skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tbh, php excels at being a templating engine. it is very easy to get data in and out of the database and into the browser.

however, the implementation of php itself is buggy and often plagued with security vulnerabilities. personally I just don't trust the platform, regardless of the language faults.

anyway

you should look at the components you have, and if php is the right tool for the job. if it is just templating, then whatever. but I would advise against long running services or daemons in php.

the maintenance burden may be availed by a better product. you already use postgres because it is easier than writing a database in php (obviously), so there might
be a few other tools or languages out there that can radically simplify your code base.

you might also find that node.js is good enough for new work, and using javascript instead won't create a significant burden since you already know most of it.

you shouldn't dismiss the possibility of refactoring or adopting new tools on the assumed maintenance cost without making a proper evaluation of it

it is too easy to fall into the cognitive trap of 'sunk cost' and continue on in the same way you've been doing things for 8 years.
It has messy stdlib (gets()!) and lots of features that you can shoot yourself in the foot with (software security would look very different if it had arrays like D).
Those are all v sensible rules. You could give everyone an OSX desktop with Windows and Linux in VirtualBox, using a shared folder, then you could do the test build locally without having to bounce it off version control in the middle.
AFAIK you can build iPhone apps in C#.
Very nice summary, thanks for that.

> - Music is just like ZUNE.

I kind of laughed at the Zune when it came out, but I've recently started to rethink it. There's been a convergence of electronic devices lately - phone, camera, web browser, handheld game device, music player, etc. Every company in any of these markets needs to realize this is happening, and either specialize and focus on their niche (high high end cameras) or be able to make an adequate showing on all the features.

Apple realized that music was going on to phones, and they made the iPhone - very smart play getting ahead of the game. Microsoft didn't realize this early enough, and had to rush something to market to catch up, so of course it wasn't going to show as well. Apple had been building and refining music players for a few cycles at that point, so it's unsurprising the Zune wasn't as nice. But they had to do it, because the convergence of music player, phone, computer, browser, camera, gaming, etc. demands it. While the Zune showed poorly, it laid the groundwork for them to eventually have a quality music player. And actually, it might even be possible to pass Apple in music in the near future, because Windows iTunes is really a second citizen. I like my iPhone, but I hate iTunes. I mean, really, really hate it. It's overwhelmingly the most unpleasant and headache-generating software I use.

So - I laughed at the Zune at first, but I'm now realizing it was a necessary play. Also, as only one feature on a consolidated device, it doesn't need to be as good as the iPod - only "good enough" at music while some other key features exceed.
ARM is new? It's been around longer than most Ruby developers have been alive ;)
Indeed, Apple's career site shows about 94 results for a search for "Java" (in the US): http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?Language=en&CountryId=3
It's simpler for ARM to adopt performance enhancements that make the core more complex than for Intel to adopt simplifications that make their cores more power efficient without losing performance.
There's == and === - they do separate things.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/359494/javascript-vs

It's not that hard to get your head around, and at least one other major language does it this way.
Ask your school to help you find an internship.

You'll probably hear this a lot but, you should build something to show potential employers. It will also raise your confidence so you consider yourself better than mildly capable.

Network a lot until you find a niche where your language skills/cultural knowledge are advantageous.

Understand the labor laws of where you are.
Metabolic disorder in Obesity.
Because when we call Java "ugly" or "stupid," it's the community we're talking about. My room mate is an extremely talented Java programmer, and he can fly around Eclipse[1] like a giant rainbow steamroller[2]. He uses Java like it should be used, and it's great. But I don't think he represents the community.

He tells me horror stories of code he refactors at work written by people in his own office, or worse, outsourced companies, and it's bad. It seems to me that that kind of code is more representative of the community.

When you're going to join a project, you have a better chance of encountering code not sucking if the overall culture of that language is better.

