skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I assume the real appeal behind SimpleDB is that you don't have to buy servers, disk arrays, backup systems, a data center, 24-hour techs to swap RAID drives, etc. You just put your data in there and forget about that stuff.
it doesn't suck. our standards continually get higher as globalization makes the number of people we are competing with larger.

in 1900 you were competing with someone down the block
in 1925 you were competing with a city of people
in 1950 you were competing with the nation
in 1975 you were competing with japan
in the year 2000 and onwards you're competing with the population of china and india
Read "How to Win Friends and Influence People", then practice what you learn. It's even in the start up FAQ.

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html
human beings will always care about a number next to their name.
Google Social Network Likely To Be A Disaster
programmers are always saying that they don't get to work on interesting algorithms. you know who gets to work on interesting algorithms? traffic engineers.
If you needed to, you could solve most of the problems with SimpleDB by writing a server that wraps it and provides consistency checks, sorting and such. I was considering writing that for a little while.

Then they announced that they were going to support mountable drives on EC2 images, and it stopped being necessary. When they release that, you'll be able to load up a more straightforward MySQL or PostgreSQL setup, and use traditional clustering mechanisms.

Honestly, I find SimpleDB interesting, but I have no idea what I could use it for without writing quite a bit of middleware to wrap it.
I don't think it's 100% luck. Larry and Sergey liked working on search engines and said "hey, let's make a company". It turned out that other people liked their search engine too, so they made money.

If you have the same passion for something else, that's only half the battle. The other half is making sure your passion aligns with the passion of people willing to give you money. I've come up with a few good ideas in my life that I'd love to do as my "real job", but I know nobody else would be interested. That is why I am not a millionaire :)

Of course, the luck is being able to predict what people will want.
News Flash:
you don't get paid the big bucks to do things that are interesting exciting and fun.

Want to work on something you love? great, if you wind up making something that other people love too you MIGHT make a lot of money.
Ruby/Python interface needs to be built.
Excellent article. I've been considering using either SimpleDB or Google's App Engine, so hearing both sides of the debate is incredibly useful.
The download client stinks. I have OS.X Tiger, and the client farked on me, and doesn't allow me to do anything else to it. No idea how to fix it.

It took me 3 days to get accepted into program. That isn't such a big deal, except there was no confirmation email/text to let me know that the request went through. I ended up signing up three times till I figured it out.

Songs keep disappearing and reappearing when doing a song search. Within minutes. If a song disappears and it's on your queue, there is now way to know. The playlist just gets stuck there. And as others have stated, the play button not actually starting any playing is rather annoying. And this was on XP.
Microsoft Ships XP SP3: Here's What to Expect
How I found out about  Ycombinator and PG
I know hundreds of you knew about Ycombinator from the moment he announced the program. I never heard of PG of Viaweb before. I think it is partly due to the fact that i am not a hacker and i only got involve in the startup environment starting the end of 2004. Anyways to make long scripts short here is how i found out about YCombinator, PG and what lead me to the most useful News site Hacker News. I read this article one early morning while at work and that was it. I was hooked.
It would be even better if you were able to share your passion with others and then capitalize on that ensuing demand.

It seems Google may have reached that point when every one of their new products is praised and lauded - they make the market where none existed yet.
True, but the reason that SimpleDB is so inexpensive is because all of the items you mention have gotten so cheap. A managed server, where the provider does all the backup and RAID stuff, costs ~$100/month. That's nothing, given the tremendous benefits (like, joins that allow for normalization, your own backup, no vendor lock-in, etc).

I understand the desire for something that's maintained by someone else and makes life easy, but if you're a tech startup, this stuff ought to be second nature.
Did you consider using affiliate links as well?
Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion
Triplify: Expose Semantics
If you want a more complicated answer, you're over complicating the situation. This isn't rocket surgery /dhh
I'd go with something that can generate javascript code and then port an existing player to that. I believe PyPy has a javascript backend or one in development.
I don't want to bash something I personally not very familiar with, especially on this podium. But I don't know what the appeal of SimpleDB-like services is. I know why Google/Amazon needed them, but those reasons don't apply to 99.9% of startups.

You don't need to buy your own RAID/SAN and powerful servers to use RDBMS, nearly every modern scalable hosting provider will be happy to rent them to you just like Amazon: get an account on Slicehost for smaller projects and move up to EngineYard or Joyent for high-end stuff: they will all let you scale up as needed, use DB of your choice.

P.S. I also think the author forgot about yet another important advantage of RDBMS: there are tons of various tools for them. Yes, he mentioned import/export/backup, but the list is much longer than that.
I was hoping someone would put together the spandex and the name and get the guy in the white spandex Tron outfit that was hopefully a Halloween costume :)
"Why can't there be a service that will let me post an ad for $5 for the stuff I want that sellers will look for."

