skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"relatively recently"

PHP 5.3 came out in June 2009. Quoting from the readme:

The key features of PHP 5.3.0 include:

* Support for namespaces
* Late Static Bindings
* Lambda Functions and Closures

I don't know what you are even arguing about.

PHP has a sort of support for types, but while you can say that a function accepts a certain kind of object, you can't express that a particular function takes an int or a string. That's really pathetic. It's fine if you don't want a language with types -- many great languages don't have them -- but only PHP thinks that stupid half measures are acceptable.

PHP has had objects for some time, but it arguably didn't work well enough until their second try.

It's true that PHP makes it very easy to get at elements of the web request, but what I meant was that it is trapped in the content-generation phase. The Apache API is very sophisticated and gives you full control over the HTTP response cycle, but PHP throws all that way, and turns Apache into a dumb teletype. So every PHP script that needs to do authorization is written in this silly inside out way; first you start to deliver content, and then you check if you're allowed to actually do so. Whereas the right thing is to check authentication and authorization first, and then never even call your content script if the user's credentials didn't check out. Apache nicely separates this out with their Authentication, Authorization, and Content phases, but nobody told PHP. Other web frameworks don't have this problem either (I've used some web servlet engines written in Java, and they too avoid the brain-damage of doing it all in the content-generation phase.)

As for daemon scripts, I have no direct knowledge, but there aren't a lot of people who would suggest it's a great language for a daemon. Even fork() can be problematic in PHP. I wrote a system that tried to use it that way and we ran into all sorts of reliability problems (none of which I've ever encountered writing similar programs in Perl).

I may be more behind the times than others, since I happen to have worked on three different PHP projects that all started around 2003-4 or earlier (and are still chugging along). After being bitten in the ass by various broken features over the years, most of them have adopted a very limited subset of PHP (some even refuse to use objects, to this day), and I can see why.

I mean, PHP can be confused by something as simple as loading libraries from different script files. Rasmus' official advice to us was to have one "loader" script that included all the libraries in one shot. I find it hard to respect a language that has difficulties with things like this.
I consider myself to be something of an input device dork (you can pry my MX518 from my cold, dead hands), but after trying a couple of the MS ergo keyboards and a few other things, I've found that the Comfort Curve 2000 (MS' cheapest keyboard) seems to work for me best. Everyone seems to be all about the clacky mechanical or ergo boards, but I love the CC2000's gentle curve, and the wide, low-throw, near-silent keys. I feel like I can really fly on the thing when I'm typing, and it's spill-resistant to boot.
http://destructivegenius.com/game2/

right click to turn, left click to fire, 0 - 9 to set speed. It's just me playing around with node and canvas. I can't decide if I should spend the time on it to turn it into an actual game.
Its my understanding that open source startups don't scale well because revenue is derived from services vs software sales. It would be hard to get venture backing for these. I'm sure there are a few outliers...
"He went on to explain that there might be other instances of the bug, since it was due to my misunderstanding of Perl and not a mere typographical error. The question arose of how we could detect and correct all of those bugs immediately. ... I meekly suggested that the task of finding and fixing the bugs could be automated by a Perl script, and it was then that they asked me to leave the room."

Awesome.
http://iijo.org

Chinese flashcards
Protip: Firefox is open source.
http://sayonarastuff.com personal project for the expat community in Tokyo.... needs a lot of work, loads slowly, very buggy.
Everyone has to make his/her choice of technology and MailChimp has chosen PHP. That's perfectly okay.

I know PHP, and I've used it to put food on my table. Luckily that is no more. I'd consider doing PHP again only if my wife and kid were starving.

My advice to people stuck with PHP codebases - start changing the site backend first. Write everything not related to spewing HTML in a real programming language, and slowly limit PHP use as a simple template-processing tool that generates your app's HTML. Which is probably the only thing PHP is good for.
Though I'd clearly separate data centers and fulfillment centers. Much harder to ship from the Bahamas ;)
http://www.makeramen.com
EmptyCloset

I also want to suggest http://www.needanym.com/ for collecting potential names for projects/companies/sites in a structured way for free.
I don't understand why it is priced so high. If you look at a similarly spec'd netbook for $400-$500, plus a touch screen (say +$100), you should still be under $799. Does Windows 7 really cost that much more? What on earth makes it that much more expensive when it doesn't even have 3G?
http://github.com/sanjoy/L

A call-by-name untyped lambda calculus evaluator. I have no clue what to do with it.
http://socialcorral.com/

I can't say it's my worst work, but I never felt like it was ready to post to HN as a "Ask HN: Review my new...". But here it is...
If you had read the post you would have known Sid was actually asking for feedback on his paper so he could make it better.
Uhm, This was about three hours worth of work, and never came back to it. http://prj-megan.heroku.com/ source is here: http://github.com/icco/Project-Megan.

