skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I figured it out. It's a bug with youtube player.

If you try and skip to the middle using the timeline bar without pressing play first it says the video is no longer available.
I wouldn't say that Atlanta is backwards. I am only confident of saying that a perception of unfriendliness to Asians and foreign-born people prevents many people from those groups from moving there.

So, I'm open to being proven wrong here. And I'm having a hard time finding any hard data either for or against this. Is there really a perception among Asians and foreigners that Atlanta is an unfriendly place?

The closest thing I can find to data is demographics. But the size of a population is only somewhat correlated to tolerance. I can find some polls but they don't have much data. Any other thoughts?

polls:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/city-vs-city/572890-what-best...

http://goldsea.com/PAC/index.php?showtopic=278
Not to disrespect your theory, but basic profit on usefulness or popularity is a very, very, very bad idea. Art is not necessarily useful, nor should it have to be popular. That encourages groupthink. That means that if you're an artist with a brilliant idea that's never been done before, even if you're blazingly ahead of your time you won't get anything unless you cater to the masses.

You mention open source, which is a perfect example. Open source projects are rarely good. Firefox is perhaps the fourth best browser on the market, after Chrome, Opera, and Safari. OpenOffice is terrible. They're popular because most people lack enough knowledge of usability to understand just how bad they are, but they're not very good. At most they're functional.

Patronage does not work in the public sector. That's what private sectors are best for, actually: the people with money to pay for musicians are much more likely to have good taste in what they become patrons of. That suddenly makes it a matter of personal taste, which is a more effective model than relying on the masses, who are almost universally wrong in their choices.
Perhaps the yawn & meh were not necessary.

But I do not see anything substantive in the letter.
It makes sense that someone who has lived in Georgia wouldn't mind moving back there. What about the Chinese people you have met in Shanghai? Would they move to Atlanta? Those are the people that must be convinced in order to make Atlanta into the next Silicon Valley.
Yes We Scan - Bring US Govt Information Online, For Free
Nthing using an accountant for the company. I do my personal taxes myself, however. If I make a mistake for myself, it only affects me. If I mess up my company's taxes, I affect my company's investors, employees, partners, and a whole lot more people.
The reason why it does not work with a regular XP media is that they (HP, DELL, etc.) install OEM-versions of Windows which:
1) checks for branded BIOS (HP, DELL, etc.)
2) installs from a special OEM-media

If you have DELL you might have luck downloading the image of their OEM-media (Pro or Home) and installing from it.
Works fine for most people on Linux, too. It's probably one of your addons or settings tweaked from default, see this thread and let me know if that's not the case?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498363
Its only 6-8 hours from JFK to LAX. Wheres the extra 4-6 hours come from?
I am an Asian American, doing a startup in Silicon Valley, and I have not experienced discrimination because of the color of my skin. There are plenty of Asian American CEOs, Angels, and VCs everywhere. Perhaps, if anything, a little disproportionate to the true percentage of Asian Americans in California.
It's not hard at all to do this test yourself, and I've done it. Not sure what the argument is-- Twitter is fine with unicode characters. Are you seeing something different?

Maybe some of the clients or the SMS stuff doesn't like it, but the core site will let you type 140 unicode characters and share that with people.
Dimitri Skylarov got jail time and brutal treatment just for making pdf files readable. Something necessary for people with sight problems, for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimitri_Skylarov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_v._ElcomSoft_Sklyarov

Lessig's 2001 writings were months before the arrest and the whole ElcomSoft saga.
How is it bizarre to have a high concentration of supply chain management software companies next to the best school in the country for ISYE?
There are direct flights from ATL to Beijing and Mumbai now. That could definitely help.
Comments, questions and reviews are very welcomed.
When I got the N95 it had all voip options disabled by the Orange firmware. I had to <<can't remember the term after having a few beers>> my phone to get teh latest actual Nokia firmware.

