michaelmartin

Hadn't seen the union approach in #2 before, I like that a lot. The 2 named properties are intuitive to other developers reading it, but now we also get compile-time safety that the combinations they use are valid. Thanks!

For anyone else that this was new to, Flow has documented these as "disjoint unions": https://flow.org/en/docs/types/unions/#toc-disjoint-unions

It's the inconsistency.

1 + "2" (12) does a string concatenation. 1 - "2" (-1) does math.

That said, whilst JS is loosely typed and won't fall over when you do this, I'd just see it as bad form to find code mixing types to this extent. Just because the language will let you do it, doesn't mean you should actually do it!

I don't know your specific metrics, but one way to consider it is to forget about money for a minute. If you were to use one of those metrics to judge how successful your users were, which would it be?

Intercom.io is a brilliant example of this. They could have priced a million different ways, but they chose to charge by active users on their customer's apps. Now I don't even care about the price, I'll be happy to be doing so well each time I go up one of their price bands!

"We think getting your whole team on Intercom is a good thing. And we think talking to your customers is a good thing too. So we won’t tax you for either. We charge you more as your user base grows. Our interests are aligned."

ES6 introduces the 'let' keyword which gives you block scope: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Browser compatibility isn't too bad, but no Safari support it seems: http://kangax.github.io/es5-compat-table/es6/#let

I hope it's an April Fools still, but here it is on Github:

https://github.com/apache/subversion

Given the histories of these 2 writers, I'd have hoped for a bit more substance in such an important post for them.

They don't mention anything specific about the new site, and given how many other good tech sites there are, the vagueness doesn't make me curious enough to come back.

And in terms of journalistic integrity with full disclosures; I learnt more about what has really happened from the comments here than I did in that post. Surely they should have disclosed that a need to "refresh, reimagine, remake and reinvent" wasn't the only thing in play here.

It's worth considering how poorly handled the communications were here. No blog posts, no responses to the forum thread that mostly started all of this [1], nor the story that hit HN's front page [2].

Just Twitter. Which is something, but not enough when you have a PR issue this big...

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/21/5234580/patent-pending-ia... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966528

I quite like Alex McCaw's http://monocle.io/ - It's quite similar in topic to HN, but with less of the news/gossip/drama stories.

It also moves a lot slower, so if you miss a few days, it's fine. Just one page or so of links will show you all the best from those few days.

I just don't store credit card details in my browser. Auto-complete for emails is extremely handy and I use that all the time, but does purchasing things online really need to be any easier?

I don't mind reaching for my wallet there; it forces you to make a conscious decision to spend the money, which is at least slightly better than a 1-click impulse.

Surely there was a better way to handle this? 1.1 million users in 8 hours on an un-official version? That's brilliant enthusiasm, which Blackberry don't often get these days. Simply shutting that down and telling them to register for some email updates is a bit of a dampener.

Couldn't they have become some massive trial group etc.? A giant set of early adopters to keep rolling out improved versions too (All with a big "alpha" caveat if that's what it takes), that can get people not yet in the group excited.

I think the little bit of hype and excitement from interested users is just the sort of thing BlackBerry needs, and putting a plug on that is crazy.

Wise up! ;) (Y's up)

Haha, fair enough, I stand corrected then. Well played.

The analogy at the top of this needs a little work. Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) wasn't in the Social Network (Jesse Eisenberg)

Both great movies though :)

Perfectly framed letter, it's interesting that he doesn't make mention of a single negative point or competitor. All very reassuring instead, and it reads like he has just been given the reins essentially and won't be rocking the boat for a while.

$100 per month isn't bad for the inevitable crisis when you really will need a good sysadmin's help.

For me, the biggest reason for paying for managed services like Heroku etc. is avoiding that risk. This sort of thing would make me far happier to ship some of the load back onto Linode. Can't fault their hardware. :)

I can see what Wade is saying here, but I don't agree with the conclusion.

"So when you begin a startup, make sure to think long term. Will you still want to do this if a family member gets sick? Will you want to do this if you have kids? Will you want to do this when _____ happens?

If the answer is “no”, then you’ve saved yourself a lot of unnecessary heartache."

I think it's fine for the answer to be no to some of these, but still want to do a startup.

If your partner was hit by a bus, then in that instant almost everyone would prefer to be at some large company where you can hand off your responsibility in no time and the company will support your time off etc.

