billpatrianakos

We get it, man. PHP sucks, you're cool/smarter/better because you use something else, and you need to remind us all about it by jumping in every time the letters P-H-P are seen in sequence to let us all know how it sucks by retreading the same old lines used by the last fifty guys who said the same thing but to your credit you really tried to be clever about it.

A good portion of why people like to mock PHP is due to the way people end up using the language rather than the language's ugly parts. This guide is a great step toward pointing people in the right direction with the language. PHP has come a very long way and continues to improve. A big chunk of the battle is having decent guides to replace all the crap that's out there showing new PHP devs the wrong way. So why not talk about the merits of the guide rather than taking an easy opportunity to shit on PHP. It's really gotten old.

Hey, remember when JavaScript was like the worst language ever and everyone felt the need to remind everyone about that constantly? I do. And now all of them are writing blogs about how awesome node.js is.

The link sent me to Yahoo Finance which had a headline that didn't include about 99% of the words in the headline here. Oh well, my mistake.

Hey, Tikhon, we know you're proud of Parse and you really should be because it's awesome but taking liberties with a headline like you did there might not be so cool. It can be taken one of two ways:

1. The founder of Parse is a total egomaniac.

2. The founder of Parse is really proud of his company and has a great sense of humor.

Parse is awesome though. I signed up back when you guys were first opening it up to people and I remember you sent out a lot of emails to get people to come back and keep using it and you have great documentation and tutorials. I see it "changing the way the app industry works" in the same way AWS, Heroku, and others changed how people thought about web app deployment. The big deal is in giving more people access to the tools they need to run a mobile app that they either couldn't build or afford before. That's awesome because lots of people will build some cool things with Parse... And amateurs like me will be able to churn out crap much quicker and cheaper. Awesome!

Back in the old days your comment would've been in the top spot here (despite what my profile says, I lurked for far longer so I do remember). Now, as of this writing you're at 3. You are totally right and your position in these comments can only support your view.

You politely ask people not to get pedantic then the majority of the discussion becomes pedantry. Instead of replying one by one I'll lump a lot of responses here.

1. The millimeters on my defensive gun were very off. I don't know about guns. Just imagine a typical handgun.

2. The handgun analogy is not about how much damage one causes over the other nor is it about the severity of the consequences. The point is that we can all relate to the average homeowner buying a handgun for protection and most people can understand that and trust that your neighbor isn't buying it to commit crimes. But when your neighbor buys an assault rifle and claims its for self defense you start to wonder because we all know, on average, most of the time, it's common sense, stop being fucking pedantic, that assault rifles are not for self defense and when someone claims that it should set off alarm bells just like when someone says "I only used MegaUpload to share Excel spreadsheets with my coworkers and so did everyone else I know or have ever heard of" you've got to wonder if that person is living in a bubble or just straight up delusional.

As you can tell, I don't know much about guns.

You've got a point but I can honestly say I can trust a judge, prosecutor, or a 5 month old to tell the difference between MegaUpload and Dropbox. What MegaUpload was encouraging was too obvious to even argue about.

That said, you are right. My argument was geared more toward MegaUpload defenders who, for some reason, have deluded themselves into thinking they're defending an innocent service and turning Kim Dotcom into some sort of freedom fighting hero. Your stance on copyright law is irrelevant here because what MegaUpload was all about is illegal in most first world countries. If you think MegaUpload was "just a file storage service" you've got to be lying to yourself.

However, your argument is important because not all cases are so cut and dry. So yeah, in the future it is important to keep an eye on the Feds and make sure the law and due process are upheld because I'll concede that if people are lax (like I am in this case with MegaUpload) then in the future it might be a truly innocent Dropbox that's next. You never know.

That's very paranoid. Occam's razor, my friend. They were probably going to do this anyway with timing being a coincidence. People give the US government too much credit for planning devious things. Most of it is a lot of fuck-ups and political favors. Nothing more. I sincerely doubt the Feds did this as so to give the finger to protesters. They've been doing this long before SOPA was introduced and will continue too. SOPA just codifies the status quo so that the chances of anyone getting in trouble for shutting sites down becomes nil.

