skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all, painting the entire South with a single brush reeks of bias. Atlanta is not racist. I have lived here for 5 years and as an Indian American and I am yet to experience a single experience of racism. This has to be plain luck because in the few months that I lived in NYC, I experienced some.

Seriously, visit Atlanta, see how many African Americans, Asians, Indians and yes, gay people lead a happy life very much free from pain caused by bias over here.

If you really want to fight racism, please at least praise the lack of bias and openness in a community when you see it. Painting these with the same brush and giving them no credit for their openness guarantees that they will die away.
MySpace runs on Microsoft SQL Server.

http://blog.de-hao.com/2007/11/17/myspacecom-running-a-megas...
No. Atlanta is diverse and tolerant by any Standard. I say that having lived in Atlanta, NYC and San Jose. Sure, we don't have as many Asians as either NYC or the bay area, but implying that Atlanta is not tolerant is just plain wrong.

I am Indian American.
Alternative explanation: people whose mental skills kept declining (for some unrelated reason) worked longer hours to compensate for a loss of productivity due to such decline.
it's down!

btw, i'm also using tyrant myself, a very cool thing indeed!
The area around Varsity and North Ave consists of GT students, who are a very liberal community or people who are basically just poor. Unfortunately you will find that racism amongst poor people is higher simply on account of ignorance.
Up for me in Toronto.
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/slicehost.com
I'm guessing you meant "fewer features" (but you might plausibly have meant "lesser features").

Careful use of few/fewer/less/lessor makes for useful distinctions.
I made a cycle :-)

http://➡.ws/♲♲
I am wondering. From the benchmark, it is obviously slower than memcached. Why someone wants to use this instead of memcached which has better support?
Custom business cards at LEGO
I thought the reason Chez Panisse, Seattle, and SF stopped buying bottled water was not because of the quality of the water, but rather the wastefulness of the bottles themselves...
(ok, does not pass the "really interesting" test, but how cool is that)
There is a Haskell REPL. ghci.
How much do you think that taxes and living expenses play into this? I know that both San Fran and Boston have some of the highest living expenses in the country, and while living in Florida isn't cheap, I would be surprised to find Tampa to be just as expensive (Miami, sure, but Tampa?).

Also, the tax rates for both personal and corporations are higher in CA and MA than in FL (and FL doesn't have a state income tax), and I can see the higher regulatory costs in CA and MA being highly unattractive.

This leads into a question I have: Why did Silicon Valley become this computer Mecca? Why not Boston? My guess is that the tax and regulations up through the late 60s/early 70s favored California (coupled with the nice weather) and what you are now seeing (as CA collapses into debt) is merely inertia. If I had to pick an area for another Silicon Valley to arise, it would be Austin.
You would think Mallett would have gotten the scant few hundred thou he needs to test his circulating ring laser by now. I think I first heard of him and his hypothesis in 2001.
memcached is a memory based key-value database. LightCloud is persistent i.e. data is saved to disk. I'll make this more clear on the website.
There is no argument, I'd like to know how they handle it. Since I don't use a language that uses a lot of wide characters, nor do I use twitter via SMS (I barely use my twitter account as it is), I'm interested as to what the experience is.
Hubcaps as platforms sounds like the most interesting idea I've heard in a long time (I understand this was not the point you were trying to make).

--Hubcap based games: Who can log the least number of hours? (if it spins,we can measure distance traveled)

--Hubcap based communications: My cars recognize and exchange information (shopping lists, to-do lists, language courses)

--Hubcap based entertainment: Quickly transfer songs/files/etc. -- hooks into your audio system.

--Hubcap based computing: Use those idle cycles while your sitting at the light to help with gene folding.

--Hubcap based energy: Spinners? Naw, they just charge my car's battery (self-powered units).

Braindumps are fun!
Conceptualizing in Assembly Tasks
If something is true of every period, you can explain it without recourse to a theory about why it's true of this
particular period.
there is memcachedb (http://memcachedb.org/) which provides persistence through berkeleydb.
Right, that's exactly my point. None of those places can really compare with the size and power of Silicon Valley. The fact that there's only one Silicon Valley is proof enough. The rest are smaller tech hubs. So there must be some other factor working in favor of Silicon Valley.
Probably not that much in practice. Startups that would have succeeded may succeed faster, but startups that would have failed will still fail. More funding never seems to save bad startups. It just makes them die slower.
memcachedb is not distributed, meaning that you can only scale vertically (i.e. by buying bigger machines). With LightCloud you can scale by adding extra servers to the system (i.e. horizontal scaling).

