skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. At first I wondered if the claim was a joke or if it was supposed to be a mercy killing of something that was barely alive anyway. But now I see that the inventors of an different product are trying to ride upon the brand name recognition of another product, without clearly thinking through how badly this approach might backfire.

Clearly this is a motorized unicycle being marketed, through pictures of tough and hip looking riders with leather jackets, to motorcycle enthusiasts who are also wealthy and interested in high tech gizmos. It's a very different marketing approach from the green and easy approach that Segway attempted. Distancing themselves from the Segway market segment rather than trying to "take it over" might be a better approach.
This has to be a troll. Both snippets of code given in page 2 are pretty readable and self-documented. The author didn't provide an implementation of the same algorithm in an imperative language. I'd be ready to bet that the comparision wouldn't be to the advantage of the imperative language.
They use the same name in Perl. I presume that's where Ruby got it from.
Ah nice. I've seen a guy on one of these in Brooklyn -- it certainly stands out.
I honestly don't know. They're all very bright. They could add a lot to any language they programmed in. Maybe making money off of PHP is easier?
>the "rich" are "evil" and need to be punished in some sort or another

That's not what the article is saying.

Also:

>Not only is PG an existence disproof of the belief,

No, a sample size of one (or two) is not make a valid counterargument.
Motherboards and HDD's.

We had a couple of large RAIDs using commodity TB hard drives and these dropped like flies.
Smoking isn't just a profession, it's an everyday skill
that everyone should learn, regardless of how badly.
A cigarette is a great enabler for this - and I endorse
this direction completely.

-- Your friendly tobacco association.
If everyone spent as much time promoting alternative languages, as they did bashing PHP, then Python would have been the most popular language 3 years ago!
Storing "wealth" is by many regarded as the most promising way for people out of poverty.
Too much water.

Describes how not to manage / grow business.
SMPS and UPS batteries. I think as pointed in other comment, we need to have temperature & humidity control.
This is definitely a problem, and not just for PHP. Check out this section from a C++ tutorial: http://www.functionx.com/cpp/examples/returnpointer.htm. The author is very clearly confused by even the basic rules of C++, yet he's out there trying to teach others. It's the blind leading the blind.

(Incidentally, I found it again by Googling for "worst C++ tutorial"—for me, it was the first match.)

So yes, someone, please do throw some good advice out there to help drown out the bad!
Cisco backs down, drops cloud from default router settings
I haven't had a chance to really read it yet but it looks like it describes thread locals well.

That would make it a lot easier to maintain thread state, e.g. an open database connection, without having to use a singleton.
Sounds like a corrupt place one would want to avoid at all costs.
Technically, Writely built that editor, and Google acquired Writely.
Forget this. I'm not reading this hogwash.

Look, make working outside a practical consideration. I need the sun, not shoddy impressionist artwork, not another goddamn water cooler. I want to pull my drink from a nearby stream and then commit my bug.

Get out of my face with your goddamn ugly buildings and their ugly interiors. My code is ugly enough without having to deal with in-building noise and 'in-office' politics.
I find it surprising that no one has mentioned, what I consider to be, the best source of information and help with the PHP language out there.

The ##php IRC channel on freenode (1) is an absolutely incredible resource. I've idled in there for many years now and the amount of good, relevant, and accurate information that can be obtained in there is incredible. Whether you have been programming for 5 days or 5 years, simply hanging out in the channel for a couple of days can offer insights and tricks that you may have never known about.

Over time, the folks there have compiled an absolutely excellent Wiki (2) for developers; old and new. In addition, there is a wonderful list of general do's and don'ts for PHP application development. (3)

Time and time again, we get folks in there who are using outdated technologies (hello mysql_* functions) or just awful tutorials or resources and they get turned around in no time.

Disclaimer: as the author states, there are many self-described experts in PHP and they do, occasionally offer bad advice. However, it is rare for the bad advice to go unchecked in this IRC channel so I can still recommend it without worry.

[1] - http://freenode.net/

[2] - http://wiki.hashphp.org/Main_Page

[3] - http://hashphp.org/
Bloomberg headline writers love to try and assign causality to the meanderings of stock prices. Daniel Kahneman's recent book Thinking, Fast And Slow recounts a story from Nassim Taleb's book The Black Swan that encapsulates the tendency to find causality:

> A story in Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan illustrates this automatic search for causality. He reports that bond prices initially rose on the day of Saddam Hussein’s capture in his hiding place in Iraq. Investors were apparently seeking safer assets that morning, and the Bloomberg News service flashed this headline: U.S. TREASURIES RISE; HUSSEIN CAPTURE MAY NOT CURB TERRORISM. Half an hour later, bond prices fell back and the revised headline read: U.S. TREASURIES FALL; HUSSEIN CAPTURE BOOSTS ALLURE OF RISKY ASSETS. Obviously, Hussein’s capture was the major event of the day, and because of the way the automatic search for causes shapes our thinking, that event was destined to be the explanation of whatever happened in the market on that day. The two headlines look superficially like explanations of what happened in the market, but a statement that can explain two contradictory outcomes explains nothing at all. In fact, all the headlines do is satisfy our need for coherence: a large event is supposed to have consequences, and consequences need causes to explain them.
Why do you believe everyone should learn programming?
First startup ideas
That's excellent! It certainly had me going, "That's pretty cool." I was checking the arduino docs and it looks like it has a ton of support for connecting the board to the Internet -- even being able to host its own webserver / connect with Twitter / run a Telnet client.

