Old questions in SO, generate interest in HN? Isn't N supposed to be NEWS?
There is a subset of developers in the valley who pride themselves on trying to build the perfect REST API. Arguing over things like PUT v. POST, laughing at people who have to use ?_method= hacks to get around corporate firewalls, and trying to pack as many query parameters into the path as possible. Things like this SO thread really get them excited, so its a magnet for upvotes.
The problem is, while technically correct, this is counter-intuitive to how you should be building an API. Unless you are going to be providing fully functional libraries in all the major languages, your number one goal is making it so damn easy your average contract programmer from Accenture (who often don't even know POST exists) could use it. Unless you have a compelling wealth of data hidden behind your API (Google, eBay, Amazon, etc.), or extreme user demand (Flickr, Facebook, etc.), you have to make the bar to entry as absolutely low as possible or you will never get traction.
I think that proper use of HTTP methods is one of the core ideas of REST, but I understand that one might have to take shortcuts like _method to satisfy real-life needs while calling it RESTful to satisfy the buzz-word hungry PHB.
Let's just agree not to do something like GET /foo?_method=DELETE
From the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"
We, as developers take some pieces of technology as granted, many of us might not understand the real use cases of usage of PUT vs POST.
I don't think HN is meant purely for "fresh news" but a place for meaningful discussions which matter.
PS: This was not a karma collection ploy by me. If I wanted karma I would go to reddit or stackoverflow. Not HN.