skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Anyone developed larger web app with a micro framework? Thoughts...
Hello HN,

I am kind of stuck and could use some advice from the community.

I have an idea for a larger web app (multiple auth methods, a lot of dynamic pages with forms, etc.) and would like to develop it using ruby as a main language for the backend.

I developed few websites before with PHP, using various frameworks, such as Zend, Kohana, CI. I've also used ruby for small personal projects and tried both Sinatra and Rails. Between the two, I prefer a small micro framework as it gives me a feeling of a more control and less of a glue-together things approach.

I know that Rails would be an ideal framework for this kind of web app, there are a lot of gems that solve most common features (auth, forms etc).

So I wonder if anyone here went with a micro framework route and had no regrets at the end, even if a lot of time was wasted by re-inventing the wheels.

Another issue is the structure of code / files using a micro framework. I would hate to end up having insane amount of folders / files that would end up looking just like Rails, but the idea of throwing everything into a single file is also questionable.

So any thoughts and suggestions are more than welcome.
Startups aren't art.
This is awesome! I've been waiting for this for a while. Now I don't need to route through PayPal or any other nonsense. Nice and easy, just the way it should be.
A) Any half-competent scientist is comfortable programming.
B) Some programming is even required in a lot of undergrad business/MBA programs
C) What the author really means by "MBA-types" are morons. So, yes there is a market for an user-friendly domain specific statistical language. It's called SAS. It's expensive. But it does the thinking for you...if you're a moron.

Also, none of this has anything to do with Python, which is an absolutely beautiful language.
I've used Hyper-V before and its pretty much garbage compared to VirtualBox and VMWare.
1. There is no usb device support that I could find, and you can't add any devices besides hard disks that I've seen
2. No shared folders at all, you need to use smb to have any file sharing capability, short of setting up ftp
3. They pretty much only support virtualized windows 2008, they have SOME Linux support but thats limited to Red Hat and OpenSuse mostly
4. You can only install it on Windows Server 2008(well thats a given but its still a drawback)
5. Its interface isn't the best, I find it really hard to find stuff and everything is in non-obvious locations
Xbox does not have a Java runtime, it's XNA with C# or C++.

C# should make a port job fairly easy.
This story is a case study in how not to sell software. This is exactly what I would expect to see at HN.
I bet if you buy it from a box at the Apple store you won't run in those kinds of problems.
Bad Career Advice: Do Something You Love
Thats fair. The issue then is that 80% of tips currently go to TC because everybody wants their startup featured there alongside all the other tech news - even if only 10% of the audience is interested.

For PR companies, TC is still the big 'get', probably ranks just below a NYTimes or WSJ feature. You'd have to do a good job of handling news and new companies to convince a lot of these startups that a good/thorough feature in a startup-focused blog is worth more than being one of 20 stories on a tech blog.
I second that the site is cute =) If that is your site though, you may want to disable debugging -- it is exposing your SQL queries. (See the end of the HTML file.)
Very cool. We've been looking for a tool like this for Scribd for a couple of years now.

If you built this out so it handled multiple locations, browsers, pages, etc. we would pay big bucks for it.
Cheap crap = sales, but you don't get to pretend that those sales don't count just because they involve cheap crap.

I wouldn't count them as much, though. A really large number of Android phones get sold to people who don't want to buy apps.

Or maybe that doesn't matter if you're not a mobile developer. But was there some other relevance to the whole iOS vs Android spiel that was brought up in the parent comment? Because attracting developers is the only thing I can think of that would make OS marketshare matter at all.
Google yanks request for kids’ social security numbers
We're hoping we can convince people to go back and mark themselves as attending on the sessions they actually did attend.
Gem Information Technology
Is there any such thing as a non-arbitrary UI?
Anytime I hear a discussion about designing computational tools for "non-programmers" I'm reminded of the subway in Mexico City, Mexico. The subway stops have nicely detailed pictures that are descriptive of the locations around the stops. This is because many people are illiterate. It's about time people realized that programming is literacy.

Also, leave Python alone!
Basic capitalism: Because they can.
The only reason I do not casually use the word nigger in public is because unlike god, HR departments appear to be omnipresent.

"Do you talk to your mother with that mouth?"

Yes, I do. And if that bothers you, kindly fuck off. You have no place telling me what I may or may not say in the presence of my mother.

If an adult loses their temper in public, they are rightfully looked down upon. If an adult publicly becomes offended, I similarly look down upon them.
AOL shut down Gnutella and WASTE. Certainly the right business move because of they were both lawsuits waiting to happen, but I'd imagine that it disappointed Nullsoft nonetheless.
“Real world” performance comparison of CDN providers
The Word of Notch - The origins of Minecraft:
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minecr...
We win when game developers build off each other's ideas, even making an improved version of what came before, but direct clones serve only to reduce the reward for innovators, so I strongly disagree that it's a win for the market place. Look at casual games for an example of a market that basically crashed when developers started spending all their energy cloning successful titles instead of trying to create something fresh.

