skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great for coming up with ideas of how to intrigue the press about your startup. Anyone got other ideas for getting more attention?
For the purpose of getting into med school, as long as you take the pre-med requirements, you are better off majoring in anything but biology.
That's what I'm taking away from it. They put out a job listing for an employee, but are expecting that person to have the attitude of a partner.
Databases became an integration point about 30 years ago, when Oracle ported their DB to every platform in sight, and standardized on SQL as a a way to integrate across heterogeneous hardware environments.

I agree with this blog post, but this is clearly a problem that comes up all the time. My question is: what approaches to abstract data models has the industry already developed to deal with these problems of schema change and so on? I have a feeling it's pretty big business.

Also, web services repeat the problem of schema brittleness, because they have a schema... if that changes, it ripples through all the services that use it.

EDIT that is, unless you can automatically regenerate the entire service, based on the schema - this is cool and works for some cases (eg. forms), and it seems to be the direction the industry is headed (as a no-coding solution, with many benefits: no tedium, no errors, no expensive/unruly expert developers).

BTW: the blog author (Mike Arace) is also the developer of the (free) software he's promoting (CodaServer). I have no problem with that, it's an interesting article. Perhaps that's why he didn't mention alternatives.
http://18thstreetsoftware.com/aboutus.php
Performance Tuning Mysql for Load
From the creator - the History of SkiFree
Now I am truly confused. Is this more humor I don't understand? Err, well, SwellJoe above identified me as a man and I said I wasn't. What am I missing?
Tying a candidate's desire for more pay with the decline the US economy is...um...creative. And saying "I do not want to know you" to candidates you deem to be greedy is disingenuous, considering that you're starting a company presumably to make money, right?

While I can understand wanting to be frugal, I still don't see how paying rates that most engineers would consider mediocre will attract the top candidate you presumably want as an early hire.
The silver lining in this crunch: Wall Street will return to IPOs
Use this nginx module: http://www.grid.net.ru/nginx/upload.en.html

It is highly scalable and spools the uploads to disk and does the mime parsing in efficient nginx C code> then once it finishes it just passes some params to your backend processes with the location of the file on disk and you can process it however you want.
It uses a lot of info, including the who you've replied to (and who has replied to you). That alone requires authentication, IIRC.
Classmates.com User Sues; Schoolmates Weren't Really Looking for Him
Let's see. Stored procs, ORM, web-tiered business-logic, functional code

Use tiers or abstraction to separate changing layers.

I hate to dismiss it as simply a plug for the author's product, but heck, it ain't like this is a new problem. Why buy yet another product to add into the stack? Programming languages and tools are made to solve this kind of stuff as part of their job.
Nice analogy to Pulp Fiction writers.

Another way to get attention is to include names of prominent companies in the hopes that it will trigger 'news alerts'.

Obviously, this needs to be done in a manner that makes sense within the context of your release.
Actually, I've found that any merchant worth doing business with generally accepts American Express. I've been using mine for years and my "Visa backup" hasn't been charged in the past year or so. AMEX is easily the best credit card company with the most perks and amazing customers service. I would be quite unhappy if they went out of business.
If I were your investor, I would be worried by the following:

1) 2 biz dev guys, one UI guy, one dev doesn't sound right for an early stage company trying to build something

2) This post makes you look judgmental and emotional - two traits that don't really work well for a leader

3) Your post also shows that you're not listening - you insist that anyone who wants a better rate is greedy, and is the cause for the downfall of the American economy. Drawing this conclusion after the feedback received from Auston's previous post seems inflexible.

4) The team is hiring outside for a technical hire. This could be because a) you don't know any good people or b) good people don't want to work with you. Neither sounds great.
The no was just to get confirmation of what I said. I read about it somewhere a while back but wasn't too sure if it was biased. My point was that it wasn't just walking away with the 8M and that he had to fight tooth and nail for it.

I agree that the interdisciplinary background is best to have but it's even more important to go out into the real world and use those skills. Philip was able to learn how to deal with MBAs by dealing with MBAs - might have been even better than getting an MBA.

Maybe the purpose of the MBA is to just get you accepted by the other MBA types which are in the higher level positions.
For a small team user of pivotal tracker, I can say with confidence that pivotal tracker will be much much better than google docs. I've used pivotal tracker on various projects ranging from 2-3 people total. Pivotal tracker is almost like a very simple todo list that you can tag & rearrange with dates. If you're going to write a list of items to do, you might as well just use pivotal tracker.
Agreed - the assertions without sources caused me to question the entire article.

"80% of families didn't buy a book last year." Doubt it.
Sorry for replying to the root, this thread is kind of a mess, with stuff scattered everywhere. Here's what I think:

What you're asking to do is very hard for anything beyond simple static page retrievals. Tiny mistakes in schema design (let alone architecture) could make or break your site.

