skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's probably because most people have never made something elegant with PHP. The language is always a means to an end. It, in and of itself, will not make you a better developer. It can do a lot of work for you (frameworks) and make esoteric design patterns easier, but it always comes down to your ability to write structured, maintainable code. PHP makes it easier to hack together scripts. A majority of developers never take the next step in their life and learn the ways to properly structure a website. Chances are, if they do, it's because they've joined another language with the promise of an easier world (Rails, Python) and fail to realize you can do the exact same things in any other language - although it might required a little more understanding of its nuances (PHP).
Pick a number from 1 to 10
Is there really no better way to put an Apple app store review online than as a series of screenshots?
Very awesome! Suggestions:

1. Revamp the "Recently viewed" and "new" lists to show the domains instead of the slugs.

2. Add "Most popular CSS pivots" for global and for a specific domain, track the most popular domains for pivots. Possibly add upvote/downvote ratings ala HN/Reddit.

3. Promote competitions for "CSS pivoting" specific sites. For example, "Best rated news.ycombinator.com pivot by April 15th wins a YC t-shirt" or something (partner with the websites for prizes, they get free design improvements).

Update: When make a pivot to a specific domain, show me "There's 11 other pivots for this domain" with a link to the list. Make it into something that could be collaborative/social. Let people fork/clone pivots easily ala github.
Warren Buffett has an interesting answer on dealing with inflation:

"Nevertheless, I worry about inflation always because it is such an easy solution to things in the short term. The ultimate defense against inflation is your own talent, your own earning power. I mean, the best doctor in town, the best lawyer in town, the best musician, the best anything, whatever it may be, they will always command their share of resources of their society whether the currency is dollars or shekels or shark-sheet.

"Next to your own talent the best thing to own is a business with talent. I mean, if you own Coca Cola, it will always be able to command, whatever the currency, a certain portion of people’s earnings or hourly earnings. So I always emphasize to students, develop your own talents, no one can take them away from you, no one can even tax you until you start bringing money in from them. And inflation can’t take your own talent away from you."

"If you know how to perform brain surgery, people are going to find you and they are going to figure out some way to give you whatever chicken they are producing and whatever the case may be. If you look at investments, the one thing you don’t want to have is investments that are tied to a currency unit as opposed to a producing business.
"First nice =! expensive. It's a subjective term meant to allow you to find your own definition."

The words 'cheap' and 'expensive' appeared 6 times in the article. I guess cheap can be used metaphorically but generally they are used to describe specifically the cost of the item. So I'm really not clear what point you are making. At no point did I confuse the concepts of 'nice' and 'expensive'.

"The point of that advice is that prevention [...] and taking care of your long-term health is a far better option than waiting until something breaks."

No, the point made was that prevention is orders of magnitude cheaper. It's you that seems to be confusing cost with a more subjective 'better'.

As for your mild_snark remark, all I can say is you've clearly not read my comments in this thread.

The topic of the question was:

"life lessons [that] are unintuitive or go against common sense or wisdom"

'prevention is better than waiting until something breaks', 'spend money on a good bed', are these really unintuitive? Do they go against common-sense?

As a hypothetical example, I would consider a good response to this question would be a well-cited example of how in fact a really cheap bed made out cardboard in fact gave the best nights sleep, or how actually it's a lot cheaper to ignore diet and deal with it later.
The completely hopeless cases tend to either require some big HTML rewrites or really laborious CSS.

In general, though, I thought of the same thing, and it might lead to an increased trend in these unsolicited redesigns.
This would be a fantastic addition. And if the styles are inserted into the html with jQuery/javascript, perhaps not that hard to implement?
Well, you have to see this article from a pre-2004 perspective. Back then, clock speeds were still increasing like crazy, like it'd never stop. This luxury made people think things like "performance doesn't matter, processors will get faster than we can optimize the code". The mindset that eventually led to Vista.

We're wiser now. These days, performance can only be increased by adding more cores, not by clocking up. Scaling up actually costs development effort. This makes optimization very important.

See also this 2005 article from Dr Dobbs: http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm . That's when the big change of perspective began.
If you are in the US, living without a car is also "extremist": http://www.novemberwest.com/blog/?p=288
You would be surprised to find out how interesting it is to read a long discussion [1] on the physics of the ideal bed. And how hard the physics is considering how obvious the answer seems at first.

Essentially distribution of force and responsiveness in ability to mold to give a minimum amount of pressure per area of skin is what is key. A perfectly molded extremely hard surface would be very comfortable while you remained perfectly still. Soft tends to be better because it responds to changes in position more readily. But too soft doesn't actually allow a proper distribution of force so hard but yielding is ideal. Hard also resists movements less and since changing positions is another way the body counters excessive pressure, it is ideal for people who utilize this feature. For those who move more this is a better compromise. What is the best bed packs a lot of physical punch, it will lead you all the way from biology to quantum mechanics if you so chose.

