skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> PHP is really fast when you use it as a straight templating system, but once you start writing real applications in it, writing your own high-level PHP inside PHP, it is the slowest thing around.

This is what I find most people underestimate about PHP - it scales badly in a slightly unique sense: it scales badly with application size. The problem is incremental and therefore hard to deal with.

You start off with one small PHP file. It's wicked fast! 3 months later you have a dozen PHP files and most of them include some common library scripts that are shared between them. It's still fast. A year later your library scripts have grown and grown. Each PHP file is now including 4 - 5 library scripts and those themselves are getting up to thousands of lines long. You try to refactor things but the problem is PHP is such a dynamic and loose language and has such poor abstractions that it's really hard to do that successfully. So soon just to spit some HTML on the page your poor application is interpreting thousands of lines just to render some simple HTML. You look at FastCGI but your cheap web host doesn't support it and then you realize that there are a host of compatibility issues on top that you never thought about when you started that will cause problems.

By the time it is mature your PHP application is slow because it is spending all its time parsing the thousands of lines of poorly structured PHP and very little actually rendering HTML.

Finally, you look at PHP accelerators like Zend etc. and realize that you're going to have to pay for a commercial solution and the free stack you thought you were building with is not actually free any more and you see that even then there are a bunch of compatibility problems. And then you wish you had built with python ... or java ... or groovy ... or ruby ... or anything else but PHP.

It's the poor support for modularization and abstraction combined with the interpreted nature of the language that leads to this.
This is stupid. Hasbro largely did the right thing. They protected their brand, and the right to make money off of it online. There's nothing but speculation here as to Scrabulous moving copies of their real world product, or their "boycott" amounting to anything but a couple dozen boards not sold.

Perhaps they should have licensed Scrabulous rather than trying to build their own, but gaining control over their brand online was the right thing to do.
Rupert Murdoch gave a lecture where he thinks media is headed - It's actually quite interesting.

It's the 3rd lecture is part of this years (6-Part) Boyer Lecture series. It's basically Rupert Murdoch's view on where the world and humanity are headed in the next decades.

Anyone interested can listen/read it here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyerlectures/default.htm
A good mortgage broker may soon be hard to find
My choice finance is a mortgage broker company, it offers competitive rates for car finance and home finance.
Rupert Murdoch on the coming "Golden Age of Freedom" (Audio)
The makers of Scrabulous did exactly this.
Personal Fabrication - Printer that can print on fingernails
I recommend listening to Lectures 3, 5 and 6

1,2 and 4 are more directly related to Australia's future and probably won't be as interesting to most of you.

BTW these lecture are around ~30+ minutes each.
Designing from the inside out
From Nand to Tetris in 12 steps
He's basing this on one of the basic types of literary rejection letters.
Two pieces of unsolicited advice:

1. You make your own choices, and there's always tradeoffs. It sounds like you've decided that a busy internship and a high load class schedule are more important to you than working on a startup. Own that decision...you'll own the consequences. If you don't feel it's the right path, change it.

2. Be careful about telling yourself someday...it can easily turn into never. Not saying there's not better times for some things than others, but lean towards taking messy plunges rather than waiting for the stars to align.
Just subscribed. Looks like there's some cool stuff coming through. But what really bugs me is that the links in the feed go to undrln.com and not directly to the site that the link's for. Making me click twice is not good. And we all know why they're doing it. Not for the subscriber, that's for sure.
Waterfall 2006
"... Shouldn't a good business analyst be able to do this? Given a business with no information system, shouldn't policy be consistent anyway? ..."

4GL's tried to solve this problem. Didn't work. I suspect this approach is always at best a weak solution to a hard problem, not because 'business analysts' aren't smart enough but the way they perceive programming logic with computers is incompatible ~ http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/
Good points thanks. Best-case scenario would be a 20K-50K project on a consulting basis, that might turn into a full-time gig if the idea proves viable. Still seems like work of this size falls between the cracks...
Greasekit script implementing AutoPair Characters for form text fields
The Rails Language aka The DHH DSL
I know little bit about bitC, but it has different purpose and ideas, and the lispish syntax is just for the prototype phase.

SC sounds fun!

Imagine writting CUDA/OpenCL kernels in Scheme-Lisp way :)
I know a few people whose business is to write ebooks and sales letters to sell the ebooks. They prey on desperate folks. And make a killing writing in a style very similar to this email.

This was totally miscalibrated for the audience, UNLESS the overall audience really did find "joy" from it and we're just exceptions.
Okay, I'm officially annoyed.

Joe Spolsky made a blog post similar to this and also stated "Don't blow off your non-CS classes". He, and to a lesser extent this article, basically summed it up as "it will help you learn to do boring stuff well".

