skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, answer me this:

Whats the order of complexity of adding an element in the middle of "an array" in PHP?

So, it's bad, because it makes it very confusing, what the exact implementation is. If you can't tell how much slower your algorithm that calculates something from an 'frankenarray' gets, when the array gets bigger, you have a problem.

That's one problem. The other problem is with language itself. When we call something an array, which isn't actually an array (an array being a very specific implementation of a vector) people get confused.

Imagine how you would feel if PHP used the word 'variable' to mean function and the word 'function' to mean variable.

So, a hash and an array are not just semantically different (that they refer to a completely different ADT's), but they are also completely distinct implementations of those ADT's.

Now, this is not a problem, when you are using PHP as it was originally intended. To add a small bit of logic to a template that mostly uses fast, well written c functions in it's built-in library.

But people are abusing PHP to write large scale libraries and frameworks. Many riddled with security issues, and unpredictable performance bottlenecks, because the language wasn't designed to actually allow you to write well defined algorithms.

Now, we've seen workarounds for these problems. Facebook wrote a PHP to C compiler, and moved all crucial algorithms to C. You can use unit-testing to supplement the lack of any usable type information, and to combat the automatic casting that PHP does (which creates all kinds of bugs in edge cases, that is hard to track or test against). You can use profiling to track performance issues, and fix code that interacts with frankenarrays, in a sort of trail-and-error kind of way.

People once wrote all their code in ASM. Discipline can make all the difference. But highly skilled disciplined, well educated professionals aren't the target audience of PHP.

All this required discipline can be justified on practical grounds. PHP programmers are generally paid the worst (or as an employer would call, are the cheapest). Hosting is cheap. And for many use-cases you can just drop in ready to go code (Wordpress, Drupal, Joombla, etc.) and just skin it.

So, i'm not saying picking PHP is a bad financial choice for a company. If you don't take on difficult projects, and don't intent to hire highly skilled coders, it can be cheap and productive.

But that doesn't make the language any better..
Road to the Python Commit Bit
Real-time Video Aggregation 
http://rawdumplings.com/
What would you expect of it?
I prefer Inconsolata-G. The differences are subtle.

http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/77079.html
They were not 3D games for starters. So he would have to abuse the "better environment". Second, he specifically mentioned the ease of deployment to all kinds of devices and the ease of collaboration on the development of the same game.
I'm willing to bet that if Google releases their AR Goggles, Apple will wait a year and then release the iGlasses which will actually work and revolutionize the masses.
Leave it to TorrentFreak to take a couple sentences of hypothesis from a thoroughly researched analysis and blow it into a story. Reading the original piece, it is clear that the source and purpose of these packets is unknown, and behavior has been observed which wouldn't necessarily match up with a poisoning attack. It is unfortunate that TorrentFreak couldn't just report the anomaly accurately, and instead had to spin it into something completely unfounded.
The authors of this article write in their abstract: "Are there fundamentally random processes in nature? Theoretical predictions, confirmed experimentally, such as the violation of Bell inequalities, point to an affirmative answer. However, these results are based on the assumption that measurement settings can be chosen freely at random, ..." [1]

From its inception, quantum mechanics has used the language of probability to make calculations (this is the "Born rule" that another poster refers to), but this does not mean that the universe behaves randomly. Perhaps, as you suggest, this language of probability conceals human ignorance. To test this, we define a physical property called "realism" that says, roughly, "every experiment has a result that was knowable beforehand". If realism does not hold, then the results of some physical experiments are somehow randomly determined at the moment that the experiments are performed. A set of famous experiments (the "Bell's inequality experiments" [2]) have shown that, with certain assumptions, "local realism" does not hold, i.e. locality and realism do not simultaneously hold. Locality is the idea that it is possible to perform two experiments in sufficiently separated regions of the universe so that they cannot possibly influence each other. If general relativity were a complete theory, for instance, then we would have locality (because no signal could travel faster than light).

Almost all non-specialist physicists (physicists who use quantum mechanics but do not spend time trying to assess its foundations) accept locality and accept that the Bell experiments rule-out local realism. This means that they give-up realism, and these physicists say that nature is "fundamentally random". Some physicists try to give-up locality instead, and you will hear them talk about "non-local hidden variable theories". Other physicists, such as the authors of the linked-to "Nature" article, play carefully with the assumptions behind using the Bell experiments to rule-out local realism. For instance, they point-out the assumption that "measurement settings can be chosen freely at random". If this assumption does not hold, neither does Bell's proof.

All-in-all you are in excellent company if you say that physical processes are fundamentally random, but there are many specialist physicists who grapple with this question in their daily work.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3195
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments
"This is the only explanation that he can think of? Genetics?"

