skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fall back on raw JavaScript DOM manipulation for performance-critical stuff, which is a decent-sized chunk when you're doing arcade games in JavaScript. You can get decent results, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you really are performance-constrained. You end up spending a lot more time than you'd like on browser-specific bugs. If you're just trying to put up a UI to respond to your user's clicks, you're much better off with a lightweight X-platform library like JQuery or Base2.
What I wanna know is how they collect payments. Virtually any form of payment is traceable today and if you can pay with a CC, you can complain to your CC company about fraud and get your money back. I did hear that some scammer use "gold payment systems" but never looked into those payment systems myself.
>calendar/scheduling/notifications with some social networking

Why?

More and more web apps are coming out with social networking tied in, and very few of them succeed BECAUSE they have social networking tied in. Socializing a site is a bit more than giving people profile pages and enabling them the ability to "friend" people, at least that's how I look at it.

So my question to you is this: how are you planning to make the social aspect of your site actually work? How are you going to make the ad hoc benefits of social networking replicate to an online presence? Will people actually benefit from socializing, or are they just going to have friends who they will have the extraneous ability to leave comments about?
I really would like to use PHP or Python in a big project to at least get some experience.

I tell ya, I do love Perl.

With limited exposure to PHP and Python, could you elaborate on some of the things PHP and Python are lacking compared to Perl?
What are your feelings as a beginner in each language? Have you found any little design decisions that leave you scratching your head, or make you start cursing loudly at the computer? Have you built anything with them? If so, did you run into any issues that you feel were a result of the language?

I'm a bit of a hedonist, but if I were in your situation, I'd probably try to pick the one that was the most fun to work with. As you say, once you've started building, it won't be (or maybe for you it will be?) as easy to switch, and you probably don't want to figure out that you hate coding in whatever you've chosen while trying to finish your web app.

When in a variant of your situation (PHP/a PHP framework versus Python/Django), I chose Python. I'm not you, so we may have totally different tastes and may have come to a different conclusion given the facts. I've been pretty happy with my choice, though.
Python... both languages are along far enough that they will meet all four of your points, but people that program in python are on average better programmers than PHP programmers. So it makes hiring good hackers easier by eliminating many of the bad hackers.

Other than that, if you like the syntax of PHP, it is as good as python as long as you program using the MVC paradigm. Personally I like the syntax of python a whole lot more than PHP.
This must be fake. I don't think cell phone antennas are particularly directional, so it doesn't seem like arranging them like that would make much a difference.
It's not clear that these honorary degrees have any meaning or purpose.
Thus far, I've built very simple pieces of PHP such as logins, maintaining sessions, writing/reading to/from MySql. My one concern with PHP is the overwhelming "alphabet soup" of functions.

I haven't done anything web-facing with Python just yet, just using it to; parse files, some socket programming - basically getting a feel for the language.

So far, I couldn't say I've run into any issues resulting directly from the languages themselves.

Thanks for the input.
Is it really a bigger feat to encrypt with a 1024-bits encryption key than a 660-bits one? If not I don't understand why they didn't do 1024 in the first place. Or even why not use a 2048-bits one...

Given the situation the scammer probably doesn't care about performance, so might as well mitigate any attempts at decryption.
The main problem with the old favicon was the box around it. It looks bad in the address bars of Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer. It also looks bad when the browser doesn't do a good job of aligning the favicon with the text next to it. I have exactly the same problem with my favicon and it isn't easy to work around without going with a whole new design.

Anyway, did they do end-user tests on this design? I would be very surprised if the results of a marketing/usability test support this change.
Go with Python. PHP is probably the worst language I've had to use (Single namespace, poor unicode...)

Python on the other hand is pretty cool. It can be OO, functional, or procedural depending on how you want to look at it. It also has a lot baked into the standard interpreter and has some really awesome frameworks (Django, Pylons)
Neither PHP nor Python have anything approaching CPAN. Ruby is slightly closer with Gems, but even that's a joke compared to the might of Perl libraries. Seriously, that's the big thing that's missing. Other than that both PHP and Python are prefectly servicable, although you're going to have an easier time finding smart Python developers than smart PHP developers (Blub hiring paradox).
It really depends on whether you like Javascript or not, and whether or not your new library-based code has to play nicely with non-library javascript.

jQuery is an interesting language. But I feel like it's no more "javascript" than C is assembly. It uses a lot of conventions and syntactic sugar that is not standard in the language. It's a cool and elegant, but there's a learning curve at both ends; first, you need to learn it, and then it becomes so habitual that you forget how to write "regular" javascript.

