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Determining Site Valuation (Bankaholic = $15M?) | noodle: afaik, in the case of bankaholic, it wasn't about primarily about obtaining the readership or revenue model, it was more about obtaining the quality content.i could be wrong, though. |
Determining Site Valuation (Bankaholic = $15M?) | alaskamiller: He was able to generate highly-valued sales leads from his audience. |
Does anyone WANT to build client software anymore? | vlad: I've written a shareware app with a good GUI. I am not interested in working on it or any desktop app. Xobni is the only YC company I've heard of where the primary product or solution is a desktop app, so I think YCombinator also prefers web based apps.By the way, I've always wondered--is there a feature in you... |
Does anyone WANT to build client software anymore? | shimi: I'll try throw something in the mix, there is a matter of fashion. Back in the 90's C++ win32/MFC development was the highly regraded, I guess I should note that VB6.0 was very in demand as well, The technology and the market trends have changes so also the developers.I for one don't like to write web applicatio... |
Does anyone WANT to build client software anymore? | DanielBMarkham: Sure.It's just another marketing/sales numbers-based decision. If I had an app that targeted MS Office apps, for instance, I wouldn't have a bit of a problem writing it on the client.I'd take it a step further. If I had an app that took a minute to load the first time over the web, I'd seriously conside... |
Does anyone WANT to build client software anymore? | pm: Writing clients is fun; writing cross-platform clients even moreso. Each platform has its own design philosophy, and I find it engaging learning each platform's intricacies, and coming to understand the psychology behind each platform's demographic.I believe the greatest measure of an application is the user's pro... |
Determining Site Valuation (Bankaholic = $15M?) | mg1313: 8,000/day doesn't seem high but I bet they were very targeted and had a good conversion rate (especially that Bankaholic was on Google's top searches for certain terms).Now, if they bring also more people to work at Bankaholic then the site could do even better. |
Does anyone WANT to build client software anymore? | thorax: I actually really like building client software. And web software. And services. And agents/bots. And scripting engines.Yes, those people exist, it's just not trendy to write lower-level OS-specific software these days. Maybe it never will be again. |
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information | noodle: 1) i don't believe that the act of storing the information in plaintext is illegal, but it could contribute to negligence suits if you mess up.2) 2- or 3-TDES (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_DES) encryption; fully secure & restrict access to whatever database you use and whatever system holds the database;... |
Does anyone WANT to build client software anymore? | zach: My advice: hire a sharp game programmer, specifically one who has worked on tools and has 1-5 years in the game industry. The pay is not that great for game programmers in that range of experience, so they can handle a startup salary. And they are typically enthusiastic and experienced in the right areas you wa... |
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information | kogir: All the major card companies banded together and formed a standards group:https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_...Once you reach a certain volume of transactions you are required to comply. Doing so now is probably not feasible if you're small, but you can still take the spirit of the sta... |
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information | olefoo: If you are processing credit card payments you are supposed to adhere to the PCI-DSS standards which do include encrypting Cardholder Data goto https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/Get the self-assessment questionnaire and work through it.Encrypting columns, rows or tables in your database is trivial, pgcrypto ... |
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information | oldgregg: Credit card storage is scary. I was working with a company that had 20k credit cards stolen. Visa never called, nobody was notified, nobody ever found out. Only a small handful of customers who had just placed orders even suspected who it was. We actually tried to notify the merchant and credit card companies... |
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information | vaksel: Our cc processor has a vault for storing cc info, so this stuff is never on our servers, so we don't need to comply with anything. Check with your cc processor they might offer a service like that too. |
Does anyone WANT to build client software anymore? | dgabriel: Just out of curiosity, what do you see as "the YC hacker mold"? |
Does anyone WANT to build client software anymore? | Shorel: I was looking for a job a couple of years ago, doing precisely that, in wxWidgets. And everybody seemed to hate C++ and love Java and related 'new' languages.Right now, I'm working full time doing PHP and I want to keep the job stability even with that slow language, so sorry, too late. |
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information | jcapote: Simple. Don't. |
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information | there: you are definitely not supposed to be storing cvv numbers, in plaintext or otherwise. according to pci, you're not supposed to be storing or processing credit card numbers on the same machine (or even network, i believe) as your public web server.if you are not sure how to handle this stuff, please, for the sak... |
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information | umangjaipuria: Like everyone else is saying, don't. It's a lot of responsibility and that's not your main business anyway.
