skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except that printing back the value of a POST parameter in PHP is just.

<?php
echo htmlspecialchars($_POST["name"]);
?>

Most other languages would need a lot more (even with things like mod_perl). Plain PHP is definitely incomparable to Rails/Django but for web development, it definitely is much more than just Perl/Python/Ruby.
That sounds awesome, and it came way before Four Swords!
Just because you can teach anyone to program doesn't mean that certain personality types don't gravitate or acclimate to it more readily than others. I agree that conversations about the differences do contain an air of superiority, but it doesn't mean the generalization is false.
Tumblr's become a youth phenomenon. In high schools and colleges it's everywhere.

Posterous is prolific, but it's not omnipresent. And I doubt it will ever become omnipresent, because it doesn't offer enough to differentiate itself from Tumblr and because it's nowhere near sexy enough to capture the vast audience that only cares about things being sexy.
Running a web vulnerability scanner at their page could be... interesting. Illegal, probably, but interesting.
Apple tightens rules for iPad news delivery
Yes, it's open source on Github: https://github.com/evanw/rapt
Why not implement it as an extension, like Chrome does?
The link above is to a page intended for the NYT's Google Chrome App. It does indeed cache articles and the like in your browser as per the HTML5 spec, so that if you were to lose your connectivity (say on a mobile device) you could continue to browse and review stuff the app has cached.

I happen to think that this layout is considerably less annoying than the NYT's main site.
The icon integrates with Google Reader just fine. Pasting it manually is an unnecessary step. I use it to add all the feeds I add.
You can easily tell firefox to use another program (or even service) to subscribe to the feeds. I've got mine going to google reader with them. The icon has been removed from firefox 4 (I'm running the betas). I don't know if they'll put it back in by default from any amount of pleading, BUT surprise surprise, there's an extension that reimplements previous functionality. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rss-icon/
If it's important enough to be committed, it's important enough to be remembered.
I'm afraid that in the upcoming years, Chrome will shred Firefox' market share to confetti pieces.
To the extent to which a degree is used to signify socio-economic status (which I believe to be substantial and to which the higher earning potential correlates), then it would be surprising if Phoenix graduates are seen as less desirable than those from less accessible schools. Phoenix tuition, is not the $37,000 a year that the Rollins Colleges of the world charge, and that is what a significant part of what those degrees signify. [http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...]
PHP is most definitely an alternative to Rails or Django. Just as going raw WSGI in Python is.

> PHP is a language, Rails/Django are frameworks and thus necessarily far-more complex.

Which completely misses the point of the linked comment, which is that PHP deployment is utterly trivial and that the mapping between URLs and PHP code is extremely simple to understand, creating a very low cognitive load on the user.

Replace "Rails/Django" by "Ruby/Rack or Python/WSGI" and you have the same level of abstraction as PHP (well probably lower actually as you don't get stuff like $GET/$POST/$GET), yet you still don't get trivial deployments and easy-to-understand mapping between code files and URLs.
Thanks! I found this as well, not CS, but close enough: http://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/BachelorinIST_CourseList.shtm...
Do we know how many people use the icon, even as something like "% of Firefox users"?

It does seem a bit silly to remove the RSS icon without any data on its usefulness. Then again, maybe Mozilla has some data we're not privy to on how many people actually use that button besides Dave Winer.
intelecrm is a good tool to track your customer relationships, it is a web based CRM solution built by Intelestream. To learn more on how to select the right software for your company visit http://www.intelestream.net/en/lp-10-considerations-before-p...
On the bright side, the supposed force driving the move (plunging prices for solar panels) is a good thing.
It is not outside the bathroom, this is the lighting in the bathroom above the mirror above the water tap. You see the paper mirrored in the mirror.
If that possibility seriously concerns you, follow it up by physical destruction of the drive. Magnets strong enough to actually damage the data aren't a good cost/benefit from what I gather (too strong, too dangerous, too much hassle), so either shred or melt the drive platters.

I'm generally satisfied with df if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda because I'm not actually dealing with anything that sensitive, but if you are, just take appropriate steps. Defense in depth.
If you're that worried about it, there's always thermite.
How developing changed my life
>"My main concern about for-profits are reports from their adjuncts that they've been pressured to pass students who perform poorly."

That is not the experience related by my spouse, and I would suspect that there is less pressure at Phoenix than at some large and well known institutions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/14/sports/ncaafootball/14aubu...
Is it? Adding the directive is easy, but verifying that it does not change program semantics can be far from easy.

A parallelizing compiler must do the latter before doing the former.
I mentioned the Facebook concept. It was obviously a concept that occurred pretty much simultaneously to a whole bunch of people across the world. The same is true for h.264; it's a system for compressing video that is convenient for 21st century media. There are many, many variations on that same concept.

