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Re:Common Server Setups For Your Web App on Monday June 02, 2014 @01:47PM (#7834753)
I did it because a new webapp deployment costs nothing, no extra work involved at all with DO, just add a snapshot and ssh key to a new droplet. If something needs to be consolidated, I just use DO api and paramiko to ssh into each droplet and run new commands. If it's updating the webapp across all customers, it's a matter of issuing restart command to all the droplets via API.
Re:Common Server Setups For Your Web App on Monday June 02, 2014 @01:07PM (#7834534)
curious who do you use as a host for 32 cores with ton of ram? I also favor this vertical scaling over splitting over multiple servers and replicating database with a load balancer sitting on top. Best to deal with one point of failure, if you need network concurrency up the ram and bandwidth. RAM should be easily upgradeable up to a descent double digit gig figure. For disk space and backup.
Re:Common Server Setups For Your Web App on Monday June 02, 2014 @01:01PM (#7834498)
my current setup on DO, I would like some inputs.

website hosted on 1 droplet. additional 1 droplet per every customer is deployed through Stripe and DO api.

DO let's you save a snapshot and load it to the droplet. I have a snapshot that is basically a copy of my 'software'. It's a LAMP stack with init script to load the webapp from git repo.

Customer logs in at username.mywebapp.com

The beauty of this is that I never have to worry about things breaking or becoming a bottle neck. if one customer outgrows themselves, they won't affect other resources. It has linear scalability, new customers, add a new droplet. I don't need to worry about writing crazy deployment scripts although I use paramiko to ssh in to each server when I need to get dirty.

The main website is mostly static content. I could host it even on Amazon S3 but currently using cloudflare.

Updating the product code requires me to restart the droplet instance. However, I test things out on another staging droplet. Once things work on there, I use the DO api to iterate through all the customer droplets and do a restart.

Re:Ask HN: FU Money: What is your number? on Sunday June 01, 2014 @12:18AM (#7828161)
there's few different categories of FU money each with increasingly lower probability

1 million dollars: doable but very hard. you can finally buy that crack shack in vancouver, bc

10 million dollars: could be doable depending how you got to your first million. if it's scalable operation, no problem.

100 million dollars: continued growth from previous operation with compounding returns or have been part of a successful startup that was sold.

1000 million dollars: founder/co-founder of a company that was sold previously to a very large search engine or social network.

10000 million dollars: own majority equity in a very well known public company, inherited.

100000 million dollars: run a country that produces oil or cocaine as it's most popular exports. You can't have any competition around. launder it excessively.

Re:Ask HN: FU Money: What is your number? on Sunday June 01, 2014 @12:05AM (#7828136)
10 million dollars after taxes so I'm guessing the actual amount is higher, possibly around 15 million dollars. on top of that 300k a year will be subjected to taxation, you will end up with 188k a year, not quite the 300k. you would need around 450k a year and after taxes, you will end up with 300k. to be able to produce that much you'd need about 15 million dollars after taxes. so in reality you'd need about 20 million dollars.

20 million dollars, would generate 300k after taxes if invested in bonds. from the 20 million, you'd end up with 15 or 14 million dollars after paying taxes.

so 20 million dollars is what one would need to target for.

however, note that you'd need to live in a large mansion that's already paid for and maintenance and expenses, property taxations being paid, I'd put away 30~50k for upkeep. You will probably have two kids on average so it will be another 100,000 to support them.

21 million, seems to be the true 'FU' money. After that leave off 400,000 after tax a year in money.

21 million is a staggering figure for someone starting out. I don't even know if I will get to one million.

Ask HN: Common interview questions for senior software engineer position?

Hi guys, I have a 3 hour interview coming up on Monday, this will be my first senior level position. Prior to this, at various other places I have worked as intermediate.What questions should I prepare myself for? 3 hours seems awful long just for asking technical questions?All in all, I hope to transition into senior level position smoothly. Most of my experience comes from building my own...

