skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't get me wrong -- passenger is great. But it's not set up by default (or even possible to set up often) on most shared hosts. Heroku is cool, but as a freelance developer I've found that it's best for me to not take any responsibility whatsoever for the hosting side of things -- just leads to the most un-fun kind of responsibility down the road.

Also, we're mostly programmers here, but there are a vast number of websites created by designers who have very limited understanding of programming and hosting setups, and all they know is shared hosting, copying files via ftp, and setting up wordpress (and maybe creating a database in phpMyAdmin).

Speaking of wordpress, that reminds me of the #2 reason for PHP's continued popularity despite its arguable sucktitude: applications! See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/php-sucks-but-it-do...
I've been following ClojureScript with mild interest but letting the clojure enthusiasts make the cowpaths. What I haven't seen is how clojurescript significantly improves DOM interaction. I agree that the core problem of client side development is controlling state, which the DOM frustrates. Sproutcore works around this by essentially binding to the DOM and preferably building a nested state machine on top (statecharts) which doesn't solve mutable state but confines it to smaller pieces. Obviously clojurescript deals well with controlling state in memory but the clojurescript sample stuff I've seen has all deferred actual DOM manipulation to Closure. What's the deal?
I agree that forcing Beijing to raise the value of the Yuan is not going to end all our financial woes (as suggested by some politicians) and turn America back into a manufacturing powerhouse. Many companies (recently Nokia) have been moving their factories to Vietnam as wages there are lower than even China.

In a recent interview between Marc Benioff (salesforce.com's CEO) and Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google), Eric said that oftentimes outsourcing is not just because of cheap labor, but rather because America doesn't have the infrastructure or skills necessary to perform the kind of manufacturing necessary in high tech industries (think printed circuit boards, which are done exclusively in Asia nowadays).

Given America's emphasis on education (or lack thereof), I don't see this changing anytime in the near future. Troubling news indeed.
but I don't see you pointing them as viable solutions

Java, C and C++ are viable solutions, due to their popularity.
I found power yoga, where I did to be a bit too soft, I swastia is very good type of yoga to do. Also found something that around here they call pilates-mat, which is pretty close to the yoga that I didi without any of the hippie things.
As the low hanging fruit disappear, the type of veteran knowledge each entrepreneur requires will change.

Right now issues like effective user interface are being solved and are general enough across disciplines/markets that the results can be shared by everyone for everyone. But as internet startups specialize in finer and finer ways, focusing their products and services on smaller and smaller niches, the struggling entrepreneur will require an equally specialized knowledge. Startup towns have been ideal for sharing the knowledge of how to run an internet startup, but when that knowledge becomes more common and less geographically constrained, I'd wager we'll see Sector Specific regions ascending.
That perhaps 'poor' is a relative term?
You do know that reloading is just a configuration option, right?
But bank failures cause a run on other banks. If the entire system collapses the FDIC will be unable to make good on its obligations.
Space hacking with modular furniture
They are lots of countries with debt dominated in foreign currency. Especially developing ones.
Soziale Netzwerke
The iPhone's lesson from India: Don't get ahead of the network
PHP is not that bad? What other popular language is worse?
I have used node and like it, but there is no way it will replace PHP. It is just too easy to drown in callback soup with node.
Exactly. To beat PHP, you have to be as easy to write as static HTML. Even though I have done Ruby, Node.js and ASP.NET projects, I still go back to PHP because of how easy it is to go from 0 to hero without all the fuss.

The closest thing I've found is the serve gem, which lets me launch a web server from my current working directory. It lets me quickly mock something up in ERB, Haml and SASS without messing with Rails or Sinatra. As a complete newbie, with no coding experience, PHP is a much easier hill to climb than Rails or Django, which is Mt Everest by comparison.
I remember writing about this for the BBC (to some British backlash) way back in January 2007, when Harj and I decided to leave London for the Valley.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6355289.stm

Funny - I mention a chance encounter helping us a lot (meeting FB's head of data at a party), and then the vibe being optimistic and ambitious (and we were working out of the then Twitter office in South Park). We did also bump into Ron Conway one morning on the way back from kickboxing.
I agree with you and I think it goes even further than that: get me from hello world to mockup of my final app to my final app. Coding in php isn't pretty, but it's fast, even once you get past that hello world part.

Look at all the questions on stackoverflow from total beginners: they don't understand much of what they are doing yet, but they already have working forms and several pages and, well, results.

Of course, that's also part of what makes people hate php.
China doesn't have to print money to buy US debt; it has massive amounts of foreign currency reserves from the trade imbalance between the countries with which it purchases treasuries. Something to the tune of $1 trillion USD.

So, in essence, the US is printing money to provide China with treasury assets.

