skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really? I've never seen Chrome close a tab on the Galaxy Nexus. I've gotten it up into the low teens on several occasions...
I did the math on those liquid-metal batteries a while back, and figured out that getting an adequate amount of grid storage would take about a thousand years of antimony production.

Tom Murphy's Do the Math blog is pretty good for this sort of thing. Most renewables can't scale up to run civilization (nor can their combination), and storage is an unsolved problem at the scale we'd need.

The two non-fossil energy sources that could do the job are solar (not counting the storage problem) and advanced nuclear.
RE: 1) this entirely depends on what your business model is. If you're validating your "insert SMB supporting SaaS here" in the market, you better believe I want to see you ring the cash register with your minimum viable product. If your building that "insert new cool social thing here", then go ahead and get your millions of users before you think about revenue. If you're referring to the "salary" of a founder as motivation, well, I don't see how having more money from that seed investment would hurt you more than not having it.

RE: 2) incubators are hedge funds. they provide extremely loose structure to make sure their assets are serious. Show me a startup with no milestones and I'll show you a startup that isn't going anywhere any time soon. "we totally would have succeeded but we got bogged down in achieving goals and getting things done on time."

RE: 3) If you're a founder and you don't seek advice, then you have no business being a founder. This particular point is agnostic of whether you're in a program or not. Sitting on top of a mountain and divining a business out of your own genius is not the most likely way to succeed. Talking to others and listening is. Best thing to do with bad advice is recognize its bad advice by talking to someone else about said advice. You will still receive bad advice, even if you aren't at an incubator btw. It's the founders job to scrutinize advice in the context of their vision/optimal business outcome.
Cool, thanks. Guess I haven't searched in a while. I know at one point there were no competing mail apps ... just folder/organizer type apps.
Chrome #1 Free App on AppStore
You know the old joke about being involved vs being committed, the punch line is that in a bacon and eggs breakfast the chicken is "involved" and the pig is "comitted." So it is with web service APIs.

If you have 'free' API access then you are providing some benefit to the web service (whether you know what the benefit is or not), when you have a 'paid' API access you are a customer of that web service.

If you're paying for a service as part of your product, you need to understand how your costs may change over time, and generally you put into the contract language under what conditions and time frames the price can change.

This is one of the essential differences between building products and building demos. Just like an engineer might build a circuit that works to prototype something, they will go back and do all the edge case and tolerance analysis prior to putting it 'into production.' If you've never shipped a product before it can sometimes be a painful learning experience to get these sorts of lessons the hard way.
Either people are stupid, or despite a few publicized cases of apps getting shut down, the benefit of being able to build on someone else's API outweighs the risk. It's probably a bit of both.
How is this different than MtGox? I don't trust MtGox, but at least they've made mistakes and have spoken publicly about how they've fixed those mistakes.

On the other hand, are these guys storing my wallet safely? How about my balance (please god, don't store it as a float)? How about my password? If they're not launching with two-factor auth I won't even give it a chance (and likely ever, honestly).

I've gotten progressively more and more pessimistic about these sorts of sites even though I like the idea of BitCoin as a currency. If security isn't heavily discussed and visible (2FA, do it!) at the launch, it will be hard for me to take this seriously.
"... run into some tiny annoyance, do a bit of research ... So you switch ..."

If you pick a solution and run into a tiny annoyance learn to work around it in some way. It is a tiny annoyance.

Best case scenario, learn why it's happening, how you can fix it, and (in a dreamland) submit a patch that fixes this for everyone else in the future.

Worst-case scenario just find a workaround.
1. Absolutely.

2. Where did you get the idea that Google asks questions out of a text book? But yes, practicing your whiteboarding skills is a good idea. It comes in handy once you actually work as a team on designs. (I love to sit down and sketch out things for myself, but from a certain problem size on that's largely practical)

2.1 It's a basic filter (and should be part of the phone screening, before you waste a day on interview). A surprising number of people really has trouble understanding even mildly advanced data structures. If (and only if!) those matter in what your company is doing, screen for that as early as possible. Trees do the job.

