skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mildly ironic how in some respects Times Have NOT Changed:

"Midgard is freely-available platform for creating powerful web applications. It is fully based on Open Source software, giving you freedom to create your solutions in an open environment. Midgard is the tool for creating, modifying and maintaining dynamic database-enabled web services.

Midgard already has a quite good set of features for creating powerful web sites, and is being used with successful results by some commercial and uncommercial organizations. But this is not where the development will end; rather, the development team also has more ambitious goals about revolutionizing the way people think about web development."

This has probably become on ongoing, albeit worthwhile, struggle.
Ah right. I must be an outlier then.
Oh, the economics of news delivery are wonderful. Its the economics of paper delivery that suck.
holds hand up I use PHP. Indeed I use PHP for most of my commercial web stuff (i.e. stuff I make at work & most of my startup ideas).

Mostly I'm a Python fan but for websites PHP is just 100% easier for me because I have a framework I know well (KohanaPHP) and years worth of snippets/experience to use in prototying sites. I bet I can code a simple site faster in PHP than Python.

As to why PHP isnt discussed much on here: well I will hazard a lot of people take the same approach. We love exciting stuff in Python, C and Ruby (well, not ao much ruby for me :P) but PHP is our grab-it-and-run language. If someone knocks on the door and says "make me XYZ website in 2 days" we will probably pull out the PHP.

Nothing exciting and new is really happening with PHP - it is doing what it is supposed to do: help us produce dynamic websites fairly quickly with little fuss. So we can get on with the real job of hacking in Python (or Ruby or C or..... etc.) :D

I could be wrong :)
Amazon Kindle DX: 9.7-inch Screen For $489
Absolutely, school has lots to offer, but what's often missing from the equation in discussions like these is opportunity cost.

People compare school vs "not-school" as if the alternative to school is sitting on your butt. In truth, one can accomplish a heck of a lot with that time and money.

It's a hugely personal decision of course.
I would normally be all over this, but I have a prior engagement. I'll probably be at Lunasa until 6:15 but have to jet then.
PHP has a few downsides, everything from poor naming conventions to security vulnerabilities. People around these parts are always looking for the cleanest solutions to their problems and the latest methods available. PHP's relative age and problems make it neither.

That said, I coded my first startup in PHP. It's dead simple to make a dynamic web page with PHP, but it's also dead simple to create a huge mess. In that sense, PHP reminds me of C. It's pretty simple to write an app in C, but there are 1,000 pitfalls.

Just like with C, there are definitely talented coders out there who can make PHP behave correctly. Sadly, they are a minority. Many of them move on to other languages and frameworks.

I've since moved on to Ruby (on Rails) as well as Python. Both languages offer simplicity and power. Rails, in spite of being the Dane Cook of frameworks, makes it extremely easy to create a web application.
This is the base for the face detection, in case you are wondering and don't want to dig through the code:

http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/FaceDetection
my bad, I used the autosubmit, and didn't see that the person added ? to the end
A J.D. is considered a terminal degree (there is no further degree beyond a J.D.; the S.J.D. is considered a different track), so technically you do have a doctorate.

But ethical rules are questionable as to whether you can call yourself a "doctor," because it's potentially misleading. So US lawyers are in the strange position of having doctorates, but being unable to say so.

Here's some more info: http://abajournal.com/magazine/lawyers_are_doctors_too/
accurate, but not specific
A cautionary tale:

When I released my game on Facebook shortly after the platform launch, the company I worked for was making bank. We consistently doing $5k a day in ad revenue for a straight 6 months. But then two things happened: the ad vendors realized they weren't getting value out of the CPM they paid out and the gold rush money to buy app installs dried up. It didn't take more than a month for that revenue to decrease ten-fold.
Some additional thoughts:

Bounce it off a "normal" person, not a person who blogs, twitters, codes, or designs. Just regular Joe. Do the mom test w/ your idea. Do they like it? Understand it?

Get a prototype up and show it to all your friends. They have great ideas. It doesnt have to look pretty. It just has to essentially work.

