skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well clustering is having multiple servers addressing the same content. Boosts performance and reliability.

Sharding is where you split the data across multiple servers, based on some identifying category like users, functional area, etc.
A year or so ago I remember a couple private rainbow cracking sites that had tables of up to several terabytes in size. It was easy to just submit your hash and they'd queue it up to be cracked. I think one of them is now rainbowcrack.com, but it seems like a few have gone to paid services.
Managing Your Reputation Online
A little on sharding:

An Unorthodox Approach to Database Design : The Coming of the Shard [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407]

Partitioning vs. Federation vs. Sharding [http://www.lethargy.org/~jesus/archives/95-Partitioning-vs.-...]
By non-free clustered version, are you referring to Slony (http://slony.info/) ? I believe you can use it for free, and I have known people who use it successfully in production.
"82% [of the top 5000 private companies] are self-financed"
a) "It's business", move on.

b) Don't let it! Move on, worst thing you could do is drag this on and not be up front and clear cut about it, because then it will drag the life out of the project and you.

c) Talk to your lawyer! IANAL, but -- Have you signed anything? If it's pre-incorporation, and you haven't agreed to anything, it's kind of a non-issue. As for ConnectU, I bet the case gets thrown out anyways, they don't have a very strong case and the judge is already annoyed with them.

d) You answered it yourself, plus you've learned a valuable lesson about getting the legalities out of the way before engaging in any part of the business. A good part of incorporating is so that you have a clear way of dealing with dispute resolutions such as this when they arise (and believe me they will!)
I'm not generally concerned about a man-in-the-middle attack. What I am concerned about is someone just capturing my data and then having it or using it. For example, in my backups will usually be a copy of various databases.
Are you completely sure that it can't be salvaged? Have you talked to your co-founder about the sort of work you were expecting? If you've not called them on it previously, they're probably assuming everything is fine. A gentle prod may be all it needs.

If you really must break up (I feel like I'm giving marriage counselling here...) I'm sure you can do it without being an asshole, something along the lines of the letter you've posted here would be fine - to the point and no personal attacks.

As for your partner having your IP now, well that's probably too late now - horse, stable door, bolted etc. I think the best you can manage is to perhaps come up with some sort of agreement (possibly consult a legal-document-writing-type-person to get this in writing) so that you both agree not to sue each other in the event that either one of you does well with it and the other gets sue happy.

Yes, it'll set you back and you'll have to find someone else which is why I suggest you try and work it out first. Otherwise, I'm sure there web sites where you can advertise for this sort of thing ;-)

Failing all of this and you decide to ignore my advice, I would suggest a fight to the death involving pistols at dawn or something.
Record Industry Proves Again How Much They've Lost The Plot
Replication options?

Hot spares?
If your question is about YC patents, why doesn't your title reflect that?
http://slony.info/
"By 2010 computers will have disappeared. They will be so small they will be embedded into our clothing. We will interact with virtual personalities via signals wired into our retinas." (not an exact quote, but close)

I wish it was true, but that's not going to happen in 2 years. Maybe by 2020, but definitely not by 2010.
Same thing, really. There are two times to kill a company:

1.) When it's small and not established yet.

2.) When it's big and complacent.

FaceBook is neither at the moment, so it's not really a good target to compete against. But that doesn't rule out them becoming #2 in the future. (Particularly since Zuckerberg is quite a bit more arrogant than, say, the Google founders.)
Random Acts of Initiative
Ultimately, I don't think migrations are really that useful in the first place. When you have a schema that's actually being changed often, you're in development mode, and you can afford to lose data. You can also be smart (yourself) about how you make changes to the tables to avoid data loss.

If you really do have a need for migration-like functionality, you can make a new database for each major departure. However, eventually you're going to have to reconcile the two, so you'll end up doing what you might have previously no matter what.
I've always been a fan of PostgreSQL-

We've seen the pain that mysql rebuilds can cause, with companies being down for hours. I've seen this in companies I've worked at, and on public companies such as wikipedia.

We've had good luck with psql internally. The speed isn't as much of an issue as some people had predicted, once we eliminated row counts. We're doing most of our processing on the server side, rather than using stored procedures, so we may have a different use case than most.

Slony should be fine for replication for most people. There's also the heftier Mammoth replication, but that's for-pay.

We've talked with Command Prompt (commandprompt.com) a few times, and they've been great at supporting pgsql- They have top notch pepole on staff, who know the details of slony setup, or tweaking db files. I believe they employ two slony devs on staff.

The only real annoyance I've found with postgresql is capitalization. they're being faithful to the SQL standard, but they require that all column names are lower-case, unless you put each part in quotes.

select * from "Product"."Table", where "Field", etc.

It'd be great if there were a way to allow more permissive names throughout.

