skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have much experience with PHP, so I don't hate it and curse the people who inflict it on me the way I curse, say, perl programmers. My complaints are basically: I tried it once and didn't like it. It was hard to write the abstractions I wanted and the results were buggy. It could just be me.

Several years ago I wrote a feature simultaneously in Python, Perl, and PHP. It was a fairly simple task-- retrieve a list of formatted strings, parse the data with regular expressions, and transform the 3-dimensional information into a 2-dimensional table.

In the python version, the regexp functions were ugly, but idiomatic and also separated into independent functions. The logic was clear and 3 years later it's still easy to understand what it's doing.

I can't find the perl version, but I remember having to use a retarded workaround because references weren't working as documented in one tiny (but essential) edge case. Basically I had to duplicate the entire program to handle two different cases. There is was probably some completely different strategy that would work better, but I didn't have three days to spend digging through perl docs to find it.

In the PHP version, I seem to have had some trouble using abstractions. The program is just one monolithic while loop with some comments. Also, I see some weird hacks in the PHP version and I don't remember why I had to use all of them. At one point I'm populating an array with empty values using 'array_fill()' and I see some temporary-looking variable names like $start_end, and there are a bunch of comparisons to arbitrary index values. For example $start_end[1] is 'start' and $start_end[2] is 'end'. There's none of this crap in the python version.

Ultimately I went with the PHP version. Because the rest of the app was already written in PHP it was far easier to deploy. A year later the feature broke for some reason and I never had the time to fix it.

So ultimately, I would probably tend to avoid PHP in the future because it doesn't seem to support my style of programming very well and I don't see many advantages to indoctrinating myself to its quirks.
Flaws are not always unintentional, but they can still be flaws. I think there is too much credit given to Apple when they choose poorly.
I think a major problem with 3D right now is that you don't really know what you're paying for. Are you getting a movie where some real effort was put into the 3D, or are you getting a half-assed version? The (increased) price is the same.
I'll take that over this comment:

"The other possible explanation is that it was not chance. The movie 'Signs' makes a good discussion of this point."
With so many different options, it makes me wonder if they could do a choose-your-own setup and pay by the core/memory/disk you select.
Thanks for the feedback. Yep, we'll make the content more general when we launch other platforms.

The 1-2-3 steps were supposed to reinforce the name but making the connection can be hard. I'll work on it.
Even when IO bound, you might want to spend less of that precious battery when you're not waiting. So even if your perceived speed doesn't change, the battery can tell the difference.
Quantitative Finance StackExchange Proposal
I like how it's broken out and a nice basic list of what is good and bad for a startup / hacker, but for most people won't it come down to cost? What they can comfortably and reasonably afford?

I have never been to California, but I want to check it out someday, possibly give a try as a place to live for a while. I quick googled apartments in Palo Alto because it sounded like the ideal location for me. The cheapest one I saw looked exactly like the place I have now but was > $1000 / month (counter tops, layout, size, etc). I'm currently paying $475 for one of the better 1 br here (Oklahoma). The most expensive I have seen is < $900 here for a 1 br in the newest upscale places with every little bill paid included.

So, unless the pay is significantly higher for the same work that I'm making here, I want to know how people deal with the cost of living in the areas provided in this link? Do you live paycheck to paycheck? Do you save much (I'm saving about 2/3 of my paycheck each month)? I wouldn't want to live in a rundown area with holes in the wall (I have lived in such a place) eating only ramen or the cheapest ground beef on discount from the local grocer. Maybe I just should not be looking at Palo Alto.

I will check these areas when I take some time off to travel out there and I will be doing that someday, hopefully not too far in the future.

I'm grateful to the OP for providing this link. Living out here in OK, having never visited CA/SanFran this provides a better overview of the different parts of the area you often read about on here from people.
Too much text on the landing page and the domain name (specially the 123) activated my anti-spam sense, which would have made me close the tab automatically if I hadn't remembered that it came from HN.
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Scandinavia?
I don't know why you got downvoted on that. I totally agree, my first impression was also 'cheap & spammy' ... something those annoying social media marketing experts on twitter would hawk.

Here's a blurred screenshot to get that 'First Impression' feeling, judge for yourself: http://i.imgur.com/med1t.png
Yes, of course. I wasn't holding you responsible. :)
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I'm not sure how the color scheme or domain is but the whole make money thing can be seen that away and we're staying aware of it. If you have any suggestions on how to improve it, I'd love to hear them. Thanks for clarifying.
I have to take it again :<
I don't think I ever had a me@domain.edu address in school. There was always an vestigial environment name in the middle (@eos.ncsu.edu and @titan.sfasu.edu)
I can see the support point of view: reduce the number of customers = reduced support burden. But a "Starter" plan could come with lower (or no) support commitments. There could also be disproportionately less events (i.e., $10 for
20k events vs $149 for 1m)

"a product so obviously unintended for you"
I guess this is the part which really annoyed me: until the pricing was announced, KISSmetrics was exactly what I needed and there was no indication that it wasn't being targeted at me (or any other small business). Most of the buzz I've read, and recommendations I've seen, were from other small businesses so I don't think I was alone in being surprised by their positioning.
Mix of array and hash types, combined with automatic type conversion has one very ugly gotcha: $x[1] === $x['1'].

