skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you. I wasn't aware of that.

Yeah, there are three things in play (I would say):

1. The language design of SQL is often icky. A different logical language could be nice.

2. The logical / physical separation is sometimes right on and sometimes... not so much. At the very least, there doesn't seem to be One True Logical Model, hence exposing a physical model with transactions seems justified.

3. Often, people are quick to give up consistency and while that is not always the wrong thing to do, it's done more than it ought to be. But... a lot of people hacking up big sites and similar these days... their standards are low and the "customer's" tolerance for resulting bugs and glitches is startlingly high (for now).

All three of those get lumped under the "NoSQL" heading and it is helpful (I think) to tease them apart.
Every language is designed according to that rule.

False. Ruby and Perl were both designed (at least for a time) by adding stuff people were asking for or talking about. Not all language designers set a high priority on the thought, "Can we do without it?"
> Solving the problems of distributed systems is incredibly hard and not necessary if all you need is scalability and high availability.

Once one scales beyond a single node the system becomes distributed. Then by definition one must deal with distributed systems problems in order to achieve scale beyond the capabilities of a single node.

> When you decide to give up consistency, your application can no longer assume consistency ever. Giving up availability in case of network partition means few extra minutes of downtime a year.

Depends on the application. Giving up availability might mean cascading failures throughout your entire application. For instance if the datastore is unavailable for writes then any kind of queueing systems built around the DB (a common design pattern) run the risk of overflow during the downtime.

And I would make the argument that once an application scales beyond a single datacenter it cannot help but give up strict consistency under error conditions.

> I don't think he completely misunderstood distributed systems - I think he decided to completely side-step the entire field.

If he didn't misunderstand them then he is purposefully ignoring the hard problems. Which is worse?
lolwut, they aren't engineers. Maybe "engineers"
Wait, did someone think I wasn't serious?
There isn't an engineer in the world that understands AJAX, jQuery or HTML5. Oh wait! You're talking about software developers or computer programmers or computer scientists aren't you? Why didn't you say so??
>He and his colleagues estimate that 5.6% of the total mass of the targeted lunar crater's soil consists of water ice. In other words, 2,200 pounds of moon dirt would yield a dozen gallons of water.

5.6%: impressively high, wouldn't have guessed that at all. Though it was in a crater, so could be abnormal.

2,200 pounds of moon dirt: weighed here or there? Where's metric when you need it, instead of where it's a PITA (mass instead of volume in cooking == ?!) ?

edit: that's one of the lamest animations I've seen in a while... where did they get it? Remind me to black-list the animator(s).
"Imports" have always been our research strength :-). Thank you Germany for going all crazy in the 30s giving us an era's worth of top-tier scientists.
It's really a shame apple put in a 5-point Security Torx for the bottom casing. Just got a new toolkit a few weeks ago... but it doesn't have the security torx tip.

But overall really nice form factor. I love how neat and well fit everything looks.
Sorry about the confusion. We call our developers engineers.
Sometimes (usually) it's all about marketing and getting your name out. Posting a link to your site here, there, everywhere (especially on a post about a product launch.) Talk to people about it, get feedback and build a community that gets emotionally attached to the product. You're done with the "hard" part, now it's all about increasing your luck by mingling and networking. Good luck!
> If we published anti-rfses,

Actually that doesn't sound like a bad plan. Dalton Caldwell's talk was full of sage advice only a veteran could give. Perhaps other areas have similar obstacles that are not apparent to people looking to startup?
I think that's right. If social games are going to continue to exist, and I think they are, there's going to be an arms race which focuses on quality.

People may have got sucked into Farmville by the viral aspect of the game, but having been fooled once they've developed an immunity to straight-out viral games. (Also, so has the platform -- games are no longer allowed to publish more than one message to your friends' newsfeeds.) So future games will have to focus on having a gameplay experience which makes people actually want to play them.

Of course, writing a really good game isn't easy. And if you're capable of writing a really good game, why not sell it for ten bucks on iPhone/Android/MacOSAppStore/whatever instead of giving it away for free and trying to shoehorn in enough ads to cover costs?
Banking on humans not making mistakes is not robust.

This should be expressed as a bumper sticker. How about: Human Error: Bet on it!
How far out does the infection spread? For example do startups like Songkick have these kinds of problems, or are they far enough away from the nasty stuff?
Songkick and thesixtyone both seem to be fine. It's not music startups per se that are dangerous, just music startups that touch label music in some way.
From what I can tell there are two camps that are converging: 1) capitalists that want to monetize off the 3rd Economy and 2) resource-based social engineers using a YC-like network of startups to start an internal shared economy. They are both experimental in nature right now and the future of which one will succeed will be determined by how efficiently either one is run. I don't think there's middle ground in the long run.