This said, Tokyo Tyrant performs better than memcachedb and offers more features (such as master-master replication and Lua scripting).

I posted a comment a while back on Tokyo Tyrant vs. memcachedb: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=480055
Ingenious Inventions
No, I've done that a couple times before.
High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques [pdf]
I think taxes and the cost of living make zero difference, except possibly in NYC. Renting in Silicon Valley is not that expensive.

It's a very involved question why Silicon Valley has pulled ahead of Boston. People write whole books about it. I think the elaborate theories are probably mistaken, and that it's mostly due to a combination of historical accidents (Shockley Semiconductor specifically) and the quality of life in the Bay Area.
Why bother? The pirated version works right out of the box, and since he legitimately owns a copy, his ass is covered morally.

He may not be getting the Windows "Genuine Advantage", but as far as I can tell this "advantage" is about as real as cold fusion.
I did actually mean the essay to apply to all cities, not just those in the US.
I will be more excited to see how this key-value database actually helps to scale plurk. I am interested to integrate this into Rails if this really works very well.
I just started with hardware since I can safely assume you have to use that. But I'm guessing you also use Google, no?
having managed hosting doesn't mean you don't need to a dba. In my experience all the host does (worked for a managed hosting company) is set up the servers and keep them running, their help really can't help you with tweaking queries or tuning the db. I can't speak for on engine yard specifically. But I wouldn't bank on your host knowing anything beyond the basics of databases.
Caching bugs exposed in djbdns
There is no easy out, if you really need to scale, regardless of infrastructure you are going to need someone who understands databases. If you're lucky you might be able to find someone who can do more than one job. e.g. dba+sys admin. Just make sure that they really do know both things.
I was stuck in traffic driving home from Lake Tahoe the other week. I scanned the AM channels for 30 minutes trying to find a traffic report to figure out what was going on. Then it hit me, search twitter for "tahoe traffic" and sure enough the first tweet was a report that CHP had stopped traffic due to icy conditions. I got off the highway and took a different way home.

Thanks Twitter.
> The ability to get government funding increases the success probability of various startups.

How about some supporting evidence?
Do you therefore see LightCloud as a possible alternative/complement to memcached? Certainly buying 500 GB of disk space is cheaper than buying 500 GB of RAM.
I did a quick skim, but I didn't see any mention of the laws of the state for things like IP, employee mobility, etc. As I recall, MA is rather restrictive and so things like non-compete clauses have some meaning there. CA, on the other hand, ignores such things. I would think that the "business environment" is critical - too pro-management and the workers won't go and take their risks in that environment.

The comment re: NC/RTP is spot on. The natives are content, slow-going folks. The imports are more active, but the slow-n-easy environment probably slows them down eventually. The triangle's a bubble in the midst of a lot of farmers...
IANAL, but this sounds like a class action lawsuit or an argument that MS has stolen something from you. (You paid good money for that license as evidence by the sticker. You have something that purports to be the program that you paid money for, but the two don't work together because of affirmative measures by MS.)

In many/most US states, they can't get around the implied warrantee of fitness (the thing that you bought does what they said it would do when they sold it to you), which at the very least for an OS includes "installs".
I buy ramen at 8 to 10 cents a pack, and not at any special restaurant supply place or anything like that, just the good old HEB.

If you start going the route of adding pinches of veges and peanut butter and etc, and your own flavorings, you will realize that you can switch to wide egg noodles for a few cents savings at the expense of a few extra minutes cook time.
Even if we accept this, to avoid all sorts of distortions you would need all market players to believe this.
I probably shouldn't chime in but since my name was brought up a couple of times I feel compelled.

Yeah, I'm Indian. Yeah I'm American too (born and raised in Kentucky).

Is there prejudice in the world? Yeah, sure.

Have I experienced prejudice/racism? Of course - and not just in Georgia or Kentucky but all over the world.

Does it matter one bit (at least to me)? Nope.

Anyone that shows prejudice (based on race or otherwise) is someone I don't need to be friends with, do business with, or interact with. I've never felt like a customer wouldn't buy because of some racial prejudice or an investor wouldn't invest because of the same. If they did, would I even want to do business with someone so small minded? No, I wouldn't.

Starting a company is hard. It doesn't matter if you don't have one hurdle or another - there are a lot of obstacles to a successful liquidity event. Entrepreneurship isn't a path where success is guaranteed. If it were, everyone would do it.

