skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of his type get attracted to entrepreneurship because of the freedom of life that it 'offers'

Angel investor Dave Berkus talks about the "freedom dream", also, here (at the beginning of a 9:32 video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3-ozlr_fYM

.

I think there are the right reasons [that people become entrepreneurs] and the wrong reasons, and one of the things that I like to do is ferret out what those reasons are. So I have memories of, and stories of, entrepreneurs that I've asked that question to that suprised themselves when they had to answer it honestly, because usually people want to become an entrepreneur because of two things: they have a great idea, and they don't like the life they're in.

So they envision this idea bringing them into a new life, where either they or somebody else finances their way into success. And then success means lifestyle changes. Success means freedom. And that's the usual dream. And, in fact, you [angel investor Frank Peters] and I both know from our years of entrepreneurial experience that, first of all, the lifestyle of an entrepreneur typically means longer days by far. The point is that you often mortgage your home, and if you don't you know that you're at risk from personal guarantees, and if you add all of the extra stress, along with the personal guarantees and the extra hours, entrepreneurism isn't necessarily the panacea that people think it is when they're looking at a good idea and thinking it's time to go do it. ...

I look for passion. The whole thing gets down to passion. If they have that kind of passion, and the idea is good, then we move on to all the other more substantial things.
How about EC2? 1.7GB on their lowest virtual server - Works out at about $72~ per month I think?
tweak your apache configuration to see if that will fix your swapping problems. there are tons of articles on what you need to do to do this available online. sounds like you're just spawning a lot of children that are sticking around to fill up memory and swap space.

i had similar problems with a default config of apache on a 256 slice. if you tweak things correctly, you'll be fine.
You're paying quite a lot for a very weak VPS--compare at slicehost or linode. So your first step might should be to spend less for a more powerful server at one of the other VPS providers. OTOH, I'm not sure linode or slicehost even offer the kind of support package that you have paid for with midphase--you'd be on your own. OTOOH, if I read your post right you're paying midphase $130/month currently. You can get a whole lot of server for a lot less than that.

For some combination of Drupal's general heavy-weightness, lack of caching, slow server, your front page performance is sporadic and mostly very poor. I get times mostly in the 0.6 - 1.4 sec range just for loading the HTML, and that's with about 0.15 sec as the baseline for just loading a similar-sized static image from the site. I'm not a Drupal expert even a little, but if you could fully cache the front page (so that apache serves a static file directly) and update it, e.g., once every 10 min, you'd be flying, comparatively.

But about what's going on, I'd lay money it's all of the above: you have a low-resource server, drupal isn't fast/light by default and you haven't made it any better, you're not using any caching where it would really help. You should work on fixing all of those.
Rocket Racing League to leave environmentalists fuming?
That's the problem with Slicehost for me. I did sign up for a Slice, about a month ago, based on the reviews here. I spent three days trying to learn how to "make it go" and after some thought and cost/benefit analysis, decided against migrating over. Perhaps I should bite the bullet and spend a month learning sysadmin basics...
This is discussed in Jared Diamond's book "Collapse." (A good book, although winding.) A skewed sex-ratio was definitely one of the factors, but it would be foolish to say it was the only one. In fact, one of the theses of "Collapse" is that it is almost always a combination of multiple factors that leads to major changes in a society.
Same .. that's pretty awesome though. Unfortunately my cats only dwell in the following areas:

- Behind the fish tank in an attempt to catch a fish

- On the couch

- On our bed

- In the toilet because for some reason one of them loves tossing his toys in there and then fetching them out (Perhaps some training for the fish catching?)

Of course, such is the life of any apartment-dwelling cat
This is actually not so far fetched. A buy-sell agreement like this is not uncommon, but it's often structured where one founder can buy the other out at any time for any proposed amount... But MUST be willing to sell for the amount they are proposing to buy for. i.e. If you wanted to buy me out for $100, I can either sell for $100 or buy YOU out for $100. Fairly elegant.

