Hacker News Reader

h2son Glio (YC S13) Aims To Be The “Yelp of Brazil” And Beyond in Latin America

The ridiculous Facebook login "social paywall" only applies to the front page and city pages. You can get around the site to some extent using "site:glio.com" + keywords on Google.

For example: http://glio.com/local/cafe-com-letras-leblon-rio-de-janeiro

h2son Reasons Why WordPress Made PHP Popular, not PHP Frameworks

I agree in as much as I think that PHPClasses is an anachronistic throwback to the bad old days of PHP. It has a shameful history of promoting terrible code with dubious "awards" as if it were the greatest thing ever built. Newcomers to PHP development would be better served by a web that lacked phpclasses.org in its current form.

For example, in a recent article entitled "26 Ways to Show that PHP Can Be Better Than PHP" (http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/203-26-Ways-to-Show-that...), they showcased a series of "multithreading" implementations in ascending order of WTF, culminating with this:

    Mohammed Yousef from Egypt has written the PHP
    Threader class that also takes advantage of the
    fact that a Web server can run multiple scripts
    in parallel, except that it uses AJAX requests
    sent from the browser to start the scripts.

I disagree, however, with the idea that Manuel Lemos is a clueless, destructive clown. I think he's a well-meaning, intelligent person who has somewhat failed to keep pace with the "proper software engineering" standards that have infiltrated PHP in recent years.

For example, in an article from 2013 comparing development using Wordpress vs using a framework, I would have expected some comparison of the viability of automated testing in each approach. And unless my name was Fabien Potencier, I would not expect to be advised to "use your own framework if you have a good capable framework to address your needs".

But this is only destructive to the extent that others fail to make a strong case for building well-tested software using high quality open source libraries where suitable instead of endlessly reinventing wheels. There is room for competing ideas, and I don't see these particular ideas as an especially worrying competitive threat.

h2son Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

Doesn't matter how good you think are. If you write code professionally for long enough, you eventually experience an event like this first hand. It's an absolutely horrible experience for a developer.

h2son My self-published book on being a great developer

I think you've misunderstood the example code. Each instance of that Order class has exactly one product. There is neither a quantity to consider nor other items in the cart. That may not be the same design as whatever ecommerce system you're used to, but it's definitely the design of this example.

h2son Reasons to avoid code comments

Not only are you right that these docblock comments can get out of sync with the real parameters, but I would argue that it is almost inevitable that they will. I rarely waste my time reading them any more, but when I do, there's something out-of-date more often than not.

I like your idea of documenting only the interesting aspects of the parameter list. I'd advocate just going ahead with it, using plain old concise English prose to do so. Comments are supposed to be for humans to read anyway.

h2son Don't be evil: Moving everything off of Google

If GMail kills email marketing, I will walk all the way around the world to Palo Alto and personally shake Larry & Sergey by the hand. Nobody likes email marketing, not even the people building their livelihoods on top of it.

If Google managed to snuff out such a widely reviled marketing channel, it would be an enormously disruptive force in the tech industry. And disruptive forces aren't hurtful for the startup community at all. Disruption makes room for innovation.

Sure, it'd be bad news for SendGrid, but it'd be awesome news for some lucky group of people in the 2015 YC batch.

h2son Should I use a carousel?

I think I can best express what I think of it in code.

     <marquee onmouseover="this.setAttribute('scrollamount', 0, 0);" onmouseout="this.setAttribute('scrollamount', 6, 0);">

It's certainly a nice implementation of what it's supposed to be an implementation of. But it's effectively just a resurrection of the <marquee> tag.

h2son Should I use a carousel?

I've been waiting and hoping for the anti-carousel movement to gain cultural traction among web developers for some time. The fact that this page has made it to the front page of HN gives me hope that momentum will begin to increase more rapidly now.

Some people seem to think carousels are some sort of design cheat code, making it possible to include five pieces of content in the space of one. It's almost the front-end equivalent of a TODO comment.

    // TODO: decide which of these things actually matters.
    // In the meantime, let's just show all five one-by-one

They don't even work for images. When a person wants to browse a collection of images, they'll want to choose when to skip to the next image themselves. That's why Facebook's image albums don't automatically move to the next image after five seconds.

And those fucking carousel pagination "dots"... just when designers had begun to catch on to the fact that numbered pagination links need to be big enough to click easily, along came carousels to preserve the tradition of impossibly small UI elements that are difficult to interact with.

