skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
its very VERY easy to fall into the "bad habits" trap with PHP

This is like telling someone that they shouldn't buy a tambourine because it won't help them learn to conduct the London Symphony.

Mind you, I'm not saying that your first 10,000 lines of PHP code won't be filled with bad habits. I'm suggesting that your first 10,000 lines of code will be filled with bad habits whether or not that code is written in PHP. The secret is to keep practicing and learning.

As a language, PHP is not as good as Ruby or Python. It's less flexible, less elegant, and has less expressive power. But I assure you that placing a flexible and elegant tool in the hands of a beginner doesn't magically give them good habits. You can write ugly global-filled procedural spaghetti code in Ruby, and that's exactly what beginners are likely to do, unless they have a great teacher looking over their shoulder and correcting them. And how many people do? Most programmers are compelled to teach themselves, because their teachers either don't exist or are hung up on Java, an absolutely awful beginner language. That's why so much of Web programming is done in PHP, a language which has evolved to be very easy to teach to oneself.

I have reluctantly concluded that, if you force a self-taught beginner to start with Ruby or Python, all you do is add that much more friction to their learning curve. These languages are harder for a beginner to work with, in part because they are so flexible and general-purpose. Everything about PHP is relentlessly focused on the goal of getting your web page running -- it's got one use, it's got a canonical set of docs, everyone's Hello, World looks the same and can be run on an $8/month shared host in five minutes by following a simple recipe. Python was invented before the web and has a diversity of uses, which makes the books thicker and the setup more complicated and lowers the odds that any given web page about Python has anything to say about the problem you are trying to solve. Ruby is all about OO programming, which is great after you know what the hell OO is and how you should be using it. Before that, you'll either write Ruby that looks like bad PHP or you'll cut and paste idioms from Rails books without understanding them.

I wish I knew how to get more people using better languages. And I fear that I do know: They need good teachers. But, in the absence of a lot of great hackers who are primarily interested in teaching, and assuming that you aren't one of those rare people who can just pick up SICP and instantly feel a rapport with the authors [1], your best bet is to just get started. So if Python doesn't grab you, try PHP.

---

[1] I wish I had known to start with SICP; I think it would have worked out great. But I'm the guy who got so bored with BASIC and assembly that I taught myself Pascal three years before I got my hands on a Pascal compiler. It occurs to me that I may not be typical.
The more things you get the less happy you are, they are like a burden you carry with you, or rather stay home as carrying them would be too heavy.
When I was in college I got my first laptop. Before I could leave my room door and windows open all day, after that I had to watch things closely. Instead of socializing I "was online".

"Every thing you own, owns you" to cite Tyler Durden.
Subsequent languages will seem easy because C exposes you to fundamental hardware and programming concepts that nearly all languages use even if only implicitly.

Sometimes experienced programmers underestimate the difficulty of learning something when there is a lot of magic involved. One thing that makes Scheme so appealing as a beginner language is that most of the language can be exposed fairly easily, all the way down to the compiler. C is similar, in that it is not too difficult to see directly how your code is manipulating the machine. When you learn C properly, you know exactly what your code is doing.

Python is a fairly small language, but under the hood it is still significantly more complicated than C. C is not an ideal choice in all situations, but for many it is really an excellent first choice if you take a good approach to learning it.
They could give passengers an option to use UPS (for free) instead.
Django-Mingus 0.2 Update
Are we still recommending the Dragon Book? I have a copy on my desk, but I got a lot more out of Modern Compiler Implementation in ML, I felt. The Dragon Book covers a lot of ground, but I don't think it really goes far enough towards being able to construct a real production-quality compiler, whereas Modern Compiler Implementation is more focused, but gets you a lot further towards being able to write real compilers.

