skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are problems with php?

I left PHP around the time that v5 was recently released and v4 was still common, as did a lot of people (moving over to Python and later Ruby+Rails). I think a lot of people put PHP now down using their experiences of PHP4 (awful "object" features, irritatingly inconsistent standard library, ...) and PHP4/5 transition problems (which IRC were not really massive, but many libraries didn't deal with the compatibility breaks quickly so there were for a while issues knowing which libs and example code outside the "standard" library were compatible with 4,.x, 5.x, or both) before migrating away.

I assume a lot of the above has change considerably in the intervening years, but I think a lot of people assume instead that it is just as bad as it was when they migrated elsewhere.

That and there is a lot of bad code written in PHP largely due to its perception of being a beginners language (any environment that is easy for a beginner to dive into tends to make writing bad code as easy as it makes writing good code).

> It's not the prettiest language,

That I take as understatement, though I'm still supporting some ancient "classic" ASP code (fingers crossed that legacy will finally be stomped out by the end of this year...) so I can conclusively state there is worse in use out there!

> but people have been building insanely successful businesses on top of it for years. Think Facebook.

Remember though that Facebook don't use stock PHP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP
Don't worry, you are not alone, I agree 100%

Entertaining nonetheless!
(Somewhat tangential) Is Slavoj Zizek a "real philosopher", or a troll? I found him through a reference to qanda someone had posted here, and I'm pretty sure it's a troll.
Zotonic: Erlang Web Framework and Performance
A proper standard for syncing rss? So that, like email, you just have to point your various clients at the address of the sync server you are using. That can be one you run yourself or one from some third party provider. If your provider closes you can just point your clients at the new service, without each client needing to implement a new custom API. You are also free to use whatever client(s) you want. It seems to me like this should have been part of RSS since the beginning.

The web community seems disinterested in developing standards other than presentational ones (HTML/CSS), I guess largely for commercial reasons: the creators of services want to lock you into their specific (magic hip RESTful JSON) API.

Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself. -- Anil Dash [1]

[1] http://adactio.com/journal/6291/
Backdoor in HP backup servers
How to Help Pay For Snowden’s Getaway Without Being Caught? Bitcoins.
Yes, it was really a dumb question. And the condescending tone, of the American that believes everything he is told even more so.

Hindsight's a bitch too:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/24/journalist-m...
Windows is not closed source. It's proprietary software, but the source code (especially for embedded operating systems and custom hardware projects) is readily available.
This is pretty entertaining.

The US government meanwhile disgraced itself by accusing China and Russia of unlawful behavior.
He does have a PhD in Philosophy from a university in Slovenia. However, he's generally lumped in with the post-*-ist critical theory crowd. When he does his inexplicably popular academic guest lectures he's sponsored by the cultural studies department, not the philosophy department (unless it's a philosophy department with a non-analytical bent, like the New School).

He is definitely a troll, though. That's kind of his thing. I think he would even agree with that label.

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/03/why-we-sl...
As far as I can tell, ELBs are just commodity EC2 nodes, which are actually pretty shitty because they're EBS backed; you can build a better ELB yourself using an S3 backed EC2 node.

Some of the OpenStack people were using hardware load balancers (F5; I think maybe HP OpenCloud?) as an option.
This article could have made some sense in terms of self-reflection à la "What's your attitude to code?" (See the alternative description below.) But as it is, it's just an exhibit of a single-minded attitude by itself.
Steps To Successful Facebook Advertising - Time To Go Back To Basics
Oh there is plenty of Java going around Brisie... :)
As a human adult, you are probably capable of making moral judgements, and making limited predictions about how your actions will affect you & others in the future.

The minority of people who litter make the experience of walking/living/sitting in that area less pleasant for everyone else, and they increase the likelihood that others will litter ("this park is already full of trash; should I really go chasing after that wrapper that fell?"). Alternatively, you could not make it worse, or you could even make it better by picking up a few things and throwing them out as you pass through.

The minority who don't vaccinate encourage others to avoid vaccinations, and it doesn't take very many of them to undercut or even nullify the benefits of population vaccination (like protecting newborns who can't yet be vaccinated).

Etc. etc..

Do you want to be worse, meaner, less moral, etc. than the average? Or do you want to strive for a little more than that in life?

Realistically, most of us aren't going to have a huge positive or negative impact on the world; but thinking locally, if you are going to seek a mate, friendships, etc., you'll probably do better (and be happier) in life if you at least try to do better than the average.

You may even get an opportunity to make a seriously good decision somewhere along the way, if you have good moral habits and keep your wits about you.
A beer recommendation system made with R
SQL Joins - Types of Joins in SQL
At my university OS course we once had to implement a usermode threading library in C. Not cooperative, but preemptive (signals), with all the required locking, signal masking, atomic_t's and so on.

