skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you make a case for Django [or Ruby on Rails] to non-technical clients.
Businessmen typically want a web application developed. They are aware of .net or J2EE by names, without much knowledge about either.

Altho' Rails and Django offer for a much better and faster development stack, it is a big task to convince businessmen to use these platforms.

The task begins with introducing Django (or Rails), quoting some blog/research. Then making a case for the use of the framework for the specific project.

Lot of the task is repetitive. What are the sources/blogs/whitepapers and other materials you use to make a case for django (or Rails)

Don't you think there should be a common brochure developed that many development agencies could use to make the same case, over and again. Are there any such ones, now?

There seems to be enough discussion on Django vs Rails. Whereas the need is (Django and Rails) vs (.net and J2EE), at least so, while making a business case. Both represent a faster pragmatic web development in a dynamic language.

Corporates have a lot of investment in old frameworks, way due to legacy code and resources. They may have to use Java, or even Cobol. But a end user need not. How do do U get him to understand it?
Me please! mike_agar@hotmail.com

Thanks.
Yes, LabVIEW is great until you learn about functional abstraction. ("Gosh, you mean I can write this code once and then call it multiple times with different arguments?") At which point you will start pining for the awesome expressive power of Visual Basic.

Imagine if, every time you wanted to define a function, you had to open up a PowerPoint document and draw that function's interface using the mouse. Then you'd have to call your function by embedding its thumbnail into another PowerPoint document. (The linking is done by embedding a pathname, which you pick by using a File Open dialog box.) That's the feel of the LabVIEW programming experience. It takes vast reserves of patience.

You might wonder what happens if you copy your program onto another system, or -- god help you -- revise one of your functions in a way that breaks some other program which invisibly depends on it. The answer is: you're screwed. You can't even ask your version control system for help: Your code is in a proprietary graphical binary format. Better keep those backups current!

As you can probably tell, I'm a veteran of LabVIEW, like many laboratory scientists. LabVIEW is to experimental science what Excel is to accountancy. It's a powerful tool in its domain [1], perhaps even an indispensible one, which tempts amateurs to extend it farther, and farther, until they find themselves doing things that really ought to be done using a different tool. One that can be configured using a text editor.

---

[1] "Make the oscilloscope talk to the spectrum analyzer, then sample the voltage with this interface card and draw a strip chart of the results. You have twenty minutes."
A small positive from the "TL;DR" post: It finally occurred to me to do a bit of research and find out what it stands for. Now I have a greater understanding of why I get a slummy feeling when I see it.
People speak in binary on support for CANVAS, SVG, CSS etc -- "this browser has CANVAS support", "that browser doesn't have CANVAS support".

They should actually be speaking of "what level of CANVAS support", because there are different implementations among different browser brands, versions, and possibly operating systems. Whenever there's a common spec with multiple implementations, some solid conformance testing is vital before starting development.

(I'm not too concerned about the lack of "graceful degradation" here, because it's more of an enthusiast piece, "look what I can code", rather than something solid to deploy out to the general public. Different priorities.)

jd/adobe
Yeah - It seems like a move to satisfy people that clearly won't be satisfied?

I mean, the rules to apply to everyone indeed - I think it's unreasonable to expect someone who is effectively an industry insider to not have conflicts of interest (conversely, it's reasonable to expect transparency about it).
Would it be better for an investigative journalist who specializes in the oil industry to partake in the oil industry, or strictly comment? Would it be better for, say, an individual reporting to congress on a certain industry, healthcare and such, to take part in that industry, or strictly comment?

Seeing as TC is his biggest investment, and the main purpose of the blog is to deliver unbiased, somewhat investigative, pieces on the startup sector, it'd probably be in his best interest to pull out of companies that might bring about future accusations of Michael and TC being biased.

I guess you really can't please everyone.
A soft launch (the product launch in my nomenclature) is also pretty a fairly common/typical technology de-risking exercise.
There is one for all the naysayers. Congratulations Sleep.fm
It's good to see someone take such a hard stance on integrity. Unfortunately we live in world filled with dishonesty and are constantly witnessing the implosions of such individuals/companies.

MA didn't have to do what he did. It's also true that he takes a great deal of criticism for what he says and how he says it. But I have much respect for someone who blows the whistle publicly.
Yeah but being nice doesn't mean kowtowing to their every whim. It doesn't get you very far either though.
Well, you don't go to a surgeon and make him explain why he has to use the tools he uses.

If I'm hired as an outside consultant in my area, I don't take a new project unless it uses the tools that I think will minimize risk. It's better to reject the micromanaging client, who doesn't know shit about your field, than to accept the offer, fail, and screw up your reputation.

Luckily, so far there was only one client who tried to force me to use blocks of modems instead of scaling Skype addins. He also wanted me to work for free for first several weeks. Needless to say, I didn't continue the conversation after two strikes.

