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murz

319 karma · joined February 9, 2011

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murz··on Angular 2 Beta released
https://github.com/angular/universal https://github.com/angular/universal-starter

Design doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q6g9UlmEZDXgrkY88AJZ6MUr...

It still seems like a WIP

murz··on How I Start: Go
> are there any good form validation libraries for Go?

Here are a couple:

http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/pkg/schema

http://godoc.org/github.com/mccoyst/validate

There are also some bigger web framework projects that include validation, Revel is one: http://revel.github.io/manual/validation.html

murz··on Ask HN: Do you know any Blind Person Who Can Code?
One of my first mentors was a blind programmer. He's actually one of the smartest and most productive programmers I know.

The main tool he used was some screen-reading software called JAWS, which apparently is pretty sophisticated these days. You can see some of the other tools available here: http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/blindness-produ...

murz··on Ask HN: When should a web application use Java?
> Also, for those who are using Java, where do you host your application/service?

Heroku, EC2 (or Elastic Beanstalk) and Google AppEngine are all pretty good choices if you ask me. For side projects I usually just throw them up on Heroku, but I'll use EC2 for more sophisticated deployments.

> Django/RoR or Flask/Sinatra have their niches - what are good reasons for a solo developer or small team to look outside Python, Ruby or PHP?

I'm struggling to come up with an answer to this topic. To be honest, I think you'll be fine with whatever tool you choose and I think you should just use whatever is most comfortable for you. That said, some scenarios where it might make sense to use Java (or another JVM language) over Django/RoR include:

(1) This doesn't matter for most applications (and isn't necessarily true for all applications), but if you are expecting a lot of load you will likely get more throughput out of the JVM (see how the Java platforms compare to Ruby and Python ones in this benchmark: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/) and you will probably be able to handle more traffic with fewer machines (Twitter reportedly needs about ten times fewer machines to run its site after rewriting a bunch of Ruby services in Scala).

(2) You may need to use a particular JVM library (there's a lot of really good ones).

(3) Some spaces of the open-source ecosystem are largely written with JVM languages (especially in the data space: Hadoop, Mahout, Spark, etc). If your team is heavily dependent on one of those spaces you may choose the JVM for your web applications simply to focus your teams knowledge and tooling on one platform.

murz··on Search Engine Yandex Launches "Cocaine" To Compete With Google App Engine
There are heroku buildpacks for C: https://github.com/atris/heroku-buildpack-C
murz··on Ask HN: Why do designers begin with PS rather than going straight to HTML/CSS?
I'm a designer who knows how to code (or more accurately: a coder who knows how to design).

When I am mocking and laying things out, it's much faster to use Photoshop because it's easier to just drag objects around instead of tweaking CSS properties (at this point I'm mostly just dragging around and resizing vectors/shapes/photos/text to get them in the right size/position).

After I'm pretty satisfied with the layout I will go into vim or Sublime Text and start hammering out the actual design in CSS. I find tweaking CSS properties and refreshing my browser to be at least as productive as editing layer styles in Photoshop (if not more productive). Features of CSS like gradients, borders, opacity, shadows, etc. actually make it a very reasonable environment for quickly iterating on designs (especially when paired with SASS/Compass or LESS). Plus it saves you a step (it's gonna need to be coded sometime anyway...). YMMV

murz··on Chec(kout) - Sell anything, anywhere. A platform for longtail ecommerce.
I believe they are referring to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5332192
murz··on Google+ Is Growing at Facebook Speed
I think you missed my point, which was that the Wired article is citing the number from the second half of that sentence: "and 135 million are active in just the stream." (not the first number, which includes people who just +1'd an app)

I don't think the statement in the blog post could be much clearer, you just have to read the whole sentence :)

murz··on Google+ Is Growing at Facebook Speed
> Which would be great if checking a feed meant more than logging into your gmail.

If you read the actual announcement it would be clear that when they say "stream-actives", they are not including people logging into Gmail.

"Today Google+ is the fastest-growing network thingy ever. More than 500 million people have upgraded, 235 million are active across Google (+1'ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search...), and 135 million are active in just the stream."

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-communities-an... (which is linked from the Wired article)

murz··on Three day health hackathon. Investors pitch problems they'd love to fund
Looks interesting, but it's unfortunate that the timing clashes with Startup School.
murz··on Ask HN : What are some great books an aspiring entrepreneur should read?
Have you checked out the handful of books listed on the YCombinator "Startup Library" page (http://ycombinator.com/lib.html)?:

Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People

Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters

Jessica Livingston: Founders at Work

murz··on The truth about Goobuntu: Google's in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux
The typical engineering setup is Mac laptop + Goobuntu workstation.
murz··on What's the best way to learn to be a sysadmin?
I really like the Linux/server tutorials SliceHost has: http://articles.slicehost.com/
murz··on Ask HN: Is go a system programming language or a web language?
The goals of Go, as stated in the 2011 I/O slides (http://golang.org/doc/talks/io2011/Writing_Web_Apps_in_Go.pd...):

- fun to work in.

