skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Marco Arment's Second Crack FAQ's (hilarious)
It's very cool to see that after posting looking for a co-founder to get into YC, it looks like Brian has gotten into YC as a solo founder and by the looks of it, is doing great.

I sent his previous post looking for a co-founder to friends because Brian looked seriously formidable. Best of luck to him.
Look at what they did with all the pent-up innovation with Android tablets. Lets see, HP Touchpad, Motorola Xoom,Sony, Acer, Viewsonic, HTC, LG and a hundred others. How did they turn out? They even had full rights to change Android as they wished and all they did was make it even more bloated with uninstallable skins and adware

HTC and LG already quit the race. I am sure you'll find a way to blame Microsoft for this too.
>Moral of the story: be-wary of developing applications with dependency to a platform.

I've come to the conclusion that this belongs in the category of "Make regular backups" and "Use unique passwords and a password manager".

Everyone knows they should, and yet so many people refuse to accept that it could happen to them. I don't know if it's hubris or arrogance. How many times has this lesson been displayed in the last week on HN, let alone the last 4 years. iOS, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Twitter, often Facebook.

Not me! My app is too {small, unique, creative} to be a problem.
Of course not. By the time we see enough effect from carbon, it will be too late to reduce the emissions. Before that time, no one will invest in the commons as they don't derive any individual benefit.

Humans are imperfect sensors and even more imperfect judges of issues at this large scale. We see it even at such small sizes as our economy, much less the global ecosystem.

We operate on such small scales of time and space that we first need an extension of our collective ability to perceive before we will solve this problem that is so much larger than us. Perhaps there is room for technology there.
Facebook could one day let you 'want' what you 'like'
I agree wholeheartedly we should exercise caution!

But thinking less of Linux because the military picked it up and said "Hey this is an awesome tool!" seems wrongheaded and counter-productive to me.
I'm not convinced this is true. You see, way back in the day in 1997 when I was doing web dev, everything worked the way PHP does. ColdFusion, ASP (not ASP.net, ASP), PHP, and almost everything else that was seriously trying to do web pages worked that way. It took the community collectively a long time to stop seeing URLs as identifying anything but specific files. This is back when having those files be programs was still a bit of an innovation.

After 15 years of one of the biggest bursts of innovation the open source world has ever seen, and with such diversity in frameworks that the mind boggles, nobody has returned to this model successfully. I've got MVC-inspired designs coming out my ears, continuation-based designs, frameworks just beginning to incorporate web sockets deeply (instead of as an afterthought), GWT, ASP.net, and other attempts at building a fundamentally different model and compiling it into another, and everything under the sun... but no return to the page-is-program model.

I don't think it's the key to PHP's success, because even in the competitive-yet-very-fertile soil of the web framework world, nobody else can make it work anymore. I think it's vestigial, and nothing else.

(Personally I think the key is simply that everybody has deployed it, and since there's basically no way to force every web hosting company to support Language X simultaneously, PHP isn't going away until the entire concept of web hosting goes away. Which isn't anytime soon.)
When you get to the share button is that the end of the test or is there some secret level for l33t h4x0rs?

You can do the whole thing without JS, just use standard HTML forms. Assuming it does finish there.
I've used git much more than SVN. SVN's model is definitely limiting but it's very simple.
> If you open more tabs it closes the earliest opened tab.

This is the case with Chrome for iOS too. At least on my original iPad, Chrome trash the first tab after I open the 4th tab (tested this with Reddit front page) where I can open up to the 9 tabs limit in Mobile Safari. I guess this is just the original iPad showing its age. Things seems to works better on iPhone 4, but my point is Chrome for iOS do trash tabs.
There are a lot of ways to sequester CO2 besides just injecting it underground somewhere. Biochar, for example.
All I've read about CCS over the years make it sound more like a marketing/stalling tactic. There are huge problems to be overcome, most of the worst kinds of coal plants aren't compatible with it anyway, and there are big risks from leaks, etc..

All the effort put into making it happen should probably be used on long-term solutions rather than a band-aid.

More wind, more solar, more geothermal, more hydro, more investments in efficiency, and grid-scale liquid-metal batteries (see this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_... ) seem to be a better bet.
+1, this is fantastic advice. I found that when I stopped reading about languages and instead just opened tutorial and _tried_ them my learning rate improved drastically. Pick a tutorial and go.
Sure, the GPL allows it, but the GPL doesnt allow Bob to dictate what Alice does with the source once she has it (GPL v2, term #4). If she decides to distribute it, his recourse is to not do further business with Alice. That could be enough, but if Alice sees sufficient short-term benefit, that may be a risk she is willing to take.
> The only thing actually wrong with PHP, is that it's popular but not cool.

Hey now, we're all human. Even engineers. As soon as something becomes popular, it is no longer cool. Cool is the next popular. Cool is being different. That's just how things work.

