skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PHP is used by plenty of people that (at least think they do, looking at myself ;) ) do understand programming, they just use it because they literally got used to it.

The perl community was pretty abrasive when I first looked in to it, the PHP community was the opposite so I ended up programming a large amount of stuff in PHP.

But before that I already coded my way around for about 15 years or so in lots of other languages, projects including cad systems, low level communcations drivers for weird bits of hardware, an OS and a whole slew of other stuff.

Basically my take on it was 'it's good enough for what it's for', web programming and making money.

To this day a good part of http://ww.com/ (possibly nsfw so don't go there if you are on your boss' line) is written in PHP, I've recently gone over the whole thing in order to clean it up readying it for a port to something a little bit more clean.

It was quite amusing to see how many hoops we had to jump through 11 years ago when it was first built compared to how easy you could do some of that today.

For plenty of people it is just a means to earn a living, language aesthetics and purity or expressiveness don't enter in to the equation, it is whatever their boss tells them to use, C#, PHP or Java.

And perl definitely suffered because of the attitude perl aficionados take, both with respect to other languages as well as to those that do not fully grok perl just yet.

Community is a huge part of any programming environment, possibly even more important than the language itself.
If you have an iPhone it replaced your previous cellphone - the point is that it's not trying to create an entirely new market with an entirely new kind of device.
The C has/is being replaced by C++
Clojure: Java
Ruby has also been done in Objective-C, hasn't it?
I don't know, nobody thought they could revamp the cellphone, either.
That doesn't really matter for my point, which was that group selection is a very wrongheaded way to look at the issue. Abstracting an organism's genotype and phenotype as "an individual" is accurate shorthand, while group selection just doesn't happen.
I write maybe one or two ad-hoc shell scripts every day, many only for a single use. Bash isn't so bad once you get used to it. Things like Perl, Python or Ruby are often less suited owing to lack of parallelism or scalability without more effort than I'm willing to spend, as I typically write the scripts in 2 or 3 minutes or so. Most of my scripts are pipes of other utilities, written in a streaming style, often with multiple forks writing to temporary files and joining with a sort at the end.

I wouldn't feel the same way if it was a different sh than bash. For example, this is easy in bash:

let total=0
let n=10
for ((i=0; i<n; ++i)); do
if (( i % 2 != 0 )); then
printf 'Odd: %.3d\n' $i
fi
let total+=i
done
echo "Total is: $total, average is $((total / n))"

Staying inside bash, you only have integer arithmetic, but that's sufficient for many problems. The major advantage is that you can easily, and more importantly, readably, compose solutions using programs written in dozens of different languages. The syntax for piping programs together in scripting languages tends to be imperative, rather than declarative like a shell script.
It's amazing to see the socioeconomic divide at play in this area (I'm from Concord). If you look just northeast of Hanscom on the map for Milk, you'll see a sharp dividing line between the richer towns of Carlisle, Bedford and Lexington and the more working-class towns of Billerica, Tewksbury and Dracut.
USGS Develops Twitter-Based Earthquake Detection System
In improv acting we explicitly learn how status transactions work. Note that "status" in this context means something slightly different: http://greenlightwiki.com/improv/Status

Understanding status changed how I fundamentally view interactions. I've wanted to submit (or even write) something on this for HN, but I haven't figured an angle to do it from.
http://www.macruby.org/ not sure if it's rewritten in ObjC or just integrated-with
I think the main issue (and with the original poster) is not that you were subscribed, but that their newsletter was far too intrusive: not enough good information, and too often (did you mean twice a week? or fortnightly?).