That's too simplistic. Lets take the example of a gun. The gun industry makes a product that can be used for intentional harm or for protection. One company sells a 35mm handgun to the general public and another sells assault rifles to the general public. A reasonable person knows an assault rifle is not for protection (and don't get pedantic and say "well depends where you live", etc. because you know what I mean). That's like what MegaUpload is. Dropbox and Box.net are file locker services. MegaUpload was very obviously a file sharing service - one that was very much all about sharing movies, music, and software with no regard to copyright law. Dropbox and Box.net are the handguns to MegaUpload's assault rifle when you put it into my above example.

I like to always make the point that users are spoiled and have an awful sense of entitlement when it comes to the web but in this case I can't say I blame the users. It's really important to think long term and definitely overprice your product rather than pricing it as low as you can. If the price point you set can't be sustained in 2 to 5 years with the number of users you project (and this is where you should overprotect or, put another way, plan for the best case scenario) then be ready for some backlash and lost customers. Always try to make it so you have to lower prices as username grows. It's common sense. Now of course you can't always do that and you have to feel for the company when that happens but the customers will get over it. So long as you handle it well and you're offering something people want the users will pay the higher price as long as they're still getting value from the product.

Customers bitch about every little change you'll ever make so sometimes you just have to take it with a grain of salt. Hell, even free services get this when any change is made because people already using the product don't want any change. At all. Humans hate Amy and all change. So if you think enough current users will eventually get on board and new users will surely get more value from a change then it's worth it.

He frames this in terms of grandfathered pricing but really it's about users reacting to change. Higher pricing is the worst kind of change a user can experience but in the end it's almost no different than when Facebook changes privacy settings (or changes your email address without asking). The success or failure will be based on new users valuing the change thus getting them to sign up and current users eventually getting used to it versus the exact opposite of that. Users will bitch about all changes always. Upping the price, unfortunately, is the worst thing you could probably do. But they'll get over it.

I'm really happy to see the, charging right from the get-go. I've seen a lot of my friends build a simple app that they want to make a little side income with but they usually make the tragic mistake of launching it as a free service and charging after it gets some attention. The logic is that no one will pay a no-name developer for something simple like this. That logic is wrong. Yeah, lots of people can implement the same things themselves but most won't and they'll pay for the convenience of having access to these projects. If you start charging after launching as a free service you're pretty much doomed as users get a sense of entitlement and feel like you've pulled a bait and switch on them. It's far easier to charge from the start and delight users by bringing down the price later if you can than it is to start free and increase the price. Joel from Buffer actually wrote about that recently and it's something that I've taken to heart. Kudos to RaterLater for having the balls to charge for their work in this crazy web culture of entitlement.

I get what you're saying and I'm on board but the way you put it left kind of a bad taste in my mouth. It came across just a little bit like you haven't considered that you can just stop reading when you come across bad writing. I'm a poster child for poorly thought out blog posts. Luckily, no one reads them. That's the thing I've learned about blogging. You suck at it for a long time and with practice you get better and then people can stand to read your writing.

Way to read into it. That was totally beside the point. The point was just to specialize. The example pitch was exactly that; an example.

I think we all knew this already. But now now does this article count as startup advice? If so, do we not take it seriously either? In all seriousness though, we should take startup advice with a grain of salt but at the same time realize that while most of it is contradictory that doesn't mean it's all worthless. The trick is to pick out what applies to your particular situation. If there are two conflicting pieces of advice that apply then you just go with your gut. Only you know what's best for your situation. It's always useful to learn what others think or have gone through. So yeah, it's all a bunch of feel-good contradictory stuff but it still has its worth. You can compare it to self-help which is often worthless but even then at least self-help gets you moving toward bettering your situation just like startup advice. Startup advice is like a very useful worthless thing. Yeah, it's both of those things at once.

As a developer I too a, disappointed by Twitter's move to restrict API access as it has but again, still as a developer, I can understand Twitter's point of view and I'll actually say what they're doing is smart and other sites should follow suit.

We all want our API access, we want it now, we want it free, and we want it unrestricted whether we monetize our use of another app's API or not. But unfortunately we can't just feed off Twitter's teet and expect them to just cater to our every want. API access is a privilege, not a right. By monetizing their API as they are they are avoiding the most common mistake that afflicts tech startups - the problem of monetization. They have their "verified" accounts and "promoted tweets" which is a good start and now that the API has become so valuable they are monetizing this. They're a company that offers a free service and making a true profit instead of just taking on VC money and hoping someone will figure out how they'll make money later. They did this at just the right time too. They are now an established player much like Facebook. Now that users are locked in and so many people are getting value from Twitter's quick information sharing and marketing capabilities they made a smart decision with this new monetization strategy.

