skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see how that relates to the grandparent post. I think the parent post is saying that a world in which cabs can only called by smartphone and can no longer be hailed in person would exclude some people and you are saying that some people who want to form cab companies are being prevented from do so. I imagine for the most part these are two separate sets of people.
Alan Kay is a brilliant guy, but I really wish he could open his mouth without shooting it off. In particular -- to speak to my own domain -- he bleats about "feature creep" in an operating system with absolutely no demonstrated understanding for a modern OS. Is KVM "feature creep"? Is ZFS? Is DTrace? He shows not so much as an ounce of understanding for why these things exist or empathy with those for whom they were created. I have great reverence for history (and Kay and I share an intense love for the B5000[1]), but I also think it's a mistake to romanticize the past. Viz., when he wistfully recalls the Unix kernel having "1,000 lines of code", he can only be talking about Sixth Edition: even by Seventh Edition (circa 1979!), the kernel had (conservatively) over ten times that amount.[2] And this is still a system that lacked a VM system and TCP/IP stack -- and tossed if you created the 151st process![3] If he wants to criticize the path that history has taken, fine -- but when he is so ignorant of the specifics of that path, it's very hard to treat him as anything but a crank, albeit an eminent one.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010407

[2] http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7

[3] newproc() in http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/sys/sys/...
Apparently their pricing is $0.10 per GB per month, so the same issue. The only other option they gave is going dedicated but we really want to avoiding having to manage a dedicated server.
eh, this is amortized O(1) and you are almost guaranteed slow lookups for a large number of requests.

don't confuse true O(1) with amortized ;)
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Do you have a source for that? I've heard that the recycling company that Apple uses in fact does not recycle the newer "glued models".
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Mongrel did.
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Why do you people find it necessary to comment on stuff you do not understand at all ?

This is 2012, it would take me about 1 day to provide you with a working twitter viewer that is 100% cachable and for which all tweets are cachable too. All that requires is a one page app for the viewer, and ajax calls for tweets to view like api/tweets/978486971987169876 which will be cachable for everyone.

Content size matters a whole lot because it linearly dictates the size of your server pool. Serving a million small udp packets is pretty standard for any quake server. Serving a million youtube videos is another story.
US Law Enforcement Sought Mobile User Data More Than 1.3 Million Times in 2011
Nice to know, but I bet It won't be used widely soon, no matter if it works or not. Medicine wants keep cancer pacients alive, not cure them. Curing is not profitable. If they (and people themselves) wanted us not to be sick, almost nobody would be.
Wait, see my comment below. Twitter received 15B (yes, B) API calls/day last July. How does that compare to your typical email client?

I don't want to argue that Twitter is astoundingly hard, but serving ~170K requests/sec can't really be that trivial, even if they're 160 bytes (they're not, since Twitter sends metadata, logs those messages, tracks service metrics, etc. for those messages)
Well, to be fair, MySQL has a storied history of implementing 95% of a feature, calling it good enough, and shipping it.

And while, as a Postgres user, my tone here may be a little snide, I also say this with grudging respect: I think there is a point at which implementing n% of a feature X and calling it X (rather than MaybeX or MostlyX) does give you some momentum and practical compatibility that you wouldn't have otherwise. Is it dishonest to hide the limitations regarding the edge cases in some documentation no one will read? Maybe. But will providing the feature solve more problems than it causes? Quite possibly.

I don't agree with MySQL's decision with respect to UTF-8, but I do understand it.
If you don't have a controll to transform github event into tweet The body in RSS is much longer then 140 symbols. You would need to parse it, normalize it and only then generate a tweet body. And you need a full featured programming language support to do that.

Also, you need at least several days to setup all types of github events with edge cases.

Believe me, this is not an option if you want things look really good.
"What's this with wanting two monitors? I say you share one with someone else. Think of the money we'll save!"
You can't really pirate in-app purchases as far as I know, just the main game. And since that one is free, piracy should be irrelevant.
You know what I love? Waiting a tiny eternity while a city employee waits for their crappy, slow computer to load up a simple form so they can help me with something routine.

Next time you're put on hold for that reason, remember money spent on appropriately powerful hardware is never wasted.
Alright, sorry for the confusion. Our commercial offering (SpaceBase) is very much targeted at MMOs and real-time LBSs. However, like many start-ups we really do like building cool stuff. And while it indeed the case that Galaxy will soon be a offered as a component of SpaceBase, it is has a very different design from other memory-grid projects/products, so we decided to open-source it to the community and let it explore other possible uses.

