skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PHP scales well:

Yahoo and Facebook are the leading PHP sites.

PHP is efficient:

It's a compile-then-execute language and a lot of the standard functions just hook into C code.

PHP is maintainable:

Well written PHP code is easy to maintain, have a look at the Wordpress sources.

PHP has good support of OOP:

PHP5 introduced many of the standard OOP features lacking in PHP4.

PHP is straight-forward and easy to learn:

That's why it's so popular. But it's also why it has such a bad reputation - PHP makes it easy for novices to build websites with terrible code.

PHP is a domian specific language:

Of the popular scripting lanaguages, it's the only one designed specifically for running on web servers. Perl, Ruby and Python are general purpose languages which can also be used for web scripting.

In summary, if you want to build efficient, scalable websites then PHP is a very good choice.

Some people look down their noses at PHP, but if anyone thinks that PHP is a blub lanaguage then try solving the following puzzle in your favourite language:

http://www.facebook.com/jobs_puzzles/?puzzle_id=5

I've written a solution in PHP which runs in less than one second.

The point being, there's no such thing a blub programming languages, only blub programmers :-)
andrew, we've chatted before, I like your blog posts...

but, karma bait?

of course viral strategies rock!!! upmodded.
Would you like to eventually become profitable?
That one web-based MS-Word knockoff startup used ASP.Net (no offense intended, they were the best in the space) - eventually they were bought by Google. MySpace also uses "MSFT technology".

I'm personally not one to hate. If you can get your rocks off on MS tech, then so be it. FeedBurner rocks some incredible stuff out in Java, in amazing time.

I personally wouldn't start something in anything but RoR or Python these days.
Just curious, any of you go look up how to spell 'misspell' just to make sure you didn't misspell it? ;-)
Yesterday I pimped some sites on StumbleUpon.  Extra 45% Visitors (6k or so).  Take note!
For those who don't get it, this is a karma whore joke.
... as an upper-classman so poignantly put it to me as I was graduating school: "... it's not who you know, it's who you blow."
Your examples are foreigners in a time of war. The interview asks them why they were detained without any other information from other sources on their case. I think most people you ask in prison will say they are innocent. In any case, this is not an example of a US citizen being put in jail etc for political reasons.

Also, the main point here is that even if the US were prosecuting people for their politics, which they are not, it would not make what Google is doing any better. What Google is doing is directly aiding in the political prosecution of people in China, and nothing makes this right.

I think I've said now more than enough, and so I withdraw from this thread.
Django or Rails ?
Free-Internet plan gets S.F. controller's office OK
YouTube Video Advertising: No Pre-roll, No Context
Unorganised teens? Try Notely
Google has big plans for corporate services, expert says
IAC close to launching Ask.com mobile service
ASK 10 people to vote this up if you like viral strategies
change it to "Vote this up if you want to become profitable."
'Racetrack' memory could gallop past the hard disk
Kharmasmic
Let's test out viral strategies to see if they really work! Simply ask 10 people to vote this up! You have to register on this site first.
or the zend framework: http://framework.zend.com/
I'm pretty sure Google uses the same veto method with ~3 people. I don't think it's a good idea. Some of the best people I've known seemed strange, and even stupid, when I first met them. More than a small group of people with veto power seems likely to filter out many of the greats.
Viral strategies have been pretty intriguing lately, especially what Trent Reznor did with his latest CD. I see viral marketing becoming a lot more prevalent in the near future though, which will dilute its effect quite a bit. I think I'll be pretty sick of viral marketing soon, as large corporations turn it into another standard marketing technique.
"Google buys a start-up once every few days, or around one a week"
Just like with webapps. The problem with mobile browsers is that it takes 5-10 seconds every time the user clicks a link which quickly gets annoying. Luckily nokia, opera and others are giving uss mobile widgets. As easy to make as web apps but run on device with full api access to hardware. We just have to wait the 2-3 years whilst it becomes standard on most handsets.
And what's next?
I like the 37 signals stuff better for keeping track of notes and deadlines.