Craigslist.
License details also need to be elaborated...
No More VC Eulogies, Please
Taking the Eco-Dome to Darfur
That's true, however its not quite what I mean. We're limited to the audience that uses craigslist in that model. One idea would be to have a Twitter-like service where I can say "I want X" and businesses who are monitoring that service are alerted to my request.
Exactly. And its not just hardware you can forget about. No longer having to worry about indexing, scheduled backups and database shrinks, temp table sizes, connection pooling, and all the other nasty stuff that goes along with maintaining a DBMS is equally as nice.

I've switched my project from a local MySQL instance to SimpleDB and I'm never looking back. It took some work to simplify my existing schema to be purely atomic (no joins), but after that you can forget just about everything else.
"I was just talking to some founders about what terribly bad judges VCs are, compared to how confident they seem. They're in the same position as governments. All governments are horribly inefficient, but they don't realize it because their only competitors are other governments."

-Cough- Y Combinator too -cough-
Yeah, just talk to a local insurance broker and you'll get set up quick. Make sure you know what kind of liability insurance they are requiring general liability or professional liability (sometimes called errors and omissions). General liability + workers comp will probably cost you a few hundred bucks a year. Professional liability will cost a few thousand.
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Heh, when I load the page it just says "Alternative content" in an H1. I am using Iceweasel with javascript disabled and Gnash instead of Flash though :)
related to malaria, maybe you want to look at Amyris Biotechnologies as a living example of similar ideas to what you describe. They started with Bill and Melinda Gates money to produce artemisinin, which the grant stipulated had to be produced without a profit, but have taken that technology and have used it to grow an amazing Biotech startup that most PhDs in the field would die to work for. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation isn't usually thought of as a startup incubator, but this is one example of a company that started from the idea of treating malaria, and continues with that idea as they apply the same technologies to solve the other needs they see in the world.
GetOutAndPlay -- must watch
Shattering news: non-RDBMS not a RDBMS
All valid points if compared against a single-instance RDBMS. Except that modern RDBMS used in any large scale web service will also be guilty of these points. When you shard/cluster your data across various master/slave DB instances you essentially lose the ability to store your data in a non-atomic normal form, just like SimpleDB. In both a sharded RDBMS and SimpleDB your data is denormalized.

With a DB setup like this (and all major web sites are) you cannot feasibly join, group by (or do associated aggregations), or order by anymore anyway. Constraints are not really a good idea either. It would be nice if SQL was still useful in a situation like this but it just is not.

The days of hugely massive single machine databases is coming to and end if not already dead. Even if you are reporting on massive amounts of data and need to do aggregations across large datasets, then OLAP is increasingly becoming the way to go (again, with fact tables and cube partitions sharded across multiple instances to increase query performance).
Gotta love the chemist who chooses an enormous reference book that's about as dry reading as a dictionary.
wow, this is old
It is way easier - than becoming the next facebook. He's right on that point too. Were you not listening to what he said?

He also said pretty clearly - getting the 500 users is still pretty hard. I'm pretty sure he even had a slide that said "It's still pretty hard".
Statins, cholesterol, health; fancy employee compensation, EBITDA, and company value
The OP asked a question, and I simply extrapolated a response from my observations. I don't see how that makes me a "smug Mac weenie", I've got three boxes running, and only one is a mac.

To suggest that there isn't rampant pirating in the windows community by holding up Paint Shop Pro (generally a b2b piece of software) is ignoring the obvious, though.
This is interesting speculation, but also curious is how it happens whenever I get drowsy, which includes the drowsiness following a heavy meal. So either the brain capitalizes on the signals of the body ready to go to sleep, then it immediately starts reorganizing memories, or the body tries to go to sleep once the brain starts to reorganize memories; or, since sleep is regulated in part by hormones, the hormone production precedes both the brain and body... haha, the more I think about it the less I think I know. If it is hormonal then, perhaps certain foods could induce the behavior more strongly than others?
Reminds me of this shovel designed to fill sandbags:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHBpn3OQH7o

I think the arguments for it were that it protects your lower back, it lets you work alone without needing another person to hold the bag open, and it's much faster, which is important if there is going to be a flood.
a few people mention it but it doesn't seem to get zeroed in on.

don't just build a solution, build an elegant solution. ideally one that is practically transparent to the people using it. I think people constantly forget that the vast majority of computer users wouldn't know the difference between the internet and their desktop much less between campfire and huddlechat.
I like the idea, too -- neat!