My post was meant to be an introduction to a series of very technical blog posts discussing theoretical and practical aspects of distributed systems. The post was not meant to serve a clear commercial purpose, so I was trying to steer the discussion away from commercial uses and more to its CS aspects. You know, we really find this stuff interesting. Some of my future posts will discuss the more theoretical sides of Galaxy and will drill very deeply into its design and algorithms, while others will discuss how SpaceBase will make use of Galaxy to help MMOs build huge, rich worlds, and LBSs track lots of moving objects in real-time. To be more concrete and give just a taste, I'll say this: when SpaceBase runs on top of Galaxy, objects are transferred from one node to another to create a dynamic area-of-responsibility for each node. This means that each node will be responsible for processing all objects in some region of the game world (or real world for LBSs). But the regions are dynamic - namely, they shrink and grow to accommodate non-uniform load, so that small busy areas will be split over several nodes, while large, relatively vacant ones will be handled by just one.
Horrible comparison.

* For one, choosing a "random laptop off of Dell's small business" is not the equivalent of a MBP.

* Second, your choice of power benchmark is ridiculous. FTA: "Before we mention the battery life of the Precision M4600, it's important to point out that our review unit came equipped with the Intel Core i7-2920XM Extreme Edition processor." And based on the source's graph[1] they are dead last by a significant amount. Are you sure you chose this "randomly?"

* Third, choosing a laptop slightly more comparable, hell, even if it's not as comparable, will yield significantly better battery life. The ThinkPad Edge [2] ranges from 7.4-5.7 hours; The T series can go up to 16 hours on a 9-cell battery [3] and the X series with up to 23 hours.

* As for price, Lenovo is near the same price range at around $179/9-cell battery.

The word "exorbitant" may not be completely qualified here, but the prices are neither decent nor cheap.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/Ucep7.png -- Don't want to take their bandwidth.

(Shortened lenovo links below since they were really big. No referral nonsense in there, I promise.)

[2] http://lnv.gy/N0mufz

[3] http://lnv.gy/cVtbKt

[4] http://lnv.gy/dBYhVr
Your assumptions are laughable. Tweets have considerable metadata that pushes them far beyond 160 bytes. Fragmenting this into a secondary object is counterproductive due to the constant factor of 2 requests vs one larger payload.

Someone who's been around the block a few times understands that it's difficult to make pronouncements without informed observation. That you are not willing to extend twitter's engineering staff the benefit of the doubt considering your lack of visibility into their measurements speaks loudly.
Understanding Algorithms and their Role in Web Promotion
I just did a quick eBay search, and you can get a genuine battery for that particular Dell model well under $80. And as with most Dells, you can probably replace it yourself (which was my main point). Replacing the battery in the MacBook is 2.5 times the price of replacing the battery in the Dell.

And what if the SSD or memory is not large enough anymore for your needs? (Which often happens after a few years of use.) In most other laptops and non-Retina display MacBook Pro's one can replace them at market prices. Not so with the new retina display MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, etc.

A friend of mine recently asked a quote for upgrading memory in his (pre-aluminium) Mac Mini, it was over 200 Euro. The market value of the memory was 40 Euro.

Edit: I would like to add that I am a happy Mac user. But I think Apple is rapidly moving into the wrong direction with their changes to rapidly deprecate older models, either by making them non-upgradable or pretty randomly removing support for them in new operating system versions (both OS X and iOS).
Hi Lusr, we'll definitely do this for the next big contest and we'll make sure we get prior approval from the winning expert. Appreciate your comments re exposure, but it's not the contest holder we're worried about; it's more an issue of publicizing our experts' secrets and shortcuts. There's certainly nothing against airline policy in the winning entry, but this is our experts' livelihood. Our flight hackers are everything to us and we'd rather err on the side of maintaining integrity. We'll better plan for this in future, no doubt about it.
This reminds me of one of the problems with the never-released Infinium Labs Phantom console -- making PC games designed with a 2ft UI playable at a distance of 10 feet in the living room.

This project's goals strike me as quite similar to the Phantom's, actually, but with mobile games instead of PC games. And inverse problems -- Infinium had the UI problem but their controls were pretty well figured out, while OUYA's UI situation seems fine but the controls may present a challenge.
All of the companies you cite ARE technically innovative - Google created map-reduce (amongst many other things); Facebook stores, indexes and retrieve billions of images; Twitter contributed real-time graph processing (Storm) to the open-source world, and mostly solved fan-out on a massive scale; Wikipedia - well, it's Wikipedia, and it's done on a tight budget, to boot.

