skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just had this experience. Took an existing code base and worked about four weeks to try and modify it to support new functionality. Had an epiphany that 'this shouldn't take this long', started from scratch and duplicated all existing functionality as well as the new code within two days.

Sometimes tossing badly designed code seems like two steps backward, but that isn't always the case.
I actually doubt that they really care about competing with Google App Engine. I mean, AWS has NetFlix, New York Times, Dropbox among their customers and GAE has.... who?

What I do think is that services like GAE have set a standard for the ease of use and price. People are now looking for free tiers, instant deployment, and traffic-based pricing. Customers are expecting Amazon to provide the same and so they do.
It also took Microsoft almost 10 years and millions of man hours to get NT to a stable state, iron out comaptibility and performance issues before they eventually replaced 95 with XP. It was a huge undertaking - probably not something a startup can afford. IIRC Microsoft had a completely separate team working on Win NT initially, lead by David Cutler.

edit: fixed 'not something a startup can't afford' -> 'not something a startup can afford'
Marketing isn't just advertising, it's understanding your customers and building those features. Marketing built into the product can help with acquisition more than paid marketing. For example, invite a friend. Think about it from the beginning and you'll be far better off. Get advice from experts, it's worth it.
Rising quantity of these coupon plus discount middleman means good times for consumers. I can already see coupon comparison meta-search engines popping up in near future.
Both of these are good tools --- you won't go too far wrong no matter which one you choose.

In brief:

The strength of Mercurial is that it has a fairly simple set of basic commands. These commands are easy to use and the documentation for these commands is way less daunting than those for git commands. Using Mercurial out of the box, without enabling extensions, it is harder to screw things up in a way that destroys history. At the same time, it may be harder to manipulate the contents of a Mercurial repository in ways you want. However, there are extensions for Mercurial, some third-party, some that come with the system, that let you do many of the manipulations that git provides.

Git's command set and UI are more complicated than Mercurial's. But, you don't have to learn them all at once, so just getting to a point where you can get basic stuff done isn't difficult. The strength of git is that it has fairly straightforward conceptual underpinnings, and once you start thinking of commands in terms of how they manipulate the underlying structure of your repository (see, for example, http://www.slideshare.net/chacon/getting-git for details), it's a very empowering system (or, if you're a pessimist, you've been given enough rope).

A not uncommon pattern is for people to start out with Mercurial, perhaps because the learning curve isn't as steep or because it had clearly better Windows support at one time, and then switch to git as their usage pattern requires more complicated functionality than Mercurial easily provides. An example of this is: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2010/8/17/git-and-mercurial-branchin...
It is a proper sail propelled by light pressure instead of wind.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Solar_sail
I think this must have always been a concern for companies like Sendgrid. As someone who operates a service to allow incoming email (CloudMailin) there's nothing more worrying than the big boys coming along an sweeping you up. However, so long as you continue to add value people will choose your product over the competition. Moves like this can ultimately lead to a far better product in the long run.

Having tried the service it's currently clunky and command line based too! I wouldn't actually call these comparable products. SES seems more like it replaces transactional emails that users might have previously event sent without a lot of a anti-spam measures. The value that companies like Sendgrid/Mailchimp/Postmark add outweighs the price for me and, at least, in the short term I won't be moving anywhere.
Yes, all of which have various strong and weak points.

For instance, light houses are generally constructed by governments.

Do you want the government to be in charge of who gets paid to write or make music? I'm not a libertarian, but I don't really like that idea.

Intellectual property is another listed solution that, despite recent problems, has worked pretty well. As of late, enforcement costs may be exceeding benefits, although it's hard to say, really.
Interesting, for $5 I'm in. Why not? Even if this is dare I say malicious, I'm not worried too much. Is this going to be coordinated through email, snail mail, or what? I just realized that the shipping address on my PayPal information was not updated to my current address, as I had just moved recently. That old address no longer holds my being. :)
I think the point is valid and the possibility realistic if we don't assume a literal interpretation of "100% compatibility".
You write one line of code, say "printf("Hello, World!");" ten thousand times. It's easy. Making it work together introduces the complexity.
Strange. It's still working fine for me. Said I wasn't logged in, so I logged in and checked and work, and I logged out again and checked and it worked. I wonder if you're using a proxy that is interfering somehow? I'm assuming it's not an addon as you said it's the same in both Chrome and Firefox?

I'm sure this isn't what you're thinking, but just to double check... You don't think that you're logged out of twitter just because it's not open anymore do you? If you log in, and then close the tab without logging out, then you're still logged in...
> Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature set, and AWS never will

Seems to me that Amazon has been quite busy innovating and expanding their feature set.
The situation is never 'tidy up' though, when it comes to software. When was the last time your assignment was to 'move 4 buttons on the screen, and make them shinier'?

