skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone is certainly entitled to their opinions, but I'm puzzled as to whether some of the people claiming that PHP's greatest strength is its deployment model have had significant PHP experience?

As with most things, it's both good and bad. It IS fantastic that you can so easily toss a .php file into a directory, make a few minor Apache config adjustments, and BAM - dynamic website behavior.

...that's also a glaring weakness, though, when a complex application is developed without the structure imposed by other tools. I have to maintain an event registration system written in PHP, and I'm having incredible difficulty with it. The logic to store form data, look for errors, display the current form, and prepare the form for submission are all in a single, 1000+ lines spaghetti-code file.

I think the author's point (and certainly the one I'm making) is not that this is the only possible outcome of writing in PHP, or that other languages do not have this problem. Rather, the point is that the lack of cohesive structure removes barriers to writing bad code; in fact, it makes it (initially) easier than writing good code.
Around here, the only bank ATMs that are not drive through are at the banks that are inside grocery stores.

You usually can't walk up to a drive through. Although my wife has ridden horses to the McDonalds drive through window before...
Maybe I'll finally have to see if I can do something interesting with skype.

http://search.cpan.org/~mncoppola/Win32-Skype-0.01/lib/Win32...
Thanks for your comments.

Our service isn't aiming to be a cloud platform like Heroku nor a database like Amazon SimpleDB. Our aim is to help client developers by removing the need for bespoke server and database for each and every project. API development often involves a lot of repetition. We aim to remove some of that repetition so that developers can concentrate on creating a rich experience for their users. We're all about everyday widgets, mobile apps and rich JavaScript sites.

We've got a lot of features around the corner including a user management engine, powerful add-ons, data import/export and so on. It's early days for us. We're building the product we want to use, and hope others will too.
You owe a lot to the practice of PR actually, which you should probably consider investing more in if its working for you.

I have this spreadsheet at Twilio that tracks signup sources by type, and lifetime revenue. Without going into too much detail, people who signed up after learning about us in a news story generate a lot of money per account, and that has continued to prove true over 3+ years. So we invest in being good at PR (bringing it in house, using various agencies to help us get broader distribution).

Startups, especially those filled with engineers, generally dislike PR. Can't blame them, it is this ridiculously irrational art and it can become very expensive - but it has a big impact if you can wield it as a tool in your tool belt. You don't have to hire a PR professional to do it though - I did it for Twilio by myself for the first 18 months and learned a ton. The first thing I ever got to the front page of HN was this post on exactly this topic: http://www.twilio.com/blog/2009/03/doing-startup-pr-on-a-sho...

The coolest part of PR is just how many media outlets there are targeting different audiences - so TechCrunch is one important one of many. Pitch wide, read more, dive into niches, get to know writers and the audiences they are trying to reach. PR isn't about manipulating writers either (at least not the credible form of writers), all you can do is tell them your story, they decide what to do next.

One thing I'll add, is that it is a shame that publications are struggling to figure out business models while businesses are benefitting a ton from coverage. Its a shame because I worry that the publications will eventually run out of money and go away, killing an important customer acquisition channel. This asymmetry is an opportunity.
Don't have SMB exposed on any public network anywhere ever.
I get a "Warning: Suspected phishing site" alert in Safari.

Edit: I just checked Google's Safe Browsing diagnostics page and it's also flagging arstechnica.com http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=arstechni...
Are there rooms for an alternative?
It's not awful, it just seems off-the-mark. My point is that it seems avoiding physical activity at all costs is better viewed as a consequence of such a metabolic disorder, less so than a cause.

I completely agree that exercise is very important in maintaining health (exercise, especially weight-training is know to increase insulin sensitivity to some degree, for instance), I just think its role in weight-loss, for most people, is greatly exaggerated compared to fixing a diet which actively promotes fat storage (going beyond a caloric excess).

