skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article: "With the hindsight of a decade, we can see that it’s a disaster. The trouble is that every time you call a method that throws an exception, you create an immediate crisis: you break the build. Rather than conciously planning an error handling strategy, programmers do something, anything, to make the compiler shut up."

Frankly, this is the weirdest complaint I've ever seen about checked exceptions. If you're trying to build a system with crappy programmers, you're kind of screwed anyway, but checked exceptions actually help you out quite a bit, because you don't have a problem with stray exceptions taking down entire subsystems. You might miss a lot of meaningful errors and get corrupted data, but at least the system keeps running, and that's the most you can hope for if your programmers are as crappy and lazy as the article describes.

And contrary to the article, few programmers are really that lazy and irresponsible. In my experience, far more code is written by responsible programmers who are inexperienced, rushed, or lacking a complete understanding of the system. Checked exceptions catch a lot of normal programming errors and result in more error cases being handled correctly. Like any other restriction imposed by a programming language, they don't ensure perfect code, sometimes they result in busy work, and crappy programmers will find crappy ways to work around them, but IMHO they are helpful for most programmers.
This is probably why The Mars Volta split up their longest songs into multiple parts.
Edge-Case YAGNI. Have lots of shards, put multiple shards on each machine, shuffle the shards around as necessary. Rinse. Repeat.
Bartz is going to be a great CEO. I admire and respect the woman immensely! Sometimes what a company or an organization needs is simply a great leader -- somebody who can inspire the worker bees to do what worker bees do best.
Hmmm. What the article describes as "The Elevator Effect" is basically traffic spikes due to effective PR. Alone such spikes are worthless. Without a product people actually get value from (ie: what enables organic growth), the spike just drops off to where it was before the spike (cuil anybody?). I don't think the author thinks that you just need PR driven spikes, but what he's discussing isn't anywhere near as nice as viral growth.

When we launch new versions of Miro, we tend to get covered on all the big sites and see really big traffic spikes. Our user base typically doubles after one of these spikes and then stays relatively flat. This means that people like using our product, but don't help spread it. Next month we'll have over a million users, so I'm not complaining. Nonetheless, if these users spread our product to friends in addition to just using it, we'd be a LOT better off. Clearly, this is going to be a point of focus for us.
You can serve html pages there like any other file.

It seems you could use a CNAME configuration to do top level hosting. But you'd have to get someone to link to "index.html" explicitly since CloudFront will not do this for you. So "http://example.com/index.html" is definitely do-able but you need to worry about "http://example.com" and "http://example.com/"

Objects in S3/CloudFront can have a trailing "/" as part of the name, so maybe you could get around that issue somehow.

--

More ugly, but you could alternatively put everything on a subdomain and do a permanent redirect to CloudFront.

example.com is your webserver, redirects all traffic to the exactly right path at "x.example.com/[....]" where "x.example.com" has CNAME pointer to cloudfront (relative links from those files will resolve OK directly to cloudfront URLs)
I'd say Fog Creek Software is pretty successful.
We used to mix peanut butter in to some of the flavors, delicious.
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v651/indiejade/?action=vie...
OK, but # of shards is fixed "for ever" under the modulus scheme? You pick it once, when you first shard and then you're looking at downtime to adjust it?

In order to split across multiple dbs, you're looking at creating say 100/1000 dbs in our initial split (when you've got maybe 2-3 machines). And that number then caps the number of machines you can scale to without adding another layer (sharding-shards) or having downtime?
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I think my point was mostly to debunk the notion that you should just sit and wait for your traffic to grow slowly. There is a fast lane out there that you can take. But you are absolutely correct: it presupposes having a real product that people will use.

The more subtle point is that once you get a spike of traffic, you can leverage it to get a bigger spike of traffic, and hopefully continue to surf the wave. So spikes can create bigger spikes. That's not so obvious.

PS: what is miro?
Not really, because you could take any two products competing against each other on functionality and proclaim comparisons with the "browser war", no matter how low the stakes are.
While the degree might not be meaningful, I find an accomplishment of finishing school especially if they find it meaningless. It shows a finish-what-you-started mentality which thrives (or at least persists) in opposition.
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Poll: What social class did you come from?
I'm interested to know which social class your average hacker comes from. I used wiki to get the info of what class = what money, so it might be off. Since people tend to have some movement in their social class, use the highest # before you turned 22
Underclass -- Less than $18,000 family income/year
Working Class -- $18,000-$35,000 family income/year
Lower Middle Class -- $35,000 to $75,000 family income/year
Upper Middle Class -- $75,000-$250,000 family income/year
The Rich -- $250,000-$500,000 family income/year
The Super Rich -- $500,000+ family income/year
It's also worth pointing out that per-capita income is much higher in CA than it is elsewhere, NY including. We need to pay our teachers here that much just so that they can afford the rent. The rent is that expensive because there are too many rich Californians. =P
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Shameless plug: check out my "memengo wallet" http://www.memengo.com/?src=hackernews - it's a password organizer for iPhone with optional sync to, and editing from the cloud. Client-side AES encryption and server-side AWS S3 backups every 30 minutes.

