skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Care to share? Or at least point me to the original library? I had found a few things http://ioreader.com/2007/05/03/php-closures/ and http://www.steike.com/code/php-closures/ a while ago...
Although I've run apps over Wine for awhile now...I still find myself thinking "ooh, ahh" when I launch a win32 app in Wine and it just works.

Cheers to the Wine dev team for all their hard work.
"Manhattan Project" for next generation of bionic arms
Absolutely, I think he just missed the chance of writing a great article. Worth a read though.
Where do you live? I know plenty of places in the UK (especially London) that are hiring...
As the value of stuff accelerates exponentially toward zero, the only thing that matters is social status. I suspect that in the future most burglaries will fall into one of two categories:

A) The object being stolen confers social status (e.g. iPhone)

B) The act of stealing confers social status in the individual's social circle
That's a PHP4 framework. It's a bad idea to use PHP4, because 5 has so many useful new things, performance improvements, SPL, etc. In the OO area, PHP5 is practically a new language.
This sort of interface problem is common with clocks too. We have a clock at work that signals break time; it has four alarms but you have to manually turn them off. One time I had to be the one to turn it off, and I looked at the back. Four identical, round buttons - simply labelled "A", "B", "C", and "D". WTF? I need the manual to look up what the buttons do!
It works relatively well if you keep an eye out for "(scribd.com)" after the post's title...

But yeah, it would be cool if pg auto-tagged PDFs.

Wait... why am I getting the PDF and not the iPaper?
Irony is that company that sold that Toaster made money. How ironic (and encouraging) is the fact that companies like eBay, Microsoft makes loads of money ;-)
Feature-laden products sell. At the day end, we all want to acquire powerful things and you'll find very few powerful products in this world that were made keeping in mind the less is more philosophy.
Bug: The "More" link (at bottom of page) ususally gives
this error message on most days (in Firefox 2.0.0.11):
"Unknown or expired link".
Are you looking for a PHP5 version? Here's a fork:

http://kohanaphp.com/

Haven't tried it yet.
Or maybe window glass is thicker in the UK or one of another of the zillion other possible explanations for this statistic.
The GE microwave that came with my house is worse than I thought was possible. It includes an appointment scheduler (!) and has some sort of message button I've never pressed for fear of being reminded of what my voice sounds like. Apparently the designers thought there was a large underserved market of families whose entire lives revolve around their microwaves. All the buttons to support these extra features mainly make it less convenient to use for heating up food.

The worst feature by far is its insistence on having its clock set. Every time I lose electricity, which happens every few weeks in my neighborhood, it refuses to cook anything until I:

1. Press "clock" to set the time (even though all other functions are disabled).
2. Enter the time in HHMM format.
3. Press "start" (but don't get too excited about actually "starting" anything yet).
4. Locate the single-purpose "AM/PM" button and press that either once or twice.
5. Press "start" again.
6. Enter the date in MMDDYY format.
7. And again press "start".

What this means is that you can always calculate how long it has been since the first time I zapped my morning instant oatmeal after the last power outage by subtracting from the current time and date displayed by the microwave: 2011-11-11 11:11 a.m.

So, yeah, don't design a web site like that.
Design and Code Reviews sit somewhere far on the slow-and-formal-and-clunky hand side of the spectrum between them and pair programming, but essentially achieve the same aims. Both pair programming and peer reviews (of code or otherwise) have the same aims and same results:

1) fewer bugs (peer reviews / pair programming is the most efficient known method to reduce the number of bugs, by far - testing is a distant second)

2) better spread of knowledge around the team

It's important to realise that they're the same tool, just twisted into a different shape. Pair programming is essentially taking the peer review concept and making it continuous rather than applying it at a regular interval.

In a startup environment, I'd recommend pair programming rather than code reviews, because it tends to provide a greater return, and it feels more nimble and fresh.

To ease yourself into it, you could start with pair programming days once a week, and see how people like it...

