skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've filed bug reports for other languages and have never so much as received a confirmation, let alone a patch, the php devs responded within a few hours, that shows to me they care.

It's great that the PHP devs do that! Is that a compelling reason to use the language? I'm not so sure.

>That's a straw-man, I said no such thing;

You said:

> The team that makes PHP makes quality a higher priority than just about any other language

Can you explain to me what I misinterpreted?

> And no, I'm not going to provide you with any 'evidence' for my claims, you can take my word for it. This is not a court of law, and besides that I never made any claims about other languages before this comment and I don't feel like putting other languages and/or their developers down.

It's a little silly to make a comparative statement like "The team that makes PHP makes quality a higher priority than just about any other language" and then refuse to provide examples of where this happens and matters. If you'd just said "The PHP devs respond quickly to bug reports", sure, but when you start saying "They do this better than other languages", you're implicitly already "put other languages and/or their developers down". In a case like that, I don't think it's out of line to ask for examples; if there are major failings in other languages that go ignored and unaddressed, then that's certainly worth some attention. If there aren't, the whole point is moot anyhow. If there are examples of systemic problems that go ignored in other languages, I'd like to know about them - that may matter when I choose a language for a project.

I'm not interested in trashing PHP here; I use it on a daily basis, and get a lot done with it. I also use Ruby, Python, Javascript (both server and clientside), bash, and the occassional perl on a daily basis, and don't have problems with mysterious segfaults and unexplained crashes from 2-year-old bugs that would somehow make PHP's lack of such problems a major marketing bulletpoint. I don't understand your position at all, because as far as I can tell, it's "The PHP interpreter is mostly bug-free, and bugs get fixed quickly" (which is great!), but...what language with showstopper bugs survives mainstream use?
It's pretty simple. Just switch off your brain and pretend you're writing really poor JavaScript.
The same footnote also directs students toward set theory, combinatorics, and graph theory. As I double major, I would say my study in those areas has been useful for computer science. I would guess that the recommendation to avoid "x for engineers" classes comes from the expectation that classes meant for nonmajors are likely to water down the material and reduce rigor in teaching/grading.
I've had to use PHP even though I really love Rails because WordPress is built in PHP and a lot of my client work is with WP.

It's definitely not elegant when compared to Ruby or Python but it's not as bad as Java. Because you know Python, it won't be hard to pick up but you'll need to accept that you're working with a different environment and live with the tradeoffs.

The neat thing about PHP code is that it runs pretty much anywhere. This is not a big deal when you're building one app that is going to be used by a lot of users but it is a big deal when you have projects you're building that are open source and you want to foster a growing community.

As others have mentioned, a lot of your sanity levels will depend on what their current code looks like. If it's at a company like Facebook, I'm assuming their code would be at least decent or even nice. On the other hand, it could be a complete nightmare to work with bad code. A different way to look at bad code could be as an opportunity to do a lot of work and make yourself very valuable to the team. It just depends on whether you want to take on that type of role.

Now if money and distribution of your code isn't a biggie for you, I wouldn't take the job as you don't want to realize you've wasted a year on something you hate.
All You Did Was Weaken A Country Today
> You said:

>> The team that makes PHP makes quality a higher priority than just about any other language

> Can you explain to me what I misinterpreted?

Yes, that that was terra_t, not me making that claim.
Doh. Egg all over my face. My apologies!
np. Glad we got that cleared up :)
If you're like me, you'll never be happy using PHP. It's like being a piano player and having someone ask you to play their favorite song, but only if you cut off 9 of your fingers.

The result is a bloody mess. Find a different job.
18 year old who wants be be millionnaire by 21 completely villified. Unfair?
Ask HN: Is there a spectrum of difficulty/prestige in programming?
I'm a CS student and I've been wondering about this. It seems most professions have this type of thing.

For example in engineering you would have chem eng at one end and maybe mechanical or something at the other. Doctors would have a scale that goes from, say, brain surgeons to (just guessing) podiatrists. In the military it would go from (probably) fighter pilots or Delta Force to basic infantry.

My question is, Does the programming/software eng. profession have a similar scale (or the perception of one, which is basically the same thing)? Or in other words, what would be the opposite of writing unit tests at your local insurance company? A web startup? AI? Trading bots?
Those aren't superfluous, because they help with the primary goal of selling more vehicles at higher margins.
Stay in school. Quitting school just "because" would probably be a mistake, especially without a spectacular job offer already on the table. Yes, talented people will succeed either way. But always ask yourself: "what if I'm wrong?" What if you couldn't find a job after leaving? Are you prepared to start your programming career unemployed? What if the current VC/angel activity ends faster than you think? The last time and internet boom went bust it all happened practically within 3 months.
I was in 3rd grade.
Sometime in the middle of the day, a lot of kids started leaving, but I wasn't sure why. My teacher didn't say anything. I think I thought it was a birthday party for a kid who had their birthday that day.