Are we CS majors really such mindless brutes that topics such as history, philosophy, religion, literature, etc., are automatically snore-fests that we complete just to make good grades? I'm just really confused how these people can have a seemingly complete lack of interest in the humanities.
I often wish I had an undo button in the terminal. Obviously not everything can have an undo. But most things (anything you can undo in Windows) you should be able to undo on the Web.

This is what people will expect from web applications or they won't use them.
Google Off, Apple On 2008 List of 20 Most Trusted Companies
Crackers break into Brazilian government systems, issue permits to fell trees.
Why is it an unfortunate reality? I think that is the coolest thing :)
Not if he pulled it as a drill - just notify the fire department first, and say we are having a drill at so and so oclock.
Unfortunately, it doesn't do exceptions well - certainly not Windows SEH, and it relies on DWARF2 exception tables + specific runtime library unwinding support.

Apart from that, and the slowness of its instruction selector, though, it's pretty good.
It would, and it would arguably be more efficient, too. I'd consider it, depending on the overlap of projects they undertake and the projects I'd prefer to support.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be insulting. I just noticed that you've had other run ins submitting digg like stuff. But the other readers have spoken, you win; I lose.
GitHub's new Fork Queue
I too am a big Economist fan. I just asked because I'm always looking for good reads - didn't mean to sound like there was nothing else to browse for business news.
There's a book that this lecture is based on: http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/ and, while not particularly challenging, it does provide a good overview of how computers are structured.
Sorry. I meant source to source, as in Python source to Java source. Python to java byte code, as in Jython, is a reasonable thing to do, but not easy.
The article misses one key point in favor of web-based applications -- you don't need Apple's permission to write one. Writing an iPhone app consists of agreeing to an EULA to get the SDK, then writing the app with proprietary APIs and arbitrary restrictions (you can't call this function; you can't use a language that allows code modification at runtime[1]), and then finally gambling on whether or not Apple will approve it. If they don't like it, all your work is wasted.

If you write a web app, you have none of these problems, and you don't have to share your revenue with Apple.

[1] As anyone knows, this is not technically possible. Are config files or preference settings "code"? Why not? And what about languages that allow putting shellcode on the heap and overwriting the saved instruction pointer with its address... like, say, Objective-C?
6-12 months of adventure traveling, lots of reading, and spending time with people I don't get to see often enough. Buy a fast car and move to a little nicer place (with a bigger garage). Then start another company.
Take a look at http://phonegap.com. It will let you develop a web app and also get access to the iPhone’s GPS, accelerometer, etc.
That's a load of FUD and a fabricated horror story. Computationally intensive business logic should be implemented as a C/C++ extension in any case because PHP is still essentially a web language and a glue language. Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP's creator, has stated as much.

Any claim that PHP can't scale is at this point a dead letter, as are more dated claims that Java is too slow, etc.
The emphasis, of course, is on usability for long-term users. I'm not really concerned about users being able to easily learn the interface

The solution to your problem lies buried in this sentence.
I believe Yahoo mail has more users than gmail.
I'm impressed with the way Arrington is digging into this. I feel like if he didn't, nobody would, and we'd never know what had happened.
Neat. I'm new to Git, and so far have mostly been treating it like Subversion, emailing patches to each other (yeah... I know... shame on me). Maybe this will help transition my way of thinking to "the Git way".

What sort of workflow do you suggest for testing out a set of changes before applying them to your main repository? Perhaps applying them to a test branch or something, then merging the test branch?

edit: just tried this out and got this seemingly impossible status message... "Status: Processing 1 of 0 Commits"

edit2: I didn't actually select any changes to apply... but the status message is deceiving
The hardest part about building a successful social news is building the community, good luck. Getting marketing and advertising people to remember u-n-d-r-l-n dot com is going to be an effort in itself.
Controller route prefixing seems suspicious. Do you include every controller at runtime and use php reflection with some regular expressions to parse all of their prefixes only to figure out what single route to use?
I see something very special--the cost of starting a software business and the opportunity for getting it to profitability have become easier and more profitable for small teams of engineers. It's special because not all technical fields share these characteristics and it's special because it's newly prominent in web software.

I think it's fair, if we're measuring success in terms of money, to measure the success of a business by how big it gets. However, it seems completely wrong to then measure the success of individual engineers by the size of their business. Instead, you should measure their individual financial outcome.

The question that matters here is which approach maximizes the financial outcome for a programmer. Did the Trott's do the right thing for their family by taking funding for Six Apart, or could they have done more for themselves keeping it private? What about programmers that have a product idea that doesn't qualify for funding or wouldn't make good founders for a company with a traditional mix of talents? Would they do better joining such a company? Or building a company that plays to their strengths.

