skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please back this claim with evidence. There are many things wrong with PHP. Performance is not one of them...it's very quick.

I'll start: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...

Don't sweat it, Ruby's only 50% slower!

Proportional results on a faster machine: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...
If you use something like Lisp's syntax, then writing a parser is pretty simple:

http://blog.fogus.me/2008/07/22/broccoli-v022-bellwitch/

Smalltalk has only about 8 terminals and nonterminals in its grammar. You can hand code a top-down parser for it in an afternoon.

Then there's always Forth.
Why Life Originated (And Why it Continues)
1. I use the PEAR standard:
Well defined, popular, and plenty of code written in it.

2. Use php_CodeSniffer to check if yout code coonforms to the standard.
http://matrix.squiz.net/developer/tools/php_cs

3. Make CodeSniffer a pre-commit hook so that when you commit co to SVN it doesn't let you until, your code follows the standard.

and done.
Intel's Survey: Half of Women Would Give Up Sex Over Internet
Compact (mini) keyboard recommendations wanted
I recently fractured my right humeral shaft (think upper arm above the elbow) in three playing tennis and will be in a cast for 12 months. Safe to say, the is impeding my ability to hack and using a full size keyboard (apple air or apple keyboard) with just my left arm is tiring an inefficient. I contemplated 'chorded' keyboards designed for one hand (frogpad) but they lack critical keys and have large learning curves. I am seeking sage advice for those of you who can empathize with my situation.
Using Git With An Alternate SSH Port
I'd go back to school and study bioinformatics. I've seen too many friends and family suffer slow deaths from cancer, Parkinson's, and soforth and I think the solutions to those problems are only a matter of time. To be even a small part of that solution would be the most satisfying thing I can imagine.
The NAND to Tetris course has a section where you implement an Object Oriented language with a syntax comparable to Ruby/Groovy/Lua/Javascript.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7654043762021156507

There are course materials available for free download, including all of the programs and emulators, which are Open Source.
As a reader for more than 25 years, I cancelled my subscription to the WSJ when it recently changed hands and haven't so much a as peeked at it since. Considering it's current ownership I'm not surprised by this distortion
Some observers skeptical of Palm's "Nova" OS strategy
Hardly unique. Microsoft's (now deprecated) ASP had this. ASP.Net can also be treated like this if this is desired, although most of the time it isn't.

ASP is not supported, so throw that out. And every language with template engines built for it can be treated like this; that doesn't prove anything.
"By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net."

I think this is the key point of the article, but I feel the author didn't really do much with that finding. He says that papers could have done better with online classifieds and should probably do something with aggregation. These are pretty standard conclusions at this point. More importantly, these conclusions still cling to the traditional role of the newspaper as a provider of news specifically.

If newspapers are really in the information business, and I believe they are, they should act like companies that sell information. There are plenty of examples of successful information businesses on, and off, the web: Comscore, Nielson, Hoovers, Marketing Sherpa, Motley Fool, the credit reporting bureaus, Google(!), etc.

While newspapers may not be equipped to compete in the same areas as all of these companies, they are more than prepared to enter into a variety of niches within the information market.

My local paper, for example, routinely compiles data into little online features where you can go and find out, for example, what the weather was like on the last 5 Labor Days. They also keep track of and print the latest executive-level stock trades from local public companies. Why aren't they packaging that data for investors and selling it as an online subscription? Why don't they sell local housing data to realtors or speculators (granted, they'll need to wait for the next bubble)? Political contribution lists to watch-dog groups? Names of new hires/fires to recruiting firms/departments?

It seems to me that while newspapers may be getting over the print business, they still think they're in the news business. If the advertising revenue from the news is getting thin, newspapers might consider augmenting that revenue by selling higher-margin information.
New iPod In-Ear Headphones reviewed: Apple's best yet
Also reminds me of the rube who couldn't believe that someone could improve on the speed of MRI by a factor of 50X, simply because he somehow felt that everything about Ruby must be advanced in every possible way.

Got a citation / reference for this?
Forget the Bailout, Here's How to Save Detroit
He's grandstanding, for example "limited error checking." I have written commercial compilers for a computer manufacturer and a number of translators, DSL compilers, and an application generation framework. I wrote a Pascal to C translator in a week, but it took another month's work before it could translate any Pascal program, not just MY programs. The reason it took only a week is that Pascal's data structures and types map easily to C. Most importantly, I wanted to get rid of Pascal's variety of strict typing. It is brain damaged. By using C, I let the C compiler do the heavy lifting like code optimization. If I had been trying to map Python to Java, it would have been way more difficult, because of the typing mismatch. Python has dynamic typing and Java has static typing. Python to Java is so difficult that I doubt any sane person would attempt it.

