Hacker News Reader

ctideon Scaling GitHub

You're right, they wouldn't. GitHub would never hire the PM you're referring to, because that's the type of PM that makes engineers hate their jobs and become demotivated.

ctideon Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0

Maybe they were busy creating a great product instead of obsessing about perfect architecture and optimising prematurely?

I think you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who believes that ensuring all of the servers are running the same code is a 'premature optimization'.

ctideon How I Designed Code Year in 1 Hour

The article was about design, not implementation.

ctideon User Experience Critique of Path 2

Don't worry, the emails are ridiculous anyways:

http://imageshar.es/4ed7bbc343641e6c1e000dc1

Why even include a link in the email if it brings me to a page that just lets me know I can't do anything from there?

ctideon Stop misusing "Disrupt"

Disrupt is the new pivot.

ctideon 10gen's response to MongoDB's slams

Widely read publications aren't known for their intelligent discourse. HN preventing this sort of thing would be doing it's user's a disservice, since the value of this whole debacle was the discussion that ensued, not the piece itself.

ctideon Ask PG: Are there IP blocks?

No, I can assure you that's not the case, unless Comcast decided to do it. It appears to be fine now, but for this week we were getting 0 byte responses from port 80, but everything working fine over HTTPS.

ctideon Ask PG: Are there IP blocks?

Our work got blocked as well this week, it seems. I can still browse HN via https though. I don't know if that's intentional or not. :)

Have you tried loading: https://news.ycombinator.com/?

ctideon Introducing the Gmail app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

Yes, I don't doubt that the iOS5 login bug was not intentional, however every other issue I mentioned has been there since I switched back to an iPhone from Droid when the Verizon iPhone was released. That's nearly a year of a completely malfunctioning app (although, I could actually log in to that one.)

ctideon Introducing the Gmail app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

No, I switched to one of the paid apps (GV Mobile+) because it actually worked.

EDIT: I don't really know why I'm being downvoted for this. Wouldn't you switch apps too if you relied on google voice for your text messages and you couldn't log into it anymore without it instantly crashing?

ctideon Introducing the Gmail app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

Have you used the Google Voice app for the iPhone? It's literally the worst app I've ever seen in my life. Crashed constantly, won't refresh from the server, will close your text box randomly while typing a message (clearing your message), will fail to make calls frequently, and since I upgraded to iOS5 now has signed me out and crashes immediately when trying to sign back in so it's been rendered completely unusable.

I can only assume that there's some desire within Google to make sure the iPhone versions of their products are complete dogshit to try and encourage Android adoption.

ctideon If all Rejection Letters could be so nice...

How old is that why not link? If they're interviewing 70-80 groups, doesn't that mean that nearly everyone who interviews gets in? I mean, last group was over 60, wasn't it?

ctideon Lead Bullets

All of his blog posts start with a line from a rap song. It makes a lot more sense in the context of his blog (http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/, for example) than it does on Techcrunch, but I assume he just did the same thing out of habit.

ctideon A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy

Sounds remarkably similar to my life in my early 20s.

Get out. Now. I spent about 5 years in a job that initially taught me a lot about a lot of different technologies, but I peaked very quickly. I felt like I couldn't leave, however, since I was easily the most technical and was responsible for lots of disparate systems. So, I would go to work and spend 95% of my day chatting on IRC and 5% of my day writing a solid chunk of code that made it look like I was busy.

The biggest regret I have is that I spent at least 2 years too many at that job before I grew the balls to change my life. Don't waste another day of your life rotting away in an environment that's doing nothing for you.

ctideon Node.js has jumped the shark

I thought the point of this article was to generate a cliff notes version of the last week of arguments, coming from the side of someone who thinks node is cancer. Why are we even discussing this?

ctideon Show HN: Export your data from Twitter/Facebook/Gowalla/Google+ as JSON

Or, use: http://lockerproject.org/ and export everything locally without it passing through someone else's web server (as well as keep your local copy of the data completely current for as long as you decide to keep your locker running.)

Full disclosure: I work on this!

ctideon When TDD Fails

That's done via fixtures, not mocking your database, and is significantly more trivial than HTTP request mocking.

ctideon When TDD Fails

I have no intention of ever mocking the database, and I mock HTTP requests solely so I can work on my app without an internet connection. Look, a better approach is to use TDD for things it makes sense for. Spending a ton of time to mock out your database does nothing for you. Is mysql going to fail for you? Is the mysql driver that a million people are using going to fail for you? No? So, don't mock it out.

ctideon When TDD Fails

That's not why it's faster. It's faster because I never have to manually run through whatever I'm developing. On a large feature that I can completely write using TDD, I don't ever 'test' the feature until I'm completely finished. There's a MASSIVE time savings in not ever having to walk through anything in a web browser, and never creating any regressions while fixing anything that breaks later in development.

ctideon When TDD Fails

I got as far as: Oh, and good luck mocking your database and HTTP request objects. and just stopped. If you don't have any experience with TDD, then don't write about it. Mocking HTTP request objects is incredibly trivial and tools are written in every language to do just that.

