This is a terrible set of slides. The only new thing I gathered from it is "cabal sucks". Then the presentation came to a sudden end which left me thinking "what, that's it?" How does such a low quality link get so many upvotes? takes notes for future marketing endeavours
It wasn't really intended to make much sense by itself. I find if I make slides that stand alone, the audience reads the slides and ignores me. I put the slides up as a courtesy to the people in the audience.
There was less than zero marketing involved - I gave this talk months ago and only just noticed this thread.
Apologies if I sounded like I was criticising what you do - I'm sure that these made a lot more sense in the context of a presentation. I was questioning why the person who posted this link did so and why it has been upvoted to such an extent.
Didn't you notice the multiple david vs goliath references? Or the challenger vs incumbent dimension? Conflict makes for a good story makes for frontpage news.
Moreover, the 50/50 text/visuals is a refreshing change away from huge blocks of gray.
ha. I didn't think that at all when I was writing it, but I can see how it's applicable. I'll be sure to analyse that more explicitly next time I write a presentation.
You do realise that you're doing something quite dangerous by turning to dopamine-influencing drugs to motivate you, right? This class of drugs can change brain structure, promote cancer growth and generally make you devoid of emotion. At the very least, protect yourself with anti-oxidants and NMDA antagonists. There are plenty of less serious things you can take/do if you simply lack motivation. Exercise, cut out sugar and caffeine entirely and try Noopept.
I've been on Ritalin since I was 10. I used to take it daily, now I just take it when I need to concentrate for extended periods of time. Thank you for your concern, though.
Nothing at all like that. I was prescribed it for ADHD as a child. Now, I take it if I'm cramming or spending all night in the lab. Generally, less than once a week.
> benzodiazepines generally lower cognitive ability
On the subject of a particular drug sometimes being useful and sometimes counter-productive, the missing link is that the brain has several points of neurochemical homeostasis - these are also known as 'moods'. Moving from a given mood to another requires some combination of influences. E.g. moving from mood X to Y may require a boost in dopamine while moving from mood Z to Y may require more GABA. This is why it's relative and different people are not affected by the same drugs in the same ways - their baseline levels of major neurotransmitters differ. So one person has a natural tendency towards mood X while another tends towards mood Y - i.e. one person has naturally high dopamine levels which another has high levels of serotonin.
I believe that these tendencies are the result of the body adapting to the conditions it grew up in. The major factors I can see are diet, the social situation (both in terms of family and culture-at-large), amount of exercise, genetics and pollutants.
I completely agree that mood and productivity are inherently inseparable. It's not a one way relationship either - they affect each other. Hell, everything in the brain seems to affect everything else in the brain. It's a giant web of dependencies and influences. It reminds me a lot of badly designed legacy software systems - everything makes sense when you dig in deep but looks like an absolute mess from afar.
Who wouldathunk that doing LSD could turn someone into a complete asshole with no regard for an open culture and a penchant for superficial things which don't matter in the least (like one button devices)?
All of the pain points that this supposedly solves have already been solved with tabs. Middle click compose and all of those problems are solved with the added bonus of having an entire screen to write your email in.
Google is being taken over by pointy haired managers and marketing. RIP.
I seem to recall that both Google search and Gmail were initially popular with technically sophisticated users. I remember proselytising this amazing new search engine to people still using Lycos, or Yahoo, or Alta Vista, or whatever it was back then.
I used to be able to get very accurate results in Google search with judicious use of quotes, excluded terms, and exact phrases. Now, Google second-guesses what I really meant, and usually gives me a result that's more generic, more mainstream, but not actually what I was looking for.
The contemporary services are better for people who don't understand sets, and who don't really know how to use the more esoteric features of their browser. That's not necessarily bad, but it's bad for us. But we'll cope: there's no shortage of alternative email clients.
Good to see that PR is on the job of trying to convince people that they don't really want what they really want. It's funny that even verbatim search asks me if I'm sure that I spelt something correctly. I guess our definitions over verbatim differ but to me, in this context, it means "do this and stop second guessing me kthnx." It's also annoying that I have to switch to another mode every time I want to search. There appears to be no setting to set verbatim as the default and even if there was, one would either need to always be on the same computer (if the preference is saved in a cookie) or always signed in (if it's set on the account).
A suggestion - provide a subdomain with the old search, e.g. old.google.com. All of the mainstream customers get whatever UX/marketing think is best for them and everyone else gets to keep using a tool which they find useful - everyone wins!
Oh, and since you might be the right person to ask, why is Quora still turning up in search results when they censor most of the thread? They're even worse than Experts Exchange (and why are they still turning up in results too?).
