nrser

yeah, my read was that he didn't totally get the context of the package dist / CDN suggestion immediately. i think the github peeps probably understood that they were using this approach because the developer workflow was simple and strait-forward, but as you scale up simple and strait-forward approaches often break down, and CocoaPods seems to be hitting this tipping point with using Git and Github as a package dist system.

this is what we used to call the "good" problem (things breaking because they are successful), but that doesn't make it cheap or easy to fix. the other stuff they're talking about in the thread will alleviate some pain and buy some time, but it won't solve the fundamental problem if CocoaPods continues to get "big" (imagine apt or yum trying to run like this).

i understand their want to maintain the simple and coherent workflow... if i was writing a package dist sys, i would love to have it work off a standard git repo. maybe this is something that could be solved with a plugin architecture like the large binaries stuff so that developers could continue with their preferred workflow but end-users could take advantage of a CDN-like system for distribution.

don't race to the bottom as a foreign firm against locals in China. you won't win. they will go much lower and harder and longer than you will. they will turn the heat off in the -12C winter and have people coding in their parkas to save cash.

i hung out with some of the Uber e-staff and founders when they were in China. i think the most memorable quote was "there's what works for every other country in the world and then there's China".

i think they stood a chance if they had positioned themselves as an upscale service. foreign brands convey status. they could have had something there that the locals didn't. but that's not what they're doing everywhere else in the world, and i understand them not being willing to split their strategy for the market.

so i guess they went with firepower. and i would guess they knew it had a low chance of success. entry into China is hard. that trail is lined with bodies, every drop of blood sucked dry.

it's difficult understand until you see it for yourself. there are people arranging fake uber rides online to split the subsidies. but they had some idea. it's a big market and Uber has a lot of cash, but $1B is still a big bet with such bad odds.

yeah the numbers are likely fudged, but it's baffling how someone can write up that much about Alibaba group with seemingly no understanding of how the platforms work... Alibaba is like Amazon for China in scale and dominance, not in operation. it's basically like saying Airbnb is going to have to buy a ton of houses to satisfy the Christmas travel demand.

yeah, i know, i live in a big city. but i'm talking to some people that came from rural areas... no one's even heard of this stuff. that in no way means it doesn't happen - China's a really big place - but it certainly doesn't seem to be the status quo.

friends actually said the opposite: people in rural areas would tend to have a lot of kids trying for a boy (something about boys getting to go to school and being able to work the farm), though i guess that's getting better with the education and gender equality stuff.

did you grow up in one of those areas or something? or know people that did? which areas are you talking about?

i've lived in China for a few years, and no one's ever seemed to care much about the one child policy. i just asked some people, and they said it depends on where you grew up, but that it hasn't ever really been a big deal for at least their lifetimes (~30 years).

you have to understand that laws here usually range from completely unenforced to strong discouragement with possible financial implications.

it wouldn't surprise me if there were incidents of the stuff you mention, but doesn't seem like any of it was ever common place.

it would be nice if the site or github repo had some information about how it actually works

yeah... the synchronization for these services should be zero-knowledge. though maybe not the best idea, my vault should remain secure even if available publicly, right?

sync is a must have feature for many, myself included.

serious: which states are police states? did you / do you live in one?

i live in China and i do not miss the cops in the US.

the best part of security is that fat meaty area in the middle of the venn for people that don't understand it and don't understand that they don't.

there's a dude there asking how to pick an email address. i'm pretty sure it's serious.

