skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PHP advocate Terry Chay has said:

Rails is like a rounded rectangle and PHP is like a ball of nails.

When I say that PHP is a ball of nails, basically, PHP is just this piece of shit that you just put together put all the parts together and you throw it against the wall and it fucking sticks.

Putting aside the comparison between a framework and a language (maybe he really meant Ruby rather than Rails, I don't know), These quotes really rung true to me as a person who has some experience with PHP and Ruby on Rails.

PHP is ugly, no one will really disagree with that. But when used in the domain is was designed for (websites) it gets the job done. It's a ball of nails that sticks to the wall. Until recently at least, Rails was a bit more hassle to deploy, PHP is ever present, even on super cheap shared hosting packages and more "plug and play" in deployment. The fact that PHP is so popular means there's a massive amount of pre-existing apps and help (of varying quality) only a Google search away. This is true for any language, I guess, but PHP more so than most.

But Ruby (like Python) is a bit more general purpose and compared to PHP just seems more thought through to me. More consistent. I've always felt that aside from any other factors, this possibly also has to do with the age of the languages and what time they "grew up" in. But in any case, I actually find it easier to conceptualise more in depth concepts when using Ruby and Rails. So Ruby - and by extension - Rails is more like a rounded rectangle, it feels nice with no sharp bits, somehow balanced and symmetrical in my mind. But I feel the initial learning curve of Ruby (and I assume Python) might be a little steeper than PHP. Maybe that's just because I had gotten more ambitious by the time I'd hit Ruby.

Hopefully my ramblings have helped you a little. But to more directly answer you, yes it is absolutely possible to code some awesome and scalable apps in PHP. Just look around, the Internet is full of them. But would you benefit from learning some Ruby or Python along side your existing PHP knowledge, the answer is again absolutely yes. I probably don't have to add it, but just to be clear, you can of course also code some awesome and scalable apps with Ruby or Python.

I don't think these choices are as "either or" as a novice might generally think. Many concepts are similar regardless of which language you use. Putting time into one language does not necessarily mean that time is wasted if you later choose to switch.
I'd love a fully brain-implantable FPU.

I'm even willing to start thinking in stack notation!
or wmii/dwm/xmonad/awesome to a somewhat lesser extent
What aliens can tell us about evolution
Dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460555
Not only develop the app locally, but really take some time (a day or two) setting up your dev environment and getting it dialed in if its not already. If there are tools you need to install (mysql, apache, ruby, etc), build them from source whenever possible.

As for planning, I like to do mine in a notebook with a pen. I'll outline some basic use case notes and list what I think the db schema should look like. Then I'll take that and use it to build my initial models and migrations (RoR) and start working locally.

I generally don't deploy an app to a live server until its just about ready for consumption.

Not that it matters, but most of my work is in PHP and Rails. Nothing against Django, I just haven't had a chance to try it (soon, hopefully).
Working like it was supposed to during, say, the Great Depression?

That was a likely outcome if we'd followed the prescriptions you seem to advocate above.
And meanwhile, what happens to the people who are bankrupted, ruined, cannot eat or get health care, while the system self-corrects?

Reasonably happy, non-malnourished people make better employees, you'll have to admit.
For the default password length of 10 characters they use ~60 bits of MD5 output. That's more than enough information to uniquely identify the master password.
I think you are missing the systemic causes -- the low cost of money and its devaluation through inflation cause makes taking risks more economical (safe investments lose money). The markets are more regulated now than they've ever been.

The cause of this crises has been building for a long time, and goes back to the 70s when the united states went off the gold standard.

Additionally, there were things that happened that never happened before. For instance selling stock in financial institutions, which incentivises risk taking. This of course led to a mistake on the public's part of not realizing what they were investing in was riskier than they thought.

A culture of "gotta have it now." doesn't mean anything except that those participating in it will be poorer than those who don't, and lending to the first group is riskier than lending to the second so their interest rates should vary.

Productivity is constantly increasing, and will be increasing at faster rates. As for CEOs if they were acting wrongly then their board, or shareholders should revolt. If it's a private company then the owner, if the CEO is the owner then it's his to do what he wants with it.
I've never seen the online book posted on here before. Or are you just talking about weekly SICP related stories?
It helps me on days I workout because I know I have a target I'm trying to beat. There are many times where I know I would have stopped wayyy short of the daily target... but the determination to meet or beat it keeps me going.

I'm not sure it's the solution for lazy people though, there's not much that will get you over that.
"Philip Greenspun constructed a filter at photo.net which bounced all those who misspelled the word "aperture," on the grounds that they did not know much about photography."

