Candy Japan 2017 Year in Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/2017-year-in-review <comment><USER2> I'm glad to see this, as so often Year In Review posts are by companies humblebragging about how well they're doing, and they stop posting Year In Review when it's been a down year. It's refreshing to see a post that isn't "we're Crushing It", but is honest and real. (Though I hope next year will be more positive though!)

Also, I don't know if this has any SEO impact, but I thought the sitewide "flags" link in the footer of Candy Japan looked suspicious. At first I wondered if the site had been hacked or if you'd started selling backlinks, before I realized it's a requirement of the Creative Commons Attribution licence for the flag images. Maybe experiment with removing that from the sitewide, and just putting that link on a Credits / About Us page?

I'd love to read more about hiring the photographer & your artist. The artwork in the blog posts is amazing!

<comment><USER3> It wasn't that difficult. I just posted both as jobs on UpWork, then spent an hour looking through the portfolios of people who applied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am following Candy Japan for years and I like the idea. In its early years the landing page was super charming despite its bootstrapped style. Now in 2017, it just looks aged. I mean the entire presentation, the dull white packaging without any branding and the still unexciting pictures feel like somebody lost all motivation and ambition. No offense, just my perception.

I just googled competitors and all of them feel way more vibrant + being more active on social media (I checked Instagram for the first two):

[https://www.japancrate.com/](https://www.japancrate.com/)

[https://tokyotreat.com/](https://tokyotreat.com/)

[https://wowbox.jp/](https://wowbox.jp/)

[http://www.kawaiibox.com/](http://www.kawaiibox.com/)

[https://www.sushicandy.net/](https://www.sushicandy.net/)

Building a slick landing page which is also responsive can be quite some work but looking at that competition it's a must, sorry. Look, it's not that people really need a monthly candy box, it's not a rational decision, it's something emotional—an impulse buy. So, if the landing page isn't even thrilling what should then trigger the buy?

Social media in particular Instagram might be a significant marketing channel because Japanese candy and its colourfulness is tailor-made for Instagram.

Maybe the business model is also the problem. There are little lock- ins/network effects and a low-barrier market entry for Japanese entities, thus all these competitors. There might be opportunities to pivot the business or extend into new fields/models. The first thing which comes to mind is licensing successful products for exclusive import/distribution to key western markets. Different game but highly scalable. Maybe there more unseen opportunities. If not then selling the business could be an option (after a final revamp re presentation and SEO).

However, Candy Japan has still one major strength: Frequently placing stories on social news sites like HN and Reddit which always hit top 10 positions and generate tons of free traffic (should be 20-30k visits per placement which would translate in 200 to 300 subs at 1% conversion).

<comment><USER5> I'm a current Candy Japan subscriber and have been for a long time. Looking over some of those they simply seem like a better deal. An average Candy Japan box has 4-5 items in it and you get two per month. That comes to $29/mo for 8-10 items. JapanCrate advertises 15 items at $30/mo. Tokyotreat is 17 items at $31.50/mo. Wowbox is 10-14 for $25/mo or 12-16 for $34.99/mo. Kawaii Box is 8-10 for $20/mo. SushiCandy is 20 items @ $15.99/mo.

To my eyes at least, CandyJapan seems to be the worst option of all of them. I'm afraid that they're simply being out-competed and without some rethinking of their model they will continue to lose subscribers over time. After looking at those competitors just now I will certainly be rethinking my subscription.

<comment><USER6> > Tokyotreat is 17 items at $31.50/mo.

No it isn't. It is 17 items for 35 USD/month if you pay per month. It is 31.50 USD/month if you follow their 12 month prepay plan (aka sub for a year and pay in advance).

We also shouldn't put too much stress on the amount of items. It isn't descriptive of what's in the box. Tokyotreat is specific with what's in the box.

These services also seem to have more lightweight, cheaper deals:

* Japancrate's Mini is 5 items for 12 USD/month, original is 25 USD/month with 10 items (1 DIY kit), and the Premium is 30 USD/month with 15 items (1 DIY kit, 1 drink, and 1 bonus item so its 16).

* Sushicandy has a set of 20 for 16 USD, a set of 30 for 20 USD, and a set of 40 for 27 USD. With also, like Japancrate, the option to sub for 3 or 6 months.

* Wowbox has a 15% coupon right now, and has a "try it out" button on the landing page. That invites me to give it a whirl. They also have different themes, and allow me to select different size of packages.

* Kawaiibox specialises in the kawaii candy theme (I suppose? I'm very newbie to this whole theme stuff or Japanese candy but I am curious). Its 19.90 USD for 8-10 items with discount options available if you subscribe for longer. The discounts are modest: 18.90 USD for 18.20 USD for 6 or 12 months respectively.

* Tokyotreat I discussed above as it all started my post, but since GP mentioned 5 companies I want 5 bullets in list. Its more expensive than Candy Japan, but you also get more items.

Even though you had that detail wrong you are right that all of these are indeed cheaper than Candy Japan. I feel like Candy Japan is a very small business compared to these (which isn't going to volume, but then again the question is, is it going for quality then?) and no offence, but a 10% coupon on Candy Japan isn't going to cut it compared to the competition.

All seem to provide free shipping world-wide. Payment options vary. The ones I checked accepted credit card, some accepted PayPal as well but not all.

As a final note, again no offence but you're basically exporting some stuff you buy in bulk from some local stores. In my language we call companies that sell technology equipment with low margin "dozenschuiver" (box mover, aka Sokoban). 50 USD/hour isn't a bad wage at all in that field. Larger Asian stores (called toko here) might even sell Japanese candy. You can't compete with that, so you want it to remain a special niche.

<comment><USER5> I agree that items/box is a bad metric. A regular-size butterfinger amounts to 4 kid-size. I'm not sure what a better metric might be.

> the question is, is it going for quality then?

I wouldn't say so. The candy in CandyJapan boxes seems about average. I've actually seen some of their candy brands in local grociers' foreign food isles quite cheaply. This leads me to believe the CandyJapan stuff is nothing particularly special. Some of the DIY candy kits they include lately are gross too—they're usually some variant of slime + sugar/flavor.

As a side note I actually ordered a Tokyotreat box. They have decent item count and they include a drink as well. I've really enjoyed some of the random Japanese drinks I've tried and I'm looking forward to receiving some!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The box subscription business model is getting harder and harder as competition increases. I can relate on two points with my own Japanese tea-of- the-month subscription ([https://tomotcha.com](https://tomotcha.com)):

\- At one point customs were very slow to clear in Germany (one to two months), though shipments never actually bounced back. Paying for tea and not getting it is frustrating. Then eventually it arrives, two months late. We lost customers because of it. Eventually that problem went away and now shipments are going through as usual.

\- Competition: we used not to have too much competition when we launched 3 years ago, now similar services are aplenty. It hurts conversion rates, a lot...

<comment><USER8> It sounds really worth it if I earned USD. Unfortunately I live in a place with a weaker currency and a strong immigrant population. I'll definitely subscribe once I try the teas they have around :)

<comment><USER7> I'm actually thinking to add currencies besides only USD and EUR. At the end of the day we don't have any particular love for either, since our costs are all in JPY. The biggest issue is to not clutter up the interface...

<comment><USER8> The world wide shipping makes the prices worth what you're getting, but it doesn't change the fact that my currency isn't that great.

What I've seen in some e-commerce shops is that they automatically change the currency based on the customer's location and have a small option on the bottom or top right of the site displaying available currencies. For your site a dropdown menu/box for the currency to the right of the price might be best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My thoughts:

Subscription boxes are hard. I sold mine.

It's hard to keep subscribers happy every month, especially with food.

Most profitable subscription boxes are profitable because they are run by savvy internet marketers & capitalize on novelty, trends, & gifting, not because the products deliver incredible value to the customer.

I think Proactiv is the only subscription box service that's stood the test of time without having to drastically change their business model and they have historically been extremely savvy with their marketing.

If you look at the landscape of subscription boxes, it suggests that for longterm growth & profit:

1\. Curation doesn't work.

2\. You have to make / manufacture / private label your own stuff (Dollar Shave Club & Proactiv)

3\. You should raise money, use that money to sell your first million boxes at a loss, grow rapidly and try to race towards an exit.

