skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PHP isn't quick. It isn't faster than other languages. It's just a tool, and if you know how to use it well, it will be faster for you.

If you want fast, build a static site. If you're iterating on your builds and doing something non-trivial, pick your tools carefully but don't be afraid to try new things.
This really depends on your definition of "great".
It baffles me why do all browsers pretend that https with an untrusted certificate is worse than plain http.
There is no such thing as neutral and unbiased news. Journalists often claim such thing is possible, but it isn't making things worse by hiding their bias. You can try to find out in what direction the author/news outlet is usually biased to and try to subtract that, try to find multiple sources to get views from different angles, try to find reliable hard facts.
I actually agree with the original statement. PHP, for quite a few years now certainly has NOT been the language of choice for most startups, yet we still see the majority of them fail.

"and miss all of the tremendous losers who picked php and got nothing for it"

certainly applies equally across all languages in my opinion.
I never entirely understood Georgism's focus on land value rather than capital in general.

Surely owning a factory is capturing the benefits of productivity just as much as owning the land it stands on?
Unfortunately if he reads the article, he'd then know about the content, so could never bear to see it on HN
No program will ever look beautiful in M4 or sed.
So, as someone who went through the process and got through it (so is less inclined to hold a grudge):

> Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory.

AIUI you can get easily 5 or more of the pre-screen questions wrong and still proceed to the next stage, depending on your experience and how wrong you are. The point here is not that you know each and every one of those things, but to show that you are, in general, knowledgeable enough to spend Engineer hours on.

And your judgement of these questions is seriously impaired by the fact that they are written down wrong. I assume, that the author of this post has written down a rough transcript from memory and as such it's colored by their own (mis)understanding of the question and whatever got leaked from memory in the meantime. The questions he wrote down are, at the very least, not verbatim the ones from the checklist given to recruiters (and there is a strong emphasis on reading them out verbatim there, so I consider it relatively unlikely that the recruiter didn't do that).

> It's formed of the dozens of posts that appear every year about how someone who seems qualified is turned down for spurious reasons like "being unable to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard". It's what makes this particular post so believable - it fits the stereotype.

Exactly. You are reading "dozens of posts every year" from disgruntled interviewees who got rejected and are pissed. On the flip side, a quick internet search will tell you that Google gets on the order of millions of applications each year, meaning you don't hear from >99.99% of applicants.

There is also the widely advertised fact, that the Google hiring process accepts a high false-negative rate, if that also means a very low false-positive rate, so it is to be expected that a good percentage of qualified applicants still get rejected. It is thus also to be expected, that you hear from some of them. Meanwhile, again, you are not hearing from the thousands of qualified applicants that do get accepted each year. Because an "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice and they got me a good offer" blog post won't draw a crowd on hacker news, even if it was written.

> How about the responses from your own employees which are pointing out that they see the problem too. Are they being unreasonable?

Let's not ignore the responses from Employees that don't think there is a problem.

From reading this post, I'd say a likely reason for the rejection is, that this person wasn't being particularly pleasant. Frankly, he comes of as kind of an arrogant prick. And, as a general rule, engineers at Google, just like everyone else, don't particularly like having unpleasant people on their team. And I also believe this post has gotten enough upvotes, that someone will look into the situation to see what went actually wrong here.
Exactly, they don't provide measurements and comparisons, for example I'd love to know the temperature spike of the motors when it's cooled and when it's not (e.g. when they have to programmatically stop it because it risks overheating). Active motors still work at ~ 100°℃, can't they?
Agreed, barring an outside force, or other members with experience or a strong voice/drive, experience will be what drives most technology decisions, and should.

I'd say the opposite, I can get a node project up and running pretty quick these days... as to peer comments on APIs, I don't think it's hard at all to spin up a react + node api project once you've done it before... and starting with a boilerplate for react+redux and express is very straight forward as well.
Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I feel like a lot of the tech talks Obama gives are heavily scripted and he doesn't understand everything he's saying. He once made a joke about sorting algorithms, and I find it super hard to believe that someone who's never programmed before (outside of publicity stunts) would be capable of doing that.

However, I guess props are due for the effort even if he doesn't personally understand all of it.
Mackenzie Child is good
https://www.youtube.com/user/mackenziechild

He does dev & design, specialising in Ruby on Rails
Must watch John Lindquist's Pattern Craft : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8B19C3040F6381A2
Seems like this is just a copy of another module (even the readme).

I'd personally recommend this one: https://www.npmjs.com/package/config
Not only for the labor, but for the product as well.

I know few people that dislike pastries... ok maybe they like some kinds more than others, but still...