We've been telling overweight people to exercise more and eat less (esp. fat) for 40 years, it simply doesn't' seem to work [1].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-...
There's a system I used at work that actually stripped my password of some characters, but still allowed me to register. Couldn't figure out for the life of me why the password I just typed wasn't being recognized.
I've been living in more car centric semi-rural area for the last two years and I have been stopped by the police 7 times.

I had a job where I walked to work .7 miles and people would ask me almost every day if I need a ride home.

Someone told me that the few remaining buses in the town should be eliminated because they only service the scum and losers of society.

I've had 4 cars attempt to hit me on my bicycle because they felt and yelled that I should be riding on the sidewalk.
Submitted because I've never seen any precedents for duckish (ducky?) typing in static languages before. Curious if people with more extensive systems programming backgrounds have any opinions.

Wikipedia says that Boo and C# allow you to add annotations in order to make type checking more dynamic, but (from what I can tell) the purpose of this discussion for Rust is to make duck typing require less boilerplate than the statically-typed alternative, if the programmer so desires.
He explains how he uses tmux for pair programming. Seems useful to me.
~~It all tunnels over SSH, what is the security risk compared to other protocols that also go over SSH?~~

(is it possible to strike text?) Thanks for the correction, I misunderstood how the protocol Mosh uses works. SSH is apparently used for initiation. Caution seems wise.
I created something similar a while back to demonstrate what makes a password secure. It's drastically less sophisticated than this (I wrote it in an hour or so), but it has the same approach - evaluating a password by entropy, not random requirements.
http://files.jjcm.org/jspass/

The important thing I found while testing this was that it was important to tell users why their password sucked. Often times, they'll just keep adding 1's to the end of their password until it's good enough. Let people know, "Your password is in a known list of passwords", rather than, "The entropy of your password is 0."
Forget about Instagram, take a look at the Social Enterprise [infographic]
http://bikeshed.com
Ah I see now, thanks. You don't need any of this though if you have a dedicated development/staging server, which is I prefer.
As far as I know, they are using ACH's to get money in and out of the service (which has the disadvantage of taking a couple days, hence Dwolla Instant).

The low fees are simply their differentiation technique.
This is also part of the problem. Go read Crockford's "Javascript: The Good Parts". Then notice that this article demonstrates why there is not, and probably never will be, "PHP: The Good Parts."
I just love it when people create projects to solve problems that have already been solved before. 5 minutes of web searching would have told you:

* The USPS already has this information

* ZIP codes are not precise enough to provide a single city/town result (in fact, many web sites already get this wrong).

* ZIP+4 codes will give you block-level detail, but I doubt more than a few percent of people know what their +4 digits are.
Adding a digram or trigram model would be interesting, as having one of these could greatly reduce the crack time of an English sentence as compared to random English words.
This sort of "appeal to authority" holds very little weight in and of itself.

Rich and smart people make plenty of mistakes, and are just as prone to tunnel vision as the rest of us.

However, I am fairly certain they view this acquisition as protective rather than expansionary. Picking up Instagram just means it can't be used against them (FB), not that it has some hidden-to-the-masses potential for being monetized.
WebGL Lathe Workshop
Eeesh, was not aware that merely creating a circle would spam all of my friends in that circle. I like the idea behind everyme, but if it isn't properly communicated when I'll be sending stuff to friends you lose a lot of trust really fast.

Edit: Not entirely true, requires a post first, see ensuing thread...
The whole world has postal codes. Some are simpler than others. It would be nice to see an API like this one that supported more than just one country.
Science Fiction
Low fees & convenience, I suppose.
More often than not, I upvote submissions only to influence what's discussed on the front page. Many comments are far more in-depth than the original article however tangential they may be, but the topic has to be brought up.
Interview with Inglorious Apps, a webOS to iOS developer switcher
Hi newhouse. Thanks for trying Everyme. We've thought a lot about this process and have made sure not to do anything without your permission. We don't spam your friends when you create a Circle. We only share things with your Circle friends when you actually post them, by clicking the share button in the Circle.
> Who cares if I press cmd-t to open a file or my pair
> prefers to open a file with cmd-shift-n? Just send
> me the action that a file was opened.

