skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty poor analysis of today's events.

1. Misunderstands the 1st rule of breakthrough consumer internet companies. The challenge is always getting users and almost never monetizing a loyal user base. This happened with Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Facebook...strange that people still bring up this argument.

With a flip of a switch the Instagram team could put a banner ad and make >$10M/year but they decided to pursue a more native business model that will take time.

2. Myspace didn't fail because of some inherent problem with their model, they failed because their team was unable to compete with Facebook.

It's true that Instagram could suffer a Myspace fate but the data so far suggests they're more like the Facebook of their space then the Myspace.

3. This is the worst point. Every startup has a random success multiplier but Instagram was big enough that the high order bit was their hardwork (persistence) and talent.
> That is its strength.

No. That's it's weakness. Programming languages are not like natural languages. PHP did not emerge spontaneously from conversations amongst PHP programmers -- people actually sat down and wrote code. When that happened, they had the choice to exercise some degree of higher thought. They did not do so.

PHP is a perfect example of how local optimality -- slap on the first thing that "works" -- can lead to wildly suboptimal global outcomes. PHP is a system that is a constant state of partial failure.

> And that is why it is the most popular programming language.

This is demonstrably false. Folk didn't adopt PHP because of some hand-wavy, post hoc, revisionist bullshit about linguistic evolution. They did so because in the late 1990s it was not possible to run multiple mod_perl applications on a single Apache process, but mod_php could do so.

That's it. Perl's horse wasn't shod. The rest is merely a painful, expensive, misbegotten parade of path dependency.
I enjoy Eevee's posts. I was first introduced to him through a handful of Pokémon sites where users would reverse-engineer the Pokémon games and protocols. He writes good code and knows his stuff. He even offered some assistance when I was writing a .pkm file manipulation package.

I completely agree with most everything in this post, too. It can all be summarized in this sentence later down the page:

> PHP is a minefield.

You can measure a language's design by how often you shake your head at something. I've run in to pretty much every problem he outlines in the Operators section alone. Too often, a problem I'm having is due to a quirk in the language itself and not in my logic. Too often, I find myself needing to check the docs to see which order I need to supply arguments to core functions.

It's hard to imagine the pain of working in PHP without working in it. All those little things you take for granted in Python, Lisp, Ruby, etc. are gone. The only consistent thing about PHP is its inconsistence.

If you don't mind, I'd like to save this for future reference when someone tells me, "PHP isn't that bad." Yes, as others have said, it was beating a dead horse, but we shouldn't forget just how bad a language can be and still become wildly popular.
Well, if you take the engineering analogy in a somewhat different direction, you end up with all the structures we ever created before we mastered statics and material sciences. Those bridges the Romans built were evolved patterns based on trial and error of previous designs, where the last design was the testing.

Anyhow, just something to ponder about.
Its going to be a hot summer.

To the contrary, it was just forecast in a story I read earlier today, "Temperatures this summer are forecast to be about normal, and much cooler than the last two summers, says David Streit, a meteorologist at Commodity Weather Group expects.

"Sultry winters, he said, do not usually develop into sultry summers."

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-04/D9U0NTI03.htm
It's a nice theory... Until you look at the sheer range of quality of postings on Facebook. Have you seen Lamebook? It's utterly mind-boggling. I don't believe that identity has even the slightest effect on stupidity. Facebook proves that, in my mind.

Metamoderation has always demonstrated the ability to support quality, especially in the absence of identity. People lacking history or demonstrating poor behavior punish themselves and self-select in that environment.

I'm not complaining except for the fact that I'm deliberately avoiding Facebook - there are people on there I want nothing to do with and from whom I wish to isolate myself, and the utter complexity of privacy issues on Facebook further turn me off to it. I feel safer when I can dissociate my accounts across various sites, however misguided that may be. I'd like to participate on your site, as it looks interesting, but the requirement of a Facebook account is a complete dealbreaker.
He's using poetic license, if that's not obvious.
There are those of us who have been forced to use PHP, and quite honestly, we could use a few good round-up posts of why there are better choices for a project these days than PHP.

Sometimes we can't forget that it exists, so we try to educate people so that with a little luck, they won't pick PHP for their next project.
This is a real feather in the Django community's cap. Eat that Rails
Thanks for be honest! It is great to admit mistakes and even greater to share and learn.
the question indicates you do care about them, specifically.
You may be able to do some fancy (i.e. useful and profitable) stuff in another language and show it to your boss. Maybe do this in your spare time while learning another language for fun. It may impress them!
The title of the article is wrong. A correct title would be "The number of documents on the web about C is now larger than the number of documents on the web about Java."

