skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You say that most people don't understand security, and unfortunately, you're exactly right. So why do those who know better intentionally choose to make things /less/ secure but market it as /increasing/ security?
"until relatively recently"

if by recently you mean 6 years. almost everything else you said is also wrong.

op - use what you are most comfortable with and don't force yourself into whatever is cool or latest groupthink

(Edit: ok you got me.:

* PHP's syntax is very random

you are confusing syntax with the standard lib, which was inherited from C func for func (which if you come from an OO stdlib can seem 'random' - but it makes elegant sense in the old unix world where CamelCase object names didn't exist)

* PHP lacks (or lacked until relatively recently) many programming niceties such as objects, types, closures, lambdas, and namespaces

see php5 - 2004.

* Even if you can (with difficulty) use PHP libraries in command line programs

tons of daemon scripts run php - you are talking about a php3/4 problem (set_script_timeout etc.) see mailchimp post

* Although it is almost always built into a web server, PHP doesn't make it easy for you to do anything useful with web requests

this is what PHP excels at. want a function to retrieve the hostname from a URL? done. want to send a HTTP header? done. want to parse basic auth? done.

php.net/parse_url

$_SERVER

php.net/header

PHP was probably the first http/web aware language, you picked its strength as a weakness.

* Since it's a web templating language at heart, PHP practically begs you to do the wrong thing and mix presentation and data.

you can say that of any language, implementation-dependent. python and ruby also print to stdout which is just the web process as well. you think this because you have seen more php scripts that mix presentation and logic.

* Due to its ubiquity, PHP is the choice of script kiddies who can't program.

sigh
Yeah, I think this is ridiculously naive. I know many janitors that would totally disagree with you. This is sort of like idea of slumming.
I don't see how perpetuating the problem (every phone device is going to be insecurely logged in within the next 2 years) moots the concern. "Everyone does it!" is no excuse for a poor security model.
Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project
Release early, release often.
Don't worry, be crappy.
Fail fast.
Iterate.

Show us your half baked, not really ready for prime time projects, HN. Is it ugly but interesting?
I'll start with mine: http://smsul8r.com - a SMS message scheduler. Ugly, buggy, but it works.
Come on... let's see your worst work!
I am starting to think that MN's Senators (not House Reps) are going to be overly helpful to big media at the expense of everyone else (one is a cosponsor - not the former actor, maybe some horse trading).
Indeed, few experts think a million is enough to quit your day job.

I hear the startup crowd screaming "Wha!" $1m is more than enough of a safety blanket to quit your "day job" and work on your own ideas for even a decade or more. This article clearly assumes being rich involves "not working", yet all of the rich people I know personally are perhaps the hardest workers I know.
I'm not to worried. Finally a chance to scare people off of the ICANN controlled root!
So your whole thing falls a part when you realize that many people dropout of school, as well as grad school, for financial reasons.
If they settle isn't that admitting they have a nexus in Texas (love saying that) and will have to collect sales tax going forward?
This is a good summary of the common gripes. I would like to add to this list the history of things BREAKING even with minor version updates (although to be fair a lot of this has been due to radical changes in the object model over the past few years).

I also think there's a fundamental problem with this question. I think one must make the comparison between web development frameworks, rather than saying PHP/Ruby/Python - you need to say Symfony (or PHP framework X - I just happen to like Symfony), Rails or Django (or Spring or Grails or whatever).

In that case: the comparison is simple and personal. Go to the Symfony tutorial, go do the Django tutorial, go do the Rails tutorial. See which one clicks the best.

I personally find PHP enjoyable to use because I've used it for a while and I'm used to it's idiosynchracies. I've used it for web development but I've also used it for command line daemon processes that have run, without fail, for the past 3 years.

I've never had cause to benchmark those processes in terms of performance with any other language because I've never run into performance problems, but your mileage may vary.

