skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What you need to understand (and most of us hackers too) is that there is a difference between the 'hacker' and 'get shit done' mentality.

Programming is something I've done for the last 10 or so years (in various forms). It is essentially the only activity (in terms of 'work' or career) that I enjoy. The engineer in me just enjoys making things 'perfect' (where perfect is a definition perhaps only I understand, but generally its something built on solid engineering principles. Well-tested, reliable, modular, efficient, etc). When code looks 'just right', I enjoy the code regardless of whether it is bringing me any $$$. In that sense, for me, engineering is a fun activity, and not 'work'.

The hacker in me will enjoy a well built piece of software for its engineering brilliance regardless of whether the software got anything done at all.

In the last year or so I've been able to isolate these personalities and perhaps merge them. I do not scold the hacker just because he wants to try out new languages every month and is opinionated about his favorite ones. I get pissed off when this stops him from getting shit done.

I'm glad for the hacker in me who cares deeply about the tools (languages, IDEs etc) that he uses. Its this hacker that makes my job 'fun'. It is this hacker that has helped improve the quality of my code and my thought process for building good software. The 'getting shit done' would never have been enjoyment enough if it were not for the hacker.
Also note that the Zend-Framework for PHP became mature in the last few years, which also helps a lot to get over PHP's deficiencies.
I really don't understand why a language is so important. Since you have your own VPS or dedicated server, you can use C or any other programming language, create executables that do complex and targeted work and send the result to PHP, rails, python... You can use all of the languages at the same time. It really doesn't matter what main language you are using for routing your websites.

PHP is cool. I have found (http://fatfree.sourceforge.net/) and I couldn't be happier. It's similar to Sinatra and has everything a small app needs. It's simple and make separation easier. But if I need that complicated data structure processing that can be done with python or perl, I'll just write down that script and run it through php and get the results.

Between, this statement makes no sense for me

>> This is just going to get bigger and bigger as we grow by 500% or more _every year_
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This. Why chase the latest fad while you can spend that time on working on the product? The workarounds for the issues that the proven solution has are well-known, and learning them is a sunk cost. The issues of the new platforms are yet to be found, maybe you need to fix them yourself, maybe the issues are different and you can fix it with different architecture.
PHP is a programming language (that is, a formal grammar for specifying the operations a computer should perform), but also an implementation of an interpreter for that grammar. You're talking about the implementation, which is of fair quality (certainly better than, say, MRI Ruby) and very widely-deployed, a combination which many devs (brilliant or not) take advantage of.

People who say PHP is badly designed, however, aren't talking about the implementation; rather, they're strictly talking about the language itself—the syntax, the semantics, and the standard library. There is no advantage to the way PHP-the-language does things; it makes nonsensical choices (like the flat, disorganized, all-libraries-included function namespace, the inability to chain method calls in a single expression, the extreme amount of "weakly-typed" cruft surrounding the comparison operators, etc.) which derive no benefit.

It would be strictly beneficial to the programming ecosystem if PHP-the-language were treated as an object-code for other, better-designed languages to target, such that PHP-the-implementation could be used without needing to write in PHP.
I'm not sure I understand the implications of this. Can it make Vimperator better? Or is it aiming at creating lots of little Vimperators i.e. various, less ambitious browser UIs?
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They have Java based apps for the Film industry. I have to support them on OS X. They are hideous to use, hideous to install and maintain. I don't know if they use OS X Java specifics, but some how I doubt it.

They were broken by Snow Leopard. Took them months to fix.

My experience, purely as a sysadmin and user, is that cheap and cheerful cross platform apps seem to be much nicer when written for Adobe Air.
Yeah I imagine it's not that easy to change the flow :)
That true, but also consider that the especially idiotic "register_globals" has been disabled in PHP for many years. If people are still enabling that manually, it is solely because they use very outdated scripts which depend on this. Then, however, the real problem is relying on those crappy old scripts, and not the usage of PHP itself.

On the other hand, there's still other stupid stuff like "magic_quotes_gpc" that has only recently been deprecated.
"I think Rails is a more modern platform. I think PHP is not the ideal choice. But I think PHP is a great platform."

Yeah but here's the rub. You can't compare Rails with PHP. You need to compare Ruby to PHP, and ask if the switching costs will outweigh any deficiencies; and you need to compare Rails to e.g. Cake or Symfony or similar, and ask if one language provides a framework whose advantages are so compelling that they too will outweigh those switching costs. I have yet to be convinced.

