skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait, there's a difference between concentrating on tasks that you reasonably expect to yield $1000 an hour, and spending $1000 here and now to save an hour.

If there were two services, say an email support answering service, one requiring $50 a month and 2 hours of your time, and one requiring $1000 a month and 1 hour of your time, are you really saying you'd choose option #2?

I don't think that's in the spirit of the original blog post. It stipulated the example current, risk free value of time as $150, which is probably more accurate, and that would be the figure you'd use to make decisions like this.

In other words, spend an hour to save $150 today, or spend an hour to possibly make $1000 two years from now.

(But I agree with the rest of your post, FWIW)
Is that like a wolf squared, or is it just a really emphatic wolf that looks pretty pissed?
I use this database in my apps to solve exactly this problem (US only): http://federalgovernmentzipcodes.us/

No idea who runs it but its updated regularly and has never caused issue (so far). It includes both the USPS preferred city and all possible cities so you can either default to preferred or provide at least auto complete. Its also has all the military addresses and as well as lat/long, which is a bonus.

I can see the ziptastic concept being interesting if it was fully international but for just the US it takes about 15 minutes to download the linked csv, toss it in a DB table, and write the 3 queries you need. I don't understand the need for a service to handle such a simple task.
The "craigslist effect". It's when a product or service with shitty design and severe flaws is the only one that does what it does and starts growing in popularity due to it's monopoly and it's owners think "hey we must be doing something right so lets not change or improve it because we don't have to". A.K.A. "What happens when you don't have competition."
I talked to Alex briefly at CanSec about your strategy. I appreciate the idea of setting a minimum bar, but it can start to sound like selling feel-good security. It's easy to say in hindsight "all you had to fix was these ten bugs and ignore the rest." The truth, however, is that you can't reliably predict that in advance. History has shown that even the low-end mass malware moves to more advanced techniques as targets become harder. And, of course, the strategy you're proposing does nothing for those at risk from targeted attacks (which is something I'm professionally seeing more and more of).
My guess is the same mechanic of humanity that keeps people buying lottery tickets. Maybe, just maybe, tomorrow it will be me!
Inspired by Spam: Showcase of Beautiful Typography Works by Linzie Hunter
the fact that my Android app can read log statements of other apps is also helping creating this security hole. Sandbox each app I would say!
My main reason for the browser is that it makes seamless to execute code on a remote machine. Text-based interfaces are not very useful because you can't see plots without saving them and copying them. X11 forwarding is slow. My current solution is NX, but it's not optimal, since I hate NX 4 and NX 3.5 doesn't run on Lion.

Cloud9 IDE is already a decent browser-based code editor. It's already better than the MATLAB editor in just about every way but integration with the interpreter. Using a browser-based IDE will solve both the cross-platform UI issue and the remote access issue.
True. A lot of webhosts are configured such that you can drop some PHP files into a directory via ftp, and it'll "just work". Which is nice. But...

...that's not really inherent in PHP. You can configure Python to be just as easy, and some webhosts do this. Node is pretty much always this easy. Django and Rails can also be this easy (if you've ever used Webfaction, you'll know what I'm talking about).

And, on the flip side, if you want to install configure PHP yourself, it's actually not that easy. It's trivial to get a PHP page to execute given a web server configured to make it trivial (but, again, that's true for almost any language), but configuring the web server isn't trivial.
> I’ve never seen anyone point it out.

Really?

The easy of deploying a single-purpose script / hello world is always trotted out as the reason PHP ever became popular.

Yes, even in yesterday’s big item “PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design.”
> One of my largest pet peeves is that Skype quality is so poor that DTMF tones can't travel across intact

I nearly threw my laptop across the room in frustration this morning due to this issue.

I was trying to log in to a conference call. I think it took me 5 calls and 9 attempts.
Im waiting to see how quick Apple and Facebook respond, not really fast :)
I think the PHP documentation is the major thing not mentioned here for the non-programmer layman (like me, who uses PHP).