<http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/38ba26/professiona...

my perspective from some friends that bought a Japanese software startup and moved over there to help run it a few years ago:

promotion is based on age and length of employment. employment is essentially for life. you can't really be fired and you if you quit you may never again be hired (and i can't imagine whistle blowing would bring you any better). seniority reins supreme and unquestioned. there is a huge focus on hard work and long hours but also on loyalty and face.

contrast this to where and how you're working and think about the differences it would make. my friends were constantly frustrated that, try as they may, they could not elicit feed/push-back from anyone that worked under them. part of this is them being stupid foreigners that can't "read the air" properly, but part of that is people being extremely hesitant to touch anything that could be considered a break in seniority or disloyal. and this was a start-up. these were the f'in cowboys in comparison.

from what i gather, this system worked out pretty good with the long, patient and deliberate development cycles in hardware. when a product cycle takes ten years it might not be that bad to have people running it 'cause they've been there 10-20 years. but it doesn't work very well in software.

bundler is great. i really wish it worked for most major languages. switching between projects in different languages with different packaging systems is a bunch of weight i don't want to have to carry around or time i don't want to waste.

it sounds like you some-what 'ported' bundler to dart... what's your impression of how difficult it would be extend a tool like this to work for many languages?

it seems like i'm always asking them all to do the same thing... go get this at that version from there, include anything it needs, and stick that somewhere this thing can find it.

it can make it much easier to do on-demand migrations: in massive online apps, a large percentage of data is essentially 'dead' - it's unlikely anyone will ever access it again. and massive online apps (call it 'web-scale' if you will ;) can accumulate a lot of data. the systems they're discussing make it easier to migrate data as needed instead of at once (which sometimes isn't even possible if the infrastructure is really being pounded).

yup. once upon a time we had a MySQL db on commodity hardware doing around 6K QPS with over 100M rows in the biggest table. you can't do much to it without taking it offline, and even then you have no idea if/when the migration will complete.

i only half read the article but i'm still gonna call color

the funny part is: the people i know that used the service (who were far down towards 'non' on the technical spectrum) complained regularly about it's terrible design, stability and security, and were under the impression it was administrated by parties that had little idea what they were doing. they theorized it was a big scheme to go Gox* on them once enough coins were present in the system.

it's interesting that these people, who have no idea what an ip or load balancer or VM is, were able to pick up on this. i would guess that the h4xx0r5 actually spent little time using the service or had the bit of their own necks being exposed taint their assessment.

* yeah, i know no one really knows exactly what happened, but it's fun to poke fun.

i think that's what's special about graffiti. it has a heart of damage, of destruction; of disrespect. it has undeniable artistic elements to it, but it remains very difficult for people, even those in the 'quite accepting out-of-the-box' world of the LA art scene, to reconcile. they invited a vandal and he vandalized. i think that's kind of beautiful in a way.

"why didn't he respect our space, our praise, our attention, our money? why didn't he respect that he was being given something 'bigger' and 'better' and 'more' than his petty world of crime?" because fuck you. graffiti is fuck you. still. regardless of recent attempts to embrace it, recognize it, retain it, reform it from the art and corporate worlds. it's attractive and interesting and 'hip' to these people, but they struggle with it.

i remember reading a graf mag sometime in the 90s, and a rather amazing and accomplished artist said something to the effect of "i think what's most important is damage. everyone can do damage, regardless of skill." i throughly rejected this as a young kid looking for an artistic outlet, but many years later, after becoming a part of the corporate world learning more about art and business and society and money, i think he had something. i think maybe that is what's important. it's not art that everyone can call art, even some people that are trying really hard.

can anyone provide insight into the business reasoning behind this? i really can't conceive of why you would want to supersede a user's exact, known language with a guess. sites are pretty difficult to use when you can't read anything. maybe there are technical issues for some sites, but Google search is the worse i've ever dealt with, and they def have some resources behind that.

having some of the largest rights-holders in the world identify your organization's destruction as a significant revenue opportunity puts you in a rather haphazard spot. if you don't have a war chest, you're not going to have a very fun war. we've all seen how these corporations have acted. they have been stockpiling legal weaponry and applying it belligerently for a decade. something about a lot of hammers and you look like a nail.

my understanding is that they were in the right place at the right time to capture the tip from feature to smart phones in a country with an unusable SMS system and an unbelievable virtual goods market.

source: friends were in social / mobile games in Japan 2010-2011

i think tencent did the investment, the point of which is likely "none of them".

start-ups are supposed to pivot like shit. gorillas are supposed to keep the lights on forever.

