Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ctdonath 5261 days ago
By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages

Sounds like a marvelous challenge. Anyone have other similar "technological frontier then, high-school science fair project now" type challenges? OPer notes BioCurious as one. A major factor in education is walking kids thru a subject from basic principles to state-of-the-art, recreating historical milestones along the way.
2 comments
jaylevitt 5261 days ago
AOL in the late 1990's, minus the dialup itself.

Content publishing: Weekend project. Rails, memcached and CloudFront and you're done.

IM and Buddy Lists: 1.5 million simultaneous users doing n^2 pub/sub-type distributed transactions.

Mail: 4,000 emails per second with live unsend and recipient read/unread status. I think PostgreSQL tops out in the millions of rows per second nowadays.

Web caching/acceleration: pick your favorite proxy solution and configure it.

Single sign-on: Form strategic partn-- Hey, you said technical challenge, not political.

link
ippisl 5261 days ago
Building mobile, handheld computer games(A 14 year's old did build an app game that got very high in the app store).

opening a web shop.

Building robots(at today's kid's levels).

Designing really complex and fast digital circuits(using FPGA, and IP blocks).

Building a global, scalable and complex database application(using something like MS lightswitch).

link