skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, I thought this was going to be about who invented files in the first place. Why'd you call something a file? How'd that idea arise? The only real-life "files" I know are these reports the police keeps on people, or I guess any dataset. But who invented filesystems?

Edit: 302 found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_file#History
> Most of his criticisms were completely valid

Not even close. The author trolled through a bunch of other misinformed articles, copied some them verbatim mistakes and all. He doesn't know PHP and didn't research anything.

> Which ones have been fixed in the current stable PHP? And which ones can be avoided "with sane design"?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177516
I always assumed prefetching just grabbed html output... does it run javascript too?
I am always surprised with the level of argumentation in reference to programming languages. From my perspective, good development paterns and arquitecture are WAY more important than the language. It's similar to writing poetry or novels: picking one language over another won't make you a great writer automatically. Can you imagine Cervantes and Shakespeare arguing whether Spanish or English was better? What's most important is what you do with the words of the language, and not the language itself.
I'm not seeing a blog post.

I'm using Chrome 18.0.1025.168 (Developer Build 134367).
This is true.

Anecdote: I've used Ubuntu for a long time, but due to some nonfree applications dependence on mac/win I've gotten myself a apple laptop. It's mostly the same, I use a browser, terminal, vim and a thousand silly apps but they are about the same amount of config-time.

The biggest difference is that Ubuntu ships with APT and a lot of tools that are good for a hacker, but it's not to hard to get equivalents on osx.

Summary: Mac OS and Ubuntu are more on par in ease to use than I could have believed before I tried.
...Where once there was one rendering engine, now there would be two. That introduces fragmentation for any developers targeting web users on iOS devices, as there would surely be a handful of nuances differentiating the two. Even if those were just around performance.

I don't even think that matters very much, though – I'm just addressing the concern of the crazy fucker above.
from the link: "for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used."

They have a vision and it doesn't include 3rd party developers. I think developers were hoping for a universal message bus / directory of users and Twitter wants to be something else.
> when you reach many, many files, tagging and searching is typically needed.

When you reach many, many files, just try to get people to tag them. Just try.
According to this calculation (which attempted to probe all the racks in EC2), over 70% of EC2 lives in us-east.

http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/amazon-data-center-s...
What makes you think this radar is any good at picking up an aircraft like the F-22?
Yet you'll notice that the only features they mention that people might build upon are all features based upon contributions to Twitter itself, in the form of either content (posting proxies) or analytic data ('like' buttons, embeds). Consumption is left entirely out of the mix.
The funny thing about #4 is that php has been making a lot of progress on that exact front. Register globals has not only been deprecated but removed. Mysqli is now the default means of talking to dbs. Meanwhile, you see very fundamentally similar issues in, say, rails not getting the attention they deserve because everyone assumes rails is well engineered.

I don't mean to defend php overly much. However, it can't be ignored that progress is being made at making php better.
Well my reply was to the above poster wrt to Apple's inane policies in the name of security that kills innovations and and hacker culture.

For example: The most important app for me is iBlacklist for iPhone. It prevents nearly 20 spam text messages for me daily, which directly translates into less annoyance and added productivity daily. Yet, Apple will never approve this app for general public.

Same for Microsoft's on{x}, which is a genius innovation imo but because of the recent inane app store policies trend, even Microsoft had to release it for Android only.
Ironically, to turn it back on is...

$this->startAllThisPHPBashing(again);
I travel a lot and have to use UIs in several languages, and being able to copy the text on button labels (or graphs!) to paste it into a dictionary is very important to me. On some sites I have to fall back to using the web inspector and it's just as annoying every time.
> I'm pretty sure it's still the case that when you add a HTML5 app to your home screen (so your users see the icon instead of a bookmark in Safari) all of a sudden it doesn't get run on the Nitro JS engine anymore.

It is not the case.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/06/ios-5-brings-nitro-spee...
Segways would need parking / secure storage, or lots more upper body strength on the average person to get them up stairs. Costly physical barriers to widespread use.

Something like this pretty much just needs something to charge from. Like your computer while you work, and the wall while you sleep, from a USB port perhaps (which you already have).

Not making any claims as to which are more useful / applicable to more people. Just that there are major physical barriers to anything that requires even a pocket, much less infrastructure. A small wearable computer just requires somewhere to sit when you're not using it.
i'm so bored of these arguments and how people get so religious. its honestly nuts.
"The user is then presented 10 images (a tiger,
a house, a moose, etc) from a library of 10,000 images."

I should have made this more clear. The ten images are chosen randomly from the group of 10,000

The question is: are there 10,000 images that are different enough people won't be fooled. Say my picture is a green house. And a prompt has a picture of a red house, will I accidentally think its the right site key?

