skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is very true. Hopefully Yahoo's new Open initiative will help them to gain visibility and search market share.
As much as people bag on Techcrunch, with many times said bagging being justified, I find that it's one of my main sources for startup news. They tend to cover a lot of startups that I wouldn't hear otherwise from other sources, probably runner up being Mashable.

You guys have to remember that they are writers, so it's in their nature to write stuff that's interesting and conspiratorial, granted this can come at the price of accuracy, but that's where the community here can filter and chime in.

But inaccuracies of specifics aside, I still think it's a great source.
Ask YC: Software developers at Apple?
Apple gets so much great attention for its hardware, design, vision, taste, etc, but I was wondering what it's like there for software developers. They write OSX, embedded (iPod, etc), applications, utilities, etc that get lots of acclaim, but you never really hear about them. Does anyone know Apple hackers, what it's like, if it's a sought-after job (I'm sick of hearing about how everyone wants to work at Google and Facebook) or just an option, etc.
More room? Is there some submission/day limit I'm not aware of?

It might be that most read TC, and it might also be true that most read it through here.
I like Techcrunch. I can't keep up with it though, they just publish so many articles, and I don't have time for all of them.

I count on Hacker News, Reddit, etc. to tell me which ones are worth the read, so I vote no.
We do a lot of work in PHP, but wouldn't even consider it if it wasn't for clean MVC frameworks like Code Igniter.

To be honest, it doesn't feel much like PHP on the average bit of coding. It feels like a "real" language most of the time because of the framework. They have one of the best user guides I've ever run into (click Table of Contents at top):
http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/
NSFW? I'm not familiar with the term (yes I could google it but perhaps you could enlighten those of us who aren't, so we don't all have to.)
No, but if you're using Python or Ruby at least you won't need framework features that work around problems with your core language.

My point about using a framework wasn't to knock PHP; it was more a piece of advice - "if you do use it, you'll need to be aware of this".
I occasionally skim TC to find articles about photo sharing, since that's related to my startup and possibly not as interesting for other news.yc readers. I mostly find interesting non-photo-sharing TC articles by seeing them rise up on news.yc.
Yeah, it's perfect for your little side projects that will never grow or have lots of traffic. You know, like Facebook.
Not to take a stand, just FYI: PHP5 has built-in iterator support now and PHP 5.3 includes namespace support as well (TBR this month).
Yes. I like the unique interesting stuff Hacker News aggregates. Techcrunch is like fast food these days.
Sure, but the evidence I cited above does not seem to support that.
I'm finishing a big project on cakephp 1.1, this framework is great. But if you are starting something new - go straight to cakephp 1.2
It takes some time to go throw the learning curve, but it worth it.
Not Safe For Work, i.e., not suitable for looking at while at work.
No please. The comments here on TC articles is very interesting. The comments on TC often are trolling and add no value.
It's a high stress, demanding job. Great work is usually rewarded, but Apple does have its politics. Talented engineers I know are well rewarded and recognized internally, but other engineers have been shafted due to politics or the bozo-ness of their particular department or team.
We reviewed both Cake and CI and when it came down to it, CI won us over with one of the best user guides for any language framework (PHP or otherwise).

I haven't seen what Cake is doing lately, but I have nothing but good things to say about CI.
Tcl's C API is pretty nice, especially for something that's been around a long time.
Remember that, unlike modern copyright and all trademarks, patents still expire. You get 17 to 20 years. If Newton had patented calculus... the patent would have expired centuries ago.

So let's try an alternative view of Intellectual Ventures: They perform the valuable service of donating piles and piles of inventions to the world's stock of prior art. Each donation takes twenty years to mature, of course, but after that it's available to be developed into a product without any patent worries, because the patent will have already been filed and allowed to expire. If one of their ideas looks particularly great and you don't want to have to wait twenty years, you can get an early start just by paying them a royalty.

