skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>No replies to ad hominem attacks.

I'm sorry, you are right. That was uncalled for.

>From when was that any criteria for success? Worse is better won a long back. Fighting that has proven to be futile.

No, it hasn't. Pragmatism won over theoretical grounds. And there are very many pragmatic reasons to prefer PHP for certain projects. No one is arguing against that.

But, with legacy and a changing market, some of those pragmatic choices come back to bite you.

There are many ways to combat this. One can evolve the language, for example. This has worked better for some languages (Javascript comes to mind) that share some of design flaws in PHP, than it has for PHP itself.

What I am arguing about, is that, we as an industry, as a community, as a profession, we shouldn't be aiming for a future where PHP is still dominant, any more than we should be aiming for a future where horses are our dominant means of transportation.

Now, maybe we can shoehorn modern features into PHP. It has been tried with PHP4 and PHP5.

But for what reason? There isn't any decent implementation of PHP (performance and stability wise). Other syntaxes aren't that hard to get accustomed to. The algorithmic complexity of core operations has changed between versions. It's not like there is any important code written in PHP, that must survive some transition, like there is with C.

Is it just to keep those on board, with no academic training, who only know PHP? If they were capable of learning PHP by themselves, would other languages really be that hard for them to use (or abuse)?
I can't understand why the writer is reacting so much to the comic

Because the comic is spreading non-sense as it is clearly evidenced in the article?

I don't believe Edison could spell Tesla on his best day

This is exactly the attitude I believe the article is opposed to, that I personally find naive as well - mythologizing people and single contributions and making science/engineering look like a game of who is more awesome. This is a conception that some popular science writing installs in many people and that could easily be cured by tracking the long history of many things we consider simple, in which at least tens of people contributed ideas that made the final invention tick. The article sums it up very well:

First of all, I’d contend that nearly every invention in the engineering or sciences is an improvement on what has come before – such as Tesla’s improvements to alternating current. That’s what innovation is. It’s a social process that occurs in a social context.
"Any actual real professional musician knows good and damn well that he can get a beautiful sound out of an Alvarez and that only rookies have the time to make fun of each other for their choice because the pros are too busy creating."

So, why do professionals then bother using better tools in the first place?

I really wonder if people submit links to HN with the sole purpose of getting ripped to shreds. Maybe it's a masochistic element in the nature of those blog writers.
About 9 months ago I went through the exact same thing. I was experiencing the inability to learn new things, the inability to remember very basic words (so I would stall in the middle of a conversation, trying to remember the word), and sometimes I was confused over things that were extremely basic, like which toothbrush was mine. It was extremely debilitating, and being a programmer it affected my performance drastically. I couldn't fix bugs quickly, and when given new tasks, it would take me much much longer to actually understand WTF I was supposed to do. I then started getting a tremendous headache that felt like a vise grip on the back of my neck, and at that point, I couldn't even remember what I had done earlier that day. Trying to learn new things was almost impossible, it was like my brain was unable to function at all.

After a couple of months of this, I finally went to the doctor, and immediately got an MRI for possible brain tumor. Thankfully it turned out negative, and that's when I did some self-diagnosis and thought I must be sleep-deprived. I was getting about 4-6 hrs sleep every night for years, so I immediately started getting into bed at 10pm and would lay there until I eventually fell asleep.

Within a week, my headache disappeared and I felt much better. The funny thing is that since then, I can't stay away past 10:30pm, regardless of how long I sleep. By 9:30pm I'm exhausted, and after staying up past midnight for years/decades, a few months after sleeping at 10:30pm, I have almost no capacity to stay up late anymore.

I still think I have other sleep problems like obstructive sleep apnea, because I still don't get good quality sleep, so I'm scheduled for a sleep clinic in the next few weeks. I went to a seminar hosted by Kaiser on this, and the symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea were so exactly the same as what I was experiencing that I almost burst into tears because I realized I wasn't crazy, and it felt like there was finally some hope.

In summary: get your sleep, it is precious!
I'll try the React framework for Node+PHP. We'll see how that goes... but wait, why isnt CI useful enough?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3994054
Your blog is so low-contrast that it's damn-near impossible to read. I don't normally have difficulty with low-contrast websites, but yours is really bad.
"I think his point is not that "ls" needs less flags, it's that it needs no flags."

