Hacker News Reader

_gd3lon What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

- No standardized tests (except one) - Individualized grading by teachers - Less homework and days of school - More emphasis on creative play - etc.

No, I don't think "equality" is the main thing we Anericans are overlooking. We're overlooking freedom. Trust in people and children to be curious and learn, and let them be free enough to do it. So many of the big bureaucracies put in place here in the US to "help" education just legislate the shit out of schools and regulate everything. Yikes.

_gd3lon Ask HN: Best blogging platform?

A huge thing people forget with WordPress is that most .org-powered sites are on shared hosting. Simple little bugs make it easy to hack an average WP site, but just setting things up right can solve a ton of issues. I'd recommend the digwp.com security recommendations. The book has better info but is pricey.

_gd3lon Ask HN: Did you learn a language this year?

Wouldn't consider it a new language, but after all the back-and-forth articles on HN about CoffeeScript, this year I really spent some time learning the fundamentals of it.

Mostly though, I just drastically extended my capability with the languages I already know.

_gd3lon Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not?

The core idea of the free exchange of money is that people only spend it when the result will benefit them. If a business is focused on profits, its decisions from day one are focused and creating something other people will exchange their "profits" (their money) for.

(Paraphrasing, with [ ] comments added by me:) On day one, a bootstrapped company [inherently one looking for profits because there's no other way to stay alive] needs to make money; on day one, a funded company needs to spend money.

- Jason Fried

_gd3lon Old, but gold - "Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry's vs. Amazon"

This is a classic look at fragility versus optimization, much like what Nassim Taleb writes about.

A lot of his charts to demonstrate this concept (that the more "optimized" something becomes, the more fragile it becomes) look like the ones from this article. For example: http://bit.ly/sKM7B0

I'll try to find more images. Taleb's writing looks at this general concept in great detail across almost everything; in the context of business, basically what Joel says is right on the money. Great article.

By the way, I think I'd prefer running a small biz to an Amazon or Wal Mart. You?

_gd3lon Time to end the war on drugs

> How is drug usage a "medical" problem?

Because it's the ingestion of mind-altering substances to achieve a certain goal. Most often this goal is inebriation for entertainment purposes, some times (especially in indigenous cultures) it's a spiritual goal.

> It's a personal choice.

Sure, many times it is. But I think more often than you'd realize it's less of a choice and more of a predisposition. I mean, if some people are born with allergies or giant feet or different colored eyes, would it be too crazy to assume that some people are more easily addicted to drugs?

> Most addicts aren't born addicted and they make the choice to pick up that first joint.

Just real quick, I think you mean joint as in marijuana joint. Marijuana is completely non-addictive physically, in any circumstance. Nor does it kill brain cells, etc. These are remnants of the hilarious Reefer Madness nonsense that the US unfortunately took part in.

> I don't want to make it easier to be a drug addict in this country. [...]

Then make drugs further decriminalized. Marijuana, for example, is not a gateway drug. Drug dealers are gateway drugs. Every drug dealer that I know, except one, doesn't just deal pot. They've got cocaine, saliva, mushrooms, ecstasy, et cetera et cetera. So instead of being able to just go to a safe environment and get some harmless little green stuff, many drug laws force benign drug-users to be around shady, scummy people with lots of other shady, scummy drugs on them.

> [...] Especially at my expense.

See the above comment, and recognize that your hard-earned tax dollars are being brilliantly spent on DEA sweeps of Marijuana dispensaries in California, for example; countless arrests are made and resources used over completely benign drugs. Massive, massive wars are being waged around the world that suck money into them faster than a black hole. I'm not a socialist myself and would agree that Person A having Person B take money from Person C to pay for his/her decisions is almost laughably dumb; but there are far, FAR more money-sucking endeavors in the US than drug addiction care/treatment. I'd take a socialistic addiction treatment plan over 3 million+ Dept. of Defense employees (that we know about), 216,000 "Department of Homeland Security" employees, massive military expenditures, and who-knows-how-many-millions of dollars spent annually "fighting" marijuana and other drugs.

Just my two cents. Sorry for the long post guys.

_gd3lon Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect

The Jekyll recommendation is a great one. For quick one-off articles something like pen.io is great, as well. And GitHub Pages are just fantastic if you didn't know already :)

In my experience, MediaTemple handles traffic spikes remarkably well. Maybe not ideal for the super-techies, but running WordPress on it with a caching plugin handles traffic pretty well at the $20 / month plan. And using S3 to serve static sites is fantastic. I'm on my phone right now so it's a pain to find the specific article, but Kyle Shank uses S3 and wrote a pretty handy article at http://kyleshank.com. Check it out and try to find the article. Great read.

