skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With SimpleDB, you can still accomplish many-to-one and even one-to-many. So in your example schema you described, you could have an attribute (aka column) in your tags domain (aka table) which holds the ids of the article items (aka rows) in your article domain that the tag is associated with. Since your data is denormalized though, you will have many duplicate items if a tag applies to many different articles. Thats ok though, SimpleDB was designed for this dont worry about large domains.

So this is how you could get your many-to-one mapping. To determine what articles have tag foo, you would just do the equivalent of select from tags where your attribute value matches the item id for the desired article.

It seems unintuitive, but you can actually do one-to-many mappings too with SimpleDB. So you could say "show me all the tags for article A" without a join table or duplicate items. The reason this is possible is because SimpleDB can attach up to 256 values to a single attribute. This obviously isnt possible in SQL. You just assign references to each tag id for that article to one attribute. Kinda like putting a list of Strings in a single cell in SQL. Be very careful with this though, as you cannot exceed 256 values bound to 1 attribute. So no more than 256 tags per article in your example.

But the problem with all this is keeping track of changes. updates and deletes do not cascade so you have to handle that yourself. And of course you have to consider eventual consistency if making frequent changes on top of each other.

My suggestion to help reduce the complexity of managing your domain references is to use this library (if you are using Java that is). It makes SimpleDB so much more usable: http://code.google.com/p/simplejpa/
When I view this request, for a monitor, you are recommending a laptop: http://clayvalet.com/r/an-lcd-monitor-with-dimensions-of-at-...
How Government Hurts Tech Innovators (Including YC)
It works for me all the time...
killer user interface
In the article I argue that Y Combinator is a victim of an unfair (inefficient) economic advantage that's being exercised more and more by incubators funded with state money.
God damn that website hurts my eyes.
True. The older a report, the more likely we are to have 'misfire' recommendations. We still have some, but they're getting much less frequent.
Good point. Post on your progress, I'm interested :-)
Gmail down ?
An interesting point, my current method hasn't 'failed' me yet (using google with "site:*"), but I still really felt something was missing (even if the service was near equal to google results)....

FWIW, that's all...
Fully Electric Car Complete With GPS And Onboard Computer
I just think there is a very clear comparison to be made between IBM in 1983 and Apple today

The comparison is clearer between Apple in 1983 and Apple today. Not surprisingly.

I never said that it was better for consumers to have a single supplier of hardware and software. All I said was that users would be better off running OSX than Vista. It happens that OSX is made by a company that also makes the hardware, but that wasn't the reason I was saying people would be better off using it. I wasn't saying that Apple won't, if they get dominant market share, turn into an evil monopoly, or that a company who broke said monopoly wouldn't be Robin Hood. All I was saying was what I actually said.
I'm also on Leopard, FF, really? Works for me.
I'm coming out to interview for YC on Friday, so I should be hacking on our demo. That, or doing some of the massive pile of homework I have, so that I can graduate at the end of this term. However, I watched just one speaker on justin.tv and was hooked. Sunday completely disappeared. Thanks for all the great talks!
True, but this really isn't even doing anything. It's no different than an animated GIF. I think it would be truly interesting if they made it able to play normal video formats.
I think we're all hoping one day we'll have a similar story. I know I am... :)
Right. I don't know what their premoney was, but it had to be in the 8-10 range I'd guess. VCs don't approve 2x returns.
This is a dupe of the article already linked off the ycombinator homepage.
Wow...

Very simple, but really nice. It needs some work on usability and design though. If you get that rigth it's a winner. There are some great possibilities in sharing pages too.
Sometimes it's about staying in the game long enough to get your first deal. And I quote, "10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain, and 100% reason to remember the name." - Linkin Park

Corny but applicable. :)
Do Or Die Week For Yahoo
IGoogle start pages: Vertical integration of the first, second, and Nth click
I don't think there is an in or an out group here. Your comments are judged rationally and everyone has an equal chance of chiming in.

And if you mean to ask how one becomes a prominent contributor to the group, it's not a matter of how long you've been part of the community. If you submit interesting articles, and write good comments, people here will recognize that. I've been here for a year and have been more of an onlooker, yet there are those who joined much more recently than me who have made greater contributions.

Point is, I don't think there are any natural breaks in this community. People drift in and out of 'in,' 'out,' and 'lurk,' groups often that all the areas are blurred.
Is a million good enough anymore?
The problem I have with OpenID is that I enjoy having separate accounts on various sites... it keeps my activities compartmentalized and I value that sense security over a universal ID. Furthermore, I'm not always interested in having a known identity on some sites... Get my drift?! :)
They were lucky they happened upon an algorithm as smart as they did.