This, of course, is the original purpose and spirit of the patent laws. And, though patents are broken in various ways right now, that purpose is still alive -- especially relative to the terrible situation with copyright law, which is nigh-100% broken thanks to the Disney Corporation and its pet lawmakers.
Absolutely, when project is in progress it's easier for new developers to join the team. Takes less time to understand the system.
I build absolutely everything on the top of PHP and the WACT framework. The latter ensures that my code stays maintainable and well-organized. It also emphasizes the use of design patterns. I'd never switch to anything else when it comes to web development and I'd have left the industry if there was no WACT. That's why I became one of its core contributors.
Well, we have used PHP extensively until now. We have gotten more disciplined in designing code, compartmentalizing it into classes, documenting the code etc.

However, I recently read an article on YC about how many startups go through a phase debating about which language an application should be built on. We did not give this much thought as we saw a few prominent websites like facebook use PHP and we thought PHP seemed to be a pretty scalable language. Plus, with support for OOP (as of PHP 5), PHP seemed to be a pretty good choice.

I am interested in evaluating if we made the right decision
We tried Mosso out for a while about a year and a half ago, we were not impressed - frequents outages and performance issues. Also, MySQL DB connectivity often dropped. They responded relatively quickly but outages were too frequent to justify staying with them.
Don't bite the hand that feeds you. I know that some people find Mr Arrington very annoying etc, but a lot of people read TC and he does generate a lot of traffic towards the target, even if what he writes isn't nice.
PHP is the lazy man language. Sure, its messy and has bad convention. It gives you bad habits unless you use a framework...

But then of course we should all take a step back and realize that Facebook is built on PHP, haha.
Open source distributed Twitter - No f-ing way.

The open source part is fine, its the distributed part that would never work. I don't think people realize the SMS infrastructure/expenditure needed to pull off something like Twitter.

Their 5 digit short code costs (at least) $1k/month in the US. Twitter has these in multiple countries. Each received message costs approx. $.03 and each sent message costs approx. $.05. Added up over 30mil. messages per month (avg. of $.04 per msg.) = $1.2mil. Twitter is almost certainly getting a better rate, but their monthly messaging expenditure is certainly multiples of $100k.

For those of you saying, 'Oh, but what about sending TXT msgs via email. I do that on my homebrew project, and its great!' Sending 30mil msgs (and growing) WILL NOT work via email, the carriers will NEVER let you do that.

I could go on about the technical reasons Twitter cant be distributed and FREE, but in any substantial mobile play you have to deal with the carriers, their infrastructure, and their fees. It is a totally different scenario than a website that has per page serving costs approaching 0.
A Perfect example for us:

Mac > PC
Mibbit: IRC for the Rest of Us
Watching an assembler at work
Freedom! (by way of Netflix)
i prefer codeigniter as a good php framework.

benchmarks: http://tinyurl.com/5dcjzd
Has anyone heard of a case where someone needs an idea and turns to Intellectual Ventures to buy one?

That's an easy one: The Department of Defense. A great deal of the DARPA budget is dedicated to paying companies like Intellectual Ventures, or their partners, to develop one or another of their ideas into some military technology. Moreover, companies like Intellectual Ventures would not exist if it wasn't for the fact that -- unlike consumers -- the U.S. Government is often happy to pay for ideas that have no successful implementation, and may never have one.

Do you think it's a coincidence that one of Intellectual Ventures' key employees is a former Star Wars researcher? Do you think it's a coincidence that one of their brainstorms was a way to prevent post-injury strokes in soldiers? Companies like this one don't brainstorm at random; they think towards the money, just as a plant grows toward sunlight.

It's not all military, of course: The NIH and the NSF are also good for pure-research money.
I'm probably way off base, but it seems like MSFT is doing this to decrease the price of YHOO.

1. Pull out offer
2. Shareholders complain
3. Markets kill YHOO
4. MSFT comes back and buys cheaper?
I think he needs to read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. Programming, like architecture, medicine, or sculpture, is an art. Those at the bottom of the profession see only the mechanical process of churning out code, drawing a room, prescribing medication, and making a pot from clay.