In all though, I'd highly recommend it.

-Colin
I'm not a huge believer in ____-killers, at least not via direct competition. If you're small and not established, no one even mentions you in that blank, so that's out. In the case where you're big enough that people could consider you worthwhile attempting to kill, you're well-enough entrenched that no one will beat you at your own game. The way you have to die, instead, is by some alternative that wittles away at your core business. No one will kill Windows by making a better desktop OS, and no one will kill Facebook by making a nicer student networking site.
Suit alleges Google does not do enough to differentiate organic search results from sponsored links
The iPhone to Get TV Out
I'd be curious as to whether YC companies should be considered "self-financed".

It's kind of like taking money from a really smart family member that happens to be very well connected.
For part c), I suspect he's thinking he's going to be ConnectU trying to prove that the idea was his to begin with.

My suggestion is to try to find something that he's good at, and let him work on that. Otherwise, before you incorporate, sit him down and ask him flat out if he's committed to the project and share your concerns.

Very few projects I've worked on have succeeded without good communication. Sometimes it's just a matter of realizing that you're going to be the one carrying most of the weight (and varying equity to reflect this may be something you want to consider).
So when do you sleep? Don't tell me you don't sleep, we all know that's impossible for more than a week or so.
That's how the Reddits did it.
Search for Fossett turns up wrecks of 8 other small planes
There is no way seed funding from YC should be considered self-financed. Even money from family shouldn't be considered self-financed.
Should Apple Burn Its Economics Textbooks?
Why Facebook went west and Boston lost out
Music industry betting on 'ringle' format
Comparison of web application frameworks
They use Postgres? I hadn't seen that before.
Get all your friends & web 2.0 services in one place
Ok, I understand that, but back to my question: why do you need encryption for something that's openly available anyway, for example an open-source program? And it's not everyday that we copy private business data over the Net, so my point is, it would be nice to have an option for faster unencrypted transfers.
Ahh, neologisms. This one sounds dumb, though. Hopefully people will realize that you shouldn't have to pay for ringtones, people will continue not to buy singles when they could buy the real single for $1 from Apple, and the music industry can find a real business model.
My only question about google's sponsored links is whether people who are colorblind or have low contrast on their monitors can tell the difference.

For someone with normal vision on a normal monitor, I think the colored "sponsored links" box is plenty.
Fun with :target demo  - complete interface done in CSS (no JS!)
Seven Wonders of the IT World
The fastest supercomputer. The most intriguing data center. The constantly changing core at the heart of Linux. CIO.com looks at the most impressive and most unusual marvels of the IT world.
There is Javascript for the window dragging.
Fascinating; shocking. Blew my mind. Wait ... I'm starting to get the hang of this ... viola: "Every Platform is a Paradigm" ... "Every Paradigm is a Vector" ... etc. Fascinating. This will shock the world. Wasn't there a recently posted Dilbert in which this was the butt of the joke?
You're both right and wrong; on the one hand it is often hard to figure out what people want based on what they say and trial and error works (lookup "skunkworks") well in many industries as long as you 1) keep failure costs low 2) have methodology to rapidly progress from failures and instantly apply insights. On the other hand, sanj is right to - there are many better ways to go about this. Think about all the things that tick you off about non-technical sites (sites that a larger audience cares about) and I guarantee you 9 times out of 10 if you go to people who use them and ask, "Why do they do this - wouldn't this be better if they did this instead?" most people would agree with you.
Look into rsync [1] if you want transfers to be fast. You have the option (but not the requirement) to encrypt by using rsync in concert with ssh.

Incidentally I do transfer private business data over the network, encrypted, every single day, usually many times per day.

[1] http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/
Mobile Usability Tips #1 - Registration and Login
Kill the company/project/idea. If you really like the idea, start fresh with new code, new names, etc etc. Your company is way to young to be having this type of problem. It will only get worse.
No worries, when you get frustrated enough none of the above four points will matter. You'd do anything to get rid of him.

All that is assuming you have a valid case against him not contributing--and not just "we don't get along".
I think I probably would've passed on giving The Facebook money at a $15 million valuation during that first year. The article notes that the user base was in the small thousands, so not so much evidence that it had any traction. And there were certainly competitors as well (some of whom actually had a better feature set). Not to mention the whole uncertainty of deriving revenue from the site, an issue Facebook's still dealing with today.

edit: I missed the latter part of the article. It indicates that Thiel chipped in in half of Zuckerberg's "minimum," for well short of his proposed valuation to Battery.
Just this morning I wrote and email to the 3 other people involved in the project I was working on explaining why I was leaving and what I felt the correct split up was.

I had been doing the majority of the work and the rest of the team was not performing to the level I had expected as well as not meeting several deadlines that they had agreed to.

