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Ask HN: All startup websites look the same All recent startup websites look the same to me. I don't have the designer chops to explain it clearly, but the main style is:<p>A whole lot of white, plus one dominant color (usually blue, green or dark grey) used for footer/header.<p>Layout uses light-grey-to-white gradients to make gentle borders between columns and even tabs.<p>Borders that don't use gradients are always 1px grey.<p>Large rectangular rounded buttons in dominant color (or green, orange) with white lettering.<p>Sans serif font everywhere.<p>Bunch of links that don't fit anywhere are moved to lower footer in small font.<p>Approximately 940px wide fixed main layout.<p>http://www.loopt.com/<p>https://indinero.com/<p>http://www.nozbe.com/<p>http://www.peerindex.net/<p>Does anyone know how/why this came about?
{ "score": 0, "text": "The important stuff in the common design pattern has been tested to death - everyone who matters is using clicktracking, a/b/x testing and deep user analytics. The reason they all look the same is the same reason that all infomercials or porn sites use the same basic structure - that's what testing indicates will convert best. Some people know this empirically, some are just blindly aping the fashion, but there is wads of data backing it.Lots of whitespace improves readability, as does the use of a sans serif font. Deviate from either and a lot of people will hit the back button because they can't easily read your text.A clear call to action massively improves conversion. The rectangular button in a dominant colour will increase signups by 10-20%.960px wide because the majority of web users can see a page this wide without scrolling. For the same reason, all the important stuff on the site should fit within the first 500px vertically. a 960px grid is highly divisible and so gives you very flexible layout options with minimal hassle. There's a strong argument for 720px, but it's largely a question of browser demographics.The links in the footer should be stuff for people who know what they're looking for, providing greater information density without added clutter. It works in large part because it's a convention, but it works nonetheless.Familiarity matters in web design - the better people can predict where things will be, the better they can navigate.That isn't to say that all these websites work as well as they should do, but there's only one reason to deviate from the norm - if you've tested something and found that it converts better." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "i was one of the designers on loopt.com, and the reason i think most of these sites look the same is because we all go through y combinator hearing the same thing: \"the number one enemy is the back button.\" we just don't have time to overload the home pages with too much stuff if we intend on someone doing something while they're on it. so i think all styles gravitate towards a similar highly-focused product-oriented design.as for the actual ui elements. i think a lot of companies out there, specifically the freelance design firms, are taking their inspiration from apple's mac os x ui elements. the gradients and button styles are very similar, and then other freelance designers will look at that and try to find ways to change or improve that even further. i think it all ultimately derives from apple though.many designers i know of will use a css grid framework; we used grid 960. the reasoning behind the number 960 pixels is described on their web site:\"All modern monitors support at least 1024 × 768 pixel resolution. 960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with.\"" }
Ask HN: All startup websites look the same All recent startup websites look the same to me. I don't have the designer chops to explain it clearly, but the main style is:<p>A whole lot of white, plus one dominant color (usually blue, green or dark grey) used for footer/header.<p>Layout uses light-grey-to-white gradients to make gentle borders between columns and even tabs.<p>Borders that don't use gradients are always 1px grey.<p>Large rectangular rounded buttons in dominant color (or green, orange) with white lettering.<p>Sans serif font everywhere.<p>Bunch of links that don't fit anywhere are moved to lower footer in small font.<p>Approximately 940px wide fixed main layout.<p>http://www.loopt.com/<p>https://indinero.com/<p>http://www.nozbe.com/<p>http://www.peerindex.net/<p>Does anyone know how/why this came about?
{ "score": 1, "text": "i was one of the designers on loopt.com, and the reason i think most of these sites look the same is because we all go through y combinator hearing the same thing: \"the number one enemy is the back button.\" we just don't have time to overload the home pages with too much stuff if we intend on someone doing something while they're on it. so i think all styles gravitate towards a similar highly-focused product-oriented design.as for the actual ui elements. i think a lot of companies out there, specifically the freelance design firms, are taking their inspiration from apple's mac os x ui elements. the gradients and button styles are very similar, and then other freelance designers will look at that and try to find ways to change or improve that even further. i think it all ultimately derives from apple though.many designers i know of will use a css grid framework; we used grid 960. the reasoning behind the number 960 pixels is described on their web site:\"All modern monitors support at least 1024 × 768 pixel resolution. 960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with.\"" }
{ "score": 2, "text": "What you're describing is good design and UX.White space is a fundamental of good design.Light gradients and thin grey lines provide subtle distinctions between content areas without overpowering the content.A strong, obvious 'Call to Action' button in a vibrant colour encourages click through action.Sans serif fonts work better than serifs in websites because of the inherent limitations with rendering fine details using pixels (they often also communicate 'modern').Moving secondary links to the footer is simply good UX. They're available but out of the way.940px (I'd say 970 actually) is the current sweet spot if you want to target the majority of people's screen resolution to provide a good experience.(I agree with HNer... the examples you provide all look very different, but are just fairly well designed)" }
Ask HN: All startup websites look the same All recent startup websites look the same to me. I don't have the designer chops to explain it clearly, but the main style is:<p>A whole lot of white, plus one dominant color (usually blue, green or dark grey) used for footer/header.<p>Layout uses light-grey-to-white gradients to make gentle borders between columns and even tabs.<p>Borders that don't use gradients are always 1px grey.<p>Large rectangular rounded buttons in dominant color (or green, orange) with white lettering.<p>Sans serif font everywhere.<p>Bunch of links that don't fit anywhere are moved to lower footer in small font.<p>Approximately 940px wide fixed main layout.<p>http://www.loopt.com/<p>https://indinero.com/<p>http://www.nozbe.com/<p>http://www.peerindex.net/<p>Does anyone know how/why this came about?
{ "score": 2, "text": "What you're describing is good design and UX.White space is a fundamental of good design.Light gradients and thin grey lines provide subtle distinctions between content areas without overpowering the content.A strong, obvious 'Call to Action' button in a vibrant colour encourages click through action.Sans serif fonts work better than serifs in websites because of the inherent limitations with rendering fine details using pixels (they often also communicate 'modern').Moving secondary links to the footer is simply good UX. They're available but out of the way.940px (I'd say 970 actually) is the current sweet spot if you want to target the majority of people's screen resolution to provide a good experience.(I agree with HNer... the examples you provide all look very different, but are just fairly well designed)" }
{ "score": 3, "text": "It's fashion. In 10 years we will no doubt make fun of this design.It's not necessarily a bad thing that everyone follows the fashion, though. It makes it easy to quickly scan the page." }
Ask HN: All startup websites look the same All recent startup websites look the same to me. I don't have the designer chops to explain it clearly, but the main style is:<p>A whole lot of white, plus one dominant color (usually blue, green or dark grey) used for footer/header.<p>Layout uses light-grey-to-white gradients to make gentle borders between columns and even tabs.<p>Borders that don't use gradients are always 1px grey.<p>Large rectangular rounded buttons in dominant color (or green, orange) with white lettering.<p>Sans serif font everywhere.<p>Bunch of links that don't fit anywhere are moved to lower footer in small font.<p>Approximately 940px wide fixed main layout.<p>http://www.loopt.com/<p>https://indinero.com/<p>http://www.nozbe.com/<p>http://www.peerindex.net/<p>Does anyone know how/why this came about?
{ "score": 3, "text": "It's fashion. In 10 years we will no doubt make fun of this design.It's not necessarily a bad thing that everyone follows the fashion, though. It makes it easy to quickly scan the page." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "I don't have the designer chops to explain it clearlyActually that was a pretty clear explanation from where I'm sitting.And yeah, I've noticed that too, but I have to say it is serving to modify my aesthetic expectations - now I get jarred by websites that don't look like that. Hazard of spending too much time on HN I guess....(Although I have been a fan of rectangular rounded buttons with white lettering since olwm, so at least I can claim I am consistent)" }
Django on Heroku running with Celery
{ "score": 0, "text": "Heroku, AppHosted, DotCloud, ep.io, Gondor.io, DjangoZoom, Google App Engine.Looks like the market for \"push-hosting\" django (suddenly?) increased much more than that existed for ruby frameworks.AFAI am concerned, WebFaction, Linode, Slicehost, EC2 more than addressed what I wanted for a while.Not that I don't like these or that they don't make my life simpler- They very much do. But is there room for so many? Do I just forget the Apache VirtualHost config details, as I may never need that again?" }
{ "score": 1, "text": "I feel like the title of this post would make someone over the age of fifty's head explode." }
Django on Heroku running with Celery
{ "score": 1, "text": "I feel like the title of this post would make someone over the age of fifty's head explode." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "I thought Heroku only suppoted Ruby and node.js. Can someone explain what is going on here? Does it run arbitary executables, but it handles Ruby in some more powerful way?" }
Django on Heroku running with Celery
{ "score": 2, "text": "I thought Heroku only suppoted Ruby and node.js. Can someone explain what is going on here? Does it run arbitary executables, but it handles Ruby in some more powerful way?" }
{ "score": 3, "text": "Only http traffic is routed to your web processes so a different protocol (I don't know, IRC) won't be routable to one of your deployed processes, correct?Also, how much RAM can a process use? What happens if I run Redis and fill it up with \"a lot\" of data?" }
Django on Heroku running with Celery
{ "score": 3, "text": "Only http traffic is routed to your web processes so a different protocol (I don't know, IRC) won't be routable to one of your deployed processes, correct?Also, how much RAM can a process use? What happens if I run Redis and fill it up with \"a lot\" of data?" }
{ "score": 4, "text": "Are there any drawbacks to this? I've been looking for a \"Heroku for Django\" for a few months and I just started using Google App Engine to get some of what I want. I'll go ahead and try this if it works well." }
Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology
{ "score": 0, "text": "\"No feigning surprise\" or anything of the sort can be important. Years ago, I was in a college math class where the teacher used an analogy and mentioned John Elway. Yes, this class was being held in Colorado.Anyway, one of the other women in the class asked who that was -- she needed context to better understand this guy's analogy. He was just flabbergasted, and could not believe that anyone could not know who he was.It didn't help that this particular student had only been in the state a short time, was from New England, and probably knew nothing about football. This prof couldn't make heads or tails of that and proceeded to tear into her as if she was doing it on purpose.There were many tears and a lot of bad feelings all around. I doubt she got much out of that day in class. I know I sure didn't.Stuff like this can make or break a system." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "If someone gives less money to women, -because they are women- it's sexism.How giving money to women -because they are women- isn't sexism?A more honest approach would be to hire the most qualified person, regardless of your current male/female ratio." }
Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology
{ "score": 1, "text": "If someone gives less money to women, -because they are women- it's sexism.How giving money to women -because they are women- isn't sexism?A more honest approach would be to hire the most qualified person, regardless of your current male/female ratio." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "I think it's great to look into why your organization doesn't have more women represented across its divisions. I even think outreach in the form of awareness about this 'problem' is great. I dislike the implicit message being sent by offering money specifically to women to go into engineering/computer science. At best it says, we know you know that engineering is not a field your interested in because your a woman which is why we're focusing on the fact that you're a woman in our recruiting pitch, and so we're offering you a 'bonus' of $Xk. I was aghast when the NYT article ( dave-to-girl ratio ) linked mentioned that \"Most women think, 'I'm going to be in a cubicle at Microsoft typing next to some guys who smell funny.\" if they go into computer science. Because clearly all women make decisions on whether to enter a field based on some absurdly gross overgeneralization of that field. And even if every engineer in the world smelled like a sewer rat, to list that as the first/most important/first mentioned reason women don't want to become engineers is disgusting in the first order.Here's an idea. Why don't we do real research into what cultural factors influence men and women into going into different fields, and then decide to act on those cultural factors. Rather than say, I don't know, do what we do now, which is tantamount to, here lets fix this symptom of a much wider societal problem, and trample on the 'self-worth' and 'competency' of the very minority we're trying to 'save' in the process./rant." }
Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology
{ "score": 2, "text": "I think it's great to look into why your organization doesn't have more women represented across its divisions. I even think outreach in the form of awareness about this 'problem' is great. I dislike the implicit message being sent by offering money specifically to women to go into engineering/computer science. At best it says, we know you know that engineering is not a field your interested in because your a woman which is why we're focusing on the fact that you're a woman in our recruiting pitch, and so we're offering you a 'bonus' of $Xk. I was aghast when the NYT article ( dave-to-girl ratio ) linked mentioned that \"Most women think, 'I'm going to be in a cubicle at Microsoft typing next to some guys who smell funny.\" if they go into computer science. Because clearly all women make decisions on whether to enter a field based on some absurdly gross overgeneralization of that field. And even if every engineer in the world smelled like a sewer rat, to list that as the first/most important/first mentioned reason women don't want to become engineers is disgusting in the first order.Here's an idea. Why don't we do real research into what cultural factors influence men and women into going into different fields, and then decide to act on those cultural factors. Rather than say, I don't know, do what we do now, which is tantamount to, here lets fix this symptom of a much wider societal problem, and trample on the 'self-worth' and 'competency' of the very minority we're trying to 'save' in the process./rant." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "Getting more women into tech* isn't just about the money...1.) Not encouraged in early years: If you are a tech-savvy female, \"soft\" tech careers (Graphic Design etc.) are generally recommended as career paths.2.) It's a Boy's Club: If you make it past the college classes (with a 20:1 M-to-F ratio), you enter the workforce with (mostly) the same ratio. This means that unless you have thick skin &#38; a good sense of humor, you'll never make it.3.) You're Wrong: Even if you are right. And no one will hesitate to tell you why.* Speaking for a professional career in Tech. In my experience, a lot of these actually provoke you to strive to over-achieve &#38; prove yourself. But I can see how it can seem off-putting for a new-comer." }
Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology
{ "score": 3, "text": "Getting more women into tech* isn't just about the money...1.) Not encouraged in early years: If you are a tech-savvy female, \"soft\" tech careers (Graphic Design etc.) are generally recommended as career paths.2.) It's a Boy's Club: If you make it past the college classes (with a 20:1 M-to-F ratio), you enter the workforce with (mostly) the same ratio. This means that unless you have thick skin &#38; a good sense of humor, you'll never make it.3.) You're Wrong: Even if you are right. And no one will hesitate to tell you why.* Speaking for a professional career in Tech. In my experience, a lot of these actually provoke you to strive to over-achieve &#38; prove yourself. But I can see how it can seem off-putting for a new-comer." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "I am skeptical that there are few women in tech primarily due to sexism or any bad behavior on the part of the men in the field. But regardless of the source of the imbalance, I am also strongly in support of efforts to correct the imbalance, as I think that women have a lot to offer the field that it desperately needs. I firmly support \"sexist\" efforts to create artificial incentives to lure women into the field, however unfair they may be to men, since by my estimation there is real wealth that will be created by getting them there.Though I support that ideal, I question whether approaches like this are effective ways to achieve it, or even push things towards it at all - Etsy is basically throwing reasonably large amounts of money ($5k apiece) to get people that have already expressed a strong interest in tech to...continue expressing their strong interest in tech.It's like the customer has already started entering their credit card number as the final step of a purchase, and you're spending all your development time optimizing the wording of your product description on that final page because you really want to make sure they finish entering that credit card number. You've already made the sale, spend your time worrying about something else!What I'd much rather see is a focus further up the funnel, where you can actually affect people's behavior and choices in some meaningful way. Spend that 50 grand by offering, at a select set of good schools, $100 apiece to the first 500 freshman girls that enroll in a real CS course, and I'll cheer the effort - $100 bucks is a small price to pay to know that a smart girl at a good school is taking a programming class, but it just might be enough so that you actually see an increase in enrollment. If it's not and nobody bites, bump it to $200 the next semester, see if it changes. Keep the sample of schools small enough, and you'll at the very least be collecting some interesting data on how much money it actually takes to convince college girls to take CS classes. [I suspect even a $100 incentive would be enough to get female enrollment on par with male for intro classes, since at most schools an intro CS class will satisfy some sort of distribution requirement anyways]If we can get girls into first-year CS classes, we will see more women enter the field, I guarantee that. Not all of them, but some, and some of them will be fantastic. It might be crass, but I have no problem with bribing them. I'd happily contribute a few thousand to the effort if there was a sizable one set up.But if we're going to resort to bribery, let's at least make it cost effective. Bribing a tiny set of people that are already going to do what you want anyways is not a smart approach, not when there are so many more creative options." }
In Los Angeles Coders Are Too Scared To Take Risks
{ "score": 0, "text": "As an LA resident engineer myself, my theory (backed by an extensive amount of no facts whatsoever), is that engineers are more likely to \"end up\" in LA than to deliberately move there.Almost every coworker I have had is in LA because they needed to move closer to family due to illness, they moved there because their girlfriend/wife is in some grad school program at UCLA, their girlfriend/wife is trying the acting/performing thing for awhile, etc. Engineers in situations like those don't have much flexibility in taking much under market rates and basic perks (namely health insurance).Also, as Paul Graham said in one of his essays, Los Angeles' identity is \"you should be famous,\" and unfortunately, software engineering isn't known for breeding famous people outside of our TechCrunch echo chamber. In the Bay Area, founding a successful startup makes you a rock star. In Los Angeles, just about the only thing you can do to be a rock star is to be a rock star." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "One theory is that coders from L.A., such as myself, who want to work for a startup move to the Bay Area. This would inflate the number of risk takers in the Bay Area and deflating that number in L.A.Another point to look at is that while many companies in the Bay Area are 'engineer-driven' many of the tech jobs in L.A. simply exist within other industries such as entertainment." }
In Los Angeles Coders Are Too Scared To Take Risks
{ "score": 1, "text": "One theory is that coders from L.A., such as myself, who want to work for a startup move to the Bay Area. This would inflate the number of risk takers in the Bay Area and deflating that number in L.A.Another point to look at is that while many companies in the Bay Area are 'engineer-driven' many of the tech jobs in L.A. simply exist within other industries such as entertainment." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "This article is so full of such silly generalizations I'm not even sure where to begin, or whether i should.\"I did an informal survey of different Los Angeles based Information technology companies. One common theme: although espousing a culture of innovation, and although some are very profitable, most are simply not cutting edge, and some are very behind the times.\"An informal survey of LA start ups.. awesome. Any word on how exactly you went about conducting said survey? My guess is it was based on recalling random techcrunch articles read over the past couple years, but please correct if I'm wrong. LA has a ton of start ups that have all kinds of products, working environments and compensation levels, most of which I would guess the author never heard of.\"In most Silicon Valley Startups, coders know SQL, a major scripting language as well as HTML and CSS. However MySpace had positions solely for just HTML/CSS, a trend that harkened back to the 90s when web pages were manually created.\"So basically, no one needs to know js and css/html anymore because they are all magically generated by some server side fairies. So facebook, twitter and google do not have people who specialize in js or css/html because that's just way too simple. Totally. For a product the size of what MySpace had, I think it would be shockingly incompetent to not have people who would specialize in that tech.\"Another Los Angeles great, eHarmony.com, uses 40 to 50 engineers for its matchmaking algorithm and servers, whereas OKCupid.com uses only 10.\"In your survey, did you happen to ask them why they had such a discrepancy? Because i'm pretty sure it's not because eHarmony's employees are 5 times dumber than okCupid's. There could be a ton of reasons why these numbers are what they are besides lack of skill.Anyway, I think this is an attempt to rationalize some failure the author has experienced at his previous job. But frankly I think this was a pretty bad attempt at generalizing something as big as the LA and SF job markets. Start ups exist everywhere and come in all shapes forms and sizes, LA has lots of them. To say that an entire city's worth of start ups is one way or another because of myspace, eharmony and your last work place is just way too simple. Anecdotally, I have friends in several LA start ups that are doing just fine, have working environments as good as their peers in SF, if not better, and are using the same range of technology people in SF use." }
In Los Angeles Coders Are Too Scared To Take Risks
{ "score": 2, "text": "This article is so full of such silly generalizations I'm not even sure where to begin, or whether i should.\"I did an informal survey of different Los Angeles based Information technology companies. One common theme: although espousing a culture of innovation, and although some are very profitable, most are simply not cutting edge, and some are very behind the times.\"An informal survey of LA start ups.. awesome. Any word on how exactly you went about conducting said survey? My guess is it was based on recalling random techcrunch articles read over the past couple years, but please correct if I'm wrong. LA has a ton of start ups that have all kinds of products, working environments and compensation levels, most of which I would guess the author never heard of.\"In most Silicon Valley Startups, coders know SQL, a major scripting language as well as HTML and CSS. However MySpace had positions solely for just HTML/CSS, a trend that harkened back to the 90s when web pages were manually created.\"So basically, no one needs to know js and css/html anymore because they are all magically generated by some server side fairies. So facebook, twitter and google do not have people who specialize in js or css/html because that's just way too simple. Totally. For a product the size of what MySpace had, I think it would be shockingly incompetent to not have people who would specialize in that tech.\"Another Los Angeles great, eHarmony.com, uses 40 to 50 engineers for its matchmaking algorithm and servers, whereas OKCupid.com uses only 10.\"In your survey, did you happen to ask them why they had such a discrepancy? Because i'm pretty sure it's not because eHarmony's employees are 5 times dumber than okCupid's. There could be a ton of reasons why these numbers are what they are besides lack of skill.Anyway, I think this is an attempt to rationalize some failure the author has experienced at his previous job. But frankly I think this was a pretty bad attempt at generalizing something as big as the LA and SF job markets. Start ups exist everywhere and come in all shapes forms and sizes, LA has lots of them. To say that an entire city's worth of start ups is one way or another because of myspace, eharmony and your last work place is just way too simple. Anecdotally, I have friends in several LA start ups that are doing just fine, have working environments as good as their peers in SF, if not better, and are using the same range of technology people in SF use." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "I worked in the LA area (aka \"Southern California\") for 4.5 years in three different companies in three different industries--image restoration/movie post production, network test and measurement, and finance. FWIW during that time I also interviewed in Silicon Valley and got job offers in the Bay Area, but elected to stay in SoCal. I recently left the US primarily for family reasons and the farcical US immigration system.It's true that there isn't the same concentration of high-tech companies in SoCal compared to Silicon Valley, but then it's a much bigger place in terms of population. In the Hollywood area (e.g., Burbank, Glendale, Studio City etc.) there's a ton of animation and post-production shops that develop a lot of software. If you're a system administrator you can run some of the largest render farms in the world.If you're into computer graphics, whether it's image processing for post-production or 3D for animations and games, SoCal is probably the center of your universe. E.g., the technology to shoot 3D movies like Avatar was largely developed in SoCal.Further west in the San Fernando valley and Calabasas there's a healthy cluster of mid-sized world-class companies like DataDirect Networks, Ixia, DTS and Fulcrum Microsystems.Further south in Orange County and San Diego there's a bunch of companies like RED, Blizzard, Broadcom and Qualcomm.Suffice it to say that there's a lot of very good high-tech work being done in Southern California!" }
In Los Angeles Coders Are Too Scared To Take Risks
{ "score": 3, "text": "I worked in the LA area (aka \"Southern California\") for 4.5 years in three different companies in three different industries--image restoration/movie post production, network test and measurement, and finance. FWIW during that time I also interviewed in Silicon Valley and got job offers in the Bay Area, but elected to stay in SoCal. I recently left the US primarily for family reasons and the farcical US immigration system.It's true that there isn't the same concentration of high-tech companies in SoCal compared to Silicon Valley, but then it's a much bigger place in terms of population. In the Hollywood area (e.g., Burbank, Glendale, Studio City etc.) there's a ton of animation and post-production shops that develop a lot of software. If you're a system administrator you can run some of the largest render farms in the world.If you're into computer graphics, whether it's image processing for post-production or 3D for animations and games, SoCal is probably the center of your universe. E.g., the technology to shoot 3D movies like Avatar was largely developed in SoCal.Further west in the San Fernando valley and Calabasas there's a healthy cluster of mid-sized world-class companies like DataDirect Networks, Ixia, DTS and Fulcrum Microsystems.Further south in Orange County and San Diego there's a bunch of companies like RED, Blizzard, Broadcom and Qualcomm.Suffice it to say that there's a lot of very good high-tech work being done in Southern California!" }
{ "score": 4, "text": "Silicon Valley Information Technology Workers (excludes hardware, e.g. Apple, Intel, financial software which would total 387,000): 49,900Los Angeles Information Technology Workers (excludes hardware, financial software which would total 758,000): 106,100Despite having a smaller pool of talent, Silicon Valley tech workers’ companies are able to produce 1% of the GDP of the United States or $174 billion annually.I don't understand this analysis.1) why exclude a large portion of the Silicon Valley workforce - because their hardware/financial jobs aren't \"startup-y\" enough?2) Where does this GDP/earnings estimate come from, and if it is for SV companies as a whole, isn't it likely to include a whole heck of a lot of employees at these companies that do not work in SV? Apple, Google, etc employ lots of people across the globe.In most Silicon Valley Startups, coders know SQL, a major scripting language as well as HTML and CSS. However MySpace had positions solely for just HTML/CSS, a trend that harkened back to the 90s when web pages were manually created.What is the point being made here? That MySpace was not as advanced because some of their job listings did not include SQL? Or because they have some job listings for front-end web work? It takes a huge jump in logic to assume that a job listing for \"HTML/CSS\" means web pages are \"manually created\". And since when is an entire city defined by a single company's job listings?This entire post is full of shoddy analysis and conjecture. I don't understand people that think you can sum up all of the people within a given geographic area with a few words (\"scared\", \"not taking advantage of innovations in automation\")." }
Living to 100 and Beyond
{ "score": 0, "text": "Peter Thiel says this in the foreword:---\"Unlike the other animals, we have knowledge of death. The origins of language, of culture, and of religion can perhaps all be traced to that point in the distant past when our ancestors first acquird this terrible knowlege and needed to tell themselves stories to make sense of life and death. Every myth on this planet is an untrue story that tells people that the purpose of life is death. Nationalistic myths tell us that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country, ideological myths tell us that progress requires violence and that one must break some eggs to make an omelet, and religious myths tell us to worship the old, the ancient, and the spirits of the dead. The crisis of the modern world is the crisis of mythology. We no longer believe in the old stories about life and death, but we also cannot go back to a time when we were not yet human and did not know about death. We cannot go back in time [to the innocent ignorance of youth] and we would prefer not to be turned [into animals]. As the same time we cannot simply deal with death as a 'fact of life.' What we desperately need is a new story - a true story - to help make sense of the world in which we find ourselves.\"---The book should be read in the light of this thought: we build our myths, recapitulating them in technology just as soon as we are able. Though nowadays people are more likely to talk of \"vision\" and \"cultural aspirations\" than to tie present directions to the legacy of stories and desires that emerged from the deep past. Unlike Thiel, I don't think that all of the old tales are bad for being lies. In some tales, humanity lives in a world in which objects think and speak, aging can be banished, wounds healed with a touch, and spirits and gods watch over all - and with progress in artificial intelligence and biotechnology most of that will come to pass. There are good reasons why certain forms of story survive the millennia: they attract us and steer us just as much as we steer them. So long as there are at least a few people who prefer to build a tower rather than talk of building a tower, then we will build our mythology. Thiel is, however, right in the prevalence of tales that celebrate death and aging over life and longevity, and there is a scale crying out for a rebalancing.http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/our-beauteous-but...---\"This is an age of progress and biotechnology. Yet we folk who might be the first ageless humans stand atop a bone mountain. Its slopes are the stories of the dead, created, told, and appreciated by people who knew their own mortality. It is an enormous, pervasive heritage, forged by an army of billions, and no part of our culture or our endeavors is left untouched by it. This is one part of the hurdle we must overcome as we strive to convince people that a near future of rejuvenation biotechnology is plausible, possible, and desirable.\"---Burying the bone mountain is a big job, but that's why books like this have to be written. The better visions and better myths must win out if we are to see the broad support and desire needed to accomplish any great advance in technology, and then make it widespread." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "Link to an academically hosted .PDF of the paper \"The Value of Health and Longevity,\" mentioned in the submitted article.http://www.econ.yale.edu/seminars/labor/lap05/topel-050325.p...I'm going to have to check the methodology of this working paper, as I am dubious about its conclusion.And here's a link to Amazon's description of the newly published book on which the submitted article is based:http://www.amazon.com/100-Plus-Longevity-Everything-Relation..." }
Living to 100 and Beyond
{ "score": 1, "text": "Link to an academically hosted .PDF of the paper \"The Value of Health and Longevity,\" mentioned in the submitted article.http://www.econ.yale.edu/seminars/labor/lap05/topel-050325.p...I'm going to have to check the methodology of this working paper, as I am dubious about its conclusion.And here's a link to Amazon's description of the newly published book on which the submitted article is based:http://www.amazon.com/100-Plus-Longevity-Everything-Relation..." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "I think that some points in this article are a bit misleading. Much of the focus is on an increase in the average life span of the population, of which a large portion can be attributed to a reduction in infant mortality and an increase in sanitation, or treatments of common disorders. However, for 100+ year lifespans and (optimistically) 1000 year life spans, we would need to drastically increase the maximum life span, which proves to be a much more difficult task in healthy individuals." }
Living to 100 and Beyond