Bouncing someone for a single typo, or maybe because English isn't their first language, seems a little extreme.
Isn't steam more of a distribution channel?
I have to complain, I've ridden BART in San Francisco for three years and had no idea I could have signed up for wifi. I wish I'd noticed the network on my phone and looked into it, but of course looking for wifi on BART never occurred to me (to save battery life I have "search for networks" turned off). I ride the train almost every day and I've never seen a notice at a station about the network. If only 16,000 people of several million in the BART service area signed up, then apparently tens or hundreds of thousands of wifi-enabled commuters never heard of this either.

And now they'll be expected to pay as much per month for a daily hour of the Internet as they do for constant access at work and home.

As a layperson, the only reasons I can see for BART to set such a high price point are a misunderstanding about the economics or a desire to keep usage at a low, manageable level.

I suspect I should be glad that there's wifi at all, at any price, but frankly $30 a month makes this "public service" a toy for highly paid commuters rather than an intensely useful public tool for all the area's travelers. I hope against hope that the daily and hourly fees aren't high enough to remind me of AOL-by-the-hour. To think we've reached a point where the privately owned cafes give away wireless, and the publicly owned transit charges for it.
"Password Gorilla" is a GPL-licensed, cross-platform password manager. http://fpx.de/fp/Software/Gorilla/
I'm honestly not being cheeky, I suppose I'm just slow: Wouldn't it be easier to just not think about the points? I've found the points useful when looking for a summary, takeaway, or rebuttal that earned attention.
I started working through my copy about a month ago and have no regrets about spending a lot of time with it (still have 1 chapter to go). While I might not have felt very enthusiastic about working through all the exercises, they're VERY helpful and a central part of the book.

I found that SICP helped hone my skills in finding elegant solutions to certain problems and improved my coding style. On the downside, I switched back to C++ tonight and found myself putting parenthesis in all the wrong places for the first hour. It's a small price to pay.

Enjoy!
The day pass for wifi is $10? I think by 2011 (date set to be completed), a lot of people will be on mobile data plans and it won't really be worth it to pay for internet on a 30 min ride.
Theoretically, that's the optimal solution. They have advantages for situations like what you listed.

The problem is that pretty much everyone is in some way influenced by them just by seeing them.

Do you really approach a comment at -10 points with the same open mind as one with +30?
> JavaScript itself is a great language, not just good enough. It's got higher order functions, closures, prototype-based object definitions and all sorts of other lovely, lovely things.

Exactly, and these things let you use it in any way you like. If you're frustrated with and feel limited JavaScript, then you just plain don't understand it.
Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but you seem to be saying that it's okay for people to renege on debts when convenient.

In my opinion, people who take on debt do have a moral responsibility to pay it back. If you don't want that responsibility, don't take on the debt.

I understand that bankruptcy is necessary for some–but I would hope people arrive there as a last resort. Teaching people that bankruptcy is a "card up your sleeve" is sending the wrong message.
With Bittorrent and the like, your usual garden variety piracy, you at least know who you're stealing from and you know that everyone involved is simply supplying bandwidth, information alone, and that no money is changing hands. If at any point in time you prefer to purchase a legitimate copy of what you have obtained, you are free to do so, and many people often do.

What Ebaum did was claim the content as their own and act as a gateway to it, in effect making a buck off of the piracy of others. Since the original creator is no longer known, there's no way to provide compensation even if you want to.
Pretty silly if you ask me.
Just because the guy's everyone's favorite visual information guy, why would we rely on his opinion for user interface? Especially social interaction?

His "better" iPhone interface was godawful.

This post on forums is also totally missing the point.

I see somebody already re-submitted Clay Shirky's good, thoughtful essay on the subject (Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy).

I wouldn't waste your time on this one. Read that one instead.
What's the canonical book? Norvig has, IIRC, written two widely-appreciated books on AI.
Workforce shifts to part-time and gig work
hacker news is not digg. end of sentence.
Hybrid free/regulated systems like ours have all of the downsides of both approaches but none of the benefits. I do believe that the free market regulates itself, but we don't have a free market.

In a free market, there would be no bailouts. In our system, on the other hand, wall street counts on bailouts. You don't leverage your company 40 to 1 unless you believe there's a safety net. It's in vogue to believe that everyone in finance is an idiot, but they're not. They do exactly what makes business sense within the rules of the market. And our rules say: leverage yourself as much as you can. The fed will be there to bail you out if you fail.
Yeah, I would have more sympathy if it was someone else. It sounds like they were just tossed out on the street. I do find it somewhat ironic that Eric accused the new C.E.O. of basically stealing some of his personal computer files when he took all the company's computers without letting staff remove files.
Link to description of eviction:http://blog.ebaum.tv/2009/01/so-this-is-how-it-all-went-down...
I would think that people should be able to handle the truth (either way) - painful as it may be. I mean if the Internet stands for one thing, it's transparency. Hiding stuff is not something we should strive for.
Do You Miss W?
When will programmers stop blaming users for the deficiencies of software?

