ctdean

A great talk by William Byrd

I'm all for threading and pipelining when appropriate, but I don't find these any easier to read. The nested example in particular is harder to follow.

This is in sharp contrast to Python list comprehensions, which are very straight forward and understandable.

Job posts are marketing ads, so don't take it seriously. All this posting is hoping to do is to attract people who like Python and get them to apply.

This won't get 100% of the applicants you want but it will get some of then, and that's the whole point.

Yes, she is talking about one particular kind of company, but Jessica's definition of a startup is the generally agreed upon one here on HN [1]. (The fed is using a definition of a brand new company.)

While the fed paper is really interesting, I don't think it is relevant for this discussion.

My own personal and unsubstantiated view is that we're living in the golden age of startups.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Like others have said this is for SaaS startups with more than 1mm ARR. It won't work for your local Kwik-E-Mart and it won't work for non-startups.

He's just misinterpreting the quote, and then setting up a strawman to make an slightly related point.

"A" players make an outsized impact on a rapidly growing organization. Successful startups aren't like other activities - it's built into the model that the early team has to be truly, deeply, amazing. If you don't think that "A" players exists in startup land, you're just not paying attention. Just like there are "B" players who join a startup and then just coast along and don't make a giant impact.

I've never heard Jobs (or anyone else for that matter), claim that all people could be permanently categorized as "A", "B", or "C" players.

You want to be Apple? eject the "B" players.

CDB is one of my favorite data structures. When a student wants to learn about databases, I get them to implement cdb.

It's easy to implement and really demonstrates some good system engineering tradeoffs.

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How does it work? If I have a collection/table with 100,000 rows and want to create a histogram by month does it pull the 100,000 rows over the wire to your servers and does the aggregation there?

  select month, sum(x) from T group by month;

You can just use any of the online DB REST interfaces.

MongoLab has a nice one http://support.mongolab.com/entries/20433053-rest-api-for-mo...

That will return a json object as the value.

> Because labor is a mostly fixed cost for each alternative, it will tend not to impact the relative comparison of the two alternatives

I don't buy this. My experience is that the ops cost of a co-location facility are much more expensive than aws. The ops cost functions doesn't seem to linear as he is describing either.

People costs dominate early on and are a huge factor until you start to reach steady state and that's the variable that you need to optimize for.

Having said that aws is expensive. If dollars are worth more than hours to you, then yes, by all means host things yourself.

MySQL and PostgreSQL are fine relational databases and you can build large systems out of them.

You might also consider embedded DBs such as SQLite (relational) or qdbm (non relational). If it were me, I'd go with one of these.

Good luck!

There is something wrong with the format. Some readers are ignoring the comment field (not your fault, but that's the sad reality), change it to a description field and encode the link to the story and the link to the comments in that field. This is what the reddit feed does, fwiw.