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Review my Startup: Pitch - stop re-writing the same emails | ScottWhigham: 1) Volume on video demo should be higher2) Better mic on video demo - got tired of hearing sibilant ssssssssss within 20 seconds3) Better demo4) Less compression on audio on video demo5) Does Tawheed really want his actual email address in your demo video?6) I see the need but don't get it. Why is it free? How will you make money? If you don't make money, then you close. If you close, I've wasted x hours of work. |
How did you come up with your startup idea? | seven: One project I am working on is the reimplementation of some old software I wrote 8 years ago. It worked very well but had some conceptual problems and got very bloated. New version offers more or less the same, but in a more modern way using modern standards and fixing some old problems.
I had the idea to do this out of frustration about the old code and that we had no nice way to build custom systems.
So I wrote a prototype that covers most features of the old system. Prayed to the flying spaghetti monster that my old client would love the idea and give me some cash for development and to provide me with his sales infrastructure in exchange for shares. Everything went well. :)The other project I am working on is a mix of existing technologies with very domain specific features for a very targeted niche. The idea came up because I wanted my girlfriend to quit her job and work together with me. (solid relationship since 10 years; we already worked together) So we started brainstorming about how to combine my IT skills with her knowledge about the specific niche to make something that could help people do their job better.
The initial idea has nearly nothing to do with our current product, but lead to discussions with our target group and more ideas about how to make something nice. |
Where to find reputable legal advice for web startup? | javahava: Yes, I needed to clarify this would be for the U.S. Thanks. |
How did you come up with your startup idea? | gruseom: People at a company complaining about how existing software didn't do what they want. |
How did you come up with your startup idea? | chegra84: Three ways:
1) I see something I like and want it done better.
2) Randomly, enters my head. Like connecting stuff. This happens alot when I walk.
3) Observing a need
4) Testing out a new theory :D(I should stop doing these they are unprofitable)
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You should try to observe yourself when you are creative and what you do. That's how I found out, that creativity is anchored for me when walking[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning]. |
share your copyright/patent nightmares with us | mlLK: Related (or why I'm asking): http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/bqcut/ask_rweb_d...Related submissions: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+intitl... |
share your copyright/patent nightmares with us | hxa7241: I would have thought http://www.techdirt.com/ was one of the richest veins to mine. |
Any Successful Startups using Microsoft Dotnet Stack? | csomar: So far what I knew are StackOverFlow.com and PlentyOfFish.com1- The stackoverflow engine is a great example. Also you have the power of SilverLight, if you want to make your application interactive.2- You are not really locked in, you should just pay the server licenses. Expensive, but that's the price you pay for using MS products. Read Jeff Articles about StackOverFlow, they have mentioned licensing and its matters.3- Not So Cool? You already said, it has an awesome IDE? |
What are the best free and pay web charting libraries? | alexjmann: I've used the free version of AM Charts. They look nice and work well.http://amcharts.com/ |
From what countries do people use HN beside USA? | Y6b: UAE, Dubai :-) |
What is scarce now - what will our descendants be addicted to? | ascuttlefish: Hopefully enlightenment. |
What is scarce now - what will our descendants be addicted to? | knieveltech: Craftsmanship. |
review my startup concept - web achievements | yourabi: I think you are on the right track with the idea - but I see some problems with some of the specifics.1) A lot of companies are paranoid and will want to run this inside their network/firewall. You should develop that option (look at GitHub firewall for example)2) What incentive do platform providers have in pooling achievements / users - I don't see that happening. I would focus on a white box rewards platform - think SimpleGeo for rewards.I wouldn't focus on having Webchiever being the destination for leader-boards ...etc because then you are competing with the people you are allegedly providing a service for. Become the plumbing, and if you do it well people will pay.Cool idea. |
review my startup concept - web achievements | barmstrong: I've never tried adding achievements to my app...is it difficult to get right?The services I like to outsource are the ones that are hard enough on their own...mail server (sendgrid), possibly hosting (heroku), recommendations (directededge). Some of them which are relatively easy, like comments with disqus, have been successful, but there is an added benefit here of letting users comment with the same account all blogs they visit.Are achievements hard enough that users should offload them to you? Will they have to define various rules using some sort of interface you develop? I'm skeptical at first glance, but have been wrong before. |
review my startup concept - web achievements | franck: This reminds me of this project by Jeff Lindsay (progrium) : http://www.getachievements.comI'm not sure it's still active though. |
review my startup concept - web achievements | Sidnicious: You watchedhttp://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-bo..., didn't you? |
