skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The following does not work anymore in 1.9 (at least when it was released, who knows if they reverted the change):

{"a", "b"}

And there were plenty of gems and small scripts online I was able to get working just fine under 1.8.7 but not 1.9. Thankfully that is largely no longer the case, as things have been updated or replaced.

String class was also given a nice kick in the ass, at least in regards to iteration.

Would you say that these were not backwards incompatible changes? Code that worked before stopped working. Breaks BC in my book. And in both cases the changes were arguably for the better.

- Stop writing code with uninitialized variables
- Stop iterating over stuff that shouldn't be iterated over in that way

As far as why the changes were thus, it was decided to destroy PHP 6 - do people still write books about that? - and port every change other than unicode support down to 5.x. Someone feel free to correct me on that point.
HN uses silent banning. Basically, when you get banned everything looks normal on your side, but none of your posts or up votes visible to anyone else (unless they have the show dead option turned on in settings).

If you want to, you can see banned accounts by going to your settings and enabling show dead.
You are missing the point; titling the article "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia" is a rhetorical device used by the author to illustrate the criminal nature of what went on and draw parallels to activity that is commonly understood by the average person to be unethical. The author isn't trying to suggest that these banks literally learned this from the mafia.

"the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business."
I understand that the bug reporter is in a bad situation but this is definitely an edge case and passing an empty or whatever non-numeric string to a function that is clearly meant for formatting numbers doesn't really seem like good style. is_numeric(), is_float() and casts are available for a reason. So I guess the answer is ultimately 'deal with it'.

That said, I don't see this taking 'months' either, they could just write a wrapper function that mimics the old behaviour and their tests should cover it. If their quality control or inner workflows make changes like this take months, I'd expect that upgrading to a new PHP version and the related testing and QA should take them years.
Somewhere around Ruby 1.8.6, the stdlib Digest::MD5 syntax changed without any explanation that I know.

In one patchlevel of 1.8.6, they've added a check against creating new Ruby objects while the GC is running (I hope I remember this right), breaking all SWIG extensions at once.

Ruby 1.8.7 changed the C extension API, I think? I'm not sure if 1.8.7 broke the old one or if 1.9 did.

Ruby 1.9 broke "when 5:" in case statements. Files also started needing "# Coding: UTF-8" comments. And then there are subtle changes that probably aren't even documented, like [Math.sin 0] not being valid syntax anymore. Block variable scoping and automatic splitting into Arrays is different.

Ruby 1.9.2 (!) changed the way require() works and added require_relative() which is impossible to properly backport.

And Ruby 1.9.3 fixed a parser bug again, breaking code that worked on 1.9.2. (I think you could have a superfluous "do" in one place.)

Those are the breaking changes that I can remember from first-hand experience now, only the last one is second-hand over IRC. And this is excluding Rake, Rubygems and all the other crap that breaks at every other git commit.

Ruby is a bad example.
http://sourceforge.net/p/jsdosbox/home/Home/

For anyone interested in the source.
It doesn't matter anyway. Semver is just a practice and not one everyone has or must sign up to, especially in its official form.

Further, you're right about Ruby 1.9's hash syntax, although in the interests of accuracy, it's more accurate to consider it an additional syntax. It certainly doesn't replace the existing one (indeed, hashes notated in the new style get returned in the old style with #inspect) and I don't believe there are plans to ever remove the standard syntax.
Mozilla Celebrates a Year of Shrinking Firefox Memory
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Likewise, some people are born ugly, and ugly people are more likely to be poor, and why didn't TFA mention all the research on this?

Contra-point: the rich have more resources to invest in beauty.

Contra-point: but surely there are some beautiful poor people, denied the opportunity to maintain, develop and leverage their beauty for material gain. What of them, the deserving poor?

Contra-point: it's not just good genes, it takes hard work too, with proper diet, exercise, plenty of sleep and good grooming. I deserve my success, I earned it.

Contra-point: do beautiful parents necessarily have beautiful children, and vice-versa? I know this girl, she's really hot, but her sister is such a dog....
An open auction is one where everyone's bids are public and visible to everyone hence allowing price discovery, contrasted with a closed auction, one where the bids are sealed and not disclosed to any other parties. It seemed from the article that the bids were submitted over the phone and known to the broker ahead of the conclusion of the auction, as opposed to a sealed first-price auction.
If you read it until the end you will find out that the technical support representative talking to the irate customer is the creator of PHP. As the creator, PHP can be whatever he decides he wants it to be.
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Actually I get to email first thing in the day. I prioritize the ones I want to read and respond to or delegate. I also read email last thing in the day.

