skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Help me with the architecture of my SAAS web application.
I'm about to begin the development of my first ever SAAS web application. I already have 20+ customers of a niche business segment willing to pay for it. Our application will let customers create & manage their business websites through our service either through subdomain or their own domain. e.g., customersite.oursite.com

I am comfortable with both python and php. I have developed web apps before but have never dealt with SAAS. What are the things I need to watch out for? Any known pitfalls? I also have some questions regarding architecture of SAAS apps -

1) Should I put all customer's data in single database or should I use one separate database per customer?

2) I want customers(and 3rd party developers) to be able to develop their own themes much like Wordpress. How should I architect my app to do that?

3) Should I go with Python/Flask or Python/Django or PHP/<Some framework>? I'm comfortable with all three but I don't know which one is better for SAAS app.

Any advice, books, articles, resourced will be nice.
Yeah, that was the problem. Downloading from the servers, I tended to choose the x64 version and it was never good. The x86 always have been better.
This decision makes no sense.

I figure that, sometime in the next 10 years, 32-bit OS'es will go the way of 16-bit OS'es. The time to iron out the bugs in the 64-bit version is now, while it's only used by diehard techies who understand the necessity of switching to 64-bit.

If we wait until the unwashed masses are forced to switch by ever-advancing technology, they'll jump ship for browsers that have been preparing for years.

Also, the fact that the link has exactly one post in between the proposal and the switch tells me that nobody noticed it, and more effort should have been made to get community review, buy-in, sign-offs. There should have been lots of commentary and input on such a fundamental feature as 64-bit support in such a high-profile open-source project.
Power to overcome form drag goes up with the cube of the velocity and linearly with fluid density. Moving something through water requires over 800 times more power than in air.

The only thing that could make land-based transport less efficient (other than fuel and power-plant issues) is rolling and drivetrain losses. I doubt that those make-up for the over 800-to-1 power discrepancy.

The greater point here isn't a pissing match between individual efficiencies but rather to look at the problem with a long (50 to 200 years) perspective in terms of pollution, fossil fuel consumption, geo-political and economic concerns and more.
Try searching for something using their api, and compare with websearch. There is a world of difference between the search results. IIRC they aren't allowed to share results from some of their other sources via their api, so you can get a good idea of how much they take from other sources and how much from their own index.

But that is a non-issue as far as I'm concerned. As long as the results are relevant and they got them legally, then who cares where or how they came from?
Directly quoting from Orientalism (E. Said) since he said it best:

"The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once wrote an analysis of what he called the poetics of space. The inside of a house, he said, acquires a sense of intimacy, secrecy,
security, real or imagined, because of the experiences that come to seem appropriate for it. The objective space of a house—its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms—is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel: thus a house may be haunted, or homelike, or prisonlike, or magical. So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here. The same process occurs when we deal with time.

Much of what we associate with or even know about such periods as "long ago" or "the beginning" or "at the end of time" is poetic — made up. For a historian of Middle Kingdom Egypt, "long ago" will have a very clear sort of meaning, but even this meaning does not totally dissipate the imaginative, quasi-fictional quality one senses lurking in a time very different and distant from our own. For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away."
On chrome, when I right click on the search bar on duckduckgo.com (or any site), I get an option to "Add as search engine...", on clicking it, I get a dialog box for specifying Name, Keyword and URL. What chrome can do is add a checkbox to this dialog box for making it the default search engine.
I don't disagree that designers choose a less threatening aesthetics that incorporates familiarity. Pandering to the lowest common denominator eventually leads to the most familiar of features - GOOG is just a box and two buttons, for example.

I would also argue that the Formerly-Known-As-MetroUI pattern is also rather utilitarian. It was designed to have a low information density, but highly relevant information - that is to say, show less, but show higher quality information.

Too bad people have constantly misused those great ideas in patterns tho
There is always waterfox for 64bit http://www.waterfoxproject.org/
Curiosity Rover's "historical" breakthrough to be announced
Not managing programmers (2006)
Did the Lomo camera save film photography?
My desktop has 24GB of RAM, yet Firefox crashes on a regular basis when it bounces off its 2GB limit, usually when many image-heavy pages are opened, especially simultaneously from a folder of bookmarks. Seems like the single simplest thing to fix this is the option of using a 64-bit binary, given that it appears most of the work is already done.

The alternative is to break up the browser into multiple processes, much like Chrome. That would however reduce the distinctiveness of Firefox and be one less reason to keep using it. Though the reliability effects of using multiple processes is probably better in the end.

