skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You only have to remember 3 facts for addition: 0+0 = 0, 1+0 = 1 and 1+1 = 10. The last is the only carry situation, further simplifying memorization. THe same thing holds for subtraction, multiplication and division, very few facts to memorize.

I'm guessing that Polynesian civilizations didn't deal with millions and millions of any particular item, so that they rarely did a one page calculation. Indeed, the article claims that "80" is a large number for the ancient Mangarevans.

But this article totally misses out on the real issue - who owns the Intellectual Property of Binary Math? Previously, we thought it was Leibniz, and clearly, we've been paying his heirs for the use of their Intellectual Property, but now we have to trace down the descendants of these fantasically Inventive Mangarevans, and give them the Lion's Share of the money previously given to the (now know to be false) owners of Binary Math Intellectual Property.
IE6 -> Welcome to incompibilty of ORACLE form.
If any other programming language was as popular, there would be just as much bad code in it. Nothing about PHP forces you to write bad code, nothing about other languages forces you to write good code.

Also, if PHP is really just sucky and offers no advantages, why not simply rewrite it in a better language? Surely the costs would ammortize quickly.
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I'm not really making any strong comment about PHP's usefulness or anything. I'm just saying that many of the things that have happened in its development would sound like they came right out of the manual for INTERCAL, except that they're too over the top.

As for its popularity, well, that would be the "got out of hand" part.
Pundits said the Bezos interview with the Prime Air gimmick ruined CBS credibility.

Now we have this to cement their new reputation as "PRNewsWire.tv"
It wasn't pure binary. It was a decimal system with three large binary steps superimposed.
Previous hn entry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265613
But if they wanted to, its more than within their ability. I'm sure they have plenty of idle computing time to do so with the proper physical sensors providing data.
>Not to mention almost all families in poverty today have air conditioning, refrigerators and access to more varieties of food than anyone did 50 years ago.

Red herring. The problems that afflicted the poor then are still here today.
Technically accurate, but it's not that simple.

Under a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, AT&T (the parent organization of Bell Labs) had been forbidden from entering the computer business.. Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product. Indeed, under the terms of the decree, Bell Labs was required to license its non-telephone technology to anyone who asked.

AT&T made Unix available to universities and commercial firms, as well as the United States government, under licenses. The licenses included all source code including the machine-dependent parts of the kernel

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix

So, while they did not actually release it to public domain, they got about as close as they could have without actually doing so.

Remember the GPL didn't exist until 1989. Also, I would speculate the generally free access to Unix V probably helped bring about the modern environment of open source, which didn't really exist then.
You're going to need to put some more information than that on the site before I'm entering my email address.
Indeed "The Idea Factory" is a very good book recommendation. In the conclusion of the book the author argues that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute[1] may be the closest existing research organization to Bell Labs. While much smaller in size than Bell Labs it shares a focus on basic research and is well funded for the long haul.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes_Medical_Institute
Four Points Beginner Risk Managers Should Learn
> It might be better than Perl, but not by much.

Oh come on.

PHP is more evolutionarily fit than Perl in a handful of very important ways (I would illuminate, for example, function signatures and a pre-built object system, syntactically trivial nesting of data structures, and a newcomer-friendly out-of-the-box execution model).

That said, I wrote Perl for years as a hobbyist (still do, now and then), and have spent the last 6 or so primarily writing PHP. There is not a day that passes that I don't miss some aspect of the rich, expressive, elegant, sophisticated, and intellectually delightful environment that is Perl at its best.

It is a doomed and sinking continent, Perl, but if we let the considerable wisdom of its once-great civilization evaporate into trite dismissal, we as a culture stand to lose a great deal.
This is exactly the system that Robert Forslund advocates as an explanation of certain ancient numbering systems in "A Logical Alternative to the Existing Positional Numbering System" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.44....).
There's also this article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25034598
You can listen to a podcast about one instance http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/471/t...
From Zero To Hero: Google’s Chromecast Has A Real Shot At Total TV Domination
Show me "4*5" in base-(9+1) hands. Now try it in base-(9+2)
> Polls of the NSA surveillance highlighted some of this

citation?
To me, it just break even. It might be large sump value but the process of approval payment and user acceptance are way to long.
There aren't much diffirent 30 buck subscription accounting software and 30 million erp software. The way much diff is building for enterprise system take lot of time doing discussion and reporting rather then make software itself.
How to make a viral video
I find comments like these interesting and at the same time ironic, especially on a sites like HN. I could think of 10 reasons why PHP is the "wrong" language but I could also think of 100 reasons why it made a successful one. Rasmus my not have created a perfect language but he sure did create one heck of a successful one which even the "elitest"/"perfect" language are still trying to catch upto.

