skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for that... I had not seen shadyurl.com. I might start using it to see how many people notice.
Why do you think Facebook security is security by professionals? I fully expect that Microsoft and Google have a stronger set of security experts working on their various authentication and encryption methods.
OK, sorry, I misunderstood your point.

Yes, it makes a lot of sense to do Javascript server-side for templating (client-side only is still tricky because of concerns related to crawlers, like search-engines).

But on the other hand, I would prefer the JVM with Rhino, not Node.js ... especially since using Java NIO you can have scalability for I/O bound requests similar to Node.js.
My only nit with your nit is that the security you are attributing to WordPress is more inherent with PHP and exists in any PHP-based CMS, including Drupal. Hate to be the guy that keeps defending WordPress but the problem is PHP and Apache and those file permissions... not WordPress itself. ;)
Jake Lodwick’s Blog | BLOGGONE IT
The problem is, in order to know that Quora is good enough to force you to use FB Connect even though you don't want to, you have to use FB Connect... I'm certain this slows their growth.
Hmmm... interesting. I suppose this could be thought of as a real-life example of livelock. Or maybe a deadlock with busy waiting.
Yes, although I'd argue that it's not meta-hipster but meta-geek. If you wouldn't use 'grok', you probably wouldn't use 'eir'. In the same vein, putting your punctuation outside your quote can either be a simple mistake or meta-grammarian protest. Even the choice of single versus double quotes is signalling, consciously or not.

The problem is not correctness, but whether the signal is properly received by your audience. You chose 'his or her', but was this a conscious choice? And at what level? Was it because you fear being judged poorly for the grammatically correct but non-politically correct 'his'? Because you find 'eir' pretentious? Because you find substituting 'her' to be an affectation?

To me, 'His or her' is a signals that you are aware that language can be sexist, and want to show that you are not. I think it correlates with college-educated American liberal born after 1960, or one who has learned his English from such.

I fit these characteristics, but usually consciously choose 'his', hopefully signalling that I detest linguistic contortions for the sake of signalling political correctness, but more likely just being judged an unrepentant sexist. If I don't want to take this risk, I switch to an across-the-board 'her', as I feel this is more effective at actually combatting sexism.

Have you read Hofstadter's essay on "Purity in Language"?
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
I don't get it - where is the spiral? The ants are circling.
Isn't "there's more than one way to do it" why Python programmers hate Perl?
Animated visualization of US unemployment rates by county
That article is so terribly written I couldn't get to the end. Here is the story from the source:

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...
Assigning the result to one variable (totally different to this) is about 6% faster, so this syntax is what I'll use, thank you!

On your exact machine with your exact version of Python, today.

Please don't let microbenchmarks dictate what code you write. If you need a 6% performance gain in a microbenchmark, you've chosen the wrong language to use. Python is about readability and maintainability, not syntax hacks to make some benchmark slightly faster.
I've pushed some CSS tweaks for IE to CoffeeScript.org -- it still won't look real pretty, but everything should be usable now. Should have done it a long time ago, thanks for the nudge.
Somewhat off-topic, but I've switched to Tumblr ... it does posts to Twitter / Facebook automatically, and sometimes you just want to post a small snippet or a picture.

After using it, Wordpress / Blogger seem kind of outdated.
They might know that it's you, actually.

I spoke with a facebook employee recently and they apparently spend quite a bit of effort identifying likely duplicate accounts. Usually people make several accounts to have more farmville neighbors, so you may not get lumped in this category, but who knows.

Google does the same thing - I believe there was a post here recently about an interview where an employee said their was a console matching accounts and likely duplicate accounts the person has.
I'd enjoy a 3rd party login manager that is a separate system from Facebook. Some place where I can view all sites that I have authorized, manage my communication settings, and keep track of who I've registered with. I don't want facebook to know this about me.

I'd be more comfortable with Google doing this. It would simplify my sign in process for new websites, reduce the number of accounts and passwords I need to manage, remove the need for a password manager like 1password, and give me quick access to disable or block access to sites I no longer want to have an account with.

A startup could tackle this, but they would have to build trust and widespread adoption.
Not to mention the different kinds of airplanes, different kinds of electronics, and all possible permutations of the above. Yes, this may seem like overkill to many software devs. Safety-critical systems require huge amounts of testing. It's much more than "release early and iterate."
I agree it's smart.

But that doesn't change the fact this platform is, from top to bottom, everything Microsoft has been criticizing and sabotaging for the past decade: GPL, Linux, MySQL...

It's like Google deciding to do search through Bing...
Yeah, I read the sentence as tongue-in-cheek humor.
Are you talking about another language?

