skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought the lack of references was a major failing of the book. Some of the algorithms barely scratch the surface, and it does a disservice to the reader to provide noplace to go. Here's a few to get started: 1. Russel and Norvig's AI text, 2. Elements of Statistical Learning by Hastie et. al., 3. Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Chris Bishop.

On the other hand going right into code examples is useful, including jumping right into getting real data downloaded and worked on.
Where have all the PHP guys gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the PHP guys gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the PHP guys gone?

Gone to Python and Ruby everyone

Oh when will they ever learn,

Oh when will they ever learn...
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
I've had 2 ideas already taken by the big guy who can implement stuff quick (but sloppily). I'm not doing anything that earth shattering. Their user base is hard to chip away at when they match me step for step.
Ah that's a shame. There's always hoping for next year though. I always check your site first for conference videos after every conference, keep up the good work!
If I were given a piece of paper and a pencil and expected to start writing out code, that, to me, aside from just being annoying, would raise serious questions about how well that employer was planning on treating me. If they can't even supply a cheap computer for me to write some code, what else won't they provide once I actually have to work there? Yikes.
Machine self-replicates
A PC like that mentioned in the article should be free. A 533 MHz Celeron, 512 MB of ram, 80 GB hard drive? Don't you have any family? I know of several old computers meeting or exceeding those specs that various acquaintances have sitting around.

Personally, I would spend another $150-200 and get a processor that was top-of-the-line a couple years ago (instead of nearly a decade ago), faster/more RAM (512 MB is solid for Linux, but with 1 GB you'll never have to worry about it), and a faster (if not bigger) hard drive.

In my opinion, advertising a crappy $150 PC is almost a disservice to the build-your-own crowd, when you could get a similar-quality one for free from someone you know or for cheaper from a used computer store. Noting that you can build a very solid computer for $300-400, though, is really something.
Your example does make sense, but in the case of Digg, its not a car, but a careless air carrier.
Ruby on Rails or Django.
Interesting point.

For years I have had candidates code with pencil and paper and never had a single objection.

The purpose of the coding exercise was never to see what they would come up with or how well it ran, it was to learn more about them in the discussion afterward. And I have found that this was best accomplished with a big sheet of paper and 2 pens, (one mine, one theirs). I imagine a white board would work as well, but for 2 people it's not necessary.

I also found that they were more relaxed working off-line, where nothing could be judged or examined. It was just me and them and something specific to talk about. That's all.
I then argue that "better" as defined by the HN heuristic is exactly defined as an article with more points.
The API idea is excellent, thank you.
All three work if your goal is simply to avoid forking a new Python interpreter for each incoming request, ala CGI.

The difference is in where they hook into the request-handling workflow within Apache. Both FastCGI and WSGI apps only receive the request after Apache (or lighttpd, nginx, et. al.) have finished doing access control checks, URL rewriting, header parsing, etc.

Code inside the mod_python interpreter, on the other hand, can hook in to any of those earlier stages of request processing, which allows it to do things like block a request, alter the Apache log format, or look up a vhost docroot in a database, all before any content is generated.

The downside is that each and every Apache process on your server has a full copy of the Python interpreter embedded inside, which can cost you a pretty serious chunk of RAM when you start dealing with servers running 25-50 (or more) httpd processes.
Why I skip 37signals: because all those guys seem to know how to do is play contrarian.
Hmm... very interesting. Flash is sent to the browser as a binary then, right? The GPL says that any derived works which are distributed as binaries must have the source code (including the changes) made available publicly.

Out of curiosity and to maintain the openness of open source software, it might not be a bad idea to mention to Google that the app looks to use GPL software and request to see the source. Of course, if they rewrote it, this is a bit more complicated (a line-by-line rewrite, or an interface-based rewrite?), but it might be worth a shot.
While I support full-disclosure, I don't think the author acted responsibly. He didn't give them enough time to respond, he didn't make any extra effort to contact digg's engineers and he also very publically bragged about it.