In this case, however-- it doesn't seem like there's much value there if you're taking loans to pay people. If the company is in debt, you should offer to buy the company for the cost of the debt and perhaps (depending on how much he contributed before this lackluster year) give him a token % of equity (less than 3% if you're on a funding/liquidity path, less than 10% if it's more of a lifestyle/sustainable biz).

There are two sides, but from the way you describe it, he doesn't deserve much of anything.
I will be impressed with Ning's growth only when they start using the 'active user' metric. the spam/ghost town networks on Ning are a huge part of their "growth".
It also has the benefit of helping you to find your family if they and the cat ever get kidnapped by undesirables wanting to rob a bank - as in the film Firewall.
Steve Wozniak explains why the iPod will die
Right. And to call this "single child policy" is a nasty euphemism.
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Unlocked
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is here! Nokia’s first touch screen phone is among the company’s first devices to support Nokia’s “Comes With Music” service which offers one year of unlimited access to the entire Nokia Music Store catalog.
Cool web 2.0 app idea by theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson: Worldview Manager
> I, personally, would rather carry a little extra junk through an airport because I decided to include a backup shirt and slacks in case I spill some soup.

I once managed to make it through a meeting with a huge, gaping hole in the backside of the pair of pants I had on, caused by a spring poking through a chair. I think the client wondered why I was so attached to the bag I was carrying, but didn't say anything.

Carrying backup stuff is a good idea.
People who kill their own daughters for "economic" reasons stretch my ability to be non-judgmental.
The "Trying to Try"[1] post linked to early in this article has an answer to that: The slightest effort suffices to convince ourselves that we have done our best.

Work smarter and harder.

Couldn't you, in your head, convince yourself that you are working "harder", simply by imagining that you could work less hard than you currently are? Couldn't you do that, regardless of you current level of work? So does "work harder" even mean anything?

[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/trying-to-try.html
This was the bane of my existence at one point.
agreed. I have had to pack for trips for overnight, two weeks. a month, six weeks, six months, and same day. Get some durable, cheap luggage. I had great success at Tuesday Morning with a friend on the phone who was cross checking brands and prices on ebay. Got 4 matching pieces of very good luggagefor $400, less than the price of the rolling garmet bag of the set at a luggage store I had visited earlier in the day. Tuesday morning seems to be better than TJ Maxx. I'm sure there's some ecofriendly-no-child-labor-yet-low-cost boutique in San Fran, but I don't live in SF. Also, never buy a standard case bigger than 27". Anything bigger, when full, will be to heavy and the overweight fees outstrip the cost of buying a new bag.

I can travel indefinitely, as a military doc, with a week worth of casual civvies, a suit, a 'service dress' uniform, working uniforms, study materials, and 'doctor stuff' like whit coat, stethoscope, etc, with a folding garmet bag, a 25" rolling suitcase, and a standard messanger bag for carry on. Volume is about the same as a navy 'seabag' duffle. Tested over four- and six-week trips, doing laundry once a week.

My dad recently did 2 weeks in Japan with a folding garmet bag. A rolling folding garmet is definitely my go-to piece of luggage for city-to-city travel, flying or driving. For travel on ships, I recommend the seabag, as it takes very little room and can double as a backpack in a pinch. Obviously, if you're walking inland, your backpack can double as airport luggage. I tend to use an XL timbuk2 for overnighters.
http://articles.slicehost.com. A godsend.
Ok. I'm going to call the folks at ServInt and Linode and talk to them. I am concerned about migrating from one host to another as I've never done that before but I can figure it out.

I'm also going to look more into improving my site's performance. I have enabled Drupal's page caching, but I guess it's not doing much to help. I'll pursue that further.
We have a lot of articles at http://articles.slicehost.com which will walk you through a lot of typical server installations. Additionally, even though our service is unmanaged, we're usually in a campfire chat and will answer questions if we're able (and direct you toward the answer if we're not).
Scaling Hadoop to 4000 nodes at Yahoo
I'd ask them to clarify what they mean by a crash. Is it a system crash or is it Apache going out to lunch or is it something else? A "crash" can mean so many different things because it is somewhat vague. I've seen plenty of cases where if you press someone for a root cause of a "crash", they can't give it to you because they don't really know what went wrong. You've got to understand the problem before you can solve it or be sure what they are recommending makes sense. If you want some more input, feel free to e-mail me.
I second the suggestions to make a list of necessities, so you don't forget them . . . next time.
How to make updates enjoyable
In this process you are highly likely to lose either your "friendship" or your business.

