More letters to RIM; employees rally alongside anonymous exec - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2011/07/01/more-letters-to-rim-employees-rally-alongside-anonymous-exec/

<comment><USER2> RIM is now a textbook case of Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy (<http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html>) in action. Group one, the goal seekers, have been or are being forced out or converted to members of group two, the organization supporters. Those anonymous letters coming from the current and former employees? Just desperate attempts from group one employees to be heard over the crushing silence of the group two management structure.

Don't expect RIM's fortunes to turn around any time soon. Only a catastrophic business failure is going to shake up the management structure. With RIM's financials and market position, it could be years before that event comes to pass. Even then, there's no guarantee that RIM would really make a recovery. Most likely RIM will be absorbed by a larger competitor (and the current RIM top brass removed) before anything like real business failure can occur.

It's so painful to watch this. RIM has really made some great products and services.

<comment><USER3> "Most likely RIM will be absorbed by a larger competitor (and the current RIM top brass removed) before anything like real business failure can occur."

I think the most likely outcome is RIM stockholders will force some big changes after a few more quarters of getting drilled by Android and Apple's holiday lineup. Then 6-8 months later we'll see RIM starting to ship consumer Android devices with a Blackberry security/messaging ui layer alongside their other products. It will stabilize their fortunes and they could go on to be the leading Android vendor with their strong brand and messaging focus.

edit: you could even argue that they can't really do that now and couldn't do it last year. Everyone would say they're crazy to kill the golden egg and go make lower margin phones. They needed to have disaster quarters, failed products and tanking market share in order to make these decisions.

<comment><USER4> > Then 6-8 months later we'll see RIM starting to ship consumer Android > devices with a Blackberry security/messaging ui layer alongside their other > products. It will stabilize their fortunes and they could go on to be the > leading Android vendor with their strong brand and messaging focus.

I have a feeling that even if they go down that route, they won't be the leading Android vendor.

If RIM is unable to innovate for a few more quarters, then their brand will be worth less. The longer they hold out, the less their brand is worth. If they switch to Android after their brand has taken hits, they will not do so well. Samsung and HTC are firmly entrenched in the Android market, and I doubt a weakened RIM would be able to overtake them.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, not just Samsung and HTC but also the likes of LG and Sony are better positioned to wind up as Android top dog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know a RIM exec personally (and leave it at that) and he mocked my iPhone for several years, calling it "fragile" and a "toy for children".

It's been only in the past month or so that he muttered something about the competition getting tough lately.

It just seems RIM leadership is extremely arrogant and proud. They see the train coming right at them, but are too afraid to make the radical blue ocean product that's required to save them.

<comment><USER7> An executive of one company isn't likely going to complement another company. They're going to do everything in their power to downgrade products of their competition. I really don't think it makes a difference whether your friend worked for RIM, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, or HP because all of Apple's competitors followed this exact train of thought for several years.

<comment><USER8> With the notable exception being Google who immediately changed the direction android was going to account for the innovations Apple had developed. RIM and Microsoft laughed the iPhone off and now wonder why Google and Apple are so far ahead.

<comment><USER7> I think it's more that Google was hovering around from the start with the G1. So the improvements they made were incremental on that brand new platform but Microsoft and RIM would need a revolution to be able to catch up to the iPhone and G1 at that point in the game.

The problem is that all the old players were left in the dust because they had too much momentum on their old platforms. It's like hitting the breaks when you are going 100 mph. For Google and Apple, they were going 0-60 pretty quickly and then just slowly came up and surpassed the incumbents.

<comment><USER9> IIRC Android was in development at a company Google bought even before the iPhone launched. Early prototypes looked like a Blackberry, not like an Android: they adjusted dramatically.

<comment><USER3> You could say Google was just smarter and they probably were but I think their main advantage here was having no established product bringing in billions. This freed executives to look at the market objectively and pick the future winners.

