skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This happened with most frameworks throughout the years. We're still trying to figure out what we need from a JS framework, and we haven't figured out the balance to be good enough for everyone. Backbone is minimalist, ember is opinionated, knockout and angular have solutions that look really good for the enterprise and a particular subset of apps, and a few others trying out interesting new ideas.

This is really the second generation of JS frameworks, and there's likely a third one coming up that will consolidate the best ideas we've found so far with more batteries included. (I've been tempted to pull together a metaframework over backbone with a few essential plugins and great documentation, but my startup comes first.) (Note: Take my idea! I don't mind! :)
At a prior job I was a key member of a team that did a 2 week long, intense root cause analysis of a prod issue that threatened a multi million dollar contract. I consider it one of the most interesting and rewarding things I've done in my career. All obstacles were removed, we could follow the clues wherever they took us, use any resources etc. In the end it took careful analysis, many simulations and hard work to find and fix the root cause, and no fingers were pointed, instead we learned some good lessons and were better for it.

When done right, RCA is a great thing.
Making calls is fifth most frequent UK smartphone activity, according to O2
Apparently it's closer to 78%

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/all/all

No matter how you try to hide from it, it's blatantly clear that PHP runs at least half the entire Web.

What else exactly did you think was? Surely you didn't think Python was running half the web. Obviously Ruby isn't. So what does that leave? Coldfusion? C?
Google bans gun sales on US shopping center
Twitter plans curbs on 'horrific' abuse
This comment just made me want to view Hacker News more often. Maybe. 24 hours in a day--there's lots of things I could be doing.
I find that random(5) is the best performing. For okay but consistent performance, random(5) is decent, but you should definitely avoid random(5) due to high load.
I guess I still am lost as to what frame of reference people are discussing here. What real host [1] doesn't let you run WSGI processes, or arbitrary processes? What happens if you need to make TCP connections, or run a websocket server?

[1] This does not include Dreamhost, Bluehost or any of the other oversold shared hosting (please, feel free to search G+ and see complaint after complaint about them, especially recently).

I guess I don't see any "real" sites being deployed in environments where only PHP is available. A random script that you want to let someone else use for a few minutes, sure, upload that to randomphphost.com, but a real life public webapp??

If you take the time to learn it, deploying C#, python, ruby apps can be insanely easy. And to be my usual self, deploying Golang apps are beyond insanely simple. (I cross compile from my Mac to my Linux 64bit target, upload and run `sudo ./server -host=:80` and I'm deployed).
If it's early in the life of a project and you don't have much experience with the framework, tiny annoyances are a warning sign. If the easy things don't work the way I like, what happens when I try to do something hard? The cost of switching is low.

I used merb for all of about 10 minutes before giving up on it. I fooled around, created a couple very basic crud pages, and it worked for a bit, then I got nothing but error pages. root cause: I had created a new class called 'fish'. That opened my eyes to the fact that were was so much automagic fairy dust sprinkled about, if anything serious ever went wrong I would never figure it out.
Are there any Dropboxes, Herokus, or similar startups from other incubators?
I have felling that there are only a couple incubators worth applying for.
Looks like a stop gap for Java 8 (the static portion that is). Please Oracle let me have my closures sooner so the .NET programmers will stop making fun of us :)
For me the biggest challenge is that at the company that I work for is too strict in trying out "unknown" technologies. So I can only learn in my free time. I don't really have any real project ideas in which I can try out my knowledge, so I forget the most of what I learned a few weeks ago. I think it's hard to change, when your job ties you to php. And in my country (Hungary) anything other than php, or java for web development is pretty unknown.
> Rather it's simply: hello world

Wouldn't that also apply to jsp, cfm, gsp, jsf and asp?
Website offers to delete its posting of your arrest mugshot — for $200
tl;dr: I think this could be a very useful service, but the execution is very important.

There are already services which are in this space who are trying to get it right (olark.com comes to mind). I'm not really sure what the right way is, but if I had to take a guess, the experience should feel very homogeneous with the app which offers it. Yes, there's a reasonable amount of value you get out of a drop-in service that you don't have to configure or think about, but I think every point of interaction with the customer should be a carefully-thought decision and not a white-label feature you add as an after-thought.

I think if you were able to figure out how to construct a communication's channel that could be easily added to an app while neatly integrating into the existing experience, that would be a major win that I'd give you money to provide me.
Part of the reason so many people use Red Hat specifically instead of Debian, say, is rules prohibiting the use of "freeware". But if you pay Red Hat for Linux, suddenly it isn't freeware anymore.
It's that they all look similar and you like the look. You also might be looking at websites built more by hackers than by web designers. Bootstrap is great for visually clean rapid development, but that comes at the cost of individuality.

