skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It’s been very interesting beginning my trajectory in web development in 2012... [PHP] might be the best language to use in gaining an understanding of the fundamentals of web development... No web development language outside of PHP grants you the kind of flexibility to both (a) produce genuine functionality from scratch, outside of an MVC framework, and also to (b) work within the bounds of MVC in deeply sophisticated ways if you wish."

I believe you have overstated your case, perhaps due to inexperience with other languages. In particular, claiming that any modern scripting language is inflexible sounds a bit crazy.

I have attempted explaining how to get a WAMP stack running, with EasyPHP, to an absolutely new-to-web-dev indiviual who was curious about creating a chat room. Let me just say that the situation is ten times better now than when I was the same age and was poring, lost, over Bruce Eckel's Thinking In Java trying to do the same thing, which must have been sometime around 1999/2000.

These efforts to teach a newcomer reminded me that there's a lot I take for granted. There is a step where you are saying "okay, we've got to see where Apache is; what port is it listening on, how can we get you to phpMyAdmin; here's how you set up rows and columns in your tables and think about a database; no the reason it's not working is because you saved as '.html' and not '.php'; I know you've seen URLs that don't end in '.php' but that requires invoking the Rewrite Engine and teaching you about .htaccess files; oh the header modifications can't be the first thing you emit; here's the docs, you basically have to search them because there is no organizing principle and no way to find out what you can do..."

I agree, Python+Django will make you learn a bunch of weird "modeling" stuff first. To me, setting up the data model at the beginning of an app is like inputting a character name at the beginning of an RPG: as some sources testify [1], you can easily waste several hours on purely aesthetic concerns before you even really start to play.

Nonetheless, Python+Django comes with a lightweight dev server and an interactive console and a routing table, as well as a template language. The knowledge of the database is internalized to the language, so that I don't have to teach someone how to use phpMyAdmin but rather when to use a ForeignKey. If we talk purely about learning to develop on the Web then PHP has much, much more useless overhead.

Sure, eventually we will have to get a production-ready web server communicating with the application, but that can be abstracted until later with Django: it occurs as an up-front teaching cost with PHP.

I say this not even as a Python aficionado per se. If anything I like Node, and Node is nowhere near either of them in offering pleasant functionality.

[1] http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20030630
All large apps are a pain regardless of the framework. It's called coupling.

Building your application as a series of small applications that work with each other is a solution that has worked for me.
Yeah, credit to him for proof of concept. I used to say McDonalds when I made the argument, but after seeing that guy's story I now say Twinkies.
It becomes non trivial to detect when they start spamming using 100s of aged accounts run through proxies. You can detect that lots of people are submitting stories to the atlantic, but it looks organic.
Well said. RESTfulness will ALWAYS have its place, and blogs are the example par excellence. Even in Node, which prides itself on its async/non-blocking capabilities, there are all kinds of ways to incorporate REST.
This does not justify chosing PHP for a new project.

There are hundreds of examples that show how bad PHP really is. Why make the choice of using a broken language when there are so many better alternatives?

I strongly believe that using a complex, non consistent and hard to debug language actually slows down development and is even dangerous.

Being "absolutly everywhere" is not an argument. COBOL, PASCAL and FORTRAN used to be everywhere too.
This initial release is not meant to be definitive. I welcome pull requests for better implementations in your language/platform of choice and any suggestion to better tune Linux for these tests.
Design Roundtable: WeekPlan
"Ruby is by no means inferior to PHP, and you will get paid more per hour to program in Ruby."

Any decision you make to learn anything based on payback has to factor in what will happen if more people choose to learn something. If more people learn Ruby because it pays better (let's assume that is correct) then supply and demand could equalize and the pay will go down. Right now if pay is high for Ruby it means most likely there is a supply and demand in balance. When that changes so will the pay. The only time I haven't seen this happen is with the rates lawyers charge. And the reason for that has to do more with personal relationships and quality of work.
Ask HN: How do you avoid literally Man-in-the-Middle actack?
Hi hackers

I have been wondering about how to avoid the actually man in the Middle, not just a person who sniff your connection, but where another person/machine sends your information throgh to the real site REALTIME and are then able to ude your account.

Here in Denmark we have a paper keycard, that we have to use every time we log on to our bank account. You first write your username and password and the server responds with a number. That number you have to lookup on you card and respond back with the answer.

The problems is that some evil hackers has sit on the same time and just made the user think they were login in successful, but the hacker used their in info to login to the bank. The hacker now gets the question for the keycode, but do not have it. The hacker now ask the user who thinks that he has logged in successful, and then give the hacker the CORRECT keycode the hacker need, SUCCESS hack for the evil hacker.