Pricing models, stand-alone software vs. enterprise what works? | pedalpete: Without knowing your business, or the environment you are in, it is difficult to really make a recommendation here.I would recommend picking-up the book Crossing the Chasm or Inside the Tornado, both by Geoffrey A. Moore, if you haven't already looked at them.You mention that you've gained pretty good traction both and you're getting close to mazimizing the 'in-between market'. I suspect you are saying that you aren't finding as many premium stand-alone customers, and aren't finding yourself jumping up to the enterprise purchaser level.Is that correct?By the sounds of things, you've got the premium product in the stand-alone purchase, and with the right marketing, maybe you could be the defacto purchase in that market.At the dollar ranges you are talking about, are businesses really cost sensitive? If your product is truly that much better than competitors, you should be able to up sell the extra $50. |
review my startup concept - web achievements | OmarIsmail: Congrats! I had this idea about 8 months ago and knew that it was going to exist in some form on the web within 12 months. Now there are two services that are entering the space, so that is very cool.However, my original idea seemed to be a combination of both webchiever and iactionable. And to be honest, I think both are necessary to make a successful service. Since founders of both companies are in this thread, I'll just lay out my thoughts here for you guys to incorporate as you see fit.Fundamentally, achievements and points are a form of motivation/incentive that the designers of software/service can use to reward behavior they want the users to do. Now this has one really big assumption, that the users of the system actually care about the points and badges. For my high level thoughts around motivation check out my blog post (http://mysimplemindedworld.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/a-framew...)So going by Bartle's classification, the people that are motivated by points for their own sake are the achievers. And for some sites, having a few achievers do a heck of a lot is enough. However, if your leaderboard only has 5 people on it, the competitive aspect isn't really there and so achievers aren't AS motivated, and you don't get the Socializers/Explorers.So you want to have quite a few people part of your leaderboards to spur competition, set standards, and show off their stuff. However, for small sites that can be difficult.The solution? Aggregate points/achievements across many sites/services. Follow the standard of Xbox Live and have the meta-game of overall Gamerscore be a big motivator. So while that one particular site may not have been that interesting to you, if you know that you can increase your overall NetScore by another 100 by contributing to it, well that's just the extra bit of motivation you need to do.You then have a centralized identity that people can show off. You also then have a service that sites will want to use to motivate their users. Of course you have the standard chicken/egg problem, however there are enough sites that want to outsource this kind of point/badge system you'd probably have it cracked.Here are the specifics for my idea... which I liked to call SocialScore.There are two point systems at play. There is what i like to call the "internal" point system, and then the "meta" point system.Internal points are applicable only for a specific site, and are used to power a site's leaderboards. So let's use twitter as an example. If they signed up to SocialScore they could create an event such as "get a follower" and that would be worth 100000 points. Writing a tweet they could make 5000 points. Following someone is 10000 points. Whatever, totally arbitrary and up to the site owner. It's only used for insite comparisons anyway. You then have a leaderboard widget system, and also show leaderboards on the central site.You then have a badge system. Just like Xbox Live each site that signs up gets a fixed number of SocialScore points, and an upper limit of badges they can give out. Maybe you start with 100 SocialScore points you can give out (per user) and 20 badges. Of course there needs to be a verification/approval system in place to make sure people don't just register a ton of fake sites to get lots of badges. The integrity of the system is very important.The interface/rule engine I concepted would consist of the following. A site master would register a series of events with the SocialScore system. So would register "Get a follower=1000 points" and the system would return an event id. And there could be an arbitrary number of events a site could register.The site master would then create a set of requirements on which to award a particular badge. For example To Get Badge "Follow Master" a user needs to have event id XXXX happen 100 times. Or you could get a bit more complicated and be event id X happens 10 times and Y happens 5 times and Z happens 30 times. You get the idea.Now on the programming end you have a very very basic API that just registers events. It's just one call "registerevent(userhash,eventid)" and the SocialScore system handles all the point calculations, badge awarding, etc.The SocialScore site can then provide a bunch of widgets that client sites can embed such as leaderboards, profile-badges, etc. I'd even have the SocialScore system have a javascript library that would handle notifications, etc. But that's expansion stuff.The business model here is great too... your first block of SocialScore points and badges are free, if you want to be able to award more SocialScore points and badges site masters have to pay for them. I disagree with the per-event payment model that Webchievements is pursuing since there's too much risk for the site. Also, if the aggregator site gets enough traction there are sponsorship and advertising opportunities. There's the obvious regular advertising, but then there's the cooler advertising where sites will want to be promoted to users of SocialScore.So there's my original design laid out. It seems to be more ambitious than what both IActionable and Webchievements are going after... I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. |
Open-source PDF Viewer for my Website? | zbanks: I know it's not OSS, but scribd.com is a really useful service. They have a decently powerful API that lets you upload the doc and let them handle hosting, rendering, metadata, etc.I'm not sure if this will work for you, but sites like drop.io seem to use it pretty well. |
review my startup concept - web achievements | johnrob: Problem - if a new game shows up, it doesn't provide a fresh new leaderboard for the achiever to climb. |
