skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really really think this is asking the wrong question. Sure PHP beat perl at its own game, and really was the master of the CGI style web. But the thing is, that really isn't where the world is anymore. Sure, there is a place for building pages from templates, particularly in piecing together custom splash pages and whatnot, or xml feeds, but honestly, the CGI style web is just going away.

Look at what everyone is doing right now: make an app in javascript+html5+css, serve those static files, and feed the app with json. Save bandwidth, scale easier, and just have better control of the display by manipulating the display directly.

tl;dr - Nothing will replace PHP, because no one is making tools for that case (file-oriented-web) anymore.
While I don't agree that it's good. It is definitely a huge reason why beginners love PHP. For learning how to code you can't beat how easy it is to put PHP on a server.

Also things like, file_get_contents() is stupid simple. It's often abused but you can put anything in that and get something back. Even a URL. Who care's if every once in a while you get a 500, or 404. Most of the time it works just fine.

PHP is going to be really hard to replace. I think your better off looking to graduate PHP developers to something else.
Sean Parker's Email to Daniek Ek of Spotify
Waddle launches to make photo sharing a bit more personal
Yes, but at least proportional voting isn't as bad as first-past-the-post in this regard.
I also have scoliosis. Chiropractic adjustments correct my alignment and balance; I walk taller, can stand for longer, and feel less pain after an adjustment.
Nope, games are written in C++ just like you described it.
Ask HN: Review my startup
Check it out at: http://www.oneall.com

oneall is a bootstrapped startup located in France and provides ready-made plugins and a single API access to more than 20 social networks.

We recently launched our open beta and would love your feedback on the idea and its direction!

Claude
I've come to expect hackery from this guys blog.

The truth is that for professional, skilled developers, mastering their Nth language is an increasingly smaller investment compared to their first.

But for people north of HTML coders and south of professionals, they have a lot invested in the scripting skills they've developed and nobody is interested in seeing the value of their investment diminish for a reason like this.

People here always tout PHP's installed-base as a big "plus" for the language. But I think more than that is the mindshare.
Play Minecraft with your friends
GitHub for the project: https://github.com/symkat/DBIx-Class-Schema-Config/
No, I think it is in fact a Big Deal (tm). The old model was about involving the server in the behavior of the page. The new model is about turning the web into a classic client-server architecture, replacing the desktop executable with a javascript client.

The way I write web apps these days is to have static javascript code, that contacts a web service to fetch its settings, and to load the data to be edited. Then it performs all editing client-side, without contacting the server. When it's done, a single save() method call to the server persists the data. That the communication occurs across HTTP is almost irrelevant.

That's eerily familiar to the desktop apps I've implemented. In a sense, it's a paradigm shift back to the way stuff used to be built, except there is no dll hell, because the client always has the latest version of your "executable".
Nobody grasps the complexities of financial markets. Everyone is just along for the ride. If anyone grasped the complexities, they would either be able to solve the current mess or be able to tell it is unsolvable. Instead, everyone is handwaving, guessing and trying whatever ridiculous thing they can to keep the system from collapsing.

There are a few that have found how to profit from what's going on: not because they understand how the system in general works, but because they understand some minor parts a bit better than others.
Dharmesh, thank you for the exceptional post. I find this post to the hit the nail on the head and wish I had this information earlier on in the process. I agree with every single one of your points based on my own experience. I suppose some could argue you set the bar high for the minimum requirements, but I can already tell you that in a short amount of time, I've had problems because former co-founders lacked some of the essential ingredients you mentioned, especially those who are committed to an idea and not the company or those who think much more than they do.

I think the African proverb is perfect too. I couldn't have said it better. Despite being an extrovert, I've always preferred doing it alone, mainly because I was weary that people wouldn't be as committed or work as hard as I did on a given idea. But like the proverb says, if you want to go far, go together, and I know how that going together is extremely useful and fun, especially for a startup!
Samsung Wave Hard Reset/Factory Reset
>> Plan9 keeps being mentioned, but do regular users
understand it? (Is there a "this is why we do things,
and this is why that's good" written for people who
haven't written their own compiler?)

