skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I admit, PHP sucks. But there is one thing it has going for it. It's simple to configure and secure a server that your general userbase can run applications on. I work at ITECS, the Engineering IT department at NC State University. ITECS is responsible for maintaining the server infrastructure for dozens upon dozens of university Web sites, most of which have dynamic content. Not to mention the people server, which anyone affiliated with the College of Engineering can get directory space and a MySQL database on.

I was once talking to our Systems people about, why not allow Python applications. They said that every time they have experimented with allowing CGI scripts in any language supported by their Web servers, someone has always found a way to exploit their sandbox. With PHP, the applications can still get exploited, but they have never had a breach that affects the servers themselves.

So if you're a startup or a major tech company who can spend time customizing a Web server and trust everyone who has access to it, then you're crazy for using PHP. But if you're a college with 8,000 students, almost 1,000 faculty, and a bunch of support staff in addition, and a good quarter of them need Web sites, PHP's pretty much the only option that will keep you sane.

In my opinion, that's something that seriously needs fixing. But it's certainly an explanation for why PHP is still around now.
From Stanford to Startup: Instagram Co-Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger
I think the data is significant as a record of what happened, but the greater conversation about climate change should continue even if the data showed record cold temperatures. Also of note is the Arctic oscillation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_oscillation and as others mentioned La Niña. Washington state is interesting too as the normal trend of Pacific Northwest's somewhat temperate patterns were disrupted a little.
Actually, now that I think about it, PHP just might be the Bud Light of programming languages.
That PHP logo trick is going to make it easy to spot companies with a wobbly PHP stack.

http://www.0php.com/php_easter_egg.php
So now it's the city's job to run cable for the private businesses that provide internet? Because that's what this part seems to say to me:

Our initial excitement was quickly lost when he mentioned there was actually a draft construction plan in front of Boston officials. The plan is an estimated $60,000 in cost, that no one seems to want to agree on, with neither the City of Boston nor Comcast assuming any responsibility for this projects completion.
20-something centuries ago, without the benefit of calculus or Newtonian physics, Romans were better engineers than Rasmus Ledorf.
"launch its own "clean" alternative"

If I lived in Iran I don't think I would be renewing my ISP plan any time soon.
such a wonderful country and great people, but government of crackpot thieving crooked perverts
Pretty nice. We used to play this with pencil and graph paper in high school.
I hate not being able to do phone calls at my desk; one of the biggest problems with an open plan office.
Don't complain about it, simply don't use it. The language seems to be good enough for some of the largest sites out there to use it as their primary langauge.
figuring out how to sign a FF extension properly without an https cert was one of the most difficult things i've accomplished in my programming career. :(
They say eventually you learn to love your captor.

Frameworks can help a lot, but what PHP really needs is an equivalent to CoffeeScript that fixes all of these glaring issues with PHP.

Although there's issues with the PHP language implementation, the biggest problems are the enormous number of functions with quirky argument ordering that need to be understood by a developer before they're operating at full efficiency.
I was trying, but it appears to have been a bit too poetic.
I wonder if people back then also ran around saying the sky is falling. It's not like the people in 1910 did anything to stop global warming. They continued industrialization worldwide and ended up on the other temperature maximum of the past 100 years. It's characteristic of any cyclic process.
These complaints are all well founded and researched. They serve as an education on what not to do if you're working on any computer language or applications with an API that are used by others.

"Good enough" is not good enough. COBOL was "good enough" for many companies. We can do better, and we should try to.
Show HN: A metro-inspired Start page for Google Chrome
"preg_replace with the /e (eval) flag will do a string replace of the matches into the replacement string, then eval it."

The mind reels.
It might actually be illegal not to disclose that.
I'm sorry to say I'm deadly serious O_O
You can blame Larry Wall (Perl) for that one. It's amazingly powerful but also the stuff of nightmares in the wrong hands.
Please don't astroturf.
I am a big fan of synchronous dataflow as a way to organize programs. It meshes well with the idea of modelling knowledge rather than "programming".
It's not awesome if the applications so developed by amateurs grows to store PII, financial information or do anything that has any security consequences whatsoever since it is likely to be riddled with "game over" security vulnerabilities.

Unsurprisingly, most PHP applications end up in this state. Cf. http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?query=phpbb... - and phpbb is one of the popular ones with an active community...
Here's a HN meeting room for those of us who have no one available to test it: http://m1.io/w3. Anyone care to join?
You don't need to write Firefox extensions in C/C++ to do raw IO. The same interfaces Firefox uses to implement sockets and streams are accessible by JavaScript. I wrote a web server in ~200 lines of code.

