skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right that it's to do with the size of the market - 300 million potential customers is a huge amount of growing room.

However, the UK has 60 million people, not 20 million (I thought you were talking about the adult population, but you referred to the total population of the US). Also, the difference between US and British English is so slight as to be irrelevant.

I think the lack of a large domestic market is one cause, however I'm going to say the main reason is that we don't have a Valley in the UK.
I thought aspies didn't do jokes? (I'm joking :-)
"At the vanguard of this digital revolution are teenagers.
While their habits will obviously change (especially when
they start employment), understanding their mindset
seems an excellent way of assessing how the media
landscape will evolve. To this end, we asked a 15 year
old summer work intern, Matthew Robson, to
describe how he and his friends consume media.
Without claiming representation or statistical accuracy,
his piece provides one of the clearest and most thought
provoking insights we have seen. So we published it."
Just a remark; the site is joke

Not quite. The site is "ha ha only serious"; it's intended to convey a real and important message.
Here's what I understand: at any one time a Keyspace cluster has one master server which ALL writes go to - the other servers in the cluster replicate from it. If the master goes down another master is elected automatically, giving you your fault tolerance.

You can only write to the current master, and reading from slaves may suffer from replication lag - so if you need to write and then read back the same value you need to read against the master as well.

Your underlying storage is BerkeleyDB, so your write speed is limited to BerkeleyDB's write speed (which is pretty fast). If I wanted to scale writes I'd need to run multiple sharded keyspace instances, in the same way I might run sharded MySQL databases.

Is this accurate, or did I misunderstand something?
My brain is a jewel.

I agree with the idea that all human beings are precious and all deserve to be treated with dignity.

But is the statement here that everyone's brain is as good as everyone else's brain, or do the various jewels differ in rarity and differ in appropriateness for particular settings?
"When sending SMS messages in this manner, users don't have to pay SMS charges levied by their mobile carriers because the SMS messages are sent by Google."

This could be a major blow to the profitability of texting. I'll probably drop my AT&T plan (I think it's a thousand or so texts a month) when the iPhone app launches.
Unfortunately there's plenty of non-"sensible" companies out there.

The most recent example was Atari using ScummVM for Wii games:
http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/06/gpl-scummvm-and-violat...

Also notable was the long running Cisco case where every time the FSF thought they'd reached an agreement it would be revealed that yet another product violated the GPL.

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2008-12-cisco-complaint
Hence, islands.
This might be part of it. I study at a UK university and it seems a lot of people expect to apply for a graduate placement at some blue-chip company when they finish their studies - starting up is rarely seen as an option. (Though I know a few people at Warwick who are trying to get a startup community together there - google OoTheNigerian for one)

Can anyone from America say if entrepeneurial ambitions are evenly distributed, or are places like Stanford special cases?
For the companies with global data centers it may prove more profitable to create more data centers around the world and shift workloads than to build one monolithic data center in the midwest (for example).

Costs of hardware have fallen enough that other costs are starting to dominate data center planning.
You're afraid health care will become too bureaucratic? Are you familiar with health insurance companies? There's already a bureaucrat between you and your doctor - the fact that he's from the private sector doesn't change that fact.

And private sector bureaucrats have an incentive to deny coverage, purge rolls, etc. - it means greater profits. In the last twenty years, health insurance companies have gone from spending 95 cents of every premium dollar on health care to roughly 80 cents today. Where did that extra money go? Greater overhead and profits. Under a universal system, public bureaucrats wouldn't have the same incentives to deny care.

Just a friendly reminder that before you start spouting cliches about "bureaucrats ruining things" you should ask whether they already have - just not from the government.
If you want quick adoption I would have your server also speak the memcached protocol on memcached's default port if it is all possible. You'll then have a ton of client libraries already written for you and the pain of testing and rollout is greatly reduced.

Very nice homepage btw.

Edited: added "also" between "server speak". I didn't mean you should dump your current API.
Interesting article. I wish that it had given an estimate for the magnitude of power savings, however.
I'd like to address the finite resources thing.

The American government has completely failed it's citizens. There should be plenty of money for us to have a vibrant all encompassing economy.

We are the most productive nation on earth per capita. We should be rolling in it.

But it's all gone. To the Caymen Islands, Austria, Switzerland and China. In private bank accounts and foreign government coffers.

That does not even include all them good old American Dollars held by all the drug traffickers or used by all those poor people in countries whose national currency is a joke where the defacto currency is the greenback.
if healthcare was totally free, what's to stop people from totally trashing their bodies then asking for organ transplants on the public dime?

Hell yes, if healthcare was free, I would totally be trashing my body and getting free organ transplants - again and again - I just can't think of a better way to spend my time!

