skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Consistency: The design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either complexity or inconsistency in the implementation.

. . .

I don't know about you, but IMHO, this is PHP in a nutshell.

If you had read some of the criticisms of PHP that had been posted to HN (like http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de..., which was even linked to in the current article), you'd realize that PHP is nowhere near consistent. I'm not sure simplicity, correctness or completeness apply either. I think the only thing PHP has going for it is momentum (in having a large userbase and being installed almost everywhere).
This is really cool. It's basically hacking the macroeconomic system, taking advantage of the devaluation of Greek bonds to actually get out of debt. Just imagine if people all over the world started throwing in some money here and there; we could save Greece with little effort. Or maybe better than cancelling the debt would be to use the ownership to replace some leadership there.
Have you done any Agda, recently?
Is just affiliate spam
I have to ask, because it's really been getting at me for a while honestly. How do your developers react to that? I mean, you guys are known for going after the best and the brightest. People who have worked hard to perfect their craft. These people tend to have strong opinions when it comes to language design. How do you get them from that point to "ok, now write some php code" ?
Android = $0, W8 = $85.

With Google they're on more equal footing. Though HP did have webOS...
This might actually help Microsoft become more like Apple, if they can shed some of the OEMs. MS may own the market in several areas, but Apple has the buzz and the flexibility to do pretty much whatever they think they need to.

It's a pity that these OEMs aren't talking about Linux as a replacement - accelerating the adoption of Linux would help pretty much everyone (including, eventually, Microsoft by forcing them to be more innovative).
This guy must be making a fortune in affiliate marketing fees right now.
I know more than one person who's quit their day job, started up a business, made a few million pounds and then retired. They won't be anyone that you, or I suspect anyone else on here, knows. They are simply people I've worked with.

And that's the thing. The ones that become mega-famous are typically the ones who have been around for an extended period of time - either through having spent the time building a single successful company (Bill Gates, Zuckerberg etc), or people who become well known for starting up multiple companies. If Bill Gates had retired 4 years after starting up Microsoft, how many people would even know his name now?

Rather than trying to identify people who've famously walked away after a few years and comparing them to the number of famous people who didn't, a far better measure would be to find random 20 entrepreneurs who have only been doing it for a couple of years and see how many of them are still doing it, either with the same company, or with a new company, in 10 years time.
You should leave #6 out of your list. Your argument would be much more compelling for it. (Compilation/obfuscation is the norm, not the exception.)
Sorry to hear that. There are a lot of insecure nerds who work in technology and they enjoy making others feel as insecure as they themselves do. The best advice I can give you is to ignore their ridicule (unless you can learn from it), and move on. And don't be like them when you see a young person make a mistake. Make the world a better place.
I came here to write a comment- and happened to click the OP link and saw that Doc Brown and I think alike.
Yeah, but the average person doesn't really understand how their PHP is set up either. It was done for them, or they copy and pasted some instructions.

Perhaps it's best if you either completely take deployment into your own hands, or you let someone else do it for you. Given all that, rolling your own could still be made simpler.
Perhaps a beter approach would be "root cause of failure". It's easy to jump all over this guy, but what he's trying to achieve is a good thing. I just don't agree with the tactics.
Prizes.org is Shutting Down
While I find this news somewhat disturbing considering a military goes against some of the ideals of open source software, the benefits will hopefully be great.
But it would take you longer because you would have to turn the hammer on occasion. You would also have to consider an additional failure scenario where turning the hammer caused you to drop it.
Mindshare is more what I meant than marketshare.

If you look at Wikipedia's statistics, Microsoft represents about 75% of visitors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

I imagine that in 2002, their share would have been hovering around 95%.
How people cash in on stupid Internet memes
I don't know about the Navy, but NSA seems to be more giving with their Security Enhanced Android source code:

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/NSA-releases-secu...
Probably not a good idea to run NodeJS as root.
I think it has to do with helping to keep iOS users, who are numerous and often technical, inside the google service infrastructure by providing chrome syncing to their iPhone/iPad.
That's true to a degree. But when you think about it, there does not exist any physical quantity that can be specified as an irrational number (because every measurement is quantized, so you could argue even a whole number. Rational numbers and whole numbers are models of eachother however, so there is arguably no "fundamental" difference).

As to why people can calculate better/easier with relatively low numbers compared to irrational fractions ... does that really need explaining ?

How much is 1+1 vs how much is 1/7 tau + 1/3 tau. Degrees are very useful and quick indeed.
I'm sure there's even a name for it, and pretty soon a whole movement could develop around this amazing approach, complete with evangelists, books, e-books, courses, conferences.
An API seems like the antithesis of Craigslist. Craigslist is the online classifieds equivalent of the long form sales letter. To contemporary designers/developers, the design is hideous, the usability sucks, and if you asked for an off-the-cuff evaluation, most would tell you they (long form sales letters) won't work. Yet, they do.

