skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What draws people to PHP now? I loved it once but I can not imagine choosing it now.

I choose it regularly, although to be fair I also do web projects in Ruby on Rails or Node.js. To me there is no inherent reason not to choose PHP if the nature of the project fits it, it often allows me to get stuff done very quickly, with very little code, and (this might be surprising to some) elegantly.

PHP's per-request execution model is a strength that is often overlooked by people who are mostly using persistent application servers. Starting with a clean environment at every request can be a huge advantage, especially in large projects where PHP allows you to selectively load only what you need. This can be used to severely limit code complexity and unexpected runtime behavior (in addition to the more obvious points such as better resource management).

Language-wise I wouldn't say PHP syntax is pretty, and the standard library is very uneven. There's also some weirdness with the parser that should be fixed. I hope there'll be a reboot that addresses these, but sadly this would probably not come from the PHP core devs. At the same time, "recent" language features have made developing in PHP fun again. For example, I couldn't imagine doing PHP without anonymous functions.

On the flip side, some OO features are superfluous to the point of being a liability. Also, and this is me departing from the party line even further here, framework envy has bogged down PHP by zapping its strengths and unreasonably emphasizing its weaknesses. With the exception of light-weight MVC frameworks, more heavy-handed RoR "clones" and object-relational silliness tends to kill performance and severely hinders developer flexibility. Of course, some newbie developers probably should be prevented from exercising flexibility, but I'd argue that PHP isn't suitable for them in the first place.

You said that PHP is going toward increasing complexity, but I'd argue that this is more due to the proliferation of complexity in its ecosystem - which ultimately comes from importing unsound ideas from other languages just for the sake of making PHP development seem hip and legit by (badly) emulating counterproductive features. Again, this might be unpopular, but for example: why should a PHP app use a templating engine when PHP itself is one? I can see this is justified when unprivileged users are editing the templates, but this case can't possibly account for all the Smarty (and worse) misuse that is happening all over.

People like to switch between languages and frameworks as if nothing changed, but I'd say they're wrong. Building stuff in Node.js is fundamentally different from Rails, which is fundamentally different from PHP. Use the right tool for the job, don't bend runtimes to do something they're unsuited for.
Why Business Software is Broken: Fear
Saying "we don't think law permits X" should damned well mean "we don't do X", though. Knowing, reliably, "they don't do X" is potentially useful information. It would certainly change my strategy in a game of chess if I knew my opponent was forbidden a particular move.

I meant "marginal" in the sense of change, not the sense of unimportant. I don't have a good way of quantifying just how important it's likely to be. I certainly wouldn't make a claim myself that it is "infinitesimal" - it might very well be, but I don't think that's obvious without any data and we're somewhat limited in the data we have available.
I will admit to using the "I'm training the recommended filter" excuse to justify downvotes long after the recommended page went away. Once the admins caved and added /r/politics, I gave it up.
Author here.

Sounds like App Trajectory (by ThoughtBot) may fit the bill. It has discussions, and these discussions can have many related issues. Each issue gets an estimate, agile story point style, and App Trajetory computes your velocity (and pushes too big issues off an iteration!) so you can see how a two week detour will affect timeline.

It worked really well for me on a project.

It also does multiple projects, although I don't think it will give an agregate view over all your projects ("this week I have these two items due for project x, an these 3 for project Y")
Micro CPU Monitor : Keep an eye on CPU usage
I up-voted his comment because I personally found it interesting, but most people wouldn't. Their eyes would gloss over and they would move on, probably back to celebrity gossip or some other shallow pursuit. It's important to be self-aware enough to realize this, especially when attempting to teach others. Waxing pedantic and nit-picky alienates the audience and only hurts the subject and those who would learn it.

It was not my intention to be personally disrespectful, I probably should have worded my comment less casually.
(1) There is a modification of A * star. It's called A * jump point search.

http://harablog.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/jump-point-search/
Show HN: Testelf - black box testing for iOS
SEEKING FREELANCER - Southern California - Remote is possible:

Looking for a User Experience Designer / integrator with some dev chops to bring a modern edge to our MVP/beta by designing, UX, UI enhancements and developing some additional features. Its is a fully responsive bootstrap site build on WP with custom plugins used to help aspiring talent get connected to entertainment industry influencers while developing an audience to showcase their work to. We have 24 of the most influential people in the live entertainment industry testing with us already and this rapid uptake has created a necessity to make some moderate design and functional enhancements.

Ideally this relationship can grow into something longer term but for now we are looking for a solid step in the right direction from a design and lite developmental perspective.

Please e-mail me if you are a WP-Ninja with design / UX chops or if you think this gig might be right for you.

