DanielN

Unit test ( as already mentioned) and build up static json/xml/whatever files to run your code against so that you can integration test your stuff without integration testing the 3rd party stuff.

This hopefully one of many future congratulations to the Zapier team. Great job guys!

I'm curious why you suggest avoiding ORMs. I've been debating this for a while and while I like the accessibility and abstraction that ORMs provide in Django and Rails I'm not familiar enough with Doctrine, DB_DataObject or the other PHP options to really have formed my own opinions yet.

Is this a language specific suggestion or something broader? I would love to hear a deeper debate on the subject.

The problem of "low innovation" in relation to the internet seems to be a problem of infrastructure.

Building Google lead to building Google maps which is now leading to building a self driving car which is a problem that when/if it is solved will save millions of lives and billions of dollars.

Not a perfect example, but it is an instance of not being albe to solve important problems without the necessary infrastructure.

opps, fixed.

Thanks

a lot more information here https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/SplitSettings

I typically use this set up:

- settings.py contains global settings that aren't effected by deployment level.

- at the bottom of that file you have

      try:
          from settings_local import *
      except:
          pass

- in settings_local.py you have your deployment level dependent settings

- then just git ignore settings_local.py

Please have an espn3 api, please have an espn3 api, please have an espn3 api...

well darn!

I've had this feeling before and I've worked with people who express this feeling. My question is, what is the alternative to having this feeling.

You want to show that you are now knowledgable of better methods and you would like the criticizer to recognize that your mistakes are not ones that you are still making. Furthermore, you can't really blame the criticizer, they're just trying to help you become a better programmer.

It seems all you can really do is give the sheepish grin and say "yeah, well, that was written at a very foolish time in my life..."

How would you streamline the shipping process?

It would seem that the next wave of movement to web services will be SAAS services that address larger business side services like shipping and piece-meal manufacturing, but I'm not sure how that is going to be done.

/thread-highjacking.

So it would seem that the outrage of the author is misplaced. The emphasis is put on the fact that the sites are being cloned, but that is not where the value lies. The value is in gaining traction in international markets. This practice seems perfectly legitimate to me. The straw man in this article is developed from the belief that the raw value of a startup comes only from the software.

To be clear, from what I could tell nothing described in this article is honest to goodness slave labor.

I'm sure you can get decent traction from adwords in this market, but I would think that you could do wonders with seo here. The number of blogs you could write and forums you could comment on have got to be nearly endless.

A few small things:

- you seem to have some crazy js loading on the facebook auth page. In chrome/mac it resized my window to fill my screen length wise. I would recommend going with facebook's default auth popup. Then again maybe you are and their js was just acting goofy.

- the image resources on the autocomplete for your location suggestions do not load.

- the video explanation after you sign up could be more clear. Maybe have some steps to go through in order to "complete" my signup process like making my first recommendation and planning a trip.

- when I create a trip and select that "me myself and I" are going on the trip (ie. I am going alone) the trip shows that two people are going on the trip.

- A lot of the encouraged interaction on the site seems passive. I suspect people are going to be good about setting up their own trips but lazy about making recommendations for other people's trips. Whether it's gamification or something more you should find some way to encourage or even force people to interact.

I'm not convinced that they want to backpedal at this point. They get the sponsored content and users that they wanted (or whatever it was the changes were that upset everyone). And frankly, the content is a lot better now than I ever remember it being.

Nice site. One thing I came across:

Your code validation checks for necessity without checking for sufficiency. In other words while

    "hello world"

will be accepted. So will something like

    "hello world""

Also, when I attempted to deploy some 'malicious' code it didn't deploy (great), but it would be nice to get some message as to why my deploy failed.

Small things but something worth accounting for since the goal of the site seems to be making taking that first step as pain free as possible.

God, why are physical product startups so terrible. I understand it's the nature of the beast. But still, it's been at least 25 years since the advent of carrier shipping and the proliferation of make-piece manufacturing throughout Asia.

I suspect there is a billion dollars in it for someone with supply chain experience who wants to make the Amazon of manufacturing.

I like that conceit in the abstract, but I don't think this site even passes that. Does is display a significant talent in that there are many pictures from many sources with all the same theme?

Doesn't this site just display an ascetically interesting element that is easily replicable.

That isn't to say it isn't nice to look at, but is it more than that from the perspective of HN? How does this differ from any other artistic tumbler blog.

(This is not meant as a dig against the creator of this site. Only a question of this sites relevance in regard to HN. After all it is friday, maybe I should just get over it...)

So, I flagged this post as not relevant to HN, and normally that would be the only action I would take. But I'm kind of curious as to why this is being up-voted so much.

Is there some element of this site that is legitimately within the purview of links appropriate for HN (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)?

It is getting enough votes that I am curious if there is some deeper element that I'm missing other than just the ascetic interest of it.

Excellent. Does a great job of clarifying.

This is pretty cool. Unfortunately it's coupled with some of the more obnoxious documentation I have seen recently. While the docs aren't very long, I had to read through a third of it to figure out simply what Spark is.

I'm all for being cute, but it shouldn't come at the cost of a basic understanding of what the program actually does and is useful for.