If on the other hand, he specialised in startups or small business and gave you relevant, useful information, I doubt you'd have been too concerned.
no it wasn't water weight, it was the net result of eating approximately 470,000 calories beyond what you burned
Javascript: C++ (TraceMonkey, Spidermonkey, V8), Java (Rhino) [EDIT: Sorry, C++, not C]
Renault Truck Racing 2009 Download
Is it time to reimagine your product / service?
Myst 4 is played exactly like this, actually. You're surrounded by panoramic pre-rendered video, and clicking where you want to move to takes you to a new panorama, analogous with the movement in the original game. (Myst 3 is similar, but it alternates between panoramas and pre-rendered video without doing both at the same time.)
lisp is written in lisp. (and sometimes C)
Community is important, and that is the main reason why I tolerate Perl's various annoyances. There are simply a lot of Perl programmers that give me excellent code for free (see http://github.com/languages) and that makes it all worthwhile.

The same does not appear to be true of PHP. PHP's community is more talkative ("How to cut-n-paste code to hash passwords"), where Perl's is more programming-oriented ("Authen::Passphrase"). As a programmer, I prefer to stick with the programming-oriented community.
Oh, and good documentation too. PHP.net is awesome. It's probably the largest contributing factor to PHP being easy to use.
You may be right. Her storytelling is free of the sort of opaque language that lets people interpret it any way they like... such language is sometimes poetic and inspiring, but would not be a good fit for Rand's novel. Thus it is not a weakness of the novel that she avoided it.

The passengers on the train symbolize the unwitting half-participants in the travesty that led to the train's malfunction. Surely none of them would have expected that their half-hearted support of the system that led to the crash would result in their own deaths.

The reader is intended to focus on the thoughts of the passengers and the consequences of their prior beliefs. The point being that few would expect there to be any consequences, which is why the train crash is an effective plot element. The crash is not intended to symbolize the killing of those who oppose capitalism but to show the folly of loose, whimsically held beliefs.
Sounds interesting. "Here's what I learned about status in improv class" sounds like a good enough angle to me!
Though its interesting information, I think the data could help their competition like REDBOX to stock particular dvds at their locations
I wonder if this isn't just down to keyboard layouts.

US keyboards have an extra-big left shift, and a small return key, with the backslash and pipe above the return. UK (and as far as I'm aware, most other Eurpopean) keyboards have a small left shift with the backslash and pipe key just to the left of the Z. The return key is nice and big, hard to miss. The button above the return is the backspace, also nice and big and hard to miss.

(And annoyingly, every single Linux installation I have ever used has mis-mapped the Dvorak translation of the key to the left of the Z, mapping it to < and >, rather than \ and |. I often have to faff about with loadkeys layouts and xmodmap layouts for several hours every time I do a new install.)
In a world where you have to eat, sleep, and work, sometimes you have to live with a bit of imperfection. If the code works, and you will never need to modify it, it doesn't matter how clean it is. (This is why I use UNIX. It sucks, but it is pretty easy to paper over the suckage. If I used a properly-designed OS, I wouldn't be able to browse the web, program, etc., etc.)
Intellectual soda pop for the simple minded
Yes.

Python

* CPython is the "original", written in C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPython.

* Jython is written in Java http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jython.

* IronPython is written in C#http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironpython.

* PyPy is written in Python (I had forgotten this) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyPy.

Ruby

* The reference Ruby 1.8 (MRI) is written in C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_MRI.

* Ruby 1.9 is still written in C, but compiles to a bytecode VM (YARV) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YARV.

* JRuby is written in Java http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JRuby.

* Rubinius is largely written in Ruby per Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubinius.

* IronRuby runs on the .net framework (I assume it is written in C#) http://www.ironruby.net/About and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IronRuby.
I'd seen pictures of this place before, but I didn't know that the conditions were so extreme.
Well... an attempted bomber comes from Yemen, now people start thinking about maybe focusing attention on Yemen. Maybe Somalia too. And there are riots on the streets of Egypt because the US is paying off Mubarak to isolate Gaza, what with their democratically elected government not being popular enough with the Israel.

