danieldon

    Is the problem that they're sitting there in a city 
    without any other Internet industry

orbitz, groupon, careerbuilder, peapod, everyblock, skinnycorp, grubhub, the onion, ars technica, to name a few

Search is practically necessary for using the web. Social networking websites are neither necessary for using the web nor for socializing.

My first web app had authorization. I didn't even go to school for CS.

Simply put, they focused too much on trendy tools and libraries like MongoDB and CarrierWave and neglected the basics.

I'm in my 30s. My social group is mainly urban and mobile. It certainly seemed that vast majority of people around my age were on MySpace, and I say this as someone who never actually joined it with a real account. Incidentally, the same people who used MySpace heavily are the ones whose posts fill up my Facebook wall. In fact, most of those people were also on friendster.

Well, my mom already quit facebook.

Also, I have a relatively large family, many of whom are on Facebook. A year ago they were trying to use Facebook for family notices and communication. These days they've gone back to email. Everyone has email, but not everyone is on Facebook, not even among those who have already joined at one point.

As long as you can only do facebooking via Facebook, there will be people who aren't connected to it.

It's interesting to see people on HN downvoting some for being responsible with information while upvoting those who advocate irresponsible disclosure.

Well, there's at least one glaring security issue that should be obvious to any Rails developer.

In my experience, those systems are in dire need of replacement, anyway.

That's not what it's dependent on. IE6 will be supported until 2014. Even with Explorer's glacial release cycle that will be about 5 newer releases than IE6, 4 for the still supported IE7 and so on.

It's not just IE6, it's IE7 and IE8.

Some people like to use explicit self to differentiate methods from local variables. Also, there are consistency issues. Explicit self is required for attribute writers and implicit self can call private methods on parent classes. Personally, I'm not a big fan of implicit self.

It's pretty universally acknowledged, even among PHP developers, that the language is a mess. There are reasons to use it despite this, but don't try to pretend it's something it isn't.

No. If your differentiating feature is a principle, then you can't ignore that principle.

Today, DVCS is essentially the foundation of developer social networks, both formally (github, bitbucket) and informally. How are you going to make a supposedly decentralized open source social network when the foundation isn't decentralized? Mom doesn't care right now whether a social network is decentralized and open source, developers do.

I didn't downvote you, bmelton.

    it also seems like a much more performant idea

Why is performance important to you? Presumably to make it cheaper to run, in which case I suggest you weigh the costs of coding and maintaining multiple dbs against the cost of that extra join. Note that the multiple db approach is already costing you since you are still trying to get it to work while you could already gave the single db approach in place relatively painlessly.

I strongly and completely disagree. For a supposed next-generation, distributed open source application, language and version control choices are important. There are arguably valid reasons for using PHP, none of which you provided in either of your comments, but there is no excuse for using SVN. SVN has its place, and that place isn't in a project like this.

We know and so what?

Not only is it in a language that many hackers dislike, but it's a supposedly decentralized social app in a centralized (and, in this context, archaic) SVN repo.

Immoral? No. A bit tasteless and silly, though.

Really, if your goal (what you call a "win") is to get rich, go into finance. It's far easier to get rich in finance than entrepreneurship. Hell, your whole career path is even planned out for you.

Sure, you can go into entrepreneurship simply with the goal of getting rich, but it's a bit of a silly plan considering how difficult it is to build successful businesses. If you are into entrepreneurship in order to try build something useful and, as a side effect, make some money, then that's a sensible plan.

Big surprise: it's a Python app. Yet more proof that the Python web development community is filled to the brim with trolls. Stuff like this is why I completely stopped contributing to open source Python projects after nearly 10 years.

stop, stop, play

The 1 DB/customer approach is usually a bad idea. Strict data security requirements are one of the only situations this approach makes sense compared to the traditional single DB approaches or individual installs.

    it's the ability to serve business customers who are 
    willing to pay for heavy customizations and the extra
    support those entail

You'd need to have flags in the app itself, which would likely turn into an unmaintainable monstrosity. If you have a handful of large clients, are heavily customizing the app for each one, are using a modern framework like Django or Rails and a DVCS, the obvious maintainable approach is to have full individual installs, forks for each install and a modular application that pushes the customizations into pluggable components as much as possible.

Be very careful with stratfor. I was a subscriber back before and during the Iraq War, and as the war progressed it was clear that their information, as in-depth as it sounds, mostly reveals itself as BS in the long run. One example relavant to your comment was that they were among the worst at pushing obviously and flagrantly false WMD stories even many months into the war. But that's just the start; their seemingly detailed and insightful articles were ultimately wrong about just about every little detail they contained. It became perfectly clear that their sources came from the same ranks as the mainstream media's (the US military and a variety of polically motivated officials), the sources were just more obscure and lower level. Stratfor might have done a 180 in the past couple years, but I highly, highly doubt it.

Don't hold your breath. Apple has forever only released one model of each product at a time, with usually no more than 3 different options of slightly different specs. And it's not like this is the first time that a model has problems; long-time Apple users know to avoid the first revision of any redesign because of issues like this.

no. they use scala for some of their services, like message queues.

    this isn't targeted at bloggers

Except for the part where they actually already have famously targeted at least one blogger.

It seems utterly bizarre that posters here apparently belive that the AP's copyright stance is no big deal. The last time I checked, the AP still considered using headlines to be a copyright violation and the only reason they weren't going after sites like Hacker News is because they haven't yet figured out how to deal with PR fallout they experienced last year when (simultaneous with other controversies surrounding their legal attacks on sites) their board actually voted to go after news aggregators. Do note, they have already sued at least 2 news aggregators.

We are talking about the Push Button Reset feature and resintalling operating systems, not defragging a drive.

    he only discusses controversial ideas

Seriously? Zed Shaw loves to rant about people. Ranting about people brought him into this tiny, niche internet spotlight in the first place. And have you even looked at http://oppugn.us/? Apparently not.

    it is only available to Windows 7 Professional, 
    Enterprise, and Ultimate editions

That's sounds like a business issue, not a technology limitation, unless there are costs associated with it that make it impossible for them to offer it across all of the many versions.

    It also suffers from the overhead limitations of VMs

OS X was in a similar situation, twice: first with the OS 9 classic environment then with Rosetta for PPC-compiled apps. Performance with each was less than ideal, but that's what was needed to move on.