skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you don't host your data in several alternative dimensions so that the same events wouldn't transpire in all of them - why not assume you'll encounter the occasional outage?
It's worth pointing out that the app store is one of the things apple didn't get right 5 years ago. It came later, after they'd spent almost a year claiming that the proper software extension mechanism was web apps. Obviously that doesn't detract from its success, but I think it's an important part of history. The app ecosystem that we all associate with "iOS" beat Android to market by only about 6 months.
I like the idea, kind of a PayPal for Bitcoin. My issues would be the usual: I don't trust a new service with my bitcoins, don't know anything about their policy for data loss, etc. The about page and support pages don't really instill any confidence. If I knew I could trust them it would seem like a great service.
I agree, the language runtime should support this somehow.

http://roboprogs.com/devel/2009.07.html#2009_07_30 (point number 4 in the numbered list)

Of course, I was thinking of a runtime attribute, rather than static typing, but the idea is similar.
I don't hate on people being interested in it I'm just surprised that people are:)
What it's like to have an understanding of advanced mathematics
There's no "wrong choice" to worry about.
Famous last words ;)
Smarty is the default choice, but of course you can simply require("tmpl/$LANG/index.php") - PHP's short tags like <?=$name;?> are almost as simple as Handlebar's.
> How do we communicate effectively what makes other languages better to someone with no reference frame other than PHP itself?

You're trying to convince yourself that you made the right choice, the right investment.

That's sad.

Have confidence in yourself. You made the right choice for yourself and let others choose for themselves.

There is no universal proper language or platform to use.

PHP works and it works extremely well for many companies. Its commercial success is not debatable.

Python on the other hand ... aside from Google, who's using it at a massive scale? Even Google has been shifting to Java for a long time.

See how that works?

Let's stick to the old parable. A proper tool for every job. If you're convinced that there is no proper application for PHP, then you're not even trying to be objective ... you're just trying to make yourself feel better about the choices you made.
"Couple" is of course a verb. There are other words people have long used for this too. There's no need for obscure new jargon, and it's ironic that a talk about simplicity would introduce any. It gives the wrong impression, because these concepts are neither new nor difficult. What's difficult is building systems that respect them.
Texas lap band procedure | Texas band surgery
Stomach banding surgery can provide a way out for people struggling with severe obesity. The surgery can be an option for severely obese people who have not been able to lose weight through diet and exercise alone.
Ask HN: PHP coders, what's preventing you from changing language?
The flavor du jour today on HN come from a couple of articles describing the difficulties programmers have moving away from PHP, despite admitting that the language is somewhat broken.

I want to ask PHP devs on HN:

- have you considered moving away from PHP?
- do you know any other language?
- did you ever attempt writing a non-trivial app in something else than PHP?
- what should be done to help you move more easily, if only by curiosity to see something else?
My company, LiveOps, does the same thing. Every customer impacting issue gets a post-mortem, and some non-customer impacting problems get one.

We have good stability (we hit four 9s recently), but we're always pushing for me. The post-mortem process is very positive and affirming. That's because it's transparent, as it should be.
Definitely agree with making the advantages clear. I can see how this could be a pretty useful interface to BTC for non-technical users. I might have to try it out myself :)
Actually, if you do the normalization to make it apples to apples (and adjust for the difference in RAM) it looks price competitive. My numbers make it look slightly more expensive than AWS EAST (teh suck) and slightly less expensive than AWS WEST.
Having done substantive work in both, the most significant difference that for me favours Python is that every module explicitly imports the names that are accessible within its namespace (barring use of 'from X import *' which is generally discouraged). In comparison I found it a real pain to track down definitions of specific names in a complex chain of 'require'd Ruby code.
I'm still curious why the target is C++ and not LLVM or a direct ISA. AoT seems very useful, using PHP as a language and not a runtime at least in deployment.
Anyone care to rebut instead of downvote and run?
This doesn't explain how incubators hurt startups. Also, i'm wondering what the author believes the ideal success conditions are for a startup? Billion dollar company? the tone suggests an acquisition is a failure.
Also, one anecdote about your non-business savvy friends thinking about launching an incubator isn't indicative of anything other than having delusional friends.

The streaming video example infuriates me too. What if you have a mentor with domain expertise in another vertical of the economy who sees a massive biz dev opportunity/pivot that the naive founders never considered? I saw this happen first hand while I went through StartEngine in LA.

LINK BAIT.
Anyone have any details on why us-east-1 seems to be less reliable than the other regions? Is it the oldest?
Anything like this automatically makes me reach for a suitable Dilbert reference... oh, here's one - http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-06-02/
My understanding is that Vista and beyond have a fairly indepth and rebuilt security architecture that actually quite good.

Am I wrong?

