Yeah, your right, MongoHQ hasn't brought anything positive to web development and there's no way they're going to make a business supporting their db. It definitely needs to be put in it's place and we should all take the time to talk about just how cool we are for predicting it's downfall. If only the whole world had enough insight to just stop before they tried to do something awesome. After all, someone may have tried it before.
I suppose answering snark with snark is fair play, but our industry has a real unhealthy preoccupation with the new. The early releases of MongoDB were great proof that the engineers had failed to learn many of the lessons of their predecessors, and I think this is why I and other database-y programmers distrust it to this day. Sexiness is not a prerequisite for reliability.
Your unspoken message reflects the widespread idea in the industry that a detailed knowledge of old things is incompatible with doing new and exciting things. I think this notion is naive and also contributes to ageism, and I hope our industry recovers from it in my lifetime.
I feel like you're more concerned with making sure people understand where they sit on the totem pole than encouraging progress or exciting developers. While learning from history is certainly paramount in software development, raw experimentation, naive excitement, and continuing in the face of nay-sayers is what pushes all industries forward.
People are allowed to make mistakes, tons of them, and the software industry is one of the best industries to make mistakes in. You get quality feedback almost instantly and can fail faster than anywhere else. No one is claiming that "detailed knowledge of old things" is on it's way out. We are engulfed in systems and code that are decades old. I don't see the point in nay-saying.
Actually I am claiming that detailed knowledge of old things has never been "in" to begin with. HN seems to harbor a great breadth and depth of knowledge and I don't think it represents normality in our industry.
Failing fast is nice, but a more measured approach might result in less of it. When it comes to storage and email, people are surprisingly unwelcoming of failure at any speed. If a little study can avert a few catastrophes it's worth it. I think ours is probably the only industry that would question the wisdom of study.
By positioning history as in conflict with raw experimentation, naive excitement and all the rest, I think you're engraving the line in the false dichotomy. Is a week or two of research sans coding really such a high price to pay? Personally, I find there are a lot of really inspiring ideas in old stuff, ideas that strike me as newer and more exciting than "embed Javascript in X."
Are young developers' egos really so fragile they can't weather having someone with experience say "fsync should be on by default"? Is cracking open the source code to BerkDB really such a deflationary moment that it threatens our industry's progress? I, personally, think they can handle it.
As a young and very "green" developer, I have to agree. The biggest thing I've learned is:
Someone else has probably already solved this problem 30 years ago, and they solved it in O(n) time.
However, that's never a bad thing, or it shouldn't be.
I think an unwillingness to look backwards is a sign of an unhealthy level of pride, and I'll freely admit that it's something I struggle with. However, I believe many (most!) developers would also benefit from trying to get past one's ego.
I assume you're referring to Greg's comment about Pick and not my response to your response to it, because I think we've had a pretty good conversation.
But we can meaningfully compare and contrast newer database technologies as well. I think it's pretty clear that Mongo is the MySQL of NoSQL, and I do mean that in the most pejorative way imaginable. Architecture decisions like "let the kernel do all the swapping" decision, a casual approach to durability, the very mindset that leads to inclusion of SSL without certificate validation... ick.
They'll gradually polish their stuff up so that it's quasi-usable and maybe make lots of money, and good for their pocketbooks, but there are plenty of alternative data stores out there which have characteristics which render them more suitable for storing data for most if not all projects.
In a production environment with real applications and important data people are not allowed to make tons of mistakes. Experiment and learn all you want, but I hope you eventually understand that what professional software developers and database admins do has very little relationship to weekend hackathons.
I know my clients won't tolerate "tons" of mistakes. Not even a few. In fact I am usually hired because the person they just let go made one too many mistakes with important data.
I used to work at a big professional shop. They made lots of mistakes, and the people who made the most fundamental ones were often promoted, not "let go".
The main difference in startups isn't that they don't build software the "professional way" and thus make avoidable mistakes. Instead, the difference is that startups recognize that the mistakes are inevitable, so may as well embrace them and build a process / culture around prototyping and continual refinement toward actual business value.
Pie-in-the-sky posturing about The One Right Way is nice, and especially nice when your BigCo is footing the bill, but when you operate under real constraints (e.g. economical) prototyping speed and simplicity can outweigh all the other factors.
All that said, I still think MongoDB full-text search was a bad idea -- only because their implementation is pretty naive and this corner is satisfied nicely in F/OSS by a number of other indexes like Solr, ElasticSearch, Sphinx, etc.
