skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many both pro and con PHP articles are missing the point about PHP. PHP is a great success in spite of its obvious shortcomings because it supports iterative development. (Saying that language choice is less important for a project than other factors doesn't explain anything - all other things being equal, a language with fewer traps and idiosyncrasies would be the better choice.)

The killer feature of PHP is that you can FTP to the server and start adding arbitrary code to a static html file by adding a single tag. Other frameworks deliberately makes this more complicated with more overhead, because they want to promote a better architecture with separation of concerns and so on. Basically these frameworks have "encoded" the waterfall-method, because they assume you know from the start that you need a complex site. PHP supports iterative improvement from the simplest site (static HTML files on a server) to arbitrary complex code, without requiring major speedbumps where you have to rethink the whole app.

This also mirrors how many web developers have learnt to code - starts out with making html/css, then gradually learn php by inserting simple snippets of code to make banner rotate and so on. (The "right way" of course would be to take a pause for a few years to get a CS degree before adding the banner rotator.)

When an app grows beyond a certain level of complexity, changing to a better platform might improve quality, but then you have already made an investment in existing code.
Show HN: a HTML5 and Blender Games Demo
Walks And Walking - Kent Walks Sturry To Sandwich Walking Route
JavaScript was rushed to the market in a few weeks so it is also a fractal of bad parts, for example, the == operator sucks just like in PHP, the + operator is used for both addition and concatenation, semicolon insertion has an unintuitive behaviour, etc. See JavaScript the bad parts for more detail. The entire web is built on a terrible foundation with languages like JavaScript and PHP that it is a wonder how it got to be as advanced as it is today.
'Don't break the internet': Idiot's slogan stole your privacy
As for Facebook and Google, the worst thing they're going to do with your personal information is target advertisements at you.

Sure, I bet that is what everyone is complaining about. It certainly can't be about the possibility of your private information ending up in hands that could do you harm with it, right? I mean, who in their right mind would be afraid of how a bank or an employer or a court or a government agency might use some innocuous bit of information they thought was private? After all, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of...
Google Algorithm Updates – Top 5 in March
Doesn't work for me behind a corporate firewall. This might be a big problem, since the app is mainly targeted for business use.

Does anyone know which ports does it use?
Just some as-I-try-it feedback:

1) What am I doing?
2) Oh, okay, right. I move the blue blocks to make a "B".
3) Okay... Why am I doing this?

I'm not sure what the game /is/, or why it's a challenge, or why it's any fun at all. Could you explain it a little further, please?
Anonymous plans to take down Great Firewall of China
'The organization says that the system "consists of an Intranet designed ultimately to replace the international Internet and to discriminate between ordinary citizens and the 'elite' (banks, ministries and big companies), which will continue to have access to the international Internet."'

As long as those with power are not willing to give up their own access to the internet, hackers will find a way to break the system.
Hey, cool. I was 19 when that song hit the charts and I understand a lot of those things a lot better now. It all seemed quite sensible, but I remember that time recent enough to know there's just no way a healthy young adult can use that advice--at all.

And I always wondered about the sunscreen. I bet it depends on your geographic location a lot. Sure, if you get powerful direct sunlight on your skin it's important, but here (NL) that's just a few weeks per year, if we're lucky :-) -- And yes, that's when I wear sunscreen, it's just that considering scientifically proven benefits, I don't understand why "wear sunscreen" is stressed so much vs "eat many fresh vegetables" or "do something that really raises your heart frequency once per day, even just shortly" sound so much more universal (including boosting your immune system and thereby preventing cancer and wrinkly skin!)

Oh well.

Thanks for the link anyway :)
Toshiba to demo vid streaming without any work by the CPU
PHP is like English: a mutated fugly cockroach of a language that defies logical explanation, contains more exceptions to any syntax rule than the rule covers and yet its very ugliness is also its strength: you can always, always find someone who can work in it.

Don't underestimate how useful it is that anyone can come along and hate your codebase just as much as you do in a very short period of time.
It is bullshit, I'm currently learning to program by following the excellent CS106A paper at Stanford, free on iTunesU. In the current online climate you can learn to code without trying to figure out how to pay a massive student loan back when you're done.

What bugged me about the spin was the comment about Systrom receiving no formal training, unlike Zuck. Zuck built Facebook with next none of the "formal training" he was supposedly getting during his short stint at Harvard. Systrom actually graduated and then went on to be exposed to some pretty big name companies in the tech world.

Good on him though, and yes, inspiring stuff.
Today, nearly everyone has been coding for a long time. Everyone learns the basics in school. At college or university many will have a lot of further contact with many computer science concepts. It’s a lot like math, really: everyone knows the basics (or has at least heard them once and promptly forgotten them), but that doesn’t make everyone a mathatician.