They were lucky to get initial funding.

They were lucky to find a great income model.

They were lucky that nobody else took search serious.
One small nitpick, but it always bugs me: don't rely on browser resizing for images! Especially for really small thumbnails. This is what I see in Firefox:

http://www.clutterme.com/users/alex/thumbs_unresized.png

This is what I could see if the images were resized before being sent to my browser:

http://www.clutterme.com/users/alex/thumbs_resized.png

(I resized the middle two thumbnails from the original images)
The general term for the pictured style of building is "earthbag" construction. It's been around for a while now; depending on what you fill the bags with and how you frame the building you can even tailor the properties of the walls to fit your needs.
Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future?
I've never used LookOut, but having thousands of corporate emails in my Outlook, I can say that Xobni really rocks! I quickly ran out on private invites, and just started pirating the software to my coworkers, boss, and even the secretary, who I always catch sitting as his desk searching through emails.

In my opinion, they honed in on a huge problem of email search and solved it really well.

Admittedly, not all of the features of Xobni are very useful, but I think the user interface (keeping the search history), super-fast email search, and phone number extraction are all useful features.

They also did a good job of picking colors to make it look different from Outlook because people who walk by my desk always seem to catch the bright colors and ask me "what is that?!"
My brother just came back from the Hoffman Institute - an intensive 9 day seminar where they address how to have genuine and connected communications - picking up on patterns, and in a group therapy setting, reworking those patterns so you are reconnected... http://www.hoffmaninstitute.org/
If you don't care enough to write tests or clean up your code, why would anyone else? If you just want to throw out a proof of concept, a blog or paste site is really the best place for it.
Annotation is an interesting idea. I've seen other ideas to annotate web pages out there, but never one that really caught on to my knowledge (maybe because they required a browser plug-in to see or create the annotations), and they also allowed you to annotate anyone's site with or without their permission.

What if as an option you allowed other sites to install an "annotate my site" script you provided, which acts as a lead-in to direct people back to your site with a link or with a "find other pages like this" type of thing? You could even provide a cross-reference between annotated sites this way, and provide a centralized site sort of like a directory of these sites...
I've visited your site several times before, and every time I visit I just don't see many people using it. I appreciate the freedom your service offers, but I think even for a customized homepage there is value in structure and organization. As much as Myspace pages vary with annoying background gifs and videos, there is still an underlying framework that adds unity to the site. I think the fact that it's too open might hurt you in the end. On Facebook you have your pics, your wall, your feed, etc., so there are expected components to each page that unite users. Placing anything anywhere on a page would give users a lack of focus and expend energy to use your service because they'd have to forge the connections among their and their friends' pages.

I think your click and type anywhere technology, which is very cool, could be applied to other fields as a feature, but I don't think it'd work best as a social network.

Best of luck.
Do you know of any companies you haven't accepted into YC that have been particularly successful?
There's a difference between not actively spending time with people because you have other things to attend to, versus because you don't like them.

I am often forced to judge people. But I don't like it. At a deep level, I am unsuited towards judging people negatively.
Use your hacker skills to analyze what makes people cooler or more personal than you. List those things, then execute solutions.

Things: wardrobe, humor, hair, attitude, conversation, hygene

Dating is a huge help. A girl will help you improve all of the above things.

WARNING: Don't apply hacker skills to understanding women (on anything more than a very high level). You'll hit a critical error.
Good stuff guys. Always good to see more London love :-)
The Effective Executive is fantastic -- not just for C-level execs, but anyone who has to "execute" every day using only their own intelligence and experience (read: anyone working in software or business).
So, someone that doesn't usually use Outlook doesn't like Xobni's Outlook plug-in? How is this newsworthy?

Many of the things he said he never did in Outlook were things I did when I used Outlook four dozen times a day. He could have saved time by writing "I am not in the target audience" and been done with it.
Thanks for the props and a good question on conversion but one I don't think I have numbers to answer.

Numbers I do know:
* around 100k visitors per day
* 1,021,791 logins
* 187,047 sites

A certain percentage of those logins will be invalid though.
Yeah, that's clearly subpar. We'll have to do something about it soon, but it's not quite our top priority yet (report quality and site navigation are).
Fireball = (Fire Eagle + Dodgeball + Twitter) = Loopt Competitor?
This is awesome... the interface is so slick. The player didn't work but I'm impressed by the breadth of the music library.
Suggestion: Make hacker news fully use REST.
Who here is getting irritated at the expired links that pop up if you tab out various articles and comment pages? I frequently tend to tab out various pages and older articles whenever I try to reply to someone's comment, the refreshing and backtracking due to expired links gets annoying quick.
Matt Maroon: The Anti-Social Graph
The Graphing Calculator Story (Video)
The Prius of Open Source
link to vid: http://www.shouteureka.com/index.php/product/video-intro.htm...