>While learning from history is certainly paramount in software development, raw experimentation, naive excitement, and continuing in the face of nay-sayers is what pushes all industries forward.
Citation needed.
This "continuing in the face of nay-sayers" meme comes from old wives tales of "courageous inventors" that "went against the tide" etc.
In the general history of science and technology, those wasn't that many or important. They just make for a good media story.
The other side is more clear cut: incrementally building and learning from each field's history has been paramount.
So your reply is to take it from one extreme to the other.
Not to mention that you didn't address the (wrong? right? I dunno) extreme the parent said: that Mongo is mostly similar to the Pick database of yore. Is it? Can anybody shed more light?
>If only the whole world had enough insight to just stop before they tried to do something awesome.
MongoDB is fairly decent for what it does (it used to be much worse pre 2.0). But awesome? Really?
Firing would have been a deliberate attempt on EA's part to tarnish his career. Stepping down is the nice corporate way of saying "You're a great guy but things just aren't working out."
I think you mean any attempt to say he got push out solely because of the SimCity fiasco... It's perfectly reasonable to wonder as to whether or not the SimCity launch had an effect on his position at EA.
It wouldn't be based too much on user complaints or metacritic scores for SimCity or any other game really. Underperforming revenue is likely the largest factor in Riccitello's departure. There has been a string of quarters hitting below/low on their outlook.
To Riccitello's credit, EA was in a terrible position pre-recession. A bad business plan, an inflated stock price and a bloated portfolio. JR had to make some brutal choices during the recession and has turned EA into a leaner beast, banking on online distribution and focusing on a smaller, higher quality portfolio.
And while the big picture of where he took EA is a logical one, I assume that the missed revenue from underperforming titles is the biggest factor in him stepping down. Of course, this is all conjecture on my part.
EA's business plan has been the same since the early 90s.
Step 1: Forcibly sodomize both customers and dev studios.
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: Profit.
In all seriousness though, I think that to make the company leaner, they were forced to abandon many franchises and platforms that they found to be unprofitable. The shitty part about this, is that if the business side of EA didn't insist on ruining the majority of the games that EA makes, many of them would have actually had a chance to stay profitable.
There have been numerous occasions where the features of a game don't match what has been printed on the back of the box.
Also, look at the Sim City fiasco. The people who purchased it couldn't even play the game in many cases, because they weren't able to connect to the authentication servers.
Could you explain to me why the SimCity launch was any worse than Diablo 3? Seems like apart from initial instability and some people making a lot of noise the resulting sales numbers were still fine.
It seems nobody at esquire even bothered to read the wikipedia article on the USPS as they would have crossed the section titled Universal service obligation and monopoly status[1]. This brings me to 2 things; 1) Monopoly: The USPS has a legal monopoly on letter carrying. You're not legally allowed to compete with them and that, simply, is why mailing a letter through UPS is so expensive. 2) Universal Service: One problem with completely privatizing as that you would have to legally mandate private companies to deliver to everyone.
I think the USPS could be a profitable company, they've just royally screwed up customer service. Screwed it up so bad that most people actually resent it. Not only is going to the post office comparable to a bad visit to the dentist but just try to make sense of their services [2]. They're incomprehensible. If I just want to mail a letter with a tracking number I should be able to go to the post office and say, "I would like to mail this with a tracking number." Actually forget that, I should be able to go to a vending machine, put in $1 and have it print me a tracking number that I can slap on the envelope. Instead I have to wait 30 minutes in a slightly dilapidated room, with service change signs dated back to 2004 and ask for "First Class mail with tracking and delivery confirmation". Every time, I say "I just want a tracking number" and they have to ask me 10 questions. Just give me a damn tracking number and clean your office.
Yes, they have those. They are called "Automated Postal Center"(APC).
> "First Class mail with tracking and delivery confirmation" and they have to ask me 10 questions.
These two things never existed together. There was delivery confirmation, which is not tracking. USPS did not previously provide tracking on First class mail.
Over the past few years they have been improving their tracking of delivery conf #s, and today it's similar to UPS/FedEx tracking.. so recently they renamed it to "USPS Tracking" (in mid-Jan 2013).
On the other hand, my address is weird. Because of historical reasons, the address is on 14th Ave., but the house isn't actually physically located on 14th Ave. Sometimes when I get an Amazon package, UPS or FedEx can't find where I live. Sometimes they even deliver to the same house number on 13th Ave. (I've never met whoever lives there, but I believe they've hand-delivered packages to me a few times. Thanks, stranger!)