Need to know how to use in_array?

http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.in-array.php

Not only is there a quick reference on the top, but clear, concise, and diverse examples on how to use it if you don't want to spend time thinking about how to work the arguments.

Maybe the expert programmer doesn't really care about these qualities, because javadoc is "easy" to them, but it doesn't compare to this for me.

P.S. As someone who has dabbled with Ruby, Python, etc. I do acknowledge they are vastly superior languages in many respects.
"Not a single other environment has ever duplicated that. Until someone does they'll never displace PHP"

Someone in the Rails community is trying with a small start.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp

Ruby and its community are far from perfect. The biggest difference that I see between it and other communities, is that when a lot of people come about some negative aspect of using Ruby, eventually within a few months people start working on actually fixing it. X number of months later, it ships.
Didn't say it wouldn't matter. The NYT isn't a vehicle for conveying news. That aspect of what they do is replaceable. They are, moreso, a discoverer of news, and also an editor of both news and culture. I both roles, they are incredibly influential per my other comments.
This is a bit of a tangent, but can anyone provide an opinion on which of the static-typing big 3 (Haskell, SML, OCaml) is most suited to scientific computing?
I've seen people point it out before and I think it makes perfect sense for explaining its popularity.

I also think it's a micro-optimization for the wrong thing. It's like buying a car based solely on how close the dealership is to your house. You only have to do the initial setup once (by definition) but you have to live with the consequences of your environment of choice every single day for the rest of the project.

I'll go to a crappy coffee shop if it's the only one around, I'm willing to go very far out of my way to get to the car dealership that has the right thing for me.
OSCON 2012 Registration Opens
What is it based on? Global activity? I am seeing 99% "Eclipse Platform project repository".
Learn you a Haskell for Great Good is definitely an awesome book to get a handle on Haskell.

As the article says, it starts off from the basics and just quickly enough builds up from there to wherever you want to go. I stopped once I got distracted by writing useful-ish code :)

Also it's completely mindblowing, but irrelevant, that my high school classmate wrote that book.
If we're going to be unnecessarily pedantic, the canonical phrase is: "Ah has spoken!" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil_Abner )
User Experience is Why Instagram is Worth $1B to Facebook
Never saw that coming...
Elite Cookie Stuffing Script
Nope - because of the unavoidable fact that you'll still need a car at the other end to get around. That's not how US cities work.
The question is, do people at large even want to do casual programming?

Stepping back, what does "casual programming" mean anyway? Automate certain repetitive tasks? Do some complicated calculation? Write a two-player tic-tac-toe? Make a Sudoku solver?

For the most part, "casual programming" for people who are not into the abstraction layer have been mostly done in Excel/VBA. Most people just don't realize that IS a valid form of "programming" (albeit a very limited subset of it). It's like people who play Angry Birds/Farmville (or Minesweeper in the '90s) obsessively don't consider themselves as gamers, even though they might have spent more time "gaming" than most Counter Strike "gamers".

On the other hand, if you want to dig more into programming, tools like Lego Mindstorm or Scratch teach the concepts rather beautifully. It makes moving onto an actual general purpose programming language much easier.
As someone else pointed out, a lot of that news if it pertains to current events (as opposed to, for example, startup news) either comes from the NYT or from press releases or PR people.

Again, not claiming Facebook isn't very important, nor that it doesn't impact individual people directly more than the NYT. But the NYT doesn't just reflect what's happening in the world. In doing so, they also profoundly influence what's happening.
Kubuntu is for me takes the best usability of Ubuntu and KDE. Great news. For me they still need someone to improve usability and someone to create instructional materials so users can find some hidden features.
A small addition: use a wildcard DNS entry and you can skip 1).
People trade up cars all the time -- when you can afford to, that is.
This looks awesome! Nice work guys.
500px releases $20/yr plan to compete with Flickr
The best stylus for iPad: we review the hits and misses
I have heard personally from many Abuse email admins that .info domains are no longer a threat anymore.