Seriously, what?
that works as long as your 3 co-founders are relatively healthy and have been healthy their whole lifes, if one of them develops a problem you can expect your premium to skyrocket into unaffordability
Bing Gets a Modest Lift in First Month
1. /usr/local is where you install custom compiled binaries (which answers #4). /usr should contain only standard binaries, libraries, headers, etc...

2. Some people use /usr/local, others use generic home directories (/home/PROJECT), and still others use /PROJECT. This is somewhat of a personal choice.

3. If user content is uploaded directly to the filesystem, create a separate file system for it (if your root or project filesystems fill up, you're hooped). You could also consider uploading to S3 or a similar service.

4. See #1

5. Be consistent and make notes about where things go (to remind yourself in 6 months and to make it easier to hand off). Also, be mindful of the filesystem permissions.
At least one of my most admired companies, Autonomy, is UK based.
This kind of gives it away:

"Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10,000 individuals may be neurotypical."
From doing a lot of customer dinners in the United States with FreshBooks customers, the absolute top of the list with a bullet number one reason Americans don't quit their day job and start freelancing or start a business is lack of health insurance.

I'd bet most of our customers don't have health insurance, and that's why we push them to professional organizations like the Freelancer's Union and AIGA.

My personal beliefs: It seems counterproductive to me to make citizens risk their entire future just because you wanted to be innovative or fill an unserviced need in society.
It is accurate and contains no misunderstanding.

Some terminology: we differentiate safe-reads, which go through the master and always reflect previous writes which have been OK'd and dirty-reads, which can go through any server, even if no other servers are up; there are absolutely no guarantees with dirty-reads, but it scales linearly, although this is not the indented primary use-case of Keyspace.

Keyspace does not contain horizontal partitioning aka. sharding, we plan to build such a layer on top of Keyspace. The exact details of this layer are still being debated, so it its exact position in design space is unclear --- it partly depends on input we get from this release.
The US strikes me as having less aversion to financial risk than any other nation.

It's how they get into trouble (economic downturn) but it's also how they pump out true innovation.

The US also has an overall aversion towards the distribution of wealth. If you make money, you keep more of it there than in many other countries.

That attracts the people who want to be financially successful. And when you have more of those people around, the more likely something good is going to happen.

Go big or go home? They live it.

Clearly they have societal issues, but the US is a great place to be if you've got money and talent. If you don't have those things, live somewhere else. . . .
It seems like a lot of these "rules" for systems were created decades ago with different hardware. Not only has the hardware design changed since then, but the economics have changed as well.

With a single big-iron mainframe it probably made sense to spend a lot of money on cooling because any failure was very expensive. With many commodity servers it may be cheaper to let them run hotter and replace any failures, though an Intel study with free-air cooling in Mexico found no significant difference in failure rate.

I'm reminded of hot-spares in RAID configurations. With today's hard drive sizes it can take so long to merge a hot spare into a system that you're better off just increasing the raid level and only having online drives.
You sound a little trollish: "universal paycheck program" sounds like a thinly veiled dig at "socialism"

(For the record: I upvoted you)
I've read this comment 4 times now and I can't find anything constructive in it. People are manifestly restrained from entrepreneurship because of private health insurance in the US. You don't like the idea of the government stepping in. Fine. What's your suggestion?
Learn How to Creat wordpress theme from A to Z.
Yea I agree. Windows 7 is solid. Now that I've gotten used to the new task bar, I love it way more than OS X. I get overwhelmed on my Mac because my windows are all over the place and I can never find the one I am looking for. Windows 7 fixes that and almost makes workspaces outdated.
We originally had memcached support but discontinued it somewhere on the way. We think supporting the memcached protocol is confusing to our end-users, as there are strong differences between memcached and a consistently replicated (disk-persistent) key-value store. See for example my answer to the post below about safe and dirty reads. Also, we support a much richer set of commands than memcached.

However, we are certainly going to bring back memcache protocol support if users demand it (the old memcache code is still in the source tree right now).

Thanks.
That's an important factor. Interestingly enough Israel seems to benefit from its non-existing domestic market. Even small companies there have to target international markets right from the start.
Just want to point out Banksy and his best selling Wall and Piece. Shows the depths of the "subversive" art scene here in the UK.
From what I can tell the creative industries here in the UK are not as few and far between nor as obsequious as it might seem. I think it's harder to access and with less momentum, but then that's in comparison to a trundling behemoth shouting "Follow me!!!" at the top of it's voice....
IMDb is, well, a worldwide collaboration, but if pressed I'd say the driving force was primarily British. (With help from America, Italy, Australia, Germany, and a few other geeks of the day.) I suppose obsessive data gathering is consistent with the stereotypical British mindset.

(It's been long since bought by Amazon, an American company, but a large portion of IMDb employees are still in the UK.)