Then don't use the flags. The default bare 'ls <wildcard>' is sane 99% of the time for me, and I consider myself a junior power user.
I've seen these VPRI links before. I've read through that PDF and various web pages, but I still have a poor understanding of what exactly they are doing.

Is it possible to summarize in a paragraph how they are able to achieve this LOC reduction? Is it simply that systems like Linux et. al. have been cobbled together by many hands over many years while VPRI has a single vision? Are there coding techniques I can use today in my own work? The only example I've found was a mention of some networking stack that was able to make use of a parsing engine, rather than implementing a custom networking-specific engine. This sounds like nothing more (not to trivialize this task) than choosing the correct parts to turn into reusable libraries and then reusing them.

> they don't mind small unjustified complexities

This is something I've noticed as well. Complex code of my own creation grates on my nerves until I am able to erode it and smooth it out. I get the impression that not everyone feels this way.
Most of the SpaceX fans I've seen aren't raving about SpaceX's technology (which, you rightly point out is a direct descendant of NASA). What they are raving about is SpaceX's economic model.
If Eclipse encompassed what LightTable wants to achieve, one would only have to write a plugin... I think its trying to be something completely different...
Dude, goddamnit. This is a startup forum. People complain about shit being hard, and it's our job to make it simpler. Even if it's the temple itself.
> Why Tech?

I guess I've always enjoyed being around technology. I've been using computers as long as I've been around. As a kid in the mid 90s my brother and I used to install Debian on old powerpcs we had lying around the house for fun. I've built PCs from components for myself. I run Linux on the desktop. In college I took some tech courses (CS 101, Intro to Databases) and I always did enjoy automating repetitive tasks via scripting.

>What do you really want to do in your life?

I want to have a nice life with my fiancee, I guess. I like understanding things. I enjoy knowing something at the level that I can explain it very well as opposed to knowledge of something just at the level where I can use it.

At some level I do like creating things too, but I seem to have a very high inertia a lot of the time. I just end up thinking of ideas as opposed to implementing them. I love working with computers because software can things so easily when you just provide the idea.

>What things to you find yourself doing when no one's paying you?

I daydream. I listen to music. I think of new things to cook. I ride my bike around town. Maybe I'll complete some intro challenges on a site like codecademy for fun. I'll read HN, Slashdot. I've always been intrigued by the future of technological progress. I'm excited by google's self-driving cars.
I might come of a little hostile yes. I dislike the cult aspect of the whole story, that is.

And I think the "ViaWeb/Lisp -> super programming capabilities over mere mortals -> Yahoo millions" thing that started the whole cult worship is both wrong and flawed (e.g statistically insignificant to prove anything).
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> So in a way I understand the sentiment.

Yeah, but isn't what The Oatmeal did just as bad as what grade school teachers do? If we go from "Edison is the most awesome inventor in the history of America" to "Edison is the biggest asshat in the history of America," we've gained absolutely no honesty in our discourse. The Forbes article was nuanced and factually correct, which is what we should be striving for.
No, you have completely miss-represented that article. No where did I say to the effect that a group of non-genius can be the same as a genius. This is something that you injected (incorrectly). Now you are asking me to defend something that you incorrectly suggested and attributed to me!

The claim I made (if you actually read it carefully) is that in current field of software engineering (99.99% of software, boring Line Of Business software, OS, Kernels etc.) can and are done by average developers. And they do not require "super developers" with inflated ego's aka the a-holes.

You however taken away that to some how mean "geniuses". That is an error on your comprehension and interpretation.

So please do calm down your nerd rage :)
That particular comic clearly isn't intended to be humorous. In fact it's quite humorless. Or are you saying the factual inaccuracies are some kind of ironic joke that Alex Knapp and I both missed?
I built the same basic thing a year ago (using libevent for php, same general API as node.js) for a particular project.

https://github.com/hinathan/edges-php#summary

For some these php-but-like-node.js projects are abominations but there are a few reasonable use cases.

Of course the vast majority of php and the php 'class library' isn't appropriate for this programming model but neither was most of the existing js corpus before people built an ecosystem around node.js.
And trust me, you'll be blown away
It was a bad idea in the 6502. It was a "mode" which meant that you had to clear the decimal flag to make sure it was turned off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricoh_2A03
> Scientists claim that we only use 10% of our brains ...

I've never seen a scientist make that actual claim. New-agers yes, eastern philosophers yes, comic books yes, scientists? Can't say I can remember any such instance.

> but I think that we only use 10% of our hearts.

