skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yeah, closures are good.

we really do appear to be having two different discussions, Im neither claiming that PHP is 'better' than Python nor am I arguing against functional programming.

I am simply arguing that the most important thing in a project is the quality of the developers, not the language they chose; and that given a good developer and a choice between PHP and Python I would almost certainly find the relative language features so entirely unimportant that I would choose the language based on stupid things like what language the existing codebase is in, what language the developer preferred and had most experience in and how recently I had been frustrated by the languages in question.

OTOH, I am always willing to debate the relative importance of language features, so by all means lets go there.....

Closures in particular are a very powerful tool in async/multi-threaded environments, but in the stateless/sync environment of a web application environment, they collapse down to syntactical sugar, and solve nothing that cannot be solved in other ways.

The software industry has, by and large, been working around the absence of closures for years....I certainly wont argue that it is better because of it, but to claim that PHP has been seriously crippled by the absence of closures over the years is to entirely overlook and understate the multitude of other problems its users have had to overcome.
It's TechCrunch.
Other: Unitarian Universalist
Aung244804 စာမ်က္ႏွာ - Myanmar IT Development
On page 8 of that book Geoff Bennington says "It is, of course, impossible to write a book of this sort about Derrida."

And, then, of course, he goes on to do the impossible. This notion of "the impossible" is, in itself, a key concept in Derrida's thought, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

If you can't explain something, you don't understand it. If no-one can explain it, no-one understands it and it doesn't mean anything. A theory with no predictive power is useless.

I can explain it. Geoff Bennington can explain it. However: you have to meet us partway. You have to read the whole damn book, not just the Amazon previews.

Seriously: is that too much to ask?

Has anyone explained Derrida using words of four letters or less, without a single pun?)

Has anybody explained Kant, or Einstein, or Descartes or Newton or any other difficult thinker in words of four letters or less?

Is there any point attempting to understand this philosophy?

Yes.

Will it make me a better person?

Yes, in my experience. (It is largely about ethics, believe it or not.)

Will it enable me to organise society better?

To a certain extent, yes. And it will better help you understand why certain efforts to organise society are doomed to fail.

Will it help me understand the universe more fully?

Yes, definitely.

Or will it simply mean I can count myself part of an in-group that has no discernible external beliefs?

It has discernible external beliefs, I'm afraid. I hope that's not a deal-breaker for you.
If I tried to sync everything over my home DSL connection, software would have limited ability to make it seamless.
I would have loved to have done this when I planned to make my own game (purchased the graphics engine and tools), I just didnt have the right mind to get my head around the code base so quickly gave up. Its great something like this is being done.
Haskell 2010 Language Report
Getting started with Play Framework
June 23? You mean july? :)
BT union cancels strike ballot
Hire AND Train
This might help too: for really crap services (say, weightloss or the like), where people sign up and then pretty much never use the service, a typical average churn rate is 3 months. ie. it takes people 3 months on average to unsubscribe from a service they don't use.
Very interesting analysis.

On a sidenote, are there any alternatives to 23andme that are as good?
Prefix or Posthack
Agreed with businesses: once the charge on the CC is approved, they will be slow to remove it (because re-approving it can be though).
Thanks! From the 'try lisphp' page, I assumed that echo was built in.
We've got some open positions in Düsseldorf you should check out http://www.live.sipgate.de/jobs/positions
As a final question, what benefit could I gain from understanding Derrida? Is there an elevator pitch or value proposition?

I find Derrida to be a fascinating philosopher for several reasons. One, his thought has a profoundly ethical component (influenced by Levinas). Second, he questions many of the assumptions that other philosophers have taken for granted (in a way similar to Nietzsche). Third, he has a very subtle phenomenology which I personally find very compelling (i.e., it seems to aid my understanding of the world.)

Of course, your mileage may vary.

However, if a pure scientist says to me, "I can't explain it, but we're discovering something we think is interesting," I have more faith in her than a philosopher saying much the same thing, and I'm more happy for e.g. the government to fund her research and not the philosopher's. Is that wrong?

