skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a total idiot can install PHP and get a system that will meet the performance and reliability needs of 99.5 of web sites out there.

This is like living in a house where the builders were "total idiots" and hammered in all the screws with a hammer instead of screwing them in with a screwdriver. Sure, it holds together. It might not even collapse in a light breeze.

But one day, you'll want to reshingle the roof, or there will be a thunderstorm, and then your house collapses, killing your entire family. Good engineering requires good implementation. PHP makes good implementations too hard.

every other system requires that you make choices, and the truth about choices is that faced with a binary choice there are two common outcomes: (i) a person freezes up like a deer in the headlights or (ii) a person makes a random choice that they're 50% likely to get right. (i)'s probably the better option.

Theoretically, this is why you hire people with experience. They picked randomly the first time, and then gathered data. Their random choice either worked or it didn't. Repeat a few times and you have "senior system administrator" and "senior engineer" instead of "random dumbass we found on the street corner", and then this part of the equation goes away.

Now, if your goal is to produce something that sometimes works with the least amount of money possible... yes, you should outsource your development and deployment to some high school kids in India. If your goal is to produce something that works...

(Also, the days of PHP's deployment superiority are nearly over. With mongrel2, I can restart my app instances without losing a single request!)
Access multiple Databases using JPA Hibernate
I've seen a number of options but most people settle on quickbooks because it's the incumbent platform. I wouldn't use lessaccounting and I haven't tried indinero.

This is the opinion of a tax accountant so you may have a diffferent idea of what your accounting needs are.
This. I understand exactly what you are saying, but since it doesn't jive with many people's world view, there will be stiff objection.

The only cure for poverty (in western countries), ultimately, is the person that is poor. While there are many ways and unfortunate circumstances that one can find themselves poor - and as a society I believe it is incumbent on us to provide the assistance to lessen the occurrence and/or effects of such events - the ultimate recovery is in the hands of the individual.

They are actually hindered in this by the collective network of the permanently poor - supported by political movements on the far left that stem from this same collective belief system.

Programs should be tailored to address poverty in two ways: 1. Preventing new members of the network, by mitigating the circumstances that create poverty, and, however unpopular;
2. Disrupting the network itself, by purposely setting things up in a way that the person in poverty is isolated from other poor people and surrounded with a network that encourages them to adjust their thinking.

I'm not holding my breath, but I'd love to see some experiments along this line.
Don't use ctags, they're garbage.

--- Emacs user that uses a lot of "IDE esque" features
I fight against technologies I perceive as bad choices in an attempt to convince younger developers with less of an experience base that they should pick up something else that will give them the same or better capabilities for much less pain. My contribution to the community, as it were, as I have in turn benefited in my career from such signposting.

You can carve out a decent subset of PHP, but there's this painful and dangerous beginning and middle part where you're still learning this subset and in the meantime you're writing grossly insecure code. Perl has much the same problem. There are no languages I know where you are immediately writing brilliant code, but there's certainly ones you can learn faster, cut down the danger period, and also have many of the worst dangers ameliorated by much better design decisions at the API and language level. (How much of PHP and all similar languages would have been better if only the default interpolation HTML escaped everything and you had to especially ask for direct interpolation, instead of the other way around?)
How you find your -in- to a venture capitalist matters
Apple's iOS 4 Hardware Encryption Cracked
“We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,” Mr. Marx says. “Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.”

Mr. Marx's job is educating, hopefully as well as possible, people who already have a great educational advantage. Anyone working at Amherst or any other elite college who thinks they can be part of the solution by directly educating underprivileged kids is indulging in fantasy. Access to higher education is not the problem; preparation is. A poor person who is prepared to succeed at an elite college has already risen beyond "underprivileged" and is on a trajectory to the upper middle class.

More precisely, if Mr. Marx is wrong to imply that there is some kind of "merit" and "talent" that makes one capable of handling higher education but is not affected by a child's opportunities and environmental influences. Amherst does not admit people based on their genetic potential or even their winning personality. They try to take social disadvantage into account when judging applicants' academic preparation, but in the end they limit admissions to students who can succeed at Amherst. If Mr. Marx wants to directly help people who are disadvantaged then he should quit Amherst and join some organization that works with people who are not and could not be Amherst students.
Deckster: How to design, manufacture & brand a high-end mobile accessory product
All the processing is done client-side.
Emacs + Slime for CL should be a piece of cake as long as you don't insist on using your distribution's packages. Mail me (see profile) when you run into any problems and I'll help you out.
Your Call is Not Important to Us
One option to consider is Outright (http://expenses.outright.com). It's straightforward and easy to use. I'm not sure what your needs are, but it's aimed at people who don't need a full-on accounting solution like Quickbooks.
I don't know if it's the Aha moment you are after. But in my programming 101 class the lecturer outlined the maximum-contiguous subsequence problem (which sounds very boring). Solved it once and then solved it two more times each time making it more efficient. That was my 'aha' moment that I decided I wanted to be a programmer.

