You sound like a snob.
Edit: no downvote from me.
I'm starting to wonder if this is really "Hacker News" or if it's "we want free advice and comments from engineers on our startups so lets start a forum with technical articles"
Some types of data analytics are CPU heavy and require distributed resources. Your comment about 10G isn't true. You can move around a Tb every 10 minutes or so. SSDs or a medium sized SAN could easily keep up with the bandwidth.
If your data isn't latency sensitive and run in batches, building a Hadoop cluster is a great solution to a lot of problems.
W T F does this even mean? I genuinely do not understand what point you are trying to make?
I have used Slashdot longer than you have (ok, possibly not.. but username registered in 1998 here...).
I find HN has generally much more experienced people on it, who understand more about the tradeoffs different solutions provide.
The old Slashdot hidden forums like wahiscool etc were good like this too, but I don't think they exist anymore do they?
I never had any issues with Hadoop. Took about 2 days for me to familiarize myself with it and adhoc a script to do the staging and setup the local functions processing the data.
I really would like to understand what you consider "hard" about Hadoop or managing a cluster. It's pretty straight forward idea, architecture is dead simple, requiring no specialized hardware at any level. Anyone who is familiar with linux CLI and running a dyanamic website should be able to grok it easily, imho.
Then again, I come from the /. crowd, so YC isn't really my kind of people, generally.