skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, congratulations. What a great name! I sort of remember what Jason said you guys were working on, and "Disqus" is fantastic.

Good luck.
Anyone familiar with iTunes' infrastructure?  Scaling and bandwidth issues?
Netscape, YouTube and PayPal (among others) came out of UIUC.
Or, along these lines, eMusic's setup?
A challenge in a pure version of a log-structured
database is reclaiming space from the log when data
is no longer needed. Sometimes you don't need to,
as in Venti ( http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/531029.html ).
An ordinary DB writes each update to disk twice, once
in the log and once in the permanent DB. DBs do
defer updating the permanent DB. But they tend to be
eager about flushing the log in order to achieve durability. If you read the documentation
for PostgreSQL, for example, the only knob that seems
to allow you to defer log flushes also says it may
corrupt the internals of the DB if there's a crash. (Though
there's no fundamental reason PostgreSQL couldn't
defer log writes and have correct crash recovery,
sacrificing only durability of recent updates.)
JS-Kit: Web 2.0 For Lazy People
RejectedByYc.com - For those of us who didn't make the cut.
$59.99: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820151029&ATT=20-151-029&CMP=OTC-Froogle
Colbert Satire Suit Dropped; Viacom Moves to Support Fair Use
I think the general concept of the site is great, but I do think people are perhaps dwelling on the fact that they got rejected by YC, and are often talking about the success of their startup with/without YC.

I got rejected like many of you did, but YC and anything YC related isn't going to influence my success/failure. I'm sure there are myriad of venues to launch your startup.

YC is one of many many gates that can either close or open, meaning there are still other doors out there that need to be picked and broken into.

Not everything is so YC influenced.

Good idea, though.
Very cool! Another Tesla invention is gaining acceptance.
http://www.atdot.net/yarv/

Ruby will be 5 times faster by Christmas 2007. :)
What about dirty read, locking, lost update and all those problems that a DBMS takes care for you? Just wondering.
That's a very strange knob. What's the point of doing any logging at all if it doesn't let you recover from a crash?

I don't imagine that deferred logging is a big deal, though, because log writes are by definition sequential. As Paul pointed out, sequential writes just aren't that slow. You can build an array of 62 commodity drives for maybe $4000.
The problem is that the term "lifestyle business" is just derogatory-- it has no meaning.

Who are you to say that lifestyle businesses are not focused on growth? Or that they cant' grow fast and change large numbers of people's lives?

There's a big difference between a restaruant and craigslist.
Need anyone else?
Well, you know what they say-- those that can, do. Those that can't, teach. This goes doubly for entrepreneurship "classes".... though maybe I'm too harsh and that guy had actually started a business.

In terms of the number of millionaires or centi-millionaires in this country-- the vast majority of them got that way with "lifestyle businesses".
I'd recommend this tutorial as a starting point then:
http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/tutorial01/

It's the official tutorial and is very fast, simple, and introduces a very good portion of Django.
I know you beleive that, but just look at the number of startups using MySQL.
Deferred logging is a huge deal! Appending a record to
a log takes one (or a half) of a rotation. A rotation
takes about the same amount of time as a disk seek. So
a DB that synchronously appends the on-disk log for
each transaction will be slow.

The huge win is if you can append many transactions to
the log in each rotation. To do that you have to gather
up many updates per disk operation. So deferred logging
is critical.

I suspect the reason PostgreSQL doesn't really support
delayed log flush is that they are thinking about ACID
transactions, where you really need the data to be on
disk immediately. A more technical issue is that the
log data must be on disk before the corresponding
permanent data (otherwise crash recovery will break),
and I suspect postgresql.conf's "fsync" option
has the effect of not fsync()ing the log at all, which
indeed would cause permanent corruption after a crash.
Interesting concept. I believe there are more than a handful of regulars on this site that feel the need for better organization, and given how busy pg is (and he admits it), it makes sense to just take a stab. But do differentiate. Your project is in the right direction, but I agree it doesn't need to cater specifically towards YC rejects. "YC rejects" is probably the most exclusive group after "YC teams" (jk, well, you get me). Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16211 I dunno the overlap or similarity in vision, but it just seemed logical to ref it here.