All he has to do is to send a lot of spam and get people to fake websites who look like real websites and the hacker wins. The user do not think it is a problem because: "i have a keycard, nobody can hack me". That is a BIG problem.

I have thougt of a solution:

You could make the machine count secounds, because the hacker has to use the double time that it would normally takes to talk with the real server. That way you could tell the user, when the maybe have been comprimised, but what if the user has a slow internet connection.

You can not just say, make a program instead of using the browser, because a lot of time the user who is abused has already been infected by malware and spyware.

It does not help using SMS as a 2-factor because the hacker can still sit in the middle and log in for the user and the user will get the right SMS and send the code to the hacker.

How can we either educated our users to look for certain things like actually respond time or make a solution which do not make it possible for a hacker to do such an attack?

I ask this because several people in denmark have been hacked this way after what the Danish goverment promised to be unbreakable. Everything can be hacked in some ways, but the problem is the users thinks the can't and therefore act more stupid and freely, than before when people were told they would die if the told anybody.

Best regards from Denmark
Kevin Simper
Phys.org is vacuous and often flat wrong. It is the Daily Mail of science.
Given that xmodmap has been around since the 80s, probably not.
"gets shit done very very quickly"

In what way does PHP help to get things up and running faster than other languages?
I think the main reason is that you applied for a 'Temporary Residents Visa'. If you're just coming for a wedding in July then why apply to be a temporary resident?
I'd support banning TC and PandoDaily from HN
> then one Paul or the other will be up on the stage in 2016, getting 9% of the vote

I think you make a mistake if you perceive that Rand == Ron.

Rand is a lot more politically savvy than his dad. Have you ever seen the clips of where Ron Paul appeared on the old Morton Downey Jr. show screaming and yelling at audience members? Rand would never let himself appear as that much of a kook.

Plus, Ron Paul was always a lone voice in the wilderness. Although I think there was a lot to what he was saying, he had no hope of accomplishing any type of sea change. In contrast, Rand Paul is riding a wave of anti-government sentiment that may actually produce real legislation or put someone in the Whitehouse.
No video?? I really want to see this in action.
"JavaScript. It, or languages that compile to it, will still be in fashion in 5 or even 10 years."

How in the world can you predict what will be in fashion 5 and especially 10 years from now?

"That's because the web is shifting to thick clients, and JavaScript is the only choice in browsers."

How do you know that won't change?
http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/15/burritob0t-hands-on-video...
Imagine a machine that could give high quality meals and all you have to do is place in the ingredients... I want one.
That is what they call it.

Their 'visitors visa' is a 'Temporary Residents Visa' - as far as I could tell.
Another option is to send false information to a client. So someone using a wall hack might see 7 people on the other side of the door and or players only get shown in their correct location when it's possible for someone to actually interact with them.
I used the m1.medium instance on 64bit Ubuntu 12.04. I will update the results.md to note that.

I will also rerun all the tests on 2 core 64bit instances tonight.
Interesting that some domains are registered a lot of times, like .app

I wonder how (and if) they are going to select a 'winner'
I guess if you have a SAN hosting the vm data disks then you can just 'xm migrate' the machine from the vulnerable cluster to the updated ones without much of a hassle. This would be a massive job for cloud providers though.
By becoming dependent on "IDE's" you are only making it easier for companies to control you. As developers you are important and companies want to have some control over what you do. That was Microsoft's original plan and it has worked beautifully.

They were quick to provide an OO environment where someone could create something "impressive" very fast. A little eye candy is all it takes to impress many developers and users.
And that's all she wrote. They beat everyone else to the punch. To this day, IDE's and OO programming still rule. And MS's mysterious API's are still very much a competitive advantage, tying programmers to the MS IDE and platform. They control you.

The unfortunate result of this over a long period is that today's developers are a lot less knowledgeable about how to build things from the ground up. Take away their IDE and they can't really do much.

If you want to create something truly "new" and push the envelope (think systems programming), then you need to start at a lower level than the IDE where someone else has handled the low level details for you. (Who built those objects anyway?) A recent post here on HN said that the most talented programmers are the ones who can move from different levels of abstraction effortlessly. From very high to very low and back again. The IDE keeps you in a box. One level of abstraction. Dirty low level details are scary to many developers.

IDE's are useful. They increase productivity exponentially. But if we take away your IDE and you are helpless without it, that's a problem from a progress standpoint (e.g. new systems development). Companies like MS are controlling you and controlling the rate of progress. And they have an incentive to maintain status quo. The envelope does not get pushed.
You've obviously never looked at the Django/Flask/requests/SQLAlchemy code if you think lack of comments is a problem in Python.
I guess it depends on what country you are coming from. Most of the US/UK/common wealth countries can just use their host country passport and show up.
> The worst part of this is how this countermeasure reeks of the fallacy of ad hominem: who cares who the submitter is and how he/she personally benefits...as long as the content is good?

