It doesn't look like it's trying to be a startup at all, just showing an idea to HN- but I guess you're saying it should be more of an "ask for early feedback on HN" instead of "Show HN"- which implies show something that is working. I'm OK with "Show HN" being the default idiom for anyone posting their own link. Guess it could have had a "(proposal)" or something in the title.
An email address isn't a document though, it's a routing command. I don't mean sanitization in the sense of inserting backslashes. I mean sanitization in the sense of "we don't allow people to set their email address to a mailbox on localhost at our mail server."
Back when SMTP servers still had remnants of UUCP etc.- where the address could actually contain characters that specify intermediate servers to route to, I would have argued that front-end sanitization was important as, for example, html sanitization from end-users from a security perspective.
However, IETF made lots of progress simplifying things- to the point where, at the very least, the standard tells us specifically that we should leave it up to the destination host to interpret the local part of the email address-- that is, the thing to the right of the @ should be given the thing on the left unmolested ideally- even being ignored by intermediate relay servers. Since that's what most people complain about, any validation to the left of the @ should become extinct.
But off the top of my head that still leaves the thing on the right of the @ (such as localhost), buffer overflows by allowing longer strings than the standard allows (those limits do exist), and the problem with multiple @ which the MTA may or may not handle well... Since I'm not a security expert I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that I'm missing a bunch of other things.
My point is not that the article is wrong, though- my point is that if he wanted to convince me to only validate by sending the email on any string, he should convince me that those security concerns are not an issue- not that it's not good at catching type-os.
I always assumed it was more a sanitization issue for security's sake. By allowing only a simple subset ("common") email address type, you can be ambivalent about what email server is running and how it reacts to the wide variety of specially crafted email addresses.
With no validation other than sending the email, you have to know, for example, what the server would do with an email address that claims to be @localhost. Now it becomes a problem- or at least a question and concern- for the backend system. Whether the backend interprets root@localhost as valid and does exactly what it's told or rejects it due to some configuration- it has become a backend complication and a DOS attack vector.
A simple policy of only handling a subset- the common class of email addresses- is one of the things that allows us to have a simple mental model of what the MTA is supposed to do. The fact that it sometimes caught a type-o, or not, is incidental. "Invalid email" wasn't meant to imply the email address doesn't fit the spec- it was meant to imply that a particular site or service has chosen not to accept email addresses like that.
Replying to myself- too late to edit. Some other comments in here lead me to believe there would be experience-related questions ideally these days. Again, my experience was a few years ago :-)
Makes sense for google. And it's not that I didn't appreciate doing all that (and I did do well), it just struck me how they knew nothing else about me afterward except that I could answer academic questions, and how different that was from the startup world- where, at the very least, you want to know what they're passionate about and that they are productive.
Asking an engineer what their strengths are and then to demonstrate or explain in concrete terms is how you find out their unique value proposition. I'm not talking about "I'm a hard worker" type garbage, I mean "my strongest experience is in systems programming on Linux." "How so?" "For example, I wrote a specialized TCP kernel module that works like this..."
Again, not saying that should be the whole interview- but there are some non-academic skills and experience (like managing and leading a critical system used by thousands of people) that are worth more than a few weaknesses in problems that were already solved years ago and that are easily looked up. It's how you should judge people looking to get into a graduate program, but falls short if you're trying to build teams of awesome fury that need more broad experience and even (gasp) unique experience that you don't have a ready-made question for ;-)
I interviewed @ google several years ago as part of some due-diligence they were doing to decide if they wanted to acquire the startup I was working at, [redacted].
It was several hours, with many interviewers one at a time, of academic exercises. Some I could see were relevant to some of Google's projects, but that wasn't the emphasis- it was very much a "how much do you remember from CS courses?" (with a few exceptions- one had me explain why a snippet of C would crash- something more what I would expect a senior engineer to know that was more practical-oriented).
I _think_ I did pretty well (again, it was part of a bigger due-diligence-- another story altogether, so I never heard), but in the end I was struck by the fact that (a) not a single interviewer had looked at or asked about any of my publicly available work, and (b) not a single one even asked something along the lines of "what are your strengths / what do you think your contribution would be" (or weaknesses, for that matter, but that seems less important).
Of course, one of the other guys I worked with lucked out and got interviewed by one of the paypal-mafia, and ended up with a reportedly very stimulating hour long discussion about actual work, strengths, and actual situations that one would hypothetically need to handle at google.
I was very excited to learn about recursive neural networks and how they are different from recurrent neural networks. I began imagining self-similar fractal topologies and automatic convolution layer creation etc... Disappointed to see it was just a typo :-)
That is, it's case sensitive with the first character of the identity.
I've mentioned elsewhere that this one bugged me at first, but in practice it simply means that you get to use the language as if your preferred convention (whether snake or camel) is the "official" one- even when calling other libraries. Nothing more and nothing less. Cases where you need both styles but need them to be different things tend to be non-existent / code-smell.
Comment voting ala hackernews / reddit would be useful but in this case so would some attached polls. The +1, -1 was from "back in the day" when it was a useful way for the active contributors to actually vote on something (or straw-poll it) in a mailing list etc.
It's annoying in some cases now because 1) it's anyone, not just the active contributors or even users, 2) people don't use it as a vote but as a general expression of support, 3) -1 isn't really used anymore so you can't scan them and see what the sentiment is, and 4) in this case, it's not even clear what they are lending support to- the merge, or that it is time to discuss a merge seriously.
So yeah, in this case it's noise but in some contexts +1/-1 is a quick and simple way to govern code and it has historical roots. Just ranting as I think they and some in this thread are a little too quick to judge. +1/-1 from the right people could be considered very relevant information to a discussion (esp. within a focused community).
In addition to ignoring the big picture economics, it makes rather silly claims such as "And with that [the elimination of the need to own cars], the elimination of entire industries built up around the existence of car ownership like: mechanics, car washes, parking..."
I think he's confusing eliminating the need to buy a whole car (dubious in the first place even if/ especially if they're automated) with the elimination of cars in general (???) Or he somehow thinks that part of "self-driving" means also self-fixing, self-washing, and cars that never park... roaming the streets in packs I suppose, ganging up on people when the cops aren't looking and stealing their jobs...
Fun fact- Nimrod means mighty hunter. The negative connotation came from early Bugs Bunny cartoons where he applies the name sarcastically to Elmer Fudd.
Fun to try with code (mildly). Here's the geekiest I could do that's worth sharing :-) http://i.imgur.com/IBaLCn4.png - based on the first stanza from the following:
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Lisper got to sit and wonder, (Y (Y Y))?
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Lisper got to tell himself he understand.
— Kurt Vonnegut, modified by Darius Bacon,