But I know few people that like pastries at any price; at least not with any frequency. Once that price goes up too much they do look for substitute goods. Maybe mass-produces Hostess-style stuff: not great, but sufficient and cheap.

At some point, this too will resolve itself. I think you'll see some mix of price rise and demand reduction in the independent sector (with some labor rate rise, too, but only for the highly skilled) and an increase of demand in the cheap, mass production baked goods area. This will take time to shake out, but it will.

...And I could be wrong in how it will: you cannot plan economies. Not everyone will agree with that, but I have yet to see it happen successfully.
I know you're making a parody, but I think I agree with your parody.

I mean, essentially all you're saying is "startup success is largely uncorrelated with the programming language used to implement those startups' products". That seems like not at all an unreasonable position.

(It's not, by the way, equivalent to the statement "choice of language doesn't matter".)
>Laws preventing criticism don't generally motivate people to hang pictures of the king in their homes.

obviously you never been/read about central Europe during Soviet occupation (1949-1991), Stalin pictures/busts everywhere, people cried on the streets when he died. In Poland we had _mandatory_ 'work holiday' celebrations on 1 of may. People would march on the streets holding Stalin pictures and chanting "Stalin! Peace! Party! Comecon (Eastern Bloc version of EU) makes us stronger!" and other nonsense while being observed by secret police and party monitors.

Stalin picture was a standard wall ornament in every living room and classroom.
Any media with a sufficiently large number of consumers is indistinguishable from propaganda.
>Asynchronously curl’ing to localhost (or even another web server) provides a shared-nothing, copy-in/copy-out way of exploiting parallelism

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Is he saying that to do async work he'll send a curl request to somewhere (spawning a thread for that request), not wait on the output and carry on? Last I used curl in php it was a synchronous action. Hell of a threading model there.
Second to this... power management, fonts, hibernation—all the things I take for granted using a mac that I'm suddenly reminded of as soon as I try to use a linux-based notebook. 7 hour battery? Hah—good luck with that when your distro kicks it into performance mode for no apparent reason randomly. These are all the things that keep me using linux on a VM instead of as the host. I could live with it when I was single and had a ton of time on my hands in my 20s. Those days are (sadly!) long gone.
Yeah, it's definitely something we want to support in the future. Autoscaling requires building some components that are aware of and can communicate the underlying infrastructure APIs (AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, OpenStack, etc.) combined with app/host metrics. It's just a matter of putting the implementation effort. We'll get there eventually.
Yup, this. I work on (the original?) multi-tens-of-MLOC PHP-cum-Hack codebase, and writing new code is every bit as safe type-wise as C++, with none of the compile time. It's pretty great.

Dealing with the parts that aren't Hackified, though, is horrific. Complex codebases with no types are just ridiculous.
Node's intrinsic ability to "speak" JSON makes for some very clean code when dealing with that sort of data. If you're doing a simple API back-end in Express with JSON in, JSON out, it's extremely light-weight.

PHP, Ruby and Python here are at a disadvantage. JSON is JavaScript's home turf.
Awesome posy. Sign me up!
Job posting: Apostle (4–5 hours/wk)
All of entertainment is based on cognitive dissonance. I'm not convinced people don't like it. I think maybe they like it a bit too much. You get a hit of endorphins from it.

I'd be hard pressed to put numbers to it, but if people go through 10 conflict/resloution cycles in a day just from episodic TV, how much more is that than what our grandparents had ( or their grandparents if that is what it takes to get you back to before the barrage of entertainment product began, or at least began as much ).

The mechanism of Balkanization is about leadership using a divide and conquer strategy to maintain a power base. Then again, specifically the Balkans had Tito ruthlessly disappearing troublemakers. The Russians may have been bastards, but they kept a lid on it outside Yugoslavia. Stalin wasn't the horror he was for no reason.
That's my thinking - so this should have crazy surface area.

You could make some really awesome aluminum parts. Create a dense exterior with some interior "strut" infill structure and a very porous fill and put plumbing fixtures on the ends. Super strong, lightweight parts that you can cool at crazy rates. I wonder if this would work for aerospace? IIRC cooling the components exposed to exhaust can be a big limitation.
That count is actually inaccurate. They've added a ton of tools to be approved that are not visible (or searchable in that interface) but are included in the count. We'll fix that. It's rare that a company lists things they don't use; it's not very helpful for them.
I went from 12.04 to 16.04. I skipped 14.04 because of the DE which I couldn't bend to my will. I remember that I had similar problems in the last months on 12.04, with some new versions of some programs unavailable on 12.04. I guess that I could have installed them in a 14.04 docker container (would the kernel version have been ok?) Maybe you can do the same for a compiler. I don't know if it would be convenient. I'm more into scripting languages and I use gcc directly only every other year or more, so no big deal for me.
> "Standard process" is what actually happens in the real world. Alas, standard process is to not tell him.