Daniel
I believe I had that same microwave. Here's a hint: Hold down the 0 button for a few seconds and the time display will turn off :)
what would it make it _much_ cooler would be some way to tie in protocol-state-transitions with packet-structure to have machine generated protocol-parsers.
How Do You Protect Your Ideas?
Notwithstanding the various "ideas are worthless" threads, there may come a time when you need to prove that the ideas and concepts behind your product were indeed yours, and not swiped (intentionally or otherwise) from a competitor, collaborator, potential business partner, what have you.

What, if anything, do people do to document the origin and progress of their (potential) product ideas? File provisional patents (seems difficult of you are simply brainstorming)? Keep dated records, perhaps in hard-bound notebooks?
10 JavaScript Effects to Boost Your Website’s Fanciness Factor
Sequoia Capital’s 2nd Gospel: Good business plans
If you don't feel like sitting on the jobs page and clicking refresh to see new jobs you can see all (well most) of the listed jobs here: http://snaptalent.com/ads.html
If that works after the next outage, I owe you my life, or at least 0.002% of it.
Good standards make code reviews trivial.

Well defined, zero tolerance, guidelines virtually eliminate the need for code reviews. Variable naming, standard routines, syntax, how to do iteration, branching, common functions, etc., etc. etc., should all be outlined clearly, agreed upon, and adhered to.

I prefer to look at it this way...

Code Review: No one gets out of this room alive until this is right (whatever that means).

Standards Compliance: Wanna play? Good. Follow the rules.

Oh, and please don't give me that age old argument about how standards limit creativity; if this small price for quality software is too limiting for you, then go play by yourself.
Yes, but unless the burglar is also some kind of master spy, he will never know which house has a Canon 1Ds Mark III and which hasn't. Usually, I assume a burglar's goal will be much broader -- something like "score some stuff that can be pawned/sold in the black market".

I guess since generic "stuff" (TV, PC, stereo, microwave) is easier to get now, probably there are less buyers in the black market, too. So, less incentive for burglars.

BTW, I think this is great, and I hope this situation spreads to the rest of the world as fast as possible. (You don't want me prattling about growing up poor, trust me.)
If you can't redistribute it at all, it's not really Open Source. The GPL is the most restrictive license of those that meet the OS definition, more or less.
http://coordinatr.com is built on CodeIgniter. CI has some of the best documentation of any Framework and it's super fast compared to others like CakePHP and Symphony. Of course, it's still PHP so there are some limitations, but overall it's been great.

I don't really like the Rails comparison that people make. It's PHP and it's significantly less "magical" than rails.
Here's a CI S3 library: http://www.haughin.com/2008/02/02/amazon-s3-the-future-of-al...
Great link, thanks.
Heh. A grammatical glitch. What I meant was, Is there any idea Alan Kay is more closely identified with than "small and self-describing"?

More importantly, I'd like to hear why you think it's the wrong tree. The point of a small and self-describing design is that it provides extensibility and (logical) scalability that other approaches can't match (or even dream of). Why would that have been a good idea in the Smalltalk days but a bad idea now?
Heck, NPR is basing their theory on anecdotes from an ex-con. At least I'm putting up some numbers. Obviously, statistics like the above are a result of extremely complex systems. I tried to compare two countries with similar population make-ups, similar economies, similar legal traditions, etc, but you can only remove so many factors. Actual experimentation in social science, by contrast, tends to result in unholy bloodbaths.
well I tried going to the original site and unfortunately it seems to be down. Tell you what maybe we can connect via email or chat or something. I can hand you the original source code of the library. Be aware though it's not the most elegantly documented piece of code. But it's commented heavily and you can learn a great deal of how PHP works and how the author worked around it's limitations.
It's because stuff isn't valuable anymore

What are you basing this on? I can't think of anything to really determine the value of "stuff" except for price, and from what I've seen, stuff still has prices attached.

