skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"No second templating engine can reduce complexting"

Oh yeah, compare:

<?php echo htmlentities($firstName, ENT_COMPAT, "UTF-8"); ?>

with:

{$firstName}

Isn't that reduced complexity? And that's not even getting into other constructs. In my template language (based on smarty), a single {loop} tag expands to 10 lines of PHP code.

Would you also claim that no programming language can ever reduce complexity over assembly language? Probably not. This is just the same thing. Compiling a higher level language into a lower level language.
And the video attached to that story is a trailer for Frost/Nixon! WTF!?
How can it be cheaper as off the shelf drives if data centers also only use commodity off the shelf drives?

(probably from wholesale, though)
> Does "Programs and Features" do anything more/less than "Add/Remove Programs" in Vista SP3? No.

Actually, yes. You can search the list of programs, and there are a lot more columns that you can sort them by, which is hugely useful when you're trying to find something.

> With regards to search, I've found their implementation inferior not only to OS X's spotlight, but also Google Desktop Search. Especially pre-SP1 Vista search. But assuming you don't have Google Desktop Search installed (like the average user) it is still a usability win. But again, not worth a $400 upgrade, considering Google Desktop Search is free and runs great on XP SP3.

Care to give any specifics? I've found it to be better than Google Desktop search and a recent annoying problem with an OS X Macbook convinced me that spotlight is useless. I was trying to browse the network, and I tried searching for network and it would not show the network browser in the spotlight (apparently it's hidden in one of the menus in Finder because Apple thinks its users are too stupid to use networks, or something). And really, $400? Are you really trying to say that Vista costs $400? Sure, that was the retail price of Vista Ultimate when it launched, but now even the most expensive edition is only $300, and upgrades or OEM versions are half as much. And most people upgrade their OS when they get a new computer, so that's a stupid argument.

>. Like most Real Power Users I've adapted to the big change (internet apps)

> So yeah, most of us have adjusted to change. By bypassing crap when there are better alternatives.

Huh... one thing doesn't follow the other. But keep thinking that if you want...
Mizzou, 02-06
"At what point does your demonstrated ineptitude force you to admit that you are incapable of realizing your goals?"

I'm not really sure that intelligence matters as much as people think it does. K.A. Ericsson is a psychologist who studies expert performance, and he's clearly shown that a high iq is not required to become an expert in something. What is required is 1000's of hours of deliberate practice. So basically when you see overnight successes, you're really missing the hard work that got them there. Everyone needs to put in the effort.

And besides research is coming out that really supports the idea that intelligence can be raised. There is some evidence that practicing the Dual-n-back test will raise your fluid iq. And the test isn't domain specific.
http://cognitivefun.net/test/5 is a good site for the test.The community there is also really good.
I disagree. Losing my MP3 collection would mean losing part of my identity I had over the years.

It's really interesting/funny to look at the different stuff and say to yourself "Did I really like this? Did I really go to concerts from these bands?"

But of course, the cat/dog and the girlfriend would need to get out of the burning appartment first :)

But 60 USD? Probably not. :)
Who you are and what you do
Vilnius University
I just got into the CS Ph.D. program here!
Well, a data center using lots of drives can probably use more of the space on them. It wouldn't be unusual for an individual person only to fill up 1/10 of his hard drive. It would be less common for a data center to have 10x overcapacity.
How do you like it? And are you a CS major? I'm considering coming here for a Ph.D. (just heard I've been admitted!!!)
University of California Berkeley
I didn't mean to imply PHP couldn't be used successfully (it certainly can), rather the post sounded blissfully ignorant to the point of sarcasm. Perhaps "ignorant" isn't the right word, though ignorant of the "better" languages.
OK but look at this jobs trend line from indeed:
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=PHP&l=

All those companies just got stuck and see no way out? I'm no devotee of PHP at all, but just getting stuck isn't something that works for long periods of time for so many new projects. These are websites, not core banking systems or OS kernels.

