skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It often seems like even at the cost of getting inferior work-product, many customers have come to believe that cheap pastries are a moral principle."

I think that's the gist of the issue. People want a $5 snack, not a $35 artisanal free-range organic pastry dining experience.
Pinterest Showing It Can Compete with Facebook, Twitter
Last time I got that question, I started with nerve impulses.
This sounds like to me you are mistaking the popularity of PHP with the proficiency of the developers. PHP has been around a long time and is used by lots of people. Even if PHP projects only have a 1% success rate and haskell projects have a 20% success rate, guess which one will have more "successful projects".
That's exactly what happened to me. I was stuck in embedded systems world right out of college and then one day took interview with Google, they were asking me questions clearly looking to hear "MVC" in my answer but I just didn't know it back then...
Knox: A service for storing and rotation of secrets, keys, and passwords
Beta chrome as well. Stable chrome shows revocation if you click into details; beta marks the cert as revoked.
I was unaware finance people didn't operate like this.
I'll offer an alternate hypothesis.

Some companies are succeeding in spite of php. There are many, many users of php, and we'd expect that there would be considerable variance, with some users doing awful (no traction, buggy sites, etc) and some hitting home runs (facebook). Because it's such a popular language, it will have users across this entire spectrum.

It's easy to cherry-pick the winners and miss all of the tremendous losers who picked php and got nothing for it.
They probably both ripped something else off then.

Hey, AI, who was the first author of those words? Email me, when you wake up. Thanks.
Would that information extend our current estimation of heat death of the universe?
Who actually owns the Symbolics IP these days? I still wonder if it would be possible to put a 3600 on a chip.
So… someone care to explain to me where I'm going egregiously wrong, apparently? Because, at least on my machine with the code I spewed out quickly, the Kerningham way of counting bits is ~6x slower than a lookup table (including generating the table itself).

http://sprunge.us/IIEH

The Kerningham way code seems faster for very sparse arrays (i.e. only one bit set per uint16), but slower otherwise.
The most beautiful and elegant part of coding is the logic, Not how to use a for loop. Anything question that can be answered with google should be forbid from a interview test. show him a method, ask him how he can improve the performance. ask him a opinion based question on OO design.

if you hiring a house builder u would not ask him what a brick looks like right?
because hungry?
I am well aware of where SLIME's inspiration comes from.

As for IDEs, I have a marked distaste for special purpose tools: I want to be able to use on tool to edit all text. And not all IDEs are good: IntelliJ is pretty rubbish (although that's more to do with Java than IJ itself...)

Emacs's limitations tend to line up with the length you can go before you start becoming a special purpose tool, tightly tied to your environment, or the point at which the Unix model doesn't really work, and you're going to have to go build your own little world (like Smalltalk did). They certainly aren't perfect, and could go a bit farther (something work is being done on, last I checked), but it usually works well enough, and it's so extensible, and has had so many extensions written for it, that it can beat just about any other general purpose editor, and sometimes even some of the special purpose ones.
But they appear to be changed in subtle ways from what's listed on other sites. For example, googling for: Google SRE interview questions inode

returns a few hits, including:

https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Linux-system-call-for-in...

which lists the question as "system call for inode data" - which is importantly different from a system call to return an actual inode.

This post says something similar: http://gregbo.livejournal.com/182506.html

"There were some questions I just didn't remember the answers to, such as "What system call gives all the information about an inode?" and "What are the fields in an inode?""

(Argh, the blog post is down, so I can't compare some of the others, but several of them seemed to have been changed in ways that made the question itself seem wrong.)

((Thanks to leetrout below for bopping me on the head with the google cache. Next bit added thanks to said bop.))

Another one: The blog post lists "what is the name of the KILL signal?", but googling for: google sre interview questions kill signal

turns up this post on glassdoor: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/site-reliability-enginee...

Which lists the question as "What signal does the "kill" command send by default?"

That matches much more the answer SIGTERM that the interviewer was described as insisting on.

That suggests a few likely possibilities: (a) The interviewer misread the questions; (b) There was a horrible communication failure between the interviewer and the interviewee; (c) The interviewee failed to actually listen to the questions before answering.

I have no information with which to assign weights to those possibilities, but all of them seem more likely than "the interview questions themselves are actually this horrible" (they're not as broken as the blog post made them out to be. After writing this, I looked.)
People that have that mentality, is like:

- You sit in a dining table with 50 different utensils. White wine glass, red wine glass, water cup, salad fork, dinner fork, dinner knife, teaspoon, soup spoon, bread plate with knife...

- When the food is served, you take the food, drop it on the floor, eat it with your face (not even using your hands).