Bottom line is that your passwords are always with you - either on your iPhone, or (in a pinch) on any nearby PC with a web borwser.
This will be a difficult poll since almost everyone thinks they're middle class. I guess concrete numbers should add some clarity.
The trouble is, if you're unmotivated and your results aren't visible, time spent out of the office usually is vacation.
I think that view kind of misses the point that some professions are not solitary like programming.

I work from home (I'm a technologist), and love it that way. I can do great work by myself, without much input. But I've seen architects at work, and the majority of their work is collaborative, discussing ideas, coming up with new ideas, etc.

Designing a building draws together a lot of creativity applied at all levels, from the door handles to the shape of the building, and a major difficulty is to coordinate all this to keep the building looking like it was designed as a whole, rather than have all sorts of different styles mixing with each other.

Until architecture becomes a solitary activity (unlikely for all but the smallest buildings, for quite some time), central office spaces will remain a necessity there. This is probably the case for numerous other professions. There's no "one size fits all" work-from-home solution, not yet anyway.
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I've been evaluating databases recently. It doesn't matter if the site is not well-known in the US as long as you can post traffic numbers. TokyoTyrant is Japanese, after all.

Also these help:

* able to handle large (>200GB) datasets
* client libraries for top N languages
* easy way to write client libs (eg simple protocol, a C library, etc)
* connection pooling and/or cheap connections
* easy to install on Mac, Linux and Windows development machines
* repl (this is not much of a problem with Python & Ruby)
* stable dump / restore format

One problem for you is that MySQL plus serialize() basically does these already, with 10+ years of testing on top. Your system has to do a lot more to make it worth the risk.
This is a great article. Here's my response: http://blog.tippingpointlabs.com/2009/02/think-about-your-sc...
This image was taken right after zentu.net was born in Feb. 2006. I was working TWO jobs: as a hostess at Denny's and as a pizza delivery gal for Domino's, building the site in my practically nonexistant free time. Had to pay the bills! I'm not even sure it was worth it; I think I might finally be getting my first ever paycheck from Google AdSense next month.
Think About Your Scope of Influence on Twitter or LinkedIn
Scope of Influence matters when you're choosing your friends, followers and connections.
Why the notion here that to be an entrepreneur, you have to be a hacker.
I'm a bit puzzled by the notion and expectation by Y Combinator & folks on this forum that you absolutely need to be a "hacker" to have any shot at being a good entrepreneur. Even the application form for startup school asks you about what systems you've hacked in the past.

I am a fairly intelligent guy, if I can say so myself, who somehow ended up in computer science, ended up going to grad school but realized later on that my true interests and calling really lie somewhere else. I'm not a hacker so to say and I don't particularly enjoy programming - certainly not to the extent that I could have orgasms doing it and spend countless hours just doing it for fun. I look at it as a means to an end, do it to get my job done and happen to be decently good at it. I'm in the process of launching a site here and have already launched a beta version of it in India (our initial target audience). I learned RoR/AJAX/CSS and all else associated with deploying it in my spare time (my day job is a systems one with C coding). I truly enjoy the process of taking an idea from concept to launch and building a successful business around it. I spend much time thinking and working on it, learning about all aspects from the engineering to the business side. I've been working on my idea for over an year and half now, all in my spare time, riding many ups and downs and persevering through.

But please explain, why this ridiculous idea that to be an Internet entrepreneur, you should just absolutely be in love with programming & hacking anything and everything to death!
Throw out the spice packet.

Cook them and when there is 30 seconds left stir in:

1 beaten egg
A couple of shakes of tobasco
A chopped green onion or scallion

It tastes way better than the packets and doesn't pack nearly as much sodium.
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Global Cash Mavericks is a team of like minded people who share the same passion by help others become successful this in cash leveraging and cash gifting activity. The peoples program
The solution to that is to not hire unmotivated, invisible workers, I'd say....
The panhandler's secret
Startup looking for cofounder/hacker
Have a look at notepub.com, and if you would like to join the team share a note with NP.
I think what you describe in the article is taking the stairs. It's going to take a lot more steps like those in order for you to get where you want to go. Taking the elevator is something more like convincing users to send email to everyone in their address book or landing a gigantic customer early.
Sounds like Joel's description of the Fog Creek office space.
My solution to the news-site addictiveness problem was to install LeechBlock:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

and put up barriers to visiting reddit or hacker news after 11:00 in the morning.
Ever since I switched my pfSense router machine to using OpenDNS as it's authority, rather than Time Warner's servers, I've noticed a much faster response time, especially when hitting a domain that the router has in its cache. I've never looked back, and even went as far as to set my laptop to use OpenDNS whenever I'm not at home. Couldn't be happier. :)
Another good reason: While traveling recently, several times I got to places with intentionally free wifi that failed to advertise a DNS server. If you use your own DNS server then these access points are usable.

