skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FYI -

> And for two- I would be shocked if Google's only business model was "Create things which will force people to look at more of our ads"

is not an argument.
World Population - Google - public data
To a non-PHP programmer it's pretty non-intuitive to omit a closing tag. Most programmers are trained to balance things like tags, parentheses, and curly braces.
Very well put. I recently got hold of a very interesting book[1] that was all about how the "free press" effectively seek to raise the cost of production/distribution so as to stifle the voice of independent publishers and how this has lead to the conglomeration of media outlets under very specific political banners (and even shaped politics itself). Unfortunately, mine was an old copy, but it has since been heavily updated for the internet era. I doubt it shares your optimism, though I would certainly like to. I try to keep my eyes open for inde/underground publications[2] now, as I have a much better appreciation of their work.

[1: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-without-Responsibility-Broadca...]
[2: one I've become aware of recently - Dodgem Logic (http://www.dodgemlogic.com/) that are very deliberately subversive. I think one of the guys out of The League Of Gentlemen is involved.]
I think that's a cool idea. I've always enjoyed Lifehacker's pieces on the Featured Workspace as well as their Featured Desktop articles, because I like seeing fresh ideas for arranging my home/office and desktop. I would definitely enjoy seeing the same for workflow environments.
We can hope willingness to blow oneself up to martyrdom could be a genetic trait. If it were, in a couple generations we would get our gene pool completely rid of it.

Unfortunately, I believe such anti-social behavior is more nurture than nature...
1. I completely agree.
2. Well, there is a point, it blocks those people who just type anything in the registration forms. But I agree that it's too easy to trick. Performance shouldn't be a problem. Only registring users need to have their email addresses checked. In your example, every page load = a dns request, which isn't a great idea. As one registration = a dns request, this load should be quite easy to handle for the webserver.
Thanks for writing such a detailed, informative post! For me it comes right on the heels of reading Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts, which made me realize just how badly I was using JS.
Have you read some of the early writings of Bill Gates? It can be difficult to reconcile that with some of the things he did with his company. Maybe Google's main strategy today is to make the Internet better and maybe today providing less value to the customers goes against their goals, but I suspect they're going to exist for a long time. What would make them more money in 15 years when they've killed off every competitor in the space (they may not do this, but they could. They have the resources)?

You have very high expectations of people you don't know, and who wont remain in their current positions forever.
In the UK at least, we deal with difficult subjects through satire. But where do you draw the line? I am one for open - although much material on the web is offensive (as seen from me). I'd have rather the images were reprinted, and have the whole thing forgotten about. But there was some gesture of respect and sensitivity shown by the west deriding the work. The debate has also come up with the turn around of the BBC to allow the BNP on question time. So I think it is important to provide the material and the appropriate fora, and freedoms of speech. The herd and mob mentality is usually a result of ignorance. But it takes a long time for attitudes to change. In Britain in the eighties, people were still afraid to speak their minds or challenge the establishment. My father's attitudes have changed incredibly over the last 10 years. And I guess so have mine.

My personal belief is that people can practice what they like, but with the following caveats: no harm to others, animals or the planet. I don't belong to any faith, but see myself as more 'Christian' then many practising Christians. People get lost in doctrine or the mob, and forget to question for themselves. Natural law is far simpler.

The web provides an outlet for many voices, who's authority do you trust? Moderation requires some form of censorship. I'd rather it all open. I can't stand pruned forums, they feel like rigged referendums. It's just incredibly difficult wading through it all. As usually the average Joe, hasn't really anything much interesting to say.

So is it fear or learned sensitivity?
Wow. The project is $7.5b over budget. That seems like an unbelievable number for a military "transport" aircraft. It's good news for American defense contractors I suppose. They are probably going to get a bunch of extra business from this debacle.

Edit: Now that I read into the Wikipedia article, they seem to be doing some semi-novel stuff. Schimitar shaped props in a counter-rotating design, tons of carbon-fiber, etc. Maybe they bit off more than they could chew.
There have been a few similar posts on here in the past. The consensus is usually something along the lines of... keep building your product. Don't let your competitors scare you. Think of it like driving; if you drive down the highway staring at the car next to you, you're going to crash. Look forward.

Given that you already have a paying customer helping you develop it, and that your product is supposedly easier to use, this doesn't even seem like a difficult decision.
> we side with Google not because we love them but because we don't want the carriers to be anything more than ISPs. They are simply too stupid to manage it...

Amen! For now, I trust Google because they've positioned themselves in such a way that they benefit from doing the right thing. The balance of incentives favours openness, because Google is in the best position to exploit open platforms to deliver their services. The rest of us benefit more or less incidentally.
Perl source code comparison makes for good reading
Awww. Do the poor wittle cellphone manufacturers have their poor wittle feelings hurt? Here, have a blankie.

