skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Living in the US, most of the people I know don't use their phones for much besides email and text. Some use them for Facebook, some for pdf reading or the odd Google search (when mobile, I think there are exactly only ten things one has a reason to search for, unless one's playing a trivia game, hence the ads).

I don't know anyone who uses their smart in a way that's more than a combination laptop/dumb-phone. And usually a rather limited combination. Admittedly, I'm now outside early adopter circles.

I have a smart phone. In practice, I have no reason not to have a "feature phone" instead.

Edit: In relation to original article, I think the idea that the world is going to "appified" rapidly is implausible. For example, having a separate remote for your apartment's gate may be a hassle but it's not a hassle for the apartment's owners and so they have little incentive to spend money to universalize this.

Smart Phone only services may appear spread a bit but they have no more likelihood of becoming universal than Facebook-only services.
> but you should also read bad and mediocre code (and more importantly, be able to figure out from reading why it is bad or whether it only seems bad at first glance.)

Are there books or websites that have snippets of bad code for readers to test their skills with? I know I've seen something like that for C (maybe as part of a larger book) but what about all the other languages?
The DIY.

Or build an AeroQuad: http://aeroquad.com/content.php?s=9af9c997f8aed9a3ad958e32bf...
>> For example, working just by yourself, you are unlikely to deal with huge distributed systems, or scaling an application to millions of users.

Why not though? When companies run into these problems, they have to get the services somewhere.

Why not a small development company?

Plenty of one man bands doing crazy interesting work for surprising big names.

And invoicing £800+VAT per day for it!
> This is true for debates like Java vs C# or Python vs Ruby, but some languages are unambiguously better than others.

I strongly agree with that. What I find ridiculous is fanboyism, people that don't want to recognize the draft level of thisthose language/s.

> Deciding on a 'best' language often comes down to IDE support and library availability, rather than just the merits of the languages.

The Best Tool For The Job. True. But don't think business and practical use or usage of the language for a minute. There must be an absolute in languages and its implementation. I mean theoretically some languages are better than others. For instance take D, it does more and better than C, C++ (and Java?).

I think this debate has been implicitly solved, basically there is the scientific side dedicated to solve piratical dev issues, implementation details, math theory. In this area we can find Scheme, LISP and ML languages.

The other side is the business, engineering and fanboism where focus is on real world problems, where pragmatism beats theory and whether it's cool or not. Here there is almost only imperatives and compiled languages. Why? Winners write History and Thruth.

> The only ambiguity over their superiority comes because you can't trust programmers not to use the many new complex features of C++ and Scala, so there is a risk of the results being too complicated.

And AFAIK that's what killed Scheme and LISP, because the syntax is too powerful. And what still kills dynamic languages in general.
I don't particularly care about librettas or victorian english, but the shit these guys say is pretty absurd.

In any case this weekend we are going to have them play some heads-up
poker, a set of tennis, a drinking contest - a winner gwan emerge
(Ilan) and you girls gonna see wassup. If you wanna cover these
"World's Sexiest Startup Man" events you are welcome - we will get you
soused up you gonna feel nice.

Let me cut to the chase: Ilan's sexy is $15M Zach's is $10M YOU FEEL
ME? You know what I'm saying now? You feel me..

- http://valleywag.gawker.com/rap-genius-incites-unsolicited-s...
Overall, I agree with the post.

> The freedom to do whatever one wants, wherever one wants (within moral limits, I hope).

This overreaches. You cannot do "whatever," "wherever". This implies complete control over one's circumstances, which is obviously absurd.

More precisely, money buys increased control over your circumstances and life. This is very valuable and empowering, but it is clearly limited.
"Son do you know why I'm stopping you fo?"

Cause I'm young and I'm black and my hat's real low

Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don't know

Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo?

http://rapgenius.com/Jay-z-99-problems-lyrics
Insulin is reactive. It regulates the glycemia (amount of sugar in the blood), which would vary highly in its absense depending on the time elapsed since the last meal.
"""
The fiercest critics of technology still focus on the ephemeral have-and-have-not divide, but that flimsy border is a distraction. The significant threshold of technological development lies at the boundary between commonplace and ubiquity, between the have-laters and the “all have.” When critics asked us champions of the internet what we were going to do about the digital divide and I said “nothing,” I added a challenge: “If you want to worry about something, don’t worry about the folks who are currently offline. They’ll stampede on faster than you think. Instead you should worry about what we are going to do when everyone is online. When the internet has six billion people, and they are all e-mailing at once, when no one is disconnected and always on day and night, when everything is digital and nothing offline, when the internet is ubiquitous. That will produce unintended consequences worth worrying about.”
"""
--Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants)
The OP was about beautifully written PHP code.

The comments I am reacting to are those who are reframing that discussion into a discussion about PHP as a tool in general.