i know it's not that simple. at least start-ups have a reasonable option of open sourcing failed products. i don't know how often that works out, but it offers some consolation. gorillas have a much harder time. who knows what a service was hooked in to, what it was built off and what was was built off it.

it makes me think along a line i've thought many times. a friend once said "you either become a big company or a part of a big company". which means you either become a core service at a big company or part of a core service at a big company. or you're dead. a lot of services are going to get a bullet.

accept for a moment that is the right decision, scrappy start-up or goliath. there is obviously still value in a lot of these services to a lot of people. maybe they can't become big businesses. maybe they can't be important to big businesses. but they can still be important to many people, some of them with the capability to develop and run them.

when will open source extend to services? beyond libraries, and into applications themselves? services with open, distributed development and hosting. built and run by the community, for the community. the things happening with distributed data storage have to help, and a lot of the work going into making mobile applications efficient and responsive (every phone is a node in a network that is constantly being partitioned). it seems like this could open the door for a lot of things that don't really fit the "hit or quit" model.

i think you're out of memories brah:

    Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 21757952) (tried to allocate 7680 bytes) in /var/www/techblog/wp-content/plugins/disqus-comment-system/lib/api/disqus/url.php on line 55

i would love to. i came from linux to OSX. and for exactly those reasons i can't leave:

- Photoshop (nope, Gimp won't do, sorry)

- Word (nope, OpenOffice etc. won't do... had it fuck up the section headings on a legal doc the other day. no bueno.)

- music software (Ableton, Maschine, etc.)

i'm also addicted to the trackpad. some Apple hardware guys told me it's all software, but i don't remember any Windows or linux laptop ever coming close... i'm amazed how bad they are every time i need to jump on one for a minute.

i would go with Zynga.

i was employee 7, lived many scumbagggeries during my tenure and am aware of many more after my departure. not much to add to what you'll find online, excpet that it might not have been the right thing or the right ways or for the right reasons but we worked our asses off building that POS, Pincus as much or more than anyone. the first year was a blast and i met tons of really, really good people that I'm still close with.

your experience won't be like that. but you'll be in SF. the start-up thing ain't for everyone (if you're interested based on how much money you think you'll have in your bank account after a few years, you probably did your math wrong), but if you want to make a go at it, i would get to SF. Zynga will probably suck, but you'll meet people there and in town and you'll get to experience first-hand the shit-show / circle-jerk / world-changing whirlwind that is "The Valley".

you don't have to. anyone can build anything anywhere. but i would.

any comment on the process (or lack there of)?

no, he's actually extending credit - 'fronting' the product. he would loan someone an amount worth $300 in small end-user sales, for which the person would owe him $100 that they could pay back after selling it.

freemium would be letting people sample small amounts of the stuff and/or for a limited time, then making them pay when they want a larger amount or to keep doing it. my DARE class in elementary school told us that drug dealers would try and hook us like this, but i'm 29 and i'm still waiting for my free samples.

how big is your data set? i remember MySQL degrading when the tables got too big, i think around 100M rows or so. the data set probably didn't fit in memory either.

i don't know how much of a difference it makes, but we were also moving all the data across the wire (vs. what i'm guessing is local access on your machine), and probably about 50% writes.

i might be off on the 6K number... this was all some years ago, so it's a little fuzzy... but i don't think it was 'tens or hundreds of thousands' by any means.

like i said, i've heard good things.

what kind of QPS have you guys seen a box go up to? anywhere near the 'tens to hundreds of thousands' that [bhauer](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bhauer) threw out there?

45K req/sec is big, btw. props, yo.

no, that's sort of why i was asking for details. I'd be interested to know if postgres or some other open source solution could net us the 10-100x performance he's referencing. I've heard great things about postgres, but I've never used it under heavy load.

I'm under the impression that some proprietary databases on expensive hardware can achieve those levels, and some friends that do oracle installations claim that the total cost-per-query is competitive with open source / commodity hardware setups, but I've never really considered using them at my companies, and it seems like a lot of start-ups are in the same boat.