This principle also applies to RoR/Django vs J2EE. If you are an expert, you get to make decisions.

If they have legacy code written that's a completely different story, of course.
SXSW 2009 on BitTorrent: 6 GB of Free Music
Its not like his "money where his mouth is" approach worked. Look at the companies he invested in...they are very mediocre. A few social sites(one for dogs/one for dancing), a video site(seesmic), and an internet storage site. Nothing truly spectacular or ground breaking. Nothing that had any major success. I don't think he is yet to have an exit....I don't count edgio because that was a joke exit.

The only thing in his portfolio that was successful is Techcrunch
"Just as an aside, to give you an interesting benchmark—on roughly the same system [(compared to the original Burroughs B5000)], roughly optimized the same way, a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today. Moore’s law has given us somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 times improvement in that time. So there’s approximately a factor of 1,000 in efficiency that has been lost by bad CPU architectures.

The myth that it doesn’t matter what your processor architecture is—that Moore’s law will take care of you—is totally false."

Wow. Really?! I'd be interested in knowing the specifics of what Burroughs did right.
For this community, I'd assume innovation is fairly key.

On the other hand, it shouldn't necessarily be constrained to pure technology innovation. You might be disrupting a market, or fostering innovation in another fashion (perhaps downstream).
Honestly, with such a bird's-eye view of vvvv I'm not entirely convinced it's a revelation. It obviously is good for rendering pretty pictures, and the ease of concurrency is a big boon. I'm not convinced, however, that the language has the flexibility you'd find in a general-purpose language, but I'd like to be proven wrong. Has anyone written a webapp in it? A network multiplayer game? I don't mean to denigrate the value of domain-specific languages, but the code snippets only convince me that it's a cool tool for its intended applications.

Looking at some of the less-than-elegant "source code" examples on their site I see how there doesn't seem to be anything that magically restricts people from writing spaghetti (pun intended) code.
if you compare Redis to Tokyo Cabinet what are the advantages/disadvantages? One may be TC is stress tested by many.

docs are a great start but i hope antirez will extend the horizontal scaling/consistent hashing topic a little bit more.

one more thing example code with short explantions is much better.

Kudos for PHP support!
They assume existence of donors already willing to donate, there is no call for extra donations. It's just about how to do more efficient matching.

In this case "altruistic donor" could mean, for example, a mother with a sick kid, which she wants to save by donating her kidney, but it doesn't help because they are not a good match.

So she just gives her kidney to some random kid, with a hope that others in a similar situations would do the same, which would eventually lead to her kid getting a matching kidney.

Altruistic, because it's not guaranteed that her kid will get the right kidney in time (only that there will be some donated kidney left at the end). But if the "chain of trust" keeps going on, chances are high everybody would get the matching kidney.
This is one of the great advantages of a public beta -- once you've ironed any problems, you can have your media launch and justify it by saying "we're no longer in beta".
I'm calling bullshit. The whole article sounds like it came out of the NY Daily Post. There are what maybe 10-15 hedge funds that have enough capital to make something like this stick?

On the other hand, fake internal memos cause APPL to fly all over the place...
> If we all like play, or tinkering as he puts it, then why is there anti-intellectualism?

Because play, tinkering, and intellectualism aren't related in any way that would mean "like play" or "like tinkering" would imply "like intellectualism".
> but intellectuals are more objective and rational than non intellectuals

I've spent too much time around intellectuals to take that seriously.

> They're also more precise with words, and tend to actually mean what they say rather than what you think they implied.

Actually, they're far more likely to play word games and set word traps. It's how they preen. It's just like body-builders flexing, not that there's anything wrong with that.
Hello, an early adopter, contributor, and well known hacker replied to your question better that I'm able to do I think: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511978

I hope Python/PHP/Erlang bindings will follow the example of the Ruby bindings implementing consistent hashing ASAP but probably there is to take into account this 'hashing tag' thing discussed in the sorting article.
> I would say that anti-intellectualism is more about people putting faith above reason.

Except that it's not. Intellectuals are as faith-driven, if not more so. The difference is that intellectuals think that they're not.
thanks!

Joe

joepestro at gmail

rails javascript python
At least with web-based iPhone apps you can use something like Fluid to create a site-specific browser to view the iPhone version of websites on your desktop.
You have a year after first publication to patent. But you have successfully prevented anyone else from patenting (unless they already applied).
Is YouTube Bringing Back The Upload Status Bar?
I agree in most of your points, but actually the greatest benefit may be for large systems, where performance is very important. It is strange to compare relational DBs and key-value DBs, they are very different bests.

I imagine key-value DBs, in the short term future, to be used like you use the memory itself in a program, with lists, hashes. Just this memory with your data structures is shared, atomic, persistent.