Obligatory joke-- College president, to the head of the physics department: "Why do you need such a big budget for equipment? Why can't you be like the mathematics department? all they ask for are pencils and wastebaskets. Or, better yet, like the philosophy department-- all they ask for are pencils..."
Last I looked, facebook (a website) has raised $836 million, twitter (a website) $160 million.
Repeat after me: it does NOT matter. It does NOT matter. It does NOT matter. Choose the one you are most comfortable with.
tread carefully, if that all seperates you from a competitor is "the" you could find your self in a not so fun situation.

When it comes to domains it is very hard to find a suitable one that has not already been taken, as someone who has been in the domain industry for several years I would say:

Keep the domain as simple as possible
Try to avoid words that are hard to spell
Try to avoid words that can be spelt different ways "Right" "Write" etc.

Those should be taken with a pinch of salt as its just not that simple, however when I come across domains just as "yachtrendezvoustahiti.com" you have to wonder if something simpler could have been found.
There is one factor which counts above all others in trying to understand Derrida: you need to have an intimate understanding of the work he is commenting upon.

Trying to read Derrida on, say, Condillac, is absolutely pointless if you haven't read the Condillac.

Fortunately, in the course of his career, Derrida read through a large swath of the philosophical corpus, so it should be pretty easy to find a work of his which comments on something you already know well.
Are you speaking out of experience or do you have some stats? It seems unlikely that people take at least 3 months to unsubscribe a service they never use.
Why do you perceive this "force" as coming from some aspect of Apple's culture? Shouldn't your offense be directed at the carrier?
I call strawman. It's not McCartney and Perelman, it's Chomsky and Continental Philosophy.
Out of experience with 2 large services. Can't share stats, sorry. It may seem unlikely, but it's true :) I'm talking average, many take up to 6 months. Now you know why there are so many ads for crappy services online :) ps: I didn't say "at least", I said "on average".
"I don't think any response provided here can properly demonstrate to him the value of a language like Python over a language like PHP. "

Oh, I entirely agree. The practical differences between them in a web application just aren't that important.
100% agree, I have an HP MediaSmart and am very happy. Small, attractive, and very quiet.

Setup was a breeze, plug it in, let it do the windows update thing, while still running pop in additional hard drives (4 bays total), configure them, done.

For video clients I have both the Asus O!Play and the WD HD Live, they both work great but lack search and content download features.

The Acer Aspire Revo running XBMC seems to be a very popular and affordable option for that. The UI is beautiful, downloads movie info and covers from IMDB, very slick.
Ask HN: My computer broke in china, what should i do?
I'm studying abroad in China for 8 weeks, and my old Apple Macbook bricked. The cheapest retail netbooks in china run for $500 where I am studying.

What should I do?

I am considering buying a netbook, what is a good international vendor who can mail it to me?

Should I trust alibaba.com?
Hey - travelling to the South Island at Xmas. Always been interested in Dunedin. seems like a cool university town: any tips?
Well I get all that, but when thefacebook.com was starting up, did facebook.com have a site with a similar goal? Or was it something else entirely unrelated? I guess that's the crux of what I'm getting at here.
What do you use as an HTPC (Hardware, Software)?
Okay, so he deliberately threw me by using a term in an in-group way in a book meant to explain things? Do you see how that is unhelpful? However, I put the book on my wishlist after reading the parts I could; obviously I need to read the whole thing to have a proper opinion.

http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html -- Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity (In Words of Four Letters or Less)

On the basis of your answers I shall read the Bennington suggested, but I must admit I'm not optimistic. Discernible external beliefs are not a deal-breaker; they are the point of the deal.