Never belittle other's work, especially when striving to discover that magic formula to success. All the posts on HN about "How we made X successful" and we brush off the obvious ones in front of our eyes? Ever stopped to think why a crappy X is popular? Maybe there is something to it.

Also not to mount on irony but keep in mind, you are commenting on a site that has the HTML syntax from the Geocities era (it has its reasons though).
IOW, you don't believe privacy should exist at all in the digital age. Others disagree.
This comment really makes no sense.

We have no idea where we'd start on terraforming or if it's even possible. It'd probably take a century or two just to come up with a tenable plan if we started throwing an unlimited amount of money into it now. And then it would take tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

Terraforming is, at best, a game for those with impossibly long attention spans, not those who become impatient on the time scale of decades.
If we agree 100% on this vision, maybe we should team up. It's rare for HN commenters to agree on what the future holds.
I don't dispute that people will write bad code in any language. The problem I have with PHP is that it at best, makes it exceedingly easy to write bad code, and at worst has actually encouraged it (see, for example, magic quotes).

I also am not claiming that PHP offers no advantages. Certainly it has some good things about it. The choice to allow you to easily interleave PHP code with HTML is an example of a simple feature which makes life really easy when you're setting up a site.

But rewriting in a better language is not necessarily a viable option. It's generally not the call of the person tasked with maintaining it, and even if it is, "cost will amortize quickly" isn't necessarily good enough on a large project with limited funding.
It's http://museum.php.net/

EDIT: It's true, it's not satire... check out e.g. lex.c in php2/php-1.99s.tar.gz

/* Command hash table
* The hash is extremely simplistic and just based on the length of the
* command.
*/

followed by all top-level functions ordered by string length.
It's possible to end up with access to a database via some mechanism without having access to the code that can decrypt the values. Perhaps you've stolen a backup, or exploited an SQL injection to get access to one of these tables, but without the decryption code it's useless (if the encryption itself is done correctly).

It's weak protection, because obtaining the database and obtaining the code are pretty highly correlated, but it can make sense in some situations. Obviously, the easier it is to obtain the unencrypted values, the less likely an attacker is to get stranded between the encrypted values and the decryption code. (i.e., an "encrypted partition" doesn't do much to defend against any remote attack because they'll all be using the readable mounted partition, a pervasive API layer that automatically decrypts things for user code is that much easier to accidentally use by the attacker as well, etc. In a weird way you want these fields to be as hard to use as possible, violating normal software engineering rules; every normal ease-of-use consideration is a hole.)
http://museum.php.net/php1/
This is true, but that's not how you get these scumbags:

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/192241-p...

"Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the original author of the Patriot Act, says Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be prosecuted for lying to Congress."

"Lying to Congress is a federal offense, and Clapper ought to be fired and prosecuted for it," the Wisconsin Republican said in an interview with The Hill.
Isn't Google doing fundamental research on AI?
The same thing goes for the article. You can't put $1B into a stock and take it out at the end of the day, let alone $250B.
That is incorrect. By holding a gun, that person has initiated force against you. Initiation of force is a proactive action that requires volition on part of the perpetrator.

Amazon is not initiating force against anyone. If they provide higher than market wages for the workers, they will be violating the rights of their shareholders who will lose money and will be worse off due to the deal. In an industry with as tight margins as Amazon, it can result in flight of capital, loss of shareholder value and layoffs.
sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5

Boom, I just installed PHP5 on Apache on Ubuntu, now I just upload a file to my project root.

Let me know when you find any way easier than that.
The odd routines of famous minds
> actually encouraged it (see, for example, magic quotes).

Actively discouraged for years, and removed completely over a year and a half ago.
Vatican, Oxford put ancient manuscripts online
show ten fingers, close both fists, show ten fingers.
(ten plus ten)

show ten fingers, close both fists, show nine fingers.
(eleven plus nine)

Anyway...there are other alternatives if you're going to attribute the origin of our numeric system to the number of fingers we have. A base 6 system would be really likely as well. One hand could represent the most significant digit, and the other could represent the least significant digit. Then you could easily count to 35 with your fingers before you finger overflow.

Or you could do a binary finger count where every finger represents a different significant digit. Then you're at 1023 before you finger overflow. This is more unlikely given the large number and the unintuitive idea that each finger represents exponentially more value than the previous one. Plus you end up with some really awkward finger positions to represent certain numbers.

But I'm just not buying the idea that base ten is most likely because we have ten fingers. I'd say the base 6 system is best for our fingers. Overflow in one hand just naturally increments the finger count in the other hand. And as with the base eleven or two systems, each finger always represents the same written glyph.
Video games don't have to be crazy technical
Why flights are sometimes cheaper on Friday the 13th
I'm confused as to why you'd be against the collection of GPS metadata then. GPS data is, effectively, only associative metadata. It can tell you where you were, and when you were there, but not what you were doing. That's why I'm having a hard time finding consistency in your position.