When we write code it is obvious when we put data in memory to use the most sensible data structure for the work, right? Incredibly when data is put inside a relational DB this is no longer true, and we create an absurd data model even if our need is to put data and get this data back in the same order we put this data (an ORDER BY is required when the data should be already sorted. Strange, dont' you think?).

Key-value DBs bring this back at home, to create sensible data models for the problem we are trying to solve.
Bill Lumbergh soundboard
What I Learned at the MIT Sloan Sports Business Conference
Hey swombat, I definitely respect your opinion, so let me see if I can explain myself a bit more - and hopefully improve myself in the process.

By hindsight view, I meant retroactively analyzing everything after the adrenalin of the moment has worn off. It's pretty much what we always read. It's a bit cooler, more sterile, and methodical. And you're right, writing that down, careful and well-thought analysis is crucial. But for interesting writing (perhaps entertaining is a better word), immediacy offers a lot of emotional nuances that are lost with time.

And I simply chose Amazon because the way they openly run their AWS is a great example for startups. I was comparing their style to an article I read from box.net (an actual startup), and the difference was striking.

Finally, the indecipherable bit was simply from the original podcast on how to write a successful political diary. I don't think it's useful or really relevant for startups, and that's why I crossed it out. Perhaps I should have simply omitted it.

I'll make notes of all of this for the next time I write. Thanks!
Is Google evil?
> His resolution is that the premise is false: most people, in fact, are not curious (as he establishes by redefining curiosity.)

Thus demonstrating that he's making an "intellectual argument".

People are curious, they're just not curious in the way that he thinks that they should be, which makes them, in his eyes, inferior. The article is his "proof" of their inferiority.

Yes, those are sneer quotes.
How do we know who is searching for it? Could be a bot, sleep.fm themselves, some code somewhere...

Seems fishy to me :/

Maybe an interesting method to getting 'buzz', if companies like compete are just taking raw number of searches, rather than number of people searching for a phrase.

Why would random end users be searching twitter for 'sleep.fm'? Especially since there weren't all that many results (Until this story came out).
Sorry if it felt a bit vapid. I actually thought of writing it when I heard the interview on political diaries, and felt it matched very well with what I found was interesting for startup and business blogs as well.

I had been procrastinating writing about our "launch experience" on hn from Sunday because of coding to account for all the feedback we received. I tend to write in a very sanitary, evasive, and long-winded manner. The interview just jumped out at me with the "four i's". Out of those, I thought three were really relevant to startups/business blogs.

Thanks for your feedback.
If that is true, that might be why he is divesting. I really don't think his investments are unethical, as long as they are always disclosed.

But his investments might slightly affect his objectivity, and get his credibility attacked. And since they are not success, there is no reason he should keep them.
Hmmm... This is also the name of a (fairly old) regional search engine - www.aardvark.co.za.

Looks nice.
More ideas, less stuff
Can you do it better? Can you make money at it? Yes? Ok, go ahead. Dissing a project because it's not novel is the "originality sin".

Anyway, people who do original things usually don't realize it until afterward. It's that weird thing they did because they had to. You might just surprise yourself.
Implementing a scalable Twitter is the "Hello World" application of Redis: http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/TwitterAlikeExample

(here "Hello World" does not mean the simplest, but the one that is non obvious and exploits many important features to understand the system).
But on the other hand the author seems to be accomplished in the financial field. From his site:

"He quit school at 17 and started his first own business in the financial field, publishing analysis on the financial markets and managing funds, until he sold his business at the age of 23.
[...]
He was also active in the field of software development, is the originator of many inventions, and holds international patents ranging from climbing equipment and bicycle gears to trading systems and electronic payment systems."
Excellent article and blog from a programmer entrepreneur whose been there.

Some other points he makes include -

- Startups should be optimized to learn [product and customer are being discovered]

- Sales metrics are a good thing [start small with $5/day search engine marketing, iterate until this yields results ]

- Bite off small chunks of development [and release them, as they often are a distinct usable feature]
He programmed in machine language...
Then remove the misleading URL stub entirely.
Switching from Windows to Mac - One Year Later
Or you could simply use lots of RAM?
Labels: whatever the future of music is, it isn't "free"
Sure, there's always a point at which it's profitable for criminals to take my stuff. The idea is to make sure I have enough protection or enough consequence-generation to offset the potential profit. I'm just saying that the vast majority of current pirates are poorly armed, and thus it's not hard to make piracy unprofitable on the level of an individual vessel or platform. It's not a permanent solution, but as that and other solutions become available, the totality is a long-term solution.
I think the point of the article is they needs a lot of persistent storage. you'd have to constantly write that RAM back to disk, and then you've either bottlenecked again or have to come up with some queue system where you drop so many changes because of the disk bottleneck.
This is a clean solution that does really change how you think you can interact with persistent storage. All those little reads and writes without the performance hit.
> how long it takes to process incorporation and tax paperwork. That is not the hard part.

