risotto

Awesome project.

Browser technology is on a tear recently, and terminals are ripe for innovation. For a newborn project, this is an impressive mashup.

The number of dismissive people in this thread shows how disruptive this idea is!

Full stack web servers like Mongrel or CherryPy.

Server fabrication and automation tools like Chef, Puppet, Fabric.

Process management tools like God.

Parallel worker systems like Resque or Celery.

PHP is great for web apps, but the further I've gone into systems programming, the more I need Python/Perl/Ruby (or C).

Has anyone ever experimented with deleting/disabling features on an Android phone?

I'm always curious what it'd be like to have a "smart" phone with no email or web browser, but still GPS and a camera.

I'd like to work on my nervous habit of taking out my phone and checking HN/email/Twitter, etc all the time.

Hiring only the best is impractical unless you are Google and can pay the best for the best.

A much more practical strategy: hire people that can learn, and train them in best practices.

Food for thought for sure. True, nothing can get better forever...

But do we believe in "economy of scale" for computer and Internet systems in this age? Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. have already proven to me that they have enough human and financial capital to architect and run systems that show economies of scale.

It's a bit scary to think about what it will mean when this runs out, but for now I personally feel confident that things are getting much better, and will continue to do so.

These outages are very rough. Clearly a lot of the Internet is building out on AWS, and not using multiple zones correctly in the first place. But AWS can have multi-zone problems too as we see here. Nobody is perfect.

But what people forget is: AWS has a world class team of engineers first fixing the problem, and second making sure it will never happen again. Same with Heroku, EngineYard, etc.

Host stuff on dedicated boxes racked up somewhere and you will not go down with everyone else. But my dedicated boxes on ServerBeach go down for the same reasons: hard drive failure, power outages, hurricanes, etc. And I don't have anyone to help me bring them back up, nor the interest or capacity to build out redundant services myself.

My Heroku apps are down, but I can rest easy knowing that they will bring them back up with out an action on my part.

The cloud might not be perfect but the baseline is already very good and should only get better. All without you changing your business applications. Economy of scale is what the cloud is about.

I see your point, but who is uploading videos to Google then deleting the source? These services are for sharing and streaming, not archiving.

I don't work for Google but I do work on large scale data hosting. When you shut a service down you have multiple phases. Step 1, stop capturing new data. Google Video did this years ago and anyone truly invested in the service knew what was up back then. Step 2, pick a date to stop serving existing data. Step 3, wait for a very long time for more requests to get data back. It is crazy how and why these trickle in years after the fact. Step 4, delete data. I bet Google wont actually delete data for a very long time if ever.

Maybe step 2 is aggressive, but in my experience 90 days notice doesn't make a difference. Nobody does anything until the last few days if ever. You just have to draw a line in the sand.

It is very hard to shut a service down with any sort of usage, let alone Google scale usage. But very important to do from time to time. This is what I respect.

There is so much abandoned and bullshit video on there, it couldn't possibly be worth it.

Respect.

Edit: not a good comment for HN. More: it was a great service, and it had a good run. And mad respect for Google for running it well but shutting it down gracefully.

In thinking back, that's exactly why I picked 4.

I just clicked whatever was closest because I wasn't even thinking about the exercise.

No problem. Love the script.

If it's static, serve it directly from S3, and turn on cloudfront for even better delivery.

Congrats! I hope OKCupid still publishes those awesome posts about the statistics of dating, those are fascinating.

Companies reserve the right to fire customers. I respect this attitude.

This looks really great. Kudos to the designers and programmers.

I think I have more than 20 components using Sendgrid. I forget what and where because it's been working like magic for so long.

Also the free Sendgrid addon for Heroku is a dream for throwaway apps.

My time is quite valuable, and the costs of Sendgrid aren't even a drop in the bucket compared to other costs. So I don't plan on switching any time soon.

Great read. I agree with less immersion in 3D films.

I saw Pixar's "Up" in 3D. Such a touching story.

But at the sad scenes, when my eyes started to water up, I became super conscious of the fact that I had silly oversized glasses on my face, and it ruined the moment.

Watching the Blu-ray, in the comfort of my own home, I'm bawling like a baby.

I'm quite tired of these posts, but HN appears to love them.

If you don't like a company, don't invest in it, and don't use it's products. But it's not your duty to scare other people away, especially not by reading tea leaves.

First, any ad buy is a gamble. Perhaps investing $100 in ads on Facebook can result in $1000 in sales. But the payoff here has everything to do with your own business, and nothing to do with the Facebook platform. Literally: mind your own business.

Second, I am interested in the thoughts of long term Facebook/Twitter/etc employees. These are people with actual knowledge of the roadmap, revenue, and vibe inside a company. Everyone I personally know at Facebook is extremely happy and bullish about their career there. Ask a friend that works there if it is a Ponzi scheme and watch his reaction.

I am interested in constructive advice about how you are building a successful startup.

I an not interested in these hit pieces from casual observers. I think the small portion of bloggers, commenters, etc. that try to knock Facebook down are having sour grapes. Are you really more confident in your own business acumen than Zuckerberg's? Is your business model perfect, with bubble free growth unto eternity?

