Hacker News Reader

anderspeterssonon Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

Watched the two first and they are pretty good, easy to follow as someone new to Xcode/IOS. Looking forward to follow this series.

anderspeterssonon I want to become a consultant that helps startups scale. Where do I start?

What is scaling to you? I will assume that scaling means keeping up with increasing load on servers.

The number of different scaling problems are about the same number that startups having problems with scaling. It's a different thing for every company.

You should probably specialise in a tech that many startups use and learn how to deal with high load on that service. Learning this takes experience, gain that experience by working/consulting/running you own startup using the tech you want to specialise in.

When you feel comfortable with one tech, learn another, repeat.

When you have enough tools in your belt you could apply to a senior position at a fast growing company.

anderspeterssonon Ask HN: Handling price objections correctly?

It's hard to tell if you should get rid of a free trial without knowing more about your SaaS, but if you can get away with a shorter period you definitely should. Use the shortest period of time that it takes for your customer to get value from you business.

You should A/B test these things.

anderspeterssonon Ask HN: How would you rebuild Facebook?

If Zuck would have tried to build what now is Facebook he would never have launched, so I would keep it simple, using the tech I already know like he did.

Highscalability.com have some articles about Facebook's architecture here: http://highscalability.com/blog/category/facebook

anderspeterssonon Ask HN: “Business” framework around a SaaS

Have not used it myself, but https://www.userapp.io might be similar to what you're looking for.

anderspeterssonon Ask HN: What have you been working on this summer?

I built a marketplace for horseback riding tours [1]

Tried to get stable owners to sell their tours on the site, failed.

Probably closing it down soon if nothing magically happens.

[1] https://www.rida.nu

anderspeterssonon Ask HN: Growing faster and starting to have scaling issues. Where to go from here?

Throw money at the problem, ie scale up your servers. Move to a VPS/Cloud if you're on your own hardware. The Database is often the hardest part to scale, use services such as Amazon RDS or Heroku Postgres.

Add monitoring to wake you up if the site is down (pingdom is great).

anderspeterssonon New Heroku Dashboard and Metrics now in Beta

Heroku is owned by Salesforce so I doubt that. Interesting to know it used to integrate directly into Heroku before the addons though, didnt know that.

anderspeterssonon New Heroku Dashboard and Metrics now in Beta

If they acquired New Relic and integrated it into the Heroku Dashboard it would give them another edge over normal hosting, but doubt that will happen. New Relic seems to do fine be themself.

anderspeterssonon Digital Ocean NYC2 Droplets Down

How do you do this on the DNS layer? Very short TTL and switching on failure detection? Do you use both providers at the same time when both are up via DNS round robin or similar?

anderspeterssonon [dead]

Its the old version that existed before they launched the retina display ones, it's probably going to get dropped when they launch the broadwell models early/mid 2015.

Apperently it still sells since its still there. ´

anderspeterssonon The Internet Needs a Better Way to Handle Money. This Startup Has the Key

So, this article is talking alot about tech and not so much about the bureaucracy that is involved getting paid online.

I'm building a marketplace, airbnb, model, and have applied to braintree, the process has taken 10 days and counting, so far they have asked for the following documents.

- Copy of my passport,

- Company registration papers

- Bank account statement,

- Buisness plan,

- Terms of service,

- Privacy Policy

(Physical address and phone on website, apperently a requirement from VISA/Mastercard)

How does Stripe solve this problem? I have never needed to provide a business plan when embedding a YouTube Video.

Note, I'm in a country where Braintree's Marketplace offering (or Stripes, or Balanced) is not available. So I'm doing the payouts to the service providers myself.

anderspeterssonon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (June 2014)

SEEKING WORK - Sweden based - Remote prefered

Python/Django developer with frontend experience.

I'm looking for interesting Django projects while I'm bootstraping my own company.

My rate is $75/hr, lower for bigger projects.

See www.anderspetersson.se for more info.

anderspeterssonon Don't ever use Digital Ocean as your production System.

I did get the same message yesterday, but I'm in a little different situation.

Pingdom shows about 36 minutes of downtime, but when DO fixed the issue my sites started to work again. I guess that's acceptable for the $5/month I'm paying and if I need HA I could remove the SPOF.

One thing that do bothers me however is the fact that there are no comment on the status page on the issue witch makes me wonder how often these types of incidents happens.

anderspeterssonon Ask HN: When was the last time you completely shutdown your laptop?

Prolly a month or so ago when I went away for a weekend and didn't bring my laptop. I do the same, just close the screen to my MBP.

anderspeterssonon Ask HN: What's your take on using ads for non-paying users?

No, thats a bad idea if the only reason you're adding ads is to make the free plan worse.

If you're developing a SaaS there should be plenty of ways to introduce new features for paid users, otherwise, drop the free plan and let users try out your service 30 days for free.

anderspeterssonon Ask HN: How do you prepare a site to handle being on HN's frontpage?

One thing I did after being smashed with visitors from Facebook was building a feature switch were I can turn off the most intense functions of the site. It have worked well.

Loadtesting helps to determinate this features is and how your site will react under load.

Caching is probably the first step if you're not already doing that.

anderspeterssonon PyCon US 2014 – Videos

Is it just me, or did the videos disappear?

anderspeterssonon Macaw V1 Released

I've been following this since the first demos, looks promising indeed.

Will be very interesting to see how this get adapted by the design community.

anderspeterssonon Ask HN: What did you do after launching app...

Listen to your customers.

anderspeterssonon Invoice Ninja

This looks really good!

You could charge for extra services, for example API access or "Sell my invoice"-integration.

anderspeterssonon I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

I believe both types of drones are needed, if the "fly-to-pakistan-and-drop-a-bomb-on-a-compound"-drones didnt exist, the SOF guys would have more to do, and would take more losses, I guess.

I'm pretty sure the intel needed to carry out a drone-strike is insanely high.

Drones are also great when the insurgents flees on their motorcycles, as often happens when the ground forces come in.

anderspeterssonon I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

All this criticism against drones. Drones are awesome.

I've worked on the ground in Afghanistan on a Mechanized Infantry Platoon. There's nothing more calming than hearing the buzz from a drone keeping an eye on the terrain from above and reporting to the TACP while you're on the ground. We where saved multiple times from running into ambushes and IEDs thanks to drones. Sure, Apache's could do the job as-well, but when they run out of fuel, and they do more often than a drone, you're on your own.

Sure, that's another mission from flying a drone to a compound in Pakistan and dropping some explosive on it, that I can not comment on since I have not seen the Intel behind those missions.

anderspeterssonon Ask HN: What is your download speed?

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3183694188

Skövde, Sweden

Down 90.32 Mbps

Up 10.02 Mbps

That's over my Wifi, I could probably get it up to 100 Mbps (that's what I pay for) if I connected a cable to my router.

anderspeterssonon [Old] Taking payments online (in Europe) in 2013

Stripe has expanded to a few countries in Europe, including UK.

https://stripe.com/global

anderspeterssonon Django 1.6 released

Thanks for another great release! Also big thumbs up for a shorter release cycle than usual.

anderspeterssonon Finding the right CDN for our startup

Negative, I don't use a custom SSL.

anderspeterssonon Finding the right CDN for our startup

I made the switch from Rackspace Cloudfiles + CDN to Amazon S3 + Cloudfront a couple months ago. I was regularly getting emails about my app erroring when someone uploaded a file via my app to Rackspace, since Rackspace was down (or responding slowly).

Now I'm happy with Amazon S3 + Cloudfront, it's cheaper and more stable.