For real, just invite peers and go from there. If its not a 30 people+ party you can spontaneously order pizza pretty easily... Too much planning ruins parties for me.
Americans tend to have larger, more casual social circles, probably. Having hosted parties in both the U.S. and Europe, the "flake rate" in Europe is much smaller, but the parties are also smaller, less frequent, and planned further ahead of time.
"Europe"? I can assure you, the party cultures in Spain, Scandinavia, France and Greece are all pairwise so dramatically different that the U.S. are not the counterpole, but just another flavor in the sea of possibilities. The same applies to different cultures within these countries. Across areas, ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, political leanings, hobby groups.
It's astonishing to me how many comments around here are lumping everything together under specific nationalities.
I’m always amused by this. The US has a hugely diverse set of attitudes to things and yet a surprising number of people there then look at a more populated combination of more than 25 countries with varied languages and histories who have fought many wars over history against each other have some singular approach to parties or cycling or anything else.
we have different culutures but Americans also have decades of media exposure to inform them on what an "American party" is. Especially if you grew up in the late 80's/90's where "party" was a literal genere of movie to subscribe to.
Now of course, media doesn't reflect reality. But it can certainly homogenize sentiment.
Statistical stuff is just what’s more natural to the author of something we’d all do, you wouldn’t assume everybody you invited would come would you? You’d think about how many people would probably come, and that is often based on other things you’d know. Inviting lots of parents to an adults only thing will result in fewer coming if they all need to sort childcare for example.
> and uses a dedicated app to invite guests.
At a larger scale you need to track somehow, unless it’s all in your head or it just doesn’t matter. Even for small friends gatherings we’ll often use WhatsApp polls or whatever for sorting dates out. If you’re inviting people you’re less close to or know more tangentially you’re probably not phoning each one, and the idea of seeing a guest list for deciding if you want to go can be nice. Not for everyone I guess but I don’t see it’s an issue.
It depends on the kind of party and scale really. Other here are talking about getting absolutely trashed and ending up with people in jail. That’s not the only kind of party and just doesn’t appeal to me at the moment. If I wake up shitfaced at 5am I’m going to be a terrible dad, and that’s not who I want to be.
At times I’d have been able to invite a few people and have them invite a few people with little notice or planning and maybe I can again some day but I have young kids and so do most of the people I’d want to invite, so it just takes more organising.
You can network without an app or a permanent digital record.
We threw epic parties for ~80 to 100 people every month for five years back in the student days, in a massive cheap rental house scheduled (along with a 120 others) for demolition for road widening for a major North-South throughway.
It was high on a hill (now a cutting), colonial gilded age "beach house" with a view to the ocean ... and I suspect a great many of the people that passed through can happily live without a record of their debauchery now some decades have passed.
Networking-wise, it was a trove, numerous marriages and business partnerships launched, a few dashed on the rocks, still remembered fondly as a point of reference by a crowd now scattered across the globe.
Maybe 10 years ago I discovered Stumble upon, a website which allowed you to randomly get a page on the internet based on your previous likes/dislikes and interests. I absolutely loved it. You could find some very niche pages. I guess this is what Kagi Small Web tries to achieve somehow, but without the personalization.
They replaced StumbleUpon with "Mix", whatever it is. Probably because they didn't know how to earn money from it. Sad.
PHP already has a pretty good package manager. But it would be great indeed to have a tool to install different versions of the runtime, on top of a Ruff equivalent
Interesting that they always focus more on AI while their product is less and less usable. I want a usable and efficient pull request page, not useless AI features. Seems like the priorities are all wrong. The enshittification of GitHub is absolutely dramatic.
GitHub, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram (on the web)...
All these major websites are becoming incredibly hard to use. My intuition would be "SPA crap" but I'm pretty sure you can make great and snappy SPAs. What am I missing?
You can indeed do so, but it requires a skillset way behind new grads, bootcamps and giving up the prevailing leadership mantra of "All engineers are fungible so just throw that random team over to learn React and it'll be fine".
Front End Engineer roles pay less than general Software Development Engineers at pretty much every FAANG and so you see a lot of FEEs want to transition. Not much senior talent gets kept in that kind of pipeline.
> Front End Engineer roles pay less than general Software Development Engineers at pretty much every FAANG
Not in my experience for the last 5 years, looking at two job ads and comparing the salary range, they are usually the same. Which FAANG still does this?