4\. If your product doesn't solve a major problem (acne sucks, razors are too expensive etc), you are probably doomed over long term (10-20 year horizon), so it's best to sell in year 3-5.

</comment><comment><USER10> I recently moved to Finland, and briefly considered setting up an online shop to export Salmiakki to the UK, as lots of people there seem to love it and beg me to bring it when I returned.

I'm amused you're from Finland, but instead are importing Japanese candy! (In the end I decided I couldn't be bothered with the hassle. I just make sure every time I do return to the UK I pack my suitcase with 10-40 boxes of candy.)

<comment><USER11> Please import me some proper rye bread, karjalanpiirakka and lakkahillo every week. There are no such things here in Berlin.

<comment><USER3> I think this store can send these things to you: [https://www.suomikauppa.fi/index.php?language=en](https://www.suomikauppa.fi/index.php?language=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You mention the decline in search ranking and Google traffic.

I'd strongly suggest you set up on Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube.

I would do an occasional YouTube video, talking about and showing people the various types of Japanese candy. Maybe do just one per week, focused on a group of related candy. I read your post about YouTube traffic and correlation to sales, I think the solution to that is what it tends to be with everything marketing: consistently drive it over a long period of time (obviously along with clickable links to your site, which the blogged-about video lacked).

I'd post nice, alluring photos to Pinterest and Instagram. Making sure to update both accounts at least weekly. Every item from every box should eventually get an Instagram post, with a description. Japanese candy packaging always seems to my US eyes to be very colorful, energetic, with fun designs - which I think lends very well to a site like Instagram (and its scale is obviously immense).

A Facebook page would also be ideal if you can or want to invest the time to cultivate it (a lot more work vs posting occasional media content to the other sites).

Google isn't dying per se as a highly valuable source of traffic, but things have changed a lot in the last five or six years. Google search as a traffic source no longer occupies the overwhelming position that it used to, and that is going to continue to weaken vs everything else collectively.

</comment><comment><USER13> Idea: allow people to order add-ons to their monthly packages (something relatively cheap like manga, magazines, etc.). You can order it automatically from Amazon Japan with free domestic shipping. So people could get their candy + whatever stuff they need from Japan, while saving on shipping costs.

<comment><USER14> I've run something similar to this. It has many problems, especially in the international shipping arena.

Suppose I sell a box of candy that I make a comfortable profit on. You want me to receive, store, and repackage a book that I don't make any money on to the order. I'm just adding something to your existing order and doing you a favor, right?

So I send you a box of candy and a book. The shipment gets lost in the mail / held indefinitely in customs / destroyed / stolen. You don't subrogate Amazon over the missing book (they did their job; I received it), you subrogate _me_ for both the book AND the candy. I take on a lot of additional responsibility and work for no payoff (and often losing money in the process).

Not to mention the changing shipping costs, bizarre object handling and the look on your face when I tell you that car-sized stuffed panda or pallet of Calorie Mate you bought and shipped to my warehouse added $200 in shipping charges to your $20 candy order. The reality of the situation hits you and now you don't want either. Then I lose a candy sale, and have the pleasure of storing and handling your giant Amazon order/return.

The alternative is adding a hefty handling fee to the cost of add-on items, but then using me as a middleman likely ends up costing more than just buying it directly. Then the social media accusations of price gouging on shipping start making the rounds. "My god, how could they charge $200 to ship a stuffed panda!" It's bad for business.

This model only really works when you have a friend over there who can send you stuff. When something gets lost, it sucks, but it's _your_ problem, not your friend's. The dynamic changes when your friend is a business-- everything becomes _their_ problem. It's not worth the trouble.

There are dedicated repackaging services out there whose logistics operate at much better scale than a company whose primary focus is retail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Another major hit was that all the packages we were sending to Germany > started bouncing back. After this continued for several shipments, I decided > just not to ship to Germany any more.

I guess that explains why I only ever received one package from my gift code.

Is that still a thing? Because when I open the website from Germany it says:

> $29 monthly with free shipping even to Germany.

<comment><USER3> I've sent refunds for the missed packages to Germany. If you haven't gotten a refund, please contact email@example.com. This Germany thing happened very recently, I'll update the site to reflect it.

 _Update: Just changed it, should update when the CDN cache expires. Incidentally noticed I also had "East Germany" in my country list, oops :D_

<comment><USER16> Have you thought about offering a box subscription of just one kind of Japanese candy? I'd gladly pay up to US$50/month to get Japanese KitKats sent to me as would some friends. I'm sure we aren't alone, but not sure total market size of course or if it'd be worth it for you. Japanese KitKats are already seasonal in flavors, so makes doing a variety box even easier. Hope you'll consider it!

<comment><USER17> Japanese Green Tea KitKats seem very popular.

I've been asked for them before back in the United Kingdom.

Now, in Hawaii - we put 10 bags in the suitcase because we'd been asked to bring them.

<comment><USER16> There's literally hundreds of flavors of Japanese KitKats. I know of probably over a dozen different varieties which are green tea based.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've said this before, but a twice-monthly subscription to sweets is too much sugar. If it was once every 3 months then I'd consider subscribing.

<comment><USER3> Good idea, could be worth trying to let people select different frequencies, which practically would mean just skipping the packages in between.

<comment><USER19> Or: let people rate the candy. Then send the ones people love most. I.e., a "best of Japanese candy" package.

By the way, when you've discovered candy that you like a lot, how do you order more of it?

<comment><USER20> You'd cancel the subscription and order the favorite candy from amazon :(.

My friend received a selection of wine each month from the local store. After a while his tastes narrowed to a specific grape. Cancelled his subscription and now he goes directly to the store to get those wines. Candy Japan needs to work on retention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > What went wrong? This year I didn't have as much to blog about. In 2016 I > had five popular posts (1 2 3 4 5), while in 2017 I only managed two (1 2). > The posts tend to send a lot of high-quality traffic, so the impact was > bigger than you might expect. I haven't figured out how to invent posts from > thin air when I simply have nothing new to share.

benmu if you're reading, what about doing shorter but more regular posts on life in Japan from your family's or just your perspective?

(That being said, I'm much worse than you on blog posts; something I will correct starting now.)

> Tried paid YouTube ads, and while I did get some subscribers, in the end > they were just too expensive to keep running. Tweaking the ads was very time > consuming and expensive (but fun).

Instead of paying for Youtube ads, why not just do your own candy videos instead?

</comment><comment><USER22> I was actually thinking about canceling the service (trying to save a little more money + eat healthier) but I really love articles like this so I'll stay on for at least a few more months :)

I would say for me, the personal story is a big selling point. You're just a guy who moved to Japan and started this service as opposed to some faceless conglomerate. The new landing page is much nicer but maybe add some of the stuff in the "Who runs Candy Japan?" page to the landing?

</comment><comment><USER23> > Another major hit was that all the packages we were sending to Germany > started bouncing back. After this continued for several shipments, I decided > just not to ship to Germany any more.

Have you ever figured out what was up with that? That sounds like something is going wrong with the Zoll. Normally, sending products to all EU countries should work the same.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hi, I just checked your site and I noticed you are improving the UI of the web site as I suggested you on Twitter a while ago: now there are images on the pages "check your email for link" and "thank you" page after a subscription. Nice!

Furthermore, about the photos you added on the home page, having good photos of the products you are selling (like examples of older boxes) is a huge improvement. IMHO you did the right thing having them shot professionally. Most of your competitors already had photos of candies, and I finally subscribed to your service mostly because I finally could see in advance examples of what (and how many of them) I will get in the mail.

So, keep going and best of luck! Bye

P.S.: thank you for the discount code in the article :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice story! Thank you for sharing. A few thoughts:

1) when is the last time you sat down with new and existing customers to see their reaction to getting their physical boxes? You might get a lot of good insights of how exciting (or not) the existing experience is of receiving the candy. How does that change between the 1st and 10th box a customer receives?

2) why are people churning? Do you have a prioritized list of reasons? Not what they said (most users don't actually want to offend you or your business) but what their real reasons were for canceling?

3) keep in mind that the real product is the box with candies. The website is just for sales. Yes, SEO is definitely important to get new subscribers, but to improve your product you have to improve the box or the offerings around it.

