skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
+1 best post ever. Loaners want to be repaid with interest. They want to know how you expect to repay them. And the repayment has to come with customer money, obviously, not more loans. VC's "loan" money as well, but they want you to make them ten times as much money as they are investing; never mind a few percent interest. They also want to control your company.

His idea of "if nobody is going to fund my future idea, then the world doesn't deserve it," is still actually... factual. Exactly. Don't fund that idea. DO NOT bootstrap that idea. Do not do that idea. If that idea really does require millions of dollars, do something similar and more basic to start. Don't do a half-assed job if you really calculated it would take you millions just to get launched. Remember, the world doesn't deserve it, and you can't build your idea. So build a smaller version. Simple. And you only have to get a few customers to be in the black, instead of millions. You just won't be on the news.

Oh, and it gives you something to do--scaling it up and adding new features--after your initial launch. While, if you spend all these years and all this VC money before you can launch, and nobody cares about your product when it's launched, you're probably going to abandon ship. So, if you need VC money just to launch, you're nuts.
Founder is not a bad title or go with CEO if you like. Or "creator". That would be a good one, "God, creator" :P

I like that blank field idea, that's really neat and organized.

Don't print out your own. You have to go for high end/"real" business cards. Someone in one of my college classes handed me his business card and it was printed on regular paper. Right away I thought he wasn't very professional.
"They just don't have a place on a commercial website"

why not?
I've launched two Rails apps on MT(GS) and my experience has been very good. I believe they did have some issues initially, but I can say that I have not experienced any of the problems others have had.
this particular article is a decent tip but i'm always very wary of jakob nielsen; he's definitely the biggest whore of the usability space.
IdeaStorm Forces Dell Once Again, This Time to Bring Windows XP Back
Ruby for Rails is a good one too. I haven't read it though.
http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Rails-Techniques-Developers/dp/1932394699
I have a separate thread that writes changes back to disk at its leisure. There is also a special shutdown/restart mode that I can trigger which stops accepting input from the user and flushes everything to the db.

This can be implemented very simply and has lots of advantages all around.
Now that's what I was trying to say. Those users were about to drive me out of my mind!
Is one week really long enough to judge if its going to be successful or not. I don't think so...
I don't think Seth is correct that this was about politics; and, I disagree that the publishers should try again.

First, it took the publishers over a year after the original concept to actually release an issue on something as wavering as youth trends... And, the cover does not scream "youth magazine" to me. So, I don't think it was politics that doomed this venture.

Youth today can get direct one-on-one interaction with people their own age on social networking sites. NOw, compare and contrast the magazine with MTV in the 80's.

MTV made it easy to see concerts across the country and internationally. They banded the youth together. They were about music that you could hear and bands you could see.

This magazine is supposed to be about music, but youth can hear actual music in the profiles of their MySpace friends. They don't need to trust an opinion of an older editor. The magazine cannot play music. It's a pain to flip through magazines if you're left-handed.

Do you really need a magazine to tell you, even if it's an accurate report, about the type of music people are listening to, when you can go and see what your friends are into, or see the top downloaded tracks in iTunes, and that's all that matters, really?
I don't like sites that need an explanation of more than a few words at the top.
i think openid is bullcrap noone really uses it
I think there's a way to be like Simon but without being rude. Just give direct and honest feedback. What's wrong with transparency?
What's with all the redirecting to spam sites? If we all click on every ad on the page would google see it as a click fraud site and ban them from adsense?
I've been using GWT extensively, and while it's outstanding, "never worry about browsers" is not a feature I can ascribe to it :(

It alleviates some of the cross-browser headaches, but doing anything nontrivial can still hit browser differences, especially with styles and layout.