> Yes, you can start with the main Plan 9 paper:
http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/9

So, he asks about regular, ipad-toting, angry-birds-playing, how-do-I-turn-on-my-printer users and you link to a technical paper containing buzzwords such as "compilers", "internet gateways", "distributed systems", "POSIX", and "remote procedure calls". Do you see the problem with this?
Facebook now as big as the entire Internet was in 2004
I had the pleasure of discussing all this with Yehuda last week, but the reason why Backbone doesn't try to do full keypath-KVO-with-template-binding-and-ArrayControllers etc. isn't because the end goal is so very different, but rather because there's a difference of approach in how fine grained your Views are with respect to the DOM.

In SproutCore 2, you'll have very specific DOM elements and attributes observing very specific properties of JS objects. Here's a flavor of the Handlebars.js that connects a view to models:

{{#collection contentBinding="Todos.todosController"
tagName="ul" itemClassBinding="content.isDone"}}

{{view SC.Checkbox titleBinding="content.title"
valueBinding="content.isDone"}}

Whereas in Backbone, you'll tend to allow coarser grained views -- logical chunks of UI and DOM -- to update all together, whenever the underlying model changes. Here's a flavor of the view code that connects to models:

this.model.bind("change", this.render);

this.notes.bind("add", this.addNote);

The end result of both is that you'll be able to add an object to an array, and the DOM will update without any further input. But the style in which you get there is different.
Tiny typo: "from being the business" should probably be "from being in the business".
I didn't mean to suggest that no one realized it was helpful to be surrounded by a lot of people working on the same things. I've written about it a couple times myself. The surprises for me were in the details. E.g. that with startups, people are more willing to help out their peers than in more zero sum fields, and that you need that extra margin of help because startups fail by default.
Sean Parker Emails Spotify CEO Daniel Ek
You can do this if you have APC (and you should) installed and running. You can even nuke all the PHP files and APC will still serve the cache until you restart apache/nginx/php-fpm/whatevs.
this argument, seriously?

have you ever seen flash run well on ARM? are you really comparing casual flash games that you have to pay for to casual obj-C sold through the appstore, a store that basically pays for itself and doesn't make much money?

and i love how you can just quash anything that demonstrates how HTML5, a nascent technology, is moving toward par with flash while not sending fans into overdrive and draining my battery. all to keep an ailing steve jobs happy.

so tell me, what's the point your post?

get over your uppity, unimpressed self.
why does he compare PHP to rails ? the latter is a framework, not a language. PHP has excellent frameworks as well, Symfony 2.0 for example is awesome.
Suckered? Up until recently the switch to the Euro has been good for Germany.
I'm curious why you think there has been a "demise of Boston". Is it really no longer a first-class "startup hub"? NYC gets more hype these days but it seems like both are great places to do a startup.
AAPL today has basically re-converged with the Dow. It was tracking similarly on Monday, outpaced then fell with the announcement, and has been slowly recovering today. Hope everyone bought at $355. :)
Get me from 0 to "Hello, World" as fast as you can. That's how you build the next PHP.

I understand why that is, but I can't help but think that it's optimizing for an edge case instead of the whole operation. I'm willing to invest a little bit longer to get to "Hello World" on day one if it means a lot less pain for every day to follow.
Wow, I didn't know you could buy an unlocked 3GS now right from apple. $375 is really not bad at all, either. T-Mobile's new phones are going to be $250 _on contract_. $125 more for an older iPhone on a dirt-cheap ($30/month) plan? Not too shabby.
Why Siri just might work
Throbbing pain from the extraction site
Parse Introduces Future Pricing
Attempted to clarify with an edit.
iPad is a new product line and need to reach mass appeal. Apple is betting a lot on a form factor that has repeatedly failed. They need to sell a high volume of units, not sell a few high end units.