Get expert architecture help:

If there's no way for you to start small and make mistakes early, your best bet is to find some knowledgeable people, say 3-5 that have professional or large open source scaling experience. Ask them to NDA if you must, but they won't be able to help you unless you can give them all of the details. Solicit their opinions for architecture, and try to reconcile the dissenting opinions about any given technology to see if anyone is off base. Proper architecture could take this from a seven figure hardware expenditure down to a five figure one.

Get commercial support for your hardware and software:

Once you have a rough idea how you'll do it, you'll want to engage good support from any vendors possible. When you're starting small you can just install Ubuntu, apt-get install mysql and get to work, but at millions of hits per hour you may well start to uncover unusual things involving bad hardware, hardware/kernel, or kernel/userland interaction -- likewise with any DB or other userland software. I would say expect to buy tier 1 hardware, an OS with a support contract, and support for any major software component as well. This isn't a very web 2.0 formula, but you're buying expertise that is focused on your solution.

Other things:

1) Sharding isn't a magic bullet but depending on how your data is laid out (specifically what data is not local to other data) it could totally save your bacon here. One box (or a standard three tier architecture) probably wouldn't even have a chance.

2) SSDs aren't ready yet, IMO. Due to the fact that failure is write cycle count related and not heat/time related, they're not suitable (at this time) for use in RAID systems. I've read reports of SSDs in RAIDs that die in such a tight timespan that you can't get the first one rebuilt before the second one dies.

Good luck. It sounds like a really cool project.
Catching up with the 'internet pimps'
so for the most part i don't think i can answer in detail, but in public situations hi5's response has been that they have a dedicated pool of servers running the upload, and they store the file on a static server. once that server fills up, they provision a new one. i will call this the viking image upload process, as its like a viking burial process. each one of those images is then buffered by a CDN.

i should point out that hi5 has more photo uploads per day than flickr does.
That link redirects. This one seems not to:

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/6/0/600/600.txt?a=b
By "implemented," he means "Added `CTO` to Obama logo"

By "launched," he means "Signed up for UserVoice"

It's not a bad idea, but the title makes the entire thing feel extremely pathetic.
They're looking for "employee number zero". First person involved who isn't a founder (isn't in the room when the idea is created), but takes on founder level risk and should expect greater than usual equity and compensation somewhere between that of a founder and an employee.

Something screams poor execution: confused goals (they're talking about "getting real" - a 37 signals type philosophy of building a sustainable small business - but are acting like they're built with the intention of an exit, expecting people to work for equity), getting an office before they can truly afford, lack of the right connections to find the person I've mentioned the first paragraph (without resorting to the Internet equiv of newspaper's classifieds page)

They're also doing enterprise software/SaaS - yet it's not clear that their "biz-dev" guys have any "sales engineering" experience (that's what makes or breaks an enterprise product). Along this angle, what's even more ironic is that they're asking the prospective employees to sell themselves short! What's the guarantee that such an employee won't do the same to their software/service (and yes, an early stage engineer will be involved in the sales/support process)?
I know for a fact that google uses this internally for a bunch of their products.... so i'm fairly certain it's decently secure.
Climbing out though. This was a lot less creepy than I expected from the description.
Chatta med singlar
Träffa tjejer och killar och chatta med på en chattsida i Sverige. Chat har blivit mycket populärt de senaste åren.
Yeah, how many 'greedy' devs could you fund with just the bonuses of one 'greedy' wall street guy? My guess is that the devs are pretty much a drop in the 'greedy' bucket.
Dunno... The various Native American cultures have always fascinated me.
Why not use the angel money to extend your runway and then hire only once you have product/market fit and some indication that your revenue model works? You'll have a better bargaining position with both investors and employees then, and won't be wasting an employee's time if you fail.
Hmmm. Start here: the "threat" is that people will set up businesses offering rides to people full-time. Those people are, in fact, nothing less than unlicensed cab companies. Now, let's go with:

* There's an official definition for what a "fare" is, and cab drivers can't change it in the middle of a trip.

* Cab drivers lose their medallions if they drive people around in circles to rack up fares.

* Cab drivers lose their medallions if they randomly drop people off halfway to their destination.

* The insurance requirements for cab drivers are much more strict than for noncommercial drivers.

* Cab drivers are more stringently licensed than normal drivers; in fact, with "P2P car service", there's no incentive to be licensed at all. Reckless driving is a huge problem with urban cab drivers.

* Taxis themselves are inspected for safety, and cab companies risk their licensing by fielding cabs with bald tires and fucked up brakes.

There are two obvious reasons why you'd want to be careful about using the Internet to route around taxi regulation:

* There is no incentive whatsoever for "P2P car services" to follow safety, insurance, and fair business practice rules, because a bad actor can simply re-register their car with a new account.

