

The most dramatic change was the number of new accounts. There were 258 new accounts in the last 24 hours. On a typical day there are 50-60.

The most interesting thing to me was that the TC traffic exposed a design flaw in the account creation code. That's why the site got so slow yesterday.

https://hackertimes.com/item?id=133804

17.Tilton's Law - solve the first problem first (smuglispweeny.blogspot.com)
29 points by bdfh42 on March 11, 2008 | 2 comments

Girls like sex too.
19.Google's second click versus Facebook's second click (andrewchen.typepad.com)
28 points by cstejerean on March 11, 2008 | 2 comments
20.Join the News.YC group on Chatterous
24 points by jorgeortiz85 on March 11, 2008 | 14 comments
21.Utu: Zed Shaw's replacement for http (savingtheinternetwithhate.com)
23 points by nickb on March 11, 2008 | 26 comments
22.Warren Buffett: $516 trillion bubble is a disaster waiting to happen (marketwatch.com)
22 points by makimaki on March 11, 2008 | 13 comments

I propose "venture catapult" as a generic term for what YC does.
24.Mysterious slowness fixed. Sorry about that. (https://hackertimes.com/)
19 points by pg on March 11, 2008 | 2 comments

All users are held to the same standards, whether they're on the leaderboard or not.

Eventually the other users will get tired of you filling up the comment threads with your private beefs, and you'll stop.


   The reason [the site was slow] was not the traffic... 
   but the number of visitors who were creating new accounts.
The only better startup problem than that is "the site was slow because so many people were trying to give us money that our credit card processor crashed".
27.Guy Kawasaki launches Alltop, an "online magazine rack" (alltop.com)
19 points by nonrecursive on March 11, 2008 | 22 comments

Being on TC isn't just important for the numbers. It's who those people are. I suspect practically every startup investor reads TC, for example. That's not a factor for News.YC, but for the average startup those are good people to have know about you.

Also, the traffic boost is probably ordinarily more than 4k uniques. We probably have a fairly big overlap with TC readers.


The Selfish Gene.


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