HN user
Reality Web TV idea: Follow a few kids who have only worked one or two jobs right out of school in the Bay Area as they move to smaller industries throughout the country. Watch as the struggle with day to day activities like understanding why they need to pay for their own lunch or why they can't get a brand new macbook every year.
At my previous company we experimented with a 12 node cluster (128GB per node) used as a datastore. At one point we had over 1 billion keys. This was back in the 1.x version where they persisted data into sqlite files so each file would have 100+ million rows in it. Persisting data took forever. Rebalancing took forever.
When it worked, it was very fast. When you lost a node, things went bad. The java client would lose it's mind trying to cope with an outage. We ended up writing a connection pool were we could just recreate our connections when we detected a node went out.
That said, it was the best distributed NoSQL solution we tried and might have improved a lot since I last used it.