sauravc

The markets reflect what the money wants. But money isn't distributed equally. So the markets really just reflect what people with money want... and that's not a malaria vaccine.

I'm sorry for your loss, but how does it make you an expert on how much funding is given to malaria vs male pattern balding research?

Micro-transactions are one of the advantages. (Micro-transactions in adult were basically unfeasible before MiKandi, since no adult payment processor would allow a charge below a certain threshold (usually $5-10).)

But virtual currency has other advantages. For example: points can be acquired via offer walls (no credit card at all); it can be bought as prepaid bundles anonymously (via third party stations); they avoid charge back issues (refund points instead of dollars to the credit card); they can be given out easily (had a crap experience? have some extra points); and can be traded for other virtual currencies (just like real currencies and third party exchanges).

The MiKandi App Store has been doing this for years. It makes microtransactions a viable source of revenue for developers.

Criminal? This is the kind of warped thinking that lead to Aaron Swartz's death. Please chill out.

I'm shocked by the author's ignorance. He's kind of an idiot. Simply because he's been living under a rock and lacks common knowledge about how 90% of the world's personal computers run. Pick any OS and if you've never used it before you'll run into quite a bit of cognitive dissonance when trying it out for the first time. Nothing new here. Just a dummy who's trying to acted shocked by an OS everyone and their grandma has used for years.

"I find nothing" is a fairly strong statement. There are plenty of general purpose scripts one can write in PHP. Also config files don't preclude 'general purpose'. For example, run anything in Java and you'll find out there are plenty of defaults running on the JVM that you can override. Yet no one would argue Java isn't a general purpose language. The fact that PHP keeps these defaults in a file is inconsequential.

Some people have crazy ideas, and the world needs that. However, trading in Ruby or Python or [insert favorite scripting language] for Objective-C to write server code is a foolish idea that's divorced from reality (with some exceptions).

The vast majority of server code that is written is bit plumbing. Moreover, it's written by not-so-great devs who aren't gdb experts. The performance benefits of C-like languages are completely useless for all but a handful of companies like Google and Facebook. Unless you're doing heavy number crunching server side (which most web apps don't), there's no discernable benefit to using Objectiv-C or C/C++.

There are plenty of benefits to using Java or a scripting language though. The reasons are obvious to anyone techie enough to get this far.

That's a pretty stupid comment. Take off your blinders and read the rest of the article.

This is a step in the right direction.

This pretty much sums up most Hadoop projects I've seen at startups: http://wavii.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/hadoop_too_big.jpg

(Originally from this Wavii Engineering blog post http://blog.wavii.com/2011/12/29/your-mileage-may-vary/ )

Reminds me of this blog entry:

http://blog.notdot.net/2007/4/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Part-1-BK...

This is a joke. If one wants cold storage, look to the mountains or polar regions. The latency won't suck as bad and it will be a whole lot cheaper.

I always thought coders had the ability to sniff out a BS software patent a mile away. But with all the pro-Apple patent comments, it seems software ignoramuses and revisionists have taken over HN. How can anyone "skilled in the art" stand by Apple's patents as non-obvious?

http://www.erwanmace.com/2010/03/apple-did-not-invent-apps-a...

If such innovations weren't obvious to someone in the mobile industry given all the prior art out there, they've got to be a complete idiot.

Have you tried CouchBase? The built in admin panel is a dream. Adding and removing servers to a cluster is super easy.

http://www.couchbase.com/docs/couchbase-manual-2.0/couchbase...

That shitty deployment experience has nothing to do with PHP. There are plenty of valid reasons to move to Python or Ruby, but better deployment stories aren't one of them. Objectivity seems to be in short supply here on HN.

Good points, but I think this one is inaccurate:

"Microsoft makes a ton of money, no one will deny that, but they make less money than they used to."

Actually they make a lot more money now than since Ballmer took over as CEO.

That's a good point, but I don't think it's the question. Let's start by putting yourself in Microsoft's shoes... and by making the silly assumption that Apple's lock down of iOS is acceptable (suspending reality for a moment).

Write a piece of software for internal use. Now write a piece of software with public API's that will be available to every developer on the planet and will have to be supported for a decade.

You might find that opening up your code for global use may be easy, but it's more often the exception. But there's no denying it will push your ship date out further.

Given MS is so far behind in the ARM-based computing category, it's ludicrous to apply anti-trust restrictions on them. I wouldn't want that to happen to any company, including the ones I hate.

I probably won't ever use one of these Windows 8 tablets, given I have 4 iPads lying around the apartment and prefer Ubuntu on my laptops. But I'd still like to see as many awesome tablet choices on the shelves as possible. Microsoft is putting in a great deal of effort into making a quality product. It's already behind by several years. Let's see what they can do.

No, it means owning the browsing/battery life experience e2e.

Geez! When it comes to issues about Apple or Microsoft (or Ruby), it seems a number of people on HN lack the ability to think objectively. It's quite sad really. It's like watching Republicans and Democrats fight in Congress, or North Carolina banning gay marriage, or Muslims and Christians fighting over God knows what. All these things stem from the inability to put oneself in the other side's shoes. Extremism sucks. Apple isn't 100% evil or saintly and neither is Microsoft.

Yup. But two wrongs don't make a right.

The title is pretty stupid not to mention misleading. 24ms to talk to memcache means "they're doing it wrong".

I agree with the your first line. It espouses objectivity. But your second line goes in the opposite direction and make me sad.

The author doesn't have a grounded view of the credit card chargeback process. Square seems to be pretty well behaved despite his whining.

IE may be annoying, and I certainly sympathize with the Paydirt crew. But this author makes a good point: "it’s exactly this type of behavior (writing for or against specific browsers) that sets the Web back again."

Sometimes doing the right thing isn't the easiest path forward.

Not only is this article is outdated, it makes broad sweeping generalizations that make little sense for usage patterns that differ from the author's.

Reserved instances make perfect sense if your server on EC2 is running 24/7 for months on end. In fact, with now that Amazon has different rates for medium/light/heavy utilization, it makes perfect sense for even more situations.

We've taken advantage of RI's at my startup and the benefits are pretty clear. Our app servers are micro instances running PHP, Python and Java (SOLR). We scale by adding more instances not by renting bigger servers, so our RI's are always in use. It's also worth noting that the reserved instances for RDS are a great way to reduce costs as well (if you choose to use RDS).

Some people LOVE riding horses, but you don't see them riding horses to the movies do you?

We've been logging all of our analytics data in JSON for years now.

Rise4Fail? Really? So basically since the book's cover is ugly the story must be a fail? Obviously that's the case. Brilliant researchers always have great looking websites, right?

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/

Disclaimer: I used to work in a incubation group that was under MSR. Although there's plenty to gripe about at Microsoft, MSR is not one of them. It's a shining example of an awesome research group. (It probably employs more computer science researchers than any other company and was a great place to bounce ideas off of your peers, who are some of the smartest people in the field.) But one thing you should know, researchers aren't great web developers. Just look at any top computer science professor's personal websites. Judging a project's worthiness by its website is exactly like judging a book by its cover. It's pointlessly idiotic. At least balance it out with a comment about the projects on the page.