So no I am not reframing anything. I am reacting to the reframing if anything.
Wait, what? How do you get from "juvenile and offensive" to "hates African-American culture"? That's your own bias at play, there, bud. Loud and clear.
Nobel laureate: Break free from the stifling grip of luxury journals
Thank you for your response.

I wish it noted for the record that Lanza's weapons were a semiautomatic Bushmaster M4 clone and a semiautomatic Glock handgun; he had no access to fully automatic weapons, so did not use them in the perpetration of his infamy. I acknowledge this makes no difference to your argument, but for the sake of the audience, who might not know better, I point it out nonetheless. Readers interested in learning more about the nature of regulations around fully automatic weapons in the United States are directed to the Wikipedia page describing the National Firearms Act.

Perhaps you did learn something from me. If so, I'm glad of it. In any case, thank you for your felicitations on the season, and I wish you and your family a most merry Christmas as well.
I'm a type 1 diabetic. If this wouldn't work with rapid-acting insulin, might it not be a good thing for long-acting insulin, e.g. Detemir/Levemir (which I currently take)?
You only know if you try; kudos to you for trying.
> If you have 10mb of numbers that you need to add 1 to, immutable state means you now have 20mb of numbers guaranteed.

Immutable state also means that you don't need to add 1 to the numbers you won't use, and that you can discard the old numbers if you only wanted the incremented ones.

Garbage colletors and run-time optimizers are added complexity, and may be too much for an embbebed system (or maybe not, controlers are getting bigger each day). But that's a context dependent conclusion, not a certainty.
> I think in reality the appeal of FP is that the people who use it are generally more experienced programmers who tend not to make too much mess in non-FP languages anyway. The benefits are more the peer group than anything else.

Careful, you're arguing here that FP is better because the person using it is a better person. There is nothing wrong with that statement if it is actually an unbiased fact, but simply choosing to use or not use FP would automatically bias you towards declaring that true or false. Avoiding that line of reasoning is a good idea because it's not useful.

Stick to the merits of FP itself.
Ok, a little more input.

Both are android users and prefer open-source hardware and software. The Parrot AR 2.0 looked good at first, but I'm unsure as to the level of community support for the android software.

They are also very skilled at low level programming, so some of the newer Linux based drones are appealing.
That's my worry too.

Since you mentioned the latest book by Scott Adams, it's called "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life" [0]. I read it recently and I think it's a good book. It has some nonobvious ideas, like systems thinking vs. goal-oriented thinking.

[0] - http://www.amazon.com/How-Fail-Almost-Everything-Still-ebook...
Sorry, you are right, of course. Here, I used "chargeback" as a shortcut for saying I asked the bank to not pay out. My banks dispute form - a simple 1-pager - essentially leaves very little room for confusion in the nature of the dispute in any event. They have some 10-odd descriptions and one is supposed to pick the right, or closest one. I picked "I did not authorize nor was involved in this transaction".

In my country the "terminology" of credit card use isn't as evolved as it is in the US - we don't actually have well defined terms like "chargeback", "dispute" etc.
This would definitely be a quadcopter instead of a fixed wing.
It probably differs from issuer to issuer. In my experience Amex is very on top of it and they have always flagged every transaction I have not made myself, immediately sending push notification and SMS where I can ack/nak an automated transaction prompt. If I nak it they freeze the card and overnight a new one. I suppose they don't really care about handling it manually because that would be prohibitively expensive and they prefer to act on the patterns in an automated way. Would be interesting to see aggregate stats by card issuer of how good they are at detecting it.
The ACA expanded the income range for Medicare eligibility. Eligibility for insurance through ACA starts where that expanded range ends. The Supreme Court said that states could choose not to expand Medicare, thus leaving a gap in which people make too much for Medicare but not enough for ACA coverage.

23 states have taken that route, even though it is more expensive overall than expanding Medicare.
Estrogen and progestin need to be at a certain, constant level. Insulin needs to be at varying levels based on blood sugar. To much insulin and you go into hypoglycemic shock.
PHP is great for 90% of the cases.

In those last 10% you are right 50% might be really bad, 25% ok and 10 good.
This looks fascinating. Is it relatively easy to acquire all the relevant parts?
What I learned while getting my CS degree:

The physics of microelectronic devices
Machine language
C
Data structures
Sociology
Psychology
Anthropology
Literature
Politics and Activism

College is an opportunity to learn. Whether you seize it or waste it is up to you.

[edit: just want to add that the OP makes a great point]
Sorry, this sounds like a terrible place to work.
Thats not the typical reaction. The typical reaction is to go on a hate fest about PHP just as it happened in this thread purely based on some self-established criteria for why it is so bad.