All things considered, though, my guess is that it has a lot less to do with national character, and a lot more to do with the fact that the Valley is an oddity. It's a great place to find exactly the right mix of people to make a startup work, from potential smart employees to investors to experienced folks who can give key advice. A startup in San Jose has a better chance at making it out alive than one in London. And a fair number of entrepreneurs head to the Valley from around the world for just that reason - the statistics are hard to gather, but if you were to figure out what percentage of startup _founders_ were British, of successful companies, the gap would narrow considerably.

I'm currently at an awesome company in the Washington DC area (thinkgeek.com, a Hacker favorite!) and we're having a real hard time finding competent senior Perl people who are willing to live out here. I'm sure we'd have no problems in Palo Alto. (I lived there for most of the 90s. And would again, happily.)
As a Brit who moved to the US, I blogged my personal take on this a few days ago:
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/07/you-cant...
The amount of work we've already seen entombed in failed BSD and SysV forks is also good evidence.
The five best (and worst) iPhone games
Lipschitz Continuous ODEs are Pspace Complete
Tmax Window Uncovered
If humans are "free", why I cannot capture them and sell as slaves? Are they really "free"?

Word "free" has lot of meanings in English language. In my native language, word "free" in context of BSD licensed code should be translated as "svoboda" (fully unrestricted state of something), and in context of GPL licensed code as "volya" (has it own rights, abilities, goals, like free human).
Beyond the Valley: More on the Impact of Location on Building a Tech Business
20 Streetwear Blogs for Hype Shopping & Design Inspiration
Business Development Tricks & Traps Revealed by Chris Fralic - FRC - Philly Talk
The Importance of Location in a Tough Fundraising Environment
I think folks will find this paper and associated slides really interesting because its always fascinating to see to see an interplay between continuous and discrete math
Yeah, I could see where it could muddle your marketing message - you might end up looking like a "memcached clone" in people's mindset. However, I think if you positioned it right you could come across as a superset of memcached's features with the bonus of an easy migration for existing memcached users. Something like "we do memcached and so much more".
650 Million Years in 1.2 Minutes (tectonic drift timelapse)
But this should not be a factor to web companies like the ones mentioned in the title. We are running our company from Denmark, but on a .com domain and in English.

There are some differences like accounting, legal counselling, etc. - the infrastructure for that here is definitely not Silicon Valley level. But the market is not one of them, in my view. So it's really just up to our ability to execute (yikes!)
Oh right didn't realise this was upgrade copies.
The Web Curriculum
Ah I misinterpreted your comment as "non-EU copies have IE so Microsoft wasn't forced to remove it everywhere". I see what you mean was that even in the EU Microsoft isn't forced. Having understood that, they were getting pretty hefty fines there and this along with other measures went somewhat to fixing that.
Why It's Hard to Give Away a Kidney
Every strength is also a weakness, and (almost) every weakness is also a strength.
JavaScript is a perfectly reasonable application for the initial stages of application development, I'll grant you that. But it's flawed in the long-term, when it comes time for someone else to maintain and safely refactor the code as the originators leave and someone else needs to inherit the codebase. That's when the static nature of Java bears fruit. The nice side-effect of fully leveraging its static nature is that you always get the minimal amount of javascript to ship over the wire. (Their "pay as you go" design philosophy.)
Many British entrepreneurs travel to California, like many other entrepreneurs from around the world and like many non Californians within the USA. Brits and other non Americans are well represented at the places mentioned and other Valley start ups.
You're certainly right.

One of the reasons we focused on an early release is to gauge user (client) interest. What's the level of interest in replication, consistent replication or distributed systems in general? Are people willing to use a newcomer's software? And so on..

Right now we have a few beta users, and are hoping to pick up new users with this release.
Oh, I completely agree on the regulation front - health care in this country is broken right now. I'm not in agreement with the current Administration's plans to fix it, but something needs to be done.

I just think that when people start claiming that "selfishness" is the underlying problem with our broken health care system, they're ignoring the pressures that brought on this "moral decline".

It's really no different than the far-right nutjobs who blame the state of our inner cities on the "laziness" of the people living there.
No; you see I don't care what license he uses. No one has been attacking him, and ultimately, what license he chooses is the license he chooses. Done. Disagreement with a position is not bitching, nor is it attacking.
The echo chamber misreads another Windows 7 survey
Pointless? For all we know we will be the first species (anywhere in existence) to go to another planet. The prospect of stepping foot on an foreign planet blows my mind away. Before I get carried away, I'll just assume you're flamebaiting.
The Cost of Developing for BlackBerry
For those entrepreneurs looking to get started developing for a mobile platform such as BlackBerry OS, this article is for you. I cover initial costs, whether they are necessary or optional, and explain the purpose of each.
This is classic Microsoft: give up on securing the underlying system and layer kludgy temporary 'fixes' on top that break standards and functionality.

