skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Nobody can hate something as strongly as somebody who's spend way too much time looking at it". Wrong. You can look at something and not hate it as much as someone who just hates PHP because he/she didn't like the syntax or it didn't fit their needs.

"Those frameworks and ORMs [...] are generally obfuscatory at best". This is your opinion, not a fact. Don't state it as a fact, unless you've got concrete examples to prove it.

"downright maliciously bad (CodeIgniter [...])". Another opinion with no facts to support it.

"glacially inefficient frameworks". Another opinion with no facts supporting it.

"it wasn't going to work for us". Good. It works for many other people, you happen to be in a different group. More power to you.

"psychotic language decisions". Another opinion stated without any facts or even examples.

"slapdash internals". As someone who has developed plugins for PHP, I have to ask you what exactly can be qualified as "slapdash", to the point where it brings PHP's internal code quality below similar products?

"blatant encouragement of idiotic programming practices": Please, do share with us which "idiotic programming practices" does PHP, the language, encourage, and other similar languages do not? Otherwise, this is another opinion without any facts to support it.

"application structure wasn't essentially actively discouraged". For the thousandth time, learn to provide supporting evidence to your arguments.

"the solution to any data storage problem seems to be <<MORE ARRAYS!>>". This statement makes no sense. Here's a counter example: if I had 1TB worth of data which I wanted to save to a MySQL cluster, I would _not_ need more arrays than to store the same data to a single MySQL instance, because the storage layer has nothing to do with in-memory representation of an item (except when the programmer decides to make the two similar, but that has nothing to do with the language). Therefore, your statement is false.

"a sufficiently advanced developer, finds themselves fighting it as much as using it". Please provide some evidence. As a counter-example, I can point to Facebook, which probably has "sufficiently advanced developers" that are not fighting with PHP.

"I went back to Java". I hope you stay there.

In conclusion, I'd like to say that, given your unsupported claims, you seem to not have reached a sufficient level of proficiency with PHP. You did say you spent a lot of time looking "at it", but that doesn't necessarily imply that you understood PHP.
All the rhetoric in your comment makes for a decent rant, but it will only appeal to similarly-minded people, who hate PHP because of random, half-brained personal reasons.

I wish you a happy life, full of hatred for PHP.
personally speaking, it helped me a lot. at the end of the day, it's not a magic pill that works, as it requires a lot of work and effort to be put in by the person but i find it very motivational and helpful for me.

i made my list of goals and how i wanted to acheive them with a set timeline. it requires you to review it every night before bed and every morning. this is the hard part to actually wake up 10 minutes early every morning and do this! althought i didn't meet my goal in that timeframe, it did help me get on the right path and eventually did accomplish it.so it requires lots of discipline.
As matter of fact, while I was reading the post the first that came to my mind was how much the recommendations reminded me of the CoffeeScript introductory page...
"Easy way out of servicing their debt" is a facile misrepresentation of the problem.

The problem for a country like, for instance Spain, is that their current account balance has gone highly negative. This can be due to government overspending or private overspending and contraction.

In fact Spain didn't have a big public debt problem before the crisis. Their problems stem mostly from contraction of the private sector.

If Spain had its own currency, the current account deficit would create a surplus of peseta on the international markets and drive up the price of imports for Spain, while making products produced in Spain cheaper and easier to export. Devaluation would cause short term pain as Spaniards find themselves unable to afford foreign goods but long term prosperity as it would allow their economy to require its footing through favorable export terms.

The Euro itself won't be devalued as long as Germany retains a current account surplus. Ironically a very substantial part of Germany's surplus is exports to the so-called "PIIGS."

In the US we have examples of winner and loser regions due to our common currency. Witness: Michigan vs. Georgia. The situation here is different though because money can still flow into a loser state like Michigan through the federal government (social security payments, for instance, and highway funds). And most importantly Americans are highly mobile; Michiganders can head off to Chicago or Atlanta so while the prospects for Michigan itself remain bleak, people aren't trapped.

The people in the "PIIGS" countries are facing a truly bleak future. The Euro system has denied their countries the tools needed to recover on their own. And the practical realities of (the lack of) labor mobility in the Euro zone mean the people are trapped.
http://news.ycombinator.com or http://hackaday.com

Which one do you find easier to read?
That is a phenomenal example. I am going to steal this example to discuss it with 'business people'.

[PS: Congratulations on the engagement! :) You are an inspiration.]
What's an $800 billion stimulus worth? Negative $475 billion
Articles that end in question marks are universally answered "no".
The hypocrisy of SOPA protests
To me, the outcry following the SOPA legislation seems extremely hypocritical of Americans. You already do this bullshit blocking to the rest of the world. I live in Kenya and I can't count the number of times I've seen the message on an entertainment site: "This site is not available outside the US". VEVO, Pandora, Hulu and Netflix all give me that crap. So far THAT has hardly been a problem according to you guys, but now that you're about get a taste of your own medicine, you're crying like babies!