In short: I think PHP gets a lot of bad press - but PHP also gets a lot of things done.
Beginner Tips from PHP Masters
You hear a lot of "I should never have spent 5+ years on my Ph.D." from chemists and biologists in today's job market, trust me.
A little birdie told me that Gruber may have heard it from a hamster. Animals, they talk when we listen to them. :)
Like all "lists," I would take and file away as a "best practice;" particularly one that comes from Paul Graham. Just don't let the list limit you from executing the plan for your dream. YC even has a place for this on their application...it's called "hacking the system!" The lesser of these have achieved greatness. Many said I would never finish college and law school while being married, but two bar exams later...
I meant figure as in: numbers.

They (you?) switched from an expensive platform to another expensive platform. In an article about a transition I hope to find hard data about the performance- and cost-tradeoffs that were made.

How many hosts, how much data, how much traffic, how many queries, how much latency, how many dollars?

Instead I got a generic "AWS is awesome" boilerplate along with a generic AWS best-practice bullet-list...

FWIW, here's a not-so-old chart from backblaze about relative storage cost: http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of...

S3 ranges way up there and knowing that figure first-hand (and also their traffic rate) I sort of expected cost considerations to be at least mentioned in a document titled "XXX transition to ... storage-system".
Wish they would open up the bug to take a peak at the comments and test cases
http://smsmyride.com

http://smscard.com.au

i also have this half-baked search engine that has no content: whatwhere.com.au :) but you can't really do anything with that!!

(incidentally when you're ready to add "rest of the world" you can use my 8centsms.com API ;)
> [Is] it now possible get established relatively easier by simply writing a better book than the other guy?

Sure, just like Britney Spears gets all her sales by having good music.

Writing a good book means little if you can't find a way to get lots of people to read it.
Haha, my project couldn't be a better fit for your description: http://valuegrapher.com/
HN extension for Google Chrome that adds profile hovercards and instant search. I really dislike the current hovercards and the code is dirty but it works.

http://github.com/abraham/hackernews-extension
Twitter Hack Week
So I've been marginally involved with a couple of Mike Maple's less successful ventures. At digg, his involvement was basically put money on the table in one round, and (apparently) take money off the table at a higher valuation in a later round (not exactly "willing to throw it all away"). I've also been a customer of Egnyte.com, which seems starved for funds.

So in a world, where "entrepreneurs have all the power," what exactly does he bring to the table?

Apparently he impresses investors, but so did Bernie Madoff.
Some folks consider OS X Unix-like in the same way that we consider Linux Unix-like. It's not strictly speaking exactly equivalent to the original Unix, but it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, so it's pretty much a duck.
http://69.197.166.101:2261/
Helping freelancers find new work.

Going live tomorrow :)

Edit: if you want to know soon as it's live, add your email here: http://tekbob.wufoo.com/forms/notify-me-when-tekbobs-live/
I disagree and fail to see how that answers my issue but the real killer here is that if that is sole criteria, whether the person has experience with this particular framework, why pick something so niche as Django? Is that the best decision given this mentality?
This can be difficult to explain. Sales tax or 'Sales and Use tax 'SUT' is the responsibility of the customer not the vendor. I'm an accountant and often a small business will send us a bill that doesn't include sales tax. Some things are exempt from sales tax, but some things are not. It's up to us to decide if we need to 'assess' ourselves sales tax based on the service/product that we received. We send a check to the government for the sales tax the vendor didn't charge us. When we're audited this is one of the big issues that we need to provide documentation. It seems to be a concept that's turned around, but it's up to the customer to make sure the tax is paid, not the vendor. Although it is different state to state.
The only way I see Amazon liable for sales tax is through the purchase of their inventory, not the actual sales to customers like us, although it is normally assumed that large corporations charge sales tax and there might be a tax law that says just that. I looked at my last Amazon order and I wasn't charged sales tax, so I'm not sure how Amazon gets around this.
Some feedback for your site: You might want to put up a message promising not to do unethical things with my phone number. It would give me a little peace of mind.
Good point. fwiw I do promise.
Tasterator.com