"get shit done"... use spoon as a knife and knife as a fork, or try to sniff your food through your nose instead of eating it.
I definitely recommend using HTTPS on this site. I would rather not have all of my calls logged on a company server somewhere (especially if someone works at a company that cares about this sort of thing)
Well it certainly isn't imperative!
What do you consider its cohort to be? PHP was the first language on my radar that didn't depend on CGI.
> But suddenly because you are an "engineer" this is acceptable?

No, it's acceptable precisely because you aren't an engineer.

We software engineers in the US are not bound by a formal code of ethics like more traditional engineering disciplines. We're not required to invest a certain amount of effort in the security or accessibility or maintainability implications of our work. And, most importantly, we are not legally responsible -- independent of our employers -- for defects in our product that arise from incompetence or otherwise failing to follow best practices.

So, you're wrong and your parent is right. He's not independently responsible for his work, and he has no formal ethical obligations prior to his employment contract.
I do think certain languages are more conducive to the "just write it quick" mindset. I find it easier to enter this mindset when I write a bash script.
A few years ago I lived in Shanghai, and it was always fun to stop by the black markets to check out the fake iPhones and Apple gadgets that they were selling.

It was amazing how close they were to copying a real iPhone in terms of the hardware design, but it was always funny to see them run a version of Android. They were selling them for $10 a pop as well. It's incredible to check out these electronic markets in China and see the effort that goes into these fakes.
> so I guess I get to do that this weekend

Why not wait until you encounter a problem that Flynn solves and Dokku doesn't?
There are a number of successful startups and very large companies using Haskell. It's understandable why it isn't a common choice, of course; the potential employee base is fairly small.
https://m.youtube.com/user/1kingja

Jamie King

His series on C# is best I have seen. He also covers other topics and is very good teacher, lot of examples and is not afraid to go low level to explain things.
FreeTSA Trusted Timestamping
"These days"? It's been spelled that way for nearly 100 years.

> Spelled out as okeh, 1919, by Woodrow Wilson, on assumption that it represented Choctaw okeh "it is so" (a theory which lacks historical documentation); this was ousted quickly by okay after the appearance of that form in 1929.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=okay
> Except for, you know, when you don't want to reinitialize everything everytime someone makes a new request. There are tons of things that you only need to run once.

I mean, you're not reinitializing it, and it's not exactly slow. And when your application starts scaling across many instances, many zones, many servers, you can have more faith that each request runs independently and there are no runaway processes to worry about on a single one of your random servers somewhere.

> where I'd almost have to visit every branch of code when I alter something because of it's many weird behaviours

I'm not really sure what you mean by that. Write a method, write tests for that method. Just because PHP has weird type coercion issues doesn't mean you can't be diligent about the types that you use. And of course tools like PhpStorm understand docblocks, annotations and PHP types and classes and basically does the same thing that a compiler does, it'll show you big honking type errors if you ask it to, it'll even stop you from committing broken code if you use that option.

> Sure, a lot of people have done a lot of quite cool projects in PHP, but I would much more benefit that to the lower barrier to entry

I don't know about that. Low barrier to entry gets you a lot of crummy projects. In my experience PHP is a lot easier to manage and maintain in production, and that's a huge advantage to companies and products with small teams.
I've certainly given this plenty of thought. The idea of alcohol slowing my mind down is only appealing in social situations and I've never found drinking in and of itself to be enjoyable. I consider it a "social enhancement" -- and of course, there's certainly a point where it becomes a hinderance.

Interestingly enough, I've definitely found myself in the same social state without alcohol on occasion, but alcohol is the only method I know of that can reliably induce it. It's definitely a crutch I would love to discard but at the moment there's no replacement.
The system now used to serve GoDaddy's Website Builder content is written in node, deployed to clusters behind load balancers, and from there connecting to Cassandra clusters for the data... iirc, the average turn around time for a given request (including dynamic ones) is less than 12ms from the node server receiving the request to delivering the response, under a load of many millions of requests per second to the system.

Disclosure, I worked at GD in Website Builder when this was being developed, but haven't been there for over 2 years now.
Selenium 3.0: Out Now
I've been doing consulting for several years now, as well as a MSc thesis that involved me looking at a number of open source codebases. I am generally in the "PHP is garbage" camp, but I keep hearing people say that nice codebases in PHP are possible. I've never seen one, but I am perpetually open to the idea that they exist.

Does anyone have a good example of an open-source PHP project that will enlighten me?
I answered in other thread but my Atik 460 cooled ccd fan doesn't introduce any vibrations.

It's a high quality fan, and it's hard for a 5g fan to introduce vibrations in a 100kg+ mount+telescope setup.
Finance has a bad rep, but there are actually lots of rules and regs surrounding ethics in finance and a practitioner can easily end up with massive fines or in jail for failing to follow those rules. Even if his boss told him to do it.