EDIT:

Also, I guess you could qualify it as getting free money, but in fact it's money that has already been spent, which is the federal deficit. So what happens when China decides to stop buying that debt? Then we no longer have the money to cover our over-spending. That's the issue. The economic argument lies on whether China will ever consider the US a "bad bet" and stop buying debt (it has, in fact, slowed) or if the two countries are so intertwined as creditor-debtor that both have to continue playing the game in perpetuity.
Fairly certain. WW2 is now 66 years past, and the 20's and 30's are more a cultural memory than anything else. Sure, people get the concept, but they don't have the visceral reaction older people had to it, or the drive to monitor it constantly.

How do you think Germany got suckered into the Euro in the first place?
Ask HN: What are your suggestions for a coder who will start working in USA?
Hi.

I'm a coder with little professional experience in my own country (Turkey) and am going to work for an American company in San Francisco.

What are your suggestions for such a newbie of professional life in US? How can I communicate with American people better?
iOS 5 Means Even More Great Apps in the App Store
Just to clarify, the link you posted is the context, not a duplicate submission. If you post just a link, people will assume my submission is a dupe and flag it.
Posting voting polls in which your favorite party scores well, especially directly before elections, falls under political agitation category. Could we please keep this out of HN?

I'm suprised that party which seeks to seriously impair (if not completely blow) the software industry gets so much applause here.
Some cities have outright banned those kinds of subdivisions.
"The barber shaves only those men in town who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber?"
Microsoft officially kills the Zune
My Project: Credential Management in DBIx::Class
Thinkpads are considered really well-built laptops and typically work very well with Linux. Just double check the video card and wifi/3G cards for compatibility before you order one. Stay within the T and X (and W?) series, some of the new lines Lenovo added aren't very good. The SL series in particular appears to just be rebranded Ideapads.
The Internet is the biggest startup hub of them all. IRC, topic specific mailing lists, places like HN, etc.

99% of all good ideas in computer security were discussed on the cypherpunks list in the 1990s. I'm sure there are or were other subculture groups online equally useful.
The important difference I see in the approach used by backbone is it gets us away from having the server be in control of navigation and UI events. After the initial page load, I'm exchanging simple data as json with the server. It wasn't HTTP I was arguing with, it is having a server side framework managing the UI navigation.

The best way I've heard coffeescript described is as a better syntax for javascript. Though at first this may not seem like a big deal, in my experience it's been a huge deal in the effect it has on how I approach client side code. Now that I can write code I really love on the client, it's greatly lowered the barrier for me to do so.
U.S just love meddeling don't they?

If China raise the value of their currency too quickly they plunge hundreds of millions of people into dire poverty. (We are talking more people than in the entire US). Just so the U.S can reduce its deficit, and generate local jobs growth...

"I want globalism... but only as long as it benefits me, and you play by my rules"
So by looking at a tiny subset of programmers (those that you respect), of a tiny subset of programmers (those that you know), of a tiny subset of programmers (those in SF), you feel you can say something representative about programmers and programming as a whole.
Having received some stiff but fair criticism here for this post, I’ve updated it to clarify and summarize a few points:

1. Apple is not a fashion company. Yet the value of their brand is clearly not just about utility. Apple’s products have been so good, so sexy, so “magical” (thank you Apple marketing), that they inspire feelings of religious ecstasy and fetishistic adoration in their users. This has real value for Apple and they should be highly protective of this phenomenal good will. But, now we are supposed to believe that the tactile titillation we get from fondling EVE in our palms, is to be replaced by the experience of shouting at an IVR? Forgive my skepticism.

2. By “Siri is awesome”, I meant that what we saw yesterday from Apple was awesome. But, it feels like Apple is over-promising. I have used the old Siri off and on for the last year on my iPhone. It’s cute, but is far from “magical”. To match the speed, reliability, and ease-of-use of the other features on the iPhone (and to avoid tarnishing the brand), Apple would have had to improve dramatically upon the previous Siri.

3. There are certain visionary product ideas that have been around for decades and have been repeatedly tried, and yet somehow are never quite good enough for mass adoption. Videoconferencing is one (despite several attempts by Apple). A voice-controlled AI-backed personal assistant is another.

4. If Siri fails (which I think is likely), Apple retreats and moves on. If it is wildly successful, it is disruptive. Mobile devices start to disappear and fade into an invisible ubiquitous computing environment that we talk to. Very cool. But can Apple sustain an advantage in this world? AI, IVRs, natural language processing, search--these are not areas where Apple has a lot of experience, talent, or any kind of lead.
Rules in order to improve singing skill
No, no, we are going to get it from the Germans.
Lua and JS both come to mind. Neither of them are worse than PHP, but they're right around that same level of (un)usability and number of pitfalls.
Update: BofA site outages called 'unprecedented'
i could be wrong, but isn't anand a man's name? http://dribbble.com/charm
https://twitter.com/#!/aprilzero
it's not showing me the correct time either, but it is still amazing.
>'Web apps' have had a fantastically valuable feature nearly never mentioned. If we make big changes in how a Web browser client interacts with a Web server, then we risk getting rid of this fantastically valuable feature and seriously hurting our Web apps and the growth of the Web.

