skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Back when all you had for choices were Perl, Java, and C++ it was easy to see why PHP got big. However there are issues with starting out on PHP now:

1) It's really only meant for web development.

2) There are other languages now that are simple to learn, flexible (more than just for web apps), and powerful (Python, Ruby, and now even Javascript)

Unless PHP has another major evolution, like its move to OO; (or unless I just missed something else big) I just don't see the point of using it unless you or your company been using it for years already. This article doesn't have any real compelling arguments.

Maybe all of this will change once Facebook releases Hiphop VM AND people actually start using it. To this day, I'm not sure why no one started using Hiphop enmass and why people love using the inefficient eval method. O yeah there's also an issue with PHP and logic dealing with concurrency, in that there isn't a good way to distribute work within an app. Then again I could be completely wrong.
An empty threat, yeah. As scary as it is (and, admittedly, this is a government that is known to push buttons and pull threads whenever it wants something done, whether good or bad) it'd still be unconstitutional. That's exactly why they didn't stop publishing those figures.

Also, you have to understand something about Argentine politics right now: it's a very polarized country, with two massive interest groups trying to take control of it. I'm not saying the government figures are real, most probably they aren't, but I'm very doubtful of these other claims, specially when these 'think tanks' don't really specify what they are measuring.

This is a horrible game these two interests groups are playing, with everyone standing to lose except a few fuckers on top.
MAGIX Audio Cleaning Lab MX 18.0.0.9 + Rus
PHP has all the beauty of Perl with none of the power.

I think part of the reason folks pillory PHP is their annoyance that people are using it as their first language and may never move beyond it to the better alternatives available.
It should be noted that the software running Data.gov itself has not been made open source. This is a project of the American and Indian governments to produce an open-source version of Data.gov to be shared with other governments.

Here's an open-source government data catalog originally made for the City of Philadelphia, built on Django:

http://civiccommons.org/apps/open-data-catalog
Exactly, that form did not seem if it had been written for that specific case but rather something they could select in the system for why they were returning the item.
I put 20 days and showed them a few thousand dollars over at least 4 - 5 bank accounts, both here in Jamaica and US banks.

So not sure what happened.
Translation: I know it's pointless but it's ~art~ so you can't criticize me--this isn't meant to do anything important, it's meant to "stimulate discussion".
You can always build things with at scale, even with flawed languages (look at javascript).

The thing is, why choose a flawded language when there are others less flawed (nothing is perfect) for new code?
The only way to get mediawiki to scale is to do the same. :)
So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse.

Right. The quality of feedback information is one of the biggest factors in development cost. The bugs you can't reliably recreate are the biggest problems, sometimes by one or two orders of magnitude.

This should be used as a weapon in the security battle. Seems like not enough people use it.

In all likelihood, the scam initiator is not the same person as the scam implementor, so "making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed" is likely to inflate their costs tenfold. This also works when the scam is entirely the work of one person, but it's especially effective when multiple parties are involved.
People might disagree with this but try adderall XR in moderation.

(I am not a doctor or even a very smart person)
Exactly! This is why a lot of people, like say my father, who hate the government policies otherwise kind of agrees with them on this: "hey, we got fucked by the IMF 20 times already, let them get fucked for once!"
Next time you're seething with rage that someone crossed your arbitrary line about what you mistakenly think is "civil", save your breath and save your energy.

As to your silly play by play, it's all just your own self-serving spin. You have some bogus theory of civility that you mindlessly cling to as if it were a religion, it's a wrong theory, and that's really all the substance there is to your "criticism." I see your remarks in the same way as I'd see a religious zealot reading me the riot act over violating one of his beloved precepts.

If inside of that babbling rant of yours there is something you actually consider to be a reasonable disagreement, not with my style, but with the logic of my point, then go ahead and point it out without ranting and I'll try to elaborate for you.
The good reason is that that would be trying to present a technical solution to what is a personal conflict of interest.

The basic problem is that people's stories are competing for eyeballs - a personal conflict - and that people are not satisfied with a fair resolution with that conflict (letting the general public decide). They are seeking an unfair level of exposure.

You can't solve the basic problem of conflict technically; the best you can do is to provide fair tools. Trying to provide tools for content access, though, is unrelated (orthogonal, really) to the issue of fairness.

Changing how the content is delivered won't really change things. Either it will be fair (everyone can submit to the API) or it won't be. If it is fair, then every smart publisher will publish to the API (heck, who wouldn't want to autopublish their blog to reddit?) and the result will be a pretty useless firehose :-D

If it's not fair, then you're undercutting democratic filtration...
This will really blow your mind, then:

www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/this-part-actually-does-not-matter/258139/

Feel free to change the next-to-last part to whatever you like.
I agree, but just out of curiosity: what do you think would be the language of choice beyond JS for the browsers of the future?