Those rules may not be the right ones and they may not be enforced well enough, but there's at least some nominal level of assumed professional responsibility.
In my experience code examples as documentation are far more common than actual documentation (e.g. guides, user manuals), but perhaps I just haven't worked in a language where the opposite is true.
Offered without comment:

The site has been flaky, if not down, for hours now.
Big vSphere shops with large investments in vSphere should stay in their private datacenters. It's not worth migrating everything.

If they want to innovate. They can move to IBM SoftLayer + VmWare on top, which is allegedly a solid offering, while keeping their ways of doing things.
> do big companies actually ask stupid questions I can google

Well, he was interviewing _for_ google. Maybe they wrote up the test before google was online and forgot to update it.
I like to call myself a "biztech" entrepreneur and these are the reasons I stick with PHP. Specifically using Yii2 I've been able to whip up MVP's and simply just focus on getting traction. In my experience that is all that matters for a startup.
Good luck with the out-of-memory handling. From personal experience, that's easier said than done.
Not so; as you can see in my other comment's link, we can cite OK about 90 years before we can cite "okay", and more reliably than that we can cite the alternative spelling "okeh" to 1919, which establishes pretty well that "okay" was not standard then.
The difference between Siri and Google Now is the real downfall of iPhone (at least for me). I have enough comfort level with Google Now today that I feel comfortable just flinging any question at it when I'm in hands-free mode (say, when driving) and expect a useful answer of some sort. Trying Siri on friend's or colleagues phones, it's always a frustrating experience.

And this doesn't even include the automatic actions taken by Google Now. Alerting me about travel times, flight delays, sports scores etc. etc. without even being asked.

Ultimately, in Google's vision, the phones are rapidly becoming just a tiny window (no Microsoft.. not you), into all the knowledge and power that actually resides on the cloud. Not so much for Apple, whose core competency is, and has always been, in hardware design and supply chain management.
Fair enough. And it is irritating, I won't lie. We're too perf-obsessed for our own good. But complaining about it, or condescending the way many do, won't do any good: Either you're preaching to the choir, or you're irritating people, thus making them less likely to listen to you (sometimes both in one person, like me. But then, I took a while to come around on a lot of this stuff).

If you want a future, build it. If you're already doing it, keep doing so, and find ways to win people over, not alienate them.

By the way, almost none of this is aimed directly at you...
Hybrid cloud where you need to move or scale infrastructure into AWS from your on-prem VMware environment would probably qualify.
Precisely. This is classic base rate fallacy. If tons of people use PHP because PHP devs are cheap, there are bound to be a ton of successes despite the fact that it's a horrible technology in many respects.
Peltier cooling or heating does require a fan.
The peltier cell only moves heat from on side to the other side. Then, you still have to remove the heat somehow (heat doesn't simply dissapear) that's why most peltier setups have fans.
lol, site down. nice scale
I think his main issue is that the cache has to operate outside of the application process, adding overhead. Languages with shared state can have much simpler and more efficient caching, no io, no de/serialisation.
"Grok" is good. Perhaps it's that it sounds less pretentious, somehow?
Consider that people instinctively believe that the top of the government -- or at least the head of their tribe -- is more or less blameless. ("The good Tsar" and all that.) With a king or queen with limited powers, that halo lands somewhere where it can't do much harm; the head of state has limited powers, and the head of government (Prime Minister, Chancellor, etc.) can be justly evaluated, and despised if necessary. But if you have a president, dictator, unconstitutional monarch, or the like, the halo attaches to them, and it can do a lot of damage; have you tried talking with a devout Republican about Guantanamo Bay lately?
Really? Considering how many bodies orbit our Sun, I would have thought 5-10 would be a good average.
It is also a ridiculously dogmatic question. Many people believe into a fallacy that static typing makes safer programs, for example, and expect that somewhere in the answer.
lol, site down
nice engineering work!
> The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

They're cattle not pets.
(/semi-sarcastic)
Not for nothing has "demagogue" been in use for hundreds of years...
Sure. But that doesn't really address the problem, just makes it smaller. You still need to reinstantiate a lot of runtime state.
What's the point about asking untestable questions? You might as well become a theoretical physicist or a priest.
Because the connection to a 180-year-old fad for misspelling "all correct" is so obscure and non-obvious that it was lost long ago? Do you think we should be capitalizing LASER, too?
...Well, you do. And so do many other Lispers, for that matter. IIRC, I've been guilty of it myself.
The same pressure exists when you go to a cafe where you are expected to drink coffee. I don't like coffee, and I would rather not acquire a caffeine habit like most adults have, so I just drink steamed milk instead. It's pretty much the same thing anyway. Of course people will comment about how it makes me look weird, weak, etc. and insinuate that my business meetings would be more favorable if I drank coffee like I'm supposed to, like a man, etc.