I was waiting after school for a carpool to a Hebrew School I went to. Instead, my mom came to pick me up. I was somewhat confused. My mom eventually explained, in not very much detail, that people had flown planes into buildings in New York. I didn't really grok the significance of it then--I was too young to understand.

It wasn't until later, I think in 9th grade, that I saw a video of the planes crashing into the building, and then started to grok what had happened. I also later learned that a relative who worked in the Pentagon would have had a meeting in the wing of the Pentagon that was destroyed, but it was canceled so she was in her office when the plane hit. Thank God for that.
That is sad, as they did post some interesting columns (the war nerd was always worth reading).

Take this as a warning: do not do business in Russia.
Lanyrd update: 1,508 conferences, 5,637 users - it's going pretty well so far
Lots of people will hire you without a degree. Most of my team members in the last few years that I recruited had not completed their bachelors.

A lot of people here are giving you average advice. If you want to be an average programmer, you can listen to their advice. I don't recommend trying to be an avg programmer.

If you don't do the degree thing, all you need to do is build your rep / brand online, which is nowadays quite easy to do, for those willing to put a little bit of time into it.

Oh, and if you're actually paying for univ and also 20 yrs or older, that should make the decision easier. It's not the great value it once (maybe) was.

Hope this helps,
You should talk to another counsel, who has only your interests in mind and has experience with these sorts of deals, to help make sure all relevant issues/ideas are under consideration and no avoidable mistakes are made. An expert can think of ways to structure things that save everyone costs/worries down the road.

But you can probably skip bringing them directly into the process, at least until papers are drawn up.

I think it's common in such cases for the buy-out to be paid over a period of years, if the company/remaining-investors don't have the liquidity to pay the agreed-upon price up front.
Free consultation on Data Strategy (NLP, ML, business intelligence, etc.)
My notes and pictures are up: http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2010-09-11

I repeat names a lot in the captions because each photo also has its own web page.
lots of well known it people have never finished one, but they have made AMAZING things.... so go ahead and do something real good and people wont mind about a degree...
c'mon, nobody has been impaled or had his head axed (and having an American passport does help immensely in that regard in Russia). In general there is an unbelievably great progress on impalement made during the mere recent five centuries in Russia (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037824/). Just wait a couple thousands years more and the freedom of speech and other human rights may start gradually coming to Russia (my beloved - the farther i'm from it, the more beloved - Fatherland)
Sure, but I don't see why this translates into AT&T having the right to put up towers. If there's poor AT&T service in Harvard Square and customers complain, AT&T can simply direct them to petition the zoning board to allow them to put up towers. That way the issue can be resolved using local politics instead of lawsuits.
HTML5 - The Next Stage of Online Video Evolution
Maybe Wall Street quants and startup founders on one end, with Fortune 500 IT individual contributors (hardly what I'd call computer scientists) on the other.
the exile owned so hard. i wonder what the whole story is on the exchange at the end of the article? i can't really imagine matt taibbi throwing coffee in someone's face.
I'm hoping to get some of those cognitive effects from stat classes and the like that will also be helpful for business. We'll see!
Follow up to this "review our startup" thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1649260
Uh, the first thing the guy said was,"That's none of your business." I wouldn't call that a polite refusal. More like an FU refusal.
This is an example of the douchebags they have to deal with at LAX:

http://laist.com/2009/05/05/14_birds_found_tied_to_legs_of_s...

They see that stuff all the time, and they get suspicious about unexplained features of baggage.
I am about to turn 20 and am paying for Uni myself, by working two jobs at the moment (1 programming, 1 retail)
Perhaps, and I've certainly thought this. But as the devil's advocate: would the net present value of 60 years of life is much different from 600 years of life, after discounting?

If we use the prevent value of recurring payments equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_value#Annuities.2C_perp...) to consider the present value of 60 years, with a modest discounting rate of 6%, we get:

> = 16.161427705238

The same number for 600 years is:

> = 16.6666666666667

For context, the incremental difference between 50 and 60 years is about the same as for the additional 500+.

That far out the incremental present value of a year of life drops to basically zero. Which is to say, for many people (the vast majority, I might guess), the value of these far-off experiences may end up being academic, and thus not factor into their decisions particularly strongly.

