skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If PHP sucks so profoundly, why is it powering so much of the internet?"

The same reason that Excel vba sucks so badly but is powering so much of internal company "applications."

A lot of these sites are first started by a small group of people, looking to get something working ASAP. They do what is easiest, setup LAMP and get hacking. At the time, it's the quickest way to getting something workable.

Inevitably, you end up with a similar situation as you do when your BA takes it upon himself to create an indespensible excel vba spreadsheet. The cost of redoing it in something better is hard to justify, because atleast the current application works. Even though you know it has reached a point where having it as a real application would probably be best since so much of your company relies on its information and analysis.

So here we are, stuck with a shitload of crap written in PHP and Excel VBA, but it doesn't matter. Because all that crap works, and that's the goal. Not maintainability, elegance, programming cred, etc.
Consider, if the yuan rose in price by 100% it would mean the price of the iPhone will be halved and more of the workers who toiled the long hours will be able to afford one - or they can cut down on overtime instead.

Wouldn't the price of the iPhone also go up by 100% since they are the ones who make it?
I have a question. There are loads of cancer charities, such as Cancer Research UK, . Does donating to these make any difference in progressing the research for a cure/treatement or does it not make any serious dent compared to the big pharmas?
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Instagram Founders Offer Startup Lessons (Video)
Aggregating events in Graphite over time
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Holy carp, a thread related to Liverpool. Didn't think I'd ever see that :-)

How many HNers are from Liverpool or the Wirral then?
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Internet is not propelling us towards an Orwellian reality and this decision by Iran is a testament to that -- it turns out that even petrodollars-fueled authorities can't control the Internet to a satisfying degree. It's also very difficult to gauge the value of mass surveillance because it leads to considerable problems with data analysis. While this report is a little light on data for obvious reasons, it offers an interesting perspective:

"The federal government is drowning in data now. The decision-makers have the ability to ask certain kinds of questions. But they cannot possibly handle the amount of specific information that has been computerized."

http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1118.html
The bigger problem (as others have alluded to) is that we don't really know what the tail of the distribution looks like. There's no obvious reason to think it's gaussian.
If I live another 50 years, I'll make it to 83. At the rate I am going, by 83, I'll have watched the sun rise about 6 times by then, maybe taken 12 walks on the beach and star gazed a few more; but I'll have eaten another 6500 cheeseburgers, drank 4 swimming pools of soda and beer, and watched a gigahour of netflix. I think we get very unrealistic when we consider the future. I'm not an extraordinary person, though.

As a cynic, I say it's just a complete fear of not existing that's the draw to living forever. But if you can experience something new only once, it seems very greedy to keep this little body going while using up some kid-to-be's spot.
but the original objection was regarding using passwordless keys. again, the main concern here isn't about automated attacks, it's about targeted attacks. someone got your key, it doesn't matter that you're running on a non-standard port. they'll figure that out, if they're targeting your machine specifically.
If dedicated syntax looks that much better than functions, then there is something lacking in the syntax.
Hi, David. I am stupid. I've checked out your site before and had totally forgotten about it.

Can you email me at lawrence @ krubner . com? I'd like to know how much you want to sell langpop for.
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Can you put the slides somewhere else? the link in infoQ is not working for me.
4 Steps To Scope Your Product Right
Emacs mode already? They're doin it right. :)

I was not aware RStudio was web-based. News to me...
Hello! Ive noticed that you and other have the same problem - so Ive tried to collect everything about how to sell and market a website here: http://www.ideaoverload.com/Find-ideas/#Selling
The interesting thing to ask should be if Facebook or Wikipedia's engineers would use PHP if they had to start from scratch. I used PHP for a big project before for legacy reasons but I wouldn't choose it for anything new even with a machine gun pointed to my manly parts. Neither would I use Java or VB for that matter.
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http://github.com/strangeloop/2011-slides/raw/master/Tellman...
Zimbabwe dropped the Zimbabwe dollar in 2009. They now use US dollars.
So the default mode of the entire operating system is to only let you install software approved, for a fee, by Apple? Go business.
Am I understanding correctly?
I don't think that those problems are really independent, but rather, share a common cause with some of the things that made PHP a success. PHP evolved as it did in large part because its benevolent dictator refused to think about more than one problem at a time. I don't argue that that's the optimal way to do things, but it did provide a unique experiment for us all to learn from.
That was my first thought too. I've always thought of cancer as being beatable in ways that bacteria and viruses aren't since the latter get the benefit of evolution. It makes a lot of sense that rapid evolution is exactly why cancer has been so difficult to tackle.