You also don't need to write C/C++ to call functions in system libraries in Firefox. js-ctypes (libffi under the hood) works quite well, although converting headers to js-ctypes function definitions can't be automated IIRC, which makes it a bit of a pain.
Universal Startup Pitch Deck
If it succeeds, governments everywhere will be lining up to license the technology.
Yes you are a heretic and yes you are exactly right and yes you will be mocked/derided for it.
PHP as a language is, at present, defined by the behaviour of the canonical PHP.net implementation. Change the implementation, and de facto you've changed the language; Perl 5 is similar in this respect. A claim that an alternate implementation or tool chain supports _that_ very same language is a curious statement. It is an alternate implementation, and surely it must differ behaviourally, even if only by having unique bugs.

IIRC Facebook engineers must use HipHop for all their development, with PHP.net's php being now incompatible (hence the push to speed up the interpreter.) Wouldn't that make the language-supported-by-HipHop a PHP flavoured superset at the very least?
Watch out for western governments/corporations that may want to "borrow" those kind of ideas.
YouTube just recently turned profitable in the last two years. It was hugely unprofitable with an unproven business model at the scale at which it was bought.
Ask HN: Lisp-like macros in a statically typed functional programming language
Is it possible to have LISP-like macros in a statically typed functional PL like Haskell?

Haskell is very powerful, primarily owing to its advanced type system. LISP is well-known for it's macros.

Is there any way to combine these two?
There will always be someone bigger, faster, stronger, smarter and more successful.
> They did so because in the late 1990s it was not possible to run multiple mod_perl applications on a single Apache process, but mod_php could do so.

When it comes to single factors explaining its success in the 1990s, the one I've heard cited more often is that you could embed PHP into HTML documents with the <?php ...> kind of deal, and a lot of shared hosts enabled that by default, making it by far the easiest way to get server-side scripting up and running.
Should Paying $950 With A Text Be This Easy? (video)
Do you get standard deviations when you watch the summary today's weather on the news? I think the statistical detail was appropriate.

If you are seriously proposing that standard deviation makes an average 8.6 degrees above normal insignificant then you are going to have to present some pretty compelling evidence. NOAA do generally know how to do some basic math.
Mobile Payments - Do you use it? Experiences?
"Further, a car is simple to use out of the box"

Exactly my point. They didn't use to be simple. Crank, choke, throttle, water in the battery, where's the next fuel repository, where are my goggles, where is the rug for my legs, etc. Now they are, and you just think of moving your body from here to there, and almost not at all about how to make your car help you do that. Now people use a car casually.

It's that kind of change, only much more profound and difficult to achieve, that will be needed before people can "program" (if we still call it that) computers casually.
If I had to guess I'd say it's fear of the unknown combined with a reluctance to embrace new ideas on some subconscious level.

You should give Ruby or Python a shot as an alternative. C# comes with all the .Net baggage, it's a whole different game, and Java is far too enterprise for someone living in PHP-land.

There are things that are stupidly easy to do in Ruby and Python that are virtually impossible to do in PHP, and these are things you do all the time. PHP's feeble list transformation routines, which are a fundamental operation in even Perl, are a huge problem.

If you think PHP is fun, you would love a well designed language.
Oh God, and what're they gonna do next, build their own microprocessors? Let's be real, they're going to become the next North Korea if this and their other isolationism plans succeed...
A New Window Manager for Chrome OS
For the love of IETF please just call it Intranet.
Which canonical PHP.net implementation? They differ across minor revisions, in intentional and unintentional ways.

In the absence of a standard, saying what is and is not PHP is necessarily a practical matter: useful PHP implementations are those that run non-trivial PHP applications. HipHop qualifies.

FB's dependence on HipHop is because of backwards-compatible extensions to the language (like yield, e.g.). These extensions don't prevent HipHop from running normal PHP programs, though our use of them does prevent us from using Zend. The extensions are under flags that default off, if you don't want to use them.
I've used mosh over iodine, by simply having the iodine-server forward all of my packets via IPv4 NAT. I then set my client gateway to use dns0 instead of eth0. Works great!
Necessity is the mother of all innovations.

Nobody feels the need for a cure for cancer until they actually get cancer, and until then its always US and THEM. People take photos and share them all the time. So Facebook sells. So Instagram sells for a $1 billion.

Unfortunately we don't act until we are forced to.
Why stop at teams? How about "good departments happily deciding"? Or "good companies happily deciding"? Or "good nations happily deciding"?
I love a good, high quality rant; this is a very good one. Kudos.