Props to Coinbase for changing the looming black top bar anyway.
The page-is-program model still works as well as ever. It's just that, if your problem is so simple that the page-is-program pattern is most appropriate -- for example, if you are eight years old and you want to build a page that serves up a different picture of a dinosaur every time it gets reloaded -- you should just use PHP. Why choose anything else?

It's true that other languages have not wasted a lot of time trying to displace PHP as the language of choice for anonymous random dinosaur servers. That's because there's no money in fighting PHP on its home turf. The turf just isn't worth enough.

"Vestigial" is the wrong word. That's like describing a screwdriver as "vestigial" because the impact driver has been invented. Sure, impact drivers can accomplish many things that mere screwdrivers cannot, but that doesn't mean that screwdrivers aren't still useful, and numerous, and popular.
So I solved the puzzle about an hour ago and received an email within about 5 minutes after finishing it. When I went to register for the event though, there was no option to sign up as developer/hacker. The field only has N/A next to it on the event brite page.

Is it supposed to be like that?
> The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool.

No, what's "wrong" with PHP is that other things that are better have come along since. That's not a fault of PHP, that's the nature of language evolution.

> It runs half the Internet quite well

COBOL runs tons of mission critical business services quite well. It doesn't mean that nobody's improved on COBOL or that you should use it for a new project today.
I don't know... maybe it's where I work, but the post-mortems I've been to all too often mandate some useless extra layer of review or process on top of an already byzantine change control scheme. Sometimes, "shit happens", and I wish our availability teams appreciated that.

And even if there is justification for additional process, they should let the ops/dev teams come up with ideas/solutions themselves: we know our tools and teams best.
I hate stupid algorithmic trivia too! All of my interviews have been giving the person a laptop and asking them to make a very simple app while I watch. For iOS for example, I ask them to make a table view that shows 1 to 5. I let them use documentation and the web too. I ask them to add features if they can complete the app before 30-60m, and the more features the better. I'm totally fine with leaving the room too if they don't like someone looking over their shoulder. I try to do this with something they are skilled with.

Many people can't complete the first item, something that would take me 5-10 minutes. I feel like it's about the equivalent of fizz buzz, but scalable. It also respects their time, since I don't ask them to sacrifice a weekend day to make an app for me or similar and by the end of the interview series and a huddle, they'll have an offer or not.
A group of us developed an app for published research work that used the streaming API within academia. The amount of hoops we had to jump through for the necessary access was absurd. It's as if the attitude is "it's a privilege for you to use this API", as opposed to making it a viable platform.
It's pretty easy to do so with Python, at least. I don't know about Ruby.

The only advantage PHP has in terms of deployment is that there are more cheap, crappy shared hosts that support it.
Just to keep things connected a week later (June 27th+) a critique with pros/cons of StartupChile was posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4171252
It's funny how the Internet works sometimes: I clicked on a link on HN to a random comment on a Reddit post, just to find out that I know the original Reddit poster (saw his pic on the post)!!! Haha :)
This $35 DIY Computer Is Going to Sail Across the Atlantic
Ah, so you're dismissing people accomplishments based on your opinion of what their doing. That's also ... classy.
Tim Ferriss talked about the 80%/20% principle. I wonder if the bakery considered the author as one of the 80% who's not bringing in the majority of the revenue.

Although I think all customers should be valued and treated as well as can be, there's hopefully always going to be more customers than there are staff (otherwise, it's probably a bad sign) and I'm not sure if they can dedicate so much attention and going all out. It's definitely everyone's business problem - how can you serve all your customers with the best service using minimal staff.
This is more likely an issue with Chrome for iOS and the first iPad than Mobile Chrome as a whole though, as I don't get any trashing on my iPhone either. I closed all apps in the background and it seems to be able to handle a little bit more:

http://cl.ly/2y0K0K2P0R0E1D1C3h0s
Sure thing, here are two examples:

1) My current project at work is a GPU-accelerated keyword-matching engine. The project was started before I joined the company, so I had no say in the choice of Python. Keywords change infrequently, while we analyze a continuous stream of incoming text. There are several million keywords, ranging from small to enormous in size. Aho-Corasick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aho%E2%80%93Corasick_string_mat...) is a pretty ideal algorithm for this scenario, which we use for the GPU matching kernel.