E-mail: Galco101@gmail.com
OP here. I started Testelf a year ago to make testing easier for mobile development teams. Many of our early adopters came from HN and we wouldn't have gotten this far without the support from this community. Thanks everyone!

While cloud services have made product development faster and easier, testing is still a bottleneck. Black box testing is essential in ensuring major issues are caught before an app reaches the end user. Testelf currently provides black box testing for iOS. My goal is to build a testing service that's not only affordable, but also very easy to use. We charge a flat price ($200) per test, have a two-day turnaround, require no documentation or spec from users, and provide a very comprehensive test report.

We launched a private beta with 30 companies around five months ago and have received very good feedback. Today, we are opening up the service to everyone. While we are iOS only for now, we are planning to add Android and Mac app testing in the near future.
Yelp launches Yelp Platform to enter world of on-demand delivery
I wish I could somehow CAPTCHA comments like these so I could tell if they were people or Markov generators.
Given IE, Safari, Firebug and Chrome all support ADDITIONAL developer tools, how likely do you think it is that you'll be stuck with raw binary when the browser has to decode this to the same internal representation used for HTML today?

Nothing will change on the front-end, just the servers will get faster and new bugs will be introduced. :)
People will start wearing sun glasses..
I didn't vote for them. If I tried violent revolution I'd a) fail b) be killed. How can I be responsible?
Actually the name is not Silence but 4' 33" and it's important, because the piece is not really about a silence, but about a various random sounds you start hearing in the audience when an artist is not playing.
Sure, but SPDY is a TCP protocol, and so inherits TCP-friendliness from that; I'm just not seeing what that has to do with HTTP.
I congratulate you on being privileged, but most people can't do that. Here it costs twice that, for example.
I've said this before. Go's biggest problem will forever be a blocking GC due to the global heap they've decided to go with versus a hybrid global/goroutine local heap style like the beam erlang vm has.

The problem will show up when people try to fire up millions of goroutines and then wonder "why is my latency suddenly spiking in to the seconds! WTF!"
And I've no doubt that people whose job it is are already sorting through the available data to work out exactly what did go wrong and whether it's something that can be fixed. But breathless speculation based on the fragments of information available to the media isn't going to make that go any faster.
Worst of all is that compression is stateful, you need to capture the whole HTTP/2.0 session to be able to reconstruct any information with mandatory HTTP/2.0 debug tools.
Design is about what is optimal in a variety of dimensions and situations
You will still need and use plain text. File:// isn't powered by HTTP ;-)
>but can someone explain to me why we would want to store functions in a database?

Because that is where they belong. A database is not a storage device, it is a application development environment. Everything about your data should be in your database, including the rules, restrictions, relationships, and ways of manipulating it. In this case, trying to do it in a layer above the database would mean either doing it horribly inefficiently by copying too much data to the app server and then grouping it, or embedding the SQL into your app which means you need to go and find it and copy+paste it when you want to do that manually at any time for testing/debugging/etc. Plus, when you end up with multiple applications using a database, do you really want to be keeping multiple copies of the same code in sync across multiple apps for no reason?
A few anarchist communes existed in real life, at least for a while.
5D optical memory in glass could record the last evidence of civilization
A Spreadsheet for finding Roots of Polynomials
Could you just PGP encrypt all your email?
I like github-backup[1], which I think does something slightly different; it mirrors github issues and the rest of github's non-git metadata.

[1] https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup
Hi, Author.

Sqwiggle sounds interesting, particularly for bandwidth-challenged situations.
I'm guessing it depends on the language. In spanish we have only one type of accent and only in vowels: áéíóú, and the ñ.

The ñ is right next to the "L" key, and the tilde (accent) is either right next to the ñ or on top of it.

This adds some sort of complexity, but in my experience, the average user simple expects the key to be "where it always was" and I've had to "fix the problem" (changing the input method) many many times.

To answer your question I think that the amount of users that actually take note of what happened and understand it enough to fix it again is minimal, the rest just expect it to work and ask for help when it doesn't.

There are also a lot of variations of spanish keyboards, so it just makes the matter more complicated... I use *unix, Windows and OSx almost interchangeably and know how to change the input language in most of them to ISO spanish spanish quite quickly, but I'm not representative in that regard.

Slightly offtopic but the spanish spanish keyboard layout is extremely comfortable for programming...
Let's play this out a different way (Manning not in solitary). He's in a military prison, with military personnel. These are people who view what he did as ratting out his brothers in combat. He worked in an air-conditioned office, mind you, and hid behind the anonymity of the internet. He wouldn't last a week if he weren't in solitary. In that way, Manning's biggest problem isn't the government, it's the people he worked alongside.