FWIW, my calculus on engineer-centric small business was around happiness and maximizing the time I spent building software that mattered to me.
Undrin sounds like a pharmaceutical product. Undrin helps you regain control of your bladder. Side effects include dizziness, headache, nausea.
How to Learn a New Coding Language Fast
What I would really like to know is how much money it takes to get to that point.

$5 million isn't enough according to a very interesting New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/technology/05rich.html

So how much does it typically take for someone in Silicon Valley to "solve the money problem"?
I would do 30 by 30 :)

http://www.paraschopra.com/blog/personal/30-by-30.htm
Any guesses on how many "To Do List" apps are going to be available within the first month? Note to to do devs: I've got the killer To Do List app framework - it's a spiral-bound noteback and a cheap Bic pen. Problem solved.

Seriously though, kudos to Yahoo for this. I'm honestly very excited about the potential for creative new apps that can be built on this platform.
Poor guy can use some Valium.
Obama Spokesperson: His Commitment To Net Neutrality Hasn't Wavered One Bit
What's a coding language?
Yes, that would be the suggested workflow - to use this to easily cherry-pick patches into an integration branch that you want and ignore the ones that don't look ready yet. Then pull that one branch down locally and merge it into your master once it's tested. It automatically adds the 'Signed-Off-By' sig and everything.

Good catch on the bug, I'll get that fixed.
I just started looking at this, but if it's "CONFIDENTIAL" maybe they shouldn't have posted it to video.google.com
just to name a few: argument passing, process scheduling, register allocation, big vs little Endian - I realize this is a weak list but personally I expected more stuff to have some reasons behind the decisions.
Contemporary Sectional Sofas
Spacify offers sofas, sectional sofas, sectional sofa, sleeper sofas, contemporary sofa, sofa beds, sofa bed, modern sofa, contemporary sofas, modern leather sofa, contemporary leather furniture, contemporary furniture stores, contemporary chairs and contemporary furniture designs.
I find the error reporting the hardest thing. And a lot of "tips and techniques" kind of neglect that you actually may have syntax errors and need to report them to the user in a helpful way.
Yahoo! Mail is currently in a limited beta version and only open to confirmed partners.

How do you become a partner?
One more reason I'm so glad I moved all my code over to github. Git + github is such a great combo, for both open source and private projects too. Thanks dudes!
Ask HN:  Launching?
What is the best way to launch and grow a new site? What unique things or standard issue things have you done that you found successful?
Beauty Basic Supply
Beauty Supply is your one-stop online store where most of the products you need about beauty supplies are available. Enjoy the experience of shopping online about your beauty needs thru beauty supply website while you're at home or even in the office.
I'm not looking to 'win'. It doesn't give me any satisfaction. Just trying to understand your antagonism towards me, a stranger who just happens to ALSO be a digg user (something you seem to consider as an inherently inferior sub-species of internet people).

Hacker News is not Digg and therein lies its appeal. I love the intelligent comments here and the stories are terrific. So don't think for a second that I'm trying to 'ruin' the community by submitting digg-like content (whatever that is).

In any case, its a SOCIAL news site. Let the community sort it out with editorial votes. Wisdom of the crowds, yes?

There's no way I'm going to make everyone happy with my submissions. It's impossible. As long as its really interesting to me, doesn't violate TOS, isn't spam and falls within the general topical focus/interest of Hacker News readers, I'm going to make use of my right to contribute to the community.

I wish something like this won't happen again. If you want to continue this off-topic discussion and thoroughly exhaust your frustration, feel free to rant at me in private. My email is in my profile. Cheers.
> Contrary to both the Libev page and Marek's analysis, setting timeouts on individual I/O events is not the only way to
implement "idle timeouts"

just a quick question: what would you consider, is a superior approach to idle-timeouts ? thanks for you insights !
Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue
The funny thing is I often yawn when I'm really paying attention. It still doesn't go over well. :(
I completely agree with you. If you're not having fun, just fold-up shop and find something that does allow you to have fun.

I am a firm believer that you can make money from anything you have a passion in. Chase that.
MusicBox: a truly powerful visualization of your music library
This submission is inaccurate. The linked article uses the proper term, HACKERS, who broke into a gov't system.
Do not taunt Undrln.
I need the breeze theme when I program. Screen: http://billmill.org/static/images/desktop.png
Wait, who's ranting?

Anyways...no frustration on my part (what about you?). I was just too trigger happy from the recent spam HN has been getting. That's all. Apologies man.
Start with a "human interest" story, else you won't get covered. Focus on the nerds, expand from there.
The problem is that currently asynchronous libraries often use binary heap as a representation of internal priority queue.