The good news is that:

1. Cancer survival rates have improved over the past and are continuing to improve; so we're still moving forward.
2. I have a lot of hope in the power of technology to come to our rescue.
a. Sequencing has to get to a point where it's done in minutes or seconds on a chip.
b. Physicians' computer aids need to be Watson+. In order to be able to constantly categorize and target each mutation with a drug or suggestion for other treatment.
c. Ideally, we need to get to the point where we can automate the synthesis of different types of drugs so that the cancer attacking system can customize treatments at the molecular level to dynamically attack cancers that are mutating.
some learn to hack and to code, others verify and quantify. sounds pretty natural, doesn't it?
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I have to agree with this. I'd consider myself to be in the same boat. I was poor in school because I was bored. However I invested hours upon hours learning to code in a bunch of different languages, was making html / javascript websites in notepad in 4th grade ('95) and by my senior year I had an expert level knowledge of Photoshop. My school never taught me any of this. My parents gave me our old family computer and we had an internet connection.
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TIOBE: C is back on top... just
Any critic of PHP who advocates other languages, like Ruby, Python or Java has to answer a question "Where are the apps?"

PHP has accomplished code reuse on the app level: applications like Wordpress and Drupal are world class and you just can't find installable web apps in other languages that have reached anywhere near the level of success. Occasionally you find an app in another language and generally it doesn't have the fit-and-finish that the successful PHP apps have.

Other languages, on the other hand, grow frameworks like cancer cells, and I wonder what disease they have that prevents these frameworks from being actually usable to build apps.
Aye, I'd agree that the things shouldn't be too net-dependent. It should be a simple matter to pre-load the things with a full curriculum of textbooks, in electronic form.

I don't see anyone arguing that OLPC is the complete solution to education impoverished children. It might even be a bit cyber-utopian for my tastes, I don't think computers are the answer to every question. But then I do think that gettign books to kids helps their education, and nobody argues that. So if you can load one of these machines with 100 books, that's better again.

Is it the best way to spend $200 for a kids education? Not if it's the only money you're spending, but it could well be part of a broader imporvement.
I didn't see any pricing information. I'm assuming it wont be free, then?
I get mocked by many of my colleagues for this, but I find nothing focuses me better for programming than stuff like Aphex Twin and Autechre. So it's good to see them having a strong presence in this sound track.

One criticism though: the retired DJ inside me is screaming at the lack of set structure. :P
5 Tips to Keep Your Content Constant
It is amusing that most people defending PHP are not able to write a coherent English sentence. Just read the comments under the article.
What’s the Value of a Non-Branded Visitor?
Simon Sinek: How To Talk About Your Weaknesses
Why the answer to “What’s your biggest weakness?” is NOT “My biggest weakness is I’m a perfectionist”
Agreed, it is not my example.
My point was that a car is an application. Facebook is also simple to use out of the box, and is far more "a car for the web" than a "transportation logistics engine for the web". There is NOT an intuitive interface out there for designing a car or a robust transportation logistics system.
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Wow, this article is unnecessarily harsh. You get the feeling that one of his immediate relatives was crushed in a freak industrial machine accident and that he later found out that the machine was programmed in PHP.

I work with PHP everyday, and it's a fine tool. It does what I ask of it, at least. If the objective is to drive a nail into a board, you can do it with a hammer or a rock, and it doesn't really matter which. Accomplishing the goal is what matters. If you can do it in the same time, why does it matter which tool you use? So one may be more elegant. So PHP is slow as balls.

Programming isn't a religion. We don't need to be so dogmatic.
No Internet at all is surpassing a propaganda net.

In order for people to stand up against oppression it helps when they can "feel the pain" and not have it muffled by some cheap painkiller substitutes.
The problem is F# has arguably the best tool chain out of all of the languages you listed. Hell, I still have problems getting Scala to work with Netbeans 7.1 and I'm not sure of any IDE (for windows at least) for ML, Haskell or OCaml.
If you become an unproductive drain on society, yes that would be bad. Otherwise there's no such thing as 'spots'. The whole point of extending human life is to maintain youth-like or better functionality. If you can't think of a way to enjoy an unlimited lifetime filled with exponential technological innovation and scientific progress, I suggest spurring your imagination a little.
A Programming Model for Personal Clouds
> Ask yourself this: would the Instagram team have been as successful had they chosen PHP? I think not.

