balloot

This post is ridiculous. Amazon has spent billions upon billions of dollars building and maintaining a ridiculously efficient delivery system for electronic content. THAT is what the markup is paying for.

And from a common sense standpoint, if Amazon were really charging the crazy markup this guy claims, then some other company would mark up a mere 1000% or whatever and massively undercut Amazon's offering. Given that this hasn't happened, it is pretty safe to assume that the true costs are much higher than his math suggests. Either that or other companies have just ceded massive eBook profits to Amazon out of the goodness of their hearts. I'm going to guess it's the former.

The fundamental problem in your example has nothing to do with hiring. It's that Mary is working on something that she dislikes to the point that having to continue on her project in the medium term will cause her to quit. It's both the company and the employee's joint responsibility to ensure that this isn't the case.

Again, you are repeating this idea that all these other non-coding skills can be mastered on a whim. If you truly need an MBA type doing MBA things for your company, then you should go get one. Lord knows there's a zillion of them out there, almost all of which have a better resume than "I read MBA for dummies".

Or to put this differently. If I was working for some larger company as a developer, and I went to management and said "I have decided that I want to quit development and work in marketing", they would turn me down. And rightly so, because A) it would be bad for the company to lose my development skills, and B) there is no reason to hire me as a marketing person when there's many more out there far more qualified and experienced in marketing.

So...if this would be quite clearly the correct course of action if I worked for someone else, why would I not follow the same thought process for my own company?

OK, but here are your outcomes if you are good at X and need X and Y:

You do X, hire Y - You have one skilled person, one question mark.

You do Y, hire X - You have one unskilled person, one question mark.

Seems pretty simple to me that the first is better. I suppose that you could make the argument that Y may be easy to pick up, but if that's the case it should be all the easier to just hire someone else with a proven track record.

None of this addresses the fact that the author has set up his company such that the person doing the marketing/blogging/sales/etc has zero experience doing any of those things. By attempting to do them himself the author is completely disregarding their value!

This is exactly why the outsourcing craze fizzled out for the most part. I remember when I was in school for CS in 2002/2003 there were people who would tell me that I was earning a useless degree, as all programming jobs would end up overseas.

The bottom line is that outsourcing looks great on paper but then just murders you with hidden costs. Delays to market, code maintainability, number of bugs, etc all go the wrong way once you outsource, but none of that is quantified on any C-level report.

I think you're underselling the challenge in the parts of the business that aren't coding. Which is exactly why this guy's decision is such a bad one.

He's basically said "I have skill set X, which I'm trained in and have been honing for years. For my company, I need skill sets X and Y. So I'll do Y and find someone else to do X."

No matter what X and Y are, that's just the wrong way to solve that problem. The key issue in this case being that he is assuming the marketing/user acquisition stuff is so easy that he can just pick it up on the fly with no prior experience.

Attention readers: For some reason I cannot comprehend people use the internet in 2012 with javascript and cookies disabled and then whine when some things don't work.

Yes, information does make people happy. And my point is that a message that says "this site is hosted at Heroku" gives absolutely zero information to the vast majority of internet users. Most people simply don't know what that phrase means. It's no different than if someone suggested a new feature that is only visible for Opera users. It's just a waste of time and effort to do something that caters to such a small sliver of the market.

Also, a Heroku-specific error page would give zero help to the problem you describe above. Anecdotal evidence in this thread suggests Heroku sometimes goes down briefly for small chunks of its users. So if you see the Heroku error, it could be for just you. Or it could be system-wide outage. It wouldn't even solve that problem!

How do you not blame Heroku? You are paying them a good chunk of money to handle not only hosting, but failover strategies, multiple locations, etc. If you have to worry about any of those things they aren't doing their job.

That's like if you chose MySQL as the database, and then when an update had a huge bug that broke your site, you say "totally my fault that I don't have a version of the site that uses PostgreSQL."

It is absolutely your fault if the site does down due to natural disaster. This is why companies who are large enough to do so host the site at multiple locations with the ability to failover.

This is misguided. Nobody cares why your site is down, and for most sites 99% of your users will have no clue what is meant by "This site is hosted by Heroku". And a good chunk of that other 1% isn't even going to bother reading the error text accompanying the whitescreen.

In the end, you chose to host your site on a platform that went down. That is just as much your fault as a typo in the code. If you had a setup with a hosted machine at Rackspace and the power goes out, you don't expect a custom error. So why would you expect one from Heroku?

The thing here that is eye opening to me, and relevant to any web programmer, is that accessing something from memory from another box in the same datacenter is about 25x times as fast as accessing something from disk locally. I would not have guessed that!

You talk about a "test" like there isn't an article linked directly above wherein one of the largest web properties in the world explicitly states that server side page generation is much faster based off of real world results.

