skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love H1B visa workers. They work twice as hard and are so polite. And they will often make gifts to me of exotic ethnic food. Every American I hired had a real entitled and crappy attitude. The foreigners on the other hand are just simply great. I had one guy who let his wife clean the whole office. His daughter is cute too...when I told him I thought so, he offered me her virgin. Talk about employee loyalty!
Reading Jeff's blog is like watching a big budget Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer production of... an old guy playing solitaire. Huge wind up and little payoff.
The problem is that you can make ads that people want to pay for in print (big, lush, informative), while online advertising tends to be a little image box that some smart guy blocks with Firefox. Who wants to pay up for that?
My favourite interview question for developers is "How many lines of code have you deleted?" Lots of junior developers boast about KLOC they have written. But the more code, the more bugs. I'm interested in knowing if the developer has lived with code, not just shipped it and moved on to the next project.
How P2 Changed Automattic
I bailed out of high school after three years and went to college.

I tried to avoid getting my high school diploma (skipped my graduation), but they mailed it to me.

I tried to avoid getting my college diploma (skipped my graduation) but they mailed it to me.

I've got to come up with better tactics to avoid credentials...
The killer feature is that it reads PDFs natively now (i.e., without having to convert them). For someone who prefers to read on screen and who has to read a lot of PDFs, this is very exciting.
Anything that moves power away from Ulrich Drepper and back to the community is a good thing. He is a poison to the open source community, and causes so much bad PR I'm amazed that he's still around.

Why is he still around, anyway?
Guy sounds like a credentialed idiot.

> He also derided my location as if some guy from a small town in Ohio couldn't build anything worthwhile. Yes, I know pg's thoughts on location and there is some merit to that, but the assertion he made is a bit too over the top for me.

Amen.
Based on the price of this one, I think we'll see the small Kindle go down in price soon. Because right now it doesn't make any sense to buy the small one.

I still wont' buy one, chances are they'll release a color version in a couple of months, thats the next obvious step
Sorry, but I think there's orders of magnitude of difference involved here. Sure, you can compare Nelson Mandela, Leonhard Euler, Benjamin Franklin and William Shakespeare-- all were (are) truly exceptional men of the first order.

Asimov was a somewhat talented and extremely prolific science fiction writer. He wrote a few great short stories, a few great novels, and a lot of standard (and sub-standard) fare. To call him a "genius" devalues the term beyond recognition.
I've actually known about (and used) Archy long before I knew about its predecessor... It's surprising how obscure the Cat is, considering Raskin's renown.
Cross post from the blog to here:

To be honest, I worked for next to nothing. When I was in college my parents nagged me to death about getting a job. I didn’t want just any job, and I kept getting rejected from the lowest of the low end positions. I stumbled across an ad at my university looking for web developers at a small company called Cloudspace. I shot them an email with my resume and had an interview that week. The interview was with the owner, and he just asked me to brush up on my PHP and MySQL and come in for a quick test the next week. I crammed my head full of PHP and MySQL tutorials and went in the following week. I had to write a simple page that would query out data for a select box with option groups, each with its own set of options. The task was to select out the data with one query, allow the user to select an option and send a message to the database. I finished it all in about an hour, but hadn’t thought about SQL injection. One single quote and a press of enter and I was done, but they let me take the job anyways. I met the other candidate on the first day we started, and we worked together pretty closely. He had an edge on me, as he knew quite a bit more, but I caught up in the following month.

About 2 years passed, and I had went from making minimum wage to making $10 an hour. It wasn’t great, but the experience was well worth it. I left Cloudspace and took on my own contract job. From there, I graduated and went to work at another small company writing ColdFusion (and 12 other things), and from there on to where I work now at one of the largest defense contractors in the world.
I don't see too much similarity between Perl and PHP. Perl has a the syntax of a loose cannon. PHP's syntax is very Java like.

* PHP doesn't have special variables that change things about the language like, the starting index of an array.

* Out of the box, Perl requires you to import modules to get functionality that PHP has with a simple function call.

