skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now if only Microsoft would move all their blogs to WordPress it would be a complete win. I'm not sure if they use the same platform everywhere but some of their blogs look and function badly.
He is the CEO of both wordpress.org (maintainers of the open source distribution of wordpress) and automattic (wordpress.com). He is the main visionary and final say on all features that are released.

Back in 2003 he forked an old blog tool called b2, then grew it until it became one of the most versatile and healthy CMSs out there.

One of the things that has impressed me most about how he has run things is that he is able to balance the creation of a hosted blogging platform (wordpress.com) while respecting the needs and desires of those who wish to own their own data and operate their own systems (think about facebook vs diaspora here).

I recently had a chance to meet him at the portland wordcamp. He was able to answer both highly detailed questions (why is x implemented this way and how will it be improved?) to big picture questions like how wordpress will continue to develop to compete with the likes of tumblr as well as providing the functionality of wordpress.com to everybody.

Overall he is one of those rare CEOs who is very much enlightened about all aspects of the organization.
Virgin to launch space tourism in 18 months
Arhh yes. For the sake of brevity I didn't get into more detail on how I've done this in the past.

I've experimented with both using a separate project for non-engineering (to avoid the skew) but also simply including non-dev work into the velocity with the same rigor that items that offer true value get points and 'cost of doing business' (pay server bill, write documentation) are non-point-accruing chores.

Both work for me.
Interesting, but more telling to me is the fact that Microsoft is rarely brought up in Silicon Valley (yes, I'm sure it is some places and I know they have a campus in the valley). That is, rarely brought up in terms of innovation. I don't know anyone who talks about how to get hired by Microsoft, I don't know anyone who talks about what they're releasing or what research they've done aside from fixing vulnerabilities. Occasionally I or someone will boot into Windows 7 to see if something works correctly and say "hm, doesn't look too bad. wouldn't use it for real though."

I ride caltrain into SF every morning through most of the valley. Lots of laptops on the commuter trains. Maybe 1 in 5 is running windows. To me, this is a much bigger indication that, as mixmax put, the company is past its prime.
Excuses is exactly what they are.

The overriding reason people pirate is that they can something for free, so why pay for it?

When I was a poor student I pirated games too, but now that I'm a somewhat well payed software developer I buy pretty much every (mostly indie) game I play (and quite a few I end up not playing) because ~$20 every month or two is simply not an amount of money I will notice missing.
...or you could stash a cheap, disposable cell phone under the seat - something like the Motorola F3. There are various companies that allow you to track a cell number. Accuracy is roughly 30m radius (I think?).

Then you just have to remember to keep the battery charged.

One day someone will invent a simple dynamo-powered tracking device that accepts a standard SIM card...
I'm mostly sold on getting one... I just wonder what became of the SDK.
I can't get into specifics, sorry.
First, not every blog post is going to be your greatest piece of work ever.

Second, if you don't have a single interesting idea, why are you starting a business? Hopefully your business or product is an interesting idea. Write about that!
For some interpretations of "thought" and "right" only.
Are you running it?
I was browsing Wordpress.com (their home page) the other day and noticed that the Windows Internet Explorer Blog was using Wordpress.com. That surprised me a little. I figured they'd used Windows Live Spaces or some Microsoft-created blogging system. Maybe they do both?
PHP's amenability to shared hosting environments is an advantage I failed to mention.

I'm pretty much in the same place as you with regards to PHP: I know it like the back of my hand and everything and everybody works with it. But the code is ugly compared to other languages and I really want method chaining, dammit. Plus, of course, I don't want to have to write an MVC framework every time I want to do something.
LKML: Performance disparity, problem found
Ironically, that requires 2 extra steps, your script and heroku.
And then failed to use that as a (rather good) defense? That strikes me as a stretch.
I made some comments on the user's blog entry.

For our company, we would have loved to use Google for all our web API needs for addresses, but we can't, due to corporate firewall restrictions and the map display restriction mentioned by a reader's comment on that blog entry. Also, don't mistake this for true address validation, which is expensive.
Here's what I'm saying:

* Before this issue was found, it was not reasonable to expect people to find rax/eax truncation in routine audits.

* Now that it's been found, it is reasonable (though not automatic) to expect a codebase-wide rXx/eXx truncation bug hunt, a la OpenBSD in the '90s.

* Now repeat this cycle 85789789343 times as people find new random nits that blow up the Linux security model, and you see the challenge.
>This is a strong indication that Microsoft is neither feared, loved or admired. It seems like a company past it's prime.

It also means that Microsoft might have become ubiquitous and is thus easily ignored.