If your goal is to learn further web development, try including a net component as a more central piece of your product vision. It's your way of hacking your brain such that you'll have to, want to learn that stuff to achieve your cool project.
Wouldn't uploading their static assets to Amazon's S3 or something like that easy the burden on their servers? Wouldn't the extra cost of a service like that aliviate the load on their backend, and thus, save them more resources?
I always thought that was the most compelling feature of AWS S3, besides the "unlimited storage".
The Segway gets a lot of flack, but it's actually catching on as a tourist device. People who would normally exhaust themselves completely - or who wouldn't be able to do a tour of a place at all - now have the option of purchasing so-called guided tours on Segways.

The problem with the Segway was and is that it felt like an answer to a question no one had asked. We might still see a lot of Segways - or their equivalent.
They can't do that. If a cop asks for your phone you say no.
While stupid people keep using blinking tags and lolcats, and while astronauts keep thinking about concurrency and monads, php will grow stronger than ever.

Astronauts need to come down to earth and help stupid people build better blinking tags for their lolcats, not push them to write lolcats in monads with concurrency.

So, whether astronauts like it or not, a simpler un-evented node.js would sell like hotcakes (because it is js, not because it is evented), while a cleaner, facelifted php will sell even more.

Fork php, use + for string concatenating, . for class members, fix haystacks and needles, add [1,2,3] and {a:1,b:2} as simple data structs, that's all lolcats need.

Learn to serve your customers, even if they are stupid.
You're doing exactly what JackC is talking about. You're deciding your way of enjoying and loving music is the only way and anybody who does it in a different way is an imposter. Ironically, by my definition, that makes you a hipster :))
this is rather cool but just to nitpick "one single cell" does not always imply "small" there are a few which are visible to the naked eye (think eggs)
Indeed. The iPad 3 is here for what? 6 months now? And still websites that use lots of images don't look nice but again, so what?

I think the iPad 3 numbers and now retina MBP are so small that the extra work and bandwidth are not worth the trouble. Not now and not in the next couple of years IMHO.

Who will drive this change? Windows computers I think since there numbers are way more than Mac computers, even if Apple tells you otherwise.

Just my 2¢.
If you can't store wealth, how are you supposed to buy something like a house if the only way you could do it is by saving for many years?
Everybody should have basic programming skills, just like math, writing, etc.

That doesn't mean we have to be happy with the shitty way things are currently done.
Well, the author of the article called functional programming (FP) a "bandwagon" and cited how mainstream languages are incorporating FP features. This suggests to me that at least according to this author, FP is already "catching on" and probably more so than he prefers. Of course from the FP community's perspective, it still looks like an uphill battle.

About the 'scary' code examples, one is perfectly reasonable and the other is taken quite out of context. I think it is the case that one can always produce unreadable code regardless of language.

Proponents who are behind particular language and maybe even a specific compiler are promoting exactly those. Of course, FP-style can be used in any language that supports first-class functions, proper closures, and tail call optimization. There are plenty examples of mainstream languages with the first of those. The remainder are not as widespread. However, the advantages of many modern FP languages go well beyond that of the key features pioneered by LISP and the Landin's unimplemented language ISWIM from the 1960s. When people tout Haskell, they are probably not doing so just for the first-class functions. They probably are enamored by the sophisticated static type system, type classes, and many, many more important features which cannot be easily emulated in a mainstream language because they require language and compiler support. Another example: Because functional style often entails recursion, the lack of proper tail call optimization is a huge barrier.

The primary advantage of FP that the author of the article concedes is concurrency benefits from pure FP. Purity (statelessness) requires considerable language support. In most mainstream languages, state is just too pervasive to make any substantial purity guarantees for concurrency. FWIW, I think the jury is still out on the concurrency question in FP.

The fact is that many mainstream languages are becoming quite multi-paradigm. I think many in the FP community view that development positively. In the very least, ubiquity of some functional features will make it easier for people to transition to full-blown modern FP languages. However, having mainstream languages adopt just one or two features pioneered decades ago isn't entirely satisfactory. There is so much more in modern FP languages, but that is where the community splinters dramatically.