Need Advice for a Literary Magazine | samratjp: Hmm, on first thought, checkout this hot thread going on right now:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499 It's about dead tree version of Hacker News. I am sure these guys are going through the same questions as you are.Well, without Ads, it's going to be a tough sell (unless you will charge your members?) In any case, you should start off maybe online first? That way you can gauge your market's interest first and then perhaps go on from there. |
Open-source PDF Viewer for my Website? | stse: Don't know if I would call it really good, but pdf2swf might be a start.http://www.swftools.org/ |
Open-source PDF Viewer for my Website? | asnyder: I can't think of any OSS, but Vuzit makes a pretty good one that you can add and embed in your website without having to host your files with them http://vuzit.com/. |
review my startup concept - web achievements | hkuo: Just from my rudimentary math skills, I'm not sure the pay-per-achievement assignment would work. As an example, let's say I have 10,000 active users per month, and from their activity, they achieve 10 things per month. At one penny per, I would be shelling out $1000 per month for your service, $12,000 per year. Simply put, hell no. Perhaps, a better pricing plan would be in tiers with fixed costs, and notifications if one were nearing the limit of their chosen tier?Also, for that $1000 alone, I could probably hire a developer to build an achievement system on my own server for my own sites. Just curious, what would the incentive be for me as a site owner to pay for your service as opposed to building my own? |
Any Successful Startups using Microsoft Dotnet Stack? | kobs: Writely (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writely#History), one of the precursors to Google Docs, was written using the .NET stack. http://scobleizer.com/2006/03/09/congrats-to-writely-for-usi... |
Where to find reputable legal advice for web startup? | samratjp: Though I don't have any personal experience dealing with this in the real world, I do have an answer for those with access to an academic institution. Usually, the big research universities (in the U.S. that I know of) have a technology transfer department and they can be very resourceful. Of course, this depends highly on your university...And if your university has a business school, they might be helpful too. |
Open-source PDF Viewer for my Website? | bmills: I built this for a project I'm working on. http://github.com/Benmills/pdfizeIt's a jquery plugin that uses the google pdf viewer. Here is a demo: http://files.bmdev.org/pdfize.html |
Need Advice for a Literary Magazine | JacobAldridge: Basically, a magazine can make money either by selling Content to its readers (what newspapers do, see also http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Why-conte...) or by selling access to its readers to other people with content (often known as advertising).The more readers you have, the more revenue you can generate from either, or both, methods.I don't have actual other suggestions, but figure that's your framework. How else can you charge for access to your content? or access to your readers? |
How did you come up with your startup idea? | samratjp: It's really like sowing seeds and waiting for it grow mature. You will get some weeds, but that's part of the process.For example, I would consider some ideas and just when it's getting so good, I stop thinking about it to leave on a high note. This usually happens when you least expect it at places such as the shower or during freeway hypnosis. |
Open-source PDF Viewer for my Website? | NLark: Google docs viewer has worked well for me:
https://docs.google.com/viewerExample here:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/embeddable-google-d... |
Help us seed NewsTilt (YC 2010) with thoughtful comments. | pbiggar: If the first comments on NewsTilt are the kind of quality we've come to expect on HN, we may be able to socially engineer others into leaving really good comments too. Help set a good example.As a bribe, I promise to write about how well that works. |
Help us seed NewsTilt (YC 2010) with thoughtful comments. | ajkirwin: I have to say, I don't like this site. I run at 1680x1050 and when the actual meat of the site only takes up a fraction of my screen width..:/ |
Help us seed NewsTilt (YC 2010) with thoughtful comments. | jgrahamc: Got a comment from a 'silver surfer' in my family that it wasn't obvious how to log in to comment. Need to do something to make it obvious to people who've never used Facebook connect before. |
Help us seed NewsTilt (YC 2010) with thoughtful comments. | riklomas: From a design point of view, I think it's really great, but there's a couple of tweaks I would make. First, I would ditch the Zapfino script font, it's quite distracting and jars with the other fonts. Secondly, I would slightly increase the leading on the main body text (something like line-height: 150% works quite well for me). Apart from these small things, I think it looks lovely, keep up the good work! |
Help us seed NewsTilt (YC 2010) with thoughtful comments. | axod: Just my 2c, please rethink most of the fonts. Not a fan of those.Also I just don't understand what NewsTilt is :/ It just looks like a blog with some articles... Is there a clear description of what's going on somewhere?For example I see an article reviewing the movie "How to train your dragon". Why would I only read it on NewsTilt? Isn't it more likely I'd google for reviews and check out a few? I don't see how it fits into peoples behaviors atm... Sort of seems like an online version of a hardcopy paper, but without the hardcopy paper bit :/ |
Help us seed NewsTilt (YC 2010) with thoughtful comments. | avinashm: some random observations:Please rethink about fonts. I would prefer "continue reading" button on right side. "News" link can be little more prominent; centered content on "news" page.on the side note: are you going to let user to customize/filter/personalize "news" page? |
Help us seed NewsTilt (YC 2010) with thoughtful comments. | ErrantX: Why when I log out does it also log me out of Facebook?? Is that a limitation of FBConnect?EDIT: I see that it is a limitation.. that sucks. |