Many users do not understand hierarchical filesystems. Few users care that "Computers work best with structured data." Why in the world would one argue against making a computer do work by searching for information?

Use Google to search for your home address. Try a UPS tracking number. Enter the first few characters of a word and wait a moment. Enter your zipcode followed by the word weather. These are the types of solutions that we should be working on.
Ask HN: Time tracking
Hi all, I'm building a time tracking application. I'm curious about your personal time tracking preferences:

Do you track your time mostly after the fact?

Not at all?

Track time mostly throughout the day (stopwatch)?

I ask, because we have a Stopwatch mode in our application and a manual time entry mode and I'm curious which one will be most popular and to focus our efforts.

Thanks...
Does anyone know how much actual content was stolen? I'm wondering why someone would pay a minimum of 15 million in cash to acquire a company where most of the property has been stolen. It looks like the legal penalties have been basically inconsequential for Eric.It also looks like HandHeld Entertainment has a good chance of keeping the content/stealing, but if that is what they plan on doing, I really question their ethics.
I think the more important question is should you? If 10 other people before have expended the mental energy to figure out that this comment isn't worth reading, why should I expend mine to determine the same thing? I like where you're going with this, but it uses our group mental capacity much less efficiently. There is probably a better solution... looking at a number is a pretty efficient filter and I don't think we should lose it.
If it isn't about people, who or what could it possibly be about? What other data are you looking for? What do you think is moving the money around? The economy isn't some magical system that randomly shuffles dollar bills around, it's people and businesses buying things.
Good luck getting mobile data signals on BART -- it's difficult just to maintain a cell phone call. The value here is the consistency of the signal.

(Not that I think that $10 is reasonable for a day pass.)
Flash makes your browser slow, leaks memory and above all crash. That sounds exactly like what the iPhone needs. But above that if flash is on the iphone why would developers go out and buy a Mac for iPhone development when they could just do it in flash and have it work on other phones too.

A more likely scenario is that Adobe has been working on flash for the iPhone and is begging Apple to include it. They are probably willing to do anything Apple tells them to and would probably even pay Apple to include flash if Apple asked.

Adobe has bet the farm on flash.
http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2008/09/adobe-owns-web-an...
Unless you have a decent type system like Haskell's, statically typed languages are nothing but an unnecessary burden. I am a huge fan of python, and dynamic typing in general... Haskell was the first experience with a language that made me appreciate the power of a type system in certain situations. Every other implementation I've used has been broken.
there's still elvis, which is shipped by default on slackware.
And there's vile (http://invisible-island.net/vile/) too, a clone that handles buffers better (imo) than vim.
A PDF was posted 11 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441593
I’m not sure adherence to simplistic ideals is something we should strive for either. The goal of HN, as I understand it, is to generate thoughtful discussion. If transparency is counterproductive to achieving that goal than we should abandon it.

As far as "handling the truth" I don’t think that speaks to his point. When we use that phrase we are talking about someone controlling their reaction to a change they can perceive. Such as someone preventing themselves from emotionally falling apart when something bad happens.

But group think, and the desire for acceptance which is its root cause, is something people don’t perceive is happening to them. They therefore can’t consciously control their reaction to it.

His suggestion is that we remove the root stimuli so as to not provoke the reaction to begin with. So your point doesn’t really apply.
As a former Google employee, I can assure you that there have been far bigger screw ups than that... and it's just part of the learning experience. The bigger the screw up, the more money you've invested in training them :) (i.e. When I was there, one man single handedly instantly brought down 10,000 machines in a hard reboot... fortunately because of the way Google replicates and distributes things, the world was none the wiser. It really gave me great respect and trust in their infrastructure and no he wasn't fired.)
In most cases you’re probably right. But not always.

The problem is you don’t know the moral character or intelligence level of the people who first stumbled on to a comment. If two ignorant people happen to see a quality comment first and both vote it down that comment is essentially lost to the group. I think we can all agree there are at least a few fools running around here so the idea isn’t farfetched.

So the question is do you want to trust what might be insightful comments to the randomness of timing?
Go to UC Berkeley.
I wasn't clear. Norvig has written canonical books on AI, but they are not leading edge.
Actually none of those companies regulated themselves. The federal government took on the role.