Can you describe it to a layperson in 1 short sentence?

Eat your own dog food. Programmers (myself included) are notorious for just building stuff and throwing it over the wall. By using it day in and day out, you will find the pain points.
I am a PhD, in physics, that left academic research about 10 years ago for a programming career. As a researcher I studied Computational Fluid Dynamics. All of my programming jobs have been in network management or a related field. My Ph.D has been a plus at every job I have held. Over qualification has never been an issue.

I left academia for two reasons: pay and a preference for programming to the drudgery of publication. I started my programming career near the peak of 2000 tech bubble and had doubled my salary within with a couple of years. Six figure programming salaries are far more common than six figure salaries in academic research.

An additional bonus which I did not anticipate was the competitive advantage I would have. Competition for academic positions is quite intense involving many capable people. This is likely why salaries remain low. In programming the typical skill level is much lower.
I failed out of University in my last year, but I had a wonderful experience there. OTOH this was in the days when you could get an engineering degree from a top Canadian university for $2.5k a year tuition.
Thanks, lacker. You said it better than I. Good thing I write code better than hn comments.
Blah blah kids need god blah blah. Or possibly you need god but it doesn't seem to be working for you, you don't understand the kids, and you think you can solve both problems in one fell swoop by going on a conversion binge?
It's not ludicrous. The twitter competitors like laconica aren't really an alternative, because the users you are trying to reach are all using twitter.
How about a Boston Meet ??
Wide Awake Developers: Kudos to Relevance and Clojure
Central banks are not investing, they are trying to control the supply of money.
Star Trek opens this week, look for the Randy Pausch cameo.
Was just thinking about this the other day, thought I'd post a reminder.
I'll be there a bit early, so see you there...
We are not disagreeing. Here you're referring to your position of leadership and responsibility that you have risen to after 30 years, but I was talking about code monkeys.

"Do x, y, and z by the first of next quarter or you're out of business." Sure, but new developer hires in large companies are absolutely not in a position to decide where the business is going, and won't be for quite some time. The article and my comment were about the entry-level developer positions.

"And for everyone of those, there is someone else changing the world." Absolutely, and I greatly admire such people. But you won't change the world in an entry-level developer job. I tried such jobs, they were very easy and I suffered a lot the lack of opportunity to change the world.
Customer Analytics - From Those Who Should Know
"While you were busy in your ivory tower for 8 years, someone had to keep the world moving...You were obviously too busy in college to actually find out what really goes on in the real world...Poor baby. Get a job. Feed, clothe, and shelter a family...earning a PhD sounds like a vacation."

"You have an attitude problem"
There seems to be. From the manual at http://s3.amazonaws.com/kindle/KindleDX_Users_Guide.pdf

The screen changes automatically when you rotate your Kindle from portrait to landscape or vice versa. Or, you can lock your screen to a particular orientation to
fit your reading position.

However, since this is a much bigger device, I am not sure if reading in bed is going to work the same way it does for the iPhone.
PASS column = MD5(MD5(plaintext_pass) + salt)

SALT column = salt

Is the way used in most distributable web applications.
No, I posted that before parent edited his post (classy). Initially, he only claimed that my point was a fallacy and made no argument whatsoever.
What J.D. stands for?
Even though I probably won't buy one anytime soon, I'm much more excited about the big one for $500 over the little one for $350.
In the Netherlands it's not a matter of population -- shops are not allowed to be open outside the regulated hours. I believe the law was introduced a few decades ago in order to protect the mom and pop stores (a misguided attempt to put mom and pop stores on equal footing with larger businesses. If the mom and pop store can't afford to stay open at night then nobody is allowed to. Because that's "fair".)