YUI, on the other hand, feels a bit more like plain old JS, which some people like and some people don't. The main problem with YUI is a lack of overall consistency in naming and whatnot. YUI 3 is coming out soon-ish, and addresses a lot of that stuff quite nicely. YUI does a really good job of not cluttering up your environment with too much gargbage--everything is under one global YAHOO object, so it's a friendly neighbor.

Avoid prototype at all costs. It monkeys around with the core object types, and adds scores of globals, which pretty much ensures that, unless ALL of your code uses prototype, and always will, you'll get unexpected behavior in some cases.

YUI was built first and foremost for use at Yahoo. It'd be hard to find a library that's more play-tested or scrutinized for performance than that. Personally, I find the core YUI libs a lot more useful than the widgets. They tend to be a bit over generalized in a lot of cases, and I can usually get better results by rolling my own.

Disclaimer: I'm a webdev at Yahoo, and I've been using YUI since its pre-OSS days.
Few people seem to be aware that cities, too have an aura of their own.This aura is the cumulative aura of its inhabitants.
Out of interest, why would you suggest Prototype for "more advanced stuff"?
I realized that Google didn't really get design when they added dropdown menus to Google Docs. Even Microsoft has moved past that. One of the things that impresses me about 280 Slides is the amount of functionality they've been able to pack in without resorting to a menubar.
Wow. Lots of questions. Thanks!

On a plan to make the social aspect work, is there a finite list of ways to choose from? I don't believe there's really only one way. It definitely seems that "social networking" could have a negative effect on my plan yet I hope to do things a little differently.

There will be some socializing benefits.
PHP. So in a year down the road, you won't have to make the switch to it like everyone else has.
> If your back end is Java, use GWT
...and then take a long hard look at your life, and see if you can figure out where it went so wrong.

;P
I disagree. Achieving smooth animation without a library is extremely difficult. If you look at what the modern libraries actually do you'll see that they have two features which are tricky to implement from scratch: frame rate limiting and easing. Frame rate limiting means that if you are running lots of complex animations at once the libraries will drop frames to ensure that all animations complete in the allocated time. Easing gives you a pleasing speed-up / slow-down effect during your animation which makes them look far more natural. This is a fair amount more complicated than simple animations set up just using setTimeout.

Of course, you can roll that stuff yourself - but why duplicate all of that effort?

Also, DOM manipulation with the regular DOM is amazingly inconvenient when compared to manipulation using a library such as jQuery. The DOM is a pretty verbose API with a lot of weird quirks (removing a node: "theNode.parentNode.removeChild(theNode)") - jQuery provides a much more sensible API, which in turn means that I find myself using DOM manipulation a lot more since it isn't such a pain to do.
Perhaps the scammer waits until the money is free and clear -- transferring to a different card, spending it, etc. Other options: the scammer might just use the email to arrange a physical cash transfer.
It's certainly technically extremely impressive.

The user experience, though, is not great, and certainly not worth the effort it must have involved. Why reimplement draggable, modal windows? What does that get the user? Must we really duplicate all the worst excesses of GUI interfaces just because we can? There are some really brilliant moments here (e.g. the ability to add pictures directly from Google Image Search) where the designers clearly bothered to think about how exploit the strengths of web-app-ness, but a little more of that and a little less slavish devotion to the GUI paradigm would not have gone amiss; there's too much "look what we can do." Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Also, the author of the linked post claims that it is responsive, which it certainly is not for me; it feels very, very sluggish, 1+ second delays for mouse clicks to register.
What do you mean, "no design lightweight?" Presumably you're not basing that statement on the fact that she designed Google's logo, since then it would be a tautology. Are you basing it on other work of hers that you know and admire? Or do you mean that she must be a good designer because she taught at Stanford?
And perl has nothing approaching Python's readability. Perl may be easier to start with now but in 6 months, it will become a major headache. Read http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882 . Using Python would be an excellent choice imo.
Thanks for the link.

That's one thing I love about Hacker News; all of the links y'all leave that lead to further study and growth.
What to think about the singularity? I'm not sure this article tells us much either way. I'd guess interviews with top mechanical engineers in 1890 about the prospects of landing men on the moon within 80 years would have sounded much the same.
"To be a startup, a company has to be a product business, not a service business."
If I was going to be devil's advocate, I'd point out that LJ is an also-ran in their category, and that LJ didn't open source until way late in the game. WordPress was open source from day one, and Automattic scored 25+MM in funding.
Thinking of these things as "perks" is the first mistake. Is having a chair and a good computer a "perk"? For some jobs perhaps, but for people writing software they are a lot more important (though I'm sure someone will dispute that chairs are necessary). Likewise, good food and other environmental factors are very significant.
They do care about performance. If the victim could figure out what was happening before their files were completely "ransacked", they could simply shut off their computer and take it to the shop to extract however much of their data wasn't yet encrypted. If the value of what was encrypted so far was less than the ransom, why pay?