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eclipse+sorcery
[2]: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally
Coloured cardboard boxes cost a surprising amount extra (almost double). BrownBoxAway doesn't have the same ring to it. MagicBoxAway is pretty good though.
Hammer and screwdriver are equally ugly/pretty. But that's beside the point - it's not the ugliness of php that puts people off, it's the clumsiness and awkwardness of the tool.
I will join as well - I have spent time with many of the start ups in the program, and they are making great progress
Just like with everything else...
lol, cheers. I'm not sure I want the whole thing built around my own name though! And, somewhat unbelievably, a good number of people seem to be able to spell my name wrong.
I like box and away. Anything with auction available?
Easy answer to your frustration: you should try to code the project, that can be bootstrapped.
Auctionbox ?
>We applied to YC (rejected by email), studied "how to pitch to TC"

You can't count on a blessing from above. Those are venues for pitching to investors, not pitching to users. You gotta go ground up with forums, blogs, twitter, email.

Create quotas for yourself of the minimum number of people you talk to on each per day about your site. Signup for lots of forums, start posting in said forums. Seriously don't underestimate forums, they are still big because they are the ideal many-to-many venue of communication surrounding one topic. These are communities that are clearly labeled. You know instantly what kind of users are on there and how to cater your marketing to them. Although forums tend to be around more physical goods and concerns, if your application domain is productivity or something more abstract start hitting up bloggers non-stop.
Curious, what language is web-only…

JavaScript. Sure, in theory you can use it on the server for other things. Have you seen that happen lately?
I'm sure Craig Newmark thought in the same way. It's just that people's names are memorable and given the way you are starting, the personal touch might be valuable. Remember, names can always change...
As I said: I'm all for adopting new technologies (newer projects than this web application were done in Python 3 and lately node.js).

I'm also reluctant though to introduce more dependencies for the sake of porting perfectly working code to another language I might like more.

It's not just that maintenance will be harder it's also that in some cases our customers (very traditional enterprise. IE6-on-NT4-traditional) provide the server for this to run on and I can't present them with a huge list of services to install and monitor.

Well. Maybe I could, but I my conscience can't deal with persenting them with that list just so that I potentially have more fun while programming.

One of the things I'm currently looking into though is Websockets for a specific component of the app and in that case, I SO clearly see a huge advantage in Node.js that I will certainly go node if we decide that the shortcomings in the way we are currently solving that problem warrant the change in the architecture.

Which brings me to the same conclusion as my initial post:

Rewrite for additional functionality or fixed issues: Yeah. Rewrite for the sake of having it rewritten: I'd rather not.
That's the footer of Scott's email, not Steve's (Steve's is 'Sent from my iPhone' -- he knows any of his email replies could end up online, of course). He's allowed to share his own correspondence if he wants :)
I can say without doubt that it is the most sophisticated framework for this environment that I’ve heard of except for perhaps what Facebook uses.

He hasn't heard of Google? :-P
That was very motivating! Thank you again, and best wishes your app! :)
Well too bad MS once again is lacking on the browser side. Devs cannot even target WP7 on the browser, I will not develop non-HTML5 mobile sites. Fuck that, WP7 phone users will not be able to use my sites.
alexcart is 8 characters, that's pretty good...
They may "run" parts of the service from EC2, but the streams are delivered by CDNs, generally Akamai, Limelight, and Level(3).

Netflix is not paying $500 million a year for bandwidth.

Netflix's bandwidth pricing has been reported[1], as Akamai and Limelight jockey to try to capture more of Netflix's business.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/akamai-gets-more-of-netflixs-...
A great lesson on selling - I want to buy that peeler. Even after an autotune remix I don't want to buy a Slap Chop.
Gosling: "standards are viewed as competitive weapons rather than stabilizers"
there are none, but to implement a callback you also wouldn't have to declare an inner class implementing some interface that in turn declares tens of methods just to react to that one callback.