I think the real reason for PHP's success is that PHP doesn't force people to become software engineers when all they want to do is print some database records on a web page. And it doesn't force employers to hire expensive software engineers just to thrust software engineering complexity down their throat when they really don't need any of it.

Believe it or not, there is still a great number of websites that are not web apps and never become web apps. They just show you some pages of content with some dynamic parts on some of them.

There's no reason for MVC, no reason for object orientation, no reason for separation between designers and developers, no reason for ORM, no worries about transactions, no interaction with messaging systems or other integration stuff, no need for unit testing or mock objects, no need for 101 deployment scenarios, no need for REST APIs, no need for maintainability because there simply isn't that much code to maintain. But that's what 90% of RoR, Django, JEE documentation is about.

People complain about atrocious PHP code. That's because some websites "degenerate" into web apps over time. The majority of people who create them are not software engineers and have no interest in becoming software engineers.

And yes some of those "degenerate" websites are getting stuck with PHP. But I think you would be mistaken to assume that all or even most of them go down this route. Most websites just remain websites. Some do a rewrite. Others add more interaction or features by installing one of those clunky CMSs. And the CMSs are written in PHP to let the creators of websites (not web apps) customise the system using little pieces of PHP, again without any need for software engineering practices.

So if you need a taxi today, why would you hire an international logistics specialist? Is it because you might get stuck with Beijing taxi drivers shipping iron ore to your steel factory, or because you may never need iron ore deliveries? I think for most users of PHP it's the second. They never do complex web apps.

And all of that has nothing to do with whether or not PHP is suitable for creating complex web apps using software engineering principles.
Another possible cool thing just came into my mind:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_instance_storage
So is fewer billionaires better or worse?
I have seen photos of WP being used against enemy soldiers in Vietnam. It's quite a unique explosion, indeed. Interesting that WP was used in GW1. Hadn't WP and Napalm been banned before 1991?

I will believe in newspapers when they produce photos of WP being used against civilians in Gaza. Until then, it's nothing but fog of war, bad journalism and propaganda to me.
Some of the greatest works of literature were written in German.
Or Iraq 2004:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus_use_in_Iraq
Sometimes stories become big enough that they spill out of their ordinary stream. For example, there is a stream of news about Ebola fever that under normal circumstances is read mainly by infectious disease specialists. But if there is a really big Ebola outbreak somewhere, that starts to be relevant to everyone. What's happening in Gaza now seems pretty serious.
Univ of Utah
Australian National University, Canberra
Great post, though it is hard to follow in some places. For one, the parent's statement that "a lot of modern sites are in PHP, because that's what the best choice was when they started (as far as they could tell), and now are stuck with that decision," is logically sound, while your response that "there are more jobs for PHP developers than ever" isn't mutually exclusive to the parent's idea, so I don't see where he is wrong; as well, I think his post was limited to putting in context the opportunities for coding what we consider to be modern apps of today, back in 2003 and 2004.
Consider joining local chapter of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toastmasters_International
Well, the Washington State Penitentiary is in Walla Walla, but the song mentions Folsom, and that prison is in California. So I don't think so, but it cold be.
Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden
Another formulation of Conway's Law is that communication problems in an organization will be manifested in their finished products. One example of this is from Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" has a scene where Tom West, the leader of the Data General effort to develop a 32 bit mini gets a look at the VAX, DEC's competing machine:

"Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he
saw a diagram of DEC’s corporate organization.
He felt that the VAX was too complicated.
He did not like, for instance, the system by
which various parts of the machine communicated
with each other; for his taste, there
was too much protocol involved. He decided
that VAX embodied flaws in DEC’s corporate
organization. The machine expressed that
phenomenally successful company’s cautious,
bureaucratic style. Was this true? West said it
didn’t matter, it was a useful theory."