Wow! Some slick tools. Looks like a really great way to make some easy visualizations. Seems very slick.
Windows XP Service Pack 3 Released to Manufacturing
I find it depressing how little attention, and possibly investment, is on the supply side of the energy problem (and its not just environmental).
Yahoo Browser Plus - secrets revealed
This is pretty misanthropic. I enjoy using Facebook.
I would be very surprised if GitHub wasn't rapidly approaching being cash flow positive. Since they've been out of beta for only a few weeks I think that's pretty good. Personally I love their product and it seems I'm not the only one.

I think they're a great example of the types of companies in DHH's talk: have a product your users love and charge a price for it. As a bonus they also offer a free version for open source work for which they have my respect.
Banks and other financial institutions do a lot of 'risk management' -- that is calculating huge price correlation matrices on everything they have on their books.

This activity is perfect for AWS (and mostly pointless for its original purpose, as Citibank and others have proven).
It's comments like this that help us iterate.

We're almost back full time on our web app and it was frustrationg trying to find our niche. It looks as though we are going to open up ClutterMe to external sites.

We're thinking two levels of service, the first being something along the lines of an iFrame and the second level is allowing users to create accounts from within their site.

If you want to be included in the conversation and/or want this software on your site, send us a ping, or just keep track of the blog for updates. (blog.clutterme.com)
I couldn't agree more. Glad to see someone make the point clearly though, I wouldn't have wasted as much time on the topic.
Good article. Like anything, there are pros and cons to each approach. I tested SimpleDB pretty thoroughly for the next version of Gridjit and decided against using it.

One of the drawbacks to working with these sorts of storage services is the temptation to create overly-abstract models too early. Abstraction and metadata-based schemas are great but can also add needless complexity (ironically) early on.
really curious to see what happens in this fight. since there doesn't seem to be much of Yahoo left I'm starting to wish MS gets to buy them if only to waste 40 or so billion dollars.
Intelligent Content Filtering with AideRSS and Some Extensions
The observations I made about Xobni on my blog post were reflective of a) having formerly used Outlook for many years in large corporate settings b) my assessment of the functional usefulness of the add-in to me. I'm happy to hear about your personal experiences of the add-in in order to better understand the killer features/purposes I've apparently missed and the value it has given you.
Y Combination isn't a victim here. State funded incubators don't make it on YCs radar at all, because the state funded incubators/early stage funds are terrible at picking winners.

Until Y Combinator came around and revitalized the incubator model by doing it with micro-investments (and not being an incubator, something the clones have mostly failed to understand), private incubators were money losing failures.

As far as I am aware, AlphaLab in Pittsburgh is the only government funded incubator investing with the same magnitude as YC. They are no threat to YC, because they are only targeting people that live in Pittsburgh.

It does mess the Pittsburgh entrepreneurial scene up with Innovation Works and the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse being the gateway to angel investment. But I believe strongly that we are much better off with them than without them. If they were gone, millions of dollars of additional capital wouldn't come to Pittsburgh to replace them. Investors don't avoid Pittsburgh because they have to compete with the PA government; the PA government isn't very good at investment.
Investors stay away because no rich people want to live here. PG accurately describes this in http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

How do you think a government should encourage innovation?
Why Programmers Don’t Like Relational Databases
More classic MM haterade fuelled ranting. keep swigging. (with credit to aston)

But I like the article a lot. Facebook now feels like the warm up to something greater. (and probably smaller)

The identity thing is no longer an advantage for them since they opened up beyond schools and coroporates. It is socially engineered toward real identities, but that's all.
Sweet, that must be why all the CS majors get all the ladies!
while at PyCon I was talking to John Draper (Captain Crunch) and he brought up some idea (although I don't remember the specifics) that made me think of your site. I tried to remember the URL so I can show him your site but I couldn't remember it.
I hate this modern trend to trick users to sign up: on the first page, pretend all will be easy and peachy, no sign-up necessary. As soon as you enter anything, the evil "sign up first before you can see anything at all" pops up.

What I am saying: I saw a "sign up" form. Not very impressive, seen those about a zillion times before.

