skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Does PHP drives you crazy?
So for the last 3 years I've been busy switching back and forth between C#/Java/C++ and latly I've been working on an Webapp in PHP.

I find doing things in PHP is absolutly tendious, yeah of course everything is easy as shit, but the inconsisticies and the way it's documented really makes my brain bleed. .. and where the hell is my little rudimentary debugger?

Don't know if there is some higher level programming style to PHP, but what do you guys think?
Plenty of people question it, it's just that good. Questioning simplicity is a futile exercise. At best you can question whether it is simple enough (see Minix).
I subscribe to INC, so I read the article yesterday. It's worth a few bucks. Go out and buy it.
i'll give people one free pass on creating a new account and then submitting their own stuff. but after that, i expect participation and/or non-self-serving submissions. multiple submissions without contribution is where i start to criticize.
In addition to the non-anonymous mandatory contributions, you could also contribute some more anonymously.
Phase 1: Use that CSS/ visited-link based hack, and geolocation to show people something. Tell me that there are : 20 people using Hacker News, 2 using salesforce, 5 gazillion using FARK etc

Phase 2: people sign up

Phase 3: Profit!
All would contribute to the big ones, and all the others would still fail.
The Wolfram icon strongly reminds me of the YTMND icon.
Biographies That Will Rev Up Your Entrepreneurial Drive
Hard to say without the request but he may be doing persistent http connection (keep-alive) in which case content-length is required.
The game is utterly rigged in favor of the powerful

I want you to think about that statement for a while.

The game isn't rigged in favor of the powerful. The powerful are powerful because they have power. Because of this power they are able to influence things. Their ability to influence things makes them powerful.

It's circular.
This is great but it is pretty heavily RoR/CSS/JS slanted. Perhaps the HN community can recommend some of their Twitter follows here?

I don't have too many super tech people I follow yet, mostly friends and entrepreneur types (but in the spirit of getting the ball rolling)

Jeff Barr talks about AWS a lot (and answers questions).
http://twitter.com/jeffbarr

Kevin Smith for Erlang
http://twitter.com/kevsmith
Sorry, I thought people would be intrigued and google it.

http://betterthangrep.com/

A quote:

"ack is a tool like grep, aimed at programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code.

ack is written purely in Perl, and takes advantage of the power of Perl's regular expressions."
StatCounter does get its data from sites that use their analytics package, so this is more than just a Nielsen-style prediction. I'll admit that those numbers could be skewed due to the type of sites that use StatCounter, though.
If the article was good, I don't mind. Now, if he continues to only post links to his stuff, that's another story.
Why is signing up required?
you're mistaking astalavista.box.sk with astalavista.com.

astalavista.com stole their name to ride on their popularity.
How is that our World is not finite? Simply take the U.S., the difference between the rich and the poor widened immensely, because most of the profit (or what you call "created wealth") is not shared equally among those who made it. I doubt Bill Gates would have gained so much if he were alone doing the job, we favour only the one who bring the money not the one who do the actual job. There is a capital gain in people's work and their wages are far from covering it.
You can't do this sort of philanthropy with 1/500th of the money. The difference between government doing it and a philanthropist is efficiency. There are no beaurocracies or regulations when it's your money and your charity. Meanwhile if the government was going to do the same thing it would be bogged down in politics and bureaucracy.

As for increasing taxes on the super rich - as far as I know Gates and Buffet both support the idea. They also support a serious estate tax for the super rich (aka death tax). And they cite the reasons you cite. The wealth came from the society as a whole and thus should go back to them. That is one reason they've put so much of their net worth in Gates' foundation. [These aren't my personal beliefs about taxes or the death tax...]

I think it would be a very hard argument to say that the money Carnegie or Gates is using could some how be used better by most governments and definitely not by the US government. The Gates foundation even has a lifespan on it. It will cease to exist 50 years after Bill and Melinda die[1]. That is commendable in my opinion. It guarantees it doesn't become a Ford Foundation (etc.) and it ensures the money is spent on the generation that created the fortune.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...
Ummm, I'm pretty sure Jason Fried is a designer (and not a developer).
re: driving me crazy -- nope.

re: documentation -- a little annoying, but i've seen worse.

re: debugger -- http://xdebug.org/

re: higher level programming -- are you using a framework?
Not a terribly good analogy. Working for a big company is painful in a very different kind of, much more depressing and sluggish, way.
A more general case would be: How to change a pattern in a bunch of file names from X to Y:

for i in *X*; do mv $i ${i/X/Y}; done
That's really annoying.

All in favor of porting Gnome, KDE, Firefox, Java and OpenOffice to Plan9 and to write device drivers for nasty things like 3D accelerators, wireless network interfaces and so on, raise your hands.

clicking... "reply"... with my... nose...
A different flavor, perhaps. Think Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
I was looking at a user account just this morning. Only 30 days or so old, and everything he submitted was from the same commercial site. There were a dozen or so submissions, and no comments from him at all.

