
Anatomy of a Crushing - mbrubeck
http://pinboard.in/blog/173/
======
rimantas

       I lived in constant fear of forgetting a WHERE clause.
    

For those in constant fear: [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-
tips.html#safe-...](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-
tips.html#safe-updates)

~~~
jtbigwoo
In a huge database, even a SELECT with no WHERE clause can tie up considerable
resources.

~~~
neilk
\--i-am-a-dummy also limits the number of rows you can SELECT or JOIN.

------
kawera
_It was my experience that people approached an online purchase of six dollars
with the same deliberation and thoughtfulness they might bring to bear when
buying a new car._

Much like people complaining about the price of a gorgeous $2.99 iOS app while
ordering a $6 coffee.

~~~
TillE
But the coffee is coffee. You know what you're getting.

That $3 iOS app or $6 web service may or may not be entirely useless to you;
it's quite difficult to know.

I mean, it's easy to make sarcastic quips about the mentality. But there are
good, clear reasons why it exists. And if you understand them, maybe you can
do something about it - make it very clear _exactly_ what your app does,
include informative screenshots, offer a demo version, make payment easy, etc.

~~~
tptacek
You know what you're getting because you've been trained to associate a price
point with it. The retail markup on coffee is huge.

~~~
jarek
It's worth noting that unless you get siphon, any "coffee" you can find for $6
is much more than just coffee.

~~~
tptacek
Yes, there is also 15 cents worth of milk and energy in it.

~~~
jarek
Didn't want to get into this, but yeah, in addition to 5 cents' worth of
coffee, 30 cents' worth of barista time (fixed), and probably around 50 cents'
worth of lease (fixed) and a bit more for equipment (fixed).

~~~
tptacek
We can wrap this up tidily by observing that the "coffee house experience"
probably does cost some reasonable markdown from $6/cup. The coffee itself,
though, is a good we have been trained to pay an exorbitant markup for.

------
SwellJoe
What I think is sort of interesting is the difference in what makes a small
company happy and what can satisfy a behemoth like Yahoo.

This was an epic day in the life of Pinboard, and possibly took them from
making ramen money into maybe pizza and beer money. For Yahoo, signing up a
few thousand users at 6 bucks a pop is possibly not worth speaking of, much
less devoting a team of developers, designers, marketers, system
administrators, etc., to.

I'm not saying Yahoo hasn't been making mistakes left and right for the
past...I dunno, decade or so. Nor am I suggesting that delicious had to come
to this ignominious end; had it been kept on target throughout the years since
acquisition, this story probably wouldn't have happened this way.

I'm just saying that this _might_ not be an agonizing defeat for Yahoo. That's
the cool thing about being a tiny company. You can do things that just aren't
sensible from a business perspective when doing it on a larger scale (right
now). A small company can completely _ignore_ huge swaths of the market, for
instance, and make one niche _really_ happy and do nothing for the average
user. Or, a small company can come in with a just the basics product that's
simply easier to use than the big, complicated, product that's been in
development for a decade or two. These are freedoms big companies simply don't
have (as is the freedom to make thousands rather than millions on your primary
product).

~~~
dasil003
I hear what you're saying; this really isn't an agonizing defeat for Yahoo
because Delicious was useless to them to begin with, however it's undeniable
that the Delicious episode was a serious PR fuckup. It is a direct reflection
of their floundering culture that A) the brass puts this in a major
presentation when they are hoping to sell it (if indeed that was the case as
they later claimed) and B) the employees are so demoralized that they are
instantly leaking this presentation. Regardless of whether Delicious has any
value to them, the last thing they want to do is forcibly drive away their
user base.

All that said though, this is a nice windfall for Pinboard, and I'm super
happy for them. The positive karma there outweighs the negative karma to
Yahoo, which isn't really significant because it's just one piece of their
larger ongoing failures, and I can't really think of a better use of a small
failure than to make a company like Pinboard's year.

------
zeemonkee
"" This is especially true in the world of Rails and other frameworks, where
there is a tendency to treat one's app like a high-level character in a role-
playing game, equipping it with epic gems, sinatras, capistranos, and other
mithril armor into a mighty "application stack"."

Excellent article, giving balance to current "best practice" thinking.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, it's great to see someone using a couple dedicated servers instead of a
massively parallel web of EC2 servers and all the overhead that comes with it
for something that really shouldn't need it.

------
javanix
Thanks for posting this. Easily the most interesting sysadmin-gone-right I've
ever read, and a type of article I'd love to see more of on HN.

------
bgraves
Posted under _"Things that went well"_ :

 _We charged money for a good or service_

 _I know this one is controversial, but there are enormous benefits and you
can immediately reinvest a whole bunch of it in your project_ sips daiquiri _.
Your customers will appreciate that you have a long-term plan that doesn't
involve repackaging them as a product._

 _If Pinboard were not a paid service, we could not have stayed up on December
16, and I would have been forced to either seek outside funding or close
signups. Instead, I was immediately able to hire contractors, add hardware,
and put money in the bank against further development._

------
Vivtek
Money quote: _Of course, had bedbugs been found in the Delicious offices, our
server would have been doomed._

This is excellent writing!

