cowboyhero

Few crits & suggestions:

- The layout does render correctly at 1024x768 (iPad).

- Some of the drop downs do not work when tapped.

- Make the movie detail page URL more SEO friendly (include the title instead of your internal ID).

- Don't force users to download images & titles from a few dozen other movies when looking at the movie detail page.

- Focus on being mobile friendly. I can imagine a site like this being most useful when I see a poster or trailer at the local theater and want to remember it. In that situation, I'm on my phone with a slower connection (or one that is capped).

- You're building a site with lots of utility, not a content site. I'm not sure links to half a dozen social media services will serve your users (along with forcing mobile visitors to download all that JavaScript).

- Movie release dates vary greatly across countries. Even the US, smaller independent films will have slow roll outs over longer periods of time. Some bigger films will premier in NY and LA weeks or months before being released in a wider market. And not all films will be available in all areas. Your site gives no indication of any of this at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why%27s_(poignant)_Guide_to_Rub...

Edit: Fixed URL

Nice! I posted a similar sentiment here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5108181

Perl or PHP, because why not?

She's also got a repo called "Kittydar" (Face detection for cats in JavaScript). This is someone who loves her language of choice and is just spinning out some fun projects with it. I think that's great.

Rewriting sed in JavaScript is cool. Even as a one-off, proof of concept, "I did this because I could." I mean, why not? Isn't that what the so-called hacker "ethos" is supposed to be about? She never said her version was better. She never evangelized its use over the traditional *NIX tools.

In the early 1990s, some crazy bastard decided to riff on the Unix kernel. About a decade later, another nut decided to rewrite the encyclopedia, and encouraged people to help him do it. Then another crazy wrote a programming tutorial using bizarre illustrations while eating a lot of chunky bacon. Why not? All three of those projects could have been considered pointless. We already had kernels. We had encyclopedias, and god knows, plenty of programming books.

I have the urge now to follow in Heather's footsteps, waste my own time, and write a version of sed in PHP. Or maybe Perl. And then write a wrapper for it in Applescript. Because, why not?

> PHP will slowly phase out over the next decade.

Wordpress.

It's become a full blown CMS and its own platform. Half the media sites out there are running it, or hosting with Wordpress Pro. Then there's a horde of casual bloggers managing their own installs.

Granted, there's movement away from this kind of publishing model(Facebook, Twitter, G+), but as long as Wordpress is still the go to, "set it and forget it" app on $5 webhosts, PHP will not die.

> We have server side JS (Node), Ruby, Python and Java --

Hey now. Let's not forget everyone's first love: Perl. :D

It's still quietly running quite a few big sites out there, and is currently enjoying something of a renaissance with frameworks like Mojolicious & Dancer, not to mention the releases of 5.10-5.16.

The most striking thing is the across the board drop from one age group to the next. That to me is the more interesting story here.

Curious about Survata' methodology. Neither the author nor their website go into a great deal of information about this. (I mostly want to know who crafts the questions, as it's easy to inadvertntly skew survey results).

As an aside, linking to Survata's homepage not just once but three times in a ~600 word post makes this thing, aside from its casual observations, feel like an 'advertorial.'

Figures in similar communities were older (Larry released Perl in his early thirties, Guido was pushing forty before Python gained traction). They also didn't come up in the era of YouTube, twitter, and archive.org.

Thirty years ago Ruby-style drama would have played out as drunken rant at a post-conference hotel bar, or a snide comment on Usenet, or on an obscure mailing list. Not quite the same.

The Ruby guys didn't have the benefit of age, experience, or a certain amount of professional obscurity.

Very cool. Thanks for the clarification.

Also: I'm not an expert, or a lawyer, but it's my understanding that you can't copyright titles, but you can trademark them, or portions of them.

The guys (IDW?) that publish the "For Dummies" book series regularly enforce the trademarks around their name and cover design.

Hollywood often gets around the copyright problem by trademarking some film titles (this is why it's always "Disney's The Lion King" and not just "The Lion King.")

Love the idea, the context, and the execution. It's a great project. Not a fan of the name.

Zed Shaw has a well-established series of "Learn $topic the Hard Way" online books, with Addison Wesley publishing a 3rd edition of his "Learn Python the Hard Way" this spring. He is building a brand and a business around this name.

I'd be surprised to learn that "Learn ... the Hard Way" isn't trademarked, but even if it isn't, it strikes me as disingenuous, misleading, and potentially confusing to name your work after his.

As far as I can tell, Mr Shaw has nothing to do with this project, but then the "Learn Linux the Hard Way" name might, to some, imply that he does.

Edited to add: I do not have a dog in this fight, just pointing out a potential conflict.