4. Be careful about that. If you keep interviewing successfully and turning down offers because you like your current place, you are (at least temporarily) closing doors. So be sure to know at what conditions you'd be willing to switch, because you just might get an offer that's hard to refuse.
Pro Hunter
Your example of simplicity is a bit conflated since you don't even need PHP to put hello world on a internet visible web page in the first place:

echo 'hello world' > /var/www/index.html

Set up something a little more useful albeit trite such as a blog and you wouldn't be able to do that in 10 minutes with PHP without using a framework either. PHP is great for "unit testing" of ideas but once it grows out of that it's debateable

I do concur that deploying a Python or Ruby web app is a pain in the ass. Installing git and installing Heroku, you're only 2 lines of code away though.
How is the readability from a distance? Between the grain of the individual boards and their color it seems like there is less contrast and more "noise" when compared to a generic white board.

They do look nice though.
Who remembers the PC game Descent? Can you handle 6 Degrees of Freedom?
Common sense. Calculate how much traffic Wikipedia + Facebook + Wordpress + All The Rest generate. Calculate in the fact that most services talk to other services and more importantly, talk to Facebook.

Click on a link?

I promise, at some point, PHP is involved.
You can already redeem bitcoins for Amazon giftcards through various services, for example: http://coincard.ndrix.com/
I'm not seeing any tabs get trashed on my iPad 3.
I jQuerify'd it
It looks nice, but I don't see anything addressing safety and security. How does this service guarantee that any money you transfer to them will be kept safe? Also, do they guarantee that if a break-in occurs like the Bitcoinica disaster, that users' monies will be returned?
There is some truth to this. However, if you define a "better language" as one which is more consistent and predictable and less buggy, that implies less time to master.

One thing I love about Ruby is how many methods suggest one another. For example, Enumerable collections, like arrays, have an `any?` method. It takes a test function and returns true if any of the items pass that test.

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5].any? {|i| i > 4 } # true

Ok, you just learned `any?`. Now, you can replace `any?` in the above with

1) `all?` - do all elements pass?
2) `one?` - does exactly one pass?
3) `none?` - do none pass?

If you can remember one of those, chances are you can remember others. And if not, `myarray.methods` will remind you.

That same array has a `max` method and a `min`, a `max_by` and a `min_by`. It has a `select` to get all matching items and a `reject` to get all non-matching items. Knowing one helps you remember another.[1]

The key is consistency. It speeds up the learning process and makes you refer to the documentation less often.

That's the advantage of choosing a good language. It reduces the very pain that the OP is worried about.

==========

[1] (But wait, there's more! Any class you create, if you define `each` and `include Enumerable`, gets all these methods for free!)
Simple versus easy [1]. Getting started with minimal friction is a great virtue for the beginning of a project's life, particularly when it allows amateurs to produce something of value. Software development professionals with stronger requirements (reliability, maintainability, ease of code reading) are not always going to reach for the easiest tool. There's a reason most of the software on your machine isn't written in Visual Basic.

The people who prefer PHP are right. The people who avoid PHP are also right. They are solving fundamentally different problems.

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
Hopefully by then GNU HURD will have reached 1.0.
Honestly, I signed up for Kicksend to see this and I saw a one second long, underwhelming animation, that wasn't even very rewarding for my effort.

I totally expected the camera to "follow" the rocket and all I saw was a sloppy rocket sprite jump off the screen.

You guys have the right idea with this, but poor execution.
The Care and Feeding of your Front End Development Team
Also with a link the other day to something about graphene I got to thinking, "Graphene is just carbon, why not convert CO2 to graphene?". Turns out someone already did: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110620161308.ht...
And a lot of Microsoft's success was courtesy of partners with aligned interests (not unlike Android, it should be mentioned). Dell, IBM, HP, Compaq (pre-destruction), and on and on: all assisted in Microsoft's growth to powerhouse.