I have no doubt someone could blow this up.
People will never ask their computers for directions out loud in public
What's unethical? Depends quite a bit on your definition of ethics, even if ground rules like 'killing or hurting people is a bad thing' is agreed upon. The problem is one of balancing the risk and reward. The acceptable ratio varies from person to person, as well as the estimates for each. Collateral damage, for instance, is inevitable in war, and while such damage is clearly wrong, it isn't necessarily unethical. So saying that there is absolutely no justification to engage in unethical behavior is either trivially true, or false.

I happen to agree with your (I presume) belief that the suppressing the secrets in this case will have a higher cost than revealing them, but there is a reasonable argument to the contrary.
Love the down votes -- he didn't say different bank, did he? Funnily enough, money also moves between accounts at the same bank.

My bank transfers to other banks take a couple of hours, but I don't live in the US. The money comes out of the account instantly though.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that a bank doesn't need transactions.

As for credit cards, that's great, but that doesn't address what he said, which is that it's an analog experience, which it isn't. Also, it depends on the bank, but there's generally an available balance and a credit limit. Credit card payments come out of the available balance instantly. I'm pretty sure that's running in a transaction. :)

What happens between then and actual acquisition is irrelevant.

Anyway, the point isn't the technical details, or how implementations differ. The point is that the argument presented is flat out wrong (in this case). Banks are a completely different beast to your web 2.0 startup. :)
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That's really cool. Nice work.
For a lightly loaded site Google AppEngine might meet your needs. I use it for proof-of-concept sites. Some people have reported problems with it, but you can always seamlessly switch to AppScale which runs on Amazon EC2 and other environments if / when your load requires it.
Panic Blog » Panic State of the Union
I'm guessing indicators of "fantastically good" at undergrad level are things like winning the Putnam and original research contributions right?

I don't suppose physics would be any better?
Is this...

> according to Steven Kaye, president of Watchung, N.J.-based wealth management firm American Economic Planning Group. He based that number on real-life figures his clients tell him they need.

...an example of this? -

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Looks useful and impressive.

May be "Show details" should be "About Me". And instead of forcing "login\signup", a page allowing direct customization of the widget and embed code would be more impressive.
Thanks for the feedback! "About Me" is a great suggestion, and I have always wanted to make a site that allows someone to be able to immediately start using the site without signing up. I should spend some time to figure out how to do that...
Why are software patents a "civil rights" problem? There is wide agreement that the patent system, especially software patents and business method patents, is in need of reform. Rather than just venting your anger and frustration, you might make constructive suggestions. Do you believe in the patent system at all? Do you believe that some software can be patented? How do you distinguish that software from other software? You claim all sorts of dire things will happen because of current practice. Why do you believe that "there will be no innovation in 10 years" because of current patent practice? Why 10 years? Why not 5 years or 13 years? If things are going to be improved we need to have a clear and rational proposal for reform.
> Compare this to Perl, which everyone hates, but which has a modular-enough core that you can override core behaviors.

Also note that mod_perl for Apache provides several really good features for efficient web applications that are missing in all other language modules (including mod_php).
Just like with the PowerPC to x86 conversion, Apple will have an emulation layer when they ultimately add ARM support to OS X. It was all seamless to end users. Photoshop et al ran under emulation for years before they eventually made native apps.

I wouldn't be surprised if Lion contained ARM support courtesy of iOS. The "Back to the Mac" theme hinted at that.
Like in business it's all about the cash flow.
Thanks to the millions of Apple-loving creative types in the design industry, Adobe makes way too much money on the Mac to abandon it as a platform.
It's awesome to see so many building so much cool stuff. I just got lost for 20 minutes in benjoffe's site. Here are a few of mine:

Track lunch debts (turns out I'd rather just buy people lunch but I got to play with some JS):
http://lunchng.appspot.com/

Save clippings from web pages (2008, seems like someone builds one of these every six months, could use a refresh with ideas from http://pagestackandroid.appspot.com):
http://www.clipng.com/

Make Myst-like walkthroughs with photos you took (2009, might be fun for someone outside of real estate):
http://www.pictourist.com/
Was that done with a perl script?
The numbers you are coming up with are utterly arbitrary. I could come up with similar numbers via anal extraction and have them be just as relevant to the question at hand. That is not at all.

As for partying for 4 years and passing - Yes, there are some who party for four years, learn nothing and pass college. There are even some who do it on scholarship or government grants. But those are the exception, not the rule.

In my experience the ones who partied like crazy and learned nothing were the ones there on their parent's dime. The ones who were there on government dime rarely left the library, worked their butts off and came away with an excellent education.