(weighting factors may apply for dev experience with one or the other, legacy code, hosting/infrastructure support, etc.)
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300 million pageviews/month goes a long way. Sure, their CTR is probably lower than most sites, but their traffic is huge.

Let's say their CTR is 0.1%. That's 300k clicks/month. I'm building in some wiggle-room here, as a 0.1% CTR is abysmal, but often their ads aren't really ads. Even at $0.01/click, that's still $30k/month. More than enough for hosting. Now, I'd hazard a guess that most of my numbers are quite a bit on the low side, as reddit has operated for years without CN shutting the doors. Also, from what the admins have intimated from time to time, they make money, but not enough to register on CN's radar.

I wouldn't discount their ad sales; traffic like that carries a lot of weight.
You're pretty much stuck with doing that for invoicing, at least in Europe, where invoice numbers must be sequential. OK, you'll have to spend some money to receive an invoice. But then, at least in the UK, limited companies' accounts are effectively public anyway.
Like poker chips?
It has been detrimental as soon as a suit heard about the <META> tag some time in the 90s. Then you had I dunno, a site selling lawnmowers with "ANNA KOURNIKOVA NEKKID" in its HTML and it was all downhill from there.
Personally I don't like it at all. I would never share something called "AppDork" with my friends. Why not? It sounds too geeky/dorky.

And just a heads up: you mention that you are not a "native american" in your post. The term "Native American" refers to a person of American Indian descent, not someone from/born-in the USA.
If the forum was still called "Start-up News", I don't think you'd be able to point out a contradiction. The App Store has made it significantly easier to sell software made by small developers to iOS users, they are about to make it really easy to sell to Mac users too. It's a business opportunity. The worst you can say about it is that commercial software is catching up with ease of distribution of free software.

Hey, you've got 90 days to ship a competing app store for the Mac. Valve has already done so with Steam on Windows and Macs, it isn't insurmountable. What's going to make your one better than theirs?
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I don't know about (3) but Estonia or the Czech Republic I reckon.
Do search engines actually try to "de duplicate" such content?

Are sites that duplicate content without proper attribution properly flagged?

What is the best interest of search engines? Is it the good of the people? Or is this another "tragedy of the common"?

In the later case, what is the best way to fight back?
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> most of the money goes into salaries.

And, therefore, anything that makes your engineers more or less efficient goes directly to your bottom line.

(I agree that the comment you're replying to underestimates the cost of migration. But the problem isn't a failure to understand that salaries are the main cost; that's exactly the thing that makes moving to a better langage attractive.)
Two reasons:

- If the domain is totally new your company's DNS server will not have it in cache and will query the authoritative server (probably what happened here)

- If the domain already exists in your company's DNS server cache it needs to have a TTL set, which basically defines how long it can be in cache before the original authoritative server is queried again (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_live#DNS_records). If this is set low the cache is less effective but DNS changes propagate faster.
Hey now, just because anti-oxidants aren't magical doesn't mean they aren't freakin anti-oxidants!
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OK, but if I admit your principles as OO, then a functional language with modules and parametric polymorphism is OO (Haskell and Ocaml come to mind).

Your definition seems reasonable, but following it means that giving any language reasonable facilities for low coupling and code reuse makes it OO. I'm fine with that, but such a broad term can't be useful in technical discussions.
It's the return for Advanced RISC Machines.
I wouldn't describe the response to the IE9 AMA as overly skeptical. People had some serious issues with what MS had done with IE in the past, and asked pointed questions. The response was lackluster, at best. I'm sure if they had just stuck their engineering team in there to begin with, it wouldn't have spun out of (MS's) control as it did. Microsoft screwed the pooch on that one. I don't think you can take that incident as being reflective of advertisers' experience on reddit.
I think Estonian is the most widely spoken language in Estonia, with Russian a distant second.
I used to be a PHP programmer, and now I'm a Ruby programmer. A lot of great things have been built on PHP, I just don't like coding with it. To the folks who build great things on PHP, more power to them.
Silicon valley out, Graphene valley in
You can use it to your advantage too. Start your IDs off at a big number, and your first few savvy customers that see their ID think you're a lot bigger than you really are.

So instead of knowing they're user #8, they think they're user #14221, and are a lot more likely to trust you with their money.