He didn't try to act modest and he used the buzzword 'hack' which appeals more to non-technical than to technical people. Publicity stunt if you ask me.
This is exactly what happens when you get a bit too excited about mixing presentation and logic. It's easy for "$foo" to slip into the HTML, and then your site gets hacked. This isn't really a PHP problem, but PHP certainly goes out of its way to encourage you to write bad code like this.
You seem surprised. Digg is one of the most popular sites on the Internet; the guy is (rightfully) proud that he can make it break horribly.
Firefox 3 is Still a Memory Hog
Ask YC: 6-Month road trip down the west coast...much advice needed
Hi. Twitter version: Bored in SC, apartment lease up, want to see western US.

Wordpress version: I'm a 26 year-old single freelance web dev working fulltime from home in South Carolina. Lived in the southeast my whole life; now is as good a time as any to see something else. My very tentative plan is take my trusty F-150 ($4 gas = ouch) across the country and stay in one place for a month or two, then keep moving. If I love it somewhere, hell, I'll stay. Itinerary: SC -> Vancouver? -> Seattle -> Portland -> Sacramento -> SF/SJ -> San Diego -> Vegas? -> SLC -> Denver. Or something.

My plan is to look for furnished apartments with month-to-month leases or find extended-stay hotels. To be open about my budget, I work 40hrs/week @$40/hour (all remotely) and I plan on keeping 30 hrs+/week throughout my travels. (Haven't talked to my client about it yet but they're very cool.) That should cover my cost of living. I know downtown metros are expensive but 15 miles away I should be able to find some housing. (Right?) Say, $1,200/month avg? (SF notwithstanding)

My current lease here is up July 31st. If I could scrape 1% of the YC'ers collective knowledge about the west coast and extended road trips, it would be a humongous help. So that you can refer to them by number, here are my questions:

1.) Is that itinerary FUBAR? Any other city suggestions? I was trying to migrate south as it got colder this fall, then maybe to Denver to ski :)

2.) Is there even such a thing as month-to-month furnished apartments? Google's not a lot of help. Is $1,200/mo. for temp housing a good guess?

3.) Work: I will need wireless internet service; I'm looking at Alltel EVDO @ $60/month. Verizon & Sprint EVDO's cap at 5GB/mo. Unacceptable. Any other options / experiences? I will be working from desktop + 2 LCD's when I can, HP laptop when I can't.

4.) Need to buy: Garmin nuvi 350 GPS, digital camera, external USB hard drive for backup/photos...any other nontrivial essentials?

5.) People in the cities I mentioned - what do I simply have to experience in my time there?

6.) Catch-all advice on the western US

7.) Catch-all advice on extended road trips

And, last but definitely not least, does anybody on that route want to meet up? I follow HN daily, had 3 sites I've built on TechCrunch, had YC in-person interview last spring (stayed in SF & really liked it), and just love to talk ideas and execution. Supper and some beers with a few of you would be a welcome respite from my solo saga.

THANKS!!!

BlogSpot version: Buy VI@GRA!

Sam

samstrip at gmail (Damn, that's supposed to indicate "Sam's Trip", not "Sam, Strip")
It does seem like a juvenile mentality, but seriously, fuck digg.
Interesting. Fortunately, there are experimental data available! School busing programs have sent poor kids to rich schools for years. Somehow, test scores are still declining, though.

giving up on students and sending them to flip burgers full time at 14 is not one of them.

At what point is joining the work force 'giving up'? And how recently did this become the case? Also, do you not think there are any jobs that don't require at least a high school education, or do you think that a high school education is important even if we know in advance that the person who gets it won't be using it?
If you manage 10 hours a day coding and less than 1h day on email PLUS blogs/news, you are a pretty unique animal. We had a RescueTime group of YC Founders running during the Winter08 session, and I don't think anyone in the group EVER hit 10 hours of coding in a single day. Much less sustained it.

