skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Use what you're good at. If you're good at neither, it's time to find another day job.
Physics major has a name for a really big number
> don't be surprised when people who take a complex discipline seriously are reluctant to engage with dismissive outsiders with an axe to grind and no real desire to engage.

Would you also consider Noam Chomsky (I refer to the link posted within this thread) to be a "dismissive outsiders with an axe to grind and no real desire to engage"? Could it be possible that they are reluctant to engage within anyone who questions their assertions?

Many times I've encountered people who seem to use techniques described in the article when trying to discuss social issues, and in my experience at least, when you ask them to explain what they have just said in a prior statement, the usual response is a change of subject, even though I am genuinely interested in understanding their point of view. They are more than happy to continue the conversation as long as it consists of them continually making assertions in obtuse language, and casually deflecting questions by changing the subject, but the moment you insist they explain something they just said, the conversation usually ends. In my experiences, anyways.

As interesting as I find the subject, I think Chomsky's got the right idea: "End of Reply, and (to be frank) of my personal interest in the matter, unless the obvious questions are answered."
I know of commercial software that uses a marquee - god knows how it is implemented but is really annoying. It's a service desk system - presumably it is there to deter people from submitting requests.
The first 'blink' I used was a MS-BASIC command on a Zilog-80 machine. Later I always loved Netscape for remembering me of those times.
The Americans also showed the Japanese how to build cars and motorbikes, and now Toyota is the biggest car manufacturer in the world, and Japanese manufacturers are leading innovators in automobile manufacturing. The Japanese focus was small, incremental improvements over time, whereas for decades the Western attitude was 'big-bang' progress, i.e. trying to do a lot of innovation all at once. James Dyson speaks a lot about this in his autobiography.

Japanese manufacturing concepts of kaizen (continuous improvement) and muda (waste), among others, were copied by the rest of the world. The Japanese got the concepts in the first place from American manufacturing processes during WWII, used to rush Sherman tanks and other mass produced military hardware into production.

Sticking with the Axis powers post-WWII, Germany now produces it cars like it produced it's WWII tanks - big, powerful and expensive. The Tiger tank, for example, was a fearsome machine for it's time - one German tank ace in a Tiger laid waste to over two dozen vehicles in a single afternoon. It's 88mm main cannon could easily kill inferior American Shermans at over a mile away.

It's interesting to note how well Germany's economy fared after WWII also. To this day, the German economy is managed by keeping inflation under 2-3% (if I remember correctly). This is as a result of the rampant inflation in the Weimar Republic - conditions that lead to Hitler's rise to power. Germany today dominates the ECB (European Central Bank) so that mindset is at the forefront Europe-wide also, which contrasts with the slightly more laisse-faire economic approach in the US.

Very funny how things work out, indeed. Also it's fascinating for the historical reasons for the way policy, culture and attitudes are today.
OnLive Works First Use Impressions
There's another online games store that deals with older games: www.gog.com aka Good Old Games. What's interesting is that it doesn't have DRM.
Phish or No Phish? (Verisign Quiz)
I usually type ld by accident...
I'd have to disagree with you here. In fact, my experience is almost exactly the opposite.

Django is incredibly easy to get going, and you can rewrite bits of it as you need to. It's reasonably easy to switch out the templating language if you need to, and I haven't had any problems like you describe with the ORM or admin app. For prototyping apps I wouldn't use anything else. I'm currently running with nginx/FastCGI and haven't seen any problems.

Pylons and SQLAlchemy, on the other hand, I found hideous - lots and lots of boilerplate, particularly when setting up models, weird tracebacks that had no relation to the original problem, poorly integrated bits - I basically couldn't populate databases from a unit test, then run a controller, then check the results, since SQLAlchemy would lose the connection after the controller.
"Can PHP do this?"

well, as you've pointed out yourself, yes it can.

"for years PHP has been lacking this, so the point stands."

Im sorry? I must be missing the point.
How does the presence (or absence) of a particular language feature prove or disprove the point that bkrausz made originally?

"..<snip>...it ignores the tremendous advantage that using good tools can provide."

not really. well, kind of.

so the thing is that if I take the things that (in my experience) work to make a project successful, and I squash them all up into a big ball, and then I take that ball and I split it up into two heaps....one heap consisting of the things that the developers brought to the project and one heap consisting of things that the language brought to the project...and I look closely at the relative sizes of those two heaps....then almost always the heap of things that the developers brings is a lot larger; so much larger in fact that in general the effect of the programming language can be ignored.