Maybe in a few years there will be an 'iPad Pro' with a higher power processor, better screen, etc. But it seems unlikely in the short term.

Also a retina display on an iPad priced at 1000$ or so would probably have similar profit to the current iPads. So even less motivation.
Interesting to get there a peek at the inner workings. But his arguments are very "this is great because ....Napster!" alike. He seems to be holding on to the memories his "baby" a little bit too much for my taste.
An interesting question is why 'physical' hubs work and why all those elements can't be captured yet online?

One key element to debate is randomness - pg does a good job I think in describing the value of randomness in terms of random meetings, shower thoughts - etc - There are many other examples of this process at work - e.g., in management/strategy: http://www.management.wharton.upenn.edu/siggelkow/pdfs/SOart...

It bears the question - what is this valued randomness in terms of social interactions? And how can we get it in online? Definitely not chatrulette :)

But not "hackernews" type of places either - because in here we are interacting in a very structured manner - on specific topics one chooses, etc - so it's not random - we are directing our thoughts, so we are not randomly exploring things.

How can we find that great balance that physical hubs have? Going to pick up dry cleaning you find a random guy and you say hi - because you have nothing better to do you end up chatting with the guy and discovering he's Sean Parker. But that won't happen online. You just switch to another browser window that is more interesting - no need for randomness.

Is the internet killing randomness? - Or better yet: how can we come up with something that gives that value to people in a way that is not chatrullette?? It should be random but within your comfort zone, in a way that is casual and not sought after (which is uncool and weird).

I wonder what you guys think.
major changes to core server infrastructure approved at large bureaucratic institutions

It sounds like you've already lost.
What about adding extra features at extra price? DLC add-ons if you will. Someone suggested Freshbooks integration, offer that or whatever other premium feature at an extra $X a month.

Alternatively, I might think blogging might help. High quality posts that relate to your customers and then you can always send it to them in newsletters or something. That way tangential topics like basic accounting or social network marketing can find their way into their hands. No money in this route, but it might help them in some way.
PG, do you want me to close http://api.ihackernews.com ?
I would pass the test.

I wish companies hired based on tests not experience/education, so I would easily get that 100k job. Companies are full of shit.
Honestly, why does 2 to 4 times slower mean anything? Why can't you cache? or write that really performance intensive part of the app in something else?

There aren't any numbers to back the idea that 2 to 4X performance means something. It's pretty easy to spend $5-10K per month on a single dev, thats a fair bit of hosting.

If the concern is speed of page rendering go with .NET, the JVM, or C++ it's much faster than rails or PHP will ever be. The trick is to use RAD/MVP to get you to that twitter like world of hurt. Then you rewrite in a faster language once you know what your product is like.
You are right that I/O is usually the first bottleneck. I assure you that being CPU bound is no picnic, not least because most optimization knowledge and experience out there relates to I/O. :)

Even if you are not CPU bound, HipHop is steadily adding grown-up features to the language that make it quite nice to use, functions like mysql_connect_with_db() which save a database round-trip, and extensions like xhprof which will tell you what is actually slow.
It's always interesting to hear the process of how something was created. Great video.
I think you nailed the effect, just have to combine the two: both forms of inflation could occur. First through prices as consumer goods become more expensive, then later through increased wages to compensate as well as capture some of the excess returns capital earns. In the textbook version, we'd end up in the same spot.
Overall view. BOKMEANSSHIT
I'd love to add this type of tech to our online alarm clock site (http://sleep.fm). Though and correct me if Im wrong - HTML5 doesn't have a cross compatible audio solution available; one as solid as flash?
This seems a very important question. It's hard to simulate the randomness of the physical world, but it would be extremely useful to be able to do it.