Craigslist is similar. The site is sparsely designed, but makes no attempt at exploiting a minimalist aesthetic that we're used to seeing other places. The site continues to use bare bones formatting and lacks features that everyone expects. Forget an API, where are the like/tweet/share/etc buttons?

I think Craigslist's anti-feature pattner works for them. Posting your first listing to the site has some confusing points, but once you've made your way through the process once, friction is incredibly low. Craigslist is the ultimate in low effort online posting. I'm not sure an API would fit with this product philosophy.
Has anyone thought of strapping a rocket onto the SR-71 and getting it to orbit?

(Obviously much more complicated than my whimsical comment but maybe do-able ...?)
Do more! Practice makes better.
Time to find a new job. When the people you work for turn into dicks and it makes your work less enjoyable it is time to move on.
This is great. I really like how you can test your widgets with sample data.

Because of the lack of a decent dashboard solution, we've been running our own. We absolutely wanted to use D3 and we wanted to have multiple, toggleable pages.

This might just do the trick.
I think they only tested it with Macs (where it is a joy to use). That’s just plain stupid.
Write a multi-threaded program in PHP, I will write one in ... well pretty much anything else.
Only if they distribute it.

What people don't often realize is that GPL (both v2 and v3) has a "trigger" condition, where the GPL reciprocity applies only with physical distribution of the code.

As an end-user, it's perfectly fine to modify GPL code and keep the changes private.
In interviews, remember never to mention anything negative about your current job no matter how you are treated, because that makes you seem like a negative nancy! Who knows, maybe you will even complain if you are treated poorly at your next job?
I'll bite: how is the military against the ideals of open source?
At the right company, this field would be hilarious and fun.
Only they first ship you a copy of binary or a piece of hardware running that binary. As long as it's all for in house use, you have no right to the source code.
He's really one to talk.... ASP.NET is so amazing, right?
I know you're joking (and I doubt Linux on the desktop will ever be a thing) but it would be hilarious if Microsoft were the one to propel the old PC assemblers into making a Linux push.
As I said I have no love for flash for websites, I am only talking about flash as platform for web-games.
Enyo is still under active development, so no, they didn't snag the entire team despite what was inaccurately reported in all of the tech blogs at the time.
I will always upvote/retweet/point and jump at this quote when I see it. One of the most important lessons anyone can learn.
HP products only become popular anymore once they stop making them and sell that at clearance.
The house of the future will look exactly the same… er, totally different
What this guy is saying is, give me your EUR3000 and I'll use it to buy Greek bonds and in return I'll send you a non-legally-binding certificate saying that you're free from international debt.

If you've got EUR3000 you'd be better off buying those bonds yourself. At least there's a chance of seeing a return. Even a diminished return is better than this.
Android is a Linux. It's like Portland, the dream of the 90's.
Django + dreamhost sucks, I concur.

Try these guys (they also do rails and other stuff as well): webfaction.com
I was under the impression that Google does have licensing agreements with OEMs, for the use of Google apps like GMail, Maps, Navigation, Play Store, etc.

I'm sure it's not $85 per device for the license but the point still remains.
> It just seems so ivory tower to me sometimes.

More like a game between different sports teams. Are you going to go to the fans of the opposing team for an honest opinion about yours? Are you shocked they have nasty things to say about your team? Or that you have nasty thoughts about theirs?

What gets to me is this air of objectivity ... that part is most certainly ivory tower and is arrogant to boot.

What I want to read is a critical article on PHP by somebody who uses PHP and loves it. That would be useful.

A hit piece by somebody on a Microsoft stack is just boring!
Durham, NC and the Triangle in general are fast becoming a great startup hub. It's definitely a great place to live and the proximity to the universities provides a large talent pool for startup founders to draw from.

http://www.downtowndurhamstartups.com/
Android = $X.

Where X is the sum of all the patent royalties they have to pay to Microsoft et al.
There are several reasons, audio in html5 is not ready at this point. Also, 3d in javascript is miles away from being a reality (actual 3d, like in x,y,z referenced points, not the anaglyphic 3d kind) and Mr. Doob with his fantastic three.js is still a distance away from what can be done in flash/actionscript now.

Those are some of the reason actionscript, air and flex are going to be around for a long time, even on mobile. If you "miss it" or you don't miss it, that is your own constructed opinion and it won't make flash go away sooner/later or ever for that matter

Flash simply outputs to ios executables now and you don't have a clue you are running it anymore, so, maybe that is part of why you don't miss it.