* Perl has support for classes, but you feel like it's a hack every time you write one.

* PHP has classes, that give you the notion that they are part of the language (which they are of course, so are Perl's)

Until recently, I hadn't programmed in Perl in years, but I find that coming back to it again has given me a new outlook on it. You might wanna take another look. I still much prefer Python though.
Slicehost is ok, their pricing structure ramps up very fast though. MediaTemple is the one I would recommend to someone for a single (or just a few) site instance. If they needed multiple servers with complex config (or just want to lay them out in your own way) either EC2 (multiple clients model: we have 150+ instances working as clients) or MediaTemple CX (complex hosting - we are in the process of purchasing a 200 node cluster with them) would be my recommendations.
Twitter search in o'caml
PHP doesn't get mentioned, because it isn't interesting. I've done a lot of PHP work, and still do. But there's not a lot of NEW going on in the PHP world. Their latest earth shattering move is namespaces. The only interesting thing about PHP's namespace support is how awful it is.

Almost all of the cool concurrency, natural language, efficiency, functional programming, and what-have-you research and development, is going on outside of the PHP community. Those are topics that HN collectively finds interesting, so PHP gets left out.

That said, just because PHP itself isn't particularly interesting, doesn't mean people don't build interesting things using it, and doesn't mean you shouldn't use it.
I agree with this statement. I've reached a stage where I could code a PHP-based website much quicker that in other languages. Admittedly it's what I started programming on (and has taught me a few bad things, but certainly kept my interest in programming).

I don't agree that there's nothing interesting going on though. I'd like to see some more innovative extensions (which might be because they are coded in C) but PHP Classes (http://phpclasses.org) is constantly producing PHP libraries and snippets for common tasks
Perl is also way faster than PHP, and has had nice things like closures since... well, for a long time now. Not that I'd want to use Perl these days, but language-wise, it's a bit more advanced than PHP is.
This issue was discussed a while back in the context of hiring Haskell programmers.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468493
Well, I've posted it here before, but here goes:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
Can you load your own .txt files onto this? This is actually big enough to carry & review my source code without booting up a laptop.
The weakest link is nearly always the user... but, unfortunately, they're not a link you can do without. All you can do is look after your end and force their hand as much as you can - password strength meters, salting and hashing passwords, etc.
Amusing. Rails as the "Dane Cook" of web frameworks pretty much hits the nail on the head.

I love Rails but the fanboy culture really sucks.
Regarding 2), I think it would be fair to say that the compromised site was in fact the one that did not use OpenID and instead stored passwords poorly. Once compromised, it exposed user credentials which could then be used elsewhere. Had they used OpenID, this would not have happened.
I would say it would be an interesting experiment to see if the moderators on wikipedia now feel the the quote can be left there, seeing as it can now reference the newspaper articles that it spawned...
Claiming that someone who's been in college for several years' highest level of education is "high school" presents a very odd definition of the word "education". Perhaps you meant degree?
But, but, but... he just put a three on a four, after building suspense for the whole week! How can you be so flippant?
ErrantX

I would highly recommend learning Ruby before trying RoR. The first time I tried to learn RoR I didn't know any Ruby. I had limited success because I had to battle the framework and the language.

You don't need to know everything about Ruby to start on RoR, but you should be able to write some basic programs.

There are a number of online resources for Ruby:

Unofficial and old, but has a lot of good info: http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/ruby/0.3/

http://www.whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/pickaxe/

http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/UsersGuide/rg/

http://qa.poignantguide.net/index.html

For RoR guides online, I didn't find anything that I really liked. I ended up with Sitepoint's Simply Rails 2.0 and followed it. I didn't find any free guides/books that really helped me much. Once you get a basic understanding of MVC you can learn a lot of from http://railscasts.com though.

