Hacker News Reader

Fair enough, but you can also have a schemaless store by using JSON fields in PostgreSQL or MySQL.

goldmabon 'You Are Not So Smart': Why We Can't Tell Good Wine From Bad

Can somebody find the actual text of the Brochet studies? I've seen them referred to several times, but without citations.

goldmabon First employee of startup? You are probably getting screwed

There's a mistake in the math: one year of a salary cut is given as the amount invested. Why one year?

goldmabon Are you a Facebook employee?

That's cute but it's not accurate. I interviewed there over two years ago and I appear to be blacklisted, since whenever I look at any of their job descriptions I get this:

"Hey, we have reviewed your application and unfortunately don't have an opening for you."

I can't really square that with "Maybe soon?"

goldmabon Why We Do Pushups

"Meathead" is just a stupid thing to call someone. It's a stereotype that requires no mental effort, and it makes you feel superior.

goldmabon Why doesn't every company buy developers the best hardware?

I feel the same way. I have a Dell Inspiron that cost me something like $500 two years ago, and I have no problem doing Python development on it with vim. If I had a compile step I might feel differently.

goldmabon 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

Seriously? Everyone here agrees that unemployment is so high because of technology? Nobody remembers that the financial system nearly collapsed three years ago?

goldmabon Brubeck: A new Python web framework running on mongrel2

I don't understand what you're saying. What do you mean by "nested function calls," and how is that antithetical to both lists and callbacks? In what way is WSGI anti-callback?

goldmabon The Problem With Silicon Valley Is Itself

That would be true if your investing structure were the only variable. I think Aloisius is talking about the YC culture. You have said that the idea doesn't matter nearly as much as the personalities of the founders. The implication is that founders are laborers with special skills who can produce a valuable commodity: start-ups.

goldmabon Facebook trapped in MySQL fate worse than death

Summary: The creator of VoltDB thinks MySQL is hopelessly slow. No other sources are cited.

goldmabon Wizards of bullshit: How Forbes turned $6.5 million into $20 billion

I think some of you are misunderstanding the idea DHH is advocating. This is just part of 37signals' campaign to recognize profit as the primary measure of business success, as opposed to valuation.

It's more of a common sense understanding of business, and it involves less hand waving. Pretend you know nothing about stock markets. How do you become rich from running a business? Simple: take in a lot more money than you spend. If you don't do that, any secondary estimates of your "wealth" are in danger of collapsing.

goldmabon How to Make Text Look Interesting: Minimalist Web Design

Make that two: Verdana. Both designed by Matthew Carter. You may remember him from the hit film, Helvetica.

goldmabon Hammocks Make Sleep Easier, Deeper

I guess it would be pointless for me to rant about why you should enjoy some piece of writing that you hate. I'll just say that the essay isn't about cruise ships so much as it's about loneliness and depression.

goldmabon Hammocks Make Sleep Easier, Deeper

Really misleading headline. The study wasn't about hammocks at all, just a normal bed that sways. Makes me think more of being on a boat. I haven't experienced the effect, but David Foster Wallace wrote about it: http://www.harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1996-01...

(Not going to give the page number of the sleep thing because I believe everyone should read the whole thing :)

goldmabon Skip lists in Python

A skip list written in Python is itself an optimization. You could simply use a sorted list with the bisect module.

goldmabon Does design really matter for startups?

Well put. And I forgot to mention: thanks for the article! I especially like your definition of "feel", distinct from "look".

goldmabon Does design really matter for startups?

What you call eye candy, I call trendiness. To take the closest example: Attack Of Design looks lovely, but that background noisy pixel look is very 2010/2011.

goldmabon Does design really matter for startups?

Hacker News or Stack Overflow are good examples of very successful sites that have horrible visual design.

Does anyone else actually like the visual design of HN? Besides the endless horizontal text problem, it's very easy to read, and there are no distractingly bad UI elements. Good minimalism, to me.

goldmabon Ask HN: What (enterprise-level) platform should I invest in?

