skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rs.40,000 per person per month is way more than good enough. Surely, we are not talking Infosys salaries here. If cheapness is a predictor of success at all, these guys have no hope. Unless they are starting hardware or biotech companies.
I'm a little suprised by your reply - I haven't seen an entrepreneur say "We don't really want a founders visa" either.

We've seen several threads on news.ycombinator on the need for a "founder's visa" and immigration reform. The current H1 visa system is cearly busted. If there is going to be a new office set up for early-stage entrepreneurs, this is certainly one of the important tasks at hand for the federal office.
There is some content there, for sure. I used gotapi instead of api.rubyonrails.org most of the time (they have other stuff there too, of course, which is handy). I have since switched to just looking stuff up in the source because I'm pretty familiar with it.
Microsoft is still going to make a fist full of money licensing the software that will have to run on the end customers production server. The $999 is only for development license.
There's pretty near unanimous support among people who care about the issue at all. Startups that have immigration problems mostly would like such an option. And to those that don't, what difference would it make if another few thousand (mostly smart) immigrants were allowed to come to the US?
Maybe, but only if it was taught in sequence with a high level course. From my experience, you need both. While it is incredibly useful to learn about the low level stuff, you want be able to hold on to students as easily if it takes you a week to teach them how to do "Hello, World." Just going off how my knowledge has gone, I would say a sequence of High Level OO language->Low level language-> High Level Language-> Functional Language, although that is more of a college level course sequence, not for high school courses.
With users like this who needs competitors? It's a bit unreasonable to complain about a company branding a service they own.
The problem is, it can be very hard to fit in a button that is used once and rarely again in applications that don't have settings. Or, for that matter, it can sometimes be hard to fit in a button for a commonly used/requested feature.
It's certainly an interesting approach! Depending on the volume, it could have the benefits you described - but it may get a bit old when the volumes increase.

I'd engineer the crawler to talk to a persistent message queue, and load the database from there. That gives you a lot of flexibility to move loads around, instrument the queue and you're not reinventing things, either.
So, sometimes you write something and it comes off exactly the way you didn't intend to. Like I said, I think the talk does a better job making the point than the post; maybe it's just really hard to make this point in a distilled way.

I think you and I pretty much agree:

1. I think indie developers take security too seriously; they're trying to fit themselves in a culture that's led by banks and investment firms. I think they should pay less attention to people like us.

2. I think all developers can learn enough to help themselves when it comes to securing the products, especially if they avoid well-known complicated problems. Custom password storage systems will make you 0 extra dollars; use bcrypt and spend the energy on HTML canvas illustration code, or a more clever backend. Every complicated security problem has 10+ well-known implementations you can and should steal.

3. Like it or not, everyone is doing the outreach thing wrong, and everyone can be fuzzing their web apps tomorrow. Note that by recommending that people fuzz their apps, we're arguing against our own best interests. We're saying, "a key thing people pay us to do, you can DIY."

Having "Matasano libraries" to do password storage or crypto seems a lot more smug than telling people to use bcrypt or GPG.
Everything you say makes sense to me.

...Except that last part. If a job pops up and a client wants .NET, I would strongly encourage them against it. Why? Well like you said, you don't want to be locked in. Why would you be ok with locking in the client? If that client's site gets bigger and they need another box or what-have-you -- oops, that's another X thousand dollars for another license, etc. That sort of thing would not be ok with me.

Of course, I'm not a freelancer, so maybe my take on client-is-always-right will vary wildly from yours :)
I'm not sure I've ever seen an app that doesn't have a settings pane either in the global settings area or within the app.

I agree that adding in a landscape toggle is not going to be an option for everyone, there isn't much real-estate to play with on the iPhone.
It can be a good deal.

Personally, I use both MS and FOSS products extensively. I am a huge fan of Python and it is my primary scripting language, but my main career is as an MS SQL Server DBA, and I think that for many applications (not all) it compares quite favorably with mysql and oracle.
If anything, there should be attention and pressure brought on these companies for their abhorrent practices during crunch time and worse post-crunch ("oh you just gave up months of your life to line our pockets - here's your pink slip. We'll call if we're hiring again").
All of these types of arguments are at the wrong level of abstraction.

I've found that what makes the best programmer is not if they are a "duct tape" programmer or a "architecture astronaut" or whatever, but self awareness. They can call a hack a hack, and understand it's impact. They know when and how architecture can be improved, and when it should be improved. They can take criticism of their work because odds are, the criticism is something they already had an understanding of and can justify, or if not, they are willing to see where there was a gap in their thinking. They have a plan, and can forge a system ahead in a general direction of progress without getting bogged down in the details or taking one step forward and two steps back. You get the idea.

