One of my early jobs (mid-90s) was working for an unnamed but relatively famous (for the time) ISP in Los Angeles where the vast majority of other employees turned out to be Scientologists. They do exist in the tech industry.
What exactly is the point of saying "unnamed" when everyone knows exactly which company you're talking about? Its scientology connections are not a secret and have been covered in both tech and muggle press many times over the years.
Well, speaking of muggles it is just a name that shall not be named (by me).
I didn't mean to imply nobody would know the name, I specifically made sure there was enough information in the post (city/time frame/specific tech business type) so that it would be pretty obvious what company I was talking about (at least to anyone who was on the net back then).
I've never understood why people put Scientology in a different bucket than other religions such as Christianity. I wonder why you didn't comment 'The 79 Christians are trolls, right? ...right?'
Given the extremely limited nature of the site, what protection do you think TLS would offer (against an adversary like the NSA that could trivially correlate your IP address with your email address).
Remember what happened with "Anarchist's cookbook" and recipes for thermite and such that used to be readily available on the net, and relatively uncontroversial. It was just "information" after all. These days it seems knowing how to do some basic chemistry is considered intent to do harm or something.
"There's another about a pair of Googlers, each married to other people, secretly having a child together."
How is this possible? Are they adopting? It seems like if one of them is a woman and she is bringing the child to term, her husband would notice. Unless she just doesn't see him for ~5 months (which I suppose is another possibility)
I'd choose Ruby in a service oriented architecture. Use HTTP/JSON for internal APIs between distinct systems. If performance becomes a business-limiting factor, you can investigate replacing a single part of the system with a lower-level language (Java, Haskell, Go, Erlang, etc).
Rails (and in particular the RailsApi gem) makes prototyping and putting together a SOA like this easy and fast. Except for the API client, which I don't yet have a good solution (ie, what ActiveResource was supposed to solve).
I disagree that the slow part of a RoR app is the database - from my anecdotal experience, the slowest part is rendering views and the string manipulation there-in, probalby caused by GC. For a Rails 2.3 App with REE and MySQL, time is ~25% GC, ~25% DB and 50% ruby (from NewRelic).
However, premature optimization and all that, don't choose Java because its faster than Ruby in some arbitrary benchmark. Choose Ruby because it makes you happy and you can meet business objectives faster and easier with it.
For a site put together by search engines, the URL structure for the site search is atrocious. "#q=Product" and not "?q=Product"? Who thought that was a good idea?
Site also looks a bit like spam. Needs more Firefox-esk awesome graphics, imo.
The same principle applies to pagination. If you can do javascript pagination #page=2 vs. dynamic pagination ?page=2 you are nearly always better of with the hash pagination. If you do it right, you get the benefit of a single page, with the added bonus of being able to bookmark a certain page and having browser history working.