Well, the easiest answer to that is that one of the best ways to separate the good content from the bad algorithmically is to look at the submitter behavior. Saying "as long as the content is good" glosses over the practicalities of actually measuring that.
I certainly didn't mean to say that languages like Python and Ruby are inflexible!

What I meant to say is that you can't use either of them in direct conjunction with HTML the way that you can use PHP. This was what I meant when I said "genuine functionality from scratch." Would I prefer Python+Django/Flask for lots of use cases. Absolutely.

As for the "useless overhead," there are things like the command line (which Python and Ruby web dev absolutely demand) standing in the way of some of the other languages. Personally, I strongly prefer the command line for almost everything, but for beginners this is another barrier.

My argument was not for the superiority of PHP over other languages, but rather against its casual dismissal from consideration.
> have to work quite a bit harder to make sure that we see submissions to get involved in comment threads when possible

Setting up automated alerts for when HN starts showing up in the referer log for an article seems like a fairly easy way to handle this.
-Always have a backup
-Keep on going

An anecdote: I was demoing a game to someone on my iPhone. The game crashed so bad it rebooted the phone (bet you didn't know that was possible.) As the game froze but before it crashed out I immediately began talking to them and made eye contact to shift their focus back to me. Kept on talking and making eye contact so they didn't look at the phone and was able to pretend that it had fallen asleep mid-demo. Hit the home button after it rebooted, entered my passcode, and rebooted the game. Worked the second time and I don't think they noticed the crash.
6 customers at $199 a month is almost $1200 per month. Sure, it's not a fortune, but I wonder why it wasn't enough for "leave it running, work on something else, cash the checks, see what happens" to at least be one of the options.
Set small goals. Keep a journal (or a list) of your accomplishments, no matter how small. Set a timer and use it to keep yourself on track for even small amounts of time at first (i.e., for the next 10 minutes I will do ...). Good luck. In the Internet era we are all suffering from too much distraction to one extent or another. You are no different than most (although perhaps more aware than some).
Some founders I know price in VAT when they deciding on their pricing strategy.
Yeh...I am coming from Jamaica. I have to get a visa to go.
Features Opera did first
using the API connectors from the third party software.. thanks. I know very little about Python connectors to specific APIs but trying to learn more. This is high frequency, so moving lots of quotes around, although not thousands, maybe hundreds in an hour.
Apple iOS 6 features Finally Catch up to Android Mr BGR
If Reddit wanted to end karma whoring in general (to an extent), they'd move to a slashdot system where numbers are hidden, and only vague ranges (bad, new, good, excellent) are given.

It wouldn't completely rid the site of the bigger voting rings, but it would cut back on many individuals who spam posts looking for a quick turnaround.
Is the complaint that they are holding the money in the hopes that people will claim it? Or that they should have been giving it all out to the ones who did register, and every new source would start from zero?

"... they don't want to invest the time" in hunting down the owners of millions of domains? Yeah, that's clearly a good use of $115k - it'll only eat through that much in employee pay by the time they get through, oh, a couple percent. Only a couple percent of which will respond, only a couple percent of which will respond in a timely manner.

If they had given all the money they received to all the current registered publishers, would there be complaint? Instead, they're taking what seems to me to be a more moral stance, which is to hold it until they register, to more-accurately distribute the funds, instead of favoring the people who joined first.
although if you count ALL messages to the exchange, easily thousands an hour
Content is the most important if you want to create a sustainable sharing based model.

But, generally with reddit since quite some time the frequency of which the content is repeating is shortening substantially: Try for yourself - have a look at imgur and point out the images that you have not seen during the last 24/36 months repeating over and over ( not counting the variations of cat pics, funny heads etc)

So that is their mainstream - but there are many other still functional areas underneath.

Now if we are talking mainstream that's where this ban of BusinessWeek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, TheAtlantic.com, and GlobalPost comes into play.

When an organisation like reddit that is facing a more and more immanent lack of content bans content - well looking at that as a desperate move might be kind.

In other words - they have lost the understanding of their own business model or more precisely the underlying principle of their overall existence - sharing content.

So if those sites are the ones who share the most content - fine - IMHO at least most of them are known to have created value content for many years (some for decades and beyond).

The whole thing that a shop like reddit might achieve with that is pushing more and more of their long time supporters to the sites where the most of its content originates from.

Or in other words - sure wag the dog - or even better - post the whole thing on AOL, digg.com, myspace or name your own previous network(s)...
No, "absolutely everywhere" is not an argument by itself. But sometimes ubiquity is earned.

