skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some quick math:

With 2TB drives, that means 500m drives spinning in the building, assuming no redundancy, fs overhead, OS data, etc. (but then again, who the fuck has this sort of production capacity? Definitely not WD or Seagate or any of the major players)

If you store then akin to a Sun X4540 server, you fit 12 drives per U of space. In a 50U rack, if you take away 2U for networking, that's 4812=576 drives per rack.

If we throw back in some redundancy, that's about 1m racks.

Each rack takes up about 10sf of space (~19"6', accommodating for clearances), so that's 10m square feet of datacenter space, not accounting for any sort of power, cooling, or logistics space.

Throw back in the extras and you're looking at roughly a mile square of datacenter space.

Wow.

So, we all understand this is bullshit journalism, right?
I was at a startup from Jan-July '06 and we had several kicking around. I switched to the ball there at the startup and learned to love it. Shortly after, I replaced my home computer chair with a ball as well.

Like anything, they can be misused, and it's a matter of personal preference. I also have a laptop that doesn't fit very well on my computer desk, so when I'm on it, I'm usually lounging in a recliner or on the sofa at home.

The thing I love most about the ball is that I can get up, roll it back a bit, sit back down on it, then do a full-body arched-back stretch, then roll back up onto the ball, scoot it up to the desk, and keep working. I find myself doing that at least once an hour, and it always brings a boost. At my office (no balls allowed... heh) I end up having to run up and down a flight of stairs or do something else to get that boost. It takes a lot less time with an exercise ball, and I can keep focused.
10^12 TB is a lottabytes and, also, a yottabyte.

This reminds me of being in college not too long ago when a CS professor said "Keep this under your hat but the main server is going to have ONE TERABYTE in storage as of next month" and I got chills. 10 years ago it was a Big Deal that a major research institution had a machine with a whole terabyte attached to it -- not quite a supercomputer, but man, it had a TERABYTE, what else could you want?

These days teenagers routinely have access to terabytes, some fairly small companies deal with petabytes, and major government organizations have to go up a few orders of magnitude when they let their imaginations run wild about future needs.
Tax break != tax payer subsidy
My take is there is a yet a better way to search the Internet. We are still looking at search as a keyword driven application. Which is not the optimal approach to search. Though no one can argue that google give decent results to most of the searches you key-in. Search can be more intelligent and personalized as everyone expects a different result to the keywords "will apple fall".

If search can be made personal and more of a 1:1 activity that will go wrong with Google.
He said he believes in guided evolution, which I agree is the best way to do things. But really it's the only way, because if you're not doing that then at some point you must have lied to yourself when your vision misaligned with results.

I think what he's going at is trying to design things logically and rationally, just as evolution does. That is, seeing how the world designs itself and modeling his own methods to it with a little human guidance to speed the what would be random process up.
Anyone that doesn't believe me or other people here on HN saying that HN is getting shittier (unrelated articles, quick unthoughtful comments and so on) each day can just take a look at this submission and these comments.
To put it in context. A square mile has 27,878,400 square feet in it. The Empire State Building has 2,158,000 square feet of usable office space.

But this also assumes they're going to use HD as standard storage devices. They would probably be using a different technology. It's clearly not possible with current HD capacity.

They could also be building for the eventual capacity and not going to immediately support that much data. The comments on the article page makes this and other good points.
source: http://www.metafilter.com/86293/Yotta-vote-against-this

question: via moore's law, if it can hold up, what year can i hope to get a yottabyte on my netbook? thx
When you buy a CD, does it come with a license that only authorizes it for play in approved players?

No.
Ask HN: Raising a friends And family round?
We started developing our product about 10 months ago, and have seen steadily increasing monthly revenue since we took on our first paying customer in June. We made about $2500 in recurring revenue last month, but we would like my co-founder to be able to quit his job and come on full-time.