Why would you care so much when it's happening to you, but you readily block other countries without batting an eyelid? Why hasn't blocking countries outside the US 'broken the internet' like American internet gurus are claiming will happen if we block you? Why hasn't blocking countries outside the US 'destroyed livelihoods?' Why hasn't blocking countries outside the US 'killed' major user-generated sites?To me, the outcry following the SOPA legislation seems extremely hypocritical of Americans. You already do this bullshit blocking to the rest of the world. I live in Kenya and I can't count the number of times I've seen the message on an entertainment site: "This site is not available outside the US". VEVO, Pandora, Hulu and Netflix all give me that crap. So far THAT has hardly been a problem according to you guys, but now that you're about get a taste of your own medicine, you're crying like babies!

Why would you care so much when it's happening to you, but you readily block other countries without batting an eyelid? Why hasn't blocking countries outside the US 'broken the internet' like American internet gurus are claiming will happen if we block you? Why hasn't blocking countries outside the US 'destroyed livelihoods?' Why hasn't blocking countries outside the US 'killed' major user-generated sites?
If you want to teach computer science to people then a good first language for them to learn is C, because it will help them think about and understand what the computer is actually doing.
Suppose just 5% of the potential jurors believe, say, that it should not be illegal to kill an abortion doctor, or to beat up someone who dares to be homosexual in public, or to beat up someone who dares to flirt with a white woman while being black, and so on.

If you have a jury of 12 and require a unanimous verdict for conviction, then 46% of randomly chosen juries will not convict people for the aforementioned crimes no matter what the evidence, because they will include at least one person who believes those acts should not be criminal.

That spits in the face of the notion of equal justice for all. You and I commit a crime together, but have separate trials. The evidence is the same for both of us, but one of us is convicted and one not, because one of us happened to get one of those 5% who thinks stomping blacks or gays who get out line is OK.

Ugh.

Another big problem is that once you tell jurors they can ignore the law in order to acquit, they will figure out they can also ignore the law in order to convict. Bogus convictions won't be as frequent as bogus acquittals, but there will be some. (And you can't count on the judge throwing out the conviction in those cases, because the judge won't be able to distinguish those convictions from those where the jury simply believed the prosecution's evidence and witnesses over the defendant's evidence and witnesses).

Our system is designed around checks and balances. How do you provide checks and balances for the nullification power? The only one that anyone has been able to come up with is to not tell the jury about it. That way, it only gets used in cases where some juror recognizes that not only would there be an injustice in applying the law to the case at hand, but that there has been a breakdown of the system making it so that this injustice will not be addressed elsewhere, so that the juror decides that even though he has sworn to uphold the law, he must break that oath.

Nullification is almost never appropriate for a marijuana case. Even though I think marijuana should be legal, and I know all about nullification, I would never use it there at this time, simply because the system has NOT broken down in this area. Want to stop people from getting convicted of marijuana crimes? Then elect legislators who will decriminalize marijuana.
I wish I could have made it to this, but by the time my availability opened up it was sold out!
"hello" - 1 doesn't return NaN out of some sense of exception to trying to subtract from a string.

It returns it because parseFloat("hello") = NaN, and NaN - 1 = NaN.
tl;dr Write well.
You're right in that even Scheme, which evolved with teaching in mind, has gotchas. However, the Racket folks made "student languages" that specifically exclude gotchas, so DrRacket is as close as a student can get to a gotcha-free environment.
I think we can consider this authoritative: Theodore T'so is the maintainer of ext3 & ext4.
Great article, but URAAS isn't exactly the best acronym. :)

With regards to your article, I remember an article - which was probably submitted to HN - whose author had a great method for engaging (loyal) early users. Instead of using scripts that sent the users tailored messages, he had scripts sending him alerts on important days like, say, birthdays or registration anniversaries.

This allowed him to give the first hundred users who had stuck with the site some personal e-mails that weren't computed by scripts, but himself.

This obviously is intended for early-stage start-ups, but it is important never to go full Google and use robots, AI, and whatnot to face the users instead of human beings, or what sounds like it.

I don't think Disqus would have got the traction and success it had, if Daniel Ha's insane user engagement weren't there to humanize the transition to a new comment system, especially for the people who don't know anything about programming and web services.

Perhaps ironically, it's obvious that Disqus use analytical tools now to alert them whenever someone is having problems with the service or saying bad things about them, and the automation and ambiguous motivation for the Twitter response tends to dehumanize the service, even though they may use the alerts with the best of intents. Daniel Ha also didn't do the best job of giving users a sense of participation in making feedback; he kept using a phrase along the lines of "it is on my list - we will get to it eventually", although many never came to fruition. This was back when Disqus had its own "forum" at disqus.disqus.com (as I recall), which created a small, tightly-knitted community that had to go, as the site picked up its pace.