4) pricing. I noticed that the lowest offering of $29/month is rather expensive for a novelty purchase. How much experimentation have you done around testing lower price points with less frequent shipments? This could help with acquisition and retention.

I'll be happy to help you understand how to look at retention, basic AARR analysis, interview customers, etc. just let me know.

</comment><comment><USER26> Bemmu, you mentioned you tried YT ads. Have you tried to build an audience on YT? For example with unwrapping / "reviews" of some of the candies.

I know there are tons of people watching similar things (though my 1st hand exp is just seeing how my kid wants to spend infinite amount of time watching surprise eggs unwrapping).

Just a hunch, but that might have a bigger ROI than ads.

Thanks for the writeup, love the openness!

<comment><USER3> I was discouraged from doing this after having someone make such a video that generated millions of views, but no sales at all ([https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/sales- results-f...](https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/sales-results-from- getting-3-million-views-on-youtube)). _(Just noticed that video has since been removed for "violating community guidelines", I wonder what's up with that)_

But I'm still a bit motivated to make more videos, because at 10k subscribers you get to visit the Roppongi YouTube space :-) Here's the old channel we haven't really updated in a long time: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAWrpxBNP8LukXGd4xQIDxg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAWrpxBNP8LukXGd4xQIDxg)

<comment><USER27> I wouldn't discount YouTube based on that experience. That channel looks to be one of the channels that drives a lot of views through children, specifically, children watch and watch and watch these videos on TVs (driving up the viewcounts) but aren't engaged, they aren't going to convert to customers. You may wish to try more targeted channels, i.e channels with an engaged audience of people who like Japanese culture. A video with 1,000 views to people who are enamoured with Japanese culture will perform significantly better than that video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Every time the year update comes around I have the same I question (first time posted):

Why not have a cosplayer (preferably a lady) (dressed in costume) review the candy and post that to YouTube? I mean, this can be done for cheap ($75-100 per video or so).

<comment><USER29> Why?

<comment><USER28> Fair question. I've made some basic audience assumptions. These are:

\- people who buy Japanese candy also like other Japanese items

\- people who buy Japanese candy also like the Japanese culture

\- people who know about Japanese candy are within a certain age range.

\- people within that age range that know about Japanese candy have also purchased some

\- people who enjoy the Japanese culture that fa within the age range of those who like the candy may also potentially enjoy Japanese pop culture

\- people who enjoy that pop culture enjoy consuming media about it

\- people who enjoy consuming the media have adopted newer platforms (YouTube vs tv).

\- most of these people are male

A show with a cosplayers who talks about Japanese candy in a memorable way seems to fit these assumptions.

Why a female cosplayer? Sex sells.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I traveled all over asia with very little issues with using my Chase credit card, but when I went to purchase candyjapan for a Xmas gift, my purchase was insta-denied by Chase.

it was almost like the banks have flagged your merchant account as fraudulent.

</comment><comment><USER31> You mention you haven't expanded. Have you considered also doing Japanese stationery / office supplies? All the best tools I've got came from my one trip to Japan :)

<comment><USER3> I tried that actually, releasing Pen Japan at one point and had a few subscribers as well. Then I realized I can't really appreciate nice stationery myself. I would need to hire someone to curate it. The quality of the service was poor, so I decided not to go on with it.

<comment><USER31> Ah, well that was my one idea :P

It's also hard in that: once I have one awesome Japanese stapler, how many more do I need? For me the answer was just 1: a staple-free stapler. Then I was saturated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Aw that is a bummer, I subscribed in 2017 and love the Service!

</comment><comment> LV-426 Interesting article, and good to know you're still operating despite the problems.

> All those new subscribers beyond the first 800 were actually fakes who had > subscribed with stolen credit card numbers [...] a lot of shipping addresses > turned out to be fake as well

I don't know if this was already discussed in previous years, but this sounds like a rival (either established or wanting to copy your model).

Edit: https

<comment> the-dude Small charges on stolen credit cards are usually to test if the card is still valid.

Hence charities are popular to test on too.

<comment><USER3> I have long stopped telling people whether their charge worked if an order looks suspicious, to prevent them from getting this information. So that wouldn't work now.

<comment> the-dude I am not sure I follow, could you clarify? You do send a confirmation after sign up I presume?

<comment><USER3> Well I can't say "your payment was processed successfully", because that would give information to people who want to test cards. Rather I manually read through the orders, and only contact people if something went wrong with their payment AND the order doesn't look suspicious.

<comment> the-dude Are you on Stripe?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I appreciate your occasional updates posted here. They're always interesting.

> "This year I didn't have as much to blog about ... The posts tend to send a > lot of high-quality traffic, so the impact was bigger than you might expect. > I haven't figured out how to invent posts from thin air when I simply have > nothing new to share."

This obviously seems like a lost opportunity. If you want to sustain the business, you simply have to write more posts, as a start. I visit Japan for two weeks every year and find the culture endlessly fascinating. Searching here for mentions of Japan [1], the most popular is yours, but not a business update, rather your post on the Japanese writing system [2]. Ignore the news stories and look at all those other posts about Japan posted by others. These are Japan topics that this community found interesting (I hope you promote to other communities). You could write posts about coffee culture, beer culture, Izakaya's, ex-pat life, other one-person businesses, life in Japan, J-pop even k-pop, heck even the McDonald's menu in Japan vs elsewhere etc etc. Of course the link to candy is tangential but a blog on entrepreneurial life / life in Japan would attract Japanophiles who I expect would be interested in regular candy packs from Japan. But why just focus on candy as the income. Why not become a go-to guy for Japanese culture through the eyes of a Westerner? You wouldn't be the first but you have a unique viewpoint. What about adding a podcast. Building an audience, listing on Patreon. Just some thoughts.

I also have some comments about your website vs your competitor, presumably [3].

* On Safari, when I type in "candy japan", the Siri suggestion is your competitor's, despite the search term basically being your domain name. You have work to do on SEO.

* Your competitor's photos of their offerings are front and center. Personally that draws me in immediately. Your photo is at the bottom of your page. You are literally burying the lede

* Your competitor has a time-limited call to action at the top of their page "Free Shipping even to United States! Next box subscription closes in: You have 4 Days left to get the next box!"

* Your competitor has great testimonials. Do you have social media contests? Promote use of a hashtag / instagram posting so you can easily cultivate for your page?

* This is probably an error, but when I click on your home page link "Past Boxes", I expected to see great photos of your past boxes. Social media pics and videos from happy users etc. Instead the very first text on the Past Boxes page is the post linked above with the text "This was another tough year for Candy Japan, with many factors combining to a sharp decline in subscriber numbers." I wanted to check out photos of amazing Japanese candy I can order but now I'm just bummed out.

* There are so many things your competitor is doing that you are not. Check out how easy he makes it for reviewers to get a free copy. Check out the reviews on his website. Being copied sucks but fight back. Take their ideas and improve upon them. Stay one step ahead.

* We're just through the holiday season in the West. How many parents were hunting for last minute gifts for kids (or adults). This would have been amazing gift and yet I see nothing on your front page that's marketing to "last minute gifts", "last minute xmas gifts for children" etc. A number of magazine newsletters I subscribed to had features on "last minute gifts", most of which were ticket, voucher or coupon based. How much outreach did you do?

I'm not being critical. You've done a lot to get here and are now facing challenges. Meet them head on. There is _so much_ more you can do. Not everything will work, but some will.

As it happens, I have a relation whose birthday it is in January. I'm going to prove my own point and buy her a subscription from your site. I enjoy your updates and salute your success to date. I wish you the very best going forward.

[1] - [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=japan&sort=byPopularity&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=japan&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story) [2] - [https://www.candyjapan.com/口](https://www.candyjapan.com/口) [3] - [http://www.japancandybox.com](http://www.japancandybox.com)

</comment><comment><USER34> Maybe blog posts with candy reviews might bring in some traffic?

<comment><USER3> If we wrote those, where could they be shared to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It seems you have a high churn rate among your subscribers. Have you ever investigated that? An automated plain text email asking for feedback or a survey after someone unsubscribed would probably do it, though I guess you probably tried this already.