I honestly don't have a clue. I might guess Python because it's so big at Google and Chrome is already more or less the industry standard.
True, as long as the application design and technology is still relevant. I personally think anyone writing an application of significant size should have some experience maintaining such an application. Gives a sense of why and how to write code for maintainability.
based on other articles on this topic, it seems that allowing for trademark names is half the point (e.g. Canon.com switching to .Canon). These companies aren't applying for the string so that others may use it, they're applying so that their company brand is all over their domain.
long time ago former openbsd committer here (when that meant something).

while i have wanted to see someone do this for a long time - an openbsd with a faster feature velocity - i have not seen anything here that suggests these guys can pull it off.

who are they? the FAQ doesn't state. openness is crucial.

aside from a git repo and a wiki, what else do they have to give anyone hope.

wow, it feels like it's been eons since anyone forked openbsd. remember microbsd?
Who's trying to prove the Goldbach conjecture before they learn the rules of algebra? Most kids in middle to high school math classes aren't worried about their "mathematical maturity" or about having powerful insight. Rather, this obviously shows that the rules of algebra can be applied to other sets of symbols, and that letters and numbers are simply a subset of a much larger set. How is that not a powerful notion? If you're bothered by this, then go back and read Herstein, or any other intro to group theory. Seriously, this is a great way to get kids actively thinking about the rules of manipulation of symbols.

The seeds of abstraction must be planted before you can play with more lofty ideas. If games aren't a good way to enjoy mathematics, then you have missed the point of a lot of math.
Nasa NASA Embraces Amazon Cloud, Leaves OpenStack Behind
I'm based in Europe. Software patents don't apply to me :)

But I agree that software patents need to end. But I can't solve that problem any time soon ;)
So recursive!
Who did it first?
Something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W9Wacn79vk ?
(OK, maybe a little more automatic)
McDonalds (and other burger chains for that matter) has always been extremely expensive in Argentina, even during the 'golden age' of Carlos Menem (golden age from the American/globalized/free-market perspective). For the same money you could eat a McDonalds burger you can eat a 3 course lunch menu in Puerto Madero (one of Buenos Aires nicest parts).

But... kids love brands. That's why you see suckers using MacBook Pros to browse Facebook in the big malls, even when they cost about 3x what they cost in the US. Go figure. Maybe advertising works?
1. I wouldn't want to do anything at a meaningful level of complexity without templates. No question about it. And I think that having so many templating frameworks is wonderful (ERB, Jade, haml, etc.). I was only arguing that PHP lets you dive in without NECESSARILY needing to jump through a templating hoop.

2. Is it unthinkable that a person could start learning web dev and pick up the command line along the way? I started out learning PHP/MySQL on my old Windows machine, terrified of the CLI, and now I do almost everything on it (and have converted my old PC to Linux). If the command line were a barrier at all points in the learning trajectory, then you might have a point. But I also don't think that command line mastery should be held up as a sine qua non of learning web dev.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
Can someone explain why this kind of thing is a good idea? Apart from ICANN making more sweet sweet money, what exactly is the point?
Type 2 diabetics have the issue where body parts become increasingly "deaf" to insulin. This keeps blood sugar levels higher for longer periods of time.
The open source product is the Open Government Platform:

http://www.opengovplatform.org/

Another solution is CKAN, maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation, which actually does run data.gov.uk

http://ckan.org/

http://data.gov.uk/project#q6
So US citizens will be afforded greater protection while foreign citizens living in the US will be possibly subjected to yet further scrutiny? Human rights seem to vary greatly on your nationality and it seems that the divide grows year on year.
Why Amazon bid $14 million for new Generic TLDs
I'd love to see sports leagues that allow not just performance-enhancing drugs, but also prosthetic enhancements of any kind. The athlete of tomorrow is a cyborg.

Such a league would appear unplayable or non-fun to those players who abide by the traditional rule-set. So it's important to segregate players by skill-range. I wouldn't have much fun trying to play football against cyborgs, but I'd love to watch them compete against each other.

Pro sports leagues are run by technophobes who don't even want to run lasers down the field to augment the referees' abilities, so we won't see cyborg sports any time soon. But online games are hardly run by technophobes, so we ought to see more and more of this insightful approach.

All games should accept that players choose their own level of rule conformance. Place players in competitions based on their skill level, and and the games will be playable and fun for everyone.
How hard would it be just to expose the information on who up-voted an article? That would leave it open to easy mining to figure out up-voting trends.
Usually its in plain sight ... try something that affects you daily.