Fuck carousels.

h2son Prism Break

I don't think the analogy works. This is using consumer-grade retail padlocks to keep out the world's richest and most well-equipped criminal organisation. The fact that the shops don't sell strong enough padlocks to stop them isn't the real problem: the deep-seated corruption in law enforcement allowing them to steal with impunity is.

h2son Prism Break

That's a very fair point. There's certainly nothing bad about making privacy conscious technology choices.

I also think that the very URL of this project - http://prism-break.org/ - invokes a certain over-focus on NSA's PRISM. As a UK citizen, however, my Internet traffic itself is being stored and monitored by GCHQ. So to me it seems especially futile switching from Chrome to Firefox, or from Google to DDG, or from Facebook to Diaspora.

h2son Prism Break

While I understand and sympathise with the compulsion to resist surveillance in this practical, technological way, I think it might be the wrong reaction to the information. It's typical of techie people to seek technical solutions to social problems, and this is one such case.

It may well be possible to mitigate their ability to watch you by wearing enough tin-foil hats. Even if you succeed, all you've achieved is to protect one solitary person at the cost of considerable personal inconvenience. Worse, once you consider yourself "safe enough" from prying eyes, your incentive to actually act on what they're doing will be diminished.

I think that we should try not to be meek about this issue, passively hiding ourselves and then getting on with our lives saying "Fuck you, got mine". Why should the tech community flee the very Internet that it has played such a crucial role in building? Is the idea that our democracies could eventually fix this situation really beyond all hope?

If you live in the UK, write to your MP (http://www.writetothem.com/). Support PPUK (http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/) if you feel strongly enough, as they're seemingly the only political group treating this matter with the seriousness it deserves.

h2son Ideas on how to improve customer conversion and ease of use

Ugh. It felt extremely weird to read an entire article with that thing obscuring such a huge part of the bottom of the page. The best description of the feeling that I can think of is that it kind of felt like I was reading it by shoulder-surfing somebody else's browsing session on the train.

That, and the general focus of the content itself, put across a message of conversion-centric design rather than human-centric design. Ignoring the way a person feels while interacting your design just to increase signup conversions. Not nice.

h2son On Open-Sourcing Libraries

You've contributed some really useful information about the GPL and the LGPL, but the whole "please don't license it under the GPL" angle did nothing but initially reduce my receptiveness to that information as a reader.

The GPL is a perfectly good license, and a lot of very good things only exist because of it. That you would implore people not to use it at all seems an unwarranted use of hyperbole, and one that does not contribute anything to your actual point, which is that people should understand the full extent of the restrictions imposed by their choice of license.

For me, all this accomplished was to put my mind on the defensive as I read the rest of your comment. I had to go back and read it a second time in order to give my mind a chance to digest the real message.

h2son Nginx just became the most used web server among the top 1000 websites

It sounds wrong to me to refer to Apache and nginx as "alternatives" to IIS. They're the web servers, and IIS is the "alternative", kind of like how Excel is the spreadsheet application and LibreOffice Calc is the alternative. I'm aware that I cocoon myself in something of an anti-Microsoft echo chamber, though. Does reality match up to my prejudices?

h2son HKSAR Government issues statement on Edward Snowden

Exactly. The only way this could have read more like a "Fuck you, don't hack us and then ask for our help" is if they claimed there would be some delay in arresting him because they have taken a lot of computer systems offline for a comprehensive security audit in light of the revelations.

h2son Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

According to Snowden's leaked Prism slides, Google was brought into the NSA fold on the 14th of January 2009. So Firefox is well over 4 years behind Chrome in that respect as well. Get your act together, Mozilla!

h2son Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

When people say they want "passive income", I take it to mean "I want to start a tiny business and then neglect it and hope it dies slowly".

h2son Guardian publishes third secret NSA document, on cyberwar

This is low-quality Ars Technica blogspam. Don't submit a link to an article briefly summarising another article. Submit the article in question itself.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/obama-china-targ...

h2son A better git log

    git log --stat

h2son Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API

    The epiphany we had was that whilst machines do access
    the API, the developer is always the customer and user.
    Everything we do should help the developer, and if we
    have to break rules to help them... then largely we
    should.