Further, Linux doesn't seem to have a different design when it comes to monolithic design and tends to actually have worse permissions problems out of the box WRT granularity.
Show HN: UniYu is a support network developed for students.
Robustness and stability are not properties of mod_php.
Is this a YCombinator start-up? I see PG's name there.
For someone looking to develop for the web, ruby is pretty clearly a better choice.

For someone looking to troll while looking smart and insightful, this comment is pretty clearly a better choice. Python has a ton of web tools and lots of companies build web services in Python. Ruby is simply another choice, not a better or worse one.
Ruby and Python are nearly identical in syntax and basic functionality. But I like Python's community and philosophy better.

If you agree there is a difference, then for some set of people, those differences will be the determining factor.

Also, while fairly comparing the amount of "web stuff" that Ruby and Python have would be an effectively impossible task, the simple truth is that both ecosystems are abundantly full of stuff, to the point that which has "more" doesn't matter. You're not going to miss out on anything by going with Python, unless you drill down to a hyper-specific particular package you may need which only exists on one.
Why does Apple allow competing browsers in the App Store, but not competing mail clients? For me the iPhone's mail app has terrible IMAP support, but there aren't any other options.
1. There's no "Videos" now besides the search category.

2. Earth is the 3D variant while Maps is the in-browser digital analog of regular maps that includes path finding. WebGL is not to the point of being able to deprecate desktop Earth, and you ought to believe that Google is more interested than anyone in getting to that point.

3. There's literally no such thing as "Gmail Chat". It IS Talk... it even says so right on the label. I suspect Hangouts will replace Talk within 3-6 months, but Hangouts are brand new and tied to G+. People would freak if they killed a product as old as Talk to push people towards Google+.

5. I agree. Though Google+ basically has already merged with Picasa.

6. Fusion Tables aren't even the same thing as Spreadsheet. Not sure what else to say.

7. Play is a market and Drive is the rebranded Google Docs.

I don't think they have a problem. I think you're confused, I think you are ignoring the fact that they've shuttered probably close to a dozen projects recently and are literally, before our eyes, merging projects into the new Google, Google+. (Events now is Google Calendar integrated in Google+).
A day later and I'm still laughing over this. :)
We have only begun to scratch the surface of devices that interact with/are controlled by our phones. Good to see Google popularizing the concept. I wish Apple would make accessory design more accessible.
You should read the GPL more closely and expose yourself to some of the legal commentary on interpretations of the word "distribution," as used in the GPL.

Your right to keep your changes to yourself end when you distribute your derivative work to a third-third party. The question is: what constitutes distribution? Some have argued that some hosting and outsourced management operations may constitute distribution for the purposes of the GPL.

Your approximation of the implications of the GPL are probably sufficient for most startups, but your understanding is insufficient if you are so eager to insist that your approximation is still applicable for an organization of the scope and complexity of the DoD.

That said, the article doesn't really seem to get it either.
The same choices exist for PHP, although you may not be aware of them. PHP runs on all the servers you mentioned, and there are many, many frameworks in PHP (although admittedly not quite as many as in Python).

Just choose one and learn it. They're all excellent web servers. I'd recommend going with Flask or Django in the beginning, simply because they have the best documentation. web2py also has pretty good documentation. The only problem with Django and web2py is that they are monolithic. If you don't like their ORM, or templating engine, or authentication/authorization, it's generally hard or impossible to switch, and if you do switch you lose all the benefits of the integrated system. With Flask and Bottle, on the other hand, you are free to pick and choose components. I think the same modular design approach is used by Pylons and Pyramid, but I'm not sure since I've never used them. But as you learn more, there's a lot to be said for being able to switch out components of your framework, or even writing your own in a pinch.
The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool. And that's a terrible place to sit for any product.

It runs half the Internet quite well, but if you went by the posting on HN, you'd think it was Windows Vista.

I've probably read every article critical of PHP that has hit the front page of HN in the last few years, and the one thing they all have in common is the vague refrain that PHP is a broken language. And yet the gap between tangible proof of that being the case in real world use and the gossip of it supposedly being true, couldn't be wider.
> It's great that you can see individual raindrops, but with radar, I'd think you'd want to filter the raindrops out.

Article says it was developed to spot stuff falling off the Space Shuttle during launch, so no.
Have you tried Sparrow? Phenomenal email app for iPhone and iPad soon as well.
You do have a point, this seems to be a fairly common way to vent yet still appear 'objective'. I do it myself sometimes, and occasionally pick myself up on it... mainly when I get away with it. :)

I sense this is probably done quite a lot in journalism, so you can write 'interesting' articles without coming off like a completely biased douche.
>"Whichever language I choose to replace PHP will have its own problems that will take me years to master"

What? Really?
Sorry to barge in, but I think this is a very hot topic
2 startups that do something like this more or less (if I got you right):

customer.io
intercom.io
PSA: There is a leap second tomorrow, are your systems ready?
Tomorrow, June 30th, a leap second will be added just before midnight UTC (5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern)

Most standard date libraries handle this edge case, but if you are doing any of your own hand rolled date/time processing, you might want to make sure you can handle this edge case (the existence of 23:59:60).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
The choice does matter. A lot. When I started with ruby, I had to decide between 1.8, or 1.9, or jruby, or several other choices. Then I had to pick sinatra or rails or merb or whatever. mongrel or passenger or thin or unicorn. It didn't really seem like the choice would matter, but then you run into some tiny annoyance, do a bit of research and find out that some other framework doesn't have that problem. So you switch, only to find a new problem. This goes on for a little while until you realize that you could write the whole damn thing from the ground up in lua.

