skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Excellent post! Sometimes you just gotta say those things that should go without saying.

1. OO code is less performant than procedural code

Never forget, the primary purpose of OO is to help us, not our users. OO is a great way to get junior people thinking a certain way, set standards, and make maintainability a little more manageable (usually). The only thing it really does for our users and customers is help us help them by making our lives a little easier.

2. The backend is the most important part of development

Sometimes I think we get this backward. Think about it. You can do almost anything you want on the back end and no one notices unless there's a problem. The client side is a whole different story. It has to work perfectly no matter what browser or resolution your user arrives with, and it has to do it using a limited number of technologies, a small footprint, and with limited round trips to the server. It's almost like it's 1965 all over again.

3. Graphical designers are good at user interface design

UI design != UI function. It doesn't matter how pretty it is if the user can't figure out what to do or if it doesn't function as expected.

4. The existence of a superior programming language

Yea, some languages are better than others for certain things, but a expert practitioner of a seemingly inferior technology is almost always better than an average practitioner of a superior technology. To this very day, my mother can still print faster than any of us kids can write. Amazing.

5. XML is more economic than a DB

XML serves its purpose of being autodocumenting quite well. That's all it does well. If you need to parse for any reason, almost any other format blows it away.
"write efficient code" / "be as clever as you want" doesn't actually tell anybody anything, though. If they know C, try to explain the idea of higher-order functions, etc. in terms of passing around function pointers, perhaps. Also, definitely something about trying to contain side effects as much as possible. Maybe relate it to the sort of problems with global variables that have bitten most people at some point? If they are sufficiently interested, I would point them to the John Hughes paper, "Why Functional Programming Matters" ( http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html ) and Raganwald's post about it ( http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/03/why-why-functional-progr... ). Then, OCaml or Haskell.

When talking to non-programmers (i.e., most people), try to speak their language, especially if you know their interests / areas of expertise. Failing that, I usually fall back on cooking, because even if somebody doesn't have any experience making bread from scratch or what have you, it's not completely out of left field the way science and math can be. Everybody eats.
I wasn't talking about J2ME. In my opinion J2ME is utterly pointless.
I've been thinking about a better Wikipedia. It is silly for them to keep that style and decide what's worthy when they are not dealing with dead trees and limited shelf space.

I think something like a PGPedia, where articles are signed by the author and ranked much like this comment system would be great. There would be no editing of articles, just re-submissions. And nothing need ever be deleted, just down moderated.

You could search PGPedia by what's top rated, or by what famous uses have highly rated, what does Stephen Hawking think of articles on gravity, etc.

I expect encyclopedia style article to be top ranked but they would also link to longer more in depth articles, and those to even longer articles.

I just don't see any way to make money from that?
Thanks for explaining. Now I'm sure I disagree. :)

I'm partly kidding. I might use that design style under some circumstances. I disagree that it's the right way to do things. There are many ways to do things. I think people want a "right" way because they want to feel like they've got stuff figured out. (This is especially common in our world because software is complex and there's a lot of uncertainty around how to do it well.)

As it happens, the app I'm currently working on is as far away from this design style as you can get. We do almost everything in JS, even things that could easily be done in HTML and CSS. Our way of carving things up relies heavily on expressing everything in a single language, and the Turing-completeness of said language is an advantage not a disadvantage. It's a solution I'm fond of because it neatly combines high-level abstraction at the source level with some stringent performance requirements in the browser. It will also be fun to watch the purists turn green when they see it.

Edit: we do almost everything in generated JS. Might be relevant.
LivingSocial Gets $5 Million From Grotech Ventures and Steve Case To Create Social Apps
I'm not sure what possessed you to design a music player UI without a Play/Pause button! Other than that, looks great.
You're absolutely right. Some .com's get away with misspelled names but the copycat effect has gotten ridiculous and shows a real lack of creativity.
A Scansnap is $400 or so, equivalent to about 2 years of Pixily. That doesn't count the labor cost of scanning and organizing the docs yourself - given that this is Pixily's core business, they probably have decent defaults for that.

Obviously, if you have five file drawers to plow through you might want a Scansnap, at least for a while. But the beauty of Pixily is that you can test drive the concept first by paying a la carte, then use Pixily for maintenance after finishing your initial scanning run and selling your Scansnap on eBay.
I can't tell what you're asking. Are you saying that anyone who works on some type of idea an investor says they're interested in is now just an employee? Because practically all investors have ideas they wish people would propose to them, and a lot have written about them.
Yang is screwed.
But I have to wonder: is there a better way?

And 20 years from now, when Microsoft releases an ASP.NET with the better way ("say goodbye to templates with the new Unity Code Components (UCC)™"), Atwood will be blogging about it.