That said, obviously JavaScript is one of the most successful programming languages in history (with no slight intended towards any other mainstream language). The other mainstream languages have also achieved great success through many years of hard work. It is great that people are rediscovering FP there where appropriate. It should be interesting to see how these languages ultimately evolve.
But you teach them to write using well-written prose. You don't grab random comments off the internet and use that as a foundation for writing education.
You don't write in Objective-C for an Apple then, eh?
I actually am a full-time Django developer (pip and virtualenv included), and I hate PHP.

But if, say, I want to try out a new JS library or widget, I'm pretty likely to just throw a PHP script in my webroot and use that, instead of firing up a full-blown Django project.

The time from deciding to write some HTML or JavaScript or whatever to actually writing it in a PHP script? Basically nothing.
Funny how nevertheless many people promote Argentina as a model for Greece.
Hey, not sure if you're referring to beginning or ending with SK - SS. I'm only searching based on pattern matching of "TERM%" to ensure I'm hitting the db index. If you're referring to the beginning of a word, it's because I didn't handle the scenario of using the most popular starting 2 characters, just highest frequency characters overall.

The domains could definitely be improved upon if I used the highest frequency 2 letter beginnings as well as the highest frequency 2 letter endings. Instead, the listing is based on matching of the generalized list of highest letter frequencies.

Feel free to ask any more questions!
I feel that this is a good example of Rich Hickey's simple-vs-easy disjunction. If you are an experienced java programmer, then it is easy to understand code with a similar syntax to java. Code with a foreign syntax will be initially very difficult to understand, even if it has simpler semantics.
Its pretty clear by now that the language Anon uses is a parody of itself. I can guarantee you that the statement was written and reviewed by committee.

I highly doubt anyone has a hard time identifying it. This goes back years, to early early 4chan days. Representing themselves in the voice of the incompetent yet proving absolute competency is Anonymous's calling card. Getting hacked and having to explain a clearly phrased, embarrassing email bomb is about as bad as it could get for a security contractor. Way worse than the same if it were just a defacement.
Apple’s fix for corrupt binaries
Others have offered good advise so far, so let me try to not sound too redundant.

The first and foremost thing you must understand is that each code base has a personality of its own. Code bases, like people, change over time but they rarely deviate from their core character. And the more money that code is making for someone, the more resistant it grows to change.

So, the thing is, don't put so much of your identity on it. It is not personal and it is not about you. In due time you will have chances to try your hand and build something from scratch, but until that day comes you need to work with other people's code in order to learn what approaches are feasible and where the pitfalls are.

In this particular case, only you can decide if the current code base is so much of a mess for you to bother. But you owe to yourself to give it another try, this time from the perspective that you want to make it not perfect, but as good as it can be. Once you have given an honest try to assess the potential of this system, and can explain in detail why that is negligible or non existent, you may look for the next job with a clean conscience.
Alas, the rapid prototyping is a trap I fall into all the time. Spinning up an ol' Symfony 1.4 application to mock-up a REST API so I have something to build a Backbone.js app against is the practice that keeps leaving me tethered to PHP.

If there were something that would allow me to spin up local application and work with my existing, already running Apache processes, I could move away from PHP.
Airbnb to earn $183M in 2012 (I think)
> there are many self-described experts in PHP

I think this is the real problem of PHP.

It attracts people too stupid to realize that their own level of knowledge should make them avoid teaching others.

As soon as someone points out an issue they almost immediately switch to "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!".
Fiat money implies inflation. Or you are so naive to think that there is no US dollar devaluation?
Amazon has an option to remove items you've purchased or looked at from their recommendation engine. I don't know exactly where it is as I don't use it very often, but with some poking around you should be able to find it.
"What real significant tangible benefit are these people getting that compels them to live like this and pay a relatively high cost for the privilege?"

There is a significant "plan b" by doing that that you have to consider as well as a benefit over being somewhere else because of the concentration of like minded people. Many who will go on to achieve success.

You are around others who are doing things and you are making connections. If your thing doesn't work, you know people who now know you and you can get involved with them if your idea doesn't work out if they feel you have talent. (And vice versa). That's a huge benefit.
A Savings Secret to Get Social About
what about 5 letter.coms
Explaining American health care in China.
To call product X a killer of product Y, Y must have a substantial presence in the market. Segway does not. Even in Ryno delivers, killing the segway is not going to make headlines.

A better comparision IMO is to the mini-farthing YikeBike (www.yikebike.com), but I don't think that product has set the market on fire either
I am able to submit an existing HN article again as a new article
The URL submission input lets me enter an existing HN article's URL and then it comes as a new submitted article. Should this be allowed?
Thanks for the clarification (and no thanks for the utterly bizarre downvote, whoever that was - wtf?).

Based on your experience, is it the companies themselves who can get these later costs down, or is it entirely dependent on outside parties (regulators - only reduceable by lobbying)?