In PHP 5.3 you'd just pass the function (which of course will pass a pointer to that function) and in earlier versions you'd hack something with eval or variable-variables which, while bad, is still better than either writing half a screen full of empty methods or inheriting an inner class from some meaninglessly named class that only exists for you not to have a screenful of empty methods.
www.packyes.com
www.boxbyme.com
www.packadoodle.com
www.boxyboxing.com
www.boxinthehand.com
www.boxmule.com
Apps.gov to begin offering IaaS cloud services for government agencies
As opposed to its peers (eg. Ruby, Python), the original PHP was not a programming language but just a collection of tools for HTML preprocessing. Although the current PHP has nothing to do with the original one, and PHP 5.3 actually has pretty nice feature set with namespaces (finally!) and anonymous functions, its "non-academic" roots still show off as general ugliness. That's why I wouldn't recommend PHP to anyone as their first programming language (been there, done that, nowadays a Pythonista).
Thanks for the feedback, and kudos on including point 3. I think that may well tip the balance ;)
...and had a feature called "squirting".
I don't think it's unfair at all. Add split and ssh to the mix and now you're distributed.

"Cloud-scale" just means "more hardware than we own" and seems to me like a step backward in computing, to a time when you paid to time-share a relatively powerful machine. The main appeal of cloud computing is outsourcing the ownership of the machines and responsibilities like configuring, storing, powering, and repairing them.

I am not saying there isn't a use for the cloud computing capacity or the benefits it offers... but I just think that the hype can be distilled down to "you don't have to take care of a bunch of servers" for the average business.
How well did these sell? http://technologizer.com/2008/12/19/two-screen-laptops/
Facebook, Amazon and Zynga bet on social web
VBScript is worse. There's always that.
It's interesting you say half a year, as that is when some of the events look to be occurring. In the clear soon after a big client project too.

Thanks for the feedback.
>That would be a deal breaker for a lot of potential customers

Today it would be, but mobile is really taking off. Who knows where we'll be in even 2 years. Maybe by step 5 the remaining things we have to have windows for (e.g. Office) simply wont be a requirement anymore.
Would it be viable to get the other another dev trained in this other language? As has been stated before, having a single point of failure is not good.

Also - are there other reasons why you'd want to rewrite that code?

If it's well written in a language you're comfortable with supporting, I guess you can take on another expert dev in that language as you're growing.
HockBox.com
Some belting ones in there. Well done.
Yes, but Apple has given no indication they ever plan to shut down non-App Store distribution of software.

That would be suicidal.
Stupid was a bit too strong, but, I stand by what I said based on my experience. Articles like these exist partly because of the belief that PHP programmers in general are not competent. You do not hear such frequent rumbling on Python and it's practitioners. One could apply the same O(N)and O(k>>N) logic there as IMO, Python is not harder to learn/program in compared with PHP.
clutterbin.com

Think about what you're doing for people and maybe you'll get more ideas.

You're helping people by making it easy to clean up their unwanted clutter and then magically, they get money and peace of mind because they're not surrounded by stuff they don't want :-)
Watching Apple: A closer look at iPhone transition animations
Great programmers can make great stuff using anything.

Just because I _can_ doesn't mean that I _want to_.

I'm willing to work in lots of environments. In the last 2 years I have done projects for pay in Perl, PHP, Java, C++, Python and various in house languages you probably haven't heard of. However I have to be paid a healthy premium for the displeasure of working with PHP. And if I was asked to do it all the time, eventually I'd leave and find a better job working in something else.
Considering that nodejs is the hottest hype on the block, yeah, I have.
Did I mention anything about either of those? Firstly, entire companies have been created specifically for ruby / rails hosting.

Secondly, and this is my biggest bug bear, I know nothing about Python on a Mac and OS X. I am a Windows fan through and through, I love Windows 7 and I love the .NET ecosystem. Please don't assume that everyone on HN uses OS X / *nix
Fair point, well made
Nuclear launch card was missing 'for months,' new book says
He did say "But I still find 90% of..." as opposed to "90% of..." making it an opinion, not a pure statistic.

edit: that's not to say he didn't make up the statistic for his opinion.
App Stores Scope Illustrated
LogTool: Revealing the Hidden Patterns of Online Surfing Behavior
cash4box.com
the .com is gone sadly.
Most people could care less about more applications...