(My dad, a construction engineer, learnt programming at college in the freaking late 70s. He never needed it during his long and successful career as a construction engineer, though, and has forgotten all about it. Today, anyone who studies anything to do with social sciences – for example – needs to have some coding skills if they want to do effective statistical analysis.)

There is a difference between that and building your own app.
On the other hand, there are plenty of people with determination and focus who aren't successful in the Instagram sense of walking away with $100M+ after 2 years of work.
Facebook didn't buy them for anything like a billion dollars, $1000 plus the rest in shares is more like it.

Instagram's gamble on Instagram has become a gamble on Facebook (who are risking nothing of value).
NK stable? they depend on aid from the rest of the world to keep them from collapsing and selling their weapons to terrorists, let alone attacking SK.

The only reason they haven't been nuked yet is because it's right next to China, and because they are so miserable sending them some food scraps is cheaper than bombing them.
19 months from launch to $1,000,000,000 acquisition: Instagram
Thinking that you need ingenuity is often the root of problems.
PHP has its frustrations. It's not outright broken.

But my point was that all other programming languages suffer their own "broken" problems. I managed a team working in Ruby not long ago; they had no end of gripes and frustrations.

The key point is that compared to the challenge of building a complex application, those "difficulties" are trivial. And once you are at that stage, anyway, you're so used to the way your chosen language works it doesn't matter.

These are not constraints on what the language can achieve or do and simply require knowing about them so that you don't paint yourself into a corner.

Because application design is a hard problem it doesn't matter, given a relatively skilled team, what language is chosen.

This is identical in other engineering disciplines; a friend of mine works in motor design (electrical motor) and is constantly griping about nuances in the tools and equipment. Same issues.
That's right, but it's also important to realize that, in fact, there is no grand narrative[1].

Humans are compulsive pattern-recognizers and can turn any arbitrary independent sequence of events into a story.

That doesn't mean the story is wrong, per se, but it does mean you cannot presume to know where a story "is leading up to". Because the only "complete" story is the one that is told afterwards.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_narrative (lots of "blah" btw)
I remember that PHP became popular because of mod_php. If you wanted to script a web application on Linux or UNIX your choices were either Perl with CGI or a much faster PHP with mod_php.

It was incredibly easy to setup both in production and for development - hence the LAMP stack and the thousands of cheap shared hosts that had PHP enabled, which lead to a lot of pre-install applications being written in PHP.

Other web applications only recently became easy to install, and they didn't beat 'ftp into the site and drag files over' until cloud platforms and virtualization.
Your firewall needs to allow NAT UDP traversal. Future version will have fallback to TCP/HTTP to pass through corporate firewalls.
Blender as a 2D game map editor – Proof Of Concept
Google hangouts without the google.
Good luck with that: the great firewall of China doesn't works, you don't need to be a hacker to punch a hole through that POS system and the Iranians don't even have the manpower to make a firewall like that so whatever they do will be even lamer and full of holes.

Besides there's the social factor: the Chinese are cool with their government for now because despite all the crap you hear they are still much better off than 20 or 30 years ago. Iran on the other hand is doing like shit, the embargo has destroyed their economy and the people has already revolted before, and the ayatollahs are scared shitless about the Arab Spring.

This might be the last straw...
Gmail - Inbox (5) - sjswllmsgmail.com
In the UK we have a saying, where there's muck there's money!

It's an interesting article - I wrote a more indepth version of the same thing three weeks earlier

http://www.flipfilter.com/blog/2012/02/22/lessons-in-fast-gr...

Flippa has good and bad, but I doubt it would be any other way anywhere else. It goes back to the idea of what's value for one person isn't necessarily value for another.

We run the A-List Newsletter which reviews sales of web businesses both from Flippa and from private brokers (http://www.flipfilter.com/a-list) with a value generally above $10K. Each month I look at the top five sellers for that month (in terms of sale price) and the most active (in terms of bids). The top five can vary wildly; in February it seemed they were all Clickbank Sites that sold products in the MMO niche and followed the same formula of launch to a pre-established list, marketing the hell out of upsells and downsells, selling the business then using the initial list (now much larger post launch) to do it again.

The most active however are pretty much always sites that sell Internet Marketing Services - for example, a site which sells Facebook likes or one which offers Social Bookmarking services. Their final selling price is always around the $1 - $2K mark and they often end with in excess of 50 bids despite only being a few months old and having no real barrier to entry (ironically, the same sellers will often sell the same templated site again under a different banner a few weeks later). IMO, the sad part is the people who buy these sites tend to be new to the industry and no real information to tell them that this isn't a the easiest way to get a return on their investment.

