skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am sure this is just one way but from all the times I remember having a great experience working with someone else, it just happened without me analyzing beforehand bullet by bullet how good the guy is. And I do have couple instances where the paper analysis of the guy was great but once we started work it wasn't so great.

My experience is that if you aren't deep into a stage where you HAVE to give away a cofounder title, just start working with the guy! When we associate the cofounder title it carries the stereotypical image of a cofounder which makes us double guess if this guy is "co founder material"--but there is no such thing as "cofounder material."

All you have are people passionate and skillful enough to help you start and execute your venture and people that aren't. Before thinking of someone as a "cofounder" think if he can practically help you with a skill you need that you yourself lack or aren't best at.
Time Management for Internet Entrepreneurs 2.0
(!!!) I'd rather re-implement LISP (as in Greenspun's 10th law) than Oracle.

LOL keep downmodding me. I'd love to see the hashmap-based transaction handling. Was it as good as this:

http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/I_Think_I_0x27_ll_Call_Them__0x26_quot_0x3b_Transactions_0x26_quot_0x3b_.aspx
The Blog is the New Resume (so true)
Yes, but we did that by just assigning a user (merchant) a specific server, to which they were redirected when they logged in to edit their store, view stats, or retrieve orders.

The problem was completely parallelizable; stores didn't interact.
theplanet.com will rent you soemthing like that for USD$1,600 per month, plus bandwidth.

You can also make it yourself and colo it. penguincomputing.com has a line called the Altus 600. It's a 1U machine with two CPU slots and 16 RAM slots. Source the RAM from Crucial or PNY, and you can get a 2 core, 16GB machine for about $3,300 bucks.

http://www.penguincomputing.com/index.php?option=com_content...
Makes such perfect sense too.
To answer a few questions:

One of my issues with this person is that while I do like his company, and respect him in a lot of ways, we think differently about how to move things forward. I'm much more of a "below the radar, live cheap and get something working" guy, whereas he's more along the lines of "VC funding or bust", without even having much of a prototype. That just sounds bad to me. Though I recognize that funding at a later stage in the game would certainly help, I think we'll have a better bargaining position if we have something that sort of works in hand.

That's another thing... I believe more in having mostly technical people. Different skill sets can certainly be a good thing (the Paypal story in Founders at Work was a good example), but it's also a good way to start thinking "hrm... I'm building the code... what is that other guy actually doing?"

Juwo: I'm not planning on stealing the idea or anything like that. I have plenty of ideas of my own. The one he's hatched up is pretty good, but it's not going anywhere in terms of code or a web site or stuff like that. Just paperwork for investors...
I started out with shared virtual hosting, but after getting a couple of paying customers I moved to dedicated hosting with LayeredTech.

If you try out the demo you'll see it's really responsive:

http://ourdoings.com/

As compared to shared virtual hosting, where even a trivial sample app is sometimes sluggish:

http://brlewis.com/map.brl
Honestly, I have never been able to find a good price using Froogle. What is the point if I search for "cross pen model No##" and it turns up thousands of links? (as I recently did when I wanted to buy it for a gift).
GigaTribe hits 400,000 registered users today!
I know several first time entrepreneurs from several years ago that "tested" waters in initial stages trying to raise VC money. And it's damn hard! So unless this guy has some inside connections and has been there, done that--I'd personally say it is not only a bad idea but potentially a huge waste of time--same thought I'm sure you must be having.

If you can get going without any funding(which it appears you can) START. Yet if this guy insists on getting funding before ANYTHING else, he might just be an excuser or nonbeliever hoping the funding will validate his idea. Both bad things in a cofounder of a company that isn't even in development yet.