So my point is this - sure, prejudice may exist and you may think it will hinder you from succeeding. So what? No one said this was going to be easy. On the contrary, the large potential rewards upon success all but determine that it will be very, very difficult to achieve (go read an economics book if you don't get the reasoning as to why).

So just get to work, start your company, and be successful. This stuff is all noise and if it derails you - you need to become a better entrepreneur/leader rather than complain that someone kept you from succeeding.
At Plurk.com we use both LightCloud and memcached. They complement each other. I.e. memcached is used for caching stuff - to reduce the load to MySQL. LightCloud is used to store persistent data - such as how many times a plurk has been read.

You could also store this in MySQL, but generally, storing key-value data is not the force of a relational database such as MySQL and LightCloud (and other key-value databases) are optimized for this kind of storage.
Toradex Robin: Atom CPU on credit card sized mainboard
> California banned bottles for a reason

When did CA ban bottles?
Larrabee is supposed to come out in about a year, starting at, according to some expectations 32 cores.
I added consistent ring hashing and a rediscloud class to the ruby client library today. so you can now use a cluster of redis servers and have the client use ring hashing to determine the server for a given key.
You would still fit in in Ga. You just have to buy a pickup, fit a gun rack an wear a baseball cap with a tyre maker on it.
Austin is both in the south and a "red state" and is one of the techier cities in the US. Austin itself has a reputation for being hip and eccentric, however. I think the real question is, "Can a city the size of Atlanta make itself over?"
Thanks a lot for the response. Is the problem like what this guy had? An addon that may have changed Firefox's default IDN resolution?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498378
I've lived in both cities. A few points:

1. Quality of life in Atlanta is good enough that smart people could be convinced to move here. Its warm, there are good restaurants, there is good shopping, there are funky neighborhoods and bars, its a short drive down to nice beaches where the water is actually warm enough to swim in. Hell, I've been snowboarding 4 weekends so far this season within a few hours of town. It does not have a national reputation for being ultra-hip, but as I said in the other thread, I don't think that matters. In fact, around the turn of the century (am I allowed to say that yet) neighborhoods in SF that were hip and trendy and neighborhoods in SF that were dripping in startup money were mutually exclusive, and being anyway associated with the tech industry was just about the most uncool thing you could possible be there even though everybody was.

2. There are some people who wouldn't move to Atlanta, for reasons that are both reasonable and unreasonable. However, the same thing can be said about San Francisco. Some people will not move there because they don't like the culture or they are worried that they are going to die in an Earthquake. Atlanta does have an undercurrent of racism and that does bare repeating. But its not a death knell for the city as a center for innovation. We have a very diverse community here who can work together and produce great companies.

3. Atlanta has a vibrant, multifaceted nerd scene with various strong universities, technical user groups, cons, parties, mailing lists, web sites, facebook groups, etc. In fact I find it far easier to get networked in with other nerds here than in San Francisco, where scenes tend to be a bit more snobbish, exclusive, and corrupted by the presence of wealth. There are some things I wish were going on here that aren't, such as a genuine hacker space, but in general the "scene" here is strong and growing stronger at a regular pace.

4. In addition to the aforementioned nerd scene, I think the things that matter are the right legal framework for innovation (which I explained in the other thread, and I do not agree that the differences are trivial particularly with regard to intellectual property laws), and a supportive environment of investors and incubators. The later seems to be improving, but unfortunately the stock market crash has made everything more difficult.

5. I strongly agree with jhaynie that Atlanta has got to look at its individual technical strengths. There are certain technical communities that are particularly strong here. Innovation is not about copying San Francisco - its about leading, on the world stage, in terms of the direction we need to take technology. For example, this is a time when every business in world is asking itself how it can reduce its costs. Our concentration of industrial engineers may have new answers to that question that you aren't going to get out of Palo Alto.
It's a really good talk, though. Worth the watch for me.
Hopefully the madness will stop one day. I never bought any DRM music but then I bought a bunch of stuff since DRM walls came down and I was able to do as I please with my purchase. Somewhere down the road there is an economic incentive for the publishers to make readers happy.
I just figured out the point of the Mail Goggles feature, form the perspective of Google: it gives the press some copy interesting enough that they can mention that Google Labs exists.
Here's a picture of the CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, and his business card http://borsen.dk/light/nyhed/138424/
Yeah, this kind of question seems really close to "I'm a business guy, all I need is a tech guy to implement my idea", which implies there's some way to avoid having to know how to do something that is core to the business.
So "motor coaches" (buses) are more efficient than rail? I'm surprised: the local rapid transit organization has always said that "light rail" and rail are more efficient than more buses!
My body is on the receiving end of a billion+ year heritage of successful water filtering. That statement is superficially profound, but fails at biology.
Is There Such A Thing As A Blue Chip Stock Anymore?
Interesting. How does Amazon Mechanical Turk fit into that? Maybe that "yet?" is sooner than we think.
Man. I go off and work on something else for a couple hours, and I come back to find the bicycle shed on fire...
What I found entertaining and a big lesson is how on page 8, he asks his readers to call Geico and find out how you can save money on car insurance.
Don't know about the state of CA, but the city of SF banned water bottles and water coolers (favoring tap water) within city government buildings. Makes sense plus SF water is great.
Try a commerical database, such as Microsoft SQL Server (FD: I work there as a developer). To bring up a recent example, it can build indexes without locking the whole table so you wouldn't need to jump throught the hoops like the FriendFeed guys just did with MySQL. Unless your time is free it will cost you less to buy SQL Server than to write your own "online index thingie" on top of MySQL.

