skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But the problem with this is that those inconstancies have been around for so long that people have come to rely on them. So when you try to "fix the glitch", people get upset.

So, when you say it's part of an effort to standardize behavior, I think you're right. But is this the right way to go? I mean, was the old behavior that bad? Why not just flag it as a warning and mark it as deprecated functionality? Then wait until version 6 to actually force the change.

I don't have a horse in this race, since I stopped using PHP when 5 was just coming out. One of those reasons was to avoid stuff like this...
Wait -- they do not boot without a monitor attached? Apple can't be serious about this. I just lost a little faith...
Here is a good example.

Let me observe that both men and women don't just want to find someone of the opposite sex, they would like to be with someone who is as good as possible. When you are with a person who is as good as is possible for you to land, that person will be someone you have difficulty getting to be interested in you like you're interested in them.

So, for instance, a man who dares say something moderately insulting to a woman early on establishes that he thinks that he could do better. If he does not offend her too badly and turns around and gives her some hope, that gives her the message that he's someone she has a chance at but has to work for. If she believes that message, she'll think of him as a good potential catch.

Going the other way, a woman who doesn't feel compelled to return a man's calls promptly, puts off sex, and who insists from the start on time for herself is demonstrating that she believes she is a reach for him. If he believes her, then he is more likely to work to establish the relationship, including making the commitment to take care of her and help raise their children. (Which is what marriage is.) No man likes those games, but most of us respond to them.

These parallel pieces of advice are both effective and offensive. You'll find the advice for men as part of the standard repertoire in virtually any guide for pickup artists. It is standard because experience shows that it helps get women in bed. Conversely the advice for women is straight from http://www.amazon.com/Rules-TM-Time-Tested-Secrets-Capturing.... That is sort of a female counterpart to the pickup artists guide and is about how to land a man who will commit. The polarization of the reviews is evidence of both offensiveness and the gratitude of women who found the advice effective. (Read the reviews and you can verify the reasons for the votes.)

So there is a concrete example for you. Landing someone of the opposite sex and getting them to do what we want them to do is of interest to the vast majority of us. (Yes, some people are gay or asexual, but the vast majority are straight heterosexuals.) Yet advice that is effective for that is quite offensive.

And, of course, when we're offended by advice about the sexes, we usually call it sexist.
But IE6 is bad enough to make people use something else, and PHP is not good enough to make many people choose it. Who purposely downloads and installs IE6 these days when you have Chrome/Firefox/IE8 available? And who writes a new webapp in PHP?

Most people seem to miss the role that time plays in language choice. PHP's very far from the best choice for webapps now, but it was the best choice when it was invented in 1995, and even for a while afterwards (such as when FaceBook was created in 2004).
The parser in PHP 3 and up was written by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP
"Do you know who I am?" is probably a better answer. The "humble" answer is just an amusing in-joke at the expense of the poster. ("Haha, look at that dumb n00b who doesn't know who Rasmus is!" There is even a comment below that pretty much says this exactly.)

"I'm the creator of PHP. I am not going to fix this," would have ended the discussion much sooner and with less hurt feelings.
I could see such a setup with a hook between your pedaling and the sleep system of the computer: if you stop pedaling, it goes to sleep quickly. It shouldn't be too hard for someone who knows what he's doing.

Next step is authorizing all the "time-wasters" (hulu, HN...) only on that computer. It would surely work for me.
And for course it is running plan 9 ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_fallacy

Think of all the cool stuff they could have been inventing had they not needed to look up the name of strfind(?), and whether it takes the needle or the haystack first.
Very good point. Will do next time, thanks. I was hoping to loop in the CES tangent a bit because it's at least funny -- it's not only about the Crunchies.
You should checkout the web cycle: http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/10/webcycle-provides-pedal-p...
"cost the city an estimated $1.95 billion"!
Could you give some examples of this?

This has been described in detail thousands of times. Google it.
hmm, costs more than a real-doll (6k). Wonder there is a future merger of real-doll and this company. One makes awesome bodies and the other brains?
That may be true today but PHP is old in web terms, when PHP began to become popular it was at a time when it had little competition that offered the same ability to build dynamic web pages with relative ease. PHP spent enough time at the top of the web dev heap to build up a substantial network effect. The comparative advantages of other technologies, large though they may by, are not yet enough to push PHP from the top spot.
And re: the projector, I don't think it matters. You get hooked into the game and pedal in that gaming, goal oriented fashion. The wow-cool factor of a project won't change that, I think.

The only serious considering is distance from TV, lots of racing games require you to see small elements on the screen clearly, and many exercise bikes are placed in the back of the room.
"built and abandoned" - you're missing the bit where they spent three or four decades operating a company between those two events.