Regulation has caused part of this crises via procyclical mark to market and capital requirements. Regulation also stipulated what kind of assets banks should have creating an enormous market in the deliberate obfuscation of risk.

What is your suggestion? Just because you create regulation doesn't cause people to want to follow it. Nor do the affects end with or necessarily include the stated goal.
And what about hiding karma points too ?
Imo, the problem with karma is that people try to get more karma, per se.
It's quite annoying to see entire books submitted. It should be a requirement that you must be able to thoroughly discuss a submission. You can't discuss the entire contents of a lengthy text in a HN thread. It's like submitting a Google search or an index to pg's essays.[1] The discussion is always superficial.

If you were really interested in SICP, then you probably would have already found this link. It's the 2nd result on Google for "SICP". A blog post on the merits of SICP would be more useful.

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=410821
I have an extensive collection of unicorn artwork and imagery. How do I get them to you?
Telecommuting can work well for established teams who have a history working together. But if the team doesn't have any history together, you might consider getting office space for 6 months to bond a bit and then do the work at home thing.
First Baby Redditor
Yeah I'm kind of steering away from giving him all of the tools to learn web development in addition to Photoshop as I think it might just become discouraging for him at first.

I'm curious about your JQuery recommendation: why not just the core Javascript language first? Quicker results? I ask because I only have hacker level knowledge of both Javascript & JQuery and am looking to improve my skills but was unsure whether to attack the main language or just focus on JQuery itself...
To overcome the lack of history together it seems like one has to substitute other forms of bonding experiences; occasional lunches together, conference calls, heavy use of messaging and email, and just making the effort to talk to the people a lot and really get to know them.

My concern isn't so much whether these things are qualitatively equal to the team-building experiences of being stuck in a room(s) together as whether it can work, in practise as well as in principle.
So many ideas that I never would have thought of, AND all open source...

I dig it. Thanks.
OK, here's what he's trying to say:

1. Individuals, the final end consumer of debt, treat debt as a lifelong obligation. A serious, serious obligation. So much that they chastise each other for bankruptcy on Internet forums. (oh no! someone on the internet is fiscally irresponsible!) And act as if not fulfilling monetary obligations to big, anonymous corporations is tantamount to proving that one is a worthless human being.

2. And yet, at the same time, the same corporations that these very-responsible-debt-paying people owe fealty to, will perpetrate enormous fraud -- of the technical definition and just general "looks like a fraud, smells like a fraud, who cares what the law says" kind. This fraud can fuck not only other such corporations, but the entire financial system, and the country's stability as a whole.

Got it?

Debt payors are considered horrible people if they do not repay all their private debts. Debt payees, on the other hand, have carte blanche to act however they want and get excused by saying "That's the way free market capitalism works."

Thus you have individuals lambasting other individuals, and going "OH NO, you cannot just say that DEBT is NOT a MORAL OBLIGATION!" with regards to individuals who owe, but just shaking their heads and clucking their tongues with regards to the acts of corporations.

This is basically a case of the serfs policing themselves, while the nobles are pleased to promote any kind of ignoble acts among themselves.
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Programming Languages Grand Challenges for 2009
AFAIK living cells doesn't heal they auto-destruct and are replaced by new cells.
And much more likely any good comments that are not put in the first hour will never get the points that they deserve. Someone says something witty and gets 192 points. Two days later someone writes something very informative, but there are very few viewers after that so they get only 5 points. It would be foolish to think that an algorithm could compensate. Slashdot has this very problem years ago and solved it in a very good way. This reddit system of many points only works for when there is very small users, but does not scale.
The points provide information about what others think about the submission, which is useful in guaging the status of the comment. It does not have to affect your opinion, unless you let it.
Just like when reddit started out. So what does HN do differently that will stop it?
Yeah, but I think it may be useful to collect such metrics (and e.g. get it to cost karma).

For the record, English is not my first language and I do make mistakes, but I strive to write correctly.
Sure, I was even going to suggest something like that. A "cumulative bozo filter" basically.
Perhaps the reason that jam-resistant triggers are uncommon is because there is no need for them. If signal jamming does become common, then jam-resistant triggers will be common, off-the-shelf, and well-documented.
PHP is a great language to get stuff done. And if you're a decent programmer, the later versions even give you the tools to get things done relatively nicely.

The only problem for a beginner is that you'd have a hell of a time finding any decent code to learn from. This can be a problem in any language to some degree, but PHP is the worst, followed shortly by Javascript.
Yeah, who needs AI, when there are millions of people sitting around with nothing to do?