There is no reason to believe, and no facts are given to support the notion, that there is ANY correlation between popularity of a programming language and the number of web documents related to that language.

TIOBE just leaves it to us to draw that conclusion ourselves, and then we commence arguing over it.
Well, those who publicly spoke about it were unanimous in its being awesome. SIAI isn't very open about stats for the remainder.

Also, I don't think a regular LW meetup would be described as involving "teaching people to be less socially awkward".

I've followed LessWrong, and I hadn't heard anything, until the GP, about it giving off such an aura of "the blind leading the blind".
My big burning question, the thing that keeps me up at night:

How do the heck do we get users to read and care about these things?

Can we put virtual cotton candy in the middle? And if we do, won't we be the only honest developers doing so while the snake-oil salesmen put the candy in the preface?

IME, Android users care about privacy more than other smartphone users--but that still doesn't keep them from downloading invasive data-mining apps that don't allow them to control/delete their information, malware they side-load, etc.

How do we get people to care about protecting their own privacy?
mosh-server is started up by mosh-client when it first SSH's in
1) Great question! Yes, it is super-common. Most of our type inferences on local variables are actually of form "Null-or-X". So we can emit code that skeptically checks for Null, but then goes ahead and assumes X otherwise.

2) I'm not claiming we have all the answers here; but decent compile times has been a strong evolutionary pressure all along.

3) Yeah, we basically implement the "slightly relaxed" semantics described in that paper, and are addicted to the performance wins from doing so. WRT loosening semantics, though, in general you'd be surprised how close we come to quirk-for-quirk compatibility. The problem is that real PHP programs, including ours, end up depending, often unintentionally, on those quirks. I.e., nobody meant to rely on the order function params are evaluated in, but in practice we rely on it because param 0's evaluation has some side effect that param 1's evaluation needs to run correctly...
But why bother to improve it?

Why is the question of "What programming language is most popular" one that needs an answer?
That's simply not the case.. In general, the "no penalty" holds true for primitive data types, and when passing an r-value instance of a class that has a move copy constructor defined. In the case where your object is an expensively constructed l-value, it is preferable to pass by const reference rather than value (assuming you plan to use the object later... otherwise you could indeed pass using std::move semantics).
This. +1000 if I could.
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Yeah, I'm tired of PHP bashing too -- BUT! -- this is probably the best written article on what's wrong with PHP that I've ever seen. So... kudos to the author for a good argument.
"Prosaic license"? If the essay was written in iambic pentameter, it certainly escaped me. Anyway, "C++ macro language with striking similarities" has a pretty precise technical meaning, which sane, literate people might actually mistake.
My goal is to move away from PHP completely by 2013 for my websites.

I've recently been toying around with various methods of tying C++ to a web frontend, with varying degrees of success. My current favorite method is to use mongoose to create a very simple HTTP interface for any C(++) project (mongoose is great!) and then use AJAX and JSON for any and all communication to and fro client and server. However, this leaves people that have JS disabled out of the loop.

My problems with PHP aren't so much the language as much as it is the environment. It's such a mess with so many dependencies that keep breaking any time you want to do a security update. I'm running PHP-FPM w/ nginx on Ubuntu LTS (Lucid), with the suhosin patch, xcache, memcached, and libcurl (I try to keep the external dependencies down to a minimum. PHP's 3rd party libs are so poorly developed and leak memory like crazy. They're also strictly non-TS builds, and will segfault like there's no tomorrow if used in a TS environment.). Trying to keep up with all the security patches means rebuilding a zillion different packages and applying a few dozen patches each time. It's not a piece of cake.

As soon as I've found a nice, convenient, and lightweight C++ web interface (wt is nice, but it's very intrusive and all your code becomes wt-specific), I'm planning a series of tutorials and open-sourced projects that can help anyone else interested in dumping PHP.

Honestly, it's not so much moving towards C++ as it is away from dynamically typed languages. I've had it with subtle bugs that appear only during run time and only when a certain codepath is taken with languages that let you implicitly define variables. I've come to the conclusion that implicitly defined variables and structures are of the devil himself, and no developer should ever end up working in a language where the compiler doesn't alert you at compile time that your codepath uses previously undefined values. ugh.
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Oh, the Atari 7800 could have been so much more. Could have given the NES a run for its money.
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I got into the web space through WordPress and naturally progressed into learning PHP. There are times that I wish I could work with another language just as well as I can in PHP.

