skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forget databases.

The machine gets an address space of 0..N bytes. They stay there, whether or not there is AC power. Internally this could consist of an array of mechanical or flash disks, cached by abundant cheap RAM. How difficult is that? No proprietary anything, no "object oriented" anything necessary. Nothing to think about. No changes in software at all, in fact, except for all of the various things you no longer have to do. You build a data structure in memory - doesn't matter what kind - and it stays there, until you erase it. That's what orthogonal persistence is. Forget the snake oils which try to coopt the phrase.

One example of a current machine with actual orthogonal persistence is the Palm Pilot.

> it's harder to make applications designed around it perform as efficiently

Crank the R/W speed up to eleven and hope the issues go away. We're nearly there with striped solid-state disks.

> OS specifically designed for application providers running on large clusters with S3-style storage

Screw that, I just want a desktop which behaves sanely - from both the user and programmer's point of view. This means a single, nonvolatile address space.
If the poster child of successful niche content production changes business models, we would like to know of it; are they still in content production? are they still niche?

Success should be measured against the backdrop of time; how long can they keep it up?
http://www.uopeople.org/
#1

Ability to sign up. I have filled your online form; it says you're picky/choosy about who you accept, and I haven't heard from you in 3+ weeks, so I guess I'm not it. None of your features mean anything to me if I can't get them.

#2

Knowing that my host is not doing a lot of maintenance work behind the scenes. I don't like "scheduled" downtime.

#3

Good staff. Linode and VPSFarm have been exceptional in this; linode has almost live support, dashboard and high-tech gizmos. VPS Farm has just one cool guy :-)

[Edit:

#4

Slackware.]
I'm surprised at the university representatives who were disturbed by Clemson's gaming of the system. Shouldn't this make those people (and US News) question the validity of the ranking? Instead of making a display of outrage, why not find a better methodology?

The most troubling aspect of this is that good schools feel the need to become arbitrarily more selective in order to boost their ranking.
I once suggested to an alumni association official that the university host free parties for recent graduates and have a concerned donor hand out $20's at the door with the request that a donation be made inside. The bump in rankings would lead to more cash coming into the university and have a multiplier effect on the cash dispensed. I wonder what the definition of "donation" is -- Could a rich alumnus send $20 bills in late December, each in a separate envelope with the names of an alumnus who had not yet given that year? I suppose the binary nature of this statistic was chosen to avoid bias toward schools that pump out investment bankers over those who produce <insert lowly paid profession here>.

Obviously, all these numbers can be gamed, and we know this from reading Joel's articles on measuring programmers. However, I wonder if universities might be rational in gaming the system, even to an extent much greater than Clemson. Five years from now, few will recall the talk featured in the article, but the positive feedback loop initiated by such a strong bump in the rankings might continue for decades. Why not take the short term ethical hit?

Years ago, my alma mater gave up on application fees, supposedly for socioeconomic justice. The reality, I suspect, is that they wanted to encourage more applicants so that they could lower their acceptance rates. The trick is to make sure that the additional applicants are complete losers that are easy to turn down and not Stanford applicants adding a safety school to the list. Why not go a step further and offer free iPods for applying? A couple of years ago one university offered cash (bookstore gift cards) to already accepted students if they retook their SATs and obtained higher scores, so there's a precedent here.
I posted this in the other thread, but intended to post it here, so it's posted twice unfortunately. Apologies in advance!

I try not to reply to these types of arguments, but two days in a row of dissing postmoderism is a bit much, and so I'll try to defend postmodernism, cause I do think it's worth defending.

The first problem with postmoderism is it exists across fields. There was a movement in architecture. There was a movement in theatre. If you listed all the fields, you'd notice that they're all creative. That's the other problem, and the one that creates so much confusion for non-creative people. I wouldn't say all scientifically minded (digital thinking) people are not creative, but I'd guess a majority probably aren't. It's those that have problems with it, and this is why people 'that get it' call them 'stupid'. I don't agree that they're stupid, but I do think it's to do with the lack of natural creativity.

From my interpretation, the thing about postmoderism is that it measures the field using what makes that field unique as the variable. Postmodern designers feared that 'creativity' in design was disappearing, as it was the 'creativity' that designers valued, so without it - there was no more design. The postmodern philosophers, who are mostly concerned with humans, came to the same conclusion - humans were disappearing. Without humans, there was no more philosophy.

You also have to remember that these are creative people asking the questions, and creative people cannot be tamed. They love a prank, and if they choose to write, their styles become poetic and humourous. They redefine words as that is what philosophy has been doing since the origins of it. A bunch of drunk greeks sitting around defining concepts like love. Hegel re-defined practically every stylistic word he could find - to be poetic. Philosophy may have branched out into fields like science, but its origins are in human creativity, and that can't be measured by rigorous scientific method. It's art for thinkers. It explores a world that 'does' exist, but science choses to ignore as it has no other option but to. Some people can't accept that, and in this modern culture with modern people on a postmodern trajectory, they lash out, which results in some ridiculous polemics against it.