Those at the top are, for lack of a better term, at one with their profession, and programming is certainly no different. A good programmer can feel, in a very visceral way, the difference between good and bad code, in the same way that the average person can feel the difference between Michelangelo and street graffiti. I consider myself to be only a very mediocre coder, and yet every now and then, I see a program that is just... beautiful. Aesthetically pleasing. And I couldn't tell you why.

Things like that can't be diagramed or taught; it's up to the individual to grow that seed of what Pirsig calls 'Quality' within themselves.
Reminds me of Norvig's "more data beats better algorithms."
Obviously, frameworks have some measure of utility, being that so many people use them. Though you give multiple reasons why a person might not use a framework, you neglect the good points that are obviously making people use them.

"Frameworks suck because they are an avatar of enterprise, frameworks suck because they take away your freedom, frameworks suck because they build walls between coders, frameworks suck because they make you fit your project to the toolset rather than the toolset to the project, and frameworks suck because they take the fun out of programming, long live the library."

Please answer this: why DO people use frameworks?
Wagn: How wiki software should have been
We build quite big systems (many years of manpower) on top of Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP and we are very happy and successful with it.

We develop our own framework.
About Yahoo and Microsoft Deal
Fascinating and funny account of the tech scene in Buenos Aires from an unlikely newsgroup message:

http://osdir.com/ml/culture.people.kragen.journal/2007-09/ms...
This is one of the reasons I'm developing my current application in Rails, rather than just rolling my own framework. I'd probably have more fun building my own system, and there are certainly frustrating bits about Rails, but I like the fact that I can, in fact, work with other people.

Frameworks built by communities of passionate coders are, I think, fundamentally good, because they enable sharing, which is essential to any long-term project.
But, PHP5's iterator is broken. The only way you can use it is in a foreach loop. In Python, iterators can be used with any iterative construct.

Namespace support in PHP never really bothered me, but I've occasionally run into problems with name clashes with built in functions. It'll be welcomed anyway for sure.
PHP is the VBScript of the open source world. It's available on almost every web host, and it seems to be what beginners learn first. While I'm sure it's possible to write things in a safe and mantainable way, most code examples you see will be from beginners and will have problems with the OWASP top 10. You can't look to the built in libraries for inspiration beacuse they're usually poorly designed.
Just because there have been success stories in a language (cold fusion and myspace, php and facebook) doesn't mean it's right for you. It took me one website and only 1000 lines of code to decide against PHP. If you've used it longer and like it, it's probably fine.
Don't forget the layers of management.
I would say no. I do read Techcrunch, but I very rarely read the comments there. The important articles do find their way on News.YC, and I'd rather read 20 insightful comments here than 100 spammy comments there.
Unlikely to happen, since YC companies get so much coverage from TechCrunch....
Minimize what you don't understand, maximize what you do?

The code-centric solution, which I mentioned we are afraid to touch, is full of conditionals and branches that make it dangerous to mess with for fear of causing unintended side-effects.

Just a case of programming by coincidence.
"Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming."
--Rob Pike, 'Notes on C Programming'
GPUs: A Closer Look
Chapter 5 (Inheritance) from Douglas Crockford’s “JavaScript: The Good Parts”
The design phase is like map making. You can't make a completely accurate map at any scale, or that map would be the size of what it represents.

So, you can't make a design doc detailed enough to make the programmer make zero decisions, or you could just compile that design doc.
How to Win Friends and Influence People: The Outline
Put the web server on a diet and increase scalability
PHP is a brilliant language for small to medium-small sites.

Since most medium-small sites have an irrepressible tendency to grow into medium and even large sites, I'd stay away from PHP for anything other than a quick and simple site.