The US seems to me to be playing a very predictable game, manipulated into being the big bad guy in the Islamic fundamentalist story. And when a chunk of the US citizenry won't stand for doing nothing in the face of terrorism, the body politic is paralyzed by its fear and can be directed like a herd of cattle. I have read supposedly rational people actually say that "fighting them over there is better than fighting them here", as if terrorism was some kind of thing you beat by killing people. The mind boggles.
The title is horrible. This should be called "How a diet rich in fructose makes us fat, poisons us slowly, and wastes billions of dollars on health care for self-inflicted chronic diseases, and what you can do about it NOW.

Here's a brief summary of the salient points:

1) Consumption of fructose, sucrose (which is a glucose-fructose disaccharide), or alcohol (ethanol is metabolized by the same pathway as fructose) should be extremely limited. That includes HFCS and most fruit juices.

Why? Because the way your body metabolizes fructose, eating a lot of it results in insulin resistance (type II diabetes), hypertension (high blood pressure), high triglycerides, high LDL cholesterol (the bad kind), and weight gain due to inability to self-regulate hunger. The combination of these effects is known as Metabolic Syndrome.

There are two notable exception to this fructose prohibition: 1) it's ok to eat as long as it's in fruit because there's not much of it and it comes with lots of fiber, which makes it even more OK, and 2) if you're in the middle of (or have just completed) some seriously epic exercise and your are glycogen-depleted, fructose actually helps you restore glycogen much faster than regular carbs. See: Gatorade.

2) Do eat "food" as Michael Pollan would say. The closer to it coming out of the ground, the better. Google "paleolithic diet".

3) His research shows that you can begin reversing Type-2 Diabetes in a short number of weeks by eating an appropriate diet.

4) His research shows that the #1 factor causing most diets to fail is cheating on fructose consumption (even worse than cheating on exercise!).

4) Exercise is good for you, but not primarily due to calorie burning. It barely burns any calories relative to food intake. It's good for you because it reduces stress and helps your body maintain a "fast metabolism" on an ongoing basis.

5) Fructose is a major part of our food supply due to politics. It will take a while before the corruption that propagates the problem is broker. Thus, don't trust the government on this one.

The full video is an amazing presentation by a talented presenter. It is worth watching the full thing especially if you struggle with obesity or don't understand how the body metabolizes food.

The lecture is by a MD and/or PHD talking to a bunch of MDs and PHDs, so it's pretty high level. He covers a lot of biochemistry, but in a way that is pretty accessible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Let's be clear though --

Hsieh wasn't a founder (but was around early on) and got the company to a $1.2 billion sale after a little more than 10 years, and in the top 1000 sites on the web. Which is of course very impressive, but...

Mark Pinkus got the company he founded to a multi-billion valuation and in the top 100 sites on the web in under 2 years and is looking like IPO material in an IPO-less era. Regardless of what you think of his scruples, it's easy to see why he gets counted impressive.
I guess we need a roomba companion robot to clean the roomba brushes. Who cleans the cleaner?
Well, that sure seems to be a manager's point of view, rather popular. But is it always correct?
Kids who are interested in learning only become entrepreneurs.The kid is interested in networking but he don't know the way to network.
Low levels of vitamin D may explain higher death rates among blacks?
It's about time. The Apple Newton was just getting popular with doctors just in time for Jobs to pull the plug on that particular device (sigh). Ten years later and Jobs finally gets to put the Newton ][ out to market.
Vitamin D deficiency increasingly common
6.5 earthquake strikes off California coast
I think this is a lazy journalistic essay that desperately tries to sell feelings of fear and nostalgia with no real substance. I have not seen any reason to believe that people who 'grow up with' a technology treat it any other way than people who were already adults at the time when the technology was introduced. Not in any fundamental way - they sometimes make more extensive use of the new technology.

For any of the earth shattering novelties that appeared in the last few decades, you will find that after they established themselves, people of all ages, regardless of whether they were children or adult when the technology was introduced, use it in very similar ways. When I have to divide the quality of use people I know make of the Internet (which became pervasive and popular around the time when I transitioned from adolescence to adulthood), for example, it seems to me that the divisions are more along professional lines, or interest, than age. I know people in their 50s, 60s and even 80s who make frequent and engaged use of most internet technologies, and young people, born into a world in which the net is everywhere, who make only casual and uninspired use of it.

