btrombley

Can someone please explain the fix in practice? Is it as simple as upgrading glibc (and eglibc?) on all servers? Or is there a network change I should immediately change?

All of the benefits sound the same as MongoDB, which also does sharding and JavaScript queries, including arbitrary code in "callbacks" in map-reduce or $where clauses (though it's slow).

Can someone explain the benefit of RethinkDB over MongoDB?

It's best practices, not new practices, and a very clear concise write up at that. I wish if read this 6 months ago, rather than learning it the hard way.

Amazingly ambitious move by Amazon, which I have to respect. Yes, it will be extremely hard to take market share from Samsung and Apple, but there also hasn't been much innovation in the smart phone market recently, so the opportunity exists if Amazon takes a novel approach. Or maybe they just compete on price, as they have so many times before.

Agreed. Complaining that you are spammed with potential job offers is like complaining about how expensive it is to replace the high-performance tires on your Porsche. Please don't forget that there is still high unemployment across the US and abroad.

Funny, my friends built this company two years ago (and called it lifeswap). It was well received, but the challenge was high turnover amongst mentors due to the work involved--it's much harder to mentor someone than just rent your spare room on airbnb, and probably pays worse. In the end they discovered that the only way it would work is as a headhunting firm for tech companies, and decided to build a new company instead.

I think this is backwards: it was the book publishers (and Apple) that were sued for colluding to raise e-Book prices and had to settle -- which is what anti-trust laws are meant to protect consumers against. Amazon using its size and some questionable tactics just doesn't fall into that category.

The book publishers have done a great job painting this as a David vs. Goliath story, but it's really two Goliaths battling over a shift in publishing and distribution.

The article is short on details, but I'm not clear why Amazon is obligated to sell a publisher's books, much less at the publisher's desired prices. Wal-mart is famous for using its size to lean on suppliers ensuring "everyday low prices." Why is publishing different?

I sympathize with authors that are hurt by this battle, but it just shows that Amazon's marketplace is becoming more important to their sales than their publisher is.

Agreed, the author is using "disruption" to mean "compete with". Microsoft did not really disrupt IBM, it just changed the competitive landscape.

The Innovator's Dilemma has a much more nuanced view of disruption: an inferior product that ends up beating the entrenched player because of a side-benefit. It's pretty relevant if you want to take on eBay, LinkedIn, or Google: you're not going to build a better search engine than Google, but you can build one that respects privacy, runs without ads, etc. if that's what users really care about.

As articles like this attest, there is a deep resentment on HN with the idea that success requires long hours and slavish commitment to work. But then every article about a successful company bolsters the sense that success requires exactly that kind of sacrifice. As Michael Bloomberg put it in his autobiography, Bloomberg succeeded "because we worked harder."

It's nice to read about the exception like 37Signals, but Apple, Google, Facebook, Dropbox, etc. are not known as places where work-life balance is a priority (and they have done more than anyone technologically to make work ubiquitous). Those mega-successful companies are also the entire reason the VC model (including YC) works, which can be an uncomfortable truth if you work at a venture-backed startup.

Worker productivity has been steadily rising over the last half century, and yet people aren't working less, as originally predicted. You can view that as an indictment of American consumer culture, or you can view it as evidence that we're motivated by something else.

Just my observations.

You're reading the poem too literally if you think it endorses the idea of sacrificing parenting for your startup. The power of the piece is how viscerally it captures the price of that sacrifice without being preachy or whiny like so many blog posts on the subject.

The author is right to question the hype around culture as though it were invented in Silicon Valley, but I think he also falls into the trap of equating culture with superficial qualities that change over time. To paraphrase Built to Last: if you look outside the tech world, there are plenty of companies like Wells Fargo, Nordstrom's, and 3M that been around for over 100 years with very clear cultures and brands--far longer than any one CEO's reign. Of course, the culture changed over that time as measured by social attitudes and management practices, but they are successful because the core company culture survived. At 3M it was innovation and meritocracy. At Nordstrom's it was above-and-beyond customer service.

Don't let cynicism over the company culture of free t-shirts and late nights cloud out the goal of building a culture that lasts longer than you will. Just like parenting, it's what you do, not what you (or your posters) say that matters.

What I really like about the author's approach is that it really answers the first question: "How can we validate that our API is working as intended?"

Writing your tests from the client's perspective actually gives you that certainty. TDD is a powerful tool, but in my experience its evangelists get into overly academic debates about exactly what a "unit" is and how strictly you should adhere to the red-green-refactor steps.

For a really thoughtful and in-depth approach to API TDD I recommend Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman (http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Object-Oriented-Software-Guide...).

I 100% agree that Andrew is one of the smartest people I've ever met, but I for one wouldn't mind if Baidu started to challenge Google in the deep learning space. International competition will be better for American companies than Google's current monopoly on the research and experts.

It's unfortunate that PSD files don't work with git because so much of the development and release process ends up being built around git (e.g. merging code into trunk triggers the continuous integration tests). If designers don't use git, they can end up out of sync with their engineering peers. As the author said, designers who code are at a big advantage, even if they spend most of their time designing.

As a compromise, we had some luck syncing the PSD files with Box and checking in the exported static assets to git, but it was more of a patch than a solution.