bpatrianakos

There's sort of a standard way. But really no. It's one of those situations where if you're going to use custom webfonts and aren't using a service you'll need to go through some trial and error, do some research, and basically decide which platform/browser combo is most important to you. The second most popular post on my website discusses this. Not trying to self-promote and there are problems with my implementation too but maybe this can get you started http://billpatrianakos.me/blog/2012/12/26/fix-webfont-render...

I hope we all start to move past this phase. Is it really worth the energy of starting and maintaining a "news diet" when you already know what's wrong with news? I went through a phase where I thought no news would be good for me. Then I grew out of it. I realized that if a person understands what's wrong with news they're really not the ones who need to abstain. It's everyone who hasn't realized it yet.

I read a lot about this "no news/news is bad for you" meme going around the past few years and I have to admit it's getting a little lame. How about just taking the news for what it is and take in what you want and leave the rest. Am I odd in that I don't have any emotional reaction when I hear of a rape, murder, or most other tragedies on the news? I was in Europe during the Oklahoma tornadoes and when I heard about it on the news when I came back I thought "hmm, so this is the new big story for the next week" before falling asleep. It's not that I don't care, but I also kind of don't care.

This offers no helpful information. It's not even an argument really. Comparing examples of ridiculous 200 year old laws to what's going on today without any concrete examples aside from a half-assed list of proposals in parenthesis is not an argument. It's preaching to the converted.

Torrentfreak is to copyright issues what Fox News is to Repiblican politics. It just serves to start a discussion where everyone pats each other on the back for agreeing with each other. Isn't there a list of domains that aren't allowed to be submitted and if so why hasn't Torrentfreak been added to it yet?

I wouldn't call it an argument to justify piracy but rather an excuse. The idea a lot of times is "I don't want to pay so I'll justify my behavior by telling people it's a political/ideological statement".

Furthermore, the predictability of coffee versus entertainment is not a good comparison. When you buy a movie or book or video game or something you're not guaranteed to like the product. But no one is forcing you to buy it either. So to take it free and then say "oh, didn't like it, not paying" is the lamest thing in the world and I'd be willing to bet that if you could drink coffee before you bought it (so you can decide whether it's "worth paying for") there'd be rampant coffee piracy. You're really not guaranteed to like anything you buy but if it comes in the form of a digital file suddenly people feel like it's alright to "try before you (maybe never) buy". The reason why movie trailers, singles that get played on the radio, 30 second song/video clip previews, and game demos exist is so you can see if what you're thinking of buying fits your taste. Needing the entire thing to decide sounds like such an excuse to justify not paying.

People do need to relax like you said. Have we shoved our heads so far up our asses that 40 minutes spent watching a bad TV show is a sin? I can get on board with the whole being efficient thing but there comes a point where worrying about whether consuming some media for 40 minutes will waste your time is actually worse than wasting the 40 minutes itself. (And can't we tell if we don't like something long before the 40 minute mark? I mean, we can quit watching/listening/whatever when we figure out we don't like something)

That's overblowing it a little bit. Has anyone tried doing the same thing with third party DVD playback software? I haven't but I think chances are good that it'll work.

This sort of thing is just par for the course and I see no reason to be upset over it (not saying you are, just generally). You've got a for-profit company with close partnerships and deals with various media companies plus their own iTunes store. Of course this is going to happen. But is it a big deal? It's sure a pain in the ass if you really need a screenshot of the DVD you're watching but if you really need it you'll find a way around it.

This is more FUD for the pro-piracy crowd to get their panties in a twist over. The root kit is obviously an unrealistic idea though the network idea is a bit more realistic but I seriously doubt either will go anywhere.

This is our fault though. We have these companies that sell us digital recordings of media we want at a price they've chosen. We found a way to circumvent the buying process and get it free. This is simply not okay. We can debate how fair artists get treated, the price of media, and whether or not distributing copyrighted materials online is technically stealing all day long but in the end any rational person sees this is wrong.

So while we infringe on the copyright holders rights for years any time they try to take steps to curb this behavior (which is on a scale way larger than other types of black markets and impossible to ignore) we act shocked and appalled as if we've dont nothing to instigate it. Each time they fail to curb piracy they come back with an even more deplorable plan to stop it. In the end we're all losing, both the media companies and the consumers.

