rubyrescue

I know Andrei and have been following him and the team since they started. Great service. Incidentally they're an Erlang shop that uses release upgrades to do seamless code deploys without losing a chat session. Impressive.

This is EXACTLY what argentina did before the 2001 crash, by pegging ARS to USD @ 1:1. The problem is you lose the ability to set monetary policy because you can't set interest rates nor loan money via a central bank, when you don't own the currency.

For the HN crowd, the buried lede is that the flashlight stores location information when in-use.

One of the reasons we focused on Erlang in 2008 was a) I had been burned so many times by Java, and b) I found the Erlang community so supportive. A big part of that is Francesco. I'm very happy that Inaka is now part of his family :)

My knowledge of the GAC is out of date but isn't a bit of a security hole that you can replace that DLL?

326k users? that's... shockingly low

we're killing mixpanel as it's just too expensive

that's about right. > 3k at peak. it's a simple POST for logging views. not a lot of data in each POST. not sure on EC2 box size. using https://github.com/extend/cowboy and pushing to a 16 server cassandra cluster.

We're pushing 7 billion api calls/month through it. on two aws boxes.

1. I've tended to see slightly better overall performance running multiple VMs (nodes)/server.

2. We use zookeeper and cache locally with an ETS wrapper. It's not-erlang but there are a lot of nice zookeeper tools and the ezk module for erlang is very solid.

3. we typically don't do vpn as if the vpn goes down it is a disaster. dual nics are ideal. i don't always configure that way due to limitations of the environment (non-VPC AWS, for instance). but what are you trying to control? access to the node even if you know the cookie?

I use Earthclassmail extensively. It can be expensive.

However, it provides some incredibly valuable services. Mail scanning is great, but check deposit is better. However, it's only worth it if you really need a US address, move a lot, or have enough mail or check volume to justify $80/month.

It's not sappy at all. (Chad here)

In many ways that HN meetup in Buenos Aires changed my life (and others that I ended up hiring and working with - Brian Armstrong was there, too :)

When I saw you hit 1000 interviews I also thought back about when we met and I also thought about how hard you work every day. Thanks for the friendship and the inspiration to put 100% of your passion into your work every day...

LI has a very large data mining department, they just don't publish what they are doing. Just look on LI for employees of LinkedIn that are data scientists; it's a substantial team. Source: I'm trying to hire data scientists and I am learning where they are...

thx, will reach out!

any way i could pick your brain for 20 mins? we're dealing with a lot of it at whisper... would buy beers or ... whatever you want.

group chat in place of email

related - what's up with atlanta tech village during that building remodel? i drive by there all the time and it looks uninhabitable.

The last paragraph is absolutely right. It's incredibly ironic...

Erlang has amazing default serialization and deserialization. term_to_binary(T) and binary_to_term(B)

sounds good. i'm about to start a whisper tech blog and we can do that as our first post...

Hot code reloading is really amazing in Erlang. We use it to patch a method without restarting on a regular basis. Getting reltool properly configured to deploy the new version of your application though is a MAJOR pain in the ass.

for the non-erlangers:

the 'simple' way (ie i have a tiny change i want to make, so i'll just ssh in and do it) is to just edit your code, then attach to an existing node, and do make:all([load]) to pick up the code changes. we added a makefile "make attach" that does this for us.

the 'reltool' way is you package your application into releases. We use jenkins build numbers as the third digit in our releases, so each one is packaged into a zip, encrypted, and then is ready to deploy. at deploy time, the zip is copied to all machines, then we use some escript to attach to the running nodes, and use the 'release_handler' bring up the N+1 version of our app. it's a pain but once it's configured it's amazing...

it costs about $1000-$2000

The biggest issue is that the stats are skewed by commercial aviation. When you remove that, it's relatively risky per passenger-mile.

Small planes are certainly not safer than driving. I'm a private pilot and i've studied it at length (and I love flying).

I don't have time to braindump my research, as it's slightly hard to compare fatalities per passenger mile in autos vs per flight hour with light non-commercial aviation. It's about 100,000 hours per 1.9 fatalities which includes commercial travel. It's SIGNIFICANTLY higher in small planes.

The way I summarize it to people in casual conversation is: Flying a Cessna is safer than riding a motorcycle but more dangerous than driving a car.

A friend in SF who was the prototypical "startup designer" just got tired of it after too many failed projects and too many unstable positions and got a job with General Electric designing extremely technical user manuals. He loves the rhythm and by his account it seems like a great job. Not sure that he can ever work from home though. Otherwise it fits your criteria.

I just don't believe this is reproducible... seems fake.

IVP?

I used to work with him when he was a PM, in the pre-.Net days . He's got what it takes to run MS.

People tend to discourage posts with "This."

Flurry - good for demographics Mixpanel - great for a) realtime, b) nice retention visualization, c) a bit expensive. NewRelic - good at also giving visual indicators of api issues. BugSense - also does analytics. great for bug reporting.

Haven't used google analytics on mobile much...

overall if you have to pick one I'd recommend Mixpanel

It's always been a mix of public/private since Benjamin Franklin won the contract to deliver mail between the colonies. Perhaps more public than private but the USPS history is fascinatingly complex.