Case in point. A post about high quality PHP gets turned into a discussion about PHP as a language.
For languages that were designed to be "better than Java", then Java 8 represents a threat, however Clojure and Scala have very active and thriving communities and contain concepts and ideas that go beyond "Java with Closures".

I use Scala in production, have done so for the last 2 years, have been learning a lot about FP and loved every minute of it. It's rather interesting, because before Scala I basically wanted C# on top of the JVM. And now C# is looking bland, bureaucratic, unproductive and I don't want it anymore.

Of course, many people hoped that some language will end up replacing Java as THE language for the JVM. That never had any chance of happening, even if closures would've never make it in Java. The people that wanted more capable languages already moved on and the shops and software developers that continue using Java will not change languages, because if Java worked well for them, it will continue to work well in the future and everybody had plenty of opportunity for change already. Java will still be the main language used in the enterprise, simply because enterprise software development tends to favor cheaper, easier to replace developers. Of course, this is one reason for why startups tackling the enterprise space are thriving, but that's another discussion.

Back to the point - we tend to think of languages and their evolution as some kind of football tournament. For me it's rather uninteresting what language will "win". I don't really care. All I care about is for a language to have a sustainable and active community that churns out useful libraries. And some people fear that they won't find jobs with language X. Personally I found the contrary to be true - finding well paying jobs for working on interesting projects in languages that are not Java, C#, C++ or PHP is much, much easier. Things are easier also from the employer side, because you've got less noise to deal with and usage of a certain language becomes one of the main attractions for that job. In my experience, it's a win-win combination, which is why I fear the thought of my favorite languages becoming too mainstream. But then again, I don't really care about languages that much. All I care about is for me to not suffer while trying to express what I want in code, which is why I stay away from Java.

Anyway, I'm on my Christmas Holiday, so back to reading "Functional Programming in Scala". It's a pretty cool book btw.
Highly illegal there is meant to be free trade throughout the EU banning a company in another eu jurisdiction form selling ion your country is in theory banned.
relevant wikipedia pages:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immutable_object
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure
The health care law was passed in Obama's first term, and implemented literally years later during his second. If they were confused about what was in it, they had plenty of time to figure it out.

What apparently was a genuine surprise was how many state governments were unwilling to set up their own exchanges, which was how things were originally envisioned to operate; having the federal government operate the exchanges was intended as a last resort. But even there, it was apparent in plenty of time how the wind was blowing.

And as to what it took to operate an exchange --- there was prior information there, too, in the form of a functioning exchange in Massachusetts. (Which hasn't been functioning so well this year in part because it's now required to integrate with the federal system, and that part has had severe teething trouble. But again, none of this should have been a surprise.)

This isn't meant as commentary on the specifics of the law. But as a left-leaning guy myself, I don't think there's a reasonable excuse for how they blew it (and, to his credit, Obama's not trying to make any).
Show HN: I made isitchristmas.com's dev console unnecessarily interactive
> I think in reality the appeal of FP is that the people who use it are generally more experienced programmers

I would wager that FP is used more in universities than in any other setting, and by underclassmen, not just graduate students. So I don't exactly think this is true.
No just discriminate against non Italians as expats who work in the Italian Universities will testify.
Ultimate Frisbee Playing Founders & Investors Group
The rather unethical alternative is to find a job in a fairly incompetent group at a company that's not extremely tech focused, then spend most of your time working on whatever you want to. I've had jobs (and spoken to many people with similar jobs) where I could accomplish all my tasks within a couple hours of actual, focused effort, leaving the rest of the work week for personal projects, side business, etc.
GNUnet 0.10.0 released
As massive as it is, I can see Google's needs moving more towards the mainstream. Finding results beyond the first page will fall to other search mechanisms as their inertia develops into a... character.

For example, it's hard to search for certain medical information because of so many pop songs clouding out results for "how the heart beats," etc. There will be more and more aliasing and hacking through keywords to distinguish between pop uses of heart and medical uses of heart until eventually people will learn which search mechanism to use for what purpose. Google will most likely ride the mainstream into the sunset, the Sears of our generation.
these tax heavens you mention are totally legal in EU law, and not using them as a company would be seriously stupid. By the way its what the politicians you elect use for their own earnings, to avoid paying taxes as well.
> Why functional programming?

At least for the sake of thinking in another paradigm, having another «environment» to think about same issues.

I have scarce experience in functional language but AFAIK there are not only good for in->process->out like it's explained in other post.
You're getting a bit bogged down in details, I meant it more as a general case. There are numerous cases where it is simply more efficient to be operating directly on data - the most used example I can think of are fragment and vertex shaders. It's irrelevant to the issue anyway though: simply having the ability to do something does not make it the best way to do something. You could code in a composable and immutable way using FORTRAN or COBOL if you tried hard enough.