Assignments to existing systems involve activities like adding new db fields, new validation logic, integration with external systems, rerouting/duplication of existing data in to new modules, and so on.

Comparing these to activity on a house, all would involve construction/building of some sort. If the foundation is weak - to the point where hammering a nail in a wall causes the floor in another room to cave in a bit, most sane contractors would not get involved, or require severe structural work to get things (back?) to a minimum safety code.

Admit it - you've worked on projects where introducing a variable in module X causes havoc in some screen which seems unrelated to module X. You can harp about test cases catching all this stuff, but the types of systems we're talking about - the ones we're talking about replacing wholesale - don't have that infrastructure in the first place. They weren't built according to best/good practices, which is why the people in the article were considering rebuilding from scratch.

Only in software do we think we can order people to continue to work on systems that are visibly falling apart without having to put in the required infrastructure work to make sure things don't keep breaking.
I agree completely. I think the thing that's going to "kill google" [1] is that they tend to look at everything as a. A,gorithmic problem. This approach works great for web search, and pretty well for email (gmail really beats everyone else with their thread view of email, which can only be achieved with really smart algorithms), but groupon has showed that there is still value in traditional sales, apple that there is still value in good design, and facebook that there is still value in being cool.

[1] And by kill I mean potentially slightly slow profit growth. Google will keep being google for a long time.
One possibility some self-publishing writers are using is to also sell traditional products of some sort, e.g. limited-edition letterpress or handmade editions of their books.

It does lead to different economics, since it rewards a writer by how many ardent fans they have (preferably well-off ardent fans who're collector types), rather than total readership.

Not sure how many total writers it'll be able to support; I suppose we'll see. But then, I'm not sure how many total writers traditional publishing would be able to support either, even absent piracy; the industry seems to be converging on a model that picks and heavily advertises relatively few large blockbusters per year, which only serves to support a fairly small number of writers, though it admittedly supports each of the lucky few quite handsomely.
The offer I get for Chicago is "Save with our Internet Only rates Low Rates Guaranteed! Visit our website to Book Now! www.bestwestern.com."

Google appears to think that Groupon is AdWords ads with worse formatting. I think they just might be slightly more complicated than that. For starters, I hear they typically involve prepaying in return for a large discount.
> The industry has shrunk to a fraction of its previous size.

And by "the industry" you mean the large corporations that don't create art (the artists do that) but extract most of the value of the art products that are sold by acting as gatekeepers to the market.
Musicians have always relied on other revenue sources. Performance is the big one, but merchandise and licensing matter too. Authors don’t have the same options. Dickens engineered a profitable reading tour of the United States, as new-model enthusiasts always point out. But how many authors could do that today?

The author never really addresses his own question, leaving us to assume that authors couldn't generally support themselves through reading tours.

I just finished "reading" (by way of audio book, while sitting in traffic) a biography of Mark Twain. He's relevant here in two ways.

First, he ushered in a new publishing model, wherein his books were sold by subscription, with sections serialized and delivered periodically. That's pretty alien now (except in some sci-fi magazines), but it shows that the economic realities of the times can dictate major changes in the book publishing business model.

Second, due to bad investments, he nearly went bankrupt. He was able to dig his way out of insolvency through a giant world-wide lecture tour. Apparently there were a great many people, across the entire planet (including many out-of-the-way places you'd never think of) who were willing to pay good money to see him lecture (this wasn't readings, but lectures). So it's clear that at least some authors can make a very tidy profit from lecture/reading tours.

Trivia note: OP mentions Dickens on a reading tour. It happens that Sam Clemens' first date with his future wife was to see Dickens reading.

EDIT: fixed wrong word, "novel" where I meant "model".
That's the point, though: usage driven fees. It's absolutely not the most economical offering, but the freedom and ability to either quadruple your infrastructure or shut it down entirely, no strings attached, in an instant is what you're paying for.
First contact is through mail, send your updated address to mikecurry74@gmail.com, I'll update it.
India’s Largest Online Couponing Site SnapDeal Raises $12 Million
I'm not convinced that that sort of model can support as much production, and thus we might see a lower level of production of information goods, but I suppose only the future will tell. Musicians always have the fallback of concerts, as I mentioned in another comment.
No, you got me wrong. I get it - you hate these things.
Its your compulsion to ruin everyone else's fun by posting wet-blanket pedantic diatribes against them that makes it a "precious fusspot" moment.

Be honest - the email subject told you everything you wanted to know - you didn't spend any time at all reading the crap - you just have to vent about it.

As a veteran venter I have been in that boat. Been a 'precious fusspot' myself more than once. Man enough to admit it.
There's a subreddit discussing the reddit source code here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev

You should be able to find someone who meets your criteria.
There's no doubt at all that the music market is transforming. I'm not sure why people are so surprised that it will probably transform into something smaller. The power shifted from music executives to musicians who always wanted something more genuine. It's necessary to consider that the number of music listeners who genuinely like some bands is a smaller market than anyone with a radio/tv/ear who could be pumped full of American Idol promotions and Top 20 Lists.