The only real sticky part is that the really great flashy idea was from one of the other people, who has the potential to pull a ConnectU, but not really a leg to stand on.

No one besides me wrote a bit of code, except there was a minimalistic HTML design stuff.

I made sure to explain what my reasons were for the split and why I was leaving and did say that I intended to make something derivative, although not in direct competition. The platform was more interesting to me then the community site that was the other person's idea. So I'll just think it through and find another way to implement the community aspect without the exact implementation that he had.

The bottom line is that this happens and it is better to make the break earlier, especially before the incorporation. Start looking for a new co-founder and get a better sense of their work before you enter into any kind of a partnership.

As for the IP part of it, that's life. If you never share the idea with anyone without legal papers first you'll never share the idea with anyone who will help you with it in the early stages.

Also, make sure that they are on the same page as you concerning work ethics and integrity. They might be able to become a better hacker, but if they are trying to trick people and pulling underhanded stunts that is a direct reflection on you ...
>>> At least in my cases, I have found this to be simply untrue unless it is related to ad spending.
I don't know what numbers they had bothered to graph up but it seems to me that the evidence of traction was very strong from very early on.
Is a joint goog/aapl bid unlikely? Or am I reading too much into gmaps on iphone?
Your First VC Meeting: Give Straight Talk
VCs are going to ask you tough questions in the meeting. The answers to some of the questions may not present aspects of your business in the best light. As a result, lots of entrepreneurs try to dodge these quesitons. That's a bad idea.
I would suggest that "we dont get along" if really true is a good a reason as any to split. If you're not getting along now and have really tried its not going to get any better.
I read this far:

an online phenomenon worth up to $6 billion

Whatever. Until the next thing.
i just can't imagine a regular user ever really understanding why (or how) their username for a bunch of websites is a URL.
Just one question.

What did your partner feels about your work?
TechShop: Geek Heaven
No, but a browser plugin would be a great platform to launch a phishing attack.
GPhone: Centerpiece of a New Strategy?
I strongly agree with the article and with mdakin's point; scp is good but rsync is better. ftp is awkward, flawed, and obsolete. I am amazed that it is still used as much as it is. Perhaps the problem is largely due to Windows admins. ssh still doesn't ship with Windows and too many Windows admins aren't familiar with it.
Great Tool!
I wonder if dyslexics focus both eyes on one letter at a time.
I read a paper that talked about the difference between dyslexic reading and normal reading. The researchers found that dyslexic people actually see too much at once and that by forcing them to focus on a smaller region of text (by, for example, having them read through a small hole in a piece of paper), they had much better performance. With consistent drills, they could even read without the mask.

edit: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/pdf/geiger1992.pdf
http can do that too although I agree that mod_autoindex doesn't.
http. The article succinctly described several problems with ftp which http doesn't share: 1) bin/ascii modes (bytes are bytes, right?) 2) multiple ports make a mess of NAT 3) plaintext credentials.
From 11 months ago: [http://programming.reddit.com/info/jl2a/comments/cjpfw]

" We use postgresql + slony, and are fairly pleased. Most of the time reddit slows down, it's db related, but so far there has always been a way to work through it. That being said, I feel we have to spend far too much time worrying about the database, and that's probably the situation with any relational db.

Presently, we have a db master that replicated to one machine, and that second machine replicates to a couple others. Most of the reddit queries are handled by the master and the first slave. The other slaves are used for backups and slow queries (e.g. stats and recommendations).

Replication and query load-balancing helped out a lot with the database load, but it introduced a new host of problems. Replication lag, in particular. This occurs when a db write is committed to the master, but the next read hits a slave before the write has propagated. "
The Trouble With Patents
Kirsner didn't explicitly mention this, but notice here that it wasn't another VC that invested in the deal Battery passed up, but an angel. Angels are a lot bolder than VCs.

The big difference between Silicon Valley and Boston in my experience is that the valley has more and much bolder angels. The VCs in the two places are similar. Boston VCs have a bit less testosterone than valley VCs, but it's not a huge difference. The real difference is the angels. And unfortunately for Boston, angels are the deciding factor in how big a tech hub a city becomes.
sleep with his wife
Is anyone else really really bored with facebook and all the news stories/hype/hyperbole surrounding it?
> you're trolling, and its annoying.

No. Objecting to platitudes isn't trolling.

The statements most commonly described as "platitudes" are short proverbs and aphorisms which are intended to motivate or encourage another person, but which are in reality overly-simplistic or cliche; for example, "You will succeed if you try hard enough"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platitude

> You asked a question that was impossible to answer

Wrong again -- funny, because he answered it above, describing what he actually did for years before YC.