I don't think that this was an affirmative design decision. I think it has to do with the architecture of software, and is merely a side-effect of that architecture. Pair programming isn't the main use-case for terminal multiplexers.
Does it really matter in this sort of case? It's a single parameter, single use JSON API. The documentation is essentially a single line of text.

If it was a GitHub `README.txt` file you wouldn't be complaining that it looks like every other GitHub readme.
I seem to remember reading that Facebook was using XHP, which allowed XML literals. That would certainly be an improvement over "warts-and-all PHP", in my opinion.

Of course, I'll trust what an actual engineer from Facebook is saying over some article that I can't even cite. Is this not the case?
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TC has jumped the shark, but they still drive a ton of traffic—enough to kick start your product if it's good enough. However "king maker" is a strong word for it. I've been several times by TC over the last 5 years and it never amounted to much in terms of conversions. Back in the day they had big influence with investors which was proportionally valuable in the tight-knit community of SV investors, but these days they're well into the downward slope of the bell curve. Congratulations to the author for benefitting from TC, but there's never been a better time to ignore them.
Please give me feedback on my upcoming iOS game (not a DropZap sequel).
I'm in Boulder, but I'd travel to Denver.
Of course one big namespace is a bad idea and everybody knows it. I'm not sure why that's relevant here. Namespaces was always the #1 requested feature for PHP.

PHP does things differently; you don't import things before you use them -- PHP loads modules/classes as necessary when they're used. If you don't use a class, it's not loaded.

Other features of PHP make things like "import *" impossible (or at least very expensive) but at the same time it's also much less necessary.
For example: 94062 can be either Woodside or Redwood City or Emerald Hills.
Very useful. Saves the user 2 to 3 steps. In rare instances where it returns the wrong city, they can modify the returned values. Probably want to skip ziptastic for non U.S. IP addresses.
Have you completely forgotten about Android? Do those millions count for nothing?

To compare it with YouTube is a massive overstatement. YouTube still has ~65% market share. InstaGram didn't even have an app for Android until a week back. How is that even remotely close to YT's domination of the video space?
As with Google Documents where you can see other changes in real-time?

Yes and no. Would be really fun for five minutes and really irritating for the rest of the time.
If that were the case they'd accept it and just remove the +spam_source before selling the address.
I'm working with a SaaS company whose highest conversion rate and signup numbers are through PR (by far). It really surprised me based on my previous experience.

I think that "which you should probably consider investing more in if its working for you." is key here, though. I've done marketing for businesses where PR was one of the weakest channels.
It does get the money from your bank account. It's like a debit card service without a card.

As far as I know the difference between what they make on transactions and what credit card companies make is that they don't have a fraud management unit and they also just take in a lot less profit than the traditional cards do.
A blog post about how Instagram's user experience was the differentiating factor between it and its competitors, without a single example of said usage-driving UX?

I'd be interested to hear what exactly you think Instagram did right...
The flying squad is usually really quick to respond, but it worked out in the end...
Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn Resigns
> The thing is we need to stop advising people to use it in the first place. That's what we're advocating.

Who are you to advocate that? Or to advocate anything?

I despise people who presume to know what's in the best interest of others. You only know what's in your best interest. You have no idea what is good for anyone else.

You want to share your experience? Great. Do it when it's asked for. Nobody asked for a hit piece on PHP.

> we're decrying the fact that so-called health experts are telling people that McDonalds is actually just fine for you.

Exactly which maven and luminary of computer science has advocated the use of PHP?

That is outright nonsense. At no point has that happened. PHP grew organically, without a single endorsement.
> Specifically: dickering over whether or not to make
> screen suid root on your dev boxes is an exercise
> in needless optimization.