One of the problems is that computer screens are just so small. If displays (or whatever replaces them) were bigger, what they were displaying could be more ambient. There wouldn't have to be as much purpose.

On the other hand, maybe the difficulty of physically getting to a place is an important filter.
When I read

>> the critical thing Perl was lacking was PHP's wonderfully flexible "associative arrays"

I grabbed my copy of "Learning Perl" from 1997. Chapter 5's topic? Hashes.
I grew up in NC, lived in upstate NY and NYC, then Hawaii, and now the Bay Area. From my initial observations there are two things that set Silicon Valley apart:

1) Huge risk tolerance, and of a different sort than Wall St. The risk model of the startup ecosystem is different than for the banking system., in fact it's the inverse. Wall St. tends to chase returns (especially in trading, which has become a huge part of their revenues), and quarterly performance evaluations are even structured around that. But chasing ever larger returns based on leverage and debt entails ever more risk, exposing you to the possibility of catastrophic, systemic loss. The higher the return, the more exposure to company-ending loss.

In the startup world, many small bets are spread across many companies, 90% fail, 9% succeed somewhat, and perhaps 1% hit it big. But the ROI from that 1% more than makes up for all the small losses of the 90%.

Graphing the startup ecosystem ROI on chart would look like a line with a negative slope, punctuated by positive spikes. Whereas graphing the banking system's revenue would be inverse - a positive slope, punctuated by negative loss spikes.

Silicon Valley seems more comfortable with and tolerant of the periods of negative ROI than any other culture I've observed, supremely confident that the positive spikes do happen, and that you don't even have to guess exactly where they'll come from as long as you play the odds and spread your bets. It's just an article of faith here.

2) Innovation pervades everything, from academia, tech, and business, to social, even spiritual. By way of example, one of the first people I met here was a guy studying to be a Shamman. Anywhere else in the US, especially the east coast, such a thing might raise eyebrows, but here it's just par for the course - unbounded experimentation with anything and everything. For another example, is there anywhere else in the US that something like Burning Man could have become what it has? Doubt it. Innovation is universal here, not applied in some domains (tech) but stymied in others (social, spiritual), it's applied everywhere.

Those two also seem to reinforce each other. Risk tolerance begets innovation begets success begets risk tolerance begets innovation begets ...

Plenty of places have some degree of innovation, but I'm not sure there's anywhere it pervades culture to the extent it does here. That's one more big thing other startup hubs are up against.
Outside biotech, it has gone from number 1 to a solid number 2 to mid-list. Seattle, Austin, Portland, NYC, and Boulder are all above it for many types of startups -- Boston has some legacy VCs, great but declining universities, and big city air travel and other infrastructure, but it is getting weaker by the day as a place to base a startup.

I don't really have time to put together statistical backing for my argument, but based on talking to a bunch of new startups in security tech, it is definitely an anti Boston trend.
"Brazil is probably no more corrupt than other countries of similar size and wealth. It came out better than China and India and a long way ahead of Russia in the latest index of perceptions of corruption compiled by Transparency International, a German NGO. Brazil is blessed with competitive and aggressive media and tenacious institutions that investigate such scandals, revolving around the public-prosecutor’s office, a semi-autonomous part of the federal government and its local equivalents. This scrutiny has a price: the government thinks that another watchdog, the audit tribunal, is holding up spending on infrastructure unnecessarily."
Outside biotech, it has gone from number 1 to a solid number 2 to mid-list. Seattle, Austin, Portland, NYC, and Boulder are all above it for many types of startups -- Boston has some legacy VCs, great but declining universities, and big city air travel and other infrastructure, but it is getting weaker by the day as a place to base a startup.
Google Earth downloaded more than one billion times
If in-house recruiters are bad, what about headhunters?

I've received emails from a headhunter 3 times within a month asking me to apply for the same position. After the second time, I notified them that I was perfectly happy with my current position, and was not interested (noting that I had already respectfully declined the week before).

They didn't respond.