I was starting to entertain the idea of doing a project in PHP, thinking it can’t be that bad. Thanks for convincing me otherwise. The inconsistencies you listed would drive me up a wall.

It does remind me of the Unix Haters Handbook (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook); I used to have my very own copy; I would read it and laugh and think how lucky I don’t have to use Unix on regular basis.

Of course, that was back in the day; now I spend a lot of time at the command line on my MacBook Pro.
I had a one-to-one talk with Rasmus Lerdorf a few weeks ago. This is one of the few things he said:

"I wrote PHP as a hammer to do my stuff. Around 1993, the only way to write web apps was by hacking C and Perl. This was extremely painful, and you would have to do the same thing over and over again. So I started writing a tool which would make my work easier."

"I never thought while writing PHP that someday millions of people will be looking over my shoulder into my code. If I would have known that, I would have surely done a few things differently. But nobody knows that. Some appreciate the language, some don't. I don't blame them."

"PHP is a hammer. Use it for the right purpose at right place. Learn Python, Ruby, Haskell, Scala, etc. every language and use them where they fit. No language is perfect. There are trade-offs involved in each of them."

"When anything is too popular, criticism naturally follows. When people compare a language which is used in, say, 35% of the web apps to a language which is used in, say, 5%, their comparison is highly skewed because then they directly compare the number of things that have gone wrong in one with respect to another. They don't scale them to the same level and then see the faults. I don't blame anyone for that."

"You can scale horizontally with PHP as much as you want. There are many companies doing that, and they have been very successful."

"I can teach a semi-intelligent monkey to code in PHP in three hours."

There were many other cool and brilliant things he pointed out. What I learnt: Accept what it is. If you don't like it for your purpose, use another language which fits in.

P.S. In the new release of PHP, there are even driven servers (libevent), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Traits, Instance Method Call, built-in web server for testing, improved error messages, broad performance improvements, and many others. This language is not going to go away soon.
It seems weird to me that the Iran-linked Hezbollah organization is renowned for its technological savvy, yet their allged paymasters are Iran.
I can't see this as a user acquisition play. The number of Instagram users that are already on Facebook must be, what, 90%? Maybe more?

So, it's obviously not for talent ($100mm per head? no way...), users, or tech. That leaves it as a competitive play. They took Instagram off the market to keep it out of the hands of Apple and Google.
The whole concept of "curing" cancer is silly, and best abandoned. Cancer is just the name we give to the failure of certain kinds of cell regulatory systems, particularly those relating to growth and cell death. Coming up with a "cure" for "cancer" makes no more sense than coming up with a "cure" for buggy web programs. Just like with web programs, there are certain common patterns in cancers that can be addressed and mitigated (XSS, estrogen receptors). But over a long time horizon, all complex systems have failure modes, and that's all cancer is.
Getting pre-launch traction with web games
Statistically you'll need quite a few

This is exactly the problem: statistics. In a problem where every case is unique, any use of statistics is an abuse of statistics.

The roots of Western medicine are arguably pre-scientific, and certainly pre-statistical. We knew and could do a lot of things before we knew what a p-value was.

If what "advancing knowledge" means to you is "accumulating p-values so I can publish papers," this kind of experiment can produce no information whatsoever.

If what "advancing knowledge" means to you is "we think we know what's going on and we think we can do it better next time," the answer is very different. Of course this is what most people, indeed most industries, mean by "learning." We don't have to know absolutely that we know - we don't have that luxury. Instead we need to get things done.

Modern scientific medicine is supposed - no, required (with the increasingly narrow exception of surgery) - to learn only in the first way. Guess what? It doesn't seem to be learning much. Or at least, much of any use. Maybe medicine isn't as much like physics as we'd thought.

it is it is for the case of "oh shit, I just killed a million people because we didn't investigate long term effects".

And you're lecturing me about Godwin's law?

For what it's worth, long-term effects of OTC non-cancer drugs aren't investigated for shit. I'm permanently achlorhydric from permanently solving my GERD with daily omeprazole. As recommended by actual doctors. What the hell is the effect of taking omeprazole for a decade? Who the hell knows?

And that is where your theory really fails; because you are trading an unknown collateral now, for an unknown collateral in the future.

Did you ever read Asimov's Foundation? Remember the bits set on Trantor? Your whole mindset is straight out of Trantor, I fear - and it's certainly not exclusive to you.
We all pay for the gift of life with death. All living beings suffer.