People don't write about the wonders of refrigerators or toothbrushes -- yet they are everywhere and people are spending money on them.
...he would think twice about investing in Facebook again
Telling people to eat more vegetables has been a miserable failure
The fact that Node.js isn't a complete web development stack = win.
Unless you're being more specific than I think you are, PHP5 has basic support for method chaining, I use it all the time.
Notch (the Minecraft Developer) Answers Your Questions
Yup, the whole point of putting a `Like` button your page is so that site visitors can broadcast your page to their friends. However, to cause that broadcast to actually occur you have to put a bunch of Open Graph meta tags on your page and also (I think?) have a registered Facebook Application to go along with your site.

There's no place that's documented except for the developer forums.
Wow, is that all I have to do? And here I thought I should spend most of my time programming...
Yet another article that wants a language to be a framework. Ruby on Rails is a framework just like Symphony, Kohana, etc are frameworks for PHP.

Thus you can't compare something like Rails to PHP, but rather would need to compare Rails to the many frameworks out there. There are many frameworks out there that make working with PHP a joy, some like NOLOH (which I'm a co-founder of) feels like it's own thing completely allowing you to work in a single language that shields you from having to deal with the craziness that is client-server interaction, AJAX, Comet, SEO, etc, something which the author alludes to wanting to have.

If you don't want to use a framework, PHP can be very useful by itself to write quick scripts, just like many other languages. Furthermore, the release of PHP 5.3 last year has moved PHP forward considerably and makes the frameworks and libraries available for it even cleaner, and more powerful than before.

Personally, I'm an advocate of using the best tools for the job, but first it's important to understand what in fact that tool is and what it's capable of.

Ultimately, any blanket statement that suggests something that's being used by millions of developers and some of the largest companies out there should die just doesn't sit right with me.

I've noticed that it's in vogue to bash PHP, but frankly, with the current state of the language, along with its frameworks and libraries, there's no better time to work with PHP. It reminds me of a recent exchange I had with an associate of mine, we were talking about writing a script and when the mention of PHP came up, he bashed it without reason. He hadn't used PHP in years, but just had this impression in his mind that it was bad. Several days later I showed him the completed script in PHP and how clean, clear and concise it was. He was amazed.

I would hope that we could move beyond such statements and take pride in what we produce, instead of second guessing yourself when the tool you're using is getting the job done, lets explore some of the amazing tools, frameworks and libraries that are pushing PHP forward.
Kelner is set to give a talk about it tomorrow[1]. Anyone know if they create videos for these?

[1]: http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?s...
I am currently using a Linode right now and it is great. You get full root access to your virtual server which is great. If don't have any server running experience they have great documentation to help you get started. If you get the 512MB plan for $20/mo you should be good to go until you get a whole ton of users.
I think you're wrong about this. I've explained why many times on this site; here's the first one Google finds:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1328214

Now, PHP is definitely part of the problem. But there are huge PHP sites that manage not to have these kinds of flaws.
Finally Microsoft decided to stop investing in a bad tool and made a great partnership. Too bad it took many years for it to happen. Hopefully they will make the integration with Live profiles simple, much like what Google/Blogger did. I would love to see Live Gallery features/plugins available for Wordpress.
Anyone have a link to the actual paper(s)?
It's pretty insecure. Beyond the obvious "I know both people and their emails and that they use this service" it would be trivial to do company email attacks (IE: all employees use (first-initial)(last-name)@(companyname).com so if I have a list of employees I can quickly access all combinations of those employees).

No idea what your service is about and if that level of security matters.
I've never used a 3rd party vendor for this. I've used ServerBeach, Rackspace, etc. But it was always with my hardware sitting on their network.

Regardless, be very careful when choosing your 3rd party vendor because of PII laws. Some 3rd party hosts won't allow you to store PII on their hardware. You can use their network (i.e. colo), but they won't manage the hardware for you because they'd then have theoretical access to that data.
First -- your global-es5.js module is awesome. I frequently point folks to it for a way to bring old browsers up to speed. But at the same time, if you don't include a library like it, you have to admit that there are 30 core functions in there that it's easy to depend on, and that the global-es5 implementation isn't perfectly compatible with real browser implementations, it's just very close (Object.getPrototypeOf being a good example of something you can't fix).

The other approach, and the one that Eric is lamenting, is writing lowest-common-denominator JavaScript. The problem he calls out in Node isn't that it's not possible to write cross-implementation libraries -- but that people aren't doing it. There are tons of Node libraries which could very easily run in the browser, but don't. Just browsing through NPM, here are three random ones:

http://github.com/visionmedia/lingo/

http://github.com/Marak/Faker.js/

http://github.com/past/speller/

All of those do nothing Node-specific, but use JavaScript features that aren't present in IE6, 7, and 8.
Secure enough for what? The attack is simple: pick a target whose email you know, and then start guessing emails of people you think they might have an account with. This could be as easy as browsing to a website and entering pairs of emails addresses listed on the "About Us" page, or ripping through a person's Facebook friends or Twitter followers.

