skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I have to wonder exactly what problem it solves that Perl, Ruby, and Python haven't already done better"

I don't know what, but evidence (Wikipedia, Facebook, Yahoo, Digg, Wordpress, Drupal...) seem to say that there is something PHP is doing significantly better than all of these.

"What do you think the average newbie PHP developer is going to do the first time they encounter a function which closes over a class instance as state, and then returns a lambda?"

Perhaps they won't encounter this at all, but they might well be coding inside a framework - whether light MVC or something like Drupal - that makes use of this. For something to be useful it doesn't have to be useful for everyone who use the language.
this isn't hacker news, it shouldn't even be here.
This study supports my position. 12.9 vs 14.7. From taking my statins I get a measly 1.8% lower chance of dying over a five year period, and that's a shaky assertion. It costs a fortune, I'm impotent, and my short term memory is screwed up, but hey, the doc says to take it for that 1.8%. And I suspect the 1.8% is misleading. The profile of the people who died in both groups was probably distinctly identifiable, so in effect the vast majority probably got no benefit.

And I think I've seen this methodologically refuted elsewhere. Some studies have definitely got the opposite result.
No, it doesn't. There are fundamental laws governing parallelization of code, and Apple can't beat them:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=222279

And that's not even getting into the speed of light.
FriendFeed Comment Retrieval, Gravatar Enhancement, Optional Profanity Filter...
Google and Microsoft have nothing on - drum roll - the SuperNAP
This is a great strategy for comments.

How does it help when you want to post a story on reddit that you think is important but unfortunately is highly controversial? (Hacker News doesn't have downvote for stories for exactly this reason, thanks!)

How does it help when people are downvoting you not only for your opinion but for who you are?

Karma is a great tool to manage trolls and signal / noise. Unfortunately in real world it is also used to silence opponents. And it is pretty effective at that. I want to change that.
there was a funny joke here but the parent deleted it so I had to delete mine because it didn't make sense
the MX revolution has the free-spinning scroll wheel (configurable per-app/globally) as well, if you're talking about what I think you are.
Looking for advice on selling domains within a website creation app
I'm working on a rails app to help people create websites, similar to weebly, but focused on a specific niche. I want to make it as easy as possible for my customers to buy a domain name through the app. Can anyone recommend a domain registrar with a great reseller program/api? Are there any rails plugins that could speed up development of this piece of the app? Anything I should look out for? Thanks!
sounds like your home schooling could never have broken your spirit enough to be ready for 'the real world'
To answer 4 from 3, the first investor still owns shares in the company. Except in the worst of circumstances, the next investor will always invest at a higher valuation than all before him/her. Thus, even if the second investor does nothing after the initial investment, not only to they still own part of the company, but that part is going to be worth more (theoretically) based on what kind of equity the last investor got for the amount of money put in.

IE if I buy 100 shares of your company in exchange for a $100,000 investment, you can sell 50 more shares in the next round as long as they're worth more than $50,000. It's actually more confusing than that, because the total worth of the company becomes the valuation PLUS the investment.

The only way anybody writes off an investment is if the company goes completely under and there's nothing left to salvage. Most VC's have deals in place that give them preferential treatment if the company goes under and has to liquidate assets - they get their money back first.
ahh, but there are a lot of openings for GP's. Our medical students all want to be brain surgeons and don't seem to realise that without GP's most people would be dead before needing a brain surgeon.
I'll be honest - I'm pretty techy and I just didn't get it. What is a "social content app"? Why should I care? Clicking learn more didn't tell me anything.

Sorry, not very helpful now, but I am intrigued to know what the "technical itch" you were trying to scratch was, and how you felt it might relate to everyday people...
That seems like a good idea... I imagine it would keep out account farmers, or people using dupe accounts to vote many times.
Iceland, a Tiny Dynamo, Loses Steam
the fact that marriages suck doesn't make school better ;p
I'd find it very interesting to find out about anyone else's experiences linking home-schooling and startups (or, what makes for an entrepreneurial mindset..)

I was home-schooled till 11, when I entered school in a class a year ahead of my age. that was 12 years ago, now i'm running a startup (our 2nd employee starts next week)

I've been thankful to my mum ever since for spending the time with me when I was younger - it definately gave me a head-start with learning and a different perspective from many people. Anyone else have home-schooling experiences they relate to entrepreneurship?
I really don't care about being down or up voted.

I make a comment every now and again - if people want to vote on it, fair enough. Go ahead, that's what the system is for.

