HN user
Peppa Pig is at least funny. The one that pushed me over the edge wrt to behavior modeling was Caillou. My god people have some self respect as parents. You have to have to create some boundaries for children, not just knee-jerk syrupy-sweet coddling from dawn til dusk.
It is bad practice to have your authentication database be the same as your app database.
No, this is resume-driven-development, Google-scale-wannabe FUD. Understand your requirements. Multiple databases is non-trivial overhead. The only reason to add multiple databases is if you need scale that can't be handled via simple caching.
Of course it's hard to anticipate what level of scale you'll have later, but I can tell you this: for every tiny startup that successfully anticipated their scaling requirements and built a brilliant microservices architecture that proactively paved the way to their success, there's a 100 burnt out husks of companies that never found product market fit because the engineering team was too busy fantasizing about "web-scale" and padding their resume by overengineering every tiny and unused feature they built.
If you want to get a job at FAANG and suckle at the teat of megacorporations who's trajectory was all based on work done in the early 2000s, by all means study up on "best practices" to recite at your system design interview. On the other hand, if you want to build the next great startup, you need to lose the big co mentality and start thinking critically from first principles about power to weight ratio and YAGNI.
We did not publicize it in any way because we are a legit film streaming company with hundreds of distributors worldwide, and no good can come from any awareness of a site that looks like ours streaming pirated content. Maybe some day.
But what would be the advantage over just running Drupal on PHP?
Yes, but if you fuck it up heads are gonna roll.
I switched to Notational Velocity years ago after trying to type things into Evernote, yet I am a premium user. Why? Because Evernote's killer feature is pasting in any kind of content and syncing that across devices. It is an extremely useful dumping ground for miscellaneous pasted content.
It's not about people who don't know what computers are. It's about creating simple solutions to common problems. Most people do not want to fiddle with their computers regardless of how well they understand them, they want to accomplish a task and move on. Even as a developer this is why I choose OS X over Linux.
The question is how far can they push it without totally frustrating the power users. I think it may be inevitable that Apple eventually stops making machines that the majority of non-Apple developers can tolerate.
Could you elaborate on:
> Sandboxing non-App store apps
I thought sandboxing was only required for App store apps?
Sure dependency hell, it's a problem anywhere. It's the worst in Rails though. Absolutely 100 times worse than PHP.
> If something with Drupal's advantages were available within Rails (as an engine or what have you) it would be a clear game-over for other stacks vs. Rails.
I have to disagree here. There are clear use cases for either Drupal or Rails. I understand why you yearn for a Ruby Drupal, because dealing with PHP is a hassle, but objectively there is little to be gained since Drupal is already a beast and performance would only be hurt by being ported to Ruby.
Aside from that, the key advantage that Rails or other low-level web frameworks have over Drupal is that they don't make any assumptions beyond the fact that you are using HTTP. With Drupal there is an incredible amount of pre-existing architectural cruft to enable its powerful functionality, but it creates a ton of overhead to deal with as soon as you want to do something that doesn't neatly fit it's paradigm. As soon as you brought something like this into Rails then you'd be defeating the purpose of its simple elegance.
I just don't see any way to separate out the best of both worlds. They have very distinct use cases.
Aside from PHP being around twice as long and around for years during the nascent phase of open source web apps, the number one reason it has more and more popular turnkey apps is the same reason it "killed" perl: easy deployment.
The secondary reason is indeed cultural, but not it's nothing so abstract as what 37signals does. Rather it's the technical culture of moving fast and breaking things. With Rails you need to stay on top of upgrades all the time. If you are actively working on an app then this is a net benefit because you get new features. But it also creates maintenance work downstream, and not just with application code, but application servers are also relatively unstable. When you have something with a high heterogenous installation count like WordPress or other popular open-source apps, the pain of maintaining version compatibility and keeping it running over time far dwarfs any benefit of using a more powerful language like Ruby.
I know as well as anyone the relative futility of relying on HN, Reddit, or TC coverage for building a successful tech product. Feedback and traffic from social news is merely a blip that says next to nothing one way or another about your long-term prospects.
However, if your site goes down for any reason a postmortem of this sort is definitely warranted. The word "launch" is not signifying much more than a point in time in this case, and I think you're jumping to a lot of conclusions about what hopes they were pinning on this event.
There was an article posted here a while ago that made the case that Lisp is so powerful that it makes it feasible to do much more yourself rather than relying on libraries, and thus it attracts a higher level of hacker that wants to do things their own way and is more intolerant of compromises made in the name of standardization. Sort of the opposite of the lowest common denominator approach of successful enterprise languages like Java. The failure to thrive of Common Lisp is strong evidence of the worse-is-better phenomenon.
I don't think he consciously thinks that, but his entire argument seems to stem from Facebook being such a necessity that they are morally obligated to follow social norms or be somehow coerced into doing so, despite evidence that this has ever been a possibility.
I don't think it's ironic because Anil clearly values Facebook and wants them to "do the right thing". This is made clear in the opening paragraph:
> Now, Facebook follows the steps that most tyrants do, quietly moving from sham elections to an official policy that users will have no vote in site governance.
When I read this my first thought went to the ridiculousness of comparing Facebook to a dictator. But it shows that Anil sees Facebook as almost necessary infrastructure. Not using Facebook is not a realistic possibility. Instead we must hope against hope that they will right their tyrannical ways.
