skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is possible to write clean, well-factored code in PHP. Just as it is in other languages.

That wasn't how the language was originally intended to be written, and that is not how hordes of people use it. But it can be done. Really.
Thank, good one with the shopping.
Rethinking how people interface with computers
Every piece of gold every minted is still sitting around somewhere, there is no reason tomorrow it won't be back down to $400/oz. Gold is just a measurement of fear and confidence in governments/currencies. If you really think governments/FIAT currencies are going to fail you might as well by SPAM and canned goods because they're going to be a hell of a lot more valuable during a true depression than some shiny metal.
Yeah, the „dreizehntes Monatsgehalt“ (thirteenth monthly salary) is common in Germany, too. Many more than half of all employees in Germany get it. It’s a Christmas bonus, usually about equal to one monthly salary. It’s nothing special.

If I know my Griswold correctly, Christmas bonuses don’t seem to be too uncommon in the US as well.
"I get what you're saying, but I really don't think it's fair to ask people to do work on their own time -- for free -- in order to be considered for a job."

Bravo.

I can't stand when companies do this. Whether it's design or development, it's basically spec work. It's one thing if it's a general question, but if they ask you to do work related to their service, why not just pay them for a few hours or a few days?
What I'm saying is all opinion, of course -- not tested. But my gut reaction is that giving students ownership over sign-up (as long as the process is very simple) is less obtrusive than having automatic profiles. Anyhow, the real test is what would draw them to revisit the network. Informing them that a profile exists might draw them to the site, but tests nothing about how valuable the site would truly be.
Its called a personal anecdote. There is plenty of mounting empirical evidence of how bad groupon is, thus I dont feel I need to make a strong case on my personal opinion.

While I appreciate articles and analysis of their filings, revenue etc... I did not require it to make a gut feel for what was really going on.

Groupon has done an amazing job at what they do - even though history will tell how far they really go, I am free to express my opinion in whatever form that may take, however, and I have never felt they were seriously viable in the same way other tech giants of this era are. They are simply a coupon site which, based on direct information from business owners I know, requires said businesses to sell at a loss in the name of brand recognition/volume that groupon claims to bring - but has thus far fallen short of delivering the marketed value of their service.
5 Books That Help to Bring Ideas to Life
He didn't bring Heritage into it. He sourced a fact to a Heritage report, which turned out to be (surprise!) a fact. Please just stop talking about Heritage. An HN survival skill that has served me in good stead: just say "I was wrong, sorry." People will even upvote you for saying it, because it's so rare for a nerd to say it. You will be amazed how many pointless arguments those words get you out of.
Http://www.Facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002016559567&ref=pymk#
Here are the tools I find indispensable as a sys admin:

- screen for accessing servers

- lshw for seeing Linux server hardware config

- cfengine for automating my system administration

- atop as an advanced top

http://www.atoptool.nl/downloadatop.php

atop uses color to show when a subsystem goes over warn/critical threshold. it can be run in present time, or can be used to go back in time and "play back the tape".
The "sudden and deliberate demographic shift", also known as white flight, may indeed have happened because whites were and are irrationally racist. This is certainly the conventional wisdom. And by the end, there was surely no dearth of white racists, especially among the Polish community after the confrontation with Coleman Young.

But is it legitimate for people to state that there may be other factors as well, in addition to pure white racism? Or should they be verbally assaulted and shunned for expressing the view that history is complex?

EDIT: For example, incidents like this may have played a role in promoting white flight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2NEzu8cQgs&t=0m55s
Great, maybe then you can also enlighten me on what's so deeply wrong with the title and dedication page? It can't be about it being the only content of the sample, the main content in there is the introduction to the book.
For the record: we (MongoDB) have a policy of not posting official Benchmarks. Could you clarify what benchmarks you are referring to that were posted and "dishonest"?

The only benchmarks we have ever done have been for internal testing comparisons between different versions.

