146's comments

It's been completely reliable when there were actual problems. The web interface was pretty intuitive to us as well. I really like the login flow.

Our PagerDuty is integrated right now with Scout, Pingdom, and our own custom alerting system.

So far most complaints we've had while using the service for the first week were our own faults: for example, our monitoring was too sensitive, which was fixed by using the regexp filters, and by eliminating spurious errors from reporting on our side. One thing that PagerDuty did was that it basically forced us to fix these reporting issues so that we weren't woken up at 5AM unless it was a real emergency.

The SMS interface got a little confusing when we had two errors at once. For example, a frequent case is getting two pages at once, "Service X is DOWN" and "quora.com is DOWN". I think what I tried doing was:

1. Receive the first report (site).

2. Receive the second report (service).

3. ACK both reports using the second report's code.

4. Fix the service.

5. Attempt to resolve the second report, receive a "code already used" error.

Resolving things via SMS is a little bit clumsy (it's what I usually default to). A link to the PagerDuty login would be cool, but I don't know if it would fit in the 160 character limit.

I don't have the current numbers, but:

- On Twitter's profitability (this is before Sponsored Tweets launched): http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc200...

- Ev's other startup, Pyra Labs (Blogger), had a successful exit in 2003. There are some better details in "Founders at Work".

You need your existing (real) password to change your password; e-mail is still possible to change. Probable attack vector is to do "lost password" link and then change it, but the same is applicable to anyone with a smartphone too (it just now applies to anyone with any phone hooked up to FB).

That's interesting. Could you post a screenshot and the URL that you are accessing?

For the most part, schema changes can be done without breaking the existing code base (add columns, add tables, etc.) These schema changes can just be run on the databases before the code depending on it is pushed. Much more rarely though, there might be code that depends on a certain schema (the kind that say, alter table might do). In this case we can push out code that is compatible with both versions (at the very worst case, using table descriptions to differentiate between the two), run the schema change, and then eliminate the backwards compatibility.

There's not that much different in terms of operating procedure between continuous code deployment and scheduled code deployments; it's just much faster and less prone to merge errors.

The Russians were barely able to slow down Facebook back in 2009. Unless someone on 4chan has a bigger botnet and just decided for lulz to DDoS Facebook, 4chan would not even come close to generating enough traffic to register on the #2 website on the Internet.

Calacanis has already publicly denied being at the meeting:

http://twitter.com/#!/Jason/status/25165977135

> No, I was not at the "super angel summit," and I would never be pro collusion. Sounds like @arrington is stirring the pot to get pageviews

I think that's a rather unfair assumption to make. Do you have evidence that he's being disingenuous?

Come now, we can be more mature than this. The OP may be an oversimplification of the issue, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't earnestly see and want to fix a problem.

One thing is that it took a long, long time for women to break into medicine and start being taken seriously as doctors. Tech is still relatively young, so I'm hoping that we can start making movements towards that level of parity faster than then several generations it took medicine.

Twitter does not do any outright advertising but they put an incredible amount of time into their PR management, as well as making sure that their coverage in the news was kept high and positive all through 2009.

Their early claim to fame also was when they broadcasted the #sxsw Tweetstream in a hallway during SXSW 2007, after which their traffic launched substantially and effectively bootstrapped the service into the powerhouse it is today. They most certainly didn't sit on their asses hoping that the merits of their product would grant them traffic.

Nah. You can usually (but not always) tell who asks the question by checking the first person who's following the question, or by checking the question history by clicking on the timestamp.

That's really interesting to know, actually. I've only been with companies that had MySQL installations (Facebook and Twitter) and so jumping in was really easy, but on the other hand I do like to do things right. A few questions, though:

0/ How would I be able to tell if the limitations of our DB are because of MySQL and would be solved by PostgreSQL? That is, common pain points in MySQL that we wouldn't recognize immediately until we switched? (Edit: mostly looking for performance-related, but anything is fine.)

1/ Is there a PostgreSQL consulting firm that has the same reputation that Percona does with MySQL?

2/ Is there a good place to start when there's an issue or question I have with PostgreSQL (aside from IRC)? With MySQL I've been either going to the docs, or to Google, but it's been spotty with either.

Argh, that is really annoying though, and our servers really should be able to figure out that the two links, apostrophe or not, should lead to the same question. I'm a bit late to the game; was the original link up top unchanged?

Edit: should be fixed now.

You're right; I didn't know about the -w setting. I guess that just leaves PHP.

> That's only useful for dumb languages

The compilers/interpreters I know that don't do this are PHP and Perl (C/C++ will do it if you use -Wall, which you should be using anyway).

So yeah, you're pretty much right. /snark

A better programmer uses -Wall and lets the compiler check for him.

My favorite part about GameFAQs is that it's hardly about actual FAQs anymore. It's mostly walkthroughs, guides, maps, other content that doesn't really match a Q&A format. The forums are another popular location, but I wouldn't call them "FAQs" either.

There is a Q&A product called "Answers" attached to GameFAQs that doesn't seem to be as popular as their Walkthroughs offerings. For some games, however, they seem to be moderately well populated:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps3/928790-final-fantasy-xiii/answer...

I think the thing is that Facebook is learning from this. If there was actually a viable competitor at the time, the whole hype surrounding the incident might be enough to push and bootstrap enough users onto its competitor. We saw this to a limited extent with Diaspora, but given that there wasn't anything to actually sign up for, its hype has mostly fizzled by now.

Right now, Facebook is practically the only game in town, they don't have to worry about these mass migrations. But if Google manages comes up with an even comparably good clone of Facebook, it may become an issue.

I have to be honest, that doesn't sound like all that fun of a party.