As a personal example, search for Robokill in this game's release forum post:

https://www.mochimedia.com/community/forum/topic/game-showca...

I'm not bitter - Robokill did well and I'd be surprised if they made even 5% as much as I did - but it's hard to argue that the market place is better off because this game exists. Robokill itself is not in any way original - it's basically a mixture of Smash TV and Diablo - but I think it was a fresh enough take on existing genres to earn its place in the market.

As long as this Minecraft inspired title tries to be different in some way, though, I have no problem with it.
What I don't understand - and perhaps will be incapable of understanding until I face these issues myself (and hopefully I will in the future) - is why this view that scaling is in a sense un-documentable...

What is it about scaling an application that can't be reduced to an algorithm - at some level of abstraction at least, so newbies can at least get an idea of how they should start thinking about it.

To put the question in another way - could a framework like django ever come to provide scaling tools out of the box? Or is it just something that fundamentally can't be reduced. Might it be that there just haven't been enough people who have faced scaling problems that repeatable patterns haven't yet become obvious?
Which is to say, you can indeed purchase health care. You might not get the volume discount that Blue Cross et al do, but you can buy it.

And, in practice, if you tell the provider that you can only pay X, it is quite possible that they will prefer getting X to getting 0.
Just love it. Easy to use? Yes and therefore REALLY useful, not just another gimmick.
It's exactly the right tool for E.Factor. Thanx!
great model for ways to enter a market and win!

also:

5) Ruthless-est

For example, I'd argue Microsoft was a combo of 1, 4 and 5, and perhaps 3 -- with respect to OS's. But definitely 4 (the IBM/MS-DOS thing) and 5. In contrast, Apple's goal has been 2. Google was clearly not 1 with respect to web search, instead, 2.
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Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour [video]
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I actually really like Crunchbase, more so than anything else TC-related. It's really useful to have a quick way to see what investors have invested in something, or what kind of portfolio an angel has.
Yikes, I didn't mean to leave that on. Thanks for the heads-up.
Zsh for productivity
I tried to purchase Parallels a while back and gave up because:

* Even though you _can_ opt out of it (click the grey cross on the right of the product list), the "backup" fee is almost an extorsion scheme. When you buy Parallels, you buy the right to download it once. After that, it's up to you to properly manage your backups. If your hard disk crash and you didn't, you must buy a new version (unless you bougth the "extended download service").

* I'm in Europe, and they silently switched the price from $80 to 80€. This is almost $110. You can't switch back to USD, only to GBP (£65 which is as expensive)[1].

That's enough. I didn't wan't to know what other dark patterns they'd pull out further down the road.

[1] Actually, I've checked while writing this post, and it is possible to get the US shop in Europe too, but I couldn't find the way to do it a few months ago when I contemplated purchasing their program.
Or the first appearance of YouTube "blackouts" for local market games.
(In response to 7,) you already need 500 karma to downvote anything.
Ruby concurrency explainined simply
Political stories simply need to be killed with prejudice.
Portable C Compiler close to 1.0 release
Soundsourcing: The Sound of the Crowd
Yes that's the site. I was actually surprised to find out it was cheaper to spend an extra 10 bucks on Linode than to offload the images to S3 although that might change if the site gets bigger. I actually contacted Ben Huh from the Cheezburger network a few months ago, he seemed interested but somewhat unimpressed with the numbers I had then.

I won't kill off the site just yet, I'm prepared to lose a bit of money on it while I'm trying to figure out a solution. Thanks for the suggestions!
"I like using my fingers and hands to interact with my computer."

Trust me, the keyboard and mouse that is controlled by psychokinesis has not been invented yet. Fingers and hands are a requirement to deal with pretty much all computers...
Content-Type is text/plain, Content-Disposition is not set. Your browser overrides content type based on file name "extension", at least for commonly misused types.
Many of the things that are 99 cents are untaxed food items.
A large web app can be broken down in to a collection of small services.

You have a main Rails app as the glue and these small services can be done in Sinatra fulfilling specific needs of the App.
File Formats for Google Docs API
The Inception Movie explained to my son (by Donald Duck, none the less) [1]. Almost all the scenario and the "innovative" concepts of the film come from a 2004 Scrooge McDuck comic.

I've linked to Cracked (even though they might not be seen as the most serious source) because their account is detailed and very documented.

1. http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invent...
Cold hands, warm heart is a myth, scientists reveal
Toronto Airport Taxi
Some of the ways that we can help is by taking you to the downtown Toronto hotel that you will be staying in, provided you are a business traveller.
The very first time I saw a site like this, many years ago, that is what I assumed all of the voting was about. I know a lot more now than I did then why resource wise it is the way it is, but I occasionally think about how one might go about doing a more customized version.