AC requires some preprocessing of keywords into a deterministic finite automaton (basically a suffix trie). This is very expensive for a large number of keywords with a large number of characters. The DFA grows to something like 10GB while being built.

Meanwhile, the main engine loop has to be running continuously, while updating keywords in the background. The engine is a service available to other systems on our network, so it uses multiple threads for concurrent I/O. The problem is that the GPU performance is so ridiculously high that the CPU can't keep it fed with data. I've profiled it and this is not a memory-bound problem...the CPU simply cannot keep up with the document streams that we send to it.

The concurrent I/O threads cannot reasonably be split across processes because they need a shared memory space for the data structures driving the engine. So clearly, the background keyword updating is a problem if it runs in the same process as the rest of the engine. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the keyword updating working in its own multiprocessing process. It's a complete hack to work around the failings of Python (I can go into more depth about the implementation issues if you'd like). And this is why I loathe the GIL.

We use Cython for some aspects of the code, but the keyword updating has yielded very little gain. It's difficult to rewrite parts of the keyword updater as more optimized Cython because it uses some language features that do not seem to be supported in Cython.

2) For a personal project, I need to do a lot of timeseries processing. I'm using Python to prototype, with the intention of either optimizing it eventually or possibly rewriting it in a more suitable language. I've found parsing timestamps to be particularly CPU-intensive, while working on gigabytes of data. Most data I send to a multiprocessing process will have to be returned in some form eventually, so communication costs are huge. So huge, in fact, that I only see a 10% speedup from splitting the workloads evenly across six cores. Profiling reveals that the majority of the "processing" time is actually just waiting on data getting sent back to the main process. This would not be a problem with a shared memory space.
semicolons and brackets
As did everyone else in the tech community. But I think demoing actual current functionality of the product is much more important than demoing something that doesn't work. The way I see it, Google knows that people won't be shelling out their cash for a camera attached to a pair of classes. They know that if this project doesn't go anywhere, they will have just made a fool of themselves by promoting it so heavily. So I am just gonna trust that Google knows what they are doing and they will blow our minds once the product is further along in the development cycle. And maybe the project will fail and won't go anywhere, but I just think it's a bit early for these kinds of blog posts. Let's wait until an actual product launch.
Agreed - it might be the policy of the company for record keeping purposes to ensure the financials tally up at the end of the year.
I was a bit doubtful, so I looked it up... turns out you're only somewhat right: CentOS + RHEL are about 40% together (28.7% + 11.6% = 40.3), but Debian + Ubuntu are over 50% at (30.8% + 19.8% = 50.6). Arguably Debian is not Ubuntu (which is why I say you're somewhat right), but it is just what Ubuntu sysadmins grow up to, and has even more of a cool underground factor, despite being the most popular server distro. Of course RHEL and CentOS are the same thing as well.

Source: http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all (accuracy not entirely trusted, but it appears roughly accurate)
Safari Vs Chrome iOS JavaScript Benchmark
Haven't signed up, but http://blog.coinbase.com/ does mention 2FA is supported through SMS or an app called Authy. In case the founder sees this, was there any reason why Verisign's VIP app (which has native apps on more devices and seems to be the de-facto standard for banking sites) was not used?
On PHP:

This discussion seems to be missing a key factor: context.

I seriously dislike PHP and its inconsistent, unpredictable features and libraries. I avoid PHP whenever reasonable/possible. I also avoid talking to mean, verbose or dumb people whenever reasonable/possible. But sometimes I just gotta do it...

So I use PHP, Python, [Java|Coffee]script, Ruby, Django, Pyramid, Express, Wordpress, Joomla, or whatever else is the right tool for the context/job.

In the context of building a 100M request/month API server, I used Python + Django. I would never have used PHP and I consider it a serious mistake to build large scale systems in PHP. Of course, others would choose Ruby, Clojure, Java, Scala, etc and those are all reasonable answers. I happened to be able to get the thing up and running fastest and most effectively in Python + Django.

In the context of currently re-building a client site that needs social features, a small CMS, etc, we're using PHP and Wordpress. I would never have used Python + Django because the client would not know how to host it and whomever is called on to fix a template is going to have to set up a Python stack, learn git and SSH, log into a VPS, etc in order to tweak anything.

Blends are good, too. We recently worked with a client where the website and application were built in PHP/Wordpress, but their API was Python. The "application" was basically a handful of Wordpress templates that pulled API data. They got the nice little CMS interface of Wordpress which made the website admins happy, but the developers got to do the heavy lifting in Python. Their anti-PHP developers were quite happy with the arrangement.