I think there will probably be oscillations, though. As whatever the new form of music takes more cohesive shape, musicians learn how to monetize it, consumers learn how to invest in it, the market will probably grow again. Not to it's previous towering height, no, but perhaps to a more efficient structure that actually does have bands making money relative to the value of their work.

I'm definitely pretty optimistic. Then again, I've also learned to love music in the middle of this transformation and have invested thousands of dollars over many years buying music from artists. I'm only tempted to search for torrents when I see people signed to bigger labels. After all, they're cushy right?
Whoops! Sorry, I didn't notice the sarcasm.
Larry Page on Entrepreneurship [video]
AutoCad was rewritten to be object oriented in the early 1990's. The first rewritten version Release 13.0 [1994] was such a flea ridden dog that many customers skipped it. But Release 14 in 1997 was a marvel, and Autodesk has had success since and been able to extend the product into new areas due to the object oriented architecture.
See my other reply below; there are definitely times when shit needs to be done. Perhaps the analogy should be the state of the house in general; if the foundation's fucked you really have no choice but to start again.

And yes, there are definitely situations where that's been necessary and I've worked with some. I've seen a piece of software that got so damn complicated that the only thing you could do with it was to add stuff exactly according to the retarded design, anything even slightly varying from that would have taken literally weeks to implement.

I think the point here is that utterly fucked software occurs way more times than people would care to admit. A lot of the problem is the disconnect between non-technical managers and coders. Coding isn't factory work.
37Signals to retire OpenID for logins on May 1
Yummly CEO On Food Data & Semantic Recipe Search | Food+Tech Connect
Cloud Business Asia: Catching Up? | Cloud Business Review
This is not Google Offers. It's simply a Google Tag advertisement.

Link: http://www.google.com/help/tags/
I actually looked before I posted, but couldn't find anything about it :-)

But I'd believe it.
Yes, there are indeed two costs of production, and free market economics has terms to cover both:

"Sunk costs" and "marginal costs". Free market economics says that the price of a good in a competitive market falls to the marginal cost of production, not to the sunk cost of production.

Read up a bit, I think you can find any number of good college freshman texts on "microeconomics". Then come back and argue.
When you get to cheap+nice to retire, it's a good idea!
Pareto principle
I've noticed this as well. You simply can't start from scratch.

The first thing you do is make sure you have good tests built around our old code base. Then you slowly start refactoring/rewriting pieces out. After every small refactoring round run your tests and make sure everything is working. The key is to break down the rewrite into small steps and make sure you have a full functioning product at each step. This might even mean that you need to write code that will be removed after a couple of refactoring iterations.
On the Rapid End-Of-Lifing of Android Devices
One of my coworkers remarked that it's amazing how Amazon just takes their existing infrastructure and repackages it to be sold as a service. When you look at it as something that they already had built for themselves, while still being awesome, it helps keep perspective.
YUI team dishes on 3.3.0 and code reviews by Douglas Crockford
That may be what it needs, but will it get US-style "security"? Gotta watch out for that one, Medvedev.
Granted, the line between "refactor aggressively" and "rewrite" can be pretty blurry at times

Not at all. The line isn't blurry in the slightest. In the "refactor aggressively" case, the code is continuing to run while you make the changes. In the "rewrite" scenario, you start with a blank page, and don't have an even minimally functioning system until you build enough of it to get to that point.

In my experience, the advantages to the former approach cannot be overstated.
Good luck in your next project.
Excellent question, the article called it a solar sail but only mentioned its drag properties. I kept wondering why you would need a solar sail to keep something in orbit...?
Neurons lose information at one bit per second
One Philadelphia Offer:

>>First Unitarian Church,Philadelphia
100% Dogma Free
100% Guilt Free
100% Damnation Free

Either the hype/prediction machine totally missed what Google Offers is or I'm totally baffled as to how Google Offers, in its current state, will compete with Groupon.
I was ready to say mahalo was the biggest spam website on the internet last week after the whole google search debate but now I think mahalo may have a killer product. right now it's like wikipedia 2.0 .... so far I like the 4.0 version ...maybe I'm wrong but I like this pivot
I think that there is a scale depending on how far you've got with the startup. The pain of a rewrite rises the further along you are, which is why it's important to:

a) Make good architectural decisions (good luck)

b) Rewrite a lot as early as possible, as those decisions turn out to be wrong.

You know, fail fast.

I'm at an early stage, and I have rewritten twice this year The pain has definitely been worthwhile, as my system is now beautifully designed and organised.