How would anyone here feel about a crowdfunding platform that would allow people to fund local startups with objects/space/skills instead of money in return for their product(s)? This way no money gets wasted and the funded items are returned (except for the ramen of course) if the startup closes up shop.
Towards a new generation of analytic apps
The above is a utilitarian approach: what's the path from here to the degree that costs least in $ and time. I'm not wired that way -- but I have to respect that bobf is making choices right for him.

As I get farther away from university, I get more glad that I spent a lot of time in out-of-discipline coursework. I foresee that feeling deepening with age, because it's a fact that it's hard for many reasons to have a wanderjahr once you have a spouse, a house, a kid, a hard job, a history of acting a certain way.

I fear that the utilitarian approach might, for some, become akin to the concept of technical debt, except for your life and philosophy. You can consider those hard questions now, or you can wait til later. But later, it might be much harder.
Intel's x86 killed the RISC workstation with Windows compatibility and price per MIPS. Intel then matched and surpassed AMD on AMD64 counting on its own size and on the complexity of building a very fast 64-bit x86.

All factors, Windows compatibility excepted, are on ARM's side this time. Of course Intel has survived bad situations before, but this time I am not betting on them.
Also intel is being disrupted from the higher end by GPU's and the new ARM processors(due to performance/watt), and multicore processors like tilera.
If they don't do something they will just become another Yahoo answers. Littered with troll answers that get voted up, and offer no real insight.
Still has nothing to do with choosing LLVM over GCC. Currently GCC is happily generating object files for me that contains i386, x86_64, and ppc:

file x.o
x.o: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures

x.o (for architecture i386):	Mach-O object i386

x.o (for architecture x86_64):	Mach-O 64-bit object x86_64

x.o (for architecture ppc7400):	Mach-O object ppc

Going to another architecture doesn't mean changing the compiler at all, just like they didn't change the compiler when going from PowerPC to Intel. Back on PowerPC it was GCC and now on Intel it is GCC. I believe that GCC is also used to compile for the iPhone/iPad.

Please don't get me wrong, I am really happy Apple is embracing LLVM with the various tools surrounding it and is moving away from GCC, however that is not a sign that they are planning on moving CPU architectures again.
Identity as collateral is an interesting concept. In a way, it's happening now, albeit low-tech.

I get debt-collection calls for people loosely associated with me (in-laws). I assume the point is to have it come up in conversation and shame the debtors into paying, but I choose not to play a part.
I just signed up... I've been looking at the prgmr signup page off and on for six months and it's usually backlogged. Glad to finally get in!

I have a month-old AWS account with about $0.30 in lifetime charges on it. I never quite felt like I knew how much of a bill I was racking up when it was turned on.
That sounds reasonable enough to me.

[big bang --(we're here-ish)------------------------------------------------------- end of universe]

So the facts that we're that far to the left of that line, and that the universe(s) is/are really really big, suggest that life isn't that rare.
tl;dr version: http://files.jnewland.com/stonebraker-20101021-200946.jpg
Price points on apps is still something evolving. From what I've seen, its extremely difficult to get users to buy apps past a certain price range (99 cents?). And if you can't get massive adoption, its not really a "social" game, is it?
I've also been told countless times not to deal with music startups. While I do agree that building a business that tries to prop up the record label's business model is bad, I think there is lots of potential in the space given the supposed decline of the record labels and the huge and rising popularity of music.
> Once one scales beyond a single node the system becomes distributed. Then by definition one must deal with distributed systems problems in order to achieve scale beyond the capabilities of a single node

I meant that one doesn't need to solve the general problem of distributed systems.
Sharding is a common way to scale avoiding most of the problems generally associated with distributed systems. Scaling within LAN is easier than across data centers. You can assume no malicious traffic between your servers and suddenly solving the byzantine generals problem is far easier.

Purposefully ignoring really hard problems can be a very good engineering practice.
Why? There's no user replaceable/upgradable parts. If you're going to the trouble of buying a part and replacing it touurself surely you can get the right screwdriver.
Perhaps this is a good argument to split activities between email addresses. I guess many of us already have several perhaps personal, public, work, online account and so on. When you think of an email address as a reputation then its time to have a dozen or so on the go so that those reputations do not overlap.
I think the provision of powerful APIs (but with terms of use that say they can use any data that you gather with them) is a smart way of collecting a large amount of this type of information.

However, it's also not hugely clear (well, it wasn't when I was investigating using them a couple of years ago) when signing up to get access that that is what's happening. I was checking the TOU and noticed some alarming wording - basically, any users who used the Rapleaf API to upload their address book to my site, would also be giving their entire address book to Rapleaf (to do as they see fit).