1) In python, arrays and lists are two very different things.

2) Neither the array module nor the array class have a single function.
I'm not comfortable using any sort of 3rd party service. I also don't like that I have any kind of connected identity across multiple sites.

This sort of authentication system should be built into the browser, entirely under my control, and every site should be given a separate identity token.
Yes: Don't force me to log in with facebook.

No: Don't force me to make another fucking password.

I have a whole shitload of passwords. I use an independent (not in the browser) password tool. I'd really like to be able to generate a password and login automatically: i.e. for my tool and the website to automatically hook up.

Oh, yeah that's called OpenID: http://openid.net/get-an-openid/

And no jokes about my tool please.
Ah, hugeurl makes the links too long for tweets though, and also it doesn't have an API like this one does! ;)
We call him Oliver Twist. :)
Already broke the thing

http://www.lengthenmyurl.com/urls/8b1e05cf137bcef910c5e7ece6...

has been lengthened to

http://www.lengthenmyurl.com/urls/3be99802c526ca7d9e6aa00384...

256 -> 120 :).
I find myself in the same position. I wish naps were more effective for me because I tend to hit a slump around 2:30 or 3PM, but I find that when I nap, I wake up feeling dehydrated, confused, and in a surprisingly bad mood.
Go fly in a private plane and leave your cell phone on. I do not fly IFR so I haven't had to rely in my ILS but it does destroy radio communications. Have you ever heard your GSM based phone pulse and cause noise on a close by speaker? Imagine that being pumped into your radios and into your headphones. It is painful to hear. If I was landing when it went off, it could cause me to react badly at a time when I couldn't afford it. Also, I could miss a call that there is traffic around.
I never bothered to sign up at stackoverflow because of OpenID. Not necessarily because I have some philosophical issue with it, but because I already have a system to maintain this stuff and OpenID is just another hoop to jump through. Adding an optional user/password signup is hardly difficult.
I take plenty of risks greater than 1 in 1,000,000,000.

If you're in the US there's a 1 in 15,000,000 chance you'll die at work today.

The chance of penis fracture during intercourse in any year is about 1 in 100,000,000. I can live with that.
There are lots of things that it would be wonderful to fix, but can't be done without either patching native objects, running an interpreter on top of JS, or adding lots of special functions in a required library.

Take, for example, negative array indices. It would be lovely if JS allowed you to say:

array[-1]

As an alias for

array[array.length - 1]

Unfortunately, we can't add the feature because you'd have to intercept "[]" at every call site. For example:

a[b]

Is a an array or an object? Is b a string or a number, and if so, is it negative? You just don't know at compile time, so we don't support the feature. This is just one example of something that would be nice to fix about JS, but can't be done cleanly -- there are plenty of others.
I think you're right. Plan9's first "public" (to universities only) release was 1992, when Linux was just getting off the ground and the FreeBSD & NetBSD projects did not yet exist. People interested in Linux or 386BSD at the time would have probably tried Plan9 if they could have.
I don't use Facebook. Incidentally, I adblocked "facebook.com" the other day, and a lot of sites load much faster now. In three days, the rule has been hit over 1300 times!

If I had a Facebook account, this would scare me.
I'm not clear what's ultimately different here from running your own blog on your own server and offering feeds.

That it resurrects finger? ...So?

Of course, that's the problem - there isn't really anything here to talk about, just some 90s Wired magazine fodder of a slideshow and a plea for community help.
I don't know, they'vr got some coverage with HAMMER a couple of years ago, but where did it lead them?
I find no problem with OpenID. There are many free OpenId providers out there, and if you really don't want to use one, you can create your own fairly easily.
Thanks, I used code: TNYLHXKLXLME
Personally, I think this is a bit on the "clever" side. Plus, the error message you get isn't as easy to understand as if you used an assert statement. I'd probably just do something like this:

def get_single(l):
assert l and len(l) == 1
return l[0]

Then you get the best of both worlds: readability and a concise one-liner.
You can use Java's concurrency features to implement better concurrency features (as opposed to the language just giving you better concurrency features from the outset), which is presumably what was meant by "less opinionated" or "library-centric". You can have asynchronous or synchronous message passing or STM on mutable references to immutable data or really anything built on top of Java, but an opinionated language like Go just picks something (synchronous message passing in Go's case) and makes you use it.[1]

[1] You can implement asynchronous message passing on top of synchronous message passing, but not the other way around. Presumably the "least opinionated" language would simply give you the concurrency primitive with which you can implement the greatest number of other concurrency primitives, which presumably[2] is locks.

