skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Producing a physical product (3D printing?)
Hello HN. I'm interested in producing a simple dock for my Nexus One on a semi-large scale. Something simple for sale (a couple of bucks) as I just created a real simple one out of cardboard and think a lot of others would find something similar useful.

Some photos and more details can be found here: http://mini.whalesalad.com/nexus-one-dock

Is there any way to create something simple like this? I've never done anything like it, but have heard things about 3D printers. It could be made out of one solid piece of material. If it made sense.. I'd make them out of clay and put those high school classes to use :) Plastic, plexiglass, composite, anything semi-hard would work.
I'ma let you finish, but....
Fat Page Table and fat COW are causing poor forking performance
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
jrockway is a PHP troll. There is most certainly a history here that goes way back.

Personally aggressive? Maybe. Deservedly? Probably.
Let's put the term "framework" aside. The Wikipedia article states it is "a basic conceptual structure used to solve or address complex issues, usually a set of tools, materials or components". I believe a scripting language that is pre-designed for website design could be considered a framework, but it's not that important whether there is a consensus.

I'd like to see your source for the performance claim. To my own I can bring e.g.

http://xodian.net/serendipity/index.php?/archives/27-Benchma...

http://blog.dhananjaynene.com/2008/07/performance-comparison...

I found threading a great shortcoming of PHP. I had web services that required data from several sources and was in need of querying in parallel. there are about 370,000 results for +php +multithreading on Google so I assume it's more than just myself.
> Mr. Le Corre, 38, who once made soap for a living

Tyler Durden?
I'll buy one.
Yeah, that struck me too. My dad did his doctorate on cadmium; his jobs included things like cancer research and solar cells. There're a lot of uses for heavy metal radioisotopes. Like anything else, they're tools - they can be used for either good, evil, or indifference, depending upon who's using them.

I certainly wouldn't give it to a child to play with, but the overall tone of this article seemed very much like plain old scaremongering. I'd believe it more if they'd used a more neutral, scientific tone. It'd also help had I not checked on their "CDC list of 275 most hazardous chemicals" - the only Google result that wasn't a reprint of the article was this:

http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxpro2.html

There are 275 toxicological profiles, but they are not ordered; I can't find anywhere where cadmium is #7.
I probably wouldn't have posted it a few months ago, but seeing some of what goes by lately I figured it wouldn't hurt. It's amazing that it got so many points though - it's really not that interesting. Especially compared to some of my other recent submissions that I thought would be way more interesting to this crowd in terms of startups and hacking.
> I don't know, it seems a lot of the very high trafficked sites (Facebook, Yahoo) run PHP

I'm completely for PHP as a simple and accessible language. The previous author wanted to hear about the shortcomings of PHP and I tried to provide some. PHP sites such as Wikipedia probably need more servers (since every request is a separate process). They might be saving a lot of manpower by using PHP, so it might be an OK tradeoff.

By the way, Facebook uses Erlang for its performance-critical parts (such as chat).

> PHP is a share nothing architecture; each request is completely independent.

You could still use an agent-like messaging system for shared-nothing multithreaded/multiprocessed environment.

> I'd make more of a comment about the various PHP frameworks but "eventing system" seems kind of vague. Maybe you can clarify this a bit and then I'll comment.

e.g. When using cURL you must poll the handler until the request is complete. Obviously you'd need multithreading to achieve a better control flow in such a scenario.

> Nobody mixes in code & design in PHP anymore

I've written and debugged some wordpress plugins, and I can't say I came to the same conclusion as you...
Latest pictures posted to twitter in real-time.
Which payment processor did you end up using for dealing with credit cards and whatnot? What were the fees? Would appreciate any information you might have.
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We offer cleaning services and small general joinery services for very competitive prices. We provide a quality and efficient services for the residential and business customers based in Edinburgh.
Wireless PS3 allows for Modern Warfare 2 on the go
The latest project from a modder named Techknott, boasts some pretty impressive capabilities. Basically, the handheld sends control signals to a PS3, which transmits video signals back to the device.
According to the modder’s post the device will soon be available for purchase.
And just to be clear, I would never recommend any PHP forum software (just ask the exasperated folks @ Massify), mostly because I think they are functionally retarded and security is a joke. But that has little to do with PHP than it does with the way they are written.
My post was meant to be about uncaptured economic effects and risk.

The "Peak Oil" crowd as I understand them, are concerned that oil field production will stop growing, while demand continues to rise, and the price of oil could grow fairly rapidly, with hard to predict economic effects.

As such, they tend to advocate the development of higher efficiency consumption and exploration of alternative forms of energy while oil is still cheap. It's basically a position that calls on innovation today to avoid a problem altogether, or to soften the blow by laying some groundwork.

