Dare Obasanjo

There was a link to an article posted yesterday or the day before on HN that attempted to interpret the original article. Here's the link:

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/10/24/RESTAPIDesignInventMediaTypesNotProtocolsAndUnderstandTheImportanceOfHyperlinks.aspx

I have to admit it's still a bit confusing to me. However, look at this snippet extracted from a comment by the author of the article you provided:

"A truly RESTful API looks like hypertext. Every addressable unit of information carries an address, either explicitly (e.g., link and id attributes) or implicitly (e.g., derived from the media type definition and representation structure). Query results are represented by a list of links with summary information, not by arrays of object representations (query is not a substitute for identification of resources)."

And this snippet from the second:

"The latest drafts of the OpenSocial specification have a great example of how a service can use existing technologies such as URI templates to make even complicated URL structures to be flexible and discoverable without having to force every client and service to hardcode a specific URL structure."

This, to me, states that a restful api should implement api discoverability and give people a method to generate URI for any api call without hard-coding URIs into your code. A snippet from the article I linked-to that defines a URI template:

<os:URI-Template>http://api.example.org/groups/{guid}</os:URI-Template>

It's…

This piece mentions "No manual intervention" and backs that up with some reasons why Google supposedly doesn't have any manual intervention in the ordering of search results.

If that's true, then does that mean the eval.google.com "secret" back-end application supposedly used by teams of moderators to manipulate search results was a fabrication or just not under the principle of "manual intervention"? Or, do activities two years ago not count in the principles shared today?

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29726.htm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1532216&tid=217
http://www.searchbistro.com/index.php?/archives/19-Google-Secret-Lab,-Prelude.html
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/is-eval-google-back-on-track.html

Marissa Meyer is also supposed (and a big stress on /supposed/) to have said that Google has 10,000 people checking search results for relevance:

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/06/26/GoogleScalabilityConferenceTripReportScalingGoogleForEveryUser.aspx

In case you missed it, check the comments in this link [http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=f8e678cc-045a-4316-917d-21b6754741ba#commentstart], discussed here [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33093].

The suggestion is to constantly write db logs from EC2 to S3 instead of nightly backup, so that in the event of a crash you're only likely to lose minutes worth of data.

Also note that you can restart instances with no loss of data. Its only in failures that you would lose data.

Dare's blog is still up and reachable:

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/

but the particular link provided by the parent is rerouting to the obnoxious front page at rotten.com, which some may consider NSFW. The same behavior is observed when trying to access the post from the link on the front page of Dare's blog.

Because of this, I'm flagging this submission. Maybe Dare can get his blog straightened out; but in the meantime, the link is not directly useful or appropriate.