skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No.

It uses a semicolon to delimit statements within blocks, but (afaik) placing each statement inside its own <?php ... ?> tag would be valid.

There's also the alternative syntax[1], which is mostly used for templating these days, which looks like

<?php if ($foo): ?>
... html ...
<?php endif; ?>

and is probably the only place other than a ternary operator that might conceivably end a line with a colon.

[1] http://php.net/manual/en/control-structures.alternative-synt...
Try one in Ruby? https://github.com/evantahler/synchzor
A Simpler Explanation of Why Software is Mathematics
The article is assuming that the ToS and privacy statement is meant to be informative. It's not.

If you give people a good overview of what you are doing with their data, a significant portion will get pissed off. If you bore them with legalese, 99.9% of them will just sign, rather than wade through the terms.

It's broken, but it's broken by design.
The $700 Million Yogurt Startup
2011 13" MBP. I'll be doubling the RAM (to 8GB) and adding a 160GB Intel 320 in the next few months. Really wanted a 15" but I decided to be responsible before starting grad school. :)

Systems: Lion. Ubuntu 11.04 through VirtualBox (for patch contribution). Windows 7 via Boot Camp (for Deus Ex and Fallout 2). Used TextMate for a while, now I'm back to Emacs in Terminal.

There are some obvious drawbacks (glossy screen, poor GPU) but I dig the mix of portability and expandability lacking in both a MBA and a 15" MBP.
Is TechCrunch more influential then Mashable?

In my opinion yes. Mashable's audience includes geeks and entrepreneurs but they're branching out to entertainment, music and the internet in general. Meaning much of their audience today are more interested in Lady Gaga than Facebook's valuation, bad analogy as most are these days.

TechCrunch readers are mostly employees of tech companies, startup founders, VC's and any job within this industry. Meaning if you get TechCrunch'd people expect more opportunities to come from the post (also the knock on effect) than just traffic. It really depends what your startup does too. Part of it is your name will be known to all of these influencers. Both of these are vanity uses, really.

TechCrunch will bring you valuable, influential traffic (should do, at least). Mashable will bring you more traffic. If you need early adopters, maybe getting TechCrunch'd is useful but if you need to target a wider mainstream audience then it's probably good to get posted on Mashable.

Saying that TechCrunch is no longer relavant is incorrect but in the end, press is far less important than building a product that users will love.
I'm going to assume you're not trolling:

Fundamental problem with software patents today: usually it is much cheaper to pay than to invalidate bad patents.
Sounds good... the copyright on books should be reduced to that of recordings, I agree. Oh wait, they did they opposite? Why that I wonder?
The three secrets of business analytics (no rocket science here)
Even concerns of immediate profit aside, MSFT will definitely see it as in their interest to have a strong Windows brand in the mobile handsets market.

The reason marketing has been quiet of late is more likely due to the impending release of Mango than any other concerns.
Guide to Selling Used Books Online
Yeah, but the $ is shown as frequently-pressed in the Perl heatmap, so that must not be what he means.
Is it just me? Or does reading articles written about articles written about infighting at a blog just.... not seem interesting at all?
100 Year Starship Solicitation Now Posted
139 (and growing) web entrepreneurs warn Congress about PIPA
Whenever a revolution was successful in ancient China, the winner would burn the historical and cultural records of the loser, to prevent the old order from reorganizing and reviving. I see this as a slower version of that tactic, letting context and criticisms rot away, while your own carefully cultivated "history" becomes all that remains.
Do you like what they have to stay? Something you would suggest differently?
I'm wondering on what you base the claim that grocery shopping sucks for the "vast majority" of shoppers. Honestly, I can't remember a single time in my life someone has complained to me about grocery shopping.
An agile, distributed, and secure strategy for replacing Certificate Authorities
Why must they be bogus patents? Microsoft isn't a patent troll, they are an actual technology company that produces and sells the tangible results of their patents. Even in the reform models some propose where only the inventors and producers can enforce patents, Microsoft would still have that right.
Comodo and DigiNotar cracker says he has access to four CA
Could a distributed model really work?

