skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"designed specifically for web scripting" is worth a lot.

PHP's standard library has a function called htmlspecialchars() which escapes special characters in HTML. If you don't use a function like this, your HTML forms can be destroyed by ' and " characters and crackers can f- up your web site by putting <script> elements on your pages.

There is no function like this in the Java standard libraries. Nothing like this comes with JSP or JAX-RS. You can get one in the Apache commons lang project, but a Java web developer who doesn't know this (or write his own) is in deep trouble.

PHP is a great tool; it's creators have gotten many details right, and it offers developers the chance to get started without running into gotchas. On the other hand, other languages have things going for them too.

Ruby gems and Java's maven are incredible package managers that put PEAR to shame. There's a lot of junk software written in Java, but some of the best open source projects are there too. People are doing interesting stuff in web frameworks in Python, Ruby, Java, C# and many other languages, even PHP.
The bothersome thing about the Skype acquisition is that it's really not going to save them at all. It was a statement purchase. They bought it to show off.

They could have bought up a lot of innovative, smaller companies for $8.5B... some that might rebuild their character.
The idea is that there are plenty of other places[1][2] to be humourous on the interwebs. By coming down hard on the few instances that are posted it stops entire threads turning into just these amusing but ultimately unproductive comments.

[1] http://www.reddit.com

[2] http://slashdot.org
No, but it can throw more money at a problem. The point I was making is deeper pockets win, and no one can compete with the defense budgets. They can enlist the help of brighter minds than any criminal orginization (access to better talent pool).

India and China, who don't care about personal privacy as much as the US, gloat about doing this all the time, often to US companies' data. The US gov't does have the right to wiretap and snoop under the Patriot Act, but it does not have to have the luxury to share with the American public because Americans value privacy highly.
Therein lies your solution. Don't be a cool parent, and don't have goodies.
MS Hosted Exchange customers hit with service outages
unless you are talking about python, then readability is in fact part of the syntax.
Yes. Been to the mall with a ski mask on during the holiday season before? ;)
> Turing completeness is why you can run a JVM on top of a C environment. It means that any computation that C could do, the JVM could do.

I'm genuinely confused: I thought this was the argument you called a strawman when I argued against it before.

I've already rebutted this argument twice: Brainfuck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck) is a Turing-complete programming language, and yet you categorically could not implement the Java class libraries on top of it. For example, the java.io.FileReader class could not be implemented on top of it, because Brainfuck does not have any API for opening a file.

Even in cases where you can implement one language on top of another, it may not be efficient to do so. For example, Adobe Alchemy runs C/C++ code on top of Flash/ActionScript at a 2-10x slowdown compared with running the C/C++ directly on the hardware. Implementing a JVM on top of Java appears to be 4-9x slower than implementing it in C/C++ [0] (and that's only comparing two interpreters: the difference is far greater when the C/C++ implementation generates machine code directly).

C gets credit for efficiently supporting a whole host of different VMs with divergent GC schemes and synchronization primitives. That is what makes C special, and why it continues to dominate in system space.

[0] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1294345
Sorry to have to use HN for this as you don't have an email address in your profile, but could I get in touch with your designer in Serbia please?
Like I said, it's a cultural and a library thing.

First, the cultural.

PHP's community is largely focused on web applications, and has lots of folks that do not have a background outside of PHP or web applications. The PHP culture is generally one of "I'm not interested in understanding why its broken, just give me the code to fix it." If you browse the PHP documentation, you'll notice the comments are riddled with errors, bad advice, hacks, and so on. It even bleeds into print, I'd argue "PHP: The Good Parts" is the worst software engineering book I've ever read.

The Python and Ruby communities have their problems, for sure, but you're more likely to find good advice and altogether more competent people when asking for help there. There is a focus on constant improvement, elegance, and craftmanship while maintaining pragmatism in the Ruby community that fosters more of a joy for learning and building things than I think you'll find in PHP.

On the library side, I can't speak for Python, but my point with JRuby is that you have access to not only the Ruby ecosystem but the Java ecosystem. For the purposes of arguing the breadth of applications I can simply stop at the Java ecosystem, full stop, since it's arguably the largest set of libraries available on a single platform ever built. To start, just look at the Apache projects, Hadoop, Lucene, Solr, Mahout, and more give you access to state of the art machine learning, IR, and data analysis algorithms that are beyond your wildest dreams in PHP. And this, of course, is just the surface of what is available to you.
yeah, Andromeda, Orion Nebula, SMC, LMC, all stand out so clearly

I'm really tempted to buy the 120"x30" print, I feel like the guy should be compensated for this epic task. Problem is I'd then need to find a 3 meter wall to mount the picture on!
So this is just shareholder activism at its finest. A lot of M$ share holders are upset at the Skype deal and with the returns on the stock since Ballmer took over. Nothing new here, just that Microsoft lead by Ballmer has underperformed the market.