- efficient - performance approaching C for CPU-intensive tasks,

- designed for modern hardware (multicore, networks),

- aimed at software such as web servers,

- ... but turned out to be a great general-purpose language.

murz··on Hate Java? Maybe you should hate the industries stuck in the 50's.
Jersey actually has reasonable support for the traditional MVC thing too, you just return a Viewable from your actions [1]. I think out-of-the-box Jersey only supports JSP templates but it's easy to write custom view processors, I hacked one up for Mustache templates a few months ago [2].

[1] http://sleeplessinslc.blogspot.com/2012/02/jersey-jax-rs-mvc...

[2] https://github.com/murz/jersey-mustache/blob/master/src/main...

murz··on Ask HN: Good iOS Tutorials?
Stanford has a free series of iOS lectures that you can get on iTunesU: http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/ipad-iphone-application-dev...

I highly recommend them.

murz··on Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
Nice work. I like the idea and it looks like you've executed it really well.

I'm curious how you determine whether a given review is positive or negative, did you use something like http://nltk.org/ ?

murz··on Ask HN: Favorite Place for Startup Jobs?
http://www.startuply.com/ was pretty popular back when I was fresh out of college and looking for jobs.
murz··on Ask HN: Where can I see most used web apps for each country?
It's tough to measure, because you can't really know for sure how much traffic a site is getting unless you are the owner of that site. However, services like Alexa attempt to estimate the most trafficked sites by tracking segments of users (in Alexa's case they track users of their toolbar). Their top-site estimates can be split by country:

http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries

murz··on Meebo discontinued: shutting down on July 11, 2012
AIM has been integrated in Gmail since 2007.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/gmail-chat-aim-crazy-d...

murz··on Anyone know of a high traffic CDN?
Have you looked into S3/Cloudfront?

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/#pricing

murz··on Steve Wozniak: Android has leapt ahead of Apple in many ways
> Woz believes that Android’s voice commands and built-in navigation system are a big advantage

Personally, this is why I've kept my Nexus S around. I think the #1 thing I use it for is navigation while I'm driving. With a car mount it's as good as a TomTom/Garmin/whatever.

murz··on US Authorities Silence NinjaVideo Founder, Rush Her to Prison
> Running a video site that hosts unlicensed content uploaded by users is what youtube did for years

Comparing NinjaVideo.net to YouTube is a bit of a stretch. NinjaVideo.net's sole purpose was to host high-quality unlicensed content, they would feature the unlicensed content, and it was clearly what was driving traffic to their website. If you never saw the site, just take a look in the internet archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20100104054215/http://www.ninjavi...

Their frontpage was basically a list of links (the administrators curated and posted these links, complete with graphic banners like this: http://web.archive.org/web/20100104054215im_/http://i47.tiny..., and captions like "the DVDRip is here!!! Enjoy" and "here's a Screener for you") to stream whatever new content was on TV that night, or whatever movies had recently been released (sometimes even before they hit theaters). By simply taking a peak at their forum it was pretty clear that the administrators of the site had a relationship with the "uploaders" and commissioned them to upload the unlicensed content to megaupload where it would then be streamed in high-quality using the "NinjaVideo Helper" (basically a java applet that pushed megaupload content to the DivX web player). I'd venture to guess any DMCA takedown notices would be forwarded to /dev/null.

The clearest difference, imo, is that YouTube allows users to upload content (content can be uploaded without the owners of the site ever seeing it). NinjaVideo did not allow users to upload content, the owners added pages which allowed you to stream content hosted on megaupload (for any video to end up on NinjaVideo, the admins had to add it).

murz··on The curious case of slowing US growth for Android
The article is about the slowing US growth for Android (US, not world).
murz··on Ask HN: Which podcasts do you listen to?
"Hipster Runoff", it's hilarious.
murz··on Show HN: Our 4 hour winter break startup
> Launch time.

This word, "Launch", I do not think it means what you think it means.

murz··on Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.
I think the spike you are seeing correlates to the transition from a "field trial" (invite-only) product, to a public product.

This is the blog post announcing open signups and it is dated September 20th: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-92-93-94-95-96...

murz··on GoDaddy no longer on SOPA supporter list.
Good observation. It seems that Lamar Smith has been doing every dirty trick he can to beef up that list, like including the names of companies who had only agreed to a generic statement about fighting the sale of counterfeit goods [1][2].

[1] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111222/16384317175/gibson...

[2] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111223/09051617180/law-fi...

murz··on Desperation: Go Daddy calling customers, begging them to stay
I usually use 1and1.com and I don't have any complaints.
murz··on Anonymous threatens net blackout over SOPA
> The House Judiciary Committee is reconvening on the 21st of December. In short, we were lied to.

I think Anonymous is mistaken. The house judiciary committee's website indicates that the scheduled Dec 21st markup has actually been postponed [1].

[1] http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/mark_12152011.html

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