Superficially at least, it seems to be a good way to put everyone into a community whose size relates to the commonness of their preferences. I think this would occur as long as comments/articles beneath a certain threshold just weren't visible to a particular user.

Unfortunately it seems like a lot of calculating to do per hit, but in thinking about it, it doesn't seem to hurt Netflix too badly.
Haha great... I'm barely 30 and you punks are already calling me old. :)
I have an extremely unpopular point of view on this, because, unlike the most vocal of HN, I believe there are some things that can't have a price tag attached to them. But:

> The prob is that as a tech blog you can't ignore Apple, Google etc.

Yes, you can, dammit. If you mean, "as a tech blog you can't ignore Apple, Google, etc. and still make tons of money and eventually sell out to a media empire", then OK, we have some common ground. I'll go along with that.

But for all of the hundreds of thousands of readers you somehow amass by following the same stories that everyone else follows, there are -- admittedly a much smaller number of -- readers like me who are starving for something that isn't like everything else that's already out there.

I don't care what Apple or Google or Verizon is doing, and I especially don't care that you're covering it versus anyone else. It'll show up in my numerous news feeds. It'll show up on HN. It'll show up on Reddit. It'll show up in Google News. Or someone will ask me about it at some point during the day.

What's valuable to me -- and, I think, enough other people -- is getting the information that other people aren't getting. My clients rely on me to keep an eye on the new and the up-and-coming, and it's getting harder and harder for me to gather that kind of information, because there are diminishing reliable sources for it. You guys and Gizmodo and everyone else all compete for page views on the same silly topics and it's not helping anyone.

I'll agree that you probably won't get to drive a fancy car by running a business without compromising principles, but let's not kid ourselves that we can't run businesses without selling out. Hell, that's probably pretty much the only reason that anybody reads anythign written on 37Signals anymore -- because they're constantly reminding everyone that they haven't sold out, and they're successful. (Some of them even get to drive nice cars.)

And for that matter, it would be lovely if, for a change, I'd get to see someone treat the matter of startups like it wasn't a glamorous Silicon Valleywood lifestyle. Y'know, like a little bit of attention towards all those countless shmucks out there that are building products, taking care of customers, making money, and not dressing like rock stars or scheduling interviews every week.
I really do appreciate those links, I will be sure to check them out.

Thanks!
He could have gotten Virtualbox.
Who's in charge for these dark patterns on their site?
This will be taken down sooner or later, while no legal alternatives¹ exist in many countries. Ridiculous. Movie industry: Okay, apparently you don't want my money, that's fine, but then please don't complain about piracy.

[1] Cross-platform, HD quality, easy to use, etc.
Though I'd assume that most of your bandwidth is getting eaten up by the images, you might consider any/all of the following:

* minify HTML output

* minify your CSS files

* use the Google hosted version of jquery http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/
The design is terrible. I don't care about cover art. I want to quickly find what I'm looking for.
It seems the iPad was released not too long ago so it's 'fun' that the current iPads will have such a dive in value with the new iPad2 hitting the streets.

I know it's been released in April, but that's just in the US. It arrived in the rest of the EU at the end of July (and I bought mine in September).

Of all things Apple could release more often, they pick the iPad...

As an iPad 1st gen owner I hope at least they would release some attachable iSight camera for the iPad. Because video calling is about the only thing I would want it to do in order to be a decent Skype station.

Personally I've found little value in the iPad. A pocketable iPod Touch is perfect for light email reading, quick browsing, and Skype calls while a Kindle is much nicer for book reading. Furthermore, these two added weigh less than the iPad!
I don't understand all the website speed tests sites, this second new one I have seen this week. And calling it a startup????

What about the firebug net tab, or yslow or chrome resources?
بوابة المستقبل التعليمية
موقع تلاقي اي درس تحبه فيه
Nobody has mentioned Firebug in 59 comments?

Am I on Hacker News? I had to check the site header real quick.
Cool, that's actually what I'm building next. A simple deploy hook mechanism. Want to shoot me a quick e-mail? hoisie@gmail.com
Okay, I just wanna say that is good design :D
One solution can be to give read-only access to new users and charge a very low one time fees for upvoting, submitting and commenting. Only people who are serious about contributing will pay for it.
I've pinged a friend at VMWare about this. It's not her department, but she should be able to pass it along towards the people whose problem it should be.

EDIT: Word's been passed along. Don't know if anything will actually come of it, but (at least some of) the people whose problem it should be are aware.
Stop calling everything a startup.
Seriously it's getting weird.