Since gas stations have permission to stay open around the clock they're used to get emergency food. You can also get food delivered on Sundays and in the middle of the night, so it's not so bad.
It reminds me of Perl. Perl literally gave me a headache last time I coded in it. (Incidentally, this is why I'm wary of Ruby as well.) Besides, I am totally satisfied with Python.
PHP is like a mobile phone that's a year old - it's perfectly good, but ain't what the cool kids are playing with.
Interesting quote from this re intermittently visible bugs: "Computers simulate determinism."
remembering some of your early comments as i do, i find it amusing that you would call someone else's argument "inflammatory!"

but i have to admit, you've done a really good job of curbing your own inflammatory language. i find your comments much easier to read as a result. if only we could all be so flexible in the face of unexpected challenges.
You know what would be awesome? The same thing ... but even bigger. Gotta love creative engineering and lazy product evolution.

No in all honesty this new Kindle looks pretty awesome, but also a little ridiculous when held compared with other electronics.
They don’t. I believe the last tuition grants were issued in 1996, and they’d been price-frozen for a while before that.
PHP offers little more than convenience. I use it myself because it's so easy to integrate with PHP and MySQL, and it's easy. I think it's a decent platform for a basic web-site, but further than that it doesn't offer anything truly unique or powerful.
Virtual Currencies Gain in Popularity
Nokia 5800 Theme: Bubbles
Except every year the 'cool' phones come and go, and PHP is still around, kick ass and taking names.
I agree with both of you. I would advise Ph.D. not to take entry-level coding jobs, and employers not to admit Ph.D.s to such jobs. It will be a misfit, and everyone will suffer.

I was just a bit upset at the dichotomy of "industry = responsibility, having to deliver" and "academia = lack of such responsibility". I think we know better now what each of us meant.
I've done that too, and with good reason. (Essentially, I wanted to establish that the Wikipedia "admin" class was a bunch of buffoons, and succeeded.)

My favorite was to make up college traditions that never actually existed-- lots of room for lulz, impossible to refute.
Sounds like you went to a great school. Most colleges in India don't allow any flexibility in what courses you can take. You have to pass all the prescribes subjects. Liberal arts? That's unheard of back here.
Well said. I would recommend Django to people who prefer Python to Ruby.
Flagged - no content.
Juris Doctor
I have A levels (UK), so I voted high school (the closest out of that list, I guess).
Not that github should be the only location of open source, but does anybody else find themselves surprised when they come across code samples that don't use it?
I agree with more or less with what you said but a downside of PHP is not security vulnerabilities, that's really just a myth. I can't remember the last vulnerability which could be directly attributed to PHP as a language.

Sure, there are plenty of apps containing holes but those are not caused by PHP but by not coding correctly, eg not checking input making SQL injections possible etc.

Which might confirm what you said, it's easy to create a huge mess with PHP.

But then, it's easy to create a huge mess in any other language, too. It's probably even easier with Ruby due to its highly dynamic nature.

Languages are like tools, you have to know how to use it but you can't blame the tool if somebody misuses it.

Edit: Fixed typo.
Also had a similar experience while living in Munich a few years ago. I learned I had to plan out my food purchases much better, but otherwise it wasn't very inconvenient. Definitely a change of pace, and I comforted myself thinking that it meant people didn't have to work at their crappy grocery store jobs late / on Sundays.

If it somehow enabled 50 cent beers and 2 euro bottles of (good!) wine, I am not about to complain.
Are you implying the wikipedia article contains no content that might be interesting to HN readers?

The CC is quite extraordinary in terms of its UI, and yet many people are unfamiliar with it.
I was surprised when I saw a link to a tgz file. I almost put it into a Github repo, but the code didn't come with a license.
That's probably a good place for it. I guess I felt like posting it to github would be turning it into a "project", which definitely isn't the goal but I suppose I could just dump code there for the taking. Other folks do it. =\
I tend to see just as many using code.google.com/p.
I just want them to get rid of the keyboard. Isn't there some rule about size vs time-you-actually-spend-using-the-feature? At its present size, I'd say that if you're not using the keyboard 1/4 of the time you're using the Kindle, then it's too big.
I have often thought the same thing as PHP is a fantastic web development language, and it is very well developed. The documentation is very good, and as you mentioned there are useful code examples right in the documentation. The learning curve for PHP is very low, and there is library support for pretty much anything you want to do. Oh, and it is dead simple to deploy.

