skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google isn't about search, Google is all about the infrastructure. From my perspective, Google's main competitive advantage has never really been their dominance in search. I've always thought that their main innovations and their chief advantage has been in terms of their infrastructure.

Arguably, Google has built the largest distributed computing cluster in the world with proprietary OS and datastore that is finely tuned to run on that cluster. They just don't advertise these facts too often. I'm sure that their dataset is easily in the petascale, and I'm sure that a lot of it is running in RAM to achieve the <400 millisecond response times they have.

So, compare Google's infrastructure expertise to your $6 hosting account at Wally's Web Host, and I think that you start to see the difference. Wally might well sell you 15,000 Gb/month of web transfer, but they maybe might be overselling what they can actually provide. And, how many other web hosts offer to manage fault tolerant database replication for you? Heck, what's your instance up time at Wally's Web Host? Last I checked, Google's had 15 minutes of downtime since 2000.

With GAE, I Google isn't selling web hosting. What they are doing is offering to outsource your sys admin duties for free. The verdict is still out, but I would be interested in seeing the response of apps on GAE to first couple of Slashdottings/Diggings/Boingboings. I'd venture a guess that they'll handle it rather smoothly, and that the developer running the site will be able to snooze through it, instead of panicking and trying to reboot the server, cache the page in question, or have Apache serve the page as a static file. Not having to panic each time your server pings your cell phone can only be a good thing for developers.
is that supposed to be a news article?

and did they miss this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160896 ?
This is great news good to see it!

What I have been wondering is what happens to the memory footprint? It says somewhere on the site it is reduced by 33% - is that a typical reduction?

Also, if this is like mod_perl, deployment wasn't really as simple as it seemed. The general advice on mod_perl was to proxy requests from your front end 'static' webserver to the mod_perl one, because each apache process had to effectively run a Perl interpreter, giving them a big memory footprint. You don't want to use your expensive mod_perl/ruby processes to serve images etc.

I also think there are other advantages to running expensive processes behind a proxy (I may be wrong on this one), but I think that slow clients tend to tied up the front end process as it streams the data to them.

If you have appServer -> proxy -> slow client, the app server sends the data to the proxy at LAN speed, freeing it to serve another request, and the proxy ties up a process streaming the data to the client.

I am not trying to criticize, I am interested in whether they solved these problems (if they even are problems anymore) and how.
Way late to the thread, but anyway -- here's why Facebook is special for me:

I had at least a little 'aha' when first encountering buddy-list instant messaging; and again when it added a bit of activity awareness (like twitters or Facebook statuses).

Another little 'aha' was when seeing the convenience of Friendster for both self-publishing to friends and expanding one's social vision.

Another little 'aha' was encountering easy group-forming via the net, via anything from eGroups to the super-easy affiliation groups of early Orkut/Tribe (when Friendster fumbled affiliations).

Yet another was the benefit of online event invites/planning/followup, as through Evite and Meetup and Upcoming.

And another was the fun of casual or cooperative games with friends and strangers, as through IGZ/Excite Games/Yahoo Games/etc.

The special thing about Facebook is that it has a reasonable chance of subsuming all those, and more, based around the shared and reasonably defensible core, the 'social graph'.

That same graph offers a good hope of dealing with the 'trust' problem that's attacking the utility of the net on every front -- email spam, web spam, anonymous harassment, phishing, malware trickery, vandalism, payment/sales fraud, impersonation, libel. People are justifiably retreating to circles of trust, and a well-groomed, jealously defended, authentic 'social graph' is a plausible antidote to all those problems.

For example, email was a giant 'aha' when it was young and strong -- but it's dying under the weight of abuse and generational change. Social graph messaging has already replaced email for some people, maybe a whole generation of net users, and social graph messaging might topple (or save!) email in the near future.

Of course Facebook isn't the first social network, but it's mostly been doing the right things to be the 'last', the one that you never need to leave because it overlooked a new opportunity or forgot to defend its core trust value.
Blogging Madness Powered By TechCrunch And The End of Google To-Do List
What an interesting problem... so, if you were to build a searchbot, what would it type into those form fields it found?

It has to be very difficult, especially since you can't do too many submits. Could you somehow infer what to put in there based on searches in your own database already?
PG is like a tuning fork for the latent change-the-world/entrepreneur/hacker/idealist/realist wavelengths in us
who are these people that keep saying that Facebook is the next google? in what respect is it supposedly the next google? In that they are attracting a lot of talent? Then sure, I guess. In that they are, or will be, businesses of the same magnitude? not even Microsoft's FB valuation justifies that.