Could it even be simple enough for non-technical people?
RIP Michael S. Hart: founder of Project Gutenberg
Why would people move all their stuff to the Valley just for YC? Isn't YC a 3 month program?

If you're going to relocate to the Valley for YC and beyond then you should really just sell your furniture and start over. I moved from DC to NY for similar reasons, I found it to be barely cheaper to move my stuff than sell/rebuy, and that was only for a 225-mile move.
How much of it sucks because of grocery shopping in general vs. being in food deserts[1]? I also happen to live in the same place served by Grocery Gateway, but stopped using it years ago because the service fee increased and the selection decreased. On the other hand, I subscribe to the delivery of an organic vegetable basket every two weeks.

Toronto is not a food desert by any means, with lots of fresh fruit and vegetable vendors on nearly every major street (where I live, there's three in close proximity; where I used to live, there were five or six).

That said, I think the concept described here is very useful for a particular class of shopping: that which one would do on the way home from work. Yesterday, I had to pick some stuff up from one of our local stores on the way home (Planet Organic); my wife made the shopping list. If she had been able to make the shopping list directly with Planet Organic and I would have been able to just go pick it up without spending an additional ~25 minutes wandering around the (small) store, I would have been home about 40 minutes earlier than I was.

One of the problems of modern grocery shopping is you're typically doing the shopping for at least a week at a time; Ernie's may allow your customers to shop for food more frequently in smaller batches, getting fresher produce every time. I'd push that concept forward.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
For my app Sprouty (http://getsprouty.com)

1. SEM - Google AdWords

2. Blog on our website blog.getsprouty.com

3. Submit to starup/webapp sites -http://www.submitstartup.com/
AOL reportedly drops TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington for real this time
We had pretty good lawyers, but we got the best advice from a couple of guys who had founded and sold their own companies years before and who still had the scars. In my experience, I thought the lawyers sometimes played the whole exercise like an intellectual tennis match - whereas the guys who had been the same process with their own skin in the game could give much more directly useful advice.

For example, a couple of days before our first round of investment one of these guys told us "you do know you'll be expected to sign personal warranties to the investors" - something our own lawyers had managed to forget to mention (and strictly speaking they might have been right as they were, of course, the company lawyers). NB Personal warranties seem to be (were) a common thing required in the UK - I believe they aren't used in the US.

[Edit: I suspect we were made to do quite a few things that would look crazy to folks from the US - our first round of investment was in '97, hopefully things have got a lot easier in the UK for startups.]
I don't want to sound accusatory, but can anyone give perspective on why this writer left TechCrunch? It sounds like he was at the centre of it all for a while, there.

I think it's important to know why/how he left if we want to make sure the whole article isn't biased.
Carol Bartz: Yahoo "f---ed me over"
4 of my haskell files put into heatmap. One of them is an applicative-functor-style use of attoparsec, which tends to have more punctuation than normal haskell code. Even with the frequent use of :'s, $'s and ()'s, the alphanumeric keystrokes dominate the input.

http://fayr.am/9xkE

You can compare this to the Lorum Ipsum text map and see its only slightly different: http://fayr.am/9yk6

I dunno what that means or what sort of value judgements it drives, but it's pretty different from the other heatmaps.
Look a the Facebook's example shown in the post. Facebook could have replaced that popup with a text broth, but it didn't, and this payed.
The main privacy policy of Facebook is another example. They redesigned it with the help of TRUSTe, when they realized all that people want is to keep control of what they share (and my opinion is cleared in the article).
Furthermore, TRUSTe bases its business on the assumption that well written privacy policies increase conversions, because when people have to provide their credit card (an example), they get scared by a broth-like privacy policy.

Also think about Creative Commons: many people use it and many people rely on it when needing to know how to share content. The world is a better place with Creative Commons, and I think it will be a better place with simpler Privacy Policies and TOS :)
Saif finalizes Wedding Ring for Kareena - Bollywood : 24xindia News in Short
Get Ready for a Lot More Startup Weekend EDUs (& a Lot More Ed-Tech Startups)
Thanks and good luck :)
Betalist doesn't seem to work with latest Safari - submission form is borked.
> Siegler repeats the classic Arrington line that sometimes we criticize our “friends,” but that’s all part of the show. It is, and always has been the veil of legitimacy TechCrunch has traded on. But I know that at my time at TechCrunch, biting friends was only ever ordered, and only when what they were doing was so blatantly bad it needed calling out.

