9 ms·
Still running strong after 1,532 days without a code change.
- quink 14y ago> I set a reminder(thanks Siri) to check these stats later that night. Thank you, alarm clock! Thank you, spoon! Thank you, hammer! In any case, thank you for the post, and thank you even more for keeping this kind of service running for so long :)
- adrianN 14y agoHow advanced does an AI have to be before you should say 'thank you'?
- 0x006A 14y agoonce it gets moody if you don't?
- petenixey 14y agoIt actually frustrates me that Siri doesn't give a hoot whether you thank her. I want to thank her a) because it feels natural and b) to tell her that she's actually got something right. She's usually less use than an ice kettle so I want us both to get a kick out of it when she's not.
- pbhjpbhj 14y agoPerhaps they'll add a thanks-awareness feature that will eavesdrop on your online conversations and thank you next time yyou're using it - "oh BTW, thanks for mentioning me to your friends on your blog" ... or y'know, maybe not.
- lloeki 14y agoIt could actually have function value as it could trigger some positiveness in a bayesian filter, subsequently increasing results accuracy. I let you be creative about the negative sentences.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sopooneo 14y agoI got into college on an essay addressing essentially that topic. It was a while ago and discussed what emotions are appropriate when a talking ATM thanks you for banking. In a British accent.
- redler 14y agoThe key for the everyday user probably won't be better AI, but rather the achievement of more natural interaction rhythms. People cajole, beg and bargain with their cars, computers, baseball teams; with no response expected, the rhythms are conversational (if wry). The one second press-and-hold, then the three second wait for response, are obstacles that keep Siri removed. Once those limitations are inevitably gone, and one can immediately say "thanks" and hear a naturalistic response in less than half a second (like Malkovich in the commercial where "time sequences are shortened"), the illusion will be a strong one. Statefulness, ubiquity, and responsiveness will be a powerful UX combination. To the degree Siri interaction becomes naturalistic, we'll probably say "please" and "thanks" much as we do in everyday speech.
- firebones 14y agoSeems like those changes will just cause us to enter a stage where we'll hit the uncanny valley. What Siri seems to overcome is some of the social awkwardness around voice interaction, but the last mile, so to speak, will be much more expensive to overcome. Hope I'm wrong though.
- DannoHung 14y agoIf you've never thanked your car, you've never lived anywhere that it gets cold.
- debacle 14y agoOr been on the thruway when you're really, really low on gas.
- grecy 14y agoIf you still start your car when it's cold, you've never lived anywhere that gets really cold. (Starting your car at -55C is not a good idea, even when it has >300W of heaters keeping it warm.)
- GFischer 14y agoWhere the (freezing) hell? Not even in the Uruguayan Antarctic base does it get to -55C (my personal worst has been -17C, and I've been to Canada and the Austrian Alps).
- bwag 14y agoApparently he showers with Siri. So naughty.
- TamDenholm 14y agoHey Ryan, Id be very interested in taking this over and looking after it properly. Please shoot me an email and maybe we can talk about it. Thanks Tam Denholm contact@tamdenholm.com
- nl 14y agoI think that is a great counterpoint to the story about the problems single founders have running 24/7 web apps. It isn't clear though- is this a paid service?
- ryandetzel 14y agoNo, 100% free since day one.
- ericcholis 14y agoGives me a bit of a "ghost in the machine" feeling here. You created something interesting on a whim, gave it life, and sent it off into the world. Unbeknownst to you, it chugged on, somehow successfully urging people to use it. It did this mostly on its own. I'm sure there's a white paper or talk on the life developers give their software...
- ryandetzel 14y agoWhat keeps hitting me over and over is I created something very basic, very quickly for myself and now years later people actually rely on it to run their business. I felt so guilty getting that call...I felt as if I had let this women down even though I had never met her. The site was probably down for a couple of days...how many other people did I let down? How many people lost money or sleep because I failed them?
- scribu 14y agoI think you can walk away with a clean conscience if you offer an export mechanism.
