skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't say I love PHP, but some of your criticisms are a little silly.

For example, about typing... your argument is that when you cast a string to an int, it returns 0. What would you have it return, null?

Typing is jank in a number of ways, but in most cases I See the logic in the original decision. To a noice, the idea that false == "false" (because "false" casts to 0) but true != "true" just seems broken. But what else would you have it do?

About namespaces, people are complaining that PHP should use the dot operator like every other language. PHP uses dot for concat, which eliminates the ambiguity of using + for both concat and addition that exists in other languages. Now, they're going to use a backslash for namespace resolution. And that does create operator ambiguity. So PHP trades one ambiguity (dot) for this other.

And what do you possibly mean by "older style language"? Do you mean functional features? As you probably know, lambad's and closures will be available in 5.3. I agree that Python (my language of choice) and even C# (my 2nd fave) seem cleaner. But of course they do. They're new. Java seemed clean in 1997, too.

And finally.. I do value consistency in userland code and in the runtime. And PHP is horribly inconsistent. A salvation army of a language. But that stopped actually affecting me about 8 years ago when I left behind VIM for a real IDE with intellisense.
It's interesting that you think in terms of web app. I generally think in terms of data model, and then web app is a structure on top of that. Much of my background is in delivering complex web applications with no javascript or other fancy stuff.

Previous customers have wanted lots of functionality in as few (and fast) page reloads as possible, with lots of reporting on each page. This results in a small number of mega pages backing onto a 'Service Layer' which in turn sits on top of a schema. Multiple applications can be hooked into the domain model to preserve data integrity.

I'm not as strong as many geeks I know at keeping complex things in my head. My experience of PHP (I've shipped apps from 3.0 to 5.0, but I've never invested enough time to know it well) is that it has weak language structures and weak object relational modelling capabilities - this makes it difficult to manage the sorts of complexity that I've encountered.

For anything else, PHP is pretty much irrelevant, but
when you're doing web development, it's definitely the
swiss army knife.

By way of comparison - in python there's a http interpreter in the standard library that you can bind to a webserver in seconds, and you can write a simple templating library in a couple of minutes too. It's got XML-RPC in the stdlib too that makes it ridiculously easy to offer services to other applications. Perl has similar stuff via cpan, ruby via rails.

What more functionality could you need for a web app?

I've found powerful object modelling to be critical. The Java platform has always been strong in this.

One thing that is nice about PHP is that you instantly get to the point that you change something and then reload - bang you can see your changes. CGI approaches aside, that's not such an easy point to get to with the other languages I know.
As a debugger, I always browse source code without ever editing it.
They're jobs held by founders, not employees. It was an employee count.
Of course they do, not only are they playing for the right to win a championship, but their contracts have incentive clauses for advancing through and winning the title.

It also means they'll have more leverage when they negotiate for higher salaries since they have proven success in the playoffs. Some players are well-known (and well-paid) for just their playoff performances. "Big shot" Robert Horry has hit clutch shots while winning championships for the Rockets, Lakers, and Spurs.
Your grandmother used the tools that she was taught the trade with. She used simple tools that she'd spent years learning to use properly. She spent years learning how to read the products that her craft relied on. She was passionate about what she did, and it showed. Stories like that just reinforce the idea that it almost doesn't matter what the tool is as long as you take the time to truly master its use.
I thought they all had a search feature to make looking for specific info faster. Is that not the case?
There are two things programmers should always do, but are way too lazy (myself included). In my case, it helps I know i'll deal myself with the consequences of shoddy programming, but it's still hard to go against your nature.

1. Test anything. My apps tend to be flat and simple (business software with web interface) so automated testing is not a real option. Simply going through the motions before uploading on the servers finds 80% of bugs... but it requires considerable discipline to go through 10 minutes of data entry to check a bug fix which took you 5 minutes to code.