You don't seem to miss the know how of why it is necessary still, so that kind of loops to the point you don't know why we can't "just move onto HTML5 now?" Weird huh. How did that come about.

Picking camps is not the same as having a valid opinion based on objective reason, in your case it makes you stand out like a meme based "are we there yet" user. Cheerleading is awesome. But it really doesn't make the players score on its own.

Last reason why it won't "go away", flash developers get paid to make chart topping games that run on ios, while apple takes a store app cut from it.
Many programs can benefit from shared context. You can push all the shared context to your database, but it's often helpful to keep around some shared data structures for performance reasons. For example, you can cache pure Python functions using functools.lrucache, and share such caches between threads, but such caches can't be shared between processes. In-process data structures like dicts and lists are much, much faster than alternatives like memcached and redis because they avoid the overhead of IPC and deserialization, and they are also easier to use since they are built-in.
Although in all fairness without announcing any pricing it's not clear they're going to do that.
Are Menial Tasks the Secret to Great Achievement?
If you are trying to exploit parallelism, any kind of data sharing (other than pure read-only sharing) costs you.
And then click 'X' to close the meaningless countdown timer early.
As fun and easy as it is to take potshots at PHP, and as much as I am against personally working on any medium-sized or larger project that is written in PHP, I feel like a bit of a hypocrite because I probably owe my career to PHP.

One "feature" of PHP that really no other language or platform has touched is the vast amount of pre-existing software that is out there written in it that you can quickly and easily tweak to suit your needs. This is how I got started programming in the mid-to-late 90's as a kid in high school.

There was some auction software written in PHP, and I setup an auction site and spent tons of nights making small tweaks to the software to make it a really cool and fully-featured auction site. Nobody listed a damn thing on the site, of course, but I was hooked.

- Bad habits can be unlearned (I've unlearned enough to know)

- You can go back and learn CS basics

- You can gain an appreciation for well-designed languages and tradeoffs in design

But it is really, really hard to replicate that awesome feeling when you start out with some substantial piece of software and are able to incrementally make it better - making bigger and bigger changes as you learn more and become confident. The fact that so much open-source PHP software exists, the development cycle is so short, and it is so quick and easy to host makes it pretty good for that. Honestly, as much as I like Java now, if I'd started out trying to use it, who knows what I'd be doing now.

As crappy as the language is, it is good enough at a lot of things. You won't "kill" PHP by making a better language any more than you would beat CraigsList by designing a better UI.
Joey Bada$$ and Principles of Startup Success
> What happened at Apple was—for all intents and
> purposes—a reverse takeover. In theory, they bought
> NeXT. In practice, NeXT’s management took over
> managing Apple and its OS became Apple’s OS.

Something similar happened with Netscape and Collabra, and it was the deathknell for Netscape. jwz writes:

We had built this really nice entry-level mail reader in Netscape 2.0, and it was a smashing success. Our punishment for that success was that management saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to 'The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!"

To do this, they bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly, failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. They bought this company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. Somehow, Collabra managed to completely take control of Netscape: it was like Netscape had gotten acquired instead of the other way around.

Source: http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
That is exactly the same situation I was in over a period of years working in a company with someone similar.

In the end I decided that I would do the best job that I could possibly do with the knowledge I had and to hell with the over-inflated opinions of my line manager.

The best seniors are those that answer questions you have, steer you in the right direction and are open to new ideas and suggestions.
In all fairness to MS, HP's waffling over whether they were selling their desktop/laptop/othertop business or not and Dell's acquisition of Perot Systems to become a more services oriented company are flags worth noting.

MS isn't bleeding edge, but they seem to be reading the leaves pretty well.
Agree completely. It really all depends on the startup and the founders, but I wouldn't consider anything other than a top 10 incubator.

For less than top 10 incubators, I think they could be great for inexperienced founders or someone looking for some help. Building connections are a big part of the incubator experience as well.
HP Exec: "That's IT! We need to go it on our own with our tablet strategy. Dang, maybe we should acquire a really good mobile OS?"
All languages have their purpose, use the one you want and prefer. I'm getting sick of people bashing other languages because they don't like it. Especially people who have never really used the language...
As one commenter already said: the best way of avoiding blaim is to not make any major modifications or write difficult code. This way you avoid creating bugs. So there is a huge risk that this will reduce productivity.

A root cause analysis should ask "five whys" as to why this happened. Tight schedules, bad specs, improper training? Blaiming everything on the individual who checked the code in is not going to be very accurate, and probably very bad for morale.
Just put 'God' in the field every time.
On a more serious note, this will most certainly decrease the quality of the work environment.
The editorial is specifically about HP abandoning Windows RT - linkbaitish headline.
Nice to hear that they fixed those.