Maybe a good stereo in 1970 was 200 dollars, and today it's (inflation-adjusted) 150 dollars. But even a decline like that doesn't mean it isn't valuable.
From my experience it has some awkward workarounds if the framework is dropped in a PHP5 environment. Nonetheless it's simple and transparent enough to hack in order to fully utilize PHP5's features.
San Diego, California. I'm moving back to Silicon Valley in a few months (my hometown).
MIT tests unique approach to fusion power
Suppose someone (cough we cough) were already working on everything this guy's talking about - would you play it?
The validation lib can be improved upon but I just hate the idea of sticking into a controller function (I just move it the model, currently I'm writing a lib that should remedy this). Still I have to agree that allowing callbacks is a nice feature.

Quick question how good is PHPMailer compared to CI's native Email lib? Was planning to use the latter for our company's web app.
first time we see images in HN. video is next.
I'm totally with you, but bear in mind that standards documents (especially within small start-up teams) tend to be built slowly over time, and reviewed and modified when necessary. Code reviews are great for establishing and tweaking standards when none exist.
EC2 Ubuntu instructions for ThruDB
Somehow I can't see truck drivers lining up to take "light showers". My best friend is a truck driver - you have enough trouble convincing him to take real showers.
So, they're losing money on every customer but they'll make it up on volume?
By 2050, aliens could have taken over the earth and humans could have been turned into a fungus-eating quadruped. This is forty years from now, and there is no telling which way the technological development will take.

Scientific American is stupid. Just look at the predictions these magazines were making fifty years ago. I suppose the article's author is basing his predictions on available evidence? Well, based on available evidence, the authors of Scientific American make lousy predictions.
but Rails made MVC extremely popular, and the directory structure and admin function names are very similar (at least from a non rails user like my self)
http://djangogigs.com/gigs/country/united-states/
Five reasons why a recession is a good time to start a company
I give them away. People assume they are useless because I appear unwilling to pursue them. Then I win.
In most non-hacker circles, an iPhone is just another cell phone, except that it is advertised so much that many are getting annoyed with it. ("Okay, I get it, it's a phone with a browser and it plays music....") For that reason, the idea that an iPhone confers social status really jumps out at me, because it just doesn't seem true.
I usually don't have problems with PDF's, but this one takes 100% CPU... PDF, the new Flash.
My email address is in my profile, which I believe pg said at one point users can see if they are logged in. If not, let me know. Edit: The sample of 5 i checked didn't show an email address... It's my username here at google's service.
that was from Yahoo's first set of tips. This post is for an additional set once you have done all the first set
SpinVox Nets $100M and a $500M Valuation
What Social Network Addicts Get Up To
The Cyber Age's Impact on the Economy
Is Yahoo Trying to Squeeze More Out of Microsoft?
A different kind of gross mismanagement: One that involved less fraud, and backroom transaction.

I agree that SOX is probably not particularly useful.
Although it does target some specific bad practices that were instrumental in Enron's collapse, especially wrt off-balance-sheet transactions and auditor independence.
Of course mismanagement can cause businesses to fail, and can cause businesses to fail spectacularly.
SOX was designed around a particular model of failure and it is disingenuous to claim that because there are other models of failure are possible, SOX is a waste.

Again: SOX is probably not worth the expense, but the Bear collapse is unrelated.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/636

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
Several of his complaints seem to stem from a desire that each player should have a brand-new experience, unique from any other player's. I find this desire odd. If I am reading a novel, I do not pause to lament that others have already read the same words, and if I am playing a board game, I am not worried that someone may have used exactly the same strategy as mine.

I'm not so certain that procedurally generated content would be more entertaining than custom content in an MMO. Procedural games like Angband (and descendants like Oblivion) are entertaining, but they do not command the audience that WoW does. Most MMO players are not troubled by their repetitive experiences, so I wouldn't say the MMO's are "doing it wrong".
It would be nice to have some kind of preview feature, either in the form of a demo, or existing pages.
Immense scale and/or procedurally generated content would sell me alone. At any rate, don't be shy -- plug your game -- I'll be sure to check it out!
I disagree with this. The argument seems to be that the only valid reasons to discredit a language are extrinsic to the language itself. Granted, one should always take into account the language's problem domain and design principles before criticizing for lacking X or having X, but this doesn't mean that the language itself can be poorly designed or have issues.

