skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PHP is used for a subset of development at Facebook. I'm not sure what the split is, but I would not be surprised if PHP is the primary language used by less than 60% of Software Engineers at Facebook. The rest code in C++, Java, Python, and then a bunch of other languages that are less used.

The PHP development environment at Facebook is unlike that found at any other company I'm aware of, and common PHP pitfalls and legacy code are actively "linted" out of the system (as an automated part of the code review process). It still wouldn't be my choice of language to use outside of Facebook, but I have no issue working on the PHP code base here (although I rarely venture into it).

Over time, much logic and processing has been offloaded to backend services, with PHP increasingly playing a (largely parallelised) dispatch, post-process, and render role. That will likely continue.

With all that said, it is questionable whether it would be an investment to move off of it - which language/environment would you think a good target would be, and why?
yeah, this is just my personal blog...it's not geared up for the heavy hit of traffic from HN that I didn't expect to get...I've beefed it up a bit, it should be working now.
Staples Easy 3D will launch in the Netherlands and Belgium

This partly because Mcor, the printer manufacturer, is European, but I suspect also because there's more demand in Europe thanks to the ubiquity of fast cheap broadband. It disturbs me that the US is falling behind in the digital infrastructure stakes.
Automated XML Parsing within Objective-C (Need some help, but test it out)
Parsing XML by hand is tedious and extraneous work. I decided to automate it. Right now the code is a little buggy with certain XML files because I wrote this up in about a day. Let me know what you think.

github: https://github.com/skylarrudolph/AutoXML
I'm not pg, but that looks to my untrained eye more like the voting ring detector going off than the effect of flags.
While it isn't enough for me to want to use the Windows tablets, the lack of a proper pen/stylus tool for iPad really frustrates me. Having tried out writing on a Note/Note2 I'd really love to have an accurate writing tool for my iPad. I'd use it constantly.
> but I’d probably utterly fail any type of formal interview where they asked me to write or explain code on the spot.

If you've gotten any sort of software project to work the way you wanted it to, which it sounds like you have, I doubt this quote is true. Any company worth working for is more interested in hearing/watching you break down problems into pieces and describe how to solve them. Often times this can be done in 'pseudo-code'. If interviewers are going to nitpick your code for trivial syntax issues (i.e. things that can be fixed with 10-seconds of google-fu), there's a good chance you won't want to work for that company anyway.
You are in effect pointing out the advantage that businesses in countries with universal health care coverage have.

Not only do they not have to pay for coverage, they do not even need to be involved with the process of providing it-- i.e. no "open enrollment" months with corresponding time spent on information sessions, filling out forms, etc.
Calendaring app overtakes Angry Birds as the top paid app
In terms of starting a business, you have absolutely no idea how easy you have it there, compared to almost every other country.
Top List of Government Data Breaches for 2012
This is absolutely the right answer.
Can you explain what you're talking about? I run a small business and my understanding is that unless you have like 50+ employees this insurance stuff doesn't even effect you.

Honestly though if it is a business killer(which you know, I don't really see how it could be unless I am running a minimum wage fast food drive through and not a tech company)I will just drop my employees' wages and tell them it is to pay for their health insurance. I really doubt I will need to do this though.
On an unexpected trip onto the front page, here's what I saw (hits at ~1 Hz on a Friday evening in the top slot):

http://measuredmass.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/hacker-news/

Graphical post-mortem here:

http://measuredmass.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/more-hn-numbers...
They two links are for the same company.
The first link is for an injection MOLD. The mold can produce a few thousand parts at ~$1-$3/each.
For 1,000-10,000 parts, ProtoMold is an great option.
Coders aren't fungible. Web dev isn't embedded systems isn't databases isn't enterprise business isn't application dev isn't front-end JS.

So you need to isolate what you want to do. However, realize that I - and others like me I've met - key off of theoretical grounding and consider that the foundation to great software development practice. To interview successfully with us - regardless of the position - , you need to be able to speak comfortably about data structures, algorithms, big-O, and some level of formal language theory. Loosely, that's 2-3 courses in the CS curricula.

With your background, I would be looking for you to have spent some time to grasp the theoretical concepts and be able to apply them in practice. I would also be expecting you to have a rock-solid - hardcore - foundation of in-the-trenches software development principles.
Tablets Are Hot Holiday Gifts, but Which One to Buy? — Review
We've been at 7.9 cents/GB[1], per month, for a few months now, and neither google nor amazon is responding to our price point.

How odd!

[1] http://www.rsync.net/products/pricing.html
NASA Actually Working on Faster-than-Light Warp Drive
Grab free tickets for the Launch Festival. Limited supply. Developers only.
I frankly don't understand how you can build software without understanding what you do.