Neat toy I think, but pretty buggy and really no business potential
I think there's another more obvious outcome. Unlimitted lending of digital content has a lower physical restriction barrier. A secondary marketplace could easily spring up matching people with licenses to those without.
Thanks! I didn't know....
Most would prefer to buy locally if prices are competitive. They don't mind paying reasonable taxes. But when the price of things on Amazon are significantly less ...
Thanks! I think we need to consider changing the name seriously.
www.appcanvas.com. I posted it here a few days back and was blasted for poor and unintuitive usability. Have been working my ass off on the UX since then. For what's it worth it definitely fits the description here.
I struggled to think about how I would answer the "Naughty" question. I thought about it for awhile and remembered something that happened almost 15 years ago.

I hated high school with a passion that still surprises me when I look back on it. My high school allowed kids who got accepted to college to go and have school pay for it while getting credit for college and high school. This sounded great to me but getting accepted was going to be a challenge because I wasn't a great student and I was only 15 at the time.

I met with the admissions officer at the college I wanted to attend and she wasn't sure at all about me. I had reviewed the course catalog before the meeting and made her a suggestion. I said "If I take a 400 level course and get an "A" would that prove to you that I'm up to doing college level work?" She said yes and I suggested that I take a course on the history of World War 2. World War 2 was a mild obsession of mine from 13-14 and I still to this day remember reading pages and pages of statistics about shipping losses during various times during the war. I knew every imaginable detail about virtually anything that had to do with World War 2. She didn't know this of course and warned me many times about what I was getting myself into in signing up for this course.

I was accepted with the provision that we would review my grades after the semester was over. I received the highest grade in the class and the entire course catalog was open to me until I graduated from high school. This ended up working in my favor in many ways but the most obvious benefit was that I graduated high school with virtually all of my liberal arts electives done without having to pay anything for it.

Not sure if this is the spirit of the question or not but it seems like it to me.
I've only used it on smaller projects. Facebook use it on their frontpage for progressive loading (check the source for `<script>big_pipe.onPageletArrive(..);</script>`).

Longer running connections are a little more problematic, but some client side code should be able to handle the connection being closed. You just need to make sure your web server can handle the number of connections your are expecting. Apache is particularly bad for this. Something like nginx should perform better.
Add every secretary and administrative assistant to that list. The big volume typing problem with touch screens (other than the constant "shifting" to get other keys (e.g. Numbers on the iPad)) is the lack of movement which results in more stress on the fingertips. Not to mention the lack of contours to tell where fingers should be placed.

I do think it might be interesting to allow the word prediction to be system wide on desktops / portables.
You are trying to remove the initiation of contact to the head. This does a couple things 1.) Simplifies and remove ambiguity from any call. 2.) Reduce the initial impact to the head.

Is it going to eliminate all head injures no, but is a clear way to define a rule.
A bit part of the problem is that you don't get to vote the shares held by your mutual funds. The fund manager gets those votes and he/she is obligated to vote solely on the basis of profit motive. And because of 401(k) and 403(b), the vast majority of the workforce is at least partially invested in mutual funds. Most employer-based retirement plans do not offer the option to invest in individual stocks.
Looks great! I do all my timesheeting via an IRC bot - will plug this thing in and then blog about it when I get the chance :)
Ok. But if that's what's actually happening, we need to have that conversation. Keeping these things secret will lead to nothing but waste, corruption, and misunderstanding.
I spent a few month in rural Nepal (think $10/month for rent). An ipod, digital camera and a few grand in the back account was enough to be considered uber-rich. It's all perspective.

Sidenote: Now im back in the startup game and im just as greedy as every else
Since I get a blank white page in Chrome, I'm going to guess Flash has something to do with it...
Yes, but I don't think the turning on the screen is the big problem. If I'm wondering if I have messages, updates, etc., turning on the screen is a very minor hassle

Hmm, I would find it to be a big hassle. When I'm seated at my desk, I can just glance out of the corner of my eye at my phone to see if the LED is blinking. Having to remove my hands from my keyboard and physically pick it up would be a huge hassle.
Sure you can, but only once per story.
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Did you see this paragraph?

