HN user
You have to take into consideration developer time, because often you are paying more for your staff than for your servers. Python and Ruby applications are known (unsourced) to have faster, more rapid development cycles than PHP applications. The ecosystems there tend to be friendlier for people looking to plug and extend existing libraries to put together a minimum viable product quickly.
My issue with CouchDB is the basic approach. Instead of maintaining indexes, the goal of CoachDB is to pre-cache all search functions with the actual result, for all records. This takes a lot of disk space for certain use-cases. This difference makes MongoDB a more attractive choice than CouchDB.
I think the key to recovering from over-commitment is to increase your rates. If you are over-committed, you are giving away your time for too little money.
We are using Softlayer and we found that on our server we were not bottlenecked by memory, CPU or disk I/O. However, we were bottlenecked by our bandwidth which sat around 5 MB/s. Perhaps we could upgrade to a higher-throughput network card or something (I don't maintain our servers), but we ended up just offloading static files to a CDN instead.
Thanks. I'll be checking this out, although I was hoping they would also have something equivalent to jQuery's Sortable (http://jqueryui.com/demos/sortable/).
I'm having a hard time nailing down what the killer features are here. For example, I saw that they advertise drag-and-drop with support for touch devices, but I couldn't even find the drag and drop demo on the site.
I do a lot of near-pixel-for-pixel reproduction from Photoshop documents, and I find that using rule nesting, mixins and child selectors (a similar style to the final example from the article, the first example is atrocious) definitely helps me build more semantic HTML.
Here is a quick cut-and-paste from a LESS stylesheet:
https://gist.github.com/1212027
There are a lot of random items and I find it easier not to cascade styles as much as some recommend. I try to consolidate styles into generic classes or mixins as I find opportunities to re-use them. I try not to use the child selector unnecessarily (the article uses it a totally unnecessary amount) because I often need to add unsemantic wrapper elements to achieve the right effect.
I think this is where the mantra, "Those who cannot do, teach," comes from.
There is already a github mirror:
I wonder how hard it is to open source a Google product. I imagine that Google's products are heavily tied in to its proprietary solutions like BigTable.
I would add a page on the site to view the source for the mixins.
My first thought here is that fast food chains will try and pick this up to cut costs, it can be grown cheaper than farming.
EC2 has had some issues in the past, but did those issues affect S3?
Even if you're on linode, you might find sending large binaries to S3 is a cost-efficient way to increase your storage size. Plus, you have a built in CDN when you need it.
I would encourage you to consider sending people to a completely new URL instead of loading the lyrics with Ajax, unless the browser supports the HTML5 History API.
That way, people who use modern browsers get the original user experience, but those who use legacy browsers have to see a quick refresh. Your site is so clean already that I doubt most IE users would notice the load time.
As an alternative, support hashes and the history API so most people see the "clean" URLs.
Is there any connection to be made between this article and the usage of signed cookies to hold session state? Database-backed sessions hold a state that you know your application set at one point, but a signed cookie, if forged, could have much bigger ramifications. Since no one gets cryptography right, it seems like this would be another instance not to trust it.