Group projects are strongly emphasized in my gradschool program so collaboration tools are essential.

lecture notes are posted as pdfs, so I like to just have a clickable link to the resources.

And I also like google docs for working on papers from work, school, or home and also collaborating with co-authors.
Is your analytics program focusing on the wrong variable?
3 more geek myths about business
10 Big myths of copyright explained
http://www.djangoproject.com

It's what I'm learning/using at the moment and I'm really enjoying it. I like Python primarily because it's a very well thought out language and the Django frameworks leverages this nicely.

The other notable Python web frameworks are:

Zope, found at: http://zope.org
Plone (which is really wrapper around Zope), found at: http://plone.org
TurboGears, found at: http://www.turbogears.org/
I booked the name http://www.ditp.org for it, but nothing is published yet. Here you have some more info [http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=21287]
"Comparing this to the US system is dramatically misunderstanding and utterly taking for granted the amazing freedom we have and the reasons for it. The difference is in kind, not degree"

Well said. Democracies like the US and Japan and Europe have orders of magnitude more freedom than dictatorships. It's popular to see a moral equivalence between dictatorships and democracies, but history doesn't see an equivalence.
Here's a little experiment you could carry out to see which society is more of a police state. Take a soapbox into a popular park or square on a Sunday afternoon and start denouncing the government in public. See how long you would last in China.
"Chinese people can and do criticize their government all they want - verbally. Several people we met told us "Yeah, the government censorship is disgraceful, but it takes time to change things like that." When we visited a Taoist temple in Hong Kong, there were Falun Gong posters all over the place."

Hong Kong currently has different laws to mainland China.
"China's certainly not perfect, and overall I think its political freedom is somewhat less than the U.S."

Somewhat less? Freedom House gives the US a 1 (Free) and China a 7 (Not free): http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/press_release/fiw07_charts.pdf

Look what Amnesty International say about Human Rights in China: http://web.amnesty.org/report2006/chn-summary-eng
I know what you mean (biomedical engineering). In health care, it's standard practice to have at least 100x price mark ups, but a fair amount of barriers.

After talking to a couple people in biotech start ups, it seems pointless to pursue something unless I am a cofounder. The marriage of science and business is often not pretty.
A better title may have been:

"Tell your friends to VOTE this up if you like viral strategies"

:-)
If it were me, it would be to avoid clutter and confusion, as there are only two possible ways to vote.

But that's just a guess.
From what I gather is that facebook previously had a deal with oodle but are now rolling out their own classifieds system.
how about Symfony framework for PHP? did anyone try it? what do you think about it compared to other PHP frameworks, like Cake?
Can't find no stinking co-founder!!!!
It's hard to find a good co-founder. The good ones always have other options and most are risk adverse jerks who prefer to stay on with their cushy 9-5 job. Wuss!

And those who are willing to join you as co-founders are low-life good-for-nothing losers who offers nothing to the venture except comic relief for being the mofo jokes that they are.

And who says starting up is easy... Oh yeah. sprinkle a bit of ajax here. a bit of beta there. and voila you got your startup.

Why don't you start sprinkling some salt in that rotting brain of yours!!! (
Future of Search
I wasn't discussing what the main point of this thread is.

I was responding to the statement you made 'I have 0 evidence of anyone jailed or killed for their political beliefs in this country. Do you have any?'

Withdraw if you like. I'm normally not one to get into political/ideological debates, but a statement like this deserves to be challenged.

Yes, my examples are foreigners in a time of war. But, you said 'anyone', not US Citizens. But even if you ignore this (which I wouldn't really - a society should be judged by how it treats humans regardless of which country they happen to be a part of), you are still misguided.

How about Martin Luther King being jailed for anti-segregation protests? Does that count to your re-framed question?

I don't know if this could happen today (although the stage seems to be set with the wonderfully named Patriot Act which among other things has a section 215 which allows the FBI to search your library records), but the fact that it happened only a few decades ago should make you think twice before uttering blanket statements.
Are there any other browser limitations that might make sense to cover in this plugin? Getting the distribution and the cross-platform functionality is the challenge. Once you've done that, picking off a couple more browser annoyances would be relatively straightforward.

