You don't want to write SQL in your controllers. It's a recipe for future pain and suffering.

- If a second action needs the same data, it's likely that you'll end up duplicating your query. Especially if you work with other people, and they don't know about the queries that exist in all of the different actions.

- If you change the structure of the data in the DB, you need to find every affected query, in every action. It's extremely fragile, and prone to breaking.

If you have a model, with a nice public API, that interacts with the DB, you know that you've isolated the change to just that one place. All of the controllers that call $model->some_data(); will continue to work no matter how your change your data source so long as you obey the API.

There are million different ways you can approach that, but I strongly recommend that you find one that works for you, and stick with it.

I think part of the reason for this is it appears in allot of tutorials for different web frameworks, which I think they do because it makes the code smaller and therefor their framework look simpler.

- When I arrived on the checkout page (from the link in the nice email you sent), you had tacked on a $8 digital backup fee. That is a complete bullshit charge, and you added it by default with no explanation as to what it was, or why I would want it. It was also not particularly obvious whether or not I could remove said add-on. It is a shameless, low class, money grab.

- I switched my pricing from USD to CAD, and you added $10 despite the two currencies trading at parity (I quickly swapped back, and just paid in USD). Another shameless, senseless money grab.

- You require my name, home address, email address, and phone number in order for me to purchase downloadable software via Paypal. You do not need any of that information. You want it so that some tool in marketing can have pretty powerpoints. It should be optional. (Making it required simply requires me to make up information; a waste of both our time.)

- The “send me email spam” checkbox was checked by default. The only reason for this is to get permission to spam people too lazy to pay attention to the checkout. It’s another tasteless scam formulated by a greedy, customer hostile executive tool.

- After purchasing, I entered my serial number, and was informed that I would have to register to receive updates to the software I just purchased. I cannot explain to you how incredibly asinine I find that policy. 

- The registration process once again required information I didn’t want to give you (requiring me to give you fake information)

- After registering, and confirming my registration via email, and entering my email/password combo into the application I was told that I had given invalid credentials, and to try again. (I hadn’t. I’m pretty good with copy/paste.) So I guess NO UPDATES FOR ME?

This is actually less for marketing purposes and more for running anti-fraud analysis, which is a key consideration when you sell software at their scales. When I write my (totally legitimate) Japanese address and phone number combined with my American credit cards, it often ends up in an order getting held for purgatory for 48 ~ 72 hours until I can point them to the resolutions for the last four orders I did through them and the fact that none were chargebacks for being stolen credit cards.

Steam also does something similar. You can thank your local pirate.

The digital backup fee is scamtastic, and (shockingly) isn't the worst thing they have pulled over the last few years (that would be automatically adding rebill fraud 'coupon booklet' subscriptions to the orders). They split the fee $7 to DR and $1 to the software publisher, which means that for sales of $50 software they make substantially more from that addon than for the software itself at almost all of their (myriad) pricing schemes for the core DR payment processing experience.

For example, an annoying system which will decrease chargebacks is "If your IP address goes to a country other than your billing address, shoot first and ask questions later." It bites me all the time, but there are sensible business reasons for it.

* Even though you _can_ opt out of it (click the grey cross on the right of the product list), the "backup" fee is almost an extorsion scheme. When you buy Parallels, you buy the right to download it once. After that, it's up to you to properly manage your backups. If your hard disk crash and you didn't, you must buy a new version (unless you bougth the "extended download service").

* I'm in Europe, and they silently switched the price from $80 to 80€. This is almost $110. You can't switch back to USD, only to GBP (£65 which is as expensive)[1].

That's enough. I didn't wan't to know what other dark patterns they'd pull out further down the road.

[1] Actually, I've checked while writing this post, and it is possible to get the US shop in Europe too, but I couldn't find the way to do it a few months ago when I contemplated purchasing their program.

Oh, and I didn't know there was a free, quality alternative until shortly after. A painfully bad checkout is the price I pay for being too lazy to do any research. ;)

It is a shameless, low class, money grab. (twice)

It’s another tasteless scam formulated by a greedy, customer hostile executive tool.

Surely there are competitors in the marketplace?

We vote with our dollars.

The strings from the "hot" tag to the "Small business" column are wrong. One of the strings needs to come from behing the column, otherwise it looks like there's some weird bug sitting on the column, holding a "hot" tag.

See: http://imgur.com/gjVbb

And it's a Flash banner ad, BTW, so don't even bother trying on your phone ;)

First try, Firefox 3.6 on Snow Leopard: - Opened iPhoto and dragged a photo in, progress bar filled, but no picture appear, and no indication of success was given. Check file info and realized it was a NEF. - Repeated process with a JPG. Progress bar filled, but same results.

Next try, Safari 4.0.4: - Clicked upload button - Selected two files - Progress bar filled, but no pictures appeared, and no indication of success was given.

Now when I visit the home page, it says I have two events, but neither of them are clickable because they have no pictures.

Beautiful site though, I was really impressed by the GUI (if only it worked...).

We've started additional AWS Instances and things should be working normally and just a few minutes.

UPDATE (9:52 PST): We now have 5 machines processing & resizing photos. There are still 6,500 photos left in the upload queue from earlier today. We're processing them LIFO so it may take us a few more minutes for us to get to the photos uploaded early this morning.

Since the queue is so large expect new photo uploads to take longer than they normally should.

If you have any more problems please email us directly: human -åt- divvyshot -dºt- com

When I create a new event, and click "Untitled Event" to edit it, it would be really nice if it auto-selected the text for me. As is I had to click, then double-click, so it's three click for a one click operation.

That said, I also think it's really important to ensure that the title you submit is properly phrased. The articles that have received the most votes have inevitably been the ones I put some time into rewording to appeal to HN users.

I'm more speaking for the people who write their own stuff(sivers, asmartbear etc). Who spend 2-3 hours putting an interesting article together, only to have it die in the new bin.

For example, I get asked all the time how I got my site to 35K visits in 2 months. And I'd love to share. But I always put it off because I know there is a 90% chance it'll never get off the new page.

Why should I spend 3-5 hours putting that article together with graphs and data, if I know for a fact that there is 99% chance that it'll die. I got a site to run, I can't throw away my time like that.

In fact the only articles of mine that actually made it to the front page, were those which I linked to from another relevant discussion. Those got 40-60 upvotes. But if I didn't link them from a relevant thread, they'd be stuck in the new page like all the other submissions.

So far as the value of 'x%' goes, there are certainly ways you could game the current system in your favor: linkbait the title to appeal to a very specific demo, get a few friends lined up for a quick upvote... it doesn't seem like it would be too much trouble. I often see very recently submitted articles with 3-4 upvotes at or near the top of the homepage. If the only reason you're writing is for traffic, there certainly appears to be a lot of opportunity. Am I wrong?

If it never makes it to the front page, where 99% of the people view the stories, then all that effort was for naught. And I might as well save my time.

But just like making music, I write what I write because it helps me to put down my thoughts, how many others read it, find it useful and/or comment on it is really not that big a deal to me, though I'm always very happy when there is some kind of interaction around something I write. Usually I learn as much from the feedback and the comments as I did from doing whatever it was that I wrote about in the first place.

If I knew the article would have a chance on HN, I'd probably put a little bit more priority on it.