Mine was about 300 lines of C.
Source:

/*
* f(f(n)) = -n
*/

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>

int32_t f(int32_t n) {
return (2 * (n & 1) - 1) * n + (2 * ((n & 1) & ((n >> 31) & 1)) - 1);
}

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
int32_t n[] = { 1, 2, 3, -1, -2, -3, 0, 5, 6, 10, 20, 50, 0x7fffffff, 0x80000000 };
int count = sizeof(n) / sizeof(int32_t);
for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) {
printf(" f(%d) = %d\n f(f(%d)) = %d\n", n[i], f(n[i]), n[i], f(f(n[i])));
}
}

Result:

f(1) = 0
f(f(1)) = -1
f(2) = -3
f(f(2)) = -2
f(3) = 2
f(f(3)) = -3
f(-1) = 0
f(f(-1)) = -1
f(-2) = 1
f(f(-2)) = 0
f(-3) = -2
f(f(-3)) = 1
f(0) = -1
f(f(0)) = 0
f(5) = 4
f(f(5)) = -5
f(6) = -7
f(f(6)) = -6
f(10) = -11
f(f(10)) = -10
f(20) = -21
f(f(20)) = -20
f(50) = -51
f(f(50)) = -50
f(2147483647) = 2147483646
f(f(2147483647)) = -2147483647
f(-2147483648) = 2147483647
f(f(-2147483648)) = 2147483646
Rural broadband: Olympic push for universal (UK) coverage
you also miss a couple of "local newObj" in constructors.
What is the difference between Marxism and Americanism?
Absolutely - if you're just starting out then this is a fantastic PHP resource. I would make 2 other suggestions as well:

- Get into the habit of using PHPUnit early. If you haven't come across it yet there are plenty of tutorials on http://net.tutsplus.com/ that cover it's basic use. It may seem pointless to begin with but you'll be thankful later on.

- I know you said you didn't want suggestions for another language and I won't give you any. However alongside PHP I think it would be really beneficial to do a primer on basic computer science. An understanding of concepts such as language paradigms, design patterns and simple algorithms would inform your learning and explain why some of the advanced resources you come across later do things the way that they do.
'Password fatigue' haunts Internet masses
> First, resist the urge to put code in your templates

Unless things have changed since I last looked, PHP files are all templates. Last time I used PHP, with symphony, I actually thought PHP was a pretty reasonable templating system.
"So Komrade Snowden. We are the FSA. You can talk to us willingly, or talk to this rubber hose... or you can go to the US Embassy for protection. Muhahahahaha"
You don't really need to understand all these things in order to build "real" things with it. Just build something without caring too much whether an experienced Haskell programmer would find it elegant enough.

Most of the "clicks" I've had is when I'd already built something in a naive way (that worked perfectly) and someone showed me an alternative, more elegant way in which it could be written.
He has a talent for getting attention and seems to enjoy it. But to call him a troll would be a great disservice to his work. His ideas are very "flammable" though, so I can understand you seeing him as troll.

Perhaps best approach to Žižek is through his film commentaries. Watch The Pervert's Guide To Cinema.
To me, it says more about the company, and I wouldn't like to work in that kind of company.

Basically these questions are made to make the interviewer look clever while not assessing any relevant skill.

I've been far more often an interviewer than and interviewee and I never ask that kind of question.
I feel like this is the reason why ITTT is so popular.
Where in the world is Edward Snowden? [Infographic]
> "Not once have I, personally, found any value in the philosophy I did."

Wikipedia defines it thusly:

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument.

Maybe that course you took wasn't so good, but generally, I think there is no day in which we don't engage in philosophy in some way or other. When a kid asks why don't politicians duke it out amongst each other, instead of sending the youth to war for them, that's philosophy, to me. Maybe my bar is too low.

But still, what isn't (related to or based on) "love of wisdom"? Everybody either has or lacks that, and just because it can be studied formally until one either doesn't see the woods for all the trees or gets bored, doesn't mean it has to be. It doesn't have to be studied at all, "doing philosophy" like "doing math" is a weird concept to me; just read philosophers, or even better, daydream. The first time I read Marcus Aurelius, time slowed down for me, maybe I even had goosebumps, I was so utterly fascinated by that little book. All technical documents in the world combined don't even come close to being a shadow of that.

So to me, saying philoshopy is useless based on bad philosophy, or bad treatment of it, is like me saying programming is mostly useless because QBasic sucks.

Especially since everybody is different, what meant the world for me might leave you cold, and vice versa. I can't explain love to you by showing you the people I love, I can't explain it at all -- and while "you'll know it when it happens to you, and maybe it never will", seems condescending, it's what I honestly believe.