Really, I’m having trouble seeing what the complaint is behind all the bombast. The author doesn’t claim that Google is selling the phones at a loss or doing anything else that would raise an antitrust issue. Carriers can offer the Nexus alongside other manufacturers’ Android phones and, for that matter, the ten thousand other cellphone models that clog the market. Most consumers will choose among those models based on prices and features, not brand name. (Microsoft sells keyboards and mice under its own brand name, but they’ve hardly put the other keyboard and mouse manufacturers out of business.)

So where’s the problem? That competition might reduce the profit margins of cellphone manufacturers? From my side of the salesman’s counter, that’s anything but a problem.
PHP encourages shitty code because it is already shitty code in a shitty language. It's the broken windows effect. All you need to know is from Rasmus himself

"There are people who actually like programming. I don't understand why they like programming."

see also his other gems
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf
People probably don't want to eat rabbit instead of other meat.
> they are also predominantly impoverished, uneducated and downtrodden, not to mention constantly in the crosshairs, perhaps things are connected?

Many Muslims I meet do exhibit these traits; however I think it is the product of their faith (hardline Christians are much the same - but not as bade) rather than societies attitude to them.
> The internet has saved culture from monotone salvages of the old media

That's why whenever I hear about "piracy is killing the big production companies" and am thinking "and that would be bad because...?" They have been shoving junk down people's throats (or should I say "eyes" and "ears") for so many years, they make artists sign draconian contracts, etc, etc. If they disappear, I'll be alright with it.
They are also predominantly impoverished, uneducated and downtrodden, not to mention constantly in the crosshairs, perhaps things are connected?

Plenty of other populations are "impoverished, uneducated and downtrodden" but don't bully and blackmail the rest of the world into being sensitive to their superstitions.

This only ever became an issue through the opportunism of theocratic leaders who routinely promote outrage and self-pity in their downtrodden populations as a way of blaming the west for everything that's wrong in their societies.
I don't trust Google myself, but you bring up very good points.
The degree to which Google is "shaking up" the mobile industry has been vastly overstated by the media. I think this is mostly due to the crazy rumors that were flying before the launch (e.g. it was going to use SIP for calls, or that it would be massively subsidized/free even without a plan).

What Google actually offered with the N1 is not very revolutionary. Selling unlocked phones online isn't new. Nor is having phones that run on your choice of US carriers (hello, Blackberry).

Really, the only innovation here is at T-Mobile, which has calling plans that are a little bit cheaper each month if you bring your own phone instead of having them subsidize one.
I imagine it's not worth the cost. There isn't that much meat to be had and the bodies would have to be processed quickly or kept alive to prevent spoilage. The agency in charge of all of this probably lacks the equipment to do any of this, assuming it would be cost beneficial to do it in the first place.
Pakiisp.com - Bas Zara Ik Khayal
I could have been clearer with what I meant there, and I agree with you: it's not a problem specific to PHP, and in some ways it's unfair to label beginners' mistakes as problems in the first place.

The point I wanted to emphasize is that by reading lists like these new users might think that this is a good way to write PHP, whereas I strongly disagree with this list existing in the first place.

There's also the slightly selfish point of view of not wanting to have to clean up code like this should I come across it in future ;)
HN is not the right place for such a debate.
Other dead animals in Sweden are also used as biofuel so adding a few thousand rabbits to the process is probably really simple.

For example:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1237009/Fu...
My first thoughts as well. It's about time someone with actual clout gave the mobile phone cartel the shaft. Yes, it's a cartel, when you pay $.50 a text message off your plan with all carriers there's gotta be some price fixing behind the scenes.
I've been thinking about the keyboard issue, and I think that no matter what, the ergonomics aren't there for a keyboard, hardware or otherwise in fact. It's really inconvenient to type on a 10" tablet. It's almost impossible to do one handed (unlike the iPhone, which while slow one-handed, is very usable).

Add to the ergonomics issue the fact that keyboards are not very useful for languages like Chinese, and you have to ask if there isn't another way that they might do input. Apple already has tech on the new macbooks that lets you draw Chinese characters on the touchpad with your finger. My bet is that they repurpose that for other languages and include it in the tablet. Handwriting recognition was a failure with the Newton, but I suspect modern predictive text input can sort out some of the issues that plagued that early tech.

I have no inside information on any of this, but it just feels like something Apple would do, knowing how much Jobs hates buttons, especially physical ones.
The History of The Waite Group (in Mitch's own words)
Fuel hackers.
It sounds to me like a basic consulting service, albeit one in which you'd accept a small equity in place of part of the consulting fee.

So, I guess I'd say, yes, people do pay for consulting. The question is, what type of people/startups will you attract with the equity offer.
How it could work is to find a judge who thinks patent cases like this are ambulance chasers, and then ensure that all the suits against you are relocated into her court. If you have a friendly judge then it becomes much easier to play chicken.

