Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwatte | Hacker News Reader

In this case: Because it's more fun and personally rewarding to do new stuff, than fight the hard compatibility fight.

In startup API cases: Because it takes 10x longer to build a solid foundation, and you don't yet know whether that's worth it -- time to proof is more important. And once you have proof, well, you can't change it easily...

View on HN

> it's more fun and personally rewarding to do new stuff, than fight the hard compatibility fight

Thirteen years ago: https://href.li/?https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

And we're still complaining about the very same problems in the very same project.

Edit: God dammit, jwz. Sorry, everybody. Should be safe now, I hope. (I can't see the troll for myself, so I don't know for sure, but if this thing strips the header like it claims to do, that should solve it.)

NSFW: Picture of a testicle

What?

jwz doesn't like Hacker News so he redirects traffic from Hacker News to a picture of a testicle.

static hosting is hard

JWZ redirects all accesses with Referer: news.ycombinator.com to this image [NSFW] http://imgur.com/32R3qLv

Haha, some might argue that he has a point.

Lol, he is redirecting referral traffic from hacker news to an imgur picture of a testicle mocking hacker news users.

Trolling level A+

jwz is such a...unique individual.

To people confused about the link, copy and paste it instead. The owner of that site is trolling people with the HN referrer.

Not me, apparently. (No, seriously! I'm seeing the page I expect to see when I click that link in that comment. If I'd known jwz was doing what you claim he is, I'd have wrapped it with a referrer stripping bouncer or something. Sorry!)

Your browser is probably caching the page. If you click your link then do a hard refresh (hold shit & click) you'll see the redirect.

> hold shit & click

Such a beautiful inadvertency. Anyway, it should be solved now. Sorry!

It would seem that his server auto-displays an image based on the referrer.

If you want to see the original article you have to copy and paste the URL into a browser yourself, and not click the link from this site.

Btw, @dang: Can't you just automatically turn every jzw.org link into one redirecting through href.li or donotlink? Or maybe even to the archive.org version?

I'd say the archive.org version -- if he doesn't want HN pageviews, let's not give him any.

God dammit, jwz.

Haha JWZ has done that to me before [0], as well. I think his method is to see an HN Referer, and then pounce with his Tinder profile pic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11031074

Startup API cases also often have a chicken & egg situation: you can't know what a good API is until you've had several clients use it, but then you have several clients who will be broken if you change it.

I would think that the first rule of API design is to use it yourself whilst wearing the customers' shoes, and with that approach a large proportion of cases like that would become apparent. Or one could look at some of the longest-standing APIs (WindowS API is one) out there and observe how they evolve it to cope this requirements changes. There's still some chicken-and-egg situation in there but much of the ambiguity can be resolved with the right technique.

The REAL problem is we have all these startup turds churning out ideas faster than they can think about them, and the HN crowd has built an entire ecosystem to facilitate that churn

+1 for startup api. It is a bit sad but the same goes for code. It rots really quick and it might not be worth building solid foundations because in next year it will be out of buisness and building solid foundation takes 6 months...

In this case, it's much less responsible to do so. You have people who rely on their software to get things done. Making them jump through hoops like this just leads to frustration, or them abandoning using your program.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com