skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A counter to #4:

The point that I, and so many like me, keep coming back to is... Every man, woman, child and dog has a credit card now; a large percentage of people are carrying unbearable amounts of debt. In the past, America was a creditor nation; today, Hilary Clinton goes quietly begging in China while Obama gets on TV and tries to act as though we're so much better than China - "Can you believe that they're beating us at cleantech! Impossible!" (Disclaimer: I voted for him, and attended one of his fundraisers.)

I'm not saying this because I want to be some doomsayer fuddy-duddy. I'm saying this because I like the people in this community we have here at HN, and I want to make sure people understand what we're looking at here -- years of economic contraction. You can't spend your way out of a de-leveraging economy, and it is quite dangerous to borrow money and theoretically finance "stimulus" from tax revenues dependent on future rich people who may or many not exist (see: California's economic disaster, wherein they thought the golden era of dotcom millionaires would continue ad infinitum).

Thankfully, the online software industry seems to have made some enormous gains in efficiency/automation, and you can now operate enterprise-grade services at extremely low cost. This will allow many of us here to thrive, even in this contracting environment (i.e., I may have 1/3rd the customers I would in 1999, but I'm spending 5% of the money it would have cost to service them). We are in a unique and special place; unfortunately, however, the rest of the economy is in for continual hurt.

Also, there are some very smart people questioning whether the golden era of equities is over. What this means is -- yeah, equities had a great run for 60 years, but what if that doesn't actually mean anything? What if the past and the future are completely disconnected? In a world in which young innovators such as ourselves can operate at such low cost, and when Sarbanes Oxley and friends lead most smart people who value their sanity to avoid the public markets, this could certainly be the case. Most equities these days are held by institutional investors, who I can tell you from personal experience tend to be quite moronic (i.e., I begged the top shareholders in Motorola to make some activist moves against the crony executive/board structure there, but they did absolutely nothing - even while watching their equity value dip by 50% or more). A democracy - whether involving citizens or shareholders - only works when people are smart enough to know what to do; if we can learn anything from the idiocy of the past several years, it is that the shareholder democracy is utterly broken, because they were the ones who kept voting in corrupt boards and awarding retarded salaries. Anyone staking their future/kids' futures/etc on these people is a fool whose money will be soon taken from him/her.

If I sound slightly pissed at the state of American business/political society today, well... :)
I have no idea about the situation in the US but could this be due to other factors? For instance, you mention that these minorities are under represented in certain colleges to begin with - a place where a lot of startups begin. Perhaps there is less internet exposure too, or at least to the startup community blogs etc.. And maybe it just comes down to a perpetuating loop situation. In any case, and I don't really know US attitudes, but I would doubt in this day and age there is a conscious effort among hackers, who are generally more liberty and equality focused anyway, to exclude people based on anything other than merit.
Does anybody have experience with Capuccino? Sounds very interesting. Is this cpu intensive?
Being a member of Lance's 50% Asian cofounder club, I was going to reply earlier, but my internet gave out. And thank goodness. From reading some of the comments, I think I must be living in another Atlanta. I'll stick with mine, thanks.
The state of the art _is_ hiring a DBA. They get paid to be up on all the database monitoring, scaling, managing and management tools. This is why DB consultants charge $200+ an hour. It's pretty arcane knowledge, and for a business of any size, the database quickly becomes the lifeblood of the organization.

This is also the reason that databases like Couch DB or Amazon Simple DB or Google's App Engine are so appealing. They all have the promise of reducing db management headaches, at the cost of sacrificing features.
"than those with normal working hours"

Normal working hours weren't designed to be optimal for health - do shorter than normal hours correlate with lower risk?
Live Stream: TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable
I think when people get depressed: watching TV/movies are like a top addiction. Next comes food. So I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers actually go up, because people would avoid buying anything but involuntarily ending watching movies.
With the corollary of mercilessly stealing good ideas from other frameworks ;)
Don't forget that having UPS as an Atlanta based company has helped in creating logistics oriented companies here. That plus Memphis (home to FedEx) isn't that far either.
@netcan, well said. Economic incentives that only serve their intended purpose are rare!
Isn't memcachedb faster?

Comparing the posted benchmark results with http://memcachedb.org/benchmark.html

You get around 2800 r/s using LightCloud vs. around 64000 r/s using Memcachedb

and around 1080 w/s using LightCloud vs. around 23500 w/s using Memcachedb.

I would be interested in seeing some benchmarks that compare both.

I really like LightCloud's idea of automatic scaling, failover and load balancing.
FYI: A hackerspace in Atlanta is currently in active development.
Holiday Rentals and Holiday Accommodation Worldwide
Please do see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498699 (memcachedb != LightCloud). memcachedb should be compared with Tokyo Tyrant and not LightCloud.