Help us seed NewsTilt (YC 2010) with thoughtful comments. | AmericanOP: I thought you guys were syndicating stories to reach the audiences who would comment on human interest stories, etc. |
Help us seed NewsTilt (YC 2010) with thoughtful comments. | leif: The icon you've got there (tiny newspaper on what looks like a mac monitor) is completely unclear to me. What are you trying to say with it?I don't know if this is true for anyone else, but for me the header nav stuff is HUUUUUUGE and could use some aesthetic work. For reference, here's what I see: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v624/adlaiff6/2010-04-14-1... It is smaller on other pages.I will try to have more idea-based/conceptual/critical comments for you soon, kinda running out the door at the moment. |
Help us seed NewsTilt (YC 2010) with thoughtful comments. | jackfoxy: Disappointment. The layout is well done. In fact my eye was immediately drawn to the leads of the first 3 stories, from which I concluded I was faced with 3 more opinion pieces.Disappointment because the web, tv, and all entertainment media are already drowning in post-post-modern opinion. Eric Schmidt wants Google to get opinions you don't share in your face (somehow). Actual news gathering organizations have had their budgets slashed. What little objective reporting exists is mostly rewrites from wire services.I suppose with a name like "Tilt" I should have expected more "Look at me! I've got a great venue and I've got an opinion!"Objective journalism would have been a nice surprise.**Disclaimer: Like I said, I was drawn to the story leads that first displayed. All reactions are drawn from that experience, i.e. I did not go further. |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | duck: I would check out Visualizing Data - http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514556Also, I enjoy this site http://flowingdata.com. |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | mcantor: I've read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte, and I think it would benefit you even though you are not talking about manually generating charts. For example, he talks about how it's easy to be misleading with a chart based on how you calibrate the axes, which is something you'd still need to do even with dynamically generated visualizations. |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | alilja: Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book. He writes not about how to make your graphs look pretty, but how to display vast quantities of data and distill them down into useful graphics that communicate themselves effectively.He provides examples of good and bad graphs, but more importantly, explains what exactly it is that makes those examples good and bad, and further generalizes it so you understand how to make good visualizations. If you don't want to shell out the money for it, it's probably at your library (remember those?).Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information unless you have some background or are willing to learn about it -- it tends to be highly technical and is probably too complex for what you're trying to do. Basic stats might help you, but not as much as Tufte will. |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | ajdecon: To me it sounds like you want to be using a tool like Matlab or matplotlib in python to automatically generate various types of plots from your data. There are a wide variety of books about Matlab, and I don't really know one better than the rest. For python, there's "Beginning Python Visualization" by Vaingast. It's pretty introductory, but provides good starting points. The matplotlib web site also provides a gallery of example plots with code. |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | j-g-faustus: The Tufte books are brilliant. For dynamic charts, his first book (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) is the most relevant, it covers the theory - how to tell a good representation from a bad one - and the basics.Readings in Information Visualization ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Readings-Information-Visualization-I... ) is a collection of papers covering a wide range of techniques for a wide range of tasks.Apart from that, it's mostly a matter of picking up interesting ideas wherever you find them. flowingdata.com is nice, same with http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | anonjon: You might want to check out the processing language at:http://www.processing.org/And look at the examples section.A lot of it is about artistic sorts of representation, but it is programmatic. There are a few books that the authors of the language wrote, including the visualizing data book mentioned by duck. (They are mentioned on the front page of processing.org).It is a pretty neat language, and the core functionality can be used as a Java library. (I have been working through the 'processing a programming handbook', and it is more about using the language than about ways to display the data (So you might want to pick one of the other books)). |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | Anon84: Leland Wilkinson's "The Grammar of Graphics" http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Leland-Wilkinson/dp/0... is also excellent and fully implemented in the R programming language/statistics package ( http://www.amazon.com/ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Data-Analysis... ) |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | wdewind: Tufte is great, but he's extremely heavy and a bit dated. He is about 80% brilliant 20% completely missing the point. It's very strange.If you are looking for a smaller book I've found the WSJ Guide to Information Graphics by Dona Wong to be pretty decent and pretty straight forward, and it's about 100 pages. It's not too focused on finance either, although that's what I got it for (I do front end development for financial analysis company - lots of charting).http://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Information-Graph... |
Ask HN:Choosing the right open source license for SaaS software | drtse4: What about the Affero GPL? It's a GPLv3 that also allow you to receive code modification when a software is used in SaaS mode.