The "Benchmarks" page on our site clarifies this policy: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Benchmarks

Previously there were several third party benchmarks on this page, which we recently took down to stand firmer on our benchmark policy. In the interest of full disclosure however, you may examine the page history to verify that we have always clarified these as unaffiliated third party sourced.
It’s not interesting, it’s completely speculative and might as well be numerology.
It speeds up about linearly; 5 more machines will make it run about 5 times as fast, etc. For incredibly fast suites, it isn't very helpful, because the startup and sync times across machines outweigh the benefits.

At causes, our tests run in about 20 minutes on 1 machine, and 4 minutes with buffet and 5.
Chill Launches Video Version of Turntable.fm
While this is cool, I must admin it's a bit "worse is better" approach. Wouldn't be cooler just to unbloat existing test tools?
Politicians, Innovation & The Paradox Of Job Creation
Google Parcel Service? Search giant patents shipping notifications
I don't think anyone had that feeling when the deal fell through. Many people were surprised Google was interested in the first place. Google had to consider the deal, after all Groupon was buying shit tons of advertising on Google at the time.

If you're company realizes a certain scale on the internet (i.e. a billion dollar valuation) there is a good chance the deal is going to get looked at by all the big consumer tech firms.

Groupon walked in to the negotiations with a publicly speculated valuation of 1B, and after the deal fell through they were being talked about somewhere greater than 5B, and got an extra investment from DST. Seems like negotiating with Google worked out well for them in that respect.

Notice how Andrew Mason never answers the question publicly about why they 'walked away' from Google.
I agree. I think the problem is Twitter already is a "news feed", it's user provided though. In 99% of cases I don't care if x follows y, whereas on Facebook if x is now friends with y "Hey, I might know Y! Oh, they're someone from high school I haven't spoken to for years!".

It feels unnecessary and irrelevant to Twitter.
No, it's not illegitimate to state that. Racism was a small factor. There was virulent racism in Chicago as well. The big reason is economics.

The viewpoint that will (rightly) get you shunned is the one that says "black people" were a factor (or, worse, "an international Jewish conspiracy to take over American culture").
Five Actionable Tips on Productivity
Honest question - why do more sites need chat? Is it really something people are dying to do? I find directly chatting rather awkward when I'm not fully engaged with the person to begin with. I feel like most people start with delayed communication (message boards, email, etc) and work towards quicker means of communication (chat, video, phone, etc) only when warranted.
Agreed - it's been great. As soon as we added it we couldn't believe the pent up conversations that began to take place. Now we're actually hiring some community managers in large part to manage and hang out in the chat rooms.
too hot? I wouldv'e committed a small crime for heat. I came in to my office in July 2007 and it was 62f. It warmed up to about 66 after I ran some space heaters. (this was in the US, not the southern hemisphere!) :)
That seems like a really complicated narrative for the two parties to fabricate. Isn't it just more likely that Groupon thought they were worth more than Google was willing to pay?
Read The Slaughter of Cities by E. Michael Jones. I've referenced it a couple of times in this thread. The migration of blacks into Detroit and other major American cities isn't something that simply happened without a cause. That's the point behind the questions that I was asking in the thread to which you are responding.

Jones' thesis is that the Brahmin WASPs of the Northeast feared a Catholic takeover of the United States through their high birthrates. They also didn't like the fact that ethnic-dominated unions could negotiate such high wages for their workers. They wanted to break up the cohesiveness of those ethnic neighborhoods and make the children go to secular public schools instead of Catholic schools.

So, they influenced former sharecropper blacks to move north with the enticement of better jobs. The sudden population increase to cities that already suffered from post-WWII housing shortages did not bode well for good neighborly relations. Et cetera.

Most of the serious commentary that I've read of this book denounces it as a conspiracy theory. Even asking the preliminary questions needed to flesh out the thesis results in name-calling. People see the conversation turn to race and lose it. Spell things out for them and they still lose it.
Many of the extinctions we see today are erasing genetic sequences that will take far more than another 4 billion years to develop again the natural way.

