Hacker News Reader

whirlycott1on Ask HN: What are good alternatives to PagerDuty?

Chief Architect at PagerDuty here. Sorry this has happened to you! I can accelerate this for you but I’ll need some info to get started. Can you please email me at pjacob@ [PD domain] if you’re still open to PagerDuty?

whirlycott1on How did we get so busy?

That "Overwhelmed" book is excellent. Halfway through it now and it's really altered my perspective on everyday life.

whirlycott1on The Echo Nest Joins Spotify

It's a venture funded business. There are only three outcomes: sell, go public or crash. What were you expecting?

They also said their API will stay up:

http://blog.echonest.com/post/78749300941/the-echo-nest-join...

whirlycott1on Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

Congrats Brian, Tristan and Jim!

whirlycott1on Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

How do people feel about Springpad? I've only used both casually, but it seems like the power users probably have thoughts or advice.

whirlycott1on Amazon Services Hackpad

Certainly, there's a whole ecosystem of add-on services for AWS that improve the whole experience.

whirlycott1on Amazon Services Hackpad

On the monitoring side, we're shortly moving into private beta for Stackdriver. Ping me if you want early access. @whirlycott

whirlycott1on Dan Weinreb passed away

Dan was a super guy and a good friend. Incredibly smart, incredibly experienced, well respected and wonderfully nice to be around.

It's incredibly sad and a big loss for the technology world, but let's not forget to direct our thoughts to his wife and son that he leaves behind.

whirlycott1on Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

One solution (which obviously won't for everybody): live in Massachusetts. We have excellent health insurance plans available here: https://www.mahealthconnector.org/ I'm using one now.

whirlycott1on Airbnb Releases Infinity.js: A Javascript Library for Smoother Scrolling

I tested infinite scrolling on a large site about a year ago and the results were decidedly negative in almost every significant respect according to our A/B testing. Does anybody actually have evidence that infinite scrolling is a good thing?

whirlycott1on Yahoo’s Mojito is Now Open Source

Note to self: try not to make announcements on April 1st lest they get mistaken as jokes.

whirlycott1on Built in Boston: Why Great Entrepreneurs Are Choosing MA to Build Their Startups

The startup scene is not elitist at all. There are lots of easy places to plug in and I think people are generally receptive. Feel free to ping me when you arrive here or email me. I'm easy to find online.

whirlycott1on Google: Focus on the User

I'd say "focus on the server," which seems to be overloaded and currently unavailable.

whirlycott1on Ask HN: How many of you built a profitable startup while having a day job?

I finally had a better understanding of the context of the opportunity and started to think big. And I found people I liked who understood the vision and were willing to back the idea.

The hosting bill back then was ~$100/month since it all ran on a single box so, no, that wasn't a factor. It was a question of opportunity and not costs.

whirlycott1on Ask HN: How many of you built a profitable startup while having a day job?

If you're all presuming that EC2 is some magical pixie dust for reducing the costs of running a large site, that's not the case. We had ~10 EC2 boxes and 15 managed servers at Contegix, CDN, Dynect, email service provider and a few more services thrown in.

It's not any less expensive today because those numbers I gave are current numbers.

whirlycott1on Ask HN: How many of you built a profitable startup while having a day job?

Those are short so I will just answer them here:

* Basic social sharing of products, fancy bookmarklet, following other people and then we quickly moved into some high-end realtime recommendation technology.

* At first, it was just friends and family spreading the word. Our first big jump came after our bizdev guy joined and he did a deal with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to feature us on their homepage and for them to create accounts and share products they were interested in with their fans. We did a bunch of other celebrity stuff. Then, we really grew right after the Facebook platform launched. SEO was also a major factor.

* B2B connections were largely a waste of time.

* 90% affiliate, 10% advertising.

* Funding: I didn't pursue it at first, but smarter people than I saw the bigger opportunity that I hadn't tuned into yet and made introductions.

whirlycott1on Ask HN: How many of you built a profitable startup while having a day job?

Easy: without venture funding, I would have just been a guy sitting on the couch at home with nobody to work on this with. And the hosting costs alone to run a site that large are around $25K/month.

Yes, we had reached 7 figure revenues many years ago, long before the acquisition.

whirlycott1on Ask HN: How many of you built a profitable startup while having a day job?

http://www.quora.com/How-much-was-StyleFeeder-acquired-for

Sure, fashion search/bookmarking is a commodity - that's why those sites don't succeed.