( Read More... | 8 comments | 11 points | on HN )

Ask HN: Best database for tree storage and traversal?

The gist of what I'm trying to do is have a tree, traverse through every possible branch until all leaf nodes have been visited.I need to also be able to modify any node along a branch. I originally thought about using MySQL but it seems really complicated. So I turn to graph databases.I want a python example which does this but can't find it in the docs for Neo4j, OrientDB, ArangoDB

( Read More... | 2 comments | 6 points | on HN )
Re:Why Stack Overflow Sucks (2012) on Saturday April 12, 2014 @05:10PM (#7579228)
Well, that mechanism has not worked well. Especially, someone with a large reputation point appears to be exempt and there exists elitism amongst it's members.

Largely, Stackoverflow has now become something like wikipedia, just an index of questions and answers with zealous moderators and elitists and no longer a community.

Re:Why Stack Overflow Sucks (2012) on Saturday April 12, 2014 @04:47PM (#7579135)
I remember being ridiculed for having more questions than answers. It's skewed to the idea that answering and contributing your thought is of more important than the question generating such thought.

Regardless, Stackoverflow has fell off it's high place.

Re:RoboVM: Native iOS apps in Java on Saturday April 12, 2014 @04:40PM (#7579111)
is it possible to run this on windows 7?
Re:RoboVM: Native iOS apps in Java on Saturday April 12, 2014 @03:44PM (#7578913)
is there a tutorial on this? The biggest hurdle to making iOS app is that you need a physical hardware from them.
Re:RoboVM: Native iOS apps in Java on Saturday April 12, 2014 @03:37PM (#7578899)
are there any other JavaScript to native compiler projects in the works? last time I heard there was llvm.js or something like that was doing the same thing as hyperloop.
Re:RoboVM: Native iOS apps in Java on Saturday April 12, 2014 @03:35PM (#7578894)
what tools did you use to create your game assets?
Re:RoboVM: Native iOS apps in Java on Saturday April 12, 2014 @03:31PM (#7578874)
holy crap!

I've avoided iOS because Objective-C scared me and I stuck to Android. I have some pending questions before I use this however.

1) How much code share can there be between Android and iOS? Is it just limited to business logic like Xamarin?

2) Can you use an Android game engine, create the game in Android and build for iOS?

3) In order to create and run iOS simulator, do you need to be on the mac and have Xcode? Any way to do it on a non-Mac machine?

4) Can you use RoboVM to create Android and iOS at the same time?

Amazing stuff!

Ask HN: Does open source and free product cannibalize your paid product?

I'm in a bit of a dilemma. I have developed a product that I think would be great if it was free because not many open source, free versions of it exists but I also don't want it to cannibalize my paid products and subscriptions.Is my assumption correct in that people who would've paid for my product would now be satisfied with the open source, free version that I released and never end up...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
Re:The problem with profitless startups on Friday April 11, 2014 @02:58PM (#7574748)
I remember a coworker telling me in a condescending tone 'this is how a startup runs, you break even and try to expand market share, burning investors cash and growing without profit' when I asked about how it is that our company that has not made any profit in the past 4 years serving enterprise customers is able to still be solvent. What if investors suddenly stop injecting cash? Financials would be negative in the first quarter.

I never understood the working models of growing at the sole expense of investors money. Because I don't know but last time I checked capitalism and free market still is king, and they always have a history of major market correction. When something's not efficient or something's offplace, market has a tendency to correct itself, in a big, unexpected, ruthless sort of way and we've seen this again and again, but history seems to teach people nothing.

Re:Report: 44% of Twitter Accounts Have Never Sent a Tweet on Friday April 11, 2014 @11:01AM (#7573240)
this is a bit worrying, the news article claims that these are still active users regardless but as far as I know, I get random tweets from bots and strangers promoting their own thing and largely I don't have a very active engagement with Twitter.
What about BC? I signed a non-compete clause a while back and it says I can't work for any competitor startup or start my own in that niche. Apparently the non-compete extends for a year after leaving. It mentions I can't offer consulting or work for the competition. It's been a few years now, but I wonder what other dirty tricks they may have up their sleeves regarding this.