But please don't try to pretend this is anything other than an Internet forum. Semi-anonymous people hang out here and some of them are bound to be obnoxious. Down-votes for different opinions are par for the course. Get over it.
Mod_social_skills, mod_rationality
Bright Chunks at Phoenix Lander's Mars Site Must Have Been Ice
We use Register.com, which was recommended to us by the awesome Weebly guys. The API is excellent and their developer support people are top-notch. Domains are pricey (though not as bad as it looks when you look at their retail prices), but everything works very well.
enom has a pretty decent API. You do need to buy credit in advance. I think it was around $200. As people register domains through your site, the money gets deducted from your account.

http://www.enom.com/resellers/Interfaceinfo.asp

If you have specific questions for me, take my username and add it to gmail.com.
Being that I use Emacs (and Vim) daily, I know this. :)

"Eventually, you'll start writing rants like this one trying to convince all the young'uns about how wrong they are about what they want in their tools."

I do; I'm just a little more subtle about it.
Sounds like you need a really basic primer on business, especially 'debt' vs. 'equity' as a source of financing.

I would search Amazon for "starting a business". This isn't meant to be an insult, but maybe you even want to get one of the "...for Dummies" or "Complete Idiot..." books, because it sounds like you want a general grounding from the absolute beginning, and that will take more than a comment thread here.
Also here: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/
Sounds mostly like bad execution of a generally good idea.
I'm pretty sure I've been subscribed to the feed since before the Yahoo deal.
I believe the author is arguing against instructionism, and for constructionism.
Here's a summary for all of them:

It sucks.

Here's a couple threads where I've talked about my CMS experiences in more detail (I've deployed five CMS systems over the past 6 or 7 years):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186021

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61003
I can't tell if he's mocking the Garlinghouse 'peanut butter memo', or a general big-conglomerate or old-thinking atmosphere, or even himself as part of some long-running inside joke. And the ambiguity makes it that much better.

I just hope Yahoo can soon get down to brass tacks.
Maybe you were downvoted for being hard to understand? "there"?
Also sounds like http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/uberfac...
i'm sick of imprecise posts. the above post is not "nothing more" than an advertisement, even if you're right that that is the primary motivation.
Ask YC: Could we please provide a different approach to the pdf scribd.com issue?
Hello community,

I am a big fan of Hacker news. Coming from other well known news sites which have been flooded with troll comments this is a real gem for me each day.

Thank you !

The only thing which has disturbed me (and notably many others) is that if somebody found a interesting PDF file it gets posted with this terrible^Wnice scribd.com feature.

There are many people which then (like me) need to click on the comments link to get the direct uri. (if we are lucky and a kind soul posted this in there for us.)

Taking this for instance:
http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://www.zedshaw.com/repository/rubyenrails2008/build/rubyenrails_2008.pdf

I mean I can get the link out there myself but why is this necessary? Sometimes the link is more obscure and I have to resort to other methods to get that thing.

Dear YC News Admins, could you please just tweak the scribd feature to include something like
'(scribd.com, PDF)' where PDF is the direct link?

Please? Thank you again for this site !
English is not my first language.

I meant that on the social news site that I'm working on there are no posts about downvotes, because everybody is free to express their opinion with up and down votes as they wish and it doesn't hurt anybody.
Oh. Maybe you are being downvoted for advertising your startup too much?
France to ban illegal downloaders from using the internet under three-strikes rule
Using genetic relatedness to predict future population declines
It's a worse-is-better thing: it makes some forms of abstraction awkward, you have to fool around chaining methods. But it does take the most common case and make it simple.

It seems like a legitimate design choice, even if I don't always like the resuls.
Since when does being smart mean its impossible to be an obnoxious prick? Its not an either or situation.
i think this comment belongs to the category of: say anything about ruby = upvote. say anything about php = downvote
is that a downmod because you don't want to make yourself face the truth?
Thank you. You are right, that is not the primary motivation for the post. I liked slashdot back in the day. Had to move on to digg, then reddit, then hacker news, because the quality of discussions was degrading. I think hacker news has a chance to be free from trolls and have high signal / noise because of narrow focus, but these personal anonymous attacks on people with downvoting them for who they are and what they think started to happen here more and more often. I think there's a general solution and would be only happy if sites like Hacker News adopt it as well.
Developerlife - The Blog » Good videos for learning Android API
i would like to see it done more like javascript with un-named function. instead of:

$replacement = function ($matches) {
return str_replace ($matches[1], ' ', '&nbsp;').' ';
};

return preg_replace_callback ('/( +) /', $replacement, $text);

do:

return preg_replace_callback ('/( +) /', function ($matches) {
return str_replace ($matches[1], ' ', '&nbsp;').' ';
}, $text);

and also make array_map more like Array.each(e) in js:

$processed = array_map($array, function($e) {
return strtolower($e);
});

and all the custom defined functions like usort:

$processed = usort($array, function($a, $b) {
return $a > $b ? 1 : -1;
});
Netflix killing extra queues to "improve" service
Maybe. I'm trying to advertise a solution to the problem. My startup is just one possible implementation of it.