You clearly prefer a position where you don't innovate until your back is against the wall, and you mock anybody who does it earlier, and accuse them of not believing in innovation.

Whatever. I don't even care.
I'd argue that being in a market that people wanted made you money, not PHP. I dunno what the timescale of your successes was - I think PHP actually was the best option for webapps between about 1998 and 2004 - but there are better technologies available now.

Java and C++ made me money, PHP made me bupkis. Python at least is fun.
I was about to post the same observation. I would never google for something like this. I think of words that would be likely to occur on a page containing what I'm looking for. Sometimes I quote parts of a phrase such as "how to" to ensure I'm likely to find only how to kind of posts.
Exactly. My career started back then, and there really wasn't a lot out there:

* CGI (mostly done with Perl).

* mod_perl (a huge ungainly mess)

* ASP (no thanks, not a Microsoft guy)

* Various proprietary things

* Various niche players (my own mod_dtcl [later Apache Rivet] was faster and IMO, nicer than PHP, but never got more than a modest amount of traction).

By the time I even started writing mod_dtcl, PHP was already pretty widely used, and we were using it in production at the company I worked for, and it was certainly better/faster than doing things in Perl CGI's.

These days, I really, really, really don't like having anything to do with PHP after having dealt with too many unholy messes, but I can't deny that it got some critical things right at the right time.
I too was confused by where that request variable came from when I did my first compojure project, but I find that it is pretty fair with the macro, although I would have liked to have the request headers added as a variable too.

I was expecting to see an interface more like rails metal though, with an 'env variable that contained the whole request. (:params env) (:headers env) etc.

Part of the beauty of clojure is that it is very easy to follow the program flow just because there aren't much global variables floating around, why add them?
Now, the rules are just pure bullshit. That way leads to immorality. We just need to be good men and good women.
The people who click those haven't seen all the answers (that would be listed with a non-human query). I want the best answers, not the most popular ones.

Further, typing long phrases or questions unquoted gives a lot of false positives. I don't want that, I want to capture the essential minimum I need to look for something specific.
Touchscreen analysis shows iPhone accuracy lead over Droid
Building camarades.com, now ww.com in march '98. The webcam software was in C++.
This seems to be a more boring paraphrase of Nazi general Knut von Hammerstein-Equord's "I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!" (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord)
I'd be happy to learn, but you'd have to expand the one-liner.
I wonder how many IE6 users actually choose their browser?
The benchmarks you're linking are pretty limited (especially the first one that tests just instantiation and method dispatch). Also synthetic but somewhat more comprehensive -

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

As I said, if threading is a problem in PHP, it's as much of a problem in Ruby and Python. Common workaround is async message queueing with a great number of solutions available for all of these languages. There's a parallel curl available in recent versions of PHP that covers the simple 'multiple data services' case reasonably well.
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Malaysia truly Asia, Malaysia is one of the best countries in the world to provide the best tourismfor medical. In this country, from the past five years the growth rate of medical is growing rapidly. In coming up next decade, the growth rate of tourism makes Malaysia as the top of all countries.

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Although Rasmus is quite clearly right to have fixed the undefined behaviour and is probably quite charming in person, if anyone in our company responded to one of our customers like that, well, there'd be trouble.

He could've saved himself a lot of grief if his first reply had been:

Hi,

I'm sorry to hear this change has broken your existing code. We've been cleaning up undefined behaviours such as the one you're relying on in this release and this particular fix has been reviewed and accepted by the community over a 3 month period, so there's no chance to revert it now.

Going forward, you can either patch your code to stop relying on the undocumented behaviour (e.g. cast the string to a float) or you're also free to modify the PHP source to return to the previous behaviour - one of the benefits of relying on an open source framework.

Best regards,
Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP

Sadly, this would never have appeared on HN and thus brightend up my Monday morning.
It's not quite so simple. Higher cost reserves are higher cost because they're harder to extract with current technology. But exploiting such reserves would naturally cause a significant amount of investment in such technology, which would then reduce the extraction cost. The lifetime average extraction cost of what we may call a "higher cost reserve" today may be no higher than other "lower cost" reserves.

The state of the art in the industry is far beyond what it was a few decades, or even years, ago, and that trend will likely continue into the future. Given the total quantity of oil, gas, coal, shale, tar sands, methane clathrate, and kerogen out there, it's not at all unlikely that man-kind may be able to produce fossil fuels for hundreds or thousands of years to come, if there continues to be demand.
"You clearly prefer a position where you don't innovate until your back is against the wall, and you mock anybody who does it earlier, and accuse them of not believing in innovation."