Given OPs description of the situation, I would put both of those terms in quotes, if not both at very least the business parts.

If he is losing money, lending money and his only option "getting out" is spending even more, I'd say he has a "business", not a business.
- it has iCal, LaTeX, HTML export
- you can customize the rules for these
- you can write your own (rudimentary "plugin architecture")
Couple quick things for Drupal:

Do you have Optimize CSS files (CSS file aggregation) enabled?

Do you have Caching mode (Normal) enabled?

Cheers
How about asking here if anyone is a Drupal/apache shark and is willing to help you tune your site and migrate to Slicehost?

You could maybe offer to pay for (some of) the help with a sponsored link on your site. That could be reasonably attractive to a Chicago-based contractor with a low pipeline.
Yes and yes.

I'm also using the blockcache module for most of my blocks and have js aggregation switched on (though I have to omit tinymce and a few other js files in order for them to work).
Most companies lose money while doing the development period, prior launch. The revenue model is clean.
and export to several blog engines.
One of the saddest stories of the 20th century is the fate of air travel.
I agree with most of the above. Move to a more cost effective host, optimize your Apache server, and use page caching in Drupal. I think it's as simple as a checkbox in the settings somewhere, but it's been a few months since I've worked with Drupal.

http://drupal.org/getting-started/6/admin/settings
The manual says caching is under the Performance section and it's disabled by default.
From what you've said, I doubt host swapping is a good idea - yet. First you need to get a good understanding of what's causing the system to run out of memory. One way to do this is to watch vmstat and top when the system is failing, or to install one of many system monitoring packages.

From what you've stated, I'll take a stab at what's going on. Apache processes are big, from a memory usage standpoint. A single Apache + mod_php could use 25 MB or more. If you have a dozen or more requests that hit at once -- or processes that are feeding slow clients -- blam, you've run out of memory.

One solution is to switch to lighttpd, nginx, or another webserver with a smaller footprint. Here a single process (or small set) serves a pool of PHP processes. But that's a bunch of work for a guess at what's going wrong.

Instead, try running nginx as a proxy in front of Apache, and let it spoonfeed slow clients. It's likely you will not need to change Drupal at all, and make only minor changes to Apache to do this. A good description is here: http://blog.kovyrin.net/2006/05/18/nginx-as-reverse-proxy/
FastCGI and mod_xcache? Made all the difference on a couple of TYPO3 (PHP CMS) site I've run.
Move your static files to a different subdomain / host or vhost. (AWS?)

Turn Keep-Alive Off. (If you're site doesn't have tightly packed multiple requests). The default is 15 seconds, I saw a 50% speed increase when I disabled this.
Set MaxRequestsPerChild to 500, in case your code is leaking.
Ok.

ahem

Is anyone a Drupal/apache shark and willing to help me tune my site and migrate to Slicehost?

We were featured on the HuffingtonPost, the Freakonomics blog, Playboy.com and numerous other "name" sites last week. Would be happy to discuss price or a link.
After every outage I receive an automated e-mail telling me that httpd has failed on my VPS. The way this usually works is I notice the site goes down. It comes back up 8-10 minutes later and I find another e-mail in my inbox saying that apache failed and has restarted.
Why did you only setup a single year of vesting? My understanding is that angels don't like it when you are vested more than 40% when you are seeking financing.

Obviously looking backwards isn't going to solve the problem.

Can both of you take a week off from work and get a change of scenery? That might give a fresh perspective.