[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=464
I've never hated a programming language until I met LabVIEW.
In all honesty, the reply about LabVIEW is absolutely correct. Even PHP doesn't compare to the monstrosity that is LabVIEW. The FIRST robotics competition promotes using C++ or LabVIEW to create your robot code. And I have to say, programming by connecting squares together didn't feel like programming at all. It felt like I was being infantilized. The "source code" just becomes a whole mess of boxes and lines overlapping each other and just drives you nuts trying to understand how the program works.

Even though higher level programming languages are supposed to abstract the difficult parts away from you, LabVIEW abstracts you to the point that it's a whole new level of complexity, which completely defeats the purpose of it being abstract.
Agree on that. I was reading it from my ipad.. I tried to scroll down and it didn't work. I thought it was a bug where the javascript didn't work on the iPad or something.. but just before giving up, I saw the little thumbnail at the top and realized they were screen shot.
That's what i thought. Maybe i'm missing something.
Quick Poll: The fate of Color
Just curious about everyone's gut feeling based on what's been said recently and if it matches my sentiments.

Will Color flunk spectacularly?
Yes, this. I found myself constantly removing all the styles to compare the custom version to the original.
I was burned a few times early on, but now I'm fairly successful with outsourcing. The big stuff: be a coder or have one monitor the project progress, don't trust anyone, go hourly on large projects, sample new contractors with limited 1 hour projects, and demand daily commits to a VCS for hired coders.

Without an expensive search, you won't be able to pay coders $5/hour and get good results. As another guy said, results from coders and designers in Eastern Bloc countries are typically way better, though the hourly is also higher. I've saved a sizable amount of time and money by not hiring <$10/hour guys. For those with skills that were charging less, there was always a gotcha hiding somewhere. Either they were going to string out the project intentionally, or try to use a crappy code generator program, or just try to game whatever controls had been put in place. It wasn't worth it.
Although I would typically be the first to attack any positive mention of the Soviet system, the number of people who died under Soviet regime (yes, it was probably larger as you mentioned) is mostly due to the extreme power wielded by Stalin during his time at the helm. After Stalin's death, the communist party tried to distance itself from the crimes committed by him. So it's a bit unfair to compare fascism to communism -- you should compare fascism to stalinism instead. In addition, even if you compare fascism to stalinism (both very scary systems), fascism looks a bit worse, not because of the number of people who died, but because unlike stalinism which was mostly a culture of fear, fascism was really a culture of hate all the way down the hierarchy.
Possibly. The reviews shown in the store are localized to your country, to unless they have an option for viewing all reviews regardless of origin it'll be impossible for me in Sweden to read US reviews, e.g.
Am definitely thinking about it! Got a pretty good backlog of feature ideas from the feedback here!
This is a good exercise to help train yourself to strip out the less important ideas/features. Do it enough and apply the new learnings toward a bigger project.
I thought about this some more over the weekend, and one thing that occurred to me is that virtually all of my photos go via Adode Lightroom. The image files don't change; instead, all of the metadata and retouch history lives in Lightroom's database. I guess users of Aperture and iPhoto are in a similar position.

Plain image files are fine on the way out of the camera (and maybe via a laptop), and on the way to the Internet (which will use low-res .jpgs with embedded metadata), but my central repository is currently Lightroom, which doesn't like opening up its database.

Lightroom can, however, talk to external photo services through a plugin system; its Flickr and Facebook exports work like this. So maybe your photo app is another of these services, as far as Lightroom is concerned.
Actually, since 5.3 PHP has had anonymous functions. The implementation is a bit of a kludge, but they're there.
My favorite job interview question. There is no right answer, but any answer says so much about the programmer being interviewed that you might as well not bother with the rest of the interview.
The pie will never be big enough to take care of everyone’s desires, but the pie does get bigger.

The article is a good read. He talks about fiscal policy, sovereign debt, investing in different countries, what he promises his investors (beating the market by 2 or 3 %), structure of his companies, investing only in what you understand, performance incentives, how capitalism is still the best system despite its flaws, among other things.
By comparison, the total incidence of cancers among males aged 0-14 in SEER areas in the USA (representing 28% of the population, per their website) is 149.5 per million, and for females aged 0-14 is 128.7 per million. Thyroid carcinoma is at 0.9 per million in males, and 2.9 per million in females[1]. So, while they had a higher rate than in the USA even before 1970 (4 per million for males and 8 per million for females), I would be extremely doubtful that the increase in numbers is just due to an increase in diagnosis because doctors are expecting to see cancers.