Our model is based on direct sales with large customers. My partner is company's salesman and he believes that if he were selling full-time (he sells only on his lunches at the day job right now) we would be profitable with both of us working full-time in three months.

We have applied for an SBA loan to cover part of our costs for six months of operation and have decided to raise a "friends and family" round for the rest of it. We've never raised any funding of any kind, so we're hoping that those who have experienced a F&F round on HN could give us some insight. We are currently incorporated as an S-Corp.

How did you determine your valuation before a F&F round? This is one of our biggest concerns.

Because a F&F round is pretty small, how did you minimize legal costs?

What did you tell potential F&F investors about the opportunity? Is there anything that you're REQUIRED to tell them?

How much of your company did you give up in your F&F round?

Feel free to include any resources that you found useful when you were doing your F&F round.
An exercise ball is tough because it demands dynamic balance. You really work out your abs. You can't slouch because you'll fall off. I tried it for a couple months and gave it up. If you are seriously considering using an exercise ball, get a puncture-resistant one from a company like Fitter First (that guarantees against explosive decompression).
@vidly instead of (or along with) @fliggo
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/30/more-...

"There’s been a lot of media coverage in the past week of the National Security Administration’s plans for a large new data center at Camp Williams in Utah (which we first noted back in July). The NSA is expected to invest more than $1 billion in the project, which is said to include more than 1 million square feet of space. "
Ad blockers create an unlicensed derivative work of the copyrighted works that are received, and they could likely be sued for that.
There is talk of the NSA shutting down altogether or being rolled into another agency,

Seriously?
I hear this all the time and as the builder of multiple AJAX web applications I know for a fact that it does not behave the same way Safari behaves.
You're assuming they're using server units not mainframes. It would be interesting to see the difference in data center size between mainframes and racks.

edit: would someone like to explain why I'm being down-voted?
This is a tangent but you might want to take a look at Hudson as a CI server; it's incredibly easy to set up, not at all intimidating, and very extensible.
Agreed, but Microsoft could probably delay things for long enough to hurt Google sufficiently. It might be enough simply to auto-install it, hook customers on ad blocking, pay the fine, then send out a patch to make it opt-in only.

My guess is that at the moment it seems that the DoJ really has its eyes on Google, and Microsoft doesn't want to pull a stunt like this and distract them.
Appchemy - The Savior of Mobile Games?
Which is only about 1 billion years of video. Presuming they wanted to video every person in the United States (let alone abroad) you'd fill up that many hours in a little less than 4 years.

Now, you do get a nice multiplier from compression (10-100x, depending on the video and the quality) but that only brings it up to 100 billion years of video, max. What if you wanted to store all the video ever recorded? Bear in mind that the amount of video being recorded is currently in the exponential increase growth phase.
Government regulation.
Ask and ye shall receive -

Here's AdBlock (Adsweep): http://adsweep.org/

Here's Greasemonkey (Greasemetal): http://www.mychromeaddons.com/chrome-addon-greasemetal-greas...
great idea, I did the same for the seedcamp teams

http://twitter.com/daleharvey/seedcamp-teams
I predict this will have far reaching implications for the market, at least in the short term.
Rock bands, hearing protections, and teenage boys
I tried this at home and had similar results. For the first week I thought, "hey, this is great!" Then one day I was particularly tired and could barely stay on the thing. My upper back actually started spasming from the strain. I kept the ball but don't use it as a chair any more, though it's still fun to roll around on sometimes.
I don't think I agree with the author of this TIMES article. I think a philosopher deep down inside definitely wants to be right over read.
Wow, that seems like a great service for completely free! I assume you've had a good experience with them? How long have you used their services and how many web sites do you monitor?
I think we don't know the answer. 10 years ago few would imagine Microsoft not being a tech leader. 30 years ago few would image that PCs would replace IBM mainframes for most of the computing tasks. 150 years ago few imaged computing machines exists.