How about using something like Amazon FPS instead? |
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information | jonknee: Don't. Use a gateway that can do this for you. Authorize.net does this pretty easily. The API is called Customer Information Manager and you can store not only CC, but billing info. Makes it easy to do lots of advanced stuff (it's a good option for recurring billing when you want lots of control).http://www.au... |
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information | agotterer: I'm a developer for a large e-commerce site. We require users to input their credit card for each purchase (no save functionality). We store the credit card for the duration of the transaction. Which is usually a few seconds. The time it takes to do run an AUTH ONLY. During these few seconds cards are stored... |
Does anyone WANT to build client software anymore? | nickb: Try doing few usability studies with client-side software (I'm really talking Windows apps) and you'll see how much pushback you'll get. Consumers just hate installing apps. They absolutely loathe it. Everyone seems to be afraid of viruses and software. Now, this can be overcome to a degree if you're a huge comp... |
How to build a twitter/irc/real-time app | collint: I would also look at RabbitMQ as the messaging service and the STOMP protocol to talk to everybody.As far as getting messages down to the browser.Use http://orbited.orgIt gives you a simulated TCP socket called WebSocket(soon to be standard in HTML5)http://js.io has some work on many common network protocols i... |
ASK HN: Best practices for storing Credit Card information | multifarious: As everyone else has said, this is not a good situation. You don't want the overhead and risk of providing software security let along physical security for the storage of personal information unless your business model depends on shaving the fractions of a percent that it may save you in processing.In a... |
How to build a twitter/irc/real-time app | aaronblohowiak: don't forget that the radius of one user is not the radius of another user. so, you and knuth are both near me, but knuth isn't near you. so when i respond to you in the "channel", should he see the updates? now, if you want to have me join and leave channels based on my proximity to a fixed location, ... |
How to build a twitter/irc/real-time app | sjs382: You just pretty much described brightkite. |
How to build a twitter/irc/real-time app | silencio: Whatever you do, don't forget about privacy features. One of my friends used to work on an app called Twinkle for iPhone (http://tapulous.com/twinkle/)...it's a twitter client with their own custom location feature so you can get all the nearby tweets (using their backend, because Twitter doesn't support it y... |
How to build a twitter/irc/real-time app | guruz: Funny, Geocasting in XMPP was (roughly) the subject in my diploma thesis :) |
How to build a twitter/irc/real-time app | Tichy: I recommend programming a MMORPG as an exercise first. Sorry, couldn't resist ;-)Actually the idea sounds OK, if you stick to it, you could make it. |
How to build a twitter/irc/real-time app | lhorie: You could just grab the chat demo from jetty |
Good python code for code reading | jnoller: I would definitely recommend sync'ing the python subversion tree and picking a few modules and reading through them. Doing so taught me some of the less obvious things within the language, and also taught me a lot about the various dunder (__foo__) methods for objects.Additionally, I'd recommend reading throug... |
Good python code for code reading | pogos: BitTorrent
http://download.bittorrent.com/dl/ |
How to build a twitter/irc/real-time app | Prrometheus: I've long thought something like this would be awesome to help people meet people in coffee shops/neighborhoods/apartment buildings etc. Don't just think people want local area communication on mobile phones, though!I call this class of apps "local social applications". |
Good python code for code reading | llimllib: pybloxsom is a nice project to hack on; you can read and understand the whole of the code in a day, and it illustrates the "request handler with filters" design pattern very nicely. http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/ |
Good python code for code reading | alecco: For performance and algorithms the implementations at
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/python.php
and pay attention to the different benchmarks.Also all RPython code coming from pypy, sometimes shown in
http://morepypy.blogspot.com/They are reimplementing all the C modules and doing a great job. The new ... |
Good python code for code reading | stuartcw: I enjoyed reading the code from "Hacking RSS and Atom" by
Leslie M. Orchard (ISBN: 978-0-7645-9758-9). There's a lot more to it than just RSS related code and if you read the book you get the explanation too. |
Good python code for code reading | icey: It's an essay that contains code, but this is one of my all time favorites:Peter Norvig writes a spelling corrector in 21 lines of Python:
http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html |
Good python code for code reading | intellectronica: The Zope3 codebase. |
Good python code for code reading | olefoo: Mailman http://list.org/Things you should be looking at are queues and error handling in an asynchronous message passing architecture.Also you'll learn that not every web application needs an SQL database for persistence. |
Good python code for code reading | kilowatt: I learned quite a bit from web.py (http://github.com/webpy/webpy/tree/master). It's small enough to be fun to poke through, but has more than enough "advanced" Python tricks to be worth your while. |
What's a good startup PBX system? | RobGR: Firstly, think about if you really need to do this. Will a single line to a telephone that has an ansering machine suffice ? How much of a "professional" image to have to give to telephone callers at this point in time ? Fancy phone systems are one part of the "playing office" trap, where by people get fascin... |
Good python code for code reading | nirs: twisted is very clean and readable. |
Good python code for code reading | pistoriusp: I've always found Django to be a very clean code base. |
Good python code for code reading | mamama: The Cookbook (Amazon it, I'm too sleepy to link) contains examples of idiomatic code that you should use. |
Good python code for code reading | bayareaguy: Python ships with plenty of good python code. Just take your time and read through the Lib directory of your standard python distribution.http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib |
Best Financial Advice Posts? | jakewolf: billcara.com |
Where do you turn for graphics/design work? | brm: Here is a good place, I'd need specifics but I'm a UI guy and looking for people to work with, hit up the email in my profile... |
Best Financial Advice Posts? | raju: There's "How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283983There was some discussion on investment books too -
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248469 |
Where do you turn for graphics/design work? | aaronblohowiak: this looks cool: http://collabfinder.com/usually, i find people through mutual professional experience. |
Best Financial Advice Posts? | brentr: Benjamin Graham and David Dodd's Security Analysis is not exactly on getting rich in the sense of the two works presented in the above question, but it is certainly a book on returning to the basics in the markets, which is exactly what needs to happen now. |
Where do you turn for graphics/design work? | dmpayton: I met my designer in 7th grade P.E. class. We were both into Pokemon at the time, and hit it off.Almost 10 years later, he's my go-to guy for anything and everything design related.http://www.artificestudios.com/ |
Where do you turn for graphics/design work? | ashishk: What's your budget? Would help to know.I know a two people in the $50-80 per hr range that are pretty solid. I know another one that's more expensive.Shoot me an email. |
Where do you turn for graphics/design work? | Flemlord: I've sucessfully used 99designs.com a few times and it's worked out great each time. With each new design need, I go back to the designers that won our prior contests. |
Where do you turn for graphics/design work? | vaksel: digital point forums has some decent people. I used them at first, but now I use 99designs since you get a lot more choices |
Where do you turn for graphics/design work? | lylia: My portfolio and some past work:http://www.rosefu.net
http://www.retributionclan.com
http://www.gameurb.com
http://www.rotary.org |
Where do you turn for graphics/design work? | mjnaus: Photoshop CS3 |
What type of companies will thrive in this environment? | alaskamiller: A bean cannery. |
What type of companies will thrive in this environment? | noodle: well, just as an example, ebay is struggling. they deserve to be toppled, and someone doing things right can topple them.especially in this market, where people are probably looking to hock their stuff. |
Where do you turn for graphics/design work? | kennyroo: I used elance.com to find a map designer for Planaroo.com. Prices were all over the map (excuse the pun), but I chose one of the more experienced and more expensive designers and was very happy with the results. I have no connection to elance. |
Where do you turn for graphics/design work? | sachinag: http://www.crowdspring.com - better than 99designs because they give you legal agreements that are enforceable. Oh, and there's no $40 posting fee. Crowdspring (I refuse to do their moronic capitalization) takes their money on the back-end, so unless you get 25+ submissions, you can walk and pay nothing. |
Where do you turn for graphics/design work? | josefresco: I'm a web designer, startup founder and Hacker News ...uh addict.Drop me an email and I can probably help you out. |
What type of companies will thrive in this environment? | ashishk: Google saw increases in revenue despite the shrinking economy (although this was before the recent events of the past few weeks). The explanation was that more consumers were going online to shop in order to save some money.I think businesses that by function, cut costs and increase ROI will do well. Just tryi... |