I keep waiting for these folks to say who they think should be running Microsoft but that doesn't come up a lot.
A few years ago I would've said yes. But, thanks to the iPhone and Android, so much new technology has come to web browsers recently that there aren't many reasons to develop native desktops apps anymore.
Wow that looks amazing? I was looking for a "pricing" info page. The fact this is free - incredible.
I would echo this advice as well. As a mainly PHP developer I have learned a lot of cool ideas and techniques from Ruby on Rails that I have brought into my PHP code.

For example, the idea of the "flash" and how to properly do MVC.

Just learning another language (programming or not) opens your mind to new ideas and ways of looking at things. If those aren't reasons enough, then what about increasing your work skills and marketability?
Works just dandy on my Nexus One running the latest CM7 stable.
why not just put a tag in place of the up arrow that says (Job) or (Job Ad). That's more intuitive to me (I'm new to HN).
Well the most used one is Celery. It depends on multiprocessing which blew up on me the last time I tried it in PyPy.

But.... I just tried "import multiprocessing" in PyPy 1.5 and it worked! Is this all part of the C-API compatability layer? Does that mean Cython code may soon work in PyPy too (that's my pony feature)?

RabbitMQ should work under PyPy currently then, all of its dependencies purport to be pure python.
---

Another RabbitMQ lib is Rabbitmq-c which is direct wrapping around librabbitmq-c. It ecks out extra performance vs pure python rabbitmq, but mostly it isn't needed.
Who cares if it's in a "standard library", as long as it's available in a library?
It does. The problem with WLM is that its US user base is somewhat smaller. And the US user base is pretty influential, especially in the mobile space.

$8.5B influential? Honestly, I don't see what $8.5B gets you that investing $500M in a Skype partnership wouldn't have.

I'd like to think they have some grand plan, but honestly I don't think so.

I think they're just sitting on a stack of cash and getting pressure from investors to spend the cash and grow.
Python: programming language more popular than snake
Windows Live Messenger has 330 million active users according to wikipedia, Microsoft could have improved it instead of the current bloated crap it currently is. If it was as lightweight as gtalk, provided voip capability and a good iphone app capability I would start using it and so would all those 330 million active users.
I'd like to see a return of Gates. Microsoft will continue being unvisionary if they bring anyone else to the table.

You just can't fake the magic of the founders.
http://bit.ly/jcvm4R

That's my list of the first 50 people who joined Facebook, using the Graph API & a bit of Java. Look for Saverin, Zuckerberg, Moskovitz & rest of the gang. Its all in there!

Wrote this to find the first million facebook signons.
Look at http://dabbledb.com/demo/#play (which is closed to signups and closing down soon) and it's direct competitors.
I fully understand and agree with the rationale, hartror. It's just a little difficult to reign myself in and exercise the kind of self control needed here. But the inevitable and swift downvotes I've gotten certain helped to drive the point home.

I need some kind of Chrome extension that injects a confirmation dialog box that asks 'Are you trying to be funny?' before I post to HN.
Get me some as well, installed ubuntu server today...

apt-cache depends a* | grep -c python: 18711

apt-cache depends a* | grep -c php: 1596

apt-cache depends a* | grep -c ruby: 2839

Not that it proves anything but it might be an indicator.
Combining this and a Kinect tracking head movement for interaction would be interesting. Imagine something like that as the routine music video experience on your TV in the future.
Awesome! Drop me an email [davepeck at getcloak.com] if you'd like the special Hacker News invite code. ;-)
Apple/NeXT used to have enterprise object framework.
There's a video of steve jobs building a fairly complex DB app without a single line of code, including joins.

We still have nothing like it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A
See about 25 minutes in.
One way to correct for dividends: assume the dividends are used to buy shares immediately after it goes ex-dividend.
Be sure to update this with your Kickstarter URL for contributions to have you write/publish this.:-)
You can make money by buying a stock, having the business get more valuable so the stock goes up, and selling the stock at a higher value.
Or you can make money by buying a stock, having the business make money and pay it out to you in dividends.

At the end of the day, what matters here is how much money you make and how long it took you to get it, which is a function of sell price - buy price + dividends received - transaction costs and taxes paid. This chart ignores the dividends received part, and thus misrepresents the value of the stock. I don't know how big the dividend is so I don't know by how much. I doubt it would really make -50whatever% a whole lot better, but it would certainly be something better.

Traditionally dividends are generally paid out by businesses that can't reasonably expect to use their cash to grow - reinvesting all your cash to grow may not make sense if your growth is limited by geography or by completely owning an entire market. The textbook example is a utility company.
It shouldn't change how you interpret the stock price growth, but it should change how you interpret the total return of the company.