"What should be done? "I think we ought to go do what we did in the S&L [crisis] and actually put many of these guys in prison," said Stiglitz."

He's talking about sending people to prison.
A HTML5 puzzle game: http://www.sokogame.com

Got some very useful feedback when I posted it here, update coming soon.
ChatPatio.com - I just embedded a bunch of chatrooms into different topics people would want to discuss. It's been sitting on the side untouched for a few months now. I just created it as a quick mockup and may launch a real app sometime.

http://chatpatio.com
My programming journey
The context is the flipboard people having a whinge because this copies 'their' scrolling technique, I wasn't dismissing the project as a whole as uncreative.
After PHP and JS, which are a great introduction in my opinion.
1. Removed tptacek's listing

2. Removed bravura's (Metaoptimize) listings.

3. Emails were supposed used Mailhide, its a Django filter, which broke, and which renders things in plaintext on failing. :(

4. I wrote I created as it uses jobboardshq.com, which is another site we created. (thenayr's comment.)

(Sorry guys, I was sleeping or I would have responded earlier.)
I think this is an incredible concept! I tried to use it but couldn't actually enter in any text (FF 3.6.11) but keep at it! This is a really great idea and already well on the way to being a great execution.
It's a Flash video. Download it and view it offline.

http://videos.bloomberg.com/63932346.flv
Note that this isn't anything to do with dynamic typing: Python is very dynamic, but it doesn't have this weird coercion (or is it "automatic type conversion"?).

I hate this as well, but, I love dynamic typing. They aren't the same thing.
I'm a recent mechanical keyboard convert. Bought a Customizer 101 [1] a couple months ago and was so pleased I ended up buying a second one (one for work, the other for home). I can type for much longer now before reaching any kind of exhaustion in the hands/wrists. Recommended for the RSI-prone, as long as the people around you don't mind the noise too much.

---

[1] http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/cus101usenon.html
FWIW almost all of the applied math majors I know are going into IB or trading, which is most certainly a good career move.

Are you saying moving into academia isn't a good career move? Because that's probably true with every technical profession.
You're missing the point and kind of making an ass out of yourself while doing it. You can't just say "You might not agree with all my reasons" and make some strawman. Most of the criticism has been around how you flippantly dismiss the skill of programming while serve up UX design on a pedestal but yet you make it out as if we are dismissing usability design. It's like a delusion of persecution. Also, I fail to see how a "UX designer" is any less a cost center than a programmer. Maybe you're not sure what your words mean?

Also, I have managed those outsourced situations and you are naive: "plain and simple." I mean seriously, either respond to the criticisms like an adult or don't play at all.
Java on Mac OS X
I wanted to be able to see products on Amazon side-by-side with their pros and cons: http://silvos.com.

I need to add more products, product specs, and fix the way the pros/cons work, but I'm already using it to start thinking about which digital camera to get.
http://www.crushtease.com

Anonymous matching site with a twist.
I removed the listing. Sorry, the emails were using a mailhide filter, which broke without me noticing.
http://www.couchone.com/ is totally focused on CouchDB which is open source http://couchdb.apache.org
Great comment. Successful entrepreneurs are often very hard to pigeonhole, and are often classified by others in ways that surprise them. Really, one quality would be your ability to succeed in spite of how other people estimate your chances or "relevant" abilities.
So, what happens in the winter when you want that ambient heat?
Theft is covered by other laws. We don't need child labor laws for that.
On mechanical keyboards, Razer is bringing this puppy to the gaming masses (and the rest of the tactile feedback enthusiasts): [ http://store.razerzone.com/store/razerusa/en_US/pd/productID... ]. If you must combine some ultra-geekery, including n-key rollover even when connected via USB, with futuristic looks, it is a top-notch offer.
http://vps.kevinmehall.net:8123/hn