Perhaps it is how you deal with that truth that limits you.
I work in at an "Airbnb for X" company. We happen to do car sharing, not dog sharing, which means there's a little more technology involved, but $3M for any company isn't much.

There's a huge amount of operations involved in making any peer-to-peer industry work right. You have to have good anti-fraud, good abusive user detection (how do you weed out the guy who runs a dog-fighting ring and is signing up with fake information in order to steal someone's dog?), good support for when things go wrong, etc.

Word for these kinds of things don't spread organically—to get people on both sides of the transaction (and properly balance supply and demand), you have to do pretty focused local and digital marketing.

Add on software developers to build the site and keep iterating on features, designers to make it look pretty, maybe a PR firm to help get the word out... Things get expensive fast.
Foxconn Bears The Brunt Of Ivory Tower Assault On Capitalism
That seems very likely... His zealotry totally misses the point and comes off as very defensive.

My 2 cents: when I saw Exec's real page I thought, "Interesting idea, not for me." When I saw Kyro's redesign I thought "This product seems awesome! I could definitely see myself using it." Kyro's design looks far more welcoming and professional and it does a much better job of making me think the product stands out. It reminds me of heroku and gilt groupe's excellent designs (albeit it's not quite there yet). I think those are good design's to mimic for Exec's desired demographic.
Very unlikely they would cut themselves off entirely. No email to or from Iran seems self defeating. I suppose they won't outsource censoring to the West. ;)
Iranet, or the Intehranet.
A nit:

"Subclasses cannot override private methods. Subclass overrides of public methods can’t even see, let alone call, the superclass’s private methods. Problematic for, say, test mocks."

IMHO you don't want private methods to be visible in subclasses, because this makes the fragile base class problem worse. If I'm a framework developer working on a UI library, I should be free to add private methods to my Button class for the second version of my library without worrying that they'll influence the behavior of a FooButton that some app wrote that's derived from the class in the first version of my library.

The problem, of course, is testing. You want to be able to cleanly substitute mock objects for unit tests, without having to make everything depend on an interface or to use protected everywhere. It'd be nice if languages had more unit testing facilities built in. Microsoft Fakes is an interesting approach here.
Humour
People of all ages and cultures respond to humour. The majority of people are able to experience humour, i.e., to be amused, to laugh or smile at something funny, and thus they are considered to have a sense of humour.
Mind Over Mass Media
Even in 64-bit mode the base address for code and data segments remains 32 bits - it is only expanded to 64 bits for call gate descriptors, IDT gate descriptors, LDT descriptors and TSS descriptors. The base address for the FS and GS selectors can be set to a 64 bit value, but the upper 32 bits are ignored in compatibility mode (ie when a 32 bit task is running).

The point about being able to implement segment-swapping is well-taken however.
I've been programming since I was in 6th grade and I still want to cause physical harm to myself instead of write a shell script for any shell.
I can't reply again, but, um, are you trolling?

I didn't see this message the first time. Truly remarkable comment. Am I trolling?

I'll answer with a text from 1863, by the English historian James Anthony Froude:

In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or enquiry the judicious questioning of received opinions has been regarded as the sign of scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very source and root of healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would at present be found.

Constitutions have changed with habits of life, and the treatment of disorders has changed to meet the new conditions. New diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor Butts had no cognizance; new continents have given us plants with medicinal virtues previously unknown; new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded experience, have added a thousand remedies to those known to the age of the Tudors.

If the College of Physicians had been organised into a board of orthodoxy, and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a crime against society, which a law had been established to punish, the hundreds who die annually from preventible causes would have been thousands and tens of thousands.

I suppose it's trolling to remark that Doctor Butts has made quite a comeback. Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=Xc0YHClRwA4C.
Auto Transport Miami Beach, California
Don't you think that maybe Facebook acquired Instagram because of the latest round?
Teach That Class (Again) Using Blog Copier
> var n = 42; n.[[TAB]]

No auto-complete. It's severely limited to only live objects. Which may be an argument for REPL, but it's not an argument for "dynamic languages can have autocomplete".
This was the same argument I was having in my head, and in the end I couldn't draw a clear enough line between something like Jython and something like HipHop.
You sound lik me, Let see if I get as far as you did. Looking forward to your blog.
I actually have to agree. I started out my programming experience with C# -> PowerPC (strangely) -> C++ -> touched upon PHP -> Java -> Python -> Objective-C. Out of all of these languages, Python was by far the easiest and most flexible language to learn.

I've never done any sort of web development at all (no HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.), but I set up a local Django server to do stuff with, and I absolutely love it. I learned Pyton for web development, but I can really see it coming a part of my future projects.