I'm also suspicious of the <1hr I see alotted for email and news (all while getting 7000+ karma here?!). If that's the case, you are fabulously unique (I'm saying this with a database of data with millions of man hours of attention data-- lots of them from web developers).

Of course, maybe you mean what most people mean when they say "I'm coding", which is a distracted mishmash of IM, news, and email, with a light sprinkling of actual coding in there.

I hereby challenge you to use RescueTime for 1 week and then take a screenshot of your dashboard. :-)
The full-disclosure community used to believe in this philosophy but for different reasons. They were trying to disclose the bug as a form of motivation with little regard to what else the company was working on. I suspect this message is not well understood now and the notion of full-disclosure being good is all that's left.
No, it doesn't happen that way.

It's SICP that amazes people at what can be done with a minimalist programming language.

People who use a Scheme implementation with lots of additions have no illusions of minimalism.
From TFA:

"Cellphones emit non-ionizing radiation, waves of energy that are too weak to break chemical bonds or to set off the DNA damage known to cause cancer. There is no known biological mechanism to explain how non-ionizing radiation might lead to cancer."

I love how that's just buried in the middle and then quickly ignored.
Pyipopt, Python marries with Ipopt
as long as you could turn it off. annotations on flickr can get out of hand.
The biggest thing I got from PCI was a basic discussion of a lot of algorithms that I was able to research further on my own. I had no idea that I wanted to know more about K-means clustering until I read the book.

If that's all you get out of it great, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, covered in enough detail to get you started, which is more than enough to make me happy.
A better analogy would be "I saw an unlocked vehicle today and I think its important that all vehicles remain locked. Since they didn't come running out when I told them to lock the car, I opened the car and left a note on the dashboard stating I'd been in the car."
"So digg was supposed to jump on this problem and not worry about anything else apparently."

Quite frankly, yes they should. If you have an XSS hole in your web application your other user-facing security measures are worthless. If you're a social application of any sort it's even worse; you're just asking to be hit by a worm.

XSS is a Big Deal. XSS holes also really easy to find, so if a security researcher spots one it's not unlikely that a Bad Guy will find them as well.
If you ask me, mixing presentation and logic is the core of most web development. They just missed a lot of opportunities for sanitizing data.

I also don't see how PHP goes 'out of its way'. It doesn't do anything, neither do most other web languages, you build or use existing frameworks and libraries to help with such tasks.
Perhaps, and the article did cite recent study results in both directions, though it didn't ask the researchers their personal practices.

For that general-audience question -- "what should people do while the question is open?" -- brain specialist doctors are a great source.

Sometimes practitioners can see patterns others miss. It was doctors directly treating gastric diseases who discovered the role of H. Pylori in stomach ulcers, against a mistaken medical consensus that had prevailed for decades.
"If Linus himself doesn't think that Git works well for a unified project the size of FreeBSD or KDE, who are we to argue?"

Sure is a big departure from that git presentation he gave at Google were he was basically saying anyone who doesn't use git is necessarily a clueless retard.
If speed of execution is a key requirement, beyond C++ and some good programmers, your main options are Java and C#.

I use Java with Struts on Tomcat for a couple of projects and it's served me well.
Is this why Twitter is down? Their Engineer Speaks
Obligatory: correlation != causation
Maybe Mozilla is making Firefox more Vista-compatible. :)

Seriously speaking, the author didn't mention which add-ons, if any, were installed. In the end, if Mozilla really uses this much RAM, it comes down to a tradeoff: if you need to conserve RAM use the default OS browser (IE 7/8, Safari, Konquerer, etc.); otherwise, to enjoy the benefits of Firefox, it will cost you some RAM. This tradeoff exists with other software as well -- I still use Photoshop over MS Paint, even though Paint uses much less RAM.
Top 3 mistakes businesspeople make when forming partnerships:

1. Trusting the relationship at the expense of a signed agreement: the relationship is critical, of course, but relationships can change. So all details should be spelled out on paper.

2. Not getting adequate legal advice: your attorney can help with paperwork, your structure (LLC? LLP?), and the terms between the partners.

