skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HTTP PATCH can only be idempotent if the underlying patch mechanism is idempotent, right?

At the protocol level, there are no guarantees. At the application level, you can fake it (in the non-mathematical sense) by checking sentinels/guids or testing for applicability. This provides safety, but requires code.

But that's not really idempotence. I don't see any way that the IETF could specify a generic idempotent patch mechanism, or declare an arbitrary mechanism to be idempotent.

EDIT: it looks like you want idempotence a la SQL UPDATE. That seems eminently doable in the application layer. Specifying it in an RFC would be inadequately generic for a whole new HTTP verb, I think.
It doesn't say the first person, it says "the first member of the public".
I believe you mean, where the common good triumphs over personal agendas.

IMO, in a democracy, we have only ourselves to blame, it's our indifference that manifests as our leaders' arrogance and ignorance.
The best bit about those environments is that the devs who crank out the most code (ie. LOC-wise) are feted, but they're basically just standing in the bottom of a hole, digging.
Would suggest you bring that BIN price down. Save your base with reserve price.
But it still doesn't make PHP a good programming language.

I am doomed to fix legacy PHP projects for the rest of my life, because they are so badly written they simply cannot be upgraded to newer versions of PHP.

Yes it's popular and I've even seen designer jobs asking for php knowledge (lol), but that just tells us why it's so hated!

The new PHP might be great, but all those numbers the article has don't tell us how many of those are using newer versions of PHP. I bet 80-90% of everything written in PHP is STILL <= 5.2

Why is PHP so big? anyone can use it. Why is it so bad? When people actually learn how to program, it simply lacks everything.

I have been stuck with PHP for 4 years now and if at any point my boss lets me fix these projects, I'd run away from PHP as fast as possible...
There will be time for popularization for the laymen. It is not now. It's more important that the knowledge be transmitted accurately and completely, than it is to give a reader's digest for the laymen. We'll have to wait until all of the discovered information is processed, and then summarized. Making a summary early on in the discovery is likely to contain errors. It's also better handled by people other than physicists working on the project.
Thanks :) It seems we have some fine tuning to do.
Well, the reasons I started learning PHP were:

1. It was the most popular web language when I started (in 2000), the alternative being ASP...

2. It's extremely easy to use and set up. Most starting programmers/developpers work on Windows. If you want to start developping on Ruby or Pythons you have two possibilities:

- Install linux, which (whatever you may think) is not easy for any newbie.

- Try to work out the Windows ports of your programming language of choice. In the case of ruby, you have to find windows installs for ruby, gems, bundler, rake, rails (or whatever app you want to use), git, probably cygwin, your webserver of choice, etc... Most of these elements are not made for the Windows ecosystem and the ports are usually pretty poorly documented.

If you use PHP, you just have to: 1. Install XAMPP. 2. Click on "launch server" 3. go to http://localhost/

This is why PHP is still popular.
Has some consistency issues and flaws in design. Not perfect typeface, windows logo is smaller than office/surface logo, looks as stranger in set, metro/xbox has no logo, logo/ui relations could be better across the board. But. For 3 days project, good.
It's 1MB per resource. You can create as many resources as you want. To try bigger sizes you also get 400 credits for free. What else can you ask for?
For what it's worth, some of us have been lobbying our MEPs. We just did it the old-fashioned way, by writing to them and asking them not to support this if they want us to vote for them next time.

It will be interesting to see what really killed this agreement. I'd like to think it was a principled stand against conducting negotiations behind closed doors, or an objection to the dubious copyright provisions, or perhaps the implications for supplying medicines to developing nations.

Sadly, I suspect in reality it was at least partly driven by fear of association with politically toxic subjects like SOPA/PIPA. Still, a win's a win, and if the result here is as straightforward as the reports so far imply, hopefully ACTA is effectively dead in Europe now whatever the (unelected) Commission and (unelected) representatives of national governments might prefer.
Looks good, best of luck. However let me warn you that this could be done with something like Geotrust Anti-Malware scan by Symantec which is like $45 per year. So it might be an uphill battle... Best of luck from my side.
Shame to see you downvoted for this, yes it does sound trollish but as far as I can tell it's basically true.
Thanks. What you have said is exactly the rationale behind what we're building - a move away from expensive and restrictive enterprise solutions toward something that works (both operationally and economically) for smaller businesses.
I've had the same experience as well which is why we canned Google Apps during the trials for our business. We had a show stopper when doing a test exchange migration and we never got an email reply and never found a human to talk to that could help. That failed the risk mitigation criteria of the trial so we binned it.

I have absolutely no faith in them to actually sort something out in a reasonable amount of time.

Conversely, we used Office365 in the end and it blew up(ironically with a similar issue) during the trials. We had someone useful on the phone helping us in under 20 minutes!

