skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not trying to defend PHP too much here; I like it, but it is a horrible language on many levels (as are other languages).

I started writing a long rant which essentially boiled down to exactly that - PHP may be shit, but so is everything else. I hate all the languages that we're stuck with, and every time I start a project it's more a matter of picking the least shittily inadequate tool for the job than a matter of picking a language that I actually like, because there are none. They quite seriously all suck, very badly in most cases. The pain comes in different places, in varying degrees, but it's always there, whether it's coding pain, tools pain, ops pain, installation pain, documentation pain, etc. I have yet to find a development stack that didn't make me want to scream "fuck!" at least a dozen times over the course of a week of using it.

The real problem with most non-PHP stacks is that they front-load that pain: I have to say "fuck!" and hit Google many more times before I see a page generated from Ruby, Python, Scala, C, Java, or Haskell running on my webserver than I do to see a dynamic PHP page. Is it any surprise people tend to go with PHP pretty often, given that?

I think detractors would be wise to focus a little bit more about what's awesome about PHP, rather than what sucks about it (there's a lot, nobody argues otherwise). Because there's got to be plenty that's great about the language (or perhaps the environment overall) if it attracts people in such large numbers. We should be trying to add that to other languages/environments, not merely looking down on the newbs that still use PHP.
The title here slants the discussion somewhat. Reporters without borders presented it this way in their 2012 report;

"Several times in 2011, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, true to his nationalist policies, announced the creation of a national Web, a "clean" version of the Internet with its own search engine and messaging service. This may mean two different types of access, one for the authorities and another for the rest of the population"

To me that implies stricter use of firewalls and launching national services for search and email. That's somewhat different to re-inventing the Internet, which I feel the title here implies.
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You should have finished the paragraph

>> (Update: While YouTube was originally written in PHP, it migrated to Python fairly early on, per Matt Cutts and Guido van Rossum.)
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Basically - any single chaotic factor outside the narrowly defined boundaries you have mentioned, will bork your entire system.

Sure. If you're stupid. Science isn't for the stupid. There is a common if implicit belief that systematic methods will allow the dull, or worse the dishonest, to advance the frontiers of knowledge. No - the rules of science need to be made for those both brilliant and honest. Everyone else has plenty of other games they can play.

Aristotle had a nice word for the intellectual quality it takes to learn from sample sizes of 1:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronesis
Yeah, but what drives programmers nuts is that most of the problems in the language are totally independent of that ease of accessibility.

Is there something about consistent naming, or consistent behavior of different library functions, or consistent syntax and operators -- they can be lenient and type-coercing, but consistent, like Javascript's -- that would make it a worse language for people to wade into in the form of templated HTML? Of course not. That's what irritates people, the endless parade of bad design decisions that appear totally bad, with no upside, where they could have just as easily made a good decision and didn't.
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C/C++ is used to build the fundation of pretty much everything you use every day. I don't think a fast moving standard would be a good thing.
Just for what it's worth: you are presuming China is backing Iran for the long term, when they could be using it as a bargaining chip against a different conflict with the US / western powers. E.g. Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, the Koreas, to name the ones just bordering / within China. That said, I agree Iran has acted rational to their means, but as the country tends dangerously close to provoking an Israeli attack, one might alter that viewpoint.
An analysis of Facebook Instagram Acquisition
Recursive mutexes are useful when you need to implement multithreading a posteriori and cannot evaluate all the locking paths.
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I too have a low opinion of PHP and this article was one of the best takedowns I've seen on it. Nailed it.
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Because, like it or not, not everybody is doing everything via web.
Why do you guys use both memcache and Redis ? Redis also has LRU cache functionality.
Persistent connections regardless of your connectivity. I just unplugged my laptop from ethernet and walked into the living room. When the wifi connected my mosh sessions continued where they left off.
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This is a short post by me analyzing the FB Instagram acquisition. Please do share your opinions :)
I'm fairly happy as a PHP developer. It pay's the bills... there are times when I am presented with a mess which makes me want to shoot myself in the face. However I am sure such messes can easily be created in other languages. PHP has a history of Spaghetti code and when I was learning it mashing mysql, php and html into the same file was 'the way to do it'.

Today though PHP development revolves much more about OOP frameworks like Symfony and a good application structure.