There are always something out of left field that knock dinosaurs on the head and flip them over. Unfortunately we never know what that will be until it hit the dinosaurs.
Worked well for me recently when Linode crashed and burned, it let me know almost right away.
I tried sitting on a ball at home some time ago, but after a couple of hours on it, my back is on fire. It did not go away after about a week of trying, so I gave up.
The thought crossed my mind when I saw pingdom's prices.
I tried a ball but found the lack of air circulation made the backs of my legs sweat uncomfortably. Went back to my Steeelcase Leap. It's not mesh like the Aeron, but the cushion was a lot better than sitting directly on rubber all day.
> They would probably be using a different technology.

not even the NSA can get a yottabyte of some new technology manufactured without it being all over the news.
http://chartbeat.com/ I can't describe in words how awesome this service is for just $10/month.
"Faster by Default" Steve Sounders presentation (ppt)
The Greasemonkey clone has a lot of people warning of crashes when they installed it, so I think I'll hold off for another month or so. Still, I'm impressed that Chrome is this close. Thanks for the links!
Musicslu's "name your own price" music distribution system
@rethinkdb
There is no artificial intelligence, just a lot of humans doing experiments and keeping the best results in the kernel. I think that's plain-old "intelligence".
Daniel Dennett, himself a contemporary caricature of a philosopher, opens by asking whether a philosopher would be happier to become so successful as to strike down philosophy completely, or rather to become popular and read forever. Wittgenstein, says Dennet, aimed for the former, but achieved the latter.

To my mind, though, Wittgenstein did, in fact, succeeded in shooting down philosophy as we knew it. He did so by demonstrating with his own unique story and bizarre writing that (if to paraphrase Clemenceau) philosophy is far too important to be left to the philosophers. Wittgenstein's generation was the first one in which Philosophy as an academic and literary endeavour has contributed virtually nothing to our understanding of the world.
I've found that the biggest problem with using an exercise ball is that everyone asks you why you are sitting on an exercise ball. That and it is fun to kick.
Wait. Can you sell unregistered stock to non-accredited investors, even if they're "friends and family"? Unless your friends and family are millionaires, you need to talk to a lawyer.
When I was running xp-dev.com's beta, I used a collection of hand rolled scripts and mailman http://www.list.org/.

Personally, that did sorta work for me. I had about 1000 beta users, and did not care too much about conversion ratios (downloads, CTR, new user signups, etc). I just wanted to get the word out when something changed.

But, had I wanted to be more scientific, something like Mailchimp should do the trick.
The government gets less money. The other taxpayers get fewer services, or the government goes into debt.
And if it did, would it be enforceable or laughable? How would playing an audio CD even require agreeing to a license? The original seller may have agreed to a shrinkwrap contract, but one purchasing a used CD certainly hasn't. Copyright protection coverts duplicating the content of an object, not use of the object.
I've found Chrome for Mac pretty stable so far, too - but this is my showstopper.

Any time Calibri is requested in text, it displays like this: http://u.phoreo.com/jy.png

The font works fine everywhere else, so I'm not sure what's up. Do you have this problem?
I stopped reading after "superstition mountain". Maybe it's not the best idea to build large fields of water-hungry grass in the middle of the desert.
The basics of Musicslu:

How does a community purchase work?

1. The artists of We Are Artists lists a total amount they would like to sell their release for, in this case $1,500.

2. You name your own price, using the "Make a pledge" button above, and offer the amount you would help purchase We Are Artists for.

3. If the total $1,500 is raised before Nov 27, 2009, the pledges are given to the musicians and the album is released under the Creative Commons license as a download for free sharing.

4. If the entire $1,500 is not reached, all pledges are discarded, and everyone walks away like nothing happened. The music is not released under Creative Commons and you pay nothing.

--

Musicslu is an attempt to address the problems with pirating music. If some music pirates could take a few steps out of their trenches, and some artists take a few steps out of theirs too, this could work.

