Diego Basch

Not too long ago I spent some time thinking of a name for an open-source project. I brainstormed with other people and we discarded several ideas because of the following reasons:

• too long
• not very original
• ambiguous or unclear pronunciation
• domain name unavailable
• not too relevant to the project

We finally decided on a name, after long deliberations. A few days later I decided to take a look at the most successful projects in terms of number of downloads on Sourceforge. Here are the top 15 as of this posting:

1 eMule
2 Azureus
3 Ares Galaxy
4 BitTorrent
5 DC++
6 Shareaza
7 GTK+ and The GIMP installers for Windows
8 7-Zip
9 VirtualDub
10 Audacity
11 CDex
12 FileZilla
13 eMule Plus
14 guliverkli
15 Pidgin

Shareaza? guliverkly? Evidently there are more important factors that influence the success of these projects. I wonder what other types of entities are similar in this respect. Clearly this is also true for companies. Near the end of the last century, when I used to work for a company called Inktomi (whose name few people could pronounce correctly, and which had a very obscure meaning with little relation to search engines), we used to learn of a new startup with an “interesting” name pretty much every day. I remember that I learned about two companies around the same time. The first one, whose name I liked, had a short name that perfectly fit what the company did: eMusic. The second one, I didn’t like very much, as it was meaningless and misspelled: Google.

At Flaptor we just released a WordPress plugin for our automatic tagger. It’s called TagMahal (click on the link for download instructions). It’s fun to play with, I just used to pick the tags for this post.

I read a post on Techcrunch about a startup called YouNoodle. Their idea is to try to predict the success of a startup using artificial intelligence. I doubt they can come up with something better than what an experienced technologist could do with a simple checklist, but I guess time will tell. There is a link to an interview with the founders on the NYTimes. What I found interesting was the response to the obvious question, have you applied the algorithm to your company?

“So far, we haven’t run ourselves through it,” Mr. Goodson said, adding that the results could prove baffling. “If it says we’ll fail, and it’s right, that’s something of a paradox.”

It is not a paradox at all. There are many non-paradoxical explanations for such a result, for example:

• The algorithm doesn’t work at all, and it guessed luckily. For example, here’s my algorithm: For a given startup, I predict that it will fail with a 90% chance. It will be right most of the time but it’s still worthless. If I started a company based on this algorithm, it would most certainly fail.
• The algorithm works, but the startup itself will fail. Wouldn’t that be ironic? You come up with an algorithm that can predict whether a startup will succeed, but you don’t have what it takes to make it into a successful business and the algorithm knows it.
• The algorithm works well enough but it’s not perfect. YouNoodle suceeds in spite of the fact that the algorithm guessed wrongly for them.
• The algorithm doesn’t work at all and the company still succeeds! I can remember several examples of this scenario.

As I posted on the Flaptor blog recently, we released a tool to automatically suggest tags for blog posts based on a learning algorithm. You can check it out here:

Flaptor autotagger

Most of what we do at Flaptor is related to search and information retrieval, but once in a while people want to learn other technologies. This is how Bonoki was born. Some of the guys wanted to play around with Ajax and the browser side of things. We picked up Joel Spolsky’s book on User Interface Design and spent a few months working on (yet another) photo sharing site. Please check it out and let us know what you think, we welcome all feedback however harsh!

I read Paul Graham’s essay titled The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups. It’s a good read and it’s hard not to agree with the majority of what he says. In a nutshell: success is the opposite of failure. If you avoid doing absolutely everything that would cause you to fail, you succeed. Here is a partial list of things to avoid. Among them, he has somewhat uninformative points like “don’t raise too little money” and “don’t raise too much money” which is like telling someone to not undercook or overcook a steak. No recipe here, the proof is on the plate.

In a way, it reminds me of someone one I knew who was reading “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” in the hope of becoming a more effective person. After browsing the book for a while, I thought that she might as well be reading “The 12 Habits of Famous Race Horses”. This article is in a gray area between descriptive and prescriptive. Even though it’s nice to read, I don’t know if it’s actually very helpful. The people who have what it takes to create a successful startup (a tiny minority) will do it anyway. Those who don’t can have this article read to them every morning by their personal trainer as they work off the undercooked steak from the night before and it will do them no good.

At this point, I feel like inserting a link to something more Carl-Saganesque like the Drake Equation. The point is that a number of factors are completely outside of anyone’s control.

One of my favorite dishes.

First post after several weeks of traveling around.

I ordered a kit for this project. Their objective is to track the migrations of human genes from our common African ancestor until the current state of the world population. I’ll try to post the results when I get them, probably a couple of months from now.

Thanks to John, I learned of The Arcade Fire. Their album Funeral is the best thing I’ve heard in a long time and I have been listening to it over and over. It’s one of those rare occasions that makes me feel like sending money to an artist.

Getting outraged is one of my favorite pastimes. Fortunately it’s an inexpensive one. All I need is to read the news. For example, this week I saw this story on Slashdot about a man being sent to prison for having viewed child porn pictures on the web. The prosecution found the files in the web browser cache (the Temporary Internet Files folder on Windows) and was able to convince a jury that this constitutes “possession of child pornography”. He was sentenced to twenty years.

Now, where do I begin my outrage? First, I believe that going to prison is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. I am of the opinion that keeping the innocent out of jail is more important than punishing all the guilty. Apparently this is not the view of the legal system in many countries including the US. How else can “possession” of something be considered a crime? That concept always bothered me because it’s open to the worst possible abuses. You hate someone? Just hide drugs in their house and call the cops anonymously. The person won’t be able to cooperate (i.e. tell anything useful about where the drugs came from) so the prosecutor will be especially harsh. If you happen to live in Singapore, you are in luck. All you need is to have the police find your “friend” with 15 grams of heroin, which carries a mandatory death penalty.

Let’s escalate the outrage a bit more. The guy in the Slashdot story did not even have possession of the files. He simply browsed a site containing them, which is equivalent to watching TV. Unfortunately for him, web browsers implement a feature to speed up navigation. The first time a person visits a page, the text and images are stored on the hard drive for a while. The idea is that, if the person visits the site again and there have been no updates, there is no reason to reload the content from the internet. Because of this technical detail, the prosecution could argue that the files were stored on the guy’s computer even though, in all likelihood, he was unaware of this.

My impression of this case is that the defense lawyer must have been nowhere near the top of mount Cleverest. Anyone competent would have been able to compare this to what happens with people who own a TiVo, or set up a quick entrapment experiment. I would have brought in a laptop and send the judge an email with a link to “an interesting story that questions Yout Honor’s reputation”. Upon clicking, a browser window would have shown a bunch of random images with text like “Bang! you got child porn on your computer now!”. I guess I have been watching too much Boston Legal, since it sounds something that James Spader’s character would come up with.

Continuing the outrage-fest, twenty years? What is left for those who produce child porn? Probably not much since they are likely to be outside of the US. What are the legislators thinking? Probably something like this: “I need more soccer mom votes. I’ll double the sentences. That looks good.” Well, here’s another interesting scenario: boy dumps girl. Girl is vengeful. She finds one of those trojan programs that install spyware and sends it to him. Only this program does not install spyware. Instead, it downloads large quantities of illegal content and then erases itself. Perhaps she doesn’t even know the law and thinks he will get a slap in the wrist. Boy, don’t make any plans for the next two decades.

I hope someone smart takes up this case and shows the stupidity of the situation. Otherwise, it’s another step into a globalized, Orwellian society.