Professional 3D animation, accurately reconstructed to match the event.

YouTube - Hudson River Plane Landing (US Airways 1549) Animation with Audio

Twitter Wanted Open-Market Valuation

Representatives of Twitter liked the sound of $500 million but balked when Facebook said its stock was worth $8 billion to $9 billion. Twitter's team knew that Facebook was letting employees sell stock on the secondary market at company valuations ranging from $2 billion to $4 billion. "We said it's not worth it," the person says. "Don't treat us like children."

At that point, Facebook offered Twitter around $100 million in cash, with the rest of the deal in stock. Facebook said it would come up with the $100 million by selling more of its stock to outside investors.

Twitter agreed on one condition: that the Facebook stock it received be valued at the price company shares garnered on the open market. Facebook blinked and the deal talks ended. "They wanted to buy us but there was not much conviction," the person says. "They've been playing this charade," with the company's valuation. null

Facebook's Thiel Explains Failed Twitter Takeover - BusinessWeek

However, even that is an interesting prospect. Suppose to be on the safe side it would cost a million dollars per startup. If you could get startups to stick to your town for a million apiece, then for a billion dollars you could bring in a thousand startups. That probably wouldn't push you past Silicon Valley itself, but it might get you second place.

For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world.

Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.

Background

We use MySQL for storing all of the data in FriendFeed. Our database has grown a lot as our user base has grown. We now store over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.

As our database has grown, we have tried to iteratively deal with the scaling issues that come with rapid growth. We did the typical things, like using read slaves and memcache to increase read throughput and sharding our database to improve write throughput. However, as we grew, scaling our existing features to accomodate more traffic turned out to be much less of an issue than adding new features.

In particular, making schema changes or adding indexes to a database with more than 10 - 20 million rows completely locks the database for hours at a time. Removing old indexes takes just as much time, and not removing them hurts performance because the database will continue to read and write to those unused blocks on every INSERT, pushing important blocks out of memory. There are complex operational procedures you can do to circumvent these problems (like setting up the new index on a slave, and then swapping the slave and the master), but those procedures are so error prone and heavyweight, they implicitly discouraged our adding features that would require schema/index changes. Since our databases are all heavily sharded, the relational features of MySQL like JOIN have never been useful to us, so we decided to look outside of the realm of RDBMS.

How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data - Bret Taylor's blog

Could Atlanta Buy A Silicon Valley? The Answers

With a URL with the extension of "maybe" Paul Graham wrote an interesting essay about how a city could go about buying a Silicon Valley. Towards the end he poses a series of question any city should ask if the scheme will work for them. Here is my take on the answers.

Much discussion also at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498431

Force of Good: a blog by Lance Weatherby

The title might be a bit exaggerated, but if you have just started your adventure with Erlang I would like to provide you with a couple of hints that can spare you a serious headache.

The basic tool to work with Erlang is its REPL shell, started in terminal mode with erl command. The name REPL comes from read, eval, print, loop cycle and among functional languages is a commonly used term for interactive shell.

Lots of tips/tricks here re: cookies, shell, name/sname, etc. that will save you Erlang headaches.

Web λ.0 - Functional programming for the Web: Erlang tips and tricks: nodes

So far this year, I've probably spent $40 in charges I could have
avoided by terminating instances when I stopped needing them. Often,
I know when I start an instance that it is only to test a short
process and I don't expect to have it running more than the first
hour.

Here's a trick which can be used to start an instance and have that
instance shut itself down in 50 minutes:

ec2-run-instances AMIID --key KEYPAIR --user-data '#!bin/sh
shutdown -h +50 >/dev/null &'

Last night I left 14 small instances running while I slept. Will be running this command first from now on.

tip: Temporary instances with automatic shutdown - ec2ubuntu | Google Groups

On February 10 at approximately 1656 GMT, the Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 communications satellites collided over northern Siberia. The impact between the Iridium Satellite LLC-owned satellite and the 16-year-old satellite launched by the Russian government occurred at a closing speed of well over 15,000 mph at approximately 490 miles above the face of the Earth. The low-earth orbit (LEO) location of the collision contains many other active satellites that could be at risk from the resulting orbital debris.

The following videos, interactive 3D Viewer files, 3D models, and high-resolution images are available to better understand this event.

See also:

... POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION...

I don't understand how this could happen.

Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 Satellite Collision

How to get stuff done.

How to get stuff done

UbiGraph is a tool for visualizing dynamic graphs. The basic version is free, and talks to Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C, C++, C#, Haskell, and OCaml.

Very impressive graphs.

Ubigraph: Free dynamic graph visualization software