Nobody is talking about this, arguments generally deteriorate where someone sets up a false dichotomy and then the internet collectively rips them apart. But they get ripped apart because of the falseness of the dichotomy, not because of the fact that they are looking at the wrong things altogether.
I like option 3 the best. For the "apps that are built with landscape in mind", do they only have one setting, or do they have both, but somehow work "better" in landscape? I've seen at least one of the former, but that one defaults to landscape no matter how it's oriented, so it doesn't seem like it really asks the OS for what orientation to use.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 104 - Guru, Guy, and My BIG-IP
"However, the higher level languages abstract away the core of computer science."

OK, but what is "the core of computer science"? Is it CPUs based on the von Neumann architecture, or is it symbolic manipulation?
I'll get back to you in a few months. Building a project right now based on MongoDB.

I can't resist giving you an anecdote, though:

can anyone here vouch for a simple "plug and play" kv store that actually works as advertised, at scale, and ideally is distributed so I can just add nodes as needed

Yes, MongoDB :) With the caveat that the sharding support is alpha at the moment, database-level sharding is ready right now. Timeline is agressive in getting this solid, too.

I've been looking at and waiting for the right document-oriented database for over a year now (almost 2, it seems) and I settled on Mongo after lots of experimentation.
i didn't appreciate it to it's fullest at the time, but when i reread SICP and it seemed like a review, i was grateful for that semester.

even though i program python on a daily basis now, this is saddening.
Long comment threads get an ever-increasing reply timeout to help prevent flames.
So in order to find out who's behind a (Gmail) email address, all I have to do is send an email and then claim that I didn't want to send it to that person.
The top-ranked comment on the most recent HN thread on Founders Visas argues against them:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=815457

Eyeballing the whole thread, it looks like support ran 50/50. Note that, for instance, arguing for a "more Canadian-style immigration policy" is not the same thing as supporting the Founders Visa proposal. We are allowed to believe simultaneously that H1-B is busted and the Founders Visa is a bad idea.

Wait, no, here's a more recent thread about Founders Visas. It's got 89 votes. The top comment opposes founders visas:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832363

It refers to the HN thread on Graham's original post about Founders Visas. 196 votes on that post. Again, the top comment opposes the Visa:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556908
Apple says to do it that way.

Options are hell.

You shouldn't read in bed anyways, it is poor sleep hygiene
Written for HN: The Robe of Entrepreneurship, a Short Story
Exactly. Do you write tests for your tests?

In one TDD shop I worked in, test failures were often as not due to bugs in the test code as in the app code.
I'm with bokonist on this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556908

Particularly this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557298

bokonist's comments on this thread were incredibly good. I get the sense that I'm nowhere near him on the political spectrum, but I couldn't stop reading what he had to say about this and found him very persuasive.
You need a curriculum, no doubt, I'm with you 100%.

I think it's especially important to teach different paradigms. I've noticed for myself, that functional languages "gel" better for me than do object oriented languages. That doesn't seem to be the norm afaik, but I wish I would have been exposed to functional languages earlier in life.
Heh.

I must admit that there are many potential financial disasters that could still hit which would make last year seem minor. I have no clue how the fed plans to unwind the what, half trillion in commercial ARM loans that are under water and set to reset in the next year or two. Obama is incredibly dependent on the Chinese willingness to continue borrowing from the USA. We have a lot of work to do to get debt levels back to reasonable amounts. And I'm not at all sure that the disaster was enough to really scare people into becoming fiscally responsible.

However for the moment people seem convinced that the sky is not falling. There are signs of economic recovery out there. There is even a chance that when the official statistics are done we'll be no longer in a recession. So even if a bigger crisis hit, there would be a good cause to call it a second crisis rather than a continuation of the one last year.

And there would be historical precedent for that. Our current problems come from an asset bubble that was pumped up from attempts to stimulate the monetary supply to head off deflation after the dot com collapse. But people don't think of the recent financial crisis as a continuation of the dot com collapse, despite the connection.
Simplicity often follows good design.

Duct taping seems to be at odds with simplicity. Joel's advice to just duct tape it would lead to crappy, unmaintainable code just as often as over-design would.
thanks for backing me up. yeah i often feel un-PC when I say anything bad about unit tests. (Like saying, gee, maybe there are differences between races, or between cultures, or between genders -- Cats, what you say?!?!)

and agreed, there are situations where like you said it's embarrassingly appropriate to have tests. To me the classic case is where you are publishing a code library with thousands of real users across the internet, with real apps built against it already, themselves already in production, etc. It's probably downright stupid of the maintainer to not have a suite of automated tests they can execute, and must pass, before every release, to ensure no regressions. So the maintainers can catch them, and resolve them, before it makes apps break downstream.