- ericcholis 14y agoI can sympathize, I feel this way whenever something I've built for a large audience doesn't work. I feel as if I let them down. With that being said, perhaps you could make it easy for these users to let you know when it doesn't work. Set up multiple easy lines of communication (twitter, sms through google voice, email, etc..). Find a good, free, monitoring service. Based on what you told us in the article, this service has been cruising without issue for quite some time. That's better uptime than most projects ;-)
- ZoFreX 14y agoYou might want to consider setting up some basic monitoring. If you don't have much time to put into this, you get one free watcher with Pingdom (no affiliation other than that they watch my website for me), and you'll get an email if the site goes down again.
- 14y ago
- scribu 14y agoFrom my experience, people will use any free service or product, even if you explicitly say "this product is abandoned".
- nicholassmith 14y agoThe nice takeaway from it is that the code you wrote works perfectly well for a large number of people and is obviously stable and bug-free enough for them to use it for their businesses. Code isn't about hammering out new features or moving fast and breaking things. And if it's written in Perl looking at the source code again might break it so I wouldn't do that.
- webreac 14y agoIs Perl a quantic programming language ?
- yichi 14y agoWell, how else do you think http://www.bennylingbling.com/tag/schrodingers-bug/ http://www.bennylingbling.com/tag/schrodingers-bug/ originated
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- yogsototh 14y agoMy best example is a Perl bug I corrected. It occurred only 27 second by year! Just to think about the probability to detect it knowing the code is used only about twice a week.
- sedev 14y agoI'll bite: how did that happen?
- yogsototh 14y agoI don't remember all details. My co-workers searched to understand the bug and he discovered that changing the creation date for just some second made the bug disappear. I then discovered he called the function with a bad argument. Strangely using an integer instead of a time object (I am not sure about that but you get the idea) will render the exact same result most of the time. I corrected the bug by using the right function call. I then tried a brute force search to discover for how many time the bug occurs. And if remember well there were two close period of a few second each during wich the function bad called render a different result. It was something like 17 second and 3 minutes later another 10 second. I believe I simply tried for the current year. I might have tweeted about it some years ago.
- dmor 14y agoMaybe you should keep it, not touch the code, and consider a new mission to do some marketing experiments with your 2 hours on the train every day... who knows what might happen
- otaku888 14y agoI think both sites have just gone down. :)
- ryandetzel 14y agoNow I remember why I don't use apache any longer. :-)
- ericcholis 14y agoWell, the HN effect probably isn't helping either...
- ahmedaly 14y agothe website is very slow.. maybe because loading.. consider moving it to a larger server, and monetize it in somehow to pay off!
- ryandetzel 14y agoYeah, my little Linode box isn't setup to handle over 300 simultaneously users. :-( Normally it's nice and speedy.
- StavrosK 14y ago* apt-get install varnish * Set it to cache the specific page * Boom, 100k users at once
- ryandetzel 14y agoI was in the process of doing that as you typed that out. I never thought it would be needed though!
- StavrosK 14y agoVarnish is amazing, just install it by default, it can't hurt.
- ryandetzel 14y agoNew post, How varnish saved my ass when I was #1 on Hacker news. :-)
- StavrosK 14y agoAlready done so many times :P http://blog.historio.us/how-we-got-100000-visitors-without-noticing-4 http://blog.historio.us/how-we-got-100000-visitors-without-n...
- dmor 14y ago
- michaelfeathers 14y ago> Still running strong after 1,532 days without a code change. Oddly, I think that's a great definition of "systems software."
- cubicle 14y agoSite's down. https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+patio11+keepalive https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator....
- mgurlitz 14y agoThe site is back up. Google has a cache now in case it goes down again: https://encrypted.google.com/#q=cache:http://ryandetzel.com/1532-days-without-a-code-change/ https://encrypted.google.com/#q=cache:http://ryandetzel.com/...
- emilw 14y agoAfter reading the entire article I noticed it doesn't contain a single link to the actual project. I like your style sir.
- ryandetzel 14y agoWould you believe me if I told you that was a conscious decision? :-)
- snowwrestler 14y agoIf he's already nervous about old code, why send a huge traffic spike there...
- RobAley 14y agoIf there is one thing that you do need to do, its turn off the support forum. Its full to the brim with spam, and is (probably) the only part of the site that actually does need continuous attention. Otherwise, congrats!
