Hacker News Reader

nfmon How a load-balancing bug led to worldwide Chrome crashes

"That quota service experienced traffic problems today due to a faulty load balancing configuration change. That change was to a core piece of infrastructure that many services at Google depend on. This means other services may have been affected at the same time, leading to the confounding original title of this bug."

Why the downvote?

nfmon How a load-balancing bug led to worldwide Chrome crashes

Had significant issues with the Chrome Web Store yesterday - images not loading from some content servers, extensions failing to install ('The extension file was not a CRX'). I guess this was the cause.

nfmon Get a review of your website. Launched today.

Yeah, the 'Add comment' link is pretty confusing. I'd consider moving the '1 comment' text below the comment box, and display the truncated comment text instead. It felt very much like the comment I'd entered had just disappeared with the current implementation.

nfmon Google cuts Cloud Storage prices another 10% after Amazon S3 price cut

How can they drop their prices by 30% and still make anything? I was under the impression that the margins for S3 and Cloud Storage weren't that high.

nfmon How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

In theory, yes, but if you have a profitable business with a 1% margin by definition it already has to be absolutely giant (e.g. Amazon) to be making money. And to reduce costs at this scale is harder than increasing sales.

nfmon How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

The problem is that reducing costs doesn't typically scale. If you want to grow a businesses profit significantly, you need to increase sales. It's entirely reasonable to double your sales. It's pretty difficult to halve your costs.

nfmon An Amazon Engineer Had a Little Idea That Turned Into a Billion-Dollar Business

Wish I hadn't started reading the article before the HN comments!

nfmon InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonPainter

There's nothing convenient about having 78 character class names in your code, whether you typed them in manually or not!

nfmon :syntax Off

To each their own, but I'm having real trouble imagining that this could actually be helpful!

I'm sure it's possible to get used to, but I doubt I'm the only one that remembers when they first turned syntax highlighting on, and the difference it made to my productivity then.

nfmon Show HN: Userfox (YC S11) — Better Welcome Emails

Nitpick - http://userfox.com/about/ 404s.

nfmon [dead]

Seems to have been fixed... but red much?!

nfmon Patio11 launches his lifecycle emails course

I can't wait to be able to compensate patio11 financially for all the actionable, money making help he's given me for free. Sign me up.

nfmon Vim as you IDE

I respectfully disagree. Choosing to use a graphical IDE or a terminal based editor is a matter of personal preference; it's foolish to proclaim one or the other as universally superior. There are pros and cons to each, and they are fundamentally different in many ways.

Yes, vim is old, but it's not a web browser - it's for manipulating text (or in our case, code), the process of which has changed little in the last 30 years.

Before writing vim off, pair program with someone who is masterful at it and you'll see some if its many pros first hand. Yes, this may take (quite literally) years of use and customization to achieve, but no, it's certainly not something you can write off as obsolete or inferior.

nfmon Eric Ries' Lean Startup Course from SXSW 2012

Colloquial use: "We were working on an enterprise database solution, then pivoted to a social network for toddlers."

Intended use: "We were working on a time tracking application for freelance designers, and pivoted to making it for lawyers instead."

There are lots of kinds of pivots (customer segment, platform, channel, value capture, engine of growth etc) - in essence, it's about taking what you've learned so far, and using that knowledge to tweak your approach to solving the problem you're working on.

Eric Ries' 'The Lean Startup' is the canonical reference for this stuff.

nfmon Github: Notifications & Stars

You should check out BugHerd if this is a common use case you have: http://bugherd.com

nfmon The inconsistencies in your site's color palette

The converse is that if you're not using a preprocessor, it's very easy to 'adjust' a color and miss a few instances of it.

nfmon How to be a growth hacker

Interesting post, but the title (and subject) is actually " Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing". The 'How' is absent.

nfmon Why I’m helping startup founders

HN has detection algorithms for voting rings and won't count votes in such cases. If a post is getting upvotes, it's typically legit.

nfmon The long and sordid history of the user-agent HTTP header field

I think the GP was referring to weeping with joy.

nfmon Github Raises $100 Million

They aren't in debt. They sold something like one seventh of their company. That's not enough to lose control of the company in any meaningful sense.

nfmon Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

I don't think any of the major web browsers do semantic versioning. Mozilla doesn't increase the major version number for every patch either - they increase it for every scheduled release (ie every 6 weeks). Patch releases (typically security fixes) do increment the patch number.

nfmon Treating JavaScript like a 30 year old language

On a related note, breaking statements into multiple lines can screw with your VCS workflow immensely.

It's not a problem if you're doing something sensible like extracting nested function calls, but inserting newlines into simple statements will make tools like `git blame` a lot less useful.

nfmon Firefox Heatmap - How People Use Firefox's Interface

Interesting, but note that it's a 2010 study. See also https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/testcases/betaui

nfmon LeakedIn

It doesn't, LinkedIn didn't salt the passwords.

nfmon Google Engineer on Australia's slow growing Silicon Valley

IIRC, you can't do this for subscription based services - PayPal won't let non-US account holders store CCVs.

Are you doing recurring billing with PayPal? If so, I'd love to know how!

nfmon Responsive Mode and Layout View in Firefox 15

"Interesting, but not sure how this is different than resizing the browser..."

I'm pretty sure it isn't any different, but it's great to have this built in to the Web Developer tools instead of having to use a bookmarklet/website/resize the whole browser window to do this.

nfmon [Kickstarter] Better coffeescript compiler

This is a dup of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3840718.

nfmon Google Drive

I don't like being pedantic, but a sync'ed copy isn't a backup. It might protect against hardware failure, but it won't help against accidental deletion or corruption.

I'm not sure if GDrive has file versioning/restoration built into it or not, but there is an important distinction to be made here.

nfmon Why I Can't Use PayPal To Buy Your Product

In a related vein: Try to change your name for your PayPal account. In Australia (and I assume globally), last I checked you had to fax 100 points of ID to them. Setting up an account requires nothing. I could wait until my CC expires and open a new account in my new name, but I've tied my account to my bank account too.

nfmon Add SPDY support to your Apache server with mod_spdy

Can't wait for SPDY to be implemented for nginx. There's been discussion about it several months ago, but I haven't heard anything since.

Does anyone who's involved with nginx have more info?