Virtually all of the computer users that I know limit their use to an office application and a web browser on top of Windows. That's it. The web browser gives them everything they really need. I wonder how many computer owners could even tell you if they have 32-bit or 64-bit or how the two differ. Probably the same percentage that can tell you detailed specs about their car engines. Virtually none.

The only computer specs that matter anymore --exempting programmers-- are weight and battery life. A few hardcore gamers still care, but they're in the minority, even for video gamers. XBox anyone?
> I've used Macs for years, and I haven't seen a Java app I didn't hate. They're UI is never native and the UX is much slower than good webapp's?

I have a java app that I wrote for my own use. It was written, using xcode, on G3 and G4 Macs. The day I moved to an Intel Mac, the app's performance improved dramatically. You can slap something together (with java) in a hurry and call it an application. Or you can take the time to look at it, refine your algorithms, and make it perform quite well.

Some of the GUI issues, however, are a limitation. While I don't know what the real issues were, I would not be surprised if keeping the java interface elements, as close to the Mac GUI, was a contributory factor here. The Mac GUI is evolving quite quickly. Perhaps java could not keep it.
Visualization today is vastly better today than 10 years ago. We've also got a big, growing market that intel isn't doing well in. I wouldn't count Intel out just yet, but them winning is far from sure.
This sentence caught me totally off guard. The whole article I felt Sculley (still) had a good relationship with Jobs.
Based on my 10 second read of the patent they are taking a real world process, exchanging the word "real" (chips) with "virtual" (chips) and thus it is patentable?
box2cash.com
I have been writing command line scripts in PHP for the most part of the past 18 months.

I will have to agree with you that PHP is perceived as a web language. Hopefully with more articles like these that perception will change.
Check out GNU parallel
Ha, if you are thinking that way, I would suggest VB.NET or C# instead. Why? I remember the first time I was creating an MFC project using Project Wizard, I felt like I'm a fool looking at a bunch of auto-generated text & having no clue what it is about. And once again, I was in the same situation when I was using VS.NET to generate code for my first ASP.NET web app. But I still completed that webapp without even knowing what code is for. Does that make VB.NET/C# community more stupid than Java? Does that mean C#/VB.NET should be the ugly & stupid thing other than Java? So, you should better have another way to explain that.
>Are you talking about C++ perhaps? ;)

C++ very much applies. :)

>Not using variable-variables, undeclared variables, globals, unsanitised variables in paths, SQL without prepared statements, etc. is common sense and applies to other languages too.

This is a subset of what you have to avoid in PHP. Further, things like globals can have uses. That's the difference with a really poorly designed language: there are things in there that have no good use case. Not things that are only used in rare cases, things that should never be used.
Desiderata. Desiradata.
Wait, is it 2009 again?
FromYourDoor.com (a play on "to your door")

ByeByeBox.net (unfortunately .com is taken, but it's only parked)
What burglars steal - and how they get in [data]
If you go to any market in the London suburbs you will see people like this selling all manner of crap.

It doesn't take long to learn that their talk is all talk and their product are invariably shit.

While he's making a lot of money I'd wager he has a high footfall making up for most people just thinking he's selling tat.

Doesn't make him a bad salesman, on the contrary he knows exactly what he's doing.
Now with node.js, it isn't as clear cut as you make out it to be. It's not there yet, but in the not so distant future, you can use node.js for your scripting needs.

Running on v8, it has an edge in terms of execution speed over other scripting languages. And the javascript syntax and semantics is something most of the developers are familiar with.