_gd3lon What I like about 960.gs in some simple SASS [gist]

Those are just random markup class names I'm using to demonstrate how to use the system. Any variables are in the SASS file and start with $

The demo SASS in the second half of the file is all you need, on my opinion. This is literally the entire grid system and meant for people familiar with 960.gs already

_gd3lon Poll: Did you start company in 2011?

Yes, I cofounded a little Wordpress theme business launching soon. Happy holidays!

_gd3lon Thanks HN for the Christmas colors and Merry Christmas to you, too

Merry Christmas, Hanukkah (or however you spell it), Kwanzaa, Festivus, and the New Year!

_gd3lon What I like about 960.gs in some simple SASS [gist]

This is not everything from the 960 Grid System, but it's the stuff I use most. A lot of the other SASS grids I've seen are just too complicated for my personal taste.

This math and setup is simple and small enough that, (with comments removed), I can just plug it into the top of my main SASS file and start styling. I don't need to have a whole separate `grid.sass` file, have tons of `.pull` or `.push` or `.suffix` or typography stuff, or deal with god-awfully-ugly and hard-to-maintain HTML classnames.

Much of the same code from the 16-col 960gs is generated. The 960 css file is here for comparison: https://github.com/nathansmith/960-Grid-System/blob/master/c...

Feedback appreciated.

_gd3lon Why Science is Failing Us

Science isn't failing us. Big bureaucracies getting in the way of science are failing us. Even just to experiment with semi-controlled drugs, for example, is a massive headache and ungodly expensive. Everybody wants to get into journals and paid by government institutes, so a lot of science being done is very safe and not venturing out to the controversial as much. Studies are being funded by corporations looking to get some cooked data to support their bullshit.

Science has never failed us, as science is inherently just human curiosity. The continuing structural growth and big bureaucratic developments that many governments, schools, and businesses are implementing are failing us.

"Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible." - Javier Pascual

Science can't fail. It only illuminates. But a lot of shady assholes run this place, and the last thing they want is a light shone on them.

_gd3lon Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

Thanks, I'm trying to find the original clip on my computer. Lotta Carlin audio in my iTunes...

_gd3lon Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

"I don't complain about politicians because everyone does. This politician sucks, that politician is a fucking idiot. Yeah, we'll guess what asshole? YOU KEEP VOTING FOR THESE MORONS! You keep arguing about democrat vs. republican, you keep asking for things from the government, you keep on voting for the people you complain about. You legitimize the bullshit. This is what you get for wanting to be led like little children."

- George Carlin

I have this from an .mp3 I got from some weird torrent, but I haven't been able to find it on YouTube or on iTunes. I'll try to get it up on the web if I can...

_gd3lon Sleep Deficit: The Performance Killer

The fact that sleep is not really valued in the "start up" community is a disgusting reflection of stupid people. SLEEP MORE.

A great resource is a book called `Lights Out! Sleep, Sugar, and Survival` by T.S. Wiley. They book eventually gets into some controversial territory without much data to support the claims, but the first half or so is largely about sleep and invaluable. There's a ton of references for the sleep section.

Tl;dr - get the book I mention and sleep. Human sleep cycles change with the seasons and you shouldn't be up too much outside the realm of daylight if possible.

_gd3lon Don't Outsource

This article seems more like simply "don't be a fucking idiot".

And judging china, India, etc. is unfair. I once worked with a guy in Toronto, Canada, maybe 4 hours away from my home in New York. He ended up stealing $3,000 from me and there was nothing I could do.

So "don't outsource" isn't necessarily a good message in my opinion. A better one would be "try to avoid working with random people you've never met or heard anything about".

_gd3lon RFC: Blanking all Wikipedia as SOPA protest

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

SOPA is evil. We need to do everything we can to fight it. Wikipedia is one of a handful of sites who have the power to really make a difference.

I suggest that not Wikipedia, but blogs, community sites, even your business sites all have at least some temporary display against SOPA.

I only get ~15 visitors to my site per day.

That's still something to work with.

We must all support a temporary Wikipedia white out. Those who are opposed are blind and need to understand SOPA.

_gd3lon Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe

I'm not enough of a developer to integrate completely with stripe, but we've been making the change to Dwolla.

Anything is better than PayPal. I appreciate their contributions to epayment, but their time has passed.

Other great options out there include Square, MoneyBookers, and Dwolla (if anyone is looking to leave PayPal after this article and the recent Regretsy one).

_gd3lon Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.

Jesus Christ. Can we stop all this "PHP Sucks" nonsense? We get it, a language like ruby is better for you. And hell, there's not much of an argument against how PHP looks; Ruby and Python, to me, look much much nicer.