We all should have known the free ride would end eventually. In many cases, apps using the API are actually competing with twitter itself! Surely you can't expect Twitter to allow competing apps like iOS and Android apps to outshine them. So these restrictions force those competing clients to actually innovate still! Yes, access to tweets are limited but apps like Hootsuite and others have found ways to use the API in other ways like scheduling tweets.

I'll definitely concede that I think their limits are a bit strict and they are pretty much only useful for hobby projects. At the same time, though, we've become spoiled and entitled and I can definitely understand the restrictions. Reactions to policies like this are to be expected. Everyone always throws a fit when these things happen but we'll live and we have to understand that Twitter needs money to run so they can provide an API at all and if we want to make a buck off Twitter's API we can't expect a free ride. That's like asking the owner of an office building to let you use office space free because... Well... It's there. That said, they need to be smart about this too. Too much restriction will hurt them but too little will mean they aren't generating what they need. But right now I don't think we can judge whether these policies are really that bad because, like I said, any time a service makes these changes everyone starts complaining and a lot of exaggeration goes on.

"I prefer Python". Why did you say that? To me it feels like you said it do people would take you seriously as a "real" developer. Because surely a "real" developer wouldn't actually enjoy using PHP or use it unless they were forced, right?

I agree with your point and I just wanted to add that the fact that we have to add in little details like "I prefer Python" just to be taken seriously says more about hacker elitism than it does about PHP.

It looks great actually! What kills ,e about Microsoft though is that, especially recently, they've done a great job in making their sites, OS, and software quite pretty but they still after all this time have absolutely horrendous font rendering in Windows which kills every design they come out with. I'm a developer who uses a Mac as my primary machine, Linux as a secondary machine and in the past month has been forced to use Windows at my new job. I wasn't happy about it but it turns out I've gotten just about as productive with it as any other platform. But the problem is that now, 4 weeks in, I get terrible eye strain and the whole system looks ugly because fonts are jagged except at really large sizes. It's ironic that this new site looks awesome on my iPad and Mac but not so much on their own OS, Windows. Why can't they fix that already?

Maybe you should. The creator of Chocolat is in a position where he obviously has to charge to help him survive. Just because another piece of software that's equally or more powerful than Chocolat is free doesn't mean that Chocolat should be too.

I've been using Chocolat since the very first public beta and I loved it even when it was filled to the brim with bugs. I've also used SublimeText2 in that time. I can say that for me Chocolat is worth the $50. No, I can't afford it right now so I keep using an unlicensed SublimeText but just because I can't afford it doesn't mean it isn't worth it.

The difference is that no one will stop you from creating and distributing your own code editor even if you advertise that it's meant for malicious or illegal development. But don't expect the same privilege when you base your app off of someone else's API which you get to use for free by the way. Everyone knows when you use an API you're a house guest, paying no rent and you can be asked to leave at any time.

You can't sue the Internet though. This line of argument begins with entitlement. Dropbox is a company with an ass to protect. Anyone using any service's API is never entitled to any guarantees regardless of whether they comply with their TOS or not. The purpose of an API is to simultaneously add value for users and widen use of the produc (both of those fall technically under the banner of "to help the company providing the API make boat loads of money).

The other part of people's defense of Boxupus is this whole idea that just because it could be used to violate copyright doesn't mean it will. Anyone who honestly, deep down, truly believes this and isn't just towing the Pirate Party Line needs to wake up. The majority of people downloading from torrents are downloading copyrighted material which is not legal, like it or not, the legalities of copyright law are irrelevant here. While I'm sure you can pop in and say "but I was using it for legit use case x, y, and z", most people were using it for downloading music and movies. Where's my proof? Fuck my proof. Where's your proof (I'm using the royal "your" here, not aimed at the op here) that it was being used so innocently? It really makes me upset that I just know someone will try to call me out for not having evidence on that one point despite the fact that we all know what was up just like we all knew what was up with MegaUpload. Demanding my evidence on that one point is the last defense of a person who's just grasping at straws, defending some pro-piracy ideology. But piracy isnt even the issue nor is it relevant!