I suspect that this is the most important learning moment - what is it in programming that excites you? (probably won't be this article :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_subarray_problem
With Facebook, you always maintain the right to privacy. You can only allow a few friends to see your photos, you can restrict your public profile, and you can even refuse to use Facebook.

I've never understood why Facebook issues are labeled "privacy issues." The ability to willfully share something has nothing to do with privacy. There is only a privacy issue if you are unable to keep something private that you would rather be kept private.
> It's just that Mozilla is too weak and too dependent on Google's revenue to put up a fight.

Why would Mozilla want to put up a fight? It seems to me that One of Mozilla's biggest goals is working towards a better web, and that chrome as done quite a bit for innovation in the browser market.
Inventing Unix
You can reply any way you want, but it makes a whole lot more sense to respond to the main point of the parent comment.

If the word racism had not been in that post, would you have commented on it at all? Would you have still felt the need to make a throw-away account for the comment?
it contradicts his prior point that the Soviet people deserved compensation.

My point was that a better concept of legitimacy would define it as flowing out of how you use the property, rather than how you came to own it. The notion of land as a resource which belongs collectively to all of mankind is not a new one, and more than one internally-consistent philosophical system includes it.
I drink coffee on weekends with breakfast, I only have 1 cup so it doesn't have as much effect as something like 3 or 4 cups would, but I must say I have had 3 cups and I get really shaky and overly inattentive.

I do drink black tea though during the week about 3 times a week around 5 o-clock and it usually offers a pretty big boost when I'm feeling tired. I mostly just like the taste though.
Everybody understands PHP's ease of already-existing-installation is just about the only thing keeping it going. The idea that this is news is a strawman, I've seen this discussed for years and years.

The thing that makes it win though is not that PHP is intrinsically that much easier to install or run, what makes it win is that it comes pre-installed on most hosts. That's not a problem a language community can solve, that's a problem only the cheap web hosts can solve.

On one of my VPNs, I've had the experience where Django is actually easier to install, because all the mod_python and stuff was already in the distro, and it took less configuration than PHP to make it work and not be a menace to the net. PHP has a lot of really stupid things you better get right if you're trying to configure it from scratch, or you're insecure by default.
The White Working Class: The Most Pessimistic Group in America
PHP is Open Source. Compiling a list like this is nice, but contributing something back, and getting involved in making improvements to PHP, would be nicer.
Seems odd that Linus, who built git over a license dispute, wouldn't just code a replacement for whatever MS has rights to.

Is that hard, for some reason?
They are scaring developers to exert pressure on Apple and Google, to force them to negotiate and pay more.

Or.

They are demonstrating to another potential licensee that by paying more they can get better "protection". Potential clients would Microsoft, HP, and RIM. I can totally see Microsoft paying more to get more protection for "their" developers an then using the uncertainty to lure Apple's developers over to their side, because Microsoft have used patents in the past to similar purpose - create uncertainty around Linux, unless bought from their licensed partner Novell.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon Multiplayer Preview
Jira with Greenhopper is almost free: $20 for up to 10 users. It beats the pants off of any open source solution. For us it won out over Fogbugz in the trials. When we pass 10 users (there's currently 5 of us), we'll pay their regular price.

Anecdotal evidence against the assertion that people reading this will never give FogCreek/Atlassian a dollar: we will.
My guess is the patent on the FAT file system.
I mean "God" in this context, of course.

People tend to map a lot of other stuff onto it.
Yes. Average half a cup a day. I like the taste. It doesn't have any effect on me apparently. Didn't know that.
In order for something to be a trade secret, don't you have to protect whatever 'it' is?

Maybe I'm missing some key aspect to PayPal but what part of their tech/system is unique to PayPal, such that they can claim it is trade secret? I mean, if they aren't doing anything innovative and are just using existing technology in obvious ways (online payment processor), what could the trade secret possibly be? Something related to how they scale?
You have to wonder whether a guy who says this sort of shit has ever read or watched any dystopian fiction.

1984, Brave New World, THX-1138, Fahrenheit 451, Brazil, all of these are premised on societies where the majority of people are getting by, and are only passively inconvenienced. The problem is that the minority of people who object or deviate from society are crushed by the mechanism of the state (whatever that happens to be).