If you don't like writing nested closures, you have coffeescript which makes the code pretty, and also brings in some new features viz. list comprehensions, splats, satement modifiers etc.
I use it daily too on my Mac and its usability is pretty bad. Copy and paste sorta work, but I can never remember when to use cntl-c versus apple-c in this app. The UI is hideous and very un-Mac like. It also doesn't seem to handle network disconnects very well, oftentimes requiring a Force-Quit if I've switched from wired to wireless networking.

That being said, I still use it because I haven't found anything else free that I like. I suppose if I use a tool every day like this one, I should pay to find one that works better.
Right, I think Steve is smart enough to not follow so many others down that path in history. A completely closed system would cut developers off at the knees. Which would put Apple on the hook to develop every piece of software for their ecosystem. There is no way the could keep up with the idea factory that is the masses. I think rather Apple sees an opportunity to provide a sales channel where they get a cut of other people work by acting as the distributor and in turn do things like guarantee that the app if free of malicious actions and compatible with OSX systems.

As for Java, I knew this one was coming, Jobs and Ellison are good friends and Apple and Oracle are the only two companies that either are not at war with, they really don't compete in each other spaces. So I think Jobs is comfortable with Oracle providing the JVM for their platform.

I am sure that Steve has resigned any worry in his head that Java is going to achieve desktop dominance so it is not a Trojan horse to his platform where it will be used to provide OSX apps in preference over the native OSX development technologies.

Giving it back to Oracle means that the developers get the latest JVM at the same time as everyone else not waiting up to a year as the cycle comes around itself. I think it is a good move on both companies parts. I just wonder why Steve always has to be so vague. I think his showmanship has become so ingrained that he just can't come right out and say it everything has to be a big announcement. I guess I cant fault him, it's his trademark and has served him well.
It's hard to find a worse example than php, because when many "bad" languages fail in one or the other category, php seems to fail in most categories.

* Java has a really repetitive syntax, but it's libraries might make up for that.

* C++ with all it's features has bazillion ways to shoot yourself, but it's arguably fast and the syntax is bearable.

But php has both an ugly syntax, horrendous stdlib, and fame of security issues.

Maybe COBOL or MUMPS could be worse than php... haven't used these though.
If you put your name on it, it forces you to make it work. It puts you on the line. Puts you out in front. Keeps it real. Keeps you from hiding behind branding paraphernalia.
Direct link to the Google spreadsheet and raw source for those interested:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rBr7dAyoDnHED9VPDTTq...

http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/crimeew0910_tables_bvv.html
I think you may be misinterpreting the remark, "In Q4, we’ll spend more on streaming content than DVD content." He said "on streaming content", not "on streaming the content".

Spending on licensing the content is more than on streaming the content.

Revising a couple of your numbers[1], and then multiplying out:

((100 gigabytes) / (1 U.S. dollar)) * 50 million U.S. dollars = 4.65661287 exabytes

(((100 gigabytes) / (1 U.S. dollar)) * 50 million U.S. dollars) / (31 536 000 seconds) = 158.54896 GBps = 1.3 terabits

Articles reported Netflix was ~20% of traffic, suggesting ~6.3 terabits total traffic.

Akamai was reported hitting of 3.4 terabits[2], and is considered to be around 60% market share of delivery, suggesting ~5.75 terabits of total traffic.

These numbers are close enough to pass a sniff test.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/akamai-gets-more-of-netflixs-...

[2] http://gigaom.com/2010/04/11/akamai-3-4-terabits/
Read MS Exchange Server Public Folders & Download Messages
The new version of Aspose.Network for .NET 5.7.0 has been released. This new Release includes support for reading Public Folders from Microsoft Exchange Server and downloading messages from folders/sub-folders. The main improved features and bug fixes added in this release are listed below

•	Access Public Folders from Exchange Server
•	Add new overloaded constructor for MailAddress
•	Add EntryId property as a string for PST folders and items
•	Issues resolved with Embedded MSG file detection when extracted from PST

Other most recent bug fixes are also included in this release.