Edit: Another solution would be to ask people to explain when they downvote. Please, what's wrong with THIS comment?
Answer (not YC provided): nginx passes IPs in X-Real-IP HTTP header. If your bot trap is not customizable, you can set up mod_rpaf Apache module on app instance.
Beginner's Guide to the Vi editor
The Incredibly Shrinking Venture-Capital Industry
> But millions of other seven-year-olds accepted identical offers.

Well played.
Amazon Said To Be Preparing a PayPal Killer.
You should probably ignore downvotes until at least -2. It could be just one random idiot and it doesn't mean anything.
Confirmed: Ice on Mars.  News broken by Twitter.
(Someone from Google said something similar too, and even suggested that he was considering how the employment of regular Google employees should be reorganised in light of the SoC experience, but I'm afraid I don't have the link.)
FYI, he also invented Stretch Armstrong for those of you that remember the toy.
More on Java WebKit and Filthy Rich Client presentations
GWT updates from Google IO
I was home-schooled. I was two years ahead as I did it but at the age of thirteen I hit the limit of what my parents could easily teach me and I fell behind pretty bad. I went to school after that.
I come here to read about startups, especially community member's startups. If this post was actually a link to, or discussion of, a startup that would be great. It's not.

If everyone who has something against downvotes would like to respond to this comment I'll upvote you and maybe we can get it out of our system.
I totally clicked on the "1 comment" link to make this comment, just to find that it was already the only comment.
All the AI needs to do to be medically useful is obey the samurai principle: meet/exceed the effectiveness of a doctor on some subset of patients, and `raise GoSeeARealDoctorException` on the rest.

I'm sure regulators/politicians/medical establishment won't like it. But the technical problem isn't all that bad (and has actually been solved by machine learning for a few use cases).
Lots more information here (mostly in French):

http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/actualites/index-9.htm

At least they recognize this:

Until now, when companies defending the interests of creative artists detected a computer being used for illegal file-sharing, the only option open to them was to lay the matter before the criminal courts, alleging infringement of copyright.

However, criminal proceedings and the associated penalties (up to three years imprisonment and a €300,000 fine) are completely disproportionate when applied to mass illegal downloading.

From: http://tinyurl.com/5npg7w [link to PDF on that site]
If you just want a fairly basic website... article content with (or without) user comments... http://www.cmsmadesimple.org is rather nice in my opinion. There are some "advanced" modules, but most of them (last I checked) were fairly underdeveloped.

Otherwise, I agree with SwellJoe. The effort required to force the CMS into doing what you want it to do can grow hideous. I built an online community site a couple years ago, and was a much happier camper writing only the code I needed myself.
I just had a thought.. is it possible the chunks could have just been blown away by martian wind?

.. that sounded worse than I intended. :P
Blown out from the bottom of a trench? Without the trench getting filled in?
- I doubt mainstream users understand or care what's a pdf

- The problem in any idea is how to make it appealing, and in this case how to does the word spread about your web service.

- The public url for sharing their docs will help only if done right, so you should emphasize on making it more usable and visible...

Maybe you should make it possible, these documents to be embedeed in social networking sites and also make it possible to add some images.

- The other thing is user experience, starting from using words people recognize easy.

For example "usa a template" should be "create a new document"
Bad software explained
My sentiments exactly. To spare others the trouble of clicking the already-linked links:

> an American billionaire financier, corporate raider, and private equity investor [1]

And apparently he's trying to take over Yahoo's board. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Icahn

[2] http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...
Just avoid Network Solutions. They have an atrocious history regarding their users. If you want details, google them and see what comes up.
Well thought out arguments don't matter; we are supposed to downvote anything we disagree with: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 (from pg himself).
My uncle is a surgeon and he complains about the same things:

Overheads are getting huge, profits are shrinking, etc.

Meanwhile, however, he lives in a friggin mansion. Seriously,a mansion.

Not saying this is the common case, just one observation.
Software is never finished. It only get's abandoned.
I've always felt that the best tool for that job was active moderation. If moderators care about the quality of their 'community' they can maintain it by fairly enforcing a set of rules. I've seen cases where this worked very well.
My new home page.
Here is another interesting link (in French):

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/chat/0,46-0@2-651865,55-1059643@51...

It is a chat with Christophe Espern, member of a forum on the rights on internet, who explains how the new law is not going in favor of the public, but is rather another tool for major music production/distribution companies.
Bubble 2.0
For a class this quarter, I was writing a compiler from scratch in C. For the lexer, we had to have a table mapping current state and current character to next state. Moreover, it was necessary to figure out what states would be needed to produce the desired tokens.

Of course, knowing the language beforehand, one could come up with the necessary states and then produce the table by hand, but that is labor-intensive and error-prone, and having the language we were parsing hard-coded into my lexer code did not satisfy me.

