skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>When I'm stuck in the wilderness with nothing but an atom based netbook tethered to a patchy and expensive GPRS connection, I beg to differ.

Who cares about outliers like that? How many people using your webpage are connecting like that? 1%? 0.1%? Less? Are you really going to make major decisions based on 0.1% of your users?

And what's more, if you're building a website for that kind of usage, you probably shouldn't be using a big javascript library in the first place. And the people on those connections should experiment with scriptblocking and selective script whitelisting so they're in control of their poor connection.

Know your audience, I think, is the most important factor when deciding how to go forward.
I had a 1440 SAT. I wrote every line of LoseThos -- complete operating system including a compiler. You nonprogrammers don't know how much of a god I am.

God says...
C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT

to his bosom again; and plucked it out of his bosom, and,
behold, it was turned again as his other flesh.

4:8 And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, neither
hearken to the voice of the first sign, that they will believe the
voice of the latter sign.

4:9 And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe also these two
signs, neither hearken unto thy voice, that thou shalt take of the
water of the river, and pour it upon the dry land: and the water which
thou takest out of th

----

The sad fact is that you guys have no capacity for appreciating genius. You're fucken atheist!!! That's as wrong as you can get!!

Ask Linus -- I wrote a compiler by myself! Linus didn't do that, so he has to share glory with Stallman.

Internet Archive

www.simstructure.hare.com

www.justrighteous.org
I wish they would fix the UI and make it idiot-proof.

I'm dealing with servers every day and Grub still gives me headache every time I have to deal with it.

I know it's a low-level tool and tackling a hairy problem. But the overall handling is just terrible (chrooting, insufficient error/debug output, insufficient transparency about what the current state is and what grub is doing/going to do, etc.).

When shuffling raid-sets around often enough I'm not even sure from which drive it booted (or didn't boot) in a particular instance, there's way too much trial & error involved for my taste.
I believe that Google is very successful also because they use the same "methodology".

But still at some point, you have to work fast sometimes to keep in touch with the competition around you!
What is your problem with flash, really? I honestly can't think of a better platform for web games (and it's one of the easiest way to develop 2d games, regardless of web or not).

The only thing I can think of is people who don't care about games, in that case flash does seem like an annoyance more than anything (we can do without flash restaurant sites or punch the monkey banners, but i suspect html5/js will just take its place there).

But really, it's a great game development platform and mostly runs really well on windows and these days well enough on linux & mac (assuming the programmer isn't doing something dumb like a busy waiting loop, which would suck resources regardless of platform).

haxe+flash runtime is my favorite environment for developing (and playing) 2d games by a long shot, so I am always a bit puzzled by all the flack it's getting.
From the article: "The only downsides of this approach are that it means that CPU bound Python code can’t scale to multiple cores within a single machine using threads, and that IO operations can incur unexpected additional latency in the presence of a CPU bound thread."

Response: The only downside? As a Python user suffering from JVM envy, I have to say that that's a SERIOUS downside!

Here's why:
(1) Python is slow. Almost any real life program in pure Python will have CPU-bound components. (example: BBCode parsing on my forum).

(2) Most programs that need to scale won't need to scale beyond a single machine (the most active web forum on my continent runs on a single quad core server)

Therefore the need to be able to scale CPU-bound python programs to multiple cores on is a very real need. Even though we accept that removing the GIL is hard, let's not insult real-life Python users by suggesting that their needs are not real.
Browser sync is the killer app
The problem isn't that it's popular - television programs about Bigfoot are popular, too. The problem is that PHP is extremely useful and easy to use in addition to being widely used.

Reading the article, I was struck by its similarity in structure and language to classic Windows bashing rants of the past two decades - i.e. "the problem with PHP is that it has no taste." In fairness, the call to action is radically different; to build rather than to buy something.
Ex-PHP developers that bash PHP are like the poor kids that win the lottery and then start bashing poor people publicly.

Sad and kinda small of them.

I'm willing to win the lottery, mind you, but I'd never waste my time or lower myself down to bashing poor kids.
I've been coding for nearly 30 years and have seen this rant for every major language I've coded in. The reality is there is no perfect tool even in construction as Jeff tries to draw parallels to you will find that many different tools are required for many different situations. Often a hammer can be used to make a hole in a wall and other times you use a saw to cut a nail head off and just pound it into the wall because your hammer has a broken claw!

Tools evolve over time and saying screw drivers are useless and everyone should use a battery powered screw driver doesn't change the fact that a screw driver drives screws.

If you don't like the tool move on to other tools or make your own and get people to adopt them. Don't bash the brilliant people who worked hard to make the tool in the first place.