A week later I receive the same exact email.

Of course none of this trumps a friend of mine who was asked if he was interested in a "fantastic opportunity" at the company he currently worked for. After asking if he would get a referral bonus for recruiting himself for a job he already had, the recruiter hung up.
Cool! Very nice.

I'm sort of slowly working my way through the double winners of the Hugo and Nebula (kind of a lifetime goal, I guess).

It took me a while to find the "Hall of Fame" for books, but that is what immediately wanted from a site like this (I don't care so much about the year-by-year rankings). Maybe make it more prominent?

EDIT: also, I think there's a big difference between nominations and winning. Would be cool to sort based on actually won awards, not just nominations.
Solve Media, Backed by First Round Capital and AOL
I'm curious why you think startup culture in NYC necessarily reflects broader stereotypes of NYC as a whole.

Everyone here is very helpful.
Turner's Painting Company • Mineola, NY • $25-30 per hour
This brings up something I feel gets missed in a lot of language/platform discussions: a vast majority of sites on the internet are informational sites for people/companies and plenty of those are created by designers (non-programmers).

When you say it's easy to spend $5-10k per month, you're obviously thinking of a company whose business is the software, but this does not apply to most websites in the world.
not to forget their inflation rate is always twice as high as their economic growth ..
Pretty much sums up why I ended up ditching my subscription to Spotify after a year. Spotify is a really great service -- it's just that I truly hate Facebook and all it stands for.
But it's not just economics, it's psychology.

pg's description of his day in Palo Alto is telling. I don't think he learned anything from these interactions, or if it ever led to any concrete action. But it helps sustain the idea that what you are doing matters, or could matter. That is the single biggest psychological stumbling block for the people I know who are in startups. There's this nagging sense that maybe they are just throwing all this time and effort away for nothing.

It's possible that the reason why other cities are "startup killers" is that this optimism is, to some extent, a shared delusion. If there were a town in the USA where all the lottery winners moved to, the people who also happened to be there would have completely different ideas about risk.

But the Bay Area is that town for internet startups. Although there are real benefits to moving here, I bet there's a strong delusion-enhancing component too. Which is good for VCs, but perhaps actually maladaptive for the individual startup founder or employee.
the SDK was planned from the beginning, not the result of developer outcry—though it certainly didn't hurt. apple had to make sure that the APIs were solid before releasing them to everyone. that takes time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd97us27eSg
Websites Going Offline to Protest Italy's Proposed Gag Law
Thanks; Freudian slip...
Just because I benefit from some copyrights doesn't mean I completely agree with the direction copyright law is taking, much less patent or privacy laws. (I'm not a pirate party member or anything — just explaining where the sympathy comes from.)
WaterField Designs Ablaze With Six New Kindle Fire(TM) Cases – MarketWatch
Already covered here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077312
Show HN: A real-time multiplayer strategy game that works on Mobile Safari
Yeah, the first post I read was the ORM one, which I thought was such an egregious piece of misinformation that I debunked it ad nauseam (http://darwinweb.net/articles/in-defense-of-orms).

Now in this article there's a telling clue to why he thinks writing SQL by hand is better than using any ORM:

> I can knock out a good website in an hour in PHP, and an excellent one in a day or two.

This suggests that he's working primarily on tiny projects. Of course if you are working on tiny projects than an ORM doesn't buy you much. Also, there is perhaps no language suited better to tiny web projects than PHP and I don't see that changing. If you want to make something measurably better than PHP for general purpose web programming you start having to make decisions that developers don't want taken away from them. Rails does what it does by being opinionated, but it works because if the opinions are ill-suited to your project you can still use Sinatra or whatever. If you move too high up the abstraction layer while trying to still serve a wide audience you end up with the kind of morass that is Drupal, where the system can do almost anything adequately, but it doesn't do a great job of anything because of the creaking weight of the infrastructure that attempts to be everything to everyone.