Something funny about that.

I'd rather have people post their own stuff than having people peddle commerce sites. After all, I think the point of the board is to form a community of hackers, not just sit around talking about the latest PR event by Microsoft or Google or whatever.
FWIW, even if you use django, the database is still Google's proprietary db.
You could require that mandatory contributions be made to sites with traffic in a certain range.
Not only "still useful", but an elegant tool for a more civilized age.
I have used production batch processing systems that routinely store enough files that

ls *5*

will fail because the argument list was too big for execve(2). Would I design it that way? No, but people do (sometimes without really thinking about it), and you still have to get work done.

New users should be taught find(1) because it always works.
The May Unemployment Numbers are Here, and Worse Than Predicted
Good point on the link. It points to our page for the given site now.
Hate it or Love it, you want to be part of the gang.
Thanks for all the comments everyone (love the constructive criticism)

You guys are right and wrong with some of your critiques: Yes, I am a college student but I am not really sour on the whole college experience. I just think the system as a whole needs a drastic revamping. But I do see some weaknesses in my argument after reading your posts.

As for being a newbie and trying to boost my points, I need to apologize. I did not do it simply to promote my blog. There was an article on Y Combinator in INC this month so I decided to check out the website and it led me here. I definitely plan on contributing to the community with comments and feedback as well as submitting the occasional blog every now and again.
Imagine swarms of solar-powered robots collecting garbage out at sea. Imagine them repairing our vessels or space stations. Imagine them transporting all our goods through underground tunnels. Imagine them mining, farming or building.

Kids, almost nothing has been invented yet.

(Also, for your ethical consideration, imagine them killing people on the battle field, but don't stop imagining there)
Incredible Apple Desktop Wallpapers
"I admit it, I’m a huge Apple fan! And being a web-designer I spend quite some time in front of the computer. I’ve always loved checking out cool wallpapers and even more when they’re Apple-themed."
Ruby devs I follow and recommend: igrigorik, _why, techpickles, greggpollack, topfunky
Or just use 'rename':

$ rename s/foo$/bar/ *foo
For your consideration: Django / Python.

Not sure why they're not on your list, but I was pretty much in your shoes a few months ago and am having a lot of fun with these at the moment.
The article was above average for accuracy. But average is not very high: newspaper and magazine articles tend to contain a lot of mistakes.

The most misleading thing in the article was the whole guru theme. Maybe it made the story seem more interesting, but there is very little dispensing of abstract wisdom at YC. 99% of the conversation I have with people is about the specific problems of individual startups. Car mechanic would be a more accurate metaphor than guru.
I used Tracks for to quite a while. I liked that you can host it on your own machine. I have a problem with some hosted site for my todo's. I too am looking for something that does hierarchies.
2nd igrigorik http://www.igvita.com/
Joomla is a mess and I wouldn't recommend it for a dev.

It's much more of a CMS for designers, than any sort of framework for developers.
I am doing the same too. Bing is a perfectly good search engine for most things. I do need to go back to google to loner search terms, but for almost everything else Bing does a good job.

One thing to note though, I have not found any of the Bing features such as caterorization etc of any use.
I'm pretty sure Google, Bing and Yahoo are not giving them any direct data, so it's mostly coming from speculation.
That's right, and because of that my applications deployed on there have 2 branches: one using Google DB and other using data models provided by Django. IMHO, developing this way is pretty easy and prepare you to migrate your apps if necessary.
I've always wondered why porting drivers has never been automated.
Hell, I wish I'd realized that during my undergrad :/. Fortunately I finally got a clue by the time I started my master's (6 months of not knowing what the hell to do after my bachelor's kind of woke me up in that respect).
Shoeshine man catches a break - and some cash
> Questioning simplicity is a futile exercise

Why do you assume that simplicity necessarily equals Unix? Many of its design decisions were not mathematical inevitabilities, but are merely artifacts of hardware limitations which no longer exist:

http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/17/386bsd/prin...

"The Jolitzes believed that from its origins as a series of quick, if elegant, hacks, Unix had hardened into a series of unquestioned rituals for getting things done. Many of these rituals were fossils -- work-arounds for hardware that no longer existed. "It's amazing how much we were still tied to the past," Lynne says. "The physical machines had been hauled away, but elements of the operating systems are still being implemented in the same way." She believes today's Linux and BSD developers are carrying on that unhelpful tradition. "It's like they're doing incantations," she says. "They're repeating what they've been taught, and they don't know what it means."
Followup to:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=642677
Ask HN: Ad networks which allow multiple destination URLs in the ads
Hi everyone,
I am still new to the world of ads. I would like to place a banner ad that has multiple links to different destination URLs. Does anybody know of an adnetwork that allows that?
gvanrossum, webmink, merlyn, limi are the ones I see the most
I've installed the userscript and I like it, but your homepage made me think it was a different product. I thought it would scan my bookmarks or social profiles for sites I visit, and match me up to other users that way (maybe it does and I don't see it?).