I suspect that the cost incurred by changes in the weather itself is irrelevant compared to these losses.
Hello, you should probably familiarize yourself with this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You failed to reasonably address any of jsz0's points (using a weak anecdote as your only evidence). You then proceed to unnecessarily use all caps to accentuate 'never' and go on to say jsz0 is a 'bad user' which is meaningless. You end with a whiny snarky remark about Apple's walled gardens. In addition to all this you typed I'm, you're, and you'll incorrectly while not capitalizing any of your sentences.

You seem to be new here, but please refrain from commenting until you can match the quality of the others you see on the site. Your comment in its current state adds nothing to the discussion and is poorly written.

Thanks.
I agree. I think the mainstream environmental movement would get more traction if they reframed their position to focus on the benefits to humanity (of protecting the environment) rather than talking so much about the sacrifices humanity must endured to "save the environment."

Compare with VHEMT, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement:
http://www.vhemt.org/
<quote>

I’m a 17 year old male, 140-150 pounds and 6 feet tall. Lately I’ve been experience pains and what appear to be some kind of mass in my RIGHT breast/nipple area. It hurts A LOT when I put pressure on it, or if I’m playing guitar and the body of the guitar presses against it. I’ve had an inverted nipple (I think that’s what it is?) as long as I can remember on my LEFT breast.

I’ve checked several websites on the internet and I’m not sure what to believe. I was wondering if someone could offer some advice before I go see a doctor?

</quote>

---

And the only right answer to this question is... right!... "go see a doctor." Blind leading a blind is rarely a good thing, and it is an especially bad idea when it is concerned with one's health.
Whites committed many racist atrocities to preserve white majority rule. Those who did are rightly condemned today.

However, do you believe it was legitimate for Nelson Mandela's wife and the ANC to engage in necklacing of those who opposed black majority rule in South Africa?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing

Or for Coleman Young to literally raze Poletown?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poletown
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922498,00.h...

Some believe it takes two hands to clap.
This is really cool, and exactly what I need.

Consider me signed up.
The core of C is small enough that you can fit it in your head.

PHP has so many functions that it's almost impossible to write it without googling php.net, etc.

Not that this matters so much, Google is fast and omnipresent, but in that sense they are definitively not alike.
I've just bought my first e-books with this week's Pragmatic Programmer 40% sale ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861479 ). I'm now interested in buying an e-reader. Still hesitating between Kindle, Nook, iPad, or an Android tablet...

This might just tip the scale toward the Kindle DX.
If you are in the Portland or Denver areas, check out http://d-dish.com/ for both personal and catering needs.
If you guys are interesting in learning vim more, checkout vimcasts.org. Drew Neil does some really nice walkthroughs that are extremely helpful for beginner and intermediate vim users.
Mine's hacked, which I did via one of the simple flash-bombs. I've got a few homebrew games, but the most fun I've had is playing old point & clicks via ScummVM.
I think good programmer should aim to know both SQL & NoSQL.

The backend should be chosen because of the data characteristics, not because of someone's experience..
Close but not exactly. My product takes the layers concept (also known as groups, circles or tribes) a bit more seriously. Instead of using layers as a way to organize people, what I've developed will place users into distinct categories with certain "rights" automatically.

Sorry I can't be less vague but think about it as a "citizenship" of sorts. Once born in a country, you'll always be of that country no matter how much you change your labels. Groups and circles simply haven't done what people desire for their social tools. Hope that makes sense...
Ex-Sun Employees Launch Cloud SaaS, Gosling on Board
Html5-boilerplate issues #28: script loading solution
Then you'd be even more suspicious if a carrier OTA popped up on your phone.
Escapadas fin de semana relax
I missed that entirely - I saw the top of the dedication page and assumed it was all dedication page, like most books. I think most people will do the same. That intro, though, is a tell, not a show. I want to sample some pages further into the book to see if the promises made in the intro are fulfilled.
Little Exercise, Big Effects: Reversing Aging
When I said that what I did was unwarranted, that was me saying I was wrong. I don't know how much more prostrate you want me to be.
Would it be useful to remove the tabs so you can scan them all at once? I've seen blogs that have both Disqus and FB displayed together.
Stopped reading when I came to:

"Sometimes, I don’t even bother editing the files locally and then transferring them: I ssh to my server and modify the files live."
The biggest problem with PHP isn't anything built into the language itself, but rather the culture of mediocrity/naivety surrounding it.