2. Occasionally put yourself in the user's shoes and do whatever he's doing every day. I seldom did this and not come up with an idea or two.
But in rural Alabama, at least, Walmart is open 24 hours a day, and chain pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens as well.
Ahhh... an unfortunate - but all too common - collection of personality traits. I propose that those people should be given lots of power but not be promoted to package maintainers. Of course, it's open source, so it's not like we can decree this or anything, but it sure would make many open source projects easier to contribute to.
This would be my dream combination. Right now I'm using an OLPC XO to read Safari Books, which works ok but could be better.

http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2009/04/06/using-olpc-xo-as-an-eb...
But the tar method will generally be 5-15x faster for large collections of small files.

Handing it with tar makes operations on both ends asynchronous. scp (or rsync, etc.) of multiple files does file opens on each end in lockstep, resulting in a lot of idle wait time.
Epicenter The Business of Tech Internet Growing Like Its 2001 All Over Again
Ok.. nice way to leave logic at the door, but it's not just that PHP is more popular. It's that it's been around longer than Python and Ruby. That list goes back a decade for PHP.

Anybody using PHP seriously in a production environment is also using Suhosin and PHP is secure enough at that point to just be a consideration and not a problem.
I don't think your story is incompatible with my analogy, in fact I think it's totally in-line with my analogy.

Many hobbyists who have reached the utmost peak level in their art go totally primitive. Cooks grow their own food. Carpenters make hand-made furniture, people really serious about clothes go bespoke.

Just because we spend more time agonizing over things doesn't mean we have to spend more money on them. More "expensive" and "fancy" doesn't make them better- in cooking, look at the revival of cast-iron cookware and the people learning how to sharpening their own knives. The coffee snobs don't buy the most expensive starbucks brands- instead they go order fresh coffee beans, roast themselves, and then grind them. A person really into clothes doesn't get the latest Tom Ford/Armani suit- they instead get a bespoke suit from an English tailor, which is often far cheaper. There has been a movement away from $150 running to shoes to shoes like the vibram five-fingers to even barefoot!

Why do masters of the art do that? I think it's because of the idea that you can create something from nothing. This is very easy to do with computers (programming is the only profession where you can truly create something from nothing, limited only by your mind). You're not limited to someone else's vision when you do this- you can have everything exactly the way you want, the way you care about, the way that lets you exude your passion the most.

The guy who uses Ruby on Rails is no different from you, you just create your art in different ways. Using a green screen editor doesn't matter to them- they're not stirred up by it.

Instead, they get stirred up by using RoR. Maybe RoR solves a unique problem that they've been dealing with. Similarly, the guy tired of dealing with Java switches to Clojure and experiences the same light that you're experiencing- going simpler doesn't matter that too much to him.

There's no right or wrong answer in simplicity vs. complexity. Someone out there (Wozniak) is more of a purist than you and is writing everything in Assembly. The guy writing the latest and greatest web application is using Django because it's the simplest, most purest way to solve their problem- and when they get passionate enough about it that this is no longer the case, they'll go write their own.

You can get caught up in the tools and the techniques, but the one thing that really matters is that the examples I gave (and the example that you gave, which I love and will definitely remember) are of people expressing their passion. We may express it in different ways, but at least we're exuding it.

People that don't exude any passion drive me crazy.
Just imagine a fake swiss knife made in china with a hundred of blades and tools, no one is good enough for its task.
> My point being that you've attributed something to me with no actual basis.

An accurate quote is an actual basis.

> The rich benefit vastly more from society than the rest of us - they benefit for every worker they have that society has educated, for every worker that can drive to work thanks to good roads, etc etc.

Rubbish. The educated worker benefits more from the education than the employer, absent some actual coercion. (Read "threatened or actual force", not "Google refused to hire me.")

> You don't think it's bad position to be in, to be in the poorest segments of society?

No.

The goodness/badness of my position does not depend on whether someone else can jet to Aruba. The goodness/badness of my position depends only on my position. Telling people otherwise is both wrong and harmful.