Obviouly feature creep is a problem, but if you want this thing to be widely out there picking off a couple more things might help others push it.
I'm helping my dad design a replacement for the Digital Signal Processor. Actually, it's already designed and it actually works through the Phase I testing. Talk about years of painfully drawing up electric engineering diagrams and deciphering electric engineering language to a way that you would understand it to draw the diagram and write the description out. It's like having a crash course on 4 years of EE education in a week. (I'm not an EE major). Not to mention making suggestions upon the improvement of the design and have your dad say "no it won't work" only to find out days later that your proposal actually works but your dad is just too proud to admit it. I think the closest he got to an offer was from Nokia but he chickened out and didn't pursue it. Sucks for him and especially for me who spent days finding a personal contact information to someone at Nokia.

Too bad, he's one of those guys who just likes to invents to see if it works. Not much of a 'start a company' guy...I think he just wants to sit back and enjoy the rest of his life as opposed to dealing with the politics of a company. 9 years on working on something and the fear of someone stealing your idea keeps you from sharing it to the world. It's a shame but oh well. It's his 'baby'

I have my own 'baby' project to work on.
I'm sorry you're having difficulty finding a co-founder. If you're a student, try the university.

Y Combinator should really have a dedicated place for people to find co-founders since the 'co-founder' thread seems to be buried.
I've been learning Rails and I LOVE it. I can't stop coding, it's actually kind of "sick" since I get like 4 hours of sleep.

I have PG to blame because his whole advice on "learn to code" was so very true. I'm not a CS major (I did take a 'few'classes) but Rails really makes sense to me. Coding is just so..logical.
Confused about Semantic Web?  Watch: What is the Semantic Web? [video] (ff to 5m 10s)
I found out who did this and zeroed their karma, which will take away their down arrow. Will add protections against this. Also fixed your karma.
Perhaps posting some information as to what you're looking for, location, type of project, etc. might yield a better response and quite possibly help you find that co-founder.

Although, the impression you've given thus far isn't a very appealing one.
I'm also a non-CS major and have taken the advice of many to learn how to program. I'm actually currently learning python and will probably venture into Django once I acquire a fairly moderate skill set.

I really never imagined it being this addicting/fun/satisfying.
"It is better to partner with Dow Jones and the Financial Times...," Schmidt said. Blogger Arrington jumped in to add "...and TechCrunch."

Michael's always a business man.
Anyone know of any good resources for developing zoomable web interfaces? A general purpose Ajax framework to create interfaces like Google Maps?
I would like to know too
Build to last or build to flip. Is there a difference?
there's no such thing a blub programming languages, only blub programmers

There is such thing as blub languages, and the tragedy is that these languages attract blub programmers, or even worse, allow "blub" people to become programmers :)

PHP is efficient

As long as it resolves symbols (variable and function names) at run-time instead of compile-time, it can't be efficient. Unfortunately the language itself implies this behavior so it can't be changed.

PHP is maintainable

It took me years to figure how to write really nice and maintainable PHP code. There are some forgotten languages out there, like Turbo Pascal, which forced you to write maintainable code from the beginning. They taught you to think of interface/implementation relationships all the time.

PHP has good support of OOP

Screw OOP, pardon my language. It gives nothing but an illusion of maintainability, while in reality you end up with a bloated code that otherwise could have been X times smaller.

PHP is straight-forward and easy to learn

No programming language is straight-forward unless you know all internals. It can be quite straight-forward to learn array manipulation in the manuals, but much harder to understand the cost of each of those methods.

Only good thing about PHP is that it's a dynamic language with dynamic strings and lists/arrays, it is embedded (in HTML) and is largely supported. And that's all you need for server programming on the Web.
... and Flickr too, BTW.
Speaking of Rails, there are other options in the Python world besides Django.