I've attempted to learn Ruby. I know C++/C#/Java/Objective C. Yet I still come back to PHP. I can't explain it. I like PHP. I understand PHP. There are nice people willing to help me with PHP. PHP does what I ask.

It's not the greatest. It's no MIT Graduate. But I like working with it. PHP works hard and fast, plus it's a little fun.

I feel there is more important stuff for me to do with my life than worry about the structure of a common language.

I don't know, if anyone can help me understand my attraction it would be most appreciated.
have you messed with hadoop?
You probably also shit after a bad meal to get it out of your system, but although you may have convinced someone to not eat the chicken, the rest of the office has to deal with the terrible stench you left behind, when you could have just gone home and taken care of things in private.
Well, you can't really much rip the US highway system off the face of the Earth, and I'm guessing that it's rather inconvenient to route around it, but you surely can not use PHP, and inform those poor misguided souls who believe that it's a standard, or the web's assembler (seriously, I've heard both of those personally!) or that it's, you know, good.
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Exactly! That's the reason I hate broccoli -- every person who tries to feed me it seems concerned that salt and vinegar potato chips are the only vegetable I eat. It seems to be part of their whole culture.

They're clearly just potatohaters.
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And now google will notice that it needs decent photo integration on plus and do more innovation there than instagram ever dreamed.

or it will stagnate everything in the market like youtube did to video (and is slowly trying to repair recently).
"It evolved" is a reasonable excuse for an 0.7 product, or an ecosystem like the Internet, where no single entity is in control.

But when you've gone through 5 major versions over a decade, I don't think you can say, "Well gosh, it jes' growed that way." That takes it from "evolved" to "poorly planned".

Also, I wouldn't lean too hard on "most popular". Bud Light is the most popular beer and American Idol is the most popular TV show. "PHP: The Bud Light of programming languages" is not really helping your case.
Being able to dial into a conference instead of just out would be super-useful, especially if, like reserving a URL for a room, you could also reserve a dial-in code. We have a regular morning meeting in my office for which we currently use Google Hangouts, and it's not really practical to keep track of who's traveling or whatever and won't be able to video-conference in.
Heard about you through jimmy in houston, wish you the best of luck.
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I expect that Scott's friend generally had a great experience at the camp and made a somewhat flippant and self-deprecating comment that was appropriate in a social context, but wasn't Scott's friend's most important takeaway from the experience.

You can see all of the feedback to the survey question asking what about the camp could be improved here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/b98/minicamps_on_rationality_and_awe...
The death of a Star Wars fan
Those bridges weren't continually "enhanced" by slapping on more stone and wood (at least not the ones that remained standing for long). Each bridge was a fresh design, based on the best practices of the day.

Kind of like new programming languages.
Nice enough idea; but having protobuf and boost as deps is just silly for a system utility.
Interesting. Redacted, with apologies.
With today's acquisition news, I think this is a good reminder of what happens to a lot of companies when they get acquired.

IndexTank was a good product, and it's a shame that they didn't continue with it. Yeah they open sourced everything, but that just isn't going to be the same as if the original team was still developing it.

When an acquisition happens, everyone in the valley is happy, but so often the users lose out in the end.
great idea - we're adding this to the top of our todo list
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"poetic license" isn't the same as "poetic."

From the free dictionary:

poetic license
n.
The liberty taken by an artist or a writer in deviating from conventional form or fact to achieve a desired effect.
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Im curious to know what kind of EC2 instance they are running the master Postgresql on and if they've had any write bottle necks. Im using Postgres for an app, and am worried about running into write issues.
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Tiobe can easily be gamed. Look at OReilly's book sales to see a truer ranking of language popularity at http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/computer-book-market-2011-p...

The treemap is especially interesting. The square size shows market size, while the background color shows percentage change from previous year. E.g. both Scala and Clojure have green "increasing share" squares, while nearby Groovy and Labview have smaller, red "decreasing share" squares.

Because people need to pay OReilly for the book, it's much more difficult to cheat than Tiobe, which only takes some "Project Manager" to spend half their day creating websites, generating cycles of links, producing online verbiage, submitting pages to search engines, blah blah blah
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I agree that statically typed languages have a lot of advantages but I can't see much reason to use C++ for anything if you have reasonable alternatives. Why not Scala or Haskell or even just plain old Java?
Hacker News Meetup Shanghai - 3 May 2012
Nothing went wrong. It was a good deal for everyone involved. The opportunity for Search as a Service is still there.
But a trend of what? I don't see how anyone can conclude "X is used more (for whatever 'more' means) than Y" simply because there are more documents on the web about X than Y.
I completely agree with all of the author's points, but my day job is still PHP and I actually don't hate it so much now.

