Hacker News Reader

davcroon Maddox - I hope SOPA passes

I don't think protesting these companies is a good long term solution. We need a protect DNS act or anti-censorship bill. Big tech has more money and power than hollywood. They should lobby more aggressively.

davcroon Basecamp Next

I agree. I'm a 37s fanboy. Web tech has made a quantum leap in the last year. The difference between rails 3.1 and rails 2.8 is huge. Not to mention html5, css3 and new javascript libraries such as backbone-js. These are game changers. Adapting them means a rewrite.

davcroon Basecamp Next

DHH's Twitter suggests otherwise. He talks about the joy of starting from scratch developing with rails/master. Can't link to it because I'm on a phone.

davcroon Basecamp Next

I am surprised, I thought 37s was against rewrites.

davcroon Salesforce debuts Do.com, a smart social productivity app for small teams

Happy to see that Salesforce is releasing its own apps on Heroku. It shows they are serious about using the platform as it is, instead of turning it into something enterprisey.

davcroon What I learned on a round-the-world yacht race

I really enjoyed reading this. Especially the section about bravery, "the opposite of fear is initiative not courage". Well said. I'm leaving today for a big wall climbing trip and trying to prepare myself mentally for the intense fear that I feel high on the wall. Sometimes that fear will shut me down and I stop climbing even though I'm safe. When this happens I have to keep moving and keep making decisions.

davcroon Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?

Also living off Facebook apps from 07. Biggest downside is having too much free time and working alone. Right now im studying for the MCAT

davcroon Facebook and Heroku

Amazing. Way back in 2007 I taught myself how to code by making small Facebook apps. I started out by editing live PHP files on a shared server from A Small Orange ($3.33 a month!). After a few months I a few apps with traffic around 30k DAU. A Small Orange would automatically shutdown the apps every couple hours. I'd email them and complain about their shoddy hosting service. They'd always respond instantly apologizing and putting the apps back online. After a couple weeks I realized that I had a scaling problem and began learning how to setup a dedicated server. Over the next two years I spent about 80% of my time wrestling with hardware, setting up load balancers, configuring cache and db servers, and other operational nightmares. I had little time or energy to work on improving my apps or building new products.

Then I discovered Heroku. I would have done anything to have this when I started out. The platform teaches (forces) you how to build a scalable architecture. You can try out new ideas for apps for essentially nothing (1 dyno is zero dollars). Since moving to Heroku I spend about 5% of my time working ops. The craziest thing is I've actually saved money since switching from dedicated hardware to Heroku. I was really bad at configuring servers and the stuff I built was inefficient and expensive. Heroku's cloud stacks are optimized better than my old hardware environment.

Heroku's architecture is great for wild traffic swings common with Facebook apps. Well except for their database services. They don't seem reliable or scalable. I prefer RDS.

In sum, Facebook and Heroku is a great starting place for learning to build web apps. I would have done anything to have this tech four yeas ago.

davcroon Sales of obscure game consoles vs. non-iPad tablets

Last night I visited my uncle, a 50 year old rancher in Eastern Colorado. He wanted to show me videos of him calf-roping with a rodeo celebrity. I was very surprised when he brought out a Samsung Galaxy Tablet. This man is extremely computer illiterate and prides himself on ignoring modern technology. But wow did he love that tablet. He used it for everything (doesn't own a computer).

This incident convinced me that non-iPad tablets have a fighting chance. I'd like to see this exercise done again in one year. I believe non-iPads will gain more traction.

davcroon The Hardest Working People on the Planet

  Y'all don't know my struggle 
  Y'all can't match my hustle
  You can't catch my hustle
  You can't fathom my love dude
  Lock yourself in a room doin' five beats a day for three summers
  That's a different world like Kree Summers
  I deserve to do these numbers

  - Kanye West, Spaceship

davcroon Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

About $10k a month from an old Facebook quiz app. I haven't touched the codebase or worked on said app in 8 months.

davcroon Google at their best. Facebook at their best.

Back in the day, I had a Facebook app called Quiz Monster that was utilized by lots of people all over the world. The app had international appeal because quizzes could be written in any language. For fun I coded an internal translation app heavily inspired by Facebook translations. I would type in an English phrase, select a target language. Then user's of that target language would see a dialog box asking "Do you speak english?" If they clicked yes they would be asked to translate the english phrase into their native language. After 25 submissions the program would stop prompting users. This usually took less than 5 seconds. The end result was a list of 25 translations of said phrase. I found the submissions far more reliable than Google Translate and used them to translate my app into many many languages.

davcroon New York Times - Chrome version

They should highlight this to new viewers, I was about to complain about the lack of scrolling.

davcroon MySQL in the cloud at Airbnb

This doesn't work at scale. The IO performance with LVM is terrible. I lost a lot of money trying to implement this. Percona wrote Xtrabackup as a replacement for LVM.

Documentation:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/05/disaster-lvm-...

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/24/xtrabackup-op...

davcroon MySQL in the cloud at Airbnb

They do. I think Heroku is the best thing for new apps / developers. You can launch your app for free. Your app would have to be rather successful (and hopefully profitable) to outgrow their free database plan.

davcroon MySQL in the cloud at Airbnb

I can't imagine life without RDS. I'm a solo developer responsible for a large web app. Before RDS I hosted MySQL on dedicated hardware from Softlayer. I had a dedicated box for the master, one for the slave, and another for storing backups. The DB was about 100GB which made backing up a total nightmare. Mysqldump was too slow, I ended up having to use xtrabackup from Percona. Anyhow it got to the point were I was spending over 50% of my time maintaining the database instead of doing productive things, like building new features for my app.