Pylons is a very Rails-y framework with the difference being that it is made to be easy to customize. In Rails if you don't like something you are going to have a hard time changing it out unless you are a good hacker. In Pylons that is easy, and you've got access to Python's vastly better platform (speed, Unicode support) and libraries.

If you are an absolute beginning programmer it might be kind of hard to pick up, but if you've programmed a bit or you've used one or two web frameworks (especially Rails) Pylons won't be hard to learn.

http://pylonshq.com/
You forgot http://webpy.org Web.py
How to detect passion in a potential cofounder / employee - listen to their stories
My background is in php so I am using CakePHP and i love it.
After reading this post, I think I have a pretty good idea of why you're not able to find a talented cofounder...

Honestly, it's really not that hard, you just need to be proactive about it.

Last year, I posted a URL all around UVa's CS department (and on facebook). On the website, I solicited passionate hackers, telling them, that together - we'd "change the world" (hey, sometimes you need the grandiose visions).

It cost me $50, and I go around 15 talented guys that wanted to spend the summer with me working on a startup. The hardest part was picking two.
Eric Schmidt: "Google buys a startup once every few days"
I use the CakePHP framework, took me few hours to learn it. They have good support and lots of examples (small and large projects)
Where is the best(cheap too) place to turn for logo design?
It's really very easy to create your own logos.

I'm not an expert, but fooling around with photoshop/illustrator and looking up several tutorials is a lot more rewarding than you might think. I consider myself fairly skilled at making logos, and that's not due to taking classes or having an extremely artistic mind, it's due to spending several hours trying out different options and trying to emulate other logos.

I'm not sure if you've tried, but give it a shot. It's quite easy to pick up, and also extremely satisfying when you settle on a design you like.

I'm just not an advocate of having to pay someone else for something you can easily learn how to do and especially with a logo, you'll feel more of a connection to it.
There is such thing as blub languages

But PHP is not one of them, it's perfectly suited for the web. I personally find it easier to identify blub programmers than blub languages ...

As long as it resolves symbols (variable and function names) at run-time instead of compile-time, it can't be efficient.

That includes all dynamic languages i.e. Lisp, Ruby, Python, Perl, Smalltalk, JavaScript, Eiffel, Erlang, Forth, Lua et al.

No programming language is straight-forward unless you know all internals.

True, but as you say, that applies to any language. PHP is a very easy language for novices to pick up.

OOP ... gives nothing but an illusion of maintainability, while in reality you end up

In my experience OO code tends to be easier to maintain, and so long as you don't over do it, efficient.

Only good thing about PHP is that it's a dynamic language with dynamic strings and lists/arrays, it is embedded (in HTML) and is largely supported. And that's all you need for server programming on the Web.

That's why I recommended it as a good choice for web programming.
You will succeed when you execute Powerful Advice
Do you mean they don't use a naive Bayesian classifier, or that they don't use Bayesian probability at all? I'd have a hard time believing the latter.
How YouTube is being gamed
Gates: Don't count us out in the ad biz
That includes all dynamic languages i.e. Lisp, Ruby, Python, Perl, Smalltalk, JavaScript, Eiffel, Erlang, Forth, Lua et al.

Ok, but you said PHP is efficient. I say, PHP is efficient as much as the language itself allows it to be. If there are many late-binding languages around and PHP at least doesn't look bad compared to them, it doesn't mean it's efficient. Late-binding offers some new possibilities in programming of course, but the price is high and programmers should be aware of that. And when it comes to computationally intensive tasks (encryption, graphics, any hardware-related task), you can't trust programmers who are entirely into dynamic languages, no matter what they say about their favorite ones.

That's why I recommended it as a good choice for web programming.