It works well for throwing off the competition too. "Holy Crap! They have 150k users and they're only 3 months old! We're screwed!!!"
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Ask HN:  Looking for feedback on a startup strategy question
This is an actual problem we have to decide on with our startup. It is not a hypothetical!

Help me decide!

SCENARIO

You are doing a startup. You have launched, you have customers, revenue and some traction. You are growing steadily.

You have just taken a seed round, which gives you enough runway for exactly 12 months. At the end of that 12 months, you need to be cash flow positive or you may as well pack up your bags and go home.

You have 4 staff, 3 of whom are developers and 1 of whom is the sales and marketing person. You have a board with 1 investor and 2 founders on it.

Your product is an early iteration, which means it meets the needs of some of your target market but not all. It needs continuous development in order to reach "product to market fit", and reaching that fit is an important aspect of becoming cash flow positive.

Your product is built in a particular technology which means that 40% of the development work can only be done by 1 of the developers (development bottleneck). This affects your speed of development. The other 60% of development can be done by all 3 developers.

Now, assuming that the sales and marketing techniques and the focus on the conversion funnel remains exactly the same no matter what you do with your technology, you have two broad choices:

CHOICE 1

Stick with your existing technology platform, and focus on reaching product to market fit. Accept that you will have a dev bottleneck, but do so knowing that it is preferable to have the full 12 months of runway at your disposal in order to maximise success.

Key advantage = Full 12 months of runway to reach cash flow positive

Key disadvantage = 40% of dev is bottle necked through a single developer

CHOICE 2

Spend the first 60 days of your runway rewriting your platform in a way that 3 developers can work on 95% of it, rather than only 60% of it. Spend the next 8 months focusing on reaching product to market fit on your new platform.

Key advantage = Once you have rewritten the core tech, everyone on the team can be fully productive on the platform

Key disadvantage = Rewriting the core tech probably reduces your runway window by 2 months, giving you 10 months to succeed rather than 12.

THE QUESTION

What would you do - choice 1 or choice 2, and why?
They got sued for not adhering to the Java spec, not for their extensions. The latter would be ridiculous, it would mean you could never distribute the JRE together with any sort of extra libraries. Even the Sun/Oracle runtime ships with non-standard extensions (javax.* , com.sun.*).
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How does that make Mr. Jobs' comment more informative or honest?

Anyway, I get what you're saying (even though I've seen many web apps that I hate as well). The question is simply whether the Mac is a software platform or a consumer appliance. If it's the latter, then I understand the idea of Apple curating every single piece of software that goes on those machines. Otherwise, the idea of banning everything you or Mr. Jobs don't like is inconsistent with the purpose of the product.
FYI: Dork does not really work as a substitute for geek or nerd. It has the same connotation of someone who has no social skills but it in no way implies intelligence. It suggests someone who is both socially inept and generally stupid, not someone smart but socially challenged.

Definition from a website:

USA pejorative slang for a quirky, silly and/or stupid, socially inept person, or one who is out of touch with contemporary trends. Often confused with nerd and geek, but does not imply the same level of intelligence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dork

Edit: I will add that the connotation of "silly" might work fine if your apps are for entertainment purposes. Just so long as you realize this in no way suggests "weird but brilliant", instead it suggests "weird and silly/dumb".
> Look at the Fortune 500, tell me what you see. I see grocery stores, drugstores, oil companies, banks, a funny little concern that sells sugar water. I see a whole lot of hard work and very few great ideas.

Perhaps this is a bit of an oversimplification? The reason those particular concerns are still on top is that they had plenty of great ideas in addition to execution. You don't stay a top oil company without kickass geophysicists, for example.
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In Tallinn at least, everyone spoke perfect English.
"Email marketing" + "I thought you were cool" = cognitive dissonance
I don't need one... I eat all my vegetables with the skin on. call me lazy but it's healthier that way too
How much slower? Just how much wall clock time did you lose?
Their target was obviously not the users of OSX, I believe it was more an exception.
In the internet world this relies on every artist being an extrovert and a marketing expert as well as an artist.

Also, we don't live in a feudal system or aristocracy where a significant proportion of the wealth is controlled by a small elite who have little more to do than live idly.

So the conditions are different, an artist has to gain a lot more followers than in previous times through a method which is actually pretty specialised and tough.

But if you're that passionate about your art, maybe you're just going to have to learn how to gain a base of fans willing to patronise you.
Ask HN: To speak or not to speak - that is the question...
Looking for some pretty candid feedback around this one. Basically, I've started my own software business this year after working for others for the last 10 years and things are going well.