And if your time is free, then you are probably a startup and you can get SQL Server and bunch of other MS tools for free via http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/

MySpace runs on SQL Server: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/steve_jones/archive/20... and if it's good enough for them it will likely be good enough for your site as well. I'm not sure if the scale-out story is any good (there are "partitioned views" which are basically "sharding" but I never used those), but scale-up story is as good as they come - it can efficiently utilize 64-cores of the HP superdome.

I don't know much about Oracle and IBM DB2, but I know that the latter has a free version without too many restrictions on it, so give them a spin as well. If ease of use is importnat to you, common wisdom has it that Microsoft's is the easiest to use among the top commercial vendors. NB: I did not verify the common wisdom, YMMV :-)
As a MS grad of the UNC CS department who has spent time working with researchers at both Duke and NC State, it's interesting to me to think about why we don't have a thriving startup culture. I certainly know people who have gone through those programs, stayed in the area, and are interested in startups (as both founders and places to work).

My perspective (which clearly can't cover all the students in those programs or hackers in the area) is that a small number of successful (ie, more profitable for the founders than taking a job with IBM, Fidelity - before the layoffs, NVidia, SRA, SAS, or one of the other, non-tech focused companies in the area that suck up tech grads) would go an extremely long way in jump-starting a startup culture.

Heck, I wonder if semi-decent mentorship for founders from people who actually got something out-the-door would be more helpful than just having some VC opening the checkbook. I always think of SV as kind of nirvana, where joining a startup with some decent chance of being successful is much more a normal story than it would be here in RTP. I think a big part of the lack of a startup culture here is that people create interesting software, but then kind of sputter out on getting it in front of people. Maybe RTP has the tech talent to be a startup hub, but lacks a local and cutting edge,technically-driven customer base? Or the critical mass of like-minded founders is what we desperately need as pg speculates in his essay? Certainly the focus at the big three universities isn't on startups . . .

All that said, in my peer group, several people have gone on to work at small, startup type companies in RTP. But it seems like the common story here for hackers who "make" it are ones that seem to involve consulting for one of the bigger companies in the area or maybe less commonly developing software in 1 or 2 man shops on a custom basis (ie, roll-your-own ERPs and whatnot) for comfortable income.

I think RTP is getting closer to being more startup-oriented, but we (the area and hackers in it) need to be more driven in becoming entrepreneurs. But I don't hear hackers in RTP say anything about being satisfied with a nice beach house . . . I'm not defending the RTP hackers too strongly here because I do think we are missing some critical piece of what a startup culture needs but I'm not sure we can chalk it up to "passivity, complacency, and parochialism."

I would love to hear other thoughts from HN readers in RTP or with connections to it (ie, did you do school here and head to SV?).
A recession is going to, somewhat counter-intuitively, increase obesity.

Unhealthy food is far cheaper (per calorie) than healthy food (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...). That is also one of the reasons you see an inverse correlation between income and obesity in modern America (i.e., rich people are skinnier).

The root cause is all the corn subsidies we have. Pretty much all our junk food either contains large quantities of corn, or is fed-on corn.
It's not on fire. It has turned into a healthy discussion. What I am hearing is that lots of hackers have issue with moving to ATL due to perceptions with tolerance. Fair enough.

Now if we ever started writing $1 million checks it would be interesting to see how people would vote with their feet. In my day job I get inquires from all over the world from people that would move to Georgia for a little help.

Thanks for the article that inspired me and the spirited discussion.