"You" and me are not a very good target market.For starters we dont like to pay.
I'd like to point out, for the benefit of others, that the term well-regulated simply meant 'effective' or 'in proper working order'. It did not necessarily mean that it should be controlled by the government.

Source:http://constitution.org/cons/wellregu.htm
Now coming to HN... YC company ads are now auto-upvoted to be the top story?

Yes, Olark is neat for some applications, I use it on one of my sites. But I am surprised to see this as the #1 story today.
No, not even at entry-level. 90% maintenance is a disaster. 60 to 75 percent might be typical for entry-level programmers, and that's bad, but 90 is abysmal.

If development is done properly, "maintenance" isn't some massive chore. It's pay-as-you-go and takes the form of proper testing, early design review and refactoring, and a shared sense of responsibility for the upkeep of the code (none of this "give maintenance work to the juniors" attitude).

When a company decides to put its junior people on full-time maintenance to have them pay their dues, it's setting itself up for failure. Unskilled maintenance makes the code worse. Unmotivated maintenance makes the code worse. Finally, even in the best-case scenario where the junior programmer is motivated and skilled, he still doesn't have the clout to do maintenance properly, which often pisses off people who depend on ill-thought-out features.

Ideally, people who care about an asset (i.e. who use it) should be the ones to maintain it. Ideally as well, the maintenance overhead should be small enough that the "stakeholder" can perform this maintenance pay-as-you-go at the same time as doing other things. Maintenance is really only done well (and if it's done well, it improves rather than "maintaining" the code) when done by people who have reasons to care about the system they're maintaining.

Once a project's maintenance overhead is measured in X full-time developers where X >= 0.5, it's time to stop pissing away time and money and motivation and kill -9 that sucker. The warning range is 0.25 to 0.5 full-time developers. If the maintenance burden is in this range, it's time to get a competent person into fixit mode (not "maintenance", but active improvement and refactoring) immediately.

Here's my somewhat long post on the topic: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2011/09/23/taxation-with...
Your Core i5 should have graphics with VA-API (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API) support, which shouldn't have any trouble playing 1080p video.
> The problem with the standard "the truthful opinion of people that matter" is that if you don't like what you hear, you might just reclassify the speaker into the "people that don't matter" group.

I've done that before - and it is one of the things I most regret. I ended a friendship because of that kind of mistake and swore to myself I'd never do that again.

After all, if I do that I'm exactly the kind of person I despise. How can I seek to improve myself if I won't listen when I might get butt-hurt from the words I hear?

> Even the statement of your enthusiasm for the unvarnished truth is a veiled threat...

I'm not sure how you figure that. It is actual enthusiasm, don't confuse it.
Not in this market segment. AFAIK, Brazos > Atom in both CPU and GPU and AMD is usually cheaper.
No. But if there are no humans available it will ask you to leave a message. I've used olark as a user several times and always been delighted - the person you talk to is usually one of the techies so you can get straight down to the issues.

At my current startup I insisted we use olark and have been very happy.
This is one of those cases where you should have calmed down before typing.
I have an idea similar to this that would secretly teach circuits:

The game would be a water-tube building game. Voltage would represent the height drop that causes the water to flow, current would be, well... current, resistance could be marked by notches in the tube section, etc. Each scenario would involve building a water maze to reach a specific objective.

Gradually, different tube sections would be replaced by circuit schematics, until at the end of the game, you would be designing straight-up circuits.

Feel free to build this, just let me know when it's available :).
Gambling is illegal nationwide under federal law, except where specifically excepted. Horse races, Nevada, and Atlantic City are specifically excluded from the gambling prohibition, and indian reservations do not fall under federal jurisdiction. Sports-gambling is also illegal nationwide, except that bets may be placed anywhere to Atlantic City or Nevada sportsbooks (and for this reason, almost all sportsbooks are located in Nevada).

If gambling is going on in Black Hawk, CO, it is not "gambling" within the legal definition of the term or it is not legal. Alternatively, it may simply be an office for a (legal) sports-book operation that operates out of Nevada. Chances are, however, that it is not a legal operation and simply does not do enough business to warrant federal resources.
Exactly what liberty are we giving away if, say, a research biologist from a university funded by a research grant from the National Science Foundation is using a drone to track a tagged animal he is studying in a national wildlife refuge, and he sees someone dumping a body, and uses the drone to watch the dumper so as to gather sufficient information to lead the FBI to the dumper, and that drone-gathered evidence is allowed to be used in court to prosecute the guy who dumped the body?

Paul's bill would ban the use of such evidence, unless the biologist had a warrant to track the body dumper.

What's special about drones here? If that biologist was not using a drone, but was instead tracking the tagged animal visually from a distance with binoculars, and happened to witness the body dumping, should that also not be allowed in court?
Why not build this as a middleware layer? You can mount a sinatra app within Rails (/services for instance), and then write your API in a predefined path structure that the gem will look into (within the rails app path maybe?)