There's going to be good and bad at every price range, and likewise types of sites which tend to do well (Adsense with earnings history, Clickbank affiliate sites, Email Newsletters, anything with a big list in the MMO industry) and things that don't (Web Apps with complex backends, Ecommerce with physical products, News sites which require 'real' journalism) but that doesn't mean the sites which don't sell well aren't worth something to the right buyer.

This isn't defending the truly bad stuff or the sometimes fraudulent sellers that you occasionally see on there - it's going to happen for reasons that probably boil down to resources, but if even 10% of Flippa listings based on the 1,000s it has are 'good' then it still has more to offer than a site with 80% good but only 15 listings.
Project Glass: One day...
I have visited about 20 - 30 websites in last month that were all very obviously built with bootstrap. I can't remember even one of them (apart from the one in the topic). Because they looked and felt alike.

I think first impressions matter, and if a website/app won't make a good one on me, then they lost me as their potential customer.

The way bootstrap is built (LESS) - it allows to customize pretty much anything, widths, margins, borders, colors... To me it's just lazy if developers leave everything to the defaults and put the website/app on the web, and "see how it goes", then build on that.
Is it still true? can you actually do much nowdays (in that scale) on a cheap PC? it seems like heavy machines/cloud access is crucial
This is annoying. This will conflict with the matrices in my code.
"Control your reality like a TV set": http://rejectiontherapy.com/control-your-reality-like-a-tv-s... goes into the four states of attention and Attention Theory Control. Essentially, our perspective we use to interface with existance either gives us power or makes us a victim of circumstance.

Perspective is our power, and it affects everything, including motivation.
If only hackers can break the system, they won. See my other comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3821517

This is not about how easy is for hackers to circumvent the system, this is about how effective is the system in stopping information flow for the masses.
Because Julia is at such an early stage, such articles are important to help it improve.
I don't see why a couple of badly named functions can make a whole language crappy.

All those people bashing PHP suffer from some kind of superior complex. It's like bullies beating up the ugly nerdy kid that has glasses and pimples.

Or maybe it's just envy that something, that might not win the next language design contest can be so popular.

To all the PHP haters out there: hate away. I don't care. All the other PHP programmers making a living don't care. Mark Zuckerberg clearly doesn't care.

It's time to grow up, people.
Chronograph Mens Watches
The water resistant of this chronograph mens watches are up to 100 meters. The case diameter of this watch is approximately 42mm and the case diameter of this watch is 11mm perfect suitable size for this watch. The weight of this watch is 163grams comfortable for a men’s wrist. This Seiko Mens Chronograph Watch is very nice in any way whether the quality of material, design, features or even price.
While I like the AMEX Plum Card, I think the annual fee after the first year is quite steep ($185). It's probably not much if you actually have a lot of cash flow, but I feel like the most usages would mainly be domain names, VPS or AWS S3 bandwidth etc.
When adding locking without evaluating all locking paths, how can you be sure none of those paths cause a deadlock ?
Sixty Years Old - is my future short and messy, or long and glorious?
Hi, I'm Sebastian.

Setting unrealistically high benchmarks and goals usually destroys contentment, makes you go half-insane, and risks you always feeling terrible regardless of how much prosperity and success and accomplishment you achieve.

And yet, it also lets you drive new things to the world....

Hmm. I'll share an anecdote. It's true. I hesitate to share true ridiculous-sounding anecdotes with skeptical people, because the natural response is more skepticism, perhaps even mocking. But what the hell, it's true and maybe something interesting will come of it --

You see, ambition and hubris and uncalled-for faith in yourself both offputs a lot of people (perhaps, yourself) and also gets you into hot water. After having a confirmed appointment cancelled by one of the Director of Communications at one of the largest international organizations in the world, I got into a shouting match with him and was almost arrested.

You know, I had nowhere near the relevant authority, gravitas, channels to actually be justified in being offended at being brushed off and cancelled. In retrospect, this was... sort of ridiculous.

However, that same hubris that got me into the shouting match (with threat of arrest, and all), was applied when being brushed off in a similar situation - and the same pressing and indignant behavior led to us to a meeting with a high ranked diplomatic officer, and later their Minister of Foreign Affairs for a large charity project we're doing.

I was, in retrospect, probably completely unqualified to launch this project. However, having run on faith and hubris for a while, something of substance happened, and once you've got something tangible it becomes possible to recruit actual professionals (what'd Eric Schmidt call himself when he originally joined Google? "adult supervision"?) -- and we did, and continue to do so.