Certainly some people would be affected - those with low subjective discounting rates, which is to say, future-oriented people. And certainly on the margin it would make people more cautious, but if the premise holds, the effect might not be as far-reaching as you suspect.
Wow. Never seen this blog before. I've spent some time reading his blog today, and nearly everything he writes resonates with me. Thanks for the suggestion.
Hold on, didn't Jobs make all write native apps? How did this ever run on an iPhone or iPad?
If a tree falls in Google's archives and no non-Googler can access it, does it really exist? Anyway.

As AngryParsley says, the specific Google services in question inherently have a gap of a few years. I have already given examples from my personal trifling experiences looking up a few hundred dead sites where the sole public archive, the IA, fails. Scale that up to hundreds of thousands and millions of sites...
To be fair, most languages don't start out as a hacked up bunch of perl scripts like PHP did. They have the benefit of a design process, versus PHP's history of I need it to do X .. hack hack hack .. there it now does X. Remember, PHP started out as one dude's quest to have a dynamic webpage. It's not like Ruby or Python where someone sat down and tried to think things all the way through.

So yeah, I don't think any sane PHP advocate is going to get in your face about PHP as a superior language. Because it's obviously not true and it really doesn't matter all that much.
No original research. We need to find a professor at Harvard or a NYT reporter to bless it on dead tree first.
Likely neither. The Mac works as is, there's no reason to make it more like iOS nor to get rid of it.
Richard Branson: Secrets to Business Success
Richard Branson Reflecting across 40 years to come up with 5 secrets to successfully building businesses over his career career.
I'm also a huge fan of Python, and I do believe that it (or other higher level languages like Ruby and Lisp) spoils you. I once took a well-paying job, but the main language used was ColdFusion - and not just ColdFusion, but a huge, complex, disgusting ColdFusion framework that the company had written themselves and was riddled with bugs. I figured I'd be fine because of the paycheck and the prestige of the job. Switching to a new language wasn't hard or anything, but I ended up only lasting a few months, then quit, taking a significant pay cut to get away from ColdFusion. I found that I just couldn't stand the stupid language.

I guess my point is, when deciding whether this is the right job for you, language is a very important factor. After a little time writing in a language you don't enjoy or respect, if you're like me, you're going to start to feel creatively and intellectually unfulfilled.
One thing that makes me nervous -- I know you also go to Northwestern and as you know economics is the single most popular major on campus. It may be worth it to focus on a more practical degree in your target field in order to differentiate yourself from the "horde." If the sub-speciality that you want to focus on is economics, go for it, but don't just take economics for economics' sake.
totally get that, and i don't want to give the impression that it's a simple thing to ask for, but there is definitely something here that is enviable.

think of how fixed gear bikes made a comeback in a market swelled with ridiculous mountain bikes that were simply overegineered for what they were needed for ( or poorly manufactured with hindering mechanics ).

People can appreciate a simple design, that's easy to maintain and fix.
Like they tested that crappy new Gmail interface?
Myth: GPUs are not more awesome than CPUs

Status: Busted

Next up: Is the taste of Cheerios really unsinkable?
Would you mind sending the paper my way as well? This sounds fairly interesting. mdwrigh2@ncsu.edu
Running down Wall Street to avoid chunks of falling building and a dust cloud I imagined must be coming (I was right)
Regardless of whether its the CBP officer in the airport or a police officer on the street, the key friction point is that if everyone demands full exercise of their rights (ultimately, not to talk or interact with the officer, other than prove identity) it would be near-impossible for them to perform their function of catching criminals, terrorists, etc.

Or, to put it another way, we EXPECT that people won't exercise their full rights as part of our expectation that the police and CPB officials are able to to carry out their job.

Regardless of how you stand on the original issue of the OP, it's worth considering for a moment that our policing system relies, in the main, on people not up-holding their rights in order to succeed.
Beautiful and simple sparklines with source code
Considering he'd been drinking, I would have preferred that he'd be caught.

In the real world behavior like that causes police to treat "refusal to talk" as "guilty". Stories like this post are very far from the norm.
Does this surprise you? It shouldn't. Despite the perception on the internet, there is a reason half of the population leans conservative.
Are you a programmer?

If so, don't you hate it when people come up to you and suggest that programming Facebook is no big deal and maybe you should help them with that next weekend?

You just did that.

