skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dont let the HN Hivemind fool you, plenty of people still use PHP and write beautiful, OO code.

The language you use doesnt determine whether you're a good developer or not. I have used other languages (node, python, ruby) and I still prefer php, because its quick and simple. Its syntax may not be as beautiful as a python or a ruby, but it php just works, and it powers hundreds of millions of sites.

Bottom line, use what your comfortable with, but be open to exploring other languages. Dont ever let someone tell you a language is better than x. Make those decisions yourself.
How do we vet them, beyond "is a scam"?

There are plenty of well-meaning people who want to do a lot, but are incredibly poorly positioned to do it. Or do we want to limit crowdfunding to near slam-dunk ideas?

I think it's a problem that Kickstarter has brought out a lot of very, very green entrepreneurs with little experience actually shipping product. But what can we do about it without throwing the baby out also?
No: with PHP you can upload a bunch of files over FTP and you're done. With Python you pretty much always need to ssh into the server after pushing the files to the server. For someone who knows nothing, this makes PHP much easier.
That quote is presented as Mitt Romney's supposed view on "what would make things worse", not the Economist's.
Great example of why I hate this usage "we" though. Whenever I read an article about something "we" do I often wonder who this "we" is, especially when I don't really think I'm personally part of "we".
Was I wrong to expect Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's name to be in there somewhere?
If you don't mind, I'd love to correspond a bit more over email. I still have lots of questions and something is off with regards to this setting, speed, etc.

For the record, perhaps you got the wrong idea from the post (looking at your new conclusion). At DuckDuckGo, I've tried to avoid these mistakes as best I can.
Show HN: http://passboxapp.com/
Right. And there is zero funding for cat social networking.

My comment takes the parent pretty literally, which is mostly a response to how glib the parent comment is. If only the tech wunderkinds were pursuing interesting problems, they would solve them (and never mind the thousands of people and millions of dollars that are actively devoted to those problems).
This problem is why, as a hiring manager, you should be asking your best people whom they know and would hire. Then, talk to tose people, establish a relationship over years, and be ready to jump during the small interval between projects when they might be looking.

Recruiting top people is a multi-year project. Every time.

The only exception is when there's a meltdown (e.g. Sun is acquired by Oracle). And you can bet in most of those, serious players are literally flying down people to recruit out the best people. When the whole Borland/Inprise debacle happened, I dealt with one full-time recruiter who we'd used to capture the few great people who were poachable after that terrible transition happened.
Ah..lets see...

Why do we in using most UIs have our passwords encrypted when stored including web browsers? Anyone want to take a guess at this?

If you increase security across all links of the trust chain equally it gets severely harder to break by powers of ten or more. Why? Look up and study those 1940 information theory papers..

Now people what happens when you concentrate all your passwords on some cloud? That advantage you gained above gets thrown away as now you present a nice a juicy easy target t attack and they even advertise JUICY passwords stored here come and break it..
big money == big minds. amirite?
I work on a project that uses C++. Our runtime is implemented in C++, and our compiler produces C++. For us, performance is a top priority. I am quite frustrated by C++ sometimes, but I think it's the best tool for our job. I'm quite fond of pure C, but I also like having rich abstraction mechanisms like classes and templates, so I don't think it's appropriate for us. And no other language with broad support is as well-suited to writing high performance systems code while also allowing us to have rich abstraction mechanisms.

I am interested in D for this purpose - the most recent version looks quite well designed - but it's not as widely supported.
The Jaguar has a very distinctive front-grill. The rest of the car is less unique, but if someone were to copy the Jaguar down to the front grill, then Jaguar should sue.

The Mercedes is not very distinctive to my eye, other than the prominent round Mercedes ornament on the hood. If another car company were to make a luxurious-looking car with a round peace-sign ornament, for instance, on its hood, then Mercedes should sue.