In the end, I used Octazen (later acquired by Facebook) instead.
> Under what circumstances is either of those options "extremely confusing"?

When you're on the phone explaining this to someone.

There's too many things that can go wrong:

1. User may launch the app from .dmg, even after they've copied it. It's an icon, it works! …but later image won't unmount, app will "disappear" after reboot or will take ages to launch.

2. User needs to drag the app to Applications folder. Not Dock. Dragging to dock will seem to work, but will cause problems like #1.

3. You have to explain that dragging of disk image icon (icon that needs to be found on cluttered desktop) to trash won't delete anything. And then you have to explain that the .dmg which wasn't deleted can be deleted.

And of course user should drag to trash both icon representations of the .dmg, but not any file from within .dmg! They all need to end up in trash, except some of the icons can be dragged to trash, and some not. And order matters.
The core of it is 11 lines of code. The speed of shipping apps like this, the acceleration, is what impresses me.
Disagree and I have a very prominent argument, C.
Four options:

1) you are going to hire someone who can help you figure out what you want and will implement it quickly. This person will have a proven track record of implemented sites and will be expensive (over $100/hour depending on experience and their cost of living).

2) Hire a company with multiple experienced Django developers on staff if you want the site done well and on time. Expect to pay slightly more, ~$150/hour.

3) Hire someone who has done zero Django sites, or a few sites of less complexity than what you want implemented. This person will clearly be tech savvy, understanding what you want and promising the world. They will only have small or incomplete projects to show you as portfolio material. They promise more than they can deliver, because they are naive and possibly still on their Django honeymoon period. They will charge somewhere between $25-$75 per hour and will take several times longer to give you something that just barely works and isn't particularly maintainable.

4) Everyone else. Avoid them.

Find a developer or company who can help you to figure out exactly what you need and has proven that they can implement in a timely manner. Then pay them what they ask. Scale back your expectations if you can't afford their time. Hire someone in the US, but outside of NY and Bay Area unless you live in those areas and need to meet face-to-face.
Download High Quality Wallpapers
That may be true for fringe authors/artists/musicians, but those are not the people being pirated the most. People mostly pirate blockbuster movies, big-name artists, and bestselling books.
So bacon is not a vegetable? Darn comic lied to me!
http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive/931
Interesting article - it makes me wonder if there is a hack for consistently being able to engage people in real conversation.

There probably is. But I would suggest this falls under the heading of "be careful what you wish for". I seem to have this knack (or something akin to it) and sometimes wish I could gnaw my left arm off and escape this trap.
...and I just noticed that I can get twice as much for $6 as I do for $5. Whoops. Hopefully I can put in an upgrade request sometime after I get provisioned. Maybe clojure can run in 64mb? I'm skeptical but we'll see.
But he did apoogize and that's a difference that got noticed.
But he did apologize and that's a difference that got noticed.
I think the big thing that you're missing is that "great execution" doesn't end at building a great product. And PR is not a marketing strategy.

If you want to avoid this experience again, choose an idea that:

1) Has a broad-content SEO strategy (think StackOverflow and Yelp). New/valuable content gets created every day.

2) Has a channel for "buying" customers with economics that work. Plenty of people make adwords work. Plenty of others can afford salespeople. Find a market where people are succeeding at buying customers and compete in it.

3) Has a viral loop. Think Farmville or Groupon. Why is it in your customers best interest to evangelize your product? They can be motivated by psychology or $.

4) Create a "tribe". Read up on Seth Godin. Look at Joel Spolsky, 37Signals, etc. They sell good (NOT great) products because they've accumulated followers and evangelists.

It's not about a "great idea". Well, it can be. But look at all of the shitty products that are minting money! You can aim for a "addictive/amazing" product (and should), but it better be backed by sound customer acquisition economics for the (likely) case that your product is merely good.

About your launch day: You expect to blow it out on launch day? That's not a reasonable expectation. It's a marathon not a 100 yard dash.

edit: TechCrunch should not be a goal. At YC there's a word for the period after TechCrunch coverage... "The trough of despair". It's the period of time after TC where your traffic flatlines and you realize that TC isn't a springboard to anything-- it's just the first step (if you're lucky) on a really long slog to building a business.
Hmmm.... my business has always been in the same boat in terms of press, although we are a niche product and so grow essentially through word of mouth. That said... improving the product usually trumps getting an article written in the long run. And never spend more than 40 minutes writing an email.

My suggestions for AdSense would be to spend $500 at once rather than trickling the money out. This gives Google enough knowledge of your conversion rates that you can switch to pay-per-conversion. Bear in mind that you also have to be ruthless about excluding websites where you aren't going to get any conversions during your pay-per-click period. So track your spend daily and exclude-exclude-exclude sites that don't convert. I don't know if you've done this, but it basically halved our advertising costs and turned us from advertising at a loss into advertising more or less at cost (perhaps profitably assuming word of mouth, etc.).