Everyone's standing on the shoulders of giants, but the idea that the contributions of top engineers and scientists today are somehow less than those that came previously is ridiculous - Kay seems hurt that people have taken the ideas and run with them, and doesn't seem to get that not everyone's as smart as him - and that's fine, we can still have something to offer.
The purpose of a business is to do whatever the hell you want to do.

The purpose of a publicly traded business is to make money and thus profit for it's shareholders. Everything else becomes secondary.

There is a huge difference in responsibility between the two.
If you don't understand that the request distribution matters more than payload size, you aren't even seeing the problems.

I encourage you to analyze infrastructure for a twitter style app using inbox duplication. Once you model this against hardware costs you'll learn something about how utterly expensive write amplification is in a hot data set that must be backed by ram due to availability requirements.
>wyclif: American business has been the greatest engine for technological progress the world has ever seen

>ekianjo: We have seen more advances in the past 20 years in technology than any time before, yet it was already the end of the Cold war. How do you explain that??

The US has kept itself pretty busy with warfare over the last 20 years[1]. The Cold War is ages ago and war has been waging for quite some time since the end of it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Unit...
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I don't know. Why are computers needed to be recycled by HAND? C'mon, cars are recycled by machinery and modern cars use glue like hell. So whats the issue here?
Ah - I thought the italics made that obvious. I guess not!
There's little to no comparison b/t the Silicon Valley model and current banking system model. In the banking system, risk is systemic, in the Silicon Valley model, risk is localized. The two models are the inverse of each other.

In SV, many relatively small investments are spread over lots of startups, with the expectation that something like ~90% will fail, ~9% will just break even, 0.99% will do well, and 0.01% will become the next Microsoft, Google, or Facebook.

The small number of successes more than compensate for the huge number of failures, and the failures are not systemic and pose no risk to the greater economy. There is no apparent way for systemic risk or systemic fraud to undermine the system and put the entire global economy at risk.

The banking system on the other hand is the definition of systemic risk. Every company in every industry depends on it, for short-term cash needs to long-term investment loans. If the banking system fails for some unrelated reason (say, too much bad mortgage debt used as collateral for too much prop-trading leverage, the financial crisis in a nutshell), then every company in every other industry is at risk of failure as well.

Look at the history of banking and you see the same bubble-crisis-collapse played out over and over, to varying degrees of severity. From 1800 to 1929 there's a banking crisis literally almost every 10 years, with a few 15-20yr gaps. Read up on the history of banking crises [1] [2] and you can see it's endemic to the system.

But that is clearly not the case with the startup ecosystem, because the risk model is the inverse of the banking system risk model.

If those two mechanisms are failing us, as some people claim, I'd be genuinely curious to know why it fails specifically for banks while it works wonders in other industries such as tech.

The banking system of late is really creating and concentrating debt, not wealth. They create assets like mortgage-backed instruments of various sorts, get them AAA-rated, then use them as ostensibly high-quality collateral on which to borrow even more.

But when the cash flows on that collateral began to collapse in 2007/2008, it became apparent it wasn't AAA after all, and that it could not support so much leverage, and suddenly the entire system was at risk of insolvency and needed a government bailout, massive central bank support, and economic stimulus to prevent total collapse and all the collateral damage to other industries that entailed.

Conversely, Silicon Valley concentrates equity and cash-flow-generating businesses, rather than debt, and high failure rates are expected and built into the financing model. Risk is limited to the risk-takers, and not the broader economy or government.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_crisis

2. http://www.economics.harvard.edu/files/faculty/51_This_Time_...
No. I'm an Amazon customer.

If you prefer some other IaaS, fine. The point is that fabric can drive both the virtualization API and the actual set up of servers over SSH. I have a fake region called "dev" that runs the build against a vmware image on my local machine. It could work with Softlayer or Joyent or Rackspace or CloudFoundry or whatever.

Fabric and an IaaS provider is a really nice way to implement the PheonixServer pattern.
We can definitely see that contest coming up soon. With this contest we thought sub-$2k would be a huge stretch, but the flight hackers seemed to manage it with ease. For business, we can't imagine it being less than $5-6k, but we'll see. Sub-$5k would be amazing.
Jesus this is ugly. The whole point of Bootstrap is that it's super easy for anyone to make a visually non-jarring website. Bootstrap effectively democratises good design basics on the web. What this is doing is precisely the opposite.
He doesn't seem to get that what makes the web amazing is the data and people connected to it. That's generally far more interesting to users than novel interfaces or whiz-bang features.

