skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What I'm reacting to is this idea that things are the way they are and they can't change.

No, you're demanding change. Demand has a meaning to it. You are demanding they do something. You aren't asking. You aren't negotiating. Your are demanding!

> I believe it is entirely reasonable to demand that they make those data accessible to other services I'd like to use.

Here is some good advice: Condescension doesn't make your point any more valid that it would be otherwise. You'll actually find people take you more seriously without it. =)

> That the companies have the sole power to set the terms for what they do with data provided to them by their users. And of course they don't.

You are wrong. First, your framing this wrong. It's their data. You've shared that data with them, they've collected it, stored it, processed it, and done what they will with it. Outside of a breach of the terms you agreed to, I don't see any reason they are beholden to you or anyone else.

> It's simple business to request the terms of an exchange be changed.

But that's not how you are framing it. You aren't requesting anything. You are demanding. And, more to the point, you are demanding you have control over all aspects of that data, even, apparently, data you generated using their product.

So again, the problem is you see this as data that is yours. It's not. You've paid them already, with that data. It's like giving someone money and demanding they do what you say with it.
> No, what's "wrong" with PHP is that other things that are better have come along since.

The problem is, no, nothing else has. Node.js is awesome and fun, but far harder to set up for basic webpage serving. Python is awesome, but also has a huge learning curve to learn how to serve basic webpages with. And... I can't think of anything else. Perl? ASP? Java is a huge pain to set up and maintain.

What other language out there is better than PHP for getting simple webpages up and running quickly? I wish there were one, but when you consider practical aspects instead of just theoretical ones, there really isn't. Sadly.
+300 :)
> the desktop market and that's the target for most malware software

I think that's only the case to the extent the desktop world is tied to the insecure monoculture of the Windows world. You can't tell me there wouldn't be money to be made from being able to reliably infect Linux webservers, for example.
Yep - sorry we should really add a page on that. We're storing wallets in the cloud so this is an important concern. Private keys are encrypted in the database. bcrypted passwords. We also offer two factor authentication for your logins:
http://blog.coinbase.com/post/25677574019/coinbase-now-offer...

We'll start keeping a majority of funds in cold storage as deposits grow (we're still in beta at the moment). And I think you're right a firm policy on this would be needed about loss of funds and what is covered. I'm interested in the idea of getting insurance through Lloyds of London or something along those lines, but haven't pursued it yet (we've just been building the prototype).

I worked on fraud prevention at Airbnb previously and we had lots of money flowing through the site and stored with us, so I'm familiar with best practices around this. I also have a healthy respect for what can go wrong, and I think as we grow we'll go through regular security audits (and much more scrutiny as we pursue licensing as a money transmitter). You certainly shouldn't trust us on face value though, it's something we'll have to earn over many years.
Well that's the thing... most of the PHP popularity is for the sites that get installed on Dreamhost etc.

I've deployed C# apps; I did .NET exclusively for about 8 years. It's great! But telling Joe's Washer Warehouse that they have to pay for the .NET stack, and that they can't just find a random PHP guy to do any further development is kind of tough pill to swallow.

Yes, PHP sites are usually the lowest common denominator, but on the other hand there are lots of people that are only willing to pay for that. There's a reason the PHP market is as big as it is. Thankfully for those of us in PHP-land there are starting to be lots of quality frameworks like Drupal and Symfony so that it's not such a horrible experience as it used to be.

And the other part is really the market. You want a large CMS-driven website? PHP is where it's at. That's where the code and communities are. There's a reason that lots of very large websites use Drupal. Sure, if I was going to try and make some sort of big-backend web app that did a lot of services and whatever, I'd want to do .NET. But as a freelance web developer, those projects just aren't there. Like it or not, I'm in PHP land.