* The P2P system cannibalizes the regulated taxi system, which offer far more consumer protections.

That's a start. I don't think it's crazy at all --- though again, I'm not arguing that this Internet service should be outlawed.
NOT A GOOD SYLLOGISM.
Talk about digging a deeper hole.

So now programmers are all overpaid eh?
I don't want to open the whole debate again, but I see something really wrong with non tech people starting a company and then expecting to be able to hire a few code monkeys to build the product.
The product should come first IMHO - team of hackers working day+night.
Skinned? By skinned you mean uploaded a logo and changed the background color. That is how all UserVoice sites look like.
Maybe this whole "overpaying developers" mentality wasn't around when I was freelancing because if I actually had $100 for every time someone wanted me to make them a website for $100 I'd be rich by now.

The correct response to the "bad" cover letter in the first place was "ignore it." That would have saved everybody a lot of time.
I know the wash-out rate at my school -- just during the "freshmen engineering" program was 50%. The next year, the wash out rate was 25%.

They don't want airline safety / nuclear reactor controls / bridges devices made by D students. And the best way to ensure that's going to happen is make the person really really really want to call himself an engineer. Its far easier to be a a liberal arts major and convince two girls to follow you back to your place.
The most important aspect of the regulated taxi market to the status quo is that all the fares are set the same, preventing competition on price/quality. Also, medallions are rationed, ensuring that the supply of cabs is always heavily utilized. The demand always outstrips supply on weekend nights and rainy days, but the market cannot adjust to meet it.

You could make an argument for the licensing of any profession. In practice, most markets get by with some basic safety regulations and reputation incentives. The licensing only serves to stifle competition and innovation.
No, but it's funny that the compatibility pane suggests that since it sits on top of Oracle and MySQL you have access to your data... by integrating your normal apps at the database?
I read through all this and am thankful that I've reached a level of experience and wisdom where life is always tempered a bit.

Youth rocks, but sometimes it rocks hard enough that you can end up hurting yourself in a very real way.
Spam 'mother ship' shut down in U.S.
does anyone else think the hairless one looks like kevin spacey?
Jeeez, guys. Take it easy.

A job is a package-- money, equity, work/life balance, autonomy, authority, etc.

I personally agree that they might be a bit "penny wise, pound foolish" here - you have to spend money to succeed, and saving 10-40k on your first hire might be a really bad idea.

That being said, there are plenty of people out there (somewhere between naive and idealistic) who would happily dive into a startup for much lower cash compensation for the other benefits (whether they are equity or less tangible). There are also plenty of just-graduated wunderkind who might have the chops they are looking for but not the experience to command a monster salary.

And look hard at geography here: http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=php+javascript+css%0D%0A&l=...
(check the salary estimate on the left)

At the end of the day, these guys clearly made some missteps. They should change their tune a bit. But try to treat them like you'd want to be treated when you (publicly) screw up with your venture.
we have a whole system in place for analyzing the email headers and determining that you are who you say you are. Arrington challenged people to spoof his site and it worked well. He still uses our site today: http://techcrunch.posterous.com/
Does anyone else read the URL as

Get Real, Ordie

I kept thinking Ordie was a pretty neat name.
two parts cool, one part creeeepy
I'll actually be graduating soon from an engineering program, and myself and all of my classmates face the same issues. Some have been offered lucrative careers in tech, some in consulting, some in management, and some are considering MBAs.

The answer? Because some of us actually like tech. There are two types of people who join engineering: those who have been doing it in some amateur form or another for years, and those who are in it because they had nothing else better to do, and it seemed like an ok bet.

The former won't be attracted by an MBA, because they enjoy being in the trenches, working out the difficult technical problems. They derive thrill out of the act of engineering, and that's why they are there.

The latter will inevitably go for an MBA, or go work at some bank in the vain hope that someone will notice him and promote him to day trader status (believe me, many engineering grads work at banks precisely for this reason). They have no real interest nor attachment to engineering, and will simply go for whatever pays the most.

I think the belief that all MBAs are just frat-boy do-nothing is sour grapes. That being said, I do believe that the industry and investors in general have altogether too much faith in MBAs and pure-management types. The company my father works for had its engineer-CEO retire a couple of years ago, and investors replaced him with a pure manager - someone with no engineering expertise, and is a "pure" business type. The company is floundering, selling off assets, and generally in a miserable state. To me the concept of letting non-experts in the company's field manage the company is downright insane, but yet people do it on a daily basis. If you run an engineering company, for God's sake hire a CEO who's an engineer.
Most rational people probably agree that the medallion caps should be lifted; they were a deliberate attempt to stifle competition during the Depression. So, fix that problem. It's not a strong argument for deregulating taxi service. The regulated taxi service has huge problems as-is without making rules impossible to enforce:

* Taxi drivers tend to be unsafe drivers

* Taxi drivers tend to rip off their customers

* Taxi drivers tend to drive unsafe vehicles

There are so many cabs on the road, it's infeasible to address this problem car by car. One thing the medallion system does is to try to inject some accountability into the market, so that there's more to lose for being a scofflaw than just one car.

