skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I thought replacing the browser (actually even stronger: rendering web content using anything but the browser) was one of the items forbidden by the app store guidelines?

The real case is somewhat more complex:

1. It is not possible to replace the built-in browser (there are no hooks to have an other application handle e.g. `http` links), but it is perfectly possible to release (and sell) a "browser" application through which websites can be accessed

2. It is allowed to render any content, but it is not allowed to execute downloaded code save through the built-in interpreter, so a browser can't run javascript code locally. On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to have a "thin-client" browser and do all rendering on a remote server, that's what Opera Mini does.
I seriously groaned when I saw this post (title).

I was expecting an elitist diatribe about PHP (because this is perennially popular amongst particular programmers) but that's not what this post is intended to be.

Interestingly Jeff does take the usual potshots at PHP almost like he thinks he'll lose street cred if he doesn't but the basic message I agree with: if you want someone to stop doing something you consider undesirable give them better alternatives.

That being said, I simply disagree with the premise. PHP has a lot going for it:

1. The CGI type model of creating everything, servicing an HTTP request and tearing everything down is a powerful one (and used in Python, Ruby and elsewhere). Once you go stateful (eg Java servlets) you have to worry about resource leakage;

2. PHP has a stateless core of API functions. IMHO this is basically ideal for Web programming given (1). It makes startup/teardown cheap and reduces resource usage (making it cheaper to provide for hosting);

3. Imperative programming is IMHO a natural fit for Web programming. One thing that's wrong with PHP is all the bloated OO mega-frameworks people create on top of it to try and make it Java, Rails, whatever; and

4. Inline code in HTML is a powerful technique. The learning curve for PHP is quite gentle.

So if you want to make a better PHP (something I'd encourage anyone to do rather than simply jumping on the PHP hating bandwagon) you should tick all the above boxes. Of course if you do this, you will probably want to fix some of the following:

- argument order consistency

- API function naming consistency

- default to HTML escaping on output

- effectively default to SQL parameter binding

- no register globals

- and so on

Side note: all of the above is well known. Pointing it out in yet another PHP hating blog post is both pointless and boring.

Jeff also asserts that PHP's popularity is sheep mentality. What nonsense. (1)-(4) above explain it far more than that, particularly the cheap hosting and inline coding.

I like to point out that 4 of the top 20 sites are built using PHP (Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr, Wikipedia) so--like it or not--it must be doing something right.

Homer (Simpson) once said "sometimes the only way you can feel good about yourself is by making other people look bad and I'm sick of making people feel good about themselves". I see a lot of that with (us) geeks but it's just so unproductive and pointless. You don't need to hate on "not X" to justify your choice of "X" (X = Python, Ruby, Lisp, Clojure, Scala, GPU type, phone type, tablet type, camera type, you get the idea).

EDIT: as far as Facebook goes, they didn't "give up" and use HipHop, they decided to have their cake and eat it too. They get the productivity benefits of programming Web pages in a "fit for purpose" language while getting most of the performance benefits of native code and they only had to give up some small subset of PHP to do it.

If you argue the subset thing is a problem try working in any C++ shop where using only a small subset of the language is de rigeur.
"fucking childishness"

I love that sort of phrase, I really do. It's so ... lacking in self-awareness. Really tells you a lot about the attitude of whoever utters it.
Well, they have almost all the profit now, which is what matters most to a company (not so much to its fans though).
Is this always going to be free? Because there are other competitors in this space currently with premium solutions...
I find Nick arguing pretty much to the point and the quote above was ripped from it’s context which is a huge section balancing the arguments against each other.

tldr He argues there are better ways for scaling out than threads and removing the GIL would have enormous consequence _throughout_ the whole code base so it’s removal cannot be warranted.

Reducing 10 paragraphs and 11 bullet points to “only stupid people use threads” is just poor style.
Personally I hate when icons replace text.
Listen to this man! He is absolutely bang on. That's my only regret with going Samsung Galaxy instead of Nexus.
Well, I doubt it would ever become popular if it wasn't useful and easy to use.