>I believe that if we don't recognize the fantastically valuable feature, then the rush for 'richer' 'user interfaces' (UIs) and 'better' 'user experiences' (UXs) will get rid of this fantastically valuable feature.

>As it is, HTML is so simple it's tough to mess up the UI. With much more powerful client side software tools, it will be tough NOT to mess up the UI.

I agree with where your post is going, but unfortunately we've already made all those mistakes, already lost all the niceties of the web. Our stateless, linked-document viewer is already dead. HTML isn't dirt simple anymore. For years a "web-app" has already has all those undesirable properties. We've made the browser environment complex. The hardest to use applications I have these days are webapps. And when it became complex we didn't give ourselves any of the niceties of native applications, so they're even more of a mess than native ones.
"What's the weather for today?" Who is going to say all of that? That one was just lazy. It should be just "Weather".

Also, why didn't they make you have to say "Computer" before everything? That would have been so awesome.
I agree with you as well. Most people put their machines on standby or hibernate, eliminating most of Chromebook's competitive advantage.

Honestly, I don't see Chromebooks becoming very successful mainly due to price. For the same price of a Chromebook, one can buy a notebook that is much more powerful.

Instead I think Google should sell (or even more ambitiously give out) Chromebooks at a loss to have people use their cloud-based services. (Much like what Amazon is doing with their Kindle Fire). Unfortunately, if they were going to do this, they would have a long time ago.

I think the Chromebook will eventually go the way of the Zune. Late to market and eventually cancelled.
Super interesting hearing the how and why Node came about. Something Ryan admitted to never talking about before.
Show me a website where php is the source of the performance problems and I will show you a website php allowed to reach success/a large audience.

Frankly, unless you are very large scale php is never your bottlenecks, I/O is. And if php become your bottlenecks, you have already won.

(of course you could find exemples of math-heavy calculating sites where this isn't true, but that just means you don't know how to pick the right tool for the job)
Eh, who exactly is getting bailed out? I think you mean loans, which are expected to be paid back in full (and up until very recently, interest was also paid on these "bail outs" making it a profitable venture for the country doing the lending).
The Google code project is still there: https://code.google.com/p/feedparser/

And the software is still in PyPi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/feedparser/
My major concern is that there is a huge difference between the actual usefulness of unix signals, that is mostly limited to killing processes or signaling tiny bits of information (like when you send a signal to reload a configuration), and their semantical complexity.

I must admit it is not trivial to replace this system with another equivalent without changing a lot of how Unix works. For instance signals are used in order to interrupt a program: if you don't make this trappable (like kill -9) then programs can't recover or prepare in any way before quitting. An alternative can be to just allow a signal handler to fire that will never return.

From this point of view you could even just have two signals, with the only goal of stopping processes, one in an hard way (SIGKILL) and one in a soft way (SIGINT), firing a signal handler (but the process will terminate when the handler returns). This way you don't need handling the interruption of syscalls nor writing "safe" signal handlers. As you said signals are interrupts. If the interrupt handler can never return a lot of problems disappeared.

All the other tasks currently performed with signals should use a more general and saner message bus, with select(2)able file-alike interface.
OMG, Julius Caesar had to die too!

There is no need for any language or framework to "die".

If you do not like PHP (or Perl or Python or COBOL or Ruby or Java) just do not use it. There are plenty of alternatives.

If you and your team can be productive with any of these languages, go for it. PHP with modern OO-frameworks, like Yii, can support rapid development of complex web apps just fine. Facebook runs just fine on PHP even without any 3rd party frameworks. The proof is in the development and deployment. The only way you can "kill" a language with so much support is to offer something 10x better or create some exclusive tie-in. Where is that magic offering?

Vote with your feet and dollars and just take it easy. There is no need to fight the imagined oppression.
This was super cool on my laptop. But there was mention of HTML5/CSS3, so I just had to check it out on every mobile device I had handy. Uh oh...

Doesn't work on Android phone (3.2.6, Nexus One). Pendulum only runs a half cycle, hour/minute hands don't move at all and point to incorrect time. Low frame rate overall. Loads in different places on the screen, including half-way off the right edge, depending some factor I haven't yet deduced (zoom level, perhaps?). Doesn't allow any panning or zooming once loaded.

Doesn't work on Windows phone (Mango, LG Optimus Quantum). Pendulum animation doesn't run at all.

Works beautifully on iPad 1 in landscape. In portrait, background shows a visible seam around the clock.