> TechCrunch has never ever once had editorial independence. What Arrington means by independence is he calls the shots. That’s not real independence.

If that's true, TechCrunch basically has zero journalistic integrity and is a puppet rag. Can anyone credible substantiate or dispute this?
2006 Dell Inspiron 9400 with broken screen, using some old Samsung Monitor.

It's not what you own, it's what you make of it.
How does this "respect" account for independent invention?

Many things (telegraph, telephone, Tee Vee, automobiles, Knuth-Morris-Pratt pattern matching) are invented nearly simultaneously by several inventors. If "intellectual property" is property, how can more than 1 person own it?

If you don't account for independent invention, your "respect" is fake, and doesn't take into account the labor of the independent inventor.
Being Human is Good Business
When i launched http://www.mizu-voip.com/ I have spent ~2 days on forums to mention about it, i wrote 2 blog entry and nothing more. Since then (a few years ago) we haven't made any new effort and we have just enough customers.
So my vote is on: useful content
Ask HN: What is a good Java IDE?
I am learning Java and am trying to find a good free Java IDE. Any suggestions?
It's a technical problem. The lists have a weird two-way email/NNTP bridge, and Google Groups is on the NNTP side. Frequently Google Groups falls behind the actual newsgroup, sometimes for several days at a time, e.g. http://bugzil.la/667637

When that happens, you can point an NNTP client (like Thunderbird) at news.mozilla.org to see if your message actually went through.
You need a back button too. I skipped a few slides quickly and now have to reload to go back :-)
They published a story they got from a source, which turned out to be (mostly) wrong.

References:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-ov...

http://blog.last.fm/2009/02/23/techcrunch-are-full-of-shit

http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/22/deny-this-lastfm/

I don't see how that is Arrington's "need to interject himself into the stories"
Yes. Considering that:

1. Coverage similar acts (for example, ones covering the January Tucson shooting) gets removed at the time of the event.

2. The subject will be over-covered in totality elsewhere

I doubt that coverage of 9/11 would meet the "interesting and unique" criteria that HN news items should live up to.
Did you just use Google ads to draw traffic?
Custom built desktop - 27" apple led screen, I7 860 processor over clocked to 3.53GH (water cooled), 16GB ram which dual boots Ubuntu 11.4, Windows 7, OS X Snow Leopard (was originally just a hack-n-tosh)
Brad Feld's blog should be the first thing you read if you get a term sheet (or even better - if you start trying to raise $). He helps explain these things in plain english and what they look like in lawyer terms as well.
The "suggested recipes" idea is the rare kind of upsell that I would love to be offered. I never know what to buy at the grocery store, so I always end up buying the same 20 or so items.
The most impressive thing about Yahoo is that it still exists
This article should be titled "Former TechCrunch writer drafts poorly-written inflammatory post to draw pageviews to his new venture"
Lua doesn't, to my knowledge, advertise itself as the free and open alternative to some evil proprietary oppressor.

Whether Google intentionally positioned Android as such or whether that's just the wishful thinking of its fans is irrelevant now. The expectation for Android is that it will be completely open.

People complain about things when they are disappointed, or when they perceive hypocrisy or broken (real or imagined) promises. There's no absolute scale.
Seems odd that < and > are said to be used more in C than in C++ (templates).
I think flagging should work, but if I had to ban something I'd rather choose the Techcrunch drama stories.
Relevant to which part of the group exactly?

- Those who comment? (These are hopefully looking for good content/topic for which to discuss)

- Those who lurk? (It should not matter for this group, they will just skip over the topics if need be.)

- Those who up vote? (This group in terms of the front page will push it to top and may not necessarily even read the article)

Since the group is actually all of the above, then the long tail new users (1 year and less) [I am assuming it is a long tail, it would be great to have data to back this] will be dominant and no matter what you do once it massively popular (not necessarily on topic) it will remain on the front page.