I'll leave some room because obviously you know more than I do about this specific guy and your situation. But if I had a cofounder who INSISTED on raising VC, he would have to be DAMN GOOD seller for me to buy into it--and chances are, we would still part ways as far as working together on that specific venture.
Microsoft Targets Next Billion Customers
tough call, but this is a make or break decision for your company, if your gut says this person is not a near perfect fit, I would suggest passing.
MySpace Offers News Recommendations
great link, thanks!
I did the same when our mysql queries were taking around 30 seconds each (iirc the db had about 20 million rows, but I didn't have anything to do with it). The replacement I wrote ran each query in about 100ms. The hard part was in getting my data structures good enough that the whole dataset could fit in 3GB (that's how much memory was in the server I was using).
Anyone else think their $3 Vista PR is just a reaction to reports they've only sold 244 licensed copies in China so far?

From digg http://digg.com/microsoft/Only_244_copies_of_Genuine_Windows_Vista_sold_in_China
It is interesting how flat files can manage the evolution of the data structures you use? Any advice?
Umm, you realize MySQL is free right? The real question is really why would you even consider a non-database solution? Is ALL your data static and non-relational? If not, you are really limiting your application by not using a database.
news.myspace.com
What appalling design. Looks like something off GM's intranet.
I think it is a bit harder when the data is highly connected (social web app).

However, memory is so cheap now that you could probably get away with keeping all of your business objects in memory, having them write-through to disk for persistence. I imagine that you would have to move business objects around the servers to decrease messaging latency as the connectivity between objects changes.

I don't know of any frameworks that use this approach.
I'm sure they are crying all the way to the bank.
The layout for individual pieces breaks in Firefox and IE. When is Facebook launching their news site?
http://news.myspace.com/business/entrepreneurship

It will be interesting to watch this site and see how "good" the aggregator is at finding quality content compared to the aggregation of the news.yc readers.
Looking for a Woz
I think people that started newroo http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/02/03/newroos-real-time-news-aggregator/ are responsible of myspace news
I take one issue to the Google policy outlined here - There is danger, if you disallow candidates who don't have full consensus of the hiring board, of creating groups and rooms full of people who have the same skills, the same values, and the same thinking. Mitch Kapor put it well at startup school - mirror-tocracy instead of meritocracy.

Hiring diversity (of thought) is as important as hiring quality.
Hey folks, I'm putting this up as I'm looking for a co-founder for a new venture I'm launching. I've been trying to find a better way to organize and share my information for years and now I think I've got the solution.

If you can relate to this and are interested in trying to solve this problem, read the post and drop me a line.

There's real money committed to building a prototype with more available. Let me know if you're interested and we should talk.
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=14583
Microsoft Sells 20 Million Copies Of Vista WorldWide, 244 in China
This is a VERY good read for Java developers. Google may get slammed on YC news often but there's no denying they have some godly Java coders..

Wish I could have been there for this presentation. Thanks for sharing.
What do you mean by "clusters"? High-end, low-latency compute clusters (using e.g., Myrinet) or just a rack of machines? Are you doing lots of calculation or lots of data or both? If you have lots of data, what's your storage model? If you're going to have lots of machines, what's your needs for connectivity (NICs, intra-cluster, 'net drops, etc.)?
Check the velocity. Is he not-perfect-but-getting-better? Or is he not-perfect-and-getting-bored?

You want the former, you don't want the latter. Someone who's not perfect but listens well, is interested in improving, and is passionate about the company will likely soon be perfect, or as close to it as you're realistically going to get.

If he's not really into it to begin with, then it doesn't matter if he's perfect, you still don't want to partner with him.
I fully agree with what pg said about keeping everything you can in in-memory structures. You can save modifications to a sequential logfile, or some other simple on-disk structure that is easily maintained (e.g. separate file per record), and read this structure into memory when you restart. Once that becomes infeasible, I would switch to using SQLite's BTrees [1] directly and bypassing the entire SQL layer. Using the SQL layer is just pretty pointless and a waste of resources. You're going to have a "data access layer" over your database anyway, so why not have it operate on a level where you have precise control over the access patterns and can tune it for your application? If you use the SQL layer, you're basically losing all that information by having your data access layer transform your operations into a high level data manipulation language by building a string (eww), then you leave the SQL layer of the database engine to parse your string back to something sensible and have it guess at how to optimize the query to get the best performance. Instead just tell it directly and skip the whole string construction, string parsing, and query analysis crap.