Yes, you can write a compiler in a few days, if you have done it before, if your target language semantics are compatible, if you wave you hands about usability, if you are the only user, and you don't give a rat's ass about performance. If you want to translate to a low level virtual machine like JVM or to machine binary, you have a lot more work to do: compiler optimization, instruction scheduling, register scheduling, etc.

Tratt's three steps are something that you might find in a Wikipedia article (but I haven't looked.) Generally you don't create a parse tree, unless are doing something like mapping back into a newer version of the target language or doing sophisticated macro expansion. Using Bison or a similar parser generator, you directly create an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). Using the AST, you perform semantic checking (has the variable been declared, type compatibility in expressions...); language based optimizations like removing redundant expressions, loop hoisting, tail recursion; generate abstract machine code. Using the AMC, do machine specific optimizations like instruction scheduling (reordering to take advantage of the architecture); register scheduling; and finally generate the binary. All of which take more than a couple of days
Actually if you have been using Zimbra you will notice that this is the same as the Zimlets feature. I know Zimbra is owned by Yahoo but this is an open source project and people have been using it for a while.
Check the book Test Driven Development by Example (Kent Beck)
the second part of the book walks you on to How to build your own testing framework.

Good read
Metasploit Decloaking Engine
Yea, it seems like you are pissed about something that personally happened to you. I don't find this point to be even remotely important.
Your answer is enigmatic:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60601862@N00/942476116/

?!?
Learning assembly for some machine, and writing a non-trivial program, or writing a compiler (in any language) will get you this knowledge also. I've never learned C to any depth, although I've written some, and I've written device drivers and other kernel-level stuff (mostly various assemblers, years ago), as well as debugged other people's HLL code by looking at the emitted machine code.
Is there anything such as true sustainability? If we assume the premise that perpetual motion machines are not possible, and hence all energy sources are eventually depleted, then what is the definition of sustainability in a practical sense? Is it until our sun supernovas? Until we destroy ourselves through war? Until we decide having children no longer suits our lifestyles? I keep seeing this word put out as some achievable concept when nobody seems to have defined it in any way that I can see that takes into account the ultimate reality of physics and I have wonder if I've gone mad or if maybe I'm truly missing something. I mean do people really think sustainability, in the sense of a perpetual, clean, energy source is actually achievable or do most people realize that ultimately it is impossible but use the term anyway as a mis-used but simple and useful term rather than something like hyper-efficient or something else?
As someone who mainly write (and get to maintain) C# code these days, I have to say C# (nor any other language I've seen) sadly doesn't stop people from writing utter shit code.

It does no doubt seems more prominent in the PHP world though.
This is an inferior linkjacked version of original material:

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/16508

...which was also already posted to News.YC...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396869
I am kind of confused. Is what happened legal?
Consumers Trust Search Engines More Than Traditional Media
No. There's nothing inherently special about programmers or the current crop of small software and web businesses that makes them any better at business than founders and startups in other industries except that they're still small. To scale a business still requires people with talents in marketing, sales, accounting, etc, etc.

Small businesses in almost every industry are almost always started by people with technical expertise in that industry. Whether the small business succeeds may be due to technical prowess to a degree, but whether it scales is largely due to the business savvy of the leadership, not their technical prowess.

In the same way, to the extent that small web businesses turn into large web businesses, it's due more to the leadership and business skills of the founders and management than how good they are at writing code.
There is much to be gained from working in the same room as someone who groks what you want to grok.
I concede. You are right, it's better to pause on the belt. I thought about it all night, using edge cases, like a really slow walker, fast belt, etc.
I'd be OK with licensed CDNs

Who "licenses" the CDNs? That sounds scarier to me than adding more caching to an already heavily cached infrastructure.

You do realize this is all just a matter of degree, right? There are probably a half dozen caches involved in every request you make. Certainly DNS has multiple caches along the path to getting your data, your browser caches local copies of lots of data, and your ISP probably has a cache as well. A CDN is just a specialized form of cache that can be a little bit smarter than each of those caches.

these will all be negotiated, bundles will be introduced, and you'll kill the promise of a free and unfettered internet where we all have equal footing

I think this assumes a difference in performance expectations that isn't reflected in reality. The difference between data coming from Dallas, or San Jose, or Chicago, or coming directly from your ISP data center is measured in the tens of milliseconds. I don't think this could realistically be expected to result in "packages". Who would sign up for a "Google/MSN/Yahoo/eBay" Internet that merely promised "30 ms faster!"?
Why you need to be careful when using Chinese characters
So, does this mean that we can use yawning as a tool to focus (as long as the ambient temperature isn't too high?)
Graydon Hoare's "One-Day Compilers" (http://www.venge.net/graydon/talks/mkc/html/mgp00001.html) presentation is worth a look. It uses OCaml to build a compiler for basic makefiles (using C as an intermediate language).