It is important to keep in good contact with everyone one wants to keep in touch with. But one shouldn't spend too much time doing it.
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Love this snippet:

> > Please escalate this to someone who can answer the question as to why this was changed. -- endosquid at endosquid dot com

> Escalate? Oh how I wish I had someone to escalate to. -- rasmus@php.net
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Well, exactly. It doesn't say what happens, so pass floats or expect the unexpected. I get your point but I don't think I have ever seen documentation anywhere that covers all of the possible 'abuse' scenarios.
It doesn't work in the latest 1.9 either. It was a bizarre syntax that hardly anyone used from my experience (I've been a library-oriented Rubyist for several years and never saw it in production code.)

However, String is a good point, and especially around character encodings. Not to mention threads, major stdlib changes, enumerators, and more..
They're sealed bid auctions.

You can see what the others bid on eBay. If you choose to bid just a penny over the highest bid (as opposed to bidding up by a larger amount), you're unlikely to be prosecuted.
I think everyone here would agree that HN would be better served with an extremely robust spell- and grammar-checking WYSIWYG comment editor. /s
"This is going to cause us MONTHS (to fix)". Whether he is right or wrong, you cannot say he's not over-exaggerating and being a pain in the ass. Also, expecting "" to == 0, when it's easier and proper to enter 0 just doesnt make sense. That's like saying "i expected your software to make up for me not using it correctly". Sass or not from the guy who wrote PHP, this guy is just a pain in the ass and his complaint is ridiculous.

ADDITION: As the creator stated, it's been issuing warnings for some time now and was changed LAST YEAR. there's just no foundation to this complaint.
Ah, that makes sense. Any idea on what causes it? I did try submitting a few times and received the message "You're submitting too fast" (even though it had been days since my last submission).

PS- I came across one of your posts yesterday and today as well. I like reading your stuff man-- keep it up!
This reminds me of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3860361. Ignoring something that needs to be fixed because it might break workarounds is a lot to expect, and it likely why the IEs stayed broken for so long.
I don't agree with your analogy. The question is more similar to "Can you please tell me the number format of <silence>".

How can the answer to an unfinished question be "0"? 0 is an actual valid answer, when people are asking for number_format(0, 0).

In this case, NULL is definitely more appropriate, because the input is invalid.
The Art of Not Writing Code
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I understood that - I wanted to dispel the idea of anything more complex than a ligature.
this is a classic example of "you mess with the bull, you get the horns."
A wrapper function is absolutely the right way. Instead, he decides to modify the PHP source and recompile it, effectively forcing him to maintain a fork of PHP, as if somehow that magically takes less effort to develop and QA resources to maintain. Wow.
You seem quite naive. I'm assuming you're fairly young.

1) Top marginal tax rate is 35%.

2) Bonuses are taxed as income as well.

3) The rich pay the majority of taxes. (http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/story/2011-09-20/b...)

The world isn't out to screw you.
I guarantee that security guidelines were not involved in any decision about which version of PHP to use in a project. All PHP code is security tainted and needs protection at the underlying data service layer.
To be honest, I think Rasmus shows some class in how he deals with the issue... others may have been far more abusive.
I think most people need to borrow money to buy a property or start a business.
>There's a reason this isn't taught in public schools folks - it's because the people at the top want more for themselves and less for you.

While I agree with you that schools should do more to encourage people to own their own business, do you really think school curriculums in the US are decided by a shadowy cabal of the wealthy?

Whether to teach business and entrepreneurship would be almost entirely up to the local school district. There are thousands of them and each one is independent--that's a pretty far reaching conspiracy. I know members of my local school board, and I can assure you they aren't part of the "people at the top" trying to keep the poor man down.

The real reason people more people aren't self employed is that we've managed to link health insurance with employment.
HTML5 is not ready? HTML5 games may not be ready for mobile browsers, but check out what CocoonJS can do:
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Why is one person working on one ancient project the face of open source?
HTML predefined icon-like symbols
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I used it as the example simply because it is normally a language that is touted quite superior to PHP. I think it is better in some regards - building/using Ruby DSLs is awesome - but not all.

Languages are subject to bugs. If they didn't have bugs, people wouldn't complain.
Agreed. Flexibility is important. I always say don't look at plans during execution.
also awesome. thanks again
It is possible to add a catch-all clause to the documentation. For example any non-float argument is converted to float via floatval(), or raises an error, and so on. This behavior can be made consistent across every API so that the documentation has only one place to describe it. PHP is missing this either AFAIK.
>>If you can point to a single project that was done on time and without bugs because it was edited on vi/vim then you have a point.