Notes

1. I'd suggest BDB, but it seems to suck. YMMV, always benchmark it yourself.
wise

"if money is your first drive then you will eventually quit at some point when evrything says it is going to be over in One minute. At that point the co-founders who were in it for the money will walk out. The one who were in it for the passion and the challenge to learn and master the ultimate startup language ( not Technology, but "loyal and satisified Users") )will get 2gether and ask themselves " How the F&$ we got into this mess and how the F%^$ can we clean it up now, make it look good and have more users? "
You can either choose to emphasize how POWERFUL--as in scale--that Juwo is OR you can emphasize how EASY it can make my life.

Right now even though you have glimpses of trying to show how it can help me, the overall tone of your site(confirmed by your posts here) is on features rather than practical use.

Any tool can be used to do dozen things. Our site can be used to post music, lectures, pranks, cries of your first child and literally hundreds of other things. But it has its few primary uses and you have to pin them down and focus on those DEFINED audiences in the BEGINNING stages. Otherwise you end up confusing EVERYONE as you seem to have done here.

I'll help you get started if you're interested. This should make for a good mini guide too for folks in your position Answer the following questions for me in LESS than 20 words each:

1. What is the problem?
2. Who is it a problem for?(note: everyone isn't an answer; think age groups, job profiles of people MOST likely facing the problem you describe in #1)
3. How do you plan to solve this problem? (theoretically, not what Juwo is)
4. How is Juwo solving this problem

Use these guidelines:
- Be as specific as you can be.
- Use as simple words as you can use.
We have a winner (startup choosing RoR)
MySpace Launches MySpace News
I certainly see how a Bayesian theory is useful, but I can't fathom how to use it instead of an if statement. What does that even mean? What would it look like? Can anyone enlighten me?
I doubt this. The main differentiator between facebook and myspace is that facebook is clean and easy to use, vs. the maelstrom of crap that's tossed at you in myspace.

If they do allow widgets, I'd imagine they'd go the opposite route as myspace: instead of allowing all widgets and sites except the ones they block, facebook will probably only allow sites that are approved.
How about a few beers at the Rose & Crown in Palo Alto? It's within walking distance of Caltrain and actually serves good beer. I'm suggesting Palo Alto and not SF because I assume most people will be staying near YC in Mountain View.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/k6m7uTFW0MfVotLNwSULUA
Yes there is no doubt about it, but it took them almost an year to launch it, which is quiet a long time
Bungee Labs--next generation web development platform
If MySpace has proved any point, it is that "Design doesnt counts".

You seem surprised as if MySpace was rivaling Apple in its design concepts
This is 100% positively, absolutely, NewRoo.
You guys are lucky. I had a torturous time playing with RoR. I had a week to learn it in and just couldn't get a hang of all the automatic things it did being a guy who likes to know exactly why some thing works. Not surprising considering RoR is not just a different language but also a different way of describing what you are building. I resorted to Perl and had better luck.
The first question is...who competes with Google in this space? I doubt Yahoo! would do that. I doubt Oracle is. I doubt eBay is. Apple is a long shot. Microsoft has Office Live and well.. Office 2003/2007.

Other web 2.0 companies focus themselves in media field not technology field.
In my opinion, it seems this hiring process might actually encourage mediocrity. You might be in danger of hiring "ok at everything" employees over those that are "extraordinary at a few things."

