Hacker News Reader

rdohertyon DoorDash (YC S13) Raises $17.3 Million From Sequoia To Expand On-Demand Delivery

I've used DoorDash 3 times in the past few months and they always underpromise and overdeliver. Emails and texts are sent at each stage of the delivery (order, pickup, en-route, driver is 5 mins away), they always beat their estimates and the drivers are very friendly.

The logistics for ensuring food arrives hot when you don't have any control over the cooking process and timing is hard, but they always managed to do it. I'm impressed.

rdohertyon iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

Yup, I unregistered my devices too. Will double check and follow that link's instructions.

rdohertyon iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

I'm experiencing the same problem, I've tried:

1) Turning off iMessage on old iPhone 2) Removing phone number from my Apple account 3) Friends removing my cell # from their address books

and a few other random things. Nothing has fixed it. The only way a friend with an iOS device can SMS me is if they turn of iMessage. This is a pretty huge bug on Apple's part.

rdohertyon Startups that have bootstrapped their way to profitability

SmugMug was bootstrapped, never took any VC. Family owned and operated! http://www.smugmug.com/

rdohertyon Using PhantomJS at scale

Thanks for the link! We started working on this project in early 2013, prerender.io didn't exist then (I think).

prerender.io does do most of what we do. A few things we do differently are keeping a pool of PhantomJS workers always available, killing HTTP requests that never complete, putting it behind HAproxy and logging.

rdohertyon Devops Horror Stories

Would love to hear more about this system, sounds really cool!

rdohertyon Yii 1.1.14 release candidate is available

I've used Yii in a few projects and it's probably the most underrated and least known mature PHP framework out there. Amazingly well organized, documented and powerful. I'm always a little disappointed when a new PHP framework pops up and gets all the attention while not even achieving 20% of Yii's feature set.

rdohertyon Choosing the Right EC2 Instance Type for Your Application

Having just finished benchmarking a new project I'm writing on nearly all EC2 instance types I have to say nothing beats benchmarking.

Create a spreadsheet, write some benchmarking tools, make sure you aren't actually benchmarking another service the instance depends on (db, API, etc) and go to town. Vary # of request/sec, # of parallel requests, # of app workers/threads/etc.

Write down all your results and then compute amount of 'work' (reqs/sec, computations, db inserts/updates, etc) vs hourly or RI pricing. That should get you some good numbers on what instance type is most cost effective for your workload.

rdohertyon BigScreen — Javascript library for HTML5 Fullscreen API

I think you can get it to fire if you trigger requestFullscreen outside of a user-initiated event? I'll have to check on that.

rdohertyon BigScreen — Javascript library for HTML5 Fullscreen API

To clarify I mean a onerror callback would be nice to have if something goes wrong when attempting to go fullscreen. If I have some time I'll write a patch!

rdohertyon BigScreen — Javascript library for HTML5 Fullscreen API

I wrote a long blog post about a few months ago about the perils of using fullscreen in modern browsers: http://sorcery.smugmug.com/2012/06/06/using-html5s-fullscree..., which is cited as a reference (awesome!). This explains why some of the code looks similar, I'm glad it was helpful.

This library could use error detection and handling as there are situations where fullscreen could be aborted or fail to start.

It's much better to attempt going fullscreen and have callbacks for errors and successfully entering fullscreen mode. Users can have preferences set to not allow it, press ESC during the transition or a number of other scenarios can occur.

There's also some CSS fixes between browsers that could be included. Safari and Chrome don't stretch the element to 100% monitor width and don't apply a background color by default so you can see 'through' the fullscreen window.

That being said it's good someone is working towards something that's relatively cross-browser. The fullscreen API right now is extremely varied but a really awesome tool for advanced web apps.

rdohertyon First full-resolution images of the Martian surface

You also have to factor in that the camera needs to withstand take-off, deep space flight for months (hello radiation!), 11g's on re-entry, heat of re-entry and landing. Along with lasting for at least 2 years on Mars with no spare parts in sub-zero temperatures.

There's a reason why they don't send the latest and greatest camera or computer technology into space.

rdohertyon Cascading errors caused AWS to go down

From what I can remember of a datacenter tour, most generators supply power to the batteries, which then supply power to servers. The batteries can only supply a few minutes (I think) of power, so the generators need to turn on immediately.

rdohertyon Areyouhuman: A Great Capcha Alternative

Interesting idea of challenging people/bots to complete higher-level tasks to prove they are human. This just needs keyboard accessibility (I couldn't tab to the start button or handicap symbol link).

rdohertyon Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (May 2012)

Mountain View, CA or remote SmugMug is hiring!

We're looking for QA, iOS developers, web developers (frontend and backend) and designers.

We created Camera Awesome, a top iTunes Store app, and are the leading photo website for pros who shoot everything from BMX to brides. We're proudly profitable, free and clear of VC investors.