I chuckled a little bit when I read this.

I like video games, so I'll make a video game analogy. I'm playing a lot of BF3 right now, so let's run with that. A website called Symthic publishes a list of damage and ballistics information [1] for all the weapons in BF3. They also publishes TTK (time-to-kill) information [2] for all the weapons. With these two pieces of information, it is possible to empirically determine the "best" weapons in the game for a given scenario; that is close-quarters, mid-range, or long-range engagements. Yet I can equip the perfect weapon for a given scenario and still go 2/12 [kills/deaths] -- or worse -- in a round.

No one is scratching their head after reading the above. The answer is obvious. Even given the best weapon, my skills (or lack thereof) relative to the other players in the game result in a net negative kill/death ratio.

Programming languages are no different. PHP may not scratch your itch, but if you collect a group of talented, motivated PHP programmers, you're likely to end up with a working product. The end-user doesn't really care if the application was written with PHP, Python, Ruby, Haskell, Lua, Scala, Java... They don't care. They care that it solves their problem. They care that it makes them feel good to use the product.

In today's development landscape, these goals can be achieved with a staggering number of languages. Some won't look as pretty on the back end, and some may not be as hip as another, but to focus on that aspect is to miss a large part of the point. If you want to build successful software, the tools you use should be mid-pack on your list of priorities.

1 - http://symthic.com/?s=bf3
2 - http://symthic.com/?s=bf3&sb=timetokill
yes, that's the spirit and i love the idea that those kids won't have to pay 1,200 bucks for their first rig.
New major startups built with PHP
This is awesome. Thank you for putting it together. As I am in a group scheduling a Hackathon, we can put it to immediate use. I'd like to see a lot more articles of this usefulness and information density on HN.

I would like to complain about a very minor point though, but one that drives me bonkers. The overuse of the word "manifesto" must stop. I even wrote an article attempting to collect all the internet manifestos. It went on for a long time, and didn't come close. http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog/after-the-agile-manifesto-s... Now there is a new entry.

A manifesto is a political document calling for change. This is much more of a to-do list. Or a how-to article. Or a event helper. Anything but a manifesto! :)

While we're on content nits, you might want to add anchors to the headings for deep-linking. Also an alternate chronological view would be even more useful. Like I said, we plan on using this. If we work it into more of a calendar view, I'll post in this thread.
Oh, Kaspersky couldn't be possibly surprised by existence of Dr. Web. The company is well established and has good market share in the former USSR. I remember using their products back in 1999 or so.
This is a huge deal. Not for the quality of the education (although there's that too) but also for the branding and network it gives you access to.
Microsoft had its security Waterloo 6-8 years ago, and they have dramatically improved and changed their development practices since then. I once read that they have one whole building of engineers dedicated to security (sorry cannot find the link anymore).

Reports involving security breaches of Apple products often show Apple as someone who feels wronged and would rather try to kill the messenger than fix the problem. To their credit, they appear to be looking for fixes that cause the least harm to their users. But to me they appear to be operating on very limited manpower/budget for this so they have to prioritize.

An example: Apple didn't fix a flaw on Windows iTunes for 3 years because it wasn't a priority, and intelligence software companies sold software based on this hole - imagine if Microsoft did this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8912714/Apple-iT...
Netflix: Stories about our new PAC and SOPA are not true
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Diet and exercise can probably affect it a few percentage points either way but for all the advice, tips and tricks, people who do absolutely nothing special but have good genetic heritage will easily outlive you with better quality of life.
No, Developer IDs are free.
Too much comp-sci attitude, too little coder attitude.
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Anyone have visibility on what the support for this looks like?
I believe that has not been true for a long time, at the very least because some things are keywords in C++ that would be valid identifiers in C.
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My goal is to create something worth charging for but there will be a free/personal plan. Whatever you can do now, you'll be able to do for free when premium plans are introduced.