As soon as I heard the Nokia N97 woul dhave Skype I presumed Orange would try to block it. I had to <<thingy>> my phone just to get AGPS.

That said, the N97 looks cool, so I am waiting for it.
Is this the first time you've edited an already-published essay because of feedback on HN?
The odds can vary a bit on where the hole is located and what kind of grass is next to the hole. When you are looking at these averages they are hitting a golf ball on to a green, which typically is rather soft and allows the ball to stop relatively close to where it lands. A well hit shot that lands on the green with backspin, will slow the ball down quickly, and then it rolls at a speed which may be slow enough where it can fall into the hole.

If you are trying to hit a ball into a hole at a driving range, the driving range could have either longer grass that slows the ball down quicker or alternatively, it could be on concrete with artificial turf, both of which would make it harder for someone like a PGA professional to find the optimum place to hit the ball.

That being said, it would have been an interesting business prospect to try an arbitrage the contest by buying a large amount of tickets and hiring a PGA pro.
Wait, what's ISYE? There's actually a logical reason? I figured it was just a happy accident. That's awesome.
I think Asian is the one main exception to that rule, just as it's the exception when it comes to minorities in elite colleges.

Asian Americans don't have as much of a history of economic and political oppression (There was some, obviously, especially during WWII.), and the culture strongly encourages working hard to excel at school, helping them then get good educations and break out of the initial poverty cycles that formed when Asians first came over and were exploited by railroad companies and the like.

But if you look at startups for other minorities--Hispanics, African Americans--I think it is pretty true that they are not well-represented.
The sub-culture of technology startups is dominated by white males. Minorities are not represented at the same proportion of their general population percentages anywhere in the country.

I think this misses the point. In Silicon Valley, several minority populations are well-represented in the startup community. In particular, many startups are started by Asians and by people born outside the U.S. These groups are much less represented in Atlanta, and it's a catch-22 but this makes it tough for Atlanta to attract those startups.
http://www.isye.gatech.edu/
I agree it is useful. But is it indispensable?

(Not a rethorical question, and I have no idea about the answer.)
Industrial and Systems Engineering -- Industrial engineering is the degree program that generally encompasses supply chain management, though it is also covered by technical MBA programs, particularly those at universities without degree programs in industrial engineering.
I probably shouldn't even delve into commenting on a stream that has turned a positive blog article into "atlanta is racist". strange.

I grew up in Atlanta but have lived in Chicago, Washington state, Florida and Tokyo, Japan. I now live in Mountain View, California in the heart of the valley.

Atlanta is a great place to live, raise a family and has its own unique tech/geek/startup culture. It's hard to compare the valley to Atlanta - but that's true with any other location on the planet. Silicon Valley is unique and difficult to replicate.

These types of "centers" happen because of aggregation of people and resources. Nashville has an aggregation that supports country music, Atlanta has hip-hop, LA has Hollywood, D.C. has politics and NYC still is the financial capital of the world. Silicon Valley is just the technology capital of the world. With any rule, you have exceptions - plenty of great technology companies come out of Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and Denver (just to name a few).

What Atlanta and all other places should focus on isn't how to replicate the valley - but instead, how to create their own unique place which highlights and rewards their own achievements and strengths. It will take a lot of constituents to make that happen - entrepreneurs, investors, law makers and educators.

One stark contrast that might be worth exploring is the difference between the Valley and other locations is reinvestment through the social contract. In the Valley, there is a very strong sense of a social contract from entrepreneurs to entrepreneurs (and investors to entrepreneurs). I feel a much stronger sense of success which breeds more success (or help, resources, guidance and mentorship). In fact, anecdotally, it seems like way more entrepreneurs "who make it big" in the valley, attempt to repeat - either directly in their own subsequent startups or minimally through very active advising and investment in younger upstarts. I would contrast that to Atlanta where I believe that's more of the exception than the norm. (Plenty of people have such as John Imlay, Mitch Free, Alan Graber, Tom Noonon, just to name a few). My own personal assessment is that it might be because there are (a) fewer very large exits in Atlanta, (b) it's easier to retire with less money in Atlanta and (c) there's no peer pressure to do it again.