</comment><comment><USER36> Are your customers people who already know Japanese candy, but simply miss it because they're abroad? Or is Japanese candy new to them and your service is a way for them to try something new? With the temporary surge in search traffic, it sounds like it's mostly "new" people. In that case, my hunch would be that a subscription for a "novel" experience does not make sense. I would (personally) try to offer other novelty items as part of the subscription (eg. other Japanese cultural products such as Mangas, or candy from other countries if feasible). Just my 2¢ of course. It's your business and I know nothing about it.

<comment><USER36> And it sounds like you might want to invest in SEO. Your article says you dropped in relevance but does not mention whether you are addressing this problem already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I never got the subscription services like CrateJoy. It's nice for a one-time gift, kind of like a grab bag. But once you've gotten a couple boxes, what's the point? You've discovered the brands/items you like, and it's easy to go out and buy them at regular prices (some of those crates are $35 for $10 worth of stuff)

Something that you can control and sell at a lower price than I can buy (cheap razors, for example) is a different story.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is a bummer indeed. I've noticed a few businesses that did decently well around 2015, peaking, and declining into a slow death sort of thing. From what I read here, this seems to be happening and will likely get worse in 2018. It might be time to pivot into something else entirely.

<comment><USER3> I agree. This isn't the first project I've had where I've been riding a wave up and down. Many things have a limited lifespan, but can often still be worth doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> > even to Sweden

Is Sweden typically a country where things aren't shipped to for free?

<comment> the-dude For me it said The Netherlands.

<comment><USER40> And for me, Finland. I guess it picks the client location the same way online ads do.

<comment><USER41> Funny thing, I was thinking "I bet they don't ship to Romania" but then I saw "even to Romania" and was both happy and somewhat disappointed that even they knew Romania doesn't get much love. Makes me feel a little better that everyone's getting the same template.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Are there any other micro-businesses that do a similar end of year review?

I used to read patio11's when he ran Bingo Card Creator, and find the Candy Japan reviews similarly interesting.

<comment><USER43> Pinboard has done them in the past.

[https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/07/eight_years_of_victory/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/07/eight_years_of_victory/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wonder if the first season of the anime Dagashi Kashi in 2016 and the next season early 2018 had or will have any impact on it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Another year has gone by.

I haven't done a company, or anything, really.

I should just do something. Hmm.

</comment><comment><USER46> Did you try any of the smart fraud prevention? Like Siftscience?

</comment><comment><USER47> Let's be honest, weeaboos make a poor target market to base any business on. No real purchasing power other than the allowance they get from their parents or perhaps a burger flipping wage, and I'd imagine most of them just pirate their cartoons.</comment>


How we're using a sewing machine to design an iPad game - <AUTHOR> http://blog.vitei.com/how-were-using-a-sowing-machine-to-design-an-ipad-game/

<comment><USER2> Except you're not using the sewing machine to design anything. The design is already done; you're just making physical prototypes of something already designed because nobody has time/inclination to learn Blender.

I'm just rather sick of misleading "clickbait" titles on HN.

<comment><USER3> I'm a bit confused here, what design is already done? The designs for the characters? Nope, those are literally coming to life through the sewing machine first. There weren't any sketches prior. How would 3D help this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not just use photos of the dolls and skip turning them into sprites altogether?

<comment><USER3> Actually, they are being used as is. That iPad screen shot is a bit misleading. Our artist did up the little guys in illustrator while we were figuring out how we want these things to animate on screen.</comment></comment>


Notes on 'Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work' - <AUTHOR> http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2016/04/10/notes-on-decisive-how-to-make-better-choices-in-life-and-work/ <comment><USER2> The point that "rationalists" have trouble with media aimed at "regular people" (quotes implying my characterization, not the author's words) is interesting. Most "regular people" are compelled by stories, narrative and elements of "Type 1" (in the Kahneman sense) thinking- and I wonder if it's possible to shift into "rational" thinking without a transitional metaphorical/story-based rationale. Are "rational" people built that way, or can books like this help them shift their thinking?

<comment><USER3> Damn, you're the first person I've ever downvoted, and it occurred accidently while trying to upvote you, sorry!

To your comment, I'm sure it's possible. But you may want to also ask if it's worth to add to the cognitive overload of behaving rationally, while also fighting our innate tendency to think in terms of narratives. I think narrative/metaphorical rationale is actually a very useful cheat to (a) communicate effectively to others and (b) rewire your own behaviours.

<comment><USER4> I up voted him/her to compensate. Also his/her comment was not bad.</comment></comment></comment>


In Search of Wisdom: What is the Root Cause of Inequality? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nepalnews.com/archive/2008/others/guestcolumn/sep/guest_columns_05.php <comment><USER2> _The farther we drift away from equality, the more restless and chaotic our society becomes._

I would think a college professor would know better than to spout this type of rhetoric with ZERO evidence to back it up.</comment>


EU introduces a cyber security IoT standard to protect its citizens - <AUTHOR> https://mender.io/blog/eu-introduces-a-cyber-security-iot-standard-to-protect-its-citizens <comment><USER2> It would be helpful if products could have a label stating that it complies to the standard. I know that's tricky in terms of how to ensure the label is accurate/correct/not just printed.</comment>


Google developed a school curriculum to help kids fight trolls and hackers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/6/15739412/google-be-internet-awesome-interland-hacking-phishing-troll-curriculum <comment><USER2> "includes sections on how to limit sharing personal information with people online"

No word on if it includes sections on how to limit sharing with corporations, however.

<comment><USER3> It's google. They will teach the kids to trust the brand name they know. ;-)</comment></comment>


Google buys Fabric from Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-18/alphabet-s-google-buys-mobile-app-tool-fabric-from-twitter <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13428595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13428595)

<comment><USER3> The other article's title is misleading -- the important details are that Twitter owned Fabric and Google owns Firebase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This feels a lot like Twitter is sublimating.

</comment><comment><USER5> Unlikely that we'll see improvements in Fabric services for a while... presumably, engineering resources will be focused on integrating with Firebase :(

Anyone recommend alternatives for Crashlytics & Digits?

<comment><AUTHOR> for Crashlytics: try Apteligent (formerly Crittercism) (I used to work there).

For Digits - take a look at Twilio (more general voice & data APIs) and then absolutely Nexmo, they specialize in phone number authentication.</comment></comment>


The first app that gives you Bitcoin when you shop online or in-store - <AUTHOR> http://www.coinmiles.io <comment><AUTHOR> We built the first app that gives you Bitcoin when you shop online or in- store. It is available now for iOS and Android, or you can shop directly from our web app by going to coinmiles.io. Only available in Canada for now.

The app is free and will pay you in Bitcoin when you shop as you normally do.

We have more than 200 partners waiting for you and you can even expect a little gift when you sign up!</comment>


What I Learned When I Stabbed Myself 52 Times - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/opinion/sunday/what-i-learned-when-i-stabbed-myself-52-times.html <comment><USER2> What a shitty title, I expected a self-harm story.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. What the writer learned was how to be excessively dramatic, perhaps.</comment></comment>


The impossibly wide learning of Sabine Baring-Gould - <AUTHOR> http://theweek.com/articles/763465/last-man-who-knew-everything <comment><USER2> The scope of one person's life is almost unimaginable. For every one thing we know about a prominent person's life, there's a thousand more we can never know and only guess about.

As a result, we generally _severely_ underestimate historical peoples, because there's just too much stuff there to get to know it all. We're constantly reifying facts and narrative to fit extremely complex events. We have to do it to our own lives, and the lives of the people around us, yet even the people we know the most intimately have vast swaths of their inner lives that you will _never_ be able to fathom.

<comment><USER3> > As a result, we generally severely underestimate historical peoples, because > there's just too much stuff there to get to know it all. We're constantly > reifying facts and narrative to fit extremely complex events. We have to do > it to our own lives, and the lives of the people around us, yet even the > people we know the most intimately have vast swaths of their inner lives > that you will never be able to fathom.

One of the most difficult tasks of a historian is to recover the possibilities latent in the past. This is perhaps even more difficult than ascertaining what _did_ occur.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly, his compulsion to write puts me in mind of Isaac Asimov, who also dashed off works at a similar pace (much confusing would-be writers who thought it best to try to imitate him).

<comment><USER5> "Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." \-- Isaac Asimov

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> All: since the overblown title was sucking oxygen out of this discussion, we changed it to use a different phrase from the article. Can we let go of the title now please?

(Yes, the word 'impossibly' in the new title is self-contradictory if taken literally, so don't take it literally.)