{ "score": 2, "text": "I think that some points in this article are a bit misleading. Much of the focus is on an increase in the average life span of the population, of which a large portion can be attributed to a reduction in infant mortality and an increase in sanitation, or treatments of common disorders. However, for 100+ year lifespans and (optimistically) 1000 year life spans, we would need to drastically increase the maximum life span, which proves to be a much more difficult task in healthy individuals." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "To solve difficult problems like this, we really need to game problems to get more people involved. To get a man on the moon, for example, it took almost a decade, billions of dollars, and 300,000 Americans working on it. The problem he wants to solve is even more difficult." }
Living to 100 and Beyond
{ "score": 3, "text": "To solve difficult problems like this, we really need to game problems to get more people involved. To get a man on the moon, for example, it took almost a decade, billions of dollars, and 300,000 Americans working on it. The problem he wants to solve is even more difficult." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "Very thought provoking. My first thought de Grey's claim that the first people to live a 1000 years have already been born is that will certainly require changes to social security. It seems likely even modest advances are enough to start getting societal conundrums. It looks like an interesting book." }
Ron Conway, Chris Sacca And Others Invest 800K In Dotcloud (YC S10)
{ "score": 0, "text": "I've said it in a previous DotCloud post and I'll say it again: If they can pull it off then they'll be golden.But I'm extremely skeptical they can.Many of the components they list require intimate domain knowledge. E.g. there are entire companies dedicated to designing and babysitting Hadoop clusters, yet DotCloud just lists it casually alongside other bleeding edge mammoths such as Riak or Cassandra.DotCloud will need to not only stay on top of things for so many components and provide smooth upgrades for an inherently growing diversity of deployments. They'll also have to support old versions effectively forever and deal with all those little customizations that people need.Of course all that is doable, given enough man-power. However, after a certain point it's not very automatable anymore.So, that said, I remain curious if this will really come out as the holy grail that they seem to be shooting for. Or if it will gradually degrade into \"just another managed hosting provider\" (which isn't a bad thing either, of course)." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "Congrats to the DotCloud guys—if they can crack the language-agnostic cloud hosting nut, they'll be worth every cent. It's a big problem to tackle though :)" }
Ron Conway, Chris Sacca And Others Invest 800K In Dotcloud (YC S10)
{ "score": 1, "text": "Congrats to the DotCloud guys—if they can crack the language-agnostic cloud hosting nut, they'll be worth every cent. It's a big problem to tackle though :)" }
{ "score": 2, "text": "Congrats guys. Dotcloud is awesome, the team is amazing! Even though we weren't hosted on Dotcloud, Solomon always was willing to help us out. That's the kind of service that comes from a company that you know will do well =)" }
Ron Conway, Chris Sacca And Others Invest 800K In Dotcloud (YC S10)
{ "score": 2, "text": "Congrats guys. Dotcloud is awesome, the team is amazing! Even though we weren't hosted on Dotcloud, Solomon always was willing to help us out. That's the kind of service that comes from a company that you know will do well =)" }
{ "score": 3, "text": "Speaking as a current Dotcloud customer, the setup they've created to handle creating and managing the various components of your \"stack\" is very cool - within a week of starting work on our first project hosted on Dotcloud I was already planning and thinking about how to move ALL of our projects over, as the flexibility and ease of use is awesome. Right now they are still in beta, but so far I'm super impressed." }
Ron Conway, Chris Sacca And Others Invest 800K In Dotcloud (YC S10)
{ "score": 3, "text": "Speaking as a current Dotcloud customer, the setup they've created to handle creating and managing the various components of your \"stack\" is very cool - within a week of starting work on our first project hosted on Dotcloud I was already planning and thinking about how to move ALL of our projects over, as the flexibility and ease of use is awesome. Right now they are still in beta, but so far I'm super impressed." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "I really like this DotCloud business model. Although i see a competition directly from Amazon Cloud Formation. What will happen to DotCloud if all the independent vendors make their software Cloud Formation ready?There is a difference here, DotCloud making the platform ready for to you vs the vendor makes the platform cloud formation ready.(Thats AWS they make others to work for them)Would love to see how this little, nimble start up being chased by a big, fat, bully AWS, fights back." }
Bike - phpMyAdmin replacement for geeks
{ "score": 0, "text": "The issue behind phpMyAdmin IMHO neither is the fact that it's written in PHP nor that it looks unsexy. The problem is that it exists.It's too tempting to leave it running on some server and promptly forget it. Or get it installed without knowing by some third-party CMS.Even if it had a spotless security track record (it doesn't), this is just too big an attack surface.MySQL and especially Postgres have really good command line utilities you can use over SSH which will have the additional advantage of you learning DDL syntax for emergencies. And of course GUIs exist too (use SSH port forwarding).About Bike: I didn't install it, but this looks like a pure frontend to type in queries and get back results. This provides the security problems of phpMyAdmin minus the specialized GUI to save you from learning DDL or server internals.As such it provides the worst of both worlds. I wouldn't call that \"phpMyAdmin for geeks\". CLI mysql is phpMyAdmin for geeks." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "If you go to their github page it says the following under security: \"On current stage I don't care about login functionality. Put Bike into folder with name like 'tASTDKUWYVEjhas' or just use Apache httpauth as workaround.\"So basically... they have absolutely nothing built in for security, other than hoping you choose a good folder name. Even if you ignore that, this is an all-around poor attempt to be an alternative, let alone compete.UPDATE: Looks like the Bike developer is not trying to be an 'alternative' to phpMyAdmin and whomever made this post either used bad info or think it's an alternative themselves. Either way the guy says it's just supposed to be a lightweight and simple tool... not any sort of alternative. With that said, it's not so bad... but still, security needs to be a higher focus if this thing can access/modify your database." }
Bike - phpMyAdmin replacement for geeks
{ "score": 1, "text": "If you go to their github page it says the following under security: \"On current stage I don't care about login functionality. Put Bike into folder with name like 'tASTDKUWYVEjhas' or just use Apache httpauth as workaround.\"So basically... they have absolutely nothing built in for security, other than hoping you choose a good folder name. Even if you ignore that, this is an all-around poor attempt to be an alternative, let alone compete.UPDATE: Looks like the Bike developer is not trying to be an 'alternative' to phpMyAdmin and whomever made this post either used bad info or think it's an alternative themselves. Either way the guy says it's just supposed to be a lightweight and simple tool... not any sort of alternative. With that said, it's not so bad... but still, security needs to be a higher focus if this thing can access/modify your database." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "I realize that this is a totally different strategy to solve the mySQL admin thing, but WOW is Sequel Pro great if you're on a Mac: http://www.sequelpro.com/I used phpMyAdmin for 10 _years_, and switched after using Sequel Pro for 5 minutes." }
Bike - phpMyAdmin replacement for geeks
{ "score": 2, "text": "I realize that this is a totally different strategy to solve the mySQL admin thing, but WOW is Sequel Pro great if you're on a Mac: http://www.sequelpro.com/I used phpMyAdmin for 10 _years_, and switched after using Sequel Pro for 5 minutes." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "Adminer [http://www.adminer.org/en/] is a pretty sweet db administration tool. It's only one sub-300kB file with no installation or configuration (so if your hosting provider doesnt have any db tool you can upload yours in seconds), supports MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL and others, and does much more. I didn't had to use phpMyAdmin even once since I learned about this.One \"killer\" feature for me: Adminer automatically links items in columns that have foreign keys set, so you can click on a value and it jumps to that item in linked table." }
Bike - phpMyAdmin replacement for geeks
{ "score": 3, "text": "Adminer [http://www.adminer.org/en/] is a pretty sweet db administration tool. It's only one sub-300kB file with no installation or configuration (so if your hosting provider doesnt have any db tool you can upload yours in seconds), supports MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL and others, and does much more. I didn't had to use phpMyAdmin even once since I learned about this.One \"killer\" feature for me: Adminer automatically links items in columns that have foreign keys set, so you can click on a value and it jumps to that item in linked table." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "I often see systematic scans for phpmyadmin installations in my weblogs. phpmyadmin has had a series of security issues.New software, new bugs.I am not very confident that the bike developers will have an eye on security, since there are a couple of spelling errors on the site and they brag about how good looking and ajaxy the software is. Wrong focus." }
Ask HN: Your Oldest Finger Print on the Internet Just for fun (and to sadly date myself...): What is the oldest finger print you can find of yourself on the Internet (content you created or that was created by a human about you [e.g. no auto-generated birth announcements, etc])?<p>For me:<p>Linux Activists mailing list archive (Sept 10, 1993): http://ftp4.de.freesbie.org/pub/misc/tsx-11/mail-archive/linux-activists/Volume6/digest (search for "travis jensen")
{ "score": 0, "text": "Well, it's certainly not the first thing I ever made, but the earliest thing I can find dates back to 1996: it's a Star Trek fan page listing fans' pages dedicated to the then forthcoming movie Star Trek VIII: First Contact. Just go here (http://www.reocities.com/Hollywood/6075/) and then do a find for \"marcweb\" on that page, and you'll see it. :)Amazingly, I also found some pretty functional cached versions over at http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19990209094832/http://www.h...If you click through to the main Win95 theme site(!) you can even click through to the above-mentioned Star Trek VIII site via the Start Menu! :)" }
{ "score": 1, "text": "\"I contend that Usenet is a new communications medium, and not a broadcasting\none. In addition it is a medium without standards organisations, hence the\ncurrent success. Remember, you are not being fed this stuff when you turn your computer on. You choose which newsgroups and messages to read. If you want someone\nelse to make those decisions for you, fine, but don't make my decisions.\"...among other comments on comp.org.eff.talk, March 23-25 1993 (eddy robinson)oops http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:z7bPHSa..." }
Ask HN: Your Oldest Finger Print on the Internet Just for fun (and to sadly date myself...): What is the oldest finger print you can find of yourself on the Internet (content you created or that was created by a human about you [e.g. no auto-generated birth announcements, etc])?<p>For me:<p>Linux Activists mailing list archive (Sept 10, 1993): http://ftp4.de.freesbie.org/pub/misc/tsx-11/mail-archive/linux-activists/Volume6/digest (search for "travis jensen")
{ "score": 1, "text": "\"I contend that Usenet is a new communications medium, and not a broadcasting\none. In addition it is a medium without standards organisations, hence the\ncurrent success. Remember, you are not being fed this stuff when you turn your computer on. You choose which newsgroups and messages to read. If you want someone\nelse to make those decisions for you, fine, but don't make my decisions.\"...among other comments on comp.org.eff.talk, March 23-25 1993 (eddy robinson)oops http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:z7bPHSa..." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "July 1st, 1993 on the old WWW-Talk mailing list.It was in a discussion with Marc Andreessen (who was still at NCSA) and others concerning whether \"WWW documents\" should have two spaces after periods (like typewritten pages) or just one (like books). A few weeks later, we were debating whether web browsers should accommodate Adobe's new PDF format.It's fun to see how the issues that implemented the web were hashed out on the WWW-Talk mailing list:\nhttp://www.intercom.co.cr/www-archives/1993-q3/index.htmlExtra spaces after periods, indeed." }
Ask HN: Your Oldest Finger Print on the Internet Just for fun (and to sadly date myself...): What is the oldest finger print you can find of yourself on the Internet (content you created or that was created by a human about you [e.g. no auto-generated birth announcements, etc])?<p>For me:<p>Linux Activists mailing list archive (Sept 10, 1993): http://ftp4.de.freesbie.org/pub/misc/tsx-11/mail-archive/linux-activists/Volume6/digest (search for "travis jensen")
{ "score": 2, "text": "July 1st, 1993 on the old WWW-Talk mailing list.It was in a discussion with Marc Andreessen (who was still at NCSA) and others concerning whether \"WWW documents\" should have two spaces after periods (like typewritten pages) or just one (like books). A few weeks later, we were debating whether web browsers should accommodate Adobe's new PDF format.It's fun to see how the issues that implemented the web were hashed out on the WWW-Talk mailing list:\nhttp://www.intercom.co.cr/www-archives/1993-q3/index.htmlExtra spaces after periods, indeed." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "I wrote an HP LaserJet III printer driver for Borland's Sprint word processor way back in 1991. Every now and then, when I google myself, a copy of it comes up somewhere. Here's one:http://www.sci.wsu.edu/math/faculty/barnes/borland/simtel.ht...my driver is hplj3j11.zip, partway down the page. For that audience, all filenames had to conform to the DOS 8.3 standard.I just skimmed my documentation in that archive, and hoo boy was I ever earnest. I took myself so seriously!" }
Ask HN: Your Oldest Finger Print on the Internet Just for fun (and to sadly date myself...): What is the oldest finger print you can find of yourself on the Internet (content you created or that was created by a human about you [e.g. no auto-generated birth announcements, etc])?<p>For me:<p>Linux Activists mailing list archive (Sept 10, 1993): http://ftp4.de.freesbie.org/pub/misc/tsx-11/mail-archive/linux-activists/Volume6/digest (search for "travis jensen")
{ "score": 3, "text": "I wrote an HP LaserJet III printer driver for Borland's Sprint word processor way back in 1991. Every now and then, when I google myself, a copy of it comes up somewhere. Here's one:http://www.sci.wsu.edu/math/faculty/barnes/borland/simtel.ht...my driver is hplj3j11.zip, partway down the page. For that audience, all filenames had to conform to the DOS 8.3 standard.I just skimmed my documentation in that archive, and hoo boy was I ever earnest. I took myself so seriously!" }
{ "score": 4, "text": "While I was on the net before, the first time that I would have left a fingerprint would have been when I got into online gaming. I would have to dig deep into my memory to think of what my usernames were, but I'm sure that some of those old Counter Strike, Diablo and Starcraft rankings and match results are somewhere." }
Anonymous threatens Justice Department over hacktivist death
{ "score": 0, "text": "I am sick of hearing about Anonymous and its vigilantism. We have courts and a justice system for a reason: to place retaliatory force under objective controls (laws) so that the rights of individuals are not violated. Their tactics are both dangerous to freedom and to justice.In addition, while a few of the things they're against are actually bad things, not all of the causes they fight are just. And their illegal methods serve mainly to hurt the good fights (such as the fight against Scientology) rather than help." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "Did anyone grab a mirror or better screenshot of the page?UPDATE: Google Cached it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sV8dPXf..." }
Anonymous threatens Justice Department over hacktivist death
{ "score": 1, "text": "Did anyone grab a mirror or better screenshot of the page?UPDATE: Google Cached it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sV8dPXf..." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "Wow, CNN, the opposite of Hacker News. What an ignorant comment:The \"warhead\" names appeared as links, most leading to 404 error messages of pages not found, but some leading to pages of raw programming code." }
Anonymous threatens Justice Department over hacktivist death
{ "score": 2, "text": "Wow, CNN, the opposite of Hacker News. What an ignorant comment:The \"warhead\" names appeared as links, most leading to 404 error messages of pages not found, but some leading to pages of raw programming code." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "\"Swartz was facing up to 50+ years in prison and a $4 million fine\". 50 years from now, people will relate this saying that he was facing death penalty" }
Anonymous threatens Justice Department over hacktivist death
{ "score": 3, "text": "\"Swartz was facing up to 50+ years in prison and a $4 million fine\". 50 years from now, people will relate this saying that he was facing death penalty" }
{ "score": 4, "text": "\"Reform or we'll release this incriminating stuff.\"Clearly, the better way to get them to reform is to release the incriminating material and have a scandal about it. If it's really bad enough to be worth this headline, it'll do a lot more good when it's not a threat. Of course, that means it's probably irrelevant and/or useless." }
How Quake (the videogame) changed my life forever.