So, I don't know. If you want to be happy, have low expectations, find a vocation you truly enjoy, live below your means, and spend time with your friends and family, do lots of relaxing, spend time in nature, read books, and have a healthy physical life and sex life.

I have absolutely the highest level of respect for anyone who manages this true happiness, and would never once more encourage someone to set unrealistic goals and ambitions far beyond their caliber in order to attempt to drive the world forwards. Frankly, it's lonely and terrifying and miserable much of the time. I wouldn't recommend the path to anyone who wasn't hell-bent on it already.
Initially, after the post I've heard many people recommending a debit card which I already have. However, after a day thinking about it, I realized that there IS a case when I would need a credit card. If one of my products requires flexibility, i.e.: the "dream case" of needing 10 more VPS nodes over night, I would need some credit to make it happen.
MS in Mathematics-Emporia State University
Enough with all these Bullsh!t..., I have already seen too many articles against PHP, If you want developers to switch to other languages, Write an Article on that

If you don't like PHP, Just don't fuc_ing use it.. Nobody is forcing you to use it..

Let developers make their own decisions on Which language they want to use.

As long as WWW exists developers will use PHP, Get over that.
But the great firewall of China works so well. Yes, it's trivially circumvented by anyone who knows how things works, but the vast majority of Chinese people don't fall in that category.

The purpose of these systems is to keep the general population in the dark, it's not targeted at knowledgeable intellectuals. You can't keep them in the dark anyway and they already know. It's only point is to stop knowledge dissipating to the masses.
> It's not quite that simple. Consider firearms.

... and then half the scrolling length of this discussion thread was about guns. Great job!

Actually it's not your fault, it's just HN terrible threading algo again. Can't we just do what Reddit does and collapse things a littlebit? Because it seems there's always some top comment (not always the top-most) that dominates 90% of the discussion. And frankly it's very hit-and-miss whether that dominating comment is on-topic or not.

We could have so much more interesting discussions here on HN ...
Too much work is not good
I used Bank of America for the business checking account. As much as I hated them, I believe their online banking ability coupled with the fact that they're one of the rare banks that accept foreign money directly make them the most logically choice. In any case, they DID offer a credit card but I figured if I don't have all my eggs with BoA, it would be a bit safer in term of financial "redundancy" if that's really a thing.
It's the same reason people in any field put down things - they like to feel superior by putting down the tools that others use, thereby increasing their own relative stature.
RIM says Android app ecosystem is a “cesspool,” but what if Google agreed?
You cannot self deadlock with a a single recursive mutex.
Many self employment books recommend keeping the business and personal stuff separated as it raises less flag with the IRS when the tax time comes around.
Mirror Image Internet, Inc. (mirror-image.com) -- Tewksbury MA (north of Boston)

User Interface Software Development Engineer

Build the UI for the growing portfolio of web applications we provide to our customers!

While the work will initially be almost entirely in HTML/CSS/Javascript (jQuery, typically), we expect you are still an adept software engineer who is unafraid to dive into the Java code running on the server behind your web pages.

For more details, see the full posting here: https://jobs.github.com/positions/10e73e32-825a-11e1-90fe-a3...
Let's blame the unions?
Facebook and google are opt-in. You can stop using them anytime you want (use ddg instead of google). You can't decide which country you born in.
Supposedly, they'll still have an Intranet, it should be possible to tunnel internet connections over it to some hidden bridges.
American Universities Infected by Foreign Spies Detected by FBI
>if we were actually capable of understanding what was causing global climate change, we would be able to predict the weather

This conditional is (obviously) false. Given your argument seems to rely on it, your argument is not sound.
How to learn Emacs
Usually the latest draft is available for free and has the same content as the standard. That should be the N1570 document.

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf
Arrington is a joke

TechCrunch is a joke

PandoDaily is a joke and has a hideous design.
Wow.. I could totally see something like this taking off in Tokyo aimed at helping well-paid foreign ex-pats navigate annoying Japanese tasks eg. Go to the city office, prepare visa forms, change postal address etc.
Hell, for most of then you aren't even protected against remote code execution. Google for "PHP arbitrary script execution" and weep.
still, you can be successful without making millions.
Apple founder fears patent war fallout
From the TIOBE website: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

That last line points to the definition here: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d...
Absence of media coverage for lack of XP support in Visual Studio 11
A single pitch deck all startups can use.
Too much Deadmouse
CSS3 Snow | CSSDeck
I read this yesterday, it's a really great tutorial. It should be added to the emacs wiki as a learning resource.
I truly believe that talent helps but it doesn't take you as far as determination, focus, passion and ambition. If you want it badly enough you will make it.