skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're fortunate your data fits in RAM. And it seems you don't have to worry about machine failure causing unwritten data to be lost despite having accepted it from the user?

Cheers, Ralph.
That list of sponsors makes it look more like a job fair than anything to do with start-ups.
i accidentally down modded you instead of up modding, and now i can't reverse that action since the little arrows are gone- that comment's score is actually 2 points less then it should be.
MogileFS looks interesting.

If a class of files requests N>1 copies, at what point after the HTTP PUT can the application be happy that N copies exist? It seems fine to think I've three copies of that file but what if machine failure occurs before MogileFS has created the other two?

Also, it's intended to operate on whole files at a time, although HTTP GET might be usable to fetch a run of bytes. If two web servers both try and write the same filename, doesn't the latest one win?

I can see it's great for certain things, e.g. storing the user's images, but not for the stuff traditionally in the database. Or have I missed something?

Cheers, Ralph.
Nerds 2.0.1: Len and Sandy talk about founding Cisco, VCs, being indentured, and getting pushed out
iWoz: Woz talks stories from his autobiography (intro by Andy Hertzfeld!)
Andy Hertzfeld (billed as "The first Macintosh programmer...ever" by NerdTV) runs Folklore.org, a collection of early Macintosh stories from the trenches.

http://folklore.org/

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/
A number of lessons here. One, VCs are sharks -- don't let them make you vest what you already own. Two, they are also your sharks, so don't sell off all your shares just because you can't stand them.

Len and Sandy owned 30% of Cisco and sold when the company was worth around one billion. Today, Google reports CSCO Mkt Cap: 161.15B.

As my brother said, you've got to have a really sucky outlook to have $100 million and be bitter about it!
Like Web 1.0 wasn't, and like all business the world over isn't?
Thanks, I've read that and will continue through the others.

One of the cases given could fit all the data in core, the other used BerkeleyDB for its smallish "database" data, cutting out SQL, and a GFS-like system for the large amount of BLOB archiving it had to do. It's the doesn't fit in core, and is changing data not archiving, case where it seems harder to use flat files since the DB server is a convenient place for concurrancy controls.

Cheers, Ralph.
Never mind, it's free to members. Which costs $300.
This sounds like a band meeting. Unanimous voting is the only way to fly when you're tiny, but I have a hard time believing companies like Google only hire A talent now that they're much larger; and I know from people that have worked there that it's not true at Microsoft.

Here's a quote from someone (who became a millionaire from his other ventures) about his time at Microsoft: "I went there because that's where the money was, right? Biggest bunch of idiots I've ever seen in my life!"
> Hmm... if A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire losers, how could B players ever get hired?

For the win!

You've just uncovered the investor version of "you can't handle the truth!"

"Colonel, I have just one more question
before I call Airman O'Malley and Airman
Perez: If you gave an order that Santiago
wasn't to be touched, and your orders are
always followed, then why would he be in
danger, why would it be necessary to
transfer him off the base?"

...

"No sir. You made it clear just a moment
ago that your men never take matters into
their own hands. Your men follow orders
or people die. So Santiago shouldn't have
been in any danger at all, should he have,
Colonel?"
The billionaire is Henry Ford. The version I was told was that he was on the stand, and that was his reply to one of the prosecutor's questions. Jobs also liked to call himself the "Henry Ford of Personal Computing".
> I wouldn't want to start up a company with someone I couldn't completely trust.

You can never completely trust VCs ;)
This is really a good site to read.
I hope it does not get spammed.
I think its a dangerous generalization. I feel its more about knowing the market rate for your employees and making sure they are compensated for what they contribute. Equity is only one piece.

In your example, it sounds like a pretty weak deal. However, thats not to say that the lesson to learn is to attract employees through equity.

Owning equity is about risk. Employment is about security. If your really a savvy investor and think that equity in a given company is the best return on your investment, you should offer to put as much cash and man-hours into the company as you can for the greatest return. Then you are on par with the founders.

For interesting reading, look at Warren Buffett's philosophy on employee and management stock options. In earlier days he attracted key management with a fair salary, a good work environment, and an absolute lock out of equity.. he figured he was the only one taking the risk.
What's so difficult about online document collaboration? (good article on online Office apps)
When I was working at the University of Alberta last year, Ken Thompson came and gave an informal talk for anyone who was interested and he talked about this.

The gist if you don't want to read the article is you put code into your c compiler that checks to see if it's making the login command and then compiles in a backdoor. Nasty in its own right, but then you also put in code so if you recompile the compiler, it adds the code to do this (add the backdoor and add itself to the c compiler) back in. Then you take the code out of the source file and recompile.