The big point of postmodernism that needs to be understood is that it is the 'end' of something. The 'end' of design. The 'end' of humans. It doesn't mean those things will cease to exist, but that what made them worthy of our attention was going to 'end'. Tech fields haven't yet hit a point where new ideas stop coming, but there will come a time where the only things coming out are rehashes of twitter or myspace. That's when a genuine postmodernism movement will rise within technology.

The ultimate test of postmoderism is to hand a naturally creative human a book by Baudrillard, and see if they get it. I would guess at least half could interpret a bulk of it.
The Hawthorn experiments were run by Elton Mayo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elton_Mayo

A disruptive venture can be quantified by revenue (at least in hindsight).
Why do they need an application fee to process a simple registration form? Are we supposed to believe that they'll actually deny admissions to anyone?

And $6 million? Sure sounds like everything could be automated to require zero human input. And its not like they need a ton of resources, if their target is 15K students, that whole site could be run on a single server
Wow, if this is successful, it could be huge, particularly in combination with the various free/cheap laptop programs. I really hope this plays out well.
The enforceability of a non-compete depends solely on the state involved.

States like OH and TX will enforce them vigorously (OH is so bad that I would never move to that state, nor work there). States like CA will reject them (except for sale of businesses). This is why MS fought tooth and nail for the jurisdiction of the folks who quit to work for Google to be in WA (MS' home) - where they are mostly enforceable vs CA (Google's home) - where they are not worth the paper they are written on.

If it weren't so difficult to get a ballot initiative going (I ran for election last year, and I had to learn a lot about what it takes to get on the ballot and also getting elected - which I didn't get), this is one of my pet peeves. I'd write it so that if you want to enforce a non-compete against a CO resident, then you pay their salary for the duration of the non-compete - even if the non-compete requires jurisdiction elsewhere.
In hindsight...

"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
I'll jump in re [2] with, I guess, a sociology of science comment. You seem to have very strong feelings about this paper, for some reason, but accusing the authors of, basically, fraud (i.e. publishing what is an obvious garbage to an expert) is way too harsh. Peer review cannot catch a deliberate falsification of data, but a BS interpretation (especially an "obviously" BS one) will be dealt with mercilessly. You can try and argue that the senior author on that particular paper has enough clout to bend the editors of Nature, but I don't see what would he gain from that. So my guess is that you take a strong position on this paper because it contradicts some favorite idea of yours, but the opposite view is not "obviously" wrong.
Is this University Accredited? Cause then I would take two majors symotanelously.
There are a several good Angel organizations in Silicon Valley. But they will be looking for folks who can supply both money and expertise. I would look for partners and do a software startup given your background. Please feel free to contact me directly (I am not looking for funding but it's difficult to make suggestions without asking more questions).
That is a nuance that doesn't show up in the crudest statistic, motor vehicles per capita, because the USA has a huge fleet of working vehicles. In fact, it uniquely has nearly as many "goods vehicles" as passenger cars in the latest figures from the UN Economic Commission for Europe:

http://www.unece.org/trans/doc/brochures/transport_indicator...
Not accredited.

http://www.uopeople.org/ACADEMICS/Accreditation/tabid/200/De...
Great post htsh. Slashdot-style community-based moderation is clearly the way forward. Even reading at +2 is quite reasonable and certainly allows you to avoid the trash you get on TC or YouTube (reading the comments there surely brings anyone to doubt the mental capacity of their fellow humans).
Unconfirmed Reports of Massive T-Mobile Breach
> TechCrunch is a Wordpress install, a little bit of a different kettle of fish.

Which is opensource and can be customized. TC isn't a toy blog, so they should hire someone to work on the feature, or use 3-rd part comment system, like Intense Debate or Disqus.
That is an excellent question. Perhaps what we need is a way to make money off of maintaining reputation info for online accounts. Then there would be a good incentive for someone to figure out how to do it (and also to do it).
Here's a good article:

http://mixergy.com/why-i-wont-sign-your-nda/

While I know a non-compete isn't an NDA, the reasons outlined in the article make a lot of sense and could be applied to reasons to not sign a non-compete. Particularly:

Reason #1: It puts all the obligation on me and none on you

H&R Block is infamous for attempting to bust people for breaking non-compete agreements. Yet, it has been in the news recently that H&R Block is being investigated for their practices in forcing employees to sign non-competes.
At least in the USA, a university cannot become accredited until it graduates a class.
I wonder if there are highly-paid "educational supplement optimization" consultants who get low-ranking learning institutions higher in the annual results...
hm. #1. did you get an email with instructions? right now, the procedure is that after signup, you are sent an email with instructions on how to create an OpenSSH format public key. You email the key back to us and we set you up (hopefully... some people have fallen through the cracks)

as for #2, http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/ - the plan is to set up new servers once, and leave them online for 3 years. Our SLA makes no distinction between scheduled and unscheduled downtime.

