Lol, never actually watched the video. I think they are trying to sell themselves to the bigger companies who's main priority is avoiding DOS attacks and keeping their site online.

I would highly recommend singing up and playing around with it tho. It makes a lot more sense when you are digging around in their admin UI.

Im on chapter 8 of the free MIT course. The revised dream included a quant and maybe a programmer. Ive been reduced to trader in my HFT dreams. It has to stay a dream for now because I highly doubt anyone will lease me their secret stuff. More computers in the game is bad for them, its not in their interest to help me knowing the end game is building my own. I did pick two to concentrate on from your list so I am on my way though.

The prices for dotCloud are insane. I only tested 2G Ram and 64MB of PostgreSQL and its already at $289.44. Who pays this?

I recall trying to use AppFog way back when. The prices aren't too bad here. Didn't they originally have a free instance with retarted specs followed by $100/month? Not sure why I stopped using them, but I kind of recall the UI being irritating.

Thanks. I'll check this out. Is it really an improvement to do on-the-fly gzip though? I would think it would be better to have it zipped already on the local machine.

Minification is a meh issue for me. I can do that in 2 seconds and have it done anyways. I'm reading more on it and I'm still a bit confused. Are they saying that the resources are in the CDN or are they saying that the local resources are routed through the CDN?

I'll definitely give it a shot. I don't want to use it on the blog site though. I'm pretty confident I can get most of it sped up with a few optimizations, it doesn't hurt to learn a bit about it, and I don't think 140mb is that shabby. Certainly better than waiting 30 seconds for a dyno to spin up.

dave: Who pays this?

If you have hacked together some idea and get a couple of customers that like it it pays itself. You have to keep in mind that especially web based stuff is often used by people who don't really have a deep understanding of all things IT nor do they want to learn much more.
I mean there's a nonzero number of people that ask if Dreamweaver is a good tool to build the next Facebook. And legions of folks one level up that understand they'll need to do a little of this programming stuff and found this cool thing called Rails everyone seems to use. Way too busy to get stuff done with it and baby step up to worry about yet another battlefront.

It's a simple tradeoff. Imagine you knew nothing about sysadmin stuff (and would have used Windows all your life). It makes a ton more sense to never try to learn it and focus on stuff you're good at (talking to customers, getting them to sign up and pay you money) with every free minute you have. Even if you know it's kind of pricey you can still assume that you can hire a sysadmin to worry about this later.

Also some people that use these services may not even know that they are paying quite the hefty premium (and/or know how to find out they'll just be drowned in words they don't fully understand...what's a Redis, what does SQL mean, what is this Linux) and it would seem reasonable to them. I mean I'd imagine some designer/artist would probably laugh secretly at the prices I'd be willing to pay for their work if I couldn't research what typical prices are etc.

The people who don't even know what sql means or what linux is are the people using $5/month shared hosting and probably throw stuff together with word press.

And yeah dave their pricing is weird. A 256mb app instance on dotcloud by itself is about $35/month. I wouldn't use any of those 3 app hosting services.

clowntable's real mistake is assuming that Heroku and family has mind-share. The place I did the internship with and the place I interviewed with 2 weeks ago never heard of Heroku. The second one runs its own colo. The place I work at now told me they have a private server with Hostgator, and I'm sure they never heard of Heroku. Yes, Heroku is well-known in certain Hacker News circles, but probably not that well-known or even considered in many cases.

The person you described is going to google "How to make a website" and probably find PHP, HTML, and CSS articles, then try "Best webhost" and I'm pretty sure Heroku & Family isn't going to pop up at all, so our hapless hero is going to join up with Hostgator or someone similar, register their domain with the host, and then copy/paste PHP login forms from W3Schools then, if they are lucky, figure out how to get FileZilla to work.

It may surprise you to know this: but many shared hosts also allow you to use RoR and Django. If our Dreamweaving maestro ever gets to that point, he won't have to worry about seeking alternatives.

So, if the beginner isn't the target for dotCloud, and certainly not smallish businesses who would have a heart-attack considering paying more than $10/month on hosting (don't even ask about spending more than $10k for a website), and they can't be targeting people who are sick of Heroku because Heroku is a much better deal, and they can't be targeting people who actually know what they are doing, then that leaves a small sector of people who "heard something about the cloud" and who have deep pockets. Maybe they are able to target large corporations who have miles of red tape to contend with, but I'm not sure if that jives either.

So from observation rather than my own experience, it seems that the highest likelihood way to become a HFT boss is:
-go to a top grad program for engineering/stats/CS/finance/math/similar
-get hired by Citadel/Renntech/etc into their HFT group
-get promoted or start your own fund.

A few exceptionally talented guys who I've come across (I've by chance met two, and I've also come across the CVs of a few just from looking at research papers/bios) are able to skip one or more steps of this process. However, it's hard enough to become an HFT boss doing a phd at MIT, working at Citadel, and then going off to start your own fund. Think about how hard it would be without those advantages!

To me this says much more about the places you're interviewing with TBH.

Heroku (and family) is most certainly known outside of "Hacker News" circles. I can accept that its not so wide spread as to reach every random company/person that considers themselves a web developer - but I think thats more to do with the number of ****ty companies and people thinking of themselves as web shops and developers.