PS: Sorry to everyone for the RoR/Ruby hijack

EDIT: Wrote a sentence misleadingly, fixed it.
I use Joyent. I would argue that Media Temple is not cloud hosting (and it's "grid" is always down). If Mosso gave OpenSolaris as an option, I would switch to it.
How should we recognize each other? Do we have a table reserved or anything?
In this case though, the choice of hashing algorithm is at least as important as the salt.

If the attacker was motivated to have Jeff Atwood's password, he could have grabbed the salted hash and used a password cracker against it. We're talking a single password for a high profile user, so why not spend a few hours of CPU time on it?

Only an adequate password hashing algorithm (ie, SLOW) would have really prevented this.
IMHO Mediatemple is terribly overpriced* even wrt Slicehost - Their 40GB/512MB/1.5TB plan costs $100/mo for example.

* - I've no idea how much CX costs though
Discussion on Gladinet
Anyone have experiences using Gladinet? If so what is the best service to use with it?

Adrive.com?
S3?
LiveDrive?
GoogleDocs?
Picasa?
Other?
Yes sir, Kindle 2 does it (via http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix).
I wonder how PDF in larger paper formats (A4, US Letter) look on the bigger screen. They get rendered with illegibly small text on my Sony Reader (which has the same-size screen as the normal Kindle).

Too bad again, that the Kindle is US only.
"I do find these body parts people just plain disgusting."

Saving lives is more important than your feelings.
ugh, your right that is expensive (never used that aspect of their service myself).

In which case I retract recommending MT :P
@Jerecoh: I use Joyent too... and have been very pleased with it. But, I have to admit that we didn't spend a lot of time evaluating all of the other cloud options out there. Why did you choose Joyent?
Wow, I love reading stuff like this and realizing there is elegance yet to be discovered for a young "bipolar lisp programmer" such as myself. Humbling and inspiring. It's like lisp with warts, but very tasty and powerful warts.
I'm sure we can identify other hackers/entrepreneurs easily, no ;-)

For the avoidance of doubt, I'll be wearing a black NewsCred t-shirt.

Also, we do a have a table reserved, but if tons of people show up, there will be some standing and drinking!
Just curious: I met a lot of good programmers from small towns in Ohio when I went to Case Western, is that the "local university" you're referring to? (if so, I also have some guesses on who the "guy" was :)
http://www.mobileorchard.com/ is another resource dedicated to iphone development.
I use Mosso for fun because of the low price. Start up a 20 machine cluster and run it for a couple of hours all for under a dollar.
That's true only if you believe that what the state does is necessarily and only helpful. (There are other requirements as well, but I'm limiting myself to two of the more obvious problems.)

Govt help programs, at least in the US, are aimed more at benefitting middle class providers than the poor who are supposedly the beneficiaries.
And my Nokia 5120 still boots up like it's first day when I pull it out of the discarded gadget drawer.
All of the ebook readers I've liked for the iPhone let you disable auto-rotation - Stanza, BookShelf, the Kindle app...
This kind of stuff happens all the time and it's really disappointing. Wikipedia is a good starting place for learning about things, but if you're publishing something and citing Wikipedia then something is seriously wrong.

If you're using Wikipedia for anything more than casual learning, then you'd better make sure that you can find another source to confirm what you find (and make sure that that source doesn't cite Wikipedia).
I must say, between Jeff's first post on this argument and another discussion I saw this morning here on HN I got a bit paranoid and just now finished changing _all_ of my passwords, each generated and stored using an automated tool. I acted on impulse, and yet I don't think I'll regret it, even if it was probably overkill.
I "fortunately" lost just two accounts too, among which there was my "old" HN one.
2.4 is my favorite by far:

A novice asked the Master: ``Here is a programmer that never designs, documents or tests his programs. Yet all who know him consider him one of the best programmers in the world. Why is this?''

The Master replies: ``That programmer has mastered the Tao. He has gone beyond the need for design; he does not become angry when the system crashes, but accepts the universe without concern. He has gone beyond the need for documentation; he no longer cares if anyone else sees his code. He has gone beyond the need for testing; each of his programs are perfect within themselves, serene and elegant, their purpose self-evident. Truly, he has entered the mystery of Tao.''
Everyone should read Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface. He expresses many of his interface ideas used with the Canon Cat and Archy in the book. I now consider thoughtful interface design a moral decision.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface
It's not "feelings".