Software projects are late on schedule for reasons nothing to do with typing speed. Learning text editing is only important for you to make comfortable while you are doing other important tasks.

In other worlds like Java, Intellisense and auto-complete rule the world. You can't do any work sanely without those two things. In fact not knowing them might cause a delay in delivering projects. Using them only brings you on plane with other Java developers. Its a need not an advantage.
You ask a compelling question with "who needs to leave Microsoft for you stop cringing?". I'd suggest it is an institutional problem, and while not completely unique to Microsoft (see Apple, Oracle), it is embodied within nearly every aspect of their business model -- save the recent open source bear-hug, the overarching corporate goal is to do precisely the opposite of what you would wish to see: to have all other market options whittled down to One Microsoft Way. They are not currently open -- and as long as Windows and Office continue their bewildering dominance within corporate IT departments, they will never be open, as it is antagonistic to that goal.
Documentation is hard, thats why most of it is open source. Pretty sure you can edit the php docs online if you so chose.
Perhaps relevant: yesterday's news. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18521468).

Those are just few of the tax avoidance schemes that come to light - which it should be noted are not necessarily illegal. The reality is that the rich and famous are involved in these schemes - earning big money and paying less tax than hard working, honest men.

The government doesn't take the necessary steps to put an end to these kinds of schemes in any haste - probably because they're involved in many themselves, along with their friends. If everyone was doing it, the schemes would be closed. I therefore recommend everyone do it, when legal.
Heh, if your steps to reproduce include redirecting error messages to /dev/null, it is hard to take your report seriously.
Can you imagine how Linus would have handled it? I think Rasmus was fairly composed.
The other gotcha with "typeof": "typeof NaN" is "number", amusingly enough.
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Some helpful advice: this isn't Reddit. Try to keep your comments on-topic and helpful.
Having number_format in so many thousands of places across so many products is indicative of pretty poor code. If you have bad code, you can hardly expect to be able to upgrade to new versions of the language seamlessly.

Speaking of which, are they going to upgrade to 5.3 without testing all those thousands of places across all their products?
And he has decided it is not a standardized language, by any stretch of the imagination. That's the guy's point, and it's spot-on.

As an aside, I didn't realize there would be people on HN who wouldn't recognize rasmus@php.net immediately.
I agree this would be ideal. Will definitely keep this in mind when writing documentation (and code) for my own tiny open source projects. All the double and triple checking just adds so much bloat most of the time...
LinkedIn's turn to go down (profile page)
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Wait, endosquid writes tax software and expects that whenever a bit of data gets corrupted it should display an account balance of 0? Please share the name of this phenomenal software product.
BlackBerry is winning the SDK race
Heading of link is wrong: original source article says its 30 TIMES more efficient, not 30%. This would be a seriously big deal if it's actually commercialized: based on the Sandia video I have no doubt they have a working prototype.
If by "work" you mean do something interesting when one of the suggested words are typed, I can report it doesn't work on my up-to-date Ubuntu.
> It's a very specific concept from the United States Constitution

This is completely incorrect, and it's a little insulting to the users here who aren't American.

Freedom of speech is a value with broad applicability. The United States Constitution enshrines a right to free speech as a limitation of government power, fine, but they don't have a monopoly on the idea. Relative freedom of speech is a characteristic of every forum in which speech and the suppression of speech are possible.

Banning users of a forum limits freedom of speech, removing commentary that goes off-topic limits freedom of speech. Forums are often quite free to set their own rules about who is allowed to say what, and users are often free to choose the forums they frequent, but that's mostly beside the point - speech within any particular forum is free to a given extent, and some people (be they owners, operators, users, whatever) believe that this freedom is intrinsically valuable.

(I don't really see this one as a free speech issue myself - to me, this one is about the credit card company preserving their brand integrity.)
I think you might be discounting the potential for finding that co-founder here on Ask HN. Consider adding an email address to your profile.
What's the numeric representation of the volume of <silence>? 0 dB
I am currently homeless and deeply in debt for valuing my integrity over money. I could have dumped my two adult sons on my ex. He would take them in, though he won't give me one thin dime to help feed them. And because they are legal adults, no shelter will take us as a family. My financial mess is due to the fact that I* have gotten well at my expense. As a former military wife with an incurable genetic disorder, I, instead, could be a lifelong legal drug addict at tax payer expense. But one swear word in the subheader? I would at least A/B test it. Perhaps cleaning up his foul mouth would grow his audience even bigger.