The thing that bugs me most is inconsistency in core functions. Is it functionname or function_name. Is it ($needle, $haystack) or ($haystack, $needle). However, it is a minor annoyance negated by a decent IDE.
This was actually the reason why I started learning Python for web development. I can't remember how long ago it was, but I had spent months/years burying myself in PHP and hoping to see the light... after having a short affair with rails, Python was the language that called out to me from... eh, usenet probably. It seemed so simple and pleasant, yet with the performance to be powering the 'Tube.
Try node.js + express with some turn-key hoster like Nodejistu (which deploys as fast as some ftp transfer of some php files)
No, not all of us. I've never coded anything with PHP. I don't even know how to write hello world with it.
I would have thought Instagram would have been popular no matter what they used. People liked the product and functionality. They don't give two hoots about what is powering it.
Making the HTTP Archive Faster
I think now you could even build a fledgling Google on AWS. Once you start getting real traction then you may outgrow it but there's really no point in even talking about those steps until you have a few million users beating down your door.
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What government would let a social news website through?
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Ah, yeah, I thought I brought that up but evidently not. Yep, satellite would definitely be an option, but somehow I feel like that would need to involve opposition powers beyond even a wealthy hacker in Iran.
I believe this is a bit of a pony show. Facebook will have its IPO soon with an expected valuation of $100billion. A move by Facebook to buy Instagram for $1 billion works in Facebook's favor by positioning public opinion in the following ways:

1. If Facebook has $1 billion to spend then they must be making a lot of money.

2. If Instagram is worth $1billion then surely Facebook is worth $100 billion.
If they were to go through with this, it would mean the end of economic growth, trade, and commerce with the rest of the world. It would be very hard if not impossible to transfer any large sum of money for trade purposes, unless they intend on giving merchants the ability to use the internet exclusively for payments.

In reality though, a modern business is dead on arrival if they can't outside of the country for customers.
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It seems to me if ANY one group of people should be allowed to add new keywords to the user namespace, it should be the standard bearers. The whole _Keyword thing is something only a committee could love.
I have a low-key server at home. Ubuntu + dyndns. I even host some of my low-key sites on it. I've found it is a pretty good combo. It has come to be a very useful tool over the months.
I saw ICS and thought they meant Internet Chess Server.
Things that don't matter:

- OS
- Language
- Compiler
- Runtime
- Editor
- Testing process
- Deployment process
- Bug management systems

The thing that does matter:

- Building something successful that people want

Frankly, I don't care what language you used to build it. I don't care what shoddy infrastructure supports it. I don't care what hacks you put into place to scale that infrastructure. You know why? Because your customers don't care. They just care that the thing you built works.

So just build something successful that people want. And do it however you want.
do i understand you correctly - you found it harder to learn PHP because its so unorganized and inconsistent ,

and found Python easier to understand and learn than PHP ...

anyone else here with similar experience ?
PHP sites will have a hell of a lot more of them, though. You're not shielded against CSRF, XSS or SQL injection attacks unless you use a framework - at which point you're back to being a programmer with no "empowered amateur" in sight...
Suppose that was the only information they had about their own servers being compromised. That would seem to land in a bit of a grey area, no? You're probably right and the courts could find some way around this shield if someone was too obviously negligent, though.

Anyhow, that aside, my primary opposition comes from the fact that this is a poorly-drafted, unnecessary bill, not from how well I can imagine ways to abuse it. I mean, I don't think it's the end of civil liberties online or whatever its being billed as in the articles I haven't even read, but it's worth opposing simply for being such a crude blunt instrument.
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> I once heard someone argue on NPR (sorry, no citation) that English is perhaps the /best/ language at expressing absolutely any idea to another person precisely because it has such a huge vocabulary and so many idiomatic phrases.

I heard that on the radio, and I've been looking for it for years! If anyone knows the show, ideally the specific show or interviewee, I'd be supremely grateful!
Dialup, unless voice lines are dead.
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I'll absolutely agree that bugs that only show up on particular device/OS/network/etc combinations are harder to detect, diagnose and fix. But when those bugs are generally applicable (and the particular combination is just surfacing the underlying issue) I'd say it is better to be thankful they came up instead of frustrated by fragmentation.

After all, when it is a general bug that just happens to be masked most of the time, it is a buried bomb just waiting to explode when the surrounding context changes. In my opinion, detecting and defusing more of these issues sooner rather than later is a good thing.

Personally, I'm reminded me of the issues I run into when writing cross-platform code (or code that needs to work with multiple versions of tools and libraries). The upfront effort to multiple environments (or the effort required to add the new environment) is usually significant, but I'd say the improvement in code/software quality is an often unrecognized benefit (over and above the reason you're supporting the new environment in the fist place).
do you know any NEW major startups that have been built with PHP,

say the same age as Instagram - 2 years

http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/rh3u2/any_new_major_sta...
That's really a great example against the Dropout myth. Shows that's it success is more random than many thinks.
Anyone using this? Not much blogs/info googling it. Only one I found was:
http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/og42n/what_...