Also, and I'm not saying this justifies FB being worth 30x myspace (I don't know), but its very clear to me that in regards to innovation FB is the leader and the rest are playing catch-up at this point. I also doubt that without google's intervention myspace, hi5 or bebo would be able to catch up at all.
"Sooner or later Valleywag will write something particularly informative or amusing and Hacker News readers will miss out." ... holy cow, that's a great reason to wade through dozens of sensationalistic fluff pieces!

looks like hacker news is well on its way to being as misunderstood by the tech press as apple has always been.
One thing I don't understand: why is building applications for people interested in local events a "perennial tarpit"? Does it have to do with having a limited market of potential users?
Note this is a dupe of an existing thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=161163
Amazing resume. If they rejected you, I'm glad I saved myself a couple hours by not applying. ;)

http://daniellefong.com/?p=25
Very interesting to read the responses here. They aren't at all what I expected to see on this particular site.

I personally know two very successful 'exited' entrepreneurs that would never have had their companies acquired if they didn't rack-up an insane amount of bonus miles on those early startup credit cards.

My belief is that if you absolutely believe in your startup, you should be willing to get essential funds anywhere legal on reasonable terms, especially if the amounts are in the magnitude of $25,000-30k of debt. Clearly you shouldn't start borrowing on credit cards, but doing some financing on the credit card when things are tight and failure is the only alternative... It's a no brainer to me, and it's part of the reason I've stayed out of debt my entire life, so that I have that extra flexibility if it is ever needed.

$25,000 in equity early on is going to cost you a lot more down the line, if you truly believe your startup will be successful.

I think it's great to hear people who have learned so solidly not to use credit cards. But when the chips are down, what is an entrepreneur but someone who takes calculated risks for things they believe in?

Do what you must to keep your dream alive. If it can't succeed, quit, but if it can and should succeed, a successful entrepreneur will do what they need to do to make it happen. There isn't a "no" or "never" in that equation.
Brand advertising (most of traditional media ads) isn't measured in click throughs, isn't any easier to measure on the web than elsewhere, and can't be dismissed without evidence.
Why, because the market will reject appropriately priced goods and services from people without Princeton on their resume?
At the end of the day, the country is transferred to a new and different people. This is not a job market question--jobs and money and material comforts pass away. The things that are fixed in number: Land, natural resources, political power, etc, are the properties truly in play. The elites know this, and that is the reason for mass immigration...to "elect a new people". The southwest is almost gone, the coastal regions are almost gone: As much a Shanghai slum or barrio as anything identifiably American. In London, I would say, "A Pakistani slum". In Germany, "A Turkish slum". In France, "An Algerian slum".

As long as they don't steal jobs...
Building the application, gaining paying users, building a company from that money.

The opposite is to get the money first, create a company, then build an application.

I would prefer the last one, but getting the money up front is really difficult for most people. Not because there idea but there connections. YC builds the connections, helps build the idea, and then puts it all together. So while YC is great, there will always be a greater number of people wanting in then there is room. So it is back to Plan A.
Ask YC:  If you had a choice between doing something creative vs highly profitable, which would you choose?
It seems that this is quite a common dilemma. After all, anything creative requires greater mental effort on behalf of your users to understand and is unlikely to spread as quickly.

The fact that Scrabulous for example is so successful is telling.

In fact, Facebook is not novel either but is an incremental improvement on existing social networks.

In my case, maybe I should think less about creating novel puzzles and think more about adding an interesting twist on very well known puzzles/games.
Presumably the same tar pit Craig Newmark is drowning in.
Facebook's technology is not as impressive as Google's for sure, but they actually do have some fairly impressive technology. For one thing, they process a huge amount of data on a daily basis (I want to say I was told over a trillion "news items" per day, but I don't remember for sure). Admittedly the site has slowed a bit in the last couple months, but not significantly.
Web 2.0 Investors: Pay Attention To Caja
Our contention is that it's because it's easy to get wrong. To attract users one must simultaneously execute well on visual design, on formatting data in an easily understood format, and suggesting local events aptly, and most importantly on getting interesting local events posted in the first place. Monetization is a challenging problem too.

In our opinion none of the existing players have really thought deeply about the problem, and most attempts are similar to what's out there. A good service will require a substantial rethinking.

It's a hard problem, but one we're prepared to try to solve. We want to help people get out more.
Sandberg was a good part of the "business" side of Google's rise to being the most important company on the web. If Facebook has also managed to hire someone who can come up with an AdWords-style technology that makes all of those eyeballs staring at Facebook worth more than a few pennies each, Facebook might eventually be worth some of the hype.

I've never met Sheryl but I know a lot of the folks that worked directly under her at Google, and they were universally in awe...so, she's probably just the right kind of grownup Zuckerberg needs to have around.
GPL for dummies
I've never understood if the $15B valuation is real either (although I understand that it's quoted by everyone as being real). The original $15B number comes from an investment that Microsoft did for a share of the company plus advertising consideration.