I think RoR is one large reason why PHP is looked down now. More specifically, there isn't a leading PHP framework that has a proven following or as well executed marketing plan. There are a lot of PHP frameworks, but none that capture the attention of the masses like RoR.

The other argument I hear is that the language is annoying to program in. This just doesn't not compute in my brain as PHP code looks perfectly normal to me. I think that some people just prefer certain syntax, and I have yet to come up with a reason that I understand.

As you have probably guessed I have been a PHP fan for years, but I recently started seriously using Ruby/Rails for some side projects. There are two reasons I am playing with this instead of cakePHP/KohanaPHP/Symfony/Zend

1. There is a lot of literature about Ruby/RoR

2. I found myself resisting Ruby/RoR, and I don't want to be the old guy that won't learn new technology
In the past I've purposefully avoided submitting articles to Hacker News if they were about PHP. I kind of just assumed that they would be downvoted just for being PHP. I wonder if I'm alone in that?

Edit: fixed a typo.
Not such a mystery. It stays the same, but dependencies continue to change and it does not participate in shaping them or being shaped by them.
Good point about the license. Consider it public domain. I'll make a note about it on the blog entry.

I'll slap it up on github in a few and update the links.

http://github.com/beetlebugorg/PictureMe/tree/master
Seriously.....Doctor of Sacred Music?
Reality - Now With Augmentation
I thnk we are talking about the same thing... Based on estimations, it is always a goods idea to add a certain room for error, additional expenses, etc...

I did not say multiply $20 times the number of hoiurs, I just said that you need to derive your fixed price based on your estimation (not DIRECTLY based), which in turn is based on the specifications/requirements.

So we are in agreement. My beef was with the assumption that the service provider always gets screwed if they charge a fixed price; my point was that that does not need to be the case, if you follow a solid process to give your estimate.
I'd love to see more PHP on HN (I am here to learn, primarily, and PHP is what I do), but the problem seems to lie in there being a lack of quality PHP articles. Maybe I'm being unfair, but just lately I've been getting the impression that the more someone knows, the less likely they are to share.
Education has to go both ways, though. Sure, employees and users need to to know the dangers (for instance - Facebook users need to know how dangerous it is to give Facebook the password to their email accounts) but Facebook thinks it's dangerous for it's users to understand security.

The first time I ever saw a Phishing scam on Facebook I took a screen shot and emailed it to Facebook, because I was almost certain that Phishing was not occurring on a large-scale on their web-site at that time. The result? They blocked my account for almost a week. I guess the fact that I knew what a Phishing scam was made me "suspicious".

If the IT department where I work called me and asked for my password, I would hesitate to refuse because odds are, they'd think I was trying to hide something. They honestly wouldn't understand why it was a bad idea for me to give them my password.
A Jef Raskin followup project to the Canon Cat is Archy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy Fascinating UI concept: largely search-based, with everything persistent (no saving), infinite non-windowing work area, and many other interesting features.
You can't downvote articles (only flag them)?
No, I'm not. I spurned college to enter the working world after high school (programming) and did well. Took classes as well, and transferred to a reputable school. While it wasn't hell on earth, the simplicity and naivette of most students was unbearable.
How can you not have liberal Arts, How can u not Have Art? They probably teach that in freaking Zimbabwe :P?
How Your Startup Can Survive The Recession
I went for bachelors anyway although I get to finish this Friday. I guess the guy ain't a lawyer to take into consideration all the possible answers. I do not see what is the point of this poll though besides perhaps simply curiosity?
I dont know if I agree with all that necessarily. 10 years ago I was new to the job market and was too busy trying to learn the ropes of the career. Over the years, I've grown curious and wanted more. I've had to grow out of my shell to network and drum up business.