I think I know the reason for it, too. Technological innovation is usually not something created by children. Even the youngest inventors and developers are at least old enough to be called young adults. The needs they see, their values and their incentives are all linked directly to the world they live in - a world in which people several decades older than them, as well as some younger, live.
Hmmm, speaking of Facebook, I found it strange that their Facebook application page only lists 2 active users this month: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?v=info&id=2...
Except that everyone thinks they have relevant, useful information. And what is relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and annoying to another. So, as the author said, why risk it? I agree; err on the safe side and don't do it.
New evidence there may have been life on Mars
There's a flip side, though. Are your children using Facebook in new and weird ways? Well, maybe... but you're on Facebook too, aren't you? (Well, I personally am not but you know what I mean.) Looking up slang terms has never been easier, and you don't even have to corner a teenager and try to pry it out of them. Music crosses age gaps now because there's not much you can "scare" a current 30-year-old with; after German acid industrial death mega-rock there's not much freakout left. (The closest thing to musical rebellion I've seen in the past ten years is a cousin of mine who took up Elvis. Now that's rebellion.)

The gap may be growing, but at least for the moment the bridging is actually growing faster. The future is fragmented subcultures anyhow and we're all going to be pretty used to dealing with people on those terms anyhow (said "jerf" to subculture fragment "hackers interested in entrepreneurship" sub "people who clicked through comments on the title called "The Children of Cyberspace", a subsubculture fragment with an expected life span of about ten hours).
I find that having people present that are not in any capacity directly involved with the day-to-day goings on tends to drag meetings out. I prefer to have them short and sweet, it's hard enough to have a meeting with more than 3 people present having a person there asking questions without the required background. People will start weighing their words in the presence of a lawyer.

When I need a lawyer I'll select one specifically based on their track record in that particular field.

Even if he's doing it 'for free' if there is legal work to flow out from that (and everybody will defer to the lawyer because of his great expertise) then you'll end up paying for it anyway. Smart marketing on their part.

You need a lawyer when:

- you're incorporating

- you make a major move (investment, layoffs, policy changes, exits, buyouts)

- when suing or being sued

Outside of that they're like a 5th wheel on a car.

Also, when I go to see a lawyer I make sure that I'm completely prepared, have a basic brief + all supporting documents. This will help a lot in keeping their hours down (and it really adds up, a simple out-of-court settlement will still cost you between 5 and 10 thousand bucks, going to court can easily go in to the 10's of thousands, especially when there are appeals).
Acire: Delivering A World Of Python Snippets
There's a lot of free time in college, if you can keep your time organized. It's very possible to (a) get decent grades (GPA 3.3-3.7), (b) learn something in the classes that are interesting, (c) hang out with friends, party like it's 1999, get laid, and (d) work on a "startup" (more like a side-project at this point) for 10-20 hours per week.

If you're effective for those "startup" hours, you can have something to show for it in a year -- maybe a business worth pursuing, maybe just an amazing addition to your resume.

In any case, going to college and working on a startup shouldn't necessarily be exclusionary, unless the startup proves to be successful enough that it makes sense to drop-out or finish your degree remotely.
For implementing languages, I highly recommend Scheme, Haskell and Scala.

These languages are hell-on-wheels for tearing apart and transforming syntax trees.

I teach a compilers class, and I encourage my students to use a mixture of Scala and Scheme. If you're thinking about implementing a language, you might want to look at some of the blog posts I wrote for my students:

* A Scheme interpreter in Scala: http://matt.might.net/articles/denotational-interpreter-for-...

* A meta-circular Scheme interpreter: http://matt.might.net/articles/metacircular-evaluation-and-f...