<comment><USER7> HackerNews: threads may contain up to 25% "posts whining about titles" by weight.

(I've seriously never seen a forum that spergs out about titles as much as this one does, it's quite excessive.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sabine Baring-Gould is a character in a non-canon Sherlock Holmes novel by Laurie R. King called `The Moor`. If you enjoy fictional accounts of widely knowledgeable characters, I recommend it :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Or if you don't value the source of information over the ability to interpret it ala cognitive collaboration. Everyone knows everything. Basically.

</comment><comment><USER10> I swear I read "the TEST man who knew everything". That would make quite a novel.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like an interesting enough bloke, but I find the article's framing of him to be exasperating.

Knew everything? Truly? So he could hold forth at length on the philosophy of Zhuang Zhou or Nagarjuna, or the history of the Mayan Empires or the Tokugawa shogunate? Somehow I very much doubt it. Doubtless he was a considerable polymath within the confines of one particular cultural frame of reference -- but by that standard, there are people living in uncontacted tribes in the Amazon who "know everything" today.

<comment><USER12> I mean, haven't read the biography, but the first thing I thought of was the trades.

Does he know how to forge an iron sword? A steel one? Can he build a table? What about a boat? Does he know how to sail? Does he know how to turn wheat and yeast into bread? Does he know _every recipe, ever_? Does he know how to fertilize a field?

Even then there were highly specialized "careers," to the point that you had the title in your surname.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This interesting story of a man who was rapaciously knowledgeable and wrote an apparently superhuman number of works is made distracting by the "knew everything" claim. It's distracting because the mind inevitably searches out things that he probably didn't know: was he familiar with the General Theory of Relativity? did he read Sanskrit and Mandarin? what were his views on the recent progress in the theory of fields and rings? Really, no one can know everything -- but that doesn't make his life any less remarkable.

<comment><USER13> Yes, even in that day and time I am sure he would not have made this claim about himself. There were tens of thousands of specialty fields for everything from glass blowing to animal husbandry to machine design and explosives.

He was amazing, but the amount of knowledge at this time is far greater than this article makes it out to be.

<comment><USER5> Especially as he knew so much, and the more you know, the more you know that you know so little. Only the deeply ignorant feel that they know everything (there was a poor fellow arguing here recently that he knew everything that was worth knowing about philosophy. His responses to challenges revealed that he knew nothing about it at all).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The Last Man Who Knew Everything" (2018)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/books/review/david-n- schw...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/books/review/david-n-schwartz-the- last-man-who-knew-everything.html)

"The Last Man Who Knew Everything" (2006)

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jan/20/featuresreview...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jan/20/featuresreviews.guardianreview7)

<comment><USER15> An interesting general query:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q="the+last+man+who+knew+everything"...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q="the+last+man+who+knew+everything"&atb=v64-5_a&t=cros&ia=products)

[https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q="the%2...](https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q="the%20last%20man%20who%20knew%20everything")

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="the%20last%20man%20who...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="the%20last%20man%20who%20knew%20everything"&btnG=Search&as_sdt=800000000001&as_sdtp=on)

<comment><USER14> Nicely done; thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> TL;DR: Sabine Baring-Gould was a remarkable polymath in the 1800s.

<comment><USER17> Haha, if that's all you took away from this you really missed the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought the title was going to be a reference to an idea that we no longer need to waste brain cycles "knowing" trivia that were once taken for granted since they can now be easily looked up on your phone.

So, I was kinda disappointed by this line:

 _But Sabine Baring-Gould happens to have been the last man who knew everything. One really does mean everything._

...and as it turns out this is just a long for ad for a new biography.

</comment><comment><USER19> in the meanwhile English schools are replacing analog clocks with digital ones because reading the two handles is too complicated for pupils these days... [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/26/analog...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/26/analogue- clocks-students-cant-tell-time-during-exams)

<comment><USER20> > _because reading the two handles is too complicated for pupils these > days..._

No, it's because they're not exposed to them before reaching school or anywhere else afterward. So the school then has to teach how to read them.

The fact of the matter is that the world is moving to digital clocks. You can argue about the merits of each, you can blame the generation that is being raised without them for not learning something they have no access to, or you can accept that the world is changing.</comment></comment>


Why so much hate for PHP? - <AUTHOR> PHP is the first dynamic scripting language I learned and have been using it ever since. Facebook uses it. Can someone explain what it's issues are and any suggest any comparable alternatives? Thanks! <comment><USER2> TL;DR: Because we used it.

Like many people, many years ago I learned php. It was easy to deploy, and make simple dynamic websites. Many hosting services provided support for it. I was quite happy to use it for these things.

Then in 2008 I interned at Facebook. At the time, there had not yet been any attempts to improve the language by Facebook itself. Using php in an actual codebase - real world software - made me realize just how terrible it was. I vowed to never use it again. I even presented some of the worst aspects of php in my intern presentation to the executive team. Mark was quite intrigued. At the time there were talks of how to deal with many of the problems, but nothing had been figured out by time I left.

Its deficiencies are too numerous to simply list here, so I'll give you a high level summary (which many have also said similar things). Php is a giant hacked language originally not designed for real software and then features added on. It's syntax is the worst of any used language; it's language features are severely lacking; its implementations are contradictory, confusing, and destructive. In short, it is not easy to read, it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot, it is not able to scale both in complexity and performance; and its libraries are a mess.

<comment><USER3> I keep reading always the same things from people who simply don't know how to use it properly and feels hurted by a different-than-what-studied-at-school syntax.

<comment><USER4> Well for what it's worth, I keep reading _that_ from people whose exposure to programming languages and techniques is limited to making LOB applications in PHP and maybe one or two other lowest-common denominator languages. Most people I know who have any real breadth of programming experience find PHP's language deficiencies glaringly obvious, even if they find it occasionally useful due to deployment requirements, etc.

But more to the point, if anybody knows how to use PHP properly I'd think it is somebody who has worked at Facebook, and you can't just dismiss natmaster's complaints with hand-waving that he must not have been doing it right.

<comment><USER3> > _if anybody knows how to use PHP properly I 'd think it is somebody who has > worked at Facebook, and you can't just dismiss natmaster's complaints with > hand-waving that he must not have been doing it right._

Well, considering the scenario he described in his own post, it's obvious that PHP wasn't used in the right way. Working at facebook itself, unfortunately, means nothing as i have no idea how their code _actually_ is and what natmaster was doing there.

> _Well for what it 's worth, I keep reading that from people whose exposure > to programming languages and techniques is limited to making LOB > applications in PHP and maybe one or two other lowest-common denominator > languages._

For what is worth, i've seen PHP applied with different patterns and architectures in scenarios that were pretty wide, powering millions of contacts daily. It's probably because of this that i learnt that it's actually a well-done language whose only fault is that it isn't popular among engineers and mostly used by amateurs. But this has nothing to do with the language itself.

<comment><USER5> PHP is not well done. Even its creator agrees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A quick dive into any PHP-related topic on HN should yield significant answers. Part of the hatred comes from the fact that the way people know PHP is from 2005, when it was essentially one really long procedural program. It's not so much that people ignore the recent upgrade in tooling/modern language constructs so much as people aren't familiar that they exist.

However, these is still a lot of vitrol for PHP. Because it is so easy to use, many people are able to pick it up without any prior SE experience--these people tend to create poorly-designed, slow-running, and, perhaps worst of all, dangerous (vis a vis security) code.

The other major complaint that exists has to do with inconsistency/insanity in PHP's function signatures/naming/evolution. For example: mysql_escape_string and it's sister, mysql_real_escape_string. Although, anyone working with modern PHP probably will never touch these functions.

What is overlooked is that it has an extensive base of developers, it DOES scale (this is proven), and the language is improving (as well as the tooling (PHPUnit, XHProf, CI tools), frameworks, package management etc). And although Facebook does use it, it's important to note that, AFAIK, PHP only exists as a thin layer in between "display HTML" and "communicating with backend servers which are going to handle the majority of the work, save for presentation- layer type stuff."

There are a few alternatives to PHP, but they each have their warts too. Ruby is hilarious slow, for example.

<comment><USER7> > Ruby is hilarious slow, for example.