The time spent just researching whether it's a bug in my code or their code starts to eclipse the total project time if done in another language.
Since PHP is a template language at heart, they go ahead and use PHP. For PHP folk, I guess the question is: how do people handle templating simply in other languages, since they can't use the host language itself for that?

EDIT: Disclaimer: I'm a PHP guy trying to make a break for it, and the question was both rethorical and tongue-in-cheek.
I enjoy stories counter to the current cultural sentiment, however I found this one to be very bland.
The article does use the word "cheat" and the winner himself said he cheated and hacked, but actually he didn't cheat at all.

Cheating would be using a human to generate the responses and pretend it is a computer.
Looks awesome! I would definitely buy this for $199 instead of nexus 7
PHP is an incredibly complex project which is being actively developed [1] and improved. If there were very simple ways to update PHP that were universally agreed upon, they probably would be added (Like short array syntax, built-in HTTP server or many other new features added in PHP 5.4). It just isn't a syntax issue, there are underlying principles about the way features are considered in PHP that are just different from other "similar" scripting languages like Python or Ruby.

If somebody had profound disagreements with the way PHP was being developed, they would be much better off switching or contributing to another language then they would be trying to re-invent PHP.

[1]: https://github.com/php/php-src/graphs/code-frequency
Mistakes Startups Commit: A Twitter Contest worth 10 MBAs
gem install sinatra && echo "require 'sinatra';get '/' do 'Hello, world!';end" > hi.rb && ruby hi.rb

100 characters.
Really, I wouldn't worry about making the "wrong choice". I can identify with this, and I think its a reflection of perfectionism, which is not a good trait to have especially when you want to make something new. It takes years to master a language/web dev framework, and considering the pace at which web dev is moving these days, your mastery will be incomplete and slightly outdated by that time anyways. The point is, thats not the goal you should have in mind anyways. You can start from scratch with a new web framework and start being productive in a week, two weeks tops. After that, just use it for your projects and allow the experience of those projects to help you learn more about the framework/language.
Even Bloomberg is almost a serial entrepreneur. Effective, memorable politicians must be to some extent entrepreneurial--you have to believe in your own ability to create change and to unify people behind your cause.
Is that tooling you mentioned related to/uses 'pfff' ? (https://github.com/facebook/pfff)
> Why does Apple allow competing browsers in the App Store, but not competing mail clients?

Uh?

http://itunes.apple.com/app/sparrow/id492573565?mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/app/emailganizer-pro-email-reader/id...
That your code uses neither is trivially verified with grep. Are you saying your issues would be solved if someone added a ten-line patch to gcc for -Wconst-cast (that provided a waning, obiously upgradable to an error, if you used const_cast; as in, similar to -Wold-style-cast)?
Waldo Canyon Fire Tracker
Your us-east-1b might be my us-east-1a.
I'd say avoid platforms that lock you in to that vendor, free or not. I've read of paid accounts being shut down just as unceremoniously. Or prices were increased 10X. Even when not locked in, one should be ready enough to move to another vendor without too much problem.
I've been using Flask the past two months for a personal project (hope to demo it on HN soon!) and I was wondering: what are the significant differences between django and flask? Is it simply the amount of things that are automated for you? Can you do stuff in django that you simply cannot do in Flask?
Who cares? Honestly? I'm shocked and appalled that the measure of ease of a web development language is the trivialness of a Hello World. This willy-nilly nature of PHP leads to the disaster that it is today. The language and API are, at every turn, willy nilly. The projects that use them are constantly rewriting and refactoring to follow a new or better pattern or organization.

I haven't touched python in too many months to write it here, but it's not much harder than importing an http package, creating a two line handler and listening for connections. Now you have a much more realistic and robust system and your potential for applications is already hugely increased. (Write a websocket server in php, go on).

Here, I can write "Hello World" in an even easier language!

`cat "Hello World" > index.html`
>> "you can scale a site to 15 billion page views per month"

You know what does that even better? C.

Oh, that's too painful? You want tools that make development easier and less error-prone?