Also, it would be nice to get more information before being presented with Sign Up and Login as the only options (on the homepage). Its hard to choose either without knowing how your product works and what value it will bring to me.

I do like the locations on the HN comments though. Pretty cool.

One other thing: I have Greasemonkey, and very much appreciate your offering the product as a Userscript. That said, a lot of people might not have GM, or even know what it is. Perhaps package the script into an extension and offer both options? (http://arantius.com/misc/greasemonkey/script-compiler)

Best of luck!
I think if PHP is driving you crazy, you're doing it wrong.

Get a good framework (Recess is the most promising, CodeIgniter is fairly sane).
tbh, I didn't read the entire article; just that Q&A stood out.

And yeah, I know exactly what you mean based on the reporting on the security industry.
The other thing was availability of good projects to work on for the languages.

For objC, I can think of a few iPhone apps I could work on to learn the platform. For things like PHP, Rails, Scala (where you'll need a good amount of traffic to really excel at them and get real world experience beyond some small hello-world-like web-apps), how does one get involved with the complicated/ involved stuff ?
Internet Mapping Project (by TED attendees)
I think its worth noting that this post is no where to be found in classic view...
Now why would the government authorize such a thing, specially since it brings no benefit to them? Also, people contribute if they like a service, or if the service actually helps them. That would still make boring or bad services/websites fail.
You're perplexed? Imagine how Thompson and Ritchie feel after improving unix with Plan 9, and everyone stays stuck with unix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
A company whose browser requires an entire operating system, whose mail reader needs MS-Office to view documents is complaining that Google doesn't follow the - "small programs doing one thing well philosophy"!

Next they will be complaining that Wave doesn't use open data formats.
I don't like being lied to.

What's going on in my mind, within two seconds of the page load, is that you've used a stock image on your front page, and you've generated "These people both read Hacker News." using my HTTP referrer. So in fact these two people don't read Hacker News.

I get the cleverness of the page. But cute girls in short shorts who have nothing to do with the product have become a sort of turn-off. I feel like a trout in an over-fished lake - lures are boring.

Show me two users who actually do read Hacker News, and you've got me on the front page.
It's about 3 times the bandwidth for a start.

I agree @TLS, authorization etc, but often those just aren't a priority.

email is often used without any security but it's far from something that "doesn't matter". IM protocols have barely any security, yet we all use them.
Doo doo doo doo, doo doodoo do,
Doo doo doo doo, doo doodoo do,
Doo doo doo doo, doo doodoo do,
Doo, doodoodoo, doo doo doo doo doo....

A bit hard to communicate, but that's the keyboard cat playing all of you off.
CRV43 43-inch curved LCD arrives July for $8k
The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate
The unemployment numbers are also worse than the "more-adverse" scenario in the bank stress tests.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/06/unemployment-compa...
The picture is just like of Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Last Supper"!
Isn't DHH the only RoR developer on this list?
Although I can't comment on this specific case, symmetry in code has always been a warning sign to me that things need to be refactored.
There are lots of good services that fail. Now some of them might have a chance.

As for why the government might do this: it would advance the web and increase computer literacy.
TSTTCPW
Yes, PHP is bad. I ranted about this in the past:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579250

(To make a long story short, PHP makes all of the same mistakes as Java with respect to OO, but doesn't have the workarounds that Java does.)
I think if PHP isn't driving you crazy, you're doing it wrong. The only way to win is to not play.

The frameworks you suggest don't work around any of PHP's language inadequacies, they only work around its inability to easily write web applications. Once your HTTP requests is parsed, you still have to do something, and that's what PHP makes hard.
Hash Algorithm Strength
The world is not finite from any perspective, whether physical or economic:

- The world is not finite from a physical point of view, because it receives gigantic amounts of solar energy from the sun. Sure, it tends to radiate much of it back out, but a large chunk of that energy is converted into "wealth" in a biological form, via photosynthesis. That continually increased wealth is what has allowed us to progress from single-celled organisms to what we are today.

- The world is not closed from an economic point of view because work has a value (something your ilk seems to be arguing for, I believe) and new work is done every day. Every bit of productive work adds more value to the system, more wealth. Some people's work is more valuable because it creates more wealth. Those people are (and should be) rewarded accordingly, in a fair system.

You should read up on Microsoft's history. Bill Gates started off as a developer. He most definitely "did the work". Also, only someone who has never done any meaningful work in a business could possibly fail to understand that "management" work is not only very hard and complicated, it is also essential. Left to their own devices, most large groups of people devolve into chaos, producing no useful work whatsoever.

