Hacker News Reader

sedevon Research: How People Use Mobile Email

Personally, I have notifications turned on because I aggressively filter incoming things like newsletters so that things I don't have to care about immediately, don't hit the Inbox and generate a notification. So a phone-buzz for me usually indicates that there's signal.

sedevon The Great California Exodus

Unfortunately this is typical of the Wall Street Journal: if ever one wants a lesson in how to spot bias in the media, reading the WSJ's editorial output is always good for a quick refresher.

sedevon Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says

I read it as an accusation, basically - "the FBI is effectively doing the bidding of the MPAA/RIAA."

sedevon Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says

Sure, that's the law - but that is not the practice, that's not the facts on the ground. The moral panics over drugs and terrorism have expanded police powers such that it is de facto possible for the police forces to just steal from you. It's not legally theft: they've just redefined it, basically. It's similar to how the US government just effectively says "the things we do aren't torture, because we're doing them, and we condemn others for doing these things because they're torture."

If you have money, you have some recourse - but if you're an average citizen, the police can with any sort of drug- or terrorism-related charge, even if you are acquitted or the charges are dropped, de facto steal your shit and not reimburse you at all.

sedevon Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says

Yes it is: and like a number of such things, it stems from the War On (Non-White People Who Use) Drugs. The incentives regarding property seizure in narcotics cases are even more perverse, and lead to brazen de facto theft.

sedevon Redesign: Users: Thrilled. Conversion Rates: Up. Sales: Unchanged.

I'd never heard of Spreedly! Thank you for pointing that out: it makes this project just the tiniest bit more likely to replace my day job. :)

sedevon Redesign: Users: Thrilled. Conversion Rates: Up. Sales: Unchanged.

You recommend Stripe in a throwaway line in the post - it sounds like your experience with them has been really positive! I'm working on a project where I may end up taking people's money for services on a subscription basis. I've heard that Stripe is better for one-time charges than for re-occuring charges. Is that true in your experience, as someone who's done work with Stripe?

sedevon UK moves to restrict Internet freedom

When citizens have transparent access to what their government is really up to, those inside the government may be held accountable, which is not something they will take kindly to.

I agree with this and want to expand on it a little. This is the way power works. If having a government, having a state, is to work at all, then those with power must be saddled with accountability. However, the track record seems to say that in the vast majority of cases, those who have power, immediately act to murder any ability to hold them accountable. Which is exactly why accountability must be enforced, as harshly as possible.

When normal humans are granted power without accountability, evil results. Insist on accountability.

sedevon WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Than A Year

I was just thinking something similar. Did we all learn nothing from the recent spate of PHP critiques? Wordpress has several delightful qualities, but "runs easily and smoothly with minimal maintenance required" is not among them unless you are among the least demanding possible users of it.

sedevon PHP: A fractal of bad design

If you read that part, it certainly didn't inform what you wrote. You tapped out the same tired boilerplate argument as ever without actually saying why he was wrong to dismiss those arguments up front, or without even acknowledging that he did so. So your post was indistinguishable from what someone would say who hadn't read the article, and that's why I called you a jerkhole: I'm pointing out how you didn't add any signal to the conversation. If you'd been serious about adding signal instead of noise, you would have acknowledged that he anticipated your argument, and made a counterargument to his dismissal. You did not. You just said "no it's not, because I say so."

sedevon PHP: A fractal of bad design

This is also part of the problem. Go read Crockford's "Javascript: The Good Parts". Then notice that this article demonstrates why there is not, and probably never will be, "PHP: The Good Parts."

sedevon PHP: A fractal of bad design

Every time someone does that, the argument gets derailed into talking about the other language and into a not-actually-related argument about its problems and the relative merits of the two languages and so on. You've seen it happen a zillion times. When the article is just a headshot on PHP, it's easier to get the point of "don't use PHP, use anything else" and PHP ... "apologists," like folks upthread, can't derail it into talking about the problems with Python/Ruby/whatever.

sedevon PHP: A fractal of bad design

From the article:

>Don’t comment with these things

>>I’ve been in PHP arguments a lot. I hear a lot of very generic counter-arguments that are really only designed to halt the conversation immediately. Don’t pull these on me, please. :(

>>>Do not tell me that “good developers can write good code in any language”, or bad developers blah blah. That doesn’t mean anything. A good carpenter can drive in a nail with either a rock or a hammer, but how many carpenters do you see bashing stuff with rocks? Part of what makes a good developer is the ability to choose the tools that work best.