And if you liked, you could extend LightCloud with memcachedb support (which we also had at one point and ran it in production [see my posts on memcachedb mailing list for proof]), but really, when it comes to key-value databases, it's really hard to beat Tokyo Tyrant, which is the fastest and most feature complete key-value database out there (IMO and I have looked at most of the popular solutions).
If you really could have built it in a few days, you should come work for FathomDB!

I would point out that doing this properly on EC2 is an order of magnitude harder than doing it on dedicated hardware; the assumption on EC2 has to be that things will fail and you have to build accordingly.

The simplicity of the web-based GUI and the offering hides the complexity going on under the surface. But that's the whole point of FathomDB: you just use the database, and you don't see (or care about) the hoops we're jumping through to make it all work.
File Compression in the Multi-Core Era
What about borrowing the popular 'like' feature from Friendfeed? After a comment, it lists people that liked something, but it cuts it off at a certain point so it's not overwhelming. Perhaps one could sort the prominence of likes by how recent the like was (so that everyone gets a chance to show they liked something) and maybe the karma of the user, so prominent, active users can express enjoyment of a comment or post without having to add something specific to the conversation.

This would restore something of the personal feeling, too. As pg says, it's better for moral to know that one particular person deeply liked something than many, superficially.
Deputy Shown Kicking Teen Girl
I love how people confuse "selling to Google" with a viable business.

Just because you sell the company (YouTube) doesn't mean the business was successful. It just means you've handed the loss to another company.
Anyone else feel he still learning how to present. His presentation was well written, but he needs to practice his delivery.

In regards to not knowing what they have built, I think that's absolutely right. They built a platform for emergence. Its turned out wonderfully.
Minimalism rocks; I'm very much a fan of Mayer's design style. However, the one thing that I think could be improved for Google search results would be a simple bit of padding on the left border for the search results page; I firebugged the code for a mockup here: http://zentu.net/snaps/googleeasyontheeyes

:)

compare with: http://zentu.net/snaps/googlenow

P.S. I know this has little to nothing to do with the original article, but I've been wanting to point out this observation for awhile now. It's semi-related to the topic of design.
I agree that people do that, and that ideally a website would would not email someone their password for the simple reason that people do recycle passwords.

But, the onus here should really be on the user. If they are careless enough to use the same password for everything, they are indicating that they are willing to trade some security for convenience. In my opinion, emailing users their password is just another security/convenience trade-off. I'd be upset to get my password sent in plantext from my bank, but not an invite website.
If the 1:12500 odds are right, then each shot pays an average of 80 dollars. (I know nothing about actuarial science, so correct me if I'm wrong...) Seems like you'd need an 81 dollar premium per driver to profit.

Further, there's a lot of asymmetrical information possibilities. What if a pro golfer (whose odds might be 1:500) decides to show up?
What does LightCloud add that Tokyo Tyrant does not already provide? I've read the websites of both products, it's just kind of confusing.

From some other comments, it seems I'm not the only one confused. Tokyo Cabinet+Tyrant are pretty new on the scene and there isn't a lot about them in English yet. So, if you add a level of explanation to the site that seems excessive to you, people would probably find it more useful than you expect.
Larrabee isn't a CPU; it's a GPU.
"If you are like me, you then give up and spend time writing your own framework."

... and then release it and claim it's better than the others. I wonder why there are dozens of competing frameworks?...
I didn't realize until recently, but GMail now has an option to automatically use https. It is under https://mail.google.com/mail/#settings at the bottom, and is turned off by default.
No, it's a bad thing. It's a false economy that causes bugs.
LightCloud adds horizontal scaling. If you just use Tokyo Tyrant then you can only scale by buying bigger servers. If you use LightCloud you can scale by buying extra servers.

When scaling upwards you would generally _really_ want to scale horizontally, since the vertical scale has a limit and you can quickly reach it (plus, buying bigger machines is generally much more expensive than buying extra machines).
I don't get mocked when I board MARTA. I ride from Dunwoody all the way to Five Points and out to Decatur, both during the evening rush hour and late at night.

... There are things you can do to your body language that can keep that from happening. If you hate being where you are -- Atlanta or not -- it'll show up in your body language.
YC gives you some money, moral support, and connections galore. Why not YC?