It's true, your mileage may vary, but if you ask me it is of great benefit to society that everyone gets the best level of education they can handle as determined by the quality of their mind and determination, not the quality of their parent's bank account.

After all when you're of the age to be applying to college you haven't had the chance to begin being a productive member of society or make any money of your own. The whole point of education is to make people productive members of society. So what determines whether you can pay your own way in college is whether or not your parents were productive members of society -- and no one should be limited by their parents. We'd lose a lot of very bright people that way.

That's what government subsidies are for. They are an investment by all of society in our future. And in the people of our future. Think of it like venture capital investment. Not every investment works out. But if even a few really do succeed, then the investment in all those who don't is worth it. Of course the place where the analogy fails is that unlike with venture capital where only a few will succeed, with college subsidies only a few will fail.
Didn't downvote you, but the difference is that lambdas can only be executed (i.e. applied to something) while decorators let you analyze the code of the function and do something else other than just executing it.
yes

#$%SDPD{FPG#@$%}@#{$%}@!}$@{#++++$#^&%##

Sorry, spider on my keyboard, I can provide the script if you wish.
They are very good about updating you on the notification mailing list these days:

http://code.google.com/appengine/forum/downtime.html?place=f...
i like this idea. my husband and i are always watching tons of movies and can never keep track.
> My bank transfers to other banks take a couple of hours, but I don't live in the US. The money comes out of the account instantly though.

What happens between the time the money is debited from one account and it shows up in the other? Hint: it's not a transaction in the ACID sense of the term.

I would address the rest of what you say, but I'm afraid I cannot help you on your reading comprehension. I encourage you to read the article. All the words please.
Awesome, especially the checklist feature (when it arrives).
"[...] Microsoft violated their contract and made Java code written on Windows unable to run on other systems."

More precisely, Microsoft violated their contract when they added classes and methods in the "java" top-level package (namespace) and failed to implemented some mandatory parts of the specification (mandatory as per the contract), such as RMI.

Source: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-10-1997/jw-10-lawsuit....
http://www.fruitshow.org - A simple forum

Mainly implemented at http://www.crazyontap.com

The original version was built in 3 hours after Joel Spolsky closed his off topic forum ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/01/25.html ). The name itself comes from Joel, he called us a "3rd rate fruit show". I put a bunch more hours into it and open sourced it -- a few people still download occasionally.

I had intended to make it a much better forum following Joel's own design philosophy ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi... ) but sadly life got in the way. I'm still thinking I might revisit it someday.
I understood that. But just because Some Folks Use Capital Letters doesn't really mean much. ;)
No, but most people from both political parties support the laws that prevent people from hiring kids his age. I think he was only able to get the $3,000 because it was a bounty or a "Contest", and not a "job" or "employment".

I think bug bounties shouldn't be the only way this kid is allowed to earn money. He's proven himself to have discipline and some responsibility. He should be allowed to go work for a startup, if he wants (at least during the summers when he's off from school, anyway.)
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How is it we even used MS-DOS?
OT: Funny how perceptions differs. I liked the movie for its entertainment value, even though it was naive and used cliches about hackers.
It is no where near the middle. The nazis intentionally and explicitly murdered some 12 to 14 MILLION people in various death camps. The US has done no such thing and has only ever proposed to leave the Iraqis alone and under a democratic government that they can themselves control. The US has only stayed so long as to ensure that said government is free of corruption and coercion and able to protect its citizens from nefarious causes.

To compare what the US has done to that of the Nazis is the most unjust characterization imaginable. Obviously injustices have occurred but on a scale that pales in comparison to the the intentional actions of the Nazis. Please put everything in perspective. Look at the intentions of parties involved before you compare a freedom loving people to the worst example of political ideology in the history of the world.
Agreed. I'm thinking that they just have different sets of videos for different local times of the people viewing the page.

Awesome though.
Khoi Vinh (http://subtraction.com) and I made something called Shorty (http://get-shorty.com). It was the first URL shortener you could install on your own server.

I built Shorty in high school. It's absolutely dreadful code; hopefully I'll rewrite it sometime after I graduate college.

Last Christmas I built a webapp that displays my iTunes music library. I can't show it to you though, because then you'd max my home's bandwidth.
http://RobotsMadeToKill.com/

This has been worked on in various forms for over a year now. The main issue was always with getting quality data. No attempts at optimization have been made yet, but it's fairly usable even so...
http://lightpack.heroku.com/

A site to manage your backpacking gear and track your pack weight for different trips. A very needed service for ultra-light backpackers. Still needs a little polish, but it's usable.
Thoughts on 'RIA', Sproutcore, Silverlight, Flex
did anyone else notice we have 3 posts a week about the cap theorem? Maybe it's about time we stop talking about it and start using some other terminology.
So they are permitted to say no?