I downloaded a trial of PhpStorm last week, and loaded an old CodeIgniter project into it.

The app flagged objects, methods, and variables that were created in other files as "undefined."

I could see how that would be helpful under other circumstances, but does anyone know if PhpStorm is set up to play nice with most PHP frameworks?

Also: For smaller projects, is there any advantage to buying a Python IDE over just using a tricked out version of Vi?

Auto complete is nice & all, but Vi is Vi.

https://cooperpress.com/

It's not a blog, but a collection of weekly email newsletters.

At the risk of sounding like a shill (because I'm pretty sure Mr Cooper posts to HN), I have to say these are each brilliantly done. There are separate newsletters for JavaScript, Ruby, HTML5, and Dart (but sadly no Python).

Great way to keep up with changes in these areas once a week, and pretty much the only third-party emails I not only look forward to receiving, but actually open and read.

I think he buried the lede: Social login buttons can hurt brands.

This'll date me, but I'm still amazed that so many companies eagerly slap other company's logos on everything they do. Even if it's just a blog post.

This page is a case in point: Facebook's brand appears four times. Twitter's appears a dozen times (more because of the comments). Mailchimp? Just once.

This might be pedantic for this thread, I have to point out that Clerks wasn't really a "self financed" movie. At least in the sense that the final product you saw on theaters and on DVD was not paid for by Kevin Smith.

Smith did spend around $30k of his own money on production costs. The bulk of that was for film stock. (Similarly, Rodriguez spent $8k of his own money on Mariachi.)

Now, here's the kicker: Neither one of them spent a dime on film prints. They signed deals and let the studios take care of that. This is significant because if people talked about Clerks' or El Mariachi's budget in those terms, the numbers would be in the rane of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To put it in perspective: Would you say you "self financed" your startup if a big multinational paid for all the servers and bandwidth from the get go? It's sorta like that.

Saying it in interviews makes for a better story ("College dropout makes major movie for $8,000!") but it's not really accurate.

My favorite example of this is Penny Arcade.

First year: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/11/18

Five years later: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/11/18

The problem is that this space gets oversaturated easily and the fallout is quick and brutal. Remember the Jaguar? 3DO? Dreamcast? The Phantom?

All of them had fan support and all of them failed in the marketplace (and the "open source" Phantom never even made it to market).

There's less vendor lockin with consoles now. Fewer titles are platform exclusive. Online services are much important than they used to be (notice there's little to no mention of this in the promo video). The question becomes bigger than, "How does this console compete with the Xbox?" (which is already a HUGE question), it becomes "How doe this console compete with Xbox Live?".

This product is going to be openly competing with big, established players with lots of cash and decades of experience. And it's not just the big 3 console makers. They're competing with SmartPhones and iPad gaming too, basically any electronic gaming experience you can having sitting on the couch in your living room.

Fans of hackable linux boxen and hardcore gamers are always super enthusiastic, but I don't think that demo is large enough to help a company succeed in the way this company needs to succeed.

It's more likely that some of these are defensive applications, to lock competitors from getting them (eg: blog, tunes).

Winer is right, and I'm surprised nobody is writing about this or calling much attention to it. There's enormous potential marketing value behind domains like "beatles.music" or "harrypotter.books" or "superman.movies".

With the advertising and reach of companies like Amazon and Google (or even Warner and Sony), I think these new domains have the power to split the web, and potentially turn .com, .net, and .org into something of a ghetto (sorta similar to how .biz and .name might be viewed by Joe Consumer now).

On the other hand, it may well be meaningless. I'm continually surprised to see big companies use facebook.com/[companyname] in their advertising too.

Congrats to Mr Veen et al, but ... Ugh. Typekit was a great service.

I have little faith that Adobe won't completely screw it up.

twitter allows custom links/ buttons. These don't require on-loading JavaScript or any calls to their services.

Forget typewriters. I want a Bluetooth IBM model M keyboard for my iPad.

Clue me in about Facebook comments (I'm considering using them on a current project).

Why do you consider them a failure?

I thought Like + comments was pretty damned brilliant, because they make FB part of the infrastructure of so many sites. Plus, anecdotally, every time I turn around another site is rolling out the comments in a big way (like the LA Times recently did).

People don't read. They scan.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Your scrolling js metric is clever, but that doesn't mean they've read a thing. All it means is they've scrolled to the bottom of the page.

I generally like Siegler's stuff but he's so far down the rabbit hole now he can't see the reasoning behind concepts like 'bias' and 'disclosure.' Worse, he seems to be fully believe these things don't, or shouldn't, apply because he works in "new media."