I would argue that it is not being squandered and that slowly but surely it is disrupting.

http://www.khanacademy.org/video/npr-story-on-ka-los-altos-p...

I would simply say that if you've gone through w3schools tutorial then you know enough to just work on your project and use http://stackoverflow.com and http://php.net .

I found that one of the biggest hurdles for going from a complete beginner - just learning the basic elements of programming - to an intermediate beginner - starting to be able to figure things out for yourself - is figuring out how to get answers to your questions online.

Knowing enough syntax and nomenclature to phrase your questions to google is no easy feat when you're first starting out. My main suggestion, other than "just try", would be to start reading PHP related questions on Stack Overflow.

If you know what loops are, you know what an if statement is, and you know most of the basic request and response arrays built into PHP (see w3schools) then you're ready to build.

I would agree with your assessment. But it's not just Apple that's making life difficult for HP.

Simply put (and this has been happening for four or five years now) Assus Acer and Lenovo are eating HP's lunch on the low end and Apple is eating their lunch on the high end. All the while they are playing second fiddle to Dell ( and to an increasing extent to Assus) in between.

Additionally HP would need to play serious catch up to Apple, HTC, and in the international market Lenovo (maybe even Motorola although I don't know how that is going to work post acquisition) in mobil. And as Dell has learned, playing catch up in mobil requires throwing a lot of money down the drain without a guarantee for positive returns. (This last part about Dell is just my perception. For all I know Dell's margins on mobil have been stellar, but I don't think that's the case)

I understand the market's reaction to HP's pivote, although I think a lot of it is panic and hedging bets and some bad timing on HP's part, but that is what markets are suppose to do. I don't so much understand the tech industry's reaction to the move.

The idea that class size is a key leading to higher student success rate is a misnomer. Studies over the past 15 years have consistently indicated that class size has little (sometimes even converse) relation to student success rate.

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956184/school-founder-says-... , http://www.pioneerinstitute.org/pdf/010326_stergios.pdf

A lot of the top performing countries in education have extrodinarily high average class sizes. Taiwan has 44, South Korea has 49. http://www.arthurhu.com/index/classize.htm .

Although you aren't entirely off base, in Taiwan many math and science based classes can be 150 students or more, which I'm sure pulls the median.

Chinese government is dominated by engineers for the same reason that US government is dominated by lawyers, Japanese government is dominated by businessmen and French government is dominated by doctors and teachers. These are the most easily accessible prestige positions in the given country.

My guess is you will get some emails directly from this post, but I would also recommend you check you HN office hours ( http://hnofficehours.com/ ) it's basically what you're asking for but for the exchange part.

I'm sorry guys I must be missing something here. I figure that this video and transcript must have some deeper meaning than what I'm grokking from it as it is currently the top story with a whopping ~500 points.

To my knowledge, cultural hierarchy is very standard within pretty much all companies regardless of size. Not everyone gets a company car, their own office, the same health benefits, or if you are privileged enough to work at a company that provides them, the same gourmet lunch as has been stated elsewhere in these comments. Furthermore, the existence of sub-hierarchy (contract and temporary) workers is very common in larger companies. To my understanding, these temp and contract workers usually enjoy few if any benefits provided by the company as they are rarely actually employed by the company they are working for but rather an agency.

In addition to this, it is pretty standard procedure to ban all unauthorized taping on company campuses. If anything, to my uninformed mind the fact that an employee got as far as actually taking unauthorized video footage is if anything a credit to Google's openness (or whatever you want to call it).

So, I guess my question is: Where is the interesting aspect of this? Is the popularity of this really just due to the "divulging" that Google employs workers that aren't provided the same benefits as some of its other workers? Is it the existence of a "class system" in Google to show worker's authority/hierarchy level? If it is one of these reasons, there must be something else I'm missing as without having seen this story I would have just assumed that these things existed at Google.

I ask this as a sincere question as obviously this has gained the attention of a large portion of this community which I hold as very intelligent. I am driven to assume that whatever it is that is engaging about this story is simply going over my head.

I apologize for that. This is pretty far from my area of expertice. I guess a more appropriate titled would be "more efficient than a traditional combustion engine".

Either way thanks for improving my understanding of the system.

After viewing this video I logged into Khan academy to check out the practice tracking features highlighted in the video. Mainly I wanted to see the categorical branching of subjects that they showed.

Its a pretty amazing idea and execution. From one basic subject, addition, they expand and branch out all the way down to basic calculus. It would be really amazing if they continued expanding this out to the point where all subjects where mapped out, even the less mathematical ones. Just to see the path from addition to trigonometry is a pretty good refresher of what the mechanics of the trig functions actually entail. Imagine seeing the path from addition to linear algebra.

More to the point, imagine a world in which a student uses this system throughout their educational career. I can't even fathom the difference that that level of tracking and relational mapping between ideas would have on a students understanding of material and motivation to tackle new subjects.

I think you may be confusing viral marketing for a pyramid scheme. Given, pyramid schemes are a form of viral marketing, but exponential growth through sharing is necessary without being sufficient.

In this case it works out fine for both parties. I signed up because I was interested in beta testing and socialcam gets to choose their potential beta testers by how social they are.

For what it's worth the system may not be very effective yet. I have one referral and I've moved from #4000 to #600