ora600

I agree that companies with 3-100 employees will just not appear in SP500.

However, Mercury Interactive was included when it had around 1000 employees. 1000 is a lot, but you can still learn by comparing a company with 1000 employees to HP with 300,000.

But S&P 500 are not the 500 companies with highest revenue. Its 500 companies selected by a committee to be representative of the american economy. Its not as biased as you suggest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500#Selection

worked for me too.

The discussion in the comments of the following blog post make some pretty good points in favor of surrogate keys:

http://prodlife.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/meaningless-foreign...

Not exactly a startup (but less than 100 employees), but the company I work for is hiring sysadmins (both internal and as consultants for remote work). We are taking H-1B candidates and I'd love to stop being the only H-1B employee in the company :)

We are also looking for DBAs: Oracle, MySQL and even SQL-Server.

You can read my blog post about my experience with the company: http://www.pythian.com/news/16887/learning-on-the-job-some-t...

And apply here: http://candidates.pythian.com/

Of course there are plenty of opportunities to help. However, telling the GF "learn to code so you can help him with his projects" can lead to wrong expectations.

My husband has been patient through years of on-call duty and pages at all hours of day, night and weekends. He's been patient through all night maintenance duties and when I'm away for conferences or customer visits few times a year.

I've been patient when his company adapted this agile practice that means a release until 4am every Wednesday.

One thing I'm wondering about is the "get involved" advice: I'm a pretty mean developer, but I work in languages and environments that are very different from what my husband is working on. Whenever I try to discuss his work problems, I end up asking lots of wrong questions and generally annoying him. There is very little I can do to actually help him work on problems. Thats with me having 15 years of coding experience.

There is simply no way a girlfriend who is just learning to code can help her startup SO work on his projects.

"You should be a DBA, its a good career for a woman".

Even though DBAs have more flexible hours, I wouldn't recommend a job with a pager to my worse enemies.

10 years later and I'm still trying to come up with a good way to get rid of it.

I find that billing hourly can make for a more pleasant relationship with the customer. Provided that you give good justifications for the hours you bill.

On fixed price contracts there is lots of haggling over the exact scope, requirements, changes and meaning of words in the contract.

Hourly billing lets me smile and say "sure thing" to more requests, something that I actually prefer doing.

I'd guess that in Amazon and other online retailers, the part that completes the order of the item from the warehouse has to be transactional so two customers won't buy the last item.

Normally, whenever physical objects or money is involved, transactions should be considered.

Everyone is using MySQL. But I attended a talk by one of their DBAs where he said that they large OLTP server, the one that processes the payments is Oracle. Single-instance, because Oracle RAC can't give them the low latency they needed.

They switch the the biggest machine IBM can give them every few month.

I believe that Facebook subscribe to this methodology because MySQL makes this easy and other methods of finding issues very difficult.

When all you have is a hammer...

Some of us can even BE an attractive woman.

I left my job at BigCo because I was part of a 8 person team where the manager was supposed to create a normal distribution out of scores from 1-5. I was one of two employees recognized for doing an excellent job, but my manager could rate just one of us as "excellent".

During a performance review, my manager talked for an hour about how much I'm contributing and what an amazing job I do. Then he ranked me as average. I was extremely disappointed because I wanted the awesome job I do to get more official recognition.

I started searching for a new job almost immediately and left shortly after.

So yes, review systems considered harmful.

I'm currently searching for a new car, so I thought I'll check out CarWoo.

Here are some issues I ran into:

1. Can we have photos of the different models next to the drop down list? and maybe a short summary of the differences? I know I want a MINI, but I didn't even know there are three different kinds, so obviously I don't know which one I want.

2. Same for trims. At least a link to the manufacturer site to help me figure this out.

3. Mention payments only after I entered all my details? This seems unfair!

4. I feel incredibly uncomfortable to pay for the privilege of you giving my details to dealers. Shouldn't they be paying you because you are sending them buyers?

5. Also, why should I pay upfront? What if I don't get a good deal out of this?

6. I tried to ask all this at the nice chat, but after typing my question and clicking "submit" my text just disappeared and I never got a reply. I'm using Chrome, btw.

7. So no, I'm not convinced, and I see no reason to spend time watching videos of happy customers. I'm not into testimonials anyway. How about some statistics? What's the expected dollar value of savings for the model I'm trying to buy?

I hope my comments are at least somewhat useful, and my apologies if the tone is snarky - I got upset at the non-working chat.

BTW. All architectures have a single bottleneck. Thats pretty much by definition.

Oracle tried to market their Exalogic as "no bottlenecks" which is nearly as funny as "unbreakable linux" and "zero latency".

Ah, I love SSDs. I was just pointing out that they are not the only game in town.

You are paying developers to rewrite features that already exist in the database and you think this is "throwing hardware at the problem"?

Its year 2010, we've invented RAID a while back. Stripe and mirror everything and you get decent performance without SSD.