I'm not sure if this is the level of protection you are searching, this has always seemed a bit to strict to me (as gplv3)... |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | timwiseman: If you are considering using Python, Beginning Python Visualization (http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Python-Visualization-Transfo... ) seems quite good to me. It is of course a niche product targetting though who intend to use Python though. If you are looking for a more broad based grounding in visualization it is probably not your best choice. |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | Flemlord: I do a lot of charting for financial services software. The best practical book that I've found is The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures. Simple but practical guidelines for displaying pie/line/area graphs.But for your situation, check out some of these sites which focus on more complicated graphing techniques:http://www.perceptualedge.com/examples.phphttp://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2009/04/50-great-examples-...http://interface.fh-potsdam.de/infodesignpatterns/news.phphttp://patternbrowser.org/http://webdesignledger.com/inspiration/15-stunning-examples-...http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/ |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | aohtsab: Fun fact - Tufte's in Arlington giving a talk and we're taking a 15 minute break right now. Compelling speaker and thrilling read (he's giving away four of his books to every attendee). |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | revorad: I would highly recommend learning R (http://www.r-project.org/). It is very easy to directly query databases and R has many visualisation packages, including the awesome ggplot2 (http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/) based on the grammar of graphics. I'm writing an R graphs cookbook and my startup's visualisation product is also built on R (see profile and feel free to email me if you need any help).Also, look at Ben Fry's Processing books (http://benfry.com/). Here's an introductory tutorial - http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/your-random-numbers-getti...).If you're familiar with Python, check out Matplotlib (https://www.packtpub.com/matplotlib-python-development/book). |
Ask HN:Choosing the right open source license for SaaS software | cjbprime: If you don't want someone else to be able to build a competitor site, it sounds like you don't want an open-source license.The best you can do with an open-source license is the AGPL, which will force any competitor site to release all of their modifications -- this means that they can't gain any advantage over you, because you'll have access to all of their code as soon as they deploy it. |
Best JavaScript drag-and-drop plugin? | simonw: I've had lots of success with the draggable/droppable modules from jQuery UI. They cover a lot of tricky cases (don't start dragging unless the mouse has moved more than a few pixels, revert to original position if the drag fails, arrange draggables in to "groups" so they only interact with the correct droppables) and generally do everything I need straight out of the box.The only problem I've had with them has been advanced code that needs to make independent modifications to the position of the draggable during the drag, but a post on their support forum solved that one for me: http://forum.jquery.com/topic/trying-to-manipulate-the-posit...In the past I've used YUI 2's drag and drop to good effect, but jQuery UI's is much easier to get started with. |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | samratjp: I had a similar situation except that I wasn't as smart as you to consider books in the first place.But, I did use some really good tools. I highly recommend using Prefuse (yes, it's java but it ships with great examples and it's open source). If you like prefuse, then try flare (actionscript based). As far I know, prefuse supports querying from tables (my data backend was postgres). Here's prefuse: http://prefuse.org/ Here's flare:http://flare.prefuse.org/And for a dash of inspiration and more ideas: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/ |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | SlyShy: There are also options like Erlang and Node.js where hot code-swapping is possible. Although having a second database is useful as a slave, of course, I don't think it is necessary to run two copies of the database just to redeploy.Github just redeploys by killing and restarting Unicorn workers gradually. It's graceful, because any worker that is handling a connection won't be killed, so you won't get any dropped connections. http://github.com/blog/517-unicorn |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | thinkbohemian: Not sure if this is exactly what you're getting at, I use capistrano, it was built for rails deployments and does require some scripting/setup but once you've got that down, i can push changes to any of my sites all day long. I have a few wordpress installs that i deploy with capistrano as well. Once you've got everything setup, there is no noticeable downtime.http://www.capify.org ... to modify the database schema you can put migration logic in your scripts. |
Ask HN:Choosing the right open source license for SaaS software | staunch: One suggestion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbra#Software_license |