I would like to conclude there (feel free to have the last word; that is not an attempt to cut off the discussion on my terms, but merely to get on with some work :-) You have been somewhat persuasive and very civil in the face of my disagreement, thank you. Thank you also for your time, I owe you a beer/coffee (and by then maybe I can have done the reading and we can talk properly.)
Hm. Didn't cocaine get an order of magnitude cheaper a decade ago? And didn't it mostly wipe out inner-city drug violence? Seems I remember Freakonomics covering this.
Why not just buy one? They have the money.
I'd dispute the entire premise of the article - I have not heard anyone say that PDF is a legacy format. It's quite clearly the preferred format for putting physical documents into a digital format.
Thanks David! If this great article helps me get those extra 374,990 customers I've been after, I'm buying you a nice steak.
I'm glad that Lynx never got <blink>. I use it on a day-to-day basis!

Why? Well, I used to check the Internet too much while working. I discovered that Lynx can fetch news and not much else, so I decided to use it for my personal browsing at work. It's useful enough to ease my curiosity, and useless enough that I prefer working. Combined with a webpage-blocking browser extension, I can actually complete a decent amount of work during a day.

Thanks, Lynx!
I always assumed IBM or someone requested it as part of the bundled 3270 emulator.
This Is War: How USAID workers are trained for work and danger in Afghanistan
Just use what your team knows better. Period.

There are enough implementations of both languages in the real world (YouTube - Python, Yahoo/Facebook - PHP)
The Free Software Foundation agrees with this, too. That's why their #1 "High Priority Free Software Project(s)" is GNU PDF: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/index_html/#g...

The problem isn't with PDF itself, but more PDF viewers/creators are such a super-vast-minority behind a single company's product that it is hard to imagine it as anything other than a bad/doomed technology. But hopefully GNU PDF can change that (and Gnash too).
It brings the story to attention, just like HN does. TC does it with link + headline + text + discussion. HN does link + headline + discussion. I don't see a problem with that.

Edit: Why the down-votes?
Ah man, this was such a great and insightful and correct comment until this part -

> ...which contrasts with the slightly more laisse-faire economic approach in the US.

Nah, the USA hasn't been laissez-faire in money for a long time. Interest rates artificially low, lending based on political regulations, high ranking employees of major banks moving back and forth between government posts and high paying jobs at the major banks... nah, American currency/banks/Federal Reserve are incredibly government-managed and corrupt. Fiat currency + legal tender laws + direct election of Senate leading to short term thinking + deficit spending is legal and tolerated... well, that winds up somewhere, but it doesn't wind up laissez-faire.

Rest of the comment is good - what's interesting to me is that Japan got very little reconstruction money. Europe had the Marshall Plan go into effect, Japan had very little reconstruction money. It's a testament to the will and work ethic of the Japanese people how fast they rebuilt the economy and started prospering.

That said, I'm 100% with the rest of your comment aside from the idea that the American money/currency is run hands-off, very good comment. For anyone more curious, googling any of the terms in your comment would bring back some interesting results. I always thought it was fascinating that Germans were terrified of inflation and Americans were terrified of deflation, largely because of historical experiences in the years between WWI and WWII.
If the Zombie Apocalypse doesn't get us first...
Heroin was legal when first discovered, it was removed from the market because it's a lethal substance.

Care to cite a couple of sources for that? I thought it was due to being highly addictive with few medicinal benefits.
MythTV is awesome...my MythTV box from ~8 years ago was light years ahead in terms of features and UI than my cable companies (Shaw cable in Canada) PVR today.

Does anyone know why the software is so bad on cable boxes? I mean, it is just so incredibly bad, in so many ways, it seems like it has to be deliberate.
Hey! You wrote this story! So did the guy posting it. Seems a little hypocritical, him complaining about losing the byline - who cares? Its all him.
I like how that post had absolutely no relevant information, except for some vague description of an apparently in house alternative.
Nice clean design -- I like how you've cut out as many extraneous pages/requirements as possible.