[1] http://seer.cancer.gov/publications/childhood/adolescents.pd...
I hate using a screw driver with nails and I hate using a hammer with screws. It seems to me that with any tool there is a specific problem or set of problems it is intended to solve. There is also a (likely) larger set of problems that are very difficult to solve using the tool. Why are we blaming the tools for their users' mistakes. If a carpenter uses tools insufficiently suited for his project, do we blame the tools or the carpenter?
Disrupting startups' lawyers
> It's quite popular amongst programming language hipster-wannabes to hate on Java these days.

I'd say the hatred-du-jour has switched from Java to PHP in recent years. Java still gets a lot of heat though.
Quick tip- Disable location related browsing on Firefox 4.
Most of the article was about investment and cultivating personal talent/knowledge, not politics.
Thankfully both the most widely used desktop OSes in the world don't have case sensitivity.
Out of curiosity (I have no experience with RPGs aside from a bit of AD&D2 15 years ago), what kinds of tools do you make? Character generation, that sort of thing?

Incidentally, the title of this HN post sounds like a good strategy for developing just about any product.
My point was that Hitler didn't directly kill that many people with his own hands, just like Chernobyl didn't _directly_ cause many deaths. But the consequences of that one accident and that one man went far beyond their _immediate_ impact that can be directly traced back. (In hindsight, I should have picked a different analogy ...)
Right, but it could be that what first appears uncomfortable may still give you the best nights sleep; perhaps your immediate 'comfort rating' is a poor indicator.

Lying on the hard floor isn't comfortable for me but quite possibly I may sleep better.
At this point, we're just beating a dead horse when it comes to Color.com.

Flagged.
We would like to think it should be possible to create useful webapps in Akshell within 3 hours and are working to create a set of libraries and standard components to make this possible. See our (old) screencast for an example: http://vimeo.com/11831303
En Paris se dicta curso masivo que enseña mujeres a caminar con tacones
The worst part though is that Java developers don't seem to realize this.

As a counter, I humbly submit: Scala, Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, and JPython. A collection of languages that attempt to fix Java's (legion) problems, while allowing us (clueless?) Java developers to remain on a platform that continues to put food on the table.

IMHO, Java developers are the MOST keenly aware of the shortcomings.

BTW, VB does get a lot of hate, but it has a fabulous niche - MS Office COM interop. Down that road lies madness, and a ton of consulting dollars.
While I agree that it's probably impossible to produce a whole web application in 3 hours, I think the point here is more about incremental delivery_. Note that in the post, OP is actually talking about 3-hour features, not entire apps (after step ‘show to people’ you can go back and develop another 3-hour feature, if you like). And I doubt there exists a web application (or almost any piece of software, really) that couldn't be developed this way.

.. _: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?IncrementalDelivery

Problems, however, arise when your idea requires specific domain knowledge which you haven't got yet; it's likely that you'll need some time to become comfortable in this particular area. Though I doubt it should necessarily be counted as time spent on app development.

And there's always some in-brain idea development. Say, you have an idea of blogging via email. You cook this idea inside for a few days, working out some details in background, then sit down, code for a three hours, and boom, you have posterous. Then you see that people don't care about email blogging, but they care about bells and whistles, so you sit another 3 hours and create basic skinning support. It's better than when after two weekends on email-blogging you discover that you were going in wrong direction. (Of course, I know nothing about real Posterous development, I just tried to clarify.)

Also, I think it's generally useful to be able to produce something in 3 hours. You need to keep your tools hot & ready.
Are you referring to POSIX? Because if so, you should know that it is a shining example of a worthless standard and that most unix programs rely on unspecified behavior far more than this easy-to-make flash bug.
I agree with you except on the point of body language. It doesn't have to be mind reading, neuro-linguistic programming magic. Simple things like paying attention to tone and volume, position of limbs and posture, eye movement and facial expression will tell you a lot more than simple words. Even clothes and how a person uses words (length, timing and vocabulary) will be a hint. Control of this is what separates the "wooden" actors from the top actrosses. Profilers and poker players leverage this too. It draws from empathy and you basically trying to perform a statistical inference from the set of features in front of you to guess with high probability the true internal state and mood.

A lot of people have tells too, default motions you do when you are not comfortable. I am trying to unprogram mine.
I was surprised that Buffett's lukewarm statement warranted such a headline, but reading some of the interviewers questions, my "agendar" went off:

Q. Do you see things differently today... the shortcomings of capitalism?
Q. What do we need to do to improve the system and its shortcomings?
Q. You are still very optimistic about America. How do you reconcile this?
Q. Does Wall Street bear a resemblance to the robber-baron era 100 years ago?
Q. Jeffrey Sachs from Harvard [says] US is turning into a plutocracy. And this is a feeling you get throughout the world... Do you feel that way?
Its true, startups do need to blog more.
The interviewer fed him a leading question, and he responded by saying it's more true now, at least, than when he was born. He also said there were things which would prevent us reaching plutocracy. It's a bit like if you ask someone if the US is moving towards communism, and they say 'well I guess the health care bill is a significant step in that direction.'
Crude scoping (eg "var s = 'foo'" in an inner loop will have that defined outside of that).

