jkahn

The problem is not that the cloud is not for you / others.

The problem is that you chose the wrong kind of cloud platform for your app, and instead of choosing the right kind, went right back to the early 2000's and rented some physical boxes instead. In doing so, you've flipped your pros and cons lists, but you haven't solved the actual problems.

Heroku is a PaaS cloud platform. Zero server awareness or maintenance. An app only environment.

You would have been better off using an IaaS cloud, where you have to rent instances and install apps, but you still have the benefit of instant, (potentially automated) scalability, intrinsic high availability and minimal maintenance.

Instead, you're renting physical servers which often have a long term commitment, can potentially drop off the air for any reason - such as drive failure, power supply failure - and then you'd have to rebuild.

I think the cloud almost certainly is for everyone, but you need to use the right kind of tool for the job.

I use an iPad with Penultimate and a Wacom Bamboo Stylus every day. Works great. I don't need this.

The "angel" in angel investor is how you're seen by the company you're giving money to. It fits in a tight funding market, although it may not seem to fit now that the market is so liquid.

This. Gruber's flippant attitude has been bringing the Talk Show down for the past few months. Dan is what holds it together. These days, Hypercritical is by far the best podcast I listen to.

It's not worth listening to without Dan Benjamin.

I think you're much closer to a programmer than a layman that programs.

The straw man about reducing the amount of bad code in the world is garbage. Just code. If you're getting a benefit from it - or hell, if you just enjoy it - do it. You have nothing to apologize for.

The whole elitist concept of only sanctioned programmers coding is just arrogant. Even the best programmers wrote awful code before they were great. Doesn't mean they shouldn't have kept it up.

I don't think anyone is saying that everyone should write professional software. Just that it would be beneficial if they learned the equivalent of making a ramp for a wheelbarrow in the back yard.

You're missing the point there: if someone's looking for code samples, they're already learning to code.

When I said programmer, I meant a professional programmer - as an occupation.

This is a great example. My brother in law is a chef. I asked for his scone recipe, and he said to throw in some sugar, flour and milk (or something like that, I'm not a chef). Mix it until it looks right. That's expertise.

I'm a lousy cook - but I can cook food if I follow instructions that have accurate measurements.

That doesn't mean I shouldn't learn to cook.

I really, really disagree with Jeff Atwood here. Jeff has interpreted "learn to code" with "become a programmer". They're not the same thing. I don't think that is what this meme is about at all.

Programming is logical thinking in practise. Programming is breaking a problem set down, thinking step by step through it, thinking of edge cases, and making it work. There is nothing wrong with Jeff's BASIC example, if that is where the mayor of NYC ends up.

There was once a time when books were only read and written by an elite group. Now everyone can read - and everyone can write. There are still the elite authors that write better than the rest of us. Just because everyone can write, doesn't mean everyone is trying to be a professional author.

Computers are a part of society. To function well in society, it's beneficial to understand a little about how they work, and how to make them do things. The essence of programming is making a computer do something more efficiently than you can.

Programming isn't just the advanced stuff - recursion, pointers, functional programming, or whatever. Maybe Jeff is too far down the rabbit hole to realise this, but most people don't know what programming even looks like. They don't know how we tell computers to do the things they do. Recently I was with a customer, making notes about changes I needed to make to their application. They asked me "Is that how you make it do that?". No - that was my TODO file. And these are people that work on computers all day, every day.

It's beneficial if marketing folk understand the basics of programming when they're doing web ads. It's useful that CAD engineers know the basics so they can automate AutoCAD. Its useful that financial accountants know basic programming so they can become more efficient with analysing data.

If the mayor of NYC wants to learn to program in his spare time, why the hell not? I bet there wouldn't be the same complaints if he wanted to learn how to surf.

edit: grammar

I was one of the people in that fireball. Bought it through the App Store. Great app.

A terrible blow for freedom in an already oppressive regime.

Does this mean their public IPs go back into circulation?

This may be true in the valley, but in the rest of the world setting the initial impression with how you dress goes a long way.

Dell servers and enterprise storage are second to none, in capability and price. This isn't an "announcement" from Michael Dell, it's a statement of fact: they are a major player in the enterprise IT equipment game.

If you're an IT infrastructure geek, you should check out the way their EqualLogic storage works.

This is why companies like HP are suffering greatly: Apple is hitting into their consumer division, and Dell is hitting into their enterprise edition with capable solutions at a great price point.

In 3.1 it ran like molasses in dev mode. Fortunately someone came out with the rails-dev-tweaks gem that largely fixed that. 3.2 is fine in dev mode.

There is a huge amount of hate on HN against Rails lately. Most of it amounts to the straw man attack of "Rails is bloated and old, Node/insert tiny framework here is where it's at".

I code with Rails. With Rails 3.2, I'm more productive than I've ever been. What others call "bloat", I call "features". It is surprisingly good having an out of the box asset pipeline for optimization of JS/CSS. The simplicity with which you can construct and adjust scoped queries with ActiveRecord is astounding. The ease of adding pre-baked authentication and authorization gems is great.

Seriously - screw writing a large data-driven web app in a tiny framework. You get so much for free in Rails.