Update from Midphase hosting status thread | mechanical_fish: Excellent news! Hope you are happier in your new home. |
Update from Midphase hosting status thread | vaksel: Congrats, your host is one of the most important decisions you'll make. And slicehost is one of the better options, frankly I never heard of midphase |
Good C (not C++) code for reading/learning? | silentbicycle: The source for Lua is pretty good (if a little dense at times), and you can read it in-browser: http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/There's a suggested roadmap for reading it, too: http://www.reddit.com/comments/63hth/ask_reddit_which_oss_co...It is written in ruthlessly standard ANSI C (for maximum portabilit... |
Update from Midphase hosting status thread | tdavis: Let this be a lesson to everyone: the time you invest in finding a web host is critical. I went through 3 VPS and 2 Dedicated hosts before finally finding and going with Softlayer and boy oh boy was it worth the time and effort, not to mention the anger I caused other companies by calling them incompetent and i... |
Good C (not C++) code for reading/learning? | SwellJoe: SQLite is always recommended in threads like this (of which, I will point out, there have been several here and at reddit...you might like to search for them). I haven't looked at it since very early releases, but I'm guessing quality has gotten better over time, since it is more stable than ever and faster ... |
Who do you use for stock market data? | nickb: I used IB for few years. Recommend them highly. Not sure how much they charge these days. They're very flexible, have a great API and their transactional costs are cheap. You can get more info here: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/ |
Who do you use for stock market data? | nose: http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=CSCO&f=... |
Who do you use for stock market data? | jack_alexander: I use Cottonelle...After all, the market is in the toilet. (Forgive me, I see a need for humor here.) |
On scalability and memory footprint | ezmobius: Yes there is a big advantage to keeping your memory consumption low with ruby apps. Ruby's garbage collector is not the best and has to walk all the objects in the process when it GC's. The more memory your process uses the longer and more often GC will happen. This will degrade performance the more memory yo... |
On scalability and memory footprint | ashleyw: 1) Build your app how you would normally build it (obviously dont expect to put massive objects into memory for every request — just dont worry about the small things)2) Go back and refactor the things that really stick out as bulky3) Deploy4) Continue your release cycles and refactor stuff as you come across ... |
Good C (not C++) code for reading/learning? | rmk: How about the Linux Kernel?
- Well-documented.
- Always good to know.
- Good, well-organised code.
- Real-life C code. |
Who do you use for stock market data? | mstefff: you'll need to spend much more per month for raw streaming market data |
Who do you use for stock market data? | furiouslol: try quotemedia, esignal etc. |
Good C (not C++) code for reading/learning? | RobGR: This is probably more than you are looking for, but the fftw code ( www.fftw.org ) is a pretty amazingly designed piece of C code that does some very advanced stuff. However, if you trying to get off to a good start, you might want simplistic examples.One thing I think helps you become a better programmer, is t... |
On scalability and memory footprint | furiouslol: Here is my experience. I used Rails for one project of mine that requires processing of millions of data rows. Because the Rails ORM create an object for each data row, we end up using a lot of memory. We had to get a 2GB memory server to hold up the project. Even after we avoided the ORM (which removes the... |
On scalability and memory footprint | wheels: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." -Donald KnuthThat said, watch your 'n's. If you scale linearly, you can keep throwing servers at the problem. If you end up with some critical piece of your code that's, say, quadratic in ru... |
Who do you use for stock market data? | known: http://www.elitetrader.com/ |
On scalability and memory footprint | iamelgringo: Your bottleneck in a web app is almost always the database. In some cases, it's not. So, it depends.If, like furiouslol, you're trying to access a 2-3 million row table and Active Record is topping out at 2GB of RAM and taking close to 1 second on a production machine just to render a page, then yes, yo... |
ASK HN: Master degree in CS - USA or Sweden? | cinkler: It depends where are you from. |
ASK HN: Master degree in CS - USA or Sweden? | tuukkah: Your question is not specific: Which school are you about to graduate from? Which school do you plan to attend in Sweden or USA? What have you done this far and what do you plan to do next? What do you strive for in your life?At least, you should read http://paulgraham.com/cities.html |