3. Assuming that good friends make good partners: they can, but friendship and business partnerships are more or less orthogonal. And you don't want to put yourself in a position where you make a bad decision for your business because you won't jeopardize the friendship, or vice versa.
From what he's told me, axod has had a similar experience with users offering to help with mibbit, and he's managed to put some of these offers to good use. Care to say more axod?
The Right Thing vs. The Status Quo
I am not a lawyer, but I am a law student. This article is off in some key ways.

1. Not having a signed partnership agreement.

A partnership usually arises without a partnership agreement. People just start doing business together. If your agreement is silent on an issue, default rules will apply. Get your state's UPA (Uniform Partnership Act) rules to see what will apply.

2. Not having an attorney assist with drawing up the agreement.

Make your own first. Then go to the lawyer. This will save you some money and give the lawyer and idea of what you want. Your first draft doesn't have to be elaborate, and it shouldn't have legalese. Just describe what you want.

3. Not including a way out

Some partnerships have no way out and partnership is dissolved when a partner leaves. See if this applies to yours.

4. Not using your individual strengths

Ok here.

5. Not forming a limited partnership

This is bad advice. A limited partner in an LP has no personal liability, but also has no say in how the business is run. The general partner does have personal liability and runs the business. The general partner will be liable for partnership debts.

Better advice is to form a limited liability partnership (LLP) or a limited liability limited partnership (LLLP). General partners in those can obtain no personal liability by registering with their state. This is by statute. Check your jurisdiction.

6. Not considering the liability issues.

Ok here.

7. Rushing in

Ok here.

8. Not adhering to state requirements and regulations

Actually, they usually aren't that bad. I am in Massachusetts. Here you have to file a 1-2 page report each year listing the business headquarters, directors, stock issues, and pay a few hundred dollars.

9. Choosing the wrong partner

Ok here.

10. Not adequately capitalizing the partnership

The article got this right and it is a big issue. Failing to adequately capitalize the business is against the law. Courts dissolve businesses when this happens and may "pierce the veil" and hold people with limited liability personally responsible for partnership debts.
Who cares about digg? The site is going downhill, thanks to idiots posting "news" about their latest trip to WalMart and 10 reasons to hate Bush.
Yea, in the big companies, you would not believe how often I have seen someone 'recognised' and given great praise for being in the office real late pulling a release out of the fire - almost everytime it was that very person that put it into the fire to begin with - The ones that just got the thing to work and went home didn't even feature on the radar!

Sometimes I think the way to progress in a big company is to make a hash of things and then stay late fixing them - that doesn't compute with me though - they are bound to get found out at some point, right?
Yea if you are interested enough in what you are doing, or its your own startup things are a little different - even interesting work tires you out eventually though.

I need at least 1 day a week off all the same - I think that is important. Work real hard Monday - Friday and then party at the weekend :)
It wasn't a question, it was a statement. You're a racist. It's become painfully obvious after reading your comments over the last several months. You can accept that or not. I just thought it was worth losing karma to confront you with that.
"I hereby challenge you to use RescueTime"

No need. You're right.

I should amend my previous schedule to say "at terminal" instead of "coding". In addition to my dedicated meal breaks, I alt-tab to the internet several times throughout the day. But it's not as bad as it seems...

I go to about a dozen websites including email and hacker news. Of those dozen websites, I spend 90% of the time here. As I have mentioned before, hacker news is my social life when I'm working. I work alone, all day long, most days, so I come here for my breaks. My karma total is a result of my participation here, which is a perfect counterbalance to my coding (sometimes you just gotta pull your head out).

I never IM or answer the phone without checking caller id; everyone knows I prefer email.