Society is shooting itself in the foot with the trend of dumbing everything down. While we sit here being presented with one button devices so that "we don't get confused", the rest of the world is busy educating itself to a high standard and building tomorrow's industries. This laziness will be the downfall of the west and we'll have this constant thirst for profit at the expense of society's well-being to blame for it. IMO, anyway.
No redundancy what-so-ever? What an amateur operation. I still say Joel is a fraud.
EDIT: this site is amazing - divergent opinions seem to be actively discouraged given how many "points" I've lost thanks to stating mine. Is the point of this site for all of the members to think in the same way?
Ofcourse they have redundancy, just not cross-datacenter redundancy. And if you knew anything about cross-datacenter redundancy you'd know that cross-datacenter redundancy is something you do not decide upon lightly.
Then again, having cross-datacenter backups that can easily be taken online would be a bit more professional than 'we want to physically move the servers'.
I'll be the first to admit I don't really know anything about cross-datacenter redundancy; however, I always thought that was pretty high on the list once you had SaaS products that were pulling in enough revenue to warrant full-time employees outside of the founders. What are the reasons why you would choose not to do it? Are they all financial or are there other implications?
I think the biggest argument against complex cross-DC redundancy is that it can add complexity and failure modes, not just during the emergency, but every day.
As a simple example, I've seen at least a half dozen people who had issues because they thought it was as simple as throwing a mysql node into each datacenter, only to discover (much later) that the databases had become inconsistent and that failing over created bigger problems than it solved.
Similarly, I've seen complex high-availability infrastructures where the complexity of that infrastructure created more net downtime than a simpler infrastructure would've, it just went down at slightly different times.
And you really need to think about the implications of various failure modes. If you go down in the middle of a transaction, is that a problem for your application? Is it okay to roll back to data that's 3 hours old? 3 minutes? 3 seconds?
There are any number of situations where it's reasonable to say "we expect our datacenter will fail once every couple decades and when it does, we'll be down for a couple days."
Are you kidding me? If you run big sites like FogBugz then ofcourse you have cross-datacenter redundancy. It's not complicated to host your staging site in another physical location and point the DNS records to it when things go pear-shaped.
Yes, so this staging site of you has exactly the same databases as your production site? Without customer data Fogbugz and Trello are useless. This means that this simple staging site of yours needs to have all data replicated to it, which means it also needs the same hardware provisioned for it, effectively doubling your physical costs, your maintenance cost and reducing the simplicity of your architecture. Ofcourse, if you're big enough you can afford to do this, and one could argue fogcreek is big enough. I'm just saying it's not a simple no-brainer.
What is a simple no-brainer how ever is to have offline offsite backups that can easily brought online. A best practice is to have your deployment automated in such a way that deployment to a new datacenter that already has your data should be a trivial thing.
But yeah, if you're running a tight ship something things like that go overboard without anyone noticing.
Remember the story of the 100% uptime banking software, that ran for years without ever going down, always applying the patches at runtime. Then one day a patch finally came in that required a reboot, and it was discovered that in all the years of runtime patches without reboots, it was never tested if the machine could actually still boot, and ofcourse it couldn't :)
Data should be backed up to staging nightly anyway. There should also be scripts in place to start this process at an arbitrary point in time and to import the data into the staging server. You do not need to match the hardware if you use cloud hosting since you can scale up whenever you want.
Here's where it gets really simple. Resize the staging instance to match live. Put live into maintenance mode and begin the data transfer to staging (with a lot of cloud providers, step #1 and #2 can be done in parallel). As soon as it finishes copying, take live down, point the DNS records at staging and wait for a few minutes. Staging is now live, with all of live's data. Problem solved. Total downtime: hardly anything compared to not being prepared. Total dataloss: none.
I fully agree that this is how it could, and perhaps should be done. But you assume they are already on cloud hosting, which they obviously aren't. Ofcourse this is also a choice that has to be made consciously. Especially since fogcreek has been around a lot longer than the big cloud providers.
You can look to Amazon to see that cloud architecture brings with it hidden complexity that also increases risk of downtime while you relinguish a lot of control on for example the latency and bandwidth between your nodes.
What I don't know by the way, is wether the total cost of ownership is larger for colocation or for cloud hosting.
There's a huge difference between code you've written in your spare time, and code that exists in production.
Code that exists in production is often buggy and unwieldy, and doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. Because when you have a product that makes money, your priorities also change.
You need to become more defensive about your maneuvers, and you have to have a real reason to justify changing code.
To commit to doing redundancy well, you need a lot of resources, and you need to have a justify diverting resources that could otherwise be used to build a better product.
There's a common misconception that you can just throw stuff at the cloud (AWS, Heroku, etc), and things will just stay up. In practice, between cacheing, database server backups, heavy writes, and crazy growth, there's a lot to deal with. It's not nearly a solved or a simple problem.