My first approach was to figure out the states by hand, and then, rather than creating the transition table by hand, I defined a simpler structure near the top of my code which was an array of

{ current_state, next_state, "characters-resulting-in-this-transition" }

arrays. Then, at runtime, I would have to perform initialization to translate this structure into the actual transition table itself. It was at this point that I really wished for the macro power of Lisp, to have the full power of the language at compile time to define structures that would remain static at runtime.

As an aside, I ended up writing Python (to figure out both the necessary states and to build the transition table) that generated the C code, and then I added items to my Makefile that would run the Python to create the C and then compile it. If I was using Lisp, I could have done this in a much more straightforward manner.
I'm a heavy TextMate user but had no idea about these awesome plugins. Excellent.
Dear god, not another personalised social news site.
Anti-Virus
This epitomizes why twitter is going to get big.
Someone is staying at Yahoo
Unfortunately, you're the victim of some bad timing. Your submission's title makes it seem like yet another complaint about being downvoted, at a time when many of us are tired of seeing these things and will knee-jerkedly downvote the author / upvote sentiments against. The submission text is fairly vague and doesn't clearly dispel the notion that this is yet another complaint thread, rather than an advertisement for a startup.

A better title would have been, "Are you sick of being downvoted for having a different opinion? Try ______." Ideally, this would have been a direct link to your site. At a minimum, the URL for it should have been included in the submission text. Having us click through to your user profile == bad usability!

That said, the blame does not fall squarely on your shoulders. There's some definite mob mentality going on here that is embarrassing for a community supposedly composed of free-thinking hacker-entrepreneurs.
Dude, I've worked as an ER/Critical care nurse for years. I push a drug, a person's heart rate changes. I tweak a drug on an IV pump, a person's blood pressure comes out of shock and normalizes. The idea that pharmacology doesn't help people is quite simply wrong.

Sure, the protocol for Advanced Cardiac Life support changes every 2 years, because some therapies that we use to thing were very effective, are proven to be less effective than new ones. But, there is a strong self-corrective factor in Medicine. The ideal isn't to do what the pharma companies push the doctors to do. The ideal is to do whatever the best science says increases lifespan, quality of life and decreases morbidity and mortality.

At times, studies are funded by pharma companies, and the research is tainted. Current best practices are a moving target, because the science changes. But, over all, good medical practice is a big plus.

Sure there are drugs that have great promise, are pushed through FDA approval and then are found to have bad side effects and/or not as effective as once thought... (e.g. Vioxx, Celebrex... both recalled several years after approval).

But, for every drug that isn't effective, or has bad complications, there are dozens that do work. And, many more are found to have other beneficial uses. For example, mucomyst is a drug that was developed to help break up mucous plugs in people's lungs. Then, is was found to work as the antidote for one of the most common and toxic poisonings: tylenol. It's also used to protect people's kidney's during IV contrast injections.

I'm sorry but the anti-pharma, anti-vaccination stuff that flies around the internet is one of the clearest examples of FUD I've seen, and it's very harmful. I've seen a number of people die because they didn't trust medicine and they didn't trust doctors. Please, check what you are saying before someone gets permanently hurt by your ideas.
The KaBoom! Where's the Earth-shattering KaBoom!?
it's 1.8% percentage points which is not the same as 1.8% lower chance. It's a 13% lower chance. And that's just from dying. It prevented many others from having a heart attack or stroke which can be pretty bad to.

You can dismiss it if you like, but what these numbers mean in more practical terms is this:

Over 5 years on treatment, it will prevent up to 1 person out of 10 from dying, having a stroke, or heart attack.

And there may be a negative study here or there, but there are many more positive studies. It's like flipping a coin 100 times in a row. There will be times when you get 70 heads, 30 tails, and times you will get 30 heads, and 70 tails. If you do it enough, it will average around 50% heads and tails. This is the "true" result or chance over time of getting heads or tails.

If you do a single study, you might get a negative result (no improvement), if you do another study you might get a really positive result (huge improvement). If you do it enough, the results with trend towards the "true" result... which for statins is that it saves a significant number of lives and prevents heart attacks and strokes in certain patients.
But since the success rate for SPAM is so low, it only takes a miniscule per-post charge to make it uneconomical. Also, the requirement for payment could be structured to make it much harder for spammers to make arbitrary new identities.
What I like about this is the following:
Recording industries retract all laws regarding media types, once you buy content you are free to convert it as you please.

This is a step in the right direction. However I am just waiting on people using ToR and such networks to hide their traffic causing this whole mumbo-jumbo of a law to become completely useless. Its just necessary to have a "seamless" integration into your favorite downloading software.
Maybe we should put James Bond theme music in back of the vid?
In addition to the comments above, once you wrap your head around the basics of the process, I find Venture Hacks a great place to get a feel for a lot of the caveats ahead:

http://www.venturehacks.com/
Pathos, Logos, Ethos. The 3 Musketeers! All for One, and One for All!