{ "score": 0, "text": "Quake is also responsible for changing my life: after years of muddling around in BASIC and LOGO I started writing mods in QuakeC, which required me to write code, design a website, design and build models, and test and test and continually tweak and iterate on the experience. For the first time I was writing large code and doing serious graphics work, and I loved it deeply.It lead me towards building websites and writing about games, and out of the Quake community I met people who ran Unreal websites - they gave me a copy of their CMS, and I ended up learning PHP/MySQL from it and building and designing bigger and better websites.I dropped out of my Mechatronics/CS degree to pursue programming for a living - which lead to my first exposure to the then-revolting idea that programming and design were different disciplines. I spent years bouncing back and forth between the two, never quite fitting in, but learning a ridiculous amount along the way.Now I'm at Google, technically employed as a software engineer but leading the design of a large product. I probably would have ended up somewhere in the software industry anyway, but I believe that I'm in this exact position, the best job I could possibly imagine, because of a chain of coincidences that were kicked off by Quake and its modding tools." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "The quake community and game changed my life. Of course, when I started, it was mplayer. I had just traded my Playstation 1 for a 486DX, a huge mistake in everyone's eyes. I used my rich friend's grandmother's AOL login to get online. (This continued for 3-4 years, my mother still wonders what the \"weird noise\" was on the phone lines past midnight).The broken physics and quirks of Team Fortress in QuakeWorld is what really caught my eye. I was hooked like a fiend. I was recruited by many guilds and known for my 9600BP lagging , teleporting and fragging! Not to mention my 1MB cirrus logic integrated video card, it chugged along at ~12FPS in 320x200(?).I got interested in manipulating Quake. Living in MS, there were no mentors for learning to program or script. I went in blind and came out with a few mods.Years later, I ported team fortress with quakeworld physics into Enemy Territory, (Feb/Mar 2004?), but never found anyone interested in doing the sound or graphics.Obviously, my original endeavor into quakeC led to a whole new world of coding and languages!At this point, I had a few life changes. I made a handful of lifetime friends from IRC and my old clans.Now, looking back, it was Quake and my natural ability to tinker that led to my pursuit of a degree in computer science/bioinformatics. I am currently in my junior year.I emailed John Carmack a few times asking for legal advice regarding using shareware Quake 1 models in a development version of my port of QuakeWorld to ET. He gave me good advice and has been a great influence.Oh, and trying to figure out how to make VIS run faster on a BSP map was the end of me. VIS took forever, and I mean forever, to run on my 100mhz computer." }
How Quake (the videogame) changed my life forever.
{ "score": 1, "text": "The quake community and game changed my life. Of course, when I started, it was mplayer. I had just traded my Playstation 1 for a 486DX, a huge mistake in everyone's eyes. I used my rich friend's grandmother's AOL login to get online. (This continued for 3-4 years, my mother still wonders what the \"weird noise\" was on the phone lines past midnight).The broken physics and quirks of Team Fortress in QuakeWorld is what really caught my eye. I was hooked like a fiend. I was recruited by many guilds and known for my 9600BP lagging , teleporting and fragging! Not to mention my 1MB cirrus logic integrated video card, it chugged along at ~12FPS in 320x200(?).I got interested in manipulating Quake. Living in MS, there were no mentors for learning to program or script. I went in blind and came out with a few mods.Years later, I ported team fortress with quakeworld physics into Enemy Territory, (Feb/Mar 2004?), but never found anyone interested in doing the sound or graphics.Obviously, my original endeavor into quakeC led to a whole new world of coding and languages!At this point, I had a few life changes. I made a handful of lifetime friends from IRC and my old clans.Now, looking back, it was Quake and my natural ability to tinker that led to my pursuit of a degree in computer science/bioinformatics. I am currently in my junior year.I emailed John Carmack a few times asking for legal advice regarding using shareware Quake 1 models in a development version of my port of QuakeWorld to ET. He gave me good advice and has been a great influence.Oh, and trying to figure out how to make VIS run faster on a BSP map was the end of me. VIS took forever, and I mean forever, to run on my 100mhz computer." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "IMO, his wife changed his life. Having dreams / passions is very common, having the push to pursuit them, very rare." }
How Quake (the videogame) changed my life forever.
{ "score": 2, "text": "IMO, his wife changed his life. Having dreams / passions is very common, having the push to pursuit them, very rare." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "I like how he didn't even get started till he was about 24 and had no head start from previous work. It seems rare to read a success story that doesn't involve people getting obsessed with an activity in their mid-teens (often building on a good academic performance in maths or something like that)." }
How Quake (the videogame) changed my life forever.
{ "score": 3, "text": "I like how he didn't even get started till he was about 24 and had no head start from previous work. It seems rare to read a success story that doesn't involve people getting obsessed with an activity in their mid-teens (often building on a good academic performance in maths or something like that)." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "I wouldn't say it changed my life, but the first pretty serious piece of software I ever wrote was a game loader for Doom/Doom II/Heretic/Hexen. You could select which game you wanted to play, and which WADs you wanted and if the WADs were originally created for a different game it would run them through a conversion script for the game you wanted.Later on I added support for DeHackEd so you could modify the exe to change things like weapon speed power. Pretty sure I had support for setting up multiplayer games as well.It was all written in Turbo Pascal and had a really nice GUI where I programmed all the primitives (radio boxes/check boxes/scroll boxes/buttons/etc) myself from scratch.I really really wish I still had source code to the thing, but I lost it years ago. I was really proud of it." }
Why Learn About Operating Systems? As a CS student, we're all subject to the rigorous, mindf<i></i>* of a course called operating systems. I most likely won't be creating an operating system in the future, so why do all CS students have to learn about OS?
{ "score": 0, "text": "The point of the OS class isn't to teach you how to CREATE an OS from scratch, but to teach you how an OS WORKS. I've interacted with a lot of CS students, and it boggles the mind how ignorant they are in using a computer. To fully understand how your program works, you should have a general understanding of what's going on behind the scenes. It definitively makes you a better coder. If you understand that a file-system, memory, cpu etc...aren't just black boxes that \"just work\", you can code around their bottlenecks.My OS class was one of the most rewarding classes during my undergrad years. Don't think of it as a hurdle. Embrace it." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "The same reson why we want to know why quantum teleportation works.Knowing how is really only half of the knowlage your going to need. In most cases you will never need to go deeper than the userspace level, but in thoes rare instances you do that understanding is invaluable.Also dont write off not wanting to write os in the future, its one of the most rewarding pet projects i have ever worked on." }
Why Learn About Operating Systems? As a CS student, we're all subject to the rigorous, mindf<i></i>* of a course called operating systems. I most likely won't be creating an operating system in the future, so why do all CS students have to learn about OS?
{ "score": 1, "text": "The same reson why we want to know why quantum teleportation works.Knowing how is really only half of the knowlage your going to need. In most cases you will never need to go deeper than the userspace level, but in thoes rare instances you do that understanding is invaluable.Also dont write off not wanting to write os in the future, its one of the most rewarding pet projects i have ever worked on." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "Because OS will give you a better feel for how threading works, for how file systems work. Just because you (probably) wont be working on OS source code, doesn't mean the behind the scenes knowledge wont be beneficial because you will be getting a better grasp of Computer Science as a whole. I have friends who work on Android apps, and often times they have to dig into the Android source code to see what the hell is going on. The more sense you can make out of the code, the easier it will be to find what you are looking for.Also, it is considered a weeding out course in many schools. It separates those who are willing to dig deeper into the world of CS and those who will either quit the major or become a desk drone.Signed,\nYour CS112 TA" }
Why Learn About Operating Systems? As a CS student, we're all subject to the rigorous, mindf<i></i>* of a course called operating systems. I most likely won't be creating an operating system in the future, so why do all CS students have to learn about OS?
{ "score": 2, "text": "Because OS will give you a better feel for how threading works, for how file systems work. Just because you (probably) wont be working on OS source code, doesn't mean the behind the scenes knowledge wont be beneficial because you will be getting a better grasp of Computer Science as a whole. I have friends who work on Android apps, and often times they have to dig into the Android source code to see what the hell is going on. The more sense you can make out of the code, the easier it will be to find what you are looking for.Also, it is considered a weeding out course in many schools. It separates those who are willing to dig deeper into the world of CS and those who will either quit the major or become a desk drone.Signed,\nYour CS112 TA" }
{ "score": 3, "text": "I got the co-op job that I'm doing in January after the interviewer quizzed me on interrupts for 20 minutes. I was like you when we were studying interrupts wondering why I need to know about such low level abstraction but lo and behold it ended up getting me the job. I had a friend who used concepts from the Automata Theory course (arguably the most esoteric and least practical course in the Comp Sci curriculum) on his internship. You never ever know what you're going to end up using in industry esp as an undergrad, therefore having breadth in your CS knowledge is important." }
Why Learn About Operating Systems? As a CS student, we're all subject to the rigorous, mindf<i></i>* of a course called operating systems. I most likely won't be creating an operating system in the future, so why do all CS students have to learn about OS?
{ "score": 3, "text": "I got the co-op job that I'm doing in January after the interviewer quizzed me on interrupts for 20 minutes. I was like you when we were studying interrupts wondering why I need to know about such low level abstraction but lo and behold it ended up getting me the job. I had a friend who used concepts from the Automata Theory course (arguably the most esoteric and least practical course in the Comp Sci curriculum) on his internship. You never ever know what you're going to end up using in industry esp as an undergrad, therefore having breadth in your CS knowledge is important." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "Because sometimes when you're programming you can rely on your language or framework to abstract away the details of the hardware and operating system. This allows you to solve easy problems that language/framework designers have anticipated.Other times, you'll be faced with hard problems that require you to roll up your sleeves and mess with the stuff under the hood. Before you can do this, you need to understand what operating systems do and how they work. If you can write this kind of code, there will be far more problems that you can solve." }
Ask YC: What Non Web Application Startups have been picked? I've seen a lot of YC Web App startups, but I can't recall one that wasn't (given I don't keep close track). Can anyone tell me one? Non IT? or even just systems programming. I'm referring to the entire history of YC, not just this round.
{ "score": 0, "text": "* loopt* xobni* zecter* heroku* wundrbar* http://www.picwing.com/frame" }
{ "score": 1, "text": "Picwing does some hardware:http://www.picwing.com/framehttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=277258" }
Ask YC: What Non Web Application Startups have been picked? I've seen a lot of YC Web App startups, but I can't recall one that wasn't (given I don't keep close track). Can anyone tell me one? Non IT? or even just systems programming. I'm referring to the entire history of YC, not just this round.