But the whole 'you must write tests always, before any application code' thing strikes me as insane and masochistic. :)
I hate the epithet "architecture astronauts." It smacks of anti-intellectualism. We wouldn't say the same thing about actual architects: we would never deride Frank Gehry for building the http://www.guggenheim.org/bilbao saying, "wow what a waste of time, why didn't he just duct tape it... he would have finished sooner!" Physical architecture is about function as well as form; the Bilbao Guggenheim is not just a work of art, it's a highly functional building. Software architecture is similar in that better designs are more functional, more easily understood, and more easily maintained.

Not everyone is Frank Gehry, but working architects can learn from him just as we working programmers can learn from Bob Martin.
First HIV Vaccine
Safari fix: You'll find that Safari Mobile will never rotate so that it is fully upside down. So, tilt your mobile to the desired landscape mode, then tilt the phone upside down (so that the home button is up and the ear piece is down).

Tada: landscape bed reading mode!

(I'm still on OS2, but I expect this to be the same in 3.)
Everyone fails to mention now much more advanced and nicer developing in VS is compared to any other platform. It's worth the money for a copy if you're a serious developer looking to use .NET, it's worth it even more now that there is little initial overhead.

No, I don't work exclusively in .NET, I work in a variety of platforms, but now I have yet another service to offer clients and potential clients that is cost effective.

Does everyone think that no matter what you're automatically locked into having only one stack to work from? Why not use whatever is ideal for the job at hand?

EDIT: Also, you don't have to hate on Microsoft anymore, that's very 2003, instead of focusing on what is the negative, let's instead consider the positive moves they've made, and the quality development environment they've come up with.
Accident may be the wrong word, but he author doesn't give a better one. Why is English the language of commerce, or the dollar so popular? If it's not an accident of history, then what's the right word?

Most scientific advancement is not on time and on schedule though; it's a conflux of the right people standing next to the right problem. Gutenberg's press would have been almost worthless without cheap rag for making cheaper paper, which was available through another accident of history. I'm sure Gutenberg didn't know that movable type would lead to mass media and the protestant reformation. It's all accidents.
There are things, like crypto, where I think it's an actively bad thing for you to try to learn enough to implement them properly. I feel OK about pentesting apps that try to use well-understood crypto. I do not feel OK about implementing apps that try to use well-understood crypto. Crypto is radioactive.

Other things, like user-controlled templating or DOM injection plugins, are so fraught with implementation errors that I think you're better off avoiding the features, or at least using well-known open source implementations.

In no place do i want to argue that you should be paying to get this stuff done. The thesis behind everything we're talking about today is "here's what you do when you have no money to spend on this stuff --- and if you're a non-financial startup, you shouldn't be spending money on this stuff in any case".
Seeds of fascism, my friends.

Let me guess... after I receive funding from GovCo venture fund, they get to strong arm my company with infinite stipulations and rules about diversity, salary caps, mandatory participation in government sponsored community service, or whatever the vote-buying scheme du jour is.
Most corporate email travels via Exchange with Rich Text, so the 80 character limit doesn't apply. That's just what "normal users" use; rightfully so.

For us hackers: When sending plain text messages, you should encase urls in <angle_brackets> to prevent breaking and especially the trailing period problem like <www.google.com>.
This is basically taxing the citizens to pay for the expenses of a private company. High time someone defines how and how not a Government can use/abuse tax payer's money.
Heh, that's a good question. I was thinking in the context of von Neumann arch, but it's a good argument that it's symbolic manipulation. In that case, any language will do... but the best programmers I know almost intrinsically know the von Neumann architecture and they're C programmers too :)
Holy crap: 110,000,000 undetected landmines out there! I had no idea that was a problem.

Such an unnecessary problem!
I completely agree! Though, maybe orientation toggling could be disabled on a system level. Double clicking the home button could bring up a dialog box allowing you to turn it off easily.
I would guess a map showing a dot for every 25k people would look very similar.
37signals valuation tops $100 billion after bold VC investment (press release)
if only there were some document which explicitly lays out the responsibilities of the federal government.

darn those short-sighted founding fathers!
does it actually work?

Someone has to step forward and try it. You did that with tokyo and noticed it doesn't. Report your bug and after it's fixed it will work better for the next person to try.

can anyone here vouch for a simple "plug and play" kv store that actually works as advertised

It doesn't exist. For the simple reason that most K/V stores are under 2 years old and haven't gotten enough real world exposure to work all the corner cases out.