A website ≠ a startup.
Are We Wired For Mobile Learning?
For german users a similar service is offered by 1&1 (iPayment, with "silent CGI"-mode). The form on the site is sent to the ipayement servers and those verify the transaction data, call a URL on your servers with the unique transaction token and success/error message, and only redirect the user back to your site after the callback is finished. Works pretty well, the credit card data never touches your server but the user doesn't notice that he left your site.
If you are right, a website could automate the cycle as follows:

1) Every user belongs to at most two (or k) classes.

2) Each class can have a finite number of users n.

3) When a class fills up, a new one is opened.

4) There are always two (or k) open classes at a time, and new users join both of those two (or k) classes.

5) The classes are staggered so they don't close at the same time; e.g. if k=2, n=10000, the first 5000 people to join belong to class 1 and class 2, the next 5000 belong to class 2 and class 3, the next 5000 to class 3 and class 4, and so on.

6) Users can only post to classes they are in, and can only comment on posts in classes they are in (or maybe newer ones too).

7) By default, users only see posts to classes they are in (or maybe their classes + older ones). They can opt in to see more if they want.

The idea might work better if it is combined with some more onerous mechanism to join classes late - a fee, a requirement for an endorsement from a member or someone. Charging a fee for access to the more '1337' earlier classes might be a good way to monetise the site; the fees could either be flat, or could escalate (exponentially?) with the age of the class and / or the number of people who pay to join it late (possibly with a discount applied as active members leave).

Classes might get too small due to attrition - coalescing older classes when they get too small might be a solution to this - it might also make sense to increase class sizes (exponentially?) as the site gets more popular.
Gotcha.

Regardless, it's their software. After all that, it's not even an expiring URL, or obfuscated, or anything.
I would not support a business of which I had these sentiments:

It is a shameless, low class, money grab. (twice)

It’s another tasteless scam formulated by a greedy, customer hostile executive tool.

Surely there are competitors in the marketplace?

We vote with our dollars.
Sigh.

I work for Yahoo, after 6 years of ('failed') startup work. I respect YC and pg immensely.

However, linking to this article that is written in 2010 that references the mid-1990s (except for a single mention of Facebook in 2007) seems a bit weak.

It doesn't bother me that HN folks dismiss Yahoo as a company, so much as it does that HN folks ignore Yahoo engineering. Hadoop, WOEID, Pipes, etc.

For me as an engineer that has worked for a few startups and companies that hoped to be acquired, working for Yahoo is great because we are exposed to a lot of engineering work that is optimized for large scale. I'm sure Google and others are doing a great job of this as well, but why is it an either/or situation?
I think normal users may care about how to get the lastest things if they overlooked the legal documents.
If you really wanted to make the site more like it was, you could look at the voting history of people here at some distant time in the past and find other members whose votes highly correlate with the old timers. Some people just quietly upvote, so they don't have much karma. If you want the upvoting to be more like it used to be, award people who vote similarly like how older users used to vote.

It would help take care of the effect where older uses leave due to changing interests etc.

Note: I don't actually think it's a good idea. I think just figuring out _what_ you want exactly, in vaguely quantifiable role, is sort of a hard problem. I suspect a lot of people have different 'golden ages' in mind when they think of HN.

When I came here originally it was pretty startup heavy, which was sort of remote from what I was up to at the time. I liked it when it got a little away from startup business related stuff (my perception) and toward more generic technical issues. My point is even if everyone agreed that ait has gone done hill (an open question), not everyone might agree on what it should be like. It's not a democracy of course, but even as an individual for my own preferences that seems as hard as the technology issues.
Actually I should have clarified, I didn't mean that it is impossible to ignore the big stories, more that it is difficult to.

Totally agree that it should be possible, but there is a temptation when you start getting press releases etc. to pump the easy stories out.
What's Next is a big problem for software because the simple stuff is easy and noticeable, but the refinement is tricky and doesn't look like much.

At my old work, our basic software showed a series of line graphs crossing a page in realtime. Compared to the previous available tech (paper pen printers) it's Big and New.

Comes version 2 of the software and it has many refinements - antialiasing and smoothing algorithms to make the data look nicer and more interpretable but with no loss of significant detail; improved analytical algorithms with tighter results; reduction in data stored per unit of information; so on and so forth. But the users don't see this, and certainly don't think it's "much more" than version 1 - "Shouldn't this be a patch? Why should we have to purchase it again for v2?"

That job also taught me that what users want and what devs think users want are frequently miles apart.
You can get newer releases from their page directly, in case anyone wanted to try navicat. It's a pretty good utility, though I personally still like to use the respective SQL server command line utility shells. It's a 30-day trial.

http://www.navicat.com/en/download/download.html
Here in SF the geniuses of the Lembi Group bought a bunch of apartment buildings on credit (something like 1 billion dollar's worth), used questionable/borderline illegal tactics to squeeze people out of rent controlled units, and then jacked the prices way up. Then the real estate bubble popped and they went bankrupt.
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