So people are probably down voting you because your opinion seems naive to them. I've personally migrated a top 80,000 global eCommerce operation, and everything broke in a million different places, and we spent 2 weeks afterwards getting things working properly again.
There's a big difference between the way things are in your head, and the way things are in the production. Don't say people don't know what they're doing because they don't have a perfect system. No system is perfect.
FWIW I agreed with you but downvoted because of the posting style.
The decision to avoid cross data center replication was probably a carefully considered one instead of amateurish. They probably have multiple layers of redundancy in their setup and decided that the cost and overhead of cross data centre replication was not justified.
In hindsight this doesn't seem like such a good decision, but I don't see how that makes someone an amateur or a fraud.
Quoting Jeff in an attack on Joel has got to be irony yes?
Whatever this post says Jeff clearly didn't share your view of Joel being an amateur and a fraud given that he went on to start a pretty successful business with him.
Zynga has (up until now) made a lot of money and they write shit code. Hell, most of the companies I've seen have made money while writing shit code. Making money indicates that a person knows how to make money. Writing good code indicates that a person knows how to write good code. Since the two are disconnected, I stand by my statement that this man is a fraud. You simply don't start a programming blog when you created a new language just to address a small concern in the project spec. Start a blog on how to make money or run a business, sure, but don't tread into a field where people are trying to produce something of quality and try to 'teach' them something.
The argument you have just presented is irrational since it's central point rests upon the fallacy of false cause.
You're right, why would we want Joel to step into the field and teach us stuff when we've got you with vast knowledge and your winning manner?
After all, all we get from Joel is a decade of sharing what he's worked on and why he's done stuff a particular way, in a relatively transparent manner that allows us to maybe learn stuff but importantly to put it all in a context that allows us each to make a judgement on whether what he says is useful / interesting to us.
By contrast with you we have the rich tapestry of an anonymous account on an internet message board, a superior manner bordering on trolling and a series of aggressively worded posts.
I don't know what I was thinking. Death to Spolsky!
Just one thing. Now that you too have taken to the internet to teach the rest of us how things should be done, if someone spots any errors in what you say it's fine to term you a fraud I take it? What's good for the goose and all.
I'm not running a blog or expecting anyone to take what they read in a comment on some site on the internet seriously.
Label me however you want, it's a free internet (for now, anyway).
I still find it funny how anyone can start a blog and become famous for it. Maybe I should do the same and cash in on all that buttery goodness of advertising revenue...
So it's essentially a marketing problem. I get the feeling that you were trying to suggest that it's worthy because it's popular. If so, argumentum ad populum is irrational. If not, apologies.
I would suggest the following mental exercise the next time you want to make a comment on HN:
Imagine you are at a dinner party at Paul Graham's house. He's there, obviously, along with several startup founders, aspiring founders, and a few established industry figures, including the person you are about to disagree with or criticize.
It will undoubtedly take more effort to figure out how to frame your criticism so that it doesn't make you a pariah, but the advantage will be that you will leave open the possibility of forming beneficial business and personal relationships.
In this case, I would try describing your own successes with building redundant services, and describe some of the other approaches you found while researching ones that you have built.
Incidentally, I'm not here to form relationships - personal or otherwise. The primary goal of social media sites is to indulge in procrastination while advertisers bombard us with new products, not to improve one's life. For the latter, there are books, actions and real people made of flesh and blood. This reminds me a lot of some of the people I encountered in my gaming days - they tend to forget about the context of the platform they are using.
> While I sympathize with these arguments, this isn't how the legal system works. The law doesn't work on absolutely provable certainty. It works on reasonable doubt, intent and (hopefully) facts.
Hah, you still think that the legal system makes an ounce of sense. Read the below, weep, weep again and then ask yourself how you didn't realise that you were living in the dark ages up until now.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. If you care to know, read up on the reoffending rates of prisoners and the types of systems which have particularly low ones. Look around you at all of the seemingly civilized people who call for blood when their sensibilities are offended strongly enough.
Where we now stand, in this aspect, is not at the heart of civilization but on the very fringe of it - and hardly anyone has noticed the fact. The legal system, just like everything else to do with humanity, is solidly anchored in emotion, not logic.
> That's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but it is wrong.
Surely an opinion, a wholly subjective point of view, cannot by it's very definition be wrong. Being insulted (or not) is also a fundamentally subjective experience. Anything can be insulting or non-insulting to a given person. In my opinion, it is hurtful to tell someone that their being offended is in some way wrong since it disregards how a person legitimately feels. I'm not making any statement on how a situation like that should be handled, merely that an offended person is indeed offended and that acknowledging the fact is the best way to move forward.
