Same as Viaweb. Hash tables in memory. Updates to disk, but no reads from disk except at startup.

I'm pretty happy for just using delicious for that. It's always nicer when sites interact well with existing sites instead of bolting on a half assed version of the same functionality. Not to say that Paul's in the business of half assing things, but rather that it's slightly orthogonal to the main value of news.yc and already exists (done well).

Does the Arc/Lisp process only handle one request at a time? If it handles multiple requests at once how do you keep the writes atomic?

Hey, we all got our start somewhere :) The earlier you do it, the better.

Props to Juwo for getting off his butt and putting something out there.

That's more than most people I know can say.

The way to do this is to go to the feature request thread and put in your point. People will vote it up there if they like it. This keeps the rest of YC news clear of feature requests and focuses more on start up stuff.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=363

http://www.colorschemer.com/ is another great resource

How many start-ups sabotage their chances by being too stingy when it comes to equity?

I thought I'd save everyone the trouble of going to a blog by ranting here directly.

A while back I was interviewing at a small company that really needed another developer or three. They wanted to hire and made an offer -- a 20k pay cut, but they were going to give me equity -- the magic word! Except the president/founder of the company wanted to keep 99%+ of the equity for himself, so anyone else let in on the deal had to share a fraction of the remaining 1%. I calculated that if the company was successful to the tune of $10 million, my share would still be worth less than my initial pay cut. I pointed this out to the senior developer who was trying to convince me to join, but his blind loyalty to the company seemed to preclude arithmetic.

Prior to that I worked at another smallish company where the president/owner kept around 95% of the stock. A few top people got 1% or less. Other companies say they want to hire "top talent", but they pay "market rates" -- which usually means the average according to some salary survey, or less, and no equity.

It seems like some founders are so attached to ownership that they can't part with it, even if it means greater success for themselves! It's like they have visions of dollars from owning the entire company instead of a vision of what's needed to get there. While a fraction of a percent of Google is worth a lot now, in order to get to that point, the founders had to part with the majority of the equity.

Some start-ups work with two founders, but some have half a dozen (like Excite) or more. Even reddit got more "founders" after the fact. If it turns out you need a new band member, are you prepared to redo the original founders' percentages, or do you have other plans?

"DBMS are optimized for the fastest possible disk I/O."

I think that's disputable. DBMSes are designed for a number of considerations and it's not hard to demonstrate how alternatives can outperform a DBMS in terms of disk I/O and general performance.

Consider an HTTP request that modifies records. A typical DBMS-backed app will write all the changes to disk whereas a prevalent system (AKA object prevalence) need only write "POST /someurl arg1=value1:arg2=value2:..." or some equivalent. The data is updated in RAM with a write to only one or two disk sectors in the majority of cases, no communication with a DBMS, no construction and parsing of SQL, and none of the other overhead. A typical prevalent system will be orders of magnitude faster than the DBMS-backed equivalent, and simpler to boot.

Object prevalence doesn't offer a query language and has different scalability considerations, but it would take an absurdly broken design for a DBMS to outperform it.

I think the features request thread is overwhelming at this point. There's just too much there for new information to rise to the top.