So to respond to the article. 10 years ago, I was not entrepreneurial in any way because I was very green. Now, I would say I'm a bit more, but I am always learning
Apple in negotiations to buy Twitter for $700 million
Apple are reportedly in talks with Twitter for a potential sale the social networking site for $700 million. Valleywag, the digital media blog, claims to have contact with an inside source at Apple, who is reporting that a deal is close, and that the acquisition could be completed by 8th June....
And before I got to the ad-filled Boston Globe site, I was hit with a full page ad.
Agreed. I never meant to say that academia = lack of responsibility. 2 different worlds. I miss yours.
Amen brother! A happy customer is a great source of revenue over time even thoguh you may take a hit from time to time. How big a hti you take depends on how good you are at what you do, and how good the client is (as far as helping you draft good specs for them).
Poll: Which cloud host do you use?
I am interested in not only seeing what you guys are using, but why you choose one over the other.
Amazon EC2
Media Temple
Mosso
SliceHost
WHat would you recommend for getting into Ruby? I tried it once but their site is horrible and the "Hello World" example is really babyish and idiotic - and it put me off :)

I've never "got" RoR. Python makes sense to me as a killer all-purpose language just as PHP makes sense to me as a niche for-the-web language (I cant get these people that insist on running PHP standalone :o). But I never quite figured the rails niche.
No, I posted that before parent edited his post (classy).

Now if only I could become as classy as you, injecting ad hominem jabs, bitter snark, and class warfare into the argument as a replacement for actually backing up your points.

[edited for wit]
One of the things that I think is relevant to startups hiring is that (warning experience mixed with opinion ahead) there are lots and lots of PHP developers of wildly varying quality. This makes the initial stages of recruitment time consuming. By looking for people with skills or interest in Ruby, Python or Scala (or whatever is hot that month) you'll probably see less interest but, on average, the quality and enthusiasm will probably be greater. Which means it takes less time to hire (well, maybe), as well as getting the better people (hopefully).
> an aspiring entrepreneur reading Hacker News might like the idea of having a cheap labor pool to hire from some day

You mean an aspiring exploiter and member of the parasite class?
I follow the Zend Developer Zone (http://devzone.zend.com/public/view) and find that an interesting article pops up every now and then. I've added a few developer blogs to my feed reader from articles that I discovered there.
700 million is 'small change' ... wtf?
I've been using PHP at work and on personal projects for years. It has a very low "barrier for entry", which is both good and bad. It's easy/cheap to hire entry level programmers to write simple PHP, but it's all too easy to let them jump into big projects too soon and write something that turns into a huge mess. Well written PHP code can be just as easy to read as Python/Ruby/etc., but PHP makes it far too easy to write something that is a horrible mess.

At work we are still mostly a PHP shop, but anything I write on my own now gets done in Python. PHP's complete lack of a coherent function naming scheme is enough reason alone to get away from it.
Good advice! Thinking of passwords in pools is a good way to limit the number of passwords you use, and still maintain decent security. Since a lot of my financial stuff is linked together, breaking one account breaks all of them - so I gave them all the same password, and made sure it was extra secure.

My work and my school share servers, so I use the same password. Personal stuff gets a separate password, etc.. At the end of the day, I only have to remember 4 passwords and maybe 2 or 3 usernames, but I don't feel that it's lowered my security at all.
Shortly after Labour got into power they introduced tuition fees. There's still hope - they'll shortly be out of power, so who knows.
I have this with two email addresses I used which were unique to emusic. One when I did a trial, one when I signed up. Both have now received thousands of spam messages. I found this topic by doing a google search for 'emusic spam'. It looks like this problem has been going on for years.
The security issues mostly come from the community; PHP is branded as a language that's easy to learn, and in that same spirit, a lot of the examples offered by the manual and by people trying to teach others are horribly insecure.

I think nearly every SQL example, for instance, totally ignores the concept of SQL injection.
Being nineteen, I have to say that this text is true on so much points.

gourneau: Thank you for the link.
What common is it not true? He is making India sound like some very very poor country not a developing country