And http://ronan.collobert.com/pub/matos/2011_torch7_nipsw.pdf
wasent Mosh the name of Powershell before it became PowerShell? Monad was the code name, MOSH (MOnad SHell) was a name for it too...
with autossh and tmux i get exactly the same behaviour
No.

It should be "Hang out with co-workers and teams", not "Hangout with co-workers and teams".

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Yup, and the common universal motor (used in vacuum cleaners to power drills) is a big offender too.
> fighting with the language and coding around its
> deficiencies

That's still too vague. Sure PHP has it warts, but I don't recall anything I could call "fighting with the language".
Yep, stack/needle mess and inconsistency in naming is annoying, but not exactly a huge time waster.
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Nord Korea is not as stable as it seems, they are really much defined by their foreign policy. Technology there is comparable to Cold War times. UAE or Saudi Arabia is a much better example for something like that.
Thats true, but people use other worksheets as kind of declarative IO areas (that they print). And Google Docs is a big improvement as your spreadsheets get URLs and so enter into the outside world.
That would be interesting. We tend to think of resistance coming from within with these sorts of things, but it would really be something to see another nation (or private entity) begin a blatant campaign of getting Internet access into Iran in every way possible (super-powered Wi-Fi and 4G blasted all along the borders, free unrestricted satellite Internet to everyone who owns or can ghetto-rig a dish, millions of concealed mesh-networked routers all over the country (with dishes attached), thousands of proxies to the Internet planted within the Irantranet, etc.).

Edit: justincormack brought up an awesome point too: dialup. If we could get a black market for high-compression modems going, and possibly use the modems to fortify the mesh network routers as a secondary Internet source to the satellite dishes, this could end up being fairly robust.

I would love to see the CIA or some other organisation put a few billion into this if Iran really goes through with the plan.
It seems like one of the big things he is talking about is good documentation which includes usable example code.

Bash Shell scripting would be a lot simpler to use if each man page for a program or shell function had 10 or so examples with the most common command uses which were easy to paste into an editor.

Course my real preference would be the inverse. Search how to do something, return code in the specified language/shell to do it. Right now that's done by Google and other search engines, though rather poorly. Also google doesn't compare and contrast implentations.

The faster we can find a way to implement our goal, the greater our efficiency. That is something abstraction does of course , but we should remember that documentation also serves programmers.
With Instagram Buy, FB Officially Pushes M&A Strategy Beyond The ‘Acqui-hire’
Ask yourself this: would the Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen PHP? I think not.

Why not? You do realize the "team", facebook, that acquired them (worth many multiples of them at the time of acquisition) is a PHP-based company right?
India gobbling up chips to the tune of £5.8 BILLION
This reads like a justification of poor labor conditions, which it is. Eerie echoes of the gilded age.
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Best explanation on recursion?
I'm getting the info from testing. I tried using Yesod for a while but kept getting this error:

"A tag name may not contain a slash. Perhaps you have a closing tag in your HTML."

Which you can find in the source for the parser as well:

if '/' `elem` tn
then fail "A tag name may not contain a slash. Perhaps you have a closing tag in your HTML."

Maybe there's a way to work around this so you can use closed tags, but it sure wasn't obvious.
Meet Other Hacker News Readers In Real Life
Hey All,
We just released our app Circle which tells you when people from your networks or your friends are nearby. We were trying to think of different online communities of people that we thought it would be interesting to meet in real life and Hacker News was one of the first that came to mind. (I've personally met numerous awesome people through Hacker News... one of which I just saw reading HN on his laptop at a cafe and randomly struck up a conversation about string theory :).

Anyway, we created a network specifically for HN Readers and would love for people to join it and hopefully start connecting offline!

http://discovercircle.com/hacker-news
It's also interesting to see how certain companies use the lack of attention control to their advantage.

>Curious/Want to share? Type in Facebook.com

>Bored? Open up the Twitter app

>Don't feel like working? news.ycombinator.com

>Need to check on a quick fact? Type it into Chrome/Google Search bar

The best companies leverage this to their advantage. They tie human emotions/behavior into their own products. Once you've reach that kind of penetration, it's takes a lot of effort for a competitor to build that kind of "integration".

When I started seeing how many times I visited HN/Facebook/Twitter I made a concerted effort to at least cut it in half. Did I miss out on a lot? Not really. Did I get a lot more work done? Yeah.

