>> What do you mean by "one new user a second"?

> On average, once a second a user comes to the, call it, the home page of the site, and is a "new" user in the sense of the number of unique users per month. The ad people seem to want to count mostly only the unique users. At my site, if that user likes it at all, then they stand to see several Web pages before they leave. Then. with more assumptions, the revenue adds to the number I gave.

I see what you mean now - I got a bit confused there, trying to interpret your meaning in terms of system load, not new (unique) users per second in terms of Web property value. Gotcha.

> At this point this is a Ramen noodle budget project. So, no racks for now. Instead, it's mid-tower cases.

Ah, right. Mid-towers FTW :P

> One mid-tower case, kept busy will get the project well in the black with no further problems about costs of racks, Xeon processors, if they are worth it, etc.

Cool.

> Then the first mid-tower case will become my development machine or some such.

Upgrades are awesome. As I noted earlier I'm still on a 1.8GHz box too, definitely looking forward to getting the new (old) i3 a friend gave me up and running.

> This project, if successful, should go like the guy that did Plenty of Fish, just one guy, two old Dell servers, ads just via Google, and $10 million a year in revenue. He just sold out for, $575 million in cash.

Awesome! Wow.

> My project, if my reading of humans is at all correct, should be of interest, say, on average, once a week for 2+ billion Internet users.

ooooh. Can confirm, am greatly curious :)

> So, as you know, it's a case of search. I'm not trying to beat Google, Bing, Yahoo at their own game. But my guesstimate is that those keyword/phrase search engines are good for only about 1/3rd of interesting (safe for work) content on the Internet, searches people want to do, and results they want to find.

> Why? In part, as the people in old information retrieval knew well long ago, what keyword/phrase search needs are three assumptions: (1) the user knows what content they want, e.g., a transcript of, say, Casablanca, (2) know that that content exists, and (3) have some keywords/phrases that accurately characterize that content.

> Then there's the other 2/3rds, and that's what I'm after.

...I suddenly see why 2b Internet users could use this: you're absolutely right.

Half the time, I don't know precisely what I'm looking for. A lot of my searches find people asking the same high-level conceptual questions, and then it's pot luck about whether they're answered.

And I often want to go on the 'net to find "something interesting," where "interesting" is a fuzzy, loose amalgamation of ideas that float just under the surface of the conscious. So, it's both undefinable, and yet extremely specific. Yay. Also, putting my finger on precisely what things I want to find out about kind of kills the discovery process too. If what you're building here sort of crosses this vector, even loosely, you are going to need to make this system mobile-friendly, because your demographic is virtually every bored smartphone user.

> My approach is wildly, radically different but, still, for users easy to use. So, there is nothing like page rank or keyword/phrases. There is nothing like what the ad targeting people use, say, Web browsing history, cookies, demographics, etc.

> You mentioned probability. Right. In that subject there are random variables. So, we're supposed to do an experiment, with trials, for some positive integer n, get results x(1), x(2), ..., x(n). Then those trials are supposed to be independent and the data a simple random sample, and then those n values form a histogram and approximate a probability density.

> Could get all confused thinking that way!

> The advanced approach is quite different. There, walk into a lab, observe a number, call it X, and that's a random variable. And that's both the first and last hear about random. Really, just f'get about random. Don't want it; don't need it. And those trials, there's only one, for all of this universe for all time. Sorry 'bout that.

> Now we may also have random variable Y. And it may be that X and Y are independent. The best way to know is to consider the sigma algebras they generate -- that's much more powerful than what's in the elementary stuff. And we can go on and define expectation E[X], variance E[(X - E{X})2], covariance E[(X - E[X])(Y - E[Y])], conditional expectation E[X|Y}, convergence of sequences of random variables, in probability, in distribution, in mean-square, almost surely, etc. We can define stochastic processes, etc.

> With this setup, a lot of derivations wouldn't think of otherwise become easy.

* Chuckles ruefully *

It's only fair for you to be slightly obscure about your processes here, but the results are even more hilarious as I am yet to really master math. XD

That said, I do have a vague idea of what you're talking about. Horribly vague, but extant.

> Beyond that, there were some chuckholes in the road, but I patched up all of them.

> Some of those are surprising: Once I sat in the big auditorium as the NIST with 2000 scientists struggling with the problem. They "were digging in the wrong place". Even L. Breiman missed this one. I got a solution.

Cool...

> Of course, users will only see the results, not the math!

And rightfully so, the math needs to be kept safe and secure. :P

> Then I wrote the software. Here the main problem was digging through 5000+ Web pages of documentation. Otherwise, all the software was fast, fun, easy, no problems, no tricky debugging problems, just typed the code into my favorite text editor, just as I envisioned it. Learning to use Visual Studio looked like much, much more work than was worth it.

KEdit FTW. Visual Studio is pretty cool, yes, but it does have a learning curve. In a lot of cases it's the first thing some devs are handed, and they don't know how to live without it. Personally I wound up using various variants of vi, but I'm looking to see why people make such a fuss about emacs sometime. Heh.

> I was told that I'd have to use Visual Studio at least for the Web pages. Nope: What IIS and ASP.NET do is terrific.

Why do you think M$ still supports them? ;)

Companies have to constantly reinvent the wheel - new languages, new architectures, etc - to look like they're relevant and "current". It's one of the biggest things I dislike about the software side of IT - you can't get used to something, use it for decades, and have people look at you like you're normal. :(

> I was told that Visual Studio would be terrific for debugging. I wouldn't know since I didn't have any significant debugging problems.

You're in a very small minority, then :)

The only other project I ever heard of that had few bugs by design was the firmware for the Canon Cat, an old typing machine.

> For some issues where the documentation wasn't clear, I wrote some test code. Fine.

> Code repository? Not worth it. I'm just making good use of the hierarchical file system -- one of my favorite things.

Code repos are generally good for larger projects, and stuff being worked on by multiple teams. If you have an exact idea of what you want to build it can arguably be unnecessary.

And personally, I'll admit that a tag-based filesystem - where any file can have 0..n tags assigned to it, then I can do lookups for 1..n tags and get instant hits for the files with matching tags - would be significantly more flexible... agh, I'm nitpicking again.

> Some people laughed at my using Visual Basic .NET and said that C# would be much better. Eventually I learned that the two languages are nearly the same as ways to use the .NET Framework and get to the CLR and otherwise are just different flavors of syntactic sugar, and I find the C, C++, C# flavor bitter and greatly prefer the more verbose and traditional VB.

I can relate. I grew up on QBasic for DOS, migrated to PHP (which is an easy switch) and tried to go from there to C. It was an incredibly difficult transition.

I have no experience with C++ or C#, but C is irritatingly verbose. Thankfully other languages like Go and JavaScript are in some cases almost as fast as C. C++ looks like irritating beast to work with to me, but C# looks like fun. Now that .NET is available for Linux (yay!), I'll be able to play with it :) - but I may decide I don't like it, I'm not sure. lol

> So, it's 18,000 statements in Visual Basic .NET with ASP.NET, ADO.NET, etc. in 80,000 lines of my typing text.

Okay, none of my projects have gotten that big. Wow. :P

> But now, something real is in sight.

Awesome...

> You are now on the alpha list.

:O WOW

Thanks so much! My email address is in my profile, that's probably the best way to get in touch.

> That will be sooner if I post less at HN!

This post is predominantly anecdotal; I don't need a response to most of it. The only thing that probably could use certainty is how to get in touch in future.

One thing I think I should say, though, is that you need to consider whether you really want to be bought out. I imagine you'll get a firehose of offers if you're successful, then it's a game of "Deal Or No Deal" on top of normal dev work.

- David