Apple pursued a very different approach -- one that was a running failure for many years -- until they rose, in my opinion, on the back of the iTunes entrenchment. Now they're making major dough by their position, but it's one that few others can emulate (RIM is currently falling hard with the same approach).

Can Microsoft cargo-cult and copy one part of that and grow by leaps and bounds? Maybe, or maybe not. De-aligning with their partners is as possibly a disaster in the making.
You're completely right -- I phrased that badly.

What I meant was that it lends itself well to small apps because the lack of code/architectural overhead, as opposed to Django, where coding small apps often feels like only furnishing one room in a five-bedroom house.
No fucking shit?

Also, this article is a textbook correlation-causation problem. You tend to date people in your social world, you tend to Facebook people in your social world, the idea that you date people because you share Facebook friends so thoroughly fails the smell test that the article's author mocks it... but instead of realizing that indeed, it is that stupid, uses it as the article's hook instead of a reason to not bother writing an article at all.
I propose this as a blueprint for a solution:

{%
name = request.get('name','world')
list = ['this','language','rocks']
%}
<h1>Hello {{ name.upper }}</h1>
<ul>
{% for item in list %}
<li>{{ item }}</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

Save it as 'index.nxt' and run it in any future language you are going to design.

Create a mod_next and try it on any web server like apache, nginx, etc. It should work without any extra fiddling with config files or installing frameworks or template engines.

It should just work!

That's the kind of platform that would leave php behind once and for all.
Answer Devices promotes Mobile Assistants
Did you see the WP8 Announcement? Lets reevaluate that one in a year
>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.

Just because something is shitty to use doesn't mean you can't do productive work in it. We're all just poking Turing machines here. Let's not even talk about the enormous weight of sunk cost fallacies.
What's long-winded is the amount of text that's not actually related to the design and operation of the engine. The information he provided was actually fairly slim but there were a lot of proverbial "oohs and ahhs."
The Haskell frameworks do this, more or less: www.snapframework.com, for instance.
I was actually pleasantly surprised by not reading about the usual "webscale" BS in these two articles. Both authors made it very clear that this is not about being able or unable to build something with a given language, but the quality of how you do it.
Nitpick: creep is different from relaxation.

Creep is when you apply a constant load on the material, and the material elongates (creeps) gradually, keeping the same stress.

Relaxation is when you apply a constant extension to the material, and the stress reduces gradually (material relaxes), keeping the same extension.
I see that you understand these as steps to be enlightened and perfect oneself, but these are not the things that the saints practiced before becoming Enlightened, but rather afterwards. The reason is that you already need to have a very high level of consciousness before you can distinguish right and wrong correctly - it can't be practiced until you've already realized.
Proxlet never made any attempt to block ads (they didn't even exist when we built it!) That said, it's really no different than a normal 3rd party app which could do the same thing. Again, my beef was the manner in which they shut it down abruptly stranding users.

TweetFavor just supports an existing pattern "hey dude, can you tweet this for me?" And permission had to be given per-tweet request, there was no mass zombification. You'd pledge individual tweets. Once again, no reason as to why it was shut down, and certainly no one used it before making the call.
Ubuntu is more popular than RedHat Linux
It's not as zero-sum as you seem to imply.
Hi Mike,

I am participated here and helped the other posters in past. Right now I need feedback on my latest venture http://simplyhire.in/. Let me know if you can help me with some contacts.

-Hemant
Hybrid cloud deployments of Stackato using jclouds & Brooklyn 
Cloudsoft CTO Alex Heneveld and ActiveState's Diane Mueller demonstrate how to run applications in hybrid clouds via Stackato (Platform as a Service) using two open source projects: brooklyn (a control plane for distributed applications) and jclouds (multi-cloud library that helps deploy Stackato in multiple clouds). The demonstration showcases a hybrid cloud that spans both the HP Cloud and Amazon`s AWS.
When you "improve" inconsistency and misfeatures, you're essentially replacing anyway. Else you're building a mess of backward compatibility like in the fopen() example in http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
> Installing git and installing Heroku, you're only 2 lines of code away though.