As to whether car companies sue each other in practice, I have no idea. I'm sure they would, however, if they felt that (1) another car company were making a slavish copy of their design, (2) they had a good chance of winning the court case, and (3) the suit wouldn't somehow hurt their image too much.
Ask HN: Mobile developers - how do you find new mobile app services?
In the past we've used everything from Mixpanel & Flurry for analytics, Hockeyapp and Testflight for beta testing, Crittercism for crash testing etc. But we stumbled on all these or heard about them via word of mouth. Do you know of any directories of mobile app services? Somewhere that different mobile development tools are reviewed/rated? How do you currently find tools to solve your problems when building/testing/deploying apps?
More failure means more funding... could apply to almost any government bureaucracy. Department of Education comes to mind.
Ask HN: Great Admin Panels
I'm looking for great admin panel examples to send to our designer. Stripe[1] is the only example I could find.

[1] - https://manage.stripe.com/
The hardware isn't targeted at September 2012 but March 2013.
Plex for iOS and Android is just a front end, you need the server-side of the software to convert video.
XBMC can convert video on-the-fly, to do this on iOS it uses private API for hardware acceleration (and that's why you need to jailbreak your device to install it)
MySpace anyone?
Imagine how they must feel. If this falls through their reputations will never recover.

They'll go down in the tech history books as one of the biggest failures ever.
I claim bullshit. The theoretically optimal algorithm is, and has been known to be for 40+ years, sinc interpolation. Gimp does this (Lanczos approximation). Comparing to bicubic leaves aliasing relics and looks bad. I'd be very interested in seeing the algorithm compared to something that's not a pure known strawman.

(In CS terms, this is akin to comparing your algorithm to something using a bubble sort, and ignoring the invention of n log n sorting algorithms)
A Glimpse Inside the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
I think the first usage of self-driving cars is for public transportation.
With this technologies, crowed areas could have more self-driving buses.
or use it to replace long distance truck drivers.
It would be very helpful if the article would mention, 114% of what exactly is the household debt. 114% of annual income, perhaps?
Anyway, it looks like we are looking at few more years of decreasing consumption, to get to the year 2000 level of household debt. And even that level is probably too high.
So, mostly troubles ahead for US economy, no matter who the next president is going to be.
A cargo shipload of sodium hydroxide dumped into the ocean would be like a drop in a swimming pool. Insignificant.
While I empathize with your aesthetic preferences, I don't think that you're talking about the same thing as the article. Everyone reads the literary masters in school. No one reads Newton.
Without exploring/understanding a problem space, how would you propose the formation of solutions occur?

Moreover, you're ignoring that to get corrective action against entrenched financial/economic incentives requires overwhelming proof of a problem and public sympathy.
Innovative bookmarking service Spool is shutting down. Team joins Facebook
You know what I'd love Elon Musk to tackle next? The education system in the US. We are producing a generation of illiterates here. Today's economy demands a more educated workforce (face it, the manufacturing jobs are disappearing), but we're getting the opposite.

Yesterday, at the doctor's office, there was a young kid there (college age). He was writing out a receipt for my copay. He had a hard time spelling out "fifteen", and wrote "fifthteen" after several attempts. Yes, English was his first language. And the fact that he's working in the doc's office means he must be at least average.
I'm not trying to make you look bad, I'm just reporting my opinion. It's great that you're answering, already a big plus in my book. Private email sent.
Note that he is talking about NCSA Mosaic, not Netscape
It will probably fold just as fast as Sony's PSN, or LinkedIn, or Yahoo did, after their breaches.
Free as in beer.
> How does one proceed in a future-proof way whereby the choices are not regretted down the line?

What's wrong with HTML that has classnames, or the new data attributes that HTML5 has? They're not dependent on any one implementation and HTML seems like it's the most future-proof thing out there apart from plain text.