How exactly do you do this? I've been wondering. It seems trolls are able to get these cases heard in disproportionate numbers by a strange little puppet court down in east texas that has become famous for being troll friendly. (and indeed seems to have based its entire local economy around it)
PHP's use of variable variable's is certainly easy to abuse, but in the right hands it creates a very elegant solution.

If we took away every tool that can be misapplied and misused, we wouldn't have very many left.

This is a crude example, but imagine, eg, loading up a data model. Maybe it is lazy loaded, maybe cached, whatever, but you have an array with keys that match properties.

You could use a giant switch, a slew of if(isset()) code, or you could do something like this:

public function __construct($data = array()) {
foreach($data as $k => $v)
$this->{$k} = $v;
}

Obviously, this is POC stuff, in reality you'd want to put a 1-line check in there to ensure the $k is a valid property in that class.

AFAIK, there's nothing you can do with variable variables that you can't do another way. But there are several things you can do much easier and more elegantly.

I get your argument. Programmers all over the place inherit sucky code from newbie developers. But there is no valid argument, IMO, to a language eliminating features because they can be misapplied.
Mobile phone more than a phone
Yes, it drives me nuts when people stress over picking the right regexp to "verify" email addresses. As if they're ever going to be able to detect that screw@you.com is not legit.

The goal should just be to identify common typos (comma instead of dot). There's only one way to see if an email address is real.
The broken window effect? Really?

PHP is far from my favorite language but "language wars" and comments like yours that lead to them are 100% brain dead. Void of original thought.

I see a little irony in people like you cursing PHP as unnecessary and ugly when you are spending your time spewing comments with those same traits.
This is extremely interesting. Mitch Waite lists the journey of his PC/Computing publishing powerhouse, from its humble beginings in 1972 to its demise in 2001.

He had one huge failure that whiped him out in the late 80s but he came back up.

The pages are hard to navigate, but click on the "Next Page" button on the bottom right of each page.

Mitch Waite's Waite Group was bigger than O'Reilly; he was HUGE. I found his ways of doing business strange and ill advised, but you will see he ran one of the earliest "lean" companies out there (averaging 2-4 employees most of his career, and 50 at the height of it!)
Stop modding theotherside down. This discussion is important.
Record police with phone camera in Boston, get arrested
Let me point out a small flaw in the way you parsed my comment.

I didn't say this is a good list for new developers.

I said this is a good list for developers new to PHP.

I see a big difference there.
If all employees were trained (by mandatory corporate training) that "under no circumstances should you ever read any patents, ever", and "if you ever have any doubts about anything being patentable, direct the question to our lawyer", and you were very strict about enforcing it, you could make a case that pretty much every invention was discovered independently.

Thanks to the "treble damages" part, this is exactly how it operates right now, right down to the corporate training. Unless you're a patent attorney, "never ever read a patent" is pretty good advice for any technical professional.
My personal favorites are the stop signs with "war" scrawled on them. Right... because Mr Obama is going to be driving through your neighborhood, see that sign, and suddenly have an epiphany...
Humorless "North Face" Sues "South Butt" For Trademark Infringement
"I find the [it] mildly disturbing [...] in that it proposes to be the absolute truth that admits no questioning."

I have a suggestion for you: Head over to Germany and question the "absolute truth" of holocaust: numbers, methods, facts, etc. Lets see how long your "freedom of speech" is respected. (Will post your arrest and incarceration news here on HN!)
Phishing app hits Android market...3 weeks ago
Startups cash in on Twitter with pay-per-tweet
Interesting. What kind of brick and mortar business have you started? I have though about something outside of software and I'm curious what others have done.
Seven Technical Security Myths of the Cloud
Does anyone really believe the companies that were supposedly shafted were surprised when Google released their own phone? I knew the Google phone was in the works long before any of the other phones came out and I don't have connections at Google or telcos. I'd bet money the device manufacturers and the the telcos were well aware of the Google phone when they agreed to work with Android.
Automating Android with Ant
Dual monitor tools that let you rule
Really? Rabbit’s tasty. Hare’s nicer though if you can find it.
Two McRabbit and fries, to go please
"non-intuitive"? I would say "horrific", "disgusting" or something on these lines.
Virtual Machines are No Security Blanket
People do eat rabbit. and it's delicious, though it's a pain to deal with all those little bones.
Study: Youth now have more mental health issues
Having just gone through this with Apple for a major name organization, I can assure you they take the identity of developers very seriously. You have to be who you say you are.
This comment on the article summed it up nicely for me:

"I always thought it was contradictory that venture investors call out "conflict between founders" as the #1 reason for startups failing, yet they're always very reticent about funding a single-founder startup."
Bird-Plane Collisions May Pass 10,000, a First
But were the rabbits dead? Or were they killed? There's a difference between bunny-recycling and bunny-mass-murder :-D
I've heard the reasoning in this article before, and it's deeply flawed.