However, other than that I don't have problems with PHP's "arrays".

I find ordered key-value datatype very useful in lots of situations — all kinds of mappings ordered by priority, queues where you can remove any item quickly, trees where order matters (e.g. stuff coming from XML).

Sometimes even in cases where order doesn't strictly matter, preserving order makes operations more predictable and results easier to compare (e.g. you can load ini file to PHP "array", edit and save, and it won't get shuffled).

It might be a matter of how you think about your data: whether you think of it as arrays and hashes and try to retrofit it in PHP, or whether you think of mapping it into PHP's peculiar "array" from the start.
Template feel to it? I have to say that's the first time I've heard that - I usually get compliments on the design.

Thanks for the feedback neverthless!
OP says you need to make a new decision worth $200 every month for KISSmetrics to be worthwile.

This isn't true, it suffices to at one point make a single decision that on average will make you $200 per month for the tool to have paid itself for ever thereafter. Or more likely, keep generating revenue. For many businesses (like retailers) this could entail improving the funnel by just a few conversions per month.

If you don't have a business with the potential to improve cashflow (or other business value) by $200+ per month from analytics, of course you're not within their target group.

The lesson KISSmetrics obviously have learned and are appliying is that if you are bootstrapping your company or project, you must identify and be brave enough to stay within a very specific customer demographic in order to succeed.
Oh, come on. This new iPhone display is supposed to be great, but it will look crappy next year.
Thanks for the clarification, that makes more sense.

I think you overestimate the difficulty in ranking for keywords for which many others already rank, though. For instance, my relatively new consulting website ranks on the front page for common words/phrases, like "phusion passenger," and it only has a PR3.

Your article states that PR3 is low enough, but I would say that if you have good in-page SEO, etc, you really need a PR1 or PR2 to get the effect you're talking about.
Why working on .NET with C# would hinder a start-up culture?

Product scalability? Is that important?
One thing I've found though - girls don't care about the money in the bank.

Wherever you are meeting girls, I want to go there.

My experience in an NJ bar a week or two ago: I was talking with a coder friend of mine about my job. This was a geeky conversation with words like "latency", "queues" and "atomic operations", as well as "lost $BIGNUM in half a second", rather than a manly conversation about "parachuting into darfur to deliver aid." A guido girl at the bar visibly perked up and came over to talk and asked if I was a trader within 5 minutes of conversation.

(Note: I don't have fuck you money, though my casual reaction to losing $BIGNUM might suggest I do.)
Except that Mixpanel have both a free and basic plan ($50) to cater to smaller sites. Thanks for pointing that out to me though... I'll have to investigate
is there something wrong with this?
Right, under enlightened Soviet rule your education in history and politics is wide-ranging and complete. I believe that.
centered around university, waverly, and bryant.

I know 365 Forest (condo building) would have been about $3k to add, since the fiber was in the basement.

There is a utilities guy at city hall who has maps, but I don't have the current ones (I last checked in 2008).

When I move back to SFBA next year, I am either getting a house with fiber in PA, or a condo with IP Networks fiber up in 8th/Folsom area of SoMA. 10GE for the win

It would be an interesting niche to work with landlords to wire up their properties, set up some colo space, and rent out house + cage/racks + fiber on a quarterly basis to startup teams. I'd much prefer a (really nice) house, shared with team, to a bunch of crappy apartments, a daily commute, and an office-building office. Although at that point, fixed wireless becomes an option too..

http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/depts/utl/news/details.asp?New...
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I don't get it. An array is a different beast, and this is a major annoyance that php misses proper arrays. When you define $array[10], you summon into existence $array[0] to $array[9]. This is an intended and expected side-effect...
C is a language, not an implementation. You can JIT C just like any other programming language.
I just checked the public transit, and it's about 1.5 hours (BART to Union City, then bus to Palo Alto). So that's also viable, I'd say.
It looks busy in general and instantly made me doubt the legality of your venture. I think you need to be less wordy, use less tech words, and use more whitespace and generally less cluttered. For a good similar layout, look up Github.com's plans and prices page.

Above example doesn't make me want to close the browser.
Non suspicious layout counts.

edit: I really like your idea and it looks worth exploring further.
The post is a bit faux-alarmist, but one point he makes I agree with: I wish there were some throttling controls; by throttling upspeed you actually get better downspeed, which doesn't seem possible with the Blizzard downloader, sadly.