Dropbox is a company here to make money. Just mentioning torrents puts people in a frenzy. So they're protecting themselves from liability by making sure their product is not associated in any way with torrents. It doesn't matter whether they have a legit purpose or not. It's a case of perception trumping all else and you have to remember that even beyond legal issues, Dropbox has a brand to protect. The perception of Dropbox is that of an exceptionally wholesome file storage/sharing service. Why would they even risk being seen as even the teensiest bit shady?

At the end they ask people to ask their employers to stop using Microsoft software like the kind causing this problem.

First, I really doubt all but a handful of companies would actually do this on account of the FSF site being blocked. It's a simple cost benefit analysis. The cost of replacing such software is high and the occurrences of such mistakes that would actually hurt a company are rare. Therefor it's not happening the vast majority of times.

Secondly, I'm surprised the FSF is using a service that has anything to do with proprietary, closed source, non-free software. Given their philosophy you'd think they'd have found some way to collect donations that uses free software from top to bottom. Maybe I'm way off on this but one of my first thoughts was that maybe even complaining about this takes away just a bit of the FSF's credibility. They preach the gospel of free software but when it's time to fundraise they make an exception? Is this a "do as I say, not as I do" situation now?

I'm not trying to be overly critical and I realize this may be a bit pedantic too. It's not a big deal to me, just thought it interesting. Food for thought maybe.

Yes but domain names that are unclaimed all start at the same price. Now poetry.com is unattainable but before it was bought anyone who wanted it had an equal chance. TLDs are starting their life as unattainable unlike domains which only end up that way later.

It's simple, really. A domain name like poetry.com is as accessible to the average person as it is to a company. A TLD on the other hand is something you need to take out a mortgage to own.

The difference is in the democracy of it all. Acquiring domain names is a very democratic process even if you take into account squatting and other shenanigans. Scrounge up ten bucks and a web connection and it's yours. TLDs aren't even close. It's a total plutocracy and ICANN seems totally unapologetic about it while the companies snatching them up look ridiculous when they put a line in their proposal about how their ownership of some random word as a TLD is in our, the users, best interest.

How can anyone overlook that? It's practically beating us over the head, taunting us.

This deserves to be the top comment. Your one liner nailed it. Twitter was down long enough for far more people not to notice than did notice. Shit goes down. It always will. Whining about how whoever needs backups or failover protection or distributed networks of servers across the planet or should use a VPS instead or a dedicated server instead or Heroku instead or EC2 instead or a combination of all that crap doesn't make you right. It makes you a speculator. No amount of fallbacks will give you 100% uptime ever. And calling this a massive failure is also ludicrous. It's just some downtime. It went right back up so chill.

These posts are so incredibly annoying. We can see if service x is down for ourselves. That isn't news. I could maybe accept these stories if the link on the front page was to a blog post stating that not only is service x down but why it went down for sure plus an added lesson we can learn from it. Short of that it's become an easy way for people to build up a trillion karma points. And if you want to tell me you don't care about karma then you're either lying or you have none. Enough with this crap. We'll find out ourselves but most of us won't actually because we have lives and by the time we go online to check our favorite wank-off site it'll probably be back up again like the past fifty times I've seen a story about Heroku/AWS/Twitter being down.

There's a lot of truth in what you said but there is also the other side of that, which is disturbingly real, which is a bunch of yuppies looking at weird shit and playing along with the game because they were told it was classy and artistic. A prime example of this can be seen in the film 'Exit Through the Gift Shop'. It's a documentary about Banksy, the street artist, or at least it started out that way. Basically, this French immigrant to LA, Thierry Guetta was obsessed with street art, banksy, and filming his every waking moment. He went on a journey to find Banksy, did it, and then was kind of mentored by some in the street art scene.

At the end of the film Guetta himself is having this enormous underground art exhibit and famous people like Brad Pitt come! But Guetta is not an artist. It is obvious that he's posing. To say he's emulating his heroes is putting it very nicely. The guy is literally going around an abandoned warehouse throwing strange shit together for the sake of it being strange, calling it art, and then people eat it up going so far as to say he's a genius.

The point is, there was no context. It was strange for strange's sake but it got labelled as art. Everyone is an artist. We all have the ability to be creative and make our own art. That cannot be debated. But what can is how much of it really deserves recognition and what criteria does a work of art have to possess before we can hang it in a gallery and say "that's real art"? For me, real art has a message, it has skill, it is intentional, and the artist puts a genuine piece of themselves into it that you can just really sense. But I digress...