I told myself I would cut down many times before, but it never really worked since I didn't fully commit to it. If you 're in that position (or just want some motivation), I'd more than happy to help you stay on track (It's something that I'm really interested in). Just shoot me an email (hnusername - gmail.com).
The concept reminds me 'Music for programming' mix series: http://www.datassette.net/?l=mixes
Oh that's easy. Every social news site has a groupthink--if it doesn't have one naturally, crowdsourced moderation, i.e. upvotes and downvotes, will end up creating it. You just set things up so the groupthink either agrees with The Agenda or gets angry at issues that don't impact the ruling party's agenda. Then you have the illusion of free speech and democracy without any actual risk to the power structure.

For instance, people on HN seem to get really worked up about the TSA, sexism in the tech industry, the war on drugs, and the privacy implications of Facebook and Google. If you were trying to protect a totalitarian state, do you really think any of those would be part of the agenda? Things like the TSA and war on drugs could be deliberately bad policy designed to distract the easily outraged. As for Facebook and Google, the worst thing they're going to do with your personal information is target advertisements at you. A totalitarian state would probably just build a system like Echelon.
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I agree with you and I'm really surprised in 15 years, or how over old PHP is, THERE IS NOT ONE SINGLE ALTERNATIVE!!

Why? For PHP I sign up for one of the million LAMP ISPs, I upload a .php file with .php embedded in HTML and I'm done.

Where's the Ruby version of this? The Python version? The JavaScript version? The Perl version? THEY DON'T EXIST. You wanna use Perl or Python. You either have to use slow slow cgi or you have to RUN YOUR OWN SERVER. (virtually or otherwise)

PHP sucks, I hate it. I don't code in it unless I absolutely have to. But it's not the language that makes it popular. It's the combination of pre-installed + no setup + plus faster than cgi + works on a shared host + inline templating that's made it popular.

mod_perl? mod_python? As far as I understand them they're not useful on shared web servers so they don't fit the niche PHP is filling. Node? Ruby? They are the server rather than a plugin for apache. Again, not filling the same niche.

Someone with some chutzpah needs to step up and bring the EXACT SAME COMBINATION OF FEATURES except with a different language to the Web. They can be rich writing books and running conferences.

--

Ok, now, I suspect most would want this to be in Python or Ruby but I'd argue if you really want it to succeed make it JavaScript. Because most PHP programmers have to learn JavaScript as well for their webpages. Less to learn = more likely to succeed.

But honestly, if anyone could get any of those languages to fill the niche PHP is providing it would be a huge boon over today.
The NY Times is also part of what is widely considered a sunset industry, even with its online properties. It's not implausible for companies in sunrise industries to become more valuable than the NY Times in the future, even if their revenue models are not yet clear.
PHP is the "Rudy" of web languages. It just won't quit.

I remember switching to PHP for three reasons about 9 years ago. I cycled through Perl, ColdFusion, Java Server Pages, and ASP JScript before getting to it.

1. It was the most accessible free alternative to costly platforms (ColdFusion, MS ASP) or more strict / difficult to configure platforms (Perl, JSP). Error checking was as simple as ASP/JSP and starting up was as simple as paying for a cheap LAMP server that would run it out of the box.

2. It had the largest set of online documentation for both the language itself and tutorials / code examples. This was one of the biggest unavoidable draws to the language. The community was huge and still is to this day although documentation is much more evenly distributed across other languages now.

3. PHP may be one ugly beast but it does pre-package practically every piece of functionality you could ask for within it. I'm not sure I have ever liked the look of the code but there was something magical about being able to grab remote server code via file_get_contents for the first time. It was so damn easy!

If I were to suggest a platform today I would probably have to go with Python. It has all of the same advantages that PHP had in the past but has the added benefit of being better designed and applicable to more than web programming. Ruby would be my second choice simply because the environment setup is a bit more complicated still, although the language is the most beautiful in my opinion.
I certainly would attend this ... Europe based best for me ... preferably Prague (which is a surprisingly good place for a conference).
I've always thought that php was the script equivalent of c, in as much as it'll run anywhere and any library that's ever been written will probably have a version that works in it.

Perhaps those two factors alone outweigh all the others?
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They never will. Before that happens we'll have fully automated planes operated by -- guess what? -- software.

Software is not really comparable to cars because it's not a solution -- it's a tool to build solutions. Comparably, we have devised easier ways to drive nails into wood (nailguns instead of hammers), but nails still exist and have to be driven into wood. So I don't think software will ever really be casual, just like building construction will never really be casual. Just too many variables to take into consideration.
Could CISPA Be the Next SOPA?
Does anyone have an estimate of Instagram current yearly profit (or loss)? (sorry for the basic question, I do not know much about their service)
Microsoft is a dying giant?
You chose python for its performance?

Well, I guess it's no Ruby.