skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Want an example of "simple but less reliable"? Here's one (in one or two easy steps): 1. All updates go in to memcached, but not the database 2. (optional) A background process occasionally copies entries from memcached to the db. Without this, the values will be completely lost when memcached restarts.

Paul - here's an interesting take on your recommended solution: Use solid state ram and forget about step two. You get fast a read/write, without the risk of data loss if the machine restarts.

Here's a pretty cool board that will take DDR SDRAM, and supply it with a constant source of power (imitating solid-state memory):
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/gigabyte-iram/index.x?pg=1

Those who insist on a database, could even store the database on this board. Best of both worlds.

Here's an insane graph showing the database transaction rate for the board vs. a conventional hard drive:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/gigabyte-iram/index.x?pg=7
VentureBeat: Southern Cal overtakes New England in start-up activity
We went through this question awhile ago, and found a local lawyer in Denver CO that we are happy with. If you want to read the post we made on finding a lawyer it can be found here, http://blog.pretheory.com/arch/000431.php
You don't really know how well you know something until you try to explain it to someone. This is why at my startup we require that:

1) At least once a week you explain something you've learned in the past week to everyone else

2) To keep an internal/external blog/wiki going. Blogging/Wiki editing forces you to put your thoughts down on 'paper' and you can distill a lot of your ideas this way.
Solid-state drives greater than 128GB are in OEM testing now. Expect server economics to turn upside-down in about 12 months, when persistent storage seek times get 100X faster.
CastTV Raises $3.1 Million To Revolutionize Video Search
How to sell Cafepress items with a blog
We use WSGR in CA and Goodwin Procter in MA.
Screw your "dream job" (Email w/ Seth Godin and Zaid360)
and 99% of what we program
(from GJS or Knuth or someone like that)

link: http://www.oopsla.org/2005/ShowEvent.do?id=403

this google video is also cool:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2726904509434151616&q=gerald+sussman

anyone have any sussman stories they'll like to share?
"When something is too hard it means that you're not cheating enough." - David Heinemeier Hansson
But wait, didn't you say it was a non-existent problem?
You can't really vary the price of your product to carry such experiments, so Joel found a way to do it indirectly. Just great.

The results are pretty much predictable though.
This is how I would solve the problem after just a minute of thinking about it:

You may tap twice, and the iPhone makes a noise letting you know that the dial-pad is activated, at which point you can touch any square in a 3x3 grid of numbers, with a voice telling you which number you just pressed.

A problem is if you're holding it upside down. If you're holding it upside down in your hand, the built-in orientation sensor would simply rotate the grid correctly. The less thinking a user has to do, the better.

In other words, it could actually work better than the treo (another phone with a touchscreen), which you definitely can't use to enter a new number blindfolded with its tiny keyboard. And, you could hold the phone upside down and dial the same way, which no conventional phones let you do. A voice announcing the keys is a great idea, as well, since most phones use tones for keypushes.

This would be great in an additional way, because whenever somebody tells you a phone number, they can follow along. "My cell is 111.2345. " "Ok (enters it on the iPhone, and a voice speaks each number.) One. One. One. Three. Four.." "NO, no, I said 2345."
Expansion of Social Networks
AmazonTunes Set To Launch In May
Newsvine Relaunch: Build Your Own News Site
Yup. It didn't go to YC, and I'm not sure it's a startup, but I should have a website to show people in a day or two.
Finding a Marketing Partner
So you have built the dream machine and your up and running. What steps do you take to find the business guys who can hook you up with other companies who sell accessories for your widget. Say you want to include coupons, introductory material for accessories, or some other insert in your package, for a fee. Where do you go to solve that problem. Is this an inhouse executive job, or a partnership arrangement with marketing companies who sell in this space?
On the topic of "general lawyer-searching advice", here are some useful links from Venture Hacks:

http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/term-sheet-hacks#comment-24 :