- albertsun 14y agoThat's the story with the calendar app I use, http://30boxes.com/ http://30boxes.com/ I don't think a new feature has been added in about 5 years and it barely seems maintained, there have been a few day-longish episodes of downtime but other than that it works great. It has all the features I need and am used to, and I don't have to worry about the product constantly changing. In a way it's almost better to use a neglected product.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- srbufi 14y agoAwesome app!
- padraigk 14y agoGood article and a good reminder of how what is just a side project to the creator can be so important to its users. It looks as if he's updated his forum software about as regularly as the site's main code because it's full of spam (http://forum.invoicejournal.com/ http://forum.invoicejournal.com/). Might be worth fixing that as the consistent number of sign-ups and invoices suggests there is a community of users there to be fostered.
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoThe first contract program I wrote was when I was 17 years old. I was working at a service station changing oil. Some guy comes through who wants to stand around while I do the work (it happens) so we struck up a conversation. Turns out he was a bookkeeper and had just purchased an Apple IIe and wanted to use it for his clients. I knew nothing about accounting, he knew nothing about computers, so it seemed like a good match :) Four weeks of spending free afternoons at his shop, and it was ready to go. He was happy and I had 200 bucks in my pocket. Life was good. Almost 20 years later, I get a call from him. He says the program isn't working so well and he wants to upgrade. I'm like WTF? Does anybody in the universe still even have a working Apple II anymore? Why would he keep using something like that for 20 years? He told me that as computers modernized, it became a bit of a status symbol to have an older-looking system spewing out reams of reports. His customers, who were mostly small construction companies and such, got the feeling of stability and security from something that was unchanged. It is a very strange feeling to get a call about code you wrote a long, long time ago. If I would have had any sense, I would have realized from the experience that programming is normally an extremely tiny part of actually making a business work. But it took me many more years to figure that one out.
- scottmagdalein 14y agoone-up
- scottmagdalein 14y agoThis was a joke. :(
- perfunctory 14y agoStories like these make me think that the whole software industry is a huge conspiracy theory :) Thanks for sharing
- ajuc 14y agoMy uncle works at helicopter factory nearby as technician, part of his job is to maintain old database that keep temperature readings from meters inside some oven for making plastic parts (hull, etc). The system works on old PC with MS-DOS, and database is in clipper. I think the system works for at least 15 years already.
- perfunctory 14y agoAgile software development must be a conspiracy theory. When a corporate IT manager keeps hearing "embrace change..." whisper all around him, he starts thinking that there must be something wrong with their piece of software that's been running just fine for years. I guess it's good for economy though.
- ebiester 14y agoBusiness needs change. New suppliers with new requirements come in, it has to be adjusted to this accounting change, that personnel change, and Maggie retired, and she knew all the ins and outs of the system better than the current programmers. That said, if we all went back to keyboard interfaces, green on black screens, and people who used the same software for 10 years and got used to its "quirks", software development would be a lot easier. ;)
- excuse-me 14y agoLook at the PCs in your bank or an airline, most of them are jut screen scraping a mainframe app that thinks it's talking to a bunch of IBM3270 terminals
- vl 14y ago>mainframe app that thinks it's talking to a bunch of IBM3270 terminals... ...and runs in the simulator. My bank upgraded from the mainframe though about 5 years ago. This was a painful experiences for everyone, including customers. And now they generate account numbers longer than 6 digits, and customers have to remember longer numbers, appalling.
- mkramlich 14y agoI can personally* confirm that that is exactly how sites like Orbitz and Cheaptickets worked 4+ years ago. Lots of Java and Linux up front. But deep in the back a bunch of 3270 terminal scrapers to mainframes. But that was then. Hopefully they've upgraded those things by now. Despite the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" there's also the issue of decreasing compatibility and decreasing availability of folks who know how those things work and can maintain them. (* If you've bought air tickets or made car rentals on either of those sites, at least back during that era, it's almost guaranteed my code touched your transaction at various points in the search and booking lifecycle.)