But ultimately, there's nothing constructive here. What am I supposed to take away from this article?

The PG Yahoo article is a totally different beast. He was inside the machine and is offering his intimate business knowledge. This article is useless. Yet HN eats it up for some reason...

Disclaimer - I am not at all affiliated with Facebook but I was at the YC at FB event last week and it was fun.

The only problem I see is the iPhone and iPad.

All other browsers are open enough to get native support or have a plugin. Android phones will have support. Who knows or cares what happens on WP7...

Google is taking a stand. It is annoying that Google is removing existing support for h264. It will be annoying if Apple is completely against adding a software WebM decoder for current gen iOS devices, and ignore hardware solutions on next gen ones. But both companies are free to do whatever.

I also think this will have negligible impact in the real world. Youtube will always work on whatever. Content providers can just upload stuff there if they don't want to manage multiple formats themselves.

I've been feeling that the Internet hurts my mental health.

Filling my brain with HN, Reddit, DrudgeReport, Twitter, Facebook, email, chat, etc., is exhausting.

And this is on top of the massive amounts of code I digest when I am being productive. New libraries to learn, more of my teammates code to decipher, new specs to write, new architectures to understand.

It's really exhausting, and my short term memory for things like names and social events is shot to shit. If I can't get a brunch appointment in my email inbox, I will forget it.

I'm not complaining too loudly -- I'm never bored, and I'm happy and successful in my career. But I'm just feeling more and more like my brain is full and every new piece of information pushes out something else, but there's still endless more information to absorb.

It's giving me more and more pause these days.

A tautology, no? He wouldn't use Debian if he did have problems.

I get neck deep in large Ruby deployments and the issue is clear to me. Ruby is evolving at a breakneck speed but as a result has very poor release management.

My solution:

Use Bash and Python for systems programming. Both are stable and simple well integrated into Ubuntu and frankly much better for the task anyway. Oh no, now I can't use Chef! (sarcasm)

Use Ruby for web development, with RVM and bundler. This is a vast universe of bleeding edge web programming toys.

I struggle to see a real problem here...

You can still hook up rspec or test::unit to rails 3...

Can I get a discount on this app?

It's a matter of risk. Think of it like a house... Renting vs buying vs building one. All strategies have their benefits.

Renting you let someone else maintain the property and can walk away at any time. This is what CloudKick's current customers all do when they consume the cloud service.

Buying means gaining control. You build equity and have total control over all the maintenance and improvements. And you have all the knowledge that hindsight offers. Is the house in a thriving neighborhood? Was it built well? Did the previous owners take good care of it?

Building means what? Total control over the entire job, from finding architects and contractors, having say in every detail of the design, the budget, bill of materials, schedule, etc.

But the amount of risk is massive here. If funding takes a hit, or budget blows up, what do you do?

Back to software, more projects die in incubation than mature to CloudKick status, no matter how mature the software companies are. Think really hard about how fragile software development practices are.

And there's further risk in the market. If you set out to build your own CloudKick style infrastructure, CloudKick is still out there furiously innovating and battle testing their software. It can be difficult or impossible to catch up.

You are proposing to spend $8MM to build the cloudkick of today in 2 years time. That might be ok if you're just worried about internal tools, but that's no good if you want to offer the service to other providers.

Pricing?

A much better summary of the service than the techcrunch article:

http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/S...

The enterprise security compliance can not be understated.

This is an extremely powerful service that any of us can sip on cheaply. It probably doesn't fit your use cases, but those saying it is too expensive or offers nothing over other database software or services are missing the point.

Maybe it's too expensive for a cash strapped startup, but SalesForce is Enterprise with a capital E.

This product is very powerful and is going to be extremely lucrative, but won't ever be interesting to most of us hackers.

Amen.

I have a friend that had a true nervous breakdown recently. He's been out of work for 2 years and was essentially living on the street because he has no money and no family to help. You are doing fine in comparison.

There is almost always no way to repair your feelings at your current gig. This isn't a recent thing you are feeling, its the weight of months or years of exposure to toxic materials.

But look on the bright side, you can collect a paycheck while you find an awesome opportunity to move on. Apply everywhere. Take your time. Get a couple job offers. Quit. Take a month off before you new job.

Don't worry about your friends. They can get out on their own.

I've been through this as an engineer at a toxic startup myself.

We do almost exactly this at my company and it works wonders.

Presentations are not about powerpoint. They are about geeks geeking out with other geeks. Every talented programmer I know has a pet project he'd love to talk your ear off about.

The presentations we solicit are often little more than the candidate opening up a text editor and showing off some code, and fielding tame questions from the other developers.

As for the contract position, everyone that is motivated to switch jobs, or to come work for us, can find time to do the really simple tasks we split off for $100/hr.

It is also made clear that if you've made it to the contract, we are extremely interested in hiring you, or else we wouldn't give you access to the repo or the team. The gig is to give both sides a chance to see what working on something real feels like.

We have found only excellent developers after this process. That said, it probably doesn't scale very well, and I'm sure we've unfairly weeded out many good devs.

Also, we skip a lot of the BS if there someone comes highly recommended from current employees or other partners we trust.