That isn't meant as judgement of you, by any means... the entire issue is a morass. We want law enforcement agencies to be effective (assuming that we're not acting criminally), but we don't want them to be overseers.

I personally think that the precedent is for us to err on the side of liberty over justice, and I think that in the spirit of presumption of innocence and all that, but that's influenced by confirmation bias, at the least.
php5

installs apache, by default.
The entertainment industry (film, television, and professional sports) are all heavily unionized.

Plus, it's not like the Japanese auto-workers at the companies that are Detroit's lunch weren't unionized. Wasn't the fall of the American auto industry because of competition and market forces instead of big bad unions?
I think the recent history of 60 Minutes might be what it looks like when the government starts calling in its favors.
Yes I know, I was just pulling out a random example that came to mind. Still, you'll find a lot of code out there running on old versions of PHP with magic quotes enabled.

And that's another part of the problem: the incorporation of really bad ideas that end up poisoning code bases for years to come, simply because they weren't properly vetted before being released.
Super awesome can't wait to show this to my boy - he is super ready to move on from the programming at khanacadamy so am trying to learn him some game libraries. However he doesn't feel that comfortable outside of the nice KhanAcademy web environment, so using a lot of jsfiddle sessions is a great way to teach. Thanks!

PS jds375 comment about being sure to activate unsafe scripts (click at top right of address bar) is worth noting
Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
I see more people complaining about maintaining bad code in other languages than I do about maintaining bad code in PHP. I personally have been a PHP developer since 2001, I haven't maintained any bad code... Actually, I spent a good portion of my early career completely rewriting shitty PHP code to be good PHP code.
They have a severe momentum problem.

This one judge is the least of their worries. There are a dozen more federal cases coming over the next few years (the one going on in NY right now for example, by the EFF or ACLU, forget which).

All the momentum is strongly against the NSA, and the Snowden documents will continue to apply an endless wall of pressure. They likely won't get a chance to breathe in terms of making themselves look good (short of maybe a false flag to save the day).

Obama is about to meet with 'Silicon Valley' to try to deal with that fire. Whether it's meant to pacify them or to actually act on their marching orders (money rules), it points to the fact that the NSA & Co. are struggling non-stop to contain the wild fire.
There is no such thing as "free" so when discussing these sorts of issues it would be much more illuminating to describe the mechanism of funding, as it relates to one alternative to another.
This. Nobody taken seriously in PHP world doesn't use modern PHP tools, Good frameworks, Composer, follow PHP-FIG standards, all that stuff... Just because you had to maintain a PHP4 app 10 years ago, doesn't mean PHP hasn't changed. And it also doesn't mean real devs don't have standards and follow up-to-date guidelines.
> the difference between sports and politics is that sports don't really matter

I have some news for you. The sports industry is something like $400bn. If the Lakers have a bad night or whatever, it matters.

You may not understand why moving players around a field matters, but it seems to me that this is roughly the same sort of ignorance that would be behind the view that pushing pixels around a screen "doesn't matter". The fact that X is a hundred billion dollar industry is primate facie evidence that it is important. You may not want it to matter but this is a different thing than determining whether or not it actually does.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is that there is a certain sentiment of "silly other people, stop being bad!" that easily occurs in these conversations. The TDD debate sounds important for cars but .001% of engineers are working on the self-driving cars. Most software is mundane and these debates are 99.9% academic and are even had in the abstract without affecting any tangible software at all! In many ways, the hacker arguments are far more tribal and less practical than anything going on in sports or politics.
Better idea: Be a better programmer and don't blame a language because you suck.
Something is erasing my program while it's running (oh wait oops)
I agree, but I do tend to think true innovation moves around in ebbs and flows, comes in spurts, and is mostly the product of hard work and necessity.

Computing has reached a point where resources have become so cheap we don't know what to expend it all on. There's still a hard compsci core, masses of unsolved problems, but most of us live in this nasty ecosystem of commodity "innovations" where it's not even clear there's an incremental improvement, if there is it can be a matter of opinion, let alone something that's going to indisputably change the way most humans live for the next half a century.

I don't suppose it's a bad thing, it's just that once a technology reaches a certain level of awesome we expect the flow of goodness to continue, and blinker up and squint at it long after looking for novelty and ingenuity in really small details.

The only way I can get a sense of perspective sometimes is to talk to my grandparents, who washed in a tin bath, witnessed TV, washing machines, microwaves and even modern soaps, shampoos and detergents come in to the home. I swear my gran still revels in modern food processes that I take for granted, and sometimes even despise. Somehow incremental improvements in programming language semantics don't seem to compare to the fact that 2 years ago I had laser eye surgery, or that we have the capability to print chips at unfathomable nanoscopic sizes.
So glad to hear that you found this useful! Thanks for the compliment! =)
Good to know, I haven't used Apache in a while. I normally use Nginx, but that's not quite as easy to get up and running because you got to set PHP5-FPM sockets in your virtual host. ;)
> just as cumbersome to get started as any other language.