Where is the mocking? Again, the point being that the concerns over peak oil are wholly unnecessary - further to assume that anyone who uses the word "endless" in the context of any finite physical resource is hardly "dumb" as was suggested. Prices create the incentives for innovation - and that's not just when "your back is up against a wall" (any number of cheap emerging technologies being good examples). For someone who doesn't care, you seem terribly emotional and intent on personalizing the issue.
hey there Whalesalad,

3D printing is a process that is best used to create prototypes, the kind of thing you are looking for would typically be made with injection moulding.

That's a fairly expensive process though, under 10,000 units it isn't feasible.

A midway is to use epoxy-resin based casting, you make a rubber mould which you can re-use a few thousand times, and you cast your units one-by-one.

The mould eventually wears though, usually because of imperfect releases (for instance when the mould wasn't properly coated with release agent).

How you make your blank is not critical, anything goes, it is the negative mould made from the blank (or 'plug' in the jargon) that you will do majority of the work with.

If you lose it you can always make another one.

Beware of playing with this stuff, these are dangerous chemicals and plenty of the reactions are exothermal and can go runaway on you with little to no warning. Never mix more than you will use and use a very well ventilated workspace.

Keep your stock containers away from the place where your casting set so that if stuff goes out of control you don't have an extra fire hazard.

Enjoy, you'll learn plenty, and please let me know if you use any of this.

greetings,

Jacques
All good points.

As a PHP-only hacker (wouldn't say fan), I am always amused with the PHP bashing. It's missing this or that. It does x wrong. Yet it only powers Facebook. It is the only language where I can be up and coding in no time to produce complex web apps quickly.

Language users always underestimate the second point: personal familiarity is a great productivity boom that no other language can match. Better the devil you know...

And a similar argument holds for databases, but it's a bit more complicated for that one.
I'll stop bashing languages as soon as they stop being insultingly bad. For many languages that would mean death. I'm okay with that.
Things from PHP that I want in Django and Rails:

- "Just write an HTML file" deployment. I want to be able to dump an HTML file into a directory to get started, with none of this skeleton directory stuff. Then I could incrementally refactor that file into a template, pull its logic into views and models, customize the paths with a urls.py, and build my app up with baby steps instead of jumping into MVC land immediately.

- Tight integration with webservers. This FCGI/SCGI standalone stuff is a pain, particularly if I also want to serve static files. I want to start with something transparent like PHP's Apache module and then go to FCGI/SCGI/proxying only if I get big enough to add a separate appserver.

- User comments on the documentation. They're occasionally misleading, but usually explain some necessary corner cases.

Things from Java I want in Python:

- A fast JIT compiler.

- JavaDoc. Yes, it's superior to docstrings, mostly because there's a standardized documentation generator for Java and basically all Java projects use it. When I look at a Python project, I have no idea what documentation format they're going to use.

Things from Erlang I want in every language:

- Message-passing concurrency. It's time to ditch threads.

- "Let it crash" mentality. It's virtually impossible to enumerate the ways which your program may fail, so let it die and focus on what you should do to recover from the failure. Then use a supervisor process to make that happen.

Things from Python I want in every language:

- Whitespace-significant syntax. Controversial I know, but I find this drastically reduces clutter in code.

- Doctests. I don't think Python goes far enough; its philosophy is that doctests are documentation and unittests are tests. But with a couple simple extensions, doctests could be tests too, and much more concise, readable, easy tests than the xUnit framework provides.

There're a bunch more I could come up with, but this is already a long post...
Well that weakens my point substantially, but I still think that 'totally' is too much blame.

If you leave your building hooked up to an open tunnel line, something could come in through it. And that something could be water (or gas, or rodents...).

Claiming that's "totally" the city's fault strikes me as a dangerous abdication of personal responsibility.
Wrong.

You can get vitamin C on an all-meat diet, and various people have (of necessity, typically by living in or travelling through areas where agriculture is impossible and storing vegetables wasn't possible) done just fine that way.
The bit where he's awkwardly fingering the sex doll's uncanny valley to trigger some robotic response is the most depressing thing I've seen so far this year.
To add to the noise here: all people bashing here, please remember webdev landscape around the time PHP got started (or around the time it got to version 3, which looked somewhat a real language).

I started using PHP as a switch over from Perl (which had some powerul but cumbersome templating engines, and boiled down to much more boilerplate than PHP for the same task) or C-based CGI (that was not fun).

So, I see PHP as an enabler to webdev to the masses. It was really hard to do "dynamic web pages", as these were called back in the days, in anything else, and it was a breeze in PHP. I believe this is why many people started doing it, which in turn resulted in developing better frameworks for better languages (like Rails, Django, etc.).

Comparison with IE6 has been drawn. IE6 was the best browser in its day. The trouble is, it stayed dominant for far too long. The same could be said for PHP. If it was massively replaced by other alternatives by, say, the time PHP5 came out (which IMHO looks as the first PHP version that considered itself as a serious language; php<3 were gross hacks, php3 was nice, php4 was service pack to php3), then many woes now attributed to it would never have existed.