In order:

- <div class='expando'>Hide/Show this text.</div>

- <a href="#something">Go somewhere</a>

- <a href="otherdoc.html">Hyperlink</a>

- <video src="hello.mp4" />

- <code>console.log('hello world!');</code>

Almost any JS developer can make these work without any library, from what the browser provides, alone. Give the innerHTML to eval, for example. It seems like the most future-proof way to go, and I'll be happy to be proven wrong and find out about something I don't know about. But Markdown nor any of its derivatives don't seem to be good enough.

Of course, you could also write a Markdown parser that has constructs that will compile to the above too.

> This is about the inadequacy of PDF as a document format for the future.

And I'm guessing, since we're doing this over an HTML document, that that'll be sufficient instead.
Well then, not when you put it that way.
A good programmer chooses to use C++ because they're close to the metal. A lot of people just use it because it's their Blub.
You're comparing github to the Haber-Bosch process??!

While I think that is ridiculous, your claim appears to imply that even though my mom is not aware of github, its existance is as important that a major part of our civilization's sustainability relies on it?

No, thats just plain stupid.

Anyway - my original comment was that github is only valuable as "the most important social network" to a very narrow portion of the populous.
One could argue that funding for any place that thrives on pictures of cats is not that far way from funding cat social networks. There are a ton of well funded hard problems that may or may not have monetary reward at the end. What they do often require is a lot of patience and perseverance over a period of time. Those who lean towards tech don't seem to have that kind of patience, at least in my experience working in both worlds.
The webpage should suggest a website other than OpenPhoto, then. First impressions count. (I say this as someone who's really excited by Persona and who wants it to spread as quickly as possible.)
Loyalty with a tinge of betrayal
Massive 200,000-Piece Roman Colosseum Is An Impressive Lego Architecture Model
What about Native American cultures? They had not seen horses until the Europeans arrived, but they certainly had pants.
I've seen similar from well educated people, truly a shame.
Does there exist any non-commercial search engine? When I say "non-commercial", I don't just mean a search engine that doesn't make money, I mean a search engine that excludes all commercial websites. You accept credit cards? Sorry, you're out. You have an ad on your page? Out. Simple as that. I suspect this view of the web could bring back some of the old magic feeling. It would include Terry Tao's blog, and all of Wikipedia, but exclude the SEO'd crap that Google has incentivized.
Affiliate Marketing Benefits To Affiliate Marketer
The Middle East Media Research Institute translates Arab and Persian news into English. It's fascinating how much it differs from news in the Western world, in style as well as content.

http://www.thememriblog.org/middleeastculture
Haskell has had macros and the Dynamic type since 2002.
Above all else, certifications have been a big business for these tech companies.
Joe Armstrong: Why OO Sucks
In what way is natural gas easier to store than coal? Coal can just sit in huge piles on the ground.
I don't know anything about this area of specialty, but I thought it important to point out that Huffman compression was also proven to be theoretically optimal, and then along came arithmetic compression. I only mean to say that you should be very precise about what the proof of optimality actually showed.

And, with that, I'm bracing myself to get schooled.

Edit: This reminds me of the Iterated Fractal Systems proprietary lossy image compression algorithm they tried to commercialize in the 90s. It was able to decompress to a larger scale image that introduced synthetic detail that was often convincing to the eye. Notice how this article talks about different scales.
"we borrowed protocols, formats and even code from the world wide web project ... our goal:easy to use, fun graphical front end"

It's a classic university commercialization effort:take ip from university for some important problem, integrate it together and give it a commercial appeal, and sell.

But it's not as easy as writing some crud site.
I think it's quite different for a service, particularly if it is currently in use. See: Quickster.
"Insure" can also take the latter meaning; I think it's an American/British thing. The New Yorker uses "insure" for both meanings, and it trips me up every time.
Can we confine the April Fool's stuff to 1st April please.
I am suspicious that this is an attempt to make Scala more Clojure-like...
>>if the problem cannot be addressed than why even bring it up?

Because an engineer (not a research scientist) somewhere, given the right model, and access to the right information, has a basis on which to start working on a solution.

>>Downvote me, I don't care.