The good news is most people won't even have a picture of a house as their site key so it will protect a large percent.
It depends on the problem domain. I've seen PHP pretty similar to what I just wrote that worked without complaint. In some circumstances, great, bug-free, secure code is over-engineered and inelegant.
Agreed. Nothing beats a whiteboard for team work in a meeting.
And to put a finer point on it, tokenized APIs are basically whitelists.
Jailbreak me exploited a vulnerability in the FreeType library used while rendering PDF files. That has long been patched. While I'm sure that there are other exploits that we haven't discovered yet, a one-click jailbreak exploit hasn't happened since Jailbreakme, it it had, it would be ubiquitous. The odds are tremendously low for someone to accidentally jailbreak their phone.

I don't recall of ever hearing a story where someone accidentally jailbroke their phone, although I could be ill informed.
The "Everyone gets the source code, donations get you binaries" software model
In my most cynical moments, I think the business plan is to provide an API, let it boost your services usage via 3rd party labor, get successful, then buy what you want and lockout the rest.
Some people who have interacted with Glass testers feel that sometimes people seem to temporarily drop out of a conversation to process something they see on the display. How does Glass avoid being something that removes us from our physical environment?

My feeling is that this effect might fade away as people become more used to the device. Anyone who wears glasses can tell you that the first time you put them on, the frames are very distracting in your peripheral vision. You become accustomed to them rapidly, however-- within days, the frames are invisible, and you retain this even when you take them off for a while.

A similar phenomenon takes place when driving. Every now and then you realize that you weren't watching the road at all, just driving along automatically with your peripheral vision. And the haptic compass experiments have demonstrated people have the ability to gain an unconscious sense of location from external stimulus.

Obviously something popping up in focus is always going to be distracting, but with a notification icon in the corner of your eye, it's entirely possible that one would grow used to it and stop consciously noticing its appearance-- you'd simply have a somewhat-unconscious "email sense".

And there's no reason that should distract one from what they're doing; when the mail comes to my door, I don't stop whatever I'm doing and go read it. I make a mental note to check the mail when I get a chance, and continue the conversation.

I'm pretty excited about this technology.
If you are making a WebGL game, you do not want UI elements to select each time you try to rotate the camera.

I have used this property quite a few times for perfectly legitimate reasons. Any time that the user needs to click and drag to accomplish an action other than selecting text, you would want to use this.
Erepublik - win the battle and conquer the world
Erepublik is one of the best and most interesting online games in the online world. It is something like a small world, where everybody can achieve a place in the big battle...
What I'd like to do is make a project specifically for CoffeeScript (and maybe also JavaScript) which would run with minimal configuration under several CommonJS supporting environments like v8cgi and Node. The conversion from <?coffee ?> templating is extremely simple, and beyond that, it's simply a matter of pasting on some boiler plate to set up global variables. I honestly think that the reason it hasn't been done is that it is so easy to implement that people feel it must not be worthwhile.
But they could only pick it up when the aircraft was right on top of them, too late to launch SAMs. The method they used to down that aircraft can only really work if you already know where it is.
I too like the awesome bar in Firefox much better than Chrome's omnibox (mainly that it can match strings inside the URL). The FauxBar extension for Chrome is a pretty good replacement:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hibkhcnpkakjniplpf...
I think it missed the point. I seriously doubt Marco is mixing presentation and logic, using the file system for routing, etc.
That's really nice, if you did that congratulations!
And yet such an exchange will inevitably charge fees that are higher than credit cards, which hinders adoption.
$70 or so in VoiceBunny.com. Disclaimer: I'm it's co-founder.
Hackerne.ws points to the same IP address as news.ycombinator.com. Is the former blocked but the latter allowed?
Cracking the Nexus Q, Google's 25-watt amplified obsession
Some of my favorite data presentations recently have come from NYTimes online. Why? Simple: they're interactive, allowing me to explore the data and the relationships embedded therein. They're often very elegant designs, too, partly as a by-product of having to consider usability more than the average static infographic.
Harpers doesn't always translate well to the web for me.

On the web, when I read a list of semi interesting things, I want to be able to learn more about a few of them, not just digest it as a mass of fragments that, when considered as a whole, speak to the humor of the zeitgeist.

In print, over a bagel on a Sunday morning, Harpers and I might be better synchronized. :)
That rebuttal is fantastic. I never actually got through the entire "fractal" article - having read your rebuttal just now I can say I'm glad I didn't waste my time, thanks :)
I agree, and I understand everyone "has the next big idea", and hate throwing myself in that ring, but that is the only option at the moment. We do have some really great traction for such a young company, and we are profitable with lots of potential for growth.

I wouldn't relate equity to farts though, early equity at a company that has a successful exit can be very valuable. It is definitely high risk and most of the time (generally speaking) it won't amount to anything if a start up fails, however if it succeeds it can be worth a lot more than a salary would be. On the other hand, a jar of farts will always be a jar farts.