Yes, Rails has some issues. It has a long initial load time. Ruby is not the fastest language. My main complaint about Rails at the moment would be that it moves too quickly - not that it moves too slow. If you're writing an app to service millions of users simultaneously (and not charging for it), the speed might be an issue. I haven't found it to be a problem in my company, where we charge money for what we write.

And on this change - I'm not fussed either way, but it's certainly good that Rails core mention this on the Rails blog so that Rails developers are aware of it well before 4.0 comes out. And standards compliance is a good enough reason for me.

It's not surprising that this has now made it international.

If you read into the history, the guy clearly did not follow basic instructions. Backups are not part of the service he bought; yet the host backed up anyway. The host informed him that backups were disabled on this account because it was over quota and he did nothing to resolve the situation. He took no backups of his own.

He only lost his data because he failed to follow instructions or respond to emails and subsequently cancelled his shared hosting account before the data had been migrated over to a new VPS service.

I think the hosting company were in the right here.

Here's the forum thread for those that are interested: http://forums.ventraip.com.au/showthread.php?t=5572

How about this as a metric: revenue. Or another: gross profit.

Yeah, picking one metric might be extreme. The point is to discard the bullshit ones.

Surprising. Mobile Basecamp became a lot faster a few months ago. I thought that it was because of code improvements, now I'm guessing it is due to iOS 5.

It's Rails, so presumably the API will be one with the (regular) code for the most part.

Maybe they weren't excited because iMessage has reply all, and the tech press all use iPhones?

There's a lot of comments here saying what a great pivot that was. I wouldn't hold my breath on that one until there is more market traction.

It's a very crowded space Grove are entering. Most non tech-savvy small businesses I know use Skype by default. I run a technology business and we use it as well. And the standard fallback is just plain old email. This sounds like a hard place to make money to me. However, I wish them luck.

Why would the world be better off with computers making trades?

I don't have a proposal, except that the financial industry needs to be reviewed. A good start would be to remove the products that are abstractions of the value of companies or markets rather than representative of real value. Eliminate futures and most forms of derivatives. Keep shares and managed/indexed funds. Keep everything physical (e.g. Gold, Oil, etc).

That would reduce a number of the swings in the market caused by relatively small real stock movement. Return the market to trading value, rather than trading the anticipation of what might happen

The stock market should be used for trading companies, not shifting money from owners of stocks to the financial industry by having people manipulate it.

Humans make decisions in milliseconds, but market factors do not change that quickly. Even major, unforecasted issues like the Japan Tsunami happened in human time.

Perception of business value can change quickly. Actual business value itself does not tend to change so fast. Dumping your Google stock if oil drops below $70 per barrel is solely based on your own perception and your own trading rules. The value of Google's products remain the same. If a competitor releases a new device, that is based in human time.

Does it make a difference if you sell at 12.01pm after a competitor's product announcement rather than 1pm? Right now, yes. Do I think it should? No.

The reason prices swing so quickly is because trades happen so quickly. If trading was slowed down, prices would not swing as quickly. The current situation reinforces a vicious cycle where the fastest trader has an advantage in the market.

Public share prices is a measure of how much the company is worth to people that buy shares not of how much value the company creates by selling their products. PepsiCo should be valued on how well they sell soft drink, not millisecond-by-millisecond analysis of unrelated issues.

Stocks should only be allowed to trade at the speed that value is created or lost. The stock market is a human institution, (supposedly) designed to measure value of human businesses.

Trading in microseconds is ridiculous.

Trades should be in human time - essentially, minutes and hours, not seconds and microseconds. Business value does not change that quickly. HFT is representative of a financial industry set on creating ever more abstract tools and products that are more akin to gambling than representing the value of the actual business. The stock market needs to return to it's roots. There's been enough chaos already.

I disagree that the barrier to compete is not very high.

There have been "alternatives" for years - see FolderShare/SkyDrive. There are plenty of alternatives now, but the reality is that their implementation sucks. We tried using JungleDisk but it is just too inefficient. Others were just too fiddly.

Dropbox is so easy that my wife and I use it to share files between computers at home rather than do local file shares. Seriously. And it was her idea.

Dropbox is so far ahead of the competition it is crazy. They just need to keep that advantage.

The fifth most valuable? Only the fifth?

We use Dropbox for teams for our company data. We forked out for it because it is that good. Admittedly we're small - only five people thus far - but growing. A few years ago we couldn't do this reliable without a file server. Dropbox has revolutionised file sharing from the low end, and will continue to hit up into the business market with their current trajectory.

Yes, we have used alternatives, but none are as straightforward and fuss-free as Dropbox. I think they're the most valuable startup out there at the moment.

This looks pretty cool. I am curious to see how they will compete with Dropbox in time, though.

It does seem like FolderShare all over again - which Microsoft acquired, sat on, and subsequently re-released no less than three times with different a different name and different level of stability. It seems to be the role of the startup to re-implement correctly what large organisations screw up.

Rand, thank you for the detailed and revealing post. Especially the parts that you didn't need to share that made the story much more concrete - such as revenue and gross margins.

I am curious - how do you think the funding would have changed your current trajectory? From all appearances your business is growing well.