I want to start my own company in this niche and I can't do it because of the fear that they will sue me if I ever make it on their radar.

BC government also is not in the habit of protecting tech workers and cares more about tax revenues. Maybe I should move to Ontario or leave Canada all together.

Re:HHVM 3.0.0 on Friday March 28, 2014 @11:53PM (#7491344)
What server can I use with HHVM to get the performance boost claimed in the video? Does it have a built in HTTP server?

Are there any benchmarks proving that HHVM improves performance?

Can I get a better performance than my current setup of Nginx + uWSGI + Flask ?

I was also a software developer, not as successful but was living in a nice flat in downtown, but I ended up getting fired a few times within the year.

The first time it was smoking heroin and cocaine. Lasted about 2 months. I used to do it at work too because I was addicted. Shortly after getting fired, I smoked crystal meth to get through the heroin withdrawl. This is how scary heroin is, I was addicted after the second time I picked up. With the help of a marijuana dealer, I got clean after he cut off my heroin dealer. I'd call like crazy but he would no longer sell it.

I still remember laying on my bed on my 25th birthday, withdrawing from heroin, thinking how seriously I fucked up. It took a few months of feeling complete apathy until I began to improve. However, I still relied on tobacco and weed to get through the hard stuff.

Few more months later I found another job, higher paying and less stressful. However, I began drinking this time. Half a bottle of vodka everyday after work and smoking weed before and after work. I'd come over with a hangover everyday and I eventually couldn't keep this up for long.

Fast forward to now, I'm totally clean from any substance. I have absolutely zero fucking desire to repeat what has been a complete wreckage of my financial savings, losing my flat, and a waste of time.

What does worry me is the health effect it might have, especially the street drugs I took during this short period of time on top of the weed and alcohol. I'm alright now but I still can't wash myself of the guilt and the regret. However, it keeps me well away from it.

Looking on to the future, I am willing to be successful, and I realized that I can't do it with dependence on drugs and alcohol. I simply couldn't allow it to get in my way.

Ask HN: Hacking in to the ERP market?

I see a lot of bloatware, and looking at the flurry of tables and endless dropdown menus, I wonder how people are able to get proficient at it.Is there a way to do an innovative distruption in this space currently dominated by the big boys like Oracle, SAP, Sage?Is there safety in complexity of an enterprise software, and thus higher cost? Is simplifying and making things intuitive a threat in...

( Read More... | 3 comments | 10 points | on HN )

Ask HN: Ideas on making money?

So my last freelancer job ended up with me working for free. I put up some contact forms on my freelance website to get clients but don't know where to advertise my services, and don't have any money to do so.I go on craigslist but my area doesn't seem to have a whole lot of jobs or contract jobs.Job interviews I went to for software were hiring seniors only. I'm at junior/intermediate...

( Read More... | 4 comments | on HN )

Ask HN: Open source focused crawler?

Is there an open source crawler/library that will recursively follow only links under a certain xpath and ignore the rest?I don't want to do an exhaustive crawl of every single link, I want something that will only follow links under a main content area.

( Read More... | 3 comments | 6 points | on HN )

Ask HN: Creating a REST Api to power client apps?

I'm looking for any bit of advice on what it will take to create a REST API for a company that is looking to release web,mobile applications based on the API?What tools would you use for development, deployment? Am I better off using a SaaS service that does this like apiary.io? Ideally, we want to own the whole REST api stack, what would be some great tools?In terms of deployment, is EC2...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )

Ask HN: What's the cost of a task in Crowdflower?

hey guys I have scoured their site all over but failed to find an exact number/ball park for the cost of a single task.The task involves completing a survey on my website.has anyone used crowdflower? what was your experience. I already tried mobileworks and it was a huge disappointment largely due to unpredictable cost and quality.

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )