skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an intellectual person, I find blind faith in Christianity outright offensive. It doesn't make any sense to base your world view on the mythology of a Bronze Age people.

Honestly, I'm glad that you have the right to spread the good word on your website. But it's so rare I get to interact with a real, live Christian that I delight in the opportunity. Maybe we can both gain something.

So let's talk. Why do you believe in the god of the Christians to the exclusion of all the others?
I wonder what recently happened within Dell management that has caused them suddenly to start listening to their customers.
"people not running XP and using Java plugins in their browser"

were you able to install/run juwo? the BBC demo?
The End of a 1,400-Year-Old Business
I guess it's a good thing there's no authentication on that site.
Here is why I put that controversial paragraph:

"Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns [is ashamed of] me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven." [Jesus]

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2010:32-33;&version=31;
You don't need to know the name of something to use it. I think OpenId is going to become like an email address.
why do you believe that 2+2=4 and not 2+2=5 ?
Does the Arc/Lisp process only handle one request at a time? If it handles multiple requests at once how do you keep the writes atomic?
How to avoid start-up success?  Not offering equity!
How many start-ups sabotage their chances by being too stingy when it comes to equity?

I thought I'd save everyone the trouble of going to a blog by ranting here directly.

A while back I was interviewing at a small company that really needed another developer or
three. They wanted to hire and made an offer -- a 20k pay cut, but they were going to
give me equity -- the magic word! Except the president/founder of the company wanted to
keep 99%+ of the equity for himself, so anyone else let in on the deal had to share a
fraction of the remaining 1%. I calculated that if the company was successful to the tune
of $10 million, my share would still be worth less than my initial pay cut. I
pointed this out to the senior developer who was trying to convince me to join, but his
blind loyalty to the company seemed to preclude arithmetic.

Prior to that I worked at another smallish company where the president/owner kept around
95% of the stock. A few top people got 1% or less. Other companies say they want to hire
"top talent", but they pay "market rates" -- which usually means the average according to
some salary survey, or less, and no equity.

It seems like some founders are so attached to ownership that they can't part with it, even
if it means greater success for themselves! It's like they have visions of dollars from
owning the entire company instead of a vision of what's needed to get there. While a
fraction of a percent of Google is worth a lot now, in order to get to that point, the
founders had to part with the majority of the equity.

Some start-ups work with two founders, but some have half a dozen (like Excite) or more.
Even reddit got more "founders" after the fact. If it turns out you need a new band
member, are you prepared to redo the original founders' percentages, or do you have other plans?
You're still missing the point. Joins and sorting and grouping in SQL are what you use to populate the real data structures. Whether you know it or not, in all but the most simplistic CRUD application, you've gotta write code to deal with all of those data structures. The database is always in addition to that complexity. The argument being made is that you can leave out the database entirely in some environments, and not add that complexity.

The entirety of this thread is questioning the pervasive use of databases in web applications. There are some where it makes excellent sense (accounting, CRM, ERP, the stuff that's been the strong-hold of Oracle and SAS for years). And others (wikis, blogs, forums, photo galleries, etc.) where it may not make good sense, because you introduce hundreds of unnecessary operations and significant additional database support code. That's not to say a database is never the right solution for these problems (when your problem starts looking relational, you should start looking at relational databases, because your Ruby or Python or Lisp implementation is going to be worse than what PostgreSQL or MySQL have). And, as someone else mentioned (but got modded down)...when you start building your own flaky transactional layer, then it may be time to consider a database that has good transactions support.
'... would recommend that one should gain a certain level of understanding of what's going on behind the scenes ...'

The upside of this is you work less & do things faster because there is a lot of functionality pre-built. Solutions become a lot simpler because you are utilising more of the framework, less custom code leaving more time to solve the real problems.
Any domain cookies for .bigheadlabs.com are vulnerable, which could be a real problem (Wordpress admin maybe?).

Domains are so cheap now that I almost always buy one for every project (even hacks) these days, partially just to isolate potential XSS issues.

I didn't mean to imply anything disparaging towards you, this kind of annoying stuff pops up even at Google. It's so easy to miss a spot, especially on quick hacks.

Thanks for creating that site, it's an awesome contribution.
others have summed it up pretty well, with the "no false positives" perspective. But, I will play devil's advocate and say: Make sure you aren't just looking for "someone like me", and finding no one measures up. I've noticed this in some younger founders...there's a pair of folks who are nearly identical in skills, history, and goals, and this is not necessarily a good mix for success in a startup. They get along great, but they aren't a good team.

You both need the same drive to build something great. But you need to have different skills, different areas you enjoy working on. If you don't, you'll fight over the mythical bike shed and the hard solitary work won't get done. And there's a lot of hard solitary work in a startup.
Petition Against Alexa's Statsaholic Lawsuit
MySpace News is live; poses absolutely no threat to Digg
I would second the suggestion to try SQLite first (or give metakit a glance if you want something that lets you iterate over a table quickly) and concur with staying as far away from BDB as is possible...