Privacy anxiety is an ephemeral screen on deeper fundamental issues about fairness and justice in society. Zuckerberg may be right that incorporating further privacy eroding features into society will be easy, but that doesn't make it right.

Regardless of what you think of Google, i at least give them credit that they recognize that the tech they build has scary implications, and that there are lines that they are not supposed to cross (at least, Eric Schmitt has said this a number of times). Zuckerberg does not seem to have any such compunction.
I had the same (incorrect) assumption. Emails would definitely be more useful.

That said, via the Facebook API a user can give your app permission to access their own email, but they (thankfully) cannot give your app permission to access the emails of their friends. I'd guess that's why he wasn't able to include emails in the CSV.
w/o email what is the benefit?
Society isn't engineered, it evolves. If you try to engineer society it'll never come out quite the same way you intended; there are always unintended consequences because people are so messy and complicated.

Primary example: society is continually engineered to eliminate poverty, and yet poverty persists.
advocating the preservation of the elite by gating access to it

This statement assumes that there is a fixed amount of wealth that must be protected; it's prevalent in socialist thinking, as well as in the thinking of the poor (it's part of the contagion).

It's also 100% incorrect. The creation of wealth is not a zero-sum game.
Long term planning is important and I bet most people do not take this into account when they go through their startup phase.
Google Wallet: Five things you need to know
Right, because there are thousands of people going to ask on mailing lists WTF that means. Given the small fraction of developers worldwide who speak Yiddish or Hebrew or whatever, 'double colon' might be a better phrase to use.
Or, even better:

"Unexpected '::' on line 14."

I wouldn't want to see "Unexpected key/value delimiter" (=>) or "Unexpected opening of new scope" ({). Just show the character(s) you found you weren't expecting.
And you know, none of that offends me. But to act incredulous that professionals who have spent thousands of hours mastering a skillset might actually defend it publicly seems naive.
A lot of the resources for Android development are a bit outdated right now: probably none of them make any use of the new fragment functionality which is a must for building a functional app for phones and tablets.
You should check out JavaScript - the type coercion is similar but even worse.
What do you care if it's a public or private fund?

If it's a private fund, someone else's money is wasted on buying failed companies. If it's the government, my money is wasted on buying failed companies.
> remind me how I get context-sensitive renaming

You don't but I did tell you that IDE do some things better.

> method extraction

After the third time eclipse crashed and deleted code while I was trying to do this I'm not really sure how you can get method extraction working in eclipse either.

> And can we lay this holier-than-thou claim about "good editors" to rest already? The idea that editors that don't require six fingers on each hand or a modal personality are "not good editors" is patently silly

Agree, but it's also silly to think that any editor is a good editor and the ones in IDEs are not.

> I grew out of that sort of thing when I was 15 or so

Talk about holier-than-thou...
Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
I can't even imagine how many developers out there started with WordPress and think the ramshackle way it's put together is normal.
In my opinion software homepages should look somewhat like wikipedia pages. Any software that tells me how awesome it is before explaining what it is quickly loses my interest. And using a grid with images in place of a list really annoys me.
"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what API you can do for your country."

--JFK 2.0
Maybe finding those people and engaging them on a personal level would help more than submitting to HN.
10 Good Reasons to Hire a Grown-Up
Raising awareness of what needs to be fixed is the first step.
Would it be possible to use this in an iPhone app? I.e. extending NSObject's retain / release and having a NSGarbageCollector like thread run around and collect.
Option[X] is a crock. It's forcing you to write same bulky if-statements that you need to write for null checks.

I want something like NOT NULL in SQL. Can't static typing make it completely impossible that I'll get a null in a situation where it should be completely impossible?

For instance if something is typed as a collection, I'd like to never see null, I'd rather always get an empty collection. If I have to test for None, I'm just adding more bulky code where errors can hide, particularly when the type inference system in Scala is always doing strange things behind my back.

In my mind, automatic conversions make the problem worse in Scala, not better. Code "just works" for the programmer in certain situations no matter how inconsistent people are in the types they use.

The trouble I see is that Scala programmers seem to be pretty random if they're going return an Array, a java.util.List or a scala.util.List. This is really a pain in the ass when I'm trying to access some Scala objects from Java and I don't have automatic conversion available. I'm also sure that these different choices have all kinds of effects when you consider inheritance, variance, type inference and all that. It adds to the problem of spooky action at a distance in Scala.
Is it really fear of embarrassment? I'd expect that interrupting a designer pushes the mental reset button nearly as badly as interrupting an engineer. Interrupting them every 15 minutes does desensitize the aversion response, but that's rather missing the point.
There's an outstanding request for better array syntax. It's been out there for over 3 years and received a lot of support from the community. At least one implementation has been submitted. But the core dev team rejected the idea, as they are convinced having second syntax available would harm ease of use (and thus popularity) of the language.