There's a Steve Jobs quote about what happens when the sales guy starts running the show at tech companies that's relevant here. Even if it's not the CEO, too much of a company's top brass can get wedded to yesterday's products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing that struck me as interesting is in the second letter, section 6:

 _There is so much secrecy in the company, no one knows anything about new things until we see it on the news. That means we're not able to tell our friends and family anything about new things, and that reflects badly on RIM._

Is the reason it works for Apple so well and not for RIM because people anticipate Apple products more (i.e. the products are better), or because Apple are better at showbusiness, or both of the above, or something else?

I for one, despite being a huge Blackberry fan, never even realised there was any secrecy ahead of launches, I've never anticipated new product announcements or put much thought into what they would be.

<comment><USER11> Actually I feel all the opposite. RIM talks too much about its upcoming products that people dont feel like buying whats on offer right now.

<comment><USER12> The interesting part is that nobody really is interested in buying the upcoming things they're talking about either. If their goal is to feel the market out by revealing upcoming projects, then it's not really working for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Side thought: I've watched a lot of companies become horrible places to work because of process strangulation. The problem is a small, vocal group saying how much better life would be with one more piece of information...

The way I combat that is by documenting what is working right and determining what I don't want to change. Your process requirements then become "Learn/Enable/Etc this" and "Leave that unaffected".

It becomes surprisingly good at checking rampant process growth because you have an anchor.

<comment><USER14> The thing I love to see is how badly 'process' is implemented. _In theory_ you should be able to get everyone who's approval you need in one room at one time, take 10 minutes to explain your requirements and answer questions, then have them all rubber stamp whatever it is you need and get going with doing your work. In practice people do exactly the opposite, trying to add distance to slow down the process. I'm wondering if what we all need is a more human communication method to speed up resolution of problems and process.

<comment><USER15> Almost all process is poorly implemented. Just bypass it. If you're a good coder you should be able to contort your programs around the process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This internal drama is blowing my mind.

Here's what's wrong, RIM: you're not presenting your products right. Your business audience doesn't care that the PlayBook has true multitasking, nor do they care that there's Flash on-board. They want a device to manage their emails and make running their business easier.

And the BlackBerry is really sad to see in my eyes. You buy this nice software company and their HTML5 browser, and then put it in a crappy phone that has half the specs of the competition? You have so much potential, I can see it and feel it... but you're not utilising your resources properly. Study the iPhone and Android and see why they're popular.

BGR's original leaked letter mentioned that RIM was advertising its products wrong. I agree completely. Whenever I see a RIM ad, I just shake my head. They really aren't advertising the right things. They're putting good things like BBM aside.

I don't have a RIM device, but almost all of my co-workers do. I like my iPhone, and I'm not trying to sound like an idiotic fanboy, but RIM: I used to respect you a lot. You ran your business very well, and your devices could have been considered revolutionary. Get your shit together.

<comment><USER17> These are the only things I've ever heard from people who swear by their BB's:

1\. Keyboard

2\. BBM

3\. E-mail

I'm surprised RIM hasn't figured this out by now and put on their advertisements "BlackBerry XXXX whatever - types easier, instantly communicate better, and e-mail faster" (btw - whether or not these are really true is up to debate, but IMO they are the only selling points)

I see ads all of the time for BB's that talk about Facebook/Twitter. I haven't heard a single good thing about the facebook/twitter apps for BB or any BB app for that matter.

<comment><USER18> In the UK they've been running an ad about BBM - getting your friends together, meeting people in a nightclub etc.

When I first saw it I thought "about time, that's what they need to do - capitalise on the fact that BBM is selling phones to teenagers/young people".

And then it ends with a guy in a suit checking his bank details with a message about online security.

Totally destroys the message that the advert was, until then, successfully portraying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The fact employees and even senior management have to resort to posting their thoughts about the company _anonymously_ to another website rather than being able to talk freely within the company speaks volumes about the serious problems they have.

In my opinion, a company can only function well if there's open and honest communication.