You have a very serious misunderstanding about the scientific process and its interaction with other disciplines it seems.
Or to put it more bluntly.
Cancer is a punishment from God, not a "problem", no investigation warranted, case closed. So let's all get back to devising scientific methods for determining who's a witch, a real problem that can at least be addressed directly and is beneficial to society.
Those are clearly not the same. This is a password management service; PSN, LinkedIn, and Yahoo are not. They were also well established companies with large user bases.
When did healthcare become "broken" in the US? It hasn't always been so, back to 1776, right? I think the answer is pretty obvious.
Hip Hop Artists Cardier and Caznova Dedicate New Single to FullContact
One of the patents was filed in 2002, so 2003 is not early enough to be prior art.
Looking at in perspective, it makes sense. Every cool guy is pretending to be a cowboy.

Now, who is going to be the celebrity to go all Socrates on us and re-introduce the tunic.

Interestingly, Julius Caeser was supposed to be some kind of a rebel for wearing his tunic "loosely belted" with fringes. It was the equivalent of long hair in the 60's and 70's for our culture.

Wouldn't it be wild if things went around again--that far?
A 55 year old with only a HS diploma for whom a computer has never been more than a magical toaster that delivers e-mail, only existing in the past few years of his/her life, is simply not going to become a professional programmer even if he/she wanted to.

I disagree, if he really wanted to, he could. I do agree that most don't/won't. At that age, most people have low motivation to start over.
They're okay with a demo (as they say in the Kickstarter FAQ) and you can sideload apps. That's not anti-freedom.
I liked the straight-to-the-pointness of your dad's words. You probably think it's more embarrassing than it really is because he's your dad.
Air Jordan and The 1%
X Prize founder Peter Diamandis has his eyes on the future
TETRA hacking is coming: OsmocomTETRA
The Big War Over a Small Fruit
Most startups don't fail at building a product. They fail at acquiring customers.

Citation needed.
THIS is exactly what people on HN should be doing. Embrace and extend. Call these people up - say "Hey! I saw this and I was a little concerned. I am an [expertise goes here] who has done [experience ges here] - I'd like to either give you some advice or connect you with people who are masters of solving this problem.

Mentor them and who knows, you may get to meet Sir. Richard someday and gain his interest in your own projects! (but dont make this the goal of reaching out to them)
Flummoxed By Failure--Or Focused? It's Not About Being Smart
Great to see the evolution behind refer.ly. Helps me in the design & launch of my own sites. Great work!
The Man Who Harnessed The Sun
He's not?
Thanks a lot for your answer! BTW, you do a great job!!!
+1 on the sentiment though I'm not fully understanding why this would be useful for me...

To me this is like a crutch that the language itself cannot solve.

Ultimately, Scala will be held back because of Java. Scala deserves to live on by itself.
Stop Whining About New JS Frameworks
It's interesting that they're getting a redesign - I've always thought Python.org was one of the nicest, cleanest sites for an open source project.

Here's their reasoning for a redesign: http://pythonorg-redesign.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#current...
I list my apartment on airbnb and my considerations aren't as divorced from those of my neighbours as you're making out. Most people care about where they live. I don't want my apartment trashed by people using it as a place to party for a couple of days just as much, if not more, than my neighbours don't. I've had dozens of people stay at my apartment through airbnb and they've all been respectful, fantastic guests. I always look through their profiles and reviews before letting them stay, it's a far cry from operating a brothel or crack den. I'd bet my neighbours know less about their cleaners than I do about my Airbnb guests before they arrive.
Sure, some of that is true - but holy shit, we sit here on HN constantly pontificating about how we need to fail often, pivot, iterate and that investors invest in teams - not ideas.

Then these kids come along and did a msterful job at getting the ear of Richard and others and you guys shit all over them.