Then I either stand corrected* or I have a habit of being interviewed by people who are dumber than I am.

* I certainly see how I am probably wrong, though.

I was overselling Heroku, you're underselling it. We meet in the middle, everything's fine

Basically what I'm saying is "I want to run my mega awesome new startup with Rails" is the new "I want to build a website with Dreamweaver" (alas smaller group of people) and Heroku is catering to that crowd.

Digital Ocean has an affiliate program. Once a new customer spends $10, they pay you $10. Not a horrible deal if you are a site that isn't large enough to get real ads going. Back of the envelope worst case: $10.00/10,000 impressions = $0.001/impression. Back of the envelope best case: $10.00/1,000 impressions = $0.01/impression. Probably hit closer to $0.002/impression.

Still quite a bit better than what Linode offers, which is $20 after the customer has bought 3 months of hosting, and certainly better than Heroku's offer of $0.

Yeah, this is true, thought I'd prefer it if RoR is the new Flash, but same Adobe software either way.

I have been spending close to an hour here trying to solve this on code academy? Could anyone throw me a bone?
http://i.imgur.com/PMt04Av.png
Thank you!

EDIT: Nevermind I figured it out! There wasn't necessary anything wrong with the code, I just was not following instructions. I didn't need to do the redacting until later

The gzip and minification are more a convenience than anything else... its the CDN and caching which is the real benefit.

Regarding the CDN, you setup your DNS to point to their nameservers and every request to your website is routed via cloudflare. For dynamic content they request is forwarded on to your server, but for static content and assets, and page is served from cloudflares CDN. You dont need to set anything up, the first time any static content is accessed, cloudflare auto adds it to the CDN, and the next request will not hit your server.

how does it determine if something is static or not?
eg, i could have a index.html page which was a static page or one generated by ruby, and the URL and response would be the same...

I really like Cloudflare's marketing. That's all I got.

Its based on some analysis of the content and also you can set the headers of non obvious pages like .html (i think its the cache-control header).

Lol.

Against what should have been my better judgement I started contract to hire for a startup that I hadn't heard great things about last week.

Monday/Tuesday spent all day with a couple devs trying to get me set up on their system (nginx on my windows laptop..). When I came in on Monday I tried to get my boss to give me a signed contract with my rate on it and she was "resistant" and I never got it done. Also, they insisted on 1099...

Wednesday I come in and my boss was fired. Wednesday afternoon around 2pm I finally get started on some work.

I told them in advance that I had to go to my Uncle's funeral on Thursday/Friday. On Friday literally in the middle of it I get an email saying they're firing me.

Now they want me to come in and "discuss" my invoice for what I sent them for last week.

This is going to end super well for me.

the 2+2 programming subforum lc thread: where people ask for and ignore good advice since 2011

To my credit I never asked for any advice here =/

That sounds more like a millennial daycare than a start-up.

Fun issue of the day:
I was updating a label with javascript and it was working fine in IE 8, Chrome and FF but it wasn't working in Opera.

It was very simple so it baffled me at why it didn't work. Opera is my primary browser but I develop in a VM and use Chrome for active development.

I had checked a feature in Opera hours earlier and disabled JS since Opers lets you toggle JS very easily with a quick menu option. Obviously JS was disabled and it worked as soon as I turned it on.

It took me 15 minutes of wondering wtf was going on before I figured it out and I only realized it because I went to check my e-mail and it didn't work (requires JS).

a bug that took only 15 minutes to find and fix.... pffff... i don't care how silly it was, there should be like a 3 hour rule before anything is worthy of being held up as an exemplar of the absurdities of the web development. i mean 15 minutes is the equivalent of someone complaining that villain hit his flush draw after getting all in on the flop

Wrote an 18k bash script today to demonstrate one of our APIs that has a payload that will take 43 name value pairs. What a pain.

I have a good javascript story!

(is it Javascript, javaScript, JavaScript, or javascript? The Firefox spell-check highlights everything but JavaScript)

My job uses a program. I can't really describe what it does, but if there is a program that is worthy of the phrase "mission critical," this one certainly is. There's a million things I hate about this program, and most of those things stem from how gawd-awful slow it is.

The running joke is me saying "Oh, come on, [this program] can't be so bad that it can't do [obviously basic thing]" with the response "Yes, actually, [this program] is that bad."

One day, I decided to CTR-U and do a find. "script src" shows up 40+ times and "script type" comes up another 15+ times, so yes, they are running over 55 scripts to run the page. I look up at the url and see it is .aspx.

I'm not an expert on .Net, but I figured that since most of my operations were basically "Click this," "Enter that into the input box," and "press submit." (Good luck using hot-keys like Tab and Enter, lol), all that JavaScript probably isn't needed and .Net should be fine retrieving the data displaying the content by itself. So, I turned off JavaScript and reloaded the page. I put some text in the box, click "submit" and... nothing happened.

Not only did nothing happen, the entire site broke. Every link, drop-down, and button couldn't be clicked and nothing, and I mean not one single thing worked any more. I couldn't even highlight text! I did try to input some text in the box and press Enter but of course it sat there blankly staring back at me. So, I turned JavaScript back on, submitted the search, sat there for 5 minutes waiting, got irritated, and closed the program down.