The only viable browser-worry-free platform seems to be Flash right now.
The article does have a strong whiff of premature opt. However, using a SQL db in the first place is usually causes extra work to use something unhelpful. Usually it's way less code to just skip it.
In terms of vendors, also check out SiliconMechanics. They're touting the new 2-in-1U chassis from Supermicro that does up to 16 x86 cores in 1U. :-)

If you're in the Bay Area, ASA Computers is very competitive. They're in the south bay and deliver straight to our colo. For hardware support, they even come back to the colo and pull the boxes right off our racks, take them back and fix them, and then return them to our racks.
That seems to be a good idea
can you visualize IJigg using it?
I never got that... what's the point of backup up GMail? Aren't the chances of a local copy going bad 100's of times greater than GMail losing your mail?
Microsoft sells software for cheap to developing countries' governments. Gee, thanks!
CLOROX: A Data-Centric Architecture for AJAX Applications [pdf]
Also see:

http://clorox.csail.mit.edu
iRise lets startups try out its software-simulation applications
"IDEs generate all the boilerplate for you with just a couple
of keystrokes"

You say this as if it was a good thing. Consider the effort, months or years from now, in reading, understanding and modifying all that generated boilerplate.

A better language does not require the boilerplate in the first place.
tags and tag clouds
If you need Myrinet for your clusters then you already know why. :-? The main reason for Myrinet, IMHO, is the low latency -- otherwise, it's not worth the money.

8GB RAM seems to be the sweet spot at the moment, price-wise. Similarly, the 500GB SATA drives are a much better deal than the 750+GB drives. Be careful when you spec. the boxes because if you don't specify that you're going to e.g., load them up with additional drives later, the builders will spec them with the smaller/cheapest controller they can.

If all of the data can be handled locally then you definitely don't have a lot of data. :-). To calibrate, we're (krugle.com) pushing around terabytes of data.

If you're pushing a lot of data between nodes, don't underestimate the importance of your network infrastructure and architecture. We're using multiple 1GigE NICs per node into Foundry SuperX's (IIRC, it has a 36Gbps fabric) and 10G crosses. We've got multiple 1Gbps backbone drops into our load balancers / firewalls.

If you're going relatively mainstream on the CPU side, the dual-core Intel Xeons are definitely the choice at the moment. Watch out for the different FSB speeds.

Re: Sun's Grid. They were very aggressively trying to get our business but they aren't really geared for big data and definitely not for big, relatively non-transient data.

Hope this helps,
John
Yeah, I can attest to the style quirks.. Damn TabPanels :(

Lets hope the bugs continue to get ironed out. I know 1.4 will fix quite a few of the minor things.

I think the big deal is the RPC stuff with GWT. While it still has a way to go in terms of customizability, it is extremly powerful none the less. As far as Flash + GWT, I think its pretty sweet doing asynchronous calls via JSON messages between the two. Quite a powerful combination..
We tried basecamp for awhile but then grew out of it. Then we tried Highrise when it came out - found it pretty much useless. Lots of people heeded their call for simplicity and the fight against feature creep and that's a good thing. But when their own products begin to get lapped by competitors and the new stuff they are releasing isn't very useful, then there are problems. That said, I don't blame them necessarily for charging people for all this stuff; at $100/person, they probably actually wouldn't make very much money - they need to rent space, get some food, pay for A/V, etc. Going to a developer conference is one thing, but I'm not sure it would be worth a day to hear how someone is using a glorified web form as a collaboration tool.
A few techniques I've used:

If the file is small, I write to a tmp file then rename.

If multiple files are involved, I write new data to fresh files, then update the "master" file atomically that has pointer to the data files.

If lots of data is constantly added, I just keep appending to a file, but design the format so that I can always find the record boundary even if the last append was chopped by server crash.
I love the OpenID concept, but here are three major problems IMO:

1) Will users remember an URL? Users already have enough problems remembering their own email addresses! And I don't think the "users are familiar with URLs" assumption is true: I've seen over and over non-tech users actually using Google as an address locator (that is, typing "Yahoo Mail" on the Google search box to access Yahoo Mail).