There are some incredibly important good and bad things to be learnt about Disqus, but I honestly believe that the core business model of Disqus had more to do with the user engagement than it had to the service and its efficacy itself. People simple weren't allowed to be antsy about trying the service, if Daniel Ha could help it.
inital impressions:
- i'd like to see some more curation/feedback methods. there is almost unlimited content out there which is increasingly easy to find, i place more value quick efficient ways to decide what content is worth my completely limited time, preferably on a more granular level than just category and who posted it
- i like the ui, clean and straight forward
- your assistly page is dead
i'm always up to help a lone star startup, you can reach me on twitter in my profile. good luck
So you demonstrate a confused deputy attack on Android? This is hardly news.
Never said I was looking to be a software developer. I'm a Front-end web developer. It's tough to get my foot into the door outside of the interactive agency realm because most companies require 2+ years experience and some form of testing just for a junior position.
Twitter US Growth 2006 – 2009 (Visual) | Bombtune
2011 GovFresh Winners: Gov 2.0 and Open Data
> What I want to do is strive to make copyleft the default, instead of copyright being the default. It has to be protected the same.

I understand that your point is about freedom. But are you aware that, without copyright, there is no copyleft? Copyright is not the "default"; it is just always there. It is the right of an author to place conditions on how his work is handled, including, for example, licensing it under the GPL. Without copyright, everything is public domain, and so, for example, a requirement to make source code available when distributing a modified version of a program, would not be enforceable.
Why Gowalla users are getting emails from TouristEye
Funny, I just did an "Ask HN" about something similar yesterday and didn't receive any feedback [0].

I recently launched LetterPush, a basic email newsletter service [1]. I've been thinking of focusing on adding lots of developer features (robust API, webhooks, etc) to help automate marketing and transactional email processes.

I think that most businesses stop at MailChimp email blasts and "Welcome" emails on user sign up. Having a service that marries MailGun to your CRM/CMS tools would be absolutely brilliant (and quite profitable, I imagine).

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3375802

[1] http://letterpush.com
The Setup of Toby Boudreaux
But, but, but, Dijkstra!

In all honestly, I started out learning BASIC on Apple IIe's, and have managed to become an okay programmer. I would support it as a learning language.

That said, I don't know that BASIC's syntax is that much easier for beginners than javascript. I mean, there's no braces or semicolons, but a lot of the control structures are basically the same.
Research is teaching; teaching the graduate students how to do research.

I agree with your sentiment that college profs should care about teaching, but to be honest too much is asked of them. They're expected to be excellent researchers, inexhaustible grant writers, engaging teachers, inspiring mentors, and part-time entrepreneurs. Those who can achieve 4 of the 5 are still impressive, and more often then not somethings got give.
I'm afraid because I know that's what they're doing, and they know that's what they're doing.
Agree with your opinion on Java/OOP. There do seem to be better places to start IMHO.

If you had to pick one language to teach people who had never programmed before and you wanted to be able to demonstrate the basics of OOP, FP and other styles, then Python would be a good choice.

(Disclaimer: I like Python quite a lot.)
what country is that?
BustAName.com is a great site if you already have an idea of the words.
The totalitarianism of technology
They could either think up, arrange and print a set of random bingo cards each time they have to run a lesson, or they buy it once so they can run the app and print each time, and go have dinner.

They're really buying lower stress in producing future classroom activities for a range of lessons.

P.S. congrats Patrick :) Doesn't your family read your blog? Think they'd miss the reference at the bottom?
> Not sure why you're getting downvoted for this

There's a portion of internet users who have decided that they really really hate Bitcoin and go out of their way to denigrate it and downvote anyone who doesn't share their views. I can understand the people who are skeptical, because Bitcoin definitely has its problems, but this seething hatred mystifies me...
Solar industry die-off is hitting Europe as well
There is a risk in this. It takes time to settle down in a foreign area. I smell too much naiveté.
I wouldn't dismiss PHP's speed problems that quickly. Opcode caches typically don't speed up the actual execution, just the loading and parsing. I use zend server (with zend optimizer) and I've got PHP code that is hard CPU bound, as optimized as it can be, and still takes minutes to run to process perhaps 2 megabytes of raw data. By contrast, the exact same feature implemented in Delphi runs in less than 2 seconds, even though the code is an order of magnitude less efficient.

PHP isn't just orders of magnitude slower than JIT-ed or native compiled languages, but it has no affordances for that fact. There's no standard way to run code in the background. Zend won't start working on one either, because they sell a jobs queue as part of their Zend Server product.