An Operational Transformation (like Google Wave / EtherPad) implementation in node.js and coffeescript. Source at http://github.com/kevinmehall/OTpad . It's much cleaner and lighter-weight than the EtherPad open source project. Chrome recommended for now, FF sort-of supported.
I'd be lying if I didn't admit my main reason for submitting this is because they mention my side-project -- http://mocksup.com -- as a Rails Rumble '09 entry that's now a "pretty polished [application] with [a] revenue stream".
http://playrelay.io

I wish I had some time to finish it (client work first)! It also might be a miniscule market.
I have removed the listing.
PHP's syntax is very random. There are over 5000 builtins and no consistency among them.

This is one thing that really annoys me about PHP...for example there is stripslashes() to remove slashes but strip_tags() to remove html tags. Why couldn't they be consistent about using the underscore or not using it. Another one is array_push($array,$var) which takes the array as the first argument and the $var to push as the second, whereas array_search($var,$array) has it in reverse.
I love the story, and I'm glad the kid got $3,000 - but - do people not proofread their work anymore?

From the story: "[...], he plans yo buy Christmas gifts for his family."
You don't have to use the popup as a developer. Blame the app dev, not apple. You can just use the sound or number on the app.
I think its cool :P Cool!
How do the various mechanical keyboard mentioned here compare to an IBM Model M keyboard? Are they as loud, etc.? I find typing on my M very satisfying, but the volume truly is a problem, and I think even the weight of the key presses might be a problem for lengthy typing sessions.
I like Google and part of me wants to believe they were lobbying Congress about introducing the self-driving cars to the the mass market. But on the other hand I have a feeling that is not exactly what they were talking about.

Google motto: Don't be evil.

My response: Define evil.

Ps. Here's an idea for a start-up: a website that gathers funds from individuals (the public) to hire lobbyist to advocate for a specific cause. Suggestions? lol. If you can't beat them join them.
You do not exhibit the same behavior as users in aggregate. However, the question of Opportunity Cost in development vs marginal cost of constructing ca systems is open for debate and situationally dependent.
I'd pay $50 just for a WordPress plugin that made the new Tron movie music play when anybody read my blog, period.
The Trials And Tribulations Of The Real Candy Man, The Inventor Of Jelly Bellies
Should source-code be translated? - Part I
"Planned scarcity" is the term. But I still think "lending" is a step forward to enable booking sharing, while preserving the incentive for writers to keep writing.

Needless to say Amazon will take a cut in this feature, perhaps some to the book publisher and author too. Kind of works out for everyone.
Har har, $3800/month for a NYC apt that makes you feel rich? Try $6500++
http://inboxSEO.com - daily or weekly SEO emails - see where does your site rank, lots of little UI bugs but it works and we have some paying customers despite the poor UX...
We created that site as well. :)
We are headed quickly into politics here but I'm ignorant and genuinely curious. Do we have evidence that the search for biological weapons was false?
It is just a small plugin but there you go, just uploaded it...
http://github.com/amanjeev/histriki
The down-votes on parent are misplaced. Why not enlighten with comments about how it -is- realistic?
wow this is amazing
I was serious. A friendly invitation.
Trying to incorporate wakoopa anytime?
http://toylanguage.com - it is kind of like jsfiddle + pubsub
WeatherLoop° - http://weatherloop.com

Receive Weather Texts Everyday.
Mine is http://www.soulplaying.com

It's a web app that integrate RPG elements with a TODO list.
http://www.jaxified.com/
Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don’t Want to Work at Writing
I simply love typing on the keyboard of my MBP. Does anyone know what class of keyboard that is?
http://oddalerts.com

Made it for my gf and I, but never got around to polishing it. It still tentatively works. Basically it sends reminders at odd times because I felt when you set a reminder, you automatically remember it anyway, and wind up staring at the clock. So this comes at different times.

Bit fuzzy around the edges and I haven't worked on it in months :(
http://www.facster.com
o_O word!! This is what you call half-baked?

/me signs up and begins using it immediately