On Marco's post:

If you can get PHP programmers to agree that they need to stop using it,
the first question that comes up is what to use instead, and they’re met
with a barrage of difficult choices and
wildly different opinions and recommendations.

Yep and that's true of everyone who's ever behind a curve when the curve is shifting. The ice cutters knew about refrigeration, but couldn't adapt. And the curve doesn't always just shift up or down; sometimes it branches crazily and the only way to adapt is to jump into the fray. Even then bad things can happen: Kodak predicted digital cameras, jumped into the fray and basically invented everything and they still got crushed by the digital camera transition.

I think the tension for PHP developers is in understanding on a personal-level how and when to make the transition to newer languages. Unfortunately, many seem to ignore the possibility that a transition is underway.
Many people (myself included) find Java too limiting. Many others like it.

But even Java is so much better than PHP. If you like it, go for it.
Actually, Mobile Safari trash tabs at random too :)

If there's anything I need to access when I'm offline, I just use Instapaper or Opera Mini.
What are some things/pitfalls I should look out if I'm starting a tech consulting company?
Thanks, this is exactly the answer I was looking for.
If all someone knew was PHP, maybe they would struggle to learn something else, but in my case, if I immerse myself in something and learn it and use it, it's not going to take me years to get productive with it. Especially given the limited things that PHP can do, learning to do those in python/ruby/C#/Go took... trivial amounts of time. With the benefit of more functionality and a sane API. (and in two cases, static typing)

Alternatively, if all I knew was PHP, I would understand why someone would be scared of learning something new. I mean, look up and down this thread. Everyone thinks a one-liner hello world is the pinnacle of the ultimate web dev language. Because real web frameworks require an http handler, they assume it's more work or harder. To me, it seems that many in the "PHP is easier!" crowd are too scared or lazy to take the time to learn something else and realize that better separation of concerns and tooling actually allows for faster and safer development.
Mac OS Inventor Working On Stealth Startup
sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential rubygems apache2 && sudo gem install rails && rails hello && cd hello && rails generate controller hello && rails script/server && wget http://127.0.0.1:3000 -o -

Wait, that didn't work. I got all kinds of errors and warnings. I must have the wrong version of something. You win, point taken.

There should be an easier way. I should be able to just run "apt-get install rails-easy" and have a system that is completely configured for development.
"They should work as advertised, using native OS threading primitives and taking advantage of the native OS thread scheduler."

Just to be clear, Python does use native OS threading primitives, and it does make use of the native OS thread scheduler. Also, Python does support, from a practical standpoint, multithreaded programs, but only if the program is not CPU-bound. I think you could rewrite that paragraph to make the role of the GIL clearer.
In Python, I've always used string substitution. I've never understood the need for a special templating system when it's already built into the language:

template = """<boilerplate html>%(greeting)s</boilerplate html>"""
parts = {'greeting': "Hello, World!"}
page = template % parts

I create my site-wide template in a module and never have to look at it again, so my application code is mostly logic. When I have to work on PHP or Coldfusion, I don't understand how people can bear to have the logic hidden in a markup language that's mixed up with another markup language. Many can't, and that's why there are templating engines for what are essentially template-based languages.
Apple was just ahead of their time. They were delivering a superior, end-to-end experience before people expected such a thing from computers. The masses have come to expect that now and Microsoft is shifting, later than they should have, to the in the right direction.
Plus, if you're trying to get new people to use your language, having a complex toolchain is going to scare them off.

"Hey kid, first one's free"
| Who cares? Honestly?

Exactly, who cares?
All you need to know about QuickSort
Nope. They can't get federal insurance since they aren't a bank. The "bank transfers coming soon" - I've yet to see a bitcoin exchange actually allow bank transfers, so that will be a welcome thing.

Still, you should be storing your money in your wallet, not leave it sitting around on a site.

I think that games should use litecoin or something instead of <insert name of fake in-game currency here>.
I think z92 is on to something.

Ease of install is part of the same pattern. PHP has always been easy (with connections to a free database), and got easier with good package management systems. What's coldfusion like for ease of install, ease of install with database access?

ASP for Windows was huge. It was even easier to get started on than PHP because you just needed to install IIS from a EXE and you could reference access files. The only reason it's not still massive is that MS moved on.
I'll move away from PHP when it can't do what I need it to do. Simple as that.
The language may be somewhat broken, but it's very far from being broken enough to be moving away from it.
Building Your First Profitable Startup
this was a really helpful comment! Thanks! I will carefully think about it! Actually olark is one of points of inspiration, but i would prefer to point it more to the mobile world. Thanks a lot for the help!