If somebody makes a conscious decision and goes about to explicitly allow harvesting, then so be it. Decision's done.

Instead, these people prey on organs from the recently deceased. In my case, he died not knowing what killed him. It was an infection of sorts but we just don't know. He didn't make a decision about harvesting after he was gone, so they should respect his wishes (or lack thereof).
I see. Is this the commonly-accepted interpretation? What does the normal ellipsis mean then? I use it as a trailing thought as well -- or, is it trailing speech?

spoken: now... [pause]
spoken: lisp .. [thought...?]
thought: if only

?
> Everything is an investment.

Not at all. Buying some things is merely an expense, he says looking at a big screen TV.

Cash is an asset. A big screen TV may, or may not, be an asset.
People who are really good at their jobs obsess about their tools- artists obsess over their paint, carpenters obsess over their power tools, cooks obsess over their knives.

PHP is like buying a chef's knife at Wal-Mart. You can create a 5 star dish with it, it cuts perfectly fine, but it doesn't inspire the same passion that a Shun knife does.

Most restaurants in fact, don't use fancy-knives, they use just regular knives and it works out just fine.

But, to draw the analogy back to programming, we're not regular restaurants. We're wannabe "rock-star" chefs- coding and "startup-ing" isn't just a job, it's part of our core ethos, so we obsess over all the tools we use, the text editor, the monitor, even the chair- because it makes the experience all that much better.

Most people do this about things they seriously care about. Runners debate intricacies of running shoes or the perfect in race meal. I've had debates with weight-lifters about weight-lifting gloves. Go over to a different forum, and you will hear arguments about the perfect size of a suit lapel.

The "Everyman" tools can always accomplish 100% of the job, but provide 90% of the experience. We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get that last 10% out.

Is it probably unnecessary? Yeah. But people really bond over passions, and in arguing/debating that last 10%, you can really connect with people, which is why sites like Hacker News are fun and addictive.
Ask HN: Resources for learning HTML
Someone I know wants to learn HTML. What are the best introductory resources to recommend to her? Either books or online are fine.
Presumably you use the Cloud Servers rather than the Cloud Host?
way faster -- sounds subjective to me. What references say this?
Exploiter and parasite?

How many jobs and how much wealth have _you_ created today?
Back in the day, PHP was exciting. It was free, it was powerful, it was easy to learn. Everyone coming out of college knew C anyway and it has a similar structure. You could suddenly give your circa 1999 web pages a page date in REAL TIME and you could respond to forms without nasty cgi-bin. Eureka!

Nobody gets excited about it anymore because it solved the problem it was aiming to solve a long, long time ago.
Plastic Logic's ultra-preannouncment of its e-reader let Amazon steal its glory
I plan on getting Kindle DX even though I am based outside US presently. The wireless features are not that important to me, nice screen and native PDF support however is.
Am I tired, or was that comment nothing but ad hominem? Perhaps you should take the high road next time and assume that I am just stating my own opinions, not trying to argue with anybody.

[edit below]

However, as you're egging me on, I will rebut your flimsy argument, the crux of which is this anecdotal beaut:

"It just seems unlikely that there's 'very little' that the computer science program gave to the developer. It certainly doesn't match what I've actually seen in-field."

If that's all you have to lean on, I don't understand how your comment was upvoted so much. Absent in your analysis is a thorough inventory of what college gives you: While it provides new opportunities for learning, it also does not provide things that you get in the working world, such as

* Business sense and professionalism

* Assuming you don't live at home, a sense of independence: Knowing how to take care of yourself at 22 when everyone else is just figuring out is a huge advantage, believe it or not

* Documented experience

* References from others with working-world experience

On the other hand, there are indeed negatives of going to college. To me, the greatest one is the massive time drain: I work in the day, go home, teach myself more, read history, learn chess, and basically provide my own education. This is not by design, but rather, by my nature. It's unfortunate that so many take education to be the exclusive realm of educational institutions.