You can pretty easily share models and whatnot -- and then you have a nice clean place to define/override your DSL. I would have to do some playing to make sure this is valid, but that might be an approach to think about.
Protecting Business Accounts From Hackers
Offtopic, but the Denmark 'paper keycard' is an incredibly ass-backwards system.

All our customers from Denmark have to use their card to use our software, and I can't believe something like this exists in 2012, or ever, really.
Intel was the first vendor to have open source OpenGL 3.0 drivers, and have really driven Mesa development for the last few years. That hardly feels like "no features at all."

Disclaimer: I'm starting at Intel on the open source graphics team next month.
I got “Sorry, this tree is taking too long to generate.”

http://d.pr/i/uqlG

Haven't seen this before…
Actually, I apologize for replying to myself, but I couldn't resist going off and coming up with some numbers. There's a pretty darn strong and unexpected correlation between the price of a Big Mac and the number of cows per head population.

I could only get good cows-per-person numbers for the big beef producers, but here goes:

Country Cows per person Big Mac Price

Australia 1.28 $4.94

Argentina 1.26 $4.64

Brazil 1.07 $5.68

Colombia 0.59 $4.54

USA 0.31 $4.20

Mexico 0.29 $2.70

Pakistan 0.18 $2.89

Russia 0.15 $2.55

India 0.15 $1.62

China 0.06 $2.44

So there ya go, the more plentiful cows are the more it costs to get one cut up and put on a bun. (Or, perhaps, the more you can sell your beef for, the more likely you are to be a cattle rancher.)
At scale, disk throughput more than anything else will dominate. How long do you want backups to take? If ssds are faster they might mean fewer servers with more disk throughput per server can give users a snappier experience.
I can't figure out how this story made it to HN.
Yes, and I have used it, and the user experience for fast/twitchy games is absolutely shit.
This really won't work. I can easily make a blog that pulls all of the articles from these sites and posts them.
We really need a quantum leap in language technology. Currently the Internet technologies have grown organically and because of this, most of what we use to program has been repurposed.

HTML was meant to describe text, now it describes regions of the screen to be repainted as well as the "content" to be repainted.

CSS was meant to add simple effects like bold, italic and simple newspaper-like positioning (float this image left). It's been repurposed to describe visual rendering and even animations.

JavaScript was meant to add some scriptability to the DOM, and now it's morphed into a full-fledged programming language.

So the state of the web is a depressing mishmash of old, repurposed technologies.

It would be nice if there were a programming language that "knew" about the web. It would realize that the programming effort would be shared between two computers, client and server, and would have appropriate security and other conveniences baked in. For example, you should only have to describe your business logic once (as opposed to once on the server and once on the client). Also, this programming language should no longer be tied to the anachronistic concept of rendering a "document" with "styles".

But alas, it's very hard to simply go into an academic tower and design a language and release it into the wild and expect it to catch on. These things tend to grow organically and incrementally. So whatever next step there is has to embrace where we currently are. This is why you see not merely new client-side languages, but new languages that compile to JavaScript. If they didn't compile to JavaScript, how could they ever be used?
What, you've never been a thousand miles from home at 11PM and starving?
The Future of PaaS
Feel free to fix the go version and submit a pull request. My implementation is just copy pasta from the net.
> Hipmonk allows +2 days for a total of 3 possible. Kayak searches +/- 3 days, for a total of 7.

Actually you can change that text field to say "+-3". We're both using the same feature of our mutual data provider ITA. And if you search for the same day this way, you get the same fares on both sites.

> Also Kayak has the "nearby airports" feature which often drops the price even further (Louisville is $149) - especially in the Bay Area where SFO and OAK are both a bart ride away

We do that automatically when you give us a city name (like "San Francisco" vs "SFO"). You can also just add comma-separated airports if you know the codes.

I don't pretend our UI exposes these the best, but we really are getting the same data from the same companies.
A feature like that is a tremendous boon to karma whores. The Atlantic probably isn't the site to accomplish this, but such a feature could be used to effectively "outsource" your site's spamming to karma whoring cabals.
Any sort of scaling is a hack (not always bad). Good luck if you expect to scale to Wikipedia or Wordpress(.com) levels without using external tools such as Memcache and Varnish.
I expect it likely that Facebook would gladly break any software that alters how users interact with their datastore.
So you are opposed to police using bulletproof vests, GPS (in their cars, not to track people), and the internet (including websites for their agencies)?

Almost all of the equipment used by police today was once military equipment. Some of it still is.
"If your stuff is good it will rise to the top."

That's never the case on any of these sites.