It sounds like he may be (unknowingly) espousing the views of Jerry Fodor, who argued in the 70s and 80s that the brain has native modules for things like language, music, math, etc. It was an extension of Noam Chomsky's similar views on language learning in the 60s. Both views have been pretty much shown to be wrong.

Jesse Prinz
Is the mind really modular?
http://subcortex.com/PrinzModularity.pdf

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson
Philosophy in the Flesh
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/lakoff-philosophy.html

George Lakoff & Rafael Nunez
Where Mathematics Comes From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From

Anthony Chemero
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science
starts so: "Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher.
I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything."
http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue15_BookReview_ZipoliCaian...
have you looked at this ? http://php.net/manual/en/functions.anonymous.php
Learn how to code or make some geeky friends
Full Show 5/17/12: Going Wright is Wrong
Good to know. Though, $30 still feels kinda high
I think it's just a matter of where you are on the curve.

Basing a new project on Node.JS may be premature and not a wise choice. You may be too much ahead of the curve, and up to the point where more traditional tools provide a much more pragmatic advantage mostly related to their ecosystem.

But nobody is writing their new website in C or ASM, or think that that is any more productive than using a more modern tool.

So, there is a movement, and that movement itself is towards better language design. The question is, where on the wave, should you be.

To argue, that any innovation in language ever, was always for the worst, is something reality and likely your own preferences directly contradict.

>I have however observed a strong negative relationship between that and people bitching about their and other people's tools.

I'm not trying to bitch. I'm not trying to argue that if all you want is a blog, that PHP is not one of the more pragmatical (get it done) approaches.

But that's not what this Node.PHP is targetting for. It's PHP rearing it's head again, at the tip of the wave. And when that happens, shouldn't we all just come out and say 'burn it to the ground?'
Fiction plays a fundamental role in shaping the direction of our efforts.

For instance, Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" planted the seed for the Apollo Program. As Asimov's work on the laws of robotics planted a seed to inspire future AI development.

Edit: To better make my point, "Robert Manning used to make cardboard rockets... Now he makes real ones."[1]

[1] http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/04/caines_arcade_vis...
Several posts here about the marvelous CPAP machine, but I've never known anyone who used a CPAP to any benefit.

They take them off during the night, the mask comes undone when they roll over, etc. Like those mobility carts advertised on late-night TV for obese/walk-impaired people, the CPAP appears to be primarily another profit centre for manufacturers who feed on the Medicare/Medicaid, welfare and insurance systems.

Meanwhile there's no question that the problem is real. But more direct solutions are better: take learn how to breathe deeply, exercise, lose weight (most people on CPAP are obese), eat better, take vitamins (E, B12 and iron, aid oxygen transport), drink coffee!
"As someone who made his own opinion on the subject, I can objectively say that my opinion is the right one"

Seriously ...

It doesn't matter which language is "objectively better as a programming language", just use whatever you enjoy the most. If it's PHP, then have fun coding in it rather that use something else because some people on the internet think you should. There are tons of very successful project in PHP, including giant ones, because at some point you stop circlejerking and start coding.

Just make sure you know what else exists out there and try other things here and there to discover new languages and other ways to do things, but that's a general programming rule, not something limited to php.
We should be creating a tax structure where wealth wants to come to the US - not leave it.
default is also a verb. From the Oxford English dictioonary

verb

1. fail to fulfil an obligation: some had defaulted on student loans, declare (a party) in default and give judgement against that party.

2. (default to) revert automatically to (a preselected option).
Ask HN:  Looking for lightweight web documentation system, any recommendations?
I currently use DokuWiki but it's too heavy for my small low watt linux server. Can anybody recommend anything lighter?
Fixed her!
Why is it always the fat ones (guys and girls) that corner you?

For once I would like to be assaulted by a good looking person.
Seriously, is there any significant piece of hardware on stores nowadays that doesn't have multiple backdoors from application level down to the very microchips? Like [1].

[1] http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-06-27/news/30048253...
San Francisco's least welcome startup explains itself -SceneTap
Morgan Stanley bought 63M Facebook shares ($2.3B) to create a floor around $38
> Aside: To anyone implementing protocols -- _Please_ keep your parsers, state machines and transports as loosely coupled as possible. I, and many people I know, will love you for it.

Ok, I have to curb my excitement here a bit, because what I'm about to tell you is that I'm solving exactly your problem with an obsessive focus on achieving exactly what you desire.

Though in saying so I'll have to disagree with you slightly when you say:

> Simple on one axis may complicate things on another, and in irreconcilable ways.

Basically I'm striving for (and believe I am on the verge of achieving) a design that achieves the best possible simplicity for network parsers and serializers in all dimensions. If you're wondering what the catch is, the catch is that it's taken me 2.5 years and counting to refine the design to the point where it can achieve this.