The other advantage that using memory/fs has over a RDBMS for most simple applications is that unless you are doing complicated joins you will keep things simple and avoid introducing an additional layer of complexity and point of failure into your app.
Why would there be a plateau? The number of advertisers and their budget is not fixed.
"should I just admit defeat?"

Definitely. It worked out great for Larry and Sergey to shoot that search horse and move on to empty pastures where nobody else was grazing.

Of course...sf0 has been around for quite a long time. I'm not convinced there's a business model there.
I like Strength is not only in numbers. I have never thought of it like this before. I was always under the impression that millions of users equals millions of dollars....
YC News is one of the best sites I have come across in a long time
Paul, I would like to thank you for building this site. I realize that this site is vary good press/PR for YC, but the value that its providing to me personally is incredible and the interactivity has me hooked. This is the best site that I have come across in the past 2 years.
Vlad, I disagree with your comment about iTunes. People want choice these days (long tail economy). Thats why people get their information on the Internet.

I think magazines still have value. People need something to read in bed, on the bus and on the toilet. Until I have an iPhone that I can do this with, I will read magazines.

I think magazines are on the way out, but they still have value for now...
Hitwise acquired by Experian -- a great move!
Someone asked if the bubble was back a few days ago. I think it is. Companies are being bought left right and centre.
Long tail of Advertising. Basically there is an infinite amount of advertisers
Who here actually has an open id? I don't know anyone with one.
:-)

If you're doing Java, Azul Systems does 192 cores in 5U.
Here's an actual example, instead of all this pontificating. It's not that impressive but it illustrates the point.

I had to write an external "chat history" module (i.e., always send the last N lines of a conversation to a client as soon as client joins) for an IRC server, in python. (it's a long story)

Your standard RDBMS solution would probably involve the ircd logging directly or indirectly to a database, with a python script handling requests and doing selects out of that db. On a network with thousands of users, this will load a db machine down with IO operations. This also has to happen quickly, so that new text is added to the history log in near real-time. Batching is probably out of the question.

My solution was to have the ircd pass off its strings to another program (in this case, I used python) via a named pipe (this could also have been done via a socket, to aggregate multiple servers or do other neat tricks), and then have the logger app load these into memory - in this case, a giant python dictionary keyed on channel name which pointed to a constantly-updated ring buffer class for each channel. This ring buffer held the last N lines of conversation.

Writes were simple - h[c].write('text')

Lookups were simple - h[c].get()

Fast writes, fast reads, and disk i/o was batched for efficient logging to disk, at which point you deal with the data in batches and maybe store it into a db if you want to do something more advanced like with SQL.

Of course this could all be done with C within the ircd itself as well, using a hash table and ring buffers as well.

It was actually much faster (and logically simpler) than writing a DB solution, and I'm certainly no master hacker.
You should add yourself to the thank you list :)
Vote up if you would like news.Ycomb add a feature where users can save their favorite stories
A non-SQL solution surely can work well and be a fine solution to some problems. Especially problems that are very well understood (like problems at the optimization stage of the project).

But can a minimal non-SQL solution provide the basic features that people want and expect from a persistent storage layer: transactions, allowing multiple process concurrent access to the data, relatively foolproof failure recovery procedures, etc?

A decent RDBMS gives you those features out of the box in addition to allowing you great data manipulation flexibility. It is this sweet spot of data manipulation flexibility and fault tolerance that makes SQL/RDBMS such a ubiquitous tool.

I suspect code you're "skipping" is the code that would give you those extra features that help with reliability and fault tolerance.

While it is possible to implement those features without using the RDBMS-crutch it takes real code and real engineering effort to do it. If you are writing "way less code" you are likely not providing replacement features.
The way to do this is to go to the feature request thread and put in your point. People will vote it up there if they like it. This keeps the rest of YC news clear of feature requests and focuses more on start up stuff.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=363
That's why these kinds of discussions are difficult. Not just the usual "it depends" but multiple levels of "it depends". As you say, if you're job mix is keeping a pipe saturated then raw latency is probably not your critical problem. Though, of course, if, for example, you have one pipe for bulk transfer and one for control/meta-data.... :-)

The comment about handling data locally was trying to get to the issue of how much data needs to be going back and for across the cluster rather than just living on the individual nodes. For example, we crawl millions of sites so there's an initial lump of intake data to each of the crawlers. On each crawler, that lump of data will get processed, redacted, expanded, and what not and only the resulting indexes and segments are ever transfered off the crawlers.
4 comments and 2 points? C'mon, people, don't forget to vote up the article so other people see it. The top comment has 5 points, which is what the article should have, if it's worth commenting on!
From my experience, share grants, vesting and equity sharing are some of the hardest parts of the incorporation process and decision making. It's good to get as much thinking around them as possible because they are CRITICAL.
may you please explain why BDB sucks ? thanks !
Because I count two things, and two more things and see that there are four objects. I can observe with my own eyes that mathematics works. You can't ever see God, you have to take on faith that a book written almost 2000 years ago is absolute fact.