Note also that there's apparently a trend towards leasing medallions on a per-shift basis instead of in long-term leases, and that trend --- which is a step towards deregulation --- correlates with a decline of compliance and and increase in service complaints.

Whether or not I believe we should outlaw shadow cab dispatcher services, I think it's easy to make the argument that there's a real risk that they will hurt cab service for most people in the long run. But I mean, as long as they keep them out of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, I don't really care.
If people setup businesses offering rides full-time and those businesses perform better than cab companies or buses, who cares? If the business is full of drivers (or just a driver) who doesn't follow fair business practices it's not going to be successful. Sure, they may trick a couple people, but it won't take long for them to be shunned.

If such a company existed that could get me from A to B at half the cost of a regular cab and they had a decent reputation, I'd use 'em. Hell, I wouldn't even care if the vehicles had been inspected recently; I can wear a seat belt.

Who knows if it would even be a viable business; maybe none of the companies would do a good enough job vetting drivers or provide enough protection to get enough business, but the market should be allowed to decide that, not a bus company. If "Bob's Taxi" existed, I wouldn't care, so long as they weren't outright lying. If they said, "Hey, we don't have as many consumer protections or regulation as regular cabs but we're cheaper." I would have no problem with that at all.
According to the report Reading At Risk, 56.6% of the adult population read at least one book. Thus for that 80% statistic to be true, the majority of those who read a book would have either had to get it from the library, a friend, or have already owned it.
This is not a system I can "grow into", it must be capable of this performance from the very beginning.

I would suggest you load test extensively and make load testing a part of your development process from the get-go. Initially, I would load test to evaluate approaches and estimate hardware needs. As you develop, I would use load test each version and ultimately simulate a real world scenario before letting it loose. Rather than speculating, you can actually know what approaches work best, and have some guarantee the live system will work as required.
The only self-employed engineer I know is actually not an engineering grad, but a high school dropout who has an unusually keen skill in network security, and is rolling in massive amounts of money consulting for small-to-mid-sized traditional businesses, a one man shop.

Anecdotes can always be countered by anecdotes.

You are what you make of yourself.
Yeah. For real engineers, and not just computer programmers, I would say none of those are true. Unless we're reading Wired during the dot.com era, where any yuppie anywhere could do anything via laptop and internet.

Seriously tho:

-Real Engineers are often professionally licensed. Sometimes they have to get certified in every state they operate in. Some require a minimum of 5 years of experience before you can even apply for them.

--Real Engineers use software that often doesn't play well with laptops. VLSI/VHDL apps come to mind at first. Huge PSpice sims come next. AutoCAD and all that come next. Run into issues like needing to have a license server, or hardware dongle. And some of those special engineering programs cost $25,000/license. Not free in any sense of the word.

--Real engineers -- civil engineers I'm looking at you -- are not extremely active and passionate. They are punch clock engineers. Even in undergrad civil engineers are known as 9 to 5 engineers. Being home every night to kiss your wife is apparently one of those awesome job perks in a field that's barely changed in 30 years (i'm specifically singling out highway development in civil engineering here. This isn't meant to be flamebait.)

--Real engineers often need real budgets. Which is why governments or large corporations pay for us. With government, there's a chance you might need a security clearance. No more international travel unless its cleared with the state department.

The real truth is you become an engineer to solve the really hard problems that nobody else thinks about. Like how man will colonize Mars. Or what we're going to do with all these mountains of garbage piling up. Or what's the cheapest way we can deal with nuclear waste that doesn't involve dumping it into the ocean. Or how do we effectively managing the supply chain of a nuclear power plant so it can turn a profit (this is one I'm proud to say I've tackled.). How do we get military goods from one side of the world to another on a daily basis?

You have to want it.
Ask HN: Review my startup -- Wedding Registry Direct
You ever tried to recruit employee #1-3? I have. I have a pretty rich network (including the extended network you get being funded by YC, a VC firm, and a mess of pretty top-tier angels). We all worked our networks pretty hard (and ultimately hired out of 'em) but we also posted the job in a few places (and found some amazing candidates).

Very very few people in your network ultimately have the stones to make the leap into the uncertainly of an early stage startup (even a well-funded one). I imagine it gets MUCH harder in Boca Raton, FL and even harder in these particular economic times.

And, expanding a team does NOT equal technical incompetence. It could mean that they have an ambitious problem they are tackling. Or that they have a line of customers out the door and want to accelerate development.

Seriously-- they fucked up-- but at least they're trying. Cut 'em some slack and stop assuming the worst.