Inferring what's standard from a sample size of 1 (which is ~0.0001%) is very questionable.

> Still, you spend all your effort on saying why for example this guy's patents mean nothing and he's likely incompetent.

That is not at all what they where saying. They where saying that patents aren't conclusive evidence of competency.
No. In 10 years everybody will not believe that. confidence=6σ
Ah, but unlike nature we get to use intelligent design!
I was asked the "what syscall returns an inode?" question (and agree with DannyBee that this is extremely similar to my successful SRE screen) and I answered stat() without the clarification because I understood what the screener was doing and the parameters in which she was operating. That context on how phone screens work is missing from this transcript, but it's also unfair to expect that sort of context from a candidate because not every interviewee is familiar with the standard Google style tech interview.

The screener is the wrong person to walk down Pedantry Lane or Hexadecimal Packets Street and that's the sort of thing you save for the actual interview. But yes, I agree that it's shitty that the incentive is to answer for the test instead of the exact truth. (I wasn't extremely supportive of the interviewee once he turned slightly sarcastic and rattled off hexadecimal bytes instead of just saying "SYN" and "ACK," though.)

As an unrelated addendum, I'm intrigued by the following four things:

1) The author wrote a Web server and framework, G-WAN
2) I've seen G-WAN advertise itself questionably in the past w/r/t perf
3) gwan.com is powered by G-WAN
4) Under Hacker News load, the entire gwan.com domain is hard down

I'm not drawing a conclusion, but it is tempting.
Amen. The ironic thing is most people believe that the fashionable language/framework du jour they're using in their project is "high quality code" that will be maintained like that forever, while turning their nose up at PHP code that is "disposable" but in reality more likely to outlast.
It's actually clearly unsustainable the way we're consuming clothing and pretty much all goods, I read in s book published recently that if everyone in China purchased a new pair of wool socks tomorrow, we would be out of wool.

Guess who is getting an appetite for wool socks?
Totally with you on this - all pretty valid points; but, I'd say Heroku does still work for a lot of people, especially if they can get past the cost (which, imho is worth it from a focus and time point of view).
In this case, all of the fake cards were "name brands"

I think I got offered "Samsung", "Kingston" and "SanDisk" cards at roughly (but not exactly) the same pricing. Retail packaging was available at a small extra charge.
Hiring on their scale is generally unsolvable - anything goes.
But heavier than bone. And about 50% of all instances are distributed factories.
Not only that but a cheap, inexperienced dev can create negative value. Not just in the product that they're working on but your entire brand.

Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords. Aside: I'm sure that person is worth more now because they won't make such mistakes (again)!

Rant: Looking towards the future I want to know which ignorant fools are in charge of Microsoft's Active Directory product that is currently shipping with the same damned ignorant mistake (no salt). I mean, seriously guys: How can you allow the product to continue with such a blatant disregard for basic security?!

Microsoft is going to be the next LinkedIn if they don't fix it.
But can there be groups of humans without resorting to status-seeking? It appears to be worth it ( read: people still do it ).

The point of being in the in-group is being in the in-group, not the defense of some deep principle. If it's a sufficiently murderous in-group, then being in the in-group equates to staying alive.
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-open-source-Heroku-alter... has some more answers (I just added an answer). As of today, the list (in no particular order) is looking like: Convox, Flynn, Dies, Dokku, Tsuru, Apache Stratos, cloudify-cos, Openshift, etc
> Is there a reason projects like Flynn have not tackled it? Or is it just a question of time?

Like most useful production software, coming up with industrial-grade implementations is harder than it looks. The tricky part is picking the right basic metric.

CPU load is often a bit misleading.
It does, but it comes with deep tie-in to AWS as well.

But also, you don't typically use lambda to serve pages or a full application, more commonly it's used for specific processing tasks, individual endpoints, and generally code that can run standalone.
Because its quick, right?
Why we need a different container purely for apps
> Of course type checking can catch some problems.

Keep in mind, static types can also help performance, tooling (refactoring, cross-referencing, etc) and human understanding.

This is not an argument for or against static types; it is simply a longer list of what they can be useful for in the many situations.
Yes, my people also _loved_ Stalin under Russian occupation.
Oh man, keeping the flow laminar over all those transfer surfaces, and of course increasing the work because of the obstructions to flow...so many fun engineering problems!!
Interesting! I have somehow developed the opposite opinion. The phrase "to reason" is plain English and uncomplicated. Grok, by comparison, is arcane and to the uninitiated is semantically opaque. The latter strikes me as a more suitable vehicle for demonstrating pretension.
PHP isn't at much of a disadvantage - it has its own native JSON encode and decode functions. Granted, actually using javascript is better but it's not as if you have to import a library or write your own JSON parser.
Nice! This is a really interesting way to approach a job search.