[citation needed]. Also, relevant Stack Overflow debate is available. [1] TL;DR: yes, of course Ruby is slower than, say, C, but today's bottleneck isn't hardware, it's developer productivity. (Developer time costs way more than hardware.)

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2529852/why-do-people- sa...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2529852/why-do-people-say-that- ruby-is-slow)

<comment><USER8> Been a Ruby programmer for 5 years now and I find that this is dodging the issue. Sure the productivity is higher but what happens when you're finished developing and your code is now running in production? What happens when it's slow at serving requests, slow at any form of computations, slow when a rake task is starting?

Talking about productivity is a good thing because raw "power" doesn't mean anything, but I really wish we could admit publicly that Ruby is really not a race horse. It does other things awfully well and I wouldn't trade language for the world, but man, I wish it could get a free speed jump like Javascript got a few years ago.

<comment><USER9> There have been some steps in that direction, it seems. At my company, we made a graphics rendering engine in Ruby (haven't released it yet). In testing, it ran steadily, but consumed a lot of resources. But in each new version of Ruby, we saw that resource usage go down. Given that same level of innovation, we will see this graphics engine reach similar speeds as our current, more performant C and Lua implementation eventually.

Ruby 2.0 and 2.1 made incredible improvements to the garbage collector, a major source of our problem. We determined that it was the speed at which we were creating and destroying objects that was causing the GC to work on overdrive, which drove up CPU usage. So with the new GC improvements, we saw that usage go further and further down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are a lot of reasons already discussed, this one is especially famous: [http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

PHP is not a exceptionally bad platform from a technical perspective, it usually gets the job done, is reliable, easy to operate and performant. But i guess the real reason why so many developers - including me - hate PHP is that plain PHP is pretty boring. It doesn't have opinions on anything and no exciting concepts or language features. Now you can use great frameworks that implement great ideas in PHP, but because PHP has been around for a long time, much of the code out there and still in production is spaghetti code that is no fun to work with and the only option to change that is often a complete rewrite.

<comment><USER11> The CodingHorror blog have been quite vocal on the tour too : [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php- singularity...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php- singularity.html)

<comment><USER12> The problem with Jeff's writing isn't that he ever says one big thing that's just obviously wrong, but his pieces are full of bits that just sort of don't make sense.

 _Remember the immediate visceral reaction you had to the double-clawed hammer? That 's exactly the reaction most sane programmers have to their first encounter with the web programming language PHP._

First of all, I didn't have a visceral reaction to that image (and I'm not sure Jeff knows what that word means), but setting that aside, the second sentiment is just wrong. PHP doesn't cause that reaction on your first encounter. Most of its ugliness is in a bunch of little things that you learn to deal with over time.

Another example. He says:

 _What we ought to be talking about is not how terrible PHP is – although its continued terribleness is a particularly damning indictment – but how we programmers can culturally displace a deeply flawed tool with a better one. How do we encourage new programmers to avoid picking up the double clawed hammer in favor of, well, a regular hammer?_

And in the _very next paragraph_ :

 _Despite the serious problems with PHP, I was forced to consider it. If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option._

I don't know how he doesn't think that contradicts his previous point. Actually, now I'm not even sure what his previous point was. Inexperienced programmers are wrong to choose PHP. But, also, PHP is the best choice available.

I won't go paragraph by paragraph, but these things really add up when reading his writing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are a number of reasons why PHP is so disliked by outside communities including but not limited to MAGZine's points.

1) As mentioned there are a number of language inconsistencies, much more so than comparable languages. This includes naming schemes for functions

2) PHP and most major projects written in it are insecure. Even up-to-date Wordpress installs are vulnerable to attacks.

3) Testing still isn't in vogue. Few projects have any testing and for those that do the testing tools aren't nearly as strong as in other languages

4) The tooling that surrounds the ruby, python, go, javascript languages is much more advanced than what PHP has even now. PHP only really got a decent package manager last year.

5) For a long time most PHP projects were procedural. Real OO was only introduced in PHP 5.

6) There is a lot of bad code written in PHP because it was so accessable.

7) Most examples of PHP projects are CMS' which don't require a ton of experience to build. You meet a lot of people who have spent 10 years in the industry that really have just managed content that don't know how to build something complex and don't have any background in data structures, algorithms etc

8) The PHP community is extremely fractured. There are something on the order of 10+ major PHP frameworks. Zend, Symfony, Codeigniter, Cake, Laravel, Kohana, Yii plus a number of more minor frameworks like Lithium, Silex etc before you get to the CMS' like Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal

<comment><USER14> 1) Agreed. 2) Citation? PHP is extremely popular so it has more insecure code in comparison to Ruby. Also Rails isn't above multiple security vulnerabilities per year so I don't see how Wordpress (which incidentally is an extremely old application) could be. 3) Testing is extremely popular these days. It's 2014, not 1999. 4) Agreed. PHP finally got shut of PEAR and Composer has had an unbelievable impact on PHP. 5) PHP 5 was released 10 years ago. Give it up already about procedural code. 6) Agreed. 7) Not my experience. 8) PHP has a massive community. Ergo, it has a long tail of frameworks. I seem to remember that Ruby has had more than one.

<comment><USER13> 2)Within the past 6 months I had a wordpress install, which was up-to-date used in a DOS attack against someone else. PHP also does some surprising type changes that can be exploited. That plus people remembering the mysql_real_escape crap leaves people with a poor impression of PHP security.

3) It's definitely much better but still doesn't compare to the ruby or node communities. I think the biggest changes to the community will be a bigger focus on testing/TDD and facebook's HHVM

5)True. Wordpress and Joomla are extremely old applications. However Wordpress is still extremely popular, which is why I bring it up.

7) Would you mind adding what your experience has been? I'm genuinely interested.

Ruby really only has 2 main frameworks: Rails and Sinatra. Python and Node are more fractured, but there are generally a few main frameworks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Essentially because it wasn't a well-thought out language, but a hack, it became used widely, but that lack of thoughtfulness shows on larger projects quite a bit. It is a hack that need to become more formalized with time, but it hasn't quite done that. Whenever I still see "needle" and "haystack" in documentation I think "Wait what is this? Oh right..."

>Facebook uses it

Not really, I mean Facebook doesn't use the PHP that a common person uses.They've made so many changes and their codebase is so huge. Facebook also uses the D programming language, HipHop, and probably more tools than I'll ever know. Wasn't chat at Facebook first written in Erlang?

<comment><USER2> Furthermore, the only reason Facebook stuck with php and made massive changes to make it somewhat usable is because of its huge legacy codebase. They would have much rather be working in a different language these days.

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Several reasons, I think.

For one, it's no secret that PHP was an amateur undertaking that inadvertently ended up powering >80% of the web.

It started off as a bunch of helper functions that were meant for Rasmus Lerdorf's personal use. He has frequently acknowledged that he was never particularly skilled and that PHP was never meant to be used on such a large scale. Among the countless WTF moments you would expect from a personal project, PHP once used strlen() as a hashing function. [1]

Thus, PHP ended up having a very inconsistent design and an awful typing system. It ended up becoming quite baroque, it has never had a formal specification and it has no coherent idea of what it wants to be. This is exemplified by PHP's relatively recent appropriation of Java idioms in an attempt to bring vague Nygaard OOP.

Third, it's fundamentally a templating language and it doesn't encourage any cohesive design patterns or practice. Most PHP sites don't even use frameworks, but rather go with the Mozart (or rather, spaghetti) style of copy-paste programming. There is no clear separation of concerns.

Fourth, the PHP community has always been dominated by amateurs. I can't really direct you to any objective statistics, but in general PHP has a disproportionately high amount of leechers and newbies, largely because it has been so deeply ingrained into the public consciousness as the _de facto_ language of the web, without knowing of the better designed general-purpose alternatives.

Fifth, some concrete examples of PHP's horrific internals. [2] [3] [4]

Alternatives? Anything, really. Python, Ruby, Perl, Common Lisp, Haskell... whatever floats your boat. A minimal web framework is a trivial application to write. That's why there's so fucking many of the goddamned things.