Ruby and Python are much more sustainable in the medium term and even the long term, and just as quick to throw applications together. Sure, they won't last forever, and eventually you may have to rewrite critical bits in another language, but in the meantime it works to release something quickly and keep improving it for a few years.

Daniel
Read the book recently, and these are the takeaways. With one exception of course, the takeaway of inspiration and motivation you get from the excellent supporting stories and examples.
Ravelry gets funding from its own community
Spolsky's Paradox
No.

I don't read TC that often (or at all, really), so I get use out of having the better articles posted here.

techcrunch != valleywag
the n64 and its controller came out 10 years ago... as jcl points out, going
back so many years in the past and you'll find ugly Apple products too.

Looking at modern Nintendo products, it's really hard to say that they're not aesthetically pleasing
Instead of banning any website, pg can enable down-votes just for posts from websites that are brought up for ban.
I used PHP heavily for a few years (~70% PHP, 20% perl, 10% Java), and enjoyed it for awhile. However, it seems like it is impossible to create clean and well-divided code in PHP. This weighed on me heavily, as I had two 10,000 line projects that I was the sole maintainer for. Even if you managed to create well-structured code, it was always very... ugly (too many unnecessary symbols $, ->, etc). It wasn't much fun to work in every day.

I'm using Ruby now and I would never go back.

Here's my rough order of language preference for server-side languages that I have experience in:
Ruby > Python > C# > PHP > Perl > Visual Basic > Java > C
twitter is only cared about in an extremely small community of uber nerds.

The ideas in this post are overkill, although social portability cough opensocial cough is already on track to assist.
A bit OT, but what I like about this thread: PG didn't even react, the community decided what is best. And the title is wrong - it should be "Ask HN" not "Ask PG".
when i was looking at CI, it looked pretty neat, but it was based strongly on the mysql strategy.
Inside eBay's Quest for Craigslist
http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-with-u...
I'm all for data over code, but I'd use a Rete network so my program didn't run in O(DISTRIBUTIONS * RULES) time.
Yes data design is important, but you need to be algorithm savvy in order to know the best way to design your data structures.
The last page regarding the jumbledness of UI I think is symptomatic of a) a lack of a single strong design leader and b) too many fiefdoms all wanting to be unique within Microsoft. Windows Media Player wants to be different -- but there needs to be a design-oriented leader who says NO, you're sticking with our Vista guidelines because we don't want to look like a slapdash collection of malware.
Thanks, I'm straight, too.
My key take away from this article is that, for the most part, good ideas are a commodity and great ideas are rarely uniquely arrived at. This is one of the reasons VCs will never sign NDAs, because if they haven't already seen the same idea you're pitching from someone else, they most likely will soon. Just about every source I've read says that success is rarely the idea and most often the people behind it. Ideas are a commodity.

It's a lot like playing billiards. Given the same set of circumstances on a table and a number of players pondering the same problem,"where should I hit the cue ball?", it is very likely that two players come to derive the same idea. Whether or not the player can make the shot, that's a matter of talent, practice, and a little bit of luck. Until you've reached a certain level it's your ability to make the shots you dream up, not your ability to dream up shots, that will determine whether you win or lose.
Wanna hear more! :)
i believe that every language has its perks, and PHP has quite a few. as far as back-ends go, there are a few types
-xml/json webservices
-low memory application servers(blogs, shopping sites, etc..)
-high memory application servers(data mining, indexing, processing, game servers)

i think php is a great low memory solution, when you get into higher memory loads for the app to process, you do not want to reload everything back in to ram for each request. php is single threaded per request, and as such you don't have access to sockets, or other event based activities on the server side.

i agree with the statement in general, that you should go with what you know to be the most efficient language for the task.
simonseto mysteriously disappears
No.