(And RoR used to be a total nightmare to deploy. That whole community needs to send a collective giant cardboard check to the mod_passenger guy.)
Am I missing something? I type signup myemail myusername and I am then prompted for a password which seems to refuse any input or at least not alert me of submission.
Thanks for clarifying my statement. Boto ftw.
I was kind of hoping Dorsey coming back to Twitter would have put an end to or at least subdued their hostility to their developer community, but it doesn't appear to be the case. Their new proprietary attachments are even more concerning than this.

Costolo and Ev are dickish enough you expect crap from them, but Dorsey used to have some hacker cool. I wonder if either Dorsey doesn't have enough power to swing Twitter back to being open and cool again, or if he's drunk the rich and famous Koolaid to the point he just wants to cash out in a big IPO and doesn't care about the things he used to care about.

Regrettably companies trying to squeeze enough revenue out of "free" Internet services to have a successful IPO are pretty much compelled to be complete dicks, so its probably gonna happen.

It just kind of sucks that Twitter is the absolute coolest news stream there is, there aren't any good replacements and you KNOW they are going to totally wreck it by the time they IPO or within a year of going public and we are going to all have to start over on some new "never heard of" clone. Then repeat cycle endlessly every few years. Dave Winer will keep shouting to use RSS but RSS completely sucks by comparison.

As an aside a few days ago I read New Yorker and some other mags were getting weary of letting Flipbook scrape their content and were going to just put a lead in and link users to their main web site through flipbook instead. I'm thinking, wow that's what Twitter was already doing. I totally never understood what Flipbook offered to justify the hype. A good Twitter stream in a good client is infinitely better.
Guess I came late to the party. There was no jquery there when I did it and the fun thing I learned was I could load jquery from the console.
So maybe I just fail, but I attempted to sign up, typed in the command and then it asked for a password. I assumed this was to make up a password, so I tried that, and it didn't let me enter. Is this a you have to know a password to sign up thing?
"So don't read anything about it until some one mysteriously pops up with the complete brain specification?"

There are between 100.000 and 250.000 publications for every popular science every year, it DOES make sense to not read those which have no scientific background nor reasoning.
Mine is okay
Perhaps we'll reach the stage where developers react to third party APIs like an abused spouse does to their aggressor -- shying away from their spouse and doing their best to move on to greener pastures.

We may end up at the stage where the most successful third party APIs are those that provide strong bilateral agreements and service guarantees, so that the developer doesn't live in fear that the nerdy rug will be unpredictably pulled out from underneath them.
I know of at least one temporary dry erase surface that works well. It's a 3M dry erase "sheet" that comes in rolls. You can buy it from American science and surplus: http://www.sciplus.com/search.cfm/scategory/SFM/term/whitebo...

I have a 6' x 10' surface of it on my bedroom wall, and it works great, even for erasing old marker.
I want all sorts of things in SQLite4, but let's start by saying that usign a log-structured DB format is very welcomed news.

I'd also like the VFS to provide the page cache, so that we could use mmap(2) windows instead of read(2) and pread(2), which should result in fewer data copies and better performance.

Everything else I'd like to see in SQLite4 is icing on the cake.
Good to know - you can guess which browsers we've been testing with. Sounds like a we'll need to do a js placeholder solution or change the page.
"Pythonic abstractions like concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor.map"

Although it might be great stuff, the word 'Pythonic' is pretty funny next to a long Java-style name like that
this is the tried and true model.
This article is not using a correct definition of "scalable".

A business that needs more staff to service more customers is still scalable, as long as each staff member generates more revenue than they cost. McDonalds is awesomely scalable.

If you insist on limiting yourself to zero-touch businesses, you'll find yourself competing with all the other geeks who are afraid to go out and sell and build business relationships. On the other hand, if you're willing to build high-touch relationships, you'll discover opportunities that you would have never otherwise found.
It doesn't require ajax.

http://dpaste.de/pPpQQ/

It's for ecommerce hackers which presumes you know web stuff anyway.
I assume that for whatever reason, it is absolutely impossible for you to use any other concurrency model.