It might be fine for completely non-sensitive data, but for anything else, probably not.
Great idea! I'll be sure to implement this in my next venture.

Seriously though, does anyone really believe that writing a letter will get something done? Change in Washington, especially for esoteric topics like this, has a cost, and that cost is tribute paid to lobbyists.
Facebook has said php is a legacy problem and they wouldn't use it again if they were starting over. The Wikipedia code is horrendous. Wordpress is a security exploit masquerading as a CMS.
he cites performance as the main reason why he hates frameworks, but it seems like a compiled php module that implements an mvc framework would gain performance and put the "web development back into the language", so to speak.

creating a new language is not the answer. that will work up until the day you need to do something beyond tying a database to an html form, like process images or encrypt files or talk to a weird database that isn't mysql. php, ruby, and python have a ton of modules and 3rd party libraries that can be tossed in to accomplish a lot of things.
The Real Reason Facebook Is Trying To Kill Quora
Yeah ... after all that I'd stop and think if a complete rewrite is really necessary or if I should maybe bring somebody in who know RoR and fix what I've fucked up.
For what it's worth, he did invent (or entrepreneured, it isn't clear) the hesco bastion, which according to the former marine sitting next to me was something the troops really liked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion
PBWorks (PBWiki) drops OpenID for authentication because of lack of adoption
This makes a lot of sense.

However, I'm growing wary of "dependency sprawl", where the functionality of a web application is tied to an increasing number of other services. That said, as far as uptime goes Google is hard to beat.
The instapaper workflow mentioned in the article is awesome. Instapaper will send articles daily or weekly (to suit your reading habits/desire to avoid the download charge) and the device treats it just like the magazines and newspapers you can buy through amazon's website.
Do we really need another superficial article praising Node.js just because someone dared to say something bad about it?
not being on facebook puts you in the minority. consumer web companies aim for the majority.

note: i am not on facebook
something tells me you don't know what method chaining is
Just another academic idiot :)
… And they have an API! Brilliant. Thank you VERY much for pointing that out.
If a programming language 'needs to die', it does. If you have something better in mind, go ahead and write it. If it really is the replacement for the language you hate, I'm sure everyone will thank you for it.

True programmers aren't stuck to a language. They switch to whatever's best for what they're doing. Often, that means sticking with the language they know best to minimize issues and speed development. But often, they know multiple anyhow and have more choice available.

True programmers make a point to learn about the new languages and their strengths and weaknesses. If a new language came out and was worth looking at, they would. They may not learn enough to actually use the language yet, but always enough to know when that language might be the best solution.
Curious whether the just-announced partnership between Microsoft and WordPress will impact your new venture?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1732761
In 1995, PHP was a set of Perl scripts that Rasmus had just posted on Usenet.
You're the second person to mention that perl doesn't have pointers; references are not strictly speaking pointers but functionally very similar. I think it's pretty obvious those are what I was referring to, and disputing the naming seems like nit-picking.

Many of PHP's basic functions do not return objects, therefore method chaining frequently doesn't work. It would have been more correct to say that I want "everything is an object" to be a feature of the language.

Lambdas only recently turned up in PHP (though I'm pleased to see them!). My point is that in PHP these features are being shoehorned in late in life, and it seems like a language which was designed with the expectation of these features would be a better choice at this point.

And finally, yes, I want a language that assumes everything I will be building is an MVC web app, and builds the necessary infrastructure at the language level, with the performance and stability gains that implies, rather than having it built as a framework on top of the language. It seems weird, I realize, but no more weird than PHP seemed in 1995, with its assumption that everything you'd be writing was a web page.
> 4) Don't ride a Segway around U of I in January.

I'm so very sorry for you! Didn't it ring a bell for anyone where you work that outdoors + Chicago area + January = frostbite? No wonder the place rented you a Segway! You don't see a lot of Segway tours in January (or people outdoors if they don't have to be).
I don't know.. I applied for it but never heard back. So far there are 3 kindle active content/apps out and they're all games.
What if we argue, not from the good of the individual, but the good of society? Isn't there a saying that goes something like, "Society progresses one funeral at a time?"
On the other hand, knowing that they're less likely to be sued for patent infringement is probably worth a lot more.
Computers don't dumb down math education
It's what I've always said--cliffs don't kill people, people driving Segways off cliffs kill people.
Hmm,

I'm starting to think that "confusion" can defined as "repeatedly expecting people will do what you think they should do after seeing they don't"

In this sense, thinking language and platform can be glibly separated is the approach that looks confused given the present era. Languages live or die today based on their default platform, their example code, their default programming style, etc..