Apache is slooooow (NGINX is cool!). MySQL is retarded (Postgres is cool!). PHP sucks (Python is cool!). Red Hat is lame (Ubuntu is cool!).

See a trend? The tech that sucks is the most popular and well established. The tech that's cool isn't popular. It has nothing to do with any objective qualities of platforms. It's all about being a part of the cool croud!

Remind you of high school much?

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.
It isn't as much broken, as it is just a bit annoying. Just a bit. Not enough to make it really bad, but enough to irritate you.
This looks great - I can't wait until you can start ordering from eBay and Amazon with bitcoin.
Sort of. Writing a program is usually a fun endeavor. Having the platform owner come and stomp on you, regardless of how much right they have to do it, is still a pretty shitty thing to do.
Personally, I wonder if this sort of pushback will drive us towards a more standards-ish way of approaching platforms where it won't be enough to simply provide an API – to get use, you'll need to make it a more standardized API that provides a more standardized sort of data – because only when we have those sorts of standards can we hope of it being safe to develop based on someone else's free API – because I know if I need to, I can substitute in (or combine) some other data source.

Relatedly, Right now, what I think we're seeing is a lack of real competition of direct substitutes. There is nothing exactly substitutable for Twitter quite in the way that products ranging from Heinz Ketchup to the Chevy Malibu face real, direct substitutes, rather than a more abstracted category substitute (i.e. Facebook is similar to Twitter, but it's not a perfect substitute). As such, switching costs are higher and it makes development for a specific platform more risky.
Smarty, dwoo, moustache, some frameworks have their own engine (codeigniter for one). It's pretty much the same as other languages unless you're still one of the people who embed piles of php code in the templates.
How do you know it's not memory I/O bandwidth bound? Just curious.
Business is booming on Kinect as Microsoft embraces hackers
Vietnam promotes investment and tourism in Hong Kong | Vietnam Travel News
I've never seen a web host include java, and no shared host has enough resources to support the JVM in the first place.

It's a similar problem as Ruby and Python, believe it or not.
Changing who to why is brilliant. That encourages investigation and understanding of the problem.
Jason Calacanis rant about Berlin vs. SV & Samwer Cloning Machine 
Watch the live ThisWeekIN Startups edition of Berlin vs. London tonight at 12PM PT here: http://www.facebook.com/twistartups?sk=app_196506863720166
I think that this could be the hero that Bitcoin needs. If they make it super simple / super clean they could revolutionize Bitcoin.

To the creators, have you considered adding a USD (or other currency) funding option? Since getting the Bitcoins is probably the biggest obstacle for most everyday consumers.
This article made me angry....

The writer went into a bakery and was treated pleasantly enough by someone who likely makes minimum wage. In environments like bakeries, or food service, staff are usually taught 'obey, obey, obey' or get fired. How many options do you think this fellow has? Do you think that working a till in a bakery is really his lifelong dream?

When I was young, I had a myriad of jobs. One was driving delivery/washing dishes in a pizza joint. When I was doing delivery, I had to take every single customer a free pop. And, if I didn't fill the plastic, 1 liter cup more than halfway with ice, the owner of the place would go on a tirade, scream at me, call me horrible things, and generally lose his shit. Pop in general is rather disgusting, but pop that contains > 50% ice is a new kind of disgusting.

It took me six months to work up the nerve to quit.
"Predictive prefetching makes sure Chrome already has the page data before you finish typing."

As a website owner, I really hate that 'feature', it really screws up the exit rate in my site stats (I don't run ads on my sites.)
Hey guys, what do you think. We launched couples months ago. Group of 5 guys, no investors.
I don't see it being any better than FireFox.
The one thing that can never be fixed is a poorly chosen feature.

PHP has a lot of them. And they interact badly.
A friend of mine tried to do this a few years ago (so I'm not sure how much has changed). It didn't work. She set up a company, had prototypes, proofs of concept, did the paperwork. They were not even REMOTELY interested, as it seemed like they only gave a shit about Nike. Again, not sure how much has changed; I would hope it's somewhat easier now...
And it basically still looks exactly the same. I suppose you can decide if that's a positive or negative.
Beware. If the environment is as bad as it sounds, the issue may get forced on you sooner than later. Something will draw the Eye of Sauron onto your boss and he will need to fire a scapegoat or get blamed himself. As the guy who doesn't give a crap you'll be both threatening and vulnerable. Getting fired can turn out to be a good thing in the long run but it's stressful and best to avoid if possible.
Sorry, that was my point. Strengthening the types in python3 solves the problem without static typing being needed at all.
How To Win at Three Card Monte
I routinely read full-size PDFs in duplex on my laptop screen, which is barely larger in physical size than a 7" tablet and actually lower resolution. That's a clear functional use case, right? So by your logic that makes you objectively wrong, not simply subject to different taste than me?