What other languages do you master as much as PHP?
Sure, it looks nice, if you're into PHP, but now that I'm on my own, there is no way in hell I'm touching that language. Life's too short:-) Just my opinion though, there are plenty of people doing cool, productive, lucrative things with PHP.
Jogging Partner Tech Offers Company (Simulated Jogging Partner)
Microsoft cuts Windows virtualization features - "Windows development is just broken..."
Photos: Sun's James Gosling shows what Java can do
great tip!
Mobile IRC vs Twitter
Interviews with 10 prominent VCs & Angels
Raising chickens and runner ducks.
How can you not like an article that starts with a Jackie Mason quality joke?
Band Of Angels
I also forgot CherryPy http://www.cherrypy.org/
Business Blogs
Imagine I see you take a rock and stick and tie them together with sinew, which you then use as a hammer to break apart rocks.

After seeing you build this device, I then build my own.

For me to steal from you, you have to lose something you own, so how have I stolen anything?
"Shipping is a feature too," Neil said.

WTF?!? This guy should be fired for that statement.
C and JavaScript.

I worked with Perl before PHP but never grew to like it (it's not consistent enough and not exactly easy on the eyes, either).

I do understand the tradeoff between efficiency and power, and PHP hits that sweet spot just right for web programming.

Worrying _too_ much about language efficiency when it comes to web programming is clearly a case of premature optimisation. PHP is efficient enough (probably Perl and Python as well, maybe not Ruby ?).
Ratchet-X: XML Based Desktop Integration
The Largest Social Network In World, Untapped
I'll say it again, language wars only take time away from actually building something (especially when the options are relatively similar in effectiveness). Pick your poison and go.
If you want cheap then do it yourself. If you want to make money doing business then and you realize that your logo is th face of your company, then pay someone a standard fee for a quality job.

In the end you won't be sorry.
Yes, I noticed that same line too from the original eweek article linked here. That was the most interesting line in the whole article, but the eWeek article spent more time regurgitating the price of YouTube and DoubleClick, something that has been covered a billion times already.
I've heard good things about http://logoworks.com if you're looking for something cheap and decent looking.
It's amazing !
The Next Generation Business Strategy for Wireless Carriers: The power of the User Interface
I hate PHP, but I use it in my startup for three projects (sorry, for the fourth we are switching to Ruby but without rails, just mod_ruby), and actually without PHP my startup that is now working well and is profitable could not be here at all.

Reason? My co founder is a smart guy but was not exactly an hacker, it was a problem solver that used PHP and other tools to write web apps for a living. Now he is learning Ruby so we can switch language the next time, but without PHP the number of available co founder in your area and possibly your own friends (like my co founder is) may be near to zero.

I need to add one thing: we have a library called "utils.php" that tries to add something of useful to mitigate a bit the absurd library of PHP and add things like memoization, and I must admin that using a "functional" programming style where functions take PHP arrays and return PHP arrays, and clean design, it is possible to write decent code even in PHP.
Logos don't have to be very complex to serve their purpose:

https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/logo/paypal_logo.gif
http://pics.ebaystatic.com/aw/pics/logos/logoEbay_x45.gif
Embed images.
A Boot Camp for the Next Tech Billionaires
Pylons is awesome, but be aware that they're changing the default template to Mako soon, and form handling to ToscaWidgets. The latter doesn't have much documentation yet.
Digg and Reddit: Why I Read the Comments First
No, PHP isn't dead. But most people here won't be a great company either because they chose RoR/Python because of the hype.
I love python. I really enjoy programming in it. But then I went to my local bookstore and checked out the web section.

There's not a single django book. Or even a web related python book at all. But there's a whole section of Rails books. Now, that isn't to say that you need a book to write a rails/django app, it's just an example of all the energy and community behind rails.

It's got so much momentum. The same kind of momentum php once had.. It's only a matter of time before the tools get better and better because of it. Working in Django might be nice, but I really think it will be more like swimming upstream.
Hiring is obsolete. Google knows it. Why sift through 100349234 resumes for one job when you could just get some technology and great people?
Hiring's only obsolete while the stock market remains inflated and the cash keeps piling up. Come next recession, the deals will dry up like the Sahara.

Then again, come next recession, hiring will likely dry up too. So maybe hiring is obsolete.
My Windows installation died.  I'm buying a Mac.