The 5 points you list above sum to something greater than just those points. It's like a huge funded, connected marketing machine of experienced hackers. Camaraderie is an interesting point; in YC it's very easy to get everybody "on the same boat." YC invests in you, you deliver. They work for you, their investments, you work for them, your vision. The guys next door are also in the same situation. It's actually like a moderately sized company running parallel production pipelines. This setup is difficult to replicate because not only do you need the right people, you need the right money, and the right money and the right people.

Which means to do something similar, you cannot lack any of the points (wonders how Techstars and Highland are planning). Consider holding events (remember mydreamapp.com?); gathering a dozen or so beta-stage teams from here should be enough to throw something noticeable. A gallery kind of function, or project profile sorting by category and such, might also be good high-priority tasks. After all, your hosted teams are looking for investors/buyers.
All-time favorite quote since about 10 years ago. It really isolates out the defining quality of a "great" person: not only have they achieved greatness; they also inspire others to become great.
There's a lot of irony there, but I don't know how to make you see it.
Wow... amazing site design! App's beautiful and extremely useful as well. Nice job, Panic!
Open Data matters more than Open Source
Don't drives have hardware buffers designed so that you don't have to worry about that?
Startup Success 2006 - Google Video
"Stop reading quotes and get back to work!" - Anonymous
Coming from a Java background(to be specific J2ME, I haven't touched any Java framework as of yet.) Ruby was a God send!

I've been using Ruby for over a year now. And I'm having loads of fun using it :-) just recently I've been learning Python and I must say that Ruby has borrowed a lot of conventions from Python. Although I have a bit of a hard time using Python functions as they are not intuitive enough for me as opposed to Ruby functions.
http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/
They use Akamai to serve up the downloads.
Where Are All the Open Source Billionaires?
Thinking Small (Inc Magazine on Y Combinator and Loopt)
Just started trying it out.

So far I'm very impressed. Very clean and simple with just the right functionality I need. Will see how it does after using it for a real project...
Nice! although my one qualm with Django is that it relies to heavily on regular expressions for URL requests(Correct me if I'm wrong please!) After reading why the guys at Reddit are moving over to Django, it made me curious as to why they are doing it. Which lead me to learn Python and Django :-)

Yet 1yr experience = Ruby and 1yr experience = Rails doesn't exactly equate to brilliance either. Currently I'm having some trouble wrapping my mind around Python :-( and find myself going back to Ruby to try to solve some problem that I can't hack in Python(newb :P)
You can configure a drive to delay writing to the disk
surface, and instead just write into its cache, until
some later point when it's convenient to write the
surface. But the reason a DB issues a write to the
disk is that the DB needs the data to be recoverable
after a crash before the DB can proceed. So DBs cannot
easily use the disk's write-to-cache feature; the
disk's cache is no more durable than main memory.

You might imagine that the disk would write-cache only
an amount of data that it could write to the surface
with the energy stored in its capacitors after it detected
a power failure. But this is not the way disks work.
Typical disk specs explicitly say that the contents
of the write-cache may be lost if the power fails.

You may be thinking of "tagged queuing", in which the o/s
can issue concurrent operations to the disk, and the disk
chooses the order in which to apply them to the surface,
and tells the o/s as each completes so the DB knows
which transaction can now continue.
That's a good idea if there are concurrent transactions
and the DB is basically doing writes to random disk
positions. In the log-append case we're talking about,
tagged queuing is only going to make a difference if we
hand lots of appends to the disk at the same time. In
that specialized situation it's somewhat faster to
issue a single big disk write. You need to defer
log flushes in either case to get good performance.
Viaweb: Create your own secure online store (old Viaweb site)
You might imagine that the disk would write-cache only an amount of data that it could write to the surface with the energy stored in its capacitors after it detected a power failure.