I've not had much luck with Amazon, particularly S3 as we had a number of issues with the .Net client and they weren't very helpful. Stackoverflow was far more useful but I don't want to trust stackoverflow as a long term support option!
Commissioner Karel De Gucht said recently he'd re-field it until it passed:

> If you decide for a negative vote before the European Court rules, let me tell you that the Commission will nonetheless continue to pursue the current procedure before the Court, as we are entitled to do. A negative vote will not stop the proceedings before the Court of Justice.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120625/12333619468/eu-com...
Do Google apps allow you to have your own server completely cut off from Google? (cos no way would the company I am in want to let google see their mail)
Hah! Yeah, sorry I should have worded that better. They have been restarted as servers have been upgraded / restarted.
> Just curious, what do you think is the BBC equivalent in the US?

We have several public broadcasters, the most famous of which is National Public Radio (NPR). There's also Public Radio International (PRI), which rebroadcasts some BBC programming in addition to its own material

For TV, there's Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

There is no "TV license" here like in the UK. No government agency sends threatening letters to people who haven't paid a yearly tax to benefit the public broadcasters. Instead, all of the broadcasters run funding drives to request donations from viewers/listeners. A sizable chunk of revenue also comes from the government's Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), but that pales in comparison to donations, as I understand it.
Python docs are way better on a technical level IMO (more detailed, more accurate - if you want to know what a function does in PHP you need to spend hours reading through the massive comment threads to find the corrections, and then ignore the comments from years ago since the API changed and the comments didn't, etc etc); but much like the rest of PHP, the PHP docs are incredibly convenient - php.net/function_name will go direct to the docs for that function if it's unique, or search for function_name in all libraries if not.

This is really useful when your standard library is an incredible cockup of str_pos vs strpos vs string_pos vs sposition vs StrLib::Position vs ($haystack, $needle) vs ($needle, $haystack) - it means you only need to spend a few seconds double-checking the docs every time you use a standard library function.

Sure, a library which was consistent and thus needed no lookups at all would be better, but if you abandon all hope of making sense of it and understand that you'll need to use the documentation several times per line of code, the convenience of the docs makes it not quite so painful.
Yes, the daemon. The actual interpreter is still thrown away every few requests, because it is leaking memory like hell.
Wrote a blog about this just a week ago - here you go :

http://www.incapsula.com/the-incapsula-blog/item/303-seo-cdn...
Using cgo is an exception rather than the rule, and when Rob talks about package dependencies he means any file required for building that package, not only the shared objects. This includes C/C++ header files. Even with cgo, to use a package that uses cgo you only need that package archive, you need not care about what files that created that package.
A big thank you to those who did lobby!

I concur with the toxicity of the subject.

Unfortunately, as I live in the UK, I suspect that ACTA could reveal itself again here.
considering that I'm working right now on bug 762303 - unprefixing transition and friends - I almost did a spit take when I read the HN headline. :-)
Apple, Amazon and Others Look Over Your Shoulder When You Read Ebooks
Really interesting article: so we're basically back to studying the Aether, right? Or did I get that wrong? The only cause of mass is the particles moving through a vast pervasive invisible field?
Or let's say it this way - people have the problem of feeling unsatisfied or accomplished. This is a MASSIVE problem and can be solved in many different ways. That's why video games exist. It's also why people run marathons, triathlons, etc. They provide people a sense of accomplishment. For many people this is unattainable elsewhere (work and home, perhaps). I don't think boredom in and of itself is a problem.
This paper combines different channels from CMS, but not CMS and ATLAS.

"In this Letter, we report on the combination of Higgs boson searches carried out in proton-proton collisions at
Sqrt[s] = 7 TeV using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the LHC.
...
Combined results are reported from searches for the SM Higgs boson in proton-proton collisions at Sqrt[s] = 7TeV in five Higgs boson decay modes: gg, bb, tt, WW, and ZZ."
Ask HN: OpenLoopz: location-aware task management - advice needed
After years of on-and-off development, filled with endless setbacks and failure after failure, I have finally launched the new version of OpenLoopz for Android!

http://www.openloopz.com

I would appreciate it if the HN community could give me some feedback on the app and a little advice on what to do next!

The first version of OpenLoopz was conceptualised way back in 2008 when I purchased my first Android device (the lovable G1) at around the same time I was reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. OpenLoopz was born. While the initial release received a decent amount of interest (14K+ downloads overall) and maintained a 4.5 rating on the Android Market, the project was always a learning experience for me and it showed in the quality of the final app. I received a great deal of positive feedback for the underlying concept, but understandably, the majority of users would not consider committing to OpenLoopz fully without support for some kind of server-side sync feature.