* Really, all three of us have gotten well at my expense.
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Deciding to use an editor is not an event but a process. Its making gradual investments over time, those investments make you productive.

If you are a manager, its worth your time to study tools that help you manage things better. If the best managers in the trade say a particular tool 'x' helps them be productive, then its worth your time to learn that tool. Can you justify minor leaks in productivity while you are learning it day to day. May be no on the shorter run, but the productivity gains over time are going to be so drastically huge its going to be totally worth your time.

If this manager goes to his senior manager and explains all this, I believe the senior manager would understand this. Else these so-called managers are not managers. But glorified desk-supervisors, whose only job is pushing buttons on the blackberry.
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Can you imagine how many fools like this Rasmus Lerdorf has to deal with, every. single. day. since he created PHP? Same for Linus Torvalds. After a while, you just stop trying to sugar-coat idiocy, and just tell them as it is.
Angel and VC are completely different fundraising processes.

An angel might commit to invest $50K after one 45 minute meeting. A VC could give you $5M, but it will always take multiple meetings, thorough due diligence, the approval of all the partners, etc.
Is it worth it to enter China?
Looks interesting, however I would like to see a Paypal payment option - european customers are less likely to have a credit card and that includes me.
I agree with Steve. "No apples" actually is "0 apples".

Your analogy is a misunderstanding of null. Null is like you asking me how many apples Joe has. I say I don't know. If you write down 0, I'm going to stop you and say, "I didn't say zero, I said I don't know."
Dev Bootcamp Day 9: Rob Mee visits from Pivotal Labs
You may be right, but most "photographers" get stuck at that phase forever. Photo companies convinced most people that buying an expensive DSLR will make them a good photographer. Or if you carry a tripod, that automatically makes you a pro.

While knowing your technical side is nice, it is completely unnecessary to take good photos. I know of a brilliant wedding photographer who shoots with cheap disposable cameras from your local gas station. He is booked months ahead.
They do get prosecuted. Except they carry so much legal firepower, and then hide behind complexity at a level where the govt. has to consider which cases to go after.

See the sec going after goldman for example.

Further, the govt in many cases has been co-opted or convinced that should they go after these guys, the economy would collapse. I believe the state wide cases against the mortgage companies foreclosure mills was a close example.

I don't have the details on the tip of my fingers anymore, but in essence the mills were getting sued in every state, and were negotiating.. Perhaps to get the suits bundled together I think. At which point they introduced a clause which stated that they would not be sued for anything else after this case, on this matter.

Essentially protecting them from further prosecution/investigation. If it weren't for a handful of DAs who said no, particularly the NY DA office, it would have passed.

And then there's regulatory capture and resources being reduced to investigative bodies.

I used to follow this mess for a while, and there are a lot of prosecutions and maneuvers and counter maneuvers going on.

If you are wondering why they aren't being sued I suggest doing some research, rollingstone alone will have some great articles, and if you would like the big picture blog, carries some old articles, and is always tracking the crap the finance industry is pulling.

There is a lot going on - make no mistake. It's just that the govt really is the underdog, and is sadly the first one to get bashed on HN.
I see you're a new user: this type of comment is, by consensus and executive decree, not welcome on Hacker News. If you don't have something genuinely novel to contribute to the conversation, please do your part to keep the noise low.

This applies to the grandparent comment as well. If people seem to be jumping on your comment more than hers, it's because yours smells worse on the surface. But honestly, the grandparent is more insidious for being less obviously out of place but being similarly empty.
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I'm honestly chuckling at the thought of Linus responding to this one in Rasmus' place.

If you need the features of an old version, use the old version. Simple as that. Don't expect the rest of the world to be stuck with dealing with backward compatibility just so you aren't inconvenienced. Upgrade, pay for support, move to another platform, or stop complaining.
It is indeed possible, but whether he wrote it or not is a bit irrelevant given that he claims he wrote it - the page has 'by Charles Carreon' just above the 'tits and rice' graphic.

http://www.american-buddha.com/poet.condoleeza.htm#CONDOLEEZ...
Way to jump onto a thread that hadn't had any comments in 10-month-old joezimjs and add pretty much zero to the conversation.
Surface is a ploy to drive Windows 8 adoption, says Acer founder
This makes me so excited to be a budding Perl dev.
> What's the multiplier needed to account for the cost this change incurred for all the other developers who wrote code using OpenGL before ES?

Let me ask you that - please list as many examples as you can think of of code written for OpenGL 1.x that would make sense to port to embedded devices.

I'll kick off the list:

* xscreensavers
...