That's exactly what I assumed, at least for high-end disks. Any idea why they don't do that? It seems like a pretty trivial hardware feature that would save an awful lot of software complexity.
Please define "interface" and "best".
Let me just say this: "the idea doesn't matter" is a statement that we found to be highly, highly unreliable. Don't expect to get funded without a solid idea that is different. I'll elaborate on this later, but trust me on this one.
I said any decent DBMS.
Have too many startup ideas? Share them!
Besides, I remember Ray Kurzweill [sic] writing that the Bubble wasn't really a bubble. The companies that really created value created so much value that they compensated for the ones that went bankrupt.

Sure, overall the whole Internet thing has created a lot of actual value, and this is evidenced by the fact that the recession that followed was pretty mild. But it's still true that it was a bubble in the sense that companies were being invested in with little to no actual value, with unworkable business schemes, and a "hemorrhage money now, make billions later!" mentality. The perception was that the Internet was a money-generating panacea, all you had to do was open a site with a .com suffix, like RoofShingles2U.com, and you'd automatically put all roofing salesmen out of business and corner the roof shingle market.
I was thinking about this site a long time, and started work few days ago, before all these recent discussions. I have always had too many startup ideas, and not enough resources to use them.

It still lacks some serious features, like voting, tags, private ideas, friends. I'm not a CSS wizard, so the stylesheets probably have their own problems too. I even not incorporated yet.

I initially wanted to wait, but it turned out to be a bad move. Hope you'll enjoy it.
Be careful otherwise you will "twitter" soon because of huge load :) If you wish, I can create a css for you as you mentioned on your site.
The drives whose documentation I've
read say they may not copy the write-cache to the surface
during a power failure. I don't know about other drives, or
about why.

Such a feature would anyway be hard or impossible to use as
part of a design to get fast writes and crash recovery.
Crash recovery usually depends on constraints on the
order writes were applied to the disk surface -- for
example that all the log blocks were on the surface
before any of the B-Tree blocks. Or (for FFS) that an
i-node initialization goes to the surface before the
new directory entry during a creat(). Drives that just
provide write caching don't guarantee any ordering
(much of the point of write-caching is to change
the order of writes), and don't tell the o/s
which writes have actually completed. So the
write-order invariants that crash recovery depends on
won't hold with write-caching. That's why tagged command
queuing is popular in high-end systems: TCQ lets the
drive re-order concurrent writes, but tells the o/s when
each completes, so for example a DB can wait for the
log writes to reach the surface before starting the
B-Tree writes.

In our case, perhaps a pure log-structured DB could use
a disk write-cache. Crash recovery could scan the whole
disk (or some guess about the tail of the log) looking
for records that were written, and use the largest
complete prefix of the log. But we would not be able to
use the disk for anything with a more traditional crash
recovery design -- for example we probably could not
store our log in a file system! Perhaps we could tell the
disk to write-cache our data, but not the file system's
meta-data. On the other hand perhaps we'd want to write
the log to the raw disk anyway, since we don't want to be
slowed down by the file system adding block numbers to
the i-node whenever we append the log.
http://startupideatr.com/

With all problems mentioned here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16270
I thought the exact same thing. Long division is about the only thing I CAN do though. Haha.
I think you miss my point. I'm saying that in order to explain some of these things it's better to use a language like C that's close to the hardware and doesn't offer them natively in order that their implementation must be exposed.

Using Javascript because the language already has most of the features would just be explaining the syntax of Javascript, akin to Knuth using Python instead of MMIX and his descriptions of sort becoming an explanation of how to use Python's sort; not how it works under the covers. :-)

An older example is a good book, now downloadable, by Axel-Tobias Schreiner, the German translator of K&R, etc., that implements a C preprocessor in awk that adds OO features to C, thereby explaining how a language with the features built in, e.g. C++, implements them.