So why do you believe in the god of the Christians to the exclusion of all the other gods?
Allegro-cache looks interesting although I haven't tried it:
http://franz.com/products/allegrocache/index.lhtml
I like the idea of having a powerful datastore within the same process as the application because you don't have the IPC overhead. Although, if you're using prolog you're probably going to be less likely to want to do complex things in memory as you sometimes are with SQL.

Some considerations that come to mind:
1) Relational databases bring a form of 'automatic' documentation to a project in that somebody who hasn't touched it before can expect to make a reasonable start on understanding it by using known tools to look at the schema.
2) You get powerful hot-patching tools with a relational database (sqlplus, psql, or similar) that have the safety of things like foreign key constraints.
3) Major version upgrades. As you're developing you can track db changes by writing change scripts. Then when you do your upgrade you can 'pull the lever'. There's nothing stopping you from doing this with any other structure, it's just something to think about.
I think the features request thread is overwhelming at this point. There's just too much there for new information to rise to the top.
I agree, I've learned at least 1 tip a week that has helped me get better at doing things in my life.
A new rss-based content aggregator
Got it from Slashdot.com
From "The Other Road Ahead":

"When you have the users on your server, you don't have to rely on benchmarks, for example. Benchmarks are simulated users. With server-based software, you can watch actual users. To decide what to optimize, just log into a server and see what's consuming all the CPU. And you know when to stop optimizing too: we eventually got the Viaweb editor to the point where it was memory-bound rather than CPU-bound, and since there was nothing we could do to decrease the size of users' data (well, nothing easy), we knew we might as well stop there."

Couldn't you have done better if, instead of keeping all hash entries in memory, you kept them on disk and used memory as an LRU buffer? It seems like you could have fit more users on a server that way.
mmap of course?
Vote up if you would like people to stop misusing karma voting for polls.
Google 1Q Profit Rises 69 Percent
If you're planning on upgrading ... might want to wait a couple days. The update servers are slammed right now. It too me 12 hours to download some 1400 update packages (from 6.10). Though I'm happy to report that the update went very smoothly.
Yoono jumps into group annotation fray
Dell brings back XP on home systems
I'm planning on doing something fun with this in the next couple of months.

I think the ideal app here is a high-throughput, small-message app. Seems like I need to make a twitter clone...
The scary math behind Web 2.0
Mozilla Thunderbird 2 takes flight
Ubuntu 'Feisty Fawn' released, hit by traffic
I'm pretty happy for just using delicious for that. It's always nicer when sites interact well with existing sites instead of bolting on a half assed version of the same functionality. Not to say that Paul's in the business of half assing things, but rather that it's slightly orthogonal to the main value of news.yc and already exists (done well).
Who is going to Startup Camp 2 on May/7 in SF?
Teens get hip to exercising caution when online / Many wary about posting too much personal information on social-networking sites
Interesting and strange at the same time. Definitely thinking about going.
While you might get some good overall guidance here, I would recommend getting a consultation with a lawyer before acting on it.
ANALYSIS / Web 2.0 broadens its appeal
Quote: "Does his 2.5% entitle him to 2.5% of the profits, after my partner and I draw salaries?"

Sounds about right. However, with an LLC you can divide the profits anyway you like regardless of the ownership. For example, you can agree to have your investor get no profits at all for the first 2 years and then after that get, say, 10% of the profits (basically any percentage you agree on). Or, you can even be more creative such as having your investor get all the losses for the first two years (to offset his income from other sources and reduce his tax burden) and then get him to receive 2.5% of the profits after two years. You have full flexibility with an LLC, but consult a good attorney or accountant to make the best of it.
Your friend is not automatically entitled to any cash just for being an investor. If he owns 2.5% of the company, it just means is that 2.5% of the business assets belong to him. If you operate the business for 50 years, he's won't automatically get anything back, unless you structure the agreement that way. If you sell the business or close up shop, he is entitled to 2.5% of the (remaining) assets and cash.