If you write your code in Java (or Ruby or Python or C++) it will come back and byte if you even need to scale or change architectures.

Actually, if you have to change architectures, you are probably bitten anyway.

If you need performance: 1. Do as much as you can in one SQL statement (unless you are using MySQL where the optimizer sucks) 2. If you can't do it in one SQL statement, use PL/SQL to do data processing as close as possible to the data - this will save on network load and PL/SQL is highly optimized to reduce overhead for embedded SQL statements.

With all the talk about "horizontal scalability" we sometimes forget the benefits of writing fast code in first place.

The idea is that you don't have to write a DB - it is already there, usually even deployed and monitored by your ops team. Even if it gives absolutely no other value, thats a big plus.

In terms of randomly distributed requests: I'm surprised the topic of "working set" is not part of the question. Even with huge amounts of data, if the working set can be stored in RAM and only rarely swap data in and out, its a much different problem than 5000 disk reads a second. Lots of databases are optimized to efficiently maintain cached data in memory and swap as little as possible and as efficiently as possible.

MVCC you mean multi-version concurrency? As in writers-don't-block-readers? Because most relational databases have that.

> Once one scales beyond a single node the system becomes distributed. Then by definition one must deal with distributed systems problems in order to achieve scale beyond the capabilities of a single node

I meant that one doesn't need to solve the general problem of distributed systems. Sharding is a common way to scale avoiding most of the problems generally associated with distributed systems. Scaling within LAN is easier than across data centers. You can assume no malicious traffic between your servers and suddenly solving the byzantine generals problem is far easier.

Purposefully ignoring really hard problems can be a very good engineering practice.

I understood what he said as:

Solving the problems of distributed systems is incredibly hard and not necessary if all you need is scalability and high availability. Better think of your problems in terms of engineering trade-offs and not distributed theory and understand what you are giving up and what this gains you.

When you decide to give up consistency, your application can no longer assume consistency ever. Giving up availability in case of network partition means few extra minutes of downtime a year.

I don't think he completely misunderstood distributed systems - I think he decided to completely side-step the entire field.

This is a cost-value calculation and neither approach is "best" at all cases. Does the cost of developing the tools and procedures exceed the cost of planned downtimes during the next X years?

Often you build some tools that mitigate some of the risk and plan deployments at a less active hour to mitigate the rest of it.

Is the Open House open to startup school attendees only?

It has to be determined by specific market conditions. I don't think anyone practicing dentistry in Israel earns anything even close to the sums you mention. As you said, there could be an artificial shortage in dentists. When my father lived in the US, he worked as a researcher, but didn't bother getting a dentist license because the process was too complicated and time consuming.

Dentists don't like to quote prices because they want you to choose them based on their skills and reputation. Letting you shop around would turn this into commodity market. They do know (at least in countries without strange insurance habits) how much each procedure should cost and how much each of their friends asks for. This is not exactly collusion, but can contribute to price similarity. The same way that you can't find a decent DBA in the bay area for less than 100k. People usually know how much their skills are worth.

Hope this helped.

Not interested in Guy-to-girl ratio (I get the right ratio for me at every nerdish meetup I attend), but now I know there are 3 Whiskey Lounges in SF.

I have about 5 dentists in my immediate family (grandfather, dad, dad's wife, aunt and uncle). My dad is the head of the Perio department in the Hadassah Dental School in Jerusalem. Naturally, I had my teeth checked twice a year like clockwork all my life. I have some gum issues, but never needed a filling.

6 month after moving to the bay area, I went to a local dentist for general checkup. He used the "laser thingy" to find cavities and found no less than eight cavities that required filling. He also took XRays that showed no issues at all. I asked him for copies of the records and XRays so I can send to my father for second opinion. He immediately agreed, but despite weekly reminders, he never sent me the films.

On my first visit back home, I got my teeth checked by my aunt again. I need one filling.

Lessons learned: * US diet accounts for one cavity. * Dentist greed accounts for seven more. * Always ask your dentist for copies of XRay and files and don't return if he will not supply them. It is your right to have those copies of your dental history. * If the XRays don't show the cavities, there are not at a level where you need to treat them yet. You can safely wait until they show up. If you maintain high level of dental hygiene they may never get to the point where they need filling.

Why not set a minimum price per hour, and if the customer can't afford you, then say good-bye with no hard feelings?

He is not evil and toxic, he just needs someone cheaper and may need to adjust his definition of "good" and "fast" accordingly.

There are good reasons to take work for less than your normal fee. I do it to learn sexy new technologies I would not have access to otherwise. (i.e. if you have Exadata and need a cheap, good and fast DBA send me and email!) As long as you know what you are getting out of the deal, all is good.

Calling someone a douche-bag, evil and poison because he asked for reduced rate? Giving a condescending rant about it? I don't think its professional and I'd never treat potential customers like this, even if I disagree with their way of doing business.