That being said, it's nice to be able to sit on the most version of PHP and use awesome frameworks like FuelPHP and Laravel. I would not really consider doing anything besides nice CRUD app's in PHP though.
I'm going to be unfair and quote just two words from the article:

> empowered amateur

PHP is a gateway drug to web development. And that's awesome.

With almost every other popular web development language I've heard of[1], there's this grey area between "my app works on my local machine" and "my app works on the server" that is really hard to grok as a beginner. There's a reason entire businesses are built on the idea of making this easy.

With PHP? You get an apache box with PHP, you put the files up, and you're done.

For a professional web developer? PHP is probably nuts. I've purposefully left out things like PHP frameworks, setting up a database, or doing any sort've advanced web development. And yes, it is possible to create a large, successful, stable web app with PHP. It seems kind've hard given the legitimate criticism in the article.

But, honestly? Once you've started doing web development, you should be able to improve your own skills without the community pushing you. It's the people who are just starting out who need all the help they can get.

[1] Which isn't at all exhaustive. I'd love to hear about alternatives that are beginner-friendly.
indeed. basically: Asteroids = Space War + asteroids + single-player + occasional alien ship

i've recreated both games a few times over the years, as hobby prototypes. fun games, simple mechanics. flying & shooting + imagination FTW.
Until people stop using PHP I welcome detailed critiques of the language. There are still enough PHP apologists out there that we can use all the ammunition we can get.
There was definitely a bidding war involving multiple parties. There is no other reason Facebook would buy this at this time - ie have to modify their S1 etc.

Still a smart move I think on Zucks part. Tough decision and he made the right call. Photo sharing needs its own app and facebook can start with one thats already pretty good ...
I agree, but people commonly argue that there is so much more available today. However, the one thing we lost is the focus to turn the machine into something more.
Did they pivot? It didn't sound like the original description which I had the impression was around address books-only.
Is not like Google uses SSL, javascript, cookies or anything like that :)

Apparently Netscape patented them all once upon a time.
I respect the balls it takes to do something like this. Like someone else said, with design, everyone feels entitled to critique it. Yet, there are people on here who are defending the current design of iamexec.com.

The proof to me that your design is better was my initial reaction to it. Speaking for myself, I would never hire someone from a website that doesn't look professional. Your design instantly felt like an upgrade, even if there are things that could be improved. Most people aren't taking into consideration how difficult it is to design something without any input.

The changes I'd suggest are..

1. Focus on one call to action. You have 2 currently.
2. After the 1,2,3 limit the amount of yellow on the page. It's overpowering.
3. Remove the tagline just below the picture. You don't need it and everything else can move up
4. Social proof is great but there's a lot going on at the bottom of the page. Keep the user focused on the goal of getting them into the site.
5. Use lorem ipsum for dummy text

Anyway, keep hustlin'! I'm looking forward to next week's design..
Oh. I guess you weren't using poetic license.
I can't really fault anything that was said in the article. What left me wanting was the ending. I was expecting the equivalent of the main character happily walking into the sunset. In other words, something akin to: "And now that we have established why PHP sucks let me tell you what I use and why. I use <language/languages>. Here are all the reasons for making these choices:"...

To me at least, an equally thorough treatment of what he might consider the "right" or "good" language would have made the time invested in reading the bitch-about-PHP feel more valuable. You'd walk away with at least one well-studied view for a potential direction away from PHP. As the article is currently written you are told all the reasons why what you are using is shit but not given any hint as to what you might consider looking into.
The day you learn Python and see the light, you will look back and wonder, "Oh, God. Why?"
The prevalence of exactly this attitude is why we need all the informed PHP bashing posts we can get. It amazes me how eager people are to wear their ignorance like a badge these days.

Python, Perl and Ruby also evolved organically without (at least initially) the help of any corporate sponsor. Yet none of them are the pig's breakfast that PHP is.
Simple answer is no until there is no need to ever pull out a command line the typical none college grad, non-techie person isn't going to us it. Windows has the perfect balance of stupid simple and cheap price that makes it a standard in personal computing.
Have a look at the OK Web Server[1]. It has a clever design that cleanly separates application and HTTP concerns and the default libraries are written in C++.

[1] https://github.com/okws/okws