I still can't understand why anyone would think piracy is okay. I've done it myself but I know its wrong. Using reasons like region availability, pricing, and the usual copyright complaints to justify it dont make sense. They're usually all excuses for the person with "I should be able to get this on my terms because, uhh, freedom" syndrome.

Sometimes the complaints are legitimate but still don't excuse piracy. We've created this problem ourselves and the only way to stop it is to vote with our wallets. Piracy does not count as voting with your wallet. To vote with your wallet you have to be willing to live without the thing you desire or go to a competitor until the seller starts giving the consumer what they want. A black market is not a competitor and it undermines the goal of getting media companies to start making it convenient to buy their product at a reasonable price. Piracy just shows them we want what they've got but don't want to pay. The only way to compete with piracy is to shut it down which is impossible and leads us to crazy proposals like the one discussed here. But lets say HBO and Shotime both aired Game of Thrones. If HBO sucks at distribution and pricing consumers go to Shotime instead. HBO sees this and can't shut down Shotime so the solution is to get better at pleasing consumers.

My point is that you can't compete with a black market and this constant arms race to implement and circumvent anti-piracy measures will lead to a stalemate where we all lose. If we quit both pirating media and buying it, that would start leading to changes in a positive direction (for those of us who aren't just pirating to be cheap at least).

*Side note: unfortunately, getting media online has the potential to become VERY convenient but can never be as convenient as piracy as it'll always require a payment step but is that really so awful?

It should be trivial to get the resize functionality back. I think in cases like this breaking existing functionality is fine. This is obviously aimed at people with a relatively narrow use-case in mind. In a situation where the purpose of full screen mode is to remove the distractions of the surrounding document this seems fine. I personally would want my text box at a fixed size on some forms with the option to make it the only thing on the page (case in point is my own app https://writeapp.me [yes, an account is needed to see the text box]) so as to keep the design from breaking (it's a very opinionated page when it comes to design).

I think overall this is an improvement to text boxes generally which is why I can forgive the breakage of one bit of existing functionality.

From 1 to 20 then down to about 3 on average now. I've had my project (https://writeapp.me) on HN a few times but it really went nowhere. Recently however its been featured on MakeUseOf at least twice, Web Appstorm, and a number of other tech/teacher blogs.

Before the MakeUseOf article I'd get 3 to 10 hits a day with 1 visitor at a time. After the first MakeUseOf article it went to about 20 at a time for about a day. After that the site has been picked up by other blogs (some of them review it multiple times on different days) so the traffic has increased about 100% from pre-review levels and has been holding steady at about 100-ish visitors a day and 3 users at a time normally. Note that there are obviously periods in the day where its 0 because you can't have 100 uniques and 3 visitors on site at the same time all day. The math doesn't add up. I'm just talking about what I see whenever I check my analytics which is pretty often during the weekdays.

I like this except for the last part where he mentions that he doesn't like server-side solutions to front-end problems. The way I see it, this is a server-side problem that only shows up on the front end. If we're talking about sending headers that tell the client to download something then that should be coming from the server. Now, it's awesomely convenient that HTML5 lets us do this but still, I see it as something that still "belongs" on the server side. Just my take on that last part.

This is something I relate to a lot. I've been paralyzed many times by being unsure if I'm coding the Best way. In the last 5 or so years I write some awful code but every piece of terrible code taught me how to write good code. The bad code worked, it did what it was supposed to do but it ended up causing complexity and making it hard to add on to down the line and that is what helped me learn to things right.

It has nothing to do with bad code not working. I think its when bad code works that you learn. You should have seen my pet project when it was started in 2011 (which I'll shamelessly plug, https://writeapp.me). It was a series of scripts all string together. Then it was rewritten using a framework when the first version couldn't be extended. From there the models, views, and controllers have been refactored many times over each time making the app more extensible, less buggy, and from a code perspective, more "right".

It's a one step backward, two steps forward kind of situation. Each time you hit a wall you go back and not only fix one problem but move forward helping yourself avoid other common pitfalls.

How about VSRA. Very short reply accepted. VSRE can come off a bit harsh both for the sender and receiver. By using VSRA you're saying "hey, if you're real busy I won't be offended by a super short response. As others have mentioned here, the idea of VSRE can be socially awkward. By making it optional you avoid that. I suggest this not as a replacement but as an alternative. You could use VSRE with people you know well and VSRA with anyone else.