2) The phishing issue is a show-stopper, and convincing users to download a plug-in or install a client cert is simply not feasible. I don't see how they will fix this issue, unless if they convince Firefox and IE to provide an out-of-the-box fix (like a pre-installed plug-in or an open id CA cert)

3) It's not like user management is a huge pain from an implementation standpoint. And right now the risks of outsourcing user management to OpenID is higher than doing it in-house.
You can also check out the iRise website for more information at www.irise.com/communities
I think this is why News.YC could use a down arrow. Or at least a craigslist-style "flag as spam" type link?
The best non-database solutions I have seen are:
1. Google file system, and crawler cache
2. Lucene storage
Microsoft is smarter than Google at various levels they have 2 0 million copies of Vista out ... ;)
The users.
Joy of Victory OR Fear of Failure.  What's driving you?
I'm Hung Up on Main Memory Databases
This looks like a more sophisticated version of a regular scavenger hunt, except with teams over the internet.
A few months ago when I first got my start up going, it was the thoughts of a successful acquisition or of building a profitable company that kept me awake at nights programming. But now that the company is starting to get going and I'm signing up users, I find myself more driven by the fear of failure than anything else. I'm terrified that if it doesn't work those that supported me in this venture will think I'm crazy when another idea pops in my head (and it undoubtedly will). Anyone feeling the same way and if so which do you feel is a better motivator?
Why personalization done well is not in Google's self-interest
If personalization is done really well, then it could have a very bad effect on paid advertising.

After all, if potential customers are likely to see your product via personalization, why bother to pay for paid advertising at all?
Go for "I'm CEO... bitch" - at least that's Mark Zuckerberg has on his cards :)

In all fairness, when I asked Mark about this he said it was just a joke gone bad...
Here is a funny post that disagrees a bit.

http://lrk.livejournal.com/24906.html
domain-specific social news vs having your own blog for that domain
Same as Viaweb. Hash tables in memory. Updates to disk, but no reads from disk except at startup.
Transactionless
Why have your own blog if you can just post to a social news service for your domain?
It seems like business cards are becoming an outdated technology - one that was more relevant before the web.

My next batch of cards are just going to have my name and the company name on them.

Anything else can be found on google :)
Is it really Sequoia funded isnt photosharing preweb20 but the logo looks really good !
Transparency is good for the entrepeneurs, but perhaps not for VCs.

It must take a lot of work to prepare an insightful honest answer. A shady answer gets the entrepeneur out the door without the need for putting together a well-structured argument.
Twitter dont need a db
Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta
memcached is only 2 times faster than mysql so wat du do?
An inmemory hashmap is just a python dict ;)
A 100 million users can't be wrong
Of course, but what do you want to bet most people with a "great idea" have anything more to offer than that?

Before Justin.tv launched, I imagine there was a lot of coding/testing involved. Most start-ups don't need a TV producer even after they have a product.
Virtual World Rich List
I'm so curious about this subject. Is there something worth reading to learn more? Ultimately, I want to understand why you came to the decisions you did. Short term questions: Are disk updates performed immediately? Is there a separate thread that updates the disk? Are data stored in a flat file?
The facebook business cards are slick. They look like mini facebook profile and even have "I'll find something to put here" at the bottom.

Best job title I've seen was "CEO & Janitor" on a card of a single founder.
"Software as we know it is the bottleneck on the digital horn of plenty," he says. "It takes up tremendous resources in talent and time. It's disappointing and hard to change. It blocks innovation in many organizations ... Anything that can be done could be done 'meta'."

The article is about abstractions, Simonyi [0] and how he wants to create 'domainless' tools for users without the requirement for programmers. Except his of course.

Reference

[0] Charles Simonyi`s dissertation, "Meta-Programming: A Software Production Method" resulted in Hungarian notation. ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation
Myspace hasn't proved that design doesn't count. It proved that you can make something really popular by letting people with bad taste express it. Though that of course is nothing new.