Nolo Press has a bunch of great books to help you set up your organizational structure, and they include templates for your operating agreement. I was just browsing them in Borders last weekend. They are awesome. And they're like 20 or 30 bucks. :)
I've been using RoR for over a year, professionally for about 7 months and my best advice (it's also been mentioned in other threads) is to learn Ruby first. If you get to know Ruby pretty well, it's much easier to see through the smoke and mirrors.
Ken Thompson's theoretical C compiler backdoor
Instead, why not let people see what they (or everyone else) has voted up? If I'm looking for something I've saved, I probably voted it up...
Not to mention, less custom code = less bugs. Although I can only speak for RoR, most of these frameworks have probably done a good share of testing.
This claim is quite misleading. How many of those 100 million users are actually using OpenID? I suspect a majority of those are AOL accounts. Is AOL actively promoting OpenID among its users?

UPDATE: I just noticed kmt (post above) asked the same question, sorry for the double comment.
> Though, of course, if, for example, you have one pipe for bulk transfer and one for control/meta-data.... :-)

I do, but 15 usec is fast enough for that. :) I generally don't like paying a premium for slightly better performance. Even these rackmount systems are very pricey compared to putting together your own vanilla boxes.

Data bounces from node to node; the main reason to go 10gigE instead of 1gigE is actually for lower latency from the extra room. 100 Mbit of traffic on fast ethernet = 1 sec latency vs 0.1 sec on 1gigE vs. 0.01 sec on 10gigE (not counting overhead of course).
Too late. Vote me up for President 2008. I'm going to do my whole campaign in this one post, as well. My official web site is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=14997 Sure, it's hard to remember, but then again I only want geek votes. :)
Also probably a good idea to submit your opinions here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html
Very interesting, a specialized processor. 192 cores and 192 GB in 5U and 1000 watts! I wonder how much performance a 5-watt chip gives you.

In 10 years our cell phones will have 192 cores.
Froogle/PS is nice to find things that you can buy quickly using Google Checkout. If I don't care about price, but do care about keeping my CC safe/buying something quick, I usually use Amazon or Froogle.
Ah, I see venture hacks isn't really on the side of the entrepreneur after all.

Any VC that asks you to vest your shares is a VC who is trying to steal from you.

The business pre-money valuation is value you created. Your ownership of that is property you have EARNED.

When you take VC money, they get a percentage of the company, and your ownership is diluted, but at the same time the value of the company goes up, as it now has more cash assets in the bank. The end result is immediately post money the value of your shares should be about the same as pre-money, only the ownership percentage of the company is less.

This is fair, and this is the consideration you give up in exchange for their investment.

However, if they ask you to also re-vest your shares, are asking you to give up you property (and your voting power) in the hope that you will "Earn them back"... which first assumes you hav eto earn them (eg: it is a losss of property if you don't own it anymore) and secondly assumes that they won't have pushed you out. While your shares are vesting you can't vote them, which gives the VC even more power.

Finally, they are not giving you consideration for these shares you're putting in jeapardy and so they are simply asking you to give them something for nothing. The investment they are making is already paid for by you in the dilution you are experiencing.

There is absolutely no reason for a founders shares to re-vest.

If your ownership in the company is not enough to ensure your interests are aligned with the VCs (Who really can't do much to make the company do well, but you can.) then the VCs wouldn't be investing-- period. So the alignment of ownership excuse is patently absurd.

No reputable VC will ask you to vest your shares. Only a thief would do that-- you own the shares, and asking you to give them up for nothing is trying to take advantage.

If a VC wants to put you on a vesting schedule to keep you incentivized.... let him offer you shares out of his pool to vest into.

Anything else is exceedingly greedy on the part of the VC.
'... So, what are the basic implications of an unconference that uses the Open Space methodology? ...'

you might have to code in java, no make that 'java light' ~ http://wiki.startupcamp.org/wiki/StartupCamp2DiscussionIdeas
Hear, hear. Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner of Cisco talked about this in Nerds 2.0.1 here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2534997893350167670&q=nerds+2.0.1#53m17s

They financed the company with credit card debt and were already doing $250,000-$500,000 a month in business when they finally got venture capital (after 70+ unsuccessful tries). However, they agreed to a forfeiture contract and a 4-year vesting period, and strongly advise everyone else not to do it that way.

They were so disgusted with the way they were treated that they sold off all their shares long ago. If they still held them, they'd each be worth about $24 billion today (they had 30% of the company, like the Google founders).
I'm in favour of a low barrier to dabble; we all sometimes think "I can't be bothered" and go after the next thing that wants our attention. But not requiring registration seems to translate more easily to some sites than others.

Say a registering user has the ability to claim a two-word sub-domain of foo.com, e.g. top.dog.foo.com, and to start setting up their data there, including who can view the data and sending email invites out to others. What should non-registering users be able to do?

The alternatives I can think of are: Have a set of *.try.foo.com sites that they can play around with and reset them to sane defaults occasionally. Or, let them nab the site name of their choice but warn them it gets deleted unless they register within 24 hours. Either way, I'd like to avoid site names getting used up for no good reason. Any better ideas?

Cheers, Ralph.