fredsters_s

Agreed. Hopefully OpenStack or similar gets some serious traction and the IaaS players move closer to simply being providers of hardware. The likelihood of that happening seems quite slim while AWS holds such a strong position in the market though. And a significant chunk of AWS's success is due to their innovation in the software layer.

SSL support is available - http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/administration/ssl/ and latency can be an issue. Most drivers support routing read queries to the lowest latency slave. Again, obviously this is not for everyone. It's always a trade-off. Hence the title: rough guide. The point of this post was to increase awareness.

That's just it - they're supposedly separate - but each zone is on the same physical site albeit seperated. Unlikely to break at the same time, but more likely than two separate locations. Just google for aws multi zone outages.

Anyway - the article isn't suggesting to use four datacentres, it's trying to make people aware of the simple steps that can be taken to avoid failure.

Yep! You could also build the AMI's using a build / CI server each time you push if you wanted. Once you've nailed the process and are used to how long it takes you'll love it.

There's always a trade off between the cost of failing and the cost of engineering it out. The problem comes with the lack of understanding about where and how apps and intrastructure fail and how to avoid it. If you misunderstand the problem, you'll probably misjudge it.

You pose an interesting question that I want to see answered: do users of B2C sites actually care when the site is down? Does it decrease MAU? Your intuition is that it does not, but I'd love to see some data.

I think it's because most web developers don't ever have to understand how this stuff works. It's sometimes easier to just throw hardware at a problem than engineer it better. However, understanding what you can do is key imho.

Yep, there will always be a tipping point when your downtime becomes worth engineering out - this obviously varies per app. Understanding what's available to you is also important - I've met quite a few people who have no idea about some of the features available on AWS. I'm not sure if this is just a problem with AWS's docs / console, or just knowing what to look for in the first place.

So before anyone else points this out - yes our app is currently hosted in a single zone, and no we do not plan on keeping it this way! (we're currently in early Alpha)

"Where are the founders of the next GE? The next IBM?"

Not doing startups.

As a web designer that primarily uses Photoshop, I'd say it's a great idea. Photoshop is horrible for web design. So horrible that I design purely in the browser now. This is going to be a nice addition to my workflow for when I want to include something shiny.

There's no way this won't kill Photoshop for web design

Do you use Photoshop? It's analogous to the hotkeys there.

This is cool - but how is it different to Chosen?

so fun!

Agreed! Thanks for flagging it. Removed.

+1

  "unavoidable"

:-|

Epic! Alpha preview for Alums? ;)

Coercion is not a precondition of abhorrence. Even if it was, the publicity value of the show could be seen as leverage with which to coerce potential participants.

The point is, this is a predatory act and it should not be misunderstood as 'fair' or 'ok'.

How is that different from American Idol?

How is everyone condoning this?! This is fucking insane.

The logic is NOT we give you free advertising -> you owe us monies. The logic is you provide amusing filler in the context of a targeted program and we sell advertising the audience of that show. Just like every other show on our network.

So any return ABC would get from this is logically abnormal, and I would argue morally abhorrent. On what other show does this happen? Would American Idol demand rights to future royalties of all auditioning acts? Would that be seen as fair?

Fascinating stuff. I guess the grey ecosystem is evolving on Twitter. A look at his followers - https://twitter.com/#!/Swagstro/followers - implies nearly all are fake just from their descriptions... not the '18 luv sex lol' fake but some sort of algorithmically generated description that seems legit until you compare it with all his other followers. Most are a riff on the following: "Thinker. Writer. Bacon buff. Typical music ninja. Extreme entrepreneur. Web geek. Social media fan. Devoted reader. Subtly charming troublemaker".

Anyone know anything more about this? Are there companies overtly selling followers?

Why? Because Moskovitz's aims would have been better served if they had gone to work for Facebook instead? Seems like a pretty shaky argument to me.

Props for shipping. But how are you adding functionality? It's really not that hard to click links.

Tangent: all this 'redesign HN' stuff is misguided. HN is brilliantly designed. It's sparse, it's not pretty, but it would be hard to improve the design from a UX point of view. Good design is about thought, not about shininess.

"the product is valued enough to not be summarily taken out back and shot"

wait - you think this is actually true?

Awesome job guys!

Definitely fits the 90:9:1 theory of consumption : curation : creation. I wonder to what extent the startup community or entrepreneurs in general represent an abnormal distribution of that ratio...

Interesting, but I'm not sure I agree. In my experience education - especially post-grad - tends to push people further and further down the funnel of specificity. By that logic, you're much more likely to have a macro startup idea - like Gumroad for instance - without any grad-level education.