Actually, I think it is exactly because it's popular. All languages have odd ends, but you rarely hear people rant over Pythons lack of lambdas and weird explicit "self" parameter or Ruby's incomprehensible scoping rules. I'm betting that once they fall out of fashion, we will.

And no, I disagree. The main sentiment of the article is negative. It's a call to figure out how to dethrone PHP, but without telling us why this would be such an important goal.
Running Tips: A Fun Way to be Healthy
Sure, but the primary thing that should make someone feel good about their text editor is how efficiently they can manipulate text.
Possibly, but its possible that if another language had been chosen, it may still be languishing as some half-finished forgotten project somewhere and those engineers would never have gotten their jobs!

Who knows...
Who's Rasmussen?

> there are already easy to deploy frameworks and languages for the web, and everybody who cares about development is already using them.

And yet, amongst your rhetoric, you've conveniently managed to name none of them. Is this an appeal to the silent majority?

I'm convinced that there are really good developers out there who just keep building great products in PHP. Good developers write good code largely irrespective of the language. The code is a mere artificial interface between the developer and the machine.
I just bought one and in total it cost $268.99AUD which includes $24.45 tax and $19.99 shipping.

Anyway, I think the kids will be pretty happy.
Steve Wozniak 2.0  
With Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, the Fusion-io storage memory platform takes storage technology to the next level with the PCI-Express x16 Gen2.0 based ioDrive Octal with 10.24 TB capacity. http://www.fusionio.com/load/-media-/1td5wi/docsLibrary/FIO_DS_Octal.pdf
Various ways to create a website
Udemy Reinvents Itself With a Focus on Q&A, Personalized Discovery
Are there any examples that firing people when a company does bad improves its chances of turn around ? It seems like a stupid move by RIM to fire 5k people when their product is already delayed.
The three dots look to me like an action overflow button (now standard on Android ICS). It's typical "right click menu" type stuff.
What happened at Apple was—for all intents and purposes—a reverse takeover. In theory, they bought NeXT. In practice, NeXT’s management took over managing Apple and its OS became Apple’s OS.

I’m open to RIM becoming the next Apple. All we need is a company with superior technology and superior management that has been hampered by lack of a strong brand and sales strategy (not to mention certain legal agreements barring them from competing with RIM in its core markets).

Then we have them do a reverse-takeover, booting nearly all of RIM’s management.

Have I forgotten anything? Oh yes, then we need a hit product (like the original Jellybean iMac) that will buy them time to create entirely new markets rather than trying to compete in a business where they have already lost.

Put all that together, and you could have RIM being successful in automotive displays, or televisions, or making movies, or something provided it isn’t telephones.
Sorry - you are right.

1) 90% of our visual front-end bugs come from IE, sometimes only showing up in certain versions of IE7.

2) Our mac developers either need a license for VMware fusion or multiple boxes/VMs to test IE 7/8/9 which of course behave very differently. Maintaining these boxes, Windows licenses, and VMware licenses adds additional stress to IT, and the context switching for our developers is expensive.

3) For the ones that do run a VM, we've had to upgrade their RAM so they could run the app and the VM at the same time. RAM is cheap, but its still money for each new mac-based frontend developer we have.

4) A lot of our distributed application message passing is actually done through the browser via client-side javascript. This makes it even more of a pain to test since automating this is difficult and expensive (more setup code, and capybara tests), and needs to be run in each supported browser.
Euro zone: Bank exposure by country
خلفيات بلاك بيري 2012 
خلفيات بلاك بيري 2012

خلفيات ,بلاك ,بيري, 2012

http://pic.dlu3a.com/pics/72.html
Sometimes I wish they didn't trade legitimacy for page views so I could send their links to others without people thinking I'm incapable of critical thought.
>..my brother, without programming knowledge..
> He never complained about the "awfulness of PHP".

As the article states, if all you know to use is a double clawed hammer, it looks like the best tool for the job.
Basically, Jeff just agreed that PHP is simply better than the rest.