How illegal were they anyway?
He also reportedly said,"Humans can't write thread-safe code. It's simply beyond us". (Can't find the source). I have heard him say at a conference that, PHP is for week-end warriors.
I believe your confusion stems from defining what you term a "conservationist". At first you use it to describe someone who worries about peak oil / the finite nature of oil (presuming you understood the original context of the discussion), and later you use it to describe an environmental conservationist - one who is concerned that the costs of resources are underpriced because of the effect on the environment - to which you've helpfully provided examples of strictly environmental externalities.

Markets aren't perfect problem-solving devices - no one has said that they are, however, the regulatory "cure" is often worse than the disease. Regulations are certainly not the ideal way to deal with concerns a given resource are finite. Further, prices are signals in markets that themselves call for market innovation/adaptation - vocal calls for conservation are redundant.

(As a side note: it is also noteworthy however that the drop in sulphur dioxide emissions happened far before the creation of regulated markets suggesting that the fall in SO2 might have occurred irrespective of the regulation - further, from purely an economic efficiency standpoint, pigouvian taxes tend to be more efficient than the added structure of artificial pollution markets. Further, as an addendum to acid rain/"dead lakes" - this was a big concern for Canada until someone noticed that the primary reason the lakes were dead was because of reduced logging and the sediment that it disturbed)
Military is deluged in intelligence from drones
In case you want to see the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7NhBEx6Ank
It's disgusting how many organizations say: "But we meet safety standards." All while giving a known carcinogen to children.

I mean, forget about the "company" for a minute - companies are made of people - don't any of them care?
Sorry for the late reply. Didn't notice your response.

Well yes, I don't really support prison either. But to me as bad as prison is, it's still the lesser of two evils. I feel that society needs to make up its mind whether prison is punishment or rehabilitation. Currently things seem quite grey on this point. Perhaps certain institutions could be defined more clearly either as rehabilitation institutions or punishment institutions, and criminals could be sent to one or the other based on their history or something.

In any case, putting myself in the position of being someone falsely accused of say, murder. Would I be happy to be going to jail with the possibility of being raped or killed myself? Fuck no. But would the idea of being on death row with the ostensible possibility of a "reasonable review" make me feel better? I guess that's one of those things that's hard to judge in the hypothetical, but from this vantage point, I'd have to say no.

If you're innocent, you're more likely to die in the prison infirmary than you are in the death chamber.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised but do you actually have citations for this?

But overall I guess I don't really get what your actual argument is here? Death sentence better than life sentence because prison is so dangerous? Is that it?
I'm surprised nobody has referenced Donald Knuth's 1974 Turing Award speech, Computer Programming as an Art.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=361612

Paul Graham even posted it in its entirety here:
http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html

This question hinges on how you define the terms science and art. I like Knuth's definitions.
It fits, he got arrested for posting an idiot comment about Obama on the Yahoo message boards.
I think the earthshaking announcement was that he is actually going to finish the next book in the AOCP series. I know that he is very painstaking in making the books and it was widely thought that he will not finish them before he passes. Hopefully he has that much left in him as they are the canonical references for the subjects he writes.
Wear out the reload button on your browser. -what does this mean?
oh hai sean, how are things?
Yet the fact of the matter is that's how the cards fell - we had the well-designed, well-implemented languages and frameworks that failed utterly to find any foothold with amateurs and beginners, and only found refuge with the Java EE-enabled engineers.

And then we had PHP.

I'm inclined to side with the parent poster - yes, PHP has a lot of problems when you attempt to make it overly complex, but on the other hand it has introduced many people to programming who would otherwise never have even attempted (or even be able to), and driven ubiquitous web scripting forward single-handedly. Heck, even today, think about someone trying to run a blog - anyone reasonably experienced with a computer can buy hosting and install WordPress with almost no work... try that with anything written in Python?

PHP has a very low barrier to entry, and IMHO a lot of the hate directed at it is frankly jealousy. We are jealous, as professionals, that it is deadly simple to replicate some of our hard work, and that the people doing it are amateurs. This is the same reason people heap hate on VB.

I'm inclined to compare PHP to MySpace - yes, MySpace pages aren't pretty, in fact a lot are downright atrocious. You can make some specious claims about how MySpace-inspired "web design" has made the internet a worse place, somehow, but it would be a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, both PHP and MySpace opened up a world of possibility to a lot of users who didn't have it before; picking at it really is just being pretentious and elitist.
ranking people based on their roles in a company is a poor perspective. respecting everyone and not putting them in tidy (and possibly insulting) boxes is a better perspective.
"Robotic movement is built into 'the three inputs' and a mechanical heart that powers a liquid cooling system."