Who do you use for stock market data? | TweedHeads: Not techcrunch for sure! |
Who do you use for stock market data? | lowkey: For real-time streaming API a low cost option is IQFeed.net which charges about $67/month for Nasdaq, AMEX, and NYSE + $50 setup. The data feed source is ComStock and the only API available is through Windows COM (yeah, I know)To offer real-time to the public you will need to set up agreements with each of the ... |
Who do you use for stock market data? | alecco: With so many trading companies going bust I bet the price will go down soon. |
Who do you use for stock market data? | Shamiq: TD Ameritrade (http://www.tdameritrade.com/tradingtools/partnertools/api_de...) has an API, though I can't say I've used it myself.Also, do you mind giving us a general idea of what you want to do? Hinting at a project without sketching out an outline is cruel. |
On scalability and memory footprint | tdavis: "Memory usage" is pretty vague. If you're just talking about writing poor code that naturally requires more memory to store objects and such, it's not a big issue if you can scale linearly. What you really need to watch out for is memory leaking. This can cause processes to slow down dramatically and there's no... |
Who do you use for stock market data? | ced: Many years ago I looked into the problem, but for the Canadian market. We couldn't find a service with an API, so we took one of those 15$/month paying services that gives you some Java software to "analyze" the data (Stockwatch). I used a packet sniffer (Etherreal?) and reversed out the protocol. I used Python fo... |
Who do you use for stock market data? | charlesju: If your application can tolerate a day's delay then perhaps you should look into just grabbing the XML files from Yahoo! Finance. They let you download the history of any of their stocks and use in your own code.For example: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=AAPL&a=08&b=7&c=..., and click on the download Sprea... |
ASK HN: Master degree in CS - USA or Sweden? | charlesju: Maybe I'm a little biased but I'm going to pick the USA, and in particular, probably California. Here are 3 major reasons:1. Perfect weather2. Silicon Valley3. We have a good portion of the top technical schools in the world (Stanford, Cal-Tech, Harvey Mudd, UC Berk, UCLA, USC), I think proportionally more t... |
On scalability and memory footprint | ericb: If you're building a fairly standard web app you probably shouldn't be worrying at this stage. Keeping memory usage low does not mean a significant speedup necessarily. It means your memory usage will be low. Sometimes you trade one thing for another depending on what you're doing.When the app is written, if you... |
Good C (not C++) code for reading/learning? | dchest: Git? |
ASK HN: Master degree in CS - USA or Sweden? | pmjordan: I guess it heavily depends on how much you're planning to spend. I'm not sure if the EU-wide tuition equality is already in place for Bulgarian and Romanian nationals, but if it is, that will make Sweden substantially cheaper than the US, unless you can get some kind of grant or scholarship.EDIT: If you're pl... |
On scalability and memory footprint | Hoff: Arguing performance and scalability and footprint can be less than fruitful; a distraction.If you're serious about this, build your test cases, and benchmark.But before you invest here, ensure you have nothing better to do with your time, and ensure that the probable payback can be justified against the aggregate... |
ASK HN: Master degree in CS - USA or Sweden? | Ras_: Sweden/Finland: Free tuition. Only cost comes from the obligation that you must be a member of the Student Government/Union. That's about $100 / year.
Living is more expensive than in the US.If you are Bulgarian as your profile states, you come from inside the EU/EEA area, thus also Danish universities would be ... |
Good C (not C++) code for reading/learning? | bayareaguy: It's a little dated now but the Tcl/Tk source is very good. I'd also recommend the FreeBSD source tree. |
Good C (not C++) code for reading/learning? | xpaulbettsx: GNOME code and the Linux kernel are both pretty good examples - writing a well-structured, small GTK+ app will do wonders for your C skills |
On scalability and memory footprint | anotherjesse: I run userscripts.org, a rails site which runs on a single serverbeach box.To keep memory usage low, I find recycling mongrel processes via monit can help a bunch.Before monit, my mongrels would hit 2GB quickly, after monit with a rule to restart when they hit over 100MB, my memory usage is around 800MB f... |
ASK HN: How to deal with journalists? | yarc: Don't expect it to last. Don't expect special treatment. But if you can consistently provide a service or genuine analysis then let the world come to you. |
Good C (not C++) code for reading/learning? | reginaldo: One piece of code I found particularly useful was the old tftp. It's small enough yet very instructive. |
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