Which requires you to learn git.
American ISPs to launch massive copyright spying scheme on July 1
I'm under the impression it's the most used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

Just because a technology is "cool" doesn't mean that you're acting like a high schooler for using it. Nor does using non-"cool" technology make you an adult.
Yes, we should all just hold hands, sing kumbaya, and subsist on the gum drops and jelly beans that rain from the sky.
The high-risk world of AAA game development offers little job security
Cloudsoft CTO Alex Heneveld and ActiveState's Diane Mueller demonstrate how to run applications in hybrid clouds using Stackato -- ActiveState's Platform-as-a-Service for private clouds -- and two open source projects: brooklyn (a control plane for distributed applications) and jclouds (multi-cloud library that helps deploy Stackato in multiple clouds). The demonstration showcases using Open Source tools to do a hybrid cloud that spans both the HP Cloud and Amazon`s AWS.
Yet another Chrome release
"Coinbase now offers Two-Factor Authentication"

http://blog.coinbase.com/
I increacingly question the notion that there are any just wars, but I don't really see how such a clause is practical or enforceable.

Even if it were practical and enforceable at keeping "evil" from co-opting code contributed by "good," it would also reduce opportunities for "good" to co-opt code contributed by "evil."

I'll point out that the technology we are using to have this discussion was underwritten by the military. The military dumped a lot of money into integrated circuits before commercial applications could fund Moore's Law, and the Internet was also the outcome of a military project. You can argue that there should be other means to fund such advancements, and I'd agree, but this is where we are now.
There is a lot of miss information on that form.

First off, both energy and velocity is conserved even though Energy is a function of velocity squared.

So when you mix air of two different velocity's you get direct heating along with the change in velocity. You also get quite a bit of thermal radiation which heat up the air before it feels the physical effects from the craft. So, while the pressure does increase the actual pressure never get's all that high despite the huge increase in temperature. For a sanity check if you assume the energy of the air starts at the equivalent of ~30c at 1ATM and 1ATM = ~15lb/square inch then pressure required to get anywhere close to the observed temperatures get's ridiculous as in 100's of g's of deceleration.

Also, the blunt surface in front of a hyper-sonic aircraft collects a pressure wave off the surface. With the air next to the skin moving at the same relative speed as the craft. So the friction heating precedes the craft, and is negligible right next to it. The aircraft is also cooling the air next to it which is what creates the cooler buffer zone. (This is why they use blunt surfaces in the first place.)
What surprises me is not that a platform provider will do things in its own interests, it's that people keep falling for it.

Seriously.

This isn't new eg [1].

Also, I don't really buy into the argument that these third-party providers is what made Twitter popular. IMHO Twitter made Twitter popular and the devs just followed the money.

[1]: http://gigaom.com/2011/06/07/fred-wilson-to-devs-expect-plat...
> Now, if this is just a hobby, who gives a shit? Roll with the cool kids. If you're starting a business, be aware that the future welfare of your family is relying on your decisions. Think real hard about that.

Truer words have never been spoken. When you think about it that way, these types of arguments about why language X rocks/sucks become trivial and unimportant.

I like to geek out over languages and technologies as much as the next guy, but there needs to come a time when you put your foot down and make a decision based on more important reasons than personal preference/feelings towards a language.
"Widespread Adoption"
About $2 million a day (USD) is already being transacted in bitcoin. It's quickly becoming an international currency of the world.

Er... bit of a stretch
I suspect it's the "all the things you can do with it" part, not the format. Using the SDKs you don't see any of the underlying ugly, anyways.
How is a user protected from a transaction history subpoena?
Yes, but...