Objekt-orientierte Programmierung mit ANSI-C: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf (English translation.)
PhotoBucket Back on MySpace (I Want To Know The Backstory)
I hope you didn't use this idea in your yc application.
That's awesome. Their site has withstood the test of time design-wise. For the most part it looks like any other good modern site: clean and simple. It's remarkably free of the classic 'made-in-the-nineties' characteristics. I guess that goes back to the viaweb team's aversion to 'fashion'.

My favorite part is:

"Over 1000 Users!"
Weebly releases major UI enhancements and statistics
I think MySpace now runs on some variant of ColdFusion compiled to .NET
Interview with Paul Graham (from Techcrunch)
Spreadshirt.com is worth a look.
5 Startup Sales Tips From Turkish Rug Dealers
Not exactly an entrepreneurial quote perhaps, but this I have written on my whiteboard:

"Functionality always stays on the edge of what is feasible" - Ray Kurzweil
"Rejected" is a bit harsh; you might want to re-position it along the lines of "startups not in the YC mold" -- which is all that rejection by YC means (you don't fit their profile, but that doesn't mean you won't succeed).

Also, lose that red "no"/"anti" logo -- you're not going to get people in the right mood when they visit (that logo is really for sites looking to rip YC, which, from what I gather is not your intention).
Same here. Also finding a way of showing students in the UK that they can create startups when they graduate rather than join a banking grad scheme in the city.
If you want to see elegant, read dan bernstein's code. Let the filesystem be your database.
Is "disqus" good? I'd try to avoid any name where the spelling has to be given, "It's disqus.com, spelt...". That said, it's very hard to come up with a good, available, .com these days. Before I went off and found out the site's purpose, I thought it was a corruption of "discus" rather than "discuss". Silly me!
EU legislation threatens startups
This is a GENIUS site and a great idea because there were 50 votes to the poll I made "I was rejected by YC but will continue anyway." So, the market is there.

Since most rejects don't have the contacts and the money or the know-how to get publicity, but you're going to do the startup anyway, you're missing those things. So, this is a great way to get publicity and compete on equal ground.

In fact, part of the publicity that YC gets is because "they have 400 applicants and they select the best 10." So, the rejected applicants are already "being used" for publicity. Why not use YC for publicity? There would also be no YC without applicants, but there would still be startups. And, I knew about Paul Graham from Slashdot many years ago, but how many did not until the YCombinator came about? Again, that wouldn't have happened without startups.

In other words, if a YC company is getting publicity and you create a similar product and don't because you're not in YC, is that fair to your product?

Will the name have to change eventually? Of course! But right now, it's a great idea to ride the YC train and get publicity from the many news outlets who think YC-funded startups are the only ones worth writing about. There is no shame in being rejected, and this is going to be great marketing in the short-term. I think everybody should sign up and participate!

Saying you were "rejected from YC" in the next 6 months will mean a lot to the blogs and news outlets because it flows with their current articles. Now, 2 years from now, they may not care, but right now, it would be a big deal.

If this is done in a good natured, tongue-in-cheek fashion, this would be a great hit and a great COMPETITION between YC companies and YC rejects.
Absolutely agreed, and actually I wrote an email to the author yesterday saying roughly the same thing, although I didn't think about just C.
Interesting.
Would it replace Solar cells to power home/big devices?
On MySQL 4.1 / InnoDB / FreeBSD / FFS / SCSI, small inserts run at about 167 transactions per second, i.e. one per rotation.

Same setup but --innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0,
a million transactions in 200 seconds, or 5000/second.

I don't know if InnoDB wrote its B-Tree to disk during the 200 seconds. Same performance even with InnoDB's buffer pool size set to 200 KB with --innodb_buffer_pool_size=200000.

The MySQL documentation claims that this configuration
does crash-recovery correctly, though you may lose
the last second's worth of transactions.
Controversy is good: go ahead, disagree with me!
Cool, I'll do that. Which set of his code? I've found his website and there's a bunch there.
The knob is there to let the OS do its best buffering "if you trust your operating system, your hardware, and your utility company."