Did you try Jython?
While I'm not a big fan of BitCoin, I don't think this is a very good argument. You could use the same argument for banks and "get robbed". Why doesn't this happen to banks?
Or with curl to really save you some time.
because there's other countries then russia
Disclaimer: I doubt I'm a good role model to be answering this question. The majority of my experience has been spent working for someone. Granted most of the projects I've been able to choose, I am not yet a self-made man. I work with many consultancies and can only relate what I've observed.

The biggest problem is the overhead of managing your finances and business. It's a distraction that you'll have to learn to deal with one way or the other. In my opinion, find someone that will help you navigate these decisions early and often. (Look to your local Chamber of Commerce or entrepreneurial meetups for qualified mentors.)

Do NOT underestimate how important it is to track your time and money. My approach was to take things in small bites. I setup a DBA and opened a business account and tried my best to keep my finances separate. When I paid for stuff out of my personal account, I made sure I put together an expense form to track reimbursements. Even though there aren't much tax benefits running as a sole proprietorship, the taxes are much easier and you do get to write off a few things. Once you start making 4 figures a month, seek out assistance again and see if it makes sense to formalize your business into a corporation.

There are services which help manage your books (such as Florida startup, http://lessaccounting.com). If it makes sense, use them! They are awesome people and will be a net positive gain for your business. There are also lawyer services which will probably answer questions you have over the phone. One such law service I'm aware of (but haven't used myself) is http://walkercorporatelaw.com/ and comes highly recommended by Andrew Warner on Mixergy.

While this is basic advice, it's will set you with a strong foundation to start off. And having someone mentor you through the process will give you the best possible advice that will be tailored to your practice's needs.
I am a novice programmer and I am always put off websites that rank users (and programming competitions for that matter). Avoiding the competition seems better than putting my relatively crappy code out there for all to see.

Would more seasoned people out there agree that a clean slate is better than a low ranking on sites like InterviewStreet (or HackerRank if it gets big)?
The latest update to the GMail app for iOS is vastly improved.
Is PHP really more memory efficient than the competition? I know it scores better on the computer benchmark game but the non-existent concurrency support and general leakyness of most the extensions (unless they've fixed that these days?) seems like the difference could actually be a lot narrower in practice.
Oregon is same as AWS East, seems to have a smaller set of boxes, have gotten errors in the past about not having any more servers to allocate.
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Hey Mike, really appreciate you taking the time. I recently launched a service that creates elevator pitches for startups:

http://pitchremix.com

Any specific thoughts on the site and the service? Do you think there is a large enough market (i.e., do you think many startup founders would pay for this?) And are there any glaring holes to fix? Features that I absolutely must add?

Thanks again!
What a baseless comment. There's already issues with closed publishing, and this is just one example, not statistically significant.
Trying to signup using Chrome Canary and when I enter my password and press enter, I'm getting "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'toLowerCase' of undefined ".
Interestingly, this is the problem with non-alphabetic natural languages, too.
[Skillshare] Nonprofit Bootstrapping: How to start an NPO with no money
You wrote a well thought out response. I owe you a response in kind.

People have a tendency to overrate their rational capacity to reason out a viable decision. While you listed a few solid critiques, the situation is infinitely more complex.

And by infinitely, I do mean exactly that. As in, beyond your capacity to reason it out.

In the end, the only right decision is a decision which withstands the test of time. Both Apache and PHP have done that and continue to do so.

Apache holds 65.5% of the market [1]. PHP holds 77.9% of the market [2].

Those solutions are working, right now, for all of those people. That's reality, not grand "rational, non-masochistic" theories.

[1] http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ws-apache/all/all
[2] http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/all/all

Now that we're finished with that, I'm going to enjoy myself.

> a architectural decision which made it nearly fundamentally incapable of solving the C10K problem.