(See http://www.computer.org/portal/cms_docs_annals/annals/mahone... for more background )
I think a lot of the value of HN is the perspective that the community here applies to stories. While the story itself may not be specifically about startups or hacking, the perspective that people bring to bear is almost always informative and thought-provoking. Something may not be Hacker News, but that something may also turn into a great hacker conversation in the course of a thread.

I feel that with HN it's really about the evolving dialogue moreso than the news itself- the news is just a conversation starter.
Northeastern University :(
Romance Really Is A Game - And Game Theory Will Give You Some Answers
GT alum here (dec 08)
http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?id=2356&ga=4
I fall for The 4-Hour Workweek not because I want to work less, but because I want work less at what I don't like.

Markus Frind represents a lost opportunity to me; in that position, I would have spent half my time expanding business around Plenty Of Fish and half my time around risky new ventures (for a million dollars a year, you can afford a good programmer or two).
Big companies win most of the time when there are lawsuits involved. But obviously we can't make enforcing a patent harder as a function of the size of the inventing company.

It's a tricky question to ensure "fair" treatment of patent settlements.

Clearly patent trolls with silly patents such as the automatic trim()-on-insert should be banished. In fact, I can't think of ever reading about any CS patent that would have actually been useful and truly an idea worth the grant.

On the other hand, were there more burden of proof placed on the inventor's side, this would discriminate small inventors in traditional patentable fields (like mechanical or engineering constructions). Big companies could just "steal" their ideas and count on them being unable to enforce the patent.

I think the way of the future would be just to give up on the illusion of "intellectual 'property'". Patents don't seem to be incentive when it comes to inventing; instead they seem to incentivise commercialisation. However, all smart people I know would invent new things regardless of any monetary reward or lack thereof.
absolutely. Try using this from China ;).
Motorola L6, L7 Mic Microhpone Ways
L6, L6 Mic Jumpers, L6 mic problem, L6 mic ways, L6 microphone ways, L7, L7 mic jumpers, L7 mic ways, L7 microphone ways, motorola, V3
Case Western Reserve University
I'd suggest adding a mute button to your widget. I like to listen to internet radio while I play flash games, and it annoys me when the game music starts to play. Also some authors seem to partially hide the mute button, so can be somewhat frustrating to mute the sounds in game.
Coke to launch world's largest Recycling Plant
Washington University in St. Louis
I'm in it for the stats.

2 million bottles every 5 minutes, in the US alone? That's over 200,000,000,000 a year.
University of Toronto (graduated)
Not only compared to desktop applications was LAMP a huge advantage, but also compared to Microsofts Web-Technologie (IIS,MS-Server,ASP and later .NET). I was able to create apps the user wanted in the years I used MS technologie, but I did not like it very much. When I discovered LAMP it was like YEAH! and I stayed at home and coded away for weeks and some great stuff came out of this.

As for the language (you mention moving "up" to Ruby or Python), I dont really care if I do

str_replace('stuff','zen','stuff and the art not to care');

or

'stuff and the art not to care'.kickasstransform('stuff','zen');

or whatever the latest hottness is :-)

When it comes to things that matter, I dont miss anything in PHP. For example, Javascript is a cooler language, because it has first class functions and all that crazy shit. Ok, I dont mind that. But on the other hand, I HATE with a passion that "a=7" will by default put "a" into the global scope in Javascript. That outweights all the advanced tech in Javascript.

But the language itself is not the most important factor. Most important is all the stuff that surrounds it. When I use PHP, I get new servers within a click with any company i choose. I get the LAMP stack installed by putting an Ubuntu CD into any machine, install it and do "apt-get install php5". On IRC, there are tons of people on freenode#php (there aint many for Ruby for example). And there is a very nice manual at php.net and so on.

And VERY important to me is the whole feeling about how L,A,M and P are implemented. How I can use php on the command line, how I can start mysql from the command line and give it commandlineparameters, how one table is represented in MySql (one file for the structure, one file for the data and one for the indexes), how a database is represented in MySql (a directory)... There are millions of things I like. And they make me feel that the people who wrote L,A,M and P at least partly think like me. Thats cool and makes me productive.
more GT!!! 1987-1991
The other day there were 4 37signals posts on the top page here. I think one is more than enough usually...
There's a note on the page about that.