</comment><comment><USER20> The funny (and sad) thing is, RIM is currently limited in its options. If it responds again to these new letters, they'll just have _more_ letters flying out. It was a huge mistake to respond to the first letter, no matter what they could have said.

Interestingly, I would hope the RIM employees who've written this letter (and the guy who wrote the first letter) would've started shorting stock. If RIM responds again, I'm sure as hell doing it.

<http://www.google.com/finance?q=rim>

<comment><USER21> > It was a huge mistake to respond to the first letter, no matter what they > could have said.

And even more so because their response utterly blew.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I bet there are a lot of people out there that see parallels between RIM and the companies they work for. Sadly, I don't think RIM is in any way unique and is more the norm than the exception.

</comment><comment><USER23> RIM makes excellent business phones. My BB is tougher than most and the keyboard is excellent. Exchange integration works. As a private iPhone user I want apps. As a corporate BB user I just want something that is tough and works.

They should not try to be a better Apple than Apple.

Focus on their market.

<comment><USER24> Blackberries should:

(a) Be awesome at email (and therefore have keyboards.)

(b) Take phone calls.

(c) Integrate with your calendar.

(d) Have awesome instant messaging (BBM?).

(e) Be able to survive a 20 foot drop.

(f) Have excellent battery life.

(g) Be much cheaper than the iPhone/Android.

If you're a business, you want to be able to give everyone this type of device on their first day of work, all set up with everything. There should be no expectation of personal use and there should be every expectation that everyone in the company has and uses one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sounds like business as usual at a BigCo (founded in 1984).

</comment><comment><USER26> Does Angry Birds run on the Playbook? I bought a Gtablet (display sucks, but otherwise a powerful device). First thing anyone does when they try it out is to look for Angry Birds.

I'm getting the feeling the Playbook's selling point is "We don't need a youtube app, you can just browse YouTube inline!"

<comment><USER13> I don't watch YouTube much, but that feature of inline YouTube is surprisingly valuable. I switched to a different browser on my iPad (iCab Mobile) that supports it and the experience is markedly better.

However, listening to a singer repeat "Flash" over and over does absolutely nothing to make me want a Playbook. I run into flash problems one a week at most; I'll glady trade it for battery life, performance, and stability.

<comment><USER27> "A singer"?

That's not just "a singer".

It's Freddie Mercury himself.

<comment><USER28> That's the subtly bad part about the music. The commercial is so ineffective and off-target that RIM is managing to drag down one of the legends of rock with another kind of rock: the Playbook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The comments to this can almost be titled "Strategies for Effective Leadership". Whether I agree with all of them or not the discussion is quite thought-provoking and makes me wonder what lessons can be learned to apply at my current company.

</comment><comment><USER30> A more democratic company structure would probably help with these issues. It seems that a dictatorial structure allows the top execs to ignore all the underlings, to ignore the little people who actually do much of the work.

<comment><USER25> That's a terrible idea. A company is not a democracy. The only solution is to have good leaders.

<comment><USER31> Agreed. Generally speaking companies should be meritocracies, allowing the good leaders to rise up. The people at the bottom may do all the work, but probably can't make overall strategic decisions nearly as well.

<comment><USER32> People at the top only need to make a few big strategic decisions a year. Some of them, purely through dumb luck, will make the rights one and continue to rise. This is not meritocracy, it's a crap shoot.

People at the bottom make lots of little decisions every day. They may get lucky now and then, but over a year, the occasional bad luck will cancel that out. So you have more meritocracy at the bottom, and less the higher up you go.

In a large organization like RIM, the principle talent of senior management is not strategic decision making, or management, but rent seeking: appropriating the product of the lower ranks for their own glory. Other principle qualities: fine grooming and dress, a firm hand shake, politics, public speaking, and punctuality. These qualities are practiced _daily_. You can't fake it. Strategic decision making? A few times a year.

Add a little random luck in strategic decisions, and you have the CEO. There are enough contenders for his position that someone, somewhere will have a string of good enough fortune to land them there, regardless of merit.