Then again, can you FizzBuzz? :-)
Here's what I like about this story: Amar tried everything he could to "hack" his way into the position. In the end, he made a lot of noise but it wasn't until he sat down and spent hours learning to code that he got the job. To most people, getting a job after 5.5 months is not "hacking", but it's more admirable. That's the moral I got from the story, whether it was intended or not.
GE CEO Immelt Embraces Software; VC Andreessen Embraces Hardware
Browser you still love to hate
Google Trends: eclipse juno slow, eclipse indigo slow
Kik Tries To Preserve Messaging Simplicity While Adding Features With Kik Cards
Sorry, I was replying to dfxm and to you collectively and now I see I probably should have split it up into separate comments or something. I don't think the steak's extrinsic value (which definitely exists, and is generated by advertising and the 'decision makers') is greater than its intrinsic value, which I do believe is real and comes from labor... but quibbling over that might be splitting hairs.
Indeed!

Better quote from the article would be:

storytelling is the only way to plant ideas into other people’s minds.

This is way easier than recursively going into someone's dream, only to meet your ex-wife as base condition.
I tried to get the saved values of the input type=text tags without xss. It's a pretty messy method and doesn't work very well. http://j.mp/YbLvuK Any ideas?
People who want to rape children are not the victimized group here. Get help.
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear in the original post. I'm interested in one-off pieces that I can design to solve problems around the house and if it takes a month to wait for that, no big deal. I don't need thousands of pieces.

The parent to my original post suggested there was something akin to 3D printing out there in terms of cost and versatility that was just slower to produce. Something designed for mass production certainly isn't it.
Senators pass ECPA reform requiring a warrant for cops to read your e-mail
What version of PHP does HPHP match? 5.3 or 5.4? I ask because I've become very accustomed the short array syntax ([1,2,3]) and other goodies in 5.4.
Who cares for that? That’s the exact same niche market Microsoft served during the last decade and failed to reach any kind of mass-appeal.
I'm not a hiring manager, but if your self-description is accurate (see comments re: impostor syndrome for the possibility it isn't), I wouldn't want to work on a team with you. The problem doesn't seem to be that you're not smart or technical or industrious enough, but that you're not conscientious enough:

I figure out what needs to be done in order to get something to work reasonably well, and if I can’t do it myself I google it till I find snippets of code that mostly do what I need, then I modify them and hack around till I get something that works decently enough.

To me this is a much bigger problem than your ability to implement a linked list or describe big-O notation -- I'd be worried that I'd always be cleaning up after your messes.

The good news is that this is a solvable issue. Start collaborating with people, maybe via open source. Find a project of yours that's useful but maybe not profitable, open source it, and start handling requests for features and submissions. Learn how to deal with bad incoming code, and how to deal with your code being confusing to other people. Maybe read some of the classics on code as collaborative effort, like the Pragmatic Programmer or Clean Code.

Or maybe just decide that this isn't for you! There are lots of jobs oriented around achieving specific goals with throwaway code that you might be happier in than being a slave to the CI server, and they aren't less valuable. But if you want to be hireable in a code-oriented company, I think you have to change some things.
Show HN: wikiUp - Wikipedia in Tooltips
I understand and endorse the idea here.

It seems, though, that there must be some important distinction between "action at a distance" in physics, and "action at a distance" in software, that's being passed up.

In particular, "distance" in software is surely a function of "distance in mental space", rather than simply the number of lexical-scope boundaries crossed, or the specific number of containing modules. Do we have some way of formalizing this intuition of "distance", such that we could actually use it as a design measure?
If the battery doesn't last for a full day of meetings then the pen interface isn't a differentiator.
About a year ago I starting becoming incredibly interested in making ideas spread. I decided to read books on how to present myself and my ideas in a way that builds my own credibility, trustworthiness, and helps people to take on my ideas.

If you are interested in these things, I highly recommend Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers [1]. It focuses on the SUCCESs framework:

S - Short

U - Unexpected

C - Credible

C - Concrete

E - Emotional

S - Stories

They elaborate in excellent detail on each of these ideas and the acronym that they coined is a perfect example.

In terms of building your own credibility, I suggest reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. [2] This book is instrumental in understanding the basic concepts that can have a material impact on your life. I think that Autobiography of Ben Franklin [3] teaches a few key lessons in the use of diffidence that harmonizes well with Carnegie's ideas.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/140...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/06...

[3] http://www.classicly.com/download-autobiography-of-benjamin-...
Thanks, that's really helpful, I'll look into some open source projects.
Someone asked on another list for an explanation of the press release. This is my try.