My father is 71 years old and codes in PHP! He was never going to learn python, ruby or anything else but PHP was approachable for him. Provide a language with that low barrier to entry and let's talk. Meanwhile I love my dad but we won't be writing the next google and that's ok by him and I both. If he wants that he'll ask me to write it in COBOL! :-)
Quote from the article:

"He gave the bike messenger gig one more shot, but that only lasted for a month or so. It’s not career, but neither was programming, and being a courier helped him realized that. “I really shudder to think what I’d be doing now, if I had stayed with programming for the last seven years,” he says."
Parody Critiques Popular Khan Academy Videos
"The pay was decent, and he was doing good for the world, but he realized that programming just wasn’t his calling."

An he self-identifies as a hacker? By definition, if you are a hacker, it IS your calling. No story here.

Clearly, he is a writer by calling (self-identified in the article) who learned to program and uses it to pay the bill from time to time; an occasionally writes a code riff for fun... but that doesn't make him a hacker.
It's true that PHP gets the job done, that it's easy to learn and very easy to set up. This makes for a perfect "introduction to the web" language.

Which is why I began developping websites with it. But at some point, I felt like it was preventing me from really understanding what was going on behind the scenes, and I moved away from GRails and now nodejs.

I don't hate PHP but I think Jeff's last point is good: we need framework as easy to learn and setup, but that lets you understand how the web really works.
I would recommend you check out the GoogleIO talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2txPYQOWBtg

But yes, the idea is that what we have is zero-dependency, best practice components that could a) be used by any framework b) drive browser vendors to look at the best and most commonly used tags, so they can then be implemented natively.
I remember working 8 hours a day and then coming home and not doing anything interesting. I just want to play and enjoy myself, and then go to sleep. I never really got used to programming for a living.
What distinguishes a book is the 'form factor'. Obviously we are talking about an e-book. Nonetheless little care has been put into producing a 'book': not TOC, no index, no page numbers, etc.

(Obviously this is all independent of the content.)
Yes @brandon we've already upped the ante on front-end side. We just wanted to have a feel of what HNers think about this whole thing. Which seems very encouraging :-)
Why does this guy deserve a Wired story? He's not interesting. What next, a story about stock brokers who start a restaurant?
> there were almost no html5 features at the time so web apps were no threats at all while Apple was adding support for apps.

The issue with this theory is that Apple did not want to add support for native applications, only developer pressure made them (Steve Jobs, mostly) relent, and order the cleanup and release of a native SDK.
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I wouldn't be able to read it at all had I not used View/ Style/ User mode in Opera, turning off all the "smartness" of the formatting.
everybody who cares about development is already using them.

Even if we take that statement as given, what about everybody who doesn't care about development? Most modern frameworks take it as given that you are (or at least aspire to be) a fairly serious web developer interested in serious web development and are willing to learn a bunch of fairly abstract concepts up front about structuring and deploying apps. Until a framework comes along that assumes non of those things, php won't be replaced. Imagine your user is a domain expert in an area totally unconnected to computers or programming, but has managed to learn a bit of HTML and now needs to put together a site. What current framework targets this particular use case?
Oh yes, you should take everything from ZH with a grain of salt. All of there posts are either eerily accurate financial predictions or ridiculous, conspiracy theory laden nonsense. (I think, they'd prefer to the call the latter 'prediction that haven't come to pass yet').
My mom don't know didly about servers (they work in a cafe and bring you food?) and logs (you burn them on a fire?) but she does know that her post should be private, that her taxes be private and that facebook and google should be able to find her whenever she checks a message.

she doesn't want some dissident sharing her Internet connection even tho she sympathizes, because she doesn't know what they'll be downloading.

she doesn't care about navigating the freedombox interface cos she has enough problems navigating the mall.

my mom represents the market, not her geeky daughter. her geeky daughter loves all this talk about proxytau and encrypt but let's not make this into a VHS recorder.
PHP has array dereferencing, closures, and array short syntax since 5.4.

$func = function() { return ['a', 'b', 'c']; };
echo $func()[0];
You could say the same if you were to compare an MS-DOS computer with the original Mac OS and OS X. But I do agree with your point, the biggest advance in usability for iOS has been faster hardware and more memory, rather that more advanced software. My old iPhone 3G seems unusably slow to me now.

I don't think that should be a surprise though. OS software and development frameworks are hard to get right and easy to spoil with badly thought out changes. Apple have been there and done that, so they have a very measured approach to evolving both iOS and OS X.

