Hacker News Reader

sheffon Evernote blog: WhySQL?

EnterpriseDB (who sell a commercialized version of Postgres) have a couple of MySQL vs Postgres white papers on their site, but hidden behind a registration wall : http://www.enterprisedb.com/resources-community/whitepapers-... .

Robert Haas, a Postgres committer , occasionally blogs about comparisons : http://rhaas.blogspot.com/search/label/mysql

Theres also http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/MySQL_vs_PostgreSQL

Historically , MySQL has been more widely available on low end web hosting plans, so its what a lot of people first use when they start using databases, and a lot of web apps, such as Wordpress, support it exclusively.

Until a year or two ago, only MySQL had built in (if occasionally fragile) replication which made it popular for that reason alone. Postgres now has robust replication, with new features coming down the pipeline soon : http://www.depesz.com/2011/07/26/waiting-for-9-2-cascading-s....

I prefer Postgres, but oddly enough under Oracle theres been some interesting features added to MySQL, which is good for both.

sheffon PostgreSQL benchmarks under giant lock free DragonflyBSD

Thanks for the summary. I was drawn in by the magic phrase "PostgreSQL benchmarks" but didn't know enough about DragonflyBSD to know the reason the results presented were of note.

sheffon Ask HN: would you pay to guarantee your app's first 1k users?

Having 1000 users who have been paid , or otherwise incentivized, to sign up for a service means nothing really as they generally won't be the kinds of early users you need. Plus, this model won't really work if what someone is actually looking for is paying users.

A service to help entrepreneurs to market their web apps effectively so that they reach their target audience/users, so that they sign up organically would have a far better chance of success I think.

sheffon Is your startup idea already taken?

I like the point the author makes that "If prospective users are still available, the idea is still available."

Take online time tracking applications for example. I was looking through Mixergy earlier and there was an interview with an entrepreneur who runs a time tracking app ( http://mixergy.com/tom-rossi-molehill-interview/ ) which reminded me of an interview I'd read a while ago with another entrepreneur who also runs a time tracking app ( Clockspot , http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/12/11/engineering-... )

And of course HN user, Amy Hoy, also blogs about her profitable time tracking SAAS app Freckle ( letsfreckle.com ).

I bet they weren't the first to come up with the idea of online time tracking applications, and more people will come up with similar businesses in the future but as long as they have some differentiation and find users (or rather, customers) its irrelevant how shiny and new the "idea" is.

sheffon RubyMine 4 is Here to Make You Feel the Productivity

Rubymine has a fairly decent VIM mode ( http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=164 ) but its a lot less snappy than MacVim.

I only use it (Rubymine) now and again though, for things like browsing through projects I don't work on often, or to help find syntax errors in code and so on.

sheffon Spree 1.0.0 Released

Its great that this project has finally hit 1.0 so that there is a Rails based ecommerce engine available - I installed it recently to try it out. Two caveats :

1) Works with Rails 3.1 , not 3.2 as yet, although this is on its way I believe

2) More importantly, by default you need to set your online store to use ( and presumably send your store data to ) Jirafe.com for analytics ( http://guides.spreecommerce.com/release_notes_1_0_0.html#spr... ). This made me somewhat uneasy and it seems a bit pointless to set this up as the default. I had a bit of a problem trying to replace the Jirafe.com dashboard with the old dashboard ( https://github.com/spree/spree_simple_dash ) which I didn't manage to make work immediately, probably due to some name changes in the gems .

sheffon Ask HN: What are the best programming books for someone in prison?

Just a suggestion, but what about books which don't look at all technical but are full of cartoons and humour, eg "Land of Lisp" ( http://nostarch.com/lisp.htm ) , the Head First books and so on ? These might be acceptable.

Secondly, one of the most common comments on HN is how few programmers are also any good at design, so perhaps books focused on design, usability and typography would be another option.

sheffon The Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 2nd Edition (full draft)

Check out the Capistrano docs at https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/wiki which are pretty comprehensive for getting started with Rails deployment.

sheffon Pricing/billing strategy, monthly vs. annual?

Please consider having an annual payment option ( discounted or not ) as well as a monthly one.

If its a service I've decided I want and I sign up for it, I generally want to pay once and then not think about it again for a year.

From the standpoint of a B2B purchase, the overhead of a book keeper or accountant having to keep track of lots of monthly subscriptions to services , which are usually in dollars and have to be converted to a local currency is an extra annoyance.

People wanting to pay you an annual subscription up front are essentially showing you that they are fans of your service and aren't typically as price sensitive as the monthly subscribers. Why not make it easy for them to give you money ?

sheffon CentOS 6.2 Released

This is excellent news. After the long lead times for 6.0 and 6.1 its very reassuring that CentOS seems to have gotten its momentum back and is tracking the Red Hat releases with minimal lag.

sheffon Ask HN: Best Intro Programming Book?

This is a good suggestion , as the Chris Pine book is a very easy, quick read.

Also, the O'Reilly Head First books are usually good - with a fairly light-hearted, humorous approach for starters - and their "Head First Programming" book is Python based. ( http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596802387.do?sortby=publ... )

Does it have to be a book ? Maybe a subscription to something like Code School ( http://www.codeschool.com ) would also be quite cool, as they have courses like "Try Ruby" and "Rails for Zombies" .

sheffon Vim for developers that use other software, too

If you use Textmate and basically miss the project drawer in Vim, there is a version of MacVim which has that integrated ( see https://github.com/alloy/macvim/wiki/Screenshots ) .