It's disappointing how much knee-jerk reactionism there is when people perceive something as raining on their fantasy parade. Critical investigation will help people succeed. As a result of my not accepting the original platitude, the poster supplied much more informative answers.
I agree. I'm bored of the over-hyping.
millionth iPhone sold
Whatever FB is worth, it would have been a very big deal by Boston standards to have them here.
I got to about #4 before the ads became too annoying.
Startup Weekend Comes to NYC
Are you sure it can't be salvaged? How about just having a frank discussion? You might be surprised.
a) personal-- not being an asshole.

-- if you know its going to be an issue, its going to be a bigger one later. do what is fair and right as soon as possible. if you need to go your own ways, thats what you need to do, there is always a new twist on an old idea waiting to be developed. having been through this on the other side, i started a company a while ago, sensed things were not right and then after i spent an additional 100k on salaries and training, the guys left with jobs at another company and i was left with nothing. as an entrepreneur you have to learn to trust your gut it will allow you to make the first move advantage.

b) operational-- not having this suck the life out of the project

--it may, and you will have to face that. most likely you can say that you share ownership of the code/ idea and you can not exclude each other from using it, else release it to the public domain and make sure that either of you can use it along with the world. the value in something is being able to move it forward, not in what you have already produced. if you are so early in the company its likely that you have not produced enough to directly execute, you will need to still move the code/ project forwards. quite a bit.

c) legal -- I don't want a Facebook/ConnectU situation down the road

-- rethink the problem and solution, for our group, we agreed to own our own code up until the point it was real, maybe you loose a bit of the code, but if there was no nda between members you can go off an recreate it with your own twist. not every idea is novel and unless the patent process was started then that maybe your defense moving forwards.

d) strategic -- not that I expect it to happen, but what's to stop my-soon-to-be-ex-co-founder from taking the idea and finding someone else to execute it? [insert standard boilerplate here about ideas being worth nothing without execution]

consumers like choice and having core differences in values between two competing products helps define the market better and broader. if you are going to compete head to head with a co-founder i am sure you are going to have different core values to derive as a niche. but, even though you are competing, you will be sharing the burden of advertising and developing your market. Java, helped sell .Net; friendster, helped sell MySpace and Facebook; hotmail, helped sell gmail, etc.... competition is good, and a market without any might not be much of a market at all. do not fear the genre, find ways to embrace it.

you might find that you can form two separate businesses that share an initial code base and your partner might go for it if he feels you are driving the company in the wrong direction too.
i do not condone or suggest any behavior that involves the intentional death of a human.
lol, also a bad idea.
"Are you completely sure that it can't be salvaged? Have you talked to your co-founder about the sort of work you were expecting? If you've not called them on it previously, they're probably assuming everything is fine. A gentle prod may be all it needs."

It's too early to treat it this way. This is a total Splitsville situation.
Kudos to the poster for their accuracy. If you read this in Slashdot, at first you'd be led to believe that the suit was about Google selling (regular) search results without disclosure.
I suspect even had Facebook gotten early funding from someone in Boston, they would've moved out to the Valley (or at least the west coast) for the same reasons many YC companies do. This is mostly a story about Battery losing a potentially good payoff, not a story about Boston losing its one chance to have a young software startup stick around.
"I suspect he's thinking he's going to be ConnectU trying to prove that the idea was his to begin with."

Then he'd be the one in the team that wasn't delivering. We're taking OP at face value and assuming he is the one that can deliver a product that the world likes and that the other person is lacking in that area.
The problem with a day job isn't really the time it takes up, it's what it does to the remaining time. Yeah, you've in theory got 30-35 hours a week of "free" time. However, it's likely broken up into an hour before work, a couple hours after work, and 10 hrs/day on weekends. And your full attention won't be on your startup during those blocks, because you'll be worrying about having to get to work or exhausted from having come home from work.

I've found that nearly all my completed projects have required the ability to say "Fuck it" to all my other commitments and just concentrate on them. My first project for FictionAlley was done during summer vacation. The big rewrite of FictionAlley lingered for 3 years while I kept putting it off for college coursework, and only got finished because I put in a 4-month gap between graduating and getting a job. Scrutiny was done instead of studying for my physics final exam, which I ended up flunking anyways. My most successful project at work involved blowing off all my boss's requests for busywork, which made him pretty mad at me until he saw the result. Once I had to start paying attention to his busywork again, my productivity dropped way off.
This isn't a marriage, and if you want to use the analog, then it sounds like the "child" is still-born and really wasn't the original posters to begin with. The time to leave is now. I doesn't get cheaper, easier, or less legally entangling, later on.

Hire slow and fire fast applies to co-founders as well as employees. More, even. An employee can drain a lot of value from a company, but a co-founder can destroy it single-handedly.
Do you want to move on because you aren't making much progress with them, or you are making progress in spite of them (they are slowing you down)?