Edit: Jeff is no doubt a nice guy and it's clear he means well. Yet every time I read his stuff I feel driven to burst out with sarcasm. I think it's an allergic reaction: I know the world he represents, I spent too much time in it for my own good, and now I'm hypersensitive.
The obvious alternatives to string templates are:

- embedding client-side markup as a DSL in the language to generate HTML (Markaby/Seaside)

- component/control-based systems (ASP.NET, JSF I guess)

I prefer the first.
one more: someone who has experience as a startup entrepreneur so that he/she understands and feels the pain & gain in sync.
I'm pretty sure that would defeat the purpose for many people. It sounds like in this case S3 was being used as a CDN (which it's not) to save bandwidth and improve response times.

Using memcached locally gives you neither of those properties.
Retailers absolutely care. You're vastly underestimating how important price is to a product or service and its position.
Online businesses outlive their owners, so plan ahead
VCs get to choose, right?

Not necessarily.

You bring up a great point. Instead of building a startup that can attract VC attention, why not focus instead on building a startup that VCs will fight over. That's how we should all be thinking.
I'm not sure this improves the situation much. In fact, it probably will only make things worse since you've got an additional point of failure.

The proxy will keep your site up if S3 goes down, but if the proxy goes down you're done. This strategy hinges on the assumption that your caching proxy is going to be more fault tolerant than S3. The recent problems Amazon has been having aside, that's not a gamble I'd be willing to make.

Nevermind the fact that even under the best circumstances this is only useful for reads.
our webapp is written in php and using javascript ajax calls we keep all php, html and js code seperate
People don't watch those things, they _barely_ read. so two quick sentences will get you much further...
What I don't like about this approach is that it forces me to learn a new language just to create HTML. I don't mean Smalltalk, but the specific "HTML generation API".

I have to know HTML anyway (because eventually I will have to debug it), so it seems preferable to me to also code the output in HTML.

Another approach against tag soup I have seen is xmlc, which manipulates the DOM tree of the HTML template. The xmlc project doesn't seem to be very active anymore, though.
You're absolutely right. That's the plan going forward.
I predict that nokia's lead in the internet mobile device market will go back up with the release of the n96 in a couple months and the e66 (u.s. version). The release of these two handsets in combination with quite a bit of widespread dissatisfaction with the 3G iphone (battery life anyone?) will facilitate this. Also, remember nokia has not come out with their touch devices yet, so those handsets are also on the horizon.
If the point is to get funding, yes, I suppose. Don't you build startups to be useful, though?

I do think you have a point, though, if, if your building your company, you set it up to be so profitable, VCs will fight to get in on the action. All startups should do that, given that businesses DO exist to make a profit (and a great many people forget that fact, profit is the difference between a business a hobby), so your point is well-taken.
We hackers also need to pay close attention to this trend and how it will affect our work.

Between net books and smart phones, one wonders how much longer we can be lazy and get away with things like flash, video, and huge javascript modules.
I like your search. Very fast, and I can type locations which is nice, because for a second there when I first hit your site I was about to ask "So...how do I find jobs in my town?"
A (partial) list of Indian Startups - Participants at Startup Showcase Event - Proto IV
It's a good idea, too bad it's only for Android or iPhone... I'll have to continue thinking on ideas for Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Linux mobile phones, RIM BlackBerry or JAVA phones... XD
Some interesting stuff there.

Not sure about the wiki - if it doesn't fully implement everything MediaWiki does, it may be too early to compare performance (80/20 thing). CouchDB on the other hand is very promising, as a whole new DB concept.
Ask HN: How do start-ups deal with (black hat) hackers?
With all of the start-ups coming out of YC, I would imagine it's just a matter of time before one falls prey to a successful attack--sql injection, xss, etc. Any start-uppers on here have experience defending their turf? How does a cash-stretched start-up devote enough time to security when a million other things are calling for attention?

Edit: I should clarify--I expect the majority of the HN community is aware of the best-practice solutions to harden a new website against everyday security concerns. What I am curious about is if anyone has dealt with a particularly sophisticated attack. What was the fallout? Was it completely successful? How did you recover? I agree that a new start-up is a very small target, but... a target is still a target.
For already successful companies seeking funding, it's all asking/understanding "What do you bring to the table other than your money?" Joe Blow's $250,000 isn't as valuable as Mark Cuban's $250,000 investment for the reasons in that article.
mindmapping tools? :)
Simple, works great, and great concept. Love it. Curious to see how it would truly work on a large file though, will try a bigger one later today ..
That's part of the value of a brand. If I see anything that's .biz or .info, it might as well be .ru for how much I distrust it.
I would like to have a place where you can have an intelligent discussion of wikipedia articles as well as being able to ask specific questions on the subject of the article. Currently, AFIK, the only discussion allowed is on how to improve the articles.
I think Hacker News is using the component/control-based approach with Arc? Just curious.
I've always liked _why's approach with Markaby: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/markaby/

It's "Markup as Ruby". Quite an elegant hack I must say. :)
Trade in Your Old iPhone, get the New for Free
Would you put cartoons on your software startup's website?
There have been problems with that kind of approach before, for example for companies that ended up on spam blacklists without justification.