I recall a few times in my career when I didn't like the technology choices being made at my current employer, which prompted me to look for new opportunities with the tools I did want to use.

There are a ton more things to consider about a new job, but the tools you will be asked to work with every day are certainly a factor.

This helps sort it out.
Are you looking for a mentor, advice, or a job? If you can prioritize among them, it will be clearer what you're looking for, who you should connect with, and how to present yourself.

Based on your online profile, you have a laundry list of experience. If you're interested in PM, you need to gear that experience toward it. Give me numbers of how your work impacted key metrics, show me how your designing thinking/user research skills in UX translate to customer development, tell me how you can wrangle a team to ship stuff that people want. You clearly know all this stuff from what you've read and learned but now you need to prove it to those looking.
Not very practical, is it? I think the process is fractal down to the basic fundamental tribe-size of 100 or so. The transaction costs of tribes of 100 interacting without a larger macro social network would be substantial.
Looking at Yahoo just now, at about 50 stories, 7 were strongly anti-Trump and there were 2 that involved Trump but weren't negative (and maybe even slightly positive). I'm seeing the opposite of a right-wing bias. No mentions of HRC.
FWIW, I got told what I was going to work on on my first day, by my new manager, when they picked me up for lunch. Before that, I didn't even know the PA. From what I can tell, that is standard practice for SREs, as SRE is very understaffed, so there is a lot of arguments and back-and-forth around where people are most needed.
Markhor (YC S15) is hiring an iOS developer to launch new product
San Francisco – Onsite only

At Markhor we are developing a new class of product that bring insight to everyday fitness. Yes it has something to do with shoes. We are combining wearable tech, easy-to-use mobile experience and meaningful insights to optimize everyday productivity. You will work with our small team to develop our consumer iOS application.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
Collaborate with our firmware team
Work closely with designers to build out intuitive user interfaces
Optimize the application to maximize performance

REQUIREMENTS:
Experience in building and shipping iOS app to the App Store
B.S. in computer science or software engineering or equivalent practical experience
Strong knowledge in Objective-C and various iOS frameworks, Swift experience a plus

TO APPLY:
Please send your resume and a note to founders@themarkhor.com.
I would add one other big negative in the language design: The automatic import of the entire SPL.

Back when I was a green web programmer, I loved this feature. After working with Python for a good many years, I now abhor it.
I can't tell you how much more "runtime state" exists in PHP than in say Java. In both cases you need to initialize some sort of security-aware context. Once you've eliminated parsing, disk i/o and compilation phases. You should be on pretty even ground of bytecode vs bytecode. Java has a Hotspot JIT, so it will probably win there. I think a JIT is coming to PHP as well since the architectural rework that went into PHP7.
I'm not completely disagreeing... I've worked on pipeline transformers in node where I exposed gc and ran it after each item in the pipeline was done. It would grow insane without it... likewise I can see that if you're transforming a lot of records for delivery in PHP it could bloat as well.

However, if you're handling requests well within a given memory threshold, it isn't always something you should worry about until it becomes a problem. In which case, you'll probably want to look at something like go, rust, erlang or others to handle improvements, or break off heavy parts into sub/micro-services.
People don't have enough to do.
That is a good point. I guess the move to Let's Encrypt is a change in mindset completely. Away from Marketing snake-oil to a simple solution to a technical issue.

EV certificates do not add additional security as far as I am aware, it's simply a measure of extended validation of the customer, which in my experience is only fluff.

So going with Let's Encrypt may as well do the full cycle and sell this free solution to non-technical people who believe EV provides additional value.

Hard sell... I know.
Part of the reason could be the tipping system. It is impossible to raise the price of the food in your restaurant without giving a raise to your waitstaff, since almost everyone tips a fixed percentage. So if you want to give a raise to your chef, you want to fund it with a price increase, but you can't do that without giving a raise to your waiters.
Since there are some Flynnsters hereabouts: do you run buildpacks unmodified? How do you deal with fully disconnected environments?

I work on Cloud Foundry buildpacks, several of which are downstream from Heroku's. So I'm professionally interested in seeing another perspective on how to drive them.
I'm noticing that you are asking a question, and then ask another question, put forward a straw man, and then say:

> With software development it's a little different

without having answered any questions with facts nor citing any references or even anecdotes to support the notion that there is a difference in the jobs or the impacts to the businesses in their respective industries.