codelust

Karam/Shubhendu,

Really kicked to see something from my neck of the woods with great potential out in the market. Congratulations on the launch.

I'm assuming it will take​ significant volume to make this profitable (should be easily doable).

I had noticed recently fibre now being strung from trees in Bangalore much like how ethernet cable used to be ten-years-ago and figured we're on to something big now.

Common mode of infection I have seen with Wordpress is through site owners downloading premium themes that have been uploaded into file sharing sites by malware authors.

The site owners can't, in most cases, poke around to see what is in the code. And the code often contains hooks that inject various things into the installation.

The other route in is through scripts like TimThumb, which is included in a lot of themes. TT has had some serious security holes in it, the last one being fairly recent that allows for remote file execution. At that point, at least the account hosting the file is a goner.

Had written about this a while ago: http://frontiernxt.com/hybrid-entertainment-free-roam-networ...

Kjellberg maybe the biggest personality, but there is a significant group of people who make a decent living out of doing this.

I do strongly believe that this will become a major genre in reality television/entertainment. And I am not taking into account the other universe called DOTA here.

RSS was never meant to be a product. It is a format and a spec. Products are built around the spec: apps that push it, clients that pull it. It has incredible value where machines speak to each other. Much of the 'dying' was fed by the deluge of RSS-as-product based companies that thrived at that time. Those companies and products probably are dead, but RSS is not. And that is not surprising; not at least for me.

It was also only a year ago I said “Automattic is healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly — we’re not capital constrained.”

I was wrong, but I didn’t realize it until I took on the CEO role in January.

Find this to be really odd.

And it leads into this, which is at odds with the previous statement that they were growing as fast as they can. Did they discover any new avenues for growth that required a whole new raft of capital?

..and we realized we could invest more into WordPress and our products to grow faster

I love the company and Matt. Met him briefly in India many moons ago when he was attending a Wordcamp here.

If you have the time, there is a good Coursera course on the domain: https://www.coursera.org/course/modelthinking

I have kind of stumbled on to the same line, though I'm in the early stages of getting over the shock of it all as it was not something I was looking to do and considering where I am located (India), I never would have thought it would be possible.

I guess there is no one right way to do this. A lot depends on your own abilities, strengths and the terms in which you can get clients. If you have leverage and can deliver well, the timing is not an issue.

In any case, I'm glad there are more people doing the same :)

Looks like it uses Rails & Boiler? Why not outsource the missing bits, get it to MVP and explore options?

Bubble 1.0 was greed without the knowledge on how to value digital companies properly. This phase is greed even after knowing how to value digital companies properly.

You will come off looking really silly if an attempt is made to make sense of all these on actuals and fundamentals.

It has been quite easy for a few years now to put together your own setup on a VPS and run with it. IIRC, I started doing this somewhere around 2008, during the heydays of Slicehost. What has changed is that you now get pretty good and reliable VPS providers for cheap and in some ways it has kind of become a cool thing to do for everyone.

I would, though, add a few words of caution here.

1. It is one thing to put together a VPS to run a bunch of sites. It is another to handle major traffic on it. Some of you have done it, some of you will learn with time how to do it, but a large number won't. If it is critical for your site to be up 24/7 and Google is going to be your best friend in trying to understand which part of the stack is creating the bottleneck, you'll be in for some real trouble.

2. Do you know how to check for rootkits? Would you know if your server has been backdoored? These days attack vectors are so complex that even experienced hands (the main reason why I don't do this on my own anymore) have trouble saying for sure they are fully locked down. Wordpress on a public static IP represents one of the juiciest targets on the web for hackers and a big chunk of the phishing sites are hosted on servers with unpatched Wordpress installations or plugins/themes that have backdoors in them. Most of the site owners have no clue they've been owned till the hosting company takes them down. Please don't wind up being one of those site owners.

If you are going to do this own your own, at least get something like Wordfence installed, so that you have some degree of protection in place.

I run most of my sites these days on Webfaction. I believe they run Cloudlinux these days, which means you get pretty consistent performance from the server, even in the shared hosting environment. The sites with greater resource requirements are moved to Wiredtree, who provide beefier, managed VPS services at reasonable rates as long as you are OK with cPanel and don't veer too much from their standard stack.