>>>Do not tell me that it’s the developer’s responsibility to memorize a thousand strange exceptions and surprising behaviors. Yes, this is necessary in any system, because computers suck. That doesn’t mean there’s no upper limit for how much zaniness is acceptable in a system. PHP is nothing but exceptions, and it is not okay when wrestling the language takes more effort than actually writing your program. My tools should not create net positive work for me to do.

That's not even deep in the article! By spouting off exactly the arguments that the author anticipates, you're making yourself look like a jerkhole who didn't even do basic reading before spouting off a reflexive, unthought, and worthless opinion.

sedevon PHP: A fractal of bad design

"It also does not get in your way if you are a competent developer..."

Actually about half of the article was about how it does exactly that by being inconsistent, having action-at-a-distance effects, and not having real hashes/arrays/tuples.

Also you appear to have skipped the "Don't comment with these things" portion of the article, which anticipates all of your arguments.

sedevon PHP: A fractal of bad design

Let me put it this way: Lisp hackers think that one of the major problems with Emacs Lisp is that it basically uses one big namespace for everything, forcing awkward naming conventions and contortions to avoid collisions. That is possibly the one part of any Lisp that works like PHP ... and the Lisp community pretty much universally agrees that it's a bad idea, not because it's like PHP, but because it's a bad idea.

Also you should check out what Alan Storm has to say about this: http://alanstorm.com/python_imports_for_php_developers

Mr. Storm is a crackerjack PHP developer: perhaps you will listen to him.

sedevon PHP: A fractal of bad design

For the record, the back of "Javascript: The Good Parts" actually has that. It has "The Bad Parts" and "The Awful Parts," in which Crockford goes into more detail with each error than Eevee does, and I believe it's still shorter than Eevee's blog post.

sedevon PHP: A fractal of bad design

"(Pro-PHP flamers: I started using PHP back in 1999. Your arguments are not new.)"

See, that's part of the problem. PHP has been terrible for close to two decades. It used to be even worse than what Eevee describes.

sedevon PHP: A fractal of bad design

Since my day job is PHP-centric and I was already aware that PHP is awful, this is theoretically helpful to me, but oh lord, it makes my liver hurt.

If I could get away with it, I'd never again trust my credit card number to a system based on PHP, but I suspect that that's about as easy as never trusting your credit card to an ATM/point-of-sale machine based on Windows.

sedevon Mosh: SSH for 2012

I'm willing to go to considerable lengths to eliminate character delay - when the things I type don't show up on the screen instantly, it becomes harder to think in a painful way. That's an idiosyncratic reason, but it's there.

sedevon The nameless "they" and the Facebook / job interview trend that isn't a trend

The author's skepticism is pretty reasonable, but I feel that he misses an important part of the story. Here's the closest he gets to it:

"Is it plausible that this practice is widespread, and getting moreso? Sure, it’s plausible. Our privacy erodes every day, and millions of us do it through Facebook willingly. The story has the feel of truthiness. Doesn’t it just seem like the thing that Big Business would do to us? We already piss in cups to prove that we’re drug-free so that we can come in and shuffle paper."

I think that the reason that the Facebook issue blew up so well is that it touches on two major fears that people have, at least one of which is entirely reasonable. It's the fear that corporations control everything and aren't accountable to the law. As far as I'm concerned, that's a reasonable and well-founded fear. I grant the author's point that the issue at hand may be over-hyped, but I think that the fact that people are so worried that it's easy to press that particular button, should definitely tell us something about how much inappropriate power corporations have, and how little accountability.

sedevon I don't hire unlucky people

I probably wouldn't have copped to it quite as fast if you hadn't named one of the characters Bertie Wooster, which was a lovely bit of signaling. Good job there.

sedevon Avoid putting files through PHP, even if they aren't PHP (yes, people do this).