{ "score": 1, "text": "Picwing does some hardware:http://www.picwing.com/framehttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=277258" }
{ "score": 2, "text": "Just scrolling through the wikipedia page, it looks like there are a number of them. Xobni, for instance." }
Ask YC: What Non Web Application Startups have been picked? I've seen a lot of YC Web App startups, but I can't recall one that wasn't (given I don't keep close track). Can anyone tell me one? Non IT? or even just systems programming. I'm referring to the entire history of YC, not just this round.
{ "score": 2, "text": "Just scrolling through the wikipedia page, it looks like there are a number of them. Xobni, for instance." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "Just hold on for a few few days? No one has been picked yet. Patience :)" }
Ask YC: What Non Web Application Startups have been picked? I've seen a lot of YC Web App startups, but I can't recall one that wasn't (given I don't keep close track). Can anyone tell me one? Non IT? or even just systems programming. I'm referring to the entire history of YC, not just this round.
{ "score": 3, "text": "Just hold on for a few few days? No one has been picked yet. Patience :)" }
{ "score": 4, "text": "Propable." }
Let’s Talk Your Data, Not Big Data
{ "score": 0, "text": "A former Yahoo big data engineer here. At some point I was bombarded with enquires from different startups who were looking for a \"Big Data Guy\". The conversation would go as: - (Me) So, how much data are we talking about?\n - (them) 50GB\n - Per hour? \n - No thats our dataset so far. \n - (pause)\n - (pause)\n (FIN)" }
{ "score": 1, "text": "The wild confusion around \"big data\" stems in part from the fact that many people use it to mean something unrelated to data size.I was recently in a back-and-forth on twitter about this. Some people argued that \"big data\" refers to the complexity of the analysis or the value of the insight, rather than the size of the data.Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom advocated for a definition \"too big to fit in an excel spreadsheet.\"I advocated for for a definition \"large enough that the storage and manipulation becomes part of the challenge (in addition to the analysis).The phrase has taken on so many definitions as to become meaningless." }
Let’s Talk Your Data, Not Big Data
{ "score": 1, "text": "The wild confusion around \"big data\" stems in part from the fact that many people use it to mean something unrelated to data size.I was recently in a back-and-forth on twitter about this. Some people argued that \"big data\" refers to the complexity of the analysis or the value of the insight, rather than the size of the data.Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom advocated for a definition \"too big to fit in an excel spreadsheet.\"I advocated for for a definition \"large enough that the storage and manipulation becomes part of the challenge (in addition to the analysis).The phrase has taken on so many definitions as to become meaningless." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "There's this – potentially apocryphal – story that the etymology of the term \"monkey patch\" comes from someone mistaking the then-current term \"guerilla patch\" for the similar-sounding \"gorilla patch\".Big data seems like a very similar story to me. It has nothing to do with the size of the data, not even with the complexity of the analysis, it simply means, \"a movement that wants to do more with more kinds of data.\" Nowhere near what big data used to mean, but outside of technical circles, we're beyond the point where that even matters anymore." }
Let’s Talk Your Data, Not Big Data
{ "score": 2, "text": "There's this – potentially apocryphal – story that the etymology of the term \"monkey patch\" comes from someone mistaking the then-current term \"guerilla patch\" for the similar-sounding \"gorilla patch\".Big data seems like a very similar story to me. It has nothing to do with the size of the data, not even with the complexity of the analysis, it simply means, \"a movement that wants to do more with more kinds of data.\" Nowhere near what big data used to mean, but outside of technical circles, we're beyond the point where that even matters anymore." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "I just read this Wired article and now I'm wondering whether or not I just read an advertisement for Chartio?" }
Let’s Talk Your Data, Not Big Data
{ "score": 3, "text": "I just read this Wired article and now I'm wondering whether or not I just read an advertisement for Chartio?" }
{ "score": 4, "text": "\"The paper concludes by advising analysts to not go through the Hadoop hoops until your data size passes standard hard drive limits (currently around 1 Terabyte) or at least reasonable memory limits (512 GB).\"Is a TB really considered Big currently?" }
US Immigration System Sucks, if you are a Founder
{ "score": 0, "text": "The most frustrating thing about the imigration process to the US - is that the US hasn't actually established WHO they ARE looking for.A country needs to figure out what elements it wants to excel in (services, manufacturing, high-tech, etc.) and then make policies that will drive people towards those industries, regardless of where they are from.The US system is rather agnostic (it seems equally hard for a day-labourer as a top-notch scientist to get in) as a result - the people needed are difficult to identify and woo into the country.Canada has an interesting method to this - and is relatively open to immigration: use a point system. (want to figure out YOUR score?: http://www.workpermit.com/canada/points_calculator.htmIf you're a PHD, add 25 points - a high school grad? add 10 points...and so on. In the end, the process is relatively transparent and helps potential immigrants realize they are needed.In the US, as part of the immigration process - they will go through intense questioning on very relevant matters such as \"Were you ever a member of the communist party?\" \"Are you a terrorist?\" - both questions were asked of me dring the immigration process. But no one even asked if I had a high school diploma....hmm." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "I am not sure about the advice here. I am a H1-B holder, and here is what I see wrong with his advice -H1B: (the most popular) This Visa let you be hired from your company. So you can be the CEO, CTO or a developer of your company. It lasts 5 years, then you can extend it.Not entirely true.1. The Visa is for 6 years (in 2 3-year segments). Furthermore, you can't extend it unless you have legitimate reasons for it (for eg. if you are waiting on your GC to be approved).2. It's very hard to be hired by your own company, especially for startups. He does allude to this in his \"Cons\" section but there is more to it - For a firm to hire a H1-B the business itself needs to prove that it actually has such a need. Furthermore, its needs to prove it's own viability via a business plan, a tax statement (that shows that it makes $x in revenues each year) etc. The latter portion is hard for a startup - since they may not have any revenues yet.3. The 5 year time range (for getting a GC) is random at best - It all depends on the country of origin of the immigrant. People from certain countries can enroll in the GC lottery process and potentially get lucky (I have a friend who went this route). For most people from China/India it usually is on an average 5-6 years (a EB-2 classificatio. EB-3 takes longer, while EB-1 is usually very fast, but a very small portion of the population can apply in that category)4. He's right about having the right salary. You need to pass labor certification when getting a H1-B (or a GC for that matter). I don't know enough about part-time H1-Bs so I can't comment on it" }
US Immigration System Sucks, if you are a Founder
{ "score": 1, "text": "I am not sure about the advice here. I am a H1-B holder, and here is what I see wrong with his advice -H1B: (the most popular) This Visa let you be hired from your company. So you can be the CEO, CTO or a developer of your company. It lasts 5 years, then you can extend it.Not entirely true.1. The Visa is for 6 years (in 2 3-year segments). Furthermore, you can't extend it unless you have legitimate reasons for it (for eg. if you are waiting on your GC to be approved).2. It's very hard to be hired by your own company, especially for startups. He does allude to this in his \"Cons\" section but there is more to it - For a firm to hire a H1-B the business itself needs to prove that it actually has such a need. Furthermore, its needs to prove it's own viability via a business plan, a tax statement (that shows that it makes $x in revenues each year) etc. The latter portion is hard for a startup - since they may not have any revenues yet.3. The 5 year time range (for getting a GC) is random at best - It all depends on the country of origin of the immigrant. People from certain countries can enroll in the GC lottery process and potentially get lucky (I have a friend who went this route). For most people from China/India it usually is on an average 5-6 years (a EB-2 classificatio. EB-3 takes longer, while EB-1 is usually very fast, but a very small portion of the population can apply in that category)4. He's right about having the right salary. You need to pass labor certification when getting a H1-B (or a GC for that matter). I don't know enough about part-time H1-Bs so I can't comment on it" }
{ "score": 2, "text": "I think the main reason is that they don't have a good test for who's a bona-fide founder or not: anyone can put up a website or release some iPhone apps and claim they're running a tech startup and are in the process of trying to monetize it. Who's going to read those business plans and filter for the legit ones (and what does legit even mean; estimated likelihood of success?)? Hence the buck-passing to someone else (VCs, angels, or revenue numbers, if you successfully bootstrapped) to make the decision. If your startup's got enough cash or revenues to pay you a salary above some threshhold, you're considered a legit entrepreneur; otherwise, you're merely an \"aspiring entrepreneur\"." }
US Immigration System Sucks, if you are a Founder
{ "score": 2, "text": "I think the main reason is that they don't have a good test for who's a bona-fide founder or not: anyone can put up a website or release some iPhone apps and claim they're running a tech startup and are in the process of trying to monetize it. Who's going to read those business plans and filter for the legit ones (and what does legit even mean; estimated likelihood of success?)? Hence the buck-passing to someone else (VCs, angels, or revenue numbers, if you successfully bootstrapped) to make the decision. If your startup's got enough cash or revenues to pay you a salary above some threshhold, you're considered a legit entrepreneur; otherwise, you're merely an \"aspiring entrepreneur\"." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "You can basically leave off the \"if you are a Founder\" in the title, and still be accurate." }
US Immigration System Sucks, if you are a Founder
{ "score": 3, "text": "You can basically leave off the \"if you are a Founder\" in the title, and still be accurate." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "The U.S. Immigration System Sucks, period. It's broken broken broken, out of touch with reality, has the problem of being hard for legitimate users to use and easy for illegitimate users to get around. It's basically DRM for borders." }
Why Thunderbolt is dead in the water, aka how Apple killed Light Peak
{ "score": 0, "text": "I hate articles like these: a sensational headline with a lack of technical depth. I gain nothing for having read it. Many details are false, irrelevant, or information-free--for example, extremely new technologies are typically expensive at first.Thunderbolt has a major technical advantage with a protocol lighter in weight and superior handling of asynch communication. USB \"beat\" FireWire because it was cheap, and it was cheap because a lot of the logic was offloaded and host-driven. You can't get many gigabytes per second with that strategy. I'd be really surprised if you could drive, say, a very high resolution monitor off USB 3.0." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "I posted this on the site but I'll post it here, too.The last point is wrong. The USB Implementers Forum complained last year about lightpeak using the usb interface. The other points have some merit but, considering sony is supposedly putting thunderbolt into their new laptops, it's still too early to call the interface a disaster. Or to blame Apple about it bombing.http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/17/sonys-thunderbolt-impleme..." }
Why Thunderbolt is dead in the water, aka how Apple killed Light Peak
{ "score": 1, "text": "I posted this on the site but I'll post it here, too.The last point is wrong. The USB Implementers Forum complained last year about lightpeak using the usb interface. The other points have some merit but, considering sony is supposedly putting thunderbolt into their new laptops, it's still too early to call the interface a disaster. Or to blame Apple about it bombing.http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/17/sonys-thunderbolt-impleme..." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "Even in its non-optical, crippled copper state, Thunderbolt is prohibitively expensive. USB 3.0 controllers cost just a few dollars, while Thunderbolt hardware, we've been told, cost no less than $90.This is the key claim in the article, and \"we've been told\" is not exactly authoritative." }
Why Thunderbolt is dead in the water, aka how Apple killed Light Peak
{ "score": 2, "text": "Even in its non-optical, crippled copper state, Thunderbolt is prohibitively expensive. USB 3.0 controllers cost just a few dollars, while Thunderbolt hardware, we've been told, cost no less than $90.This is the key claim in the article, and \"we've been told\" is not exactly authoritative." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "&#62; USB 3.0 is more than fast enough for current and near-future applications.USB3.0 Bandwidth: 3.2 GBit/sHDMI Bandwidth: 10 GBit/sI am still waiting for a truly universal bus." }
Why Thunderbolt is dead in the water, aka how Apple killed Light Peak
{ "score": 3, "text": "&#62; USB 3.0 is more than fast enough for current and near-future applications.USB3.0 Bandwidth: 3.2 GBit/sHDMI Bandwidth: 10 GBit/sI am still waiting for a truly universal bus." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "To quote the article \"Just like FireWire, though, Thunderbolt is off to a slow start.\" So is firewire dead, now, after a long wait for a second, third, tenth, twentieth company to use it? No. So wait for Thunderbolt to be used or not, whichever it may be within the next ten years.Article writer is article submitter." }
TSA Making Flying More Miserable
{ "score": 0, "text": "It just occurred to me that flying is becoming like medical care - there will be two classes of people. Those who can afford to fly like a first class citizen (I.E. In Private Aviation, bypassing all the TSA nonsense) and everyone else. Anybody that matters will fly privately, and therefore doesn't really care what type of misery the peasants who fly commercial have to put up with.Single tier universal health care tends to result in the poorest members of a society ending up with the same health care as the richest - which works out very well for those at the bottom tiers, but not as well for those on the top, who have to lift everyone else up to the levels that they would like. Two-tier health care ends up with some going to the Mayo Clinic, and others getting \"Enough to keep you from dying immediately\" health care.I think we'll continue to see segregation of quality of air-travel, with the lower tiers getting \"increasing security so we don't see your planes exploding in the newspapers\" while those who can afford it will be flying in Gulfstream IVs." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "It's interesting to note that the increasing security measures onboard planes carry the exact same problems that occur with DRM. These new rules will only affect innocent consumers.Someone planing to launch a terror attack is not going to be swayed because they are told they are not allowed leave their seat. It will only affect innocent people wishing to use the toilet." }
TSA Making Flying More Miserable
{ "score": 1, "text": "It's interesting to note that the increasing security measures onboard planes carry the exact same problems that occur with DRM. These new rules will only affect innocent consumers.Someone planing to launch a terror attack is not going to be swayed because they are told they are not allowed leave their seat. It will only affect innocent people wishing to use the toilet." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "The question you have to ask yourself is whether the extra security measures would prevent something like the latest terrorist attempt from occurring in future, and the answer is usually \"no\". The news reports are claiming that explosives were smuggled onboard in the guy's underwear, so in the near future security checks at airports might be about to become a whole lot more degrading than they already are.When I visited the US some years ago I went through a machine which looked a bit like the inside of the TARDIS, which was supposed to sniff for explosives. Obviously that mustn't have worked in this case, or perhaps it was all just pure theatre and the machine never really did what it was advertised to do." }