I would say there's two clear reasons functional languages are relatively rare in the professional world:

1) Functional languages are difficult to grasp. Maybe it's the way CS is taught, but I've never heard someone say "Haskell just comes intuitively to me, but I just can't get how to work effectively in PHP". You hear the same statement the other way around all the time. The bottom line is if you have multiple tools to do the same job, and one has a huge learning curve and one has a tiny learning curve, the choice of tool is obvious.

2) Haskell doesn't have a clear application it's "good" at. If you learn PHP, Python, or Ruby, you can throw together a web application with little effort. If you learn Javascript, you can easily do front end web stuff, or if you're more adventurous, get into Node.js. If you learn the C family of languages you can write iOS apps, OS kernels, or games. What do you do with Haskell? I dunno.

All I know is I have lived in and visited many other places in the US, and the SF Bay Area (and especially San Francisco proper) is hands down the most distinctive and beautiful. Whatever is being done here needs to be done more and not less.

If the author wants to take his ball and stomp off to some urban-sprawly McMansion-filled city that is supposedly more optimal for talent, go right ahead. You have your choice of the vast majority of the country. There is a wonderful lack of regulation and population density out in the plains of South Dakota - just go there and I'm sure all the talent will follow in droves.

That's just not how it works. Pretty much every startup uses the 1 year cliff. And rightly so, because for a very early employee 1/48 of the employee's options is not a trivial amount of equity. You could hire a guy that comes in and works for a few months and then leaves and takes .3% or whatever of the company. That is just as bad of a screwjob as what happened to the OP, and companies are right to protect themselves.

Anyway, the right answer here is to work for someone who doesn't pull crap like this. And if the OP was competent at his job, I would hope the other employees have seen what happened and are properly aware of their employer's shady ethics. In any regard, this is just bad business and likely killed morale to some degree.

The question here is why are you so concerned with keeping on good terms with the founders? This is a humongous dick move, and either they're very shady or they are extremely angry at you. Either way I am not clear why you would work with them again.

But as for the deal, I think it's pretty reasonable given that they are exercising their ability to screw you over. Assuming you signed the boilerplate options paperwork everyone uses, you signed a contract that explicitly stated that you get nothing if you are let go before 12 months. They gave you 3.5/11 of what you were supposed to get. That seems pretty reasonable compared to 0, which is what you are entitled to.

Best of luck. Try not to dwell too much on this and I'm sure you'll land on your feet. As for your employer, karma will surely bite them in the ass if they pull stunts like this and screw over employees. Shame on them.

I don't get it. Why would someone have a website that was just some penguins on an iceberg?

Wow. They asked you the monty hall problem, AND argued that you shouldn't switch the door you picked? That's awful.

That is just plain stupid. I wouldn't want to work anywhere that would hire me, or anyone else on my team, without a proper interview.

None of those companies have a website as their main property as I do. The one I think of when it comes to using node is Klout, and Klout's performance is absolutely atrocious.

This article explains why I am using MySQL as the DB backend for a site I am currently building. It also explains why I am not using Node.js. New technologies are fun to play with, but they get decidedly less fun when your site starts getting traffic and you realize that your new toy isn't ready for prime time.

Both are awful. I have a particular disdain for regex abuse. I like to say that there are 3 stages in the use of regular expressions.

1) You don't get them and think they're magical

2) You learn regular expressions, and find all kinds of places to apply your knowledge of greedy modifiers and positive lookbehinds.

3) You learn enough to realize that regular expressions tend to be extremely brittle and try as hard as you can to avoid them.

There are a lot of very dangerous developers stuck in level 2.

My description would be "bad developers".

Best and most correct headline I've read on HN in a long time. Well done.

Well, I am pretty confident that the vast majority of programmers do not know both a functional and a purely procedural language. In my book, "knowing" a language entails having used it in some significant piece of software at the very least. Most programmers absolutely have not done this in ANY procedural or functional language, and very few have done significant work in both.

I guess my issue with these all-too-common HN "things everyone should know" posts is that inevitably 99% of programmers don't know all the things everyone "should" know. If you took the posts at face value, you would feel very inadequate.

A more appropriate title would be "Things I know. Look at how awesome I am!"

Hey look, it's yet another HN list of things "Every Programmer should know", followed by a list of everything the author knows! Funny how that works.

You seriously aren't willing to admit that your question has zero relevance to someone working in PHP?

The entire point of coding in a language like PHP is that you don't think about the low level stuff. And even if you did take the time to truly understand the source of PHP and made some fabulous optimization, they could change implementation details in a future release and break what you did.

Bottom line is that your interview question has almost no correlation with whether someone would be a good PHP developer. You might as well ask what the capital of Macedonia is as that is just as good of a screen for potential applicants.

Again, it's a very specialized gig. Each of those companies probably has a small handful of people who work on optimization and could answer the question we're talking about here. But the vast majority of employees in these companies work in higher level languages and never have to think about the specifics of memory management at all.