That just makes it easier to be a good person in those times. Everyone could do with a break in times like that, if it was an option.

I don't think hunting down the most severe scenarios that could happen to you in the next x years and trying to find one where you'd rather not be running a startup is a valid reason not to start one.

This seems like it does just about everything under the sun (Basecamp, helpdesk, invoices etc. all in one app?)

That could be very handy of course, but it's a lot for someone to make the change to. I think rather than doing more and more, you need find a way to make one or two features totally compelling.

One general thing I would say is that in all your tables of links (e.g. Dashboard > Messages, Accounting > Invoices etc.), then clicking anywhere in the row should load that item (And feel free to lightly highlight the whole row on hover).

Just makes it easier to click around fast, because the app as a whole seems to load very quickly. Well impressed with that aspect. :)

http://www.kashflow.com/ is another great one, especially if you happen to be in the UK.

I'd also second the vote for Xero. Haven't actually used it yet, but always looked impressive from the sidelines at least.

Like other readers have said, the real step forward in this area would be chip and pin. That raises a potentially more interesting question though, how do you transfer a country the size of the US from swiping to the chip and pin?

Even here in the UK, where absolutely everywhere that uses a card is using the chip, a bank can't ditch the magnetic strip because then suddenly they're the only bank where you can't use your credit card abroad.

Would ATMs that read the chip without actually taking the card in the whole way work to obsolete these skimmers? (The chip is always at one end of it, so why does the rest of the card need to enter the machine?)

hotels.com - Huge catalogue, fast to use, good photos, and TripAdvisor rating right there on the page.

They also do great cashback on Quidco regularly, and have their own loyalty program, so it's usually a great deal to go through them.

Absolutely agreed here, this is just going to give an edge to companies outside the US.

Worse still, it's going to hit small businesses worse because they will simply have no choice but to pay it. The mega corps have their accounting down to an art, they'll figure out a way past it given how many gray areas are inevitable in a completely new form of tax like this.

The script looks looks great, but mostly I just want to say it rocks to see a library with this much work put into quality documentation already.

Gives me a heck of a lot more trust for the script and reason to try it out.

Pricing in the UK is even worse; £210 per year for one app, or £560 per year for the suite. An expense that could have been done without...

It's one thing to charge this amount for an app that you use every day, but a lot of these are things that some people on the team only need every now and then. Like a developer slicing a new PSD for a few days and then not touching Photoshop for weeks.

For lots of cases like that, using the same version for years was a totally sensible approach.

Love it, reminds me of "If PHP Were British" ( http://www.addedbytes.com/blog/if-php-were-british/ )

Wouldn't mind a few more substitutions in the language, but it seems like most of the work went into making a really nice landing page. Great job there! (Autoplay music forgivable on a joke at least)

Really like the mention of audio/video integration coming soon.

Likely not the market they really had in mind, but this could be an awesome extension to forums. Definitely an upgrade on the standard chatbox so many are still stuck with, and it's great that you don't need to give out personal details to start a call or private IM.

I love the progress bar along the top (Forces you to keep it short, and stops everyone wondering when it ends).

But when you're on the last slide, the bar isn't fully colored. I know it's a tiny thing, but it's strangely annoying seeing a progress bar you can't fill!

Nice work though.

It's cool to see more libraries appearing for this effect. I think it's really nice on the responsive demo at least.

It does beg some questions about using it in non-touch scenarios though. The experience with a mouse isn't the best right now because everything moves.

Would be curious about the menu having a close button of its own, in the exact same position that the "Menu" you would have clicked to open it was in.

Wow. Just over a month ago they were posting their "Week 1 In Review," that was a fast acquisition!

This one is actually quite exciting I think though. They already have the product, but they need to scale like crazy. A company like Dropbox will help massively with that, and hopefully the service will grow without the Twitter-esque growing pains we're used to.

I'd far rather see these guys acquired by a company interested in keeping the product, than a company who just needs a talented team.

I agree, but you need to be careful with the distinction between the paid and the ad-free versions.

Is it just removing ads? Or is it a premium product?

e.g. Gmail has no ads when you buy a Google apps account, but you pay $50 for it because they give you a load of other features as well (Which you may or may not need).

I still think it's good to give the option, but your selling points could get diluted pretty quickly once you start adding more little things to justify your paid memberships.