Also, another aspect you have to consider: strong encryption algorithms usually have large implementations, which means large viruses. Virus transmission rates are logarithmically proportional to their size (a virus that can get sent from one computer to N others in half the time spreads twice as fast each generation, and therefore exponentially (2^t) faster over time.)
Y-Combinator and Facebook have the best i've seen. I'm really impressed with Facebook's--it manages to be stylish and simple at the same time.
From reading their blog and a little googling, they currently are using SECCOMP - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seccomp - which is a process restriction mechanism that nobody really seems to trust.

They are working towards using KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) which would be a Virtual Box running on your local workstation.
Why are you determined to use either Python or PHP in this latest project?

I would make sure you have a good answer to that question before using something besides Perl.
Reddit and Octopart are product businesses, not service businesses.
I guess, for a lot of people, PHP would be easier to dive into than Python?

I get your point; without any other knowledge, you'd be better off selecting from a pool of Python developers than PHP developers when looking for good hackers. Correct?

Although I would be able to somehow separate the good hackers from bad by initially chosing Python, would you say that good hackers would also stay clear of opportunities where PHP is involved? What would facebook think about that? ;)

Just want to know your thoughts. Thanks.
All this (awful) article shows is that there's a big need for 'singularitarians' to do a better job of communicating to the wider community.
When you think about it, what does your web browser do? It is downloading someone else's code (Javascript, Flash...) and executing it on your machine. Somehow your trust the browser. Why not trust the virtual machine? Maybe if the company only allows Javascript to be executed on the virtual machine, people might feel more comfortable about the idea.
By some tortured definition, sure. You win!
Should I read that as a little tongue-in-cheek? :)

Everyone else has switched to PHP? Explain, please.
It wasn't as strong an assertion as you made it out to be. Of course you won't be able to opt into being tracked/filmed/panoptified. You'll just opt into the auto-agent features that search out specific relevant information. In other words, although everyone will get to know anything they want, no one will have to know anything they don't want (what my boss did on his vacation to get tanned only on his groin region, for instance.)
In what sense do are those sites "service businesses"?

The whole point of the service vs. product distinction that PG was making is that a service business is less scalable: its revenue is basically linear in the number of employees that it has, because a human being has to do more work for each new customer. That is not the case for product businesses or for Reddit or Octopart (or most other web startups) -- if Reddit's traffic increases 100x overnight, they don't need 100x the employees to capitalize. Craigslist is an example that makes the difference pretty clear. Whether you want to call them "product businesses" or not misses the point.
php is not easier to dive into. it's messy and confusing. python and ruby are some of the easiest languages to learn.
I actually know Perl and Java pretty darn well.

I wish to constantly expand my understanding of computing in general, and learning a new language is a great way to go.

I hope to not only learn a new syntax or two but also learn to think in different ways. This works with human languages, too. Yosh!
JK Rowling's Commencement speech at Harvard
mootools is a great framework, and rainbow moo is a great color chooser, but jQuery is just as easy to use, has better performance and faster updates to the core.

i think jQuery has a lot to offer above mootools, but mootools does a good job of looking really clean.
Single namespace in PHP - Ouch. You can gracefully get around this with classes perhaps?

Any thoughts on PHP frameworks?

On Python, I've heard that TurboGears is a pretty good framework as well.

I remember reading somewhere that you don't run Django, it runs you. Any fiction in that?
Why two web servers (thttpd and apache) instead of just one, say lighttpd or nginx?
It's all a question of where you draw the line, I guess. There are consultancies, which scale 1.5x. There are service providers, which scale 2-3x. There are ASPs, which scale 5x. And there are product companies, which scale 10x.

Reddit is still different from an actual product company. The Reddit product scales independantly of the number of redditors or subreddits, because the Reddit product isn't hosted.

This is all a tangent, though. My fault.
Python. For a lot of reasons. It's easy. It has a lot of libraries. The Python based CMSs are better. And most importantly it's easier to find decent python programmers. The vast majority of PHP guys I have interviewed ONLY know one language: PHP. The python guys tend to be much more well rounded. Of course the PHP guys are usually cheaper. You get what you pay for in this case. I would also have to recommend against perl. I did perl for 10 years before I switched to python 4 years ago. I think their philosophies say it all: Perl: There's more than one way to do it. Python: There's one obviously right way to do it. Sure, that's a huge generalization but I find it true in a lot of cases. Perl really is line noise compared to Python. And reading someone else's Perl is a real challenge.
It seems like nobody is really ready to give up the browser as a potential operating system. We have great technologies like Flex that simplify much of this work away, but folks keep hammering away at Javascript. Must be a sign.