Frankly, a JIT-ed PHP is the only feature I need. I appreciate the syntactic sugar added in the last few revisions of PHP, but honestly, I'd trade every new feature since PHP 5.2 for a bit more speed. With stuff like closures and traits it seems like they're working on the easy stuff instead of the necessary (but hard) stuff.
1) You're in luck, there is a lot of evidence to show that this kind of thinking responds very well to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. There are a number of ways to get this; you can do it from a book ("Mind Over Mood" is one recommended book) you can do it online (the Australian "MoodGym" is often recommended) or you can buy therapy. Look for someone experienced and registered. In the UK you can go to your GP and mention IAPT (Improved Access to Psychological Therapies) but keep pushing it, some GPs say there isn't any when there is - you may have to ask your local MH trust about talking therapies.

2) Remember that tech invites high performers, and HN has a bunch of VERY SMART people. Don't compare yourself to them; you'll always feel lousy. Compare yourself to the people behind you on the bell curve. You are above average, and for the moment, that's good enough. Now you just need enough motivation to plug away at the good ideas, and keep producing them until you get the awesome ideas.

3) Make sure your food and exercise are good - there's lots of evidence to show that good exercise helps with mood. And eventually it may lead to team sports, which have a bunch of social life benefits. Alcohol will lower mood. Some people find that even small amounts of alcohol will lower mood for days. Being careful with sugar, caffeine and alcohol should help.

4) Learn a time management technique, like pomodoro (but there are probably others) and keep at least one project going.

Most importantly, good luck, and keep going. If you find things getting worse it's a really good idea to see a doctor. Depression sucks, and sometimes the worse it is the harder it is to treat.
One would hope Clang isn't going to drop support for syntax that it supports today, because that would be a backwards-compatibility issue. However, I do agree that switching earlier rather than later is better. At the very least, the longer you put off the switch, the more code you'll have written that may need to be adjusted to work properly under Clang.
Any languages which people unfamiliar with programming can get immediate (hopefully positive!) feedback with in under 5 minutes is ideal. Some languages do not pass this test :-)
If Siri starred in a cheesy horror movie, this would be its trailer
Some people don't use that at all with Java for a simple academic assignment.

Some people don't have time either to deal with scoping or the right way to do prototype in JS.

We all should use QBasic...
The $25K includes food, travel, and medical care. I doubt there will be any trips to Killington.
Nullification is balanced around the hung jury process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hung_jury If a jury can't decide in some time frame the judge can decide to end the trial without a verdict and enable a new trial to occur. Your constitutional protection vs multiple tryals only occurs after a jury has said not guilty it does not apply when a jury can't decide on a verdict.

PS: In the US In the United States, the result is a mistrial, and the case may be retried. Some jurisdictions permit the court to give the jury a so-called Allen charge, inviting the dissenting jurors to re-examine their opinions, as a last ditch effort to prevent the jury from hanging. The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure state, "The verdict must be unanimous...If there are multiple defendants, the jury may return a verdict at any time during its deliberations as to any defendant about whom it has agreed...If the jury cannot agree on all counts as to any defendant, the jury may return a verdict on those counts on which it has agreed...If the jury cannot agree on a verdict on one or more counts, the court may declare a mistrial on those counts. A hung jury does not imply either the defendant's guilt or innocence. The government may retry any defendant on any count on which the jury could not agree."[7]
Great post Syed!
What I am trying to accomplish is to stay connected to the experiences that most human beings have.
I might be missing a goal. The goal that this vow meets is my need for connection.
I think Western Union is probably more afraid of lawsuits that seek to invalidate its protectionist legislation.

http://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/candce/5:2011cv0...
did you document any of this?
Someone should write an article: 'Are articles that end in question marks universally answered "no"?'.
RIAA: Someone Else Is Pirating Through Our IP-Addresses
Boom. That's all it takes to create a barrier of entry. Not everyone has permissions to install whatever they want on the computer they're using.

Then you get into issues with multiple operating systems. Windows does it one way and Linux and OSX does it another way. Also, the tools you've mentioned are always changing. Will it be the same in a year or two?

But won't they need to install an editor anyways? Or are they just going to use notepad? That will be a horrible experience.

And JS is changing too. None of the languages change so drastically that it's not just something simple to incrementally learn. And I think getting students used to the fact that things change isn't a bad thing. But also let them know that typically backwards compat isn't broken with these changes.

With that said I'm a big fan of JS as a first language. I'd probably spend the first day with them using notepad or vi (or whatever is natively installed on the system) -- and then have them install some nice IDE of my choosing.
In the Real World™, a tl;dr is called an "Executive Summary." It's a nice way of saying "Here's what this writeup means if you don't have time to read it or aren't bright enough to understand it fully."
$major_copyright_holder choosing not to make its content available outside $country is not the same as $major_copyright_holder choosing to take down $third_party_site.

(I live in Britain.)
Visiting North Korea: What is it like [Pics]