skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firstly, he has misunderstood database design. The design that the system analysts product will be in 3NF because their job is to understand the data in its most abstract sense. They will also specify - again, fully normalized - the main queries that will need to be run. Then it will go to the implementors who will transform the tables and the queries for performance. Denormalizing too early is a premature optimization. Not denormalizing at all is inexperienced.

Secondly, if you need to scale you are most likely using a query cache (e.g. Tangosol) between your RDBMS and your middle tier, so you can preserve a far cleaner data model now then you could back in the day.
You are 17 years old and about to drop out of high school...I personally would advise you to at the least, finish school and get into a cool university and experience life outside the comfort zone of your parents' house. There's still a lot to learn, see and experience out there.

However, that does not necessarily mean that you completely stop working on your startup. While being committed is important, there is a right time for everything and it may not be the best time to drop out of school... suppose an year down the line, you change your mind- it will be a lot harder and for you to get into good universities. The risks vs. benefits at this stage may be out of whack.

The important thing is that the idea should not die and should always be on the backburner until the time is right and you have the matured view of the world [and how cruel it can be] to make the whole scheme of things to work in your favor.

Just my 2 cents...
I've got a better idea. Why don't you submit some links, gain some more karma, and then you won't care so much if a few of your comments get downvoted?

As long as you submit relevant links, the worst that can happen is that no-one votes them up.
My First Microsoft Interview
Lost techno: wifi cracking box
I'm looking for a hack I've seen years ago, and maybe you can help me to retrieve it.

It was a guy who built a box with 5-6 wifi interfaces, an integrated aircrack install and a web server.
He could set the aggressiveness of the attack to be somehow inside the law - don´t ask me how :) - and then the result would be display in the web server.

Maybe I dreamt it, but I'm pretty sure I've seen picture of this with the interview of the guy, 2-3 years ago, so if you can help me, I'll be grateful.
Otherwise it'll be a nice project to work on :)
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United First Financial
This video will show you how to pay off your mortgage in 8 to 11 years.
"I feel like Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail (excepts I can't program)"

Is it just me that finds this quite funny. I feel like David Beckham (except I can't play football).
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Stay in school. Do the startup thing over the evenings and weekends. If things take off (you can live off the earnings full time for the foreseeable future), then consider leaving school and doing it full time.

It sounds like you are looking for a reason to leave school and startup may not be the right thing. Have you considered getting a job at a tech firm to develop your tech skills which you can apply on your startup.
Learn to program. Deciding at 17 that you're "nontechnical" is premature optimization, without the optimization. At that age you're not non-anything you don't want to be. And if you're going to be in a world where people make software, there's nothing more valuable you could learn than how that's done, even if it's not what you ultimately spend most of your time on.
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Not a db expert, but I can't imagine joining tables is much of a problem. At least in theory, the db should be able to handle the tables internally as if it was only one table. Not sure if all db engines would be good enough at optimizing, but it is probably one of the easier approaches to performance tuning. Therefore I would expect that most db engines already handle that nicely.

I think it is OK to cache some things, like aggregated values (for example how many friends does a user have). But those cached values (or views) I would not consider part of the actual base data model. Even though those values might be stored in the same db, I would consider them to be another layer in a way.
Please read carefully what i will write. Unlike other people i will not give you advice like "Go for it dude" or "Wait, don't be stupid". Instead i will give you my point of view.Im 18 and i have one year left in school. I started programing years ago, but never got any deep. Started with pascal, then c++ in school, but never learned anything. In December last year i started learning python and i am now quite knowledgeable of the language. I started learning Django a while ago and i also read a lot about other languages. I view my self as an entrepreneur, although i have no business ideas, or even anything close to a product(or anything that can evolve in to a product). My goal in life if for spiritual balance. Its my philosophy. I don't care about money, or people that much. I like learning and solving puzzles. I'm poor. My family has no money, we live in Bulgaria and even by local standards, we are below average. I don't mind at all, all i need is about 20 cents(euro cents) for the coffee automate in school and a running internet connection at home(we are not that poor) I love technology and stuff like that, i love science, all kinds of it, biology, math, physics. i love it all. What's my point you will ask? I am lazy. I hate doing things unprepared. I hate having to do things the hard way. If i go start a company now it will be very hard, it will be almost impossible(not completely impossible) I will have to learn so much on the run, it will not be business, it will be home school. Its not worth it, so i just enjoy being 18. I play football(European football, soccer is a stupid name), i drink beer with friends(its legal here ha ha) I draw stuff, i listen to music, and i learn. I learn as much as i can, i prepare my self. I don't like failure. I know how to fail, I've failed a lot of times in my life and I've learned to prepare my self for what i want to do. You do what you want. Drink beer if you like too(don't mind the illegal part, i drink since 13) just think about stuff. Don't do stupid stuff you know are stupid, that way you don't have an excuse of being ignorant. Learn from peoples mistakes and think about stuff. Try to understand your self and the world. And read Sun Tsu's Art of War, its going to help you to a lot. It helped me understand the situations in which my actions matter, and i use it as advice every time i have to make a hard decision. Good luck, from a fellow entrepreneur and wannabe hacker.
Is wakoopa in the old post office tower, with a ping pong table in front of the elevator doors?
Although I like the idea of this type of service I do wonder just how useful they are. Does anyone know what the recovery rate is?