I just read about the new closures. Too bad, scoping is still somewhat broken: You have to explicitly declare the variables you want to use from the outer scope.
That figure is almost certainly the peak pulse power, not the actual supply requirements. Modern radar almost all operate by firing very very short pulses at relatively low repetition rates[1]

I don't know about the system in question (and if it's still a prototype, it's going to be bigger than it could be), but I think I've heard of systems with similar pulse power being installed in (fighter) aircraft.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_repetition_frequency
"I find society's obsession with credit scores completely insane."

Spoken like somebody who has never been raped due to a low credit score. Due to identity theft that took me over two years to clear up, my credit score was temporarily in the upper 500's back around 2007. Obviously, now it's all cleared up and back to normal, but my God, those of us on the normal credit scale are clueless as to how expensive bad credit is.

EVERYTHING costs more when you have bad credit. You are perceived to be a risk, and that risk is priced into anything that involves a long term commitment of payment. Move? You will pay a higher rent at some places, or simply a higher security deposit. Activating utilities? The power or water company will want a few hundred dollars down. Want to switch cell phone providers? Oh wait, your credit sucks so you need to give us a $200 payment on top of the normal fees. Want car insurance? Guess what, on top of that extra high car payment, you will have an extra high car insurance payment. See where I'm going here?

All of these extra "taxes" you pay due to being a quantified risk exact a huge opportunity cost. Many companies use bad credit as an "excuse" to charge you more. Others have a very valid reason to make you pay a risk tax. There are numerous cases where credit score is not statistically connected to risk, particularly with car insurance, but they will charge more nevertheless.
Yes I can't see any potential code enhancement made to Linux by the DOD/Navy ever making it back out in 'the wild'. That said it certainly helps cement Linux's credibility in areas such as this. Calling it 'single biggest win' though, ehh?
Blame the product manager or customers for coming up with the new feature requests. If they didn't give you anything to code, there wouldn't be any bugs.
This is nice, but how is this bigger than Android?
It makes sense when you consider he wrote Transport Tycoon in the early 90's (when the game had to be assembly for performance reasons), and started RollerCoaster Tycoon as a Transport Tycoon sequel. He had all that code to build on and 10 years of assembly programming experience.

What really blows my mind is that he DESIGNED and developed several classic games by himself. The man is a modern-day multi-talented Da Vinci, and I don't quite understand why he hasn't been knighted yet.
Surveying 1000 APIs – Infrastructure and SAAS APIs power new API Growth
Oracle’s Ellison and Pixar’s Catmull on Their Friend, Steve Jobs (Video)
If we've learnt one lesson from Microsoft it's that they can be really patient.

Look at the XBox. Started off poorly but it looks like they will dominate the next generation of consoles given how badly Sony has been faltering recently. So for all we know this could be a full blown shift into replicating Apple's integrated approach.
> If you don't like PHP then use another language or build a better one ... Everyone that invents a language ...

But he said nothing about "inventing" a language. In fact said very clearly that he wanted to take an existing language and add to it - particularly the things that PHP does do well.

from TFA:

> "to buff up a open source language ecosystem such that it can truly compete with PHP in ease of installation and deployment"
Say that multiplication by -1 is a 180 degree rotation of the number line. Then -1 * -1 is a 360 degree rotation -- which is the same as a 0 degree rotation.

Note that saying it like this is non-intuitive, but the point is that it's actually a geometric interpretation, so you draw a picture. This also helps students with the idea that there's actually some connection between algebra and geometry --- even though this is really fundamental, it's often omitted from mathematics education.
What would happen if we returned to the gold standard?
Stop comparing PHP to Rails.

Compare Ruby to PHP and something like Symfony to Rails.

Learning Ruby: approachable. Learning PHP: approachable. Learning Rails/Symfony: run for the hills (for newbie programmers).

Languages !- Frameworks (at least for the purposes of this comparison)
You're quite right. I was thinking of an unsophisticated site owner with simple requirements (like a restaurant site) who hires a designer. He wouldn't know to put into the contract that all source code must be delivered. In such a case, he'd be better off if the designer used straight HTML. At least then there's a chance that someone else could edit it or maintain it.
> ASP.NET is so amazing, right?

ASP.Net MVC version 4. Yeah, actually I'd say that it is. But YMMV. All I'd say is avoid commenting on frameworks that you don't know much about.
Well, you can't do this:

from __future__ import python3

(via http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/python3)
They have already mentioned they're looking to move their PC division, and transition towards a services model, a la IBM. I'm not saying this will all pan out, but that's what has come out.
MasterSly
MasterSly
Nice stats.

Would be nice to have a breakdown by categories too.