

Publicly Launched Teams of YC S12 - kclick
http://refer.ly/aYtt

======
fruchtose
I see a couple companies here throwing around the term "high performance", and
as someone who has worked with actual high performance computing (HPC)
technology, the perversion of this term is annoying.

What is HPC? HPC is writing software for supercomputers. HPC is implementing
parallel algorithms. HPC is Intel's lab on a chip, a Linux cluster with
Infiniband networking, etc.

> SpinPunch makes high performance browser games to rival PC and console
> titles.

No, SpinPunch, my browser is not a Linux cluster with 1024 nodes, each with 8
CPUs. JavaScript is not HPC. C, C++, and Fortran are high performance. MPI and
the Intel Math Kernel Library are high performance. Using MPI-IO to interact
with a parallel virtual file system to read a 1 GB file efficiently is high
performance.

> SpaceBase is a server-side, in-memory, high-performance, concurrent and
> distributed spatial data-store...SpaceBase is implemented in Java, and
> provides a Java and C++ APIs.

That sounds great, SpaceBase, but I didn't see any white papers or mentions of
academic journal articles on your site. If your revolutionary system is high
performance, you have to prove it. At the very least, you need a white paper
to show how fantastic your HPC software is. Here are a few examples of that:

Google MapReduce:
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/mapreduce-
osdi04.pdf)

Message Passing Interface (MPI):
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01678191960...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0167819196000245)

Intel Math Kernel Library: [http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-
math-kernel-l...](http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-math-kernel-
library-white-papers/) ScaLAPACK:
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=234898&...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=234898&tag=1)

Elemental: <http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~flame/pubs/FLAWN44_revised.pdf>

You're walking a very fine line when you claim that your system is high
performance, and I am not impressed by the total lack of any paper describing
how you came to this conclusion. I found this snippet from the company's blog:

> It scales gracefully across CPUs and across a computing grid. It scales so
> well that it allows building large shardless MMO games. In-fact, shardless
> MMO games and virtual worlds were one of the use-cases SpaceBase was
> specifically built to handle. (Distributed SpaceBase, or SpaceBase-on-a-grid
> is currently in the advanced stages of testing, and will be available for
> evaluation and purchase within a couple of months. The single-node, multi-
> and many- core deployment is available for evaluation right now!)

Please, just show us the numbers!

tl;dr HPC is all about scaling across computing clusters. Show us an
experiment with speedup numbers.

~~~
pron
Parallel Universe founder here. Those white papers are coming!

In the meantime, we invite you to take a look at the technical paper we posted
on highscalability.com yesterday, discussing Galaxy, our open-source in-memory
data grid: [http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/8/20/the-performance-
of...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/8/20/the-performance-of-
distributed-data-structures-running-on-a.html)

Also, you can check out the Galaxy "under the hood" series:
<http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/tagged/galaxy-internals>

And the SpaceBase benchmarks are coming, some of them probably as soon as next
week!

------
knes
Is it just me or most of these startups don't have any "Wow factor"?

I mean 9GAG has been around for quite some time now and what does it bring to
the table?

Mark.io is basically canvas / quickmeme but with a slicker "Startup look".

Scoutzie could be a side project on Shown HN. Sacha Greif is doing something
similar with Folyo.

CocoPad, I don't have word for this. I don't understand why this idea got
accepted in YC in the first place.

Its not all bad though.

Bufferbox, instacart, Flightfox and some other are really trying to change
their own industry / market and looks like true YC Startup.

Anyway, this is just a rant from someone who use to get excited seeing all the
great startup from YC demo day.

------
arkitaip
Looks like a fine lineup with lots of startups useful for businesses.

Profig: when is this coming to Europe!

I find Easel very interesting as I've been looking for a hi-fi alternative to
Balsamiq.

Coinbase sounds interesting but I have no idea what they are actually doing
based on what it says on the web site. Also, I'm pretty skeptical when it
comes to security and the BitCoin industry.

Submittable.com: two persistent feedback tools on the front page...? Anyways,
the service sounds great for content heavy orgs.

------
zio99
You forgot 9GAG and Mth Sense, we should work on this together. Been running
this list for a while:
[http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29465655158/yc-s12-c...](http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29465655158/yc-s12-companies-
demo-day)

And a list of YC S12 Rejects:
[http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29900354472/the-
forg...](http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29900354472/the-forgotten-
yc-s12-applicants)

Hope this helps.

~~~
kclick
mth Sense, 9GAG, and Delight.io have been added. There of course are a lot
more, but as batchmates ourselves, we're waiting for them to launch on stage
rather than blow their big moment.

You have a really stellar list--let's collaborate and update each throughout
the day. Should be exciting...

~~~
zio99
82 it seems, eh. Shucks I can't be in Cali right now. Maybe next time I'll
send my double ;) <http://www.doublerobotics.com/>

------
Kilimanjaro
Somebody take a webshot of that page and send it to pg.

That's exactly what HN needs.

* <http://i.imgur.com/xoMVr.jpg>

------
kevinwdavid
Betting on Instacart and Plivo to be the best out of this batch.
Delight.io,viacycle,Bufferbox,virool,vayable and zapier come next.

The last supper picture has 15 disciples ;)

------
brittohalloran
The last supper picture with PG == Jesus was worth the click

~~~
zio99
+1 Should've been a female founder in there:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%C3%9Altima_Cena_-
_Da_Vinc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%C3%9Altima_Cena_-
_Da_Vinci_5.jpg)

~~~
kclick
Noticed that too! But the ladies will be well represented on the Demo Day
stage today.

------
Kilimanjaro
FundersClub gets the gold medal.

PG should ban social startups in the next batch just to rise the level a notch
or two.

------
DodgyEggplant
nice to see many "not pure software" startups, dealing with hairy physical
brick-and-mortar issues

------
sharkweek
I wonder if 9GAG spoke to the Reddit founders at all during incubation
/karmaconspiracy

~~~
chrischancc
Yes sure, Alexis is a nice and helpful guy.