I suppose RescueTime would confirm what I think I already know. Maybe I'm afraid to find out.
I found the book really captivating and very useful. It's seldom a book about programming contains so much stuff that one can put to use.
NASA pioneer method for making giant lunar telescopes
Here's how to safely output a variable in PHP:

<?php echo htmlspecialchars($name); ?>

Here's how to do the same thing in Django:

{{ name }}

That's the thing that bugs me most about PHP: it's not even a productive templating language!
TIP Use memory on video card as swap
And in Rails

<%= h(@var) %>
I disagree. I think the better analogy woudl be: "I saw an unlocked vehicle today and I think its important that all vehicles remain locked. Since they didn't come running out when I told them to lock the car, I [opened] the car and left a note on the dashboard stating I'd been in the car."

"And then I went into the bad part of town and distributed fliers all around about how the car at the corner of Main and Screwed had been left unlocked for a while and how it had a great stereo and iPod in it."
"Your description of coding sounds more like you're in construction/manufacturing business."

Exactly. That's how I do it.

It wasn't always like this. It took lots of trial and error to figure this out. The secret was to decouple creative time and terminal time. When I'm at the terminal during the day, I usually have a backlog of straight forward work to do. Sure there are decisions to be made and some creativity, but the bulk of the real thinking was already done, usually the night before.

The decoupling has been the key for me.

Need to think? Get pencil, paper, listings, and GO TO EZCHAIR (or library or Borders).

Need to accomplish? Have detailed plans and GO TO TERMINAL. Not as much "head in the clouds" permitted there.

I talked more about this here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275
Agree. Speed of execution != scripting language.
For Mibbit there's been a few ways people have helped:

1. Testing - people love finding bugs and telling you about them. You get some crazy fanatical users that can't wait to try your new release on 17 different browsers and email you with any issues.

2. Documentation - wiki. A great way to have people help each other, and to grow the project.

3. Helping other users - if it's applicable have a help chatroom where you hang out, in which new users can come. With Mibbit there's now a core group of users that hang out in the help channel helping new users.

4. Integration with other things - For mibbit, people have created joomla plugins, mediawiki extensions, and even submitted a bug report to firefox that Mibbit should be the default handler for irc://.

5. Adding to a feature wish list (I'd recommend using a wiki and seeing if someone is willing to maintain it and keep it tidy and organised). Although I know there is a good webapp for voting up/down feature requests (Forget the name though).

5. Obviously word of mouth/recommendation/blogging about it.

6. Internationalization - People seem all too willing to translate a UI into other languages.

For me personally at the moment, I'm not interested in people helping with the software for a variety of reasons, but the above ways people do help are excellent, as they all assist in growth - worth far more than them donating some $.

Of course I'm sure once things get larger the dynamics change, but for an early stage I'd recommend those sorts of things.
Great! Looking forward to it.
Sort of. Those are the ones that tend to get promoted to management roles and proceed to use the same reward system for the people who come after them.

In the end, you end up with a culture of long work hours because "that's how it's done" rather than for any rational reason.
I just did a little wandering around the available documentation on PLT-Scheme and noticed that large pieces are untouched since 2004. Other large pieces seem to be missing. Seems like an un-propitious start for 4.0! Or perhaps this is what they meant by new work for 4.0 docs...
"Not having a signed partnership agreement. All types of partnership should have every detail spelled out and signed by all parties. Far too many friends, and even family members, have made the mistake of not putting everything in writing and ending up with strained relationships."

Partnership agreements don't avoid strained relationships between partners-- shared understanding does. A thorough discussion at the beginning is a big part of this, but it's important to have frequent chats to make sure the partners understand the other's perspective.

The document MIGHT help avoid a lawsuit... Though I imagine a lot of people might be lax on maintaining that shared understanding if they have the document as a crutch.
Travel lighter.

In Portland, take a day or two to wander around Powell's and Powell's Technical.

Be prepared to lose stuff.

Don't forget there's more to the west than cities.

Post the URL of your trip blog.

Have Fun.
I didn't realize Django is a language. Lets not compare frameworks to languages.
You only found 10 reasons to hate Bush there.

I'm up to 182 and counting. I believe the subject is a total obsession with many of the "contributors" to that site.