But sooner or later - sooner if various GL things ever get proper uptake - individual web pages are going to need more than 2GB to display and run. The bullet will need to be bitten, even in a multi-process model.
I'm assuming that storing $129.99 as 12999 and dividing by 100 when necessary would be preferable?
Great advice but had to laugh after viewing the site source.
The Black Friday Video Game Buyer's Guide
I'm really wondering if technology just happens because there's a need, or just because it was based / inspired on art, movies, etc.
Agreed.

To be fair, there was some small amount more commentary. See the other post for more links - the submission points simply to the announcement thread.
Why Hostess Had To Die
Plugins not working is a security / reliability bonus, from my perspective; every few months, I have to hunt them down and delete / disable them. At least it's easier to disable them in Firefox than in Chrome.
U.S. Judge Orders Apple to Tell Samsung Details of HTC Deal
This article is pure crybaby bullshit PR about a nonexistent problem. Does anyone care about DDG anyway? They're trying to solve a completely imaginary problem, and they haven't got a hope in hell of creating a viable search engine as that costs billions of dollars.

Why is this article even on HN?
Apple's best days behind us?
In finance, all of the models wall street types build are very similar. these models are embedded with certain variables (i.e. assumptions) and these variables drive the model. What if their models are broken at apple's core?

Currently, Apple is beginning to see the impact of marginal improvement juxtaposed with ability to maintain price inelasticity along with subtle traces of cannibalization with its ipad minis. Iphone 5 sequential market share data - trend is not their friend. What I'm claiming is that if you look at most of wall street analyst's models in depth what you will see is that many of its segments within its businesses are project to continue to grow. And that is one major flaw you should not overlook! Why? because your macbooks will be obsolete. your desktops will be obsolete, your ipad will be like your itouch. What will happen is your iphone or some company's phone will fuse all of these capabilities together. 2) What this will do is force the company to focus on digital displays and compete in a razor thin margin industry with other leaders already present(e.g. samsung, lg, sharp, etc.). Can apple introduce revolutionary new display products to the bottom line offsetting all of the other obliterated product lines and then some?

let me know your thoughts whether you agree with me or not!
Apple's Next Big Thing
I don't think this is available in Firefox for OS X, there's 2 icons in the search field and neither one responds to click-and-hold
A bit of both I'd expect. Art is inspired by need, while technology is informed by art.

See for example cell phones - wireless communication was the need, popularized in many sci-fi shows in more specific, imaginative forms, and later informed the actual product (flip phones/Star Trek communicators).
Innovation: Paper-based USB sticks can be attached to printed magazines
(Skip video on their homepage to 0:50 to see examples) This "intelliPaper" disposable paper based USB drive project is now on IndieGoGo, too, with another less cheesy marketing video than on their homepage... http://www.indiegogo.com/intellipaper
Safari you have to edit your host file to point yahoo's search to ddg (which i did)
> Basically anytime you could be listening to music.

That will be one of your core existential challenges, though...right? Almost everyone prefers listening to music...the average person bases a significant amount of their time acquiring and idolizing music...and so you don't have much time to work with. After my commute is over, I will be at a computer screen listening to spotify as I either work or read websites...there is no way I can be listening to written material.

I'm being overly negative here...it's not that the execution is poor, it's that I think you underestimate the immense behavioral patterns that you have to upend for this app to be as integral to a person's lifestyle as Spotify or the radio
Yeah, doing a reverse IP lookup with domain tools shows a list of 1,029 domains currently directing to google.com (some direct to youtube.com)

Duck Duck Go has a TM application filed on April 2, 2008. Google acquired duck.com's owner in 2010.

There is a very reasonable case for a WIPO domain dispute, which isn't particularly costly (granted if Google lost, and then sued you it would be expensive.) Very good way to generate a lot of press coverage.
Tell HN: Consulting milestone - first unsolicited "app idea" pitch
I recently began freelancing for the first time in my life, after wondering for a long time if I had the skills to do any meaningful consulting work. I just submitted my second monthly invoice, and I can hardly describe how satisfying it feels.

I had a really productive two-hour meeting with my client this afternoon. Near the end of the meeting, one of the people in the meeting said, "Do you know anything about apps?" I reservedly said I do, and then listened as the person started explaining their idea. I thought it was going to be connected to the work I was already doing, but I soon realized this was the classic "I have an idea for an app" conversation. I smiled to myself, and immediately felt I was going through a rite of passage.

It turned out pretty well; I described the recent HN discussion about apps costing as much as cars. That put things in perspective, and we got back to the focus of the meeting. But I felt my consulting hat fall a little more fully into place after that!
Review of Electrochemical Capacitors Based on Carbon Nanotubes and Graphene
Your information about Opera is incorrect. The current release (12.11) has a x64 build (http://snapshot.opera.com/12.11-1661_windows.html).