That is a pretty general statement, and there are clear cases where it is simply not true, but in general it is true, and I would particularly claim that in the case of a web application and choosing between PHP or Python, it absolutely is true.
In the hands of good developers either will solve the problem well, both will provide a good, readable and maintainable code base.
In the hands of an idiot, neither will be any good.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Consideratio....

Fascinating, thanks for sharing that. I hadn't seen it before.

It doesn't surprise me that different military branches had different proposed plans - that's common. I wonder how much sway the Army had at that point? I'm pretty sure the Navy generally had more authority in Pacific operations since so much of the fighting was naval-based. Also, a lot of infantry in the Pacific campaign was the U.S. Marine Corps, who worked a lot more closely with the Navy than the Army during that era.

That said, the Air Force was actually a branch of the Army at that point - I'm not sure if it was Army or Navy planes that were involved in the raids and bombing of Japan. Edit: The Enola Gay which bombed Hiroshima was an Army plane. Which doesn't entirely answer the question.

Was MacArthur in favor of Operation Downfall? Pretty sure Admiral Nimitz wasn't...

I keep looking up Wikipedia links trying to figure it out, but not really getting great answers:

> A unified command was deemed necessary for an invasion of Japan. Inter-service squabbling over who it should be—the U.S. Navy wanted Nimitz, while the U.S. Army wanted MacArthur—was so serious that it threatened to derail planning. Ultimately, the Navy partially conceded, and MacArthur was to have total command of all forces, if circumstances made it necessary

Just spent about 10 minutes reading through that link and it's not quite clear who drafted the plans for Operation Downfall and who its proponents were vs. the blockade route.

I hadn't seen read about Operation Downfall before - I still wonder how much it was an option vs. a serious a consideration if the Japanese hadn't surrendered. Fascinating stuff - thanks for sharing.
Audio too?
The downside of that is that it's much harder to find good PHP developers. There are an awful lot of awful developers who use PHP; less so with Python and other 'niche' languages.
I don't know how they end up with this price tag, but I have an idea where they could shave off a bit for the next austerity bill..
Err... They would simply use their billions to go legit? No damage, just making their business legal.

Yes, that is exactly what they will do. Read about the Kennedy family sometime.
I very much like the idea of producing webapps rather than iPhone apps in my business, and I think they could probably provide all the functionality I require.

For me the catch is monetisation. With the App Store, this is clear: I release paid apps. With webapps... Advertising seems viable, except that my apps need to work offline (and may solely be used in that way), which as far as I know scuppers the advertising approach. So what's the alternative? Set up a paywall and require users to login to get the webapp in the first place? That seems to defeat the point somewhat.

Anyone have bright ideas or links to clever thinking on the subject?
You are correct. Humanity will end far before the universe. It will not be call humanity anymore.
Some companies would agree to fire you on your demand, but it not very legal, so bigger one might not do it. You'll have to get good relation with your management to do it.

You can received unemployement help for 2 years, given that you worked enough before (it is roughly 70% of your salary, but decreasing over time ). You can also ask a part of that money up front, but that will cut your right.

There is also an interesting "autoentrepreneur" status that is nice if you want to boostrap something that allow you to be registered as a company but ask you minimal accounting, simplify registration and only tax you if you earn anything. It's important because company are taxed more than in the US.

Salaries are lower too (it's not very easy to accumulate 6mo/1year of cash in advance ), few peoples speak english, so you really need to speak french to start something in France.
Do you believe the reason they gave? I do.
Wooah. Now I have no interest myself in Buddhism etc. but I dont think:

in addition to the idea of reincarnation being offensive to the scientifically inclined

Is all that true.

I like to think us scientifically minded people are above being actually "offended" by such things!
Konami made iPhone versions of Love Plus so I think it is quite a bit of a stretch to call this the best quality virtual girl friend app.
Actually it is. I found an iphone 4 image:

http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/iphone4-giz.jpg

Compared to the google search which got none.
> I should point out that the author here is completely wrong when he writes "Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want...." This is egregiously incorrect. In fact, one of Derrida's main points is that we do not decide at all what the text says. (As an aside, decidability is actually a term of art within deconstruction, so the author's abuse of it here is particularly irksome. If he had say "figure out" instead of "decide" he'd have been less wrong on several counts.)

To me at least, it sounds like perhaps what you are talking about is legitimate, sincere deconstruction, whereas the author is talking (correctly, in my opinion) about an "evil twin" so to speak (ie: conservatives --> neo-conservatives).

>If he had say "figure out" instead of "decide"...