There are certainly some testimonials for the paid services but most of the problems solved are recovering lost data rather than the laptop itself. It makes me think that decent encryption and regular backups might be just as good.
Don't drop out of high school, just bullshit your way through it and do enough to get by- this isn't hard stuff, and you get food, shelter, and a good internet connection. I know, in high school, that might not seem like a lot, but it's huge when you're out in the real world.

Put as much time as you can into your startup and learning to program, just don't fail out. If you're smart enough to write as lucidly as you do then you're smart enough not to fail high school. Find some loopholes to make the classes easier, figure out what the easiest way to make 70% is, and execute.

Like someone else said, hack morning, hack lunches, hack nights- put your time into moving your startup forward.

Skip college, it doesn't sound like you need it- if you do need it down the line you can do it then.

However, experience does matter- and you can pack a ton of experience into a short amount of time if you're ok with taking risks, which it sounds like you are.

Check out Inside Steve's Brain if you get the chance, this quote stuck out at me a lot:

"For Jobs, innovation is about creativity, putting things together in unique ways. "Creativity is just connecting things," Jobs told Wired magazine. "When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

Also:

"I wish Bill Gates the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." -- Steve Jobs

With all that said-- you've got a great opportunity. You've got a co-founder, you (hopefully) have a good idea, so execute and give it a shot. If it doesn't work, bone out to Argentina or Eastern Europe for awhile, regroup, come back, and give it another shot.

And, on college, there's a great article by Sean Nelson of Harvey Danger about the merits of dropping out of college:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=12087

Good luck!
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Salesforce.com pulls plug on Sun's flagship Unix servers
AppLogic - Grid Operating System for Web Applications
Have a look at the AppLogic live demo:

http://download2.3tera.net/demo/applogic20demo.html

Amazon AWS competitors are now emerging all over the place (and I found this one is particularly interesting if you are scaling Django and and choosing between EC2 and others).
Beijing = New York in 1900
Honestly curious- have you experienced bringing an idea on the backburner back to life? I've always felt like if immediate action isn't taken and maintained to move an idea forward it dies.

I'd love to hear your perspective here, I'm interested.
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Your mortgage can be paid off in as little a seven years.
Ask HN: What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup?
The benefits of failure are often overlooked and we sometimes forget that "failure" is part of moving you toward success.

Please feel free to share any lessons learned from any ambitious undertaking.
I think you have it backwards - I had to just skip over most of the Reddit dreck, until I customized it. Now it's a much nicer time sink.
Joe, while I've got your attention, somewhat off-topic, does webmin use an intermediary language that spans all config files, or does it directly parse for each format?

What do you use to make the parsers?
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Actually I have, it is extremely cool. For my own case I don't know where it will fit in yet, as I currently do fine without it, but its one of those things I follow.
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Sarcasm is the name of the game. I was just so caught up in the article/comments that I momentarily forgot about manpages, usually my first place to consult.
While other commenters are right, nothing here really is groundbreaking, it's good to be reminded that Twitter IS indeed monetizable, they just choose to not be making money at this time.

And that might not be a bad idea. They're best option is to get bought quickly by a social network: They can keep their current service relatively unchanged and bring value to the network through more eyeballs eyeballing more often, thereby raising the owner's ad revenue while not driving away the user base.