I think discovery services are more nuanced than this and it's easier to understand the value they bring both to users and retailers, so we positioned ourselves as a "personal shopping engine." The goal was to shift users away from the Google search box towards a service geared towards shopping. I'm sure you can see value in that.

Hot company du jour is Pinterest... probably headed towards 3B pvs/month and recently closed a round of funding at $200-250M. Keep an eye on them if you think it's all still a commodity. It just depends on what lens you look through. Part of the challenge is putting aside one's cynicism and trying to positive about what your company _can_ be or _could_ be if people take it seriously.

whirlycott1on Ask HN: How many of you built a profitable startup while having a day job?

Sorta...

http://www.whirlycott.com/phil/2005/10/17/stylefeeder-step-1...

LMK if that's not what you are looking for.

whirlycott1on Ask HN: How many of you built a profitable startup while having a day job?

Good luck to you with your new venture! I'm easy to find online and will be happy to answer any questions if you like.

whirlycott1on Ask HN: How many of you built a profitable startup while having a day job?

I started StyleFeeder in January, 2005, built it into a profitable company of 8 people and sold it to Time Inc in January 2010.

From January, 2005 through May, 2006, I worked on StyleFeeder on the side - while I had a pretty demanding day job, mind you - as I built up the basic business... until I had invested so much time and effort into it that I was maxed out and needed to find a way to work on it full time with the help of others.

I don't see any plausible way that I could have made it into anything significant while at the same time working a day job. I think some people can do it with some businesses, but I think it would have been impossible in my case.

But the bootstrapping phase, yes, I think you can do that while working a day job. That's very common.

More details here:

http://www.whirlycott.com/phil/2011/08/05/stylefeeder-histor...

whirlycott1on Amstrad CPC emulator in Javascript

Wow, I'd love to see an 8256 - that's what I learned to program on. Actually, my first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, but... man, bump the table even slightly and the 16K RAM pack would dislodge and reboot the computer. So, really, it was the Amstrad that I first learned on. Great to see.

whirlycott1on Why not just use an IDE if you want IDE features?

It's not a matter of forgoing unit tests. Example: rename a method to something more clear. It's used 1000x in your codebase. You can do that in probably 5 seconds and know that it's done correctly. It says nothing about how the method functions, but rather that the code hasn't suffered because of this trivial operation.

Another example: you want to abstract a chunk of code into a new method. Easy, select the code, refactor it out and provide a method name. 2 seconds.

You want to reorder the way the arguments appear in the method? 1 second.

You want to know if a variable is in use anywhere? 1 second.

This stuff is painful without an IDE. I don't know what you do in life, but I find this functionality indispensable.

whirlycott1on Nginx sucks at SSL, here's what to do instead

In two years, people will still be saying "nginx + ssl = bad" because of this post even though the problem may well be fully addressed. Google will continue to surface this article even though it may be totally wrong at some future date. That sucks.

whirlycott1on Boston VCs don’t want to let another big one get away

Two years ago, I would have agreed with you about the angel situation - it was pretty dorky and very clumsy. But something big has changed here very recently and the energy is unlike anything you saw when you lived in Cambridge, Paul. I assure you, there is a substantive tangible energy in the air around town these days.

Whether that translates into anything big still remains to be seen.

whirlycott1on Robert Morris, Pioneer in Computer Security, Dies at 78

Sorry to hear this sad news.

whirlycott1on Heroku is down for the third time today

Uh... 99.7% is ridiculously bad if you're doing anything that matters.

whirlycott1on Ask HN: I'm about to open source a project at work. What license should I use?

You didn't indicate what language your app is written in. If you're using Java, I'd recommend steering away from the LGPL since there are some ambiguities there that nobody has ever agreed on.

whirlycott1on Save My Life: an update (Celiac biopsy negative)

The problem with my neighbor was that he was an old (75 or so) stubborn WWII veteran who didn't recognize that he had a problem earlier on until he landed in the hospital and had almost no intestine left. He almost died there since there was a lot of internal bleeding and still, in the US anyway, Celiac isn't well understood by all doctors. He had to change to a gluten-free diet, but basically he couldn't figure out how to eat since everything he ate for his life had gluten in it. This was more of an education and class issue than anything, in my view. Later on in life, he just got more and more depressed about his situation and eventually died just a few days after he broke his hip in hospital while there getting treatment for internal bleeding caused by his Celiac. His family said at that point he had lost his will to live and simply gave up.