I think that statement illustrates the disconnect...."figuring out" is what should be done, but "deciding" is what is often actually done. To me it seems you are talking about the uncompromised (correctly implemented) theory, whereas he is talking about what the theory has typically become, in actual practice. If that makes any sense.
For Twitter, Rails was the technology they knew. They decided it wasn't the right tool for their needs. Scala is the tech they learned (and continue to learn) on the job. They even have a group blog detailing this process (http://gracelessfailures.com).
Smarter than to take everything in the most crassly literal way possible? I would hope so.

I don't much like the story, and I don't believe in reincarnation, but to suggest that serious philosophy cannot be contained in a story that involves reincarnation is a pretty shallow view. At any rate, the whole "learn to become a god" thing that's the ultimate crux of the story is much more closely affiliated with Mormonism than Buddhism or Hinduism as far as I know.
i think deconstruction is more often classified as a post-structuralist technique[1]. it has similarities to post-modernism beyond the 'post', but it is different.

[1]barry's intro to critical theory
http://books.google.com/books?id=SNy26bx7L5UC&printsec=f...
When I see a headline on hackernews saying "Real World Results" I expect a bit more than a single result with only some vague information on what was running and how long.

As for the wifi - it might be that a phone scanning for networks will use more power than a phone steadily connected to an AP in the next room.
This is like Dade County all over again.
If reaching out to other countries to make them feel good about their science is the main goal of NASA, the people leading NASA are either liars or fools.
Let me guess - \(get_global_var "HTTP_SERVER", $MyServer, $ENV\)
No public stats I can personally provide. But I have seen it vary wildly depending on the type of service. Businesses are generally slower to adopt a new service/tool, and once they are locked in can be apprehensive for change. Consumers can change on a whim if something better comes along.

Here are some interesting stats I found for Evernote: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/video-evernote-ceo-phil-lib...

Evernote has been pretty open in their stats over the course of their existence.
Terminal Tips and Tricks For Mac OS X
I really doubt there is a website business out there getting 2 dollars per page view.
i think its excellent.
This was widely-known and old even in 2004, when the article was posted.
If you've got great genes, it pays to be extrovert
BizSpark/WebSpark blow away any complaints or concerns, valid or not, of server or hosting costs as almost any valid, new/new-ish software startup should qualify.

On the other side of that, MySQL enterprise licensing is only marginally cheaper than SQL Server, and one might argue lacks features and rich toolsets to work with in the enterprise. And in the end, most web-based startups are really SaaS so yes, you really do need to be thinking in terms of enterprise, and minimizing annual cost of delivery and ownership/subscriber.
I'm happy that I'm developing my web apps with Python. I have used almost all Python web frameworks out there. So let me explain my experience.

Django - Until 1.2 Django was a total headache but with 1.2 it really is a great tool to develop web applications. No reason not to use it unless you feel something's missing. Django has an amazing community with very helpful people.

web2py - web2py lets you create apps very fast, it doesn't push you hard and you can build something in a very short time. However when things get complicated, you will want to quit web2py. I don't like its form helpers, I don't like its validation as the validation is unfortunately not per object but the input data and url routing is headache with web2py. Web2py also has a great community. All your questions will be answered in a short time.

turbogears - turbogears is a subset of pylons with sqlalchemy as orm and genshi as templating system. i don't like the @expose decorator. it's just not for me. provides many other tools by the way. TurboGears has a small but helpful community. SourceForge is using TurboGears.

werkzeug - now this is the framework of my choice. the endless freedom. it is only a skeleton which lets you dress your application onto it very easily. you can choose anything as your orm and templating system. provides a strong url routing mechanism. supports sessions, secure cookies and any other thing you may need. however i am not using werkzeug anymore as i don't like the way people act in #pocoo on freenode. this is the only reason i am not using werkzeug. they are ignorant and i don't like it.

Pylons - My favourite Python framework of all times. Flexible as much as it can be. Provides you the freedom you need for anything. I strongly recommend using Pylons. I am currently using Pylons and I'm very happy with it. Pylons is also used at some very popular web sites such as bittorrent.com, reddit.com, etc. It has a helpful community whenever you need.

Frameworks aside, how will using Python will help you?
* Very clean and beautiful code.
* Easy updating and maintaining the code.
* Easiness and laziness.
* Great set of libraries.
* Python for your mental health.

And I'd like to thank justin_vanw for the great sum. :)
Betting on smarter (or betting on dumber)
The number (as I'm sure you know) typically quoted in the media, in Canadian dollars, is $1 Billion dollars.