Are you speaking from the point of view of a 13 person startup, a 200 person business or a Fortune 500 corporation?
Pretty cool... are you planning to switch from Mailchimp, though? It lists $240/month as the fee for 25K-50K subscribers. I'm curious about the business model behind something like this.
I'd experiment with different font sizes to match the line count.
Anyone from Calgary?
Hey,
Just wondering if anyone on here is from YYC and wants to get together?
> And the most strange thing is that Americans use their cars to drive to places located within just a couple of thousand feet from their home. For a person from Europe THIS is really weird.

That's definitely true. When I lived in Strasbourg I thought nothing of walking 20 minutes to the hypermarche. I enjoyed it. Now, back in America, I live ~5 minutes from a major grocery store but I would never walk there.

Not only are there no sidewalks but I'd have to cross a major street and the intersection doesn't have pedestrian signals. It'd be suicide.

And this isn't Middle of Nowhere, USA. I live in the middle of San Antonio, TX. Five minutes from the Riverwalk. It's nuts but it's the way it is.

(Though the Texas heat may have something to do with not walking as well)
Clojure-py 0.2 released
I remember people talking about the brand value of Pets.com
Neither have we. We plan to keep at it though.
I'm pretty sure this would also be an issue with screen. The pair maybe able to operate on separate 'windows' at different sizes, but would not be able to view the same window at two different sizes at the same time.
Where's the data from?
TechCrunch drives traffic, sure. I'm not willing to say their coverage or reporting is "relevant". Their article on WebRTC in Firefox yesterday was awful, even after they rewrote most of it. Not to mention the stream of contradictory posts about Google Glass.
Lol, that's pretty bad with the clarity of my message. Donations sponsor people in developing countries to get access, and pays for the text message fees from Twilio.

Looking to specifically target the entrepreneurs in the "informal economy" explained here:

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/26/141503411/the-informal-economy...

I definitely need to improve my message and the clarity behind it.

Thanks for your support, appreciate it 100%!
It sounded so dumb at first, but after thinking about how my pet changes my travel schedule and has caused me to ask too many favors from friends. Someone please do this.

It'd be awesome to be able to leave my pet with other fellow pet owners. I'd be willing to take pets in my house as well to keep my cat company.
Awesome. And congrats, this made me want to check you guys out. I wish you guys had a case study that's easier to find though. I think there might be a few in the articles section, but having one up front would really help me understand how exactly it helps me grow my business. A lot of this search and keyword stuff is hard to grasp for some of us initially.
Maybe? I don't know. It's important to act reasonably and not to spook them into releasing all the data. My company could probably do with an extra pair of hands, especially someone who's proven they know their way around debian / SQL (probable attack vectors), and now they have the DB schema to study, so... not the worst candidate... Plus, the company would by now be busy with the task of patching all the exploits.

You almost have to look at it from their point of view. Their options are (a) sign NDA, take employment, money, an honourable way out of a difficult situation, or (b) go on the offensive, release the data for little or no personal gain, and suffer through a police investigation and potentially jail-time or a permanent criminal record. Option (A) works out better for your company, your product, and for them, so you might as well aim for that.

I think this is a pretty common approach. Although, it's been used in stings in the past, where a fake offer of employment is enough to get the person in the flesh where the police can take over. There's one very interesting story from Valve about the leak of the Half-Life 2 beta[1] - and of course, Owen Walker[2] found employment after a high-profile hacking case.

It would be interesting to see what other companies in similar situations ended up considering...

__________________________

1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/14/half_life_sting/

2. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Owen_Thor_Wal...
R source code on GitHub
Why I can't Recommend any other Phone but an iPhone
Ars Technica flagged by Chrome for Malware
Maybe they could work on the quality of the service now!

One of my largest pet peeves is that Skype quality is so poor that DTMF tones can't travel across intact. If you're using Skype and trying to enter an extension, good luck. This morning I tried to use Skype to access my voice mail without success.