Then I switched to RDS. I instantly fell in love with snapshots. I love that you can backup your database while it is hot. Sometimes, before doing a scary migration or query I'll take a snapshot just in case. I love that.

Even more amazing is the ability to scale up/down while the database is live. When I was with Softlayer and I needed to migrate to new machines there was always downtime and I always had to pay for both the new machine and the old machine for a small duration of time. Thus migrating would cost a couple grand in lost revenue and servers expenses, not to mention my Friday and Saturday night.

davcroon How I Got My First 2000 Beta Users

Your's truly just applied to be a beta user. The product looks awesome. I would love to try it with my app.

davcroon Making Posterous faster with Varnish page caching

I also like to cache resources as JSON and then render them into a template with Ajax.

davcroon IE9 could be outdated in a few weeks, Sauce Labs says

I started building a new app and was bummed when I discovered Chrome didn't support the Html5 File API. The next day Chrome 6 was released along with said API support. Now the canary version includes WebGL support. These guys are moving FAST. IE9 doesn't stand a chance.

davcroon Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

> The average salary at Goldman Sachs in 2005 was $521,000

Wow. New title suggestion: "Working at Goldman Sachs will earn you enough money to found a startup with zero revenue."

davcroon Acquisition condolences

> Could this be any more self-righteous?

I believe this self-righteous attitude regarding acquisitions comes from being a bootstrapped startup. When you bootstrap your company starts with a valuation of zero. The only way to increase your company's valuation is to start making a profit. For the bootstrapped guys an acquisition offer means that your company has grown to the point where competitors feel threatened. When you are in this position the only reason to sell is if your company is no longer growing (why sell now when your company will be worth more next year?). That is a tragic situation.

The founders who raise money start with an expected valuation greater than zero. Usually these guys can sell well before they ever meet the expected valuation. I mean shit, the startup SocialThing! sold to AOL for $7 million while they were in private beta. In other situations these companies fail to meet the expected valuation and have to sell in order to protect the reputation of the investors and founders. For example Slide sold to Google for $183 million. My company Quiz Monster (bootstrapped) is a competitor to Slide, has a larger userbase, and is worth $1.5 million at best.

TL;DR: Bootstrapped companies have to work harder than venture backed companies in order to receive acquisition offers and thus feel very self-righteous.

davcroon We Built Interactive Seating Maps Using Raphael; Please Give Us Feedback

Wow. Great work guys. I am impressed with the data collection, but even more impressed with the attention to detail given to the interface. I love how big circles represent better deals.

davcroon Kevin Rose steps down as CEO of Digg

But he is leaving at the worst possible time. A big upgrade requires months of follow up work and he should know that.

I'm not usually an internet tough guy, but this is outrageous. If I was a digg engineer I would be livid. The captain sailed into uncharted waters and then abandoned ship. He should protect his crew. He should do everything in his power to save the ship.

davcroon Kevin Rose steps down as CEO of Digg

What a cop out. Kevin Rose has been hyping Digg v4 for months. He should stand behind his product, his vision, his creation. He should go down with a fight.

davcroon Why Bother With Stealth Mode?

I agree with the author. Stealth mode assumes you will deliver a competitive and popular product in your first try. This rarely happens.

davcroon Load Testing our Heroku app

Heroku's dynos scale just fine. As long as you got the money you can keep adding dynos. However Heroku's database services do not scale as easily. I recommend using Amazon's RDS instead. RDS is F'n amazing. You can scale the db up or down and take snapshots without any downtime.

davcroon Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

Quiz Monster and Friend Interview have a bigger userbase both international and in the US than Slide's apps. Granted I'm only looking at FB here, but IMO that is the only social network that matters. I work solo and believe that my apps could be run with just one educated rails developer. Isnt that a better buy than a smaller app that needs 100 eningeers?

And I'm not some special case here. There are a handful of Indy fb devs with bigger apps than mine.

This deal makes zero sense to me.

davcroon Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

This does not make sense.

I am the developer of two Facebook apps, Friend Interview and Quiz Monster. I would argue those two apps are more valuable than Slide's and there is no way they are worth $182 million.

What is Google buying?

davcroon Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

Way back in 2007 I launched my first successful Facebook app on a shared server from asmallorange.com that cost me $3 a month. Said Facebook app was making $50 a day when it outgrew that "server". I upgraded to a dedicated server with Softlayer that cost $400 a month. Said app was generating $3k a day in ad rev when it outgrew that server. Also I'm not some rockstar coder. Back in those days I didn't even know to index the join columns in MySQL. Had I done that I could have squeezed more traffic through one box. After this experience Ive decided that the majority of web apps can be launched for free.

davcroon Andy's Most Useful Knots

I think the list is too long. You can do 99% of things with 3 knots. The ones I use in order of frequency:

1. Truckers hitch - for tying anything to the roof of my car or the bed of my pickup.

2. Bowline - for attaching anything to the end of a rope.

3. Fishermans - for tying two ropes together, for backing up a bowline.

I also like the following knots.

Clove Hitch - provides an adjustable anchor. I use this rock climbing and rafting. For rafting I use it to tie the raft to shore. I can easily adjust the length of the anchor when the river level fluctuates.

Double Figure 8 - the standard for rock climbing. I prefer the bowline because it is easier to untie.