There is also Vico ( http://www.vicoapp.com/ ) which is a new Mac text editor with vi bindings, and well worth taking a look at.

sheffon Ask HN: How to buy a domain name from third party?

Looks like they are a "domain investment firm" and will probably ask for a inflated price. It can't do any harm to put in an offer and see how much they want.

I'd also look around at domain markets such as Buydomains and Sedo to get ideas for alternatives and unregistered domains that might work as well. I've bought a couple of domains from Buydomains in the past and they are always up for an offer.

sheffon What is a good tutorial/book to learn the basics of Ubuntu Server Admining?

Check out the "Community" section of any of the major VPS hosting companies - some of them have really detailed admin tutorials for their customers.

What I start with whenever I need to do Ubuntu admin is the Linode Library ( http://library.linode.com/ ). Their guides are fairly comprehensive for most sysadmin tasks, easy to follow and kept up to date, eg http://library.linode.com/lamp-guides/ubuntu-11.10-oneiric .

sheffon Ask HN: Books that cover the "SysAdmin issues" for web-start-ups

"Pro Puppet" is a good one to start with for the Puppet side of things.

http://puppetlabs.com/blog/pro-puppet-a-handy-indexed-guide/

sheffon "Ad"fully Awful

Not many people outside of media circles are talking about the real trend that's going on nowadays (although Monocle magazine keeps sharing the secrets

Interesting. I had a look at the Monocle website but couldn't find anything. Do you have any useful links ?

sheffon DNA sequenced of woman who lived to 115

Its one of those things - you have to start somewhere, and sequencing the DNA of individuals with unusual characteristics ( such as long lived people ) is an interesting data set to have for future analysis and comparison.

There are a number of projects which are in the process of getting thousands of genome sequences as you suggest, eg http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/Funding/Biomedical-science/Funded-... .

Its amazing that its only 10 years or so since the first nearly complete human genome sequence was released and that the original projects budget was a couple of billion dollars, whereas now it can apparently be done for four or five figures.

sheffon It takes three years to build a business

Another data point : Amy Hoy mentions that her first webapp and those of two other people running SAAS businesses all took 2 years to hit 200k after launch - add on some dev time and it approaches 3 years.

http://unicornfree.com/2011/drawing-back-the-curtain/

sheffon Ask HN: I'm stuck, should I outsource a part of my project?

Depending on how much time it needs ( you mention "a little bit of actionscript" ) something which I have used in the past to speed up this kind of small task is to look at oDesk and search for developers who know the technology in question and who like to pair program. You get to learn something along the way, and can keep the project focused and completed quickly.

sheffon Puppet vs Chef, Fight

I tried out both Puppet and Chef a while ago, and was also a bit confused by the Chef documentation when trying to do anything beyond the basics.

While not brilliant, the Puppet docs seemed better and when added to the Pro Puppet book ( http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Puppet-James-Turnbull/dp/143023057... ) are more than adequate, so I just picked Puppet on that basis alone, and have not had any issues.

Another useful tool , in conjunction with Puppet/Chef is Blueprint which lets you build configurations from existing servers , http://devstructure.com/ .

sheffon Lesson: Oracle's driving MySQL to open core; don't sign contributor agreement

I'm migrating an old MySQL based app to Postgres at the moment. Heres some of the things I'm looking at in addition to the base tools.

1) taps ( done by some people from Heroku ) : https://github.com/ricardochimal/taps and http://adam.heroku.com/past/2009/2/11/taps_for_easy_database...

2) mysql2psql : https://github.com/maxlapshin/mysql2postgres

3) Just slurping in the data via the FDW feature for 9.1 , http://www.pgxn.org/dist/mysql_fdw/1.0.0/

sheffon Lesson: Oracle's driving MySQL to open core; don't sign contributor agreement

They are not available in Postgres at the moment, but I believe that covering indexes / index only scans will be coming some time next year, as theres a patch that should hopefully go into the next release.

http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2011/08/index-only-scans-now-there...

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-08/msg0073...

sheffon Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?

Some previous "Ask HN" threads which have details of single founder businesses include :

Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487

Ask HN: Anyone making a living from just 1 app? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772199

Ask HN: Inspirational money making web apps made by hackers. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1764682

sheffon Urban Airship: Postgres to NoSQL and back

I believe this was one of the talks at Postgres Open - I came across the slides from most of the others earlier at http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Postgres_Open_Talks_2011, and they have some good tips on scaling with Postgres.

There was one interesting tidbit in one of the Heroku presentations : they apparently run over 150,000 databases ( https://wal-e-pgopen2011.herokuapp.com/#6 ) which is incredible.

sheffon Wordpress on Heroku

As Heroku has a Postgres backend, I imagine you could also install PG4WP (http://www.hawkix.net/tag/pg4wp/) which is a plugin to get Wordpress working with Postgres DBs, and just deploy directly using Heroku alone.

You may run into problems with any other plugins which use MySQL specific SQL syntax though.