samuellevy

I made this as an experiment. It's an idea that I've been toying with for a long time, but I only just got around to building it.

I hate this attitude that 'If you're using it, you have no right to complain'. Sure, you can always vote with your feet, but there are often times when I really like a service, but a certain feature, or a certain decision really irks me. In this case, using google shopping increases OP's revenue, which is great, but the "don't watermark your images" rule means losing out on one part of their competitive advantage (i.e. having the best product pictures which show exactly what the customer wants/needs to see).

The answer isn't to stop using Google Shopping, and the answer isn't to 'put up or shut up'. I would hope that someone at Google Shopping might be able to figure out a resolution with OP that is the best for everyone involved - i.e. doesn't break google's TOS, and doesn't leave OP paying to produce high-quality photos that his competition will steal.

Oh, I'm well aware. In Australia, I remember seeing a number of the telcos advertising "mobile data with free access to facebook and twitter". One of the catchup TV services also has "unmetered access" deals with a number of ISPs.

I don't think that the world is going to end here, or collapse into some dystopian nightmare, but the question was asked: "what are these bad precedents?" and I attempted to answer.

I can see some possible issues, too. If you want to take a hard line approach, this breaches net neutrality just as much as slowing or charging access to other sites. Sure, Wikipedia is already the defacto source of information for a lot of people, but this would cement a monopoly as such in those areas. This all sounds a bit silly when talking about Wikipedia, but it has implications for other services.

What if google or bing made a similar deal? Or any large corporation, for that matter? You set up an internet where the majors can buy their way into a monopoly position, not by convincing ISPs to degrade other services, but by convincing them to charge users less to use your service. This makes it harder to impossible for new companies to enter those markets.

All that being said, I think this (Wikipedia Zero) will be a net-positive thing, and I hope they succeed. I do see that this type of thing could have worrying implications for net neutrality, but ultimately they're not the first site to broker "free access" deals with mobile carriers.

That seems... disturbing. What are the practical applications of this outside of stalking?

I just label my fields appropriately, and put a "skip to form" link (like a "skip to content" link). Other options exist like using media detection, or JavaScript (very few bots run JavaScript on pages. It slows down the process, and requires more smarts than a generic html parser)

No negative captcha will stand up to a targeted attack, but if you're not running a huge site, targeted attacks are very unlikely.

Everyone loves to forget that America was also a British penal colony[1]. They also love to forget that America also has the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world[2].

Stop with the "Australia is a penal colony" bullshit.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_colony

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...

I remember asp classic. It was the defacto standard for programming on the web, until something better replaced it. That something was PHP.

PHP means access to easy to install, ready to go software, which meets 95% of the needs of small businesses. I would love to see that in python, or anything else, but it simply isn't there. The most widely used python CMS? Plone. It's massive, hard to maintain, and far from easy to install or host.

I've been on and off working on systems like WordPress for pyramid/python for a while, but it's a massive project. One day I might finish it...

Before this turns into a recanting of the points in the "PHP is a double-clawed hammer" post again, I would like to remind people that PHP still has a place in the business world that nno other language has stepped up to fill.

http://blog.samuellevy.com/post/41-php-is-the-right-tool-for...

Please stop complaining about how horrible PHP is if you don't use it or have. intentions to replace it.

Good to see this one up on HN.

I've been running http://www.weneedthenbn.com/ since Saturday night, and it's been getting a bit of traction, too.

My phone call to my local MP wasn't exactly promising - while I couldn't talk directly to the MP (although I didn't expect to), the person who answered seemed generally uninterested in anything that I had to say, and was unaware of the technical differences (other than "the LNP plan is cheaper").

I hope we can make a difference here, and there seems to be a lot of support for it. Even if 1% of the people who signed the petition called/emailed/wrote to their local member, we might have a chance of making a difference.

I hold out hope that even if the LNP wins tomorrow's Australian election, enough coverage of the actual cost of losing the NBN will sway them to maybe keep the plans mostly intact.

It's unlikely, but one can hope.

Every time I end up using windows, I end up frustratedly middle-clicking, expecting text to come out.

I have been using MATE to remain productive (gnome 3 and Unity really don't fit my workflow), so this won't really affect me, but it puts another nail in the coffin of the idea that I might transition to gnome 3 in the future.

Yes, it's similar to the WTFPL, but only slightly more restrictive, in that it tells the user to leave the author alone.

It's pretty much an "I abandoned this software" licence, so anyone who actually uses it probably doesn't care if potential users can't use it.

In the current incarnation, no they're not, but built into the browser? The user wouldn't need to see anything more than a "sign in with you private key" button, next to the "sign in with google" button.

And here is my post which explains why PHP is still the best language for the job.

http://blog.samuellevy.com/post/41-php-is-the-right-tool-for...