For example, I'd much rather be poor in much of the US than middle class in Mexico. I'd much rather be poor in the US than upper class in some of the post-colonial countries in modern Africa. I'd much rather be middle class in Mexico than upper-class/rich in the middle ages.

Do you really think that I'm not choosing better even though in each case I'm picking relative poverty?

Now, you could argue that rich and poor used to have it bad but now we've advanced so that only poor have it bad....

> To be unable to finance care for your chronic illness if you lose your job? Frankly, I think I'd loathe that situation.

That's irrelevant to this discussion unless you'd be happy if you were rich and had some incurable illness. (Hint: the real problem is your situation, not that someone else has it better.)

> I simply admire the basic civility

I like civility too, but given a choice between progress and civility, I'll take progress every time because progress makes people's lives better.

> Care to elaborate?

Not much beyond you don't know much about the US or you don't understand what averages obscure.
K2 for Joomla - create custom content types (items) for your Joomla CMS website
I'm a fan of RIPEMD-160 with salts, it is my default hashing algorithm that i use in my apps. MD5 sits alongside CRC checksums for me when I think about security. For symmetric encryption, I like AES.
Somewhat off topic, but that blog is the first time I've seen a picture of pg after all the years of reading his essays and such. He looks nothing like I imagined he'd look. Not sure if that is good or bad, just interesting.
Well, cancer doesn't typically kill you before you're able to reproduce.
Perspective change for you:
It's the Internet.

It takes up a huge amount of space, utilizing zillions of processors, and is insanely parallel.
YouTube - Twitter Your Way on to a TV Role - Look
Will have to try your hack out on my OLPC as I was trying to use it for the same purpose and was frustrated for the same reasons. Thanks!
Interesting, notwithstanding the questionable statistical methodologies.

Asking HN: do you think e-books are overpriced? Several writers I know say that at most they get the same royalty on a Kindle copy as on paper - or sometimes less; the excuse being that the whole book has to be re-typeset for Kindle etc. While arguably valid for some books with complex layout, I find it very hard to credit for things like novels etc. I sometimes take old public domain books in .txt form from Project Gutenberg, reformat into more readable font etc. and output a .pdf for printing or laptop reading. This rarely takes more than an hour or two, and indeed many public domain or obscure books are available from Kindle for $0.80.

So I wonder where the money is going when an e-book sells for $9.99 and the author informs me he's still getting the same ~$0.50 per copy.
Agreed. You have a nice way of putting these things.

I said "I disagree" when I meant "This just doesn't apply to me". Sorry.
Sounds like you are doing good. Issuing any stock to unqualified investors? (Psst, I won't tell the SEC if you won't, Matt)
Holding College Chiefs to Their Words
Also (with bigger screen), the iRex Digital Reader 1000S: https://www.irexshop.com/product_info.php?cPath=22_35&pr... (has wacom-style input)
I'd also be curious to find out whether or not the less religious give more time, and how much money that time is worth.

Depends on how you count worth. The lawyer who volunteers at a soup kitchen, to use a lesswrong.com example, is giving up X dollars per hour of income to provide far less than X dollars per hour of charity, and since this is true for people who give to charity in general (without reference, but I'd be very surprised if it were controversial), it seems clear that people who primarily give time are donating for reputation rather than effect. I've no clue about the relative proportions of time and money the religious and non-religious give, though.
I agree with you here. The positive effects of successful startups can quickly turn exponential in scale.

YC's just a butterfly, flapping its wings on its side of the globe...
I agree with you wholeheartedly. Passionate people love to communicate with other passionate people, PHP as, you said, has a lower barrier to entry- it's like the Java of web languages. There's too many people and companies that just churn out php and java code as a job. It's not an ethos to them.

Just because you use PHP doesn't make you passionless, but because it's gone "mainstream", it becomes a filter of some sorts- just like the Shun is getting too popular right now.