My library performs no I/O (it's buffers in, buffers out), is completely resumable (so you can suspend the state machine at any point and resume it later), is completely composable (so you can create pipelines that feed the output of one parser to the input of another), loosely coupled, small (<5k loc in the core library), easy to bind to high-level languages, minimal enough that it can run inside the Linux kernel, and FAST (can parse protocol buffers at almost 1.5GB/second).

And it's open-source. Don't be misled by the fact that it's advertised as a Protocol Buffer library; that's how it started, but I'm working on generalizing it to be capable of arbitrary parsing and serializing. Though Protocol Buffers schemas are used to specify the structure of any structured data that a parser wants to produce or a serializer wants to consume.

https://github.com/haberman/upb/wiki
So did Edison. It might very well be that Edison would not be able to spell Tesla at his best but also that Tesla would not be able to spell Edison at his best. The point is they both made very valuable contributions using their unique talents, we build upon the work of both of them today and there is no need to turn it into some sort of competition. There is no meaningful way to compare creative achievements anyway. The article has this right in some places, to be fair in others it really seems biased in the opposite direction to the comic.
Circuit Racing: GTO Drift - Free Online Games
Why does in_array() wrongly return true with these (large numeric) strings?
I see how it is helpful, but not how it is `Good
'
Alternate interpretation, at a startup you end up thrashing around a lot and think you're creating value when in fact you're just reinventing wheels and doing a whole lot of ultimately unproductive work.
I find it very strange that you're citing (a highly erroneous summary of) a Court ruling restricting the right privacy for jail inmates in specific situations, in order to argue that the Court will extend privacy of persons in public places. Actually, the lack of prisoners' rights to privacy, and the right to record things in public areas, are both well established.

By the way, the word you're looking for is "unconstitutional", not "illegal". Even should the Court restrict the right to record--which they won't, it's a well-established right--jurisdictions may establish that right through law anyway.
Here is one that shows gender affects risk preferences, and identifies testosterone as a correlated factor (even within genders).

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/luigi.zingales/papers/resear...
I'm kind of blown away that the engines don't have to be torn-down and rebuilt or something after being ignited and shut down like this.

I assumed that since the booster stages are not re-usable, the design would be more optimized for "one use". And the controlled explosion of a rocket igniting seems to count as "one use".

Clearly I'm wrong. I guess they are so robust (for saftey & redundancy reasons) that a few seconds of burn don't do any irreversible damage.
Yeah, but you know what, it's not.

It's called "The Talk Show". Gruber/Mule is using the built in fan-base from the previous show, and by calling it the same, be it "Talk Show 3.0" or "Talk Show Season 3" you're inviting comparisons to the previous one and it's not the same.

Everytime a new television season starts up we don't say "oh it takes a few episodes to get the footing", that's what season 1 is for.

Calling this "The Talk Show" (which it clearly isn't), using similar graphics, similar style, all of those things are, as Gruber would say, dick moves. If Gruber wanted to leave the show, move to another network fine. But come up with a new title. Many people would just assume "oh okay, Gruber has a new show that he's doing". Once we went a few weeks without Talk Show we might think "Hmm, guess The Talk Show is done?" and that's that.

But by DELIBERATELY making this out to be the same show is a bit scummy.

Maybe Dan fired John, and as payback he did this. Maybe John quit and took the show with him. Either way, it should have been launched and branded as a completely new thing if thats how they want it to be thought as.

If they're going to call it "The Talk Show" than its a continuation of what we already had and therefore I expect the quality 90 episodes brings. And if that's not there I'll give up, just like I do with TV shows that run their course after a few seasons.
How Does Fair Use Fit Into The Critique Of Copyright?
Dictionaries for Linking Text, Entities and Ideas
Pirate Pay? LOL, at least they have a sense of humor.

Are they only corrupting certain files -- i.e. the movies they target -- or do they cause a general damage to BT? It wasn't really clear in the artice if these "false positives" are only showing when downloading certain files, or generally on BT, regardless of what you exchange.
> Want real stuff? Check out VPRI's work

I didn't mean to make it sound like simplicity is not possible. Quite the contrary, I believe it is possible and extremely worthwhile, and it's something I have dedicated an enormous amount of time to in my own work.

All I'm saying is that the essay was not worthwhile to me, because it offered no insight that helps us get there.

> It's not much, so they say it's no big deal, and act as if it does not count.

I agree that your version is far superior, and that it is a big deal. If I saw code that constructed a class but the class didn't have any state, it would interrupt my flow while I stopped to figure out wtf is going on.
I didn't say anything about easy or hard (again you are injecting). Yes kernel programming is hard. However it is not "impossible" :

case in point-> The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles (by Noam Nisan).

Your average CS student can do this (from nand to tetris). Kernel development is hard (without a doubt), but not impossible.

"The important stuff gets done by truly outstanding people. To deny this is nothing but laughable."