This is a grossly ignorant statement. I have written my share of event loops (including epoll and IOCP based) and choosing heap for timer management is an obviously dumb thing to do if you care about the performance. Also removing objects from the event loop before delivering a callback is even more dumb for exact reasons he listed in the post. Essentially what he's bitching about is a lame-ass un-optimized implementation of an event engine.

Also, interestingly enough he actually reinvented a simplified form of Linux timer management code - http://lwn.net/Articles/156329.
"But what really bugs me is that the links in the feed go to undrln.com and not directly to the site that the link's for. Making me click twice is not good. And we all know why they're doing it. Not for the subscriber, that's for sure."

The feed for HN has two links: one for the site in question, and one for the HN comments. I almost always go for the comments before looking at the site. That, for me, is the real value of HN, and (possibly) for undrln as well.
Attacking This Problem: New Users Won’t Sign Up Because No One Is There
After posing a question on HN asking what are the biggest marketing/PR problems startups face, it seems that user acquisition is one of the biggest issues. So, I wrote a post that gives some tips on attracting users for startups. Like my last post, some of the tips are pretty obvious, but I hope these are some good steps to get started.
I have a hunch he could spend a day or two sending out personalized emails to each person, be it one paragraph or a page in length. He's in the business of building people to be stronger marketers; he's not doing much a service to them in telling them they are awesome but not awesome enough.

I think Godin could learn a bit from the devotion Gary Vaynerchuk shows to his audience.
Just submitted my post, 10 Tips On Attacking The Chicken and Egg Problem: New Users Won’t Sign Up Because No One Is There. If you have any specific questions, let me know. Happy to give feedback.
you know, I've looked at squidoo a few times in the past, but never managed to figure out just what the heck it was for. I still don't know.
That's a situation created by perverse incentives.
Ask HN: What is a reliable mail service to send emails from our site?
Does anyone know of a reliable mail service that could be used for emails sent from our site to users? We are looking to move management of our mail server to an external company that handles all of the necessary verification work as well such as implementation of dkim, spf, etc.
Vaksel- Awesome point. You inspired me to write a post on exactly what you're talking about: http://marketingstartups.com/2008/12/15/10-tips-on-attacking...
The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk @25C3
$5m invested invested fairly conservatively can throw off 8%, or $400k / year. I'm sorry, but if you can't live on $33k / month, even in the Bay Area, you've got problems.

A couple of those people in the article have homes worth over $1m that they own free and clear while they work 70 hours a week to make ends meet. Not smart. Mortgage the house to 70-80% (rates are dirt cheap right now) and invest the cash at the aforementioned 8%, which adds $100k / year to your bottom line, plus the tax benefits.
I guess if you don't have a Lisp environment for your target, it could be somewhat better than having to write C code directly (because you could more easily generate it with macros, etc.)
Submission nathanburke is referring to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387410
Agreed. I despise it when sites pull my focus to another field when I"m already halfway through data entry. Same goes for apps - if I launch an app and then switch to something else, for God's sake don't pull me back when you're done loading. I wanted you in the background dammit.

It's also a bad idea generally to break the UI the user is accustomed to.
Erlang and Cloud Computing: A Fine Pair Indeed
5 really good reasons to consider Erlang when planning your next cloud app.
SEC Gives Social Investing Site kaChing Green Light To Take On Mutual Funds
Thats assuming its some sort of social networking thing where users are aware of one another.

Its difficult to give advice without knowing who the target market is. Getting programmers, housewives, accountants or teenagers to use something all require very different approachs.

Fundamentally you need to get product information in front of your target market. How you do that will vary.
Wouldn't it depend heavily on what your site is about? B2B or B2C? Is revenue ad or subscription driven? Is the site even supposed to make money? Or just build cred? Have you figured out your vertical? Going broad? (probably not a good idea IMHO)
How to Steal the Empire State Building
Killing Robot Being Tested by Lockheed Martin
I do wonder how he managed that - have they perfected mind uploads on youtube? And how do you "deck" someones mind if they did do that?

PS. I think you meant to write "NYC cop caught on YouTube decking cyclist to be charged", but that's not even accurate anyway, since he wasn't caught on YouTube.

Actually YouTube has nothing whatsoever to do with this. (Despite what shaunxcode thinks.)

He was caught by a tourist with a video camera, nothing to do with the internet - the internet just made it famous.
http://lwn.net/Articles/156329
Hey - you forgot Adwords. Not only to get clicks, but it'll also get you to thinking about your vertical. You can't come up with good keywords unless you know who you're targeting.