Kragen Sitaker has a great collection of links for amateur compiler writers on his Ur-Scheme (http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/sw/urscheme/) page.

This paper (http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf) by Abdulaziz Ghuloum is also very interesting - he shows step-by-step how to write a simple native-code Scheme-like compiler by writing small C functions, compiling them with gcc, and then saving the assembly output. ("Since we don’t know yet how to do that,
we ask for some help from another compiler that does know: gcc.") Heavy theory about optimizing? Nope. Demystifying and inspiring? Heck yeah.
and if you slot a penny in the back end, they drive around doing wheelies!
Short Answer is: Depends on what language you want to compile.
I'm not buying this. And why didn't they study humans?

The explanation I heard many many years ago still seems right: yawning gets you more oxygen.

And if you need to test that, next time you feel the urge (meeting?), just breath deeply and it will go away.
Advertising Money Shifting to the Web
From page 2:
"Prior studies reveal yawning leads to a heightened state of arousal, so a morning yawn may function somewhat like a cup of coffee in providing a jolt of energy."
Do: snowboard and hike on awesome mountains, kiteboard on the nicest beaches, learn both sports really well, spend more time with family & friends
Not do: spend time indoors staring at a computer screen
Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
Wow, it really scares me to see this today. I was just thinking about writing something like this last night.
Seeqpod is a really great service, but it's high on the music labels' neg radar. It really depends on your long term goals. It was one of many factors in our decision.
Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part II: repeat.vim
I've heard this criticism of Seth a few times now. I don't disagree with the statement... but it's also not exactly a strong criticism either.

His work seems to be mostly about making us rethink the way we approach marketing, especially on the web. That is coming from the other end of the "actionable" spectrum. It is a strategy, not a tactic. All the old tactics still apply, but you use them for different ends.

His examples are, of course, simple and "obvious" in a style that many (myself included) appreciate. I've found writing a series of succinct, obvious statements that convey a greater wisdom is much harder than people give it credit for.

And, like any exploratory thinker, I don't think Seth himself would claim he's never wrong. It's all about if you can learn something about the <i>approach</i> to marketing, not memorize a bunch of steps.

Definitely a fan, not a fanatic, but I've heard this point enough that I wanted to state a counter.
Cloud computing comes to a PHP IDE
Besides 2 chicks? Start my own capital management firm
We'll find out soon enough, I'm expecting some kind of lawsuit as a result of this.
"But it would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper."

This has been something that I've thought about quite a lot of late, and think is definitely going to be the case. My personal idea is that there will be a lot of people who would previously have read local newspapers but would rather read a social news site online.

The problem with current social news sites for these people is that they are too focused on particular subjects, for instance tech or business. So in between university and another proper startup I'm working on I built a site that lets each user view their own stream of stories agnostic of what the rest of the user base is doing - unless other user's stories or comments overlap with those of the first user. You can check it out at http://memescout.com!

Now the difficulty is getting people to use the site!
That's awesome! Thanks! I've got to find more articles like that one.
It would be funny if caffeine actually makes people healthier by making the circadian rhythm more pronounced (for those who consume caffeine at the same time each day).
NYC cop caught decking cyclist on YouTube to be charged
Let's quantify this, what number makes you rich?
> In PageRank order:
> http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3awww.paulgraham.com
> Google has a good PageRank implementation, though it
> isn't open source.

Yes, but doing what you've done here gives the entire site,
whereas implementing it from the definition allows you to
compute the actual values, as I did.

Of course, Google have twoke their algorithm so it's no
longer exactly as they originally published, and they're
not telling anyone what it actually does. Using the
"clean" version is at least transparent.
I have, first edition even. :-) The first algorithms book that I really found readable was Sedgewick's Algorithms now updated to C, C++ and Java. Even now I will read Sedgewick first for clarity and go back to TAOCP or CLRS for analysis.
This NYT article about a book on the spread of nuclear technology is also interesting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/science/09bomb.html?_r=1&#...

“Since the birth of the nuclear age,” they write, “no nation has developed a nuclear weapon on its own, although many claim otherwise.” Secret cooperation extended to the secluded sites where nations tested their handiwork in thundering blasts. The book says, for instance, that China opened its sprawling desert test site to Pakistan, letting its client test a first bomb there on May 26, 1990.