My personal workaround is to assume the users who signed up earlier in HN maintain a certain scope and flag and vote as appropriate and roll with news.ycombinator.com/classic for the next few days until it dies down.
Chumby's NeTV - data and browser overlay for video
Excellent feedback, thanks for it.

Your "quick stop on the way home from work" is our number one use case. I'm very happy it appeals to you.

Regarding food deserts, Ernie's is a great way of addressing this issue and we are pitching a major regional supermarket chain about it.
There's a bit of a market. I live where Grocery Gateway runs (Toronto). It went well and I even used it periodically for the first few years, but they ran into the problem that their costs (gas) went up dramatically and they had to make a number of changes.

Ultimately, they were bought out by one of the local chains (Longos), who reduced their inventory even further and raised the delivery fee higher, so I haven't shopped with them in years.

The biggest problem with grocery delivery in North America is going to be distance. Toronto is about 43km east-west by about 21km north-south, and the GTA is probably 100km east-west and 50km north-south. It's really hard to cover those distances in a time-effective manner, and refrigeration trucks are expensive to buy/lease and maintain; the 401 running through Toronto is one of the busiest highways in the world. You'd need to have the ability for a truck to be able to pull into any of your chain's stores and restock, and there you might run into problems because (a) not all stores are company stores (they may be franchisees; I'm not sure how common this is with grocery stores) and (b) the stores, even if not franchises, tend to do a lot of market segmentation meaning that you may not have all the same products because the neighbourhood has different needs.
Crossword blog: The Ten Commandments of cryptic ethics
Please Stay Calm thinks location is key to mobile MMOs
Depends on how little. 0.5% is not an unreasonable conversion rate for product purchase. 1-5% is probably good for email signups.

A lot of people click through to pricing pages just to see what it is like. I do that, even when I know I won't be purchasing the product on that visit. Only signups and clicks on "Buy Now" are legit stats for conversion numbers.
I don't doubt you, but I've been doing market research, interviews, surveys and informal outreach for ten months straight on this issue. I assure you, in many markets, this is a serious pain point for consumers.

Not everyone, though -- some people genuinely enjoy the grocery shopping experience. For them, the supermarkets will always be there.
Ask HN: Easiest way to ensure a HD is not readable?
Hi, I have quite a few old hard-drives from 80 MB upwards, that I'd like to throw away. The first three to throw away have been soaking in a bucket of salty water for the last 72 hours. Is this a reasonable way to ensure they are not readable?
SoftwareDevelopmentAttitude
Math:Start with Khan Academy then graduate to AoPs.
Physics:Study Feynman Lectures.There is also a blog :'How to become a theoretical physicist by Gerald T'Hooft
It is also cheaper to pay than to try to invalidate good patents. The assumption that Microsoft's patents regarding Android are bad is an unsupported premise, and given Microsoft's purchase of Danger and Andy Rubin's close association with Android, their claims are meaningfully plausible on the surface.
Ask HN: Issues with ccTLDs?
I'm planning on registering a ccTLD for my next project. Specifically, I'm considering a Burundi (.bi) domain, one of the poorest countries on Earth.

As a result, I'd like to ask HN what concerns there are with registering a ccTLD. I'm looking for common "gotchas" that I might encounter. What's the stability of such domains (.ly seems to have survived a civil war)? Anyone have any experience with Burundi (.bi) in particular?

Just looking for what issues I need to research before I register. Thanks.
Does the machine readable P3P format have any use still?
Can just add some software to Linux? I don't think so - Linus calls the shots... I don't think an OSS project where everybody could contribute would work.
Having only do follow links pointing to your site would set off some alarms at Google Search HQ...
Italy, too. I didn't know that's what we were supposed to do when we went into a supermarket to buy a couple of peaches (or something) on vacation last year.
Ditto. If you pull in multiple plugins or additional frameworks (for some reason, we mix YUI with jquery), the $() notation can become broken, and you have to explicitly call jQuery().
HDMI pass-through was the best feature of the GoogleTV, looks like it's going to be everywhere soon. Hopefully XBMC are on the case as it would certainly make my home theater setup easier if I didn't need to jump between input channels.