[hat tip to Taleb re: executives and strategic decision making]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Revolution in Motion. (or as another comment has it Research in Mutiny).

</comment><comment><USER34> RIM forgot it's target market. Their ads are showing too many teens/family - gotta focus on their business market, and be the best at that.</comment>


How we Simplified our Pricing Page - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lob.com/post/60943260246/how-we-simplified-our-pricing-page

<comment><USER2> This is a great update, a few concerns I have:

1\. The ever popular: logo link on your blog should go to www.lob.com

2\. Is there are reason all of these values can't be loaded on the page? I don't know if this is load related, but when I change an input option, I sometimes wait for over a second for the new price to appear. There's no reason I can think of to justify this, the switch should be nearly instant.

3\. For me, this is much much better than the earlier version. But for some users, a price comparison might be helpful. As a secondary click, it might be nice to offer something _like_ the old look (or a similar price comparison page).

[Formatting edit]

<comment><USER3> I'm glad to see someone else feels the same way about logo links on blog.company.com pages. I have always been surprised they just redirect to "/" instead of the company homepage.

Does anyone know the reasoning for the trend? Is there some SEO benefit of this or is it really just oversight/becoming de facto standard?

<comment><USER2> Usually they're hosted separately (some vps and tumblr in this case). So it's just a matter of the blog using the default mapping for it's logo to the blog site. The blog is generally completely unaware it's psuedo-participating in a larger site configuration. Good from a security perspective, a bit of a hassle for admin'ing (hence this issue).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of the Azure pricing page:

[http://www.windowsazure.com/en- us/pricing/calculator/?scenar...](http://www.windowsazure.com/en- us/pricing/calculator/?scenario=cloud)

It seems like Lob is using a similar flat UI price calculator though they don't have the quantity sliders, which is apparently an oversight as a slider seems to make sense for settings like "number of pages". Their previous pricing was 50 cents per page plus 12 cents per extra page. A 100 page document is therefore $12.38 plus shipping. Under the new pricing the same 100 page document is $96 including shipping. Presumably shipping costs scale logarithmically with number of pages as the cost to ship a 100 page document shouldn't exceed $80, to put it mildly.

I also like Azure's use of the flat selection boxes which operate as radio buttons. You get to see all the options side-by-side as opposed to Lob's site where you have to click on each dropdown to see which options are available.

</comment><comment><USER5> So, one thing immediately comes to mind:

$0.96 for each document? If it was something like an Earnings Report for a startup's investors, that could be $80+ _per report_.

Does scaling never factor in, here? Bulk orders?

Edit: Got rid of a sentence that wasn't really part of their model.

<comment><USER6> You must have never experienced the prices of printing services at UPS/Staples/Kinkos... $1.20+/per page for fax, $.50+/per B&W page for printing, etc.

<comment><USER5> Maybe it's just been a few years, but I was able to get 30 BW sheets for about $8.

<comment><USER6> Ah you are correct, the B&W is much cheaper than color. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A link to the detailed price sheet would still be appreciated by some users. If I'm trying to weigh the decision to buy matte/gloss thick/regular business cards, I don't want to have to cycle through the 4 options and mentally keep track of the relative pricing.

</comment><comment><USER8> You could do with some kind of min-height fix to stop that annoying reload jump when changing options. Otherwise, it looks great!

</comment><comment><USER9> Funny, I noticed that sending a color card to antarctica at $1.23 is cheaper than sending one to the US for $1.69.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice way to get tons of traffic to look at the pricing for your product :)</comment>


How one perfume company misled scientists into believing in human sex pheromones - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/3/13/8202465/sex-pheromones

<comment><USER2> I can't keep track of what's been debunked anymore.

<comment><USER3> No kidding. Nutrition, health, history and psychology seem to be making a lot of course corrections. Unless it's physics or math, I get ticked off any more when I read "now we know..."

