hung

I believe frontend means requests handled through normal frontend hits from end users, while backend instances are for longer running background processes.

Unnecessary apostrophe is unnecessary.

I noticed that on Chrome in Snow Leopard, too. Guess it needs a little more tweaking!

I love that the image has a status message saying "I'm hosting game night tomorrow night" and that the message was posted "five days ago." How useful!

Someone should compile a list of companies that won't consider unemployed applicants. Perhaps with enough bad publicity these companies will change their policies.

Not sure, but the best day of the week to start one is definitely a Thursday.

O RLY?

http://i.imgur.com/ccBEs.jpg

Too bad this will probably be banned for eating up a lot of CL bandwidth. See prior hack called listpic: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2007/06/08/jim-buckmeister...

Caching is nice, but HTTP has a built-in method: conditional GETs. I wrote up a blog post on how to do this with App Engine but it should work generally in Python using urllib2.

http://www.hung-truong.com/blog/2010/12/01/conditional-gets-...

Winklevoss lose; get 65m.

The simple explanation does not factor in economies of scale. You might make a good wage working for someone else because they have some kind of market advantage. Would 100 mini-Googles that were 1/100th the size of Google make as much money? No, because their advantage (at least in selling ads) has to do with the fact that they have such a high percentage of the inventory.

I'm not saying some hackers can't make more than their salary's worth by going alone, but the argument is way too simplified to account for the real world.

This is a good point. I am not sure how long it takes for change to propagate, but you are right; one day seems pretty fast.

Thanks for your comment! I actually forgot to show the same mobile content to Googlebot-mobile, so I think that's why they assumed it was cloaking.

My site gets pretty consistent traffic. It goes up and down depending on the day of the week and the season but otherwise it's very normal. I am fairly certain that the drop (and now the recovery) has to do with the mobile user agent change I made. The results are now recovering to pre-dip levels, so I don't think it could be something else.

The comments on this post are really illuminating. Thanks for sharing. This is why I really love HN.

The difference is that this was not observed from a sting operation where Google tried very hard to show that their rankings were having an effect on Bing results. It's a happy accident that I decided to take a closer look at and write my thoughts up on. And I'm sure there's more evidence living in Google Analytics that might make an interesting research paper.

I also had a suggestion to show different content to Goooglebot and Bingbot. While that would make scientific sense, it wouldn't necessarily make financial sense ;)

To answer your question. My theory is that my site dropped in search engine results pages for Google. The Bing toolbar stopped getting click info for my site and dropped their rankings as well. That's how the toolbar could gather that info from SERPs alone.

All I learned is that the author of this article is insane and should give up on having a job.

Haters gonna hate. Give her a break. The site's not half bad and at least she tried.

Ted Dziuba still regularly blogs. It looks like he's switched from writing about shitty startups to generalized shitty startup architectures. Not as fun, but still informative: http://teddziuba.com/

tl;dr: Adsense loads asynchronously now.

I've implemented something similar on my apps, and I have to say, it works. Most users (including myself) simply won't give a good review unsolicited. If the request pops up and they like the app, it won't be that much of a nuisance (they can make it go away forever).

The trick is getting the timing right. Wait long enough that they've used it a few times and have actually had a chance to form an opinion. Otherwise it's just annoying.

It's refreshing to see this level of humility from a developer and a cool startup. No one knows everything, and realizing that is the first step to allowing yourself to learn.

Kudos on a sweet app! I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys build next!

Oh, and thanks for sharing! If everyone was more open about the tools they use, I think apps would be a lot better in general.

I can't decide if this comment is a troll or not. "Whom" is grammatically correct.

This is a very interesting compromise. I wonder if it will have the side effect of confusing users who are not subscribed (and may not even realize what "subscription" means). It could backfire especially if a third party paid app is released. "What do you mean I have to pay for a subscription? I paid for the app!"

Still, a smart move for keeping Instapaper profitable (or at least to keep the API from eating at Instapaper's profits).

I'll start:

http://www.hung-truong.com/blog/2010/12/31/2010-a-hung-truon...

Hey, let's do something completely differently than users have learned and expect! Why? Because we can!

The problem I have with this article is that it describes Google's designs as "bland" but gives no examples. What exactly is bland about which products?

The problem with too much "design thinking" is that you end up trying to "innovate" without taking user needs into perspective. To a designer aching to flex his design muscles, a clean and usable design probably comes off as "bland."

I'd argue that Google is much more usable than its competitors. They don't overdo their design, and that's a good thing.

Yahoo has a great design pattern library that's not mentioned in this article:

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/