Apps Using Sproutcore? | jasonlbaptiste: MobileMe is one, but that's kind of the obvious one in the room. Looking for more obscure stuff. More Cappuccino apps would be awesome too. |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | wizard_2: After reading http://highscalability.com/ for a while I've happily found myself using some tips from there from time to time. I've only used these methods a few times, I usually just push large database changing changes at night and try not to do anything that takes longer then 20 minutes.One way is to use two tables and have the application logic read from both and write to the new one. This can't always work easily but for tables that don't get a lot of joins its not that hard. Deploy the code, migrate the data into the new table and then drop the old table. I've used this once to update a user_profile table for a busy forum.Another way to mitigate downtime on table changes is to have lots of tables. I believe one of the larger Chinese social networks was reviewed on the HS blog and boasted that they found it easier not to have more then two columns on a table (pk and value). That's a little crazy imho, but I have see it working with smaller column groups.You use a lot of 1 to 1 relations and each column or logical group of columns gets it's own table with a foreign key to the main object. This way you can modify a column without restricting access to most of the object at the cost of more joins. I worked on a django project where we had a users table and any user information (there was a lot) was a different table. The data models were related to the user model and handled all the lookups. (User.profile, User.contact, User.reporting_prefrences, User.support_requests, etc.)I've never used mongodb or couch, but with a nosql you can just have the app logic take care of upgrading records on read. Run a script to upgrade everything. Drop the app logic. |
Apps Using Sproutcore? | vitovito: Mozilla Bespin now uses it as their framework (they render a canvas on top of its elements). |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | kylecordes: I wrote up how we attack this problem a couple of years ago:http://kylecordes.com/2007/01/20/web-app-swap/including how we handle schema changes. |
what SaaS do you currently pay for? | tbgvi: Right now I'm using Get Satisfaction, ZenDesk, Salesforce.com, and Basecamp |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | ziadbc: If you're big on visualization check out Harvard's www.CS171.org. I'm enrolled in the class right now and it's been very enriching. I think it is also available as opencourseware.Books:
http://www.cs171.org/syllabus.htmlResources
http://www.cs171.org/resources.html |
what SaaS do you currently pay for? | tonystubblebine: Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, Glance, Blinksale. |
what SaaS do you currently pay for? | danudey: MobileMe and Flickr for me. For my previous company, we used Hoptoad, GitHub, and Lighthouse for a while.I'd pay for Dropbox if I had more than one computer and/or I was ever anywhere near my storage limit. |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | emmett: For simple things like adding tables or adding columms, just do it. Add the column/table, then release new app code relying on it.For more complex things (changing the name of an existing column, or breaking a table into two parts, etc.) you need to write a compatibility mode into the application code. New writes go to the new column/table name, reads go to both places. Once that's released, migrate all the data as slowly as you like behind the scenes. When you're done, you can drop the old column or table. |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | wvenable: I've got a pretty good setup going, most of the changes do not require any downtime at all. Adding a table or column rarely requires any downtime (the existing code knows nothing about the table/column and continues on it's way) -- push the DB change first then the code. Removing a table or column can work as well, push the code change first and then remove them.For more grueling changes (those that require data conversion), I still take down the site. I script the changes and then take the site down, convert, deploy, bring the site back up. Smaller changes take only a few minutes, longer changes can take hours. However, the length of the downtime is inversely proportional to how frequently you need to do it.Sometimes taking the site down is appropriate. For really big changes, users simply cannot continue to use the site and be unaffected. |
what SaaS do you currently pay for? | puredemo: Pandora. I think that's it right now. |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | thegoleffect: Depends on what scale you're dealing with. If you have a high traffic site, the db should be sharded so if you do a manual switch master-slave, only a small piece would be affected at a given time.But I'm guessing you're dealing with a single M-S setup. I've asked around and it seems the standard practice for that type of a setup is to create a second table for each one you are attempting to modify, 'insert into table2 select * from table 1;', modify table2, rename table 1, rename table 2 to table 1. Then, script or manually cope with any 'leftovers' in table 1 that didn't get ported to table 2.Would be interesting to have an in-memory (but written to disk) NoSQL layer sandwiched between MySQL and the user. Then, you can change schema all you want or switch in/out DB servers without any visible impact. Might be a leaky abstraction though. Not like I tried that out. |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | physcab: Most of these (rather good) suggestions revolve around learning the theory of representing data. But how does one practically accomplish these visualization tasks?I have been delving in this area for the past couple months, and even though I am still learning, I will give my practical suggestions to the programmer:1) First accept that there is no silver bullet to data visualization. You pick the tool that makes the most sense. Sometimes you have to write a Java program, sometimes a Python program, and yes, even sometimes an Excel spreadsheet. Don't be picky--just get it done.2) Programmatically speaking, there are ways to represent truly massive terabyte datasets.- You can learn Processing (used by Ben Fry in Visualizing Data) which is based on Java and pretty simple to learn. My caveat is that you can't run these scripts server-side, that is, it doesn't generate jpgs or pngs on demand due to headless mode constraints.