"There are plenty of lawyers who know VC terms and VC deals very well, yet are not in the VC's back pockets. Ask around your business community - you will quickly learn which lawyers you can trust as being more company/entrepeneur focused, and which ones will be good VC lawyers but too cozy with VC's for a smart entrepeneur to really trust. Doing VC deals on the investor side is a low-margin business given the severe downward fee pressure from the VC's - some firms stock up on VC deals and go for quantity over quality; others will do a VC deal for the Company but will generally only occasionally work with VC's. Also, many VC-back-pocket lawyers will sell themselves to you as having all the connections to the VC's and can get your company in front of all the big players, but that should be an alarm bell. There is a difference - ask around with people who have been there and whose opinion you value and trust, and you will find it."

http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/term-sheet-hacks#lawyers :

"Most law firms do a lot more business with VCs than they are likely to do with you. VCs refer new clients to the law firms, hire the law firms regularly, and know the attorneys socially. Where do you think the law firms' loyalty lies?

The basic incentives between you, your law firm, and your prospective investors are not in your favor. Your lawyers make money by executing transactions and your investors simply bring more transactions to your lawyers than you do."

http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/term-sheet-hacks#comment-49 :

"We have always said at our firm that you can represent VCs or entrepreneurs, but not both, for the very reason you identify. You can't aggressively protect a founder if you are concerned that it might cost you the legal work for raising a VC's next fund. The VC community is simply too small, and business matter are too personal. You hit the nail on the head, regardless of what my colleagues say."
Fast disks are only faster by a factor of two.
Part of the reason that Ruby didn't gain that much traction early on was due to the the lack of English documentation.
Well all right then. I'll consider it revolutionized.
Textmate is the shizzle.
If you want to call it WhyCombinator, you're going to have to buy the domain off me ;-) Also, the red logo reads that you were not rejected.
For those who prefer a nice pretty graph to their black-and-white table:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pduUBxhjbJPfWKalnsvFaew
For the Canadians in the crowd: Do you have any recommendations for a Canadian firm, preferably in Ontario?
How to Get a Book Deal with the World's Largest Publisher
Do you really need an NDA?
A lot like the VC game in many ways.
Salesforce Pitches Startups With RealEstate, Almost Competes with Y Combinator
interesting bit was RTML ~ http://oldvw.stores.yahoo.net/ov.html
Well, it _is_ the Onion.
Would you pay 20K to be a part of an incubator?
I too think it's silly to remember phone numbers...I speed dial or directory dial everything. But the only two people who's cell habits I happen to know, are very often guilty of snail dialing. I don't understand it, but I'd guess that this is a real use case for a lot of people.
Is Goodwin Procter what Y Combinator as a company uses, or what you guys recommend for the companies that sprout from YC?
Interesting article about how Google "works"
BTW, in case anyone is thinking, "why would I need more than 167 transactions per second", imagine that you have a web site that displays everyone's "last active" time (for chat maybe). If users are performing some activity once every 30 sec, then you will be pretty much be at your limit with about 5000 simultaneous users.

Robert, did you test MySQL with a parallel load? To give it the best chance at maximizing tps, it will need to be able to combine multiple pending transactions in a single write. Also, can you tell if it's updating it's b-trees? (if not, it may not be able to sustain these rates)
He is extreme in a sense that is really hard to imagine.

He clearly makes a great deal of money, but according to the article, he doesn't use it at all. His life is his work - no romance, no home. Does he ever take a vacation?

He focuses on purpose to explain his lifestyle, and has clearly achieved incredible success at his business. But what about forging intimate personal relationships, both romantic and with friends?

I get such great value from having close relationships, a "home", an "office" that to imagine life without them is almost impossible. Of course he has 30+ year relationships with his clients, so maybe he has developed close friendships with some of them.