I've been saying this forever here but Marco says it so much better. The majority of the times I see an article on HN getting popular about how awful some app or site is its usually this kind of scenario that Marco describes in effect.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen an article here about some poor guy complaining that his favorite app changed a feature or price or policy that's often pretty trivial and turns it into an opportunity to start drama and shame the company because he didn't get the memo. Except everyone else did.

When we see something we don't like it isn't bad to complain about it in and of itself but what isn't okay is this self-righteous attitude people have started to acquire. It's this phenomenon where we think that we can not only publicly shame companies on our blogs and believe we're important enough for them to change it back for us but, worse, we seem to think we're objectively right. This sort of mentality doesn't seem to carry over into the real world nearly as often. It seems that if you do business online your customers expect you to cater to each and everyone one of them individually. If I have oddly sized feet and can't get a pair of good fitting Nike's I don't try to publicly shame the company for not providing a shoe in the style I want in the size exactly tailored to my odd foot measurement. But when it comes to the Internet you had better be all things to all people it seems.

Even stranger, for a community like HN where many of us are working on online products, we seem more guilty of this than the average person. How is that? Is it that we think because we know how to build things that our way is right? I don't know but I'm really glad Marco wrote this and I'm really glad people here are reading it.

You hit the nail on the head. It's getting very annoying to read posts by people who get up on their high horse and proclaim "this is terrible design and I'm shaming companies who do this"... except that's not the case. It's just a mildly annoying thing for them but as far as the sites are concerned this is great design. Rather than go around saying "I proclaim this wrong" we should start saying "I don't like this" because in the end that's really what most people are saying and they come off like dicks when it turns out there's a pretty good reason for the "wrong" thing to be such.

Exactly! I think there's this quality that separates entrepreneurial people from non-entrepreneurial people. That quality is to understand what the customer wants. People who naturally think this way do exactly what you do - they sell on value. Meanwhile those who don't have it end up selling based on tech specs.

I don't mean to imply that some people aren't meant to be entrepreneurs. What I am saying is that there's a certain way of thinking that comes naturally to some and allows them to excel at it faster. But the good news is that this is something that can be learned.

I'm reminded of the very stark difference in marketing I see between Apple and any other PC maker. Apple sells you the ability to listen to your music anywhere, use the web easily, get photos from here to there fast, share your life with your family, and on and on. Then whenever I see any kind of PC marketing it's all "processor speed this, screen size that, Gigs of RAM" and features that don't mean much to anyone. Consumers end up doing what a lot of these website clients do when choosing a product. They seek out the thing they were told is good. So you'll see middle aged men in Best Buy saying "I want a Toshiba laptop because I heard it has X gigs of RAM and blah blah" when really there's not much separating that Toshiba from the other cheap plastic laptops next to it. In contrast I've also seen middle aged women walk into a Best Buy and say "I want the Mac that lets me video chat with my son in college". The PCs in the store let you do that too but they forgot to mention it in the marketing because they were so busy droning on about hardware specs.

*In fairness, I've seen the marketing of PCs improve a lot in recent years and it has started to get away from this sort of thing but not enough yet.

In my experience, from day 1 it was clear no one cared about the technology. Sure you'd get some asshole know-it-all types who thought they knew how web design and development worked better that you did but most of the time people would basically say "hey, I need a website that does this and that and the other thing". The technology used was never discussed. All I'd ever tell people was "yes, you can update all of the content and a good portion of the design yourself". People who mentioned technologies were usually just parroting what some other uninformed person was saying.

I'm really curious, it seems a lot of people here may have made this same mistake, talking about technology rather than problems. Is this because you thought it was a selling point or because the client brought it up? Maybe I've just had unusual clients but this entire "problem" never really cropped up for me during my time working as a solo designer/developer.

For me SMS was a great way to give my users mobile access before having a mobile app or even a mobile friendly version of the site. Using Twilio I was able to whip up a system where users could use the 2-factor auth and the other main feature of my little app whether they had a smartphone or not. I still support these SMS features today because sometimes a text is just faster than an app. Sometimes, not always.