It would make things a lot easier (for me) if Fog Creek was charging for Trello. They are hiring developers for software they are giving away while I'm working on ThetaBoard on nights and weekends and hoping to charge... I think when I'm done there will be enough differences with Trello and I'll be able to get some paying clients on board.
The manifesto element comes partly due to the number of times we've (that is, the little cabal that drafted it) have been to events where people have failed to do these things. Point taken though. :)
That's still rather irrelevant to the agenda of our hypothetical totalitarian state. You know, the one that taps the Internet backbones and data mines it all anyway. I'm not saying its unworthy of criticism, just that it's not a fundamental challenge to the Powers That Be.
They definitely have people working on OS X's malware protection (XProtect). The definitions file can be found at /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/XProtect.plist (Flashback A/B/C are in there for me).
Not quite. You can get a free certificate for non-appstore apps. Apps signed with the free cert aren't reviewed or endorsed by Apple, but they can revoke the certificate after the fact if they find that you've been publishing malicious apps. The Mountain Lion default allows signed apps only, both appstore and non-appstore. You can also set it to 'appstore only' or 'anything goes'.
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There are many facets to the problem, some of them are easily solved with the technology we have. We need to learn from the tools people already casually program with: VBA, Matlab, Excel, Turbo pascal in its days...etc.

They may have many defects as languages, but they got a lot of the 'casual' right; we could start from there.
unfortunately its only half true. i know bunch of people that were lazy like a beach bum and got rich whether because of work of other people or because of luck.

the sad truth is, that there are no set in stone rules how to become successful. perhaps its good, because otherwise if everyone would get successful, nobody would be successful.

think it this way: imagine solid set of rules how to hit jackpot in lotto. if everyone would read those rules and applied, then everyone would win... a dollar.

yes, hard work is important. yes, who you know is important. yes, idea and execution is important. yes, luck and timing is important too. but deliberating that you cant success without this or that is a pure waste of time.
This is sort of true. I don't know of a way to simply limit the number of incoming sockets without getting a lot of ISP level involvement or just outright rejecting connections. It does limit the number of long-lived sockets for file transfer. On static file serves, I am assuming the cpu has plenty of spare capacity for doing the algorithm, so I am not worried about that. Finally I am assuming the limiting factor is bandwidth here, so bandwidth smoothing the main goal.
Unfortunately, the CRT ordinary people are probably thinking of is not going to work with the RasPi. VGA is right out. This old crt works because it was composite, like a TV. RasPis will drive old TV's (and tv like monitors) and new hdmi/dvi monitors, but not the huge amount of middle aged VGA monitors.

Its perfectly understandable why they made this choice. VGA on board would double the price, but there it is. Most old computer monitors won't work with raspi. But don't forget most TV's will.
What if you've purposely taken yourself out of the gene pool? Thereby the several children you aren't having are "spots" for someone else's kids.
A cheap PC today is way more powerful than PCs of just a couple years ago. Server rooms have shrunk not just because of the cloud, but because the same amount of work can get done with less machine.

John Carmacks quote becomes more pertinent as time goes on because computing power is only becoming cheaper. And to directly address your point, the common person now has access to more computing power than ever before at a cost lower than ever in history because of the cloud.

If anything the barriers to entry continue to drop leaving only our lack of persistence as what stands between us and success.
i got my mockuptiger entirely done in php and quite happy with my choice.
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There's also a "familiarity breeds contempt" angle.
A better analog than fixing a literal car might be changing the tire of a car which doesn't have any tires when it is parked but which instantiates some with the help of an instance of ITireFactory. Obviously it makes no sense for a car to use a tire factory instead of just having tires. That is exactly how everyone who prefers PHP feels about everything.
Writer Jack London: "You Must Deliver Marketable Goods"
I had similar issues, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. You need some sort of primer visible to people know what they're supposed to be doing. Other than that it looks pretty intriguing, I like the nice clean graphics and from what I can tell it's a pretty novel idea (although, as mentioned, I don't know what the point of it is yet).
Luck is commonly referred to as being ready when an opportunity presents itself.
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Will check it out. Another good site for coding music which has been on hacker news a few times (that's where I found it) is http://musicforprogramming.net/ Been using the music from there when I need to concentrate and its worked well.
Perhaps it is too much of a stretch for me to submit this here, but I was wondering if anyone had something similar from someone who was more experienced in coding and offered any advice like that?
Certainly does a lot of what I wish in a casual programming tool! I just wish the IDE had the autocomplete, quickfix, refactoring features of Eclipse...