Disclosure: I have no business links with Webfaction or Wiredtree.

What is the kind of traffic total/concurrent at peak that you serve?

Not on the desktop, but in Opera Mini there have been product placements on both the home screen and speed dial screens for a while.

I'm somewhat OK with it, considering it is a free product. What sucks is that they don't respect my synced Opera Link settings when on a new OM installation. Have to remove items on the speed dial screen manually at that time. The home screen ones are not removable at all, from what I can see.

It is a bit frustrating to see the NSA angle in everything these days. Going by the same logic, it is very likely that they are tapping into the backbones, should we then be less enamored with using the internet?

The snooping is a serious problem and has been discussed to death and beyond in various threads.

$this->app['component']->function() gives me an instant headache. Which is why I always wind up giving up on Symfony/Silex after trying it out every now and then.

OTOH, I had a much easier time with Laravel, though it uses some of the same Symfony components under the hood.

Replying to the reply to my parent comment, since I seem to have reached HN's nesting limit.

Forms of control are not always very direct. Let us, hypothetically, say the big state actors jump in to take control of 80% of the available bitcoins available, under various entities, they have control and authority and little accountability.

This is already a reality in some equity markets, where retail investors are under 20% and rest of the players are institutional players. It will take much lesser than what it takes to move a large equity market, to move BT.

There is a good reason why there is no global barter system. It simply won't work at that scale. A global barter system -- that would be truly subversive.

But you do recognize that people are buying Bitcoins using the day-to-day authoritarian tools, right? This is the equivalent of popularization of denims as a statement of rebellion from the 1970s; or the prevalence of Che Guevara tees in capitalist nations. Gives you that warm fuzzy feeling, but, in reality, it is no different from anything else.

Indulge me here for a bit; but how does a multi-million dollar investment (raised from the same existing authoritarian framework) into Bitcoins make it anti-authoritarian?

Best case scenario is that this is a good hedge with decent risks, worst case scenario is that it is a worthwhile asset class to manipulate at a lower cost compared to other asset classes.

EDIT: I don't agree with the larger tone of the article, but there are merit-worthy points that are made in it.

Bitcoin is the most promising of derivatives to come into the market in recent years. And as far as derivatives go, something that has no formal structure controlling or regulating is a godsend for actors who can move the markets. And considering the entire size of the Bitcoin world, it is one of the most juicy derivatives out there.

Does that mean it is not innovative? No. It is certainly innovative, especially in how it has been marketed. Alternative currencies are a dime-a-dozen in communities that are interested in currencies and communities that want to subvert existing currencies. But none of the others have gotten as far as Bitcoin has, in terms of both usage and how seriously it is taken.

Does that mean you cannot make money off it. No. You can certainly make money off it. That said, you can make money off how a bunch of horses are going to run on a given day too.

Does that mean you cannot pay for things with it? No. You can certainly pay for many things using it. Does that mean it is as good as the USD. No, it is not.

The true genius in Bitcoins lie in tapping into the Matrix-esque narrative that you are empowering every wannabe-Neo out there; which almost every nerd secretly aspires to be.

What that narrative misses out on is that, at a global level, any abstraction (currency, political boundaries, taxation) is already mainstream. By the time you make something niche acceptable by everyone, you have already inherited all the good and bad of something that is mainstream.

Congrats. This looks pretty neat, especially since it uses Composer.

Does it do the whole autoloader song and dance with Composer?

Example: If I add Guzzle to Composer, can I call it from my plugin's code the way you can with other frameworks?

Only thing I would change is to swap out Capistrano with Fabric. But that's a personal choice.

Guess one valid scenario is to use this as the base for a child theme.

Thanks, had to read up on what exactly is a materialized view. Not something I was familiar with.

One example is a CMS. An article these days is a title, body and 5-10 comments, and whatever other metadata that you would want to present on a page. Don't update the corresponding NoSQL record till there are writes in the RDMBS. Serve from the NoSQL system, with at least another caching layer in front. You get the best of both worlds and just one query instead of many.

Thanks, there are some good numbers to chew on there, though, I am always skeptical about projects, thanks to IDC/Garntner.