A couple of typos on the about page (I worked as a writing tutor in college and since then can't seem to stop...):

HTML is valid to, so it won’t [too]

What that means that if you link [means is that]

Email (not the link, but the actual content, formatted and all. [no end paren]

you choose what do do with it. [to do]

That very first sentence is actually pretty awkward as well, but I'll let you mess with it as an exercise. ;)
The math of subscription services generally goes like this: acquiring a paying customer is going to cost you about 15-60$ each (for typical lifestyle services). So lifetime value needs to be more than that. Once you're live, you tweak those numbers, make acquisition more efficient and increase lifetime value.
What would make you switch from Facebook to Google Me?
> if Paul McCartney said that someone should explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to him, and that if they couldn't, it meant that it was bunk.

Sure, it's possible that Chomsky hasn't taken the time to truly understand Continental Philosophy or lacks the technical training to understand it even if someone were to explain it all to him.

But it's also possible that continental philosophy is just profound nonsense that thrives based on the following fallacy:

1. Profound stuff (general relativity, quantum mechanics, Poincare conjecture) is very often difficult to understand.

2. Continental philosophy is difficult to understand.

3. Hence, continental philosophy is profound stuff.

Frankly, applying the "looks like a duck, talks like a duck, walks like a duck" criteria, I feel it's more likely that continental philosophy doesn't qualify as a genuine area of human knowledge - it's all just nonsense. But it might serve some other important purpose (e.g., a form of harmless mental hashish that's genuinely pleasurable).

At any rate, pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is always good in any field.
And what do you mean by scalable and usable? :) Scalable in what sense? Usable by who?
I think it's worthwhile to get a following early on. It may be feedback from this early group that helps you pivot before launch.
> The main advantage to quicksort is that it's still the fastest average-case-in-practice of the common algorithms.

I don't think that's true if you average over the available distribution of _implementations_ in the wide. Almost all implementations do one to three of the "crimes" I mentioned above. And frankly, I've met too much real world cases that triggered an n^2 behaviour on an existing implementation to ever settle for anything with worse than n*log n worst case.

If you're looking for the fastest-in-both-theory-and-practice algorithm, that's TimSort, but it's not in place. The places _in practice_ where Quicksort is the right answer are few and far between. I haven't seen any in the last 10 years.
Google Patents Liquid-Cooled "Server Sandwich"
It really depends on the city you live in, what you're area of expertise is and if you're freelancing or looking for a "real" job.

I live in Berlin and I know Nokia is currently on a hiring-spree here (it's funny, because, the river is called Spree:) I know a lot of smaller companies in town I could ask who might need someone, again depending on what you do. Earlier this year I did some freelancing for the Telekom in Darmstadt, they have offices in Köln too.

Other than that you probably should be looking for jobs on these sites:

http://www.xing.com/
http://www.gulp.de/
http://www.projektwerk.de/
http://www.designerdock.de/
Do you have any sort of automated solution in place to calculate those stats for you on a running basis, or do you just manually re-calculate at set intervals?
I agree, personally I like domain hacks, they are creative and are interesting from a creative perspective.
The link will still point to this story tomorrow.

Honest question, do you know if each blurb on the front page of Woot has a permalink?
Ahh, thanks for the clarification. My late-night brain didn't comprehend that, clearly!
China’s top four social networks
[Album] Pussy Sisster - Pussy Sisster (2010) - wWw.NhoMaiNhe.Com
Nice article. I did write about the Play Framework once in my blog. Some good things to consider for Play:

- No maven, no deal with anything heavy - Play uses Python!

- Fun and joyful.

- No configuration to begin with.

- Routing is easy.

- Influenced by Django, Rails and Grails.

- Testing is easy and great.

And the most amazing thing for me on Play is, the Scala support is growing more and more so we will be able to use Play with Scala instead of some nonsense Scala web frameworks.
There are tons of iPhone 4 pictures, such as the gizmodo picture re-leaked onto thenextweb, etc.:

http://www.google.com/images?q=iphone+4&hl=en&safe=o...