In the context of the patent debate, it would make more sense for government to grant monopolies/patents where its own policies introduce the costs. Even if these costs do not decrease, because of e.g. public safety, this may actually be quite a nice criterion for things that should get protection.
It's not very nice to refer to people as being stupid for wanting to use PHP, or likewise for those who code in PHP themselves.

My Erlang isn't bad, but it would be madness for me to suggest it to a client. What happens if I get run over by a bus tomorrow, or we need to bring extra coders on board?

Erlang, for all its many, many favours, is just not appropriate for the average-client-on-the-street.

I realise that you didn't use Erlang as an example, but there's a reason why there's so much work for competent PHP programmers, and it's not stupidity.
This is how the Facebook Edge Rank works (how to appear on the fans timeline)
I think it comes down to the fact that PHP does a lot of things right, and its still more efficient all around than most other tools for the problems most people need to solve in the real world.

You can point out all the flaws, but that's like pointing out the flaws in McDonald's. Sure it's cheap food, but it's consistently cheap and there's a much larger market for cheap food than gourmet food.

Perhaps "other language" developers should start thinking of themselves as gourmet chefs. And like gourmet chefs, not many people can afford their products in the real world.
@qiqing: Are you willing to tell us a bit about the screening process? I'm curious about what worked, what didn't, what traits you learned to avoid etc..
It reminds me of scifi movies where computers are made of crystals
Well done code has good variables, good method/function naming and small methods/functions.
If you have those 3 parts, you won't need any comments because it's self explanatory.

Comments often tend to explain the same thing as the code exactly does and what you see w/o looking at the comment. Also, they tend to be forgotten - if someone changes the code, he/she often doesn't change the comment.
As a result, you'll have an outdated comment which can confuse you.

I recommend "Clean Code"[1] for more info on this subject. Beside other chapters, there's a chapter about what's a good and what's a bad comment.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsman...
What does PHP have to do with JS?

I'm not trying to be snarky, but I feel like I'm missing something. How would creating an 'index.php' be any faster than an 'index.py' with Flask or just using Python directly?

Again, comparing it to Django isn't exactly fair. I wouldn't see many people standing up a full CodeIgniter setup for that either.
A couple ways to do that date thing in CakePHP (ymmv and of course you may not like the options):

- Use the db schema to enforce a value: "ON INSERT/UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP". Note that doing so will not allow you to simply set an arbitrary column to the current timestamp

- Use the php `date()` function. Your server time should be UTC, your app time should be UTC, your datastore time should be UTC. Doing anything else is poor practice. And if you can't do this because your Sysadmin is stupid, fire him and get a new one. This is how the created/modified fields work.

- Use created/modified fields. These obviously won't work if you want some random field to be the current time that isn't actually the created/modified field, but I cannot for the life of me think of such a use-case.

- Use "DboSource::expression('NOW()');" as the value of the column. A little more verbose than just doing "NOW()", but at least it won't be interpreted as a string when saved by the "ORM".

I think the biggest problem with PHP is developers not truly understanding the API they are using, and then writing spaghetti code that happens to work. Ease-of-use backfires, since your code actually works and you have no intention of learning to improve it.

Also, I recommend doing "md5($salt) . $password" to hash passwords. Set $salt to 4, I guarantee that is a random number. ;)
I guess people are the real problem of PHP. But then again: people are the real problem of everything.
The 5 letter space is a bit more crowded, but I could definitely follow up with that next. I might try running combinations of bigrams and trigrams.
So far 4chan is one of the last places I found which still fosters an absolute anything-goes policy. It is almost a last frontier of a world where people can dump their thoughts, ideas just without having to use any form of self censorship. Once one gets over some idealistic expectation how other people should behave it is, at least from my perspective, a truly liberating experience.
Some pretty good ideas right here.

Not sure how node.js can be 'simpler' though, it's pretty much coding in pure JavaScript which is a simple language itself?
Wow, these little guys are incredible! I had no idea such complexity could evolve at that scale. I think these species deserve a mention in science classrooms.
"The True Problem with PHP" is all the posts about it on HN.
Single page link for those who would prefer to read the article whole, instead of chopped up into three pieces:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=food-poison...
That's a very good point. I keep forgetting about hashphp... Perhaps that model is better (a semi-curated list of tutorials off site)...
"The odds of getting VC are low -- only 1 in 400 pitches result in funding"

But you are pitching more than 1 VC.

Rose said "VCs invest in roughly 1 out of 400 companies who pitch them." and it's obvious he means "an individual VC".

Most importantly (something I try to point out with respect to dating as well or anything where success is essentially "1") you are looking for 1 person/firm to believe in you.
A game that is fun and popular is by definition well designed I would say.
We're screwed, and nobody even cares enough to do something about it.