But complaints about its technological capability are completely false. It's super easy and simple to learn, and even a HTMl/CSS guy like me is able to build pretty powerful, dynamic websites and simple apps with WordPress and (gasp!) PHP.

Before you start shitting on PHP, realize that a) you're arguing over a programming language lol b) it's been around for a long time and thus has a huge community, good documentation, lots of books and resources, and comes preinstalled on a lot of servers, etc, c) great applications like MailChimp, Wikipedia, Digg, and FaceBook use PHP extensively d) the learning curve is low e) yeah, it is ugly. But its easiness to learn got me into quasi-programming with WordPress, and since seeing .rb files I've begun to get curious about ruby. But the basic programming knowledge is there from PHP experience and facilitates learning other languages.

Sorry, it's just frustrating to see people making fun of a language and criticizing the people who work with it.

_gd3lon Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.

See, I still disagree. Working with WordPress has been nothing but (relatively) easy for me, even when making relatively complex plugins.

No one is arguing that WordPress is better, necessarily, than a custom build. But reality trumps theory. Theoretically a perfect diet may be out there, but if you can't afford it and won't adhere to it, for example, a less-theoretically-perfect diet that you can afford and can actually follow is better.

A lot of times I or my client can't afford a developer for a custom app. WordPress solves that problem, and I think it's only getting better, simpler, and more stable with time (as all open-source projects kinda do).

_gd3lon With 750K Paid Users, Evernote Brings In $18 Million A Year

Anybody else confused as to why "tripling his employee count" is a goal of Libin's? Not being snarky, just don't get why you'd want more chefs in the kitchen (unless they're building a few new apps or something)

_gd3lon Ask HN: How Many Startups Failed?

Ouch that sucks. Care to share more about the startup itself? What was it? Was it VC funded? How was the founding team composed?

_gd3lon Ask HN: How Many Startups Failed?

Yeah, I was talking about ones that went out of business.

And it is a fair observation. However, I wouldn't consider something "not growing" as a failure. Why does it have to grow? It might not be what you want it to be, but then it's only a failure to you and not an objectively failed business...

...an objectively failed biz simply is one that's not in business anymore. Thanks for the input though, interesting story about both businesses.

_gd3lon Ask HN: How Many Startups Failed?

In this context, failure means you weren't able to keep the business running.

_gd3lon Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.

Just as an example, it is better to make an app like BaseCamp or Campfire with Ruby on Rails than WordPress. But I can learn enough in a matter of weeks to make something like the P2 Theme (http://www.p2theme.com) with WordPress; god knows how long it'd take me to go from completely zero programming knowledge to the level required to build the same thing in RoR

_gd3lon Wordless: stop writing Wordpress themes like it's 1998.

It's not a horribly ugly theming system.

I'm mainly an HTML and CSS guy, and know a healthy amount of PHP.

But I don't know enough to set up a server, databases, write a CMS from scratch (well, maybe I could), and I don't like spending a lot of time in the Terminal. I'm not a programmer.

Even as a designer, I'm able to use WordPress' powerful theming system (which is pretty easy to understand and, in my opinion, not ugly at all) to build out an entire easy-to-use site for a client without having to also hire a developer. The WordPress community is massive and helpful, PHP is well-documented and simple to work with if you know HTML, and you can literally use WordPress to make almost anything on the web. Maybe it would be better theoretically to hire a developer or learn to be one, but I don't like hardcore programming and sometimes just don't need a developer that I have to pay for, wait for, etc.

WordPress, in a way, makes the ability to make simple web apps, dynamic sites, and blogs a more democratic thing; many people can pick enough WP knowledge in a few weeks to do things that would take months or years of programming training.

_gd3lon Basecamp Next

Basecamp could theoretically be less interesting than a Segway. But a Segway won't help me run a freelance biz with a guy 4,500 miles away.

Utility is far more valuable in many ways than entertainment.

Can't wait for the new updates

_gd3lon JQuery Shutters Plugin Site

Although WordPress' repo uses SVN (I prefer Git), it runs really smoothly. Something like that would be great for jQuery, but you wouldn't need the whole update feature set.

_gd3lon If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come You're Not Rich?

And "business acumen" has nothing to do with good decision making.

_gd3lon "What I Miss About Counterstrike" - Blog authored by CSS legend JonMumm

"When you pursue something difficult, eventually you have to make a choice between being balanced, normal, and conventional, and being different, weird, and exceptional. I chose the latter."

Wow. You are not a normal writer. More writing needs to come from the heart like this. I don't even care about video games and loved this article.