#3, well, there are 3 of us, and we are all pretty good technically, but we need to put some serious effort into response times. I need to put an alarm on tickets that haven't been touched for 12 hours in RT or something.

#4, I'm trying to move towards using images from http://stacklet.com/ or similar (or rather, making it easy for you to upload those images) Chris is actually really into slackware.
One person company
YCombinator says: We're reluctant to accept one-person companies, though we have funded a couple.

I disagree with YC being reluctant to one-person companies, being a one-person start-up avoids all the time you waste trying to agree on ideas, deadlines, responsibilities, etc... I also understand the advantages of sharing ideas and work, however, you can actually have one or two other people help you with your ideas and giving you advice without them being founders... that is just my opinion. I hope YC will start to NOT being so reluctant to one-person companies... they should now more than anyone that human resources can be added at any time if necessary ;)
The next big thing: Africa
I agree that the author's understanding of the term is imprecise but rather than refer him to an etymology of the term, I think this wiki would be more appropriate to convey the term's common usage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_Internet
Well, to be perfectly honest, BB's "community management" hasn't been all that great (remember when Big Brother decided that Violet Blue needed to be erased from the interwebs?)...
more on #1: email me your username (lsc@prgmr.com) and if you are still interested we will give you a month off. (it wasn't a rejection, it was incompetence. If a user doesn't email us, we often don't notice.)
It's amazing how chemistry turns out to just be a domain-specific language in Haskell.
Apply and maybe you'll be part of the couple that get funded. They didn't say that they wouldn't interview you.
Cl-mpi: MPI bindings for Common Lisp
Is it the next big thing after BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China)? Because those countries still have yet to fully develop.
Enables users to develop web applications with the shortest codes
Is the Great Firewall of China not effective enough?
I think so - as these countries have their middle classes develop, they're going to need cheap labor to fulfill the roles that their citizens are no longer willing to do themselves. So, far in the future, China will export its low-wage factory jobs to Africa as China increasingly focuses on the type of goods that are currently produced in the US.
It doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.

I had to sign one for my job this summer (small tech consulting firm that's now doing a couple products and less consulting), but it was pretty limited. It just said that I wouldn't work in the couple of pretty-specific fields that my company's products are in for the next year.

One nice thing about the one they gave me was that they had a clause saying that it did not in any way prevent me from using the programming knowledge that I'm gaining, just the specific knowledge about the fields the products are in.

Now, I wouldn't be comfortable of signing one much longer than a year. A lot can change in say, 5 years. But 1 year so that you can't steal their ideas or have an unfair advantage in competing with them because you know their plans is fairly reasonable.
Yes, that was weird. I'm pretty sure the unspoken explanation had to do with being able to get more advertisers or better relations with their advertisers if their site had no links to pictures of naked women.

My point is that sites beyond a certain size need to have a system of moderated comments or the comments cease to function. The individual decisions of the moderator (and the moderator's bosses) shouldn't factor in here -- what do you suggest as a superior alternative? Community moderation in the style of Hacker News and reddit?
Don't do it. The most important part of a PhD is "spending years surrounded by smart people doing research in your field" -- and part-time students almost completely miss out on that.
We could call Africa the next-next big thing, then ;-)
How do things get automated? Spontaneously?
do this: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keywords.html
It doesn't require additional changes. I'm not sure it will fix the .NET client library's paranoia though--I was only guessing.
Solo "co-founding" is HELL. I am doing it until I can find another Arabic speaking hacker who can switch between ar and en and able to travel 20% of the year (emphasis on hacker.)

I am bleeding, man. Most days pass with me either not doing much of anything but feeling sorry for myself, or going on 3 day streaks kicking, minor but important, ass and taking pseudonyms. You could be the most skilled Jack of all trades, but the moment you start solo you can count on spending 50% of your time LEARNING on the job.

Just a list of things I have done since I woke up today:

1) responded to emails in 4 different languages. wrote some.

2) wrote CSS, for 5 different browsers until my arm hurt.

3) wrote html, javascript, postfix config, make files, shell, and C.

4) wrote excerpts for manual.

5) took phone calls, pausing between them as I switch my spoken language.

6) bitched about Internet Explorer.