You could also remember the IP of a usable DNS server elsewhere on the internet.
Agreed on most of the points... about MySQL, I developed Redis just because MySQL does not scale enough with given kind of datasets :)
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heh ok I missed the 'in my head' bit. I just use a simple script to generate passwords.
I'm waffling about whether I want to see SvN banned. I'm tired of this rehash.
"You might miss a lot of meaningful errors and get corrupted data, but at least the system keeps running, and that's the most you can hope for if your programmers are as crappy and lazy as the article describes."

What? If I'm working with crappy programmers I don't want the system to keep going and corrupting data -- in the vast majority of cases, that's the worst possible result. Taking down the system with an nice error message and stack trace is a much much better. Crappy programmers, in the presence of checked exceptions, will handle exceptions with empty catch clauses (to prevent breaking anything) and there will be no way to find that error when it happens.
The way that I'm thinking about it is this: that it is relatively unusual, from the standpoint of the community, for a high-karma user to upvote a low-karma user.

Karma is a measure of the norms of the community, parceled out to users.
Larry Page holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford, according to Wikipedia.
I would love to be able to put music "ads" in my blog feed. Seriously, is that do-able? You pick a song you love, and at the end of each post an "ad" appears for it, which is really an embedded music player and allows a person to play 30 seconds of it. If someone clicks through and buys it, I get a commission, ala Amazon.
I enjoyed Zed as a bringer of change and entertainment back when he did it loudly. I'm enjoying it even more now that he's toned it down - he's still got attitude in a good way, and brings a beatdown on specious thought, but he's much friendlier and courteous about it now. I think it actually makes his writing more powerful, and it's just as fun to read.
IMO this site is for hackers, hacker entrepreneurs and hackers who want to be entrepreneurs, not for entrepreneurs in general. There are many paths and this is just one of them.
What would they sell?

The engineering team they need for other projects?

The technology which several startups have proven is easily recreated?

They aren't going to sell part of the AOL or Yahoo brand, so they could only really sell it if it had a unique name with which to preserve the user base under.

I dunno, the basic math shows you can charge people for storage and bandwidth and you can make money on top of it. I wouldn't right this product off yet.
Reading this makes me realize how naive my DB setup is for my startup.
"checked exceptions actually help you out quite a bit, because you don't have a problem with stray exceptions taking down entire subsystems"

Dunno about this. It's some time since I did any Java, but it seems to me that if you want to isolate a sub-system then the thing to do is to isolate it in the code explicitly where you want the sub-system isolated (i.e. like C++'s `catch (...)`) rather than force exception propagation/chaining through every function in the call chain.

I've found far more nasty problems caused by exception masking than I have by too many exceptions being thrown. I'm not sure what sort of system you might be working on where erroneous data is less of a problem than an exception.
How about saying what it is you're specifically looking for?
Reasons to get out of bed early:

1. Young child as stated earlier
2. Dog that needs to go out NOW or will crap on the floor.
3. Sunlight streaming in through the East-facing window. Bonus if it's a subzero morning and I'm curious if there are sundogs.
4. Roosters crowing reminding me chickens want to be let out(I live on a farm).
5. Wife still too sleepy to be in the mood.

After all this I usually just yell at child(1) to put dog(2) outside and roll over and go back to sleep until wife(5) is awake enough :-)
Stupid License Tricks
Just how bad of a license can you come up with?
I think I wind up adding new ones at about the same rate as old ones disappear, but I'd have to run a report over the history to know for sure.

It's always nice when I come across a note that's been made irrelevant by other parallel improvements along the same theme -- even though the note wasn't the impetus for the other changes. It's like finding a $20 on the street!
It's not that you have to be a hacker, it's that you should be able to justify yourself with contributions.

The "YC Way" rejects idea men in favor of people who get things done.

To paraphrase Linus, "Talk is cheap, show us results."

By the way, if you picked up a framework and built a business on it, you're close enough to being a hacker.
That's an interesting piece and it's made me think a bit. One potential drawback: People historically never respect shared space as much as they do personal space. Regardless of the general maturity level, damage/uncleanliness of shared space is always going to be higher than in dedicated personal space. Part of this is because just one or two messy people will gradually mess the whole area, instead of being contained to their own area.