Recently, however, I'm very encouraged by all of the entrepreneurs that have decided to take things into their own hands. Atlanta knows who they are (Lance Weatherby, Scott Burkett, Sanjay Parekh and all the guys at Shotput Ventures like David Cummings and Mitch Free). I've long said it's the entrepreneurs that will "save Atlanta" -- if there is such as thing that people believe is necessary.

I'm very much rooting for Atlanta. Not to become yet-another-failed-silicon-valley replication attempt. Wow, gives a f* about that. I'm rooting for Atlanta to become it's own identity: something more powerful, more creative, more sustainable and more unique. Something that people say: "you can only do that in Atlanta".
There are many more Asians in the Northeast, though, and they are on the same coast as some of these Southern states.
Silicon Valley: Bastion of tolerance.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Palo_Altos_Top_Cop_Enco...

I do agree that if someone is seeking out a tolerant place, they're probably going to rule out the South based on the way it's typically caricatured. California has the opposite reputation, though I don't think it really deserves it.
I loved that book for so many reasons, but one in particular is the appendices which cover the bad parts of JavaScript. Coming from a C++ background, I had a few WTF moments early on coming up to speed with JavaScript and it was a cathartic experience to know that I'm not the only one who finds certain aspects of JavaScript a little annoying (I'm talking to you, variable scoping rules).

It's one of the first books I recommend for colleagues who want to really learn Javascript.
I lived in Atlanta for 7 years. (went to school at Georgia Tech too). I moved there when the population hit 3M. Honestly, I did not like the startup scene there, I moved out and now live in the Bay Area. I'm an Asian American and there really is no diversity unless you live on Buford Hwy... at least nothing compared to living in SF/Bay Area. You don't notice the racism there until you move out. People here in the bay area don't really care where you're from or what's your background. It's incredibly refreshing!

If you're white, you probably don't notice the racism. If you're not white, I'm sure you'd notice it. The African American population in Atlanta often think that all Asians living there came from oversees.
That will depend greatly on how you use your database (number of queries over time, type of queries, size of returned data, etc...).

I worked on a large DB intensive eCommerce site, with a large number of writes and un-cachable data. While it worked great locally, trying to point a cluster at the DB in the backup data center (50 ms away on a dedicated backbone line) absolutely killed performance.

Also, for another eCommerce site, the local dev instance on my laptop boots in about ~ 1 minute when running against a local database. It takes about ~10 minutes when running against the corporate dev db over the VPN connection (~50ms added latency).

However, for an application with more cacheable data, and less queries per second, it would matter less.
Do Social Networks Matter?
I'm not sure that's true, at least for Twitter. I just tried tweeting 140 ♥s, and all 140 of them showed up. (And I'm sure my followers now feel very loved)
As an Asian who has lived in Atlanta for 7 years, I can definitely tell you that it's not friendly to live there as an Asian. Well, it's better than some places, but it's definitely crappy compared to the Bay Area or Boston.
You're very right. In fact, 30% of SV startups are by non-Americans. And there are huge networks in SV representing all kinds of minorities, from Indians to Chinese to Filipino to Afghan. There's even one around African entrepreneurs (note, not African American).
What is irony? Using grids to help save time on a project only to discover dozens of competing frameworks each purporting to be better than the other. So you waste time learning how to use a few of them.

If you are like me, you then give up and spend time writing your own framework.
doesn't google own blogger?
Erm, I guess you have a higher threshold for tolerance. Every time I board Marta, I'm usually mocked by someone of African American decent there. And almost every time I have to explain that I grew up here, I'm as American as you, yada yada. And these Marta stations are pretty close to downtown (Midtown, Peachtree, Lindbergh station, etc) Diverse? Partially. Tolerant? No.