Stop it, this kind of flaming is beyond dumb. To claim that you prefer a 10" screen is fine. To claim that you can't read a PDF on a 7" screen is absurd.
All languages are annoying if you go by the griping, the more popular a language is the more amplified the griping. It scales out of actual proportion to the flaws, and instead scales based on the popularity. Then throw in the wide spread use, the trendy nature of people, and you have a recipe for endless bashing. The better PHP serves the bottom 95% of developers, the more the top 5% will hate on it.
Obviously we need to write a Python interpreter in PHP
I prefer Mustache, but there are plenty of alternatives.

http://mustache.github.com/
Licensed listening based on the habits of pirates
This just made me laugh. It reminded me of http://projecteuler.net/ where you are feeling proud because your solution works and then you realize it can be done in one line of one line of Haskel/Python/Perl/Ruby =).
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment...

The first app created a layer between twitter and its users which meant that stripping ads would be trivial & likely universal (they don't put ads in 3rd party app streams yet but should they chose to this would stop them) and you could be harvesting the analytics and user metainfo that twitter wants to sell for ad-targeting against what they probably consider "their" content. I can see how they would take exception to a service that allows users to fully control their interaction with twitter; it could seem too much like "handing the keys over" to a third party.

TweetFavor (ironically) seems that it would worsen the signal to noise ratio that Proxlet aimed to improve. Friends turning themselves into voluntary zombies in a twitter spam botnet? I know it's not actually that bad but I can see why twitter would want to cut this off.

None of this excuses the manner with which twitter did what they did, and like I said, "Devil's Advocate," neither of the apps were that bad, but it's not unfathomable to me why twitter would have a problem with them.
It is not that support is completely non-existant. Ruby, for instance, can be executed in a PHP-like fashion using ERB.

$ echo 'hello world' | erb
hello world
$ echo 'hello world' | php
hello world

If a new user could throw index.erb up on a server and have it execute in a Ruby context, would we be any further to supporting better development practices? Will the user take that experience and move into a framework like Rails later? If yes, what has stopped them from using the similar PHP frameworks that will already take them away from the comfort of the single page template?

If you truly only need a single page template without any further abstraction, then why not use PHP? It seems all of the complaints about PHP stem from using it in big projects. It is hard to argue that it does a single page template very well for when that is all you need. Right tool for the job and all that.
If you're a really good PHP developer and are considering using another language, you should ask yourself one question:

Why do I need to switch?

You've already gone through the pain of learning how to work around all of its warts, and you will lose a ton of productivity immediately after switching to a new language. This may seem trivial if you are just programming as a hobby (and fun, even, to learn something new) but if you are a professional programmer, the productivity loss can be a problem. If you are a freelancer billing at a good rate, can you charge the same thing to your new client knowing things will take you twice as long and be less optimal, with bugs happening in new surprising places?

Taking on a new language needs to happen for a better reason than "the language I'm an expert in is kind of ugly." Are there libraries that are only available in the new language? Is there a different server architecture that lets you write applications with several times the performance in certain important use cases? These are valid reasons. "Too many functions in the global namespace" is not, especially if you already have them all memorized.
Just by looking at a syntax table, the higher-level differences are not going to be enumerated.

Just off the top of my head:

- Ruby was always designed as an OO language, whereas Python OO was bolted on later. Ruby's object system is almost a straight transplant from Smalltalk and is very powerful.

- Python lambdas can only be one liners. Ruby lambdas can be arbitrarily long. Guido doesn't really like FP - there's no tail recursion, either.

- Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities are a bit more powerful (haven't really looked at Python in this regard, so don't quote me).

- In fact, there are some pretty big syntax differences. Python requires brackets even for the print statement now, whereas Ruby lets you miss them out if it's unambiguous. Ruby has blocks. Python doesn't have "end\n end" sprinkled everywhere.

The main philosophical differences are that Ruby is more powerful and implicit, wheras Python is stricter and explicit. When I say "powerful", by the way, I don't necessarily mean "good", just that it exposes more functionality to the user. Although I like Ruby a lot, I accept that on large projects Ruby's power (like that of Lisp or C) can be dangerous. Python has a lot going for it.

You're right, they're still very similar in many ways. Maybe they're like Democrats or Republicans; up close, they're screamingly different, but from a distance they're almost alike.
> You need to learn to stop trying to explain yourself, and start providing evidence that anything you say is true. You just look like a crazy person to me; I doubt I'm alone in this assessment.

> I'm not interested in your opinions of why you're right, I'm interested in evidence of your claims. If you don't have that, you aren't worth my time.