I don't like it :-(
If they people on startuply are measurably and consistently better, wouldn't it be worth paying more for?
Is it possible to have some screenshots of the new design please ?
if the product is good then VCs will line-up ... also startups are cheap to start so a good product will be your own PR machine.
rule of thumb: sanitize your inputs.

if you do this correctly and thoroughly, you're better off than like 70% of the web apps out there. doesn't take much time, just requires that you set up everything and remember to do it for everything from GET/POST to cookies to manipulating the DOM.

edit to clarify, based on child comments:

sanitizing inputs doesn't necessarily mean you apply one filter to everything. it just means that you're ensuring that what you're taking in from the app is something your code is expecting and can handle. if you're expecting a sql query or some unescaped html, you don't need to filter out the query or the html.
Well, if U.S. has an advantage in an overlooked area by general public and someone in the Economist points out, then the author is "blatantly pro-US"?

At the other hand. A better question to ask to anyone from Europe is: if there are good universities in England, France and Germany, then why students from these 2 top universities in China are not going there?

Is it because language barrier? Is it the economic prospect of Europe not viewed as good as U.S.? Are immigration regulations more restricted in Europe when they finish school and decide to stay instead of going back to China? Or do universities in those countries not accept more foreign students than local students? Do in general those countries have problems with immigrants and those student feel unwanted or discriminated? Or do universities in those countries forge good relationships with the two universities in China?

U.S. is not perfect in every aspect. But I don't like the idea when anyone points out its advantages then he/she should be labeled as "blatantly pro-US".
What world does he represent?
I thought it was macro-based HTML generation, which is typical of Lisp web libraries.
I use this one https://launchpad.net/rescuetime-linux-uploader
Enraged Pakistanis Stone Stock Exchange, Demand Government Make Stocks Go Up
I think the best advice is to take a common sense approach. Do the things you would normally do to protect against things like this and don't sweat it too much. As a startup, you're a pretty small target. I doubt you'd even register on anyone's radar.

It seems like the motives for a lot of these attacks involve extortion or high profile destruction. You're basically a worthless target to anyone interested in either of these.

If you've put effort into protecting yourself you're making the decision to attack even more difficult for a blackhat. If it's going to require about the same effort to attack you and some larger target, chances are they'll go for the bigger fish.
Hottest brand: Google pips Microsoft
Man, I tried this a bunch of times and it never sent any email and just stared at me pretty blankly.

Until I realized the problem is that your site doesn't except "+" characters in emails and then fails silently entirely, leaving me the expectation that it might be waiting for me.

Anyway, please change the site to something that allows + signs in email addresses so I can try this out that way. Thanks in advance!

You should also fix it such that it doesn't ever fail blankly without any feedback to the user of the problem.
Launching a High Performance Django Site
Interesting idea with the open source stock exchange. I always assumed that one can't simply launch a stock exchange, it has to be highly regulated and expensive to get into (just like not just anybody can start a bank). Not sure if that is the case, but the "open source" part made me think, perhaps in developing countries it could be useful. Perhaps people could just have local stock exchanges, and the government wouldn't even care.
A glimpse into Windows 7
Venture Capital for the Long Tail
you might be onto something there.

gruber wrote that essay in 2004. in those days, it seemed like the mac would always be the niche computer for special snowflakes. now it's more popular than anyone could have imagined. so it seems entirely likely that the platform will eventually get its share of uninformed, indifferent users.
If they were funny.
> hardware scares me

What you describe is something like 90% (if not more) design and software (including embedded software). The hardware part mostly consists in integrating a few existing high-level components, most of them dealing with digital signals,
For Rails folks, we wrote a plugin to sanitize the entire params hash in a before filter. This is protection against XSS attacks.

http://code.google.com/p/sanitizeparams/
When I read this, all I could think was: "we need fewer graduate students".

Want to know why American students don't enter PhD programs? Ask one: to get a PhD in this country, you must forgo five or more years of income and savings, live like a pauper, and lose many opportunities for early career development. Meanwhile, you get to watch your undergraduate classmates buy cars and houses, take authority roles in their companies, and accumulate significant retirement savings.

And what do you get in exchange? The obligation to work long hours for 3-5 more years, in a $40k/year post-doc (usually in an expensive city), with the long-shot possibility of finding a professorship somewhere (hopefully, somewhere near your spouse!) There, you'll work your ass off for six more years, in the hopes of not being permanently fired from the only job that you're qualified to do. And as an extra-special bonus, your job security rests largely on your ability to beg for money from the government...here's hoping that the NIH/NSF/DOE/DOJ grant budgets don't decline!