All languages (like any system) will have cruft, after a while. Is the solution really to do a periodic break with backwards compatibility for purity reasons, Python 3 style?

There should be a better way?!

What about a low level machine like Java/.Net and just let the next language evolve on top of that -- so old libraries could run? (Maybe there could be Xcompilers for Ruby/Perl 6/xxx to the Perl "bytecode", to take advantage of CPAN?)
I agree, I can understand IE6 since not even ms supports it anymore but 7 and 8? Seems a bit drastic to me.
Have they been hacked yet? It's a rite of passage.
When you actually have a real source or numbers, let me know.
> It has nothing to do with any objective qualities of platforms.

The problem is, it often does take into account objective qualities.

The downsides of popular platforms are often ignored because they carry with them all the advantages of popularity: good support, a well-established community, a wealth of experienced people you can hire or draw upon.

These are not "objective qualities" of the technology, but real side-effects of popularity. In fact, you could say it's a technology's popularity that fools you into ignoring many of the objective qualities of the platform.

I think part of tech hipsterism (which, let's face it, is what you're talking about) is a rejection of this groupthink, and a return to true technological thinking. It's the ability to say "we don't care what's popular, we're just going to look at what works again and see where we end up." I think this very idea is considered 'cool' in the tech world because we tend to like people who think logically about their problems and don't just blindly follow what people have already done. We like people who look at lesser-used technologies (which all of the "cool" tech you listed above actually are) just on their technical merits alone. This is, perhaps, one reason they're considered cool; because it takes actual thought to break away from simply using what everyone else has used for years.

So I think you have noticed a definite trend, but I don't believe it's as purely social as you imply.

That said, "be aware that the future welfare of your family is relying on your decisions" is an argument that's used in so much Enterprise software that it's almost scary. Often the most popular, most entrenched, least risky, biggest company with the largest pockets wins because the CTO can't be blamed for fucking up that decision. It's an incredible driver of technological stagnation in the Enterprise world. It is great to think through your decisions to their far-reaching impact, but be thankful that all of technology is not driven by that kind of strictness, or we'd never use anything new.
Not for servers. Which is what we're talking about.
There's a fantastic reason: Having fun. Programming should be fun. If you find the language you're working with being ugly and terribly designed, it's hard to believe you're having fun.
I've just been rewriting much of the stuff I can't stand (or adding the stuff I can't find) like this ... http://tetraboy.com/lolcode/ and various easy helper libraries for more intuitive/flexible functions .... listcontains("1|2|3", "|", 3). Most problems solved.
The only thing flawed with PHP is your outlook on it. People with money (investors, clients, etc.) don't care about ANY of the nuances mentioned here or by Jeff Atwood. At the end of the day, we use PHP and are rewarded for doing so. If you want to use another language or make a new one...Great. Do it. But I'm not sure why some people just want to try to change an entire industry and move people off of PHP... It makes no sense. No one is holding a gun to your head to use PHP. You have alternatives and if you're not happy, make something yourself. You can't have everyone hold your hand your entire life and do things for you.

PHP is good. I'm living proof of that. I'm a very successful developer and PHP does just about everything I ask of it. I also find it enjoyable (when you don't use crap frameworks or CMS' like Drupal). For those of you that do struggle with PHP, then what on God's green Earth makes you think you'll do any better with the next language? There comes a point when you've rifled through everything saying they are all junk that you gotta look in the mirror and ask yourself what's really the problem?
How do you feel about Facebook?
How Do You Feel About Facebook? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92zTigbWnME&feature=plcp Please share
carltilchen.wordpress.com Carl Tilchen Singer/Songwriter
Simple bookmarklet, straightforward instructions, great job.
I know what you mean. I have a lot of issues with AWS, but the AWS console is exactly what my manager needs so he can do things himself. Simple things such as AWS load balancing fails when we get any decent amount of traffic.