If Facebook powered its front end using FORTRAN, I would call it a quiet powerhouse, too!
I'm not sure what the deleted comment said but there is plenty of official reddit admins commenting in the linked thread

http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...
As somebody who maintains and develops a commercial WordPress site as well as doing Rails work, my impression is the opposite: Rails projects tend to be moderately easy to follow while PHP projects tend to be composed of 10kloc balls of intertwined logic, state and IO with no comments aside from a healthy helping of:

// $var = foo(bar);
$var = baz(bar);

Perhaps we're both encountering a bit of luck rather than accurately assessing the two languages' ecosystems.
This:
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/155941/domainbias.pdf
It's fine for you to think this, but it's beside the point and a fatigued argument that ignores the retrospective history of computing devices. Indeed I have heard the same comparisons for CPU/GPU/Sound Cards becoming soldered onto the main board. (Along with a myriad of obsolete components that users were certain they wanted to upgrade.)

There was a period back when computers were around 16Mhz that you could reliably keep a machine for many years and progressively upgrade it. The speed of progress has increased significantly since then, it's unlikely that you'll be able to find appropriate hardware for your machine by the time software has rendered it obsolete.

To break up the argument a bit:

- Soldered ram doesn't devalue the product, or present a less serious computer user. It reflects the reality that most people don't upgrade. This forum will definitely have a skew towards tinkerers, but it's not representative of the market, and there are already a slew of products to serve this consumer.
- If it's broken outside of warranty there are indeed many avenues for low cost repair, even though this has a small chance of even occurring.
- The cost of maxing out the ram is on par with market pricing.
- Giving the user upgrade choices at purchase time is a better route than trying to hunt down parts later on. All computers become obsolete, minor spec upgrades won't stop this.

This is what incremental change looks like, ram being a quick solution for computing woes has reached the point of irrelevancy and 16GB of ram is certainly appropriate for the gamut of uses of such a device. Most speed gains experienced on this hardware will be the result of the SSD.
History has shown that with time these numbers shrink, there will come a time when the difference is between two very small numbers and that won't be a factor. It almost is. A couple of years. 4G LTE for example.
So instead of seeing "theatlantic.com" in a link, we'll see "mypersonalop-edblog.wordspot.com". Cool.
The problem here is that it's 100% certain that this technology is going to be used for 24/7 surveillance in major cities. It's guaranteed. It's a giant leap forward in surveillance.
Not this time I guess, it was pg personally who hellbanned him. I hope he listens and drops it.

I think it's massively disrespectful to users to hellban and delete from view strongly upvoted posts, or to silently mass-downvote them. Pg and mods, respect your users' opinions a bit more than that, please...
Well, currently we do all our development work in R, and use the 3rd party software to simulate and build the trading mechanisms. However their software is limiting and slow. The idea is to develop, simulate, and trade the strategies using a mixture of Python and R, while ONLY using the API from the 3rd party software to communicate with the exchange.
> I think PHP is the perfect language for beginning web development for two reasons: "Direct HTML embedding" and "Straightforward file organization"

After thinking about it a bit, it seems that your reasons for suggesting PHP for beginners are about the same as the reasons people gave three decades ago when suggesting BASIC as a language for beginners, namely the norm of having GOTO and global variables everywhere.

Just as GOTO and global variables make it easy for a beginner to easily pick up programming, embedding raw code in your pages and having only one file organization makes it a lot easier to pick up web programming. And yet at the same time, all four are eventually shown to be "considered harmful" - the only ones who advance are those who are willing to abandon the first things they learn while the rest are doomed to mediocrity.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't think PHP or even BASIC is inherently bad (well, they are, but at least they're not MUMPS or Brainfuck). I just don't think teaching bad practices to newbie developers is a good way to promote a language.
Just for reference, here's Alex Madrigal's submission list: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alexismadrigal . Self-posts links to theatlantic every week or more.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nbj914 posts links to "outsideonline.com"

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jnickhughes posts links (almost) only to soentrepreneurial.com.

I've seen others, but these were the easiest to find.
Sorry, I happen to be living temporarily in Argentina (after growing up here, moving abroad for almost a decade) and, while surely the government numbers are made up, I don't recall anyone sent to jail for reporting a different number.

If you have links to the piece of news, I'll be more than glad to see them. If you have not, then please stop making shit up.
This is just because the index (big mac) was artificially low and McDonalds needed a real upgrade
I'd vote for keeping NYT and Wired - however it's hard to algorithmically enforce the "only post original, substantive articles" rule. (I guess that's what voting and flagging and for though.)
agreed on templating systems...
Except, of course, when the returns department kicks the return back at you based on an apparent misunderstanding of policy.
What advantages does this "direct conjunction with HTML" have over templating solutions? Why do most PHP frameworks implement templates then?

Also, if command line is a barrier for an aspiring (web) programmer, he/she should start looking for a new career path.