TSA Making Flying More Miserable
{ "score": 2, "text": "The question you have to ask yourself is whether the extra security measures would prevent something like the latest terrorist attempt from occurring in future, and the answer is usually \"no\". The news reports are claiming that explosives were smuggled onboard in the guy's underwear, so in the near future security checks at airports might be about to become a whole lot more degrading than they already are.When I visited the US some years ago I went through a machine which looked a bit like the inside of the TARDIS, which was supposed to sniff for explosives. Obviously that mustn't have worked in this case, or perhaps it was all just pure theatre and the machine never really did what it was advertised to do." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "I flew ORD-LHR on Saturday morning. \"New security rules\" were referenced -- they couldn't show the airshow anymore (the thing that counts down to arrival and shows your position; but personal GPS devices were allowed, as always), you \"had\" to stay in your ticketed cabin (as before, and continually ignored as before), and you weren't allowed to get up to stretch or congregate near your seats. This rule was, of course, completely ignored (just like the fasten-seatbelt sign). The flight attendants are indifferent, and just read from a card. After the meal is served, they usually take over a few rows in the back and watch DVDs. If a terror plot is going to be averted, it's not going to be averted by people being paid barely above minimum wage (who can be \"furloughed\" at any time), who have to deal with 300 annoying passengers a day. I had a job like a flight attendant once, and it gets tiring telling 100 different people \"that's not allowed\" every day. So eventually, you just stop doing it. International flights tend to have the most-senior flight attendants, and that means they are burned out from enforcing all the other silly rules.Basically, these new rules are yet-another-example of the government doing something so they can say they are doing something. Healthcare and airline security are the same in this respect.(Side-note, I was told at check-in for my return flight that I may not be allowed to fly back to the US today because my passport has a crease in it, and they had to type in the number manually. \"Since it's the holidays\", they are giving me the privilege of flying back to the US. A great way to treat your top-tear customers who fly 100,000 miles a year and whose creased passport has been accepted by 10 different governments. What's next, exit visas?)" }
TSA Making Flying More Miserable
{ "score": 3, "text": "I flew ORD-LHR on Saturday morning. \"New security rules\" were referenced -- they couldn't show the airshow anymore (the thing that counts down to arrival and shows your position; but personal GPS devices were allowed, as always), you \"had\" to stay in your ticketed cabin (as before, and continually ignored as before), and you weren't allowed to get up to stretch or congregate near your seats. This rule was, of course, completely ignored (just like the fasten-seatbelt sign). The flight attendants are indifferent, and just read from a card. After the meal is served, they usually take over a few rows in the back and watch DVDs. If a terror plot is going to be averted, it's not going to be averted by people being paid barely above minimum wage (who can be \"furloughed\" at any time), who have to deal with 300 annoying passengers a day. I had a job like a flight attendant once, and it gets tiring telling 100 different people \"that's not allowed\" every day. So eventually, you just stop doing it. International flights tend to have the most-senior flight attendants, and that means they are burned out from enforcing all the other silly rules.Basically, these new rules are yet-another-example of the government doing something so they can say they are doing something. Healthcare and airline security are the same in this respect.(Side-note, I was told at check-in for my return flight that I may not be allowed to fly back to the US today because my passport has a crease in it, and they had to type in the number manually. \"Since it's the holidays\", they are giving me the privilege of flying back to the US. A great way to treat your top-tear customers who fly 100,000 miles a year and whose creased passport has been accepted by 10 different governments. What's next, exit visas?)" }
{ "score": 4, "text": "I'm negotiating a employment contract at the moment, I think I will remove US and Canada from the geographic zone (I'm European). The legal risk is too high there.Moreover, some insurances now charge you more if you go there because of the legal fees and the lottery that the legal system is." }
9 Famous Nail Houses
{ "score": 0, "text": "For the nail houses in the middle of roads in China, are those private roads, or do they not have eminent domain as a legal construct?---Edit: Wikipedia claims: China does \"practice eminent domain whenever it is convenient\". So what the heck is going on here?" }
{ "score": 1, "text": "This is spam, it's a pile of Google ads shoved above a scraped article submitted by a 14 day old account that only submits this domain.." }
9 Famous Nail Houses
{ "score": 1, "text": "This is spam, it's a pile of Google ads shoved above a scraped article submitted by a 14 day old account that only submits this domain.." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "I hope they give to the Wikipedia coffers, given some paragraphcs appear to be copied verbatim." }
9 Famous Nail Houses
{ "score": 2, "text": "I hope they give to the Wikipedia coffers, given some paragraphcs appear to be copied verbatim." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "The farms in the middle of Narita Airport are pretty amazing. One second you're peering out the window of your 747 at a typical airport taxiway scene, then suddenly a farmhouse passes into your field of view for a few seconds apparently just past the tip of the wing.http://goo.gl/maps/p5VOE\nhttp://goo.gl/maps/1laf0Unlike some of the nail houses in the article, the Japanese government has basically given up for now on trying to get them to move. One house even has its own tunnel under the taxiway to so that the owner can get to his house." }
9 Famous Nail Houses
{ "score": 3, "text": "The farms in the middle of Narita Airport are pretty amazing. One second you're peering out the window of your 747 at a typical airport taxiway scene, then suddenly a farmhouse passes into your field of view for a few seconds apparently just past the tip of the wing.http://goo.gl/maps/p5VOE\nhttp://goo.gl/maps/1laf0Unlike some of the nail houses in the article, the Japanese government has basically given up for now on trying to get them to move. One house even has its own tunnel under the taxiway to so that the owner can get to his house." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "I'm surprised that this level of dissent is allowed in China." }
My legitimate co.cc site was deleted from Google, what do I do? I've had a legitimate blog at http://beatpanda.co.cc for several years(1), and Google just removed all co.cc domains from its search results, including my blog. Who do I appeal to in this case? Am I better off just getting a new domain, and if so, how can I recover the traffic that was previously coming from Google before they removed my site?<p>Thanks for any help you all can provide.<p>(1) I know some of you will go there and see that the posts only go back to 2011- the fact that my archives aren't up right now is a separate issue.
{ "score": 0, "text": "There is essentially no one to appeal to, unless someone on the Google webspam team takes a personal interest in this when it hits the top page of HN. (Which has been known to happen.) That will be to avoid the PR hit rather than out of the moral persuasiveness of avoiding collateral damage. Google does collateral damage on a fairly frequent basis.They prefer to deal with it by \"scalable communication methods\" rather than by speaking to you about it. For example, to a certain philosophy within the borg, that blog post should teach you your lesson about being in a \"bad neighborhood.\" (This euphemism has become a term of art in the SEO community. Google recommends you not link to websites in bad neighborhoods.)how can I recover the traffic that was previously coming from Google before they removed my site?You seem to be under the impression that that traffic was yours to begin with. I think the borg believes it is their traffic, though they would be circumspect about saying that in as many words. They'll sell it to you, for example. (Google makes scads on selling brands their own branded keywords.)Most professional SEOs of my acquaintance would note that, if one has a site burned, redirecting that site to a new site is a fairly risky endeavor for that new site.P.S. If one needs a new free web host and one is worried about getting smacked down again for being in a bad neighborhood, a cynical person might recommend blogspot.com. You'll still be in a bad neighborhood, but you'll be in a bad neighborhood which is highly unlikely to get hit with the orbital ion cannon." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "Honestly, I would buy the .com and just move on. There's not much you can do except protect yourself going forward. If you own your domain you can always pick up and move to a new host.For what its worth, people will probably search for you upon not finding your site. With an exact match domain, you should rank really well and your fans can find you. Maybe throw a HelloBar.com style message at the top explaining what happened, so they know they've found your new home.Best of luck. Hate that this happened to you." }
My legitimate co.cc site was deleted from Google, what do I do? I've had a legitimate blog at http://beatpanda.co.cc for several years(1), and Google just removed all co.cc domains from its search results, including my blog. Who do I appeal to in this case? Am I better off just getting a new domain, and if so, how can I recover the traffic that was previously coming from Google before they removed my site?<p>Thanks for any help you all can provide.<p>(1) I know some of you will go there and see that the posts only go back to 2011- the fact that my archives aren't up right now is a separate issue.
{ "score": 1, "text": "Honestly, I would buy the .com and just move on. There's not much you can do except protect yourself going forward. If you own your domain you can always pick up and move to a new host.For what its worth, people will probably search for you upon not finding your site. With an exact match domain, you should rank really well and your fans can find you. Maybe throw a HelloBar.com style message at the top explaining what happened, so they know they've found your new home.Best of luck. Hate that this happened to you." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or it's performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our Webmaster Guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site.http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe..." }
My legitimate co.cc site was deleted from Google, what do I do? I've had a legitimate blog at http://beatpanda.co.cc for several years(1), and Google just removed all co.cc domains from its search results, including my blog. Who do I appeal to in this case? Am I better off just getting a new domain, and if so, how can I recover the traffic that was previously coming from Google before they removed my site?<p>Thanks for any help you all can provide.<p>(1) I know some of you will go there and see that the posts only go back to 2011- the fact that my archives aren't up right now is a separate issue.
{ "score": 2, "text": "If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or it's performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our Webmaster Guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site.http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe..." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "You can appeal through the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools but I wouldn't bother in your case. They are not likely to make an exception. I would recommend getting a new domain.On possible way that an appeal might work is if you 301 redirected all content to the new domain and then go into GWT and do an appeal to be re-included stating the case that you were collateral damage from the .co.cc ban.I would only do this if your site is without a doubt a legitimate site (if it seems even slightly fishy, I don't think they'll help and you're better off starting fresh) and doesn't have even a hint of shady SEOing." }
My legitimate co.cc site was deleted from Google, what do I do? I've had a legitimate blog at http://beatpanda.co.cc for several years(1), and Google just removed all co.cc domains from its search results, including my blog. Who do I appeal to in this case? Am I better off just getting a new domain, and if so, how can I recover the traffic that was previously coming from Google before they removed my site?<p>Thanks for any help you all can provide.<p>(1) I know some of you will go there and see that the posts only go back to 2011- the fact that my archives aren't up right now is a separate issue.
{ "score": 3, "text": "You can appeal through the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools but I wouldn't bother in your case. They are not likely to make an exception. I would recommend getting a new domain.On possible way that an appeal might work is if you 301 redirected all content to the new domain and then go into GWT and do an appeal to be re-included stating the case that you were collateral damage from the .co.cc ban.I would only do this if your site is without a doubt a legitimate site (if it seems even slightly fishy, I don't think they'll help and you're better off starting fresh) and doesn't have even a hint of shady SEOing." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "I want to state for the record that I am meticulous about keeping my blog updated and thus hack-free, I do not use it for any kind of nefarious SEO purposes, and I don't even run advertising. It's just my blog.In that case, would 301 redirects help or hurt? Am I better off just starting fresh, and hoping that anybody who cares enough about my content just updates their links?" }
Ask HN:Mixcloud API - Peer Review We are slowly opening up our new api, and before full public release, we are putting the api and documentation through peer review. Essentially we would love to know your thoughts as fellow hackers on what you like and hate about the api structure. We accept it isn't perfect, but we can't see our own mistakes as well as others.<p>If you have a moment please check it out, and any feedback would be greatly appreciated.<p>http://api.mixcloud.com<p>[Edit] For those interested, Mixcloud is an online audio hosting platform, focusing on long form audio. This initial launch covers basic site interaction (favorite/follow) and all our meta data. The API authenticated is OAuth2 and JSON(P)/XML endpoints are provided.
{ "score": 0, "text": "Haven't had a chance to have more than a very brief look so far; and I don't have any apps in mind just yet. But:1) massive thumbs up for good use of HATEOS :-) Too many people miss it, and it makes writing clients much easier in my experience (also makes your job much easier in maintaining the API)2) there's a couple of namespace conflicts which make me itch, but I don't know how important they are in practice. In particular:http://api.mixcloud.com/spartacus/http://api.mixcloud.com/popular/\nhttp://api.mixcloud.com/new/\nhttp://api.mixcloud.com/me/at first glance, I would think that the latter URLS refer to users whose usernames are \"popular\", \"new\", and \"me\". If the endpoints look exactly the same, that's probably ok, but it's still a bit odd. If I'm writing an app which says \"enter a username here\", I have to remember that these are not valid usernames; and I can imagine similar sort of special-casing might have to be put in elsewhere.3) I still hate OAuth - it's probably still the best of a bad bunch, though! Nice overview of how to use it in practice.4) minor issue - for exceeding rate limits, I'd use a 403 code not a 503. 5xx limits boil down to \"it's the server's fault\". 4xx are \"it's your fault\" and in this case I think the semantics are more user error than server error." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "Took a quick look:\n1) How do you plan on supporting Versioning in the API?\n2) You need to clarify the GET/POST semantics: \nsomething like \nSupported request methods:\nGET\nwould be helpful\n3)As another user pointed out the /me /new etc are a conflict with the existing user namespace" }
Ask HN:Mixcloud API - Peer Review We are slowly opening up our new api, and before full public release, we are putting the api and documentation through peer review. Essentially we would love to know your thoughts as fellow hackers on what you like and hate about the api structure. We accept it isn't perfect, but we can't see our own mistakes as well as others.<p>If you have a moment please check it out, and any feedback would be greatly appreciated.<p>http://api.mixcloud.com<p>[Edit] For those interested, Mixcloud is an online audio hosting platform, focusing on long form audio. This initial launch covers basic site interaction (favorite/follow) and all our meta data. The API authenticated is OAuth2 and JSON(P)/XML endpoints are provided.