You cannot be penalized in any way for sending email from a .info domain, so why don't so many websites accept them still?
I loved the original post about PHP's fractal awfulness, but this sums up my feelings about it: I like it anyway. His point about PHP being shared-nothing by default is a good one: this is indeed a big part of the admirable scalability of web apps written in PHP (Facebook, anyone?).

The one point I'd disagree with is his assertion that PHP doesn't have a templating language. Of course it doesn't: PHP is a templating language. That's what it was written to be. Many of the uglier things you have to do in PHP are related to the fact that what the language always wants to do, by default, is spit out a web page.

If what you want to do with your software is output web pages, then PHP is the best call. If you want to do basically anything else, pick another language. But at web applications, PHP just can't be beat.
If I have learned anything during my 3-4 years of experience as a software dev it is that

a) All languages, frameworks and technologies are bad and ugly, each in many of their own horrible ways

b) Nobody has any fracking idea what they're doing (mostly)

c) Your best bet is to find something that does not hurt you as bad as other stuff and stick with it. If you enjoy php, that fine (of course it's completely beyond me how it is possible to enjoy it, but its not the point).

On a side note, after having spent most of my time programming in high-level languages, I wonder how things are down there in bare-metal-programming land. I've grown tired of web development and I wonder what it's like programming in an environment that does not have poorly designed, inconsistent frameworks and leaky abstractions, only registers, memory and pins :) Too bad it's probably too late for me to get started there.
haha, no.

A law would be passed removing the ability to sue the TSA for giving you cancer.
The problem is that lack of exposure causes myopia. If all you've ever used is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

Every time I've switched languages there has been a transitional period where I've bemoaned the lack of X in the new language, and later wondered how I ever got by without Y, which lets me do in 10 minutes what took 4 hours and hundreds of lines before. Each new language or technology is a new tool in my toolbox, which allows me to make an informed decision when choosing how to build a product.

So if you've only ever used one programming language, then yes, I'm going to take your opinion with a mountain of salt.
When did Facebook become so uncool?
"You can use the database api on the client!"

Does that freak anyone else out? Where are they doing permissions checking? Who can run what database commands under what circumstances?
Using PHP just because it's easy install isn't like buying a cheap car because it's cheap, it's like buying a cheap car because it's just a little bit closer to walk to than another cheap car.
That's the number of people who have skype running on their computers, not the number who are on a call. Skype is fairly common, automatically starts when the computer starts, and doesn't actually close when you click the "x". So I think that number is believable for total users online worldwide.
Interesting (and smart) that they post to Hacker News a couple of days prior to the launch of Firebase (which provided the realtime functionality used by MMO Asteroids and has been active at hackathons.)
I think many like PHP because an inconsistent language full of design flaws is in many contexts better (in a less is more sense) than a good language that is backed by a complex web framework and library system that contains too many complexities, versioning issues, is slow by default or hard to tune, and so forth.

With PHP people have something that just works, reasonably, and given that an interpreter lives the lifespan of a "page view" making big errors is non trivial.

So PHP is not a good language, but many other languages should learn something from PHP. The problem is that the community backing this better dynamic languages, such as Python and Ruby, still for some (IMHO obscure) reason aren't shipping something that is PHP-alike, but just with a better base language (without trying to add tons of abstraction layers).

I no longer use PHP because after years of using better languages (I like Ruby as a "practical language") it's too hard to return back to PHP, but I often find myself fighting with the useless complexities and layers of abstractions that Ruby contains "by default". Not in the language or the implementation itself, that is good enough IHMO, but in the tons of gems around and in the integration with the web "side".
It doesn't even work (perfectly) within the USA. Zip codes are so unreliable that they're not even used by other government agencies/projects - take a look at the Census, which uses ZCTAs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code_Tabulation_Area

The reason for this is that the USPS can change the zip codes without warning (and furthermore, leaves some areas undefined), whereas the Census needs reliable boundaries and fixed geographic areas.
While its great the GitHub added support for this how about x86-64?

https://github.com/ReturnInfinity/BareMetal-OS/blob/master/o...