Snowden is running away from having to take responsibility for his actions. It's not complicated. He knows full-well the penalties of revealing classified information, and acknowledged on multiple documents (going into his job) that he knew the procedures if he leaked any information. He leaked information. He doesn't want to go through that process, so he finds it easier to run to someone else in hopes that he won't face punishment.
Nah. Though it's possible some people vacated for that reason, it's more a misconception. Plus, carpetbaggers are always in and out of the city, earthquake or no.

There was a recession from 90-92 and a nationwide housing bust around that time due to some tax changes under Reagan that fed overbuilding in the late 80s.
You don't think Google receives enough skepticism? Every time they brew a pot of coffee, somebody out there declares that Google has violated their "Don't be evil" motto and is out to destroy us all with their dark caffeinated schemes. I can think of very few companies that are treated with more skepticism than Google.
>PHP is easily and inexpensively deployed on commodity hosting.

So is everything else now that dirt cheap VMs are the norm.

>PHP has a large base of existing documentation that can be learned to get up to speed on it.

Much of which is wrong or even dangerous.

>PHP has a large base of existing developers whose knowledge

A large number of developers, but most of them possess a shockingly small amount of knowledge.
Could it be that rather than a distinction between the big airlines and the small airlines, the author was attempting to make a distinction between flights with large amounts of passengers (100-200+) and flights of smaller size (50ish)?

I think the point is that there was a streak of 12 years with no fatal incidents of a large-size jet.
You say you found his comment interesting, but at the same time you called him out as being boring?

On the note of being self aware. While I would agree that many people would find the content of that comment 'boring'. In the context of the hackernews audience, and as a response to the parent post, I would be surprised if many people had their eyes gloss over and moved back to celebrity gossip.
But they watch, capture and post them to mailing lists and stack overflow.
Google hosts fundraiser for climate change denying US senator
I'm a pretty hardcore minimalist, but I never really got this story. If he can afford to hire heads of staff and housekeepers, he can afford to hire someone to manage them all. Boom, now he only has to deal with one person, and infrequently if he's any good.
Great explanation. I would have killed to see something like this back when I had no clue what GADTs were about. The only thing I would add is pointing out that the syntax you used in the end kind of does the same thing as

data Node = Nil | BlackNode | RedNode

but with the extra extra restrictions on the type variables.
how many bus accidents in the US in the last 20 years did you hear of where every single person died?
Wouldn't it have been cool if there were an efficient binary format and a nice human-readable and human-editable format, with a well-defined transformation from one to the other?

Back in the 1990s, Ron Rivest came up with canonical S-expressions, which are fully capable of representing the same information represented by HTML, XML, ASN.1—but can be either human-readable or binary.

Here's a simple example: (p (* class (footer x-treme)) "This is a " (b "footer") "."). Very human-readable, very human-editable, and easily machine-readable, wouldn't you agree?

As a binary format, it would be (1:p(1:*5:class(6:footer7:x-treme))10:This is a (1:b6:footer)1:.). Still geek-manipulable, if necessary, and extraordinarily simple to parse. And it has the advantage that it is a distinguished encoding--any of the myriad human-readable encodings all reduce to the same canonical encoding, which has advantages for hashing.
Working remotely requires some investments: dedicated room for office, good chair, conference set. Most people just try to code on sofa at living room, and fail.
It's a rhetorical question. None of the leaks provide any evidence that Google actively cooperates with the NSA in any way. No evidence of equipment at Google data centers, no evidence of any kind of remote access for the NSA, other than the already existing legal channels.

The claim that Google had foreknowledge of PRISM, or worked with the NSA to build some kind of firehose for them is unsupportable given what we know, and is pure speculation on your part.

Thus, the claim of close cooperation with the NSA is frankly, ad hominem.
I've always considered that a cautionary tale on interface design.

The linked yokes in an Airbus to average their inputs without force feedback, unless one yoke or the other is explicitly disabled.
The experienced pilot had no idea that his co-pilot was stalling the plane the entire time.
The "canonical" way of solving this is of course with a certificate hierarchy. You can configure your target system to allow authentication whenever your certificate is signed by the "golden" key, and by creating the certificates with expiration dates it's easy to restrict the time that a certificate (which maybe got stolen or was made public inadvertendly) can be used for login.

Adding auxiliary data (comparable to X509 certificate usage restrictions only for code-signing or signing for emails) would allow you to have a (central hardened) machine hand out certificates to your "semi trusted" administrators that only allow login from a specific IP-address, to a specific target-system, up to a certain date or even time. Putting this functionality in a script (to acquire the certificate and login to a system) such a wrapper could most likely be used as a drop-in replacement for the normal ssh-client.