If they do something to decrease the userbase in an effort to drive a short term profit, their viability as an acquisition target goes right down the drain.
Nope. I read about it and played with its interpreter some, but its niche isn't really very relevant to me. It seems designed for when you want something flexible and Python-like to embed in a C program, but you need something minimalistic because memory is really tight.

It looks like a pretty well-designed language, though. It's small and clean enough that one could probably memorize the entire language.
Do you have funding for a year or two? What about your partner? If your parents say OK, go for it, we'll support you for two years (as mine did), it may be the right thing to drop out.

Second thing is, you absolutely must gain the technical skills as quickly as possible. A startup of two cannot support one business guy. But you already know that I take it.

I wish you luck!
It turns out that my problems with the startup had nothing to do with the technology and quite a bit to do with human and business factors.

What I learned:

1. Get a partner you can count on.

2. Don't take side jobs while doing a startup. Eliminate any distractions you can. If you can afford to ditch your day job, all the better.

3. Research and choose your niche carefully.

Looking back on my (first) startup attempt, I'm amazed at how much I got done on so little time and sleep. For "extra cash" I took a side project that ended up being a huge drain of my time and energy. The money is nice, but the development on the startup slowed to a crawl. I don't think there's a startup that can handle that kind of neglect.

To make matters worse, I ended up having to handle a lot of work because my partner, while showing enthusiasm early on, produced little after we began. I'm not complaining, he and I remain best friends, but I just don't think he knew what he was getting into. :-) If you get a partner, make sure they are as committed as you are. I've heard vesting gives people motivation, or at least a way to drop partners who aren't earning their shares.

We chose a niche that had low barriers to entry. The down side of that is there were hundreds of players in the market we were after. If we had more time and resources, we could have given it a better shot, as we did have some success in spite of the competition, but it would have been a hard climb.

We had a second phase to grow from our entry, but it turns out that would have been heavily time and money intensive, far too much so for our market. Knowing that up front might have steered our plan to another area.

So the startup ended. I'm fine with it, actually, and I'm so glad I gave it a shot. I've learned so much in such a short time and it's helped me on my day job. It will also help me with my next startup. :-)
Perhaps they only looked at what parts of their brain experienced chess players used more?
Lots of people will tell you lots of different things, but as always take it w/ a grain of salt.

The thing about dropping out is that you have to be willing to figure out everything on your own (which is sounds like you are). However, you'll find that you'll end up learning alot, but there will be holes in your basic knowledges and skill set. Unless you really dig deep into things you don't understand, you'll end up with just a shallow broad knowledge of what you need to know. And that at times can make or break your project.

I'd say, wait until you can make stuff to drop out.
Should small businesses whine?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalty_shootout_(football)#History

"Where a replay or playoff was not possible, ties were previously decided by drawing of lots. Examples include Italy's win over the USSR in the semi-final of the 1968 European Championship."
its summer you dont go to school so make your attempt now and see how you do. If you cant see that and talking about dropping then its obvious you are not ready to evaluate your resources and time so allow me to question at least the validity of the idea.
If you would rather do the process yourself (or understand how it works, beyond "write out the ASCII set in thin pen, scan it, and email it to some guy"), here's a tutorial using only free software:
http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/oilpencil/making.html
Why do you want to play against a computer?

Did SVG became Turing complete?
Recession Proofing your Application Infrastructure
L: Why aren't more books written like this?

R: Because the style can be really annoying.

L: Congratulations. Now go make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

[

]

This space reserved for JELLY STAINS!

...

I found the Little Schemer and especially the Little MLer to be helpful for learning their respective modes of thought, but once I finished them, they were gone.
Normalization is not an either/or proposition.

You can have one table, normalize all the way 4th normal form, or stop anywhere in between, depending on the requirements of your app. You can use multi-values within fields to simplify your schema. You can also write your own processes to extract data, without using just pure SQL.

There's more than one way to do things, all with pros and cons. Naturally, in the early phases of your project, you're probably best off insuring the integrity of your data (that is, normalize) and worry about scaling later.
One of the biggest lessons i have learned is you need a very good and dedicated partners. You will find lot of people who want to be partners who will stay with you during good times but go away when times get tougher. Find people who believe in Not giving up and who can work hard.
The other part of Start Up failure is people look down upon you and start giving you advice. In some instances you might be even branded a Loser for failing. You always have to be very sure of what you are doing and be very confident. If you don't believe in yourself, others won't too.
Test your chops. I wrote my first contract program when I was 17 on an Apple IIe for a local bookkeeper. Once I did that I finally realized that I could take my skills and make something of value (Instead of just playing at programming where you never actually deliver value to anybody)

There's a difference between idle and productive dreaming. I had a hard time with this when I was your age. Productive dreaming is envisioning something just outside of your reach and then making it happen. You string together enough of these and you can go anywhere. Idle dreaming, on the other hand, is thinking about some ideal future state with no idea at all how to begin. It's a lot more fun -- but it doesn't take you far.

