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Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

gigpeppers.com

31–40 of 107 posts

Re: Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

#31
[ not that you asked for it here, but I've got some frontpage UI feedback: ]

I think you should put a description up front to describe what Cucumber town is. I think that main image should be a slider with multiple feature images, and I think the Latest Recipes should be the first section after this. Just my 2c!

Screen: http://cl.ly/image/3R2Y131Z433L

Re: Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

#32
post #30

That's why I like to use Heroku/EC-2 for launching new webservice. If shits hit the fan, you can jack up the processing power/database/RAM/whatever to scale to your demand. Once you have a good idea of the traffic it generates, you can then move it to a cheaper service. Obviously, it's easy to say that when you're on the bench. Congratulations on the launch by the way.

Cucumbertown co-founder here. Actually I dislike this idea though we should have been better prepared.

At my previous firm we had this culture that whenever traffic peaks we spin up new instances. And tools like RightScale & Chef make it ridiculously simple. So our style was to do that than to optimize strains in code paths. Because this is so so convenient.

And before you know it, this notion of hardware is cheap becomes a culture. Soon enough if you grow you’ll be serving 100K users with 250 machines.

Re: Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

#33
post #31

[ not that you asked for it here, but I've got some frontpage UI feedback: ] I think you should put a description up front to describe what Cucumber town is. I think that main image should be a slider with multiple feature images, and I think the Latest Recipes should be the first section after this. Just my 2c! Screen: http://cl.ly/image/3R2Y131Z433L

This is wonderful feedback. We’ll definetly look into this.

Re: Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

#35
post #32
post #30

That's why I like to use Heroku/EC-2 for launching new webservice. If shits hit the fan, you can jack up the processing power/database/RAM/whatever to scale to your demand. Once you have a good idea of the traffic it generates, you can then move it to a cheaper service. Obviously, it's easy to say that when you're on the bench. Congratulations on the launch by the way.

Cucumbertown co-founder here. Actually I dislike this idea though we should have been better prepared. At my previous firm we had this culture that whenever traffic peaks we spin up new instances. And tools like RightScale & Chef make it ridiculously simple. So our style was to do that than to optimize strains in code paths. Because this is so so convenient. And before you know it, this notion of hardware is cheap be…

I understand what you are saying.

I do agree that Chef [and RightScale? Never used it) makes it easy to spawn new instances and through load balancing average your load.

I was talking in term of tradeoff in the first few weeks of a new service with a MVP. Obviously, you re-assess your need before you get to 100k user, and probably uses something else than EC-2.

In any case, both ideas are equally good. I don't claim better knowledge in any way.

Re: Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

#36
Thanks for this post, there were some nice tips in there. Although, I do have some nitpicking about your writing style. Maybe it's just me, but I found that your use of "+ve" instead of just saying "positive" and of "&" instead of "and" did not have the intended effect of speeding up reading, quite the reverse actually.

Re: Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

#37
post #4

Running with swap enabled is a terrible idea. The authors mention how it was only once solr crashed that they were able to actually log in and start fixing problems; having swap means that rather than the OOM killer terminating processes, instead your whole system just grinds to a halt. (it's strange that they recommend enabling swap when they also recommend enabling reboot-on-oom, which is pretty much the complete o…

In my experience, the linux kernel handles no swap at all very badly, so you need a small amount.

Increasing the swap, which is the suggested solution, is however, a terrible idea. As soon as you hit high memory usage, your IO load will go through the roof, and everything will grind to a halt.

The solution here is separation of services - i.e. put Solr on a different box, so that if it spirals it doesn't take out other services.

The OOM killer is your friend for recovering from horrible conditions, but as soon as you hit it or swap, somethings gone wrong.

Re: Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

#39
post #3

Your project, Cucumbertown, is a cooking/recipe site/platform/network. Hacker News is not your audience/customer. Any "launch" on Hacker News is a fail, regardless of downtime.

Cooking often requires hacking. Engineers love to cook. Also, startups often look for cheap/simple food to sustain them.

Cooking/food articles consistently do well here.

Re: Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

#40
post #36

Thanks for this post, there were some nice tips in there. Although, I do have some nitpicking about your writing style. Maybe it's just me, but I found that your use of "+ve" instead of just saying "positive" and of "&" instead of "and" did not have the intended effect of speeding up reading, quite the reverse actually.

Seconded. Initially, my brain told me that +ve was the name of the site, so I was confused when I looked for a product page link only saw "Cucumbertown".

Granted, that's mostly laziness -- apparently I've got a rule that matches "strange words near the top of the post" to "probably the name of the product".

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