The more popular results reflect a linking pattern that's from then (mostly linking to the curved Macbook Air style fake iPhone 4), rather than now (linking to the released phone).
Great post. I especially like points #3, #6, and most of all #5.
I've heard plenty of people say that PDF should become a legacy format. Maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years, but PDF is a pain in the ass to work with from a code point of view.
Android Testing: Using Pure Unit Tests
>It is, admittedly, both technically and philosophically complex. But at the most concrete level, the use of MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) type methods to iteratively ‘solve’ Bayesian networks, allow us - in certain cases - to make strong claims about causes from naturally observed data rather than from carefully randomized experiments.

I am not familiar with these techniques, but judging from past experience with statistical and modeling claims, they more likely just make it easier to get the "evidence" you want from whatever data sets you choose to massage.
map :W<cr> :w<cr>
map :Wq<cr> :wq<cr>

That hopefully helps.
If you know PHP and CodeIgniter well, and don't know Python very well, then it will take it longer to write in Python.

If you move to something like Tornado (python), Twisted (python) or node.js (javascript) then you might be able to get more performance out of your app, but really only if think moving to that level of complexity is necessary for you app.

In general, it's best to go with what you know. Yahoo! uses a lot of PHP as does Facebook. Since you mentioned CodeIgniter specifically, you're already well down the path of using a framework that allows you to write modular and reusable code with PHP.
Sorry, but the UK really can beat that. The NHS spent ~£12bn (approx $18bn US) on a computer system that the government eventually wanted to "scrap"! http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/pbr...
Constant Contact is a public company, there for they share stats in their annual report http://investor.constantcontact.com/common/download/download...

Some key stats. Their churn is ~2.5% and their cost of acquiring customer is (whopping!) $370

PS: planning to write a post analyzing all such open stats. Do you know any other public Internet companies?
Online Market Research Company  
Online market research company in India providing you a business platform with its financial, retail, pharma, IT market research reports you can use to full extent.
Looks like a nice cool tool - thanks!

I was looking more for already done sets rather than having to do my own, but this may certainly help develop my own faster.
I thought I was future-proofing myself a bit by buying a Griffin AirCurve. The AirCurve is an ear-trumpet kind of thing that acoustically amplifies the output from the iPhone's speaker. You wouldn't call it hi-fi, but it works surprisingly well.

I figured that the iPhone 4 would just require a different dock insert to hold the new shape firmly, but no dice: Apple have also swapped the positions of the speaker and microphone vs. their positions on previous iPhones.
Semi Finals Live Streaming Soccer World Cup 2010 | Watch Live Football Match
Germany vs Spain watch live football match in semi final world cup 2010.
"The AP just act like the dinosaur they are, no wonder they're worried about going extinct"

Yeah right, that is exactly how I also feel about AP.

http://exzorders.com/.
Worse option: letting the other guy go to war, and you don't. Its called surrender and can be worse.
This looks really cool. It uses Kilim, the lightweight threading library for java, that I hadn't heard of before:

http://github.com/kilim/kilim

I have been looking for something similar for C but have not been able to find anything.
Don't we all live a life of self-delusion? Most of us haven't seen through the fog yet; we're still fighting for nothing.
"I am simply arguing that the most important thing in a project is the quality of the developers, not the language they chose"

I agree with the first part, but I think the language choice is integral to just how good those good developers can be.

I don't believe for a minute that a great developer can develop in PHP without being seriously crippled by it.

Functional programming has a tremendous amount of value outside of async/multi-threaded environments that cannot simply be replaced by other means. There are real limits to the amount of modularity one can achieve without functional programming, and modularity is key to great programming. I'd point you again to this paper: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482797

The state and history of the software industry at large only demonstrates that the majority of software developers in key technical positions within the industry are and have been less than great.

But if your argument is that PHP is "good enough" given a bunch of average developers... well then, yes, probably. Certainly plenty of good software has been written in PHP. I'd just argue that with the right developers it's far less than optimal, and that the choice of language could easily be the difference between the success and failure of a complex project.