The name sucks - the idea, I cant comment on as I havent even looked at their site - but I am sure, being 19 and 20, they have a LONG career ahead of them and lets hope they continue to think up new things and with having a connection with Richard at this early phase of their lives that is fantastic.
Am I the only one who for most of these "X joining/acquired by [Facebook|Google]" announcements, has never heard of X?
Changing the World
Venture Capitalist: Beware of Activist Holders
Well, I'm not sure if my emotional attachment to Google is comparable to that of wartime soldiers to free doughnuts. What's left is the fact that a free service is very different from a paid service, and that pulling the rug under your customers is going to leave them very disgruntled. I am not sure this is a novel insight. I guess the historical analogy is still neat.
I Am Silent, Hear Me Roar
Homeland Security warns: Hackers targeting popular Niagara software
I commented on your blog but I thought I'd repeat it here to get more answers :)

How do you determine if your product is something people don't really want? I'm looking for my hypothetical early adopters(new and young restaurant owners) and a lot of the older restaurant owners don't care too much about the product. How do you determine whether your product is not ready for the mainstream or whether people just don't care about the problem and/or solution?
This looks very cool, but you should really get a TLS certificate right now and enable HSTS.
Adults Playgrounds
Zombie Views and view.destroy()
Not to be unfair but it could be sort of like with Diaspora. The inability to deliver on the kickstarted campaign caused one of the founders to take their own life. It would be very sad if something like that were to happen again only because a group massively over promised and was unable to meet their own goals.
The /lib directory becomes a symlink
It's not. If I remember right the did some big refactoring of the compiler and found some places where this macro facility made that work less verbose.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012/Ref...

It's been a while since I watched this talk, so I may have the details wrong. It's a great talk, but at least read the abstract:

Reflection and compilers do tantalizing similar things. Yet, in mainstream, statically typed languages the two have been only loosely coupled, and generally share very little code. In this talk I explore what happens if one sets out to overcome their separation.

The first half of the talk addresses the challenge how reflection libraries can share core data structures and algorithms with the language's compiler without having compiler internals leaking into the standard library API. It turns out that a component system based on abstract types and path-dependent types is a good tool to solve this challenge. I'll explain how the "multiple cake pattern" can be fruitfully applied to expose the right kind of information.

The second half of the talk explores what one can do when strong, mirror-based reflection is a standard tool. In particular, the compiler itself can use reflection, leading to a particular system of low-level macros that rewrite syntax trees. One core property of these macros is that they can express staging, by rewriting a tree at one stage to code that produces the same tree at the next stage. Staging lets us implement type reification and general LINQ-like functionality. What's more, staging can also be applied to the macro system itself, with the consequence that a simple low-level macro system can produce a high-level hygienic one, without any extra effort from the language or compiler.
And that, of course, is the reason why we need the Wikipedia page on the dress.
> " When robotic arms replace 100k factory workers, the robotic arm companies do not need 100k new programmers"

This is entirely true, but was also true in the industrial revolution. With the increasing efficiency of manufacturing we've seen a tremendous growth in service industries that are absorbing a large portion of the displaced workforce.

Whether or not that ratio is 1:1 is hard to guess, though I suspect not quite.

The real problem here is not so much lack of jobs, but like you mentioned, it's nigh-impossible to actually transition people from one field to another. We've outright eliminated most manual and unskilled labor, and what remains is disappearing quickly. The jobs that people had, vs. the jobs that they must now pursue are incredibly different, and most people aren't going to make that jump successfully.

We are dealing with an entire lost generation, if not more.
> "2. Mass paying down of debt may not be the best thing to generate demand during a demand crisis.
"

Yeah, but is it worse than continuing to build up household debt in order to alleviate the pains of a demand crisis?
It became broken as a side effect of wage control regulations during WW2 that encouraged healthcare to be tied to employers. The second world war is long over but this particular unintended consequence is still with us.
He really isn't. Some aspects of his administration are centrist-liberal (see: healthcare reform), and maybe to the largely-very-right-wing mainstream political sphere of the USA he's a leftist, but on the global stage Obama is pretty firmly in the center.