Easier != better. Nice try.
Why Privacy Is Big Business for Trial Lawyers
With Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, the Fusion-io storage memory platform takes storage technology to the next level with the PCI-Express x16 Gen2.0 based ioDrive Octal with 10.24 TB capacity.
>When I'm stuck in the wilderness with nothing but an atom based netbook tethered to a patchy and expensive GPRS connection, I beg to differ.

That's not a Desktop. That's a cellphone conection and processing power that, by todays standards, reassembles a phone more than a laptop.

But even on mobible, latency is a much bigger problem than file size.

>"hitting a bug in one version but not the other" issue shouldn't be more significant than the current "hitting a bug in a third party library (jQuery) which I don't have the expertise to locate+fix" issue that we already have to consider.

All things being equal, you have twice as many chances of hitting a bug with two code bases than with one.
'Crowd Quakes' Were A Key Factor In LoveParade Disaster
Cloud-based Content Management Systems Are Hot — Round Up 
If you think you don’t need a content management system right now you might be wrong. If you have a website, you have content. If you have internal communications, you have content.

If you have any documentation that helps your business run better, you have content. Every small business has content, and they have a need to control and manage the content.
My 2 cents: http://ianlandsman.com/2012/06/29/PHP
Err, I love Rails and all, but don't confuse ease of use with ease of learning. The thing about putting convention over configuration is that you have to learn a lot of conventions.
Programming is merely one skill of a hacker.
Speed isn't an issue, at least in my experience, compared to similar languages. Raw PHP usually beats Rails handsdown, and most PHP frameworks are usually comparable. PHP performance has increased markedly over the past few years, and particularly in v5.4. And if you really need a speed bump you can use the APC cache or HipHop compiler. Its never going to be as snappy as, say, C, but in the class of languages its in these days it holds it head up high.

I like the namespace separator, but I'll accept I’m in the minority on that one.
I just don't understand why this is a problem. If the goal of a web language is to build websites then JUST BUILD WEBSITES. Who honestly still gives a shit what you build it in?

If you are into .NET and build .NET sites, then cool. I work with a bunch of WordPress sites and WordPress uses PHP...so that's what I use. Until they decide to switch languages, I'm sticking with PHP. Until then, shut the fuck up and let me work without making me feel like an asshole for not conforming to your way of doing things.
I don't fit in your box. And I still think PHP is a decent language for introducing people to programming.

I've written web apps in: Ruby (both Rails and Sinatra), Javascript (Node.js with Express), PHP (my own framework, CodeIgniter, and eying Laravel), and been maintenance programmer for a C CGI application. I've written desktop and CLI apps in Object Pascal (Lazarus and Delphi), to CLI apps in Go, C++, and probably a few I've forgotten. I've done Object Oriented, Evented, and to some degree Functional programming. I am a polyglot programmer.

The problem is bashing PHP. As Jeff said, PHP's power is its ubiquity and its near omnipresence. It runs on just about any platform with any configuration, with almost perfect consistency. For the most part there's no switching extensions or libraries because of the OS. Develop wherever... deploy wherever... get almost an identical experience without lifting a finger.

In fact, I have great hope for the future of PHP with 5.3 and 5.4 as they (finally!) have added and improved upon the language, and have begun to cull deprecated features. The problem for PHP right now is twofold: web hosts refusing to upgrade in a timely fashion, and legacy codebases that refuse to be rewritten. Both these are demanding backward compatibility, and slowing the advance of PHP.

I'm tired of the bashing of PHP. Bashing, in general, is the absolute least effective way to communicate your point. At least Jeff Atwood is attempting to do something.
"Where real value can be provided, however, is in providing turn-key modules that allow developers to drop in native controls to supplement their web applications."

I'm curious - how is that different from the way other frameworks allow plug-ins? As I understand it (perhaps not fully) plug-ins let you drop in chunks of native code where desired.
Yep. Skunk works describes how they pumped it around the cockpit to help cool the aviation electronics and pilot. Just to add to the scariness of flying at mach 3+, you're also surrounded by jet fuel.
"Or what about the damage that proprietary platforms like .NET (which Jeff uses if I'm not mistaken) or iOS do to the programming world by restricting progress to a single company."