Any other language that has dedicated .INI files to determine its behaviour, maybe. PHP caught on because of "Hello world" in a web browser, and smart people didn't realize the value of novelty.
Sears was doomed when they scrapped their catalog operation, coincidentally the same year that the first graphical web browser was introduced.

At one time Sears sold EVERYTHING, from a replacement zipper to a full precut and ready to nail together house.

They basically had Amazon.com -- suppliers, warehouses, nationwide distribution network -- plus a brick and mortar outlet in every town of any size, and threw it all away.
No, they really don't.

I'm married to a physician and I can tell you that Medicine is an incredibly nuanced profession, and though doctors and nurses can benefit greatly from computer assistance, they cannot be reliably and safely replaced by computer algorithms. The single data point of Watson diagnosing lung cancer is not enough to generalize over the entire profession and range of ailments.

Medicine is a great deal more than differential diagnoses, doctors are a great deal more than "professional diagnosers", and nurses are a great deal more than morphine dispensing diaper-changing automatons.

Most medical schools (in my country, at least) have moved to an entirely evidence-based and patient-centred-care model years ago. The problem of course is that evidence is not always easily gathered because of ethical issues (e.g. most hypothermia knowledge comes from Nazi human experimentation on POWs and Jews. Also it's hard to conduct a study on OB/GYN topics because you could potentially be putting infants, fetuses, and their mothers at undue risk). Being treated by a computer is not going to change this problem of poor evidence.

That forum post was written by someone who has only a shallow appreciation for/understanding of the field of medicine.
from php-2.0.1/src/lex.c

void IntFunc(char *fnc_name) {
int i=0;
int cmdlen = strlen(fnc_name);

while(cmd_table[cmdlen][i].cmd) {
if(!strncasecmp(fnc_name,cmd_table[cmdlen][i].cmd,cmdlen)) {
cmd_table[cmdlen][i].fnc();
break;
There is nothing wrong with demanding low prices. And paying high prices in no way guarantee fair treatment of workers. That Bangladeshi factory that collapsed used to make some relatively high priced clothes.

What we need is legislation that guarantees fair treatment of employees. Then you can still seek the lowest prices but you will not need to feel guilty about it. We are supposed to have such legislation, but Amazon have found some loopholes, unfortunately.
> I haven't maintained any bad code...

>I spent a good portion of my early career completely rewriting shitty PHP code to be good PHP code.

I'm curious what you think maintenance is.
My mom is most of it, the other bit is a good friend of mine... I was in a relationship for 6 years, 2 of those years engaged... It didn't work out. My shortest ever relationship was 3 months. I've dated many woman since my first girlfriend at 15... But I decided I wanted to focus on my career over relationships for the last 4 years, now my family and friends feel as if I am never gonna get married or have kids... I had always set a goal of not having kids until I'm 30.

Needless to say, I'm starting to search now... :/
Rewriting the system from the ground up, not maintaining the current code base. Sorry I wasn't so exact on that.
I have a right to use force in self-defense.

Therefore I have the right to hire a bodyguard to use force in my defense. (In fact it is the same right - delegated.)

Therefore we have the right to elect a sheriff to use force in our defense.

...But I do NOT have the right to beat and rob people.

Therefore, neither do I have any right to hire a bodyguard to beat and rob people.

Therefore, neither does our sheriff have any right to beat and rob people -- even if we voted for him to do so! Because you cannot delegate powers you never had.

Therefore the question isn't whether society should provide social welfare for the needy. Rather, the question is whether we have a moral right to use VIOLENCE to FORCE people to provide social welfare for the needy. (We don't.)

The reason you see poverty in various nations is because they do not have economic freedom and secure property rights. The nations with the worst poverty are the ones with the worst protections of rights. The nations with the lowest poverty are the nations with the best protections of rights. And note: those are also the nations who donate the most money to charity.

Government can never fix poverty by using violence to forcefully redistribute wealth. All that will do is cause worse poverty.

The best a government can do is strongly protect rights and economic freedoms -- then you will have a rich nation, which will not have poverty problems in the first place, and which will easily be able to cover the rest through private charity.

Unfortunately we do not see any governments today that respect rights and freedoms in this way, although some are better than others. But proposed solutions based on "social welfare" will only make those problems worse, not better.
"... open sourcing the server code wouldn't really do that much to improve trust."

It would allow people to run your code (if they like it) on their own servers. Then they wouldn't need to trust you.