nfm

It always puts me on edge when people choose to write their web-app in a particular language or framework 'because performance'. The C# VM is by no means slow but the fact that StackExchange is running off 9 front-end servers under pretty light load is testament to the fact that for regular web app workloads, it's just premature optimization to pull out the 'performance' card.

It's essentially regression testing. Rubyspec specs out the behaviour of Ruby according to what MRI implements, so any failure is a change in behaviour from the initial implementation. Most of the time this is undesirable/unintentional.

Don't forget InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonPainter (http://javadoc.bugaco.com/com/sun/java/swing/plaf/nimbus/Int...)

It is type coercion. The runtime converts both operands to the same type before making the comparison (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...). This is also true of !, <, and friends.

Other operators in JavaScript may behave more intuitively than ==, but I don't think you can really make a good case for JavaScript's type coercion being 'unsurprising'.

`" " == 0 == false`, and `"" == 0 == false`, but `" " != ""`.

`"Infinity" == Infinity`, but `"true" != true`.

I could go on for a while like this.

> Part of Spotify’s pitch to the music industry has been that its royalties — as low as 0.6 cent per stream, according to the company — will accrue to significant levels as the service grows

> “Wake Me Up” had been played 168 million times in the United States on that service, yet yielded only $12,359 in publishing royalties, of which he kept less than $4,000.

These numbers don't remotely add up - they're off by 2 orders of magnitude. What gives?

HTTP/1.1 will be around for approximately forever.

Scalable, reliable Postgres is absolutely possible. This comment is unfounded.

If you truly need reliability, of course you'll have to invest some time into setting it up. If this isn't something you're interested in, just go with a hosted postgres instance like Heroku.

It's just a ruby script, and it works on Linux/Mac/Windows.

It could be valuable to have a feature grid kind of page where you compare your platform to the built-in subscriptions in Braintree and Stripe, to provide an explicit list of the things you can handle that they can't.

Your pricing looks extremely generous, especially because you only take a percentage fee. This could be good (an edge over the competition when signing up new companies) or bad (unsustainable). I expect your lead time for new customers growing from $0/month to > $10k/month will be _long_ (ballpark 12 - 24 months), which could be problematic depending on the distribution of new vs established companies you end up with.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6374945

This is a follow up from https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rubyonrails-security... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7705415).

Additional attack vectors have been discovered, so you may be vulnerable even without "*action" globbing in your routes. All users are advised to upgrade to a fixed version or apply the supplied patches.

Please note the vulnerability has now been amended. "There are additional attack vectors and as a result all users are advised to upgrade to a fixed version as soon as possible."

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rubyonrails-security...

They are functionally equivalent, but the longhand versions are clearly more readable/greppable/google-able. The longhand versions have the exact same benefits as calling a variable eg. `target_file` instead of `a`.

I like this approach but there is a trade-off - you're an SQL injection away from losing your secrets, as opposed to a RCE or file reading bug when they're stored in .env. SQL injection bugs are more likely.

Strongly disagree. Yes, there will be competitors, and there will be competitors that cost less than you. However, if you're targeting business customers they won't care about the difference between $500/month and $400/month, or even $500/month and $25/month, so long as they are happy with the product and level of service they are receiving.

This is a real attack vector. It's called a timing attack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack

Permalink: http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/03/18/when-carl-icahn-ran-a-comp...

According to their blog post (https://netguru.co/blog/posts/code-ping-pong-with-dhh) DHH is in.

Maybe we can hope for an MRI/YARV scenario!

Never used Erlang nor considered it, for the same reason C programmers don't start rewriting their code in Python: it's just not the right tool for the kind of stuff I work on.

This is a lesson I have learned the hard way... You should know the answer this question before you start work on anything. If you're having trouble figuring out who your product is for, or how you're going to get in touch with prospects in an affordable way, you may have picked the wrong thing to work on.

That said, it's definitely possible to recover from being in this position. It can just take a long time.

You're welcome :) By the way, I've found running things through eg. UserTesting.com will help reveal this kind of info in a way that you won't necessarily get via feedback from friends or HN. Lot's of facepalm moments but it's definitely worth doing to get a new perspective on how people perceive your marketing and product.

I'd never heard of this site before today. This looks cool and like something I would actually want to use, and I think you've got a very promising way to demo your product while doing content marketing.

That said, I had absolutely no idea how to make it work. I clicked around, and recognized the effects of some of the things I was doing, but it didn't really make sense to me and I'm still confused. If you're trying to acquire users from this kind of page, I'd recommend having a giant call to action somewhere at the top of the page with a link to some introductory explainer material.

Sure, some of these examples are pretty academic (eg ` Array.isArray( Array.prototype )`). But can you truthfully say you never get bitten by basic JS arithmetic fails, given how many ways it's possible to accidentally coerce numbers to strings?

"At the bottom of every status page, we include a small, “Powered by StatusPage.io” link. While we felt uneasy about this at first, one of our mentors encouraged us to include the link and it has worked incredibly well... One-third of new signups and customers originate from our existing customers' status pages."

Love it. We've had a few moments like this at Paydirt (http://paydirtapp.com/). As engineers, we tend to have hangups about little details like this that customers genuinely don't give a second thought to, and they can be a means to massive (and multiplicative!) business wins.

I think this only really happens if you have a large existing audience that you funnel into the product, or you're selling it on a platform that delivers either launch traffic, or "Trending" traffic (eg. Google Play, iOS App Store).

What's your process for launching your products?

I was under the impression this kind of thing - a stack of links at the bottom of content, with the same links duplicated across many posts/domains - was automatically penalized through the floor.

Great idea. I think the pricing is way too cheap for on-site though. You might be able to get away with < $50 for some kind of screenshare, but there is definitely a market for what you're selling and the current market is priced way higher.

usertesting.com costs $49/participant and there's nothing interactive about it - you submit a list of questions, and they send you a ~15 minute video of someone testing your product. Your service is more valuable, and your costs will be higher too.