{ "score": 1, "text": "Took a quick look:\n1) How do you plan on supporting Versioning in the API?\n2) You need to clarify the GET/POST semantics: \nsomething like \nSupported request methods:\nGET\nwould be helpful\n3)As another user pointed out the /me /new etc are a conflict with the existing user namespace" }
{ "score": 2, "text": "Great looking site! (listening to mixes as I write this)So, this is the first time I've heard of you guys. MixCloud is basically a mugasha.com for everyone else, is that correct? Some of my DJ friends were recently looking for something like this. I'll definitely have to pass this along.I'm still poking around in the API documentation. I'm trying to think of something to make to test it out. What are some example ideas you guys have thought of? I'm sure you guys have thought of some cool ways you'd like to see the API used." }
Ask HN:Mixcloud API - Peer Review We are slowly opening up our new api, and before full public release, we are putting the api and documentation through peer review. Essentially we would love to know your thoughts as fellow hackers on what you like and hate about the api structure. We accept it isn't perfect, but we can't see our own mistakes as well as others.<p>If you have a moment please check it out, and any feedback would be greatly appreciated.<p>http://api.mixcloud.com<p>[Edit] For those interested, Mixcloud is an online audio hosting platform, focusing on long form audio. This initial launch covers basic site interaction (favorite/follow) and all our meta data. The API authenticated is OAuth2 and JSON(P)/XML endpoints are provided.
{ "score": 2, "text": "Great looking site! (listening to mixes as I write this)So, this is the first time I've heard of you guys. MixCloud is basically a mugasha.com for everyone else, is that correct? Some of my DJ friends were recently looking for something like this. I'll definitely have to pass this along.I'm still poking around in the API documentation. I'm trying to think of something to make to test it out. What are some example ideas you guys have thought of? I'm sure you guys have thought of some cool ways you'd like to see the API used." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "The API looks good to me. Nicely documented. Only found one thing that seems wrong.You have:\nhttp://api.mixcloud.com/popular/\nhttp://api.mixcloud.com/popular/hot/\nhttp://api.mixcloud.com/new/http://api.mixcloud.com/popular/hot/ seems like it should be http://api.mixcloud.com/hot/ to be consistent." }
Ask HN:Mixcloud API - Peer Review We are slowly opening up our new api, and before full public release, we are putting the api and documentation through peer review. Essentially we would love to know your thoughts as fellow hackers on what you like and hate about the api structure. We accept it isn't perfect, but we can't see our own mistakes as well as others.<p>If you have a moment please check it out, and any feedback would be greatly appreciated.<p>http://api.mixcloud.com<p>[Edit] For those interested, Mixcloud is an online audio hosting platform, focusing on long form audio. This initial launch covers basic site interaction (favorite/follow) and all our meta data. The API authenticated is OAuth2 and JSON(P)/XML endpoints are provided.
{ "score": 3, "text": "The API looks good to me. Nicely documented. Only found one thing that seems wrong.You have:\nhttp://api.mixcloud.com/popular/\nhttp://api.mixcloud.com/popular/hot/\nhttp://api.mixcloud.com/new/http://api.mixcloud.com/popular/hot/ seems like it should be http://api.mixcloud.com/hot/ to be consistent." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "Wouldn't you be better off exposing internal IDs? As it currently stands your keys and hence URIs are immutable, which could be a problem if somebody wanted to rename things after creating them.edit: like the way you've emulated Facebook's Graph API wrt metadata - why not go all the way and drop XML support?" }
The iPad Is For Everyone But Us
{ "score": 0, "text": "This is apple, once and for all, signaling to the world, that the people who make computers do cool things, the developers and the savvy, are not the market. It's too small. No one knows how to make computers do cool things, but lots of people want cool computers.I, for one, take this as a blessing. If you are technically savvy, it's in your best interest for companies like Apple to lull consumers into a sense of satisfaction. Your job, as a programmer, is to avoid all things consumer. Your job is to do the hard stuff. If you're using facebook, you're wasting time. If you're building facebook, you're making tons of money.This has been coming. The writing has been on the wall. The app store tragedy. Hard for developers, easy for consumers. The developers, as always, are the ones jumping through hoops. Change the color, add this, add that, i want it this way.So the devs say ok and do it. That's the way it has always been and increasingly into the future, it will be more typical. Developers work harder so everyone else can work less. That's the way it should be." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "If you ask me this new model of computing is mainly interesting for Apple because they like their 30% earning. In fact there is nothing preventing you from doing simple to use smart computer than when you press Ctrl+L+A+M+E open an terminal where it's also possible to do more interesting stuff.Or a smart computer where I can save an image from a web page and later email it. Or a smart enjoyable computer that allows me to change ebook reader and still open /My/Ebooks to read all my old stuff with it.The iPad has usability limits that are a direct consequence of the fact that Apple want to control what you can do whit it, because more control, more $$$.I don't want a world where most of the computers can't be used to write code. My dad taught me BASIC when I was 7 because we had computer at home, and this computers where build to write programs, attach it to the power line and what you see is a BASIC prompt.Don't have to be so exasperated today of course, but the iPad has all the potential to make computer users more stupid.What we really need is a decent competitor, able to do cool computers without the aim to control the world." }
The iPad Is For Everyone But Us
{ "score": 1, "text": "If you ask me this new model of computing is mainly interesting for Apple because they like their 30% earning. In fact there is nothing preventing you from doing simple to use smart computer than when you press Ctrl+L+A+M+E open an terminal where it's also possible to do more interesting stuff.Or a smart computer where I can save an image from a web page and later email it. Or a smart enjoyable computer that allows me to change ebook reader and still open /My/Ebooks to read all my old stuff with it.The iPad has usability limits that are a direct consequence of the fact that Apple want to control what you can do whit it, because more control, more $$$.I don't want a world where most of the computers can't be used to write code. My dad taught me BASIC when I was 7 because we had computer at home, and this computers where build to write programs, attach it to the power line and what you see is a BASIC prompt.Don't have to be so exasperated today of course, but the iPad has all the potential to make computer users more stupid.What we really need is a decent competitor, able to do cool computers without the aim to control the world." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "I'm not sure about this. Computers are versatile things and there is a LOT of specialized software out there. My mom has quilting software that she loves. She'd have to give that up unless the iPad quilting market gets big enough. My Dad has GPS software he uses for fishing. How's that going to work? Both of them print like crazy. My dad doesn't like games except the rare first person shooter.This MIGHT be Joel Spolsky's 80-20 problem ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html ). If you make the 20% of features that everyone wants, you have something that's sufficient for NO ONE." }
The iPad Is For Everyone But Us
{ "score": 2, "text": "I'm not sure about this. Computers are versatile things and there is a LOT of specialized software out there. My mom has quilting software that she loves. She'd have to give that up unless the iPad quilting market gets big enough. My Dad has GPS software he uses for fishing. How's that going to work? Both of them print like crazy. My dad doesn't like games except the rare first person shooter.This MIGHT be Joel Spolsky's 80-20 problem ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html ). If you make the 20% of features that everyone wants, you have something that's sufficient for NO ONE." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "I use an MBP, but my 3 year old does not...I can see the iPad keeping her occupied and me happy on long trips." }
The iPad Is For Everyone But Us
{ "score": 3, "text": "I use an MBP, but my 3 year old does not...I can see the iPad keeping her occupied and me happy on long trips." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "I agree here. I wrote a similar post this morning with the same point.http://rajuv.com/2010/01/28/ipad-is-the-computer-for-rest-of...\"This is a device I can hand it my grand father and he won’t have much trouble using it. Compare this to handing him a laptop and training him about how an OS works, what a drive is, what a file system is, why he needs an anti-virus software etc. Ease of use is the key here. Infact, we have seen this with iPhone already. Every day I see many 2-3 year old having absolutely no problem using the device. That makes a HUGE difference.In a country like India, there are over 500 million mobile phones. But there are less than 15 Million computers (connected to the internet). Why is this the case? One of the reason is, PCs are complicated to use/learn for non-techies. I think this device can address a broader market as it hides the details from the user.\"" }
Uroboros Programming With 11 Programming Languages
{ "score": 0, "text": "I was not all that impressed until I saw the size of the original source code, dang." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "What fascinated about this article is that there's a whole other world out there of geeks/programmers/hackers beyond our English speaking world doing their own things and sharing their own ideas." }
Uroboros Programming With 11 Programming Languages
{ "score": 1, "text": "What fascinated about this article is that there's a whole other world out there of geeks/programmers/hackers beyond our English speaking world doing their own things and sharing their own ideas." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "For a Theory of Computation class I had as a part of the homework to write a program that writes itself in one programming language. It is amazing that such programs exists that can switch languages and can go through several methamorphoses" }
Uroboros Programming With 11 Programming Languages
{ "score": 2, "text": "For a Theory of Computation class I had as a part of the homework to write a program that writes itself in one programming language. It is amazing that such programs exists that can switch languages and can go through several methamorphoses" }
{ "score": 3, "text": "Clever stuff - it's hard enough to get one quine working!" }
Uroboros Programming With 11 Programming Languages
{ "score": 3, "text": "Clever stuff - it's hard enough to get one quine working!" }
{ "score": 4, "text": "Someone has way too much time on their hands." }
Ask HN: How should I get started with Linux application programming? I've been asked about the possibility of creating a Linux-based point of sale program to be used in two local businesses. The program would be doing customer and inventory management, as well as tracking orders and statistics. I've never done any large-scale programming before, and would like some advice about what technologies and/or practices to use. Any websites you've found helpful with be most appreciated as well.<p>Any programming language, but preferably FOSS, of course, as this will be on a Linux system.<p>Thanks :)
{ "score": 0, "text": "Is there a reason http://lemonpos.sourceforge.net won't work for you? The site is a little sparse but their blog http://lemonpos.wordpress.com is active." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "Does your client know you're asking about how to program their application on HN? It doesn't sound like you're particularly experienced, so maybe you should do them a favor and pass on this project." }
Ask HN: How should I get started with Linux application programming? I've been asked about the possibility of creating a Linux-based point of sale program to be used in two local businesses. The program would be doing customer and inventory management, as well as tracking orders and statistics. I've never done any large-scale programming before, and would like some advice about what technologies and/or practices to use. Any websites you've found helpful with be most appreciated as well.<p>Any programming language, but preferably FOSS, of course, as this will be on a Linux system.<p>Thanks :)
{ "score": 1, "text": "Does your client know you're asking about how to program their application on HN? It doesn't sound like you're particularly experienced, so maybe you should do them a favor and pass on this project." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "Use Qt with C++.Advantages:1. Solid, stable, well maintained, well tested.2. Great documentation, a huge library of code to learn from.3. Batteries included. Web, databases, scripting, everything is painless and simple. Stand on the shoulders of giants, and stuff like that.4. It's C++, so it's wicked fast.5. Even though it's C++, it's not as difficult as people think it is.6. Qt Designer makes designing GUIs simple and fun.7. Cross platform. If you take care not to tie your app to any Linux-only APIs, you can make your app work on Windows and OS X by simply recompiling it on these platforms.Pick up \"C++ GUI Programming With Qt 4\" and dig right in.Of course, if you wanted to write Windows-only code, I'd suggest C#. If you wanted to write Mac-only code, Cocoa would be the way to go. Nothing beats native." }
Ask HN: How should I get started with Linux application programming? I've been asked about the possibility of creating a Linux-based point of sale program to be used in two local businesses. The program would be doing customer and inventory management, as well as tracking orders and statistics. I've never done any large-scale programming before, and would like some advice about what technologies and/or practices to use. Any websites you've found helpful with be most appreciated as well.<p>Any programming language, but preferably FOSS, of course, as this will be on a Linux system.<p>Thanks :)
{ "score": 2, "text": "Use Qt with C++.Advantages:1. Solid, stable, well maintained, well tested.2. Great documentation, a huge library of code to learn from.3. Batteries included. Web, databases, scripting, everything is painless and simple. Stand on the shoulders of giants, and stuff like that.4. It's C++, so it's wicked fast.5. Even though it's C++, it's not as difficult as people think it is.6. Qt Designer makes designing GUIs simple and fun.7. Cross platform. If you take care not to tie your app to any Linux-only APIs, you can make your app work on Windows and OS X by simply recompiling it on these platforms.Pick up \"C++ GUI Programming With Qt 4\" and dig right in.Of course, if you wanted to write Windows-only code, I'd suggest C#. If you wanted to write Mac-only code, Cocoa would be the way to go. Nothing beats native." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "Of course the first question would be about what kind of application you're programming. Is it a GUI program? If so use GTK or Qt. Is it a webapp? You have an almost endless amount of choices: Ruby on Rails, Python with Django, Perl with Catalyst, PHP with whatever" }
Ask HN: How should I get started with Linux application programming? I've been asked about the possibility of creating a Linux-based point of sale program to be used in two local businesses. The program would be doing customer and inventory management, as well as tracking orders and statistics. I've never done any large-scale programming before, and would like some advice about what technologies and/or practices to use. Any websites you've found helpful with be most appreciated as well.<p>Any programming language, but preferably FOSS, of course, as this will be on a Linux system.<p>Thanks :)
{ "score": 3, "text": "Of course the first question would be about what kind of application you're programming. Is it a GUI program? If so use GTK or Qt. Is it a webapp? You have an almost endless amount of choices: Ruby on Rails, Python with Django, Perl with Catalyst, PHP with whatever" }
{ "score": 4, "text": "Maybe Qt is a good option." }
Test-Driven Django Tutorial
{ "score": 0, "text": "+1 from me. We need more language and framework tutorials to be written with testing in mind. I wouldn't be surprised if the work from this was moved into Django's official documentation very soon." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "Hooray for more guides on testing in python! Although there are a lot of mostly-equivalent tools to what I've grown to love in Ruby-land, I think the most lacking thing might be a sense of arbitrary \"best practice\".The zen of python states \"There should be one, and preferably only one, way to do it\", which I see at the level of a line of code; However, at a higher level, I always feel like there are dozens of ways to pattern something, and none with any particular community buy-in. This leaves my integration balancing awkwardly across several different authors ideas of how things should work.What can we do about it - How can we make the python community more opinionated? The desired end result is that software is less surprising, that common problems have a readily accessibly, highly compatible solution.Maybe we need more snobs in Python? ;)" }
Test-Driven Django Tutorial
{ "score": 1, "text": "Hooray for more guides on testing in python! Although there are a lot of mostly-equivalent tools to what I've grown to love in Ruby-land, I think the most lacking thing might be a sense of arbitrary \"best practice\".The zen of python states \"There should be one, and preferably only one, way to do it\", which I see at the level of a line of code; However, at a higher level, I always feel like there are dozens of ways to pattern something, and none with any particular community buy-in. This leaves my integration balancing awkwardly across several different authors ideas of how things should work.What can we do about it - How can we make the python community more opinionated? The desired end result is that software is less surprising, that common problems have a readily accessibly, highly compatible solution.Maybe we need more snobs in Python? ;)" }
{ "score": 2, "text": "Unfortunately the first thing that jumped to mind when clicking through was this: http://grokcode.com/746/dear-python-why-are-you-so-ugly/I realize it's a almost self-consciously ugly and it's a development tutorial, but still - a little CSS &#38; typography goes a long way." }
Test-Driven Django Tutorial
{ "score": 2, "text": "Unfortunately the first thing that jumped to mind when clicking through was this: http://grokcode.com/746/dear-python-why-are-you-so-ugly/I realize it's a almost self-consciously ugly and it's a development tutorial, but still - a little CSS &#38; typography goes a long way." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "That is a great resource. Especially pulling Selenium into the picture and showing good functional testing. Thanks to the author for putting this together.While I understand the need to show how unit tests work do we really need to test Django's ability to save records to the database and retrieve them in part 1? I personally don't follow true TDD, especially with model fields. Am I off in left field? Is this pattern common with other developers? Or perhaps people test for a fields existence by checking _meta.fields?The example of testing a specific attribute, verbose_name, (that is expected to be altered by the user) in part 2 and the user implemented __unicode__ method test I do think is a great example, though.I like Daniel's summary in the \"What To Test?\" section at http://toastdriven.com/blog/2011/apr/10/guide-to-testing-in-..." }
Test-Driven Django Tutorial
{ "score": 3, "text": "That is a great resource. Especially pulling Selenium into the picture and showing good functional testing. Thanks to the author for putting this together.While I understand the need to show how unit tests work do we really need to test Django's ability to save records to the database and retrieve them in part 1? I personally don't follow true TDD, especially with model fields. Am I off in left field? Is this pattern common with other developers? Or perhaps people test for a fields existence by checking _meta.fields?The example of testing a specific attribute, verbose_name, (that is expected to be altered by the user) in part 2 and the user implemented __unicode__ method test I do think is a great example, though.I like Daniel's summary in the \"What To Test?\" section at http://toastdriven.com/blog/2011/apr/10/guide-to-testing-in-..." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "I'm a Django guy who started picking up some Rails out of curiosity, and that's when I realized how great TDD, specifically, automating behavior-driven testing is in general .. and I was wondering why it didn't seem like a prominent thing in the Django community. Thanks for doing this, please do continue!" }
Ask HN: What's the big deal about Ruby and/or Rails? It's not a rhetorical question, I'm really, honestly, trying to understand what the big deal is about Ruby. I'm not trying to start a "my programming language / framework / environment / technology is better than yours" fight, so I'm not looking for opinions on why Ruby might be better or worse than (pick your poison). I'm just trying to understand why and how Ruby is getting so much momentum, and whether it really matters, or is just one of those meme things that happens in a close community like tech startups.