Our core technologies are PHP, MySQL, Memcache, Go, EC2, S3 and YUI. We're also doing a lot of new work with iOS on Camera Awesome.

We have our own personal chef, awesome (private!) offices with at $500 decoration budget when you start, just about any hardware you desire and yearly company trips (http://cmac.smugmug.com/Photography/Jackson-Hole/1/18570755_...).

If you're interested send your resumes to jobs@smugmug.com

http://www.smugmug.com/jobs/

rdohertyon Kickstarter smartphone-watch project tops $7 million in weeks

Yeah, this really bothers me about a lot of mainstream news websites. More often than not they don't like to the subject's website. I find it hard to believe they'd be that clueless so is it on purpose? And for what reason?

rdohertyon Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (April 2012)

Mountain View, CA or remote SmugMug is hiring!

We're looking for QA, iOS developers, web developers (frontend and backend) and designers.

We created Camera Awesome, a top iTunes Store app, and are the leading photo website for pros who shoot everything from BMX to brides. We're proudly profitable, free and clear of VC investors.

Our core technologies are PHP, MySQL, Memcache, EC2, S3 and YUI. We're also doing a lot of new work with iOS on Camera Awesome.

If you're interested send me an email (rdoherty@smugmug.com).

rdohertyon Lessons Learned Building Open Source Software

++ for documentation. I'd say start with that first and think about how a brand new user will use your software. How do I install? What are the dependencies? Etc.

Good documentation can easily trump bad code and architecture.

rdohertyon World’s First Flying File-Sharing Drones in Action

2x2200mAh batteries running GPS + 4 motors and other electronics means the flight time is maybe 10 minutes? (For comparison, the iPhone 4S is 1432mAh, running GPS continually on it drains it very fast)

This seems like a cool idea but the harsh realities of battery life, weather, maintenance, etc will most likely prove it unfeasible.

rdohertyon 500,000 Requests/Sec – Modern HTTP Servers Are Fast

That's a good point about the hardware. I was initially comparing it to cloud hosting where you'd most likely not have access to multiple cores.

rdohertyon 500,000 Requests/Sec – Modern HTTP Servers Are Fast

Sigh, another completely synthetic benchmark with big iron: A dual Intel Xeon X5670 with 24GB of RAM from SoftLayer. The X5670 has 6 cores @ 2.93 GHz, 2 threads per core, /proc/cpuinfo shows 24 CPUs.

Serving a plain HTML page over localhost via nginx. A medium length blog post with pretty much no real-world information.

rdohertyon PHP 5.4.0 released

Are there any benchmarks (synthetic or real-world) for the performance improvements? Would have been nice if the release notes had provided some.

rdohertyon Five Days in the Valley: An East Coaster's Take on Silicon Valley vs. NYC

He was referring to the amount of traffic (mostly likely on highway 101). I've done that commute a few times and if you're driving during rush hour (7am-10am or 4pm-7pm) it can take 2x-3x times longer than normal.

rdohertyon "If we can use your details to legally make a profit, we probably will."

Take note that this is a privacy policy for a preliminarily reviewed add-on (only reviewed for basic security issues) and most likely written in jest.

rdohertyon Move The Web Forward

Other ways to move the web forward: stop supporting Internet Explorer altogether...when you start having to support Trident then it's almost like having to code a site twice

Really? I've been pretty happy with IE9, generally 98% of my code works perfectly, it's just a matter of drop shadows, rounded corners, etc that don't work. I honestly want to know what breaks so horribly that it's like coding a site twice.

My memories of IE6 make IE9 seem like a completely different browser. It is somewhat, since they rewrote their rendering engine to fully support CSS 2.1 in IE8.

rdohertyon Heroku launches SQL database as a service

Link to Heroku's blog post announcement: http://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2011/11/21/announcing_h...

rdohertyon What is wrong with GWT.

Oh hi, OP here. I wrote this a long time ago. My opinion has changed a little in that time. I've already heard the arguments for/against GWT and understand its benefits. Not really sure why it's on HN now and honestly a little embarrassed by it.

rdohertyon A First Look at BankSimple

mint.com does a pretty good job of tracking your overall spending and saving for multiple accounts.

rdohertyon Why Credit Card Companies Are Scared Of Change

While we're on the topic of processing credit card payments, anyone have recommendations for processing monthly subscriptions online? (Merchant account and gateway). Similar to this article, there are many hidden and weird pricing schemes.

rdohertyon 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

It's 135TB worth of drives, but with RAID don't you see a far less useable amount?

Also, considering saving money on hardware costs is a key factor in Backblaze staying competitive, they must be saving money elsewhere and/or have other competitive advantages. Otherwise releasing this information would be akin to publishing a restaurant's 'secret sauce'.