I'm curious why you didn't mention this as a problem with Python.
There is one already, it's called Stylebot: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/oiaejidbmkiecgbj...
Why not let the platform be agnostic, or allow native deployment outside of windows land?

Case in point, running mysql needs a separate web role and costs >$80 where SQL server is $10 (old prices?).

If your building on top of .Net then take advantage of all that native goodness. Otherwise you face an uphill battle in terms of getting it to just work and pricing.

Don't let this ruby carrot fool you...
I believe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy will fix it.
Thanks for the recommendation but it's really not a topic of interest for me. I was just idly speculating what might happen if one day a generation emerges that doesn't feel that their children can have a better life than they have. I think there might be some interesting developments. But there are far more qualified people to talk about such things. :)
Does it matter if I can read my own directory listing?
Since they're currently the poster child for the "Are-we-in-another-tech-bubble-41-mil-before-launch-says-maybe" era we find ourselves in, I'd think we have at least another week of good stories making fun of them before it jumps the shark.
Countless as in "we don't have the ability to accurately count" ... "immeasurable" would have been more accurate.
I've been using C++ professionally and personally for a good ten years now, and aside from compilation speed, I don't really have any complaints about it. Use it properly, use Boost, and it's quite decent.

I only wish it had some of the sexy features of other languages, but C++0x (or whatever it's called now) is addressing a lot of that.

It's really hard to take the things that C++ does well and do it significantly better. I think D has largely proven that.
Sure, but is HN the right place for it?
> Will Color flunk spectacularly?

One can only hope. People here have been suggesting that we're beating a dead horse at this point, but when I open the App Store (German version of course, not that they give me a choice) I see a lot of positive reviews. "Great idea!", "Neat App" they say. People are still not getting it.

However, there is probably little new insight about the app and the concept itself. For me this review says it all: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2375027

I finally tried out the app today, otherwise I wouldn't have commented. It's awful.
I think it'll have a moderately successful exit (i.e. it'll get acquired for more than $41MM).
I wouldn't be so sure about your implication that nuclear power plants reduce property prices: "In each of the seven regions, housing and real estate values have benefited from the operations of the nuclear facilities: total property values, assessed valuations and median housing prices have often increased at rates above the national and state averages. In each local area, housing prices were several times higher than prior to the opening of the nuclear facilities, and there is evidence that in Barnwell, proximity to the nuclear facility may actually increase housing values.[1]"

[1] http://www.misi-net.com/publications/IJNGEE-V1N1-06.pdf
I agree: that was the best part of the article for me. I wrote about this (Nourish and manage your career, not your job) a few weeks ago. A lifetime investment in your own education and training is an investment that will likely pay good dividends and lead to a more satisfying life beyond just money.
Since this is the watering hole for discussions related to startups, I'm not sure where else it would go.
I will have to abstain here, just because there is nobody who can maintain a neutral reaction with all thats written. I bet half the people here havent even tried the app.
It won't fail or flunk spectacularly, I see there's a future about it but it's too early to say something. Current data say they failed massively regarding PR, launch, etc. Boy, they have $41, failure is a) not an option for them b) there's no (b).

—I agree with Gruber in other news.
it is not the first time Buffett used the "plutocracy" word:

Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise. Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward a plutocracy.

at a Congressional Hearing on Estate Tax in November 2007 http://www.cnbc.com/id/21791804
The single language I hate most is Javascript. I loathe the wieird prototype-based inheritance (need a framework for something simple as subclassing), lack of modularity ("include" everything? really?), and strange handling of "this" (no bound methods). And then I don't even start about the difference between browser implementations.

So silly, for even the simplest things you need a framework. Code written for one framework is not compatible with code written for another framework, so you find this nice widget or library but need to port it first before it fits into your application.

I only use Javascript because there's no other choice for client-side browser development (yes, there's things like GWT, they're not that much adopted so you lose most of the advantages of code already out there, and they compile to JS anyway).

PHP comes second. I'm mostly frustrated with PHP for the way most people use it (mixing up presentation and logic in the web root), and the insecure-by-defaultness, not for the language itself.
We need more of Harry McCracken’s gritty tech journalism
Is that a Questment! (Something that starts as a question and ends as a statement)

George W was a master of it: he would start to say something controversial, then raise the intonation at the end.