[1] [http://news.php.net/php.internals/70691](http://news.php.net/php.internals/70691)

[2] [http://www.phpwtf.org/](http://www.phpwtf.org/)

[3] [http://www.phpsadness.com/](http://www.phpsadness.com/)

[4] [http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/) (the famous article)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a few versions old, but here's a graph I made showing which values PHP considers "equal"

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/dgymauqggtyurvp/phpeq.png](https://www.dropbox.com/s/dgymauqggtyurvp/phpeq.png)

</comment><comment><USER17> PHP does what it does relatively well, but it's a quirky muddle of a language and its design is very tightly bound to a CGI-style model of web development.

Anything can be hacked around, of course, as Facebook has proven. But you could write Facebook in Bash or DOS Batch Language if you were willing to. But newer frameworks and languages that were designed with modern web development in mind are more to a lot of people's liking than PHP's style.

Really, the best way for you to answer your question is to dig in and learn how to develop a webapp using Ruby or Node.js or Python and the amazing frameworks that are built on those languages. Dig in for a couple of years and then on the other side you'll understand better. You may still prefer PHP, but even if you do, I'll bet the PHP code you write will be better for having learned how the "other guys" do things.

</comment><comment><USER3> IMHO, PHP is hated and misconsidered because: Since a few years ago, it was mainly used by amateurs. The truth is that PHP, right now, is a very appealing and competing language. I know several companies that power their services with PHP and it just _makes_ wonders.

Of course: you need to know what you are doing. But the language itself is capable of doing _almost_ everything, without drawbacks.

Lot of people make clueless claims about how PHP is worst than (place-latest- cool-framework/language-here). This is far from being true, read this: [http://philsturgeon.co.uk/blog/2013/11/benchmarking- codswall...](http://philsturgeon.co.uk/blog/2013/11/benchmarking-codswallop- nodejs-v-php)

So, PHP is hated in the devs world because it gave access to "amateurs" to the world of crafting software. Which is ridiculous.

<comment><USER18> I think that it is great that "amateurs" have a usable tool. I did have a grudge against PHP, derived from having maintained a system written in that fashion. Do I really care one way or another? No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here is why.

I like to equate the technical community with the skiing community. The barriers to entry are tough. It takes a lot of practice to become good skier, and many that do become expert skiers instantly elevate themselves above the rest with routes, equipment, and other types of "I'm more technical than you."

So, back to hate for PHP.

The C++ and Clojure and Erlang crowd are the double black diamond skiers, and they are the first to throw hate at the green and blue skiing crowd - because, well, they've mastered everything else and since they mastered it, well, they are just _better than you_.

Meanwhile, you've got the PHP type skiers who are cruising the groomers, enjoying the sun and living life - pinching themselves because they are just getting the task done. They occasionally hit a black or two, and even hit the moguls to refine their turns and technique, but they are there to get shit done - which means to ski and have fun.

Then you've got the Perl and COBOL guys who just ski around the mountain and complain about all of the above, since they've been skiing for 40+ years.

Disclaimer: I am an avid skier and maintain a number of successful Web properties based on PHP. And I love the groomers...

</comment><comment><USER20> I could write something here. But someone has already written a pretty comprehensive post on what's wrong with PHP. So I'm going to refer you to that.

PHP a fractal of bad design: [http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a- fractal-of-bad-de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of- bad-design/)

</comment><comment><USER21>
        $foo = [];
        $foo[$userSuppliedString] = 'foo';
        foreach(array_keys($foo) as $userSuppliedString) {
            if (! is_string($userSuppliedString)) {
                die("I understand all the reasons for this behaviour, but it violates the principle of least astonishment");
            }
        }

Supply a string. Works fine? Try running with a string that looks numeric.

I use PHP every day, it's a great language for many things including teaching programming. Every language has its quirks and i don't really think PHP's quirks are worse than others.

 _" The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages. Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao - but do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it."_

</comment><comment><USER22> PHP is AWESOME! Because there are so many examples of how to do everything. If you are building a web app you need HTML anyway , and since PHP is like 75% knowing HTML you are a long ways to knowing how to do things. PHP is fast enough for 90% of websites. LAMP is a commodity you can get any hosting provider to set you up in seconds.

PHP is SUCKY! Because it is way to slow for 10% of websites. 90% of coders pieced together their solutions from a mish-mash of code examples they found on the web. HTML is just strewn through out because most people do their PHP inline with the HTML rather than populating variables to output all at once. LAMP has the word Apache, and MySQL in it and that means you inherit some badness that is being sold as a commodity (yeah you can run on a non-lamp but very few who do PHP do, and so you may not be compatible if you stray from LAMP which means you are writing in a non-standard way)

</comment><comment><USER23> Don't forget the epic php bashing post - [http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

<comment><USER24> Does no one who posts this in PHP threads even bother to check if it's been posted like three or four times already?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Since everyone concentrates on the development side, let me just leave a note from actually hosting php:

A standard, no crazy stuff, database-backed blog+login site made in Symfony consumes ~60MB of memory. Then discards it and starts again. On each request. Even if the bytecode itself is cached, it has to create/register all the classes and global objects it uses every single time.

I think people should find that at least weird and probably scary. Other languages, which separate continuously running application servers from the page serving, do not do that.

<comment><USER6> It has it's positives and negatives.

If you tell a room full of Java and C++ developers with no experience to PHP, that on every request, everything gets loaded, and at the end of the request, everything (and I mean _everything_ ) gets torn down, you'll get a bunch of blank stares.

However, the web, in its nature, is stateless. So, having a language where nothing persists across requests (except that which you store/retreive by using cookies/session data) is suited to the web. Also, not having to worry about memory management or thread-spawning helped to make PHP the simple, accessible language that it is. No memory leaks!* ;-)

In loadtesting, I've found that PHP is almost always CPU bound. Yeah, you might be loading and unloading 60MB of memory each time, but a) caching (send those 304s!) and b) it's not like your memory is going to 'go bad' from loading/unloading Symfony.

That said, there might be something to keeping Symfony loaded in memory. In my own tests, loading the classmap is one of the longest-running tasks in simpler PHP applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> PHP is the lowest common denominator.

PHP is the ghetto. It might be fun or necessary when you're young and can't afford better. But, eventually people who are able, move somewhere they aren't being mentally stabbed in the face every time they pop down to the corner store. This, of course, reinforces the ghetto. As the people who can't leave are the dregs.

Nothing is as black and white as a couple sentences makes it sound. But, that is the place PHP has (deserved or no) in the programming world.

</comment><comment><USER27> It is popular, ubiquitous, easy to learn, feature-rich, stable and fast. By ubiquitous you may infer easy to find developers and server hosts for.

</comment><comment><USER28> The more a language is used the more its hated. The ones everyone complains about are most likely to be the ones you will use to make money.

</comment><comment><USER29> There are two kinds of languages, those no one uses and those everyone bitches about.

</comment><comment><USER30> Homo sapiens is evolved to ingest, internalize and re-propagate ideas. That was our survival advantage on the savannah hundreds of thousands of years ago; that was how we out-competed other species using our big brains to carry out complex, improvised plans.

But that evolved trait now can be seen in how we conform to the ideologies and groupthinks of political tribes and groups. Homo sapiens seeks out tribes and discerns their ideologies and internalizes them and then re-propagates.

We are a species of ant-like primates, and instead of spraying chemicals or from musk scent glands, we spray ideology, the ideology of our adopted tribes.

The elite use this evolved trait of propaganda-ingesting in order to manipulate us.

Anti-php is one of the central tenets of HN ideology. To be a full member of the tribe you must internalize and re-propagate this ideology.</comment>


Atomic Design using Sketch - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/re-write/the-unicorn-workflow-design-to-code-with-atomic-design-principles-and-sketch-8b0fe7d05a37#.dctkvo41e <comment><USER2> Seems a pretty straightforward way to organize things, but can we please stop with the unreadable hipster designs. White text on a light green/blue background is almost impossible for my 40 year old eyes to read. Good design is about helping your users achieve their goals with the least friction possible.

<comment><USER3> For me using a 5.5" phone, text that should be easily legible with a different colour choice is completely unreadable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Useful approach. There's still a missing link for a perfect workflow: being able to export the CSS properties generated this way into a pre/postprocessor framework (bootstrap, zurb etc) instead of overriding the resulting CSS.

A note to the author, and a wish: please stop _abusing_ the term unicorn just for the sake of having catchy trendy titles, unless there is a meaning in "the unicorn workflow" I'm not aware of.