And the firewall issue you mention.
Just to pick on the includes example, I think it's fair to point it out as a deficiency if there exist other languages and environments which enable/encourage/force you to get it right. It's not a defence that other languages also get it wrong.
Good question.

Nope. The blogger is getting 3 choices in their Settings pages where they specify the keywords they want to link to:

1) Brand names like Apple, Best Buy, etc.
2) Product names like Dell Laptop, etc.
3) Generic names like Indian flights.

Linking is going to occur automatically depending on the selection (this is an upcoming feature). We don't have keywords that are too generic to avoid the spammy look.

This is taking some time but we're also working on relating the keywords to the overall context of the post so only the relevant keywords are linked.
Apple removing links to Consumer Reports study from forums
This is a great point against living in NYC metro area. I doubt you'd suffer this in Boston (Academia seems to be the dominant life form), SFBA (tech; a trader would be a lot less sexy than the founder of a tech startup even pre-fu money), or Seattle or Portland (environmentalism? art? food?).
I agree with you here, but to be fair his post doesn't go down the "p2p == piracy == bad" route.
Digg is becoming Twitter - digg alpha screensots
> He doesn't like the lack of strict mode, but complains that E_ALL tells him too much; maybe it's telling him too much because he's not writing things correctly, just like 'use strict' would.

"use strict" makes compilation errors. E_ALL only does runtime errors. Both are useful, and having one is no excuse for missing the other.
I have spent more on Reddit (via this donation) than I have on print subscriptions (Wired and others) for the last 3 years.

Go figure...
pirate.ycombinator.com anyone?
...because its not social, not portable, very difficult to enjoy with a partner and rarely is. Because it can be force-fed from the Internet at tremendous speed, in a manner designed to feed addiction.

Again, I have no moral issue with porn. The moral problem is in aiding and abetting the cashing-in on addictive personalities, in feeding that addiction and in ensnaring more people, all for cash.
collector pauses brings up some discussions I've had with some friends - in essence, it's not something you want your platform to do when you're programming something like a game where you're pushing 60 frames a second + audio.

If you don't know what to look for you could end up looking for a long time.
I'm writing this as I go:

I hate having to log in to things to try them.

99% of the time I use a fake e-mail and junk password just to get past the barrier. If I like the service, then I rejoin with information I'm likely to remember.

Tried it with junk e-mail then realized you send an e-mail validation. Why? So annoying. Will attempt to re-register and use mailinator. Success, finally!

If I happened upon this site, I wouldn't be confident enough in what it does to ever create an account. Too much hassle to create an account for something that I have very little idea of what it does. It takes notes and lets me share them? I don't see the value.

Ok, I'm signed in... now I finally get to see wtf this thing does.

It's basically a way for me to create tiny discussions about stuff. Kind of neat... except for the fact that people are going to have to log in to comment and view any of my scribbles.

If you could make things more open by alleviating any need to log in, I might use it.
just the screenshots:

http://imgur.com/tsg0F&19nJY&Vo18d

http://imgur.com/tsg0F&19nJYl&Vo18d

http://imgur.com/tsg0F&19nJY&Vo18dl
This new cluster compute instance size is essentially a variation of the m2.4xlarge instance (2xX5550 Nehelem - 27ECUs) with the following changes:
1. Faster X5570 CPUs
2. 10G Network
3. HVM

I think the most noteworthy feature is the 10G Nic which is more conducive to clustering than the standard GigE Nic for other instance sizes. I'm not aware of any other public IaaS provider offering 10G network currently.

In terms of raw performance the x5570 will probably perform very well relative to other IaaS providers. EC2 is one of the few IaaS clouds that utilizes a heterogenous hardware environment to enable better scalability between instance sizes. Other providers like Rackspace Cloud use homogenous environments (Opteron 2374 in the case of Rackspace) and rely on Hypervisor CPU throttling to enable CPU scaling between different instance sizes. On the low end homogenous clouds tend to offer better value but are not well suited for HPC application on the high end (e.g. a 2GB Rackspace Cloud server kills an EC2 m1.small, but the largest 16GB instance lags far behind EC2 m2.* instances). In fact in some homogenous clouds CPU performance is fairly constant from small to larger sized instances (you are essentially just paying for more memory).

I recently wrote a blog post comparing CPU performance of 20 different IaaS providers including EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. In it I used a compilation of 19 different CPU related benchmarks to produce an ECU metric for about 150 different cloud server configurations:

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...
Would you say that's more or less noisy than the email chain that exchanged and integrated as many changes and additions?

A busy wave is noisy. But I think it can be quite an improvement over plain email.
I would appreciate it if people posting here would also tell us if they were low/middle/upper class before they got wealthy/wealthier.
I've been working on this for a year so I'm wayyyy too close to it - this feedback is helpful.