Exactly.
Agreed, lets say it is relatively secure.
iCab is currently my main browser on the iPad. I've installed Chrome and like it so far, but I'm not sure if I'll stick with iCab or switch over yet..

I do wish that Apple would make Safari's javacript engine available to third party browsers OR allow them to provide their own javascript engine. I don't even care about the ability to open links from other apps with a third party; just give it a level playing field when it comes to speed.
On their about page (https://coinbase.com/about) there is written "Investors: YCombinator"
Are you seriously basing a whole argument on what the hello world program looks like? That has nothing to do with actual real world programs. Mixing logic & presentation might make it easier to get something running quickly, but it's one of the downsides of PHP that these things get mixed up when they probably shouldn't for a project of reasonable size. The whole idea that it's an advantage of PHP that you can get something up and running so quickly is wrongheaded. Actually, it's much better if it requires some amount of thought and planning to code something up because that increases the likelihood that you'll do it right the first time and build on a solid foundation.
Authentic Indian food
According to the About page (https://coinbase.com/about#), yes.

The AllThingsD article linked from the page mentions that the company is part of the current Y Combinator class.
So why are we spending all this money on "stealth" fighters if essentially other advanced countries like Russia can certainly have similar technology.
ChakraLondon is the best Indian restaurant in London and Notting Hill. Guide for Authentic Indian food, Tandoori cuisine in central London.
I totally agree. There are no free lunches and there will be no free lunches. Piggy-backing is fine but it's unsustainable if you don't offer the part you're piggy-backing something in return.
http://i.imgur.com/5lg7k.jpg
What people continue to fail to explain is why PHP needs to be replaced.

Why not improve it? After the millions of man hours that have gone into the plethora of open source PHP based frameworks and tools (aka, what powers the internet) - wouldn't we as a community want to improve the foundations rather then scrap them entirely?

You know, like what happened with Javascript...
I don't see the need for keeping open more than 9 tabs in Safari. Pages I need later, I save in Reading List or Instapaper, which also have the advantage of being available on all my other devices.
I'm a PHP dev who wants to escape. I'm trying to learn Ruby on Rails, but not doing well. I know functional Ruby and a fair bit of JavaScript.

The main barrier to my leaving PHP is that it basically forces me to use OOP. I want to use OOP, but I haven't got my head around it, and I'm yet to be persuaded that it's worth it and I don't really fully get the benefits.

Materials on learning Ruby and other languages tend to miss out that jump, which is the biggest one for me. Any ideas for getting me up to speed on OOP fully?
Sadly, I don't think there's any kind of "social contract" with web services providing APIs. Just as the exploitation of crowdsourced data is now common practice (including personal data), most organizations provide APIs only as long as they find free access in their own interest. There's little loyalty or feeling that they owe users anything, at all.
> Windows is a good desktop operating system but one with many, serious security flaws.

It's called PEBCAK.

For the most part, Windows can be just as secured as Linux.

Problems manifest when incompetent fools to incompetent things.
Ask HN: Anybody here do the Apple MFI Program?
I have an idea for a hardware accessory for iPhones. I was reading into the Apple MFi program and see that I need some initial investment even just to understand what the NDA/royalty agreement is. Apple requires a legal entity name for which I need to register a business license and they require to buy a credit review for which they don't specify the price. So, I am just wondering if anybody else on here has already done this and can offer some tips or suggestions.
I'm interested to hear about your CPU-bound Python programs that also involve large amounts of data. Normally such problems are I/O bound and are better solved in a data parallel way. (Graph problems can sometimes be an exception, but those are still generally I/O bound.)

For writing extensions, have you considered Cython?
I'm not intentionally trying to make you repeat yourself. And I know that removal of the GIL is not pragmatic at the moment (or maybe ever), but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be valuable. The GIL wasn't much of a problem ten years ago because not many personal computers had multiple cores. Today it's become a bit of a pain for me personally, and it will only become more painful as core count increases while single-core performance remains largely stagnant.

And all I was saying in this thread is that the performance gap between threads and processes isn’t that big of a deal, if you run non-native code anyway. The multiprocessing module is pretty cool.

This is a line that I hear over and over again, but I strongly disagree with. It's not always easy to predict where your performance bottlenecks will be until you actually start implementing it in some language. If I've chosen Python for a project and find I need more cores, I'm stuck with either re-implementing critical sections of code in C extensions or other languages, or using multiprocessing. And multiprocessing is not that great because it splits the memory space across processes and communication between them is extremely expensive. And there are many caveats to this which cause enormous headaches (eg., you can't fork your process while having an active CUDA context, not all Python objects are serializable, pickling is slow, marshaling doesn't work well for all data types, you must finish dequeuing large objects from a multiprocessing.Queue before joining the source process, etc.).

Yes, I could get a 10-100x speedup by re-writing everything in C. But most of the time, I would be very happy with a 6-12x performance gain from just using threads in a shared memory space.