<comment><USER5> The unicorn had a meaning similar to "rare/holy grail" long before it started being used for startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know... In his presentation Brad Frost makes fun of websites that look like different iteration of the same design. With the Atomic Design approach he delivers... websites that are completely in line with current aesthetic trends.</comment>


Savage capitalism is back – and it will not tame itself - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/30/savage-capitalism-back-radical-challenge

<comment><USER2> Not sure I agree entirely ... but there is clearly some systems engineering that needs to be done.</comment>


Save one species and countless others benefit - <AUTHOR> https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/explore-our-research/environment-and-clean-energy/mika-peck <comment><USER2> are humans included?</comment>


The GoDaddy Ad That Has Been Pulled from SuperBowl - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blDezzNEX3E

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think it is right to have pulled it?

Do you agree/disagree?

<comment><USER2> This fiasco is clearly a publicity stunt and a poor one at that. This is a total non-event.</comment></comment>


Eric Schmidt: Hire a coach - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0906/gallery.best_advice_i_ever_got2.fortune/14.html

<comment><AUTHOR> > Eric Schmidt: "His contribution to Google - it is literally not possible to > overstate. He essentially architected the organizational structure."</comment>


Surface Pro 3: Not ready for the business professional - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/2ahmr0/surface_pro_3_not_ready_for_the_business/

<comment><USER2> I think everyone who has ever owned a laptop has had an issue at one time or another with the laptop failing to go into deep sleep when they close the lid. I don't think a one-time occurrence, however unfortunate, is enough to dismiss the SP3 entirely.

Now if there's a high incidence of failure to trigger deep sleep being reported among SP3 users, that might indeed be a serious problem.

<comment><USER3> Personally, I've completely given up on the notion of keeping a sleeping laptop in my bag. I just shut it down and stow it away to save the hassle of going through this situation.</comment></comment>


The simplicity and power of Elixir: the ws2048 case - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@azzarcher/the-simplicity-and-power-of-elixir-the-ws2048-case-b510eaa568c0 <comment><USER2> I started digging into Elixir on Columbus Day and was excitedly telling friends about its features after a few hours of tinkering. Extremely cool language that forced me to think and approach problems a little differently (pattern matching is awesome!)

<comment><USER3> One of my favorite things with pattern matching in Elixir is how you can use it to trigger off of sections of the AST when building macros.

Hundreds of lines of gnarly tree walking down to a single function prototype, it's incredibly elegant.

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord _I spent most of my time getting into its vision and philosophy, trying to distance from the object-oriented mindset that my previous studies and experiences had consolidated._

Which would be somewhat off the mark in Erlang. Control flow and common interfaces are frequently expressed via adapters written using polymorphic pattern matching functions. Processes are message-passing, isolated units of work. Modules and OTP applications are encapsulation, etc.

The functional aspects aren't as important as the pattern matching on data types.

<comment><USER4> I don't follow. What in the quoted portion is off the mark? I don't see any contention between the quote and the rest of your comment.</comment></comment>


Fully insured bitcoin storage. Would you use it? - <AUTHOR>

A service which accepts bitcoin deposits and holds them for you securely. Fully insured and guaranteed. Instant withdrawals.<p>Supposing you were happy with the guarantees & underwriting. Would you use it? <comment><USER2> No, because it doesn't protect me from the volatility of bitcoin itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is a necessary next step for Bitcoin. So yes.

</comment><comment><USER4> No why would I?

</comment><comment><USER5> No.</comment>


Ask HN: How Do You Know When It's Time to Give Up?  - <AUTHOR>

I really enjoy the building phase. Development and solving problems are my passion... but my projects tend to never take hold and sit stagnant with <10 visits a day for months after the initial 'i made this' plea to folks/sites/forums.<p>At what point do you call it quits on projects and hang them up, let the domains expire, etc? <comment><USER2> How educated is the market on the problem you are trying to solve? How tied down is the market to their current solution? Does your product have sufficient value to justify switching costs?

Assuming your product actually is better than what's already out there, it is up to you to figure out how to reduce friction for your potential customers. Have you reduced your signup flow to the least amount of pages and fields required? Are you able to showcase the value of the product even before they sign up? Are current customers able to easily share the product with others in a way that's also valuable to them?

A lot of this stuff sounds simple but many products don't get it right since some successful products get by without addressing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Taking the marketplace project: a marketplace is probably only as good as it's contents. Liquidity is the determining factor... and it's a chicken and egg scenario. So maybe that venture would fail that test from the start. You can be better with technology but the intrinsic value wasn't raised so maybe it's a fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I created [http://dogehold.com/](http://dogehold.com/) out of interest in crypto and the lack of a good escrow system for Dogecoin. However, after the first few transactions I realized I wasn't actually interested in maintaining it as a business.

One seller had an issue due to a bug in DogeAPI, and given that my reaction was "Ugh, I don't have time to deal with this nonsense", I realized I didn't have the passion for it that I thought I would.

It was a really fun project, I had a blast building it and playing with Redis, but I knew within the first week of its release that it wasn't something I wanted to sustain.

</comment><comment><USER4> I struggle with the same issue. I've shifted my thinking quite a bit and now think of it as just solving a different problem.

Say my goal is to write code 6 hours a day with headphones on. In order to do that, I need people to pay me to use what I'm building.

So the problem to solve has become "how to get people to pay for my service/product."

Projects die all of the time because of bad market fit. Less likely do they die because they were built poorly.

<comment><USER5> I am having a hard time following your logic. If you wanted people to pay you 6 hours a day to write code, then I am sure you could get great pay working as a programmer.

I think the better question to ask is, "What problem am I solving for my [potential] customers that is worth them paying for it?" (rather than "how do I get them to pay?" The former is a more sustainable business philosophy)

And I am pretty sure market fit and quality of the product are not mutually exclusive. They go hand in hand.

<comment><USER4> I think we are in agreement. I am interpreting OPs problem as "I love developing code but my projects don't go anywhere." My answer is to switch from writing code to solving the trouble problem, which is "how to find customers for my project."

Also, I've worked for many companies that had shitty code but lots of revenue.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct. That puts it succinctly - I like making things, but I suck at choosing what to make (or selling what I make). Maybe they are the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How saturated are the markets you are trying to enter? You're not going to invent a better search engine as a side project (without a ton of luck and an amazing idea/staff/developer/perfect execution).

Do you receive feedback for these projects?

Do you listen to your feedback and pivot when necessary?

If the idea is good and the site is made, then it should be just marketing and appealing to customers needs.

<comment><AUTHOR> The visits for one specific project were in the tens of thousands over the course of a few months after 'launch'. Feedback was numbered in the tens at most and mostly things like 'cool site!' 'cool idea!' or 'i cant find this specific product'

The site looked promising but noone comes back to check things and of the initial rush of users, a decent % signed up but did not participate in any transactions.

<comment><USER6> My first question is asking about your competitors. If I want a company to provide the service you offer, can I find an established one with a quick search on Google? Do you rank well on search engines?

If I'm a customer then I'm going to look for the best product to provide the service, some people will base it on cost depending on the service.

Keep in touch with your potential customers. Reach out and say that your site is new and you'd like to know what they think and maybe even be as bold as to ask why they did or didn't purchase from you and if they purchased from a competitor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those questions were asked and it came down to the fact that it was a collectibles marketplace and the specific things they were looking for were not available or not an attractive price. There is also the trust issue... many seem to rather want to use ebay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So long as you're alive-- there's still hope. If you read the bios of great inventors, tinkerers, and founders-- all of them faced failures, road-blocks, and years of struggle. Areas to explore: Can you persist? Have you ever achieved anything in your life that required years of disciplined effort to complete?

</comment><comment><USER5> What kind of project(s) are you building? Do they really make people's lives better, easier, etc.?

<comment><AUTHOR> The last couple have been collectibles marketplaces and quantified self tracking platforms. I think that is my main thesis -- solving problems/making things easier for people through technology, especially in markets where they are not taking advantage of technology much.

<comment><USER8> Not to be a dick, but that's not really a thesis: there's nothing in need of being proven or disproven. We all know that technology can make things easier for people, and that some industries don't use it much.

Think a little bit more about your own personal reasons for doing something. That's where you'll find a good reason to keep going or not.</comment></comment></comment>