The graph that was shown is misleading because it only represents the share price growth over the last ten years, which was down (or flat). For much of that time Microsoft was paying quarterly dividends, which means shareholders were yielding some return from their Microsoft stock even if the share price wasn't appreciating.
Some services/companies/websites are blocking Amazon's IP addresses because of abuse. This means that using your VPN I may not be able to access certain websites or services.
I think part of the issue is that even PyPy + NumPy wouldn't give you compelling gains versus NumPy + Cython in CPython.

The big win of PyPy vs. Cython is that you get a 10x or so speed improvement without having to specify types, but if you're using NumPy already, then its pretty standard to specify types already so NumPy can optimize. At that point, you really have to ask yourself if it isn't worth it to just build a Cython module and get next to C speed for that hotspot.

The great thing about Cython is that it lets you call inbetween C and Python at little overhead without having to write any code for the Python C-API like you would if you were using CTypes or even Boost::Python.
Microsoft has a new application specifically for building CRUD apps called LightSwitch:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch
Why should the market cap be adjusted to reflect dividends? Those have been paid out to shareholders and no longer represent assets of the company.
A failed takeover of T-Mobile would cost AT&T as much as $6 billion
Sadly, I also think it will commercialize it on a whole different level and take away the innocence. But ah, ch-ch-ch-changes -- not all bad.

Personally I haven't been involved in the demo-scene for some 15 years but every now and then I indulge myself in the latest releases at http://pouet.net and find myself having lost a whole evening. That said, from what I have seen, and if this was indeed cutting-edge, we still have quite a bit to go... But yeah, we are definitely getting there. Not sure whether to jump for joy, though. :)
Someone wrote about a honey pot trap for robots. They made a new directory and added it to the robots.txt as do-not-enter. All IPs that hit the directory where banned.

If the sites that scrap your content do it from servers with fixed IPs, then you could go hunting and try to block them.
That second item mentioned in the parens, reminds me of Hamachi...
DMCA.
I'd imagine you could just subtract the value of the dividend from the stock price. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

If you buy a stock as a dividend stock, you might not really want it to rise much, or at all, since you want those dividends giving out the increased value rather than seeing it reflected in the market cap; ie. you want the company paying out the results of expansion.
I believe it is on GitHub https://github.com/nex3/arc
You may want to check out http://wufoo.com for some data collection tasks.

Also, I recommend trying out a hosted wiki and Google Docs. Having a shared Google Docs spreadsheet will probably be more functional than anything you can build without actually programming.
Skype is free for video chat too. And I must say it's worth every penny for its phone line in service when compared to free offerings like Google Voice.
Yes. We're going to be moving to a different provider in very short order -- we'll have more to say about this soon.
They're hedging. They even go as far as to say "you heard it here first". I'm sure they would rather be in a position of being overly cautious than have people lose faith because they didn't report on a coming bubble.

In terms of actual analysis, they're falling into the trap all other journalists seem to be by just repeating the bubble rumors that are floating around. You'd think Economist could come up with more substance for their argument.
I have not really studied this issue in depth, but from what I can tell most of the increasing investment activity that they are referring to is occuring in the private investment world - not on stock markets.

With that said, it seems that it would be difficult to call this activity a "bubble". "Bubble" in the popular nomenclature are typically used to refer to developments that can have widespread consequences when they "pop" (Re: the housing bubble, the credit derivative swap bubble, etc, etc).

There has been a lot of private investment activity in the tech world recently, but I think that it would be fear mongering to refer to this activity as a bubble. The Internet in general (and the web specifically) is still a relatively recent development. It makes sense that you will see a lot of investment activity in this area.

This same type of thing tends to happen whenever a major technological advancement spurns rapid innovation (Re: the gilded age). It is merely capitalism at work - not necessarily a bubble.
Throw up Firebug or Chromes Dev Tool and watch the HTML dance around too :)
There will always be those that do it because they enjoy making something beautiful and challenging, even as others take it in commercial directions.
Teaching methods: An alternative vote
The service I am STILL looking for is one that will let me upload RAW, will allow end users to view them, and will let me pay some price (per picture if necessary) for permanent archival. IOW, I worry that about a year or so after I'm dead my last hard drive dies, and my digital pics going all the way back to my first Sony that used a 3.5 inch disk to take 640K photos are gone.

I've thought about doing a mass conversion to JPEG, and then see if one of the public archive servers would take my collection, but I worry about how long it would take me to upload 2TB of photos. Alternately I could self-curate to get the collection size down, but I've learned over the years that sometimes a poor photo of something that ended up to be transitory is better than no photo at all.
My take on this is that if the job is more of an apolitical bureaucratic post and he's doing a great job at it, then why not? It's like if anyone said "CEO's can only be in charge for X years, whether or not they're good at their job" - they'd be laughed out of the room.

