jconley

You should test the level cutoff concurrently. Try 5, 30, 100 in a multivariate test. Spend enough ad dollars to get a comfortable level of significance within a week. Roll up the test for everyone. Make sure you don't tell anyone how many free levels they'll get until they hit the wall. Repeat. :)

The Typescript syntax looks shockingly like Adobe's ActionScript. Next up, Adobe releases an ActionScript to Javascript cross compiler?

A lot of commenters here are mentioning Nguyen is pulling in a "CEO Salary". Does anyone actually know this? As a founder CEO with a lot of personal cash in the bank, I would assume he is taking little to no salary. Not that this makes up for his absence in a time of need, but just sayin'. . .

Expectations. Set them wisely.

The Azure Mobile Services look to be a first step for Microsoft to wrap up some of their Azure offerings in a nice little package with a bow on top. Azure goes very much beyond what's mentioned in this article. Azure is something like a mashup of Heroku, AWS, and App Engine. It supports java, php, python, anything you can run in an IIS process, and anything you can run in a Windows/Linux VM. And, the new management interface is HTML/Javascript, not Silverlight.

See: http://www.windowsazure.com/

Clearly the game of Telephone has never been able to have a higher impact than it does today with the speed and scale of the social internet.

But I think there is one question left unanswered: Why are we assuming this story itself is in fact true? Because it's written on a blog? :)

EA knows this type of litigation is probably a waste of time, in terms of shutting down a particular game. But, it is probably at least partially a PR stunt to drive down Zynga's flailing stock price and hurt the long term outside capital outlook for Zynga. Smart move EA.

Yeah, but, "identical behavior" and "strikingly similar" are not Copyright violations.

This is all very reminiscent of the video game industry of the 80's, where everyone was making largely the same games and trying to figure out where they fit in the marketplace. Some lawsuits like this were successful, and others weren't. It's a tough call, though I tend to side with Zynga here.

Copyright on characters, art, text, code, and logos is great. We obviously don't want direct clones. But, Copyright applied to a genre and style of gameplay is ridiculous. We wouldn't have any of the great games we have today if those things were enforceable.

Yes, this is a great approach for javascript code. Usually, like in this case, there is something that will be faster than a round trip to check for if-modified-since or the ETag, which I would assume is used to do the invalidation in this case. Of course, YMMV, and if fastly is close enough to the edge and there aren't very many requests, this kind of optimization won't be required.

There might also be an opportunity to modify what is served from the customer's sites, depending on how all that is architected.

Wow, Firebase needs a new static asset management system. The fact that entire set of static assets have to be purged and can't be served with a 1YR cache timeout is a big red flag. Independent file versioning, whether through a version number or hashing, should be put into play.

This will definitely require more than the two minutes of thought I put into this post, but. . . Large companies like Adobe, Microsoft, etc, often sponsor projects that will serve as good marketing for whatever initiative they're trying to push. Something similar could work once you see projects out there. In the spirit of openness you could setup and initially fund a non profit similar to Apache Software Foundation with a board that decides where the money goes. Doing something like Google's Summer of Code might spur some interesting projects. Or maybe even set aside the cash and do some sort of community voting contest thing. Like: "Build something awesome and win up to X in no-strings-attached cash, voted on by the internet." Put in caveats like it has to become a full time project, etc.

It would probably be valuable to use some amount of that $11m to fund development of interesting applications/startups that showcase Meteor in the real world. For instance, you notice something interesting a community member is building on their own time, but you don't want to focus on it. In my experience close partnerships can work as well as dogfooding, as long as you trust the source and can make the right decisions based on the feedback.

Another thing this OP leaves out is Sparrow was also probably running advertising, and thus burning more capital, to try to get their app store organic coefficient up. The peaks and valleys in the ranking numbers lead me down that train of thought.

I purposely avoid programming and electronic devices for the sake of perspective and brainstorming.

When I'm writing code I'm boxed into production mode. Get. Shit. Done. But, particularly when the work I am doing is self-directed and self-prioritized (aka my own startup or side project), I need hours away to really think about the big picture.

Activities that are away from the bombardment of input of my computer/phone work best for me. Let my mind wander. Think about different ways to approach problems. I often find there are higher priority things to do than whatever I thought I was going to code up next.

How many downvotes did you get? :) Apparently you get downvoted nowadays for having an unpopular opinion. Strange.

Regardless of merit on either side, the attitude presented by the creator of PHP in this post makes PHP and open source in general look bad. Seriously? I still can't believe that's how the situation was handled.

EDIT: Rasmus calls the bug reporter an idiot in the first reply. It's probably some sysadmin that has been tasked with upgrading the infrastructure and really has no idea what to do. So rude. It would take just as long to write: "Sorry about the inconvenience. We changed this undefined behavior for consistency's sake. You could cast the first argument to a float like: '[sample code]' and you'll get the old behavior back. One of our consulting partners [link] could help you with that if you'd like." Instead, Rasmus set the tone that he was superior from the onset.