It concerns me that a so-called bastion of tech reporting aspires to have all the ethics of TMZ or your friendly neighborhood penny stock newsletter pump and dump scam.

Because they're desperately trying to protect the sales of hardcover books, and, in part, trade paperbacks. They don't want to risk cannibalizing sales.

Consumers look at ebooks like another variation of the same product. Publishers don't. To them, it's an entirely separate entity. To them, the question you're asking could be (very roughly) translated to "I don't understand why concert tickets aren't the same price as a CD. It's the same music."

It's a bit backwards, and the same kind of thinking that made the MPAA consider the VCR a threat to movie theaters and the MLB think that nobody would buy tickets to the ballpark if games were broadcast for free on TV.

But I can understand why they're doing it. An enormous part of their legacy business model is wrapped up in hardcover book sales.

As for production costs, it would only be paper, printing, and distribution. Nobody ever thinks about pre-production costs or employee costs in professional editors, typesetters, and jacket design. That's a lot of dough that they have to lay out that still needs to be paid out whether we're talking ink or bits.

Correction: It's any computer, not just Windows PCs, and you can recycle old phones, iPods, and iPads too.

No, trademarks began and continue as a way to protect creators and commercial operators. It's a way to put your stamp on something and say "This is mine, I created it, I own it." It began, and remains, very closely tied to branding.

It's not about individual words. This is a red herring on Notch's part. Bethesda never claimed they owned "scrolls." They don't.

It's about Notch releasing a product in the same commercial space with a very similar sounding name to a product that Bethesda already owns.

As I said elsewhere, Bethesda must take action. They have no choice.

Bethesda has multiple trademarks for the franchise. Each individual installment is trademarked, eg "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" and the entire franchise is trademarked, eg "The Elder Scrolls."

If you (in the collective sense, not you personally) know who Bethesda is and what games they've made in the past and know who Notch is, you're not the average consumer in this context.

I think there's a definite reason to think confusion could come into play when these titles are next to each other on the shelf, or show up in search results with little to no context, or are featured in Amazon's contextual results or on services like XBox Live or Steam.

Parents don't know Notch or gaming history. They know that little Timmy asked for a fantasy game with the word "scrolls" in the title. This situation, which I imagine would be pretty common at Christmas time, is part of why Bethesda is taking action.

The other part -- and this is the much more important part -- is that Bethesda has no choice. If they fail to take action and do their due diligence, and a competitor can later prove it (by citing this example with Notch) then they risk losing the mark entirely.

Which means then EA could conceivably come out with a game called "The Younger Scrolls: Obsession" and Bethesda would have no recourse.

This story annoys me to no end, because it points once again to a seemingly pervasive online and generational sense of entitlement when it comes to things like trademarks and copyright.

While C&D letters are never a nice surprise, Bethesda is right and Notch is wrong.

Given that these both involve computer games and computer games in the same or similar genre, it's entirely reasonable to think that the average consumer would be confused at the titles. (And I have trouble buying the line about the Google search. Even now, "Elder Scrolls" and a link to Bethesda's website shows up in the top 10 results, filter bubble be damned).

The article lacks detail in a way that reads as inaccurate. While it's true you have to protect marks from becoming generic, this involves defending them against all infringers, proving that you've done so, and also proving that you've used the mark in public within a certain amount of time. Which means that Bethesda is only doing what it's required to do to protect their franchise from this exact sort of situation.

While companies like Activision/Blizzard and Ubisoft do things that are of dubious benefit to their customers, I feel like in this case Notch is riling up a large fanbase and positioning this as big-corp versus the little-guy.

This is disingenuous on two levels. One, ignorance and entitlement aren't excuses (just ask Andy Baio and his $35,000 lesson in copyright fair use). Two, Notch is the public face of a company that, by all accounts, is worth millions of dollars.

It's time he started acting like it, educate himself, and put the babe-in-the-woods routine to rest.

PS: I'd also be very surprised if a trademark was granted on a generic dictionary word like "Scrolls."

Fair points, but:

1: This isn't exclusive to Groupon, and I'm not sure they're doing anything that CitySearch and AOL weren't doing in 1998.

2-3: Purely anecdotal but I've heard too many horror stories of small businesses being screwed by their groupon deals, essentially losing money on the discount and not attracting enough repeat business to justify the deal in the first place.

The problem with the model is that it attracts customers who are focused on price, not value. That's at odds with the proposition behind many specialty stores and boutiques (eg vinyl records, hair salons, upmarket clothing, etc).

Groupon as a standalone business just digitizes those local coupon books that used to come in the mail or be sold at bulk for ten bucks or whatever. That's a good web based business but not a great one.

Also, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.

Postman references Huxley/Orwell in the introduction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death