Google were unbelievably lucky that they had a modern, flexible platform in Android that they were able to very rapidly re-engineer so that it could be competitive with iOS. If it hadn't been for that, Apple would have had the whole smartphone market entirely to themselves for the first 3-4 years, and they'd have deserved it. No wonder Steve Jobs was so pissed at Google.
5 years old? FUCK!
Probably because you did not read the last part of the article where he says that he's trying to build a better alternative.
From the post:

> build compelling alternatives and make sure these alternatives are equally pervasive, as easy to set up and use as possible.

A bite later:

> We've got a long way to go. [...] The best way to fix the PHP problem at this point is to make the alternatives so outstanding that the choice of the better hammer becomes obvious.

Basically, Jeff just agreed that PHP is simply better than the rest. The problem is that he cannot accept that thanks to PHP anybody can code something pretty fast. I am always amazed when I see my brother, without programming knowledge improving his wife website like gardening. Small changes here and there. End at the end the website is making money. He never complained about the "awfulness of PHP".
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Everyone should be a programmer, but not in the eight-year-in-cubicle-daily sense. So it's not even mutually exclusive.
Update: "bite" is a typo, but it fits well :)
Two other stories mentioned among the comments on reddit:

http://www.barthworks.com/aviation/sr71breakup.htm

http://tailspinstales.blogspot.se/2010/01/slowest-blackbird....
App prototypes, what do they mean?
I can't find an answer to this by googling.

When we talk about app prototypes, do we mean a fully functional application including databases and all functionality of the app? Or do we just mean the visual UI interacting through buttons etc but without any backend functionality to support it?
I suppose Wired covered this because the general sentiment these days is that everyone needs to learn programming since it is pretty much the only way to be productive in the future.
Well, I am doing it again now and it works again. I think services companies don't get funded (in general, because they DO get funded once they get to a certain size) because they don't scale. If you invest $10 million in a service company, there is almost no chance you'll get a ROI of 1000% or even 10000%, but you actually, in my experience (but we actually might be an exception; the ONLY thing I see us doing differently from most companies on HN is that we watch the bottom line from the get-go; if there is $1 going out, there WILL be $1.3-2 coming in from the very first day we start) can expect 150-200% which is surely a better invest than most things you can invest in.

And of course, 200-10000% ROI is on that ONE company that makes it, out of N companies invested in. Again, in my experience with services, and i'm talking bars/clubs, laundry services and software services; all of which I or very good friends have experience with, there is not that much failure going on. One of my good friends opens bars/clubs ; he gets $300k investment, opens up, hires people, makes everything run and the investor gets about $1 million back after a few years. Every time, even in crisis times. Why? My friend is brilliant at this and it's definitely not 'luck'; he knows what he is doing. Accidentally I met another guy in the place I live now who I befriended who does exactly the same; different country, different rules, different times and he does EXACTLY the same; from the way he finds places, does the makeover/revamp, hires and trains people etc. I learned a lot from these guys; if you work the same way in a software company it works as well. Of course the skills are different, but the management style the same. I can honestly tell you that every services company I will start or mentor will make profit and enough profit to have a really nice life. And I know a lot more of these.

So I really think that there is a difference here :) If you want you can mail me, we can chat a bit, always interesting to meet people.
Hacker != Programmer

Being a hacker to me just means someone with an "engineering" mindset. Someone who can make solutions out of whatever's available. It's the innovative and clever mindset that most programmers share, but there's no rule that you have to be a programmer or work in IT.

You'll find people with these traits working in medicine, construction, agriculture, and any number of different professions. We wouldn't have advancement in lots of areas if everyone that was a "hacker" only became programmers.
It's so bombular that it doesn't even work on the outdated version of Chromium I'm running at work.
I like the appropriation of an archaic word for this use. The point is to make you think about something familiar in a manner that is unfamiliar to most.

The word is now strongly connected to the concepts of easy and simple which Rich tries to untangle. From now on, when you hear someone tell you that you have "complected" something, it will most likely cause you to remember the talk and sort of forces you to think.

Just hearing talk about "coupling" might not trigger such a reaction.
Great point, but if people stop using those Google services because they start perceiving the diluted brand as inferior, that doesn't help the cause.
Does Google Have Any Social Skills at All?
Why is python or ruby too hard for your dad to learn? If anything I would think something like ruby would be even easier than php since things are a bit more consistent.

I just don't see how PHP is more approachable, especially compared to the supposed ease of ruby on rails.
I use PHP because I love it. I wouldn't consider myself a "drone", I'd like to think I form views on the basis of my own investigation and relatively impartial evidence.

And it's not that I haven't spent the time learning other languages and working with them. I did a degree in Computer Science and have worked for 12 years in the industry, over which time I have learned and worked with Pascal, C++, Ruby, Lisp, Javascript and dealt with a number of other languages. I discovered PHP early on, but only relatively recently have I really taken a shine to it, particularly with the releases over the past few years, and now I won't work with anything else.