I'm very much opposed to this idea of completely ignoring the news. Eating too much meat has negative effects on your health so do we suggest we all go vegan? No. Just because something has it's downsides doesn't mean the solution is to avoid it entirely. The suggestion that we should all ignore the news is such a broad, black and white solution that doesn't really solve the problem.

I don't think it's healthy for anyone to have a full on "let's not ignore news" or "let's totally ignore news" attitude. A lot of what you're saying is true and they're valid points but they're not compelling enough of a reason for anyone to stop consuming news. It's impossible to live a life where you avoid anything that would negatively affect you. You mention loss aversion. That could be considered a bad thing. But it can also be quite helpful. After the bombings in Boston yesterday we had a noticeable increase in security in Chicago where I am. Because I paid attention to the news I knew something had happened and was a little more aware of my surroundings on public transportation than I would normally be. Now, did anything happen? No, but having that awareness didn't hurt me either.

Ignoring the news means being ignorant of the world around you. I understand that no one is immune from the emotional impact of what they see on the news but it doesn't mean they also cannot pull themselves away from it or that it will necessarily lead to some kind of depression or other negative.

People like us don't need to be told to ignore the news. It's the people who watch Fox all day long and can't discern opinion from fact and are looking for someone to validate their world view that need to be told this. The rest of us I think can take it in, learn a thing or two, and see the rest for what it is. If a few of us get emotionally invested in a story for an hour or two then so be it, is there really any serious harm done?

This entire "ignore the news" idea is way too black or white to be realistic. The vast majority of things in this world, including this idea, are far more complex than a simple "do or don't do this or that" answer can provide. There are things you shouldn't do - don't eat Uranium, don't jump off tall buildings, don't stick your tongue in a light socket... this isn't one of those thing.

Agreed. Last night my personal trainer who is otherwise the nicest guy ever said "why does this always happen here, these things happen here all the time" to which I replied "they happen almost every single day in other parts of the world, they barely ever happen here". He didn't believe me and proceeded to tell me about how "it's because we let all those god damn foreigners into the country". This is a really great guy and I had no idea he had these views but after hearing him say such an ignorant thing I too wonder why this doesn't happen here in the U.S. more often too.

This "No news"/"News is bad for you" fad needs to end. New is not bad for you. News is good for you. Knowing what's going on your world and the world is important.

What isn't good for you is getting sucked into the manufactured drama and drawn out 24 hour news cycle.

The correct attitude would be something more like "be an intelligent consumer of news" rather than "news is bad, stick your head in the sand and ignore it". If you understand that news is entertainment then that's just about all you need to know to be able to pick out the relevent information and go about your day. The news media may do a lot of terrible things but journalists themselves still exist and are still ethical. It's just that they're beholden to their bosses who turn their reporting into something other than a report of the facts.

News is not bad for you. The inability to think critically about what you see on the news is bad for you.

Easy, equal or better pay/benefits and more interesting work. I think people have a sliding scale though. For me, excellent health insurance coverage would be a dealbreaker. I'd stay where I was if another company offered to pay me 50% more without health coverage but totally leave if they offered me 10% less with the same health coverage and more interesting work.

I've got a PayPal business mastercard which is connected to PayPal Smart Connect. They may not allow PayPal proper but you could pay using PayPal by way of their card. I use my PayPal card hooked into Smart Connect for a good number of recurring payments like this.

So I guess the answer would be, if you ended up hooking your PayPal account up to Linode in the way I described, yeah follow the same steps as other cards, otherwise it's not even possible to have a problem.

This comment is why communication sucks.

Edit: (I'm kidding, not being mean)

His main thesis focuses far more on why people who don't live in Facebook wouldn't like this ("it took over too much of the phone") than why people who like Facebook will like it. The mention of features Facebook fans would love was really more of an afterthought than the point. It was like saying "all this stuff sucks but I guess it'd be cool if you love Facebook". Articles like this always seem to be written by someone who doesn't understand the audience of the product.

"So while Home offers more of Facebook than you’re likely to want, it gives you fewer ways of interacting with the social network than you probably would like." (emphasis mine)

Written like exactly the kind of person I'm describing. I think if it were fair criticism then it would focus more on how engrossing and mesmerizing the author says it is and of course then mention some of its lacking features. If you take out all the love-to-hate-it parts it'd end up being a fairly positive review of the product.