If Rand had created him as a character, maybe the purpose would be to show the downside of total focus on only business. Life without romance - never!
BuyYourFriendaDrink.com
Yeah, solid-state storage is clearly the future for most apps. Flash is over 10x cheaper than DRAM though, so it'd be nice to see some high-performance flash drives as well. It's also nice to not have to worry about losing data during a prolonged power outage.
The natural choice for search, advertising and everything else
It is a caricature of failure despite epic success; his life is a dire warning.
Wow. That is a lot of money.
Salesforce.com starting a startup incubator
Just in case you're not all up on the inside-the-valley lingo: WSGR is Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. From their website, I see they're offering a private (?) seminar series called "Entrepreneurs College". That sounds vaguely familiar... ;-)
Amazon set to launch online music store
I hope my startup can someday make similar announcements about the open source tools we use.
Anyone applied to TechStars? How was it like?
I know they selected the finalists on 4/10. But their blog doesn't mention details.

http://www.techstars.org/site/page/pg5899-as1290.html
We just code fast.
Yahoo Music Adds Music Lyrics, Becomes Worlds First Music Lyrics Store
I think I was saying something improper.
I don't know this person or firm but check out Suzie Dingwall Williams: http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/term-sheet-hacks#comment-49
You got late on this one PG, I posted about Amazontunes a while back
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16448
Making sense of what, why, and how
Yes, I applied.

How was it like?

Rejection!

But I am very curious to hear about how that program turns out and what's the current status of interviews, etc., perhaps from the people who were actually selected.
Thinking Small - Inc.com article on YC & Loopt
dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16261
dupe.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15530
Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
Ok, this is topic I know a little bit about. Here goes...

1. Samsung & BlackBerry browsers? That's not a fair comparison at all! Opera Mobile and Nokia's S60 browser are the clear market leaders (and, yes, both of them render full web pages with JavaScript/AJAX as a thumbnail that you can then zoom in on) See: http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/ and http://www.s60.com/browser/ (btw, the S60 browser is open-source and based on webkit). The iPhone browser is supposed to be very good, but no one's really seen it yet. And it took many years of work for Nokia and Opera to get where they are today (Microsoft still isn't there, and they've really been trying).

2. Touchscreens. If all you want is a touchscreen, you can pick up, say, the LG Prada phone or the Samsung Ultra Smart F700. They both sport full-screen touchscreens like the iPhone. There are others.

3. Mobile fonts: please. Virtually all modern smartphones have nice, antialiased fonts. Take any cheap Windows Mobile phone for example.

4. Big Screens: You can get phones with bigger screens than the iPhone. (But until they invent fold-away screens, they're gonna be bulky)

5. Mobile interfaces suck. Ok, I'll give you this one. But I've got a bonus anti-feature of the iPhone for the YComb audience: The iPhone is bad news for developers! http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/editor-s-corner/2007-01-16
Honestly? It don't matter.

There aren't really any apps that would only be possible with one or the other. If you don't know either: just pick one. (for what it's worth I like Ruby)
Makes me wonder what new buzzwords we can expect in the next couple of years.
When To Turn Off The Camera (more on everyone's favorite exhibitionist)
Mobile is the future of the web -Google
The Expansion of Social Networks (Generic vs. Specialized)
Truly a new era of information when a while back is 2 hours ago.
Here are a few that I like:

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas A. Edison

Don't wait. The time will never be just right.
- Napoleon Hill

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
- Albert Einstein

Failure is rarely fatal.
-Seth Godin

Eighty percent of success is showing up.
- Woody Allen

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.
-Richard Branson

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
- Thomas Jefferson
Valuating A Web 2.0 Startup
Inside Dot Coms - Old BBC show from 2000 [Caution: RealPlayer link]
RapidMind: a multicore programming tool startup
They also just secured $10 in funding:
http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6435743
Advice for PhD students
The Next Net: Startup Watch: Yapta (Beating the Airlines at Their Own Game)
I found this helpful back when I was starting, and I think the general ideas here are applicable across disciplines.
PIMP MY TWITTER. what would you add to Twitter?
No need to wait, really. Addonics' SATA/CF adapters for your $80/8GB flash cards cost $35. Even cheap compact flash does random seeks 40x faster than platters. Throughput is a little slow but what the hell, for 115 bucks? If I were building a server farm right now I'd try those things out.
I really wanted to like Newsvine and I visited semi-regularly for quite some time. But I found that it didn't do much for me as I found other news sites more convenient and relevant to peruse. Their new version seems like a good step in what they want to accomplish, though.
How would you PIMP twitter?
What is the best book/resource for CSS? (more than the basics)
I am looking for something like the quality equivalent of Agile Web Development with Rails, but for CSS.
O'Reilly's CSS Cookbook is a pretty good book. Again, that's the only CSS book I have, so I don't know how it compares to others. However, this book was recommended to me by almost every person. I'm not sure if the book contains the advanced CSS programming you desire.