That's just creepy. Not the fact that a heart-like pump keeps the internal computer cool. The fact that someone, somewhere, is falling asleep to a mechanical heartbeat...
Apparently not, at least not without OS X Server edition.
Many people write new webapps in php.

Nobody purposely downloads IE6. That isn't the point though. If they buy a computer (maybe this isn't true anymore) and go to Google using it they don't go "something's wrong." They just keep using it.
YouTube Gets 1 Million Subscriptions Every Day
I don't think you're looking holistically at the environment of building a dynamic website with no experience at all programming, which is what I think this conversation is about.

If you can, put aside all that you know about language design, frameworks, and software engineering, and try to think from the perspective of a person just wanting to "get something up". Say you want an online store. An online store requires a shopping cart. You ask google how to do this, and google tells you: How to build a shopping cart with PHP. For whatever reason, php was chosen by the internet gods to be the beneficiary of a positive feedback loop: beginners use php, find it easy to use, write tutorials. Tutorials attract google, which means the community is likely to be less of the programmer type (programmers would already know how to do these things in python) and more of hobbyists/internet entreprenuers with little technical skill. Because this community is comprised of less technical people, they are more understanding of the shortcomings of n00bs. They turn away less "stupid" questions, write more tutorials and abstract more of the academic attributes of programming that "make it work". By virtue of attracting so many people, inevitably, there will be some truly capable practitioners that will go on to have success. Derek Sivers of CD Baby fame is one I can think of.

The point i'm really trying to drive home is that the accessibility of a language isn't just about being easy to learn, but about having a welcoming community and environment that helps new users.
"There’s nothing positive that you can say about this metal. It’s a poison"

Unless you're operating a nuclear reactor.
I think it's clear that the problem with California is not the taxation rate (which after all at 10.5% is not much higher than the national average of 9.7% and ranks only 6th) but rather that the entire state government is incredibly broken.

A big portion of the state's revenues are constitutionally mandated to go to certain programs via the ridiculously easy referendum process.

Meanwhile, Proposition 13 requires a 2/3rds majority vote to pass any sort of budget, and a hardened radical element in the Assembly would rather see the state go down in flames than raise taxes (even when coupled with spending cuts).

I think the very short term limits (3 terms) for assembly members feeds this tendency because they don't have enough time to get good at legislating and compromising before being kicked out of office.

At the same time the (vast majority) Democrats in the assembly don't want massive spending cuts -- but you must admit they have the majority! A 2/3rd requirement to pass a budget is incredibly undemocratic.

The result is unrestricted borrowing and inevitable collapse.
The Entropic Landscape
Sources?
I never knew insurance companies took on this kind of risk.
It was totally the city's fault because the city owned the tunnels. See the FAQ: http://users.ameritech.net/pokeefe571/ctcfaq.htm

Q: Why were the tunnels under State Street and Dearborn Street demolished to make room for the rapid transit subways? Didn't the Tunnel Company have any say so in the matter?

A: The Chicago Tunnel Company owned only the locomotives, rolling stock, track, and overhead wire. The City of Chicago owned the tunnels. Because of this, the Tunnel Company didn't have much choice but to give up their most profitable trackage when subway construction was started by the city. You can't fight City Hall!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1044457
Let PHP be a lesson in what happens when you don't think before you code.
I am a little perplexed here. His friend died and then as a way to restore his personality he created a female sex robot?!
She needs a haircut.
Okay, when reading various blogs (or checking facebook) I always get nervous that the page's owner will analyze the logs and call me out on just how many times and how rapidly i hit refresh waiting for new content to appear or hoping that someone has replied to my comment.
Cadmium is commonly used to make yellow, organge and red paints, beware of stuff in those colours.

The fact that it is banned doesn't seem to mean much.
looks like he started off fine, but then got bored by the time he got to the face. Talk about your butterface.
How do you get anything done? You seem so hung up on the tools versus creating stuff with tools. I guess it makes sense because you're the maintainer of a web framework ... for perl ... a language saddled with a checkered history of generating some pretty unmaintainable shit. And my guess is that you will respond saying "you can write maintainable code in perl!" And, of course, one would counter that you can do the same with PHP. Which boils this whole discussion down to being about the developers and the quality of developers, and less about the quality of the languages.

So why are there so many crappy PHP developers? Because anyone can make it do something approximating what they are envisioning it doing, no matter the skill level. That seems pretty powerful to me. And, in the end, it's really about the results instead of how one necessarily got to those results. You can't make money if you don't deliver a product. And if history is any indication, only a tiny fraction of the masses care about quality. The dominance of Wal-mart and MySpace are proof of this. My guess about your guess is those millions of lost man-hours have been made up with the millions of hours beating competing products to market due to the rapid nature of PHP development. I mean if we are throwing around unverifiable assumptions, let's do it, let's get crazy with it.