"A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom."[http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html , listed at #1]
If not the cure, at least a solid attempt.
That's a great question. Certainly, we're not the first company to receive investment from F&F -- how do "normal" small businesses do it? As loans? We want to give our friends who choose to help us out some kind of return on their investment.

Before we do anything we'll talk to our lawyer, but we would like to get a sense for how people normally do this before spend big lawyer $$$.
Maybe in movies. I played golf in high school, and not everyone is out there to get drunk. Many people enjoy the game because it's difficult and interesting. Executives, even...
Learning Cappuccino: A Linked List
I was more wondering about teaching methodology

If I understand correctly, I'd imagine teaching everyone to implement languages using a system like Ian Piumarta's COLA might do the trick. The point is to break open these black boxes of abstraction (even though black boxes are good sometimes).
The stock piece of advice we gave at the technology incubator I used to work at is to consider giving them debt rather than equity. There is a minimum of legal fuss associated with this -- for many friends & family, you can literally proceed on a handshake ("$10,000 loan, 5% APR, 3 year term work for you? Thanks Uncle Jim. My bookkeeper will cut the checks.") and if you want to contractualize it you can have loan docs drawn up very, very reasonably.

Personally, if I were to do it, I'd have somebody like Prosper (but not Prosper) involved in the middle to handle the loan payments/collection/etc. It costs a little extra money but saves on you actually having to calculate loan payments and may well prevent you and Uncle Jim from ever having to have an unpleasant discussion about the tardiness of your check.

Particularly for a concern with actual revenue, loans are a great alternative to equity: they won't entangle any of your activities going forward, there is a built-in way to sever the relationship with both parties leaving on amicable terms with each other (repayment), and they're very, very easy to understand for people who are not in your business, in a way that an equity position in your company is not.
Nike Dunk High - Brown Camo Save 30%-70% OFF
This seems like a hugely un-necessary thing to do; I imagine the next headline on the news will be "NSA rescued from 2 square mile apartment filled with 8000 cats and pizza boxes to the ceiling".

I honestly can't think of any technology that is stable enough to support this magnitude of long term storage.

Dealing with the amount of bit rot alone leads me to boggle at the notion.
Displaying Gravitar images with PHP
pingdom checks your site from multiple servers all over the world. they provide great uptime and response time graphs. lot more than a one line script can do via a cronjob.
I'm sorry you didn't like my blog (though I feel you're a bit uncharitable in your summary), and that you felt I was making some sort of attempt to foist my ideas on you. My moniker is actually derived from the greek word 'hegemonikon' which translates roughly to 'that which guides' - it was what the greeks believed was the guiding part of the mind or soul. But I digress.

I probably should have elaborated more to avoid the 'snarky' interpretation. As best I can tell from your comments, your intellect more or less prevented you from learning to socialize, and so now you handle most social interaction with gloves and forceps. This is the sort of thing that builds up over years and is probably rooted deep in childhood experiences, and can't be undone by simply reading a forum comment telling you to 'be more empathetic' or 'recognize the values of others'. Subconscious processes are stubborn and resistant to change. If you really want to change your outlook, I'd imagine you need a long period of careful deconstruction of what produced it, followed by building it back up out of the thought processes you already have (along with a few new tools). Since this seems to be more or less what it is that psychologists do, seeking one out could be helpful.

Just my 2 cents of course, so take it with a grain of salt - you weren't wrong when you told me to go see an educator :)

I don't share your particular circumstances, but I know social isolation all too well - I wish you the best.
i use nagios to monitor a lot of sites. there's also montastic.
How to boil water - the sequel
That's a curious way to look at it. Would you say that all the (infinite) taxes I am not paying in excess of what I am paying are a subsidy from the rest of you?
I don't think there's any one silver bullet that's going to take them by surprise. For search I think the biggest danger is not being able to keep up with spammers and tricksters. People may not abandon Google search but it would make their advertising platform far less appealing and open the door to competitors. For everything else there's the privacy & reliability concerns. A few big high profile privacy breaches, some frequent outages, or any hint of corruption in how Google handles personal data would take their toll.