Email me if you want it.
Dasher: information-efficient text entry
Dude-Entrepreneurs College is open to anyone; I'm currently attending the NYC sessions and it's pretty good. Gives you a very good sense of the legal and financial issues you're going to face - and you're getting the perspective of real practionters.

It's also not just 2nd year lawyers talking - Rosati (yes, the dude with his name above the door...) was one of the first speakers.
This is a cool thread.

So please spec out a couple servers for us. How would you get a bunch of memory (32GB, 64GB even) into one of them and still have it be a good web/app server?
For you and I, we may never be able to accept such a life. But this guy seems totally content with what he has. That is the more shocking part. You don't really sense much of wishing it wasn't like this from the tone of the story - but then again, I don't know him personally.
Compare ABC's Lost to running a startup...
I'm an auditory learner. I prefer to read at a conversational pace while hearing the words in my head. In an academic setting, I learn much more from listening than by note-taking. I go into some sort of zen-like state when taking notes that I don't get into while just listening. It's like my ears tell my hand what to write without my brain processing the information. If I put my pen down and listen (and participate when appropriate), I retain a high percentage and usually don't need to study later. I wish I knew this sooner about myself. It would have saved a lot of wasted effort.
Nah, they should just post comments that say they're starting/launch on x date and that's it. Afraid of competition? Toooooooooo bad :-)
What's the incentive to share ideas? The satisfaction of getting them off your chest to people who build businesses off them? I doubt very many people would do that. I would only ever consider submitting my ideas to two types of people:

1) very close friends/potential cofounders

2) people who can help me build it (investors, etc..)

I don't think this site has the right interface because people are naturally protective of ideas that can make money.
my website is updated. Please visit again.
And the jackpot: More pg essays!

http://oldvw.stores.yahoo.net/secrets.html

http://oldvw.stores.yahoo.net/se.html
my website is updated. Please visit again. I have added screenshots.
The "Over 1000 Users!" thing actually looks like it could be on the BaseCamp website. It's the bright pastel highlight thing before it was hip.

I agree we can learn something about design from the whole thing. The simplicity means that it holds up strikingly well. The only thing that really dates it is the image buttons and image bullets. Nice job, Paul, or whoever did the design. It's really very nice.
[ANN] RateMyApp!  Click to watch Episode 01 (Pilot) - Justin.TV (new YouTube show)
Private equity and hedge funds backing patent trolls
Seems like an easy bet for a hedge fund to make... 10 million for a lawsuit and an expected value of a lot more than 10 million. I don't blame the hedge funds though, I blame the insane patent laws.
Someday updates per second might be a problem. The nonexistent problem is "they seek the disk head to some specific location and then read or write my name to that location." I may have missed it, but I haven't seen you admit yet that you were wrong. You've been informed now that reads use a memory cache and writes use a write-ahead log, right?
Fascinating. My basic take is that he has both a unique philosophy of business/life and a unique way of thinking/problem_solving, and he gets his enjoyment out of applying this to other people's problems. It would be interesting to make a meta-cognitive model of his problem solving process.
I think I could address any such performance issues within a factor of two growth of updates per second.
I'm not sure. First I'm going to get rid of that operating system. It has lots of features that aren't relevant to my web app.
Charles River Ventures QuickStart seed-level funding program FAQ - Very Interesting
A Programmer Ponders Life After Acting Classes
I guess it boils down to personal preference and what you want to do with the language. I chose Ruby cuz of Rails....and because Ruby's syntax generally fits my mind set.
Running a Startup: Like Running a Russian Nuclear Power Plant
Reminds me a little of Paul Erdős, although Erdős maybe wasn't quite so extreme. According to Wikipedia, he voluntarily spent most of his life as a vagabond, showing up at people's houses to collaborate on Math papers. (csci type stuff: Combinatorics, Graph Theory, approximation, etc)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
In many ways, I'd love to be that guy. It'd mean I'd never be unhappy because I'm in place A doing thing X instead of in place B doing thing Y-- I'd be doing the thing I most wanted to do 100% of the time. No complicated issues with people and obligations and such. Simple, and exactly right.