[2] I could be wrong about this.
Honestly, I'd rather not give Jeff my password. So +1 on OpenID.
This Just in From the Institute for the Obvious: Media Likes Covering App
If you ask a mathematician, everything is or can be described by math. I'm inclined to agree when it comes to software. Software is just a domain-specific mathematical notation for expressing algorithms in a machine-parsable way.
I have to use the Facebook api for work. I have asked that I no longer have anything to do with Facebook development due the the immense stress it causes, seriously, just thinking about it can put me in a bad mood. unfortunately this isnt really an option so im stuck with it sadface
This is the one way to do it. masklinn has cousin comment that does a good job of explaining why: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1732575, and others have made some good points questioning whether you'd ever actually want to do this particular "it" in the first place.
I agree, this is very useful. Entering address information into separate fields is something we have, sadly, come to accept. From a user standpoint though, this makes no sense. I write my address on an envelope, and the US post office delivers it just fine. Why would I need to separate my address?

One thing to keep inmind is the Geocoding limit. If this is used on a busy website, you'll need to build in checks:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/faq.html#geocoder_limit
I can't speak for general popularity, but the reason I haven't been able to try it as a C & C++ replacement is that I tend to use C or C++ where I have to. Weird hardware, integrating with some existing piece of software, etc. Using it for that kind of thing is hard and definitely more work than using C/C++. I guess it's the same reason I don't use D.
It basically looks like the precursor to Civilization and friends.
To each their own. Use something else if you want, but there's millions of people who don't want PHP to die.
Dave Mclure is a Dick
Threre was no need to wear that shirt...
Nice catch indeed, we'll fix that... eventually ;)
Perl has pointers? Uh, nope.

Also, how does Perl not have associative arrays? Oh, you mean that vectors and dictionaries are separate types, whereas PHP has one type that does both poorly? Yeah, I'm sure that's why PHP is so popular.

(What is it with people writing about Perl as though they are experts without ever having written a Perl program?)
Aliens have deactivated British and US nuclear missiles, say US military pilots
And if you absolutely must "connect" with Facebook or Twitter, please do NOT ask for permission to update my account.
Clojure++ (notes from Rich Hickey talk)
A Self-Taught Programmer's Journey
Actually a thoughtful article.
hello everyone! This is Cas from Puppygames. It's been very interesting reading this thread (thanks ewj for posting!)

A few straight from the horses mouth facts:

I sat down and worked out what our revenues are, and they work out as $750/month over the last 7 years. Out of that, we pay for hosting, advertising, accountancy, and tax, leaving about $400/month and then Chaz and I split the remainder. Chaz just about scrapes a meagre existence in Spain. I live in the UK though so I have to keep on doing a day job (I've got a family to support). So up till now Puppygames has always been part-time! It'd be nice to do it full time.

If you're wondering why we bother at all, well, it's because it's actually a monumental pain in the arse to release two versions of every game - a demo and a full version. It's loads easier just to do a full version which can be unlocked. That's all our "DRM" is, really - just a really simple way of doing unlockable demos which won't go wrong and is practically impossible to not understand.

Also, anyone who thinks that it was a "lot of work" developing the system should probably know... it wasn't. It's really trivial stuff, and most of the hard bits are built in to Java anyway like the public/private key encryption. We're already working our little fingers off making the game, can't afford to spend any more time on unlocking schemes!

It really is utterly trivial for anyone with half a brain to defeat, and even crack and release. It's Java - any fool with JAD and Eclipse can rip it out. But what we're getting at here is... what's the point? The demos are lengthy, the games are cheap, the rights we give you along with the games are exactly the rights you would expect to have and want. They're exactly the rights I expect and want from things I buy, anyway.

Lots of piratey types give all sorts of feeble excuses as to why they get dodgy copies of things but at the end of the day we basically addressed every single one of them except one which is that the games cost too much and you wanted them anyway! Which we're figuring out how to address right now. We tried in the past reducing the prices of the games but discovered they made even less money.

Any suggestions?
Have to agree with this.

It might take 15-30 minutes to develop your own authentication system.