Is it really any wonder that Americans don't want these gigs? The economics of the professorship don't make sense for people from an affluent society. If you want more American students to take an interest in academia, you've got to stop flooding the market with cheap labor.
Exactly. I used to sweat security too much until I took a detailed security analysis to our CIO once and she said, "Yes, these are all risks, but what are we going to do if the building burns down?"

There are more potential disasters than security breaches and many of them are both more common and more disastrous.
I agree, it's an excellent post.

Another caveat that relates to #2 is that a lot of people get so obsessed with the back end that they build it before they figure out what problem they're trying to solve in the first place. Without knowing what the user is going to do with the application, how can you design a back end to support it?
Should startups fix venture capital?
Will look into and solve this asap.
Ask YC: What is best place to get a logo designed?
I need a logo for my site. What is the best place to get one designed? Looking for a site like rentacoder.com but for logos.
I agree, however we would like not to get users confused that Stremfile.com is yet another web 2.0 app with large headlines etc. We want it to breathe backend and be very minimalistic. I mean look at Google.com?
Could Global Warming Be Stopped By Adding Lime To Sea?
Dr Kush: How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry
Not necessarily. Some of the best businesses in the valley were turned down by several VCs before getting funded. Many VCs are like sheep..."good" or "bad" is irrelevant, as long as others want in on the deal.

I know several companies that I know are going to be great businesses, but haven't had an easy time raising money because of lack of skills in other areas. The presentation is at least as important as the product, because getting past stage one requires a good presentation. There are lots of PowerPoint-fu masters in the valley who've been funded numerous times, and have yet to build a business.
Try 99designs.com.
Not really. This article is about low cost ultra portables, not regular laptops.
Who actually owns your DVD player?
A few days ago I became extremely annoyed while starting up the Shrek II DVD for my daughter, who is autistic and cannot operate the DVD player by herself. Some genius had decided that the owner of that particular DVD has no right to skip the previews.

At first I was mad at the makers of the DVD itself. Not only must I endure the usual and pointless anti-piracy threats, but now I can't even skip the previews??? But then it hit me that I was missing the bigger picture: my DVD player does not obey me. I tell it to skip the previews, and it does not. WHY NOT?

I could be wrong here, but it seems to me that the player can read the physical disk, so it should be able to advance the read head whenever I tell it to do so. But it doesn't, or won't. What's up with that? I would pay double for a DVD player that skips ANYTHING I tell it to skip, one that does what I, its owner, tells it to do. Is such a device available? If not, why not?
I've had decent luck w/ elance.com and have heard of success stories from craigslist.com
Testing the new One-Click Ruby Installer for Windows
Not a rails specialist, but I don't understand the point of sanitizing input? It seems to me the correct place to sanitize is output (in HTML or SQL). Otherwise it will all get messy - "escaped" text ends up in the database and might be escaped once more during output (if you use the typical Rails h() method). And what do you escape, SQL, or HTML, or both (and don't forget JavaScript)?

Also sometimes the user might want to save code snippets in the database, would be bad to escape them.
I'm surprised not to see the Windows Mobile platform mentioned by a single word. Almost everyone I know with a smartphone has a Windows Mobile-device.

I very much doubt, as the article somewhat implies, that Nokia's loss of market-share is due to the iPhone alone.
You can do the same with Smalltalk and Seaside of course ;)
He is using convoluted presentational HTML interleaved with logic. This makes it a mess. For example, the upper half of the code seem to be some kind of tabular data, while the lower half seem to use table-markup without any reason at all. This could be made much simpler by using clear semantic markup. He is even mixing style info into the HTML by using things like &nbsp; and class="gray" - this shows a complete misunderstanding of the concept of separation of content and presentation.

Now, there may be legitimate reasons why you would use presentational markup - e.g backwards compatibility with old browsers, or very complex layout or effects. In that case a transformation should be done - using XSLT, custom tags, or whatever is appropriate for the framework. This markup transformation should be separated from the logical markup just like CSS is.

The code is a bit ugly too - the f and c variables see to be used to switch styles for the first row and for every other row. Again, this is presentational and should be handled by CSS or some kind of transformation system.

Lots of comments suggest that the code could be improved by using round or square brackets instead of pointy bracket. This does nor really reduce the complexity though, the important thing is to simplify by abstracting styling and layout away from logic and structure.
I found an even better one!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAEaengvr2w
It's a mixed emotion to laugh at the misfortune of others, but this is the most hilarious thing I've read in a long time. (well, at least for today) It's the perfect illustration of panic and greed stomping all over logic and reason.