Several new images coming soon; and my apologies for the slow-loading website. In a few weeks these JPEGs will have a cool zooming function, using Microsoft's new SeaDragon technology. Please stay tuned! ~cj, December 2008
Hillel Torah North Suburban Day School (graduated)

Oh, and I once took a linear algebra class at Northwestern University, but it didn't take and later I had to reteach myself from scratch.
Are these statistics publicly available? I'd like to verify them because they seem too big. For example, 106,000 aluminum cans used every 30 seconds seems off by an order of magnitude.
APU - www.anglia.ac.uk - a 3rd rate polytechnic university in the UK ;)
me too, but i'm on a leave of absence, trying to get stuff off the ground.
Wow, you don't see Rockers too often. I'm an alum.
Do you have to be the #1 in a sector to make a lot of money though?

Plentyoffish has just overtaken match as top dating site in the US - some parallels with facebook. Difference is, plentyoffish has been massively profitable for years... Why hasn't facebook? Do they need 10,000+ servers and all those staff? The big fancy expensive offices?

Facebook seems like a tech bubble in itself to me.
Rescue of U.S. banks hints at nationalization
Apparently the UN also thinks it's phosphorus

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/yesterday-david.html
> What's happening in Gaza now seems pretty serious.

Serious things have been happening in that part of the world for more than 2000 years, and will continue to happen long after we're all dead. I think they are given ample coverage on other sites, and there are plenty of other forums to discuss them on the internet.

Or, put another way, say this site had some hawkish Israeli users and some Hamas-oriented Palistinians. Wouldn't it be nice if here, they could just stick to peacefully discussing the things this site is about, rather than getting sucked into an endless, fruitless discussion, which is what 99% of discussions about that area are?
Well this story does touch upon a potential chemical being used and its effects - if you're looking for a yc news slant
There can be no useful and constructive dialogue on this topic, and therefore, whether or not it is called Hacker News, it is pointless to post it here.

It's important, certainly, but do you really think anyone here is not aware of what's happening in Gaza? So then, the only value of reporting this would be to create an interesting discussion - but on a topic so politically inflammatory no useful discussion will come out of this community, and no one will alter their behaviour in a way that will make any difference whatsoever to this conflict.
Sweet, let's start discussing whether white phosphorous could be a good basis for an online start-up.

Or not.
University of Toronto -- Undergrad.
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
Well, here is what I would write:

Smarty: {$firstName}

vs

PHP: <?=h($firstName)?>

And, loops?

Your: {loop}

vs

PHP's loop: <?while(loop()){?>

Of course you have to define function h() and loop() somewhere. Just don't do it in your template file and you are fine. Hardly saving you even one line of code. We are down to counting how many charecters each need.

Would you also claim that no programming language can
ever reduce complexity over assembly language? Probably
not. This is just the same thing. Compiling a higher
level language into a lower level language.

I woun't.
nice =) is the ATDC still there?
not everything on yc is just startup/business centric; that ended a while back.

That's why its named changed from startup news into hacker news (I still remember complaining to pg about the name change - though now I've changed my mind)

What's wrong with discussing a chemical? We've been doing that a long time already on hacker news

one more edit: another thing that hacker news brings is a dif perspective on an issue (as opposed to just flame wars like on other sites - I guess I am an idealist at heart)

have you ever seen war/military geekery? http://exiledonline.com/the-day-americas-empire-died/
(I'd post the Gaza article but it has some graphic images - though the content is very balanced / impartial - imo)
It's one per American per day, by my reckoning. Seems reasonable.
It would be great to have the possibility to import scores from other popular software (cubase etc) so you can collaborate on projects
How does it find the "related" tweets? any ideas?
White Phosphorus is not a banned substance, nor is there anything obviously illegal about Israel's use of it in this conflict. It's certainly not a chemical weapon or any other sort of WMD, despite what some of the more breathless reporting would imply.