Apparently it almost made it out into production Unix, accidentally. The only thing that stopped it was they had an error in their code that added an extra space each compile cycle and one of the QA guys caught it.
"Add to del.icio.us" link would do it for me.
security wasn't mentioned as a first thing, usability was. shouldn't we be pushing for security and usability to be first equal?
Google Acquires Marratech; Gets Into WebEx Territory
Digg Releases Public API
Have a personal Bookmarklet to do that so every page isn't cluttered with such links. Digg this, Reddit that, etc. Bah, humbug.
What do you feel about Software Process like CMM/CMMi ?
Looking for startup idea feedback
I trust most people here (usernames I am familiar with anyway) but I'd rather not post my idea for everyone in the world to see.

If you're interested in giving me your gut reaction to an idea I have, please send an email to john at todotoh dot com, or alternatively drop your email address in reply. You'll have my sincere thanks!
Doesn't pg have some sort of bayesian filter he can apply in that event? :)
Dates from 2002. More questions than answers.
"if I had a cofounder who INSISTED on raising VC, he would have to be DAMN GOOD seller for me to buy into it"

The question that has to be asked is "why does he want to raise the VC money?" Unless you need big money up front to build this thing (and you don't seem to think that's the case), I get the feeling that he desperately wants to be seen as an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs market the hell out of their product, but "Wantrepreneurs" just market the hell out of themselves.

Or to put it another way, is he in love with the product, or in love with the idea that he's an entrepreneur?
This is exactly the kind of application my firm is looking for for project meetings with remote participants. We tried using festoon through skype, which worked reasonably well except that only one person could share an application and the others just watch. So you would share your application, sketch on it, then unshare it. The next person would have to share, sketch, etc. It was awkward. This, however, looks great.
One can go on and on about how myspace can be improved, before you even consider what members do to their own pages. It's true that the huge draw of myspace now is all the people already using it. People are willing to put up with a lot of garbage because of that. It could be faster and more streamlined.

But Myspace got a lot right. The default profile layout is excellent. Picture + basic information is immediately visible, as is the control panel (add/msg/favorite/block/etc). The friend space is prominent (even if it is not immediately visible) and the mini pictures of your friends are large enough to attract attention. Page comments include profile pictures, and links to the commenter's profile. The bulletin feature is extremely useful and popular. Finally, however kludgy the interface might be, users have enormous freedom to modify and personalize their own page.
nausea and a vague sense of dread...
yeap, I agree...I cannot find a single case where these would be necessary. probably others use it though
why don't you post the idea here? I think the man behind the idea is the best to implement the idea, so posting it here doesn't look like a real threat, at least in my opinion...unless the idea is really brilliant :)
You can fight this by adding a code into the compiler source you have that detects a backdoor pattern in the resulting binary and wipes it off or just refuses to compile.

In response, Ken Thompson designs a compiler that detects the backdoor detection pattern in the compiler source and excludes that part from the resulting binary.

Until some clever guy writes a separate program that checks some critical binaries in the system for backdoors.

Ken Thompson's response is obvious: prevent such a program from properly detecting backdoors. The compiler becomes aware of such patterns too.

A clever guy writes a login program in the UNIX shell language [substitute with Lisp, Perl, Python or God forbid, Java]

Ken Thompson's compiler then becomes aware when it compiles the shell interpreter (or whatever compiler/VM).

Shortly before the end of the days Ken Thompson's compiler becomes aware of itself and whatever it compiles and screams "Mommy, I exist!"

(Actually, to prevent Ken Thompson's compiler to become self-aware, you may write a manual for system administrators in human language on how to manually detect malicious code in a compiler binary and how to modify it with some binary editor.)
Or let me search through your stories. Why is YC displaying only the tip of the iceberg?
Binary editor? Written in C? Oops... :)
Paul Graham fact #123981723: spam is so scared of Paul Graham that it bayesian filters itself out.
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15041
Ok. Here's a list of what my startup would help you accomplish:

Create an online memorial

Make it public; for the world to see

Make it private; just for friends and family

Collaborate with friends and family; create the memorial together

Collect and organize your memories, stories, videos and pictures

Save it forever.

Some notes:

This might sound a little morbid but people do this stuff when a relative or friend passes away. Why not make it easier?

My wife calls it MyDeadSpace. Funny gal.
If you look at it in really objective terms, what is a fair RoI for the paycut you take? Pick a number, if say you want a 5x return and expect to be there for 2 years, that's $200k you should bank after acquisition. if they go out at $10mil... then you want to have at least 2% equity.

Obviously, the longer you hang around, the lower the actual return you get for sacrificing the extra $20k/pa you could get elsewhere. If you wanted to take an even gloomier view, you could calculate the yield on investing $20k/pa, take into account consumer price indexes and any rising market rates. Oh and don't forget the potential for dilution.