<comment><USER4> While unreproducible data does exist, I'd honestly blame mainstream news organizations more than the researchers themselves for all this 'course correcting'.

Case in point, back in my bio days I worked in a lab that published an article on CBD knockdown of metastatic cancer genes in cell cultures. Mainstream news organizations picked it up and published it as "Smoking pot cures cancer" pieces, which was not at all what our research even touched on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While it's likely humans do have sex pheromones... there's been no study to confirm which of _many_ pheremones act as sexual indicators in humans... or how much affect they have.</comment>


Linux on Galaxy Never Showed Up, So These Guys Built It - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tech.ula <comment><USER2> I'm always left perplexed when projects like these don't make F-Droid distribution a priority over the Play store. Regardless, I'll check it out if it ever finds its way to F-Droid.</comment>


Want healthy food delivered to your office fridge? It's available in Oakland. - <AUTHOR> http://oaklandnorth.net/2012/04/02/delicious-nutritious-delivers-healthy-meals-to-employees-at-local-businesses/

<comment><USER2> So, when those so called journos learn to put some contact information for the covered business - a link, the domain name as text (if links are too hard or impossible within their CMS), or at least a phone number! Now, people have to google "Delicious Nutritious" and hope a domainer isn't owning DeliciousNutritious.com already. Well, in this case, the website is <http://www.deenut.com/> and is the first hit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't even realize they didn't include a link. I just assume one links things in this day and age.

<comment><USER2> Well, often Mashable, GigaOm, and ReadWriteWeb make the same mistake, so, if the technically savvy guys do it, I cannot be too harsh to the mere journos. Mashable is even worse with their self-linking approach (you click on a site's name assuming you're going to visit the third-party site, but instead, you're going to a tag search page) - totally counter-intuitive and a total pageview bait - it's totally disgusting!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've used these guys before for the office, the food was a hit!</comment>


Is Your Site Hacker News Ready? - <AUTHOR> http://www.brandonsavage.net/is-your-site-hacker-news-ready/ <comment><USER2> If you're hosting some sort of blog post, the best way to ensure that all goes well with high traffic is to make it static. Something like jekyll works great for this (publishing especially), and you can host any static site with a node server in like 3 lines of code on nodejitsu for $3/month.

Nodejitsu can handle hacker news traffic without even the slightest blink, with one dyno - I had a post up on the homepage for hours with over 200 concurrent visitors and like 13,000 total for the day and never had a single issue. Again, $3/month for that.

No need to over-complicate things : )

<comment><USER3> Really, I don't know why dynamic languages became so popular for blog platforms.

It's an overkill all you need is static content.

<comment><USER4> Non-programmers find it much easier to log into a site, type in a text box, and click 'submit' than to run some sort of static site generator.

<comment><USER5> If you're at the stage where you're maintaining your own server anyway, it doesn't seem like too much to ask.

Static websites are glorious. Much more secure, much faster to load, far fewer things that can go wrong. Cheaper, too, since they require fewer resources. And, as luck would have it, there's a perfect Hacker News thread to get one started:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4857473>

<comment><USER6> Or, if you really want or need a dynamic website, throw CloudFront or similar in front of the site.

Then lock down your CMS at a secret, SSL-only URL.

It's about 2 lines of Ruby or PHP to ping CloudFront and request an invalidation when you change a page (which only happens rarely anyway.)

Secure, fast, dynamic, only goes down if CloudFront does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm constantly amazed at how poorly Wordpress is able to perform. 2.5GB virtual server with a cache in front of it and it went down?

My blog is a Django app running on a 512MB Rackspace VM with a basic Apache, mod_wsgi, and Postgres setup. I have a dozen low traffic applications all running on the same server alongside it. I have zero caching set up so every hit is doing the full process of querying the database and pushing the results out through a template.

I was on the front page of HN last year and the server load was negligable. I have graphs: [http://thraxil.org/users/anders/posts/2012/06/02/How- Django-...](http://thraxil.org/users/anders/posts/2012/06/02/How-Django-deals- with-a-Hacker-News-frontpaging/)

<comment><USER8> I bet if you switched to nginx, your server would use even less resources to handle the same amount of traffic.