I think initiative like this drive a need for a more consistent, and even if slow, PHP has been deprecated/reworking its stdlib so I'm hopeful on this.
array_map is variadic. It is actually (callback, ...arr)
One function works against a single element, whereas the other works against multiple. In that case, the parameter order is more meaningful. You can use array_walk if you want (arr, callback), but that only works against a single array -- similarly to array_filter.
> And (in maths, at least) one maps something onto something else.
Yes, but that's the opposite of what you said earlier. You might map x onto 2*x, for example. Or, if you're talking about a collection, you might map the integers 0..10 on to double their value. Data first, then the way you're manipulating it. I'm a mathematician and this is what makes sense to me.
I would only say "map this function..." if the function itself is being manipulated somehow (mapped onto some other value).
When you consider that PHP is used by hundreds of thousands of non-native English speakers, I don’t really think you can make a legitimate claim that “English sentence order” trumps “consistent argument ordering”.
There’s enough viral videos online of how even neighbouring European counties order common sentences differently. Even little things like reading the time (half past the previous hour vs half to the next hour) and counting is written differently in different languages.
So modelling the order of parameters based on English vernacular doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for programming languages used by programmers of all nationalities.
> When you consider that PHP is used by hundreds of thousands of non-native English speakers, I don’t really think you can make a legitimate claim that “English sentence order” trumps “consistent argument ordering”.
I'm quite surprised that the article doesn't mention Laravel.
PHP as a language? Definitely getting better but still not great. Doesn't support async, the stdlib is awful, data structures are quite rudimentary (no tuple, no list, no map, just a weird array type mixing maps and lists), the old extension system sucks.
But the ecosystem? Damn. I see many people here saying that Typescript is definitely the mature choice for the backend. Honestly, I wanted to believe it, but I disagree. The level of productivity with Laravel is absolutely insane. You have everything you need out of the box and you can launch something so fast it's almost unreal.
Typescript doesn't have that. Maybe it's because of a different mentality in this ecosystem (you should build your blocks yourself), but nothing comes close. The closest would be Adonisjs but it doesn't seem to gain traction.
You don't choose a language to build your web project. You choose a stack. A framework.
I definitely prefer python but Django has way less features than Laravel and I don't really enjoy using it. Typescript on the backend was a thing I wanted to believe in (because sharing types between the front and back is a great idea), but I feel like I have to reinvent the wheel, or at least choose 20 different wheels to do something quite simple.
Is Ruby such a great language, or do people just love being productive with Rails? It seems to me that the usage of Ruby without Rails is quite low (I could be wrong).
People choose and stick with stacks, not just languages. And I couldn't find something equivalent to Laravel elsewhere. Give me an equally productive stack and I'll happily drop PHP.
My day-to-day work now is mostly Python and Vue, but PHP was my bread and butter for almost 20 years and to this day probably still probably one of my favorite languages just because I am still so familiar with it. There's something to be said for knowing all the traps and rough spots, and knowing how to avoid them.
The things that held PHP up in the early days, especially it being just dead simple to deploy, are not as big a deal in 2025 as they were in 2005. Shared hosting, while it still definitely exists, is kind of a dying model. Most modern dev I see these days even in PHP is nginx/PHP-FPM and containers, which is really not that terribly different from any other web framework. Even Wordpress, these days I recommend anyone who truly wants to go down that path to find a hosted Wordpress provider rather than trying to do it themselves.
Personally? I would never start a greenfield project now using just PHP. I don't know many people who would.
But PHP + Composer + Laravel? Laravel did for PHP what Rails did for Ruby, and what React/Vue/etc did for JS. Composer gave PHP real package management. It cannot be understated how important it was to have a framework and package manager to take care of all of the thoroughly unpleasant parts. That way you can focus on building the app, not reimplementing things you've done so many time before.
It also probably depends on the country. As a French person I never met anyone who thought it was a good idea. I also don't think I have ever seen a pizza with pineapple in a good pizza restaurant. Only in bad fast food restaurants.
I guess it's quite different in the US.
I have never said French was a standard regarding pizzas. Read my message again.
I'm just saying that maybe the proportion of aficionados of pineapple pizzas varies from country to country.
> As a French person I never met anyone who thought it was a good idea.
If they serve it, whether in "good" restaurant or in fast food in France, it's probably because the strange people that pay money to enjoy them do exist. Perhaps you need to enlarge your social circle.
Putting so many rules and so much science on something that should be fun and spontaneous feels so wrong to me.
Maybe a cultural thing. But I would never go to a party hosted by someone who thinks in statistical terms and uses a dedicated app to invite guests.
I admit there are a few interesting tips though. Especially the one about splitting food and drinks across the room.
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