I personally use Django nowadays for any new projects I do, having done stuff in PHP before. I have a hate/hate relationship with PHP, I consider it a very bad language as languages go, but it's still invaluable for quick hacks, in which boilerplate for other system takes more to generate than writing the 10 or so lines of PHP.
I would like syntax highlighting for my doctests.
It is a good reason to stop deindustrialization of USA and Canada. Europe as far as I know produce a lot of toys themselves. At least I saw a toy truck made in Sweden. Guess what was the truck's model ;)?
As a new php -> python programmer here are a couple other things i'd naively like to add to python:

Built in json_encode.

Type hinting

The only reason i decided to learn python was because of the free quotas on the google app engine.
I suppose I'm still kind of reeling from the triple whammy of having to learn Django (ok, its not really hard), Python, and the google app engine with its non-relational db all at once. Unlearning relational stuff is much harder than it looks.
Nice story
Are you using Safari?

Even if not, your browser is ignoring the encoding tag. Change the encoding to ISO-8859-1 or ISO-Latin-1 or ISO Windows or whatever your browser calls it...
Thanks for the great comment! Surprisingly everything you said made a whole lot of sense. I guess for now I was more interested in creating a prototype. I have absolutely zero 3D modeling experience, and after giving Blender a try for about 10 minutes I need some Tylenol, heh.

The epoxy casting makes a lot of sense and seems like the best route to do it myself. My dad built his own kayak not too long ago, and I helped him out a lot with the fiberglass coating and epoxy (it's wooden, but it's coated in those things). I guess the hardest part in that sense would be creating a perfect and symmetrical mold, which is where the 3D modeling comes in handy =/

Hopefully I can find some semi-interested hackers or someone here in Honolulu who might be interested in helping with the project. Thanks again for your tips, It's helped push me in a better direction :)
This is a fairly pointless post, just a collection of snarky one-liners without much insight. Less of this on HN please.
"As a PHP-only hacker...personal familiarity is a great productivity boom that no other language can match. Better the devil you know..."

It's possible to become personally familiar with more than one language. Get to know many devils. ;-)

Learning a new language always feels like a pain when you're doing it, because everything's 10x slower than with your old language. But then you become familiar with the new one, and can write two languages at full speed instead of one, and the pain of learning it is quickly forgotten. Moreover, it gives you perspective on both the old and the new that can be quite valuable.

Do this enough and eventually you realize that there're some languages that are just bad. But it's very much worth examining their history and understanding how they became bad. Because I can guarantee that it wasn't because their designers were stupid, and the same forces that make a language go bad tend to make any software project go bad. If you're aware of them, you might keep your software project from going bad, at least for a while.
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/cercla/07list.html
I fail to see any coherency in these points. Can someone enlighten me as to what unites them?
Making threats has been a "something" that's considered a crime for... well, a long time. Typically the law requires that the threat be at least somewhat believable in order to be successfully prosecuted, but there are certain types of threats which are criminal regardless of ability to be carried out (e.g., threatening to plant a bomb in a public square is a crime, even if you have no way of building or planting the bomb).
What kind of friend was he? And why did he want to restore his guy friend's personality into a sex robot?
Thanks for the tip, happy to change it to hit it a little more squarely.
Python 2.5 ships with simplejson, and in Python 2.6 it's been renamed to plain old json. I'm not sure on the implementation - one of the problems with Python JSON implementations was fragmentation, so if you wanted the standard implementation you'd use simplejson, but if you wanted the fast one you'd use cjson, yet if you wanted the maximally compatible library there was yet another 3rd-party JSON library. I'd like to think that the json module is fast and standards compliant, but I haven't looked at it.

I kinda would like type hinting too, although that's a deeply divisive issue in a dynamic language community.
I do learn other languages. Right now I'm focusing on the non-alphanumeric soup we call Erlang. I can also (just) barely do some Python, and Node.js is next on the list.

For PHP, it's best to think of it as an inconsistent wrapper around lots of other libraries. In most instances, I know there is a function to do what I want, and a quick lookup gets me the right syntax.
You're welcome. If you get stuck mail me, email in my profile.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=silicone+casting+rubbe...
Also the company was called 'Clozure Associates' long before October 19th, 2007.
I wonder why the font on the middle line is slightly off...

http://skitch.com/swombat/nqhn8
the volumne 4 fascicle 1 (Bitwise Tricks & Techniques) can be found and downloaded from safari o'reily. have no idea about the others, though.
Cool! Learning clojure on this end, slow progress but one day I'll get it :)

How is Erlang working out for you?
A message on a yahoo board seems to be a bit of a stretch though.