Last, but not least: Don't ask what philosophy can do for you, ask what you can do for philosophy :P
GoCardless (YC S11) is hiring B2B salespeople in London
The laws in western europe (to be more specific: Austria - I don't know that much about Brazilian laws) ensure that only the state has the right (in most cases) to use violence and give criminals what they "deserve".

It cannot be that a normal person or even worse, a victim, tries bringing justice (or at least what they personally believe to be justice) to criminals (or people they believe to be criminals), because they are not trained policement that know their limits, nor are they usually judges.

I am not saying that a normal person should not use self defense, I definitely would, but there are limits to what is considered an appropriate reaction.

I cannot kill someone if the person doesn't show aggression towards me or someone else. (a burglar breaking into my home)

Likewise I cannot beat someone into unconsciousness if I could have just held that person down until police arrives.

What did your friend do to the robber after he disarmed him? Could he just have held him down? What kind of aggression did he use? From your description many things are possible, from slapping him, to breaking his spine and many things in between.

The same goes for the policemen. Did they needlessly risk or cause the death of innocent bystanders? That is also something that policemen must consider before they do anything that could start a shooting.
It is pretty much becoming something out of a Tom Clancy novel. You could easily imagine a situation room like you see in many a Hollywood movie tracking him. Though Hollywood, this is not.
Did it say "free of side effects"? Seems trivial to me.

#include <stdio.h>

/* works for all signed integers, but isn't particularly useful */
int f(int n)
{
static int b;
return b = !b ? n : -n;
}

int main()
{
int n=-1234;
/* int n=1234; */
printf("%d\n", f(f(n)));
}
Yep, you are exactly right, that is the only proper solution.

Like you say, though, the proverbial "community" doesn't seem any closer to building that then they were when Google Reader was created in 2005.

I had hoped that the demise of the proprietary Google Reader would finally inspire the creation of such an open standard, but so far all it seems to have inspired is more crap like Google Reader...

(But, lacking the good solution, I would still pay for another crappy proprietary solution in the meantime.)
The article is about a wealthy guy who can travel the world racing cars.. who then got pissy at coming second.

Not my impression at all. I read it as quite humble and self-insightful. He's basically debugging himself and pinpointing how his utility function works, and hinting at how it might be improved (the bit about flow at the end of the post).
The best you can do is getting all but one number (2^n - 1) correct.
Woww..! I just learned Git branching. Used Git for 2 years, but never really bothered to learn more!

Awesome stuff
I rode my bike for 3,497.2 kilometres to relax.
I agree.

In our case it would be nice to have an account manager. As far as phone support I think the idea itself is comforting, however, it doesn't mean a solution is going to be fixed any quicker.

Regardless of the means - whatever you use has to work. I can't recall what it was but I had some sort of situation where you had to call and leave a message for support (ISP maybe?). The idea seemed ridiculous, but I was assured that it would work. Low and behold, it did - this business promptly returned calls and sorted out support issues. SO despite the weirdness of it, it did in fact work.
Just look at the answers - all tricks you can come up with are there, this one included.
whats wrong with horizontal scroll? If a site has both horizontal and vertical scroll, the site looks messy! Horizontal scroll is also good to scroll pictures.
gReader Pro on android has worked pretty darn well now that the bugs have been shaken out. I'd definitely recommend it over the pretty but useless feedly interface.
You say it's not Hollywood - maybe Snowden will end up like the guy in "The Terminal", unable to enter Russia but unable to leave the airport....
Of course it is legal to always use equivalent force in Austria. If someone threatens your life by pointing a gun at you, you are allowed to use potentially lethal force.

It's just that burglars here do not bring weapons with them (because they do not expect their victims to have weapons), so you cannot assume that your life is threatened, just because you see someone in your house.

Of course, that might be different in other countries.
Oh, and: even "usefulness" strikes me as a philosophical concept. At least unless you qualify it, like "shovels are useful for digging" is not philosophy. But "useful", or "purpose", just as words by themselves? You're already off the deep end without knowing it!

Show me someone who says they have no philosophy, and I will show you someone who doesn't know it, like a fish doesn't know water because it only ever swims in the one kind.
Claustrophobic web design (and why they don't improve readability)
UPDATE: As it turns out they had bad contact info to contact us when the issue first occurred. So in all fairness they did make an attempt to get ahold of us. However, there still is the issue of handling support when you need it. Meaning, there has to be a way to support your users during a time of crisis vs. simple blackout - no matter who's a fault etc...
The disparity between what I can assume to be the local Delhi populace and the backpackers/travellers is huge.

The Indian kids just want to study, while the adults want to own houses/shops. The travellers on the other hand, have more abstract goals.