* Compiling Scheme to C: http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-scheme-to-c/

* Compiling Scheme to Java: http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-to-java/

* Architectures for interpreters: http://matt.might.net/articles/writing-an-interpreter-substi...
Some form of "Group Selection" works, with stuff like the Green Beard Effect. There can be subgroups where sexual attraction is influenced by something like that. If group selection can work with a pair of traits in two halves of a population, it seems like it could work for a single trait in both halves of a population.

If you treat "race" as a word meaning "extended families that reproduce to some extent," then you have a great evolutionary argument for in-group altruism. By being slightly sensitive to race, you allocate slightly more resources to your own set of genes, meaning that people who share your genes, in turn, have more resources they can allocate back to you. In conditions of scarcity, that really helps. However, I don't know if it helps enough to deal with defectors (i.e. if there's a group that allocates lots of resources to group members, someone born with a "mooching" gene could afford lots of kids. It is basically the same math that wrecks cartels, just on a longer timeline).
I wonder why the author chose to use backslash instead of any other character. Backslash is used for escaping in nearly every other language.
I was tempted to try it, but the Facebook thing is a no-starter.
GHC, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, is implemented in Haskell.
Ayn Rand overload for the day, flagged.
Some have also suggested that Vitamin D may be the link in the seasonal nature of the flu:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16959053
I'm not buying the whole tablet PC in health care idea. Even if Apple developed it, I don't think the industry would buy it.

The tablet/slate is making serious in-roads in clinical/pharmaceutical research. How do I know? My team just released a new tablet product for collecting patient reported outcomes, and it is selling well. Of course, this is quite different than your situation, I think, but clinical research (particularly electronic data collection) is an always-growing market. If, indeed, there is any truth to the rumor, that could mean that Apple will treat the tablet more like a "computer" and less like the iPhone--meaning users/developers have far more control over the device. (Initially, my company was very excited about the iPhone, but there was absolutely no way we could make Apple's business model work for us.)
In my judgement the piece is not much better than standard Fox News / Repub Party propaganda. Lots of their buzz words are being used, like "czar". When Bush had people working cabinet-level posts they weren't czars. Obama has them they are now "czars". Too funny. Actually, probably the latest evidence it may be time to push for IQ-weighted voting systems, so folks who fall prey to such drivel don't get to vote with as much weight as those who do not. It would disproportionately hurt the RP by counter-acting their redneck/guns-and-bibles demographic.
Upvoted for sincere willingness to help others

(Even if I don't particularly subscribe to the point of view promoted.)
Had to quit reading that. It's always sad to watch the exulted elite coming to a common-sense solution only after long and laughable failure.

Well, I decided to NOT let the dog shit on the rug 15 times before doing anything about it, and that seemed to work better...
How much dog food do dogs buy?
I took it as "some people are ignorant of basic statistics," which isn't quite as daunting as "some people are dumber than me." The cure is motivation to learn, and one can take the view that the hyperbole of the title broadens the post's reach and simultaneously provides a little negative motivation. I didn't take the title quite that literally.

I personally take the view that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but I suggest the article as a whole including the title provides a general good.
Id assume that it's not going to be faster for all uses, maybe it means faster than C for a problem that can leverage concurrency well.
Exactly.

The conversation could very easily go like this:

DOUG: When is your flight due in?
YOU: 3 PM. ... Why do you ask?
DOUG: Oh great! Could you drive me to the airport? My
flight leaves at 6PM.
YOU: ...

If someone asks you when you'll be free, without telling you why, it's probably because they don't want you to know. They're trying to trick you. So you have a perfect right to ask.
Banks do gave detailed descriptions of your purchasing activities to the federal government. However, Google does not sell data to advertising agencies because they are an advertising agency. In other words when you give information to Google they user it internally. OMG, the horror.

As to bundelling up information and selling it in bulk they also just give it away. Where to do think the search suggestions come from? That's correct it's excerpts from everything anyone has ever typed into Google, yet people don't complain about it.
Tracemonkey and V8 are C++