Edit: not saying you can't require users to sign up eventually, but please show me SOMETHING about what benefits to expect before I sign up.
Now that I think about it, that's a good suggestion.
Seth Godin explains his marketing insights in a 2006 speech to Google [video]
I think he makes a good point about the apps. There are literally thousands of apps and when I was involved in Facebook app development I saw _nothing_ that used the social graph for anything interesting.

I actually started a social news system inside Facebook (called Wildfire), the idea was that stories would only get voted up if people passed them from friend to friend. It went nowhere, perhaps that was my fault.

Has anyone seen a really cool Facebook application?
Mashups a hot item at Web 2.0 show
i am trying to sum things up

a lot of his problems seem to suggest that SimpleDB require more coding to contol the data.

the counter argument is, that okay, this is true, but you also don't do any maintenance ... which seems like a fair trade-off, plus you can always add an abstraction layer in code that simplify the cooding

so my question becomes, can't one add an abstraction layer on top of simpledb that makes it act more like a traditional rdbms ?
Hmm, I'll try and push the issue more next time I talk with them.

The other reason is mere career progression, but I'm not especially keen on that either. I detest the artificial relationships of networking and the like. I'm of the opinion that I can easily be financially free in at most 5 years, so there is no need to make alot of money.

Maybe my real problem is a lack of courage to go with my own judgment. I'm confused though because my own judgment seems so much at variance with most people I know on this issue that it seems like I'm missing something.
That's the problem with getting greedy. They had a great thing going when the community was more closed, in fact that was their selling point for me. Opening up like this seems very short sighted, but I guess that's what you get with the flipper ethic.
Very cool, dude... I don't know much about the web design industry, etc., but maybe you can get multiple revenue streams going by using this technology for a variety of applications. Maybe Web-based photo annotation? Web-base architectural diagram creation? Just a thought... seemed like cool tech that could be used for a lot of different things.
Twitter May Not Have To Care About Uptime Any Longer
I haven't but I've had two ideas I thought were fairly interesting.

1. Tomagochi app where your creature's features are representative of your friends friends. I.e. people with fewer friends will contribute more unique and interesting features to the creature and people with many friends contribute more material for making bigger creatures. This would motivate people to seek both ends of the spectrum.

2. Trusted distributed computing. People would bid for users' cpu time, and users choose who they want. Bids can either be money or promise of payout from the job's results.
Article about other missed VC opportunities:
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2004/11/08/nothing_v...

The VC arm of Allstate Insurance passed up 20% of Microsoft for $8 million. Ouch.
My lolbertarian sense is tingling.
"bio fuels" keep getting mentioned as one source of the problem, but I wonder how big their impact really is? If it is big, I suppose it is because "bio fuels" tend to be heavily subsidized, distorting the market?
My understanding of what you considered the benevolence of Microsoft was that they allowed a low-cost IBM PC compatible computer market to develop, which allowed people who wouldn't have been able to afford a PC to do so. Apple has never been accused of being a low-cost, or even affordable, computer supplier (and the existence of a used market doesn't invalidate that--a used PC running Windows XP or, better in my opinion, Linux is going to be even cheaper and within reach of more people). If the dramatically lowered price point for a personal computer was not the benevolence of Microsoft, according to your argument, and the price of a personal computer doesn't matter to your argument, then I will humbly stand corrected. Though I think I'll need some clarification about what the benevolence of Microsoft was, if not that, as I'm drawing a blank on anything else good that came out of Redmond.

But, all that I actually said to start with was that I was amused that you praised Apple...the earlier criticism of IBMs abuse of power and the benevolence of Microsoft in breaking down the IBM monopoly made for an amusing contrast to me, an outsider who generally uses neither Apple nor Microsoft products and doesn't really consider Mac OS X a significantly superior OS to Windows Vista or XP. I don't really care which is "better" in this discussion, as "better" wasn't a qualification for Microsoft's benevolence.

I found it amusing, that's all. I really didn't mean to stir up so much argument about it. If I were the type that used smileys, I would have included one in my first post...but I figured "amusing" would cover it. ;-)
7 Incredibly Useful Tools for Evaluating a Web Design
Well, remember Paris Hilton's advice: to appear to be interesting, say as little as possible. So maybe you have the wrong perception of yourself, and appear more interesting to the social outgoing people than you realise - without jumping through hoops.
MM is doing the wrong startup. He should be writing more and I bet he will have a decent size audience. Although i think he mostly likes to be on the opposite side just for the hell of it, i still like to read his post and sure knows how to defend his views by backing them with data. MM is sure making or writing "something people want": controversy.
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