You are not alone in your 'assessment', sir, and to be quite honest, I gave you what I consider to be logically sound evidence that meditation can't lead to Enlightenment, but you won't find the evidence of this statement from me since I don't meditate. Therefore I am asking you to go look at what really happens to people who practice meditation and then confirm how what they can see, how they behave, and what kind of problems they have, are different from some people in human history who really had opened their eyes completely. If you don't want to, that's your loss. But even if I show you evidence by bringing the people in front of your eyes, if you don't want to confirm the axioms I set forward nor check the results of them, if you just reject me without confirming, then how can I be sure you properly understood my meaning in the first place?

Science and philosophy are two sides of the same coin, and you can't recognize evidence until you can understand what it means. I regret that I couldn't have had a proper conversation with you.
>Chrome is the best browser out there on laptops.

Only if you have as much memory as a desktop. Chrome is painful to use on anything with limited memory, even with very limited plugin use. (Roughly 20 megs per extension and 50 megs per tab).

I've had much better luck with Safari, even the Windows version. No lastpass for Safari Windows though :(
Agreed. "Without coinbase, this is how you would use bitcoins _____..., with coinbase it looks like this instead ____." Dont assume any knowledge of bitcoins.
So the behavior seems to be even worse in Chrome, as in Safari you can have 9 tabs open at most no matter what, whereas in iOS Chrome you don't know when a tab will be trashed.
Follow the "deeply flawed" link in the article to see lots of bullet points of precise criticisms. The target of the link is http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
Flask is not built for smaller web apps.

The idea of Flask is to build a good foundation for all applications. Everything else is up to you or extensions.

http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/design/#what-flask-is-what-flask...

There's even an entire section in the docs about scaling your application up: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/becomingbig/#becomingbig
Any technical details on how wallets are protected? I think we've seen how previous bitcoin websites have fared on HN, it would be cool to know some of the details on how the BTC are going to be protected so that the problems of the past don't happen again.
PHP "runs half the Internet quite well"? Source?
Is it that Bootstrap makes every website look amazing or is it that people who build amazing looking websites tend to use Bootstrap?
> 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.

This is solid advice for an engineer. And absolutely moronic for a businessman.

Choosing what platform to use is a business decision.

If you take too long to get it right, you will never get the chance to make a dime off of your work.

We are all working on limited time frames. It is far better to throw something together that works and rewrite later, when you're actually making money.

PHP is amazing at letting you write something fast and rewrite it into something more manageable later.
I am damn tired of his takes on PHP. It's damn pissing off to see the kind of points he puts in his posts.

I don't even get the part where he says that we need to come up with better solutions. So, if we want better solutions when are they going to arrive. It's not like that the solutions are getting baked in some oven or something.

We have new solutions that we can use. We may even call them better, but I don't think that I will quit a language just for the fun of using something new.

PHP might be st, it might even break at times, but there are some wonderful frameworks which have come up lately. Laravel is one of them and a number of developers are contributing to the code.
One cannot just ignore the fact that so many people have gone mad and not even a single one of them actually felt the need to quit PHP forever and build a new language that is better than it.
Wow, thank you for this - one of my favourite stories too. This is worthy of its own post in my opinion (Reddit would probably love it, too)

Edit: How much did it cost to get this done, and is the same voice actor still available? He did a really good job of capturing the ATC tone! I'd love to hear more sled stories read by him.
People make mistake, 100% of them. People who don't haven't tried hard enough or haven't gone out of their comfort zone often.
I don't understand the motivation for this design? Almost immediately I ask, "Why have sentinels? Why not have an election process exist within the ring of master service candidates?" The second question I ask is, "Wouldn't Zookeeper also be an excellent way to coordinate this sort of operation?"

I know that part of the design goal of Redis is to create a system that is "Simple" and "Readable", and the redis server as it stands succeeds at this goal admirably. But the approach in this draft is neither particularly simple nor is it going to make the codebase more readable. It seems fairly awkward and introduces more of a burden on the operations and management of your product.

Can someone explain the value of this design?
People are so insecure, I don't understand culture anymore.
You have obviously never worked on a million-line codebase.

When you have crap like this in your language:

> E.g., $i = 0; $a[$i] = $i++; makes a different array than $i = 0; $a[$i + 0] = $i++;

you have no hope of making a truly large program work. There are just too many sources of itsy bitsy bugs; you'll never find them all.

(I'm not a PHP user; I have no idea why those are different arrays. Don't bother explaining; I don't want to know.)
Well, if you're paying, you should at least have some sort of contractual protection. If you don't, you're just a wallet to them, not a valued customer.
I was in the exact situation a year or so ago. Everything I wanted to build, I always went straight to PHP.

I stopped myself from, unfortunately, not building things. I've spent the last year learning Ruby, Python, Rails, Django, and a half dozen javascript frameworks to get myself acquainted with it all. Only recently I took a position where I'll be working with Rails full-time. It's a tough addiction to break, but it's so liberating once you learn what else is out there and what you can do with it!
Use Veritable To Make Your Apps Smarter (Ruby and Python)