ctide

Those are the possible outcomes for premier VC funded startups, so, yeah, that definitely excludes most startups.

I'd imagine that being relatively young is an advantage in a test like this. You're not utilizing any features, and features are what slow down requests. The less features something has, the faster it should perform in these trivial tests.

It didn't. Origin was built by a different team within EA after Rupture was laid off. I was the engineering manager at EA for the Rupture team.

Should also include Rupture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupture_(social_networking) :(

Oh, and I Play Wow too: http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/01/16/i-play-wow-facebook-app-re...

Why git? I store my .vim directory in dropbox and just have it symlinked into my home directory on each of my machines. I don't really see a need for version control, and I don't want to have to do anything to make sure a change on one machine is reflected on all the others.

I submitted my first contribution, but I never got a response: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/8903 :(

I suppose it's a lot less of an issue now anyways, but in 3.2, using fetch with memcache with raw objects is super gross since you get totally incompatible responses depending on whether an item existed in cache or not.

Yeah, we're using wal-e in conjunction with streaming replication.

Either of those options would have been awesome (anything but Bucardo, really. Bucardo's triggers overwhelmed an already overwhelmed database)

Yeah, if you run Ubuntu, don't try running any versions other than 11.04 if you're going to be under heavy i/o. We had all kinds of CPU soft lock issues with software raid on other versions. Otherwise? 2 m2.4xlarge running mostly standard postgresql installs absolutely dominate Mecha instances.

Obviously, you need to deal with backups and that sort of thing, but, you can hire a full time person for the price difference between Heroku and EC2 as soon as you get to the top end of Heroku pricing.

Whatever you do, get your database off Heroku. Heroku's postgres offering has sweet options, but performance is fucking awful. We went from a 20k+ month heroku bill to a fraction of that price on EC2 so we could get a slave that could keep up with the writes to our master.

Performance being shit would be fine if it wasn't a miserable experience trying to migrate off. Not being able to setup replication to slaves off of Heroku means you have to deal with things like Bucardo and all the problems that brings along.

Heroku is really awesome for little web apps that performance doesn't matter on. If you think you're building something that people will want to use, you don't want to be on Heroku.

I suppose you could look at it like that, it's certainly powering the types of experiences that Color was hoping to create. It's a much different way of achieving it, though.

If that works for you, that's great!

Many software developers around these parts (myself included) want equity in the companies we work for. Equity is just our industry's form of royalties. Make awesome software that people love? Greater valuation of your equity!

The comments here are generally super confusing to me. Are there companies in San Francisco who actually give a shit about where you went to college? I've only been here for 5 years, but I spent 2 or so of those just bouncing around from startup to startup doing consulting work. I've never worked with anyone who gave a shit about what college people went to. Literally, none. The startups I've joined have been predominantly staffed with college dropouts (even including a high school dropout or two), and a lot of the best engineers I know here have no degrees. Where are all these startups that are hiring based on credentials?

If I had to guess, I'd say the people who read 37 signals' blog (and HN) are much more likely to over engineer than under engineer. Most of the client work (and I've done my fair share of consulting) I've seen suffers from exactly what you describe, but those aren't the people who are going to read 37s' blog.

However, I've also worked on the opposite end of the spectrum, lots of turbo nerds who were big on planning for every eventuality (and WERE the types to read 37s etc) and that suffered heavily from exactly what he describes here.

Know your audience!

I would argue that thingist is actually a micro-blogging platform that has renamed tags to lists. :)

Mine (http://lists.io) turned into a useful app for me as well, but I had to deviate pretty far from our initial idea (which was nearly identical to this) for that to happen.

Speaking as someone who has built this product before, I think you'll run into the same outcome that my product, Well, Bagcheck, Listly, Listgeeks, and others end up at:

It doesn't actually provide any value.

It sounds really harsh, but unfortunately, that's the reality. People show up, make a few lists because it sounds fun, but you don't give anything back to them. You don't end up getting information that isn't already more readily available (and more useful) in other forms. There's this notion that people will carefully curate lists of things they care about, and it's true that they do, but only for a few days. There's no incentive to come back and maintain them because they aren't getting anything back out of it.

You can certainly say that I'm cynical and/or jaded from having built this and seen it first hand, but I think there's a reason why none of these sites ever stick. I don't believe it's due to them being built by bad engineers, or being implemented in a way that doesn't work, it's just that it's a feature and not a product.

Not if you're too scared to take the risks that lead to making them.

Probably the bit about being mortified about screwing up. It's certainly not an attitude that's going to jive with the majority of the HN audience. Embrace failure, learn from your mistakes, etc.

It's a new trend because then everyone discusses their age, and keeps the app bumped to the top. It's the secret to getting your Show HN seen by lots of people. Otherwise, you end up with 4 votes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4744508 :)

The iPhone app is actually why I never use this. It's too cumbersome to put together an order. It took my girlfriend and I just as long to find everything I wanted (no efficient way to browse) and put together the order as it would have taken us to just go to Safeway ourselves.

No pictures yet, we're more focused on nailing the single user experience vs. trying to make it compete against the more social list type apps.

We hope to have the notes be a lot smarter in the future, but right now you'll have to actually select the item to get pictures and such.

Definitely need to make some things a bit clearer and to have a better intro.

Thanks for looking at it!

Hi! It's all native, I looked briefly at some of those tools and decided I'd rather just learn objective-c.

If you didn't think the patent system was fucked up before, you sure as fuck should know now.

This really isn't that surprising to me. Game testers are the same young kids who are running around xbox games going out of their way to be as offensive as possible to everyone. It should come as no shock that they act the same way at work when work is just an extension of their regular gaming life. I'm not defending it, mind you, since Kixeye is going way too far with it, but the 'culture' he speaks of is the online gaming culture.

Unless there's some caveat that says 'if you got a discounted meal on the same receipt as a fully paid for meal then this specific receipt doesn't count towards the 8 receipts' then I don't really see how he's 'being difficult.'

Don't advertise something you don't plan on honoring, and you don't have 'difficult customers.'

I built this too, but with sweet user accounts: http://imageshar.es/

I, however, did not spend much time on the UI. :)

Or, why don't they just interleave ads into the streams and require developers to either display those ads or pay a CPM equivalent to hide them? It seems clear their main concern is around the home_timeline feed anyways, so weaving in their 'sponsored tweets' and requiring developers display them seems straight forward enough.

Congratulations Dalton Caldwell!

Who could have known that Twitter would just hand you the entire game with one stupid maneuver.

Design is all about subtleties, not big deals.

Does it make a difference? You bet.

It's true, going to college for a semester taught me that I never, ever want to write java for a living.

One of the biggest problems with the 1.8.x versions of MRI (or CRuby as it's referred to in this article) is that the GC is pretty slow and tends to get called a lot. A good explanation of the reasons behind that can be found here:

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/mri-memory-allocation-a-...

As Rails got more popular and sites built on Rails got bigger, people started running into performance issues that could often be rooted down to GC being called over and over during a single web request (due to instantiation of lots of AR objects, causing lots of memory allocations which lead to GC being called.) This lead to people exploring other implementations of Ruby (REE, Rubinius, etc.) and more importantly, becoming a lot more familiar with how GC works in MRI and how to program around it's shortcomings.