Perhaps include a field where an inquirer puts a price range of what they are willing to spend (including tax and shipping) would be helpful for you to select something a gift that the person inquiring can afford.
Why is it, then, that services seem to trend towards all-you-can-use at a flat rate? Even when there are lower levels of service (in whatever), they're usually ridiculously less service for a bit less price, which seems to just be a way to drive people to the One True Price that the provider really wants.
PG is #2 in google search for "essays"
I thought this was reasonably interesting as he beats Montaigne and Wikipedia.
We added a link to the original file next to each picture. Sorry for taking this long to reply. Thanks for your feedback,
Cheers.
We're showing some affiliate links (when the recommended merchant happens to be an affiliate), but we're concerned about possible misperceptions of bias.
Thanks for the suggestion. You know, we've gone back and forth on offering a variety of more structured forms. In this case, it probably does make sense.
and me.
Galois web libraries for Haskell
Ask YC: Can you provide Feedback on my customizable homepage start-up?
We're always looking for new input. Even criticisms are appreciated.
Shows up as #1 for me (location: Australia)
If you know businesses interested in licensing a version of ClayValet, please send them my way.
Thanks! Now all we've got to do is execute.
If I had a working AI, I'd be sitting pretty.
Thanks, glad you like it. Dull colors, and you're not the first to say that. Hmmm.
Very cool technology.

Unfortunately, the page looks ugly because I suck at design, and you're making me do the design. So it ends up looking really tacky.

Perhaps this "click anywhere and type/edit" technology can be used to annotate webpages (or even iPaper PDFs). I know I'd use it for those purposes if I could.
As plinkplonk pointed out, you're suggesting it is good for consumers to choose a single supplier solution for both hardware and software. Not just any single supplier, but very nearly the highest cost supplier (you can spend more, but you get better quality hardware if you do). I just think there is a very clear comparison to be made between IBM in 1983 and Apple today, and it seems that your enjoyment of Apple products (and/or dislike of Microsoft products) has blinded you to that very clear comparison.

Apple isn't quite in the position of dangerous strength that IBM almost had, but IBM also had competitors (Commodore, Apple, Atari). I merely think that a Mac system (even a three year old one) is not the ideal computing option for the average consumer. Additionally, I think an Apple monopoly would be every bit as dangerous as a Microsoft monopoly. Apple has a long history of taking advantage of the dedication of their users.

I come down on the side of Open Source solutions to this problem, though Linux also has problems of its own, it does solve the problem of having a single supplier for any element of the system. With things like the Asus eee lowering the price of a laptop dramatically, while avoiding reliance on Microsoft (or Apple), I think things are looking up.

In short, I think your IBM vs. Microsoft as Robin Hood analogy should be applied equally to Apple, though Apple has managed to hold tight the reigns such that no Robin Hood can spring into existence to bust up the control Apple has over the Mac market. Note that I don't have a problem, in particular, with Apple or Mac machines or Apple making money...just like I didn't have particular problems with IBM back in the day. I just think it's amusing that Apple gets a pass, while Microsoft is Robin Hood for cleverly thwarting the IBM monopoly on the PC. Pot, kettle, yada yada yada.
Struck me as a bit of the tactics mentioned in No Logo. (anti-portfolio=anti-marketing) But I'm young, and still a tad too stupid I'm certain... :)

It's all very nuts though, and I agree the world is starved for honesty. Honesty, how do we become more honest when we might even be lying to ourselves?...
Not to be a irreverent, but lets build an altar...

(PG seems to be a bad ass, and I trust you appreciate irony and poor word play when you read it, but I'm just getting started on my reading stack. I'll be more reverent in the future. :) )
Extremen Premium Beverage and Business Opportunity
High quality maca coffee improves blood circulation and strengthens the body system, thus making it an ideal natural health drink.
BitTorrent sees big growth, LimeWire still #1 P2P app
Having worked on search at another company, I'm pretty sure Google's results can be different based on, among other things, your location or other attributes. Google's algorithm also was semi-recently tweaked to place higher weight on sites with more recently generated content, and PG certainly has published many essays recently.

FWIW, it shows up as #2 for me.
Storytron: Chris Crawford's Nine Breakthroughs
Notches’ Niche - the Whole Universe
Microsoft's insane 386 promo video (skip ahead to 7:00 if desired)
BlogRovr Acquisition by BuzzLogic Calls Data Portability Into Question
if you think in SQL every project seems to require the "advantages" of an RDBMS. But the critics are forgetting that:

a) when you use sharding your RDBMS looses most of the advantages you seem to like so much

b) SimpleDB and friends not only distribute your data but they allow you to parallelize your queries. think map/reduce

c) as a programmer I would much rather solve summing and grouping in my code then learn the subtleties of properly configuring and managing a particular RDBMS (and re-learn everything when I switch vendors)

I'll agree that SimpleDB is not appropriate for everything, but most of the perceived problems are really just a lack of creativity.
Ask YC: Why no search box on YC?
It's happened twice now. I read an amazing writing: poignat, timely, and oh so apropos: but, two weeks later it's memory filters up through the "time fog", and I need to send a link, and I spend 15m site:news.ycombinator.com "cogent(s)".