The OP was asking for cases where you'd prefer to be using FP over the type of code he is used to. Manipulating blobs of sensor data are simply unlikely to be a productive use of FP - although it could certainly be done. However, calculating statistics from that data is going to be a place where FP would shine and would be a good choice for it.

Not everything is a nail simply because you can spend hours hitting it with enough transformations to make it look like one.

EDIT: Thinking about it, fragment and vertex shaders actually seem like a very good place to use FP.
Chicago Fire Cast personal best wishes breastcancer
The cast of NBC's "Chicago Fire" pulling together personal well wishes for my friend, Dee Dee Simpson, as she battles breast cancer in our small southwest Virginia community this Christmas.
Much Love to you all for this great girl, great cause!!! Alleghany County, VA says Thank You!!!
~ Team Dee-Dee ~
Whats the difference between their goal, and simply adding an duty tax on imported services?
Wishful thinking. But we can wish, can't we?
Target hasn't said, and Target is the only one who know the "how". I believe the credit card processors were independently able to determine that Target was hacked by buying some of these card numbers and determining their commonality, and then telling Target.
As someone who only got experience in Haskell I have to ask the same thing. Why should I use X OOP language when I can write almost anything in Haskell with ease? I tried learn programming in C and Python and even the beginner language Scheme, still I did not get programming until I learnt Haskell. Code shouldn't be abstracted as real world objects becuase code is instruction not something concrete you can touch, its information. Abstracting it using a more mathematical approuch very much makes sense and let even a beginner be able to handle quite complex problems.
Internal reporting for example. Perl is often used as a "glue" between different systems.
When he first took power, he had a General executed via Mortar Squad. Allegedly he told his men he wanted every trace of his existence to be erased. That's one way to do it.

The General had allegedly been "Drinking and carousing" during the mandatory 2-year period of mourning for Kim Jong Il.
Actually I think the poster is right, and I don't think we should avoid all lines of argument that might be subject to personal bias.

The poster was saying that FP has a certain cachet (no pun intended) that is probably due to the quality of the average programmer.

It's a bit like if someone was asked to explain higher salaries in Silicon Valley. Are we allowed to refer to the quality of programmers? Of course there is a risk of personal bias, but how could one have this discussion without referring to this factor?
I am not as experienced as you, far from it, but my -very limited - understanding of functional programming is that it's all about limiting side effects, which means limiting the ways you can screw up something. I could try to explain what I think, but John Carmack did it much better than I would ever do in a blog post, that was once submitted on HN: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programm...
Not just law enforcement, but the credit card companies themselves have a very high incentive to stop the trafficking of these numbers. They won't get you thrown in jail, but they can render all your hard work useless.
This is just silly. Not everyone wants to be self-employed or work at a startup, and that doesn't make them not potentially a "best developer".

I just wanna code, I don't want to deal with administrivia. I've worked at large companies that get out of my way and let me do the parts I'm good at, I don't have to worry about billing or anything.
That doesn't really help for online transactions. I'm not aware of any 2-factor authentication being used for online credit card transactions anywhere.
The real reason behind Amazon's booming stock price
"it's gets" => "it gets"
The weirdest thing is that I've worked at places where I couldn't get other people to move fast enough to stay busy.

That is, if I tried to work at 80% utilization I'd always be arguing with people to get them to pick up the pace.

Once I decided to work at 40% utilization I found I got along better with people. My boss bitched me out once for "not being fully committed" but he quit the next month, so things went on for another year when my new (absentee) boss told me that we ought to let the guy who has temper tantrums all the time get his way because I'm more flexible than him... A recruiter called me the next business day and I was outa there..
They are a lyrics site, yes.

But the whole idea and vision of RapGenius (and why their investors bit) was because of their goal of "annotating the whole internet."

They don't want to be just a lyrics site, they want their annotating paradigm to be the norm with every web page you go to.

Unfortunately, for now, they are just a lyrics site... with annotations.
I hope the law itself will be nothing more than a footnote in the history books. It's maddening to me that we still have insurance companies in charge of and gatekeepers to health care.
Would love to hear what you're using. And if you're concerned about competition, well, given that you have a headstart you can just start your own technologyXcasts site, newsletter, etc.
That is just theory. In practice, it is going to be very hard for the compiler to know, at the time that you change a single value in a huge array, that you are never going to refer to the old array, and so it can just mutate the array.
Why?
I mean isn't one of the main great things that you just place your php files in the apache/nginex web folder and run.
"Letting"? You didn't have to come here.
I'd like something that involves a GUI, perhaps using QT unless you know something you think is better.
The tricky bit is successfully hiring high performance people. You have to have a pretty high success rate, and low turnover, or else you'll just be constantly churning through the "satisfactory" people and getting an occasional gem in there.