Hypersonic engines are up against hard physics. The ram air heats so
much in the inlet that it's hard for combustion to add much energy to
make it go faster out the back.

The idea behind the SABRE engines is to cool the ram air before it is
compressed. The heat exchanger to do this is what the press release
is all about. With not much more than a ton of mass, it sucks 400 MW
of heat out of the incoming air, dropping the temperature from 1500 C
to -150 C in a few inches of heat exchanger that looks much like
fabric because the tubes are so tiny.

The engine cycle also uses the temperature difference between the ram
air and the LH2 to run the compressor. It takes close to 2/5th of the
energy from burning hydrogen to liquefy it. The engines recover much
of this by running a helium turbine on the temperature difference
between the ram air and the liquid hydrogen flow to the engines. The
turbine powers the compressor stage that raises the pressure of the
-150 C air to rocket chamber pressure.

The design is extremely clever thermodynamics which also avoids most
of the metallurgical problems of high temperature. Fabricating the
air to helium heat exchanger was a very hard task. They have miles of
tiny tubing, tens of thousands of brazed joints and they don't leak!

Using these engines and breathing air, the vehicle reaches 26 km and
about a quarter of the velocity to orbit giving an equivalent exhaust
velocity (back calculate from hydrogen consumption) of 9 km/s.
That's twice as good as the space shuttle main engines. It is
expected to go into orbit with 15 tons of payload out of 300 or 5%
even though the rest of the acceleration is on internal oxygen that
only gives 4.5 km/s exhaust velocity.

Leaving out the oxygen and using big propulsion lasers to heat
hydrogen reaction mass, such a vehicle would get 25% of takeoff mass
to LEO, reducing the already low cost by a factor of 5. That's enough
to change the economics of power satellites from being too expensive
to consider to a cost substantially less expensive than any fossil
fuel.

But try explaining any of this in a press release.
> Frankly I don’t even know where to start. I’m most proficient in PHP, but I can pick up anything really. I breezed through the codecademy.com Ruby and Python tutorials in an afternoon but I’ve never done anything in Ruby or Python.

If you're experienced as you say you are, then you shouldn't be learning new languages via tutorials...but rather through things like O'Reilly's "Cookbook" series. That should get you up to speed much faster.
I don't know about DOA, it does have wireless and more space than a Nomad.
I've got a shelf of those books...I've always used them.
How will we travel in 2022?
Is there anything here that offers more insight than keeping your DB in the same datacenter as your app servers?
It is true that a hard sell will turn off someone with the mind of a developer. I specifically remember trying to buy a car and not buying from the person who was really pushy.

What I mean by sell mode is that the discussion needs to be focused on what the company can do for the developer to convince them they want to work there. Lots of people call me up and the conversation is all about what I can do for them. You called me! I have a job and didn't ask for a new one. The first thing you must do is convince me that your offer is so good it is worth changing my whole life for it.
Adventures in FOIA-Land (or: Red Tape Is Not Transparent)
The United Nations Grants Palestine State Status
Barriers to P=NP Proofs
My Battle With Scope Creep - Just Say NO
Would this then make the case even more pessimistic, considering there is an inverse correlation between family sizes and parental education levels.

I.e. smarter individuals have less (or no) kids.
I didn't say they were running out of making money, but the days of just churning out a new version of Windows and Office every 2-3 years and counting on millions of reflexive upgrades are limited. And since more and more money spent on computing devices is _not_ being spent on devices where Microsoft has a dominant position (i.e., laptops and desktops and servers to a lesser extent), MS is rapidly losing market share even if their share of PCs is not substantially decreasing.

Microsoft's greatest competitor to Windows version X has been version x - 1 ever since XP came out (except for Windows 7 whose greatest competitor was version x - 2). With Windows 8, there is very, very little incentive to upgrade unless you want to use a touch-screen device. I would bet very few people even upgrade Window any more. 99% of the time they only get a new version of Windows when they get a new computer. I know that's been true for me for 10+ years, and I'm cool with that.

Consumer preference may be driving the move to app stores, but only because no other delivery mechanism provides that kind of end-user experience of being able to pick out an app, install it by pushing a button and knowing you're almost certainly not getting malware.

Oh, except for most Linux distros for the better part of 10 years.
It is closer to 5.3, though we've adopted some 5.4 features: traits, our closures' treatment of $this, and f()[$x] syntax.

Edit: notably not short array syntax, at least yet.
You sound plenty hire-able to me, based on your story. Your best bet will be getting a job through a personal connection, somebody who _knows_ how you work and wants you (or is willing to strongly refer you). Barring that, not all companies will make you do sorting algorithms and brain teasers for a job interview.