7) found out I was benchmarking my fast object store on the wrong server; I was ssh'ed to my fat box at home, not the deployment VPS.

8) made 1 pixel wide graphics with gradient for repeat-x; got RSI with it.

In between all this I read industry RSS feeds. Then talked to family, friends, acquaintances and potential angels; adjusting my pitch for each, encouraging some and scaring others.

All this time I'm drinking coffee, smoking and eating in my car with laptop. Or I am crossing the street with notebook, gesturing wildly and modeling interaction and snappy animated ajaxy stuff with my hands, oblivious to the oncoming Ford Tauri.

You will talk with tens of people everyday and NONE will know how you truly feel or where things really stand. You just can't; your loved ones wouldn't understand, and the cognoscenti in your social circle couldn't be trusted. There you are, a poet sworn to secrecy, a bard turned backup vocalist for white noise.

It's draining. But it's GOOD :-)
Tried out duckduckgo briefly. Switching to a Chromium alpha kind of killed that as there's no way to customize the search engine yet.
Exactly how much do you think it costs to create a lesson plan or pay a teacher? Not to mention that virtually all US universities (even online ones) charge fees on top of tuition.

This is a university with professors and TAs and set coursework and graded assignments, not just a bunch of documents and automated quizzes. Wikipedia may be closer to what you want, if that's what you're looking for.

It'd be more useful if/when it is accredited, but if the coursework is even halfway decent, it's a bargain.

More about how it works here: http://www.uopeople.org/THEMETHOD/tabid/209/Default.aspx
I actually don't think the tech in Silicon Valley will provide the best return on your investment - it's no longer the wild west out here, more like the 3rd generation of settlers setting up small to medium businesses. If you understand the market, I think there are some really good companies (tech and otherwise) in China that would be worth investing in. And if you want to invest in the US, real estate is an extremely sane thing to do: Avoid 'hot' areas, find a quiet but predictably growing area and buy up some land right outside the currently developed areas - the development will eventually grow over your property and you will profit handsomely.
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I have two comments:

1. This article appears to completely ignore write speeds for SSDs, which aren't that good. Do people just not care?

2. I believe that while Google's server farm machine have drives, the goal is to RAM cache absolutely everything they have to serve. To the speed and power requirements of their HDDs are transient issues at worst.
As if they're not using the same techniques... The 'outrage' is probably just a façade. You can bet that they took notes and will be using some of the same strategies when they get back and start having meetings.
Does quantity + learning = quality?
I hope this doesn't end up like Western Governor's University. Early on it was hard up for attracting students. I think it was (or is) an idea before it's early time but now will fit in.

http://www.wgu.edu/

Anyways, here's hoping.
Also, consider the beginning and end of semeter/quarters where people register/report/check on their classes/grades. Then it can go all wrong under the load.
They have an event during the day tomorrow that is free for anyone to join. It's 7000 yen for the day. I'm not rich, famous or awesome, but I'm going.

It's basically a bunch of well-known geeks and investors from the US and other parts of Asia. I saw Dave McClure speak here a few months back and he had a lot of great information for young startups.
TechZing Podcast - News and views from the front-line of tech & startups
It is a nice read but not appropriate HN at all.
The kids nowadays don't even know about MPI as a framework for parallel processing. Thank you, MapReduce.
I have plenty of interactions with some of the best in my field; I work as an engineer with some guys who have done groundbreaking work. However, I have personal reasons why I wish to complete my education with a doctorate. Advancement at work is definitely not one of them as I'm doing quite fine without.

Since I'm doing the work myself in the evenings, it would be nice to get some paperwork along the way.
I kinda like the HN system of only allowing downvotes if you maintain a comment karma above a certain level. That, or something like that, makes a lot of sense and it can't really be "gamed" by the comment trolls on techcrunch.

Again, my belief is simply that this is not a new problem. The word "troll" has existed since the BBS days and over the last 10 years other sites have come up with clever ways (that work) to filter the trollish comments out. I don't think any of them are perfect, but it seems a bit cynical and overstated to say "any" voting system would be gamed if other sites have managed. Even digg.
Yup, this is exactly it. When shopping the company to investors or as a potential acquisition, Non-Compete/NDAs are an item on the due diligence checklist.
"I suspect that whatever ratings mechanisms develop to fill the void, they would eventually coalesce into a single entity"

I know you're speculating, but I don't think that's realistic. For that to happen, people would have to unanimously agree on a single rating mechanism.

As for doctors, their guild gives us a great example of what actually happens when guilds enjoy special legal status. Guilds and professional societies work to restrict entry into their fields, in order to prop up their own salaries. When they do this, they usually claim they are simply ensuring high quality.
Same for me, except change step 2 to "git pull" and 5) sound the alarm