"A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop." - Robert Hughes
You don't say, someone that is 72 that has already retired...

whoosh.
It's kind of ridiculous that Chomsky is #1. You can't deny it was influential. Chomsky singlehandedly split the linguistics field into two camps, and it's taken the better half of the century to put his ideas to rest.

He basically argued that all languages are governed by the same set of rules, that such rules were innate, and that languages could thus be parsed into trees. The problem arises that a lot of primitive languages don't even seem to support the notion of recursion, let alone something that parses to a syntax tree. And the statistical NLP folks have a major bone to pick with such ideas, because real language apparently isn't so clean.

What seems more plausible is that more advanced societies developed rules of logic that they then imposed on their communication, hence the property that well-written English ought to be pars-able to a syntax tree. But even then you have ambiguities in how the tree is structured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity

The flip side is that Chomsky's framework hasn't been useless to science. You can do some interesting things if you can parse a piece of text's syntax tree with halfway decent accuracy. One example would be idiom-finding. If a word seems misplaced, or used out of its usual context (e.g. "kicked the bucket"), then it is likely an idiom. One could simply do an analysis using the frequencies of the words as they appear next to each other, but applying a filter on only those phrases that are likely to be idioms improves your results by quite a bit.
But the argument hints that they are missing the big picture by, as you claim, 'mismanaged spending and [a] high taxation rate'. My point is that it's better to miss the big picture while helping people, than to miss the big picture while criticizing people.

Greenspun visits Berkeley for maybe 3 or 4 days and he's now quite sure that people there have it wrong? He mentions Prop 13 in passing, as something that everyone in the East Bay keeps on talking about. Some might argue it's a much bigger issue than he realizes. Far from over-taxation being a problem, it would be that California has not taxed based on real property values for decades. I.e., Greenspun has side-stepped a large problem in the bigger picture by being hyper-critical.

Perhaps I'm overreacting, but I was just getting a little tired of Greenspun's hints that there is a problem with being naive about 'doing good' -- as you mention (quite well said, that is sort of how I read Greenspun's attitude). My point was to hint that there is also a problem in taking one's 'cynical reflex' too seriously.

After all, these actions, at a certain level, are really kind of similar movements. Hyper-taxation and hyper-criticism both attempt to optimize at the wrong time, too impatiently. However, in the former case, at least someone gets helped (though arguably by being critical Greenspun is helping eventually). At any rate, I don't think what he says is completely incorrect. There's just a flip side to it. E.g., in any sufficiently large Lisp program, a lot of time is spent in FFI.
Definitely agreed. TC editors by and large are terrible writers, but Paul Carr is a real journalist. I love his stuff.
That's not quite the way I'd want to be remembered, but then, it takes all sorts to make a world.
every one of PHP's advantages is offered by other languages

Speed in a shared hosting environment. I've read about developers running multiple commercial sites from a single Dreamhost account e.g. http://www.pseudocoder.com/archives/2009/01/04/how-much-mone... . That's not realistic with Java, RoR, or Perl.
That's just linkbait. He - probably correctly - reasoned that people will click that in a heartbeat hoping for something other than what they get on the other side of the click.

Smart guy.
IPod shuffle 2nd Generation 1GB MP3 Player
You know what they say about good things and small packages. But when something 1.62 inches long and about half an ounce holds up to 240 songs, “good” and “small” don’t cut it. Especially when you can listen to your music for up to 12 continuous hours.2 In fact, iPod shuffle just may be the biggest thing in small. More Details...
I've heard Joel Spolsky say that. https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W29083
Yet Wordpress is still the most widely used blog software ever. PHPBB and it's ilk still run the forum game. Wikipedia has yet be unseated.

If it's cost > it's profit, why is it still used so widely?

I recently replaced a C#/.NET app with a PHP version and saved a company close to a million a year in licensing, servers, staffing and development costs. Not to mention it took my team a third of the time to develop as the original application, yet performed better and had more functionality. There was a significant gap in LoC as well.
What a load of tripe. You can promise yourself anything but this seems to be just a convenient hook to attach a quest for money and an advanced sex toy to.

There is nothing respectful about having someone pass away like that and then to use their memory as an excuse for something this tasteless. Assuming that's even true.

If I were his friend I'd feel less than honoured. Something along the lines of 'thanks for remembering but leave me out of it please'.

Or are 9/11 victims now fair game in marketing nonsense?

The AI claim is also complete rubbish.

She can't vacuum but "has a full C cup and is ready for action", that's some impressive AI there.

Ira Levin is turning in his grave.
You undermine your argument by making it personally aggressive.
"Where Mathematics Comes From", Lakoff
How would you like it if poets coded, huh?

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/youhavelovedenou...