My problem is that I have the memory retention of a gnat. I learn quickly, then discard the information to make way for new stuff. Six years ago, I was a full time .NET programmer (for years!) and I can barely remember anything about .NET at the moment. This makes certain types of technical interviews difficult for me.

My team runs a moderately high traffic web site. Learning quickly, being flexible, and fiercely persistent matter much more to us than a deep understanding of computer science concepts. Now that I am in a position where I do the hiring, I try to accommodate people like us. Unconventional background, hate whiteboarding in public, terrible memory. Whatever. Can you produce something of value in a reasonable time frame? That is all we care about.

The way I hire people now days is to give them a simple challenge to do (at home, on their own time). Basically, take a small data set and display it on a web page. Depending on the level of interviewee, I will ask for more or less features (make it sortable, derive additional data points according to some algorithm you must devise).

The challenge has no time limit or rules. You can use your own resources and do it on your own pace. When it gets sent back to me, I evaluate the candidate based on the final product. I don't much care how they got there. If the product is good, we bring you in for an interview.

During the interview, I ask you to work on _your_ code. The code you provided to get the interview. Essentially, we pair program. Adding features, fixing bugs. Whatever seems the most fun.

If you show me that you can code on your own codebase, using your tools and process, and you are pleasant enough to work with side-by-side for several hours, you've got the job.

I know you said you don't want to move, but we are hiring developers here where I work in NYC. Drop me a line if you are interested jdslatts at fzysqr dot com.
This actually touches on another issue, which is the definition of "pornography". Weirdly, most people these days seem to make an exception for artistic adult nudes, but consider any image of a nude child to be pornographic. This is insane, of course. If you take a cute picture of your toddler playing in the bathtub, that is not pornography, yet a lot of people would lump it in under that definition, including many governments.

But when we're talking about images and video depicting child abuse, that's a different situation altogether.
Maybe it doesn't tell us directly and the title is a bit strong, but so is the word 'nothing'. Cloudflare tells us quite a lot. It is unlikely the terrorists cut all the lines, so that is out. That is information I didn't have before this blog post.

That leaves a few options of how to shut off the internet of a country, and they give a pretty plausible one, and who would have the authority/power to do it. And they back it all up with evidence.
You should not be running a ToR exit node from your home.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
er, yes. "Locality" here doesn't mean keeping everything in the same place, physically - it's talking about keeping causes in the same modules as their effects. Different "space" entirely.
Where's your GitHub

1. Acquire GitHub

2. Upload lots of nice code

3. ???

4. Employers are impressed
I too was entirely self-taught and had very little opportunity to work with other programmers, right up until I got a job writing system software.

I simply made it my priority to become obsessed with data structures, algorithms, and software engineering. I read every such book I could find and wrote code to implement things. It was harder back then, before the internet. There were far fewer books at the bookstores. Nearly everyone told me I could never be a software developer without a CS degree.

This is a solveable problem, if you really want to solve it.
My startup, Plebu.com, is a website builder with less features. You can customize the design, add text pages, galleries, and a contact page. That's it. The sites you build are mobile friendly. Please let me know what you think.
This is a bit of a tangent, but at some point I find the "it was really an acquisition" thing becomes rather silly, as there is very little difference between hiring people specifically because of their experience and ideas in a product area and a startup of some people with experience and ideas but no actual product yet. Maps and Android definitely fall under that second group, as Where 2 essentially thought that web mapping was a good idea, but hadn't actually done it yet, and Android didn't release anything until two years after acquisition, let alone ship an actual phone (which came a year after that).

There can be insight there (one great property of startups en masse is that they serve as a great experimental method for proving zanier ideas will work or market segments can exist if a product is made for them), but there does come a point where it's like saying Google's success in AI research is because they spotted AI researchers and snapped them up. Well...yeah, employees usually are hired for the job they were hired for.

Regardless, the original poster's criteria was "Google continues to validate its service not by competing on quality or feature distinction, but by throwing gobs of cash at it", which I think the GP's examples clearly contradict, as all of them have continued to gain quality (for some people's definition of quality) and feature distinctiveness.
It's useful to add "eclipse juno" and "eclipse indigo" for scale.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=eclipse%20juno%20slow...

Is there a log-plot option I missed?
They dropped the EFF because that's what the developers voted on it would seem

https://twitter.com/humble/status/146655575290286080
Enterprise users are still stuck on IE 6, 7, and 8. How are they going to use tablets with IE 10?
I have read almost to the end and I still have no idea what a "growth hacker" does. Is this SEO (another blurry, but less blurry term) or content generation or scaling?