It's not about the specific tool you use- instead it's about the passion and ideas that the tool conveys. In the end, the tools are meaningless. It's the ideas and messages around the end product that people remember.
Paranoia is a useful tool in business, according to Andy Grove of Intel. Don't leave anything to chance!
I'm thinking of getting my niece one when she goes to college, but that's still a couple years out so who knows what will be available by then. The point is, I'm sure many if not most of the students will not buy them directly but will have them bought for them by their parents, or others just as computers are now.
I disagree based solely on the fact that there are multiple fully featured Open Source CMS's currently available that use PHP. No way anyone's coding (for example) a CMS faster than I can download and install a copy of Drupal, Joomla, or Wordpress.
You know, I think you can do it for far less. The key is human assets and time. Legal copy you can acquire for free, or if a founder is a lawyer everyone wins. Marketing is free, provided you're willing to do it. Hosting is really all you have to pay for, and that starts at a paltry $20/month at SliceHost or lower on shared hosting. What is it that costs so much?

Sure, rent, food and everything isn't free but my day job covers that. I guess a good designer might cost you some cash, but even that doesn't amount to $5k if you do some leg work yourself (i.e. sketches, html breakdown).
Never worked with Joomla, just read about it. But I thought it already had these features built in, no need for a component...guess I was wrong.
Yes, if I had an LL.D. degree, I would have blushed and chosen "Doctorate" on the poll.
They seem to imply that YCombinator takes around 70% ownership with a poorly worded sentence.
Despite the question "What are you doing right now?", the value in Twitter is that people answer "What are you thinking right now?" I can use Twitter search to find some things out faster because people's opinions appear on Twitter before they appear on Google.

This is not to say that Twitter will replace Google. No way, this is an entirely different problem. The reason Twitter search makes sense is that it takes the search problem one step forward towards a recommendation problem. With Twitter I can get real opinions from real people. It's not that I can't do that with Google. It's that Twitter is a little faster and a little better.

If I was unclear and suggested that Twitter should become a search engine or acquire a search engine, I apologize. If anything, a search engine might want to consider acquiring Twitter.
ugh, as a baller this doesn't make any sense.

not only do folks crash the offensive boards harder when it matters, they box out harder as well on the defensive boards.

i love stats + basketball but you need at least a little knowledge of the game to make it work.
How is "write an interesting novel" not a goal?

I was once a fairly talented writer, but coding is less effort and on average better paying, so that's the path I chose. In the end I really don't see that big of a difference in the creative process. Granted, once you focus on a specific path for several years you change your relative strengths so it's easy to confuse innate talent with effort.
I've seen Moose, but haven't actually used it. The codebase I work with at work uses the ole Perl blessed hashes, and we won't be switching any time soon.
Is there a crisis actually :)? If yes you have plenty of talent to hire...
Your statement makes some unsafe assumptions. Mental state has a strong effect on ability to reproduce and raise offspring. Cancer rarely has an onset early enough to be a factor in this and the traits aren't something that can be "sensed" by potential reproductive partners. Evolution is blind to debilitations that don't impact reproductive ability (this is the same reason our natural healthy lives aren't much longer, on average, than the time it takes for us to be successful grandparents).

Maybe in a few hundred years with a society that stagnated with the exception of a strong stigma being placed on reproduction with people pre-disposed to cancer you'd see a natural reduction in the traits.
They're not cheaper, sadly.
Google Trends on your website
maybe not yet a monopoly...but soon.
Ha, I originally typed "What is more significant is that, for the most part, these are 198 highly skilled jobs."

But sometimes you have to be less precise to make a more memorable point.
How this affects a website from the design stand point? Especially AFTER the conversion?
Isn't this a libian domain name? Can that country/somebody there take it back if they want to?
I'm both a programmer for and an administrator for network infrastructure at my university. So the code that I deploy I have to live with. A lot of it was written before I got there and I probably really have deleted just about as many lines as I have written. Decade-old Perl code usually needs to be updated. And now with us switching to IPv6, a lot of things need changing.
Wait, number 200 has to be a supermodel!!