Anyway, I used to not drink alcohol either. I would go to parties and everyone would drink but me and it would be pretty boring. I'd try to start intelligent conversation but it's pretty hard for that to happen in a large group environment. I would always have this feeling that I wasn't being productive or doing anything important.

Now I drink a bit, and it dulls me enough to just put on a happy face and enjoy random company. I become less goal-oriented, more harmless. People respond positively to it. It's like a form of self-handicapping, making everyone more harmless and approachable, which explains why people get so uncomfortable if you don't participate.

I don't even always have to drink, though, since I can just act like I've been drinking now. I still don't like the taste of hard alcohol, but some drinks taste good, like Bailey's Irish Cream or Mike's Hard Lemonade, or a Pina Colada or a White Russian or an Amaretto Sour.
And here's Knopfler playing Dylan's take on a classic Scottish folk tune (The Parting Glass)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fKszPYmj7s
/var/log
This is optional, and the main benefit of this is to find bugs in the code. It especially helps to port code from Python 2 to Python 3.

I used typing with PyCharm for one of my project and it helped me to find several bugs.
Pyramid is the third party I mentioned in my post. It is not a Microsoft product, as I mentioned in my post.

Pyramid offers .pbix file hosting and web rendering. It does not offer the Power BI portal that is a cloud offering from Microsoft. There is a big difference between these things.
So on the surface, this is essentially just a library that implements an abstract interface to a bunch of "cloud services", and then provides implementations of those abstractions for some of the actual cloud services.

It adds API tracking, so presumably there is some connection back to CloudRail. What happens if CloudRail goes down or is responding slowly or the connection is blocked? Does the library still work?

Seeing as it's also only a library, if someone stops paying, does it continue to function? Obviously if the upstream provider(s) change their APIs in a backwards-incompatible way, it would break, which is no different than if you use the provider directly. It seems like what you're really paying for here is the work done to build the library, the updates (and monitoring for need to update), API tracking service, and support. You're not actually using CloudRail's systems for the connection, so is there a license check that disables the library if the CloudRail account goes dead?

The nature of this abstraction also means lowest common denominator. The use of "interfaces" over top is a good way to handle this, but could also get messy. When you have a certain function that is only available on one provider, or is not available on only one of several providers, how do you decide when to create a new interface vs not support that function vs implement it as a "throw not implemented error" (or do you have any never do that)?
I think there is a needless air of elitism especially here that can only come when people take themselves too seriously, seek validation for their choices, and are always on 'display'. This is also now fuelling a full scale culture of complexity as nobody wants to do things simply lest they be judged as 'unsophisticated' and lose career and other opportunities.

This cannot lead to real conversations or good software. There are far too many naysayers always eager to jump in with their 2 bits of negativity with the same cliched talk points and links most of whom I am sure would never be seen near php and may not even have used it.

The criticism goes silent when HN favourites like Slack show up on discussion. Ignoring the sheer number of high traffic websites and successful startups using PHP is just another way to deny it its due.

Most PHP apps are a breeze to install and use compared to just about any Ruby or Node app. Try installing Discourse to understand just how user hostile it has become. The respect for users and simplicity comes through in PHP. NPM and Ruby with their dependency hell expect a full dev environment even on user machines and nobody thinks this is ridiculous. There is no denying PHP warts but Node, Ruby and Python I think have their fair share of issues.

I really do like Python but for a web project that needs to scale and not get mired in other issues I would choose PHP every single time. For a library or SAAS app maybe, but for an installable app I would never expose users to the Ruby or Node ecosystem.
Here's the issue tracking this: https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/3375
> The superior technology is rarely the "winner"

True dat. Unfortunately, as Theo de Raadt once said:

"In some industry markets, high quality can be tied to making more money, but I am sure by now all of us know the computer industry is not like that."

I think the only thing we can do is follow the trend. This whole industry is not perfect anyway.
> the "trivia" interview at Palantir ... Seemed like a big red flag at the time.

Besides the bigger red flag that it was Palantir, you mean.
The toilet example: explaining mutexes vs. semaphores
FWIW PhpStorm handles property type hints via docblock annotations and it works quite well, I've found myself not truly caring if the language enforces it as long as my IDE does.
This is exactly what mypy allows, actually! (Except for speedups -- types currently have no effect on runtime behavior, and it turns out they wouldn't make a big difference anyway.) The hybrid type system concept is called "gradual typing", and it's actually powered by some somewhat-recent developments in programming language theory. See this seminal paper by Jeremy Siek in 2006 if you're interested in the details: http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/13-siek.pdf

[Source: I'm a mypy core developer.]
My bad. I didn't get that you were talking about the built-in vSphere HA. This thing is truly amazing =)

I thought it was the usual complain about AWS instances dying and needing to be replaced on regular basis. That thing is a myth. An instances can run for years without any issues, if noone stops it manually.