I always envisaged expanding OpenLoopz into a full service complete with a web-app, sync and support for other mobile platforms such as iOS, but in the early days it was always a bit of a pipe-dream to be honest. I had to maintain a full-time job and for a good while I was only able to work on OpenLoopz now and then when I had some free time.

At one point around a year ago, I decided it was time to get serious. My brother became involved and we half-heartedly went down the investment path for a while without any success. Despite setback after setback I decided to commit to the project and took several months out from my day job to work full-time on OpenLoopz, living on my savings. Unfortunately, it all ended in disaster (http://goo.gl/LIlhe), but it was a great learning experience and I have come back much stronger this year (and hopefully a little wiser!).

Now that the Android app is finally released, I am looking for advice on ways to generate funds so I can potentially work full-time on development of the web-app/sync feature. As crowdfunding seem to be all the rage at the moment I have been researching the various services. Unfortunately, I cannot use KickStarter as I live outside the US (I am based in County Durham in the UK). Out of the alternatives that support the UK, Indiegogo looks like the best to me so I am in the process of putting together a campaign on there - I figure it’s worth a try! I would be very interested to hear from others regarding any experiences using alternative crowdfunding services and/or advice regarding other approaches to generating funds.

I am looking forward to any advice I can get from the HN community whether it’s constructive criticism/feedback regarding the app or advice on crowdfunding (or both!).

Thank you,
Paul Drummond
Most entry-level jobs involve "sitting in front of a computer for many hours a day".

The difference, for programmers, is that they get to do interesting stuff with those machines.
Show HN: Forget LinkedIn. MercuryPuzzle evaluates your talents.
Ugh. We should get rid of prefixes already. They are a hassle for web developers, and reality is the web moves so fast that what's supposed to be "experimental" may be very quickly put into production use. Removing them would not prevent changing the syntax of a CSS property. Prefixes are bad anyway because they ensure only 4 engines can be ahead of the curve, unless web developers decide another matters enough to add the prefix for it.

Edit: Actually, if we don't get rid of prefixes entirely, we should get rid specifically of vendor prefixes. Using -experimental- or -x- is fine with me. Just don't segment by vendors so only some browsers are explicitly supported.
HTML5 On-Device Caching – What It Is and What It Does for Mobile Cloud Computing
Mobile cloud computing, which essentially means that the processing of applications and the storage and retrieval of their data are being performed by a cloud-based infrastructure.
Those are the results of a vote back in 2010.
I recommend that you join our beta programme. As Ferruh (@fmavituna) said, we'll no doubt be making some attractive offers to beta users.
(I'm not really sure why I felt the need to write this rant. It was an itch I had to scratch.)

It may surprise you, but healthy adults don't differ much in terms of physical ability. If you measure watts output or steps per second or anything quantifiable, it's going to be less than an order of magnitude difference, never mind a 100x difference.

I can run 100 meters in 15 seconds. That's 6.7 meters per second. Usain Bolt can run 100 meters in 9 seconds. That's 11 meters per second. 11.11/6.67 = 1.67 times faster. If Usain could somehow cut 5 seconds off his time and do a 4-second 100 meter dash, he'd be moving along at 25 meters per second. That isn't quite 4x faster than me. Such a feat would certainly be much more than 4 times as impressive as me running, but it wouldn't be more than 4 times as fast.

If you used some other yardstick, you could come up with some other number. Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter alive. That makes him one in 7 billion. There are likely millions of faster runners than me. I'm maybe one in 100. 7 billion divided by 100 is 70 million, therefore Usain Bolt is 70 million times better at sprinting than me.

Sound silly? I think so too.

When measuring programming ability, we don't grade on a curve. It doesn't matter how much (or little) effort you had to expend. All that matters is the result and how long it took.
Twitter - fixed the same problems at text messages but went public to put a different dynamic on it.

Facebook - solved Photo Sharing, a constantly updated contacts book that is up to date with all of your info.

Skype - Huge disruption, one of the biggest out of any startup. I stay connected with my Dad who travels a lot and with my family in Canada and America.

Angry Birds/Tiny Wings - They're games, the same problems that people have been solving for thousands of years, Boredom.

Pinterest - They made a huge distributed store and it'll become more like this over time, offers consumers millions of choices and lets friends curate those into boards making it easier to find cool things. Letting the small sellers rival amazon.
"Yes, the daemon. The actual interpreter is still thrown away every few requests, because it is leaking memory like hell."

I'm talking about the CLI SAPI, NOT the Apache SAPI.
Well at least they didn't say "God particle" in the headline. Points for that.
Linux vs BareMetal SMP Performance
Oh dear, the Wifi I was using when I posted that was terrible and - a trip to Venice later - I am unable to delete the repeat comments. I'm very sorry :-S
Galaxy Nexus Pulled From The Google Play Store,Google Working On A Fix
The core answer seems to be very similar to a great many ethnicities:

* Don't respect authority.