The difference is that news.myspace is designed by Myspace, not its users. Standards are higher then. People may be amused by their own farts, but they're generally disgusted by other people's.

iPods would not be so popular with Myspace users if they looked like they'd been designed by Myspace users.
Because they turn many people away. You asked for our feedback and several people made a big deal about it. Listen to us, trust us, your project needs all the help it can get. Don't make more reasons to turn people away.
You have it backwards. The more a publisher knows about it's users the more targeted ads they can sell for higher rates. Compare CPM on myspace.com (pennies) vs the wsj.com (tens of dollars). Yahoo and Google have similar people searching, but Google has been able to provide more personalized ads and therefore make more money. Advertisers measure their return for every dollar spent. If Google doesn't keep on doing a better job than other sites at personalizing pages their users will go elsewhere where they can find what they need more quickly.
If top management were paying attention, it would notice that that's a dumb, bad, evil thing to do. So, either top management is evil, or it's not paying attention.
I've read about Myrinet but never used it; I wasn't sure about the distinction you were making about a compute cluster vs. a rack. As for latency, isn't that only on an empty connection? E.g., if you're sending half the max per-second traffic down the pipe, isn't any new message going to take half a second to arrive? (In which case 5 usec vs. 15 usec on an empty pipe is lost in the noise.)

Sun's grid would just be for automated testing, as a step up from uniprocessor EC2 nodes. I agree on the network infrastructure using multiple 1gig cards or a 10gig. I'm not sure what you mean by "handled locally" -- each node handles part of the data, so collectively it's larger than what any single node can manage.
It would be hard for investors to give as much feedback as an American Idol judge because they have so much less information. AI judges have actually seen the person perform. An investor merely talks to them about what they would do.

Often you have no more than a gut feel. E.g. "This person seems kind of ineffectual." It would be useless as well as insulting to be candid in that case.
16 cores in 1U is pretty amazing -- I wonder how long until we look at it like the Altair 8800 ;)
Remove the Web developer & the Web gets developed
Harnessing Collective Intelligence
I have to be honest I don't know what is Juwo. The exercise was not to tell ME about Juwo but to in general clarify for everyone here. I do hope you'll be able to answer those questions here at some point.
Search & the Dumbness of Crowds
Yes, knowing more about people's interests is great for targeted advertising.

However, providing (unpaid) personalized search and news can hurt you since there is less need for paid advertising.
It makes sense that hope would drive the desire to start a project and that fear would drive the desire to complete it. I think hope is harder to rely on, but it's better in the end. Fear tends to become negative in many ways.

I think all entrepreneurs exist with both motivations constantly in flux.
Haskell Application Server: in-memory transactional applications
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/database_war_stories_2_bloglin.html

Check out the whole series.
I agree that it takes more work, it also takes more work for entrepreneurs to be transparent, honest and open. It's always easier to hide. At least it will always feel easier and safer.

VC's almost unanimously claim that they like what they do because they get to be involved in helping entrepreneurs succeed. I don't doubt that to be true. They could be more helpful with a bit of effort put into providing true, honest feedback to entrepreneurs.
Ubuntu 7.04 Released
The guys on Reddit pointed out that this was BS - that figure was from one small vendor, who was pleasantly surprised at how much it was selling.
Microsoft will linger on as long as games are based on DX. They might be able to do some additional damage with their browser monopoly. But I agree: fresh air is blowing in the door, and programmers are getting a feeling that it at last is spring-time.
Wow, OK many of these comments are kind of like disrespectful to Paul Graham because they kind of indicate that many people have learned absolutely nothing from him. Wow. That's really depressing.
Google's Honeymoon Season Continues
Amazing how their revenue keeps increasing. You would think they would have hit a plateau in ad revenue by now.
How to build a community around your site
The point would be offline access to email. I used to use Outlook in disconnected mode on planes, back when I got a couple hundred emails a day. It made a big difference. Thankfully I don't get that volume of email right now.
Martin works for, basically, an enterprise intraweb consulting firm. Mostly J2EE and .NET, with a touch of Ruby thrown in to keep the guys happy. Very much an older school type of place though. Three-tier, web servicess, Oracle, the whole nine yards.
I'm assuming that by "having your own blog" you mean a link blog on which you submit links to stories you find interesting in your area of interest (as opposed to writing your own posts) and others can read it just like they read reddit or digg. In that case, I'd say that a social news site is better because it won't stop when you're on vacation or not feeling like posting. However, for a very small domain for which there is not a big enough community, a link blog is the next best thing.
I mean both actually, not just link blogs.
We'll have to wait and see..
Mike Davidson: Pagination and Page-View Juicing are Evil
Domain-specific, but interesting RDBMS alternatives:

