gmonaco

    YC is slowly drifting away from its original mission.

I think that they tend to fund people who they think will have the highest chance of success. You end up with priorities like:

1. Previous successes

2. Company with traction

3. Employee at Stripe/Google/Apple/etc

4. Smart MIT/Harvard/Stanford student

5. Misc. high magnitude achievements

I think what you're seeing might be a higher number of 1-3 applying to YC, not leaving much room for 4 and 5. The four and fives who do get accepted are extraordinarily impressive.

Right. So when can I write:

    shards = []

    boot 'ec2', 'us-east-1', (server) ->
        shards.push server.start 'mongod_docker_image'

    boot 'ec2', 'us-west-1', (server) ->
        shards.push server.start 'mongod_docker_image'

    setTimeout ->
        shard.stop() for shard in shards
    , 5 * 60 * 1000

Does this exist yet? I started writing my own earlier today with Docker because I haven't found anything yet.

The plan is to cook a single ami that can be deployed ad infinitum. The image only has a slave application on it that receives and runs Docker images.

I've been checking out all of this new stuff recently, like http://www.packer.io and http://www.coreos.com. It all seems cool, but I can't help but think it's too little too late.

I want to deploy at the application level, not the OS image level. The abstraction that I want is:

Servers: Something that runs applications. Could be a physical server, an instance on EC2, or a local process, etc.

Applications: My code. Black boxes.

I want to be able to boot up a new server and throw some applications on it, like a new MongoDB shard or whatever. Then tear some applications down, or tear whole servers down.

And I want it all to be managed by a RESTful API over HTTP so that I can write a script to automate deployment, and even automate the scaling of my service.

I think you can do it with just Docker, a bare Linux distro, and a few scripts.

Does this exist yet?

Congrats to Trevor and team!

    Not making time for exercise now seems akin to cutting out food because you have no time to eat

So now we just need Soylent for Exercise ;-)

FWIW, I agree with the article. Also, exercising seemed like a chore at first, but now it's fun and I look forward to it.

Read "Schlep Blindness" from PG[1].

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

I love the Mathematica Stack Exchange just for these sorts of things. Another one of my favorites that was previously on HN: http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/5676/how-to-p...