<comment><USER7> Having used nginx on other projects, I'm sure you're right. My blog setup is pretty old and hasn't really needed any improvements.

On newer deployments, I'm still using Apache+mod_wsgi to manage the Django processes (it's a setup that has been reliable for me and that I know how to debug), but I'm sticking an nginx proxy in front as a matter of course. Not for performance reasons, but just to leave myself a hook for handling later changes. I can trivially spin up additional application backend servers and load balance across them, or quickly flick a switch to have nginx cache a particular resource in an emergency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mostly as an educational exercise (perhaps in futility) I decided to try writing my own small php framework specifically to build and serve static files, load external libraries only when necessary and automatically send caching headers. The point being, for instance, not to even load Dwoo except if compiling the static pages (as opposed to fetching data from a view, building them and serving them with each request.)

Now i'm wondering if i'm not both overoptimizing and missing the point entirely.

And yes I do realize 'custom php framework' is missing the point of frameworks and that php is an abomination. Getting Laravel to do what I wanted (awesome as it is, and it is) started to seem like trying to tweak a cannon into a flyswatter.

It's still fun, but I dread it ever getting posted here. Assuming it gets finished.

<comment><USER10> Building a static site generator is always a good learning exercise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> NginX + php-fpm + APC did the trick for me, at one time even in an EC2 Micro instance under heavy load.

There is a very nice hack I applied to my WordPress installs, but it's not for the faint hearted: hack the WP index.php to serve pages directly from Memcache for all non-authenticated GET requests. The beauty of this is that for most requests, the WP environment (which is horribly bloated) does not even get loaded.

It works about an order of magnitude better than all those cache plugins, but the downside is of course that software updates require some special care.

<comment><USER12> You could just pop Varnish cache in front of Wordpress to do the same thing - any unauthenticated GET's will just hit Varnish, and come nowhere near Wordpress itself.

That way you wouldn't need to worry about software updates.

<comment><USER11> Totally. I guess I could also use some advanced Nginx directive/plugin to do that. The hack is just something that occurred to me spontaneously, it took about 2 minutes to implement, and I didn't even have to install anything :)

<comment><USER12> You could give these 2 config files a try sometime:

[https://github.com/ewanleith/Wordpress-Server- Configuration-...](https://github.com/ewanleith/Wordpress-Server- Configuration-Files/blob/master/nginx-caching/default.conf) [https://github.com/ewanleith/Wordpress-Server- Configuration-...](https://github.com/ewanleith/Wordpress-Server- Configuration-Files/blob/master/nginx-caching/nginx.conf)

Basically they make nginx cache itself, which combined with this Wordpress plugin:

<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nginx-champuru/>

Makes things very minimal, no need for even a dedicated cache :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> First time I reached the front page I had ~250 concurrent users and increasing, then the server crashed.

After that I wrote a cronjob that runs a script which automatically increases my virtual machines RAM. When I have little or no visits it uses 1GB RAM the most it went up to was 9GB RAM (increasing with 1GB at a time).

It also sends me an e-mail when increasing/decreasing the RAM so I can ensure that it doesn't crash.

I also use Wordpress with caching enabled and the above helps me keep the costs down, don't want the server to run on 8GB RAM all the time nor 1GB RAM.

<comment><USER14> Which provider is that? AWS? I feel like it's only a matter of time before auto-scaling works well enough that it's just a standard feature.

<comment><USER13> Glesys <http://www.glesys.com/> they have server centers in Sweden, New York and Amsterdam (from what I can remember...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 200 hits per minute? Is that all it takes?

(I guess the answer is "No, only if you've misconfigured", but still...)

<comment><USER16> A misconfigured site that serves all its own assets will perform terribly because 200 hits per minute x 20 assets = 4,000 hits per minute. Wordpress has tons of assets too.

