
Show HN: See what the best startups in the world are using - yonasb
http://leanstack.io/cloudstacks/
======
sspiff
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?

~~~
detst
[Meta-comment warning]

This comment is in the same category as the one PG talks about here:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920>

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).

~~~
sliverstorm
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.

~~~
detst
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]

~~~
mgkimsal
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.

~~~
detst
> For the time being, yes, it is.

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.

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5736869>

~~~
sliverstorm
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.

------
salimmadjd
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.

~~~
Cryode
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.

------
Zolomon
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.

------
suyash
Getting a lot of 503's, please fix the problem. Seems another website not
being able to handle HN 1st page traffic.

~~~
yonasb
Sorry everyone. Just switched to nearlyfreespeech, thought they could handle
it. Trying to work through it now.

~~~
asmosoinio
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.

------
moondowner
This should be 'See what services the best startups in the world are using'.

~~~
arocks
Exactly. It would be great if we can see which languages and other server side
technologies they use.

~~~
mcintyre1994
www.builtwith.com seems to be pretty accurate, probably a good starting point
for that information.

~~~
jaegerpicker
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.

~~~
QuantumGuy
Thanks for the heads up. It explains what I was seeing the other day.

------
moe
Interesting data but worst presentation ever.

It's tabular data. Put it in a plain old HTML table so we can make sense of
it.

------
olegp
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>

Is this something you'd find useful?

~~~
gearoidoc
Interesting yes. Useful.....not so much.

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.

------
rachelbythebay
Good people can make amazing stuff happen with any stack.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
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.

------
austengary
Very nice. Throw some charts and graph up in this bitch, compare against time
for popularity. I like data.

~~~
jerrya
Mash it up with Crunchbase (?) and see if there is any meaningful correlation
between stack and funding rounds, stack and IPO, stack and aquihire, ...

~~~
austengary
Would die to see this. OP get on it.

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.

------
mflindell
Seems like its time to upgrade your own stack. Getting some 503 errors on some
pages.

~~~
markwakeford
influx of HN users ?, I am getting the same. Refresh sometimes fixes it.

------
joewee
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]

~~~
austengary
They're manually adding this data.

~~~
joewee
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.

~~~
austengary
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.

~~~
joewee
Didn't mean to point a finger at you.

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.

------
suyash
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?

------
acjohnson55
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.

------
ljd
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.

------
pavanky
Many of these companies are not "startups" anymore.

Fir example, Ebay ?

~~~
suyash
well most of them are startups.

~~~
mosselman
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.

~~~
colinhowe
When do you cease being a startup?

~~~
wensing
When you shift from customer development to company-building. In other words,
when you stop searching for, and instead start scaling, a business model. See
also: <http://steveblank.com/2012/03/05/search-versus-execute/>

------
markoa
I have a validation bug to report: "Is your service currently in Beta?" is a
required field however there is no way to answer with no to that.

------
outside1234
Is there a site that talks about the technology in the stacks in use by
startups instead of the cloud and SaaS platforms they are using?

------
calinet6
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 worldâ€™s largest..." and other
places. Check your page's UTF-8 support.

------
pyvek
You might want to optimize those images (startup logos). Many of them are like
175 KB each.

~~~
PavlovsCat
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).

------
suyash
Btw orignal post from the co-founder Yonas, seem to have no traffic:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243671> (89 days ago)

------
riteshpatel
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).

------
daniel-levin
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.

~~~
Popcorned
It's not dead. It's alive and kicking: <http://usesthis.com/>

------
why-el
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.

------
garazy
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.

------
clement75009
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!

------
PavlovsCat
You should run those .pngs through pngslim or similar :/

------
dewey
Just FYI: <http://leanstack.io/soundcloud/> "SoundCloud is the worldâ€™s
leading"

------
dakinsloss
In the same vein, sign up at swRev.com to find out when we launch with a
consumer reports for software. Should be this summer.

------
whichdan
The Squarespace link goes to /squarespace/c instead of /squarespacec, and
incorrectly shows the profile for Cage.

------
lewisflude
I don't think your use of hamburger buttons is appropriate. Maybe a normal
button would be better?

------
Pent
There is a typo on the Braintree company information page. Right at the
beginning.

------
n1c
Nice; I started doing something similar at thestack.io but lost momentum.

------
waltz
It would be cool to check all the startups that use a certain tool.

------
stevejalim
Your Dropbox link is broken (/dropboxc vs /dropbox)

------
qompiler
But what does leanstack use? ;)

------
Goranek
Wow Github is on Rackspace?

------
ParadisoShlee
Needs more software.