Diversity is nothing compared to SF. Atlanta has whites, blacks, and latinos. You won't find a significant percentage of another. Even on Buford Highway where the majority of Asian grocery stores are, you'll find that Latinos outnumber the Asian population 2:1. California has a good mix of everyone, it's the reason I love it here.
Congrats on the launch and good press! I wish you the best of luck. There is probably a decent number of people who would like to avoid dealing with the database infrastructure directly.

However, this launch raises a question for me, with regards to funding and YCombinator.

Obviously I'm only seeing what's in the video, but it looks like you have a provisioning system, and a web interface (like an enhanced phpMyAdmin). I assume there's backups, failover, monitoring, etc... in the background as well.

Why did you need funding for this? What did you gain from YCombinator? Perhaps I'm downplaying your efforts due to ignorance on how your system really works, but it seems pretty straightforward to build. I don't use EC2, but I'm pretty sure I could build a web app that creates new databases, an enhanced version of phpMyAdmin, and my standard monitoring/backup stuff that I do already, in a couple of days. My understanding is the "cloud" aspect of EC2 makes scaling the new db instances out much easier (than if I did it myself using dedicated servers). So I'm not sure why you felt you needed investors, months of dedicated full time work, exposure to VCs, etc...?

My intent isn't to be snarky or put down your accomplishments, but clearly I'm missing either the complexity and effort to build your solution, or I'm missing some key ingredient that YC provided that made your startup easier/possible/etc...
please let me into the beta! Railsjedi@gmail.com. My site opensourcerails.com is going down every day because of dreamhosts shitty mysql server
Thanks, this gives me some things to think about. I do have to wonder though, is privacy really something inherently human, or are we conditioned by society to require privacy for comfort? I do think it's the former, but I still have to wonder.
What? Where do you live in Atlanta? I've spent the last 7 years in Atlanta and I can tell you that it's not as tolerant as you think. I spent about 3 years living in Canlen Walk (Near the intersection of 85 & Buford Hwy), 4 years on the Georgia Tech campus. What ethnicity are you?

I can count many times walking from shops near the Varsity around North Ave when I encounter African Americans, they always ching-chong me thinking I'm from out of the country. I'm like dude, I've lived in America for as long as you have.
Ask HN: Just replace my DBA: painless db admin and scale without the cloud? 
The recent launch of FathomDB is the latest of many articles on HN about databases, scalability, and the cloud.

What is the state of the art -- in terms of scalability, management, monitoring -- for people who need to keep their data in house? Maybe X where X:FathomDB as Xobni:Gmail? Or are we stuck hiring a DBA?
If it helps, I asked a more concrete version of this question focusing on PostgreSQL on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/556325/postgresql-managem...
A NY Times press release on GOOG...
> a lot of smart hacker immigrants would never move to a "red state".

As someone who isn't an American I can't really weigh in on this statement but there is plenty of data that suggests that hackers would live in a "red state".

California was a red state for all of the 60's through to the end of the 80's and silicon valley thrived during that time.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/11/...

http://www.democracyforums.com/showthread.php?t=19761
Many parts of the US still don't have DSL or cable broadband options.
I just don't understand what kind of person gets their jollies by molesting a virtual child until they are crying in a corner. I'm not suggesting there ought to be a law against molesting virtual children.
I really appreciate that you took the time to write this, it's the sort of thing I've been searching for online and trying to figure out for myself to no avail.

I realize now that my question was overly broad, and the different types of privacy (from government, from corporations, from friends, from strangers...) can't be lumped together for the sake of argument. And yet you still managed to cover all of them in your points, which is great.
APIMuni - web service for NextMuni.com data
Well, I'll be sure to vote with my cash and only buy books that allow TTS. I spend a LOT of money on books (I am a bookworm) and would like the ability to listen to them sometimes.