Try it here in Italy and then say that. Sadly, that sort of thing does matter, when it really shouldn't. We all have different ideas about how much, if any, taxes people should pay, but it's really stupid to make people pay through the nose before they've even managed to start anything, let alone made any money at it.
> "predicting a self aware system like the stock market"

Please elaborate on why you think the stock market is self-aware!
Almost any point of theirs could be countered with don't use their product.

The one I saw that couldn't was caching web pages and if you don't want your website to be cached maybe you shouldn't have a website or take measures to ensure it isn't. I mean really how much harm has google done compared to all the new things they introduce people to?
Better Golf Through Physics
Can you give an example of something that intellectuals believe based on faith?
He saw the movie Pi.
I'm glad that Michael Arrington is a firm believer in fair play and egalitarianism:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/02/back-i-am/

When my time was up to leave, I asked Potts if I could stay another week. He said something about being fully booked, but I offered to pay more than his usual rate and said I’d plug Surfboard House on TechCrunch (consider that a disclosure). He had (and still has) no idea what TechCrunch is, but the dollars did the trick. Schedules were juggled, I stayed.
"...as more and more ads are placed on our site"

Maybe I'm jaded into believing there really is no such thing as "objective reporting" anymore, seems everyone has a conflict of interest or 3 these days.
I'm 22 years old and you hit the nail on the head about why I want to go into business for myself eventually. When I was growing up I was constantly told that starting your own business was too risky, that a stable job with a big company is the most secure way to go.

And then for the last 10 years I've seen my father move from job to job, fear for his employment constantly, and right now is batting down the hatches because his PHB-dominated company is going through another round of restructuring because they can't build a product if their lives depended on it. Yay.

I look at this and wonder how secure a "real job" really is, and given how little security there is in a job these days, is there a good reason to take one?
What a bunch of fluff. Criteria such as "ease of doing business" are so subjective they are essentially meaningless. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics as well as the US Small Business Administration, entrepreneurship has been trending downwards for years:

http://tinyurl.com/dyh6hs

I knew this from another article I read awhile ago, and went even further into debunking this myth, but could not find the link. But it does appear that the Economist article lacks substance.
Who cares? Tons of people make and spread Apple rumors. It's not going to have a significant effect.

I wrote about a different aspect of the interview if you're interested. http://blog.vezquex.com/2009/03/jon-stewart-is-wrong-about-m...
But the existence of the stub indicates an external link instead of a job posting, AskYC, or poll.
I think that it is also worth noting that there is no free, independent implementation of LabVIEW. Being dependent on a vendor is not ideal, but hey, it's life.

Anyway, there are some tasks that lend themselves much better to imperative constructs. (imho) I wish it had a scripting language embedded. LuaVIEW serves that purpose, but it is not widespread. It is not good to send people my VIs and ask them to install some 3rd party component to be able to run them.
it's jim cramer....
New Facebook design: Thoughts?
So I see we get a new facebook design (yes, yes I know - but it is handy for my ex-Uni friends).

It worries me that Facebook initially led the way in interface design and now have done this? Is it just me or is this an example of poor UI design. I've been studying/reading on this subject recently and it strikes me their failing on some crucial aspects.

Thoughts (purely the homepage here):

- somehow they have managed to compress the center part of the page. Every item seems twice as tall now

- The notifications on the left have been removed and replaced with ads and a "compressed" stream of media (which is really hard to read/skim/view).

- You have to use buttons now to filter the content, not a bad idea but some things now dont seem to appear by default - so you have to click = not easy.

Every tweak strikes me as adding more clicks and more complexity.

Any more thoughts from a technical viewpoint (this is HN :)). Am I being too picky & thinking into the desing too deply? Or am in on the right track: have they messed things up?
frankly I think him having the ability to disclose his investments actually was beneficial for him. He was able to plug his sites a lot more times. i.e. any time he covered a competitor
I sort of wonder if things won't swing back towards 'stable jobs' a bit. I don't think a lot of people want to run around taking all the risk on themselves... it's pretty stressful and can be quite distracting. I could see a company doing well by really being a good place to work that takes care of its own.
Physicists get closer to finding the 'God Particle'
Do the high scores not work? Or did no-one else finish a game?
given how little security there is in a job these days, is there a good reason to take one?

Yeah, you get an automatic paycheck. Entrepreneurs can go months or years without making any money at all.
He links to SEM on $5/day (http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/09/sem-on-fiv...)

In that post, he mentions bidding directly against searches for competitor products. If the competitor has trademarked the terms, is it legal to use them as keywords? I've heard of companies receiving "cease and desist" orders for such behavior.