The mediocre employees wouldn't get any negative votes, while the extraordinary ones would.
What is the best RoR book for beginners? Best online resources?
I would agree with you about Ebay - but Ebay just bought StumbleUpon. Maybe they are shifting, albeit subtly.
I think there is even more to it than that. Imagine the buzz that can be generated from 300 blogs going up after the conference about the latest, greatest 37Signals app coming up...
A similar approach is so-called "object prevalence" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Prevalence). Basically, keep all the data in RAM and write a journal of changes. On startup, the journal is played back, incrementally restoring the state. Snapshots are taken periodically to keep the journal down to a manageable size.

It's a form of the Command design pattern and has some nice properties. You can get transparent thread synchronization by executing queries in parallel but serializing commands that modify state. For web apps, the HTTP request offers a natural representation for commands (but of course you'd want to strip them down to their essence). You can get fault-tolerance and scalability by feeding the command stream to replica servers. (State-changing commands must be executed by the master server but queries can be load-balanced across the replicas.) And if you keep the journals around, you have a complete history of the application's state.

EDIT: See also http://www.advogato.org/article/398.html
Agreed. Especially if you "need" 100 employees and everyone else is saying yes, there's pressure for consensus, if they are "good enough".
Definitely go for .com.

If slightly-worse-name.com is hard to remember and/or pronounce, then you're options are:

- try to get slightly-better-name.com on the cheap

- find another .com...

If you choose to negotiate, here are some tips:

1. Don't tell the squatter you have the .net & .org. If you do, this will give him even more reason to keep the price high - he knows you want it!

2. Offer low, and make it sound like you don't really need the domain

3. Try to convince him that you've gotten an offer from someone else, selling a better domain, in your price range. This works best if you know someone with a good domain name. For example, I own odio.com. I could send you an offer (from sam@odio.com) to sell odio.com for $500.
I haven't used Rails yet in a real project, but I'm a bit worried about the same thing. I've actually shied away from using Django (I'm a Python guy mostly) since they have a bit more magic involved. TurboGears/Pylons/Web.py makes me happiest so far.
One important issue that seems to be missing from these discussions is that a lot of hiring is about internal team dynamics. The big fear I have is of people who don't want to hire employees that are smarter(broadest sense) than they are. One of the biggest benefits of working is the opportunity to work next to people you respect or enjoy.

For ambitious, smart people also known as 'A Players', it's not easy to provide them with an environment where they will feel challenged and inspired by their team members. But doing so greatly increases the likelihood of winning those hires. Why do so many 'A Players' want to work for Google? I believe that it's because there's a sense that other smart people work there. You get a network effect happening in the HR side of things. Think of reasons for attending Stanford and Harvard, it's not really about the quality of what will be taught but the assumed quality of the others in attendance.
Sometimes a solution that is specific and targeted is more efficient and usable than a general solution molded to fit the problem.

No one says that if you need a relational database you should reimplement it yourself - just that the DB is not the only solution for all web back ends.
Software by Microsoft Is Nearly Free for the Needy
No one here is offended by your religious beliefs. They just don't have a place on a commercial website, unless you are providing a service only for a group of like minded people and then done right your comments may even be welcome.
http://poignantguide.net/ruby/ is one of the most entertaining writings I have read, not just out of technical books, overall. Highly recommended.

Rolling On Rails from OnLamp is a very quick and useful tutorial found here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html

This is the easiest and fastest way to get started: http://tryruby.hobix.com/
The one thing wrong with sites like Digg
By far the best:
Agile Web Development with RailsSecond Edition
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails2/

DHH wrote it.
It took me a while to see why that's funny. Only 244 legitimate copies in China, with most copies being sold for $1 on the streets.
What I'd like to see is companies hiring lawyers who spend their surplus time blogging. Being involved in the community should prevent them from being as seriously out of tune as this, and if they spend some of their time explaining tech law to the unenlightened (like me), that'll reflect back on the company.
The news came out after report that Microsoft sold only 244 copies of Vista in the whole of China in the first 2 weeks.
I highly recommend the Lynda.com online training for rails:
http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modListing.asp?sid=229
It does a great job of explaining the theory of rails and is a great intro to ruby as well.