Good luck!
I totally hear your frustration. I've become incredibly burned out on launching startups / small products that flop.

I'd say one thing - Techcrunch is definitely NOT the only game in town for PR. They are very fickle and clique-y. There are huge startups that never made a dent in TC. PR is all about building buzz from the ground up, exclusives are a load of crap and mostly reserved for established players anyhow.

If you're not getting any coverage from anywhere, yes maybe there's something at the core that isn't compelling (and you need to talk to customers / users first to determine that), but chances are you aren't spending enough time sending fun personal emails to lower-level bloggers and journalists. If you aren't in the elite old-boys club, you shouldn't be focused on approaching the journalists who are.

But PR and "viral" launches are hard work. The idea of the massively hockey-stick organic viral launch is largely a myth propagated by a few outliers (aka survivor bias).

And good PR does not make a success, either. I've built 2 things that made big PR splashes (everything BUT TC haha) and neither landed me either fame or fortune. The one product was blogged about by the New York freakin Times, and it never achieved escape velocity. PR isn't a long-term marketing strategy. Its a one-time high and believe me the downslope doesn't feel good either

Honestly, there are 2 types of folks who make it: the lucky ones, and the persistent ones. Its hard as hell (and heck I haven't beaten it yet) but you have to ignore the burnout and be one of the persistent ones
I wonder what this would do for the startup community. Free hosting for a year means, all you really need is an idea.
No advice here either. Let me know if you want an outside product review though, email in sig. If you're product is awesome, you should be able to have it do well.
Can Any Tech Product Resist Going Freemium? Amazon EC2 Couldn’t.
Ask HN: Review my side project - Rails Kitchen Sink
I've been putting this together in my spare time recently - it's basically a bare-bones rails starter app with lots of stuff included.

I'd particularly appreciate feedback on the test suite (since this is the first time I've tried rspec), and the general rails-3-ness of it all (also my first attempt at a rails-3 app).

Apologies to any French-speakers for the French translation - it's probably horrible since it comes straight from google.

thanks!

http://railskitchensink.com/
Don't stop now!
On JVM, languages, platforms, and frameworks
This is the comment I left on the post (still moderating):

There is an extreme case of partition tolerance that must be considered: disconnected operation.

For users at the edge of the network, latency can be the biggest performance killer. If it takes 1 second or more for each user action to be reflected in application state due to round trip time (mobile web) those seconds add up and users can be frustrated.

However, if you move the database and web application to the mobile device itself, users no longer see network latency as part of the user experience critical path. Latency has been proven to be correlated directly to revenue, because users engage much more readily with snappy interfaces.

Once data is being operated on by the user on the local device, the key becomes synchronization. Asynchronous multi-master replication demands a different approach to consistency, than the traditional model which assumes the database is being run by a central service.

The MVCC document model is designed for synchronization. It's a different set of contraints than the relational model, but since it's such a highly constrained problem space it also admits of general solutions and protocols.

It's my belief that the MVCC document model is closer to the 80% solution for a large class of applications. Storing strongly typed and normalized representations of data is an artifact of our historically constrained computing resources, so it will always be a good way to optimize certain problems.

But for many human-scale data needs, schemaless documents are a very good fit. They optimize for the user, not the computer.
FaceTime for Mac opens giant Apple ID security hole
I purposefully ignored the tornado and so it did not hit my datacenter, tear off a section of the roof, kill all power sources, and drench my servers. Hard problems: solved.
I thought PR was in fact a marketing strategy. eBay did great with their (very smart) PR program.
The first thing that comes to mind is, did you do any customer development? http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/what-is-custome...

In your story, I didn't see anything about sales efforts beyond "signed up a couple of early customers." Perhaps that was the missing link. It seems you relied on PR tactics, rather than finding, choosing, and closing customer deals one by one.
Go to the IRC channel NOW! :-)

God! I love companies with IRC chans.
Television networks block Google TV from accessing web-based content
You're confusing ARM with PowerPC, both of which are RISC architectures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
Automation Insurance: Robots Are Replacing Middle Class Jobs
Cheer up, guy. Techcrunch front page doesn't guarantee success at all....remember that 90% of startups fail. So there's no possible way that all those startups Techcrunch reported on succeeded. From your story, it doesn't sound like you persisted with your first startup, which may be why it failed.
Identity and The Independent Web
And then we won't have research. So the material taught will stagnate, just like in high schools.
If we treat students as customers, then they want the best -- so to improve, the student-oriented university would hire teachers that are also great researchers, so they'd have something new to teach, that isn't taught by the competition.
And that research is costly; and we come full circle to the research-oriented universities.