But being more flexible on office setup, and minimizing empty desks when costs are tough - really fascinating stuff. I'm going to roll this around in my mind more a bit later.
Engadget interviews Paul Aiken, Executive Director of the Authors Guild
Magic: The Gathering card search "startup"
flickr deals with that problem by manually moving power users if necessary. They have a tool that lets them do that. See: http://highscalability.com/how-flickr-handles-moving-you-ano...

In practice it's going to be very rare that you'll overwhelm a single shard and adding an extra layer to point to where people actually are is quite simple and fast. You can use a simple cache key (read-through cache of course) that, if it exists means the user is on a specific shard, overriding the default algorithmic pick.
She's off to a great start. Let's hope it keeps.
Part of the reason is because YC concentrates on web companies. From their website:
"Though we fund all types of computer startups, we're especially interested in web-based applications. We've been thinking about that problem longer than anyone else, and by now can visualize much of the space of possibilities."
It sounded like his solution was the idea of the sampled-down rss-esque feed, with the only purchasing taking place through the artist's own paypal-or-whatever basket. The feed protocol needs to have some sort of cryptographic audit trail so that users can always reach the artist's sales page, and the artist can inspect, if necessary, where and how the distribution is flowing.
It depends on what kind of application you're talking about. When I think of hordes of crappy Java programmers, I think of enterprise web apps schlepping around business data. In that case, I think it's better to corrupt a few orders than to have hours of downtime every week.
These are the ones I usually use too, level3, 4.2.2.[1-6]
well, it's holding on to an active connection during that timeout, right? if it were much higher, you could quickly eat up all your available connections. on the flip side, for something low traffic that may not be an issue.
Will the Future of the Web Be More Like the Present?
Google introduces ads to Google News
Quality is important if you are the gatekeeper trying to sell other people's music. But if I am an artist, and I record something that everyone thinks sucks, so what? The only consequence is a low rank in the aggregators, just like low-quality submissions here on HN.
I've been recruiting developers for intern and entry-level positions lately. If anyone cares, here are the factors I look at when doing preliminary resume screening (in order of importance).

1. Time until graduation (we prefer candidates who will be graduating soon so that the good ones can return as full-time employees)

2. Software development experience that goes beyond class projects (including other real jobs, previous internships, and work on open-source projects)

3. Familiarity with a variety of programming languages (some schools teach most classes using Java plus a little bit of JavaScript, but we like to see a greater breadth of experience)

4. Relevance of major (Software Engineering is probably the closest fit, followed by Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Applied Mathematics, etc.)

5. School reputation

6. Master's versus Bachelor's degree status

7. GPA and academic honors
Justin.tv is hiring summer interns in SF
That will work too. But I think it's more polite to do it the hard way. Same reason you used to set up your own time server and package server for your farm.
Justin.tv is hiring smart software engineers in SF
Would not have expected that kind of tone from a Fortune 500 CEO addressing the public, but it certainly made me think "she's going to be good for Yahoo!"
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You're correct, the right way to handle exceptions is to catch them in the right place so the right "unit of work" fails -- that's exactly what the article author describes. However, he argues that many programmers are too lazy or stupid to do that in the presence of checked exceptions.

"I'm not sure what sort of system you might be working on...."

I'm not sure what kind of system we're talking about either. Accepting the article's assumption of such stupid and/or lazy programmers, and accepting the implicit assumption that it's possible to produce useful software with such programmers, I'm guessing it's some kind of web-based business software.
Yup, running your own local DNS cache is almost always better than the ISP-supplied resolvers.

Note: I used to run DJB's software a lot, back in the '90s especially, when there was no secure alternative. But nowadays there's no point in doing that. Bind has cleaned up their act, it's secure and usable enough nowadays.
Brilliant! Reveals just how much "desperation" can breed a ... shoddy type of innovation. Reminds me of some of the schemas for certain types of products: give away razors for free, but charge for the blades and shaving creams, etc.
You can get ramen at all price ranges and levels of quality, even in the grocery store. The cheapest stuff in America goes for about 25 cents per person per meal, so it is well-known among college students and the like as an inexpensive way to stave off hunger.

My limited experience with it in Japan is that I prefer store-bought udon (which is generally sold fresh) to store-bought ramen (which is generally sold dried), but I'm sure if I looked at my noodle aisle more closely I could find a million permutations. Be that as it may, I can't eat ramen anymore without feeling like I'm cheating on the sweet old guy who runs the ramen shop by my old apartment.
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In Canada we call them Mr. Noodles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Noodles
Isn't it more a lack of angel investors?

Maybe the problem is when people get rich they think: off to California! and never off to Boston! :)

Or they got rich in CA, never bothered to leave, and then became angel investors.