I am not an automotive engineer, but large swathes of my family are and I have had many discussions about their work from an engineering point of view. You would not believe what goes into just that crumple zone stuff, nothing the word "simply" applies to. Did you know there are entire engineers dedicated to making sure the cars pass rather stringent noise emission requirements from the body (that is, not the engine)? It's hard enough to get cars to pass specifications without adding in yet more restrictions about the nature of the cars. (Or adding $20,000 to the price.)
As a personal data point, I don't think I would mark myself as student even though I am currently a student. (Open question) What do you think differentiates a "student developer" from a "student?"
It's Twitter's decision that each 3rd-party gets full "be you" permissions; they could choose otherwise and still use OAuth.

And the fact that everything done by a bad actor can be attributed to them -- for reversal or blanket punishment -- does add a lot of security, in addition to the party-at-a-time revocability.
There was a pertinent post from the other day. Scott Adams' recommendation and the comments at:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1676242

Are quite helpful as well.

Good luck!
I spent a few months of full time work investigating the viability of an eHow like site - trying to measure likely profit margins. I put the effort in because of this Demand Media article in wired: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/ and because it was the opinion of some people whose opinion I value highly that such a site would be profitable. The idea actually went against my own gut feel because I was wary of all the SEO that goes on. Although typically localized in topic, I thought in aggregate the global phrase space would be pretty densely covered by now.

Anyway...

I optimized on both the demand side (data from keyword search tool) and supply side (number of results returned from searches, number of exact term matches, and page rank of each site in the top ten). I did this for about 200k phrases (yes, it was difficult to get the supply side data). I set up 3 separate test sites to test the most promising search phrases.

I couldn't make the numbers work. I was actually nearly an order of magnitude off being somewhere reasonable and even allowing for benefits of scale (which are admittedly hard to quantify) I still couldn't rationalize that it would be a good business.

So i'm quite happy to see this article in that it some what validates my own findings. I for one will not be taking part in the IPO!
Because that's not what the dictionary says?

(As a side note, I did not vote you down.)
So looking at this, and extrapolating I see some people in the future picking a time period and living there in all but fact. I envision the matrix, but set in whatever time period people choose. I can see people choosing to live in say the roaring 20's or the 1970's...

In fact, now that I think about it places like that do exist... While on vacation I think I visited a place where people lived and worked as if they were in colonial times.
The wider issue here that I don't see anyone really addressing is why are US Citizens interviewed/interrogated (even casually, at the CBP desk) about their activities.

I'm a British Citizen living in the US (so I'm mandated to fully answer all questions because I have no pre-governed right to entry into the US) but when I return home to UK they scan my passport and wave on me - no questions at all.

Regardless of this individual case, as a wider issue I don't understand why people (US Citizens) accept as policy and expected MO that CPB routinely asks the level of questioning that they do to citizens.
This isn't the first century where men have tried to discover a fountain of youth, but I doubt it will be the last, either.
That's what I was thinking too.

When I saw this, I imagined doing the same thing (alone) with my old 1987 Toyota pickup. It is difficult for one person to completely remove the body (I've had to raise it by myself to install body spacers) from the frame, but once the body is off, the rest of the truck would disassemble easily. Most of the effort is dealing with rusted/frozen fasteners. The rest of the vehicle comes apart fairly easily. Working on these older, simpler vehicles is pretty straightforward.

Contrast with my 350Z: it would take days to accomplish the same thing. Much more integrated system and access is more difficult.
This is pretty much the best advice. I began programming in PHP, and 95% of my web dev still uses it. (Though my latest project is using Python's Flask microframework.) I don't consider using it for anything else, even though PHP-GTK isn't too bad. My favorite language is Python, I've drunk heavily from the Scheme and Lisp koolaid, learning about programming games in C/C++ along with embedded systems that also use assembly here and there.

And yet, for my own anecdote, at the start of the summer I got a job where the main part of my work is creating a Flex front-end application with Java services running on Tomcat/Jetty for the backend, using SOAP (though we do have REST hooks too generated automatically) as a data transfer protocol. It's kind of ugly at first, since hey, it's Java, but really it's not bad and my "I wish this was PHP/Python" moments grow more and more infrequent.
Just buy a kit racecar :-)
I went with my wife and a friend (developer). We had a great time, there were a lot of exciting speakers. The only thing I would suggest in the future is to either spread it out over two days (probably not possible) or to cut down on the number of speakers (tough, I know). Moving through so many 30-minute presentations felt like a sprint, and we were having a hell of a time discussing what we saw afterward because so many talks had jumbled together. Still a great time, though, thanks to all involved!
This particular conversation follows the PHP conversation template uncannily well:

http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/bxfok/9_useful_p...
They gotta make money somehow, ya know? Streaming video is not the cheapest thing.

Though I do think it would be cool to have a no-ad price. Would you pay a buck to watch the same broadcast without ads?