{ "score": 0, "text": "I believe it's not as big a deal now as it was when it first arrived. At that time the idea of an MVC web framework wasn't new. Django was also in development and PHP had several crap web frameworks available. So, there weren't very many web frameworks and what was out there wasn't very good. Rails hit the scene and brought the idea of web frameworks to the masses of web developers. Even today after all those years there are PHP frameworks which try to mimic Rails and fall short. The alternatives of today are largely good enough though, especially for more specialized cases.I think you are a step behind. These days you should probably be asking \"what's the big deal with Node.js?\" ;)" }
{ "score": 1, "text": "regarding Ruby:Ruby is dynamic. Kind of like Perl, Python and PHP, but meta-programming features make it feel even more powerful.Ruby is object-oriented. Even more than, let's say, Java. No primitive data types. Even things like regular expressions and pieces of program code are objects. This makes the language feel very consistent.Ruby is beautiful. The syntax and consistency appeal to many developers for a variety of reasons. For me it's the fact, that if you adhere to some common sense rules of naming your variables and methods you get extremely readable code.Ruby has some unique and interesting features. Such as code blocks (kind of closures).Combined this means that you can accomplish a lot with very small amounts of actual code. Still, this code remains extremely readable and thus maintanable.For many developers, Ruby ist the last language they ever want to learn. But to be honest, I think it is not for everyone. You should try it and see if it feels \"right\" for you. Do not worry, if you don't get it, and maybe try Python instead.regarding Rails:Today, I guess Rails is nothing special anymore. These days you can choose from a variety of quality web frameworks in whatever language you are comfortable with (and most of those probably borrow some ideas from Rails).To understand what really set Rails apart you have to imagine the world of web development in 2004, when Rails was first released. Back then you had to either use PHP, which has a bad reputation for many reasons I do not want to delve into, or some ridiculously complex Java framework.Rails was (and still is) a wonderful framework that takes the tediousness out of many repetitive web development tasks. Furthermore it gives your project a structure, trying to lead you to write well-structured, testable and maintainable code.Oh, and of course Rails is written in Ruby. Rails introduced many people to the Ruby programming language. I think it is the combination that makes it both so powerful and likeable." }
Ask HN: What's the big deal about Ruby and/or Rails? It's not a rhetorical question, I'm really, honestly, trying to understand what the big deal is about Ruby. I'm not trying to start a "my programming language / framework / environment / technology is better than yours" fight, so I'm not looking for opinions on why Ruby might be better or worse than (pick your poison). I'm just trying to understand why and how Ruby is getting so much momentum, and whether it really matters, or is just one of those meme things that happens in a close community like tech startups.
{ "score": 1, "text": "regarding Ruby:Ruby is dynamic. Kind of like Perl, Python and PHP, but meta-programming features make it feel even more powerful.Ruby is object-oriented. Even more than, let's say, Java. No primitive data types. Even things like regular expressions and pieces of program code are objects. This makes the language feel very consistent.Ruby is beautiful. The syntax and consistency appeal to many developers for a variety of reasons. For me it's the fact, that if you adhere to some common sense rules of naming your variables and methods you get extremely readable code.Ruby has some unique and interesting features. Such as code blocks (kind of closures).Combined this means that you can accomplish a lot with very small amounts of actual code. Still, this code remains extremely readable and thus maintanable.For many developers, Ruby ist the last language they ever want to learn. But to be honest, I think it is not for everyone. You should try it and see if it feels \"right\" for you. Do not worry, if you don't get it, and maybe try Python instead.regarding Rails:Today, I guess Rails is nothing special anymore. These days you can choose from a variety of quality web frameworks in whatever language you are comfortable with (and most of those probably borrow some ideas from Rails).To understand what really set Rails apart you have to imagine the world of web development in 2004, when Rails was first released. Back then you had to either use PHP, which has a bad reputation for many reasons I do not want to delve into, or some ridiculously complex Java framework.Rails was (and still is) a wonderful framework that takes the tediousness out of many repetitive web development tasks. Furthermore it gives your project a structure, trying to lead you to write well-structured, testable and maintainable code.Oh, and of course Rails is written in Ruby. Rails introduced many people to the Ruby programming language. I think it is the combination that makes it both so powerful and likeable." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "Ruby is probably the most zen thought interpreted OO programming language. Example: http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=IpkcxQEdui\n\nRails is probably the most zen thought web framework. Compare Rails#has_many with Django#foreign_key , which feels more natural?\n\nThe sum renders the benefit of cognitive discharge that lets you focus on important stuff and not tinker on details.The rest is huge community, huge documentation, large mature ecosystem (mostly web stuff, python's SciPy pretty much way-ahead, all tough ruby can do science too), lots of best practices from the start, github-lead, mature implementations etc" }
Ask HN: What's the big deal about Ruby and/or Rails? It's not a rhetorical question, I'm really, honestly, trying to understand what the big deal is about Ruby. I'm not trying to start a "my programming language / framework / environment / technology is better than yours" fight, so I'm not looking for opinions on why Ruby might be better or worse than (pick your poison). I'm just trying to understand why and how Ruby is getting so much momentum, and whether it really matters, or is just one of those meme things that happens in a close community like tech startups.
{ "score": 2, "text": "Ruby is probably the most zen thought interpreted OO programming language. Example: http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=IpkcxQEdui\n\nRails is probably the most zen thought web framework. Compare Rails#has_many with Django#foreign_key , which feels more natural?\n\nThe sum renders the benefit of cognitive discharge that lets you focus on important stuff and not tinker on details.The rest is huge community, huge documentation, large mature ecosystem (mostly web stuff, python's SciPy pretty much way-ahead, all tough ruby can do science too), lots of best practices from the start, github-lead, mature implementations etc" }
{ "score": 3, "text": "Because it's easy to learn, has good community support, and powerful metaprogramming features. In a nutshell it's easy to think and create in ruby.Also significant is that the tradeoffs you must live with (speed, lousy debugging/refactoring tools) to get ruby's benefits just don't matter for a huge swath of web projects.Ruby is optimized for a very common, very pragmatic set of problems." }
Ask HN: What's the big deal about Ruby and/or Rails? It's not a rhetorical question, I'm really, honestly, trying to understand what the big deal is about Ruby. I'm not trying to start a "my programming language / framework / environment / technology is better than yours" fight, so I'm not looking for opinions on why Ruby might be better or worse than (pick your poison). I'm just trying to understand why and how Ruby is getting so much momentum, and whether it really matters, or is just one of those meme things that happens in a close community like tech startups.
{ "score": 3, "text": "Because it's easy to learn, has good community support, and powerful metaprogramming features. In a nutshell it's easy to think and create in ruby.Also significant is that the tradeoffs you must live with (speed, lousy debugging/refactoring tools) to get ruby's benefits just don't matter for a huge swath of web projects.Ruby is optimized for a very common, very pragmatic set of problems." }
{ "score": 4, "text": "I suspect it's because of Rails and the commercial potential of the web these days (Groupon, etc.).As an aside, it seems like a pretty nice GP language in its own right. I had to write some shell scripts for a Windows box and picked Ruby largely on a whim. Two months later, and I've got a stack of Ruby books and I'm going user group meetings." }
The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
{ "score": 0, "text": "&#x27;Whatever. Fucking Apple.&#x27;As a developer, I find myself saying that more often than I would like. Glad this isn&#x27;t just a developer thing that Apple does - it seems like a consistent part of their DNA." }
{ "score": 1, "text": "Not to be an apologist, but it seems like Apple&#x27;s actions make a lot of sense.First of all, who posts meeting notes from meetings with top executives when given a heads up about upcoming products? NOBODY. Of course it&#x27;s confidential by default.Second, Apple was right to presume a company charging to get music in the App Store would likely provide lower quality music. Charging for access completely reverses the motivation of record companies. Until they were ready to open the floodgates, excluding companies that charged was a reasonable if rough quality filter." }
The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
{ "score": 1, "text": "Not to be an apologist, but it seems like Apple&#x27;s actions make a lot of sense.First of all, who posts meeting notes from meetings with top executives when given a heads up about upcoming products? NOBODY. Of course it&#x27;s confidential by default.Second, Apple was right to presume a company charging to get music in the App Store would likely provide lower quality music. Charging for access completely reverses the motivation of record companies. Until they were ready to open the floodgates, excluding companies that charged was a reasonable if rough quality filter." }
{ "score": 2, "text": "&quot; Whatever. Fucking Apple&quot;Just about sums it all up, really." }
The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
{ "score": 2, "text": "&quot; Whatever. Fucking Apple&quot;Just about sums it all up, really." }
{ "score": 3, "text": "There&#x27;s a great expression that is especially useful when dealing with big companies: &quot;Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately described by incompetency.&quot; [1]While it&#x27;s tempting to think that Jobs was pulling all the strings, the reality is that Apple is a large company where legal departments take forever, internal debate occur, and communication is slow.It sucks that Jobs made that $40 statement without someone vetting (or caring) that they were negotiating with CDBaby and that&#x27;s their price. It sucks that Apple did not communicate better about the reason for the delay. But doing enterprise deals is nothing like working with an individual, and in that context I wouldn&#x27;t simply assume that Apple&#x2F;Jobs was being spiteful.[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanlon&#x27;s_razor" }
The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
{ "score": 3, "text": "There&#x27;s a great expression that is especially useful when dealing with big companies: &quot;Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately described by incompetency.&quot; [1]While it&#x27;s tempting to think that Jobs was pulling all the strings, the reality is that Apple is a large company where legal departments take forever, internal debate occur, and communication is slow.It sucks that Jobs made that $40 statement without someone vetting (or caring) that they were negotiating with CDBaby and that&#x27;s their price. It sucks that Apple did not communicate better about the reason for the delay. But doing enterprise deals is nothing like working with an individual, and in that context I wouldn&#x27;t simply assume that Apple&#x2F;Jobs was being spiteful.[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hanlon&#x27;s_razor" }
{ "score": 4, "text": "Long story short, dont trust others with your business. I have seen this dozens of times where a smaller company gets really excited because they are working with the big brute, and they get screwed because the big boy gets to make all the terms, and if&#x2F;when they break the contract or act like complete assholes, you have really no recourse." }