Java really is verbose.
Perl really does have an inconsistent syntax.
C++ really does lend itself to memory errors.

Do each of these languages solve the problem that they were meant to solve? I think so. Do each of them still have issues that deserve criticism? Of course.

I think that there is nothing wrong with criticizing a language. If we didn't criticize nothing would improve and there's always room for improvement.
Right now i have customers that want to pay me, but i don't have a back end. I would love to just get something done now in prototype, so i can build a real nice MVC later on.

in the "RAILS MVC" pattern i have only tutorial experience and now the code ignite tutorial behind me. I come from a C# world, so a lot of this is still new to me. We decided to move from C# because php5.2 is so awesome, and mono was becoming a scary rabbit hole. Code Igniter is an exciting idea.

I am curious what the best way is to extend a model in CI. it looks like a few days work just to think about it. i think if we bring in 4braham in Madison, WI we might be able to build a decent set of classes though. ThruDB also launched today for ubuntu, so i would like to build in the hooks for thrudb and memcache on s3 objects so that it is built for scalability and simplicity.
i am not using s3 as a just a file store, we are using it as an XML store most of the time, so in essence its replacing my need for a DB, which is hard to scale.

we have a smart client so as long as i can publish xml, smart widget can read it, and since we are not using javascript, we can read XML so effortlessly in flash.
CI has completely separate cores for PHP 4 and 5, so if you're using 5, you get the benefits of 5.
I don't think it is "mostly" true. This is a romanticized view of both startup failure and what your non-startup peers may or may not be doing by choosing the "safe" employee path.

- startup founders and employees are often complete freaks. they wouldn't get hired at Google in the first place, and are definitely not interested in pee-wee softball and 2.2 Volvos in the garage. Statistically, the type-A Ivy League wunderkinds are taking those stable jobs. The bulk of startup founders I meet dropped out of no-name schools or even high school.

- if you are an early employee at a VC funded startup you make close to market rate salary... that's the whole point of the VC funding... to hire key employees.

- the most successful startups I know of were founded by people who still had jobs, were in graduate school, or saved up a bunch of money at a previous job.

- Another unspoken story about startup founders is that a significant percentage of them come from wealthy families or have parents with serious connections in the industry. It is easier to take "risks" when you have a trust fund.

- The valley is filled with MORE sad, "failed" people who toiled as an employee at Yahoo or Apple or Adobe for 7 years, then freaked out or got laid off.

I'm also not sure the novelist community is littered with sad failures, either. Most novelists have day jobs. It is unlikely many failed or successful novelists passed over a lucrative corporate marketing career to suffer for their craft.
CI's email library has 3 modes: PHP Mail, Sendmail, or external SMTP server. In my experience, using Sendmail is very fast if you have a mail server installed on your webserver. I haven't tried PHPMailer because I haven't found CI's mail library to be missing anything that I needed.
Creators of the BBC Micro reunite
> Variable naming, standard routines, syntax, how to do iteration, branching, common functions

You're seriously wasting time if your code reviews could be done by a batch of regular expressions and a cron job, ala http://search.cpan.org/dist/Perl-Critic/lib/Perl/Critic.pm

I always thought the point was to keep things well factored: find hard to spot duplication or inconsistencies in disparate areas of the code, point out a library/api that could have done the task better, etc.
I still find myself thinking "ooh, ahh" when I launch a win32 app in Wine and it just works.

It's not just you. Even my professors think it's pretty cool that I can fire up Windows apps inside Linux while all of my terminals with their garish Vim syntax highlighting continue to stare at them :-)

Great project.
Look at the number of median wage hours of labor it takes to buy things. It has plummeted. I've known poor grad students that could afford huge TVs.