The only international convention which may regulate the use of White Phosphorus is Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, however as WP is designed primarily to be used as a smoke-generating agent it falls under Section 1(b)(i) of the Protocol for most uses, which states:
(b) Incendiary weapons do not include:

(i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants,
tracers, smoke or signalling systems;

If used as an incendiary weapon, other restrictions in the Protocol might apply. These include a prohibition on using WP as an incendiary weapon directly against civilians or by air-dropped shells against military targets in heavily civilian areas. But again, this does not apply when WP is used as a smoke-generating agent and it's perfectly legal to use WP as either a smoke-generating agent or an incendiary weapon against military targets if they are not located within heavy concentrations of civilians, such as in an open field.

Israel (along with the US) is not a signatory to Protocol III of the CCW and so it's not subject to its restrictions in any case, but the IDF's military manuals instruct its soldiers to abide by its restrictions voluntarily. Thus far, there hasn't been any evidence that Israel has used it as anything other than a smoke-generating agent, which is absolutely necessary in this kind of urban fighting, or that it has intentionally been used as an incendiary weapon against civilians. In fact, the particular shell Israel uses (the US-made M825A1) is remarkable for having a much slower fall-time through the air than WP weapons of old like those used heavily in WWII, so it provides sufficient time for people to get out of its way and makes it a lot less effective as a weapon.

So all indications are that Israel's use of White Phosphorus is well within the accepted and legally-permissible bounds that govern its use. That does not mean that groups like HRW should not keep a strict eye on the IDF's use of it in case there are transgressions and targeted attacks on civilians, but it does mean that we need to stop this ridiculous tendency to regard any use of WP as an illegal and barbaric action. It's a legitimate weapon with legitimate uses and NGOs and the media should recognise that.

As an aside, the International Solidarity Movement used as a source by the Guardian is hardly an impartial source, having long been linked to Hamas and supportive of that organisation. Any video, witness interviews and photographs released by the ISM should be regarded as immediately suspect unless corroborated by other sources.
Not sure what you mean beyond the twitter API call with the query string, but the source code is available (link from end of post). Most of the work is in file fresh.py.

http://vik.singh.googlepages.com/fresh.zip
Forget civilian women. Doctors from the Red Cross, the Doctors without Borders association, the UN, and others in Gaza providing aid have described the burns on the affected victims, many of which arrive at the conclusion that these burns can only be had as a result of white phosphorus.

Take a look at this Creative Commons documentary by AlJazeera (forget their bias, just look at the facts presented by authorities in the video): http://cc.aljazeera.net/asset/language/english/gaza-white-ph...

Summary of clip:

Israeli bombing with bombs of white flames.
Children’s playing with the phosphorus fires from the bombs burning.
Women speaking about the bombs being dropped and the burns it has caused.
Young man with burnt wounds.
Man in hospital.
Doctor Medhath Abbas speaking.
Israeli bombing with flames.
Marc Garlasco speaking about the use of white phosphorus.
Voxpops.
Wide view of bombs bein used.
Women crying.
Fumes from the bombs dropped.
Children playing with the flames of phosphorus.
Aymen Mohyeldin PTC
Are they just blaming the language for the code quality?
If you are maintaining someone else's rapidly developed code, on a site with over 100 million users, then it's not exactly going to be easy is it?

If they had developed it slowly in Java, say, over 10 years then the programmers might be happier but the site would have been too late to the market and lost.
Indeed. Note that I am not making a comment either way on whether WP was used; my problem is the sloppy journalism. Esp. from the Guardian, which has a reputation for anti-Israel bias - they need to be meticulous in their reporting from there to escape those accusations, and they're not being at all.
second

Blizzard's no longer in the research park though. They've moved to a complex near the Spectrum.