In general, some aspects of PHP will not be fixed/improved for reasons of either:

* backward compatibility, or

* incompatibility with the vision of the language by the core dev team.

http://marc.info/?t=121142259100001&r=1&w=2
http://marc.info/?t=119995974300003&r=1&w=2
Most of these are extreme cases for the C compiler. Usually it produces code 3-12 times slower, depending on how recent the compiler is.
Yes- I am comfortable giving my privacy up. I will never be comfortable having it taken away. Facebook either does not understand this or does not care.

A side thought> what would facebook be like today if they actually respected privacy legitimately?
I had the same reaction.

A big recommendation would be to have the value stated up-front, alongside the big Connect to Facebook button. Like: put all of the /about/ content in a column next to that Facebook button.
Facebook profits from your lack of privacy.

That's why he's an advocate of you giving it up.

It's really as simple as that.
"Everybody" isn't cool.

Cool is taking a hard, miserable lifestyle and through persona making others yearn for it. The starving artist is "cool," Facebook is populist tripe.
I would argue they've received neither.
This is such a powerful, simple concept.

We've discussed this before on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=539900

And there's a whole forum dedicated to this style of product creation / testing on Tim Ferris' site:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/vBulletin/forumdisplay.php?s...

Lots of goodies buried in there.
I'll bet they often wonder what would happen if they give you the literal (and truthful) answer to your greeting "how are you doing?"

I'm sure that would be fun to watch.

(I was born and raised in EU, living in the US currently.)
Hmm... I never thought of it that way. That sports are a weighted random number generator,but the various weights are unknown. And the commentators are discussing theories as to what the weights are, and how derived. (Although the cartoon seems to be saying the narratives are just about the numbers generated, which is more cynical, and frankly less interesting).
Exactly. Poverty is inescapable without discipline. Unfortunately, when you have to work long hours at a low-paying day job and then go home to do your chores, the temptation of relaxation becomes unimaginably sweet unless you've already built a solid foundation of discipline in your youth.
For an illustration how PHP is 'different' from other languages, consider 'implode':

implode — Join array elements with a string

string implode ( string $glue , array $pieces )

Note:

implode() can, for historical reasons, accept its parameters in either order.

WTF! What other library has a major function which doesn't care about the parameter order? It goes against every notion of good design.

http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.implode.php
I never underestimate a startup. I'm sure you guys had anticipated something like this being launched anyway so it's not completely out of the blue.

Good luck!
Official leftist dogma? Man, OK, I'll have to think about that. I'm not advocating a mindless "fight the rich" ideology, I'm not sure why you're getting that from my comment. The bit about preserving the elite wasn't meant in a way to suggest we need to eliminate the rich. I was primarily responding to this part in the parent comment: "Sending them to Harvard isn't going to make a damn bit of difference. Well, MAYBE if you sent one or two, but if you sent enough, they'd just ruin Harvard."

That and him being so hard on the attitudes of the poor, and all the talk of it holding him back. I'm not saying the poor can't also develop good habits (many learn to work really hard for little reward), but they clearly don't develop whatever attitude it is the parent commenter was looking for in order to not be held back. And that is probably largely related to not being around that particular mindset in the first place, because it's more of a mindset of the non-poor.
I don't think Norvig was arguing Chomsky was completely wrong about what he said, more that statistical models are a hell of a lot more important than Chomsky implies.

Looking at the statistics and evidence is of great importance in trying to form models and answers to the "why" questions. Although mimicking a bee dance may not mean we understand it, it does provide a basis for founding and comparing theories.
> There's no future tense in Finnish

Huh, really? How do they express phrases that refer to future events?
I've just started using Facebook after ignoring it all this time.

I've noticed exactly that problem. I commented on some stupid photo my friend posted, and then my mom told me later "Aren't you and Phil supposed to be working?". Good natured of course but it made me realize that actually, Facebook is a really awful place to interact with my friends.
AFAIK Microsoft has never said what in Linux those patents read over, except to its licensees. And those are very probably bound by NDAs anyway.
If you've got Mono around, there's the interactive C# shell there too. (I think it actually works in .NET as well but I haven't tested it lately.)
Any chance that someone could provide an example of what a trade secret might be in this scenario?