* Socially aggressive.

* Cynical.

* Entitled.

That reminds me of almost every eastern European hacker I know, most Indians, the Germans, the South Americans, the Australians.

So we have one of several possibilities:

* People in entrepreneurship tend to be all of the above, regardless of ethnicity.

* People in technology entrepreneurship tend to be all of the above, regardless of ethnicity.

* People from other countries that work for US companies or emigrate to the US tend to have these personalities.

The English Way, which most Americans and Canadians also follow to a fault, is a bit different:

* Respect authority, but also subvert it when you can get away with it.

* Very socially passive-aggressive.

* More sarcastic than cynical. Cynicism is looked down upon. Sarcasm is an art.

* Internalize conflict. Possibly the opposite of entitlement - poor self worth.
So I should alter the way I use the software to work around limitations imposed by their DRM? How is that an acceptable solution?
Hm, it may not have had it a number of years ago, I'm unsure. I would have looked at the man page though so I'm certain there was a reason for using mencoder in the end.
Additional Info:

MercuryPuzzle let's you self-evaluate your skills and talents and gives you the chance to find your dream job.

After one year of development we partnered with companies like Microsoft and Oracle (more to follow) to achieve this goal.

Here is my profile as an example (you can control in detail who can see your assessment data):
https://mercurypuzzle.com/alexander-birke/assessment

Use HNROCKS as invite code to exclusively pre-register.
I'm sorry but you can't fix 'failing Web startup security' with automated scans. Automated scans are useless for finding all but the most trivial of vulnerabilities.

There's almost no doubt in my mind that the only way to fix the situation is with education. I think that if your goal is to fix poor security practises, you should change your strategy to teaching developers how to be security aware, rather than offering a service that merely pokes around for a few well known vulnerabilities.
I think "you have to pay competitively" is true and pretty much negates the claim that financial compensation is low priority.
The Perfect Compliment
No, he's a hero because he's standing up to illegal practices by the US government and entertainment industry that can go as far as strong-arming another nation into breaking their own laws at their behest.

Of course there is pirated stuff on MegaUpload, there's pirated stuff on every cloud hosting service.. every single one of them. Anecdotally, I use Google Docs and Dropbox to share music with people, should the government raid them and take all of their servers?

Whether or not you feel this is a piracy hub is beside the point, because if there was a reason to shut the site down, the people responsible should be able to present evidence of criminal activity in order to justify their actions.

The fact that they undertook a military raid, and tried to collect evidence after the fact is a clear sign that they did not have a strong case to begin with.

More than anything he's becoming a hero because the RIAA and MPAA have been using lawsuits to demand hundreds of thousands of dollars from middle-class parents, the elderly, and many others who are often innocent of crimes they are accused of. This has become a rallying point for many to stand up to these organizations tactics, because it's only been a one-sided battle using questionable practices for the past decade.
And you usually know physically where the seller is, or know what they look like.

This is the worst of both worlds!
PHP is big because 10 years ago, it was the best choice. Back then, the non-microsoft options were Perl, ColdFusion, Java, and PHP. PHP was the best for web development out of that.

This isn't the case anymore. PHP has been far surpassed by Python and Ruby.

PHP is a wonderful templating language.

Where does my opinion come from? I switch us from PHP to Python after writing a large CMS in PHP.
I’m an idiot :( Sorry! edited
A fellow HNer once predicted this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4168581
By definition, GET, HEAD, PUT and DELETE are idempotent: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html

I personally agree with the parent. PATCH should be idempotent; overwriting values with new values is idempotent and that should be written into the spec rather than avoiding it in favour of things like writing logs (which IMHO should be a POST).
I think this advice is better served as - "solve problems that everyone has, not just your own"

This, however is a pretty blanket statement, as is the authors. The overall point is actually this:

> As it turns out, it’s not a compelling problem for many people.

This is what the lean-startup and customer development process seeks to find. So here's my advice: go out and talk to customers and take the time to clearly define their problem. In some cases this is your own.
"I am betting that the users of those phones downloaded some malicious Android app in order to avoid paying for a legitimate version and they got more than they bargained for."

Not using a vetted marketplace is a dangerous security gamble as the author claims the passwords were probably taken by a keylogger.
Online compiler and collaboration tool dedicated to D Programming Language.
90%+90%?
I'm dropping too many references to Black Mirror these days but it's worryingly apt:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)#3._.22...
Why not do a port scan yourself then?

Or are there things you don't know about and don't know how to test for? Should you maybe pay a professional who knows about this?

How much is your data worth?
Quora founder talking about they went with Python: http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-did-Quora-choo...

"PHP was out of the question. Facebook is stuck on that for legacy reasons, not because it's the best choice right now."