jaylevitt

Read it? Hell, I live it every day. I just never know which half of the book it's going to be.

I think you're in violent agreement, and that this was the point of "if THEY believe they're helping fight crime".

You can do a lot more than asset caching with Akamai; they have stuff from "edge-side includes" all the way up to your own J2EE at the edge.

Oh, it returned appropriate-looking TTLs even at the time; we didn't watch them go down to zero and wrap to their original value, but I suspect that's what they did.

Also, if you're not on RCN, you aren't getting the same NS1 as someone who is. (Again, I assume anycast or load balancing, but I'm handwaving; I haven't understood routing since gated.conf changed.)

My boss was on RCN at home, and I was a few miles away on Comcast. We both pointed dig at 207.172.3.8 and hammered on our domain name; he saw stale results, I saw fresh ones.

Would've loved to have the expertise and tools set up to figure out what went wrong, but we just went to bed and by lunch it sorted itself out.

We just moved our DNS from Network Solutions to Route 53 this month, and I can verify that there are indeed resolvers that'll ignore TTLs. Ours were 3-6 hours, but it took some sites about 24 hours to pick up our new SOA.

Which would have been fine - the A records were the same - but no, NetSol instantly starts serving a blank "Business Profile" landing page A-record. Thanks, people who used to run the Internet.

I know one such caching server was ns1.dns.rcn.net. (But only from inside RCN; querying it from Comcast gave different results. Same IP address, so I'm assuming it's anycast.) whatsmydns.net reported others as "Bell South" and "Cox" (I can't recall the locations, I think one was in Georgia).

I don't know Wikipedia's donor requirements; how do they avoid that same conflict of interest via donations? Is there some maximum donation per individual, reporting requirement, etc. that prevents corruption any more than using an automated ad network like AdSense would?

Don't most of those contracts specify the arbitrator, too? I know I've read many articles about forum-shopping by corporations; are they just relying on the consumer to not know which arbitration forums are truly neutral?

Great idea, but what happens when every major purchase includes a EULA that requires binding arbitration, like so many contracts already do?

RubyGems doesn't have anything particularly better here, unless you're maintaining your own gem server. If Facebook deleted the repo and the gemcutter published gem, you'd be in the same boat. If gemcutter disappeared (even temporarily due to an outage), you'd also be stuck.

In general, you should mirror external dependencies to the extent you're risk-averse. Mildly paranoid startup? Fork any github repos that might disappear and that don't already have forks you trust. Running a large financial institution? Run your own gem server, apt repo, etc.

Preferences > Manage Search Engines... will do the same thing in Chrome (though it doesn't have the wonderful right-click-to-add ability; you have to enter the URL yourself).

This wasn't even a registrar transfer, just a DNS repoint from NetSol to Route 53. Amazon was all set up before the transfer; it was NetSol's screwup (which is probably some ancient set of CGI scripts) that caused the problem, and there was no way we could have avoided it even if we had known exactly what would occur - NetSol controlled both (a) the registry data telling the root servers where to find our SOA, and (b) the name server that the old SOA pointed to.

People using GoDaddy for both registration and DNS could find themselves in exactly the same predicament, so it makes sense that they'd want to do it carefully.

Hm.. no, that's not ringing any bells. Other ideas?

That's absolutely not true if you also use the registrar for DNS. We transferred a domain away from Network Solutions a few weeks ago, and got bit by the combination of:

1. When you re-point your domain at non-NetSol servers, they momentarily point toward a server that in turn says your A record is their "business profile" default landing page. It takes a few minutes before pointing correctly at your new name server

2. Many large caching nameservers don't obey TTL; our SOA's TTL was 7200, or 3 hours, but we saw servers at RCN, BellSouth and Cox serving our old SOA nearly 24 hours later.

Together, that means that for 24 hours, some people got this lovely page: http://www.vttcorp.com/ instead of our server.

Google's product is not Chrome. Google's product is not search. Google's product is advertising. Search is how they deliver it, and browsers are how they deliver THAT.

Google doesn't care, financially speaking, if Chrome or Firefox does better in the marketplace. They care about the eyeballs that Firefox, Chrome, and any other browser can deliver to Google ads.

Yes, if you've read "The Halo Effect", which demolished much of "Good to Great", you'll want to wait for whatever book demolishes "Great by Choice" before reading it too.