It's the concept of 'multiple independent discovery' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery. Just because somebody got around to patenting a concept first doesn't mean that many others didn't think of it at the same time.

You probably know how it is - many people have the seed of an idea, several will take it further than that, a handful might get to the stage of implementation - but only a couple will make it to the point of success.
Thanks. After finishing the article, I found the definition of that request: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Offline_resources_in_Firefo....

I am guessing I had pre-primed myself for paranoid thinking after previously reading another HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106677.
I see two problems here. First, the Marketing Version (which is CFBundleShortVersionString) is set to a rather ugly SHA1. Which will now show up in your application's about window, in Finder, and other places. Nice, but not quite.

You can't easily sidestep this by setting the SHA1 to CFBundleVersion, which is the internal build number. That's because you then break OSX's Launch Services. Why? Because LS expects a version number in the form of nnnnn[.nn[.nn]][X]

While not automate (but probably fairly simple to do so) I use the system described by Dave Dribin at http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2006/08/02/versioni...
1% + market salary at an A-round funded company is an extremely good deal for an engineering role.
Startups, Bollywood and Indian Society
> Now I will go on with my own experience as a youngster in mathematics. Another thing that my father told me--and I can't quite explain it, because it was more an emotion than a telling--was that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of all circles was always the same, no matter what the size. That didn't seem to me too unobvious, but the ratio had some marvelous property. That was a wonderful number, a deep number, pi. There was a mystery about this number that I didn't quite understand as a youth, but this was a great thing, and the result was that I looked for pi everywhere.

When I was learning later in school how to make the decimals for fractions, and how to make 3 1/8, 1 wrote 3.125 and, thinking I recognized a friend, wrote that it equals pi, the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle. The teacher corrected it to 3.1416.

I illustrate these things to show an influence. The idea that there is a mystery, that there is a wonder about the number was important to me--not what the number was. Very much later, when I was doing experiments in the laboratory--I mean my own home laboratory, fiddling around--no, excuse me, I didn't do experiments, I never did; I just fiddled around. Gradually, through books and manuals, I began to discover there were formulas applicable to electricity in relating the current and resistance, and so on. One day, looking at the formulas in some book or other, I discovered a formula for the frequency of a resonant circuit, which was f = 1/2 pi LC, where L is the inductance and C the capacitance of the... circle? You laugh, but I was very serious then. Pi was a thing with circles, and here is pi coming out of an electric circuit. Where was the circle? Do those of you who laughed know how that comes about?

I have to love the thing. I have to look for it. I have to think about it. And then I realized, of course, that the coils are made in circles. About a half year later, I found another book which gave the inductance of round coils and square coils, and there were other pi's in those formulas. I began to think about it again, and I realized that the pi did not come from the circular coils. I understand it better now; but in my heart I still don't know where that circle is, where that pi comes from.

-Richard Feynman

"What is Science?"

1966 Lecture

http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html
You're right, we never responded, sorry! We appreciated your e-mail, and your wish has (finally) come true: the JS version is open-source.
The technology and storage capacity of organisations like the Stasi in the 1980s is utterly trivial compared to what's possible now. Technology also greatly reduces the costs of spying, such that mass surveillance and "automatic policing" becomes economically viable without needing to employ an army of informants, investigators and people steaming open snail mail correspondence.
"Defensibility is more about network effects than patents." Interesting point.
1) In the end, both xvid and divx (and other, like ffmpeg or nero) decoders contain fixes for divx/xvid quirks. In software, it is easy. For extra fun, get your hands on some dvd players, that claim divx support. Yes, they can decode divx, but decoding xvid is much bigger problems for them (it is not about profiles, but about bugs in produced bitstreams).
Enough with the software holy wars
A source told me there is a law that has been passed preventing sales people to earn a commission from consumers they enroll them into schools. That maybe another reason.
Will Apple's Find My Friends fly?
Feynman Lecture: What is Science?
http://www.edge.org
Because it's already in there, they have to do something to take it out. But that said, I don't know why -- I'm just a user of Firefox. Haven't wanted to switch because of things like this. You get used to the quirks of a product.
I had to reread your first sentence quite a few times. You're saying that software engineers in total have had more of an effect on society than lawyers or law enforcement officers? If this is really what you're saying, I think that you are taking the work of these two groups of people completely for granted. Software engineers have affected society, but universally more than lawyers and police? I highly doubt this. You recognize that the vast majority of politicians in the US (for example) and other makers of policy tend to be lawyers, right? That almost every major court proceeding that determined interpretation of legislation and the Constitution have primarily been lawyers? Law enforcement agents also have a huge impact on society...by preventing it from imploding.