1. I don't see how this is better than using a system that already has a mature language and libraries. Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, et al have that. Yes, Node is catching up very quickly. But how is catching up better than being ahead?

2. This is a restatement of the first reason.

3. How do you know that popular technologies right now are going to decline? Java was popular ten years ago, and it's still popular. Python was not popular ten years ago, and now it is. I don't expect either to decline in the next ten years. Node, on the other hand, could very well stop growing, or even recede.

4. Why would you require Node experience? A good web developer should be able to pick it up quickly. That allows you to work with the same general talent pool as if you were hiring for Rails or whatever.

5. This is a restatement of reasons one and two.

goldmabon Ask HN: What (enterprise-level) platform should I invest in?

A lot of smart people find themselves asking this very question, and they choose a lot of different answers :)

Anyway, I vote for something in Python with SQLAlchemy and either Werkzeug (maybe Flask, if it suits you) or CherryPy. Pyramid might also be good, but I haven't used it much. I tend to avoid Django because the ORM just isn't as good as SQLAlchemy, and the template language isn't as good as Jinja.

Not sure why everyone is suggesting the standard enterprisey platforms Java and .NET. You control the server environment completely, right? Go with a dynamic language for development speed, then. The big ones for the web are Ruby, Python, and PHP. Of those: PHP is a mess of a language with no big advantages; Ruby and Python are both great languages with all the libraries you need (probably :), but I give Python the edge because things in the Python world tend to have much better documentation.

goldmabon Advice From An Old Programmer

Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier, you could actually just go run a fast food joint.

Zed appears to be saying that he isn't happy as a professional programmer. Some people really enjoy it.

goldmabon Ask HN: I call myself a "computer programmer", how about you?

If the term has any connotation, I think it's more an emphasis on best practices, especially things that help programmers work together: version control, continuous integration, bug tracking, API documentation, etc.

goldmabon Ask HN: I call myself a "computer programmer", how about you?

I asked some non-programmers about this recently and they all said that "software engineer" sounds professional and they know what it means. "Computer programmer" sounds very old fashioned to them.

If anyone thinks that I work in "IT" after I tell them I'm a software engineer, I stop talking to them.

goldmabon Show HN: My embedded DSL for HTML in Python

I made this for some personal projects of mine, since I like using Python itself to do my HTML templating. I haven't tested it in very many situations, so there are a probably few bugs still.

goldmabon College is a waste of time

The author is 19 years old, so I'm guessing he dropped out pretty early. I don't think he was actually in college long enough to even know that it was a waste of time for him.

I loved college, especially a lot of the stuff that happened well after I turned 19. I feel really lucky that college forced me to learn so much stuff. Otherwise my mind would have gotten stuck in a narrower path.

goldmabon Python's Functional Training Wheels

Reduce got banished to functools, but map and filter are still around. So people can process collections using the lispy style if they like. I just hope they realize that it's only a difference in style.

goldmabon Python's Functional Training Wheels

I disagree with map/filter/reduce being "key" in Python. I've been writing Python for a long time and I never use them. Comprehensions are more pythonic than map+filter, and reduce just doesn't come up. Here's Guido explaining why he wanted to move all three functions out of builtins in Python 3:

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196

goldmabon Our superficial scholars

"We interview the best graduates of U.S. universities..."

The best at what?

goldmabon Mongrel2 and Tir Now On Github

GitHub is just really well designed. I prefer Mercurial, but I use GitHub because they are so far ahead of everyone else.

goldmabon [dead]

I have a Civic Si, and I would say it's a good compromise of many things. It's more powerful than a base Civic, but I still get 35 mpg highway. It's small, but it's roomy inside and it has a big trunk. It has also been very reliable, as they tend to be.

Maybe get another one.

Also consider: Miata. Because they are the most fun.