Also see http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html
It wouldn't take much to put a big stop to that. Imagine if adblock came installed by default in 3.2!
I wonder how many others post drunk to HN...
"Our advice: Beware of geeks bearing formulas."
My favourite startup (if you could still call it that) is Telnic (British). I think the .tel TLD will be revolutionary, but has so far received surprisingly little attention from tech/entrepreneurial communities like this one and TechCrunch - perhaps because it's not in the Valley? I guess this might change when it launches next week, or on March 24th when general availability begins..
This seems to be a very unpopular opinion around here. There have been few web businesses I think of as "wow" as well. This era isn't about the technological innovation (there has been little really in the last few years of software), it's about usability innovation. Mainly making things simpler and putting a framework around marketing your wares. This is great, and needed, but not so interesting.

Another friend sharing widget video thingy? Bleh.
This is why Free Software is much better. There is no license that needs to be bought or activated and thus none of these problems exist.
Why Adam Carolla Represents the Death of Radio; Future Podcasts
WB is never one for tech companies.
You could just dump your current DB and restore it to the new one hosted at EC2, then point your application to the new one.
That an unlikely scenario. Pop-up ad blockers became popular because they eliminated a genuinely obtrusive method of advertising. Current online advertising is a pretty good compromise of unobtrusive vs. self supportive.

If a company like firefox implemented ad blocking by default, they'd be doing the web a huge favor. Unlike pop-up blocking, firefox would be killing the only revenue sources for the majority of today's popular websites. Sure, it's easy to say that more companies should focus on getting 'real' business models, but a web in which _every_ professional web site required a subscription fee would be totally impractical.

It will be very cool, however, to see how the micropayments industry challenges advertising. While it's unlikely CNN will every jump on it, what if some of the more adventurous sites ditched advertising in favor of a donation box model?
Chicago has much more sprawl than San Jose. The latter is confined somewhat by geography and several open space preserves, while there is apparently nothing to stop the westward migration of Chicago's suburbs. After spending my university years in the Chicago area it was very bizarre to visit last week and realize that you can almost drive from the loop to Rockford without leaving suburbs/exurbs along I80. It is somewhat similar to how Austin and Round Rock used to actually be cities separated by open expanses of empty space and now the trip between the two cities can be navigated just by hopping from one strip mall parking lot to another...
I want to make it very clear that I'm not a business guy.

Think of it in the context of building a database-backed enterprise app that customers run in house. You don't want to ship a DBA to every customer...
This seems to be the holy grail for designing a new database: something with the reliable scalability of a cloud hash DB with the front of a regular SQL.

IMO it'll never have a regular SQL front-end but would require additional instructions or statements, because it needs to know more about how to shard your particular application.
It seems like I asked the question in the wrong context. Sorry about that. Given that scale is hard, how about monitoring, or management?
Wrong question, I think. The right one is "Is there even a such thing as a 'blue chip' stock?"

Which immediately leads into, "What timeframe are we talking about?" I might believe in a blue-chip classification on the time frame of five years as long as it isn't absolute, but there isn't a single company in existence anywhere (or anywhen) that I would guarantee will exist in fifty.

I think the entire idea of "blue chip" only works in a worldview raised not just before the 21st century, but in the earlier part of the 20th century (and before) where things generally moved more slowly and even a behemoth could take decades to fall. That's just not as true as it used to be, if for no other reason than in the 21st century said behemoth was likely to be leveraged to the hilt....
cool. very interesting.
I think the movie industry should sue the investment banks for ruining the economy. Imagine how much more money they would be making if it weren't for the damn recession.

(I hate to explain jokes, but this is their argument about piracy -- pirates are killing the industry despite the fact that they are seeing record profits. If it weren't for piracy, the record numbers would be even more record-y.)
"Kijiji" Isn’t Kutting It. How about eBay Classifieds?
How does it deal with events like disk failure, network partitions, and concurrent updates? The design documentation is rather light, so it's really hard to make out how this actually distributes data.

You say it doesn't have any concept of eventual consistency. Yet how does it coordinate updates to nodes? Does it do two phase commit? Paxos?
You can't throw out the idea that "blue chip" stocks are a safe haven based on 9 months of underperformance.
Burning Incense Is Psychoactive
Ask HN: front-end news?
I'm a front-end junkie. Anyone have a good list of constantly updated sites specifically about javascript, html, and css?

I read Ajaxian daily, but they don't update enough. Readwriteweb is good, but doesn't focus enough on just the things I care about.

I'm subscribed to John Resig and a few other's blogs, but its just not nearly enough.

Any additional recommendations?
Rails and Gems Documentation for netless hacking
Engine Yard has several excellent DBAs on staff. They tell you what queries are slow and tune the db to optimize for your type of traffic. That's why they are worth the 30% premium on top of EC2.
The Great Solvent North
Thats because he never invests in anything that he doesn't understand. He wants to fully understand how they make money. That is great investment advice, too.
What I find the most ridiculous about the comments in this thread about the "prejudice" people have experienced in Atlanta is that the prejudice cited was coming from places like... people on marta trains.