Frankly I'm not holding my breath, but Anil has reach so maybe something good could come out of it.
Very true, however I think the talent and ability of a technical team is just the tip of the iceberg here. The real coup that the Obama campaign pulled off was bringing a top-flight tech team in-house and somehow fitting them into the established campaign apparatus so their skills could really be leveraged.
The fact is it doesn't matter how good the engineers are, if they are mismanaged then you will not get good results. The main thing that Silicon Valley has really figured out is the necessity of letting engineers into the board room so to speak. You can't have a bunch of big-shot executives trying to dictate what to do from on high because the technical and operational challenges are just as significant as the political and strategic challenges. If the engineers are outsourced, or don't have autonomy, or aren't given a seat at the table for high-level decisions, then it will be impossible for them to deliver anything as groundbreaking as what the Obama campaign delivered.
What is conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley has been slow to make its way into the political sphere, but I think the cat's out of the bag now, and I'm sure you'll see a lot less hubris and a much more solid effort from the GOP in 2016.
What's the value of humility in the professional world?
Honesty, integrity, credit where credit is due, etc, but an overdeveloped sense of humility is the best way to go unrecognized, at least in America.
I think you've spent more time reading social news linkbait than actually using ruby or examining its community at the ground level.
> The whole tone of this article is a good example, actually
Hold on there, don't extrapolate whatever shitty article makes it's way to HN or Reddit as a litmus test for a "community" (btw, putting "community" in quotes is pretty condescending in and of itself). This guy has no standing in the ruby community whatsoever. I don't know if he's a good developer or not, but his article is certainly sensationalistic and defensive and won't earn him any respect from any ruby devs I know.
If you were to judge every PL community by their most defensive blowhards then you wouldn't be a programmer at all, because every community will attract some proportion of ignorant coat-tail riders without the courage to confront the real issues of their ecosystem.
The Ruby community's biggest fault is a higher-than-average adherence to fashion, as annoying as that can be from a stability perspective, it's not an unmitigated failing because it means a genuinely good idea may catch on faster.
But haven't you been consistent on the co-founder line since before YC was founded, and hence before you had significant data? Wouldn't that bias your YC data as well, which as far as I know only has a tiny minority of single founders?
How is it not free distribution?
> In the same way that BMW is a luxury brand, except to those who want to buy Ferrari and Bently. These people have even more money to spend and are not receptive to Starbucks.
Starbucks / Blue Bottle makes even more sense considering that BMW is already a driver's car. The driving experience is at best marginally better by going to Ferrari. Whereas Starbucks is anything but a coffee drinker's coffee. People go there more for a caffeinated treat vs being into coffee per se. If Starbucks started producing the lighter roasts and more subtle flavors that coffee drinkers value, it wouldn't work with the heavy cream and sugar. So the whole Blue Bottle philosophy dovetails nicely. That said, they'd need to keep the association under wraps to avoid frightening away the coffee snobs.
I didn't have sympathy for Facebook when their traditional ads turned out to be worthless and the price fell through the floor. Likewise I don't have sympathy for businesses who feel entitled to free distribution on Facebook and don't like it when Facebook tries to monetize.
The bottom line is that people don't come to Facebook because of brands. Rather brands come to Facebook because that's where the people are.
The fact that at one point a business convinced a user to click a Like button does not provide anything approaching a symmetrical benefit to Facebook. Sure, Facebook is always happy to add content, but that marginal value of that content is nowhere near as important to Facebook as the distribution is to the brands. Facebook's primary asset is an engaged user base, and it's the social exchange that engages users. Meanwhile if businesses are pursuing any social media strategy, where can they get anything approaching the reach of Facebook? Even if another startup comes up with the reach, they'll be in the same monetization boat as Facebook and certainly will make decisions that piss off someone.
A sponsored post can stick around for a while. But in any case, if a user doesn't come they don't charge. It's exceedingly unlikely that 100% of your followers will see a post, but you don't pay for that.
> Just because you enjoy a certain brand doesn't mean you actually want to know every little thing they're doing.
Twitter is more obvious semantically, but heavy Likers of brands on Facebook already understand the implication, and increasingly so will everyone else, regardless of the terminology. For me it's basically to the point where I only Like things that are owned or run by people that I actually know.
To say nothing of brain plasticity.
However actually shipping when you're that young is hard. It was not til I was 19 or 20 that I finally felt like I could write "real" software. The pieces just never fell into place before that despite dabbling for a decade or more as a child. Granted the web as it exists today makes it infinitely easier to learn today than it was when I was a kid, but I'm not going to use that as an excuse. Even with Google in all its glory I can't say unequivocally that I would be shipping code if I were 14 today.
Unless you had a Mac, in which case $200 was the price of simply buying the API reference (Inside Macintosh), without which your pirated copy of Think C was inscrutable.
I did do some cool stuff in HyperTalk though.
I would assume that Groupon has thought of most of these ideas, probably years ago, but let's not underestimate the power of the hype cycle. If you are literally the hottest startup in Silicon Valley as they were a couple years ago, the last thing you do is anything that could jeopardize growth. Now that they are public it's a very difficult retreat back to a leaner, more innovative mindset.
I'm guessing simply because he could not verify that he was the account holder.
Of course there could be numerous curatorial reasons, but that first one would seem to be a deal-breaker regardless.