SEEKING WORK - remote / Brisbane, Australia

PHP, python, MYSQL and JavaScript (jquery, extjs/sencha, raw JS).

I'm a freelancer who specializes in web development/dev ops. I don't just write code, I can design, deliver and maintain the full stack.

Email: sam+hn@samuellevy.com

Previous open source work: http://www.samuellevy.com/mico

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=57178348

Github: https://github.com/samlev

My brother and I are building an X/Y plotter with one, which is either going to turn into an etch-a-sketch printer, or a CNC/3D printer hybrid.

The other one is either going to become a quadrocopter, or an arcade table (cheap coffee table, cheap LCD, and some controllers).

OP here. I went to the interview to see if I could salvage some work out of it (I'm a contractor, and quite often a skilled contractor would suit better than another full-time employee). The person I interviewed with (he was tech lead in the company) was actually quite happy with the idea, but he couldn't get it past HR.

And here I was expecting a serious pitch... but then I should have realised that "a serious pitch" and "I want to contact Yahoo" may not be compatible.

I can still check-out with paypal without an account. It just deals directly with my credit-card details, and leaves it at that.

I have been (slowly) migrating to using my real identity in all places, which has left a strange mashup of identities in some areas. Really, I should get rid of the old identities (which will be difficult, no longer having access to all the email addresses/passwords/whatever of accounts I opened 10+ years ago), but my actual real name is relatively "clean".

I have a couple of "incognito" identities which aren't easily linkable to me (it's probably possible, I haven't ever been particularly careful, but I try to keep them separate), but other than that I'm slowly trying to migrate into using my own real identity now.

At a certain level, naïveté is negligence.

I work with systems that have to comply with HIPPA regulations. If we didn't comply, we couldn't say "Oh, we didn't know, we'll do better next time". It is our job to know, and to comply with regulations; anything else is us being negligent of our duties.

A company the size of AOL? They're negligent. This doesn't mean that what Weev did was good, or OK, or even that he should be the poster boy for reform. He also knew what he was doing, and the fact that AOL's security was poor doesn't excuse it. If anything he'll become the poster boy for "why these laws need to exist".

I don't know why people keep insisting that G+ is a waste land. If you personally don't use it, or see a use for it, that's fine, but there are many people in the world who are not you.

Personally, I get far more value from G+ than I do/ever have done from twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or any of the many social networks over the years. I have a use for it, which it fulfills better than any of the other services out there, and so for me (and the thousand or so people who I'm connected to at various levels through G+), it's far from a waste land.

G+ isn't for everyone, and that's fine. It is a product which is now highly polished, and provides exactly what I and many other people have wanted from a social network. The exact numbers of users who actually actively use it may not be clear, but if it was a waste land, Google wouldn't be integrating all their services so tightly into it.

Google is not a stupid company, and they're not about to "break" all of their services to drive adoption of a service which can't stand on its own. G+ is a good service, and is providing massive amounts of value to Google. Reader was not creating new value for them; wave wasn't getting adopted; Google had reasons why continuing to support those products was a losing bet.

They are integrating so many of their services into G+, that you can pretty much guarantee that it's a winner (for them, at least).

</rant>

Define "using" a domain name. I have a couple of domain names where my primary reason for holding them is for email addresses, or an inside joke with friends.

Admittedly, no-one is clamoring for these domain names, let alone offering me $7500 for them for their business, but just because you can't see the use doesn't mean that they're not being used.

Yes, domain name squatters suck, but they're making money, so they'll keep doing it, and there's no way to fairly stop them that doesn't take away my right to hold stupid domain names.

I tend to go Foo, Bar, Baz, Fizz, Buzz, Bing.

If I need more than that, then I should probably simplify what I'm writing, or use more descriptive names.

Dreamhost, as a shared hosting provider, has within the last month rolled out the option of PHP 5.4 on all their servers.

I wish all hosting providers would make newer versions available, then maybe open source projects would move with the times, and start bringing everyone up to date.

No responsible webhost would just roll out a new major version of PHP without warning. Dreamhost have made their servers support it, which means that it is now an option that you can pick, along with PHP 5.2, and 5.3, in multiple modes (cgi, fastcgi, etc.).

But even so, if I build some PHP code that isn't future-proof for even the warranty period that I offer on any code, then I've got to fix it at my cost. If I build some code that, in 3 years time becomes incompatible with a new version of PHP, then it can be fixed then. I can't be expected to predict the future of PHP and build forever-proof code, though.

The way to "do drupal properly", which makes it so popular, is to use it almost as a "lego" platform, which is also much the same as how you would use wordpress.

Both of them have such powerful plugin/extension frameworks, that most of the effort in building drupal or wordpress sites is finding the right plugins, and skinning. Very little actual programming work is required to get an operation site running for a client in either framework, which makes them ideal for many of these low-yield "corner store" sites.