The only way to only use 10% of your heart is to suffer from massive ischaemia, and that leads to death on pretty damn short order.
> Describe a few of those experiences?

In high school I was pretty scruffy. The Man wasn't going to keep me down with his "combing" and whatnot. Fight the power!

Anyhow, I got off shift at my dumb grocery store job and went to see the doctor for a checkup. Tired and grubby, I didn't say much during the early part of the visit. He was not quite contemptuous, but not far off. Until I got all nerd-fu on him, using medical terms and pronouncing long generic drug names correctly. Suddenly, I got respect. Instant respect. It was an eye-opening moment for me.

> but IMHO it's intelligence that gives one the biggest boost

I don't think it was just intelligence at work here. There was definitely a big element of social class. I may have looked like a white-trash stoner, but when I opened my mouth, suddenly I was in the club. I went from "other" to "in the tribe".

I could have gotten the same effect by dressing well. But that's partly because I'm a straight white male; all that was keeping me out of the elite that day was a haircut, a shave, and an expensively comfortable outfit.
Trust: The bedrock principle of any business
Inconsolata is the poor mans version of the fantastic Consolas... alas, on non-windows platform Consolas looks like shit.

Consolas comes for free with Visual Studio (probably pre-installed on Windows 7/Vista too)

Funny, inconsolata as well doesn't look that great on Windows...
TorrentFreak are just amazing at pandering to sites like HN.

"The security researchers don’t make any conclusive claims about the origins of the attacks, but they do note that anti-piracy groups are a possible source."
FWIW, about half way down right before the first map:

http://www.tfcbooks.com/teslafaq/q&a_016.htm

"An article appearing in the New York Daily News, April 2, 1934 titled "Tesla's Wireless Power Dream Nears Reality" mentions the planned "test run of a motor car [for a distance of 30 or 40 miles] over a stretch of [Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe] railway track [running from Boise City, Oklahoma] to Farley, N. M." using wireless transmission of electrical energy to power the vehicle. The equipment was assembled by "two Californians" and is described as "including a high-powered radio transmitter with big coils and and short antenna."
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Well, Forbes is a business magazine. Do you really think they will let the world think engineers, not CEOs, are gods? :)
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You were "interfering" with her job. You should never get in a cops face when they are arresting someone. Unfortunately cops can ask you to step back, and there is no clearly defined boundary on what distance would be considered "interference." Typically the distance is in direct correlation to the sort of recording device you have pointed at them.
Some random guy designs a cool looking ship. Then he gets his buddy to modify science (or create new science) to make it seem feasible. Then, Random Guy creates stories based on this entire thing...

Why would anyone think basing reality on this fictional ship is a good idea?

There's an awful lot of science that needs to be discovered before we can do much of this. And the problem is that, in a capitalist-driven world (especially one that must have its profits tomorrow), it's not profitable at all to do this. Now, I'm a pure research proponent, but picking a goal 150 years in the future for a technology we don't even know could exist (say warp drive) is just a dumb way to try to Do Science.

Let's keep spending money on alternative fuel research, nuclear research, medical research ... and at some point, one of my great-grandchildren (or yours) will see the ground we've covered and have that epiphanic moment where she discovers proper wormhole travel. Or whatever.
Dr. Wedding Crasher once said that.
This is a bit straw man; no one ever said he wasn't exaggerating. The author isn't objecting to some precisely calibrated sentiment. He's disputing the premise: that Tesla is singularly important, and that Edison is vastly overrated. The author is exaggerating or effect, but the effect sought is to make a case that isn't sarcastic, but rather quite sincere.
It's one thing to correct the falsehoods vs trying to minimize Tesla's accomplishments in light of Edison, which the article also did.

There's a big difference between editorial/opinion and journalistic pieces, sadly the comic can't be held to a standard, but neither can the writer to know the difference.

Blurring the line between editorial/opinion pieces and journalistic pieces starts to present or promote an opinion as fact.

This is also known as propaganda, and once that word was made dirty, called public relations.

Propoganda/Public Relations was created by Edward Bernays in the 20's for manufacturing ongoing demands for goods, known as consumerism. He was a nephew of Freud, and a fascinating read.
Upvote and comment: for many users, Facebook is indeed solving a "quality of life" problem -- how do I stay in touch with people? It's a first-world problem, sure, and maybe it looks a bit like entertainment, but it's a real problem that they are solving.
A good cartoon is better propaganda than a pure-text rant. It's been true for centuries.
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It may be naive but I think the best science and creation happens in a mindset of creativity, imagination, possibility and experimentation instead of doubt.