Too much noise to read TC directly. I prefer to see the noteworthy posts show up here.
Think about other important areas of human endeavor: driving a car, flying a plane, running a company, designing a house, teaching a child, curing a disease, selling insurance, fighting a lawsuit.

driving a car, flying a plane:
These are extremely poorly understood tasks, but fortunately parts of the average human brain are pretty good at things like that.

running a company:
Smart people fail at this all time.

teaching a child:
Why are so many people unable to remember the math they learned in grade school? Why are we engaged in a public debate about the value of teaching to standardized tests instead of some less well-defined but apparently better approach?

curing a disease:
Come on, new methods and approaches are constantly being invented in medicine! We have no general way of doing this.
Sneaking Ruby Through Google App Engine (and Other Strictly Python Places)
It must be cold in hell today. It seems that Sun made a right decision.
It's a good point, but of course someone is going to say that code is just a kind of data. So to be more specific, I like a principle like TBL's "Principle of Least Power" http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower-2006-01-23.html : You should express information in the least powerful format possible. If possible, it is better to express logic in a constrained (e.g. declarative) DSL than in a general purpose language, and even better if it can be factored out in configuration files or a database.
What harm is Techcrunch doing here on HN? None that I can see. (Valleywag may be another matter.)
Let's ban everything!
Wow. Joel seems pretty ticked in this one.

I just never thought I'd ever see a comparison between Microsoft's visionary products and 1955 salisbury steak.

Paraphrasing, I think Ray Ozzie (Groove) points out in "Founders At Work", that Microsoft is a horizontal company; they want to deliver the platform which every one will use to build their vertical apps.
Also, Python and Ruby developers earn a bit more.

Here are the average salaries for permanent jobs over the last 3 months according to http://itjobwatch.co.uk:

Python: £45,282

Django: £42,326

RoR: £41,204

Ruby: £39,897

PHP: £33,004
I've been pretty critical of the content of TechCrunch articles in the past, but I'd never suggest an outright ban on them for any reason (either volume or content). If we really believe in crowd-sourcing, then any issue with any content provider, TechCrunch or otherwise, should correct itself if the collective group thinks that it's becoming a problem. Artificial, arbitrary bans shouldn't be necessary.
I found it interesting that, in Naughty Dog's postmortem of Jak and Daxter, their Lisp-inspired language was #5 on their list of "what went right" and #1 on their list of "what went wrong" (although the ordering might not indicate importance):

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020710/white_02.htm

While they loved the runtime flexibility of the Lisp-ish engine, their compiler developer -- "one of the top ten Lisp programmers" -- turned himself into a giant bottleneck, since no one else could understand his code well enough to help him fix the bugs in it. They also found it difficult to interface the language with existing C/C++ game utility libraries.
Bad requirements may not be root causes of project failures
'Ban' is a very strong word. Maybe there should just be a handicap that rates TC articles 'lower', that way if the article is good it can be rated up, but the ones nobody cares about will trickle down
Jerry Yang, village idiot
I'll admit, I'm a rookie. I've spent a few months now learning and writing PHP...is my effort in vain? Should I ditch PHP and dive into Ruby with a Rails framework?
http://www.folklore.org/ has stories about Apple from their early days, I couldn't stop reading it, and you learn a lot about the hackers from back then.
Compare this to a GIS for crossing the chasm:

http://images.google.com/images?q=crossing%20the%20chasm

Seth's idea to redraw the curve from the POV of the user is brilliant. I'm tempted to cut and paste this onto the cover of my next business plan with a big X on the part of the passion curve where my idea product is targeted, but of course I won't since no one will get it.
No, don't ban them. I only read TC articles when they show up here.

The comments here are also good.
You're right down the street from one of the best CS programs in the nation, which also happens to have one of the strongest bioinformatics programs. Have you tried posting this there?

Just curious. Contact me, if you'd like, and I can put you in touch with some people.
"the U.S. Government is often happy to pay for ideas that have no successful implementation, and may never have one."

a lot of University research money comes this way.
I'm not interested in the internship, but I have to say that the building and location is seriously cool. Always see it on my way downtown on the bus or to REI :-)