The 64-bit register names are still not handled correctly. It does properly color the 8, 16, and 32-bit register names.
Are you guys in Boston?
C or C++ aren't competing with PHP.

That's true, but my point is that there isn't such a visceral hatred for C and C++ even though they are widespread and notorious for memory leaks, vulnerabilities, indecipherable corporate quagmires (perhaps due to an over-engineered OO architecture or 700 line functions or opaque symbol names or dependency hell, etc).

Besides the lack of language features like @ (error silencing)

Red-flag bad practices exist on all platforms. The horror story of a PHP project littered with error suppression is like opening up a C project and discovering that the control flow is guided by a 200 label GOTO architecture. It's not PHP's fault that the programmer abuses the language, it's the employer's fault for hiring a highschool student at $15/hr.
I think the concept has already been coined 'gamification' and I agree with the author that one of the best methods to apply a game concept to mundane tasks is keep score. For competitive people, that one small thing (score) gives you a reason to do the task.
The comments link to information about the Apollo Guidance Computer.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer)

(http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/)
What do you think of this equity offer?
I was offered 20,000 options at a strike price of $3.14 on a total share base of about 75 million (probably about 0.025%). As far as I can gather the company is valued at around $175MM, and they have a few hundred employees. I would be going in as a Senior Engineer (4 years experience).

Base pay would be around $115K.
got it, so all you need to do is provide a little map next to the form to avoid breaking their TOS
From the docs (http://docs.meteor.com/#meteor_collection):

"Currently the client is given full write access to the collection. They can execute arbitrary Mongo update commands. Once we build authentication, you will be able to limit the client's direct access to insert, update, and remove. We are also considering validators and other ORM-like functionality."

So just for toys for the moment. Still, very cool...
haha yeah I just saw that as well — apparently eclipse just uploaded several years' worth of tags.

it's a very simple wrapper around the github events api:
https://api.github.com/events
(or in the code at https://github.com/hrldcpr/githubbub/blob/master/githubbub.j...)

in particular, it shows the main event types that have substantial text content in them, so mostly commits and comments.
What does it not do well?
It's just bad code, not a conscious decision to block any specific e-mails. Here's the code of a local construction project's e-mail subscription form:

validationexpression = "^([a-zA-Z0-9_\\-\\.]+)@[a-z0-9-]+(\\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\\.[a-z]{2,3})$";

It assumes all e-mails end in 2 or 3 letters after a dot.

I run into it all over the place. I can't redeem reward points on my Visa card because the redemption 'shopping cart' requires an e-mail to notify you when the rewards ship, and says mine isn't valid. I was blocked signing up for a checking account online because of my "invalid" e-mail, but opened the same account at a branch with the same e-mail address, where they now e-mail my statements.
I, on the other hand, am struggling to think of the number of times that Phillips screws have aggravated me that much. Maybe my needs are not as complex as yours. Perhaps there is a PHP parallel there, too.
Just watched the entire demo. First time I heard two people present a product together - definitely makes it a lot more interesting and much less monotonous. After the first 30seconds, I went "pfft, live reload isn't new." But I'm glad I stayed till the very end because it is indeed so much more. It looks very promising, especially if you offer app hosting of some kind (or make it easy on Heroku etc.)

I am curious about the security aspect of writing to DB directly via the client but I'm sure you've thought of it. I love the 'add less', 'add coffeescript' feature. Can't wait to try this out soon.
Looks very interesting ... This or something like it seems like the obvious "other shoe" for nodejs.
It is open-sourced?

https://github.com/substance/substance/blob/master/LICENSE
When Best Buy Swipes Your Driver's License, Here's What It Knows About You
新开1.76传奇私服
SEEKING WORK - Remote or Kentucky

I'm a RHCA who's looking for a new opportunity. I'd prefer to work remotely, but, I'd consider a local position in the Lexington, Kentucky area for the right company. I have experience with Openstack, Eucalyptus, Cloud Bursting, Configuration management tools (Puppet/chef), writing my own back-end applications to assist with backups/notifications/cron (using Rails or Django), comfortable using most RESTful and SOAP API's, and J2EE/(Tomcat/Jboss) Administration. Very comfortable in a command-line environment,

My wife is working on her Doctorate in Education at Morehead State University, so relocation is not an option at this moment (but may be in the future).