Not so much security through obscurity, as security through making the system hard to use for everyone! See also Vista's UAC...
Passion or Relevant Experiences Required
Furthermore, the thought of spending $1000 USD on VS.NET 2008 Pro and Expression Suite and being locked into using IIS for "smooth streaming" is appalling, considering that mostly equivalent applications can be built entirely using an free and open-source toolchain. I guess you need some proprietary runtime for video, but hopefully that will be cleared up at some point.
My mom found the computers I hid in the attic and shipped them to me.

Not sure where to put this vic 20.
Some people think that way, they just don't say it like that. If you smoke two packs a day, drink until you pass out a few nights a week, and eat fried food every day, you're making conscious decisions that are affecting your overall long-term health.

My point was that if you're going to be using the public healthcare system (that everyone is paying for), then you should have to compensate that system for any damage that you purposefully cause to your own body that will drive up the costs of keeping you alive and healthy. If you live a reasonably healthy lifestyle and then get liver cancer because you're genetically predisposed to it, that's not your fault, and so you wouldn't be charged extra for it. If you got liver cancer as the result of living a hard and fast life, then yes, you should be compensating everyone else, or at least seeing a private physician instead.
No, you'd always be able to see a private physician if you wanted to pay for their services out of your own pocket. If you can afford that, then feel free to treat your body however you want. If you're going to be costing everyone else money because of how you're living your life, then you can pay the difference between the extra costs of your healthcare and the baseline amount spent on the 'average' person.
C# How to limit method execution time – Generics implementation
Three cheers for the NY Attorney General. Fake commercial posts and non-disclosed pay-to-posts are clearly deceptive false advertising.
The post is pretty clear to me: Healthcare in the US is in the state it is now because of the way government treated it (via regulation and taxation). The GP's link documents this very well.

>You don't like the idea of the government stepping in. Fine. What's your suggestion?

The government stepping out.
That is the mark of traditional media on the Web.

Although not as disappointing, what is the obsession with low-res imagery on these sites?
not when they block U.S. ips due to licensing issues
Isn't this more or less what the parrot book guy was doing?
All I can think of is Cryptonomicon and how much work Epiphyte(2) put into securing their IP and company plans. Of course this is fiction, but it made sense to me that the main value in a startup is in their ideas/IP so this should be protected to a great extent.

Apparently, Twitter didn't take this approach.
Indeed. It's a good day for common sense. Usually when laws are applied to the internet, everything flies out the windows. "Oh it's on a computer? Well that's different!"

It's nice to see false advertising on a public site treated the same way false advertising in a magazine would.
That's a bit of an overly obscured reference to Apple.
This isn't actually correct, is it? Assuming an average 6-letter word length, there are about 10^67 valid combinations that your iterate_all() can go through:
(((2^6) * 1000) ^ 12) * (94 ^ 5) = 3.5 * 10^67

Since this is much larger than the total hash space (2^160 = 10^48), you can hope you'll get a collision after the number of tries equal to half of the hashspace (10^48 / 2). That means you'll have to generate 10^47 hashes. At 5 minutes of runtime, you'll have to generate 10^45 hashes per second.

Bottom line: if you can run this on 200,000 cores, you'll have to generate 10^40 hashes per second per core, and that seems impossible to me.
Thanks for the link.
And agreed. India Times is very poor w.r.t that.
Ask HN: Logging Remote vs Local
I have a bunch of servers that run webservers with a specific option to log remotely or locally. In my case remote,equals the logserver box sitting right next to the webservers on the same rack. In such a case I can make the boxes diskless and log remotely. Or else I have to have disk just for the sake of logging and not sure which approach is wise in the long term..Any ideas??
Not a bad article. But the article summary on HN is pretty much a lie; I'm pretty sure you can cure NS with various techniques, including blunt-force-trauma to the cranial region.
Not at all. Phusion uses a different approach with different design goals... It would have been a lot more work to rewrite mongrel to handle those additional goals.

I don't care about support, but for Zed to be mad that nobody wanted to hire him as a consultant for mongrel is a bit absurd considering that he abruptly quit maintaining the product. What's to say he wouldn't just walk away from a consulting gig if his feathers got ruffled.
HOWTO: start using lisp in your work environment (part 1)
Twitter's Secret Growth Projections Exposed (Screenshots)
12% of e-mail users have actually tried to buy stuff from spam
Intro. Courses on Neural Nets, Visualization, ML, And Astrophysical Chemistry
So it fills the same niche as cappuccino. It's a full featured javascript framework that happens to be written in a different language from javascript.

But it's not like Jaxer, since it doesn't provide a server-side component built in.
a perfect example of this is that of all the users using openssh, all of the donations to the project have come from individuals and small companies. most of these users are just using openssh to manage their servers.

of all the big router/switch/os vendors that have actually integrated openssh into their products that they sell and make money from, not one has donated a single dime back to the project.
And what happens then?