So test you chops. Prove you can code something somebody likes. Then prove people will pay you for it. Continue along this pattern.

My advice only -- good luck!
5 questions for Y Combinator's Paul Graham
FYI, the worst side-effect of Modafinil (beyond addiction) is that it makes your urine smell bad (or worse depending on what kind of diet you already have.) When Modafinil metabolizes it breaks down into sulfur and sodium, so you get salty smelly urine.
No. I am too.

I have commented before on how offensive posts like this are for so many reasons. It ususally turns out to be me against the world. So I don't even bother anymore.

But now that I saw your question, I decided to throw my 2 cents in (again).

AFAIC, with few exceptions, everything we do is a marathon, not a sprint. So using crutches for sprints is, at best, myoptic. Any stimulant, I don't care which (food, drugs, etc.) has another side, i.e., what goes up must go down. One of the commenters on OP's site talks about this much better than I can.

I really don't care what anyone does in private. But setting aside all the ethical, medical, and legal considerations, here is my biggest concern: Lots of people come to this site to learn and exchange; I'd hate to have them walk away with the idea than drugs are a good idea for their startup, just from the feedback of their peers. That's irresponsible.
The Depressive Realism Economy: America's economic self-esteem suffers three major blows
I'll add to the "partner warning". It's incredibly important to pick the right people!

I worked at a startup where one of the two partners was really good during the "garage phase", i.e. just two guys hacking away on a prototype. When the company grew, and developers were added to help out, it turned out that he was completely unable to grow into the role of development lead. Instead, he just stayed in his corner, grudgingly handing out assignments, never resolving discussions between developers etc. Never having even simple design discussions resolved, can really wear down a team.

It's also important to have a great seed engineer, who will be in charge of creating the company's software development culture (Mentioned at http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...).

In the company mentioned above, the software development culture never got beyond the garage state; There were no design documents or meetings, no continuous integration, no quality assurance, no code reviews.... All things that the partner could / should have introduced into the development culture.

The side-effects of this was a scarily buggy product, developers not being on the same page about central concepts of the product, design not being implemented uniformly between developers etc.
Just on their ideas alone they were able to raise a Series A round of $18.4 Million from A-list venture capitalists. I was blown away by that fundraising process. With a couple of handouts and some smooth talk from an obviously intelligent CEO, they were able to raise all that money. No product. No prototype. No mockups. Just ideas.
Why did he shop with the small company? Amazon marketplace could be anybody, even a private person just selling stuff for fun. If Amazon and Marketplace have the same item, it is a nobrainer to buy from Amazon directly. But maybe the marketplace offer is cheaper, or not available from Amazon. In that case by choosing the cheaper offer, I know that as a trade off the service will likely be worse.

But I agree that small businesses should not whine.
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Canonical doesn't give back? What about Debian? Do their changes propagate through those channels?
I think I can see why it turns into "you vs the world". Can you back up those broad claims?
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The bar for "lots" isn't that high with SQLite. The primary difference is that Postgres does Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), which allows readers to continue accessing the 'current' version of some data while the 'future' version is being written, and that Postgres' locking occurs at the row and table level. With SQLite, readers are locked out of the entire database while a write is occurring, and everyone else's cache is invalidated following a write.

Postgres may also be faster for non-trivial reads; it has more options open to it (hash joins versus sort-and-merge versus subqueries, for instance) and its planner does a pretty good job of selecting the right strategy.
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Some yummy changes; particularly the Wiki-like edit tracking.
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I don't know. At 17 I had been programming for 5-6 years, which is pretty normal for most decent coders I know.

In my experience, if someone does not have the mindset for coding (anal retentive, OCD, borderline autistic, you know the type ;)), then trying to make them is an excercise in frustration.

Maybe better to focus on the things you are good at, such as business development, marketing, sales and whatever else is crucial in a startup.