I'm not saying that software engineers aren't reshaping the world, but let's not use this as a springboard to downplay the (very important) contributions of other members of society.
Thanks for the response, all except #5 have been resolved. I'll still be looking for a designer to help with that.

Thanks Again.
I think "#2 Attempting big leaps instead of baby steps" should be changed. Attempting big leaps can be very educational and motivational if you're realistic about the fact that you're going to backslide. Making a big change for a week or two while you're highly motivated feels great and establishes some new habits and memories that will be useful to you later when you're having a hard time. It's also a great opportunity to try out new behaviors that are unknown and scary to you. When your motivation and interest are not so high, you will not be able to keep up the changes, but you will benefit from having removed the uncertainty and the first-time inhibition from your new behaviors and activities, and your idea of what _you_ can accomplish will be forever broadened.
Facebook takes a 30% cut of Facebook Credits transactions. I believe that Zynga has negotiated that cut to be slightly smaller.
An important point appearing elsewhere in the comments: who is a programmer anyway? If you can write Hello World in C, are you a programmer? If you can't write your own compiler are you a non-programmer? This is an unanswerable question.

Maybe we could focus on kinds of thinking that help you program well. There is nothing you can't learn eventually. However, we might find some common ground by looking at how good programmers have trained their minds.

We can list some desirable skills for a programmer that reach across languages and tools. There is an old saw by Joel on Software that some people just can't understand pointers and recursion. Or on the next level, that some people can't understand multithreaded/parallel programming. I think I'd say that an instinct for simplicity or mathematical beauty and symmetry also plays a role in making good designs. In other words, making not just consistent mental models that you can simulate in your head (as another comment says), but making beautiful ones.

I was sitting with my manager yesterday. He was giving me requirements for a system I'll have to build over the next two weeks. Along the way we came across a problem where we need to take a bunch of multidimensional values and combine them together.

Instead of leaving it to me, he wanted to design it on the spot. He thought of this like voting where each value makes some contribution, but then the requirements dictated that we needed to add things like "some values have more votes than others", and "some votes have veto power".

As he was describing this pseudo-consensus algorithm with weights and vetos, I was surprised he didn't know how ugly this design sounded. It is hard to set up the contribution of each value, hard to predict the behavior, and hard to make intuitive.

It's not that this is a bad, uncreative idea. Voting is an interesting analogy for the problem, and intuition is a good way to take a stab at a problem. It's that when he started working it out he didn't see the multiplying problems, or the counterexamples that would cause trouble for his system. And I do think this is something that good programmers and system designers do well, even without much conscious thinking. They find the attack surface, figure out where their abstraction leaks, jump immediately to edge cases.

I'm going to have to pull him back early next week. :oD

You don't have to say that the programmer has a magic switch in their brain that enabled them to be a genius while everyone else is left out. Anyone Can Cook!

edit: wwhere => where
Comment site
This may be an old school rant but I'm old school so...

There has been a bothersome trend in software in general lately to strip things down. It used to mean that a new version of software contained new features on top of those you already had but lately there has been a push to remove things that are viewed as used by only a small percentage of the user base. Sadly many of those things are used by the more 'advanced' segment of the user base.

FF4 is removing the RSS icon and also the bottom status bar which are the two that irk me. Not just turning off, removing entirely. The status bar functionality has to be restored by a plug-in now, which only serves to bog the browser down. The RSS functionality I'm sure will be the same but again, more plugins to replace what was native functionality.

I fully understand catering to the bulk of the market but this should apply to default settings, not removing features entirely. Default them to off if you want an uber clean interface, don't gut existing features.

I have always avoided Chrome (even with its speed) because I can't stand its UI but once FF4 ships I may just make the leap since really I'm not seeing much difference anymore. (though FF does let me put the tabs back down where I like them) Just a word from one old school guy... if you have features, don't remove them just for the sake of streamlining. Someone out there relies on that... and that someone may just be one more rat that jumps ship.
My mother doesn't know what that is or its use. Neither does my brother, sister, neighbor, dog, ipad, etc. So I'd say only geeks know what a feed is. Then let geeks use an extension and don't bother +90% of internet users with that.

It is in a sense like developer tools, if you know where they are you can easily activate them and use them, if not, they are out of the way.

Good riddance.
I haven't played with the latest FF4 beta, but FF4b7 it was pretty simple to add a Feed button, as it's provided, though defaulted to off. The one issue with it is that it isn't contained in the awesome bar any longer.