<comment><USER17> Never used WP, but aren't those static assets? The bottleneck would be bandwidth then, should not be a huge load on the server. If it's compiling stuff or fetching them from DB though, then that could cause some problems.

<comment><USER16> It has to do with the number of requests plus the number of allowed processes plus the requests each process was allowed to serve. At a limit of 300 requests per process, the processes fell over at about 3 seconds time. With only 20 processes, dying every three seconds, the server was overwhelmed. So it's really a combination of issues.

Looking at the records for MySQL data, there wasn't that much of an issue there with MySQL connections. This is probably due to the fact that the page cache was working correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My blog (elweb.co) has been on the HN home page a few times. I use Wordpress with WP Super Cache, hosted on cheapest available shared plan from Dreamhost with no problems.

</comment><comment><USER19> We had a blog article on the front page of HN recently ( <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5133906> ) and I can't say we had much trouble. Pushed the Heroku dynos up to two for an evening then dropped them back down to one at the end of the day. The site assets are hosted on S3 and we didn't have to touch that. Ended up with about 16k hits.

</comment><comment><USER20> We recently launched a simple website monitoring app for the iPhone where we ping sites from our servers, and send push notifications when we detect something is wrong (a poor man's pagerduty or pingdom where you do everything from your phone and can subscribe using IAP).

Probably the biggest lesson we've learned from collecting data on latency and timeouts from our backend is that there are a LOT of very poor hosts out there. Trying to strike a balance between intermittent failures, and actual "Your site is down, you need to do something" is pretty difficult, unless you are willing to simply wait long enough. We'll regularly see timeouts from places like Tumblr and Github Pages--they never go down, but things can get spotty. We can also tell when certain hosting providers are doing their weekly backups (or something - just guessing) because things will just go to pot at the same time every weekend for about an hour.

I can second the S3/CloudFront recommendation. Pretty rock solid (modulo downtime in specific regions).

For anyone curious about the app: <http://vigil-app.com>

</comment><comment><USER21> I've read so many times on HN that people find it hard to scale WordPress. Really? Running WordPress on 128MB VPS and theoretically I can handle more than 250 request per second without problem[1]. Granted that number is just theoretical value but please, if you have gigabytes of RAM and your WordPress site fail after some hundreds of request per second, you certainly have done something terribly wrong. Especially for site with text and very few media content.

Forget any other setup you've ever used, go with this for high performance WordPress

1) Nginx [set so that request to static content to completely bypass PHP]

2) PHP-FPM

3) APC [Object & Database cache]

4) W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache

5) Varnish

There many other high performance WordPress setup you could find out there but in term of simplicity and manageability, this is the one I fancy most. The bottleneck in this setup is RAM, not PHP, WordPress or MySQL read/write operation as I've seen in many server setup.

Disclaimer : I run small operation of managed WordPress hosting called KittySensei[2]

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/m0Dg9YR.png>

[2] <http://www.kittysensei.com>

</comment><comment><USER22> Good tips for Wordpress users. Another great option we went for is hosting your entire site/blog on S3/cloudfront. This can be done using tools like Jekyll (<https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll>) or Middleman (<http://middlemanapp.com/>).

<comment><USER23> If your site is entirely static content and mostly text, you don't really need a CDN. I've had a static site survive the HN frontpage without any problem on cheap-ass shared hosting.

<comment><USER24> If all you need is static hosting then S3 is great. The benefits of a CDN, and it's incredibly cheap too.

<comment><USER25> If you want the benefits of a CDN I think you'd have to link S3 to CloudFront. S3 alone does not provide CDN capabilities AFAIK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you are self hosting Wordpress, the w3 Super Cache plugin is solid: <http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/>

My otherwise poorly maintained blog didn't have a problem with a simultaneous HN/Slashdot hit, and I'm not even sure I'm using all the settings correctly. But the basic page cache seems to do what it promises.