- rwhitman 14y agoI have 2 products in a similar-ish situation, both of which I don't even remember where the source repo is to make a bugfix even if I had to.... But after a few outages that I had no clue about until days had passed, I did learn to sign up for Pingdom so I can at least reboot apache within an hour of the site going down
- pnathan 14y agoHi Ryan, this sounds interesting. It sounds like something that could use some TLC and maintenance. If you haven't committed to a decision with it, give me an email (it's in my HN profile). regards, Paul
- forinti 14y ago10 years ago I wrote a sales system in Perl with a couple of friends. We charged something like US$750 (it was really simple: uses a hash instead of a database). It is still going strong (no bugs reported) and about US$500.000 has been sold with it. That's what I call ROI and stability!
- themonk 14y agohash is know as nosql in modern world.
- rokhayakebe 14y ago$500,000.00
- forinti 14y agoOps. Sorry 'bout that.
- dkersten 14y agoTotally off topic, but I really dislike how ruby (and I guess others?) has popularized the word hash to mean a hash table. I stare at that sentence for a good two minutes thinking "how does someone use md5/sha etc instead of a database???" before I realized what was meant. There are plenty of good (and well known) unambiguous names for this data structure that I really don't understand why it needs to be given a name that's in common use to refer to something different (and only kind-of related really). Some alternative names that have been in common use since the dawn of time are hash table, hash map, map, dictionary or associative array.
- abecedarius 14y agoI think it's the Perlers who started saying that; it predates Ruby's popularity. (And I agree, I still stumble over it every time I read it.)
- rodolphoarruda 14y agoThis is the living proof that the "web app market" is really stratified and the value perception within each customer group varies immensely. Who would tell that a 4 year old scope of features could keep a product alive? Who could possible agree that a system that supports thousands of accounts could survive without "hygienical" processes like OS/DB maintenance, bug fixing etc.? Who could imagine a product with a growing adoption/acceptance not having paid options included as plans to leverage revenue in the long run? Uff, this is all mind bogging to me. Congrats to the author though, this is an incredible story!
- dugmartin 14y agoZombie projects are fun. I created this in 2006 and haven't changed any of the code since, other than the copyright date (in 2010 - I guess I should update that). http://passwordchart.com/ http://passwordchart.com/ I didn't add Google Analytics until 2008 but here are the stats since then: Visits: 304,619 Unique Visitors: 246,368 Pageviews: 361,097 Pages / Visit: 1.19 Avg. Visit Duration: 00:00:41 Bounce Rate: 84.44% % New Visits: 80.87% I get one or two thank yous a year from people that get my email from my whois entry.
- jorgem 14y agoI'm not sure you have to update the copyright every year for any particular reason. Anyone know?
- mcherm 14y agoI know, and you don't have to. (Actually, you don't even need the copyright notice at all -- copyrights are valid without it -- but it's a good idea anyway.) In fact, you shouldn't update it. If you write something in 2002, someone steals the code in 2005, and in 2007 you change the copyright to read "copyright 2007", then later it becomes an issue, the person who stole it can claim "Look, my version is earlier!" and you'll have to go through the explanation of what happened and perhaps provide proof of it, which is an argument you wouldn't have had to make if you'd just left the copyright notice alone.
- dugmartin 14y agoI guess I just use it as a proxy to show how long the site has been up. I use a range in the footer on that project: © Copright 2006-2010 Probably dumb but I do find myself looking in the footer of sites to see how active it is.
- sbov 14y agoWe do this, but make the later date dynamic. So it will always say Copyright <year>-<current year>
- nashequilibrium 14y agoThanks for post! I found this very inspiring including some of the comments, since it shows that solving a real need almost builds a business itself with grateful consumers. It also does not require the latest and flashiest software tools. I wish there was a blog that reported these little small projects that are basic and solve a real need without facebook logins flying around and asking me to import my address book.
- powertower 14y agowebsite: http://www.invoicejournal.com/ http://www.invoicejournal.com/ It's actually not a bad template. To the point.
- ben0x539 14y agoOh, dear, the sign-up button says "SIgn Up" instead of "Sign Up". I'm worried that that is the first thing I noticed.