~~~
zachbeane
See also <http://idlewords.com/>

------
thaumaturgy
I really enjoyed this article in a way that I enjoy so few like it. It had
just enough detail in the right places while being a really fun read.

And thanks for mentioning apachetop -- I somehow wasn't aware of it, and as
one of my hosting customers is expecting 6 digits of page views over the
course of a couple of hours tonight, it now has a terminal window all to
itself.

~~~
xbryanx
I agree (on apachetop). I wish it were easier to discover essential tool like
this beyond post-mortems. This will be a lifesaver in the future.

------
CountSessine
_But now the Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to
give us a little help._

Jeez - who keeps hiring this guy? I think we had him or his brother at the
next to last company I worked at.

------
erickhill
"And a final, special shout-out goes to my favorite company in the world,
Yahoo. I can't wait to see what you guys think of next!" Seriously - you
should send Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions a bouquet of flowers.

One of the best posts I've read on HN in a long time, and I'm not even a sys
admin. It was compelling, informative and funny - nice job!

------
code_duck
That's great - you never know when your competition can unroll a red carpet
for you.

Also, apachetop. How did I not know about this?

------
cschmidt
Pinboard has a slowly increasing price as more users join. It was only $4.21
the day I signed up, and is now up to $9.25. I'm really glad I joined before
the onslaught. :-)

~~~
mkinsella
With the signup fee currently at $9.25 and a pricing scheme of

    
    
      fee = (number of users * $0.001)
    

that means there are currently approximately 9250 registered users. Who
remembers calculus and can calculate how much revenue they have generated,
assuming their signup fee started at $0.01?

~~~
idlewords
The pricing scheme is (number of users * $0.001 * C) where C is a multiplier
that has changed with time. On top of that a significant portion of total
revenue comes from archival accounts.

This urge to reverse-engineer our total number of users when I actually share
that information _in the post_ baffles me.

~~~
mkinsella
Reverse-engineering is much more fun

------
brown9-2
Anyone know what tool is generating these very-pretty load graphs?

~~~
idlewords
Microsoft Excel 2004

------
DuncanIdaho
I find it quite surprising how little users pinboard actually got overall. But
on the other hand - most of them are premium customers.

Maciej I'm curious is this endeavour profitable for you? I understand the
point of an itch that needs to be scratched and all. But still I'm curious - I
find the service excellent (I'm a devout customer) but for all the resource
intensiveness that your service requires to offer caching and search and the
time sunk into implementation and maintaining, well I find the fee kinda low
(on a over thumb estimate that is).

Are there any other ways you are monetizing this? Since all those bookmarks
are true "human powered search engine"?

~~~
jonknee
You have to pay to sign up (right now it's $9.25 but it increases steadily),
so it's not too surprising that they got a relatively modest registration
bounce. The money adds up quickly though.

------
mise
He was paying something like $500/month for the servers, right? Were the two
hosted projects worth that monthly spend? In retrospect, of course it was, but
maybe not on a month-to-month basis.

------
maguay
Great read, and I've personally used Pinboard more than I ever would have
thought. Best small web purchase ever!

------
tnorthcutt
_We charged money for a good or service

I know this one is controversial_

How unfortunate that this should be the case.

------
iancanderson
This is one of the best reads I've had in a while on a tech blog.