As at least one other commenter has said, there are disciplined and skilled PHP programmers. If only they were the majority! Sadly, for the PHP ecosystem, a few good apples don't unspoil the bunch.

Here are a few ways PHP's bad culture manifests itself.

1. Cargo culting

The web is filled with questionable recipes for doing this or that in PHP. I've observed a strong tendency of PHP programmers to approach every possible addition of functionality like this: 1) Google search; 2) find source code that supposedly does what's needed; 3) paste that source code in without understanding it or thoughtfully evaluating its appropriateness.

I'm all for learning by reading other people's code. I'm even OK with pasting code when you understand it fully. But cargo culting is bad, and it seems rampant in the PHP world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

2. Lack of architecture

PHP applications often lack a coherent architecture. It's a typical mistake of new programmers--one that I made many times--to think just enough about architecture to accomplish the task immediately at hand. Naturally, this comes back to bite you when you want to extend your code's capabilities. I see this all the time in PHP applications.

Consider Wordpress. Its API is a random, ad-hoc mess of global functions. Things that should logically be exposed as objects aren't (like posts, for example). The API for retrieving content is different depending on whether you're in the mysterious "Loop" or not. And so on. A more detailed analysis of the lack of architecture in Wordpress can be found here:

http://www.phpvs.net/2009/12/08/an-exercise-in-wordpress-int...

3. Frankenstein coding

Similar to cargo culting, Frankenstein coding is when you cobble together an application from a bunch of off-the-shelf plugins or modules. This is a common practice in the Drupal world specifically, but it applies to a greater or lesser extent in much of the PHP ecosystem.

There are two major problems with this approach. First, the chunks of functionality you download are not likely to match your needs perfectly, so you're forced to make due with software that's almost what you want. Second, the code quality of these modules is often abysmal, and that means security flaws, among other problems.

Sadly, many PHP developers seem perfectly content with this. Even worse, they do this for clients, who get a semi-functional end product at bargain basement prices. That practice gives me a cheap, sleezy vibe, and it doesn't help my impression of the overall PHP ecosystem.

The language itself is so-so in my opinion--not good enough to be my go-to language, but not so terrible I'd refuse to work with it. But somehow, probably due to the language's accessibility, the PHP ecosystem seems to have been swamped by coders who know just enough to get by. And that's my real problem with PHP.
You can locally heat up a cube. There isn't really an effective cooling substitute that's localized.

I would have killed for 62F. My house is 68F year round (I work at home now). (My bedroom is probably 64-66 or so).
Looks like we were talking about two different things. wccrawford was talking about the preview, while we were referring to the "sample"... <sigh>.
So, to clarify, my point... Having the client request only what it needs is a valid optimisation, but having the server send only what is needed for a given request can give the same benefit in a different way.

It necessarily depends on the details of the situation, but it naively seems that it should be possible to not have users download 2MB of JavaScript if they aren't going to use it by rearchitecting the data or doing some server work, instead of sending them different JavaScript to manage that from the client. Perhaps even more naively, if this is done correctly it will reduce burden on both the client and the server instead of just the server (provided the cost of the loader is actually mitigated by the savings).

With that in mind it can make sense regardless of whether you favour server or client bound implementations.
FTC Focuses Probe on Android, Web Search
Making OAuth Implementation Simple
Have you tried https://www.paydivvy.com/ ?
Interesting.

However,

It also features deep integration with Facebook, allowing you to share full songs with friends, even if they don't have the extension.