If you want rock-solid then you're looking at the wrong market. Use PostgreSQL. It's not optimized for that use-case, but it's as chuck-norris as you'd expect after 20 years of development and production vetting. It won't segfault under load, it won't corrupt the datastore and it won't plot sawtooths while plowing through a large index.

And at the end of the day a K/V store is a table with two columns, right?
DropBox grows like weed. Reaches 2 million users.
AS does have a calculator, but it's not very fancy.
Contingent.
Borism,

I was thinking more the moderators were tired of running through flamey threads that amounted to "VC is the only way to build a REAL company" "Nah man, VC's suck! Bootstrap 4 eva!"
I would say that I have plenty anecdotal evidence, but I prefer baseless speculation.

Anecdotal evidence is that a small (probably less than 10) prolific European investors like the Skype founders, Fon's Martin Varzavski et al have done a fantastic job promoting entrepreneurship Europe wide.

My baseless speculation is that they have probably done considerably more in the past 10 years than the last 20 years worth of EU and state sponsored 'enterprise programs' and my guess is for a fraction of the money spent on setting up all the 1000s of enterprise agencies, regional enterprise centers etc sprinkled throughout Europe.

US state and local governments are also filled with these local business development agencies and startup one stop shops. I just haven't spent any time looking at them, so yes I can only speculate that all of them together have had less positive effect on the world than one Paul Graham.

Of course since Obama unlike all the governments of Europe always surrounds himself with the smartest people in the world, this is sure to be different. This time government will finally come through for us and help us out.
It's the sandals.
If you use an embedded lisp such as ECL or PLT Scheme, you can take advantage of whatever graphics facilities the host offers, and code in lisp with a "live" repl.

This project might get you started:

http://createuniverses.blogspot.com/2009/09/qtimagine-skelet...
It's true that if the government implemented such a program, they'd probably do a bad job. But they couldn't do worse than they're doing now, which is to turn people away at the borders.

If the strongest argument you can make against a proposed government policy is one that you could make against any government policy, then it's pretty good, as proposals for government policies go.

I agree that by default the government does things badly, and that the government ought therefore to do as little as possible. But immigration policy is an area where they're already acting, and going to continue to act. So it's reasonable to propose ways to act more intelligently.
hacks are fine as long as they're localized

That's the difference between a duct tape programmer and a genius duct tape programmer. The genius has a huge brain that envelopes the entire program. To the genius, everything is local. The non-genius duct tape programmer can't comprehend the entire program, so he just blindly hacks on local problems. When you can't comprehend the whole system at once, you have to use abstraction and good design to ensure that your locally good parts will interact to create a good whole. Compare this quote from Charles Simonyi:

Right now, I have to really concentrate and I might even get a headache just trying to imagine something clearly and distinctly with twenty or thirty components. When I was young, I could imagine a castle with twenty rooms with each room having ten different objects in it. I would have no problem. I can't do that anymore. Now I think more in terms of earlier experiences. I see a network of inchoate clouds, instead of the picture-postcard clearness. But I do write better programs.
Holy crap. That's about 5000 new users per day.
The bank has a duty to inform their customers that their identity may have been compromised.
There's pretty near unanimous support among people who care about the issue at all.

pg, this is absolutely false. Maybe you haven't been reading all of the recent HN threads on this issue, but the highest-rated comments tend to oppose founder's visas.

what difference would it make if another few thousand (mostly smart) immigrants were allowed to come to the US?

Multiple people have pointed out that a founder's visa program would have larger ramifications, and you've replied to at least one of them so you must have seen answers to this question.
I'm not entirely sure that the craft of programming has a great deal to do with the core of computer science.

A programmer develops software for the hardware of today, so good programmers had better be well acquainted with von Neumann’s architecture.

Theoretical computer science doesn’t need that architecture. It also needs mathematicians more than programmers, I think.
bokonist even concedes that your proposal could be beneficial in the short term. It's what it does in the medium-long term that concerns him. So, I think the Founders Visa is bad policy. You asked, there's my response.

That aside, I'm with sachinag. This issue is a red herring. If we want to foster startups in the US, we should start by addressing barriers that face US citizens:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832480
Oh please - I thought it was just me.. I have to turn in such a way, I get told off for shining the screen in her eys.. disable it, and I will have a better life!
I just watched the talk you gave. Really impressive presentation. You three definitely have a good dynamic up there.

I have a question on passwords. For authentication bcrypt and a one way hash is great, but is there any reversible encryption that you would use to store passwords(not for clients more for personal use with throwaway passwords on a per site basis)? Is 256bit twofish using CFB secure enough for your tastes in the short term(5 years) storage of passwords?
I'd like to see them use this forum.
That was more or less what I was trying to get across: unless you know it, don't do it.