Even if only takes 10 with facebook, the extra 5 minutes are worth it to me to keep 100% control over my users' experience on my website.
Correct. And people in the Perl community didn't stop just because someone else had more market-share in web development. There's many area's of programming and I'm always surprised when people think web development is the only one that matters.
You could save yourself a lot of time and money by sharing the costs of the defense.
(Insert hackneyed religious battle between Python and Ruby here).
I prefer http://dickensurl.com/

Sounds NSFW, they should have prefixed it with "Charles."
Great point. I hope there's another way of getting rid of anonymity than having us all have Facebook accounts, because that is a great value. Having your real name and ties which connect back to your social life can hopefully be achieved somehow else... albeit probably through other sorts of centralized profile stores which might have the same stigmas as Facebook with some people. I think the key is in having many options for where you can have your profile kept and what level of data is there. As long as a profile provider's minimum level of profile data is sufficient to do away with the amount of anonymity that is necessary for a service (say Quora), it becomes a matter of how accurate the profile data is, i.e., how easy is it to create a fake account on the profile service?
Precisely what I was trying to avoid by being as respectful as I could to both languages. They're great, they just don't do what I want.
4 Copy + Paste Monetization Methods
I'd avoid doing this, because people who'll read your code would have to check themselves what the `get_single` function does.

Also, the performance here is probably much worse. (Although in many cases it would not matter.)

But that's just my opinion, your suggestion is legitimate.
A good point. I focus on web development, and the question is entirely about what will replace PHP in the field of web development (not that PHP is extensively used anywhere else).
Perhaps independent developers feel like prisoners (slaves may be too strong a word) where the wardens are software patents. If you ask the FSF, non-Free software is unethical for "enslaving" the knowledge contained in the software (though I think that position goes a bit too far).
Haha nothing against your article - it's well written. But if we're on HN, any post that can invite an argument, will invite an argument.
Founders Fund offers $100K each to twenty teenage entrepreneurs
It's called agnosticism. It's not new.

"...in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line."

-Bertrand Russell
What's interesting to me is the percentage of tech articles that cover Apple (15.1%) and the advantage that Apple has over competitors, particularly Microsoft and to some extent Google. The implications of this advantage in terms of brand value are substantial.
Not to mention possibly the most important benefit of clarifying your own thinking on the subject.
Should that be a consideration when deciding whether to abolish software patents? If nothing else, the USPTO can grandfather the existing patents in, but restrict the ability of their owners to use them aggressively.
Exactly. This is the reason that I am far more comfortable using my Google or Yahoo OpenID than a Facebook login.
I love Tumblr and I love Wordpress. Tumblr has a lot of great features, but WP is a very powerful engine. Far from perfect, but it is improving steadily.
Here's a link to that Russell essay by the way. It's a good one.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8299499/Am-I-an-Atheist-or-an-Agno...
I notice a lot of "shoulds" in this comment. Unfortunately, what should be and what is aren't always the same thing.
Looking back at my own experience as a newbie developer in 1995, the convenience of PHP was absolutely the reason I picked PHP over perl, and having arrays that could also be dictionaries if I changed my mind was a big part of that.
What happened to being a good old agnostic? I think that in attempting to fight against being pigeonholed as either a believer or a denier of god/gods, he lights on the notion that somehow being a better (or real) scientist by being open to possibilities is an alternative. With respect, there's already a reasonable alternative to being either a believer in or denier of god/gods: agnosticism. The open mind stuff just makes you a good scientist.

Edit: Oops, markstanbury beat me to it.
When he said "language" I guess I automatically translated that to "APIs" since that's usually what people mean when they complain about incompatibility in JavaScript environments.

Differences in the JavaScript language in engines are fairly minimal these days (BTW all the features you mentioned can be added to legacy engines, see http://github.com/280north/narwhal/blob/master/engines/defau...) I think the bigger problem with sharing code between client and server is the libraries that unnecessarily tie themselves to APIs specific to each environment (i.e. the DOM and other browser APIs, and Node.js or other server-side APIs)
I think lunch can also be to blame for afternoon fatigue, depending on what you eat.
just like the shorteners except it's longer and stuff which is better for some reason.
You can get the original URL using http://unshort.me service.
PHP can die when there's another language that's as dead simple to run as PHP. A new programmer can open up a text file with a php extension on (pretty much) any web server, type "<? echo "Hello World"; ?>", and it works.
Should be: http://doyouwantyoururltobelongerwellwecandothatforyouhere.c...
What is it with people writing about Perl as though they are experts without ever having written a Perl program?

I've long believed that some sort of rigorous comparative linguistics education would only benefit programmers. Certainly it could have squelched some of the howlers in this article.
Possible Google Instant Search Bug
It is a good thing if code is readable by people who only know the language a little, only know similar languages, or have not used the language for years.
Doesn't seem to be taken...
What kind of programs are these where you don't have to rewrite a bunch of other code anyway to account for the difference between keyed and indexed lookups?
I imagine that the convenience of PHP is why its still going strong. Simply because you could have a html file with some php tags in there and throw it up in a directory on your webhost and you now have a "dynamic" webpage.