Once again, you are adding things that do not exist in the original article.
KBC 6 Registration, Important Dates &#8211; Audition Venue Details
This doesn't hit the root of the problem. If we rely on the current SV enterprise model, we're basically just hoping that the billionaires that come out of this social media binge will be socially aware enough to invest in hard problems themselves, and in that sense, they become almost feudal lords.

This is a case where I think, just like Blanks states, the government's responsibility to counteract market forces for the common good plays a role. We should be tripling our research grant budgets for hard science. I feel like every week I'm hearing of an MIT PhD student making major breakthroughs in nanotube battery capacity or thorium reactor tech, but these aren't valuable investments for private VCs because the returns will not be quick and will not be as outrageous as a site that can go live tomorrow with the virality of the Ebola virus.

But that's just the way the cookie crumbles, ie, the market forces at work. I don't think it makes sense on a society level to be investing as much as we are in social ventures, and I hope we do find a way, public or private, to shift some of that investment back into solid tech.
Wildcard prediction: biotech is the next big boom.
Thanks for teaching me something. I was referring to this[0] which is indeed hot air rising and only occurs at low altitude, you're talking about this[1].

Is there a possibility for the phenomena you describe to occur 10 meters above flat land at dawn?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_wind
Being humorous is fine but when it comes to wanting to set the record straight on history, the comic should also be accurate.
Nobody would read it if they did that.
This might well violate FCC rules. It's equivalent to jamming a communications channel.
UsBook
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/08/consolas-and-cleart...
Another thing you can do is build caching into managers.

Here is one such effort (shameless plug): https://github.com/stucchio/Guacamole
Can we stop with the sanctimonious bullshit posts like this now? It's not immoral to choose to have a different citizenship than the American. Get over it!

Flagged.
Show HN: An app that automatically bookmarks links in you Twitter feed and tags.
Agreed. But notice that "shaping the direction" is not the same as "let's build Star Trek."

Fiction inspires us to consider new possibilities, it doesn't give us a roadmap and blueprints. This desire to build Enterprise is assuming that Star Trek is indeed a roadmap and blueprints. Did we build the Apollo vehicles based on descriptions of technologies, materials or even shapes by Verne? No.
I noticed it only uses libevent if the PECL dependency is satisfied. I'm not aware if this is now packaged by default, but I don't have it installed.

I can imagine any event-based library will now warrant a comparison to Node. However, I've not seen things like EventMachine calling itself Node.Ruby, or Tornado calling itself Node.Python. Or NginX calling itself Node.Server.

That's my bugbear. It feels like linkbait.

Re: the server stuff. I was poorly trying to make the point you made further up, about PHP not being well suited to long running processes or being daemonised. I may well be wrong, but each request will get its own event loop, no?
> There's an awful lot of science that needs to be discovered before we can do much of this.

Not for the Gen1 and Gen2, and possibly not even for the Gen3. We already know how to build ion thrusters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster

Building an ion drive ship to meet the Gen1 or Gen2 specs is a matter of engineering and cost, not science. The only other significant spec is the radiation shielding, but we know how to do that; again, it's just a matter of engineering and cost, not science.

The big change in the Gen3 specs is the required 1g acceleration, which is probably too high for ion thrusters to reach based on our current knowledge. So we would need to do some development on nuclear rockets; but there has been scientific work done on fission and fusion rocket concepts, so even here it's mostly engineering and cost. It would certainly help to have a breakthrough in materials technology that would let us build lighter radiation shielding for a Gen3 ship, but we could build one without it (albeit it would be a lot more expensive).

I agree the Gen4 spec is "out there".
Would you want to have someone looking over your shoulder all the time?

People who work in retail seem to be doing just fine, not to mention officers of the court who's every word and deed is recorded and transcribed.
Welcome to being old! :) while you can no longer stay up all night, the company here is nice and every morning can become a little cause for celebration if you slept well. I'll fix you a cup of decaf tee. :)

On a more serious note, if tests show apnea be sure to inquire about all remedies. I spent months in a love/hate relationship with CPAP before I discovered a more expensive but much more convenient dental appliance. So grill them till you hear all options.
Yeah but clocks generally don't interface with other technology. Trailer hitches and screw drivers do. There is a whole slew of different hitch adapters. And, most of us have or at least have seen screw drivers with a set of attachable bits.
Yes, exactly! Leonardo Da Vinci's contemporaries didn't believe the helicopter would work when he drew it either. Granted, the current helicopters look nothing like what he drew, but he did get the idea of it right and one tends to iron out problems while experimenting.

All I can see are guys making fun of this guy's ideas because it was originally based in fiction. That is an illogical argument. The man with the plan has put up all the details he can on his website. You can pick apart his ideas if they really are flawed. Why just focus on the fact that his idea was originally a piece of science fiction.