- You can use Beautiful Soup in Python to easily modify XML data for SVG graphics. Check out this: http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-th...- You can learn Java's image library (I haven't done this so I can't really give any advice, but this is what Processing simplifies I think)- You can use Excel to easily pump out bar/pie/line graphs- You can use the Google Chart API- You can use Flash. Check out AmCharts for that Mint-y goodness.3) Learn statistics. Browse the Netflix Prize forums. Struggle with MatLab or R or Octave. You need to learn how to efficiently handle large datasets in memory to better sift through the essential information you need. For very very large sets that absolutely cannot be handled in memory, you'll want to check out Hadoop + MapReduce. Check out Cloudera's distribution for Hadoop. Handling data is every bit as important as visualizing it. |
Best place to hire Web Contractors? | thegoleffect: Add these to your list:* odesk* rent-a-coder* craigslist* referrals aka friends-of-friends |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | jeremyw: It sounds like you're making rolling updates across your app server cluster, version n -> n + 1. You have to separate database updates into innocuous and harmful, and your developers have to signal that state for deploy.Changes:a) Schema changes and row updates that are compatible with 'n'. No downtime, no worries.b) Schema changes and row updates that are _in_compatible with 'n'. Ideally this requires downtime, but I've seen architectures that get away with live rolls by grouping app server updates by shard.c) Database changes that will have a severe performance impact, e.g. index/update a massive table or hit some other perf corner of your db. Downtime or you invest in a key-value or FriendFeed-style architecture.Most agile updates tend to be (a), luckily. |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | stingraycharles: What we're doing is this: when doing upgrades that actually changes the data model, they go in two phases:* First, an upgrade that understands the old model and the new model, internally uses the new model, and writes in the old model. This means that this new version is 100% compatible with the old version. We launch new services, test them, add them to the load balancer, and remove the old services from the loadbalancer.* Secondly, a new update is launched: this one is almost the same as the previous version, except that it writes its data in the new model too. The same process with launching new services and adding to the load balancer is repeated.Using this two-phase upgrade has the major advantage that you're always running the new services next to an old version that is completely compatible, data-model-wise, and thus allows you to do an emergency rollback to a previous version if required. The trick with adding to the load balancer also ensures that no downtime is experienced for the clients.All this requires quite a bit of work (especially since you need to deploy multiple releases), so it depends on how much zero-downtime upgrades are worth to you. |
What do you do with your iPad? | martingordon: I've been reading a lot more on it than I thought I would.I thought that having a multi-purpose device would create distractions, but instead it gives me more opportunity to read since I bring my iPad with me more than I did the Kindle. |
Best place to hire Web Contractors? | primemod3: Here's a HN topic about contractors:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262467
and the list:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV... |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | jhancock: Its a pretty special app that can't handle a few seconds of downtime. The first thing I would do is be very certain this is a requirement.I thought it was a requirement for a couple of webapps I manage and I now think otherwise. I have scripts for starting and stopping various server processes and have other scripts that pull them together to do full deploy like what you are talking about. I could optimize it, but after doing it this way for a bit I realized I feel safer by keeping it simple. I'm fairly certain I've never had a quality of service problem with my users. |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | lamby: Are you just trying to avoid it looking "bad" for visitors, or do you actually require your site to be up that long?If the former, one hack is just make the downtime for users more fun - I added a chat interface so that anyone waiting doesn't get too bored and can interact with other members.Screenshot: http://lamby.uwcs.co.uk/b/playfire_maintenance.pngArchitecturally, it doesn't touch our database or "main" site at all so we are free to break everything during an upgrade. |
Best place to hire Web Contractors? | lsc: what does elance have that you want that craigslist doesn't? This is relevant to my interests, as I'm kinda sortof toying with the idea of setting up a job board myself. |
Is HN Ignoring The Long Tail? | lsc: I watch /newest sometimes. But yeah, a way for the user to choose other ways to choose stories would also be pretty cool. say /getarticles?ratingbetterthan=10&afterdate=20100101 or something? |
Is HN Ignoring The Long Tail? | pg: Sure; click on the More link at the bottom of the page. |
Is HN Ignoring The Long Tail? | oscardelben: you could also subscribe to the RSS feed. |
Is HN Ignoring The Long Tail? | thinkbohemian: I would like the option to auto hide stories that I have clicked on after maybe 5 minutes, and to auto promote the "next" story to my front page.Pros: More content on front page.Cons: Slightly inconsistent content on front page between users, would need to be able to easily toggle between modes, incase you wanted to show a friend something.What are your thoughts? |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | lamby: Can you change your database paradigm? ¬_¬ A document-oriented database like CouchDB would "just work" in the most common database schema changes. Or perhaps you could throw upgrade-friendly data in a KV store encoded with Google Protocol Buffers. |
