davidhansen

I know that hipsters and other socially capable people have invaded the technology industry in the last few years, but it should be noted that an entreaty to most technologists to "just have more sex" is extremely unhelpful. Would you tell a homeless person to "just make more money"?

As a matter of fact, telling this to someone whose depression has a large social disconnect component to it may trigger further feelings of inadequacy via the mental model of "I'm the only one who seems to be incapable of doing what is obviously so easy to this person, and everybody else."

If you live outside these areas, I am guessing you're comparing the kind of things said in the HN echo chamber to your own experiences outside "The Valley", and finding some dissonance as a result.

As opposed to what? LISP has lists, C has structs. These are both nouns, and they are represented as memory-backed data structures in exactly the same manner that objects are. The boxes on a turing machine tape are nouns. What mystical language or platform supports verb-only development? I am completely missing the point of your objection to nouns, here. Please enlighten me.

The real kicker is that if you have a successful startup exit, it gets much worse. My own cynicism grew enormously after witnessing the dramatic change that money brought into women's attitude toward me. The day you realize a woman is sleeping with you merely as a chore to gain access to resources - well, let's just say that's not a very good day.

You'll witness the madness play out when the legislators, having given the plebes their "voice", ignore every single one of them and proceed with graduating the bill to a full vote. Which will likely pass.

Last I checked, the HN hostname is inside the ycombinator.com DNS zone.

It's 2011; we are traversing inflection points of development in solar energy, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, and seeing the early, dramatic fruits of stem cell research, and Parker is bitching that the best of the best aren't keen on improving software that shares drunk photos and your latest opinion of Kim Kardashian's divorce?

Wow. Just, wow.

As for performance, our customer-facing sites are quite a bit faster then a typical DB-coupled site because page objects are fetched from a local memory cache that is invalidated by MQ processing.

Our application is not small, but not large, either. For a large application, Amazon.com is well-known for also using a SOA architecture to deliver customer-facing sites, none of which directly call the DB.

What I have seen, however, is a moral judgement about the relative merits of what skills the founders bring to the table. Specifically, I have known many technical people who perceive sales and management as of lower value than technical creation. Consequently, they privately scoff at the notion that the person doing the "hobnobbing", "gladhanding", and perceived-to-be-commodity sales activities gaining equivalent equity or compensation as themselves.

Out of their sense of "fairness", some of these people go it alone or hire out rather than seek an equal partner in their endeavors.

I know this sounds highly anecdotal( and it is ), but I've seen it enough that I suspect it's at least somewhat widespread.

This is a fairly strange assumption. Not everyone makes friends easily.

The reality of the situation right now in the startup world is that when people hear you are making x amount/month, you get 500 emails, but when the tables turn and you are suddenly on the receiving end of heavy criticism, you get zero emails.

Is this a serious observation? It is my experience that literally nobody cares how much money you're making. Your popularity as a "startup celebrity" is entirely associated with how cool your project is perceived to be, and who is backing it. There are legions of founders making plenty of money on perceived-to-be-boring projects that nobody cares about.

Interesting. I have not heard this before. As it stands, I have always worked on multiple projects for as long as I can remember. My current main company started out as a side project, for example.

Is there a canonical reference or blog post that the startup community refers to, to elucidate the reasons for one-project focus?

Control group: Those whose drink of choice does not have resveratrol.

Experimental group: Those who drink almost exclusively red wine.

Both groups will have ill health due to the alcoholism, but the experimental factor, the consumption of red wine vs. other alcohols, should show a correlative difference, if one exists.

"Cofounder: set up shop in grandma's living room and lived on the couch. Me: quit my prior startup, endured business partner's rage, dumped girlfriend, moved to a different state. Business: bootstrapped, profitable, growing."

Probably not dramatic enough, but there it is.

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

Pingdom - for global average responsiveness. Server Density - for server internals monitoring. Blamey & Stella - for public status reports.

I highly recommend checking out Blamey & Stella, if for no other reason than their brand is absolutely hilarious, and they offer a pretty good product, as well:

http://www.blamestella.com/

We have had profiles on AngelList for a while now, with the expectation that we would "age" the accounts and gradually accumulate interested parties, such that if the day came when we would like to seek additional growth capital, we could then reach out to these people.

Result: Zero followers. Most likely zero views. AngelList is very much a walled garden, useful only to those with preexisting angel connections.

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html

Well, yes, except that when an algorithm is doing all diagnosis and analysis, and all you need is someone with bedside manner to interact with the patient, your job requirements go from "N years at a good medical school" to "Experience as a receptionist". It is virtually guaranteed that compensation for this type of position will be driven downward.

We run an architecture somewhat similar to that described in the article, and a lot of the issues you raised we either dealt with up-front, or realized we needed to deal with them very soon after rolling it out.

Regarding extra latency and sql select result marshaling, we cache extensively and invalidate through message queues. The few exceptions include data that are involved in transactional contexts, like actual order placement and fulfillment.

We have effectively solved debugging/logging by generating and chaining request identifiers, which turns out to not be as computationally expensive as one would think.

YAGNI is, of course, the elephant in the room. Some aspects of the architecture have turned out to be quite beneficial, but the traffic scalability afforded by shared-nothing, API-driven architectures is not something we have had the luxury of really exercising as much as we'd like :)

Employees of Amazon, feel free to correct any holes or errors in my understanding of the web application architecture there.

1. Intelligence. This should be obvious. Smart people, even if they are not currently competent in a given technology, business domain, or platform, are capable of becoming competent in it.

2. Interest in the job. I want people in my employ to enjoy what they do, and derive personal satisfaction from it. I don't abide clock-punchers who got a CS degree solely because there's good money in it.

3. Good work ethic. This is almost always unnecessary if #2 is met, but sometimes you will encounter candidates who love writing software, yet for some reason they choose to browse the web all day instead.

In response to your app itself: I would suggest offering arbitrary thumbnail sizes( not just 72px ), up to and including full-screen resolution. In addition, I would suggest a snapshot scheduling service, such that regular images are captured for given urls on a regular schedule.

A company like us, for instance would probably pay for a service that allows us to build a design history of our web properties automatically, instead of adding "screenshot the existing live site before deployment" to the design or technical workflow, or relying on the Wayback Machine to do so.