HDF5

Mnesia

Kx
You still have to implement queries, sorting, joining, etc. If all your queries are simple key queries then you're basically done. You can also hash at the network level by assigning group hash identies to specific machines in your topology.

Where you will find a benefit to using a RDBMS is in heavy correlation, multilevel sorting especially when you're talking about very large data sets. This is one of the key problem that RDBMS address. If your requirements also say anything about atomicity and integrity of the data it may be a better investment in the long run to go with an existing database solution that had a couple decades to work out those details for you.
Alexa Backlash Begins, Call for Journalistic Boycott
The Pirate Game
'... Very much an older school type of place though. ...'

I agree with the thought, very much the anti-hacker ethic, established business. It's always good to give counter ideas, articles. Otherwise the you get the feed-back loop reading ideas that don't stand the test of time.
You don't get as much SEO juice by using social news services. There is a little element in the HTML markup of some social news sites that essentially tells search engines to ignore the link. This means you don't get credit for that link back to your domain. In addition, having your own blog can increase the number of times search engines visit the rest of your site...again, SEO 101.
Cross Site Scripting is a Big Problem [bug fixed]
Mr. Do It All
Using MogileFS (also by Brad) might be a solution.
63M of those are AOL users:
http://dev.aol.com/aol-and-63-million-openids

Those OpenIds were created automatically. What percentage of those AOL users do you think even know what OpenId is?
Google Labs Aptitude Test
I think everyone likes this site because it represents the fantasy of getting venture capital, which only a very small percentage of us will ever achieve. I'm not sure about you guys, but I'm a long way away from a five million funding round. It's still a lot of fun to learn about how to not get screwed by VCs.
Partnership agreement template for an LLC?
want a job?
'... "How much aptitude do you have for the sort of mind-bending engineering problems encountered each day at Google Labs? ...'

Relax, it's meant to be humorous. Great to read something that takes the 'p' out of recruiting. Btw, I thought it was:

e^((-i) x pi) [0] instead of (e)^(i x pi) for Q 12 as suggested.

Reference

[0] http://www.google.com/search?q=e+%5E%28-i*pi%29
There is one...check out buildv1.com. It's still in it's infancy, but the mission is in line with the theme of this thread.
So I've managed to get myself an LLC. I have a friend that is giving me $10,000 dollars. I'm giving him 2.5% of the company for an investment of $10,000. That's a valuation of $400,000, right?

We expect to be generating revenue pretty quickly. Does his 2.5% entitle him to 2.5% of the profits, after my partner and I draw salaries? Or does he get a a dividend that is 2.5% of the salaries we are drawing? We'd also like a clause for us to buy out his shares. What's a good price for that?

Googling for "partnership agreement" gives me a lot of results. Are any of these more suited to our situation? Thanks, I really appreciate the help.

I'll let you guys know as soon as we launch. In the meanwhile, I'm not comfortable sharing the idea because with a basic background in the medical/laboratory sciences anyone could duplicate what we're doing.
Both. I think the initial plunge will have the fear factor set in.

Once you've gotten your feet wet and have seen some return, you probably start to switch into the higher gears.