Try building a program on Google App Engine. I personally like python, but you could go with any JVM-targeted language. The particularly new part for you is the datastore:
No joins (except for "self joins"), entity groups, sharded counters, and the mindset that computations should be on write instead of on query. At the end, you can work through this article that shows how to implement a YC-style decaying vote score purely on writing of entities (records):
I signed up for an app engine account when it first came out and I haven't touched it, so I think this is what I'm going to do. Thanks for the info and links!
Everyone else that replied thank you as well, some stuff that I will file away for next time. :-)
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/
No joins (except for "self joins"), entity groups, sharded counters, and the mindset that computations should be on write instead of on query. At the end, you can work through this article that shows how to implement a YC-style decaying vote score purely on writing of entities (records):
http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/overheard.html