If your restriction is to use only the default openssh already deployed to the target machines, one quick solution to hide the critical private key from the developer/admin/service machines would be to place it on a (hopefully somewhat hardened) machine running the ssh-agent, and access the agent by creative use of tunelling. In essence then the hardened machine would act as a kind of "smartcard" for all your admins.
While it would be nice if the programmer never had to worry about this situation in the first place, when confronted with something like this I use runtime.Gosched() rather than a sleep call to yield. It more directly performs what you're attempting to do and is much more clearly self-documenting for situations where you really don't need to sleep for whatever period of time but do need to yield.
Thanks pg, I edited to make it more clear.
@PanickedOmlette: You're hellbanned; don't ask me why, I just read HN with the option to see dead users.

Regarding your post, you're wrong about the MEP salaries:

Article 10 of the new Statute sets the amount of the MEPs salary as 38,5 % of the basic salary of a judge at the Court of Justice of the European Communities, thus currently €7,665 before tax.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...

Besides, I'm pretty sure the EP doesn't rule over the airspace of the member states.
Testelf has been my answer to testing. I love this service and highly recommend it to everyone.
On the upside, western internet users mostly ignored Usenet in favor of BitTorrent, which made Usenet a real pleasure to download from for years. Copyright holders are starting to catch on, though, so this is going away.
Accelerator program start engine (powered by Accenture) is backing UCLA Neuroscientists on the nourishment piece to brain fitness. Full disclosure, I’m on the team for the summer.
Have a look at what we are doing at trubrain and I’ll bring on Dr. Andrew Hill to answer any Neurofeedback or nootropic question.
Sysadmins use as much or more bash then perl. So according to this index there are still a ton of people who use lots of perl and little bash, implying not just sysadmins.
Can someone from Standard Treasury comment on the security model they are using for these API's?
How Entrepreneurs Should Use Their Accountants
> HTTP header parsing/writing was never near a performance issue.

Since header lengths are not limited, and a single TCP packet's payload is quite limited, long headers can cause very measurable latency difference. Additionally, while I agree the generation / parsing overhead is probably quite small, saving it for every HTTP request is still a boon.

I'm also curious where you are reading raw HTTP from?

For me it's primarily in two situations, reading a packet capture from WireShark, or in the browser's debugger. In both cases, the tool will end up translating the request for me.
the term "regime" connotes a "bad" government, "government" or "administration" connotes a "good" government. It is very Orwellian, but no mainstream paper would ever refer to the Obama regime.
Advanced Command Line Techniques
I have the a) problem and have yet to find a solution that doesn't involve (manually) sending a fixed-format file with transfer orders to the bank we work with...transfers within the EU are free, though, but this is the bank's policy (due to competition, of course). A simple RESTful API that can be used for ACH transfers across countries or even continents would be killer, given the current options...
The only Google employees commenting on HN are the ones with an inflated ego and superiority complex (those who think everyone else working for other companies is an idiot) who then spew garbage on their eng-misc mailing list.

Everyone else is busy at work and is able to form their own opinions without drinking the Google cool aid and can see people like Vic Gundotra for what they truly are.
OK, so at the various minimum wage jobs I've worked at, there was a serious attitude of "I'm paid to lift things/fix things/make coffee, not to care about this company." That's fine, but I don't want to work there thanks (unless I'm a teenager with no other option, again.)

However, at the software company I worked for, the attitude was "we love this company because they buy us beer!". This was cool in that they paid for theme park visits and big, free-beer parties as "morale" activities, some of which I enjoyed and some not so much, but I also felt a bit empty working there. I felt that this was because they were a services company - i.e. they were very very skeptical about "product" ideas, and where they did have a go at them they tended to dramatically underfund them (there was one notable exception to this, but the continuing revenue from the product was mostly in services-style support contracts, since it was a B2B product.) I would have preferred that they spent some of the beer money giving some of their more exciting ideas a better shot of working. (they also took on some services work that I didn't think was particularly ethical, although it was all legal.)

so, things I would delete:

- "beer is the best way to have fun" attitude.
- "9-to-5"-ism.

things I would add:

- motivation about company mission (also, dependently, hiring
people who do care about the mission.)

This is perhaps why my ideas for start ups tend to be either social enterprises, or fighting some political mission (like PRISM-evasion) - because I want there to be a mission to care about. I hope that the two things I want to avoid would follow, at least in part, from the thing I would add (although my 2nd-hand experience of the charitable sector says that 9-to-5ism may be difficult to escape anywhere.)
But doesn't mean they have JS developers.
Buy a good chair. :-) I used to use a painful chair, and eventually I shelled out $350 or so for a fancy chair off Craigslist. I figured billing $100/hr I would pay it off fast if it helped me work a full day. Sure enough, my troubles sitting have disappeared.

I'm still trying to find the right arrangement for my trackball to keep my shoulder from aching. . . .
Stop Aiming For Amazing