I don't know why these articles keep getting written. No one's forcing you to write your tests first, and if you can't wrap your head around the benefits (which the author clearly can't) then don't do it. It's fine. I'll still continue to utilize TDD, and continue to pump out significantly more code (with significantly less bugs) than the code I produced without TDD. Yes, there's definitely code I write where I don't write the tests first. It happens, sometimes it's just easier to bang something out because you aren't sure what you're building. That doesn't mean TDD is a failure, it's a tool, like anything else. Use it where it's appropriate, because the benefits are massive.

ctideon Poll: Non-Founders, Why Are You Not Starting a Start-Up?

It's not just building software, building companies is inherently fun. It's a different set of challenges problems that need to be solved.

It's ok that you have a different mentality, but understand that it's just that, a different mentality. Some people enjoy the hustle and bustle of building organizations more than lounging on tropical beaches for the rest of their lives.

ctideon Strata Web Framework

Connect middleware has never been especially clean for me. Every app I end up working on, we slowly grow this hideous mess of middleware that starts off like:

https://github.com/LockerProject/Locker/blob/master/Ops/webs...

And tends to end with around 40 lines of checking URLs and other various bits of information to know which middleware can be chained in, and in which order that doesn't cause them to conflict with one another.

If Strata can solve this mess, then it's definitely a step up in my opinion.

ctideon Notepad of all my startup ideas

Regarding #6, have you never been to twoplustwo.com? The forums there (whilst not a 'social network') surely provide all the benefits.

Also, re: #9 - see http://memolane.com/ or http://lockerproject.org/

ctideon Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

This, but more specifically for me, writing code for features that you find utterly repugnant.

ctideon Remembering a relationship, one chat at a time

We are building a service specifically to track this sort of thing. It's an open source project here: https://github.com/lockerproject/locker

If you're interested in ways to track and parse through all the types of data that you're producing, take a look! We're probably about a month away from a hosted offering, but you can pull down the source and run it yourself today.

ctideon What I learned raising $1 million for my startup

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2875703 already discussed the first time this ended up here.

ctideon A Fast, Simple, Queue Built on MongoDB

I was going to ask about Resque as well. There's also a port of it (I don't know how well maintained it is, but it exists) that uses mongo as the backend instead of redis if you want to avoid adding another platform to your app.

ctideon First employee of startup? You are probably getting screwed

There's nothing at all mythical about a 100k / year job where you work 40 hours a week. There are plenty of coders out there making at least that much by pumping out enterprise Java 9 to 5 for insurance companies and banks. You don't even have to be very good, you just need to not completely suck, stick around for long enough, and know when and how to ask for more money...hell, if you go the consulting route, you can make that much on a 20 hour work week at $100 an hour, which is not very difficult to get to if you're good and pick the right clients.

Those are not the people we're discussing. Those people aren't deciding whether to work 9 to 5 writing java for an insurance company or go work for a startup as employee #1. Yes, you can make lots of money consulting. I spent a year doing nothing but consulting. It's mind-numbingly painful work. Apples to oranges.

But what you will find is startups that are willing to offer their early employees wages fairly close to market rates (though to be fair, we don't know in this situation whether the person in question's salary was near typical market rates, we just know that he was deciding whether to take a 50% cut in it), which is (if I'm reading correctly) what the article is suggesting people look for rather than settling for shitty wages and delusions of Facebook-level growth.

I think you'll find this is much rarer than you think. Most startups, especially YC companies for what it's worth, are offering exactly what's mentioned in this article at that stage. While it's totally ridiculous, it's currently the state of the world. Sure, it sucks, but asking for 20% is going to get you laughed out the door.

ctideon First employee of startup? You are probably getting screwed

Yes, so this 100k / year job with no benefits and no equity for exactly 40 hours / week is mythical.

ctideon First employee of startup? You are probably getting screwed

I don't understand why all these people are responding to this post so positively. Overage hours? Job-less risk? Career risk and opportunity cost? What? You seem to be including those numbers as his 'cost', are you assuming he's not getting benefits, or that he's going to work only 40 hours a week at this mythical 100k / year job?

Also, the advice is just wrong. No startup is giving away a 20% equity slice to their first employee after they've already raised a round. The chance of a startup even creating a 20% options pool for employees hired after series A is slim, and even slimmer is them giving their entire pool to the first employee. You're essentially saying you expect nearly the same equity slice as the people who invested their time to validate the market and build a prototype, which is absurd.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong by pointing out a startup that's given 20% to their first employee after raising a seed round.

EDIT : To clarify, the dude in the original post is definitely getting screwed, but this is way too far in the other direction to be at all useful.