Perhaps, we should just give in and give browser appropriate hooks into the operating system.
calendar/scheduling/notifications with some social networking and people matching/search functionality. The site will be highly configurable/maintainable by its community from establishing/interacting within groups to tweeking page layouts.

How much of your app can be built by hooking together existing Drupal modules?

If the answer is "lots" -- and because your brief description sounds like a long list of stock parts from the Social Network aisle at Costco, I wouldn't be surprised if it is -- perhaps you should consider Drupal. Which means PHP, alas, but that's a small price to pay for avoiding the annoyance of building every single one of your site's 120,000 proposed features yourself, from scratch.

If the answer is "a lot, except for features X and Y, and I hate Drupal's existing, buggy options for Z" the Drupal community will be really happy to see you develop and contribute open-source code that can do X and Y. And we probably all hate Z, so fix it and you'll be our hero. You'll have plenty of time to work on Z because you won't be spending time redeveloping things like "basic user logins with emailed password reminders", or "users can create and join groups which have their own subsites" from scratch -- yet again -- in a language whose idioms you haven't learned yet.

If the answer is "not much"... may I suggest that you seriously reduce the scope of your first project?

Of course, if the proposed app is less of an actual future product than it is an excuse to broaden your mind by learning a language that's not Perl or Java, you should probably grab onto Python or Ruby with both hands. PHP has many practical features, but it doesn't have much to teach a Perl programmer.
How long before retailers have all sorts of interactive entertainment you can "play" with as you walk by?
"XXXXX is a religious rather than a scientific vision"

where XXXXX = Evolution, Gravity.....

Just because something deals with issues that religion addresses does not mean it is not scientific.
"Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the same scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well have not lived at all. In which case, you failed by default."
you don't run Django, it runs you

I use Django (GeoDjango actually) at my full-time job, and love it. My progression was PHP -> Python -> TurboGears -> Pylons -> Django. I can say with confidence that it is the best of them all. Yes, many choices have been made for you, but they have been made in an elegant, Pythonic way, and you retain the ability to get under the hood to a healthy extent.
Ah. Ok, then that makes things easier.

For your case, don't use Python, nor PHP. Both are pretty much just like Perl and Java with only minor syntax changes.

If you want to expand your understanding of computing in general, while also learning a new language, and while doing a webapp, if I were you I'd learn Common Lisp and try out Hunchentoot. There's even some screencasts for that setup floating around.

Going with Python or PHP after Perl and Java is not going to be terribly enlightening for you.
+1 for YUI. The Yahoo team has done an astonishingly good job of demonstrating what javascript looks like if you treat it as a language worth using well, as opposed to forcing it to pretend it's something it's not (eg. prototype). I've been working with it for a year and a half, recently migrated a substantial Rails app from Prototype/Scriptaculous, and couldn't be happier.
Python. It is more powerful with an extremely flat learning curve. In other words, you don't hit many walls with it. When you want to do something more powerful, the answer is 'right there'--it fits the brain.

This is a bit dated but may help: http://www.artima.com/intv/prodperfP.html
I loooove Python. But if asked to "bet the farm" on a web app, I'd go with PHP because it's been successfully demonstrated again in again in every form of web app you can imagine. In a year, I'd recommend Python, but I still find Django and the other web frameworks a bit too immature and clunky to do things that PHP has been hacking with for years and years. As much as I hate to say it, for the Python community the web server has been an afterthought until the past two years. PHP was bred there.

I probably would say it's a closer call if we hadn't found a great MVC framework for PHP called Code Igniter that just makes PHP (of all things) much more pleasurable to hack in than it used to be.

All this being said, you're not risking much by going with Python/Django. But if the farm is on the line, I'd personally have to go with LAMPhp.
self limiting factors may make our technological approach to the singularity asymptotic.
http://mtg.lcc.gatech.edu/games.php

Mobile Technologies Group. They made a PacMan game as well. David Jimison is a cool guy :).
Hard to win feature wars. I think the best sales mechanism involves showing a potential customer how someone just like him/her is using your product successfully.
I like both Javascript and jQuery. In what way is jQuery not "javascript"? To me, it feels as though jQuery really embraces js much more so than some other libs that try to pretend that it's java or some other lang.
Computer peripherals that read thoughts
Any tips for integrating sms into your web app ?
I was wondering if anyone has experience with integrating this in sms in their web app. Any services out there that I should know about ?
Meaning of an honorary degree: a (potentially prestigious) education establishment formally attests to the relevance of one's contribution to society.
Stanford alerts employees that stolen laptop had personal data