And please don't do that, the "not sure if you read the article" thing. I didn't come away with the same message as you but I read it.

All this criticism of Facebook home is kind of ridiculous. It's basically preaching to the choir. What I hear when I've read almost all of the recent criticisms is "Don't use Facebook Home if you don't like the whole point of Facebook Home". Well, duh!

Facebook Home is for people who live on Facebook. It doesn't pretend to be anything different. If you're a Facebook fiend you'll love this. If you read HN you'll love to hate it. This software is not bad. It just doesn't suit the purposes of people who, well, have a different use-case in mind for their phone than the people who would like Home do.

I'd like to see more reviews that are aimed at those who would actually want to use this software. At this point all we get is "hey, people who would never like this thing, you shouldn't use it and hey let's have fun hating on it". I wouldn't use it. I agree with the article completely but my problem is that the point of the article is irrelevant. Instead there should be balanced reviews that weigh the pros and cons of this software for the audience it's aimed at.

This is like going to GNU conference and reviewing Windows as an OS you wouldn't like and shouldn't use.

The author is reaching here. Us nerds need to remember the web isn't just for us, at least not for B2C businesses. Google isn't doing this to squash competing technologies and take over the web... on purpose. What's going on is that only nerds like us give a damn about RSS. Everyone else wants to just point and click around and have stuff work. Google+ and some pointing and clicking around = a lot of happy normal people. Seriously, meta tags? Again, who's gonna do that except me and everyone else in this thread? Techie folks like us tend to really overestimate our importance and how many of us there are. There's a lot but we're nothing compared non-technical folks.

Google isn't for us. It's for your parents. But that's alright because there's a whole world wide web out there without Google and Google really can't do much to actually kill any technology. RSS exists guys, there's just no Google Reader anymore. The cool thing is that if you actually care about this stuff then you're probably in a position to know how to build it. Google caters to those who don't know or care to build stuff. Why would you blame a company for catering to its customers?

This is a neat idea. Before I got into web dev I was majoring in Music Composition. I wish I had been exposed to this when I was studying music, it really does make a lot of sense.

I don't think Kickstarter will harm open source. I think opporunists might. But do you really think people like us would fund something like this? I'm honestly asking the question. I don't think they would. As a programmer I know better than to fund something like this. There's no shortage of Ruby tutorials out there for free and a ton that cost money too. All great resources. I see this and I think to myself, "nice, someone decided to capitalize on the hipness of Ruby by duplicating what's out there for free with a twist - vaguely familiar games as lessons".

I have faith that this won't be funded.

I absolutely hate them! There's nothing wrong with giving people who break the law a punishment but it feels like it's one step closer to 1984. Now they can catch me committing crimes without being present. They're watching me and it feels very invasive. I don't mind getting stopped by a cop but to have robots (cameras, same difference) doing it feels wrong. What's next? Are they going to start monitoring me on my private property? Are thought crimes next?

It's a slippery slope. Today people get used to being watched on public property and being issued tickets. The more people get used to this the further the authorities can go with it. And if you know me, you know I'm the furthest thing from paranoid when it comes to privacy issues. I assume nothing is private anymore and I just don't care but when I can be fined by a camera that's just crossing the line.

It also comes across as really lazy and sleazy too. A very cheap way to make a lot of money quick. When you get one of those tickets you really have no way to contest it. Yeah, you could go to court but they have a video and the law assumes the robots are always calibrated correctly and they don't know nor do they care if your wife is in the passenger seat having contractions or whatever the case may be.

Front-ends that work in IE6 but not in modern browsers? Are you sure? That doesn't really make sense to me. I can see how maybe some outdated code or a bunch of hacks could make a site designed for IE6 look just a little funny here and there but I don't see how it would be a lot of work at all to make a site made for IE6 work in a modern browser. As far as I know, the only reason large companies don't upgrade is because they have a bunch of infrastructure that's totally unrelated to websites that stop them from upgrading. Basically, the IT department sets up the entire company's computer systems a certain way and then resist upgrading anything so they don't have to do a lot of testing, more patching, and generally adapt to the new tech after they've tuned their infrastructure just so.

Sort of. I think HN is where you come to talk to other smart people about a topic. A blog's comment section is where you communicate directly with the author and a much broader, more random group of people. The latter is hit or miss with regards to quality but sometimes people surprise you.