Thank you, this articulates my disagreement with the idea of hashing all URLs so that client developers are forced to follow links returned by the API instead of generating their own URLs

http://blog.ploeh.dk/2013/05/01/rest-lesson-learned-avoid-ha...

h2son How Email On Acid stole our work

I think you know quite well that this is not what xordon is saying at all. Whenever something like this happens, people throw words like "theft" and "stolen" around. This widespread conflation of stealing and copyright infringement is the deliberate outcome of a long-running effort by the copyright lobby. Reminding each other of the difference is healthy for the long-term balance of power between the general public and rights-holders.

h2son Designing blogs for readers

I couldn't agree more with his claim that comments are an unnecessary feature for a modern blog. Back in Web 2.0 times comments were an absolute must-have. I think the web in 2013 has largely moved on from the notion that "everything must have a comment form below it".

People generally don't put as much work into their comments as you did into your blog post, so the comment section is a tangible dive in written quality. And they tend to be quite "fire and forget", because although somebody might disagree with something in the five seconds after reading a post, they are unlikely to remember that disagreement two days later and return to see if anyone responded.

Personally, if somebody felt strongly enough about something I wrote to want to say something to me something about it, I'd prefer an email anyway.

h2son Designing blogs for readers

A couple of Matt's complaints might apply to the design of your blog: tiny fonts and long lines. Long lines are a readability problem because the eye tends to get lost when jumping from the end of a line to the start of a new one. Small fonts are a problem for obvious reasons.

The very first thing I did when your URL loaded was to increase the browser text size. A good rule of thumb when it comes to typography on the web these days is to be very cautious about setting a font-size smaller than the usual 16px browser default.

h2son The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)

    > wanted old equipment for free
    > had to pay a nominal price for it instead
    > felt sad and less appreciated

Gotta say, your disappointment really isn't resonating with me. Sounds like quite a reasonable response on their part. People in management perform a constant balancing act with things like morale and expectations. Perhaps it wouldn't have been prudent to have you be seen to be getting "special treatment". Unless there were 19 similar old TVs to give to the rest of the team, then you can guarantee several people would have felt resentful about you getting yours for free.

h2son The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)

There is nothing wrong with cleaning offices for a living. It's good, hard, honest work. But did you really bust your ass learning to program just to clean toilets so that somebody getting paid more than you can make the numbers on their spreadsheet look nicer?

There are good reasons for you to leave that situation. For one, the fact that your employer can't afford a cleaning service is a very bad omen. Secondly, programmers don't usually like being deprived of their programming like that, so even if your employer isn't about to go under, it's likely that some of your colleagues are planning their own exits. It's also almost certainly a departure from the job description you signed up for.

I have to admit, I am wondering why you're still working there. There must be some good mitigating circumstances, right?

h2son Ubuntu Linux Community: Canonical Vows to Maintain Focus

I'm struggling to find anywhere in the cited Ubuntu blog post that talks about a vow to maintain focus. The summary itself never revisits that phrase to explain it further, and while the words "maintain" and "focus" do appear in the Ubuntu post, they are completely separate and there is no theme of vowing anything or staying focused on any particular thing. If anything, it's the opposite.

    Phase one of the restructure consisted of updating
    Ubuntu.com to reflect the expanded scope of the
    project.

Weird!

h2son jq - like sed for JSON data

Crockford's refusal to extend JSON is genius IMO. Totally agree with you: if the task you're trying to accomplish sounds like a fit for XML, then please use XML. JSON is what it is, and not everything needs to be gradually extended into six mutually incompatible versions of increasing bloat.

http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2012/03/thank-god...

h2son When to refactor code

    > "this 10 item checklist."
    > 11 items in the checklist

Heh, it's not often you see an off-by-one error in prose!

h2son It’s all about being productive

It's because incorporating any open source product into your own project means you will need to read and/or modify its source code eventually. I work around deficient documentation by reading source code several times every day. And eventually you're gonna need to report or fix a bug, or in the best-case scenario add a feature yourself.

The sensible answer to this is "just learn CoffeeScript, then". I guess a lot of people don't want to, for whatever reason. Personally, I know I'm still a bit skeptical of the whole affair myself. The alternative to reading and learning CoffeeScript would be reading compiled JavaScript code. As somebody who occasionally works on something that compiles JavaScript, I know from experience that reading that stuff isn't very fun either!

h2son OVH has been compromised

This type of shit will keep happening until people stop trying to store money in relatively insecure consumer-grade hosting environments. The entire bitcoin economy is built on sand. Look into how much expense real banks go to in order to secure their systems. Then look at this never-ending parade of surprised victims who lost their bitcoins just because somebody found a vulnerability in some hosting company's bespoke password reset form.