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/interactive/runtime-config-wal.html
The regular expressions approach to URL management is a good one IMO. It's a clean way of managing dynamic urls without using querystring parameters.
Paul looks very happy in that photograph. I wonder why.
"Proper tuning involves keeping as much database information in RAM as possible while not adversely affecting other areas of the operating system."

The section on write-ahead logging is informative.
While I think he makes some good recommendations, his listing of "Advanced algebra" under "High school" makes me think he might not have gone that deep down the math rabbit hole.
No, this was a side-project inspired after the rejection. I figured that with at least 50 or so startups continuing their original plans after being turned down (including us), there might as well be a place where the rest of us can get the same sort of hacker atmosphere as the yCombinator companies.
WIRED journalist won't do email interviews--ironic.
"It may be true that no programmer with any sense would work for him". Why? Did he do anything particular?
I likely will re-brand/re-position it based on feedback here. Different domain too. Unfortunately, my graphic design skills kinda suck (as I'm sure you noticed) - my cofounders usually handle that, but this was a bit of a pet project, and they've been working on our main idea while I tried to get this out without spending too much time on it.
You mean the "4 main reasons to go with yCombinator" and then listing 5, or was there something more substantive?
Very interesting but a bit misleading. Where's the recommended feature? Where are the comments?

If I know anything, it's that the devil is in the details. Building something that simple doesn't take much code at all but I'm willing to bet that the misssing features would add quite a bit more code.
It's silly to focus on your rejection like that. Create a self-assembled group of startup founders if you will, but don't define it in a negative way.
Maybe it should be called "WhyCombinator?" -- position it as an open community of startups which compete (in a serious but friendly manner) to the official YCombinator companies.
Paul Graham's 06 RailsConf Keynote address
That's probably better, but I'm thinking it may be better off with a name that doesn't derive from yCombinator at all. After all, there's YEurope too, which got similarly panned for ripping off the name.

Unless it were a name with an obscure wordplay in it. For example, we could call it Ackermen.com because the Y-combinator is a function that lets you bootstrap recursive functions, while the Ackermann function is one of the simplest examples of a function that is not primitive recursive. ;-)
FON, Time Warner Cable link up for free WiFi
I don't know - "may be true" is just conceding the point to the grandparent, because I have no personal knowledge of Greenspun, and from his username, it appears that the grandparent worked at Ars Digita. I've heard that Greenspun's management-style was pretty abrasive and he could very egotistical, but this is all hearsay.
"I got rejected like many of you did, but YC and anything YC related isn't going to influence my success/failure. I'm sure there are myriad of venues to launch your startup."

That was sort of the point of this site - to provide yet another alternative for launch and development of your startup. The name and logo was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, taking a rejection and making something good out of it. After all, it could be read as "NOT rejected from YC"...

Anyways, I'm looking for a new name & positioning. Ideas?
Response here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16316
Amazon readying DRM-free music service
It looks sexy, but how does it compare to Bluefish?
But unlike YEurope, which is just a copy-cat, your source of members (at least initially) are those whom YC didn't accept.

And in terms of fostering a (again, friendly) rivalry with YC, it's a neat conceit (especially if any of the YC rejects outshine those that got accepted).
He's lording his superiority over the Ruby on Rails crowd, "Fear my Lisp!"
Seth's Blog: The brand formula
Keeping all data in RAM and just saving changes to a log file is a great architecture. It is a pity that the current "hip" tools/models for web development impose unnecessary cost for using it.

The problem is that the Ruby / Python / PHP stacks typically have one process per request, and they do not share memory. When you use memcached in such environment, it is a separate process and communication with it is rather slow - it involves marshaling the data, which would not be necessary if all requests were just threads in a single address space.You don't have this problem if you use Java/C++.

I have used with some success a huge mmaped file as persistent memory to store my data. It's not exactly using disc as sequential device, that depends on the application and data locality. There are just a few tools available to support that scheme.
Metaphors in Negotiation
James Hong (HOTorNOT) on the Move from Paid to Free