kuvkir

Thank everyone for participation. Did some more research and found out two interesting projects:

http://smart.fm – a next generation learning platform from Japan featuring personalized learning techniques.

http://grockit.com – a social learning tool to help students prepare for SAT, GMAT, etc. With elements of a social game.

Thanks for suggestion, will definitely look at it.

Maybe not hosting content yourself, but embed it somehow into your website.

Good point, will think on that.

Seems very promising. I like the slogan – "explanatory social learning".

How many users do you have at this moment?

Have you contacted content owners to ask them for permission to place the videos directly on your website? It'd be awesome if you can do so.

Yeah, you're right, the biggest problem is to make users interested from the beginning. That's why I'm not going to build it from scratch. My partner built a unique educational website with great content on programming, algorithms, networks and computer architecture. That content could be a starting point.

A very interesting project, will look at it.

Thanks, that seems interesting. But it is only a platform for creating online educational communities, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm more thinking of a service that is a combination of great educational content with an active community, that help a student throughout the learning process.

I think of it as a open-for-all online university, in the beginning at least for Russian speaking students as I have access to many Russian universities and professors who might like to participate.

Regarding the problem of schoolkids misusing the community to solve their homework, if the project is targeted for people who really want to learn something, doing so is cheating themselves. Also, for university students I believe the effect of this problem is not so evident as in middle schools.

I'd like to see a lightweight project mgmt tool, something like basecamp integrated into Google Apps.

Just out of curiosity – is there any list of YC participants of past years?

Thanks everyone for suggestions.

Just for the reference, here is another related topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=193308

Is that news? Irssi has been around and well-known for quite a long time...

you might want to take a look at oovoo.com, don't know if it's capable of video recording though...

Does auto scaling mean my instance will grow in ram/cpu/other resources or i'll be just given more new instances?

Given real conditions that the minimal slot for VM is a 256MB RAM instance, with a physical server having 64 such slots, the educated guess is that the distribution might be similar to the normal distribution with a centre of a 2-slot VM, as 512MB VM is the most popular choice on our target market.

How can that particular fact be of help ?

That's not a simple question. But I would guess having one 2-slot migration is better than two 1-slot migrations...

Yes, completely reject if it's not possible at all.

We can't reject as it'll be used in the commercial application with users paying money for using cloud resources.

Basically what is needed is to find the list of VM migrations needed to be done to free enough space for a new VM (of course, if it's ever possible).

That's not that simple.

Let us imagine the following configuration.

We have 3 servers each of 4 slots, below is the state of each server (the state of a server is a set of VMs it's running)

[3], [2, 1] and [2].

Say we need to place a new 3-slot VM to our system. We'll pick the third server as less-loaded and try to accomodate the second server. Together they have enough space, but we can't provision the VM withour using all 3 servers. The solution here is

1) migrate a 1-slot VM from server 2 to server 1

2) migrate a 2-slot VM from server 2 to server 3

3) place the new VM to server 2

This isn't acceptable unfortunately. VMs are meant to run for quite a reasonable amount of time, so we'll be waiting very-very long until slots get available...

Thanks for your reply, eru!

> Do you need an online solution or do you know all demands in advance?

The online solution, as we don't know the type of load in advance. It resembles tetris in some way, meaning that we don't know which piece you'll get next.

> Also what do you do when not enough slots are available for all VMs?

If it's not theoretically possible to host all VMs like in examples you provided, nothing can be done. But it's not an algorithmic problem, in real world new servers should be bought in that case.

I wouldn't say Vim has a ridiculous learning curve, it took me about 5 minutes to read through vimtutor and get started with vim.

However, being a vim adept for a long time hasn't stopped me from switching to textmate when it came to developing rails apps. ;)

Thanks, the curious thing that I saw that post and even bookmarked it, but somehow forgot to read it ;)