C10K is not a problem and never was. The limiting factor in the overwhelming majority of deployments is the pipe. Apache can saturate the pipe just as well as NGINX. You will saturate the pipe long before you reach 10K connections. Which is why people continue to use Apache. Being technologically superior is pointless when there are no real-world benefits to that technological superiority.

On top of that, Apache's thread model provides it with greater stability. If a worker thread crashes for whatever reason, another will simply spin up. If your NGINX process dies, you'll need to wait until your monitoring solution brings it back up. Which could be a long time.

> PHP is among the worst languages most sane programmers have ever used.

Worse than COBOL? Yes, yes, a fractal of bad design! Except that article was written by somebody who doesn't have much experience in PHP and most of those complaints don't apply to the current stable version. The rest are easily avoided with sane design.

> Python is designed with an emphasis on readability

Was that humor? Python shoves its version of readability down your throat and laughs as you choke on it. Not all of us get off on syntactically significant white-space. In fact, most of us don't. Which explains why Python is so unpopular. But I get, I get it. It's cool.
You have it really wrong. PHP also has really neat new features and great frameworks. You can do anything with php that you can do with the other cool techs.
Cedar (Ashe Juniper) is not an invasive species in central Texas. Some people are extremely allergic to the pollen though, so that's usually why they want to cut them down.
Maybe just email the file to yourself and open it on the mobile devices? Or Dropbox? Or one of the pastebin sites?
At $2300/month you could redundantly colo or lease VERY powerful servers in 3-4 data centers around the country.
This looks cool. But I'm getting a javascript error when trying to sign up.

TypeError: Cannot call method 'toLowerCase' of undefined [http://www.hackerrank.com/assets/application-18e8ea124a72677...]
It was done due to badly written tools and scripts firing up instances in Availability Zone A every time.
Even google's two factor authentication got hacked. How do you seceure yourself for something like that?
I'm not sure against what kind of problems are you looking for security against? If it's just to make sure employees phones are safe against external attacks, why not simply tell your employees to not root their phones and use Android's full-disk encryption? If it's defense from malicious employees from accessing your VPN, then the solution seems out of the scope of your phone software - and banning non-blackberries (as many companies do) wouldn't solve the problem.

Or is it something else I'm missing?
BTC transactions are all public in the blockchain so they're not as anonymous as many think.

But as for preventing your identity from being linked to your BTC wallet? There's probably no way to prevent that if the service provider is under US jurisdiction.
From my experience, some things that tend to trip people up in transition attempts:

- choice paralysis - With Python, you must first decide whether you want to invest in Django or Flask (or whatever). Then you get to decide whether to invest in Mako or Jinja (or whatever). etc, etc. W/ Ruby, you have Rails vs Sinatra. ERB, Haml, etc etc. In that sense, PHP is realistically more "convention-over-configuration" than the competition (whether MySQL for data persistence and raw HTML in templates are good defaults is a whole separate discussion)

- poor interop w/ real world - good luck convincing a client to sign up for Node.js hosting. Or explaining that it doesn't come w/ wordpress (or phpbb or squirrelmail or pretty much anything not-so-sexy-to-develop-these-days-but-widely-used-by-non-techies.)

- no measurable benefit - most levels of abstraction have comparable complexity in all languages, i.e. using ERB or raw PHP (or Jinja, or mustache, or whatever) generally take the same time and the same effort to write/maintain - code debts come from other factors (e.g. team member inexperience). In addition, most levels of abstraction quickly get cross-ported between projects.
Etsy is considered to have one of the top engineering teams in NY - their CEO was originally brought in as CTO to solve what was at the time a technology mess - and they have a strong engineering culture. Dwolla is hungry to get developers to use their platform, and Alex and the NY team were a key part of organizing AngelHack NY. I imagine b/w the two of them they will do a good job.
Which is entirely not true. The fire scout drone for example is a military development based on the Schweizer 330 civilian heli. The S-434 is partially based on changes developed for the Fire Scout drone. The Bell Eagle Eye drone was initially conceived for the military but at a later stage, plans were made to make it a coast guard drone. Many helicopters have two versions, a civilian and a military version, for example the Bo-105 series which was extensively used by the german army but also formed the backbone of the german air ambulance network from the 1970s until the last one was replace in 2007. Which one of those is "military hardware"?