The entire reason for term limits in the rest of government is people attaining then clinging to power, and abusing the system so they remain in power indefinitely. I doubt that's the case here.
Doubtful since Netflix already runs on several Linux devices, most notably the Roku, the Boxee Box and the WD Live TV. Just like with android devices it all comes down to built DRM which regular Linux distributions will not support.
One way to look at this is to track the market value of a company less its cash horde. It is a safe bet to assume that none of these companies is earning much beyond money market rates, except when it is adding (or subtracting!) value by investing in its own projects. Of course in this world of financial opacity, you can't easily estimate cash more often than quarterly. The cash-less value chart would be pretty interesting.
I agree that for the most part this is correct. But, I also would argue that some aspects of a language can lend itself to more organized code. The include statement is one example where I think PHP doesn't help keep code organized. An actual module system with packages helps a good deal here.
Someone should start a company that rates how companies handle customer data. On a scale of 0 to telco, how invasive are you.
Video Review - Apple TV 4.2.2 Update Addresses Minor Bugs
I've heard of someone through an acquaintance whose company gets something like $60 mill in revenue from one of those iffy agencies of the US. It's nothing to sneeze at.

Officially, I think it's called the "brown nose" business model.
Thank god the FBI doesn't abuse any of their power. ~phew~!

All the things they've enacted, attempted to enact, and done behind the curtain (often knowingly violating rights and laws in letter, if not at least spirit) are reason enough to laugh at their proposition.
but you have know about it, and Java programmers have a lot of things clamoring for their attention. Programmers in all languages, including PHP, fail to escape characters correctly. But PHP programmers have no excuse: you can tell them what to do and they don't have to mess with the build system, think about licenses, all that.

In a large Java system, you might find you're using 4 different JSON libraries... because 2 of them are used by other Open Source projects your project uses and 5 of your subteams picked 2 different JSON libraries.. Now you've got to deal with bugs in 4 different libraries and if you're doing cross-functional coding you've got to know the idiosyncratic APIs and you can always get your panties in a knot about which library you should use in who's turf.

PHP programmers use json_encode() and json_decode() and avoid bugs and wasted time.
The market is a place for risk transfer. That is where the profit that HFT makes comes from. Long term investors transfer the risk of being or not being in a position to HFT market makers, who then (in expectation) make a small profit per transaction.

The bigger picture that your argument misses is that trading is zero sum in wealth, but NOT zero sum in utility. That is the amazing thing about trading (and by trading, I mean trading in general). Say I have three oranges and you have two bananas. It turns out that I really really love bananas, and you have equal preferences for oranges and bananas. I would be happy to exchange two of my oranges for one of your bananas. The next result is an increase in both of our individual utilities. That is how trading work (and why people trade), and HFT is no different.
Here is one that ranks the original content bottom of the first page. The first two results are exact replicas of each other and a copy of original article. The query is for the title of his most recent post.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=Quick+Look+%E2%80%93+W...
We're like a bunch of penguins crowded at the edge of the ice waiting to see if the first few to dive in get eaten by a sea lion or not.

I for one am happy on my 2.7 perch as while I would love to get my teeth suck into 3.x I have to choose the productivity of full library support over engineering joy.
A short, but well written article that does a good job of taking on the "full meltdown" hysteria that some news organisations seem to clutch on to.

Granted, the situation at Fukushima isn't good, but "meltdown" seems to trigger the idea of a huge explosion and the scattering of nuclear fallout for miles & miles to much of the general public.

PS: As an aside, the dramas in Japan are disappointing, because I'm a strong believer in nuclear power going forward. Misconceptions & a lack of education, fuelled by crisis' like these, don't help the cause.
That's an overstatement to say the least. Microsoft still mints money at an incredible rate. They may be doing terrible in the mobile and web space, but Windows and Office will continue to live for a long time, particularly in corporate environments.
You should use the right tool for the job. Sphinx is a very functional search product, is available as a Ubuntu package and is easy to integrate to e.g. Django data models.

(The article links to some weird page in http://www.sphinxsearch.org/. The right link is http://sphinxsearch.com/.)
The hype-to-content of this article is ridiculous.

It was a slow, toilsome process. And it was so meticulous that even veteran intelligence officials have marveled at bin Laden's ability to maintain it for so long.

Really? Really? It's still more efficient than traditional post, and I'm guessing there wouldn't be this level of hullabaloo if that had been the mode of communication.
You think the'd tell the full-timers about secret smear campaigns against competitors?
The ideal would be to be able to mix both versions. Use python3 by default and, by specifying an option somewhere, import from an older version. I.e.

import-2.7 whatever-lib

I know about features that aren't compatible (print as a function for instance), but what about python's bytecode.. ?
In the extreme case, consider you were on the other side of every other trade that happened in the market. You would by definition have achieved VWAP over some time period.

Trading randomly during any given time period probably comes close to achieving VWAP. I'm sure something a little more intelligent could probably achieve it in expectation.