Facebook? Not interested. Now, g+ integration would be nice.
Amazingly, it goes one further — reloading any pages that were already open before the Chrome Frame installer ran is sufficient to get the CF goodness on those pages!
Gizmodo Officially Not Being Charged in iPhone 4 Case
My brother has more experience in the business and has been in the area far more than me. He called them drug dealers. I trust his judgement on the matter.

The smell of marijuana was, like I said, an added tell.

EDIT: grammar
I think this article looking at the two major financial drops as independent events is mis-guided.

The article states that the 2008 financial collapse was caused from the bottom-up, starting with mortgage lending.

It then goes on to state that the current drop is a result of 'Governments around the world, unable to stimulate their economies and get their houses in order, have gradually lost the trust of the business and financial communities.'

But the reason the governments were trying to stimulate their economies was as a result of the 2008 recession. Wasn't most of the spending and debt which accumulated a result of the stimulation packages aimed at resolving the 2008 drops?
Thanks. I updated the post and credited you. I posted this example (a Vevo video):

curl -s https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/eAfyFTzZDMM?v=2 | xmllint --format - | grep media:restriction

shows:

<media:restriction type="country" relationship="allow">BD BE BF BG BA BB WF BM BN BO BH BI BJ BT JM BW WS BR BS BY BZ RU RW RS TL RE TM TJ RO TK GW GU GT GR GQ GP GY GF GE GD GB GA SV GN GM GL GI GH OM TN IL JO HR HT HU HK HN VE PR PS PW PT PY IQ PA PF PG PE PK PN PL PM ZM EH EE EG ZA EC IT VN SB ET SO ZW SA ES ER ME MD MG MA MC UZ MM ML MO MN MH MK MU MT MW MV MQ MP MS MR UG MY MX VU FR SH FI FJ FK FM FO NI NL NO NA NC NE NG NP NR NU CK CI CH CO CN CM CL CA CG CF CD CZ CY CR CV CU SZ SY KG KE SR KI KH KN KM ST SK KR SI KP KW SN SM SL SC KZ KY SG SE SD DO DM DJ DK VG YE DZ US UY YT LB LC LA TV TW TT TR LK LI LV TO LT LU LR LS TF TG TD TC LY VA VC AE AD AG AF AI IS IR AM AL AO AN AQ AR AU AT IO IN TZ AZ IE UA QA MZ</media:restriction>
Welcome to HN. Don’t worry about any downvotes to your first comment, but do keep in mind we tend to discourage comments that don't add anything — sometimes even if they are kind and positive, as your was. Check out the FAQ for more guidelines.
And it only took them what? 24 years? The not-quite-maximize buttons were introduced on System 5. I may be wrong, but I believe NeXT did that right.
You're assuming that government spending is helping. What if it's the problem? To illustrate, imagine a hypothetical country where 90% of the working population is employed by the government to enforce needless bureaucratic rules on the 10% of the population that is actually engaged in producing goods and services people actually want. Because of the taxes needed to fund the 90% and the onerous business environment, the country is in a recession. What is the solution? (Hint, it's not to maintain government spending.)

A big government is a "luxury" that poor economies can't afford. This is an old problem. Over two hundred years ago, Jefferson complained that the King of England "has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."
> Bill splitting is the service I want.

One of my phone app ideas (inspired by demoing Word Lens' real-time video translator over lunch) is a bill-splitting app that uses OCR:

1. Photograph the receipt.

2. OCR the items ordered.

3. User clicks the items to group each person's order. Or even cooler: fling items to the side or corner of the phone screen nearest that person (like a card dealer).

4. The app calculates each item groups' total with tax and tip.

Unfortunately, the market for bill-splitting or tip-calculating apps is probably pretty crowded. <:\

EDIT: I see now that an iPhone app that uses OCR to analyze your receipt already exists, though the reviews say the OCR sucks: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bill-split-ocr/id347826835
Geometric proof that angle trisection by straightedge and compass is impossible