[/HowIMetYourMotherJoke]
Quite, and the same used to be an iron rule of journalism. The whole benefit of (any-)pedia is to guide you to those sources by presenting them in a meaningful context.

I get just as irritated by people who reflexively say 'you cited wikipedia LOL fail' which is usually an excuse to avoid reading something that contradicts or undermines their argument. Entertainingly, if you give the same person links to the sources cited in a given article, they'll just as often complain about 'ivory tower elitism'. teh stupid, it burns :-(
It's about time. Posterous is the best blogging platform ever. Times five.
A valid point. I don't mind hoaxes too much though, because a) they incrementally improve editing standards on WP and b) I'm starting to think that the form of someone's reaction to WP tells you a lot about their thinking process, or lack thereof.
I'm still holding back, in large part because most of the books I read tend to be non-mainstream, while the stuff on Kindle so far is largely new releases, etc.

That will probably change at some point.
http://github.com

That good enough for you?
I've been using Linode for about 3 months now and I'm 100% satisfied with both their service, the quality/rapid response of their support and billing team as well as the helpfulness of their IRC community.

I originally was thinning between SliceHost and Linode, the Linode offered 'more bang for the buck' - same prices (and as far s I've read, quality too) as SliceHost, but with more RAM and disk space
Linode's extra features (HA clustering, internal networks, custom partitioning, DNS service, and API), great support, and sweet price points all make it an amazing host.
http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html
Yes, I am.

I'm salivating over the idea of replacing all of my textbooks with pdfs. But unfortunately I doubt I could get all of my textbooks on the kindle right now. And price is an issue. Checking on Amazon, there is not a large price difference between kindle textbooks, and real textbooks.

So the only reason I would get a dx is if the textbook and the kindle pdf were bundled together for a reasonable price. But I doubt that will happen.
So does Kindle 1. For me the Kindle 2's killer feature is the text to voice.
Christ. They have a country falling apart under the burdens of mass immigration. Ppl who even consider voting for those morons would have to be complete idiots.
Forth is ridiculously simple to implement. But there's no reason to use it, beyond that. It's less expressive than C but not faster.
I just use http://is.gd/ when twittering. Shorter by one character. ;-)
DreamHost, SliceHost, and Heroku. Didn't know which poll choice to select so I went with "Other" :|
The same thing happens in America -- we talk a good game about charity being driven by individual donations, but we don't tend to donate very much.

Last I heard, your average US charity has less than 30% of its budget met by donations.
Look at the conversations and see what the value proposition of the site is. What is it that people are looking for. And then highlight that value.
Yes.IIRC even the Kindle 1 had search.
It's a very vague goal. Moreover, there is no such thing as a "wrong" novel.
wow

i hope they gain two or more seats in the european parliament. suddenly, eu-politics would be much more interesting to follow. on June 7 i'll vote for them instead of the green party, i've typically seen as the least evil. the pirate party stands for ideals i can fully support.

since they're still a very young party they might not have good answers to a lot of questions. but they will learn and grow and spread, and will have a certain kind of influence / voice. that is a step in the right direction
My dad just bought a Kindle 2 with his Indian credit card and Indian billing address (although he used my Amazon account and shipped it to my American address)
That sounds about right. I write all my stuff on the Microsoft stack whenever I have a choice, and still I'm not at all excited about their Cloud offering. They really missed a great opportunity to dominate the space.
Interesting, I never bothered to look for his picture. But when I visited that link I saw the pic and thought, "who's that?". Over time you get a mental picture in your mind of someone you don't see, like when listening to the radio. Then sometimes you finally see that person and the do, or do not, look like your minds picture. Now I have to reconcile his real picture with my minds picture when reading his essays. Based on the voting, I must be the only one. Oh, well...