angilly

Yeah the definition on UD definitely misses out on the negative connotation implied.

Yeah man. Nothing wrong with continually asking a questions ;)

No that's not what we're thinking. We're not just giving software startups a place to raise capital. That's just the first bit. Once you hit your goal, we're building a whole bunch of tools to help you collaborate with your early customers.

Anyone that's built a startup has done that initial back and forth with the first customers. It's done with surveys and one-off emails and shared google docs. It's a mess.

We've looked at these processes, and we're building these features into Ramen (in "The Kitchen") that help founders collaborate with their early customers while the MVP is being built. That's the value we're creating.

Hey everyone, one of the Ramen founders here. Would love to answer any questions you have!

The idea is that we help you find your first 100 customers while your building your MVP. Money changes hands, but not a lot. Don't think of it like crowdfunding in the traditional sense. It's simply a way for a founder to come out of a 30 day campaign with ~100 customers a few thousand dollars committed, and give them a better chance at succeeding.

Thanks. We hope it takes off too!

Just gonna throw this out there as a counterpoint ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6857213

Thanks! We can't wait for you to try it out either!

Thanks man. We're really excited at what it represents!

Thanks for the points man! I'd love to hear your ideas for improving it.

Wow I wrote this two years ago! I saw a few comments coming in this morning and had no idea what was going on. Gotta love Google Analytics :) I'm glad you enjoyed the story. I enjoyed the experience :)

6'5 dude. And in 2005... yeah I was easily still pushing 275. :)

Wow. I was one of them. That's hilarious.

only when you're outside. :)

I was impressed (surprised?) at how civil this response was. Probably because it was a response to Joel and not randomHNuser9 :)

I was also surprised that it didn't really address the question of whether or not you (37S, dhh) are "stewing in their own witty ideas, listening only to the adoring comments they get from the groupies"

Do you have any thoughts on the "bubble-ness" of Chicago. Think it's a totally invalid point?

> Don't get me wrong, I love MongoDB, but there are much better reasons to use MongoDB, such as the fact that every document is a flexible data structure, not a strict collection of columns. You can add keys and values as you choose, and store them as arrays or sub-documents depending on the encapsulation you need, etc.

Yup. I dropped the ball on this one. Should have a list of 4 reasons. :)

Totally agree.

You're going to a depth that is testing the limits of my example :) You wouldn't have to do that. You can have deep indexes, and query on those attributes. So if events had invites embedded, and invites all had email addresses for their recipients:

db.users.find({'events.invites.email': 'sv123@gmail.com'})

and that would return all the users that had invited you to an event.

Now, like I said you're testing my example. When these kinds of requirements are taken into account, you'd probably want to have a separate collection for events. Then you could do:

db.events.find({'invites.email': 'sv123@gmail.com'})

Got it. I agree. The "where exists (select 1...)" thing was neat. Learned me something.

Ahh I was not clear. sad trombone

In this case, the events in the user document are events that the user is HOSTING.

There would be another object in our data model to represent the people that got invites to the event. These 'recipients' could be another collection or a list embedded inside each event object.

My first response was "not necessarily," but I'm gonna ratchet it up a notch to a flat out "you're wrong."

Storing event_ids as an array in the events field defeats the whole purpose of organizing your data into rich documents.

In real life, you very well could build something where the events info was built straight into the user record.

#3: You can force flush any write that needs to go straight to disk. insertion & update commands (at least in JS and Ruby) take an argument allowing you specify "safe_mode: true"

I'm no SQL guru, but won't that subselect will break down when users and events grow to the millions?

I probably should have thought out the example a little more. We don't ever actually write that kind of query against our production database @Punchbowl. We have a data warehouse pull out high level stats every night, and we query that.

WRT aggregations, you're right -- they do require a bit of acclimation. Once you write a few, though, you're good to go.

FWIW, judging by "My team does not have experience in setting up a server" I doubt OP is going to be playing with any of that stuff.

Trust me, Heroku is not costly compared to setting up a server:

$ git push master heroku

is a lot cheaper then:

Setup a machine. Then setup mysql, nginx, REE 1.8.6, or did you go with MRI 1.9.1? You're not gonna launch on Rails3 right? Because then you can't do 1.9.1, you have to go to 1.9.2. And you know how to setup nginx to pipe requests through to a Rails app. Are you going with Passenger or Unicorn? Oh make sure to bring up another machine to act as a MySQL slave. You know how to do that right? And you're dumping your DB to disk and backing up to S3 regularly right. Just write a simple script/cron job to handle that. And when you setup your machines you made sure to setup 2 so that if one goes down, the other will still be around, and you setup a load balancer that will realize when one of those machines goes down right?

etc.... :)

It's not screen-scraping. They use Yodlee and CashEdge.

Slightly off topic, but this jumped out at me: "In hindsight, I could've used something like Apache Solr or Lucene, but I just enjoyed finding the solution to a complex problem and building it myself..."

If I were your client I could see getting fairly annoyed at this. Is/was your client pissed that you spent (wasted) time building something from scratch when you could have just used something open source? Or were there legitimate reasons in this case to build something from scratch?

it was a free podcast that i downloaded from iTunes on the phone. no syncing was involved.

FWIW, I've had posts w/ 4k pageviews get 15 comments and posts with 3k pageviews get no comments.

Didn't know there was a process. Would have agreed with you even without knowing that :)