PHP is used for web development. Microsoft's best alternative for web development is ASP.NET MVC which is open source.
The first one. I think the language is pretty fair game. However, the bashing seems to carry on over to the programmer often enough.
The Reason
1. You can buy things even if they're taxed. 2. You can buy things from places that are not kogan.
He doesn't have to come to the USA to litigate it. That's what lawyers are for...
because they need pageviews to stay alive and someone over there figured, 'huh, i bet we can get this on the front page of hacker news'
Ignoring the point doesn't refute it. The idea that gay people are in fact people, and have the same rights as anyone else is not a partisan issue in modern, civilized nations. And saying "if I invent a definition of hate that excludes hatred, then by that definition Eric doesn't hate gays" is not a productive line of discourse.
Why are we, as a community, having these "epiphanies" about how to start and run a successful business? The functions and skill-set may have changed, but the core principles that drive an entrepreneurial undertaking have not. For over a hundred years.

Sometimes it seems like we believe that we are paving new ground, when all it is is that we never bother to learn from those who have traveled this road before.

A "hustler", as the article defines, should be the function of everyone in a startup, even us "hackers" (if we can come down from the pedestal).
Business Math: The Problem of the Local Maxima
I use Python for my day job. I've experimented extensively with Java and Scala. I must say this: Threads are AWESOME. Threading is the most flexible model of concurrency because you can can build programs that EFFICIENTLY implement "alternative concurrency models" like message parsing and STM with threads. Threading is supported natively by every OS. And fast.

Erlang is hyped as the ideal model for concurrency, but in practice is a niche product that's primarily useful for programs that are almost pure IO - chat servers, routing components like proxy servers and packet switches.

The Erlang model does NOT apply to python, anyway, since Python processes are nothing like Erlang processes. Unlike Erlang processes, Python processes are very heavyweight and message passing between them is costly.
Looks interesting. I looked at Geckoboard a while ago but gave up since the dashboards didn't offer the flexibility I needed at the time, and they were just too slow to render (I don't have a dedicated screen, just want to it the page often).

One issue: I tried to sign up using Chrome 20 (Windows 7) and the dialog that appears is below the video in the Z-order.
Jason Hutchens wrote a paper about his winning entry (linked in the OP), which is just as interesting as the OP. The relevant discussion starts from Chapter 7.

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/mindsandmachines/...
After Solyndra, A 2nd U.S.-Supported Maker of Solar Panels Going Bankrupt
Try getting Django to run on various hosting sites. Dreamhost - been with them for ten years, gave up trying to get Django to work after a month of poring thru the docs, trying to get tab A into slot 3x. Mind you, I really like Python, but it's not worth the effort for a couple more years.

PHP is the A-10 of languages. It's a slow, ugly and easy target. It works pretty much everywhere.
Would it not have been better to create a genuine video on how the concepts can be explained better instead of making fun of the course videos. Or better yet, launch a competing site instead of nitpicking.
No, PHP is a language with some framework-like aspects. Your nitpicking is quite poor.
The self-signed SSL certificate causes Firefox to scream security issue. You might want to fix that.
My own critique from watching a few videos on Khan Academy is that I hate how he makes mistakes sometimes and just leaves them in. (And corrects them in the next video)

I know that's his philosophy. But as someone who's a rules-based learner, it makes it really hard to learn anything when I start focusing on a mistake and wondering how does this fit with the general rule, etc.

And beyond that I find it much harder to unlearn something wrong than to learn the right thing to begin with.

It might be a good philosophy and practical for classroom teaching, but he needs to use the advantages electronic media offers and do some editing. At least to remove anything that's really going to throw a student off and possibly even discourage them.
You mean civil lawsuits? That’s not what I was talking about.
Don’t Kill a Site Because of a Failed SEO Program
Keyword Research Best Practice Steps
I think you forgot an important feature of PHP: it just works.