Decade-old business books are SO much more enlightening; you get to see how history really turned out.

I just switched to pow to avoid the annoying content-length warnings in 1.9.3 webrick, and it's pretty darn zippy, debug-mode asset pipeline and all:

curl get.pow.cx | VERSION=0.4.0-pre sh

@jonleighton committed a big refactor yesterday that might be a good sign here; looks like a lot of the old monolithic AR code is now new-style Concerns, more of a defined API, etc. If the root problem here is ARel itself, that won't help, but if it's really AR::Relation, maybe Rails is moving in the right direction.

We use user-defined functions in Postgres, and I have the same complaint - in theory, the move toward composable relations is great, but in practice, there are so many hitches and gotchas and prior assumptions and backwards-compatibility requirements that it's never clean.

Gah, of course. Brilliant, especially skipping rake. (Though, pro tip: With Ruby 1.9.3, set export RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT=59000000 and you'll save 5-6 seconds at launch.)

How did you deal with the migrations problem? I usually can't bisect Rails code because there's no way to migrate from here to there anymore, let alone do so automatically..

I think the negative responses are trying to tell you what you've missed: If, 9 months ago, you had no serious press or startup experience, you have no idea what the startup should do "in most cases". At best, you have a not-yet-validated idea of what your own startup should do. At worst, you have a mistake you'll reflect upon later.

I applaud the effort to open a dialog, but you're missing the technology point. Any system that contains the ability for a board of directors, no matter how representative and multipartisan, to block a site's DNS - that system breaks the Internet.

And I take issue with "If you're going to work in the CS field." You're assuming that all programming/coding/software engineering/whatever jobs are in the CS field. There's a lot more out there.

Unfortunately, all I have is n=1 anecdotes. As I'm fond of saying, we have no newspapers here, so it's hard to get data!

But I liked the state-mandated individual plan enough that I've told our CFO we'd be better served by having no health coverage. With only 10 employees, we don't qualify for anything but a low-tier HMO, and apparently risk pooling (i.e. business-association group plans) is no longer allowed in MA.

I think the individual plans might be a worse deal for families, though, which is of course a big consideration - I have no dependents.

Here in MA we're running the 0.5 beta of health care reform, and the absolute best PPO refer-yourself-anywhere no-claim-denied coverage was $350/mo in 2010. There were high-deductible HMOs for a third that.

It's actually more of an issue for me now, working for someone else's startup, since I'm eligible for group coverage at work and therefore no longer eligible for the great individual coverage plans.

I've done that with Stack Overflow; I'll ask a highly-specialized question that would be best answered by the actual mailing list, often because I'm already on SO and I am too lazy to go sign up for the mailing list.

In my defense, two days ago I tried to post to the git mailing list and it took many, many minutes to do, because:

* the git web site does not actually tell you the mailing list subscribe address; it links to GMANE and shows the post-to-the-list address * GMANE has a subscribe option, but of course, they mean subscribe through GMANE

I finally found the master list of lists at vger.kernel.org (one giant unreadable page), which lists the unsubscribe command, which can of course be reverse-engineered into the subscribe command for that majordomo server.

And I freaking wrote a major mail server. No wonder people just post to "that place where you ask questions".

I don't think that's it. If ICANN can ever launch their TLDs-for-everyone plan and let a thousand flowers bloom, you won't have companies buying defensive domain names in every TLD, because there will be thousands. It makes the point moot; with only a few tlds, consumers might expect that airsupply.com leads to a medical services co or the high-tenor ballad king of the 1970s, and they'll each compete to register that name first. When it's airsupply.brakes.railway and airsupply.diving and airsupply.fixaflat, that assumption is broken, and it becomes futile to try to pounce on every domain with your brand in it.

The companies pushing the loudest "Sky is Falling!" messaging are those like MarkMonitor who (a) already protect their customers from fraud, real or exaggerated, and (b) just happen to be a registrar..

And how much time do they spend on the more plausible ones? You sound like you know this.

Eh? SOPA has a private right of action.

Of course Gruber is dismissive; he's always dismissive. (Yet I read him every day.) He thinks he's objective because he criticizes both Apple and Google's missteps; he's wrong because he smartly and analytically criticizes Apple, while he sticks his tongue out at Google.

John Gruber will be a great blogger when he grows up.

We didn't think there was anywhere for the traffic to go either. -- AOL, 1989-2001