It might be possible to design the perfect architecture on a whiteboard and then go ahead and execute it, but that's an order of magnitude harder than writing a subroutine and having it execute first time with no errors. And most of us can't even do that regularly.

Your product is like a bit of jello which is solidifying fast; you need to make the dramatic changes early to avoid being stuck with an ugly lump later on.
All this sophisticated talk about the movie is great, but personally I just liked the monkeys beating each other up.
Ah, thanks for that clarification.

However, I would have thought that the "one-to-one type communications" would be more expensive (per email), than sending to lists. Amazon seems to allow both, at a much lower cost.
I thought Groupon doesn't pay businesses until a few days after they've sold the deal to customers.
Thank you and jrnkntl (edit: and alttab) for explaining it.
I don't see anything to get overly excited about.
Does anybody here use Mahalo? What are some use-cases where it makes sense?

EDIT:

So I checked out the new Mahalo's advertised feature, "How to Convert Fractions":

http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-convert-fractions/

They have a video which is pretty good. (I wonder if creating hi-quality videos scales to satisfy investors?) Then they have the steps in the video in text format with words such as "Fraction" hyperlinked to a spammy Mahalo page:

http://mahalo.com/fraction

Below this content they have "Related" stuff like "How to convert fractions - XXX" where XXX = {Videos, Images, Newsfeed, Twitter}. These are {Google, Bing, Twitter, etc} auto-generated spam/noise and contain no useful information. (You can't auto-generate a sensible feed about converting fractions.)

Overall I'd rate the new mahalo.com as spammy. The videos + transcribed text may be good, but there's too much surrounding crap.
In the video Kunal Bahl, the founder of snapdeal mentions that the laws didn't allow his company to sponsor his visa in the US (i assume he is referring to the H1B work visa). This is the state for some one with Ivy league degrees and probably a not-so profitable startup. Loss for the US and good for India! The startup visa will be a big boost for entrepreneurs like Kunal.
A different kind of China PR video created by some Beijing animators.
What does adding the phone into the mix add of value?

It removes the "need to walk to the place where to pay" bit. I think that is the main reason why paying by phone works for paying for parking space.
This is the book that was used in this class at my university: http://www.amazon.com/Business-Dynamics-Systems-Thinking-Mod...
I think the answer is not to 'not rewrite' but 'rewrite well'. Rewrite, to me, doesn't mean throwing out the whole thing -- it means start from a blank slate and leverage what you have as you rebuild something that matches your problem.

I'm a big proponent of 'rewrite often'. Instead building your software like you're playing Katamari Damacy, take the time to rewrite to your current specs as a whole -- playing Red-Green-Refactor on a bigger scale.

I know the article is addressing 'bad rewrites', but I think all rewriting gets an unfairly bad rep.
It'd be nice to have some more specific data. How is the revenue loss distributed? For example, is it that: the kind of artist who used to bring in $10m in revenues is now bringing in only $5m? Or is it: artists who used to make $50k are now making $0 or losing money? Or if both, how much of each? Or to look at it differently, how many artists in absolute terms are there in each revenue range? Also: how is the decline in total music revenues distributed between: 1) the major labels; 2) indie labels; and 3) self-released musicians?

Different people presumably have different preferences, but I'd be most worried about a decline in the total number of musicians above the "make enough to eat" threshhold, which may or may not be reflected by that data. I'm less worried by whether the top 40 musicians make $1m or $5m or $50m each, so if that's the main source of revenue loss, I would care less.

I've tried to find that kind of data, but it doesn't seem to exist, at least anywhere I can get to it.
How do you signal those, if not through the web site?

Do you have a different sales channel?
Often the perception that code quality is so bad that a rewrite is needed stems at least in part from the "not built by me/us" syndrome

That plus the lack of understanding of why the code is complicated. Corner cases and exceptions are a huge PITA.
I am a big proponent of gradual change like this. I've used it multiple times on major enterprise systems.

I'm still baffled by why more people don't do this.
Pixelmator Grosses $1m on the Mac App Store
Obvious followup: "Amazon Simple SMS Service".
Watch out Twilio...
Ask HN: Why would my post get buried by a mod?
We had posted an announcement on some new hiring we're doing:
http://www.myplanetdigital.com/digital_strategy/blog/myplanet-hiring-billion-people

It was a play on the Groupon announcement. We're a small company, and I'm a Hacker News regular so I figured this would be a great place to tell people about it.

The post was subsequently killed in its entirety. Not edited for perhaps having a silly title (which I will readily admit), but killed altogether.

Is there any way for me to discover why?
Do you have a hobby or a skill set that would benefit an organization like this? Do you have 30 minutes to spare in a week?
Doesn't expose any "real" private info( eg: passwords ). If the intent of the piece was to get users to turn off Javascript and secure themselves, the possibilities laid out are not forceful enough to achieve that objective, imo.