Edit: oops, I see the OP is using Super Cache as well but still flopped. Then he is definitely doing someone wrong. My blog is hosted on the cheapest hosting plan that Dreamhost allows.

</comment><comment><USER27> My solution was to move my WP blog from being hosted locally to Github pages using Jekyll. They'll do a much better job keeping it up than I will and more importantly it's less for me to worry about.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wrote about my experience related to this in detail - Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch [1]. This blog post provides insights into the caching, concurrency and stability issues I've faced.

[http://www.gigpeppers.com/post-mortem-of-a-failed- hackernews...](http://www.gigpeppers.com/post-mortem-of-a-failed-hackernews- launch/)

</comment><comment><USER29> For <http://pineapple.io> I had 250 simultaneous users at once, and I believe 16,000 over the course of the day.

Server cut through it like butter :) Just lots of caching, optimization, sprites, etc. That traffic isn't even that bad, but I was happy my rails code performed nicely.

</comment><comment><USER30> Tip: if you have an image-heavy blog, don't host the images somewhere that charges extra for exceeding a network traffic limit. Getting an overage charge email was how I discovered that my fractal article full of pictures was on HN.

As an aside, I found that being on Reddit can give much, much more traffic than HN.

<comment><USER9> I'd also like to suggest, as a matter of politeness, don't just hotlink to images on other people's sites either. Then you're just screwing someone else over. I'm still getting requests for an image I posted to an old wordpress blog years ago because random j. user liked it and reposted it to a forum. It's a popular forum, judging from my logs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> 2.5 GB virtual server? You don't need that at all. I use shared hosting for my blog, and yet I survived several hours as #1 on the HN front page. The trick? Static HTML pages (made with a homemade PHP blog system, but I could just as easily have used one of the many static site generators).

</comment><comment><USER32> Is Wordpress.com itself capable of handling a slashdotting? If so, why not use it?

</comment><comment><USER33> You can just use free services to host your wordpress blog without any trouble. Set it up on AppFog or OpenShift, use cloudflare too, and use a cache plugin if needed. I don't think any HN-effect could take that down.

</comment><comment><USER34> I am preparing a new blog, that I do have the intention to have it featured on HN sometimes.

For now what I will do is use a very lightweight Wordpress theme, and cloudflare.

Is that enough?

<comment><USER35> If you're just blogging, is there a reason you want to do it all yourself? I just set up a Blogger account with a custom domain and let it be...

<comment><USER34> I used to have a wordpress.com blog, but after they charged to everything I wanted to do, I got annoyed with them.

Also, I like to sometimes fiddle with stuff, and not let my "webmastering" get too rusty.

It is good to sometimes ssh to something that you own and wreck it at your will :)

To me, part of the fun of setting up a blog, is not only writing, but also taking care of it. I don't know really why (I have no intention of doing that for other people)

<comment><USER35> That's fair. I have a similar thought process around other servers and sites that I have, so I can appreciate the need for fiddling.

Funnily enough, I think the reason I went with Blogger (alongside not needing to worry too much about traffic etc.) was specifically to take away my complete ability to fiddle... otherwise I tend to do all that instead of actually writing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


5 things Linux does better than OSX and a couple of things I miss - <AUTHOR> http://mergy.org/2012/12/5-things-linux-does-better-than-os-x-and-a-couple-of-things-i-miss/

<comment><USER2> I don't see a link for here.

>More information here.

Please complete your sentence?

>Standard SD seem to be okay, but SDHC cards (like the one I happen to use with our Canon camera.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out. I will fix that.

<comment><USER2> You're most welcome. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > 2\. Workspaces / Virtual Desktops

Don't worry, just install gnome 3 and you'll have your crappy OSX desktop again.

<comment><USER4> This doesn't make sense to me. He's saying that he'd rather have the linux virtual desktops behaviour than OSX one. Why would he want what you wrote?

<comment><USER3> It's a jab at the regression from gnome 2 to gnome 3.</comment></comment></comment>