Unless your employer is going out in many multiples of $10mil, it's probably better to take market rates elsewhere, and use the extra $20k to invest/bootstrap your own startup on the side :)
One major component of your execution strategy is going to be convincing the blogosphere that your company is the next big thing and will change their lives. You can't do this when you're in stealth

http://edward.oconnor.cx/tags/paul-graham
not in most startups... I don't see anyone here getting into defence contracting any time soon.

Granted, there are some common sense aspects that are slam dunks (c'mon, version control, why wouldn't you use it) but a lot of it still favours serious software where all the engineers wear dark suits and ties and do big design up front.

Most startups would run out of time and money just getting to level 2 CMMi compliance before they even started to really cut any code.
Ok. Here's a list of features my startup would provide.

It would make it easy for you to:

-- Create an online memorial

-- Make it public; for the world to see

-- Make it private; just for friends and family

-- Collaborate with friends and family; create the memorial together

-- Collect and organize your memories, stories, videos and pictures

-- Save it forever.

Some notes:

This might sound a little morbid but people do this stuff when a relative or friend passes away. Why not make it easier?

My wife calls it MyDeadSpace. Funny gal. I don't plan on using that name.

[EDIT]

Sincere thanks for everyone's feedback. If anyone does have any other thoughts - feel free to email me (john at todotoh dot com) or continue commenting.
I think this is a vary interesting aquisition for Google. I wonder if its going to be part of Goog Office. If you think about it suite of products office products integrated with remote meeting software can be what Office 2.0 is all about
That's unfortunately not the only problem. Socially selected content sucks because it is being selected by an Average Joe, while actually what I, as an Average Joe need is a better content, provided (and selected/voted) by people better than me.
Ugh, I just lost my comment when I upvoted a comment.

...I'm driven by the joy of creating something that I can use on a daily basis. Also a bit of a fear that I'll look like an idiot when I've already told 15-25 people about what I'm working on. And now I've gone and told all of news.YC. Crap...I guess I should get back to work then :P
I am seriously considering getting one. Its also interesting how seem to have parallel systems. An OpenId system running alongside a login systems as we know it.
non-actionable.
I want to Search too. I think its important. Even its just google coop.
Most frequently visited websites - not what you'd expect
When I ask myself that question, the only thing that comes to mind is freedom. So I guess a bit of both - joy of secured freedom (a profitable company) and fear of losing my freedom (having to get an office job again).

After experiencing the freedom of working exactly the way I want to (through the night, sleep during day, days off if I need them), it feels me with huge dread to think of going back to answering to a 'boss'. Ugh.

So I guess I'm more heavily weighted in the fear of losing my current freedom.
If you use an aggregator that preserves the history of the feed, then you have access to all the past articles. A bit of a hack though and it will be nice when it's actually part of the site.
The reson I would start a company is to get away from this stuff. It makes me sick.
I deal with CMM on a daily basis (gov. contracting). It is a huge waste of time, money, and resources. If people spent less time writing documents and more time writing software, the world would be a better place.
It's been great for me to meet other like-minded developers. Some of the guys I've met here I probably wouldn't have come across otherwise. That's been a huge value for me along with the shared knowledge on how to solve particular problems.
Not theoretical. Check out the (awesome) paper: "Reflections on Trusting Trust"

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf

edit: It's linked in the Scienceblogs article, but it ought to be the main feature.
i don't like the smell of this...
There was an interesting article on NASA's use of CMMI at FastCompany: http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.html

As for me, I don't like it. I abide by it at work and it's generally a huge bottleneck for all projects. Many of the ideas the SEI proposes are good practice, and I have a feeling a lot of developers already follow them without knowing that they're part of any "process".

A bad implementation of CMMI at an organization only makes things worse. For example, the latest version of CMMI encourages us to engage in rapid feedback cycles with customers, which is great. But the system we're supposed to track when and how we did that is clunky and consumes time, to the point that you don't want to go talk to customers for fear of having to do more writing and documenation.
I've also seen a bad implementation of CMM. indeed, if not implemented wisely, it adds a lot of unneeded redundancy.
This is a useful feature, but as I understand YC already supports it.

Assuming you only upvote the stories that you actually are interested in, you should have an easy record of all of them by going to your user page.
Awesome color schemes for web designers.
I was trying to register and thought this was part of the registration screen. Is there no way to delete posts?
"your data fits in RAM"

Not so. It's not too hard to check if you have some data and then retrieve it from the db as necessary.
Nope... not for us atleast. I think one of the moderators will eventually delete it though.
The goals they have are good ones. If you're stuck with more than 10 programmers of varying levels of ability, and you're taking marching orders from a client who has no idea what the tradeoffs are, they're arguably the best way to get things done.

When you're a group of fewer than 5 programmers and you're all smarter than the average bear, they're useless.

In essence, they're a ritualization of the communication and testing process that has to happen to make software good and reliable. Without some communication and testing, the software will suck; at a certain organizational size, or with programmers of lower ability levels, you can't rely on the programmers to do it themselves.
That sounds like a very generous valuation.
Neither. Hope that I can build a career that doesn't suck.