From the little I have seen of NoSQL, I like it as a niche use-case DB, not entirely divorced from a RDMBS. Thus, not surprised it has the potential to grow like crazy.

Hey Slava,

First up, congrats. Whatever the back story is, getting funded (save runaway revenue/profits/margins) is always a crucial inflection point in a company/product's lifecycle as an enabler for bigger and better things. Whether those will eventually happen or not, nobody knows. But there are a lot of things that only money can accomplish and investment is a key enabler for a start-up that needs capital to scale/grow. If you find an investor who is aligned extremely well, it is a massive bonus.

Historically, a lot of good has also happened from a combination of events that may not exactly be awesome. Outcomes always trump everything else. So don't sweat the mind-reading angle much!

Can't comment much on the technical aspects of the product as I am not even remotely qualified to do something like that.

I'm excited for your team and I have immense respect for anyone who builds an OSS company. There is much that the world owes to numerous companies and individuals releasing code like this and don't get enough credit for it. So, thank you and hopefully it will come together very well for everyone involved :)

Used to think the same way about most investing till I figured out better.

I do not know the specifics of this particular deal, nor have I used the product, but I hope the points are of going to be some use.

Let us look at it this way. Assume there are 200 funds out there who can do a series A of this size. That would naturally mean that not every fund is going to be either a leader or someone who spots new trends (there are not enough trends out there). Naturally, a lot of them have to invest in deals in other companies in a hot sector.

A lot of investment is momentum-driven and momentum is often driven by the narrative. You have to remember that as long as a successful exit happens, the fund winds up with a good deal irrespective of whether the public (IPO) or the acquiring company (M&A) eventually profits from it. NoSQL has that momentum at the moment.

A healthy start-up ecosystem can easily support more than a handful of companies in a single domain. Once the narrative for the domain really picks up, even the not-so-great ones (again, I have no clue about RethinkDB) stand a good chance of being acquired as long as there is decent enough traction and the sector is so hot that there is pressure on the GPs to make a play in it.

The later they get into the game, the pricier the ticket becomes, but you get lesser risk too.

And all of this is perfectly OK and fair.

Have not read the piece yet, but your comment resonated with me.

I'm at a similar place in life, especially after being a terribly critical person almost all my life. Thankfully, the best takeaway for me from my so far below-par tryst with entrepreneurship has been to be much more appreciative of everything.

All the things that are wrong are things that can also be improved, so, these days, I try to think of what I can do to improve them.

Turn off, as in, turned off location tracking in Google.

I do not believe it is possible to break out of the surveillance state by using technology, unless you want to go the RMS route, which I am not that keen on or even sure if it works 100%. I also consider this to be a problem that is social than technological. If society largely agrees to an invasive level of snooping as a valid trade-off for reasonable security, no amount of cyrpto or anonymization will keep you safe. Privacy is a social contract that is enforced using technology. If the contract is flawed, the technology, as always, will only serve to amplify that flaw.

Meanwhile, Google is only one of the players in the data harvesting world. Starting from the ISP that you are on, everyone captures and sells your data. The only saving grace with Google is that they at least admit to doing this and provide some degree of visibility into it. There are companies out there that the average person has little idea about. For example, some of them are shipped billing data of telcos that get mined and profiled on daily basis. And that is just one company.

I turned mine off recently, not because I am convinced there is a method that guarantees 0% data leakage, but because it is a good idea to reduce the surface area of data that you provide voluntarily to anyone.

Anyhow, what is more amusing for me is when others, like me, turn all this off and tweet away with location turned on or check into various locations on FB/FSQ or comment on what they are doing or where there are at or who they are with at regular intervals.

That's the reason why I gave it up the last time I tried it. IIRC, there's a requirement to run 'vagrant up' with sudo and that does things which I don't like.

Maybe, I'll try something like leaving the files on the guest and mount it on the host using SSHFS. My write performance will take a hit when I am editing files, but, if I can get rid of the sluggishness it will be worth it.

Virtualbox VMs. Never tried the VMware ones.

The performance is acceptable most of the times, other than when I am running one of those PHP frameworks that includes a million files to process each request.