Why the downvote? The link takes you to the download for the 64-bit Windows version that was just released
> I don't know why no such addon exists for Chrome?

Because someone has to be arsed to write it?

I suspect that part of it is a confluence of events: it's not exactly easy to change the search to DDG, most Chrome users don't bother to change it, and no one who is capable really wants to write an extension for Chrome to make it easier.

Which is, to my mind, a far simpler explanation than a conspiracy against DDG (in that one area).
password recovery option...
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind for the future.

I don't even know what we're running Freckle on, because it's an app that's had zero problems. Alas, Charm is a troubled baby.
With the development of network technology and the theory of mass customization for manufacturing, the knowledge production industry was impacted. On the driving of modern knowledge production characteristics and the drawing of the environment demand, a new knowledge production mode – the mass customization for knowledge production, was put forward.
It's perfectly possible to generate accountant rounding using integers. If the accuracy required is one cent then the system must merely multiply by 10 before calculating and then use dutch round to the nearest 10 before dividing by 10. I'm pretty sure you could do it with quarter cent accuracy rather than 10ths of a cent.

You just shouldn't calculate with 1 cent accuracy if the rounding methodology is important to your business, but truth be told most businesses have a lot more to optimize than the rounding methodology used.
Shouldn't we use technology to stop exploiting animals?
so, is it foo.getSize() or foo.GetSize(). Naming all instance variables my* might or might not be very useful, but naming some instance variables that way is defiantly harmful. The point of having standards and conventions is that you can just know what arbitrary and useless decision others have made, because it is not arbitrary, it is the standard.
I'm considering creating a programming language to be used on the internet, are you saying it would be a bad idea to make all numbers in my new language floating point?
Why are you here? This is entirely relevant to HN. How is a small business that does things uniquely supposed to get users when their biggest competitor is actively making it difficult to try the other service out?

Regardless of whether their claims are true or not, that is.
Side Hustle: Overcome Your Objections to Starting Your Own Business
I'm also inclined to that answer.

But a quick thought though. Isn't art is inspired by imagination? Which is if "art is inspired by need", it maybe be just a need based from imagination. Maybe not a really a need.
I would go further and argue that software is design.

I don't know that much about real-world engineering, but I imagine you can plan out a car, or a bridge, or a skyscraper, almost perfectly before you build it.

Wheras the only perfect design for a piece of software is the software itself. If you wrote pseudocode that was unambigious and covered every detail, it would simply be code.
I've seen people do the side project thing and I think it's somewhat of a waste. I'd only advocate it for personal satisfaction reasons.

If you think your technical skill is an asset and you want to stay fresh I'd say you should be participating in technical design discussions, doing code reviews and occasionally writing tests. If you're doing those things you should have a very comprehensive knowledge of the system despite actually writing very few lines of code.
In the corporate space I'd agree, but the Xbox brand isn't to be discounted. The Halo series is a money printing machine.

"All in all, the Halo franchise has made nearly $3 billion from sales."

"Halo: Reach, Halo creator Bungie's last Halo game, made more than $200 million in sales in the US and Europe in the first 24 hours of release. This figure eclipsed all previous 2010 US entertainment launches, including the three-day opening weekends of Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland and Toy Story 3."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-10-31-more-than-46-mi...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/12/us-microsoft-halo-...
The problem is that every javascript number is floating point.

Even if you think you have integers ... sometimes you don't.
Oh, I see, I misread your first comment. Yes, you should release it. I'll certainly use it and probably contribute to it.
How to fix Steam Greenlight: An Indie Dev's Perspective
It also chokes networks - an open seeding torrent client significantly increases latency, even with the number of connections limited.

It's a problem we have in my house with Spotify, which utilises P2P to lower costs - it has a negative effect on anyone else who is gaming.
Does anybody know what the stats are for how many users generally have a webcam either on their computer or attached? It seems the only way to know is to actually use their camera either via HTML5 or Flash, or to look at user agent and infer from the OS, but that wouldn't tell you about attached webcams.

It would be a useful stat to know before adding webcam-related functionality into our site.
I think we are quickly moving away from decades where people spent significant time acquiring music. My 2 terabyte music library was rendered mostly pointless after I got Spotify premium (I say mostly because some is not available on the service). The entire purpose of collecting all that music was not because I listened to many of the tracks frequently but because I wanted them playable with a click of a button if I ever desired to give them a listen. Now people can skip the collection building phase and also access their (Spotify's) entire collection anywhere and on many devices.

I don't think people that want to listen to music are going to listen to anything else. I DO believe that people who want to listen to news articles may settle for listening to music if the methods for accessing what they desire are not convienient.
I work on an internally-funded startup within a small business - equal parts management, development and devops simply by necessity. So i'm guilty of finding management a chore, or at best, a huge time-sink.