However, USPS has never failed to deliver correctly. And I think there's something to be said for their reliability in general.
No company is legally allowed to compete for business with the USPS. In order to deliver letters, other companies must by law be providing premium services that the USPS either doesn't provide or aren't it's core business. UPS must charge you significantly more to deliver your letter in order to stay out of the USPS' market.
I'm confused as well. I thought the reason why mailing a letter through UPS is expensive is because using a system set up for delivery of packages to deliver a letter is a bit wasteful and thus they have to set higher costs to make any money on letters.
"FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS) directly compete with USPS express mail and package delivery services, making nationwide deliveries of urgent letters and packages. Due to the postal monopoly, they are not allowed to deliver non-urgent letters and may not directly ship to U.S. Mail boxes at residential and commercial destinations."
I don't know what specifically the definitions of urgent and non-urgent are, but you get the idea. UPS may not now be designed to deliver non-urgent letters efficiently, but that's largely because they aren't allowed to, so why would they bother?
(Not strictly a reply to you, but following up since I found that interesting.)
The original quote was
> that, simply, is why mailing a letter through UPS is so expensive.
So the actual reason is: Mailing a letter through UPS does not exist. Mailing an express letter does exist and it is more expensive.
And I think they wouldn't bother either way, simply because it's not economical for them. Once again a reason why having it as a quasi-government service makes sense.
And I think they wouldn't bother either way, simply because it's not economical for them. Once again a reason why having it as a quasi-government service makes sense.
If nobody was in that market at all and there was no legal barrier to entering the market, it would be economical for somebody to offer the service, be that UPS or some other company.
Not economical to the customer. . .I don't think private companies would necessarily find it economical to deliver letters to very sparsely populated rural areas - at least not using current technology. And I don't think it would be worth it to them to invest in researching more advanced technology that would make it more economical to the company. The potential customer base would be too small to yield a decent of rate of return on the investment, let alone the expected actual customer base. Look at other areas where nobody is in the market and there are no legal barriers to entering the market and there are still geographic regions without service providers. . .mass transit, retail. . .
True, but it would still be debatable to what extend the service would be as useful as the USPS if it was "economical". Today, though, it is more likely to be somewhat decent, so that is debatable as well, but not so when the postal system was first put in place.
And by the way: My perspective is that of living in Germany and having actually worked for two years as a postman for Deutsche Post after it was privatized and the monopoly was abandoned. I think it is highly debatable whether we're better off with the "free market" (also a debatable term in this case) solution right now. I was employed as a help because they needed more capacity to deliver advertising, which is - by volume - what they mostly deliver these days.
If you want to speak up, don't hesitate to contact LayerVault's support ( support@layervault.com ) and let them know, respectfully, how you feel. You can also tweet your opinions @layervault.
I stress respectfully. Try to be well spoken and sincere.
I actually did. I was told by @Allan -- the founder of LV -- that I was "trolling", "writing inflammatory blog posts", that my "entire base of argument was based on the wrong facts". All in all, a very obtuse strawman argument, so being well spoken, sincere in many ways, will only lead to that sort of reaction from LV.
I disagree with this. When you have an issue with a company, that company is going to try to use all the little power it has to turn the issue in its favor. If you contact them, you're giving them power (the power not to answer your emails, the power to reply privately in a harsh way, etc.).
So go public. On a medium which the company doesn't control. And then they're not in control anymore.
It's exactly the same with SO: everytime someone comes up with a very valid criticism about SO there are SO officials (or high-rep users) saying "Put this on meta". But no, that's precisely the point: do certainly not put it on meta because once it's on meta it's the same little clique who's in control.
My opinion is that something like this reaching several times the front page of HN is the best way to make people aware of the problem (including the people at the company/ies concerned).
This is one of those obvious to some, and eye opening to others things. I had always wondered why other countries keep their eggs unrefrigerated and we Americans have always been very thoroughly warned about the dangers of room temperature eggs.
I always figured it was a matter of cultural tradition and that eggs weren't really as sensitive as I've been told. I had no idea there was so much process and science behind it.
This kind of fits as a rough analogy for software. Consumers may see eggs in either market as just eggs. Maybe they have a slight different taste, maybe some are kept in a fridge, but they're still plain, simple, safe eggs. Getting to that point of consumption though is a choreography of processes that has no "right way" and is more complex than the average consumer wants or needs to know.