Fascinating. And also sad upon further thought
It's a bit wide for my taste. I think that fixed width (max width at least) would have have been appropriate here.
This sounds right out of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (or Big Lebowski if one wants something more modern)
Language is a medium of expression of ideas (nothing in common with medium.com), so, less constrained it is the better. That is why Scheme in particular was chosen for SICP - it is small and expressive. It was a language for teaching, in good old times.))
Indeed, I didn't look that far down, thanks. Too many FP purists on SO apparently. ;-)
My favourite history book that I've recently read:

Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography - amazing work of scope, depth and human understanding.

I also studied philosophy as a degree and agree there are no really great introductions. I finished my degree somewhat disengaged with the subject and haven't pursued it seriously since. My favourite book though was John Rawls' A Theory of Justice.
Your dismissive snark is fail. What makes you think there's no fat in her ice cream?
If it's true that the US authorities can order a company to implement access for the NSA and lie to its customers about the fact, I don't see how you can trust any US company with data that need to be secure.

Also, AWS recently signed a huge deal with the CIA (http://www.businessinsider.com/cia-600-million-deal-for-amaz...). I doubt that a company that works so closely with US government agencies is jumping through hoops to protect its customers from government snooping.
So when is the movie coming out?
What are your thoughts on crypto.cat and do you think a similar poisoning to hushmail is possible with their model?
Great use of the theme....creative!
Ask the NSA.
http://xkcd.com/1170/
avoid XML, make sure to read about JSON and sql databases.

google for REPL, than get one for php, so you can see results instantly. https://github.com/d11wtq/boris
Have you tried spending some time learning how it works and reading through the manpages?

In my experience, as long as you hold onto the cognition that a repository is a collection of files and commits are, in effect, diffs, git won't ever really make sense, since none of what it does could be feasibly implemented with diffs. It's actually much simpler than that, hence the name.

When I first started learning git, I had only experience with SVN and Perforce. Both typically led to egregious practices (branches are directories?) and actual merges were rare (rather, you manually merged and just made a new commit). I felt they were a huge hindrance and were actually constantly in my way, a sort of mandatory bookkeeping I had to maintain.

When I started working for a company that heavily uses git, I buckled down and read through pro git (available at http://git-scm.com/book for free), the user guide (https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual...), and the man pages of the commands I was using. One day it just clicked and all made sense, and it was the only logical solution to SCM. Now I can't live without git. In my personal projects, step #1 is to git init a new repo. In working, git is never in my way, and rather provides me with incredibly powerful tools for massively increasing my productivity through workflows that just aren't possible under SVN/P4.
Last year results http://pouet.net/party.php?which=1570&when=2012
I hear Denzel is in talks to star as Snowden.
If Seattle had a better investor population, it would be a no-brainer. That seems to be the key thing holding it back.
As an alternate explanation: we practice fire drills, but that doesn't mean building fires are routine. Drills are indicative of something you want to get right when the time comes, not frequency.
A reminder for people signing up to Coursera's Signature Track
I've shown her exactly what "entry level graphic designer salary" is on the 'net. Moreover, she's been told that if she isn't delivering 100%, I'll let her go, because the company needs that full-tilt startup delivery.

So you're exploiting her and psychologically pressuring her.
Meet the WikiLeaks Guy Who Got His Gmail Seized by the Feds
Perhaps I haven't followed you to a T.

What specific problems or arguments in philosophy are not easily illustratable, using plain language?

I do understand that some thoughts and experiences of the human order may not be easily captured or made intelligible by language.

I guess you could slot the experience of a color-blind person in that category. Especially in the past when testable apparatuses have not yet been developed to even diagnose that such a medical condition does indeed exist.

However I fail to understand why most philosophical arguments cannot be made intelligible to laymen.

René Descartes' "Brain In The Vat" argument is quite easily comprehendable.

It is my opinion (and very often found to be true) that most obtuse arguments (philosophical or otherwise) are indeed "highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand."

In fact I think PG is being charitable. I wonder if the "highly technical stuff" that doesn't lend itself to the peer review of more than a handful of scholars is even valid and credible in the first place.

I know that I am going down the slippery slope of If-I-and-most-non-scholarly-people-of-above-average-intelligence-cannot-grasp-an-argument-then-it-must-be-patently-invalid-and-thus-hogwash.

However at times I wonder if it is indeed possible that the scholarship of even a fraction of the world's most esteemed scholars (in various fields) actually has some validity and truth value associated with it.

Since nearly all of it is produced in academia and thus only subjected to the scrutiny of academic peers.

I wonder if it is just a nice formal product of a large volume of essentially meaningless cogitation that passed the consensus of equally unworthy peers.

This has to be true especially in the more arcane disciplines where there is little oversight or cross-disciplinary activity.

I'm sure there is a name for this phenomenon. Something on the lines of "legitimacy by consensus".
My take, probably present in the original link tho

int f(int n) {
static int timesCalled = 0;
return ++timesCalled % 2 ? n : -n;
}
What happens if you mispell Github's URL...