But there are highlights. It's oft-repeated but it really is true that supporting your customers and dealing with marketing can give you great insight into your own product. Through customer interaction i've gotten simple feature requests that add significant value, that I would never have encountered on my own with a programmer mindset.

I'd still take a pure 'maker' position any day of the week.
I read that article with interest. Of course our rail system is not crap when compared to others. That's not what I meant.

What I meant is that it could be much, much better. The article you point out hints at some of the issues: The inter-mingling of passenger and cargo trains ends-up seriously affecting the potential performance of cargo trains.

With regards to it being an absurd idea. Well, of course it is! And so is the case for nearly every idea that sparked a revolution in technology and thinking. The earth NOT at the center of the universe? Absurd! The earth not flat? Absurd? Everyone needs a computer on their desk? Absurd!

Not that I am comparing this to any of those shifts in technology. What I am trying to point out is that being open minded enough to even consider the seemingly absurd is an important part of discovering new ideas and developing new technologies. I always consider the absurd. I have hundreds of ideas catalog that are probably absurd. The alternative is to discount everything as ridiculous without even giving it an honest look. I just don't do that.

For example: Could this high speed train take the form of an underground tunnel connecting both coasts? This is absolutely ridiculous and probably even insane to consider. However, I take the approach of at least doing the research to try to get a sense of proportion in terms of cost and technical feasibility. For example, would there be an important mining element to the project that could offset the costs? I don't know and I am not trying to argue for a 3,000 mile tunnel. All I am saying is that I believe that it is very important to give seemingly ridiculous ideas a chance to be explored and, if need be, discarded based on data and not knee-jerk reaction.
Think twice, like what? "Gee, there's a woman with integrity who shuts down a service while it still works 99% of the time, and refunds my money, instead of growing it like a nutjob until it has weekly downtime like oh I don't know Desk.com"?

I do so hope you're right.
First attempt: http://cl.ly/image/340S0R3b0K0d
Your questions make me think you should start with a much smaller project.
Office has strong competition. I've seen businesses switch to LibreOffice under the threat of BSA. And Google Apps is just awesome ... being an online service it doesn't have all the features of Office, but it's within reach 24/7 on whatever device, wherever you are, the only requirement being an Internet connection.

Being able to make changes to a document (collaboratively too) from an iPad or an Android device, while commuting, is the definition of awesomeness.
Ask HN: Does higher education matter for a startup to be successful?
Do people with higher education (say, Masters in Artificial Intelligence) have more chances of their startup being successful?
Since their product may be better in terms of technology and also the founder would have gained more maturity, experience and contacts in course of his higher education.
We have a huge number of examples like Google, Foursquare where the founders were doing their PhDs.
Not sure why you got downvoted, because we agree with you.
If anyone is curious where this comes from, I wrote extensively about the usability issues with adding search engines to browsers here: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/usability-issues...
A number of things have changed since I made that post. Streaming downloads are long since supported. Peoples's net connections are much faster than they used to be. Flash can be relied on to do playback. And I've just plain figured out a whole bunch of new techniques, reworking from the ground up, to actually get latency under control.
While I agree with you on the problem solving part, I feel you are a bit aggressive.

>Why is this article even on HN?

I think its relevant because PG wrote an article about "frighteningly ambitious ideas" and DuckDuckGo seems to be inspired from it.
Blekko has millions behind it and does a full index of the web.
Why is your comment the #1 comment? I mean, I count 3, count them, 3 unsubstantiated claims:

1. Does anyone care about DDG anyway? I think it's safe to say, yes, there are some who do. I for one.

2. The problem DDG is solving is imaginary. Oh really? What precisely is that problem? Is it search itself that you're referring to, or the prospect of going up against Google? If the former, then you are delusional, and if the latter, there is nothing wrong with attempting to disrupt a monopoly.

3. A search engine costs billions of dollars. Actually, no. There is no rule of computer science that says that. If someone discovers a new, cheaper way to do search then cool!

In answer to your final question, perhaps the reason this article is on HN is to inspire comments like yours, which are wrong, and then comments like mine, which correct comments like yours.
Hands On With The Dell ‘Sputnik’ Ubuntu Laptop [Review]
To give everyone cancer...

Ask yourself next time your pocket vibrates.
"Don't go on vacations. I don't know what people do on vacations"
MS spent gazillions of dollars trying to do it with Bing and isn't close yet. Google is simply the best service out there by a very wide margin. When people close the gap, there will be a viable alternative. There's no cosmic law that says there needs to be an alternative to product X.