That alone rewrites atomic history. It casts new light on the reign of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister of Pakistan and helps explain how the country was able to respond so quickly in May 1998 when India conducted five nuclear tests. “It took only two weeks and three days for the Pakistanis to field and fire a nuclear device of their own,” the book notes.
Right, it's such a bad thing, yet he encourages everyone to do it. That makes sense.
I did not think it necessary for Mr Northrop to use the "political third person" when referring to the employer instead of the more common 'he' or 'they' --

"She can quickly get a picture of who you are and what you know, and then drill in for more detail when she sees something interesting."
Worse, this technology will create stronger incentives to pillage the remaining natural forests.
See if you can use MT to provide the fitness function for some genetic algorithm, evaluate the results, tune it, and profit!
The 17th Floor, Where Wealth Went to Vanish
Do another startup.
It is pretty hard for someone not deeply immersed in the particular jargon of the debate to understand what Lessig is trying to communicate in his public statements. For example, this quote from Lessig's testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee is quite ambiguous:

"As I testified in 2006, in my view that minimal strategy right now marries the basic principles of “Internet Freedom” first outlined by Chairman Michael Powell, and modified more recently by the FCC, to one additional requirement — a ban on discriminatory access tiering. While broadband providers should be free, in my view, to price consumer access to the Internet differently — setting a higher price, for example, for faster or greater access — they should not be free to apply discriminatory surcharges to those who make content or applications available on the Internet. As I testified, in my view, such “access tiering” risks creating a strong incentive among Internet providers to favor some companies over others; that incentive in turn tends to support business models that exploit scarcity rather than abundance. If Google, for example, knew it could buy a kind of access for its video content that iFilm couldn’t, then it could exploit its advantage to create an even greater disadvantage for its competitors; network providers in turn could deliver on that disadvantage only if the non-privileged service was inferior to the privileged service."

I understand how someone could misread that statement to support the view that Lessig is opposed to tiered content-provider access. I certainly did not get the point that Lessig wanted me to get when I first read his statement.

That said, journalists should try to get these things straight.
Apple's been saying that all along. http://developer.apple.com/webapps/ The old "web apps are the SDK" line wasn't greeted with open arms by many, but I think Apple's done much to promote iPhone-tailored web apps as a viable alternative to Cocoa Touch for the very simple reason that there are more web developers than there are Cocoa developers.

They've even tried to make it reasonably transparent to the user, as web applications can reside on the home screen, and when launched, can be set to not display the browser toolbar, making them appear practically indistinguishable.

If you look at the work that's gone into WebKit/Safari, like a tenfold increase in JavaScript performance, HTML5 dbs, and a whole host of CSS work like gradients, canvas backgrounds, masks, reflections, transitions, and implicit animations, it's a more attractive platform than ever.
It's easy to write a compiler.

I understand that writing a good compiler is somewhat more difficult.
Great - more Seth Godins.
Agreed. Keep in mind it's now Fox news....
Just curious, what do you read instead?
Five Reasons Apple Should Open Source The iPhone
Python to Java what is difficult? Python code to Java code, maybe, but not interpretation. The Jython interpreter is written in Java.
Cross-domain POST with jsonptunnel.cgi
Seadragon Mobile: first AppStore application from Microsoft
Makimaki,

Submitting stuff like this doesn't help your cause:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=394963

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=393490

None of us are perfect, but a top ten list?
How to Get Results
It is almost as if it is a non-falsifiable truth.
I had the same problem, and called Apple support. They said they have been getting calls about it all day. The solution is as follows:

Turn off your computer (don't worry it is safe to do so).

Restart and log in.

Go to /Library/Updates/ and delete the Mac OSX Update folder.

Use the standalone installer to update your system. You can find it at http://support.apple.com/downloads/
You don't want desktop apps, you want a better browser. Put in a URL, download software from it, run it locally. That's a browser.

The only thing that Google Apps is missing from that is that it periodically has to hit the server to save your documents, and that its interface isn't as flashy, because current browsers suck.

Bringing out MS Word into your argument only confused things, because traditional get-it-on-a-CD software is a huge step backward no matter how much nicer the GUI toolkits are.
It's been suggested contagious yawning could be a result of an unconscious herding behaviour - a subtle way to communicate to those around us, similar to when flocks of birds take flight at the same time.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6270036.stm
A new religious war is breaking out before my eyes: web apps vs. native apps on the iPhone.

The reality is that there are lots of native iPhone apps that should be web apps. Right now, the web apps don't quite pay as well.

I believe what we're ultimately seeing is the rise of the native/web hybrid application. These are a class of web-like applications that can run in disconnected mode:

* views use HTML/CSS stored locally on the client

* handling of requests from the views is done within the client itself, or dispatched externally to a web API

* sophisticated data structures can be persisted on the client (in mysql, text files, etc.)

* more sophisticated processing than typically occurs in your standard web app

* better access to native hardware features

The technologies are coming together: Adobe AIR, UIWebView/iPhone SDK, Android's WebView, etc. to support this. I'm looking forward to it.