Part of this is that large changes in group behavior are actually easier than small changes. Will we improve our Perl/C++/VB style - heck no, we're used to doing it our way. Will we learn a whole language with a whole new style? Maybe, especially if it can be sold as the sexy-secret-source. So talking about the whole package is realist if not literally accurate.
Follow up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1723677
What he probably meant to say is:

In Perl, you can pass only one kind of argument to a subroutine: a scalar. To pass any other kind of argument, you need to convert it to a scalar. You do that by passing a reference to it. A reference to anything is a scalar. If you're a C programmer you can think of a reference as a pointer (sort of).

That's from

http://www.troubleshooters.com/codecorn/littperl/perlsub.htm

... which I found because I, unlike the OP, happen to remember that the thing-which-is-sort-of-like-a-pointer-only-not-really in Perl is called a reference.

So let me help the original author: What he meant to say is that "Perl has things that remind me of pointers, but have a different name, and that aren't exactly pointers, but are nearly as confusing as real pointers, especially to someone who just wants to put up a simple web page in five minutes."
I've found that over time, I prefer services like rekindle.it to instapaper. Mostly this is because I only tend to push _really_ long content to my kindle, and I usually want it titled correctly (everything coming from from Instapaper ends up on the kindle as 'Instapaper', and the new content pushes out the old).
Ask HN: what are the current trends in naming companies?
Flickr and Flattr and Jaxtr all feel a little 2005. What's the current trend in naming your startups, if any?
"Obviously in the case of slavery most people would believe that matters of economic stability play second fiddle" -- It wasn't obvious when slavery was legal.
He thought he could just put his project on Kickstarter, then walk away and it would collect enough money for him? He even went on a month-long vacation in the middle of it?

Gee, can't imagine why that didn't work.
Does anybody think this will affect Jason Cohen's startup announcement this morning that will sell WordPress hosting?
Iran Acknowledges Stuxnet Worm Infection
When I worked in Taiwan the office lights were normally turned off for 20-30 minutes after lunch while colleagues napped. I personally was seldom able to manage a nap, however.
We've used JanRain as well, they do a nice job of abstracting away some of the differences in the platforms, making it much much easier to support more options.
Ask HN: Do user-mode exploits render Heroku (and similar) too dangerous to use?
The recent privilege escalation exploit in Linux prompts me to ask this.

Heroku runs multiple application instances (20 or more) on a single Linux VM. As they put it, they rely on "battle-tested Unix permissions" to separate applications. However, it is clear that each step in the deployment spectrum from dedicated server to VM to process increases the attack surface.

It seems that a user-mode privilege escalation in Linux would render Heroku applications vulnerable to each other. Furthermore, by simply increasing the number of dynos and issuing a bunch of requests, an evil application would be automatically deployed on a large number of victim instances, coming into contact with hundreds or thousands of other applications.

What effect does the probability of a 0-day exploit like this have on the practicality of Heroku, and any similar shared hosting platform? Obviously this is hard to quantify, so feel free to answer with an educated guess.
Rate My Startup: Diversity Offsets
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl,+php,+rails,+ruby&...
French Thieves Use Vacuums to Suck Thousands from Safes
Is there anyone outside of a mental institution who isn't open to other possibilities? There has to be something seriously wrong with you if you are willing to state a priori that you will not consider unequivocal evidence of a new phenomenon, should it appear.
I know, I know, it's a crime. Bad people.

But... neat (literally) hack.
I don't believe every entrepreneur should write. Sometimes those of us with the passion & ability tend to take things a little too far... Its almost impossible for me to write something decent that isn't essentially a heated op-ed piece that in turn gets me into trouble in some way. Not every entrepreneur is an even-tempered sensible person driven by logic and rationality. In fact, many are quite the opposite. A blog in these cases would only give them more opportunities to put their foot in their mouth and damage their reputation. In my opinion in some cases its important that some entrepreneurs deliberately stay away from blogging...
The date on that post is April 1. Took a while for that to register for me.
Your ideas about the white fake CEO's make sense, but I'm not so sure about the hipsters. The problem there is even though hipsters do dress "unfashionably", they always do it in a way thats different than those who aren't trying at all. In other words, most people don't have trouble distinguishing the two.
Old Spice's campaign with "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like", particularly the personalized videos that he made for random people on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and others: http://mashable.com/2010/07/13/old-spice-gu/

It's the only ad campaign that has made me go out and buy a product basely only on that ad campaign.
Design patterns have (mostly) flopped
Minnesota and Private Cloud. There Goes Today’s Blog
HP Exec Bradley: Tablets Will Be A $40 Billion Market
The fact that they have a facebook account does not mean that they want to use it to login. There is some loss from day one given your strategy.
That fails for sets and other non-list iterables. It would have to be something like:

def get_single(l):
i = iter(l)
val = i.next()
try:
i.next() # expected to throw exception for one-element iterable
except StopIteration:
return val
raise AssertionError('More than one object')

Eww.
I've found PHP very useful as an indicator of what jobs I do not want to apply for.