Most of technology initially conceived for military purposes was at some point repurposed for civilian use (Think: That packet-based network nowadays called 'The Internet')
If person is never mentioned in "person to blame" field, then boss should question whether that person has any meaningful contribution.
A victim must want help.

Make small incremental steps.

The investment you think you have in X (PHP) is less than you think. It's much more in how to code, how web works, etc. the PHP parts are cruft you won't miss anyway.
OK, so here we have someone who knows PHP but not Git. Knowing PHP, probably they're a web developer and have also learned the standard stack there: HTML, CSS, Javascript, MySQL, and Subversion. And with the way the HTML5 family of technologies is exploding nowadays, that's no small feat.

You're saying that learning Git is going to be the barrier to someone switching to Ruby? Naw, don't think so.
The signup is broken, there is a 'login undefined property' exception.

Hope this will be fix soon, cool idea
I'm not sure why, but I find the term "for the masses" horribly insulting and elitist. It instantly turns me off on whatever it is you're talking about and tells me absolutely nothing about the product other than you think your target market is a mass of people that aren't as smart as you.
I don't know if the stuff I mentioned upthread, made by 3M, is the same stuff as magic whiteboard, but I find that it erases just fine, and is stiff and slick enough to make wall surface texture not a problem.
FDIC Insurance, lots of regulation, and criminal liability.
I find it easy to vaguely believe almost anything about computing 100 years from now.
Hold on, let me look up the sales numbers using my Palm Treo.
After Shutdown, Buses Shake Up a Chinatown Network
> The problem is, no, nothing else has.

Myself and an army of other ex-PHP developers disagree.

> What other language out there is better than PHP for getting simple webpages up and running quickly?

This discussion is not just about "getting simple webpages up and running quickly". In fact, it's pretty clear people are talking about developing web applications, and not slapping together a quick and dirty page or two.

If you want to have a discussion about what language is best for inexperienced people to whip up a simple site without having to bother learning much, that's fine, but that's not this discussion. At the very least, that's certainly not what Marco was talking about, nor Jeff in the blog post Marco was responding to.
very sorry about it. Can you try now?
Sorry, it's fixed. Can you try now?
>I use Linux/Ubuntu at work basically because I have to. There are advantages on having your dev environment mirror your production environment and Linux (over OSX) does actually have a package system (it's a messy hack on OSX) but I certainly don't like it.

I'm very surprised that Google doesn't provide some kind of consistent dev VM environment that is similar to prod that developers can SSH into.
Yeah unfortunately it looks to be an EBS problem and if your underlying EBS volume housing your primary DB instance takes a dump then that is unfortunately going to cause replication to fall over too
wesm, I can't thank you enough for this library.

I own and operate a quantitative finance business. Pandas (+ numpy) has been a godsend. Not only do I not have to pay for matlab licenses, but even the less experience programmers on my team have been insanely productive.

Thank you.
Converting 'binary' to ASCII and being able to make a POST request is what counts as a capable coder these days?

I'm just saying that it seems like an arbitrary hoop, when I go down to hackspace they don't make me jump through hoops... some of the people at the hackspace definitely can't code they're doing things like yarn bombing or moss graffiti, some can't code and are absolute geniuses with electronics.
Sorry about it. Can you try now? It's fixed. A js error
The difference between the bitcoin banks/cloud wallets has been that the bitcoin counterparts seldom have any law or big organization to back them but only a few hackers with a bitcoind and a web servers. Some, like the old mybitcoin.com, have been hacked mysteriously with little data released, but only millions of $ worth of bitcoins gone forevermore.
Google is slowly cracking "open" iOS