If he leaves with a 50% stakes it sounds like you are going to be in a world of hurt. :(
You may be surprised. I was pretty sure our cat would have to be convinced to wear it, but he took it without any complaints. It works surprisingly well. We were able to discover that our cat had a friend we didn't know about:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/pictures/catcam.jpg
I agree. However this might not be as effective as one would expect if you usually realize your mistake only once you're past the point of no-return.

In other words, if you know your mail won't be sent right away, will that delay the background, subconscious mental process of analysing your actions to see if you screwed up?
The seedling of the inspiration of Facebook?
First, you should know that many types of caching will increase your memory usage, not decrease it. The whole point of a cache is to use fast storage (RAM) to keep a local copy of data that would be slower to retrieve from its persistent source (filesystem or DB).

Second, 384 MB just isn't much memory for a medium-traffic Drupal site. I would recommend at least a gig of memory, and perhaps more if you use plugins heavily. Drupal is neither particularly lean nor blazingly fast, so you're going to need a lot of Apache listeners working to handle that load, with each process probably consuming 30-50 MB of RAM.

Third, you're right to think that you need someone on-call who knows Apache, Drupal, and database tuning and configuration inside and out. A $60/mo. support package isn't going to do it, though. If you think about it, that's really only paying for an hour or two of tech time each month, so expecting to get 24/7 interactive performance tuning and optimization for free along with your support contract is pretty unreasonable. Put a performance guru on retainer, and establish an SLA with them if necessary to maintain your site uptime.

Finally, opening >30 tickets in less than a week is not the best way to get quality support. It's like the stereotypical impatient kid on a road trip, asking "are we there yet?" over and over again.

My suggestion would be for your to find an experienced LAMP admin who is willing to manage your hosting for you, and pay them a reasonable fee for doing so.
Garage chemistry used to be a rite of passage for geeky kids... not anymore
ELottery
At least this way of syndicating you know that no one like your so called friends or work colleagues is going to run off with all the winnings! (like you hear in the papers!)
Startup venture with a fulltime job
How many of you are doing both, and think that its possible to do justice to both? Though I am referring to early stage ventures. At a later stage, you have to decide though one way or the other.
Is he the only developer?
I'm surprised to hear that. My apps all use relatively simple js, so I have no experience one way or the other personally. But I'm curious to hear what these "other constraints" are?
(make sure you know HTML)(heres a good cheat sheet
http://www.webmonkey.com/reference/HTML_Cheatsheet
)
im 13, i know it. the best way is to learn it here
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/javascript/
go thru it all
then think up ideas for scripts and try them.

these are wat i did (you may not know enof from that site)
-a personal greeter- a form that lets people write thier name is a box clik a button and it displays a greeting w/ thier name included in it
- a coin flip script.- that displays a RANDOM heads or tails alert
-a dice roll script- that display a RANDOM number 1-6
-any of your ideas

Simple as that =]
___Jasello___
Not particularly shocking -- which is exactly the point.

Of course its amazingly easy now to make connections looking backwards. But I do think that it is safe to say that there are plenty of working systems/services that people are okay with, but who's full potential is masked by mediocrity.
We've each written substantial code on the project, but he is substantially better an it than I am.

I would have a hard time launching solo, and would probably need to bring in additional help.
It is getting easy to break anonymous datasets with mining:

Netflix: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105
AOL: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/07/aol-this-was-a-screw-up...
~~~sorry bout the repeat~~~
Rendering and DOM. For example, setting the position and size of a div.

The difference is dramatic: Webkit is probably an order of magnitude faster than Gecko right now. And as far as I can tell, JS has nothing to do with it. (In fact the most intensive JS code we have runs slower in V8 than in IE7, which is bizarre, but doesn't matter because it's no bottleneck.)
I must be misunderstanding something, because I thought that the problem you noted was that they wouldn't see the open source version on a shopping comparison. Wouldn't the same problem apply to shareware?

It depends on what market you are thinking of, ie. where they would see (or not see) the offering. I thought you meant physical retail outlets. What did you have in mind?
i am doing both, and think its possible to do justice to both. the issue that quickly arises is that progress on your startup will be slower than if you were doing it full time. which is obvious, of course, but it needs to be said, especially if time is of the essence.
I was in very similar situation.

My friend and I had 50% each. I appreciate him a lot but he was unable to contribute. I was doing 85% of the work and he was doing about 15%. I sat down with him, I told him I was worried. I proposed a new agreement. 75% me and 25% him. It was a good deal for him. It was also a good deal for me, I kept his friendship and I owned something more inline with my investment.
Old Time Penny Rug Patterns and Vintage Penny Rugs
Penny rugs are so fun to make, but you can buy vintage ones too. Folkart designs are exquisit
I think you should find out why he's not as motivated to work on the company both of you started. If you can't figure it out on your own, then ask him. Even if you (or both of you) decide to split, you will need to know for the next time.

It sounds like you are effectively a manager. Most of the comments here have leaned towards what he did wrong. It's uncomfortable, but you should evaluate what you've done wrong as well. It hurts now, but your projects are more likely to succeed in the future.
Early stage, I think it's possible, though difficult. I did both for about 8 months before going full-time on the startup. A lot of early-stage tasks (market research, prototyping, learning the technologies you'll be using) can be done part-time before you quit your job.

Long term, I think you're really screwing your startup by trying to do it part time. It's not just a matter of speed. There's a qualitative difference between the work you can do when you devote all your attention to it, and the work you can fit around your day job. Most products need the former in order to solve a real need.
We've also got a great community of people on our forums (http://forum.slicehost.com) and our IRC channel #slicehost on Freenode.
If the economy tanks, will subscriptions become a panacea?
Bernanke Signals Fed May Cut Rates as Crisis Deepens
"4 gigabit ethernet uplinks from each rack to the core (unfortunately a misconfiguration, we usually do 8 uplinks)"

Whoops!
That's nothing, three days ago I quoted Card Captor Sakura and no one called me on it.
Ah, well, I studied at an IIT too, (Madras [Ganga] 98-02 shoutout! :) ) and I do agree that the pressure to jump examination hurdles is rather intense, but this again is a case of striving for very conventional goals, and for a limited period of time.

How many have kept up the effort, after getting through (or not)?

As I said before, a conventional trajectory passing through a marriage in the mid-twenties, is also one that makes the uptake of risk (and consequently effort) much harder in life. I keep bringing up risk because effort without the possibility of significant success is rather pointless. And without risky opportunities that afford that kind of success, people reach for the cruise control after just-enough.

Malthusian scarcity should reward and select for effort, ( and also voluntary birth control and later marriage) as it did in the period right before Industrial England (([1] ; descriptive review: [2])), but, in India, it strangely doesn't! Predestiny, passivity, and fatalism, all predate socialist India. Our mythology reflects this.

I do agree that we are turning a new chapter and we are host to a whole new set of cultural ideas, but the numbers aren't, unfortunately, high enough. Yes, while about 300 million people, are (or were in 2001) technically urban, 50 million are slum dwellers; I'd wager that only a tiny slice is literate enough to accept cultural transmissions.

Still, I hope that this tiny slice of a humongous pie proves to be big enough....

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princet...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?pagewa...
Why Digg Should Buy StumbleUpon
check out http://novanix.com/

I realize the website looks shady as all hell. But we use them for EVERYTHING and we've never had a problem. Their support is also top notch. Usually answers+fixes <30 mins.
Seriously? If we manage to turn space travel into a "mundane chore", I'll be very happy indeed.
Better yet, set Keep-Alive to something very low (1 or 2), so that when users load a page, any initial assets can still reuse the same connection, but you'll still drop the connection quickly to serve other users.
"One of the saddest stories of the 20th century is the fate of air travel."

Or the Holocaust.

Or Stalin murdering 10 million folks.

Certainly one of those three.
20lbs (9kg) seems pretty light for a long hike - unless this is just baseline travel gear and you're not counting food, water, tent.
On a seemingly unrelated note, "Happiness is only real if shared." - Christopher McCandless