And as for the publishers who disallow TTS, we'll.. there's always certain IRC channels and bittorrent networks. If they intend to fuck me over, they I likewise them, I say!
"People are commodities." How many business owners think this way, without realizing it?
The annual meeting is one huge sales event for Berkshire companies. For good reason: 25,000 mostly wealthy people (investors and their guests) are there. Borsheim's sells millions of dollars of jewelry, people sign up for NetJets, the Nebraska Furniture Mart has its best day of the year, etc. And up on the stage during the meeting, Buffett conspicuously eats See's Candies and drinks Coca-Cola.

BTW, if anyone else is going to the meeting this year, email me (in my profile). I'm considering it. I've gone for the last three years and enjoyed it a lot.
According to the stats posted below disproportionate to the tune of 50%.
Seconded. When my weight starts ticking up and I can't bring it under control, my "nuclear option" is to record my weight every morning and write down everything I eat. At the end of the day I put everything on a blog. Even though the blog doesn't bear my name, doesn't have any readers, and can't be connected to me in any way, it hurts like hell when I have to record a bad food day. It hurts even worse than eating right. It's my bogeyman.
I'm sorry, I don't follow how you're applying Occam's Razor here.
Managed hosting works for us (Engine Yard), it is significantly cheaper than hiring your own DBA.
Why does the insurance company need to be stupid?
They are in Atlanta as well. One of the strongest organizations in the city is TiE Atlanta.

I am formally attached to 3 early stage startups outside of my day job. In total these startups are comprised of 50% White and 50% Asian cofounders.

Another that I helping is founded by a young lady out of Ghana.

To say that minority populations are not well represented in the Atlanta startup community is not a statement based on first hand knowledge.
This looks better suited to the B-Tree version of Berkeley-db than MySQL.
In Atlanta in particular this is not true. Two of the most successful companies started in Atlanta: CipherTrust and Manhattan Associates (although you may not think of the latter as a startup now) were started by Indians. I personally know of several other "very likely" to be successful startups started by minorities.

If you read news about Startup Riot on the front page of HN in the past week, it is run by Sanjay Parekh, another successful Indian American entrepreneur out of Atlanta.

I am Indian American and I cofounded a startup in Atlanta last year. I have yet to experience any bias. I have worked in Silicon Valley at a startup and the startup community in Atlanta is at least as welcoming to minorities as in the valley. The valley attracts more minorities simply because there are more opportunities

Nearly 80% of the engineering team at CipherTrust consisted of Chinese, Indian and African American engineers.

California in general may be much more liberal than Geogia but Atlanta is a very very open minded place not just for ethnic or racial minorities, there is a thriving gay community in Atlanta. If you visit us, take a stroll in midtown some day so that Atlanta may disabuse you of false notions about the South.
So, he's unimpressed with silicon valley conventions like "friends lists" ... but one of his favorite startups is a "mobile social network"?

I'm unimpressed with Max's shallow evaluation.
Hah. 11c in MI and CA over 24oz.
It may not be possible to understand what they can become, but one can look at the industry and know roughly what will happen. Let's say some guy comes up with some really great hubcaps.He can grow to become the best hubcap maker in the world. But he's still just making hubcaps, and most people don't care about them.

But the people who do stuff in media, for example music or tv, always have potential to change the industry. Same with anything communication related. These are core industries that are fundamental to human beings - so startups in those areas always have huge potential. Like muxtape for example, or justin.tv, those startups can change the world. They are not changing the world yet, but I can see that with the right things in place, they can change the world. It's the same with microprocessors, anyone who was in the field knew that if size went down, price went down and so on, microprocessors would make a huge difference. They did not predict the apps that would be enabled because of them.

Why did they not? Microprocessors created a platform, and a platform opens a brand new field for new people to create ideas within. When a startup works on something that creates a new type of platform, then breakout ideas can happen on the platform. Hubcaps are not a platform that others can build on. They're the end of a line.