If you just valued the company on the share then it would be worth $15B but since there were other considerations you can't know at all what the valuation was.

I've heard of follow-on investments but I never heard any hard facts about the valuation of those investments.

On the other hand, I've heard people who should know (actual VCs, TechCrunch, press) say FB has a $15B valuation. I just don't understand how that's the case. Is it bogus or what is the piece of information that I'm missing?
I think that when Facebook introduces a transactions API to their platform to enable frictionless micro-transactions in apps it will start raking in a lot of money by taking a cut of each transaction. How successful it can be is pure speculation, of course.
We get a lot of serious folks at that time of day. It's for bootstrappers, who are founders who are trying to sell what they have instead of seek investment. We've had many attendees who have raised investment or been acquired, but the focus of the conversation is on practical issues related to bootstrapping a software startup. The age range is 20's through 50's with a mix of men and women. And since it's in Silicon Valley there are folks from many lands. It looks like you are in Austin: check out http://www.bootstrapaustin.org/wiki/index.php/Monthly_Get-to... they seem to meet later in the day.
Without knowing the details on the MS deal or the follow on funding, it's hard to say. I would speculate, solely from what I've read, that MS's investment values them at $15 billion while giving them the right to run ads for which they'll have to pay a certain amount as well. So in the case, and assuming other investors also valued them at $15b, that's their actual valuation.
The whole point of my post is that it is a general observation. If the genders naturally have this qualitative vs quantitative distinction in their interests, then the lack of women in quantitative disciplines is a straightforward implication.

I can see the problem if women don't naturally have such interests and they're somehow forced to be this way through societal expectations. But is this really the case?
The deep web isn't limited to GET requests and forms that don't require passwords.
Hacker News Considers Banning Valleywag
AOL has a lot of very popular sites and brands, like Engadget and TMZ. The AOL-branded sites are pretty much worthless, but there is a lot of value there otherwise.
Some of the people involved in the MySpace deal are calling shenanigans. I almost have to believe them. Their traffic was just so immense, even then, and that was long before people even imagined how hard it is to monetize social network traffic.
The Star Prefer Firefox Than IE
What Social Network Brings You A Life?
"Sooner or later Valleywag will write something particularly informative or amusing and Hacker News readers will miss out."

Because in the off chance that Valleywag writes this informative and insightful article, we won't have access to it through any other source. It's not like we have access to a medium that enables efficient propagation of information.
No, not quite. Wall Street decides the market value of public companies, which is in the same ballpark -- but it's a different ball.

This would be a tool that businesses would use for market research. Right now large corporations spend billions of dollars hiring economists who study data and tell them what the elasticity of demand is for any given product.

This information gives companies a good idea of how much they should charge to maximize revenues. Small businesses don't have access to the data or to money to afford economists. So this tool would provide that service.
If they do write something interesting, then someone here can write a blogpost about it and link that.

"Plus, we like the guys! In fact, we'll be hanging out with Wag-In-Chief Owen Thomas and his underling Nicholas Carlson in a few hours at Nowhere Bar near Union Square."

Somehow I feel that that might be the primary motivation for this article.
I think that is partially true based on anecdotal evidence from a friend who tutors students in math. But still, there seem to be intrinsic differences between the genders in the general nature of their interests.

I don't think this is bad. Women are obviously much smarter than men in certain areas of life and it has been said that behind every great man there is an even better woman. What needs to happen is for us to realize the mind's quantitative abilities are not the only important aspect of the mind.

Anyways, I don't think women should be purposefully kept from quantitative disciplines. I think the system should be entirely merit based and if women want to be technical then they should do the same work as men.
does anyone else get the feeling in that all these back&forth articles with TC, Valleywag, SAI and the like putting mirrors facing each other ...
If you like Chipotle, you should find a Pancheros. Pancheros is very similar to Chipotle, but it has much better tortillas, and that makes a huge difference.
I deny that the theory of genetic male/female differences in what interests one has (or tends to have) is plausible. I think it is like astrology. One takes something, and says it causes something else, for no reason. One needs an explanation of how it causes it.

Of course there are observed gender differences. Culture can explain that. We can actually explain how culture could cause all of the observed effects. With genetics there isn't any explanation.
Right, this is the "aha" one of the parents mentioned. The major problem with the internet is the lack of accountability, accountability is necessary to form trust, and trust is necessary to form good social networks.
When we forget why we bothered to try
"You just can't imagine how frustrating it is," he said, looking up at the ceiling, as if trying to make sense of the ceiling tiles. "I keep looking, but there's just no answer!"

