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Re:Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps by alain94040 on Thursday October 07, 2010 @07:37PM (#1769975)
While my brain agrees with your position, my heart tells me that it's more likely that you never make it to 500K users if you focus on security.

I'd welcome a counter-example: can you name a succesful startup that died because of lack of early security?

The way it seems to work today on the Web is succeed first, get the money, then fix whatever needs to be fixed.

Re:Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps by david_shaw on Friday October 08, 2010 @12:40AM (#1770648)
I don't mean to criticize the article posted, and welcome many of the points myself. I am coming more from a software development perspective, although I understand that the article is geared primarily from a marketing point of view.

I agree with you that being paranoid about security instead of working on a human-friendly interface, or worse--a functioning product--will absolutely hinder developments to grow, but that is not what I'm suggesting. In my experience, the vast majority of crippling bugs are simple things, that can easily be prevented using methods such as the four I listed. These should be part of everyday secure coding practices.

I would never tell a developer that they should stop working on their product to tinker with obscure security fantasies, but I'd also say that they're crazy if they don't include basic checks (such as ensuring on a basic level that user input is clean) as mentioned above.

Development methodologies like TDD include this inherently in the software life cycle: tests reaching outer bounds and unexpected input are regularly created to make sure that errors are handled correctly.