If you went out onto the street in Canada and did a survey with one question: "How many Million dollars are in a Billion dollars", what percentage of people would be able to answer that question correctly. I would guess well below 50%. Literally not knowing how much it actually cost is the only thing that would explain to me the public apathy....other than apathy about almost everything actually important, which is the simpler explanation.
Actually, older versions of PHP could do that, too, as long as you pass the function names as strings. $functionName() works fine in PHP < 5.3, though I'm not sure when it was introduced.
Im not clear what makes you think the OP is a non-technical person? The question he phrased was the exact question that he should have asked, what is unfortunate (but unsurprising, given the complexity of the answer) is that nobody seems to be answering it clearly.

He asked:
"How will it impact my webapp if it is written in Python and not PHP"

That is a fantastic question, and it deserves better responses than the 'language x sucks' ones it is mostly getting.

The simple fact that he asked the correct question gives me a great deal of faith that he is in fact technically inclined, technically able and has some development experience. The way in which it was phrased makes me believe that english is not his habitually spoken language.

He clearly does lack experience in using Python, and is (quite reasonably) hesitant about plunging into a different language without attempting to find out more about it.

"I'm advocating he choose the anti-PHP guy, slightly tongue-in-cheek, because given the limited amount of information presented, that choice gives him the best odds."

it really doesn't. some quite ridiculously stupid people are anti-PHP.

Given the information available, I would advocate that he use the language that the majority of people on his team are most familiar with. Nothing like having a team learn an entirely new language and associated design skills to bog down a project.
Incompetence does not always explain fuckups of that magnitude. Throw in equal amounts of conflicts of interest and corruption.
On page 8 of that book Geoff Bennington says "It is, of course, impossible to write a book of this sort about Derrida." (Unfortunately the conclusion of that thought is on the next page, which Amazon isn't showing me, but I'm assuming he means what he says here.)

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.

(As an aside, I had a look at some of Geoff Bennington's other freely accessible work and came across the gem "The end of communication is the end of communication." That's a clever pun, but was it really the best way to explain an obtuse philosophy that others regard as simply an edifice of clever puns and tricks, void of thought? Ballsy, but surely not the best way. Has anyone explained Derrida using words of four letters or less, without a single pun?)

I am wasting too much of my time, and yours, so my parting shot shall be this: Is there any point attempting to understand this philosophy? Will it make me a better person? Will it enable me to organise society better? Will it help me understand the universe more fully? Or will it simply mean I can count myself part of an in-group that has no discernible external beliefs?
see this post from a while ago too - "Erlang Doesn’t Fit The JVM": http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/Erlang_Doesnt_...
Thanks for your very civil, truth-seeking reply! I don't usually notice or remember usernames on HN but I've noticed that in your comments before.

I don't know much more about Operation Downfall that you won't have already come across, but there is one detail you'll be interested in - from the Wikipedia article on Purple Hearts:

"During World War II, nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the estimated casualties resulting from the planned Allied invasion of Japan...In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals in stock." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Heart
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You can do both, even using the same code base. Check out this site/app for example: http://jsway.se
Here are my numbers for S3stat. We don't have free accounts, though we do have a 30 day trial.

Visit to trial conversion: 3%
Trial to paid conversion: 26%
Average subscription length: 11.5 months
Average cancels per month: 2%

Over time, those last two numbers keep getting better, since there's more time passed for our first loyal customers to inflate the average subscription length, and there's more people on board to lessen the impact of a few people cancelling.

It's worth noting that you only need to calculate one of those last two numbers to know the expected lifetime value of a visit to your site. Until you asked the question, I had never actually calculated my churn rate as a percentage of active users.
Fairly hopeless. It's less about startups/business than it is about people becoming self-employed. I've tried it in various areas, from the shit to the affluent - always abysmal.
Yeah! I think porting nginx to JVM is the next big think? Anyone?
Does TechCrunch add anything to this story? Seems like we could have just linked to Woot.com instead of a page of quotes and a quip that TC doesn't talk about the AP.
Interesting stats. How long have you been running S3stat?
+1 I think it's the single colour scheme and Arial font.
Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand.

This is a patently unfair test. Without a doubt, someone with infinite patience could take the time to explain all this to Chomsky-- but the fact that he lacks the inclination to actually study Continental Philosophy, and there aren't any volunteers willing to take the time to spoon-feed it to him isn't a reflection on the subject matter.

As an analogy: imagine 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.
Did you notice that they were developed most powerful code-reviewing tools? That is an evolution of the pair-programming concept from an ortodox XP. ^_^