Not crazy I'm making barrel loads of cash well, but I have a couple of good clients, a pretty solid little opensource library that is the basis for some good professional services work and if I can finally finish off the last few chapters will have a book published early next year.

All in all, I'm really happy with how the first 9-10 months of business have worked out (even if there is a little less money in the bank than I would have liked).

The problem is now, I'm really not sure how to move things forward next. There are a few speaking opportunities that have presented themselves and others I would like to pursue, but obviously this takes out ever-precious time and in general yields little or no financial return. In some cases, it would probably (or more than likely - you tell me) cost a little to get myself out of Australia and over to the US or Europe to pursue these opportunities.

I guess what I am looking for is some advice. Should I be looking to pursue speaking opportunities to promote myself, my business and our opensource libraries? Or is the cost too great? Given income for the business comes from professional services (both development and training) does profile building hurt profitability too much to consider?

The business is still small in terms of staff (2 now - including myself, and 3 projected for Q1 2011), and I think my gut is saying I need to focus on work closer to home. I'd love to have some feedback either way and hear of others experiences if you are willing to share.

Thanks,
Damon.
We (well. back then it was just me) began doing this back in 2004.
Fast forward 8 years.

well... uhm... it's still 2010 isn't it?
For new development you should disable all legacy/noob options, enable all error reporting and use PDO with prepared statements.

If you have application that relies on register_globals or magic_quotes, you can assume it's vulnerable. PHP allows enabling these on per-directory basis, so at least you can somewhat isolate the legacy code.
I don't think something like Cake is a good comparison for Rails, and it's honestly not how I think of PHP. Developing in PHP is making a collection of functions and custom made classes hacked together, in my mind. I know there are frameworks, but if you're going to use a fancy framework, you'd might as well use Rails.

I wouldn't develop in Ruby without Rails, but I wouldn't develop in PHP with a framework.
>>I am already overwhelmed by work (and I have a day job too)

[Offtopic] Can you tell me how you keep both a day job as well as develop for iPhone, iPad and Mac? My mind always shunned the idea of working like this thinking that I'd burnout juggling so many responsibilities! Also, how do you balance your life with this much work?
> not adhering to the Java spec, not for their extensions.

And AFAIK specs are made for "write once run everywhere."

> it would mean you could never distribute the JRE together with any sort of extra libraries.

You can as long as you are using only what Sun (now Oracle) approves.

> Even the Sun/Oracle runtime ships with non-standard extensions

They make the rules, so what they do can't be used as an argument.
I doubt anyone can really give you a list of places that fit your criteria. Maybe some folks can suggest some websites for looking up each criteria?

I use http://www.bestplaces.net/ for comparing US cities.

I currently live in a hot place. I would like to go someplace more temperate and my sons would like to go someplace generally cooler than here. The difference between these two views is that we all agree summers are too hot but, unlike my sons, I don't really want to freeze my arse off in the winter. The reality is that most places which are cooler in the summer will also be colder in the winter. The San Francisco Bay Area has the only Mediterranean climate in the US, which is not so hot in the summer but is also not too cold in the winter. Hawaii is also pleasant year-round in terms of temperature, which is probably why it is hellaciously expensive to live there. (I have other reasons I don't want to live in Hawaii -- and, yes, did look into it/ask around -- but even if I wanted to, I couldn't afford it).

Anyway, I personally think you would get better feedback if you asked for links to websites with info on each one (individually) of your criteria -- and I would love to add such links to my stash of place-comparison resources.

(I occasionally toy with the idea of doing something like bestplaces.net but with a different set of criteria. It will probably never happen. <shrug>)
> The only thing the degree does is get you an interview
> you should have got through networking.

And maybe you also gained some useful skills.
In of the videos of Google I/O, developers were talking about the "bus factor". It basically means if one of your developers were to get run over by a bus, how would the development process of your product be affected? That's why they encouraged documenting the work done etc.

Same principal applies to your current situation too I guess. If that 1 critical developer is run over by a bus / decides to quit / has a health problem / has a baby etc things may stagnate more than you can imagine.

A key advantage of a startup is to be flexible and lean, which means you'll be able to adopt and discard things faster than the "big boys".

So basically rewriting the core to let everyone (especially newcomer employees) get productive on it easily would be a better idea.