My only problem with it would be meaning-- I'd have trouble doing something that would probably have no trace when I was gone, aside perhaps from whatever philanthropy resulted.

Excellent article, by the way; reminds me of the old Reddit.

However, speaking of Reddit, this is pretty tangential to startups-- beware of community drift!
I only did a few high school productions, but I just launched a video review show about 1 hour before your post. :) I spent two weeks on it and I decided I should just go for it. Let me know what you think!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-mXm7lzWfA
My current favorite is the Altus 600 from Penguin Computing. Cheap chassis with dual sockets and 16 RAM slots. More slots means cheaper chips. 2GB chips for that board are about 300 bucks. Throw two 2.2GHz Opterons and 2x 300GB drives in there. Add an SATA controller card, 4 SATA/CF adapters and CF cards (in the CD-ROM bay), and you've got a nice machine: 1U, dual processors, 32GB of RAM, 600GB of platter, 32GB of flash for about USD$7500.

Expensive, yeah. 5 grand of that is RAM. You could get away with 4GB of RAM and still have a fucking fast web/app server as long as your active dataset fits on the flash.
One thing I've noticed by looking through the server logs for my blog: There is a huge bubble in news aggregators.
Why don't you try this website http://www.cssplay.co.uk/ they're usually doing the most cutting edge of experiments in CSS.
Here is then the ultimate learning method:
Read something, then hear an audiobook version of it, make sure to look at the illustrations, then discuss it with others in a personalized environment, teaching to anyone who doesn't understand.

The result: 10+50+80+95 = 235 percent learning. Great!
4/24/07 sundays BARRONS stated MS poor sales with new os offering (VISTA) walmarts lcd tv price cut cause big shake up in tech sales. LISTS retail closings etc.

got vista at closing comp usa 20% off awhile back... its linux with windows name (protected mode) works fine!

MS is now to busy with the MS FOUNDATION and that BURKSHIRE guy from OMAHA to care about WINDOWS or computers. I'll bet VISTA is the end of it!

THEY HAVE OTHER FISH TO FRY......
Borat without the humor :-)
I'm probably at least partially wrong about everything..

It's true that PostgreSQL uses a write-ahead log, but it's still going to do that seek when it checkpoints, correct? I don't think that it will be able to sustain high transaction rates (100,000 tps for small transactions should be very doable). If you find that this isn't true and that someone has demonstrated these rates, let me know -- it would certainly be good news.
Well, shoot. This guy never heard of bucket testing? Or controls? You have three changes to test. So you split your users into four groups: unchanged, A, B, and C, where each group sees one changed feature. Test & compare.
Current voice recognition technology is actually fine. My wife's phone has a dial-by-voice feature that she uses all the time to select from her contacts, and it's a prepaid phone she bought outright for 19 bucks. This suggests to me that voice recognition for things like "Call Mike" is a solved problem.
$215: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E168201343...

Brings the memory cost down to around $3440.
It's too bad that the transfer rate is so low. It should be pretty simple to build a very fast device which spreads the blocks across a large number of flash cards. I suppose you could do a raid array of addonics adapters, but it's unclear how that would perform (and it might be a mess dealing with a large number of them).
No, and especially not when they tell me what to build!
Googling for RateMyApp turned up this: Did you mean: ratemyass

That's made my 2am much more enjoyable.
100% bullshit?
That's true of any set of Turing-complete languages.
Is negative PR still 'good' PR?