I can pretty much create and "deploy" a PHP web app within minutes of getting a run-of-the-mill hosting service.
> default to HTML escaping on output

??? Is that a joke? Don't do that! That's just as bad as magic quotes.

> no register globals

It hasn't existed for a quite a while now in PHP.

Other than that I quite agree with what you wrote.

Most of the criticism of PHP is simply a desire to be special. If lots of people are using something, you want to make sure not to, so that you feel special. Now that you've decided not to use it, you need to justify it to yourself. And people find all sorts of real criticisms in the process - yet none of them matter!
>Stick with 1.9 or 1.8

That's a terrible solution.

>unreliable connections and mobile devices with slow processors

Which are not Desktops, so I don't see your point.
You must be referring to this thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c1rcu/iama_person_with...
I'm not saying PHP is so great, not by a long shot; but if it's 2012, and people are still writing "OMG PHP SUX" posts, yet PHP is still everywhere, the only thing I can see that meaning is this: the things that matter to people who write "OMG PHP SUX" posts don't matter to anyone else.
If you want people to learn "problem solving", not just "following the rule to solve a particular equation", learn programming and apply your mathematical skill to a programming problem?
"I prefer Python". Why did you say that? To me it feels like you said it do people would take you seriously as a "real" developer. Because surely a "real" developer wouldn't actually enjoy using PHP or use it unless they were forced, right?

I agree with your point and I just wanted to add that the fact that we have to add in little details like "I prefer Python" just to be taken seriously says more about hacker elitism than it does about PHP.
It might be a good philosophy and practical for classroom teaching, but he needs to use the advantages electronic media offers and do some editing. At least to remove anything that's really going to throw a student off and possibly even discourage them.

Leave the mistake in and then correct it.
Personally, I would agree with you.

But Hutchens' own paper was called "How to Win the Turing Prize By Cheating" -- http://www.csee.umbc.edu/471/papers/hutchens.pdf -- so I guess reasonable minds differ.
Tis a pity the Windows 8 desktop is not that clean.
a few years ago a graphic designer asked me for some help using PHP to query a database.

I wrote a little thing that worked, and then said, "oh wait, this could be a problem with SQL injection, here's how you fix that".

And his response was "umm can you just send me the first thing you wrote".
Irish Consumer Marketing Database
A coworker manages to get his kids to bed by 8:30... he dines at 7 which is insanely early by my country's standard (Uruguay).

As brc says, it's routine, routine, routine. I'll definitely get my coworker's advice by the time I have children !! :) .
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Perception Of Performance. On the new IOS Chrome & Safari.
I am the developer of InfoCaptor and would be pleased if you can take a look at https://my.infocaptor.com
I don't think you have to go all the way back to the ST,Amiga era, I recall there was a surge of Win32 assembly after that with some nice assembly applications as the result. However with the level of optimization offered by compilers today, these days assembly seems mainly relegated to where it's fine-grained control allows for better performance in extremely performance oriented parts of code. An example of such would be SIMD code where highly fine-tuned assembly code often runs circles around the compiler generated equivalent, as proven by simply comparing x264 performance with or without assembly optimizations.

Personally I haven't done any assembly programming in atleast the past 6-7 years but I still get the urge now and then to program in it again. However, even though it's unlikely that happens, my assembly experience has given me a thorough understanding of how the computer works at a basic instruction/memory level which has been extremely valuable when I want to create optimized code in higher level languages (like C). So yes, while learning C is certainly worthwhile even if you are going to write in even higher level languages, learning or atleast graping the fundamentals of assembly is in my opinion even better.
You could have said the same thing about Apple in the 90s.
I don't understand. Are you disagreeing?

I think leaving the mistake and correcting later is very confusing and possibly discouraging to students. What is your response to that?
Haters Gonna Hate!
damn, that was spot on.
Yeah, but do most programs that need to scale also need shared context? Otherwise, what are the big downsides of processes vs threads?
I'm just saying that Microsoft offers tools(languages or frameworks) for web developmet that are open source. And yes you have Mono project also.