Is HN Ignoring The Long Tail? | devinj: I see plenty of posts with 10 points on the front page. This was one of them. |
what SaaS do you currently pay for? | apsurd: github, linode, pandora, getclicky |
Is HN Ignoring The Long Tail? | gaulinmp: I'm with @oscardelben, the RSS feed is the way to go. I browse what's interesting to me and am indifferent to the votes. |
Is HN Ignoring The Long Tail? | Kilimanjaro: My view:- Voting for STORIES is retarded. It can be EASILY gamed.- There should be editors who pick news RELATED to the main purpose of the site.- Let the people SUBMIT stories but let the editors PICK the most relevant.- On the other hand, voting in COMMENTS is ok.A good idea would be to have say ten editors and let them vote on stories submitted by users. Stories with 5 votes or more go to the front page.Can it be gamed? Sure!When that happens it's time to change editors. |
Is HN Ignoring The Long Tail? | dmharrison: Yep, but this is true for RSS and most news sites generally as well IMHO. You see it, read it and then unless someone reposts it, it's gone forever. I use delicious to tag that I've liked it and then can search, but it doesn't search content etc.But the primary reason I use the feed is that it's filtered high quality new material that I'm genuinely not likely to have seen before. |
Less features with new releases. Have you done it? | uncoder: Never. If your product is generating revenue and profit, the profit the only wise thing is to invest in the product. If you do so, the product will have more features and becomes bigger. If you did not, your competitor will have done so, and will have innovated to a build a better business. |
Less features with new releases. Have you done it? | j-g-faustus: A company I worked for tried to remove a feature:One release added a "tagging" feature (similar to Gmail tags) while the next release had a "hierarchical folders" feature (similar to Outlook folders).The thinking was that tags and folders did pretty much the same thing, and folders were clearly superior since they were hierarchical. So we stripped the tagging and shipped with just the folder feature.Perhaps unsurprisingly, there turned out to be customers that had built a whole lot of import/export/processing infrastructure around the tags, and were less than happy about having to reimplement it all using folders. Plus they had a ton of tagged data and we hadn't included a tool to convert the old format to the new one. (Because we thought noone were using the tagging feature, it had only been in the product for a single release.)The lesson learned is that released features are similar to published APIs: If you remove or change them you will inevitably break something for someone. |
How to turn my web application into a lifestyle business? | pedalpete: First off, that site is amazing in it's simplicity. Even your sign-up process is the easiest I've seen (though I'd make it more clear that it is a sign-up, because I wasn't sure if I was supposed to already have an account).As far as monetizing, with the volume of todo lists available, you may have difficulty monetizing in such a direct way as getting users to pay monthly.You mention Covey, and clearly you are influenced by his work. Have you considered contacting them and seeing if they'd be interested in partnering with you?They could use your services to build their brand online, and help with defining new features, while you do what you do (which we can see you do very well).The Covey site (https://www.stephencovey.com/) mentions that they have online tools, but maybe your stuff is better, and maybe you could sell them on it.
Or other competitors who are in a similar market. |
Patterns for deploying webapp updates with no downtime | lol_Sprint: Are you working for vendor X on the Sprint.com upgrade? 'cuz they seem to be having this precise problem lately. Down since 2300 on Saturday with no end in site. |
Open-source PDF Viewer for my Website? | seven: Not sure if this is an option for you, but you could run OpenOffice in headless mode and script it to convert pdf files to html. |
How to turn my web application into a lifestyle business? | steveklabnik: Read everything by our own patio11: http://www.kalzumeus.com/ specifically this post: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busin...I'd also suggesting reading Getting Real (or Rework, if you want to pay, I think it's worth it) by 37signals: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ |
Open-source PDF Viewer for my Website? | rbrcurtis: if you are into the java ee scene you can look into icepdf by the icefaces people. I've never personally used it but is is OSS now so it might work out for you.http://www.icepdf.org/ |
iPhone/iPad online app-development | xsmasher: You can get a Mac Mini for $599, hook it to your network, and access it using logmein.com or some other remote access method. That's what I did to get started, and it's worked very well. |
iPhone/iPad online app-development | Magneus: Apple does not support any development environment other than XCode on an Intel Mac.Thus, if you want to do Objective-C development, your best bet is to get your hands on a Mac. Barring that, you could rig up Hackintosh, or Hackintosh VM in VMWare/Virtualbox.If you are willing to consider some zanier options, there's a open source project that's attempting to create a portable iPhone toolchain: http://code.google.com/p/iphone-dev/.If you're willing to forgo Objective-C, and try cross-compiled development, there's stuff like PhoneGap, xmlvm, etc. |
Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? | tedshroyer: Please keep in mind color blind people. I'm red/green blind and about 1/3 of the charts I run across are meaningless to me. Here are a couple sites with info: http://wearecolorblind.com/ http://www.vischeck.com/ |
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