- josscrowcroft 14y agoThis is just great. I had a very similar experience with http://openexchangerates.org http://openexchangerates.org - hacked it together and left it running, and only realised just how popular it had become when, one morning 6 months later, I woke up to over 20 emails, all saying similar things to what the woman said to OP. "What the hell! It's been down for a day already! When is it coming back?" I was pretty bemused, so I checked the server logs and found that it had been hurtling along at what looked like 60,000 requests per day (I later found out it was closer to 200,000). Needless to say I jumped in, fixed it, and got talking to the users who relied on the project for their businesses or personal projects - it's been a blast. edit - it's since been completely rewritten, so I can't say the code went unchanged..
- outside1234 14y agoha! i love open exchange rates! - i hit it once a day with a side project of my own. thanks for running a quality service!
- josscrowcroft 14y agoThanks! Glad to hear it - email me if you'd like the side project to go in the showcase.
- keithpeter 14y ago"I had forgotten about it, I had neglected it, I had basically written it off but this soft voice reminded me that all though I had written it off she had not and that she actually relied on it to run her business." Is this likely to become more of an issue as people move to Web based applications for things they used Office and file folders for before?
- keithpeter 14y ago"I had forgotten about it, I had neglected it, I had basically written it off but this soft voice reminded me that all though I had written it off she had not and that she actually relied on it to run her business." Is this likely to become more of an issue as people move to Web based applications for things they used Office and file folders for before?
- Mc_Big_G 14y agoHeh, one of the first web apps I wrote was around 2002 and it ran on an NT4 box without a modification or a reboot until this year. I left the company 1.5 years ago and got a call from a supervisor asking me how to start it up again after a power outage and UPS failure.
- opendomain 14y agoHey Ryan - I would love to help you with Invoice Journal. Contact me at Hacker @ (My username) dot Org
- jroseattle 14y agoWhile most people are looking for the next {x}-illion dollar opportunity (me included), the positive charge one gets when hearing that something they've created is actually useful to someone else is a great feeling. Such a great story, makes me want to go fulfill those umpteen other ideas I've got hanging around to see what sticks. (I keep all these ridiculous domain names as kind of a skunkworks project task list.)
- adrinavarro 14y agoPlease don't sell it or break it down. If it isn't costly to maintain, then don't sell it for scrap as most people seem to want it. Close sign-ups if anything, but free users look like they're happy with it and after trying it, it works nicely. It's something easy to clone and it's not really something anyone would develop on top of, so rather than selling it for its user base (selling your users) plus the concept, open-source it. If anyone wants to copy the concept, it's easy to (and anyone buying it would need to write it from scratch if they want to make money out of it, anyway). That gives me mixed feelings…
- ricardobeat 14y agoWhat if the buyer wants to keep the free users happy and make it a profitable business? One thing leads to another, everyone is happy.
- brianbreslin 14y agoI wrote a site on contract when I was 15 years old, exactly 14 years ago this summer. That site is STILL running. It was filemaker pro + Lasso on a mac server of some sort. http://mactalent.com http://mactalent.com I don't even want to know what kind of things are wrong with it today, but it made the guy who I built it for many thousands of dollars over the years.
- scottlilly 14y agoInspired by this post, I went to the website of a company I worked for back in 1999-2000. The login screen for the first "real" web app I ever wrote looks exactly like I left it. The company was in a bind with some contractors who were developing a web app for them, and I had recently written my own personal HTML site. So, I bought "Teach Yourself ASP in 24 Hours", read it over the weekend, and put together a little prototype, to see if I could actually connect to the database and report the information they wanted. I ended up writing that website for them over the next two weeks. Once I deployed it (no IIS web admins at the company), I went back to my regular Clipper work. I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't been touched in years. Part of me wants to be happy that it's lasted so long. But I'm also a bit disappointed that all the other 'cool' stuff I've worked on since then probably hasn't had one-tenth the use of that site.
- kristianp 14y agoIt makes me a little sad that it hasn't made him any money. I imagine it might be good for the resume, though.
- taftster 14y agoFrom the blog post: "Now I’m wondering if I had continued to work on it, if I hadn’t neglected it could it actually be a useful successful, dare I say profitable project?" I'd argue it's likely successful just for the mere fact that he _hasn't_ touched it in four years. Had he actually tried to monetize the project, he probably would have just gotten in the way and screwed something up. This gives evidence to the "simple is more" rule.