I really like the design, and appreciate the effort. I just find it a little bit kooky that the OP promotes the non-use of Flash, touting instead technologies that are supposed to work much better (or at all) on mobile devices. It's Alanis Morissette Irony.
who is we? what r ur thoughts....email me
I do think there have been significant improvements in Greek public administration since joining the Euro, but miracles would've been needed to get the turnaround that would've been necessary in such a short time. If Greece had had 20 years to gradually get its economy in line with western Europe, I think it was on pace to do so, or at least come close, but the 7 years between it joining the Euro in 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008 weren't really enough, especially since some of the positive structural changes it had made (like the beginnings of pension reform) don't really pay dividends until some time into the future. Joining the Euro did help somewhat in improvements also, because Greek politicians were able to use the "it's not us, Brussels is making us" excuse to push through some of the less popular measures.

The changes, at least from the perspective of some of my Greek relatives, were pretty encouraging up 'til 2008. The notoriously inefficient public administration was still not good, but seemed to be getting better; some things that used to require you running across town to get physical stamps from 10 different offices were being consolidated in common service centers, the number of separate approvals needed for any given document was being reduced, etc. Outright corruption was greatly reduced from the pre-Euro government, and book-cooking seems to have been reduced as well (the vast majority of the dodgy statistics are pre-2001 data). The telecom sector got much better than the old OTE-or-nothing monopoly, leading to many Greeks finally having home internet. The Athens metro finally finished construction (partly spurred by the Olympics). The national sport of tax evasion was slowly being tackled, starting with "soft" shaming measures like publishing maps showing purported average incomes of various wealthy suburbs of Athens, if you took their official tax returns as accurate (all the wealthy suburbs somehow look like low-income ghettoes!), and moving to more hardball measures like doing inventories of yachts in yacht harbors and inquiring with owners who appear not to have ever reported sufficient income to explain owning one. Pensions went through at least the first round of rationalization to remove the most egregious loopholes that allowed some people to retire exceptionally early. Etc.

But basically the scope of changes needed was quite large, and the amount of cushion Greece had, with an already very-large debt, was quite small. Probably someone should've noticed the looming problem earlier and worked out a sensible restructuring and feasible N-year plan before it became a crisis.
Sproutcore has come along way since 1.0, I totally agree. However, the code that I've seen in sproutcore apps just didn't seem as clean, simple and intuitive to me as in backbone apps. What really got me going with backbone is that I could so easily refactor my exist jquery code into a backbone view, and that the models talked to my existing server app (rails) with almost no effort.
Sam Harris on the Future of the Book
Davis is better than Berkeley
>they're basically giving us free money every time they do this.

No exactly. China provides US with goods produced in China in exchange for treasuries printed in the US (goods -> dollars, dollars -> treasuries).
ASP?
Why would Apple drop $n >> 0 per iPad when competitors' screens are relatively abysmal and the iPad would sell out?

Uh, because people will pay more for it?

I would cheerfully fork over $1000 for an iPad with the resolution of the iPhone 4's display.
I think the world has changed drastically in the past few years...

I can provide perspective from working for a startup in SF in 06-07 and a startup in Chicago now... In Chicago noone thinks you're unemployed if you say you work for a startup. That was the case a couple of years ago, but with Groupon and a TON of other companies that just isn't the case. The difference is just that more people are doing startups in SF vs. consultants/bankers/fortune 500 workers... Go to a bar here and girls think it's so damn cool that you are running a startup (apparently girls are obsessed with all things geek - http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20110924/ISSUE03/3092...).

Re: the coffeshop thing- just by chance (ie we didn't know this going in and it is NOT the startup hub area within Chicago), within 3 blocks of FeeFighters office are: 37signals, SproutSocial, Threadless, Crowdspring, and several other startups. I don't see how it helps us significantly to bump into them (though we have helped our neighbors when they've had merchant account issues). Many people think it is a wasteland anywhere not the valley but I have seen that not to be the case here, in New York, and even in Pittsburgh.

So what is the difference between here and there? The largest differentiator I've noticed between the valley and elsewhere is funding. We raised most of our money in Chicago from VC's we really like, but could have raised easier on the west coast. A lot of top VC's prefer to have you close and told us flat out they would fund us if we moved there. We had term sheets dependent on us being in Austin, SF, and LA. I don't think it has had an effect one way or another on our business thus far.

Startups need money, and often flock to where it is. Things are changing all over the place though (Rich people in Chicago all of a sudden want to fund startups, will be interesting to see if that continues post-Groupon IPO)

It also depends on your type of business. If you sell mainly to startups, you should probably be in the valley.
"willingness to help people out" would seem to suggest NYC, LA, and DC will be forever handicapped. NYC seems to be overcoming this through bei great in other ways, but LA/entertainment culture seems the antithesis of startup culture, although both constantly create new things from ideas.

This all makes thhe demise of Boston even more stark and sad. It had every advantage except weather!