(I wonder if you can add this functionality to the Raspberry Pi device via some kind of HDMI to USB input or if it's something that needs to be built in from the start?)

And how does this kind of thing interact with DRM? You're effectively putting a full computer inside the HDMI cable.
No, I'm disagreeing that he does those things (except perhaps for the questionable sources). I think he reports things that happen, and sometimes those things include drama.

Take AngleGate. Was that "injecting drama", or was it reporting an important story?

There are lots of things I don't like about TechCrunch (MG's Apple fanboism, Erick's tendency to see everything as a zero-sum game), but I think the hate isn't constructive and goes way too far.

As for shaky ethics, idiocy - I think that blogging isn't the same as print media, and the ethics are different to what print media's are. I'm not sure Arrington has them right yet, but I do think there should be a way for him to be a player and still report and offer analysis.
The unfortunate part is all the prior art melted.
Totally free Jobs 2011
Ooh, my bad. Though I was actually smarter than that and made gcc (4.6.0, amd64) do the division. The problem is that "int a=0x80000000; printf("%d\n", a/-1);" when compiled without (!) optimization generates a NEG instruction, not an IDIV.

That's not constant folding, that's strength reduction. And it's an optimization that I specifically told gcc not to do. Honestly I'd consider this a compiler bug. And of course NEG does what I expected and produces the 2's complementation negation of 0x8000000 (which is 0x80000000).
I think that it's too complex to work on a scale. Maybe our service will embed it in the future, maybe we'll rethink a new standard (since p3p is a bit outdated) :)
Google buys Zagat
If the ideal name is four letters with no vowels then I'm not sure a few extra letters are that much worse

Even if the entire focus of my app was brevity I'd be very happy with tldrapp.com, tldrhub.com or sorrytldr.com (all available) as names :)
Ask HN: Fantasy Sports Improvement
To my fellow Fantasy football, etc players, what is missing from your online competing experience?
What could be improved?
Option number 2 is what we have planned. We have been working with a warehouse engineer that worked for a failed grocery delivery service. Note: it was delivery that killed them, not the challenges of warehouse management.
Followup: Openness is Overrated http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974037
Ah, I was hoping for my request to be fulfilled. Such is life on Offer HN. Do you have an ETA for availability of the service and a preview of what the pricing will be?
Two's complement negation of N is defined as ~N+1 (try it). ~INT_MIN == ~0x80000000 == 0x7fffffff. 0x7fffffff+1 = 0x80000000.
The Apple Core: Steve Jobs' final project at Apple
These tricks are depressing and bolsters my attitude more toward a profitable yet slower growth start-up, doing without the sleazy investors...

By no means am I saying all are sleazy, but a slower growing startup will not attract the better of the lot.
That's what upsell ads are for ;)

"Why not treat yourself? Instead of Own Brand Generic Turkey Slices why not try Bernard Matthews' delicious Wafer-Thin Turkey Slices, with meat from free-range turkeys, for only 20c?" "Having a BBQ? You bought barbeque sauce - what about some premium BBQ sausages and a chef's hat to grill in style?"
You can still hear the podcast he made when he left here: http://www.blogherald.com/2008/05/05/podcast-20082-an-exclus...

As I recall he left under favorable terms but the relationship between him and Arrington quickly degraded (You can read Gawker's skewed to the negative account of things here: http://gawker.com/5019358/%7CcommentLink%7C)

The irony is Duncan Riley and Marshall Kirkpatrick remain the best proof that the TechCrunch authors and Arrington could move on to a new site and probably do quite well.

The irony
Male Enhancement
What about drug companies. In just a few years Viagra is entering the public domain and that's more valuable (and cost more to create) than every single song produced in 1961 and 2010. The reality is Artists get a ridiculously long period of time to extract value from their work and we would probably be better off if copywrite lasted 20 years than what it's been extended to for the same reasons that patents are so short.