Purely on competition I think Google Docs is a weak spot. IMO it's pretty bad and has not been improving. Microsoft's Office Online looks pretty good. As inept as Microsoft is it would be unwise for Google to let them get a foot in the door. They might end up regretting the years they decided not to make any significant improvements to Google Docs.
Yahoo Query Language (YQL) and PHP
I can highly recommend a standing-desk arrangement, at least when compared to a very cheap office chair.

You need two things to keep with it for more than a few days: a good anti-fatigue surface to stand on, and a taller-than-average chair so that you can alternate sitting and standing.
From 2005 to 2007 to 2009, the largest available hard drive grew from 500 GB to 1 TB to 2 TB. This is the normal historical trend for hard drives[1].

Projecting that trend out a mere 10 years in the future, we anticipate 64 TB drives to be available, reducing requirements to 32k racks. 10 more years in the future and we have 2 PB drives, reducing requirements to a mere 1k racks.

The trend of course might slow before then, but the point still stands that if you're planning on a scale of a decade or two, those numbers stop seeming impossible and start seeming inevitable.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives#198...
Dark fiber is great for peering but it's the last mile that costs real money. Even Google doesn't have enough money to pull it off on a really large scale.
Commoditization of search: at some point people will stop caring whose servers stand behind that little search box in the top right corner and whoever controls user experience will just pick the best provider out of many, driving down search profit margins.

This is why Google wants their own browser, this is why they want to control cell phones and other mobile devices.
One approach is to raise the funds in the form a "convertible note", which is basically a loan that converts to equity when you raise your first round of financing. Rather than interest, you give investors a discount (20% is typical) on the conversion. (e.g. If your price per share is $1.00 when you raise your next round, the notes convert by paying on $.80 per share).

One other comment is that, if you can, it's better if your friends and family investors are experienced investors (not necessarily with angel experience). It makes things easier if they understand the risks and have the means so that if they lose their investment, it won't be a hardship for them.

Good luck.
Google would patch their ad code to get around it in an hour, tops. It's a cat and mouse game, and Microsoft isn't a particularly fast cat.
The Semantic Web blossoms beyond the need to infer meaning from bodies of text. If the information on the web becomes more structured, structured beyond the need for Google.

If web pages and web services were to all completely expose their information as RDF and embed rich metadata inside bodies of text the need for Google's fancy AI and Entity extraction would be none.

Google's bread and butter is advertising. That advertising is driven from their search domination - their ability to extract meaning from web pages and match that meaning up to searched terms. Semantic web completely commoditizes that function - if you can crawl, you can search.
but this is HN, not godaddy user forums.
A scandal related to personal data large enough to spook your average consumer. We're talking serious stuff, like records being sold to criminals or given to the government without a warrant. The only thing that could cause a user to get over the large cost of migration is a massive breach of trust.

It doesn't even have to be related to search. A scandal involving Gmail or Google Voice would have a large impact on search.
guarantees against explosive decompression

I will forever associate exercise-ball chairs with the hilarious moment when, in the middle of one of Leo Laporte's podcasts, there was this BANG sound off-mic and he went off the air for a few seconds. Then we heard his voice, a bit distant, as he explained that he was picking himself up off the floor because his chair had just exploded.

Of course, if you land wrong after such an incident it won't be quite so funny.
@zumodrive
"Normal" small businesses just take the money from the F&F and don't worry about selling securities to non-accredited investors. But presumably you're not a normal small business, you're trying to build a billion dollar company. It's certainly not illegal to sell shares in your company to non-accredited investors, but it can be a problem for due diligence that can happen when raising money, selling the company, or going public. Loans are definitely easier.

http://www.thestartuplawyer.com/seed-funding/life-is-too-sho...