Sitting through lectures and working to verify for your professors that you are learning, to me, is a waste of time, when I know damn well if I've learned it properly. If I haven't, and it's important, it will show quickly back at work.

Oh, and college costs tens of thousands of dollars.
When you know you could save pages of code with it, being without proper higher-order functions is beyond tedious.
That reads to me as "Rails is a pop culture icon that only XYZ people know about." I'm not XYZ because I don't know who that is.

Actually, perhaps unintentionally, you still hit the nail on the head.
I use PHP every day at work. I find that the best way to program PHP is to pretend it is java and ignore (almost) all the other features. Many of the features of the language are very powerful and because they are so powerful, PHP has a tendency not to scale well.

If there are 200+ ways to do one thing you can guarantee that looking at someone else's code will always be an adventure. You CAN write good code in PHP, but it is flexible enough that bad programmers will be able to take it and do much worse things than they could with, say, java.

Call me old hat but I think type safety is an important aspect of scalable projects. If I could add one feature to PHP it would be enforced type safety.
So... it's an ajax-y forum?

Don't get me wrong, I really like what they've done, but it isn't mind blowing. The design and user experience are stellar. It's amazing how the guys at Automattic can take an old concept, pare it down the the minimum viable product, and polish the hell out of the experience.
How about a Los Angeles meet?
My, this is going to be a hit. I sorely desire a wacom on it though :(((
I have not read this before. But I heard this story told by a college professor Michio Kaku when I was in his astronomy 101 class. Yes, he is the author of the book, Hypersapce.(http://www.amazon.com/Hyperspace-Scientific-Odyssey-Parallel...) It's a good book to read if you're interested in those things.
If these articles are thought provoking, they could be written about PASCAL and reasonable HN members would upvote it. Someone can be a language snob, but also a computer scientist; computer scientists keep an open mind.
Does free mean you cannot complain?
Obvious but orders of magnitude harder in difficulty. I'm thinking 2 years, from a Japanese company.
AppEngine doesn't count?
Surprising results about ebooks from Google Trends
This is a bit off-topic, but I might be able to help you with the analytics side of things. I'm a programmer at Rentrak (http://rentrak.com) and we're in the process of launching our TV ratings system. We collect data from millions of set-top boxes every day. We're a lot cheaper than Nielsen and we might be able to do some kind of a deal that works for you.
I'd take your statement one step further: if you are citing anything that isn't a primary source, you're very likely "doing it wrong".

Sources like Wikipedia or other encyclopedias are good for beginning to understand the topic, and finding relevant primary sources.
I haven't tried any of these options, mainly because we use Nutch and CPU intensive stuff tends to get a bit pricey. Haven't looked @ Mosso though...
Do you mean because it's never been used?
PHP is not a language that was designed to be a language. It was originally a set of scripts that slowly morphed into a kind-of language. Because of that, PHP lacks a lot of the language features (threads, namespaces, proper OO design from the ground up) that "serious" languages all have. Ruby was buit to be the best language Matz could think of. Erlang was built to be a great language for programming telecoms. None of the "serious" languages morphed out of some CGI scripts.

As I already mentioned, PHP is not an OO language. It is a language that has OO as a feature, but the core API is not OO. This creates a very awkward mix of OO and procedural code.

One of the most embarrassing things about PHP comes from its complete lack of naming and ordering conventions. Look at the array functions. http://us.php.net/manual/en/ref.array.php 47 of these functions start with array_, 25 of them are a mismatch of whole words and partial words that happen to do array functions. The reason PHP documentation is so good is out of necessity. Without fantastic documentation, PHP would be completely unusable due to this staggering oversight.
Yeah, tough call. Since he knows better, he shouldn't have let the passwords be stored on this other website so insecurely, and he shouldn't have been snooping. He did help Jeff out, technically, but he definitely crossed the line to do so.