Customer support is also horrible. The standard response is that it is the customer's fault. Audio quality on Skype seems to be directly proportional to how old the device is.

Nokia Maemo tablet? Great! Nokia N95, not so great. Windows, Android, Linux, Apple? Nuh uh.
I think it's interesting that "correcthorsebatterystapl" is more secure than "correcthorsebatterystaple".

Makes sense, but it's amusing to see the time drop as you add letters.
Considering that the gold farming business runs revenue in the billions, the moniker of startup could definitely apply to a service catering to MMO gamers.
The idea is that the reason that gas stations and convenience stores keep adding cash discounts is because they are getting fed up with how much money they are losing based on the widespread use of plastic instead of cash.

Dwolla charges a flat fee of 25c per transaction as opposed to credit which is like 2 or 3 percent. If you are at someplace expensive like REI or something and you buy $300 bucks worth of stuff with a credit card, REI gets a $9 bite taken out of it, which adds up when it's compounded thousands and thousands of times.
It depends on your definition of fine, but probably, yes.

If 'fine' means not hassled or delayed in any way, then it already didn't work out 'fine'. If you're willing to add on another hour or two waiting, perhaps the night, waiting at the police station as 'fine', then you're still good.

I'm not sure if you're concerned that you would have been beaten or harmed? I'm sure it's not out of the question, it never is, but so long as you remained peacable as you explained it to the officer, I'm guessing it wasn't likely.

Every district / cop / municipality is of course different though.
It certainly needs more tweaking. FJ, FJFJ, etc isn't in any of the 10k passwords people commonly use, isn't a sequence, isn't a single repeated character, etc, so zxcvbn recognizes it as bruteforce.

A fun extension would be to recognize repeated chunks in addition to single characters.
So excuse my ignorance, but does the multiple independent streams mean that multi-party chat support is going to be available right away, not just 1 to 1?
Responsive Prototyping with Foundation
Sony products have been decent but way overpriced for a long time now.
My car ships with crapware
Totally agree. Kind of cool to hear I'm not the only one finding this channel surprisingly valuable - anyone else out there?
Really bad. Use PayPal for donations.
I just got it on FF... weird.
> I can't remember the the Hindi word for "guess" right now.

Bujho.
I'm seeing the same thing, and now I'm excited about the upcoming ars article about how Chrome and Safari mistakenly identified their site as malicious.
Explore the Sky with the Best: SkySafari for iPad | In-Depth Review
You could always have the city state and country pop up as separate, pre-filled input boxes once the zip code is entered, so the user has a chance to correct it.
Obama to Make Case for ‘Buffett Rule’
10 companies Facebook could have bought instead of Instagram
Great idea. I develop many projects that are non-public and this is a nice way to get publicly credit for them as well. I guess that there are many people out there who don't actively contribute to open-source, but are still great developers.
Study of the techniques for emulation programming
If you're going to do this, do the whole enchilada: zip code + person's name ought to give you their whole address for 99% of the population (hint: voter records). Well, 95%, considering such records are often out of date.

The problem is this will likely spook many people - "how does this website know my street address?"
"Apple will come out with a brand new version of the MacBook line, in 13″ and 15″ screen sizes. It’ll have the Air’s form factor, but will use larger-capacity drives."

Yeah, lost me there. Apple's not going to come out with a higher-priced product under a _different_ brand name that looks essentially identical to an existing product in their line.

The author is overthinking it. They upgrade the MBA line, add a 15" version. Maybe update the MBP line, removing the optical drives (let's face it, they're going) but keeping superior graphics and maybe room for a second drive. Much easier to explain, fewer SKUs, etc.

Or, more radically, they just up the power on the MBA line (maybe having more processors options per size) and just drop the MBP as a line. Call them all Macbooks. Have 3 sizes with 2-3 processors each. Done.