If you'd like to know more about me, visit http://ianwilson.org/
Urm. Yeah. It scares the ba-jesus out of me. The first thought when I heard this "killer feature" was, 'well, there goes security out the window'.

Stupid hypnic jerk question perhaps, but, how's it deal with injection attacks ? is this left upto the javascript programmer to make sure strings are "safe" ? I almost dread the answers.
This comes up all the time in mobile app reviews. It is probably the #1 or #2 unique-to-mobile security flaw.
To the extent that learning languages takes time (it does) and to the extent that setting up an environment takes times (it does) and to the extent that time is money (it is), I'd say using PHP in lieu of a premium language is exactly like saving money on a car when you don't have a lot of [time/money].

But in the end, what's most important is that the car/language gets you from Point A to Point B.
Ask HN: Do I need a network of friends to make a post to the frontpage?
I'm a long time reader of HN, and have recently tried to contribute to it. I do not have a network of friends in HN, or any other social networks. I do not have any colleagues or coworkers who I can send a message to vote for my posts.

To make this worse, I do not know how to ask people who have the permission to down vote to not give me negative points just because they have a different view to me.

It seems here is no different to reddit, or digg (RIP). I see some low quality links which make the frontpage easily, and I see some very good links in the new page buried by negative points before they were born.

This is disappointing as I had a brighter impression of the HN community.

The logic of the HN web app is far from great. I had to leave my old account because it was stuck with negative points. For a long time I didn't know that my links and comments won't be visible to anyone but me due to the negative points.
Wait a minute, is a 4-inch iPhone even necessary?
"The only reason they haven't been nuked yet is" that they would retaliate against South Korea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1928023

burgerbrain 506 days ago:

[...] there is an absolutely absurd amount of conventional artillery positioned at the DMZ just a few dozen kilometres away from Seoul. If all out war were to occur the city, with it's 25million or so citizens, could be levelled in hours.
I already know JavaScript, and prefer CoffeeScript. But thanks for sharing your irrelevant opinion, and enjoy your false sense of superiority.
Right. But as soon as you have this ability, don't you quickly turn off insert/update? then you throttle/contain reads... So in the end, do we benefit from having a client side database connection? I'm struggling to put together a real-world use case for one that isn't irresponsible.
Linux Skype, which makes you open a new window for every chat you have? Linux Skype which won't notify you of incoming calls if you're already on a call? That Linux Skype?
We visit a lot, but we all live in the Bay area these days.
صور مسلسل فاطمه غول 2012
It looks you misunderstood the whole post. The OP clearly noted that "PHP sucks" and can't do many things other languages can. But despite this, he says he likes the language.

And his reason is because of its ease of use and the fact that it works. That to me sounds nothing like "PHP is awesome." Sorry to put it this way, but it looked like you put words in his mouth.
> PHP the language sucks ass.

Depends on how you define the language? Nobody is twisting your arm, you don't have to use any of the inconsistent syntax. Just write your own functions.

The core language is actually very similar to C.
I wrote a script that lets you initiate and respond to calls using only the keyboard, which made my Skype usage bearable when I still had to use it: https://raw.github.com/technomancy/dotfiles/master/bin/skyyy
That's part of what I meant by calling it an oversimplification: all of any developer pool are not going to fit some description.

Does the analogy apply to enough of the PHP developer pool to have value? My guess would be yes, but if your experience dictates otherwise, I have no problem with that assertion.