In the meantime, I'll make 'a post' so that I can find it through my 'threads'.
searchyc.com
If Microsoft cared about users, they'd recommend they switch to OSX. If Microsoft cared about programmers, they'd recommend they switch to Debian-based Linux.

For $500 I'd rather be working on 1 year old ThinkPad T60 (2MB of RAM, Core Duo 2) with Ubuntu on it.
#2 in the near west (oklahoma territory)
An added advantage of map-reduce? (loose localization)
Everything is in the eye of the beholder. I, for one, love to see what my friends are sharing in Google Reader, and vice-versa.
I would be interested in hearing more about your migration from MySQL to SimpleDB.

Basically, I am a big fan of normalization (since none of the other ways seem elegant to me). For example, if I were going to write the schema for a Blog, I would have an articles table, a tags table, and an article<->tag mapping table. This means that "show me articles with tag foo" is indexed (and "faster" than an O(n) search over the articles table).

The only approach I can see with SimpleDB is to tolerate scanning all articles to search tags (and authors, etc.) or to maintain a separate "document" for each tag (that links to the articles with the tag). Then I worry about concurrent updates to a tag ( {foo:[1,2]} gets updated to {foo:[1,2,3]} while someone else immediately changes it to {foo:[1,2,4]}; the correct result would be {foo:[1,2,3,4]} but adding 4 overwrites adding 3.)

Anyway, like I said, I would be interested in hearing people's experiences. Perhaps I am missing something obvious.
sweet, thanks!
reminds me of http://www.supersuppers.com/

this site (thepremierchef) doesn't have much info though... such as locations, menus, and so on

is this real?
Why people start startups
Ask YC: So whats the user "awareness" bell curve for YC?
So I just ask what I'm sure is drop in the bucket of "old" YC questions... That is if I had been a memeber of this community longer, what would I know about it's community? What, if I were playing loosly with language are the perecents of "insiders", "stand-by-ers", and "outsiders". However you as a YC reader would rate yourself. (Specifically not looking for 'objectivity'.)

To simplify to (maybe) a more straight forward metric
Is it me, or is the site down?
The best method for you probably varies based on _why_ you're socially inept. If it's because you haven't interacted enough with other people, then the advice others have given to get more experience makes sense. If it's because you're under confident or constantly worried about things the other person is thinking, you should work at getting rid of your insecurities.

The right course of action will then depend on the insecurity, but exercise and improved health generally boosted my confidence. If you experience anxiety over others judging you, consider that in most situations the person you're worried about probably isn't paying much attention to you, and even if they do notice you do something odd, they won't necessarily remember it; everything only revolves around you in _your_ head. Most of all, just get off your butt and do something about whatever bothers you -- if you're embarrassed by your long hair, get a haircut. A surprising number of my own insecurities were things like that -- easily fixable if I only took the time to calm down, consider them, and make a list of solutions.
I have to log in to read it? I don't mind logging in to comment but to read it?
I hear what you are saying - I'm just thinking luck is the multiplier - ebay, google, etc - how many other search engines aren't as successful? how many ebays does no one know about? I guess luck is timing to some degree - but its also plain luck. All of the monday morning quarterbacking that goes on seems obvious in retrospect, but the future is still completely uncertain. VC's expect 1 in 10 to fail b/c thats just historically what has happened. If they knew what made the 1 hit they wouldn't fund the 9 losers. I'm just saying, really nothing new I guess, that the business of predicting the future by looking at the past is colored by confirmation bias. What characteristic do all self made men have in common? They took alot of risk. However, thats also the same trait incarcerated bank-robbers have in common. I'm just saying prediction is impossible.

By all means do what you love b/c if it crashes and burns at least you won't have hated the last 2 years of your life.
The examples in the article are a corporate intranet and how to find a local store.
Not exactly the most user friendly interface. I kept trying to type anywhere into the google search box. :P

Not bad. However, I agree with aneesh. Probably better used for annotation.
This is a topic I frequently discuss on my blog. I think you may be saying something similiar/same when you refer to your concept of hybrid as I state with respect to the trend of Modular Innovation. Check it out and let me know...
http://tpgblog.com/2007/12/06/modular-innovation-101/
Being "Bad" -or- The Startup Lottery Ticket
Do you think I'm arrogant?
Google.com site:ycombinator.com and searchyc.com both work as good as any search that could reasonably be implemented.
Startup School 2008: Key Takeaways
for example, I'd say there is a tendency to upmod an item (without really reading it, or agreeing with it) just because it already has 50 karma.
Ask YC: Feedback on startup: shouteureka.com