I highly recommend the film, it used to be on Netflix. I think it's a perfect compliment to this article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop

Yes, Heroku is down. They have a status page that lets you know about that sort of thing. It seems like folks like to keep an eye on certain service status pages and post them here real quick for some easy karma or something. This is HN, not the Heroku/AWS/PaaS/SaaS service status page. Those pages are easy to find and now there's one less spot for a really interesting article on the front page.

I was shocked that they threw in the part about developing an application to alert people that they may be depressed. This is the one amd only study on this and they have the nerve to pitch a software idea at the end? Honestly, at this point using their application to detect early signs of depression is like going to a phrenologist or getting your palms read - and taking it seriously. There needs to be more studies with reproducible results. What ever happened to science?

I think we work very hard. You seem to be wrangling old browsers into submission for sport. And that's fine but time is money and we don't have time for all that work for so few users. Thank god for these big guys who are pushing users of old browsers to upgrade. They're sparing the rest of us from not only being the bad guy but from having to do all that extra work. I can see some sites maybe being able to put the effort in to support ancient browsers but then you went after Twitter and I think that's where your argument suffers. First off, Twitter users know what the term "social network" means. Users of IE6 and below will probably never visit such a thing because their browser choice totally gives away their demographic. Beyond that, if Twitter were to cater to these older browsers they'd have a front end code base so bloated it'd rival their backend. Or the other option would be for them to do some graceful degradation work but since a lot of their current UI doesn't lend itself well to that (at least not as far back as you suggest they should) we'd be stuck with a poorer version of their UI which currently is really great! Sites moving toward being as responsive as a desktop app is such a great thing but it just can't be made to work in IE6 and under without bringing down everyone else's experience.

While you may be right about browser elitism your tone suggests coder elitism. Yeah, we can often allow sites to degrade gracefully but the old web is dying. The days of static sites are almost totally behind us. We're entering a new era in development and sometimes supporting those old browsers is more trouble than it's worth. Penalizing users of older browsers gives them incentive to upgrade. It really is a win win situation. They get a better experience and we get another user. We can't support these old browsers forever. Ten years doesn't sound like much but on the web it's a lifetime. It's like suggesting reserving one lane of our highways for horse and buggies.

It is important to keep a cool head and consider things objectively. That's why I think it's manipulative to inject emotion into this like the post does. It's one thing to empathize with this poor mother and quite another to consider the facts and have an honest, serious discussion. What has happened to this family is awful. There's no question about that and I feel just as bad for them as anyone. But now we can't expect anyone to keep a cool head because of the way the issue was presented. Injecting emotion into the discussion is manipulative and effectively halts any critical thinking that might have gone on otherwise.

I think presenting issues in this way is manipulative. Before I explain, I want to be clear that I truly do feel for this mother and her situation. I also think the patent system is irredeemably fucked to out it nicely. But if you're going to talk about real issues then you can't use stories like this to illustrate them because it's manipulative. Tugging on people's heart strings to push forward your philosophy/beliefs/ideas is a cheap ploy as old as time and it works because a story like this totally derails your ability to think rationally.

I wasn't clear on if the author of this piece was simply telling her tale of how the patent system had a profoundly negative impact on her and her family's lives or if it was meant to push ideas about patent reform or both. As far as the author goes, it doesn't matter because it's irrelevant. I feel for her no matter what her motivations were. We all do I'm sure. What is relevant is why it was posted on HN and it's not hard to guess it was to start a discussion on patent reform.

Now, I'm not stating a position for or against anything here (though I agree with the majority opinion here if you really want to know). What I am saying is that if you want to have a serious discussion about any issue you have to leave these emotional stories out of it because it's not fair and it's a cheap trick. People on both sides of any issue, yes, any issue, can come up with a heart wrenching story to get support.

If you want to discuss and debate an issue then debate it on facts and merit. If you want to empathize with people on either side of an issue then you're also free to do that too. One thing you cannot do, however, is both at the same time. Again, I have to reiterate that I'm totally on this mother's side. I have to keep repeating that because that's what these stories do! They suspend logic, get people all emotional, and the next thing you know people are reacting to things out of pure emotion without thinking no matter how logical the person they react to is being. Using emotion to put forth ideas is a manipulation that aims to hinder or completely stop any real, substantive discussion.