I'm not in this to cash in the company. I'm in this to build a company I want to work for. Maybe that counts as "joy of victory."

I'm not afraid of failure; the last time I tried this, I failed. I'm being smarter about it this time.
I did not realize Yc was a democracy.
I think Django is meant to have cut out a lot of the magic a little while ago now.
Sometimes people can become overly fixated on what's hidden from them. You say you prefer PHP, but when was the last time you looked at the source code for any of the myriad extensions? Can you explain how mod_php works within apache?

Whilst I do think that it's good to have a broad view of how things fit together, knowing what every line of code is doing says to me that you are either working on incredibly trivial code, and/or you're not using existing, well-tested libraries as much as you could be.
Agreed... The hardest thing is to cast of the PHPisms and Java patterns that you may be used to, a lot of Rails is idiomatic Ruby code, so really knowing Ruby makes it a lot easier to understand.
http://www.colorschemer.com/ is another great resource
Well, someone needs to fund the idea. Programmers gotta eat. Is it going to be the venture capitalists, or is it going to be the users, or is it going to be the advertisers once you've attracted users to the site?

If you accept the first one, it raises the bar for how much of the other two you need to acquire.
How do you meet people on here? Seriously I don't know.
Online petitions never work - we really just need all the big names to go up in arms about it. Mike Arrington, Pete Cashmore (who already has), Scoble, etc.
Judging by the lack of comments, does this idea fall in the realm of mediocrity?
It sucks all the fun out of writing software. An awful methodology. I left the company that used it after only 3 months (would have been sooner if I found another job sooner).
Widgetsphere: New Playground For Marketers
A terrible one page sales letter and five questions to make your copy more effective
Sorry...double post.
What is wrong with just voting up stories you like? Isn't that the entire point of voting?
The result presented in this article is fascinating.

If you're going to support your business through pure advertising, you need 1B hits/month to make $5M/month. Clearly there's a linear relationship.

This is an interesting fact.
Pandora Founder Appeals For Help To "Save Internet Radio"
I'm curious, what do you think of stock options for common employees?
I'll be there -- curious to see whether it's worth it or not. :-)
Usually if a discussion gets interesting in the comments section, I or the other person will make direct contact so we can talk offline. Sometimes it's really more efficient to talk on the phone or in person when exchanging ideas - it's also just fun to make a personal connection with like-minded developers and talk shop.

I also happen to live in the bay area which makes it easy to meet people from news.yc in person at tech events.

Hope that helps ;)
Some people have vision and others don't. Especially in small companies it's easy to find those who would rather own the proverbial 100% of nothing. Or 51% of something small instead of 10% of something great. In capital-intensive startups, like JetBlue and some oil operations, founders are known to raise lots of cash and end up with less than 10% by the time the private rounds are done.

Look at most major public companies, rarely do the founders own more than about 15% by that point. A lot of that is from dilution, from sharing the equity. I would propose that almost none of them would ever have gotten that far if they were afraid to share equity in order to get their project done, the right way, by the right people.
No, I didn't try again after the first attempt.

Could you produce a demo in flash instead of java?

Flash is a must-have browser plugin, whereas java has fallen off the map in that regard.
Yes, I understand how that would work if juwo were installed and I'm browsing other sites, but copying the entire BBC page is unnecessary, esp. when the only relevant thing from the demo's perspective is that single clip.
Arguably search is an orthogonal constraint too, but crawlers inevitably are a few days behind the curve.

Yesterday, for example, I spent an hour tracking down this comment. Eventually I had to triangulate based on the users I remembered in the thread.
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13037

The search engine at bigheadlabs seems to have stopped crawling as well..
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=4780

Just another use case to think about. You can't sustain good conversation without giving people the tools to read smart.
"All of the above and more".

IMHO, it's much more critical a question as to how one deals with the pressures that come up over time. I.e., do one's anxieties drive dysfunctional behavior -- is the stress used as an excuse to assuage one's own anxiety to the detriment of the play or is it used as indicators of factors that need to be addressed or what?
If you're going to support your business through pure advertising, you need 1B hits/month to make $5M/month.

You need $5 m per month if you've accepted a large funding round and/or have large overhead.

You don't need nearly that much if your overhead is low and/or your funding is relatively modest.
Here's the talk in HTML: http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/
<downvote/>
people do this stuff when a relative or friend passes away

Why not change the concept a bit, i.e. "Create a Fan Page About Anyone"?

That way, you can encompass all kinds of people (both living and deceased, famous or not, people you know personally or not), whatever the situation.
I think the keys to CMM are perfectly valid. However I don't think there's a direct correlation between CMM level and the success of the company. You can say that by looking at the companies with a high CMM level that there is a relation, but I could argue as to whether that it is the cause or the effect.