We definitely need to get rid of the make money text. If there's anything specific that lends to the cheap and spammy impression, please lmk. Thanks!
how choosing the correct domain name is one of the most important things to have a successfull concept

Nonsense. The name is amongst the least important bits of almost any product. It should obviously meet some basic criteria (be pronouncable..). Beyond that it's mostly bikeshedding, unless you're in one of the rare markets/situations where branding really matters.

Moreover the tool you mention seems to be horribly misleading. It gives me a green "70%" in domain availability for a name that has .com, .net, .org taken...
To be blunt, if someone knew of some advantage that was not generally known, why would they post about it online, instead of exploiting it themselves?
I couldn't disagree more. I think the mental conversation is just our idle language-processor following along as we think in other modes.

When learning from a textbook, there are those that need pictures to understand explanations. There are those that need the explanation, pictures are useless to them. I don't think they are necessarily thinking any differently, just entering the knowledge through different i/o ports.
The pay is significantly higher. But probably not enough to make up for the increased rent. Many people share, or live in studios.

But the climate is probably also better (warmer in the winter, cooler in the summer), so being cramped is less of an issue.
I like the idea. Only a small styling issue jumped out at me. For your Twitter feed in the lower right hand corner, long-ish Tweets seem to be overflowing out of the quote bubble (in Chrome at least).
I was in the KISSMetrics beta and will probably pay for it, without complaint. It is a pretty simple decision: am I likely to get 5% or more lift out of them? (Assuming a baseline of somewhere near $3,000 in sales a month.) Answer: yeah, based on my experience with funnel optimization, I think that is likely. I will also continue to recommend them to clients.

I yield to no one in empathizing with cash-strapped startups. However, the broader economy has many companies which do business on the Internet and which have actual money. Not "whine about the difference between $10/mo and $20/mo at their particular size" money, which the CrazyEgg team has probably seen more than I care to speculate. Not even "replace low-paying day job with sales" money. I'm talking "Have (teams of) full-time employees whose only job is to do analytics" money and "Pay $150 a day for the hotel room that their high-priced consultant stays at without batting an eye" money.

It makes a lot of sense, especially for a product which you're going to sell in a high touch fashion, to say "We're going to focus on that sort of customer. Folks who perceive $20 or so of value a month from their funnel optimization are welcome to check out our competitors."
didn't work for me :
ubuntu 64bit 10.04 w/ firefox
Irrelevant, we all know what he's talking about, and whether it's gcc, llvm or icc, his point stands.
Yep, I just answered this question via another comment. It looks like we should elaborate more on this on the homepage.

Thanks for the feedback!
I see that, thanks for the heads-up!
"I’d even argue that the main reason kernel code tends to be efficient is not because it’s written in C but because it’s written with parallelism and reentrancy in mind, by people who understand those issues."

With this arguing, isn't it reasonable to assume that a project Foo written in C or C++ is faster than an equivalent written in Java simply because the author writing project Foo in C/C++ likely understands performance by choosing C/C++ in the first place? (I am not saying anything about the performance of a certain language implementation)

The author also argues from a performance critical application perspective. What about desktop applications where perceived performance rather acts like a quality property? I know many people that shy away from using desktop Java and even .NET applications simply because they feel sluggish and waste memory. I don't care if the Java application is as fast in pure algorithmic performance.

If I can choose between using two equivalent C/C++ or Java/.NET applications I will choose the C/C++ application. I still think this is a good assumption.
Not sure, the best way to find out is to install a bunch of spammy applications and see what they do.
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> Further: SQL is not composable. If I have a fragment of SQL in my hand, there is no reasonable way to insert that into a larger expression.

This is really annoying. If I have a stored proc for getting data w/ 3 optional parameters for filtering it, I have to either use dynamic SQL (building the query by string concatenation), or have 8 different versions of the query for each combination of filter present/not present. The dynamic SQL part might not even work with bind parameters, because EXECUTE IMMEDIATE / sp_executesql cannot take a dynamic number of bind parameters (0 to 3 bind parameters, depending on the filter).

I have to wonder why none of the database vendors ever created a syntax-tree API for SQL queries. They have the parser right there, so why can't they do something like

q := PARSE(SELECT x, y, z FROM sometable);
q.ADD_CONDITION(PARSE(sometable.value = some_dynamic_value));
EXECUTE q;
I saw Avatar. Criticisms of the plot aside, I loved the 3D. I wanted to see it with my partner. But when I talked to her about it, she said that 3D films make her nauseous.

So now, it seems like every movie coming out that is possibly even worth seeing is in 3D. I can adjust to the experience, but my partner can't, and this is a problem because going to the movies is one of the few options we have for a quick date away from the house and baby.

Like Ebert, I'm fine with 3D as an option. But I hope it doesn't become the dominant form for decent movies. I'm hoping that the studios continue offering the alternate non-3D option for each movie they release.