Finally...

There is a capital gain in people's work and their wages are far from covering it.

Of course. You're absolutely right. The reason for that is that the people receiving those wages did not take any risk. They receive a pay check at the end of the month, and they don't need to worry about whether or not the product will be successful, whether the company will get sued, whether key members of the company will suddenly leave and start a competitor, etc - they get their money anyway. The founders of a company take most of that risk, particularly at the beginning, and it is perfectly reasonable that they should get most of the reward.
No we don't. Fitting in with different windows managers is probably going to be a case of distributions skinning Chromium based on their default WM.

But we have bigger fish to fry for the moment.
This is the purpose of a great deal of regulation, simply raising the cost of some transaction to benefit those who have already cleared the bar.

This is a serious charge you are making. Is it really the purpose or rather, an unintended consequence?
He didn't say that they might shut down AppEngine. He said they might decide to close down your site. No library stops working from one day to the next.

I wonder what the appeals process is in case of a dispute. Considering some people's experiences with Google Checkout I would at least read the terms of service very carefully.

This is not just an issue with Google. It's a general issue with that kind of all in one cloud service.

[edit] If you use google accounts for authentication the risk is even greater.
"Classic view"?
It's generally unsafe to assume that quotations indicate a high degree of correlation between the person being interviewed's intent and the text within. Very often reporters start with a point they're trying to make and then search for snippets to support that, freely editing to further that end.

It's also a reason that if you're being interviewed for publication that it's a good idea to ask for the right to review it before publication to make sure that you're not being misrepresented – at least not in any way that offends you.
I agree with this - I think a lot of people lurk on HN (like me) and only join when they've got something worthwhile to say. It's when it's all take and no give that it becomes a problem.
Did you measure the latency? I would guess that Slicehost's network is already gigabit and you are getting something like a 1/12th share of it.
Yes. (And it is a great time to be living here.)
I'm done with this argument. You're a brainwashed idiot.
"If the past is any guide, they've been ruthlessly executing their R&D and product development strategies."

I read that as "they've been ruthlessly executing their R&D and product developers". But now that Steve Jobs is back at Apple either could be true.
and thomasfuchs. I may have also been mentally throwing jason fried in to that bucket wrongly. The comments also had several more.

I guess I could have been more general and said what, web? I wasn't trying to be negative, I was just hoping to see if anyone followed people for languages that weren't mentioned.
Neat tutorial.
Tampa/St. Petersburg--but if I were over near that side of the peninsula when it happens I'd come.
PHP is easy to pick up but will likely teach you bad programming habits. This is coming from someone who got their start with PHP. :-)

If you want to do web stuff I think Ruby and Python would be better choices. If you want to avoid the learning curve of Rails, you can start off doing stuff with Sinatra instead, and mostly just tackle the Ruby learning curve first.
I agree. Generations might not be the best term, even though generations of people (grandparents -> grandkids) can definitely co-exist and learn from each other. Maybe a better term is waves (as in one wave rolling into another)
Searching for 'SDK' brings up some interesting people to follow now and again.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=SDK
"Stimulus Effect: Shit Sandwich"
Before I sign up, how do you store passwords?

Can you make email optional?
Seriously, I read that remark and I laughed. What an insightful analysis!
Previous announcement http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625958 and short tutorial http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619548
How To Break Password Behind The Stars
Ever wanted to know what is behind those passwords. For example if you want to know password from facebook account that somebody else have typed and left it. Then, here is post which will help you.
Free Software/Open Source branding. A call to come together.
Among the exceptions, almost all have kept the worst limitations of the Unix family.

Is there some analysis on this issue available?
What limitations have been kept?

The only operating system that was supposed to be an improvement over Unix (that I know about) is Plan 9, but over time many ideas from Plan 9 have been ported to Unix. Unix today is not what it was 40 years ago ... the only legacy that's truly staying is the philosophy, which for better or worse, it works.

Of course, Unix could be better. But let's be serious, what do you suppose we should do? Reinvent everything every 5 years?
Changes In Stair Design Could Help Fight Obesity
Big design up front is bad, but big scaling up front is good?
Kings of Code - Web Developers Gathering in Amsterdam
Great ... I am in the program and enjoy it immensely.
a bunch of people on efnet irc say that it was hacked by some guy named darkpontifex or some group called dikline or something. supposed to not be a litespeed vuln its actually an ntp daemon vuln just changed the name to confuse people.
HotPads shows the true cost of hosting on Amazon (AWS)
Palm Pre launching with Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube
This issue with Chrome is that V8 is a 32-bit code generator. 64-bit support is coming and, as soon as it's ready, we'll have real 64-bit packages.