The acquihire is just the Dot Com Ferrari signing bonus of the new age. Except now you have to prove you can actually take risk and get shit done before they give you the Ferrari. Seems reasonable.

I wonder if he was eating our food. Playdom has three meals a day "up stairs" in that building, where we are headquartered and have an entire floor. There is also another startup incubator in this building. It's pretty funny they just mention AOL in the article.

My 3 yr old kids had exactly the same reaction to a nearly identical scenario. Though, we subscribed to cable TV after my father in law threatened to not come visit any more if he couldn't watch his live sports with the clicker...

Publishers/networks are broken. The industry needs something to happen to it like Steam, then Facebook, and finally Apple did to video game publishers. Take the (old) middle men out of the loop. Let content producers "sell" directly to consumers.

Developers (myself included) worry too much about future unlikely pain and suffering, especially the degree of said suffering. Maybe you spend a few weeks here and there rewriting things. Big Deal.

Scalability and performance is complicated. Unless you KNOW your product will have a big splash, premature optimization will kill your productivity. And you will get it wrong. You will get the implementation wrong. You will optimize the wrong things and not really understand your bottlenecks. Especially if you've never scaled anything before and haven't been bitten twice by all the compromises you have to make.

Distributed systems are hard. Multi-threading is hard. Sharding is hard. CAP is a bitch. If you can scale vertically, do it. Avoid the demons of distributed work until you require them.

Most of the services/apps we build today would do just fine with setups like Mailinator or gasp ACID-compliant data stores.

Don't worry about all these egotistical computer science bigots on HN telling you that you are inferior because you can't wax poetic about the work of the scientists in our field.

Understanding performance and result trade-offs of various sorting algorithms is sometimes useful. But usually not.

Understanding how the nagle algorithm works in TCP is sometimes useful. But usually not.

Understanding how the A* algorithm works is sometimes useful. But usually not.

Understanding how zlib works is sometimes useful. But usually not.

That is the beauty of our field. We can build larger and more complex systems because others have laid the foundation. Actively seek out and learn relevant existing algorithms and libraries when you need them.

All of this stuff may or may not be useful to know. However, it is largely irrelevant when it comes to getting shit done in most bits of software. Sometimes, ignorance is blissfully productive.

What makes you happy? Screw the rest.

It's a pretty good trade-off with a heterogeneous application workload.

There is a "to the metal" mode in ASP.NET/IIS now, mentioned in that article, that lets you use the IOCP thread directly in your applications and avoid that context switch. But, of course, if you do blocking things there it will completely block your web server.

This is almost exactly what ASP.NET and IIS do in recent iterations.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tmarq/archive/2007/07/21/asp-net-thr...

Sounds like we have a development organization that needs to say NO more often and work less, and/or get enough budget to split up and build an entirely new team.

Node enforces a programming model that puts you down the path to extreme vertical scalability, you know, actually using all the hardware you are paying for. CPUs and the kernels that manage them are good at running code. They suck at waiting for things to happen.

Out of the box the callback model can be difficult to wrap your head around. But if you are serious about writing a vertically scalable IO-bound service, it is currently the only option. There are some add-ons to make the code less ugly, but you still have to have the mental model down.

It's a lot like multi-threaded programming, or functional programming. It's a matter being able to visualize the flow and pass context around. This takes time to change the way you think.

If you approach problems in Node like you'd approach a problem in a functional language the spaghetti of callbacks becomes much less of a burden.

For the async haters out there operating at scale. How many of you have farms of machines with idle CPU's, maxed out memory, and practically idle network interfaces? Yeah, I thought so.

I didn't say the industry doesn't care. But, the business model relies on detecting as much as possible and shoving that in your face to get more bookings. I have no doubt you take false positives very seriously at an engineering level.

However, the bottom line impact of a false positive on some indie software has to be negligible.

The business of antivirus, especially, has a huge incentive to shove it IN YOUR FACE that the software is detecting things whether they're false positives or not. This scares people into re-upping their subscription. Most computer users don't understand there can even be such a thing as false positive. For all those support calls you get, there are probably 10x that number that simply take the security software on its word and let it delete/block your application.

An aptly timed popup from the antivirus vendor will appear shortly thereafter asking the user to pre-purchase 2 more years of complete computer protection! Oh, the business of fear mongering. . .

EDIT: This is one of those very hard problems startups should be solving.

This seems to be an issue in every online community, whether news-oriented or not.

I'd like to try an experiment with a less open online geek news community. Social trust-based. Very hard to get an account that can write comments. Must be invited or voted to have that privilege. Very easy to get perma-banned. Though, to avoid appearing as Skull and Bones or some other private club, all comments would still be public. Even as a lurker, the insightful comments are often the most valuable thing on a site like this.

There are successful examples of these communities as simply forums in other fields like video game programming, cars, medicine. I'm a member of one for video game developers and one for car computer tuning. There ought to be a good way to apply it to peer-voted news.

I got 8/10!