The punishment for crime has increased, which few people talk about. Most complain about the drug war rightfully, but lots more people are being sent to jail and being kept there for other offenses.

cheaper stuff + stiffer punishments = less crime
No, php's implementation of anonymous functions is not efficient. When create_function is called it stores that created function globally which doesn't allow garbage collection. Making it pretty much useless to use in callbacks or when defined within a loop. Watch the memory increase for the following test:

while (true) {
create_function('', ' return 0; ');
}
Depends. I have yet to play a (MMO)RPG with procedural content that is more engaging than one with well-crafted static content. IMO it works for strategy games, but not so much for RPGs. Yes, the procedural world is larger and has more replayability, but once your brain becomes used to the algorithms used to generate it, it becomes as repetitive as anything else.

I'd be happy to find a game that proves me wrong (not that I can afford the time to let myself get sucked into an MMORPG anymore...)
Very true. The problem I have with calling it a rails clone is that people expect things like scaffolding, ORM, and auto code creation. CI has scaffolding, but it's only for admin use, not production, and while there are libraries that can do the ORM and code creation, they aren't as well integrated as Rails. Still it's lightweight and fast which is why I use it.
A native app is nice, but it has fewer features than other available tools like QGit, which feels pretty native already.

It's still pre-1.0, though, so who knows.
Freakonomics has an interesting perspective: It is due to the legalization of abortion. The authors do make a good case for it. I tend to lean towards this explanation which amounts to less poor young people.
SF JavaScript Meetup - lots of hackers, YC people, JS experts
Hey all,

We're getting together a JavaScript meetup in downtown San Francisco at 7PM on April 16th. Specific location TBA but it will be somewhere in or near SOMA. We've got a number of YC companies represented, other startups, lots of awesome front-end hackers, and some huge names in the JS community.

It will be a lot of fun and you won't want to miss it so register and RSVP here:

http://javascript.meetup.com/4/

We'll have food, drink, a few awesome speakers, and lots of great networking and hacking.

See you then!
I guess that means no to a "gigs" page that was requested the other day?
The Cubicle-Prank Toolbox: 25 Great Ideas to Jack with Your Co-Workers
You can see it coming...
He's right, but so many tiny startups aren't overvalued and they won't tank. Also, I find it hard to imagine an event that would lead to a collapse. It's not like there are tons of IPOs that can dry up.

The interesting part is the diff between now and then. The availability of easy money can change fast. Unless there is a very large collapse in the dollar, most startups wouldn't be affected by the marginal changes in consumer behavior.
Five Keys to Corporate Programmer Happiness
I can think of a lot of other reasons why burglaries have declined, such as improved street policing and the sharp rise in other types of crime linked to drug use, such as identity theft.
Interest vs. Commitment
Highrise's first birthday
I do not miss my cubicle.
Running as fast as possible with your ideas keeps them pretty safe. You'll drop a few in the scramble, and it won't matter.
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, followed by Blue Mars and Green Mars. These to me are the only ones not mentioned already and are set in an inspiring way that celebrates humanity. Also the Rama Series by Clarke and Lee starting with the second in the series "Rama II".
I've used CI on several projects. I've also used Rails. Here's my take on CI.

The good stuff:

* GREAT documentation
* Code was designed around performance, and it is pretty darn quick.
* PHP4 based. (This, btw, is only a plus for a tiny few people. There's no need to be on PHP4 any more.)

The bad:

* The "model" layer is not really an ORM at all. It's just a slightly fancy way of wrapping SQL statements. This is better than no separation of concerns, but it's not really an object oriented way of accessing the model layer.
* It misses out on all the great things that are going on with PHP5.
* It's open source but privately developed. The pace of evolution is glacially slow, and decisions about the direction of the framework are made closed doors.

To me, CI is a HUGE advance over throwing code together in php files, but it doesn't really have enough abstractions to qualify as a true MVC framework.

If you do decide you like CI, check out kohana php. This is an open source, community developed fork of CI -- that's built for PHP5.

For what it's worth, I'm far happier coding in Rails (and the little bit of django I've tried), and would probably recommend those if you're not afraid of abandoning php.
And how lucky do you have to be to steal one of those? Will you know it when you see it?