Obviously Agile Web Development with Rails is the bible of RoR books:
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails2/

I'd personally be wary of many of the RoR tutorials you'll find online: none of the ones I used did a good job of explaining rails at the conceptual level: you'll end up with a rails app from the tutorial, but limited understanding of what you did and why.

Updated:

This page has a good selection of relevant books:
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-and-Rails-Books-the-essential

My opinion is that one should begin with a Rails-specific book or tutorial and not feel the need to learn Ruby first. Much of rails code is specific to rails and, while you'll want to master Ruby eventually, you'll get enough from the Rails books.
Outlook 2007--downgrade no longer
I've switched to web-based mail entirely. I've still got Outlook 2007 for a bit of lingering corporate mail, but I've switched fully over to GMail for both personal and my startup's use.

That's one thing I've found interesting about Xobni. I wonder how many of their peers (us I guess) actually use Outlook?
I think it's even less of a problem now a days. With cheap 64bit hardware, you can have a humongous virtual memory space, so you can go quite far with each hardware you add.
http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1816/top-ruby-on-rails-tutorials

List of 12 very good tutorials.
That's quite an interesting view. To be honest I loved 37Signals approach to web apps and how they initially shunned outside funding to build their business. Granted that they started out as a consulting company? then morphed into a product company(which is an ideal route if you don't take oustide funding) But these days I'm finding it hard to use Basecamp(although they claim they produce easy to use software) I hope that they don't lose their initial focus. Their business model is sound so is their choice of niche market. Hope they don't stray away from that successful formula.
Default things we do
I've heard good things about 'Ruby on Rails: Up and Running':

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/rubyrails/
Y Combinator's winter class
I second the thought on getting Agile Web Development with Rails. Best damn book I've ever bought concerning Rails. It is true that there is code specific for Rails(which kinda peeves me from my comfortable Ruby shell) but I highly recommend you learn Ruby first just to get the feel of programming in it. I must say coming from Java(ugh) programming is Ruby is such a pleasure. As long as you can think idiomatically then you're pretty much set!
Can someone paste the article--or excerpts from it? Login required.
I'll be in SFO Friday eve-Sat. eve. All depends on what time the meetup's at. Best for me would be afternoon Sat.
It's the same thing that was posted here last week, just a list of names of the companies and a one sentence description.

If you go to the homepage and search for "combinator" the article will come up and you don't have to register.
This is probably a dumb question (I checked out Gmail yesterday): Is there a way to import outlook email into Gmail? (I have several gigs)
Zaid,

Thanks for replying.

1. What is the problem? 2. Who is it a problem for?...

is a very basic exercise. In fact it is on the first slide of my investor presentation. I have thought through this in depth.

I will feel comfortable discussing one aspect of it on this board.

1) "I cant skip to the important parts when viewing AV"
2) Both publishers and consumers.

thanks,
Anil
Use this tutorial from oreilly/onlamp instead:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/12/14/revisiting-ruby-on-rails-revisited.html

It's nearly 2 years more recent and up-to-date with Rails changes.
barcamps (at least in boston) bring together pretty much exactly the people you're looking for, and the group is fairly diverse (young, old, hardcore hackers, serial entrepreneurs, more "corporate" developers, a couple investors/service providers, etc.)
memcached (google it) implements this idea (giant in-memory hash table), and scales to multiple machines. used by facebook and lots of other very high volume sites.

it's often also used as an LRU cache on top of a normal database so that you can still get the benefits of persistence and rich queries but use memcached to lower the number of hits to the disk/DB.
Too vague on #2.You're getting somewhere in #1 by defining specific user use--just make sure it is ACTUALLY a sizable problem for the mass(not just you).

Best of luck with your presentation.
"(2) How do I get it? (Or get access) "

Thanks for your feedback!
I have added a line at the top.

Note: When you click on a demo, NP will automatically download and install. NP can be run both offline and also connected to the internet. (see Technical Requirements)