Of course, that's what elections are for.

Try to pay attention (...) I was asserting that it was a waste in that case.

You were asserting that the wasted subsidy could be equated with the efforts of 25 laborers working 100 hours each. By that logic, 25 other laborers working the same amount might end up subsidizing the education of a student who becomes a great industrialist. Should they break out the champagne?

Tax payments go into a pool, and a proportion of the amount spent on educational subsidies will be wasted. What matters is the overall rate of return.
You should consider promoting this more widely.

Bloglines is closing at the end of the month and there's multiple people who aren't happy with using Google Reader for various reasons.

I'd be happy with a nice online RSS reader with no intelligence. :)
http://mootools.net/forge/p/lsd
(Demos: http://inviz.github.com/lsd-examples/Demos/index.html
http://jsfiddle.net/inviz/htmmv/)

New wave interface library that uses SVG to draw graphics, html as a templating language and a superset of css for theming. Already spent 1 year on this and have like maybe 5 months to go (add IE support, more polished features).

The thing is my very state of art code that i'm putting my soul into. Every day, even a small tweak makes me feel like I'm moving to the right direction.

Proud half baked product (not public production ready, but is used in several small projects) seeks for interested organizations and contributors, invizko@gmail.com :)
Great programmers will write pretty code in any languages.

However, I think that poor programmers will write more ugly code in PHP than in python/django for instance.

So, if you compare the overall quality, PHP loses.

Also, it seems that these days, great programmers use clojure/python/ruby/arc instead of PHP.. so that doesn't help PHP quality ratio (As poor programmer using PHP will continue to use PHP since they would never ever be willing to learn a new language).

I've recently worked with the most ugly code of my life. 1000 lines function, bad indentation, 8 levels of if/foreach, wrong OO, lots of repitition, etc. Guess what, it was written in PHP. Does it prove something? No. Does it make me like PHP? Really not.

That being said, I've seen some pretty clean PHP code and I even had some fun with it.
> But I'm a composer, not a pianist.

Perhaps Atwood's analogy isn't the best. Programmers are the composers and the computer itself is the pianist, running the composition. However, you need a keyboard to compose!

I don't think my typing really got fast until I started using instant messaging. When it comes to programming, I could always type a lot faster than I could think. I'm probably typing this message significantly faster than I'd type any code.
http://www.uberadviser.com

I want to make learning (for a self learner) easier by matching learning intent with materials specific for someone's learning style.

Basically if you are visual learner the system will try to suggest more visually oriented materials for the courses you are taking right now.

I think it should be really valuable to a busy student :).
wow, I guess it goes to show how much younger people these days are when getting into programming. good for him :D
One thing that became immediately apparent to me is that you need to include an alternative to scrolling (perhaps +/- ?).

The reason, of course, is that not everyone has the ability to scroll. Personally, I use a laptop as my primary machine and only have the touchpad as my pointing device. There is a way to scroll with the touchpad, but it's incredibly painful to use, and is very hit or miss on my machine. Also, I don't know how common they are today since I haven't bought one in years, but I'm sure there are users that are still using old mice without scrollers.

That said, very nice site. I can see it being very useful to me in the near future.
"My bank transfers to other banks take a couple of hours, but I don't live in the US. The money comes out of the account instantly though."

Within a single banking entity (and what you see as your bank might in fact be a composite of numerous such entities), you may see this _apparently_ transactional behavior. Between banking entities you certainly don't. There is no 2PC over SWIFT.

Crushed your dreams. Sorry.
I realize by Hacker News/Reddit/[Internet news site] a blog posting from 9 months ago is pre-historic, but:

As someone who keeps an eye on RIA/RAD toolchains and frameworks I found this to be an especially astute breakdown on the State of Things.
http://imissafri.ca/

Not a business project, just a fun aside to share hi-res wallpaper from Africa. Other projects on the go, of course.
That just means the situation changing as time goes on, not anything about a myth. Of course at some point everyone will be running >=5.3, but I still hear about PHP 4 after all...
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Well, I hate Rails so that wouldn't be my first comparison.

But yes, it would probably be more easily maintainable if written in a better language, and the developers would be able to add new features more quickly.

To comment based on your metaphor, the problem is not that the screwdriver/hammer is ugly. It's that the grip doesn't feel right and it's unbalanced. You can turn the screw and drive the nail, but it takes more effort and might leave your hands scraped up.
Your right. All this talk of distributed systems is making hacker news too nerdy. Lets go rate someone's startup and find a technical cofounder. Perhaps we might also watch a video of a prominent investor trying to promote his personal brand.