This reminds me of the "PHP Is Not An Acceptable COBOL" article from not too long ago. If the entire PHP core language team just dropped the project tomorrow, I wouldn't be at all sad to see the language wither and die. The lack of PHP would be a net gain for the developer community.

sedevon Running Closed Betas: Which Users You Need and When To Stop

I'm sad that this is short on the "which users you need" part - it's got what feels like good advice, but I'd love to see a deep-dive on this topic. I also found the "here's how you actually leave beta" parts interesting, but not particularly deep or original.

sedevon Adobe's 9% Flash tax

Or to give the US example, sales tax (and 'vice' taxes like cigarettes and liquor) - because of the different spending habits of different groups, they're effectively regressive taxes.

sedevon Schneier removed from TSA oversight meeting at TSA request

I probably shouldn't be disappointed, by now, that the TSA continue to live up to the reputation that they have around here. The agency is pretty much a pure creature of cognitive bias at this point - of sunk cost fallacies, of the desperate impulse to cover one's own ass, of irrational fears and irrational responses.

I flew over the weekend. I reached a bit of a breaking point about taking the TSA seriously when I heard one of the screeners refer to a contraband item (a bottle of water) in luggage as a "party foul." Everyone but the higher-ups knows that it's an absolute farce and a waste of money. It's a great example of why the tops of hierarchies should _not_ be insulated from the consequences of their decisions - rather, the opposite.

sedevon A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved... failure

I briefly had the pleasure of working on a similar thing: it sticks out in my memory because the stack that ran the web site was entirely obsolete.

OS: Mac OS 9; DB: Filemaker Pro; templates: Lasso; webserver 4D WebSTAR.

This was in 2011.

sedevon Are you building a company, or your credentials?

This seems like a direct callback to PG's "After Credentials" essay ( http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html ), in a good way. What I get from this post is that we might be in the middle of a credentials shift, from the credentials being good guidelines, to the period where attaining them is an end in itself, the period where people are gaming the system.

sedevon GPS ruling is "hard" on the FBI—and that's a feature, not a bug

I think that your clarification and amplification is a very good one overall, but I have a disagreement.

"The fact is that U.S. law enforcement is bound by law (and the Constitution in particular) regardless of whether one is sympathetic to them, and regardless of whether or not legal standards are violated."

However, that's clearly not the only thing that they're bound by: there's an evolving discourse of law, and it's especially evident in the FBI lawyer's statement that many in the law enforcement community have a fundamental conflict - that they want to be Judge Dredd, not Sergeant Joe Friday. Law enforcement officers are bound by multiple and conflicting directives, and that means that they have no choice but to choose, to exercise discretion about which of those is most important. That's normal for most professions, but I argue that we should hold to far higher standards the people who get to legally use force.

My favorite example is micro-scale: speeding isn't actually very dangerous among the things you can get ticketed for while driving, but it makes up the lion's share of the tickets handed out because it's easy to enforce. You can point to a specific number from a mechanical device and say "there: that proves that this person was speeding." Other driving behaviors, often more dangerous, can't be so directly quantified, and so are more of a pain in the ass to enforce - and are enforced less. The conflicting directives result in a sub-optimal outcome.

Law enforcement officers in the US are not bad people: they're normal people, like you'd expect. The problem is that when you give normal people power without accountability, evil results. As the FBI shows in the linked article, they vigorously resist any effort at making them accountable - which is why it's so critical to heap on the accountability. Further, bringing me back to agreeing with you, the standards that they're bound by and accountable to, should be as clear as possible. The fuzz in the directives is part of the expanding power of law enforcement agencies, and we should acknowledge and actively work to counter that tendency towards expanding power without expanding accountability.

sedevon GPS ruling is "hard" on the FBI—and that's a feature, not a bug

""If you require probable cause for every technique, then you are making it very, very hard for law enforcement," an FBI lawyer told NPR.

Of course, that's kind of the point."

I have to echo Ars there: that's the damn point. I'd like that lawyer fired and pilloried for making such a gobsmackingly idiotic statement. "Innocent until proven guilty" is far superior to the Napoleonic-law opposite, and I can't muster any sympathy for US law enforcement agencies until at the very least they stop enforcing corporate policy over law and face some accountability for how often they shoot and kill citizens.

sedevon Try and view the source

NoScript is the new antivirus, really.