Anyways, I don't expect anyone (nor would I want anyone) to work for free.
How does it compare to glass? After using a glass-front whiteboard, I find it almost painful to use anything else.
I am looking forward to "Super Dev Mode" over OOPHM; got tired of reinstalling plugins per browser version.
Pretty much every PHP framework is MVC. Sometimes the view is just a separate PHP file and sometimes it's some kind of template language.
Facebook's 'Want' Button
Velocity Conference 2012 Presentation Slides
32 Bitmarks
Thanks, I had an email account linked to my account name. I've now also added it to the about section so it should now show up in my profile.
Paul Graham Indirectly Endorses Bitcoin
Actually, you can market before you've written a line of code. Ideally you've figured out some pain point that Instahero will solve, so why not pitch that? "X sucks, and we're doing something about it"

Write a sales letter. A great example can be found here: http://charmhq.com/ Start collecting email addresses, and send a lot of mail keeping everyone abreast of your progress.

Blog a lot, either with product updates or educational posts about all things analytics. Check out http://greatemailcopy.tumblr.com/ and http://customer.io/blog, both of which are helping promote a non-released product.

My network is pitiful, yet I was able to get 300+ emails on my announcement list before launching. And when I flipped the switch, about 1/3rd of the list signed up within a day.
What's is a amazing is I started my first business with $486.00 in the bank. Don't berate people because you don't understand how it's done. Several of my companies were partnerships with other people for funding.

As bedris quoted: "[the] definition of an entrepreneur is someone who makes things happen despite not controlling the resources necessary to achieve them."

It's not always about rich people having fun.. most of the time it's about people following their passion and pushing every limit to make stuff happen.

And most of the time it's about complete and utter failure and learning from that so you do better the next time. :-)
I stopped reading the blog article when I read the complaints around "private" and "static". The behavior is exactly what they were intended to. If he doesn't want that, he shouldn't use them. It also implies that he doesn't have much experience with languages like C#, Java or C++. Otherwise he would have learned this already.
Go FER, go FER, go girl!
You could do this for a long time by calling Event::preventDefault method on MOUSEDOWN event. This is just the same using CSS.

Obviously, this is useful for a lot of things, disabling selection being only one.
This is being reposted. The last post got killed from the front page due to a paragraph which was giving prizes through coinbase.com to first 5 insightful comments. That's now been removed as it was seen as scammy/cheating and of course that was not the purpose of it.
BTW, I'm never going to login on a site that makes me use Facebook to do it.
Good luck! One of the best books I found for Ruby was The Well Grounded Rubyist by Manning Publications.

Also, s/peaked/piqued ;-)
If you set a precedent that your product is free, no one who's signed up will ever pay for it.

Charge right away.
1) I don't get it. Completely dropping support would not break the brand experience, but allowing use via a simpler experience would?

2) The hardware issue was addressed in 3. Also, I don't follow, what do you mean by "the costs of supporting Chrome/Firefox are very incremental?"

3) That's a fallacy, actually. You're both proposing and confirming that "No one likes running VMs on their boxes because it still crawls". I, for one, run Windows XP VMs on my 4GB Core i3 iMac with no burden on the host OS at all. Some people might suffer with it? Yes, but some people could try tuning their setup for their needs.

4) Agreed.

Anyhow, we both know that the kernel of your argument is the first topic. I could convince you that the benefits outweigh the costs in 2, 3 and 4. But if your mindset is focused on giving the very same experience to every agent that can reach your app, or giving no experience at all; this argument is already over.

Also, saying that Apple does X or Y means absolutely nothing. Even if your company were almost exactly the same as Apple in every competitive aspect, nothing can assure that copying its culture would also lead you to a successful path. Actually, I believe history tells us the opposite.
I agree.. I often say the real talent is being in the right place at the right time. Sadly that's not always an option and sometimes it's hard work that helps even the odds.
Investing in Women: Infographic
"My feeling is that this effect might fade away as people become more used to the device."

The effect of removal from the environment will not fade, but the social ramifications for the user will. People are less pissy now when someone stops to check their phone during a conversation, but that's more due to the expectations of those around them rather than our expanded ability to functionally multitask.
Problem with HTML escaping by default - it's not all HTML escaping. Javascript strings need to be JS escaped, sometimes escaped by HTML as a second (or even first) step to complete the correct encoding needed to avoid XSS for the specific context(s) that output actually ends up in for a browser. Same for CSS, URIs, vbscript, parameters, etc.