This would be my worst case scenario.
Hey. Send us some feedback on the page when it is not working. Like which session and OS you were trying to run. We will look at it.
thanks for trying it!
Matt's ability lies in catalyzing conversation, which is more important than making an article with 100 points but 0 comments.
I have to disagree with many of these points. For a lot of people I know, twitter's purpose is manifold.

For some, it's for pushing out ideas and commentary on their work and the occasional bit of inter-office banter for all to see.

And for others, they talk about their lives, interacting with friends in a way that is, for some, even more accessible than anything else.

And yes, there will be issues of 'twittetiquette' or other, stranger and more unwieldly terms. All new forms of communication have this.

From Usenet's posting guidelines.. to people trying to avoid the use of acronyms on IRC.. So-called 'Grammar Nazis' on so many forums.

And then, on the flipside, for many kids today, you're seen as strange if you aren't heavy on the acronymns, abbreviations and emoticons.

In short, Twitter is what you want to do with it. It's a blank slate where you create what you want, at upto 140 characters at a time.

And you may notice that prove my point, each of the little mini-paragraphs above.. are all under 140 characters. :)
Yes, but this is a start... give it a couple years.

And this is still more than the vaporware competitors that are still vaporware.
Pictures from the Norwegian street protest against the ISO approval of Microsoft's OOXML format.
With ODF already an ISO standard, many were not happy with the recent approval of OOXML as new document standard. I Norway some people took it to the streets...
> We vote no. Banning a specific outlet's stories from a news aggregator is a losing idea; it only lowers the value of the index. Sooner or later Valleywag will write something particularly informative or amusing and Hacker News readers will miss out.

The article misses the point entirely: news.yc's value is not in being an index, or aggregator of news items. Its value comes from the intelligent discussion of said items, and in having a smart community of similarly-interested people to bounce ideas off of.
Tag Your WordPress Archives With Semantic Analysis
Demonoid Is Back Online
for web hosting providers only giving ftp/sftp access, there's really no other way to signal a restart than to upload another file. you have no control over the processes and using some web-based administration too complex.
Next poll: Should HN ban Alley Insider stories...
I spoke with one of the Engineers at Google working on this (I'm sorry, I forgot his name). He was telling me that a great deal of the security benefits of this can be achieved with iframes, but iframes require a second server round-trip. It is likely that this technology will be integrated with iGoogle and will result in a portal which loads in half the time.
"Nerds to Valleywag ..." Mmm, maybe technology news sites and reporters who refer to people who create it with contempt are not to be trusted.
The aforementioned "name-and-shame" approach would work if the names are only displayed for bad stories.

It would be a weird scenario indeed if vote-buyers were only able to pay out for stories that did not get a positive score.

Vote-buyers could still gain some long-term information that would enable payment, such as the reliability of a given paid-voter over time (by checking the stories that didn't make it), but that same information would be available to the news.yc admin(s), who could then just ban the offending accounts (even if they weren't suspected of vote-selling--just for consistently supporting crappy stories!).
Why some companies need superstar developers and others don't
do you understand that you haven't commented on whether his position is true? you just passive-aggressively called him passive aggressive.
Google Data Center FAQ
did we take the link bait? ... next head line from valley insider - "nerds tricked by seo tactics" :/
If I were well-vested at Google, I'd definitely try my best to jump on the Facebook train. Whether or not they're going to make me rich (again), it's probably the most fun place to be in the Valley right now.

Doesn't mean Facebook is the next Google, though.
I don't understand, why is this a big deal? It must be Friday.
Do you have kids? If not, go for the creative. One-upping may give you short-term profits, but creativity, ambition and luck is what you want for the long haul.
This is the worst mistake you have ever made regarding this community.

Censorship is not the answer, ever.
When software and politics mix, quality suffers
Any chance you can do the profitable thing first and then use the profits to allow yourself to do the creative thing? That way you can more or less have it all.
Hmm. Let's say Twitter is like IM meets blogs.

Unfortunately for me, only a handful of my friends use IM regularly (at least the ones I talk to with it) and none of them blog (and let's not even talk about the ones who call me to fix their printers). Twitter is irrelevant to me because I won't see my friend's posts and they won't see mine. That's too bad, because I really liked the concept.
Their editorial process is questionable. But is that a reason to completely ban the organization?

I sincerely hope this does not turn into a common practice. Making decisions like forcing censorship due to an ideological difference of opinion is an extremely dangerous road to come to.

And I hate Valleywag.
That's true. But stereotyping happens by degrees.
App Engine isn't shared hosting. Shared hosting is a portion of 1 server. App Engine is a portion of n servers automatically allocated by load.
I go to places because of the value they offer. Facebook offers me next to nothing. I went there exactly once to peek at the Thrift documentation (you can download the source without registering but the link to the docs is a group).

I'd be there if there were some there there.