If you want to re-enable it, you just have to configure your toolbars, and find the feed icon, then position it where you want it. Sorry, this is non-descript, I don't currently have access to Firefox so that I could provide the complete steps.
I agree, especially on the part about law. "Legalese" is like natural language programming. It's very well structured, but very hard to parse for people not in the know (like myself). I think writing solid contracts is very much like writing solid programs, if only in the type of thinking that goes into it.
The Rollover of Doom: a Trap for Good Programmers
True, that is the one biggest downside. However, I fount it to be the best automated way to deal with this, short having a centralized database of build numbers. In the about window, it's an easy fix. The only place that you can't help having the git short hash is in the Finder, for a Mac app.

For iOS apps, this isn't a problem.
These benchmarks were done by someone who seems to have no idea about the ins-and-outs of EC2. For example, there's a lot of IO bound tests... but they're on instance storage. What about Instance storage vs EBS? What about network performance over time?

All I can get from these is that Amazon isn't lying that their instance sizes are different in terms of compute units and memory.
> I think the delusion may stem more from the fact that there have been far more software engineers than say, lawyers, law enforcement agents that have had a huge impact on society.

Is that so?

Abraham Lincoln ring a bell? Didn't do too bad for a lawyer.

Law enforcement has a HUGE impact on society try to imagine the world without it for about an hour or so.

Really, the delusion that we have a huge impact on society is to the detriment of seeing how much other professions, both individually and collectively have on our society and that we are only able to function in our respective niche because others do their work.

Even garbage disposal is essential and has huge impact on society and it's one of the most menial jobs.
I'll second this. Unless you're joining as CTO/VP of Engineering, 1% seems like a very generous grant.

By all means, you should try to negotiate for more, but as the first employee at one startup and the third at another I was never given more than about .5% initially, with additional grants later on as reward for high performance and to help offset some dilution in later rounds.

Your risk profile may be lower than theirs, but I would take 1% as a signal that they really really really want you. I can guarantee they are not going to be giving employees 5-10 anywhere near 1%.
Programmer's Aptitude Test (Don't scroll down until you're done.)

1. You push your cart through the supermarket
a. In a pre-defined manner
b. Randomly

2. When watching football on TV, you focus on
a. the quarterback
b. the defensive linemen

3. You drive to work
a. the same route every day
b. with a different route every once in a while

4. Which card game do you prefer?
a. bridge
b. poker

5. To plan for tomorrow's weather
a. You check the TV or internet.
b. You go outside, looking for signals.

6. Who do you prefer?
a. Andrew Carnegie
b. Marie Curie

7. You prefer
a. your keyboard
b. your mouse

8. Which subject do you prefer?
a. history
b. literature

9. Which would you rather do?
a. take a walk in the woods
b. a crossword puzzle

10. Which is more important to you?
a. time
b. space

Answer: If you tried to figure out (game) the test as you took it, you have a programmer's aptitude. If not, you don't, and probably don't even understand this answer.
I upvoted because I hadn't seen this layout for the NYT website before. It's kind of neat, especially when you click the X button the top right. Very cleanly laid out.
I really like the "Flash version 9,0 or greater is required". ;-)
I think it's a bit of a generalisation, but one often made by others to suggest that programmers think differently.

To a computer user, their approach to solving a problem may be different than a programmer's (want to be able to do this, write program to do it) but the same traits that commonly exist in competent programmers also exist in other professions. Am I a programmer? I program, I write software that I earn money from, but it's not the main part of my profession, so perhaps I'm not qualified to talk about this.

Many lawyers see the world in a different way to the rest of us. Marketers often see the world differently. I can't really speak for them though as I'm definitely not a lawyer or marketer.

What I can tell you about are penetration testers. When you look at a building, you probably look at the shape, admire the architecture, maybe look around to see if it fits in with it's surroundings. A penetration tester (a seasoned one anyway) doesn't do that. They're looking at entrances, exits, security guards, windows. It's automatic. The other stuff comes too, but experienced pentesters who enjoy their job see the world in a completely different way to a lot of people. When you see a shiny new piece of tech, a pentester's already thinking about how to jailbreak it and what they want to do with it afterwards. There's a specific mindset for a good pentester. Not all penetration testers have it, but you can spot the ones that do a mile off.

I dare say that this mindset exists amongst programmers too, particularly those that have done a lot of debugging or TDD. I'm just more familiar with the penetration tester mindset given my experiences.
While it's probably true that geeks make up most RSS users, that doesn't mean either that it should be this way, or that it will remain this way, or that there is some obvious and immutable reason that it must be this way.

In fact, of course, using an RSS feed is a very simple concept, which turns out to be extraordinarily useful to normal, non-geekly folks who just want to read a lot without being pestered by all the normal encumbrances of the web.

So, your argument strikes me as weak.
Now in the good spirit of a designer in search of a solution to everything and everybody, add an option in preferences to show/hide the feed button. How about that?