It's true that we in the West have the right to offend, but being a troll doesn't make you a righteous defender of freedom.. Those cartoons weren't some type of brilliant artwork, they were simple trolling.

While I'll stand up for someone's right to be a troll, they certainly shouldn't expect my support and respect. Instead, that is reserved for the millions who fought and died to establish and protect our freedoms in the first place.
Eat little fluffy bunnies? Come on now, we're not barbarians!
One difference from Dive into Python that jumped out at me is that the original book generally started each chapter with a short working program and then dissected that program to explain a given language feature (e.g. operations, functions, string formatting, list comprehensions).

In contrast, DiP3 opens the first chapter with a working program that uses several language features and then dissects those features over the next several chapters. I'm not sure if that's a better approach. On the one hand, by the end you're really intimately acquainted with the code. On the other hand, there isn't the same sense of payoff at the end of each chapter.
The 10 Best Restaurants For A Business Meeting In New York City
Public health. The authorities don't have any control on what the bunnies ate and what diseases they may have contracted.
A New School Teaches Students Through Videogames
Their statement is logically correct..

After all, the server is a computer, so you can replace 'computer' with server. Which makes the first evaluation true, and the word 'browser' is never evaluated, or at least irrelevant.
You could even say that either the server or my pet ferret reads the program like a script...

But seriously... the guy/girl was talking generically about scripting, not specific to server-side web scripts. So the statement is accurate.
Wichita Falls ISD
I've used this service in the past and it works great with Comcast and Verizon.
Facebook looking to beef up e-commerce team
I guess I could have refuted in the article; Windows Mobile's suckage seems like a well understood phenomenon. Hee.
You could make this argument, although all their services have advertising. But I bet the lion's share of money comes via search advertising.
Very possibly. However it's more a question of demand rather than taste. The rabbit eating cohort is probably already satisfied.
It's a good question, but it makes me go :-(
Python:

>>> a = 'apple'
>>> b = 'banana'
>>> a, b = b, a
They were killed but they were going to be culled anyway. It makes sense to do something with the dead bodies other than burying them.
There are a couple of other angles you could work here. In some jurisdictions, it's possible to seek damages for the cost of defending a failed lawsuit. I don't know if any of these jurisdictions extend this to patent litigation, or what tax and other implications might be of incorporating there (so that one might legitimately change venue to such a location). The two typical problems with this approach are getting into the right jurisdiction and being able to front the money for the defense in the first place.

Also, if the patent troll is suing a bunch of companies you're insuring based on the same patent, you could attempt to combine the cases, thus consolidating the defense costs. This works because patent trolls work by firing off lots of very similar lawsuits, each for a small enough amount that it's economical to settle. That's what keeps their costs down; such an insurance policy would let the defense leverage the same economy of scale.
BackTrack 4 Final Released - Linux Critic - Providing High Quality Linux Reviews
>Why is the NYT writing about this now?

The story is that a guy changed sides.
Is this me or I would expect a scan to be more complete than that.
Illustrated Guide to the World's Greenest Data Centers
I think efforts like Wave illustrate how much Google would like to find brand new markets to compete in; I don't think they have had much like getting real advertising dollars out of things other than search.

But you're right at least to a degree -- they have decided that open-ness is better for Google. Whether it is just for search or for other future things is a debatable point I guess.
I agree with you. But beginners need to learn from somewhere and most advanced programmers are busy at work and not writing articles :)

Plus, did you ever read a PHP book? Most of them give bad examples and bad code practices too... I just read one that said to disable all apache logging (including error logging) for performance reasons.
Why don't you get a new username without the karma burden ;) You can keep yourself recognizable if you want, just use jacquesm2 and put a short comment in your profile.
This is the problem that hunting solves. Issue licenses to allow people who enjoy the sport and like to eat small game to go out and harvest some number of animals. You get the population reduction, and the people who enjoy it get to eat wild game. You control the amount of animals harvested by the number of licenses issued (and some expenses for enforcement, but there are people willing to do that job for not much pay).

Seems more sensible than rounding the animals up en-masse and dumping them in an incinerator.
Yes! Forced accelerated evolution. Good way to think of it.
Can you identify novice programmers by how they say 'object orientated'?
They might if they tried it! It's quite like poultry, the flavour is not at all challenging to anyone that eats chicken.

It was once common to eat them in Sydney; in fact my dad tells of a rabbit man that would sell them door-to-door when he was growing up. It was so common that they named the Rugby League team in the area after the tasty critters (the South Sydney Rabbitohs).