Really? What people on a subway say to you has a bearing on a startup?

If we're going to have a discussion about having a startup in Atlanta, we should be evaluating the racism and prejudice that exists within the community that a startup would actually deal with on a day to day basis. The people that actually matter, the people that would have an effect on your startup. The business people, the technical talent, the fellow entrepreneurs. Not people on marta trains.

So yeah, to back up your final point: what racist bigots on subway trains say to you should be thrown into the "noise" bucket, no matter where you are or what you're doing.
Jeffrey Gitomer talked about his "business coin" (literally a coin instead of a card) in one of his books. With the advent of products like Evernote, the fact that your card doesn't "file" nicely is no longer an issue.
Wow. Next they'll be telling us that people who lift weights excessively are susceptible to muscle strain.

[I wish I had an eye rolling smiley to put here]

Maybe I'm just simplifying things too much but it seems to me that the average work week we have now evolved over time because it seemed to produce optimal results. Meaning pushing yourself to work extra hours would be considered excessive and would in turn adversely affect those parts of your body that you are using during your work (namely your brain).

As for the rest of the article's conclusion (shorter sleeping hours, excessive alcohol use, etc...) it would seem those would be a result of the reason behind the excessive work. People generally over work for stress causing reasons (fear of losing their job, trying to start a business, etc...) So any symptoms of stress can probably be attributed to that and not the over work (which is in itself a symptom)
How horizontally have you scaled your systems in production? The homepage mentions 2 servers. I'm wondering if you are using it in production with more than 2.
I'm talking about NOT using presentation-specific such as "box" or "blue".

Having class names such as "two-columns blue hoverable" are slightly more convenient but strategically similar to in-line styles.

Keep that presentation/behavior shit out of my content please.

Modularity is not a difficult problem to solve. But overloading your HTML is damned near impossible to dig yourself out of.
Best Dubai Vacations for You and Your Family
Check out your employment options from top Recruiters in Dubai. Decide if relocating is right for you.
You bother to cool your condo? The highs in Boston, per wikipedia, average 82F in the hottest month. That's room temperature. I have my thermostat set on 76F right now, and I wake up shivering many mornings. I guess I don't really have any content for this post except my surprise.
This is a good point. If we compute the # of calories per dollar obtained from a fast food meal, it is much cheaper than the # of calories per dollar obtained from fruits and vegetables. $1.00 for a burger and fries vs $1.00 a grapefruit; at least a couple hundred calories vs. 50 calories...
Ask HN: anybody looking for a technical intern?
So, I'm planning on doing my own startup after I graduate, but until then, I want to work during the summer.

Last summer, I worked on REST APIs for the NYT, but this summer it would be nice to work for a smaller company.

Is anybody doing cool work with Ruby (not Rails, although I'm open to it), bleeding-edge web-tech, HPC/Clustering, or something else cool?

My resume is online at http://ben.kudria.net/resume . My email is ben at-sign kudria point net

(Helpful job search tips, or pointers to cool companies also appreciated!)
Example of using PHPlot to dynamically generate bar graphs
Try this one, from even further afield (not to mention the hype around how it is collected!):
http://tasmanianrain.com/

(I'm from Tasmania, and I've never seen it -- I suspect you can only buy it in L.A.)
How is this Hacker News, or interesting at all?
Creating PDF Documents in PHP Using Tcpdf
Ooops! Freudian slip.

Thanks for correcting.
For that you use an embedded database system. Many enterprise apps come with embedded database systems, or require a major database system to be installed in tandem, and these things are targeted at medium sized companies that don't have DBA specific to the the department that is using the app.
I'm not sure what the n = 1 Google argument is supposed to accomplish - is boo.com relevant too? These are single data points in an argument about aggregate investment quality and the only meaningful statistic is aggregate ROI now. I think it's interesting you're jumping back to the late 90s again, because if you had a stronger argument vis-a-vis the quality of VC investment over the last few years, I really don't think you'd need to go there.

You could be absolutely right. There could be a lot of fantastic companies just sitting in VC portfolios making profits and waiting for the market to turn in order to maximize their exits. That is true. But it's also true that owning profitable companies does not generally incite the sort of liquidity crisis that seems prevalent in the industry right now.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying there's very little evidence that the people you're proposing get a massive windfall in the form of a $30 million turn at the roulette table know what they're doing. And some of what they're doing hurts people who are competent and profitable. So in my industry, I don't think the word incompetent is really that strong. They could be making money, they're not. YMMV.
lxml.cssselect in python
accidental click of the bookmarklet, probably