HTML escaping is not the one and only escaping strategy that magically makes everything safe. So any automated system would need to incorporate overrides on a per variable basis.

http://blog.astrumfutura.com/2012/06/automatic-output-escapi...
Great, you've now effectively reduced your password complexity to a measly 8 characters, while forcing the user to remember a 16-character long password.
There's a lot of variation in responsiveness between different apps. Have you tried Penultimate? You certainly may be more discerning than I, but I've found it to have almost no lag.
I really, really don't like this guy. But the idea is very neat, it's basically the "sell support, no licenses"-model, just with support beginning in the pre-distribution stage.
I don't use PHP much, but I was curious, so here's the answer you don't want:

You get $a[1] = 0 the first way, and $a[0] = 0 the second way. PHP seems to evaluate the array index before the right hand side if there is something more than a $variable to evaluate; otherwise PHP evaluates the array index after the right hand side, after $i has been incremented.

I haven't used hiphop, but I'm curious if it preserves that disparity between arrays when translating to C++, or if it breaks PHP compatibility by making those two arrays equivalent.
We use shower boards at the startup where I work, and we not only mount them on walls but also cut them into smaller whiteboards that we can carry around in "decks." We might take a blank deck into a conference room, work out a design on several mini-whiteboards, and then carry them back to our offices to refer to when coding.
Ooooh, thanks!
This is the reason why I hated the move of the notification bar in Internet Explorer 9 from the top to the bottom of the window. And the UI is too simple to be spoofed.
It bugs me when I see this. Neil deGrasse Tyson is asking to double NASAs, budget as if that would be the best place to have money spent on science research.

NASA was the answer to last century's space race. Throwing money at it is an old, simple solution. I'd love if people came out with more ideas like the x-prize. I can get behind those new ideas.

Edit: and it's not like the military doesn't spend a ton of money on scientific and space research
Plain PHP with framework helpers, or Twig.
That's welcome news. The only downside of improving compiler speed is that I'll have less time to peruse HN.

PS - Great job on the presentation today. Sort of felt like it devolved into a marketing pitch (with Sencha et al.), but you're a hard act to follow!
My bank used to do this, and I never quite understood why. An attacker could easily mimic the site's behavior.

1. Attacker prompts me (or my grandmother) for login name.
2. Attacker gives login name to bank.
3. Bank serves proper image to attacker. Attacker stores image.
4. Profit.
OS X is only $39 if your time is worthless.

(See what I did there? Linux, OS X, and Windows all enable infinite tweaking. No setup will ever be perfect, and making it closer to perfect takes time. If all you want is a web browser, that's a click away in every major OS.)
This is a long weekend, by 1 leap second at least
Cisco forces cloud-based data-mining software update on consumers
Flagged. I don't really think it's appropriate to say that Paul Graham "endorses" bitcoin just because his company has funded a startup that's going to try to work in that space. That's putting words in the man's mouth. Maybe he only thinks it has a 10% chance of working, but it'll be big if it does. Maybe his team is convinced that this will work, but he is not. Saying someone endorses something is making a pretty big claim about their thoughts on an issue. That claim does not have sufficient evidence behind it in this case.
Agreed, but this distinction isn't made when bashing API opportunities. The haters on this thread and others state developers are fools for depending on APIs...not just APIs who have products that exist outside their APIs.
John the Ripper 1.7.9-jumbo-6 , adds GPU support in New Release
I agree that wearers of prescription glasses would make an excellent target group: We're already comfortable with the mechanics and aesthetics of wearing a device in our face, and many of us are also used to spending $$$ for eyewear.
The best way to find out if bitcoin is a viable platform is for someone to forge ahead with mainstream oriented services like this. We'll all learn a ton from what happens.

Payments is a great starting point for a mainstream bitcoin serice. The user isn't going out too far on a limb to use the service because it's just a payment. This could increase the chance of adoption, and lessen the impact of something going wrong in the early days.

I'm really impressed with folks trying to make a service like this work. I find any opinionated naysaying to be really boring. Can't wait to see how it turns out. Hope there is enough traction to put it all to a real test.
>My next personal project will be done in Ruby.

Here's a better idea. Take a very simple problem - say user fubar enters his name, you say "Welcome, fubar!", populate a backend database with his name because he's a new user. Otherwise you tell him "Welcome back, fubar!" and don't mess with your database.

This involves what ? Handling a GET, making a database insert, doing a select on name in a database, that's it.

Now go do this in atleast 5 frameworks, and time yourself.
PHP obviously, but do try RoR, Django, Play2, JSP and ASP.NET

I actually did the above exercise and came away with a lot of valuable insight. In my case Play2 was a breeze because on Heroku its trivial to set up, and each GET xxx request mapped directly to a xxx scala method in the Controller, so no magic. The others were a little more painful, but not a whole lot. I enjoyed the exercise.
Interestingly, Paul Graham's name is in the screenshot on the frontpage of the YC endorsed website (coinbase.com)
> What you're describing is called fractional reserve lending and we definitely aren't doing that

What? Why not?
This is offtopic, but I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your "PHP's Source Code for PHP Developers" posts. Please keep writing!
Farmers + Engineers = Farm Hack