Oh, the web has got plenty of whiz-bang features alright. My problem with it as a technology is that, compared to the Internet, it feels as an ad hoc concoction of such: clunky, buggy and a PITA to work with.

I shudder to think what my programming experience would be if the other layers in the stack (PC hardware, Unix, TCP/IP, etc.) were built the same way.
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Doing search well is really hard. Google's simple interface hides some incredibly challenging and innovative work. And not just search, it's the integration of all the pieces, like translate, maps, etc. I'm sure it increases world GDP.

As for for the others, yes technically they are just plumbing and their value is more of a social innovation and very important in that way.
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There's plenty of competition in academia, and plenty of cooperation in the industry. And they cooperate between each other a lot, too.

And while lucrative social websites are not innovation per se, you should consider they may be funding the next SpaceX.
Which part of email requires advanced training?

Primarily subject line usage and interleaved replies.

The spectacularly complex system you have set up to filter your email

It's basically just GTD on steroids. Basecamp and Highrise are used by millions of non-technical people. Reading email in a text based email client isn't rocket science and, I think, would be a skill on par with learning to communicate with letters. Also gmail filters aren't advanced, and Android is pretty mainstream (as is gmail). The only tricky bits there are using an external SMTP server (made simpler through things like Mailgun, Sendgrid and JangoSMTP) and configuring fetchmail to POP from gmail.

The rest of the components are all very simple and readily available. In my experience people are able to cope with seemingly overwhelming complexity as long as they were instrumental in it's creation and the bits that make up the complex whole are themselves quite simple.
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cool! How long did it take you to build this routing?
Yeah, so what? UTF-8 is Linux standard. I use it, probably most of web use it(where needed). Why I don't see problems with it in software I use and on the web? I can't remember when I had any problem with UTF-8 last time.
Interviewing is a fundamentally flawed process for both parties. It's like moving in together after the first date.

That said, here are a couple of ideas that come to mind to get a better feel for a company. The nice thing about both of these is they benefit both the employer and prospective employee.

1) The best way I know of is if you're referred to a company by someone you know and can trust enough to tell you about the warts beforehand.

2) Failing #1, if you find a company you're interested in and who's interested in you, ask them for a contract-to-hire position with a 3-6 month or so contract. It's a great way to really get to know the culture without a huge commitment. They'll do it if they want you, but if they balk you should be able to convince them it's in their best interest as well. Just don't do anything drastic like relocating until you're fulltime.

Anyway, good luck.
You are off by nearly 2 orders of magnitude from twitter's scale. They have billions of views per day and each of those views is a stream comprised of hundreds of different sub-streams.
See my edit. Your ad impressions reached approximately 3% of Twitter's daily request load last year. Note that those requests can serve up to 200 tweets + metadata.

This doesn't account for Twitter's budding ad service, which one can assume has some of the same functionality (targeted advertising, information retrieval) as traditional ad networks.
5000 rows or 5000 columns? 5000 rows isn't a lot.

Edit: the article says 5000 rows, 10 columns. Hm.
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The first half of the solution is to ignore fads, such as node.js (how could anyone even half-competent use something as slow and fucked up as javascript for their server...)

or mongodb (seriously, who'd compare that to a real dbms like pg or orcl ? )

or ruby (too bad but it's still a decade away from reaching "crappy-but-acceptable" speed).
I'd strongly advise looking at other areas than the memcache cloud service. The whole point of memcache is to be incredibly fast to prevent having to do a much heavier weight process, like making requests to databases.

While you offer locating the memcachier product within some datacenters this is such a narrow offering, and for something that's already mind numbingly simple to automate anyway.

While 'cloud' anything is hot right now, this just doesn't solve a real problem.

I think you're rushing into building something, without looking at the market and what problem you're trying to solve for customers.

If you'd had a good mentor they would have saved you a lot of hours wasting time in ideas that are obviously doomed, they neither solved a problem, nor provided entertainment.

Except one you discarded, the celebrity photos from twitter. With a great front end, and preferably an iPhone app that served up celebrity photos in a magazine style format might very well have legs. People seem to love celebrities, and they seem to love looking at what they are getting up to. This app would have the advantage of twitter's speed at disseminating information, and people like knowing first so they can send the photo to their friends and show how cool they are.

Forget the tech for a moment, think about psychology - what human need are you targeting, then think about the business, the market, how you'll reach them and finally the tech. I hope this helps.

*edited for spelling and typos.