I enjoy my job significantly more than I used to because of PHP.

In the main I don't find it a horrible language, I'm aware of its weaknesses and its "problems" (usually not problems per-se, but things it does differently from other comparable languages). But in the main it fits the way I think and work, and I'm incredibly productive (and I like to think that I don't write code that's too shabby either!).
I have to agree here, despite the two of us rating the importance of the GIL problem quite differently in yesterday's discussion: A better strategy against the GIL FUD is plain old education, not trying to make it a taboo topic. Especially programmers who do know what they're doing won't take too kindly to a community where that becomes prevalent.
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Agreed. I can set up a VPS with debian/nginx/mysql/php in about 10 minutes and have a site up and running. Python? Ruby? There just doesn't seem to be an easy way of getting them running on a web server. At least, I haven't figured it out yet if it is easy to do.
Your E-Book Reading Habits are Being Tracked
Now if the guy would have quit programming to become a lumberjack, that would have been interesting. Instead it sounds almost like an Onion parody of hipsters.
Yes and no, there are no way in plain C to excert direct control of branch prediction or cache usage, however that's where GCC extensions come in.

Extensions such as __builtin_prefetch, __builtin_expect are heavily used in the Linux kernel to allow a higher level of optimization by directly instructing the compiler how to handle branch prediction and caching (based upon careful benchmarking) in performance critical areas rather than leaving it up to the compiler's 'compile-time' heuristics.
I don't disagree with you one bit. This will vary for each company depending on industry, the average browser of the target market, and the price-point for the product.

More the reason I think jQuery could be shooting itself in the foot. Its ubiquity is based on the fact that if you're doing client side javascript, jQuery is the best option. Coupled with what I started this comment with - its possible that jQuery isn't the best option for everyone anymore.

I personally am not a huge fan of frameworks. Too often I see people solving problems by adding frameworks. Maybe I'm just a crusty guy who doesn't use a lot of tools.
I really don’t like the word ‘hustler’.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hustler

And the word ‘hacker’ is nothing like the word ‘hustler’: it doesn’t involve any sex trade connotations, and has a well-established meaning related to productivity and creative pursuits.

As a side-note: if we actually want to address the gender imbalance in the tech industry, it’s a bad idea to appropriate words that mean ‘pimp’ and give them positive connotations.
The article doesn’t say multi-CPU scaling isn’t necessary. It says that threads are usually the wrong answer anyway.

There are great process based ways to scale out – look no further than Erlang to see it’s true.
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Is Glassdoor the next big thing is Social Recruiting?
Surely that'd be

"Ex-PHP developers that bash PHP programmers are like the poor kids that win the lottery and then start bashing poor people publicly."

or

"Ex-PHP developers that bash PHP are like the poor kids that win the lottery and then start bashing being poor publicly."

? Very different, IMO.
<rant>Okay, not directed at you, but... It was posted yesterday. Does this really have to be posted EVERY SINGLE DAY?

Every time anyone suggests improving anything, or make another product in a crowded space, this comic is posted. The author of this article doesn't even suggest a new platform - he suggests improving a platform that exists to enable easier deployment. It was posted yesterday for Chocolat... do we really have to stop making editors?

In a site targetted to hackers and startups it is disturbing that people are so unwilling to learn something new, support a new product, improve the world, do anything new. Yes, redundant standards suck sometimes, but it's not always the case.

I wish that the comic author would consider deleting this from the server, or maybe pg could ban it.</rant>
After using it for a while now it's made me realise there's a ton of features I've been missing when using mobile Safari:

-New tab with Most Visited and Recently Closed
-Google Sync for bookmarks but more importantly it instantly empowers my Omnibox
-the keyboard has an extra character row at the top that includes hyphens (simple but nice)
-Swipe between tabs
-find in page
-Open in new tab defaults to opening in the background (I've missed this a lot)
-unlimited tabs

I realise some of these aren't unique to mobile Chrome but as far as I'm aware they are missing from mobile Safari and they're the reasons I'll be sticking with Chrome.
This is a great point. I also think it is worth noting that by the third or fourth time, even if they were peniless, the person would be starting from a far better position than a first timer. Networks and Reputation are a powerful form of currency and more useful than money if you want to do hard things.

Confidence from repeated success - do not underestimate pressures from family and self doubt in their contribution to start up cave ins.
We have no control over whether or not our users use chrome frame. Asking them to install it isn't always an option, especially for government installations.
I use PHP and I care about development. Your statement appears to be hyperbolic.