Tesla clearly invented things that did not exist before him, and also improved other things.

To me, those are on an order of magnitude different.
This is naive. Do you not realize that Edison was an engineer? Just because he had a workshop of people (not so different from having a team of engineers) doesn't mean he didn't create tons of experiments.
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The point of 'The Oatmeal' isn't necessarily to be funny. The focus of the work of Matt Inman has always been to get pageviews, and he's notoriously good at it. Sometimes it's by being funny, sometimes it's by finding something that resonates, but most often it's by a certain type of pandering that IMO Inman has perfected.

Tesla is the perfect subject for a comic whose point is pageviews through resonance and pandering. There has always been a mythos about Tesla the Geek Underdog in geek circles. Many act like it's a badge of honor to know more about Tesla or to revere him or contrast him with Edison. I've even seen t-shirts like this comic. The subject matter and the treatment of it fit perfectly with my idea of what The Oatmeal has always been about.
Who invented wireless electricity? Would love to learn more.
Rather than think of it as somebody trying to bring a sci-fi object to life, why not think of it as someone wanting to make space-flight a reality and realising that a sci-fi object would be a good start?

I posted this article to HN mostly because I wanted to see technical arguments as to why this would not work. This guy's thinking on a scale that is MUCH bigger than the current space technologists. Space flight is difficult and full of challenges but since we have to solve significant problems anyway, why not solve the ones that apply to spacecraft of this scale? (because this sort of ship inherently solves some big issues with humans in space like very little space in the ship, damage to human bodies from low gravity etc)
You have to make a distinction between what happens on a microscopic (the atom) and macroscopic (decay of an amount of atoms) level. On a microscopic level you need a stochastic model to describe the decay of an atom. With a lot of atoms (I don't remember thr tipping point) you can use a deterministic model, which is the mean of of the distribution of the stochastic model.
> Scientists claim that we only use 10% of our brains ... but I think that we only use 10% of our hearts.

Very cute; I agree. Thank you :)
(It's a quote from Wedding Crashers)
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> Marconi's patents for inventing radio were overturned in Tesla's prior invention of radio.
Marconi didn't really invent the radio - though he is popularly given the credit for "inventing" it.

The Bengali polymath J. C. Bose demonstrated the practical uses of radiowaves - but he didn't patent it.

Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_radio
Yes, I'm aware of that - but was simply referring to the characterization he got in the comic.
I'll quote you again:

"There is nothing, in software engineering that can’t be done by other “non-genius” programmers. Further no one developer is greater than a community of developers. - Coding Ninja"

If you think that kernel programming is easy and can be done by "average" programmers then you are either so far ahead of the curve that you don't even realize it, or you are a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I strongly suspect that it's the latter.

The important stuff gets done by truly outstanding people. To deny this is nothing but laughable.
Ummm.... I can 'recall' music in incredible detail - piano, guitar, horns, the works, and I've been playing a variety of instruments for 30 years. 'recall' doesn't make the stuff any easier to play at all. To go from no musical ability to what that guy was able to do in a day, assuming it's true, is pretty amazing.

You can 'recall' tunes hours after sleeping - does that make it easier to play them fluently on instruments you'd never had training on?
'J' is kind of gross. Not a big fan of 'L' and 't', either. And... seriously, WTF is up with 'l'? Only a little goatse emoticon could be more vile. Sure, tastes differ. And reasonable men may disagree. But not in this case ;)

For Mac OS X, I suggest Luxi Mono. It does a much better job of looking like a reasonably-kerned proportional font.

For Windows, Lucida Sans Typewriter, with all antialiasing switched off. It has a nice clean look to it, and it manages to avoid being too squat.
I assume you watched the video? (I recorded and posted it) Personally, I actually thought he was pretty modest overall. He did mention his academic background and 'hacker credentials' when he was discussing functional programming languages and Haskell in particular, but other than that I didn't think he came across like he was promoting himself. I've been running this users' group for 12 years and I've seen much bigger egos from people who didn't have ESR's credentials.
performance on these games are shit on the iphone 4, and the 2nd game flickers unless its in landscape mode. Why are people championing for sub-par technology?
The point is that the iPad has already broken ground. And that truly innovative and groundbreaking things are yet in the drawing board.
closed as exact duplicate