Just my two cents. Perhaps other people have read the Dragon book and got a lot out of it. I've found it much more useful as a reference work (when looking for specific information), rather than as something that one might read from cover-to-cover in order to learn how to write compilers.
If R^3 is taken with vector (x1,x2,x3) defined using x1+x2+x3=0 then I can't quite picture that, I can only imagine the projections on the axes, not the actual plane ... anyone know of a simply 3D graphing tool online.
It's sad that their FAQ only addresses the 'pirate' part of their name. http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/wiki/index.php5?title=Policies...
10ren,

It's good to hear cottage industries still exist on the Internet, as that's what I hope to build. I agree that PFA is too negative. I tried to find a positive formulation but couldn't find one that was as inspiring to me.
Accenture and Google spam news sites and job boards all the time. Luckily, Google shut down the local office in my city. If they can't find an "HTML/Javascript/CSS developer" in a city filled with students, they are either idiots or not hiring.
something similar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY
Powers Of 10
To Design or Not To Design? Design in new software products
They are politicians, nonanswers are part of the game.
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this might work for games but for boring things like enterprise software domain, whats the ideal way to find testers and how much should i pay them?

have any of tried out on freelance or amazon turk etc?
Religion does not say "made just for us"; religion says that the Universe is one of the examples of the infinite creativity of the Creator.

BTW, new stars are 'born' continuously.
I thought there were only 4 ingredients to happiness: Water, barley, hops, and yeast.
Fewer workers, bigger paychecks in high tech
Ask HN: When is the best time to trademark a product name?
My app's name is close / same as another app name from a bigtechco. However, upon checking the USPTO database, the latter's app name hasn't been registered (pending or otherwise). Is it a good time to spend the resources (even if tight) to apply for the trademark even before launch (i.e. not sure if you are going to succeed)?
I was working as a reviewer when DX10 was announced, and I was heavily into the gamer scene at a higher level (actually talking with some of the big indie developers, talking with some of the pro-gamers and such). From what I saw the response to DX10 as a Vista exclusive wasn't lukewarm, it was positively insulted.

The situation got even worse when Vista was released and it came out that Vista was actively stopping some games from working, removing the *.exe's as trojans.

IMO MS rushed DX10 onto Vista way too fast, it should have been released when the OS was actually stable for gaming. They didn't appease the hardcore gamers, developers and especially the pro-gamers (who earn their money from games and don't want them screwing up) with the giant fumble start for gaming.
Healthcare debate: It's confusing, frustrating, and anything but stimulating
I'm afraid there are several errors in that.

1. A linear mapping is not a "kind of equivalence" by any reasonable definition. For instance, the function that maps every vector to 0 is a linear mapping, and it has plenty of eigenvectors. (All with eigenvalue 0.)

2. The eigenvectors are not the rows of the diagonalized matrix. They are the rows (or columns, depending on just how you define things) of the matrix that does the coordinate transformation to diagonalize your matrix.

3. I think the paragraph beginning "For the common 3D isometric ..." is rather confused. I certainly am when reading it. Perhaps the problem is in my brain; what exactly do you mean? (Here's the nearest true thing I can think of to what that paragraph says: For many, but not all, linear transformations from a space to itself, there is an orthogonal coordinate system with respect to which the transformation's matrix is diagonal; then the eigenvectors are the axes of that coordinate system, and the eigenvalues are the amounts by which vectors along those axes get stretched.)

4. Tensors are just as linear as matrices. (You can do nonlinear things with a tensor, but then you can with a matrix too.)

5. The probabilities in a Markov chain's stationary state are not eigenvalues. (Well, I'm sure they're eigenvalues of something; any set of numbers can be made the eigenvalues of something; but they aren't, e.g., eigenvalues of the transition matrix.) What you may be thinking of is: a stationary state of a Markov chain is an eigenvector of the transition matrix, with eigenvalue 1; all eigenvalues have absolute value at most 1; if the Markov chain is ergodic (i.e., can get from any state to any other), then there is exactly one stationary state, exactly one eigenvector of eigenvalue 1, and all the other eigenvalues are strictly smaller. This is enough to guarantee convergence to the stationary state.

Also: If eigenvalues are as important in dealing with higher-order tensors as they are for the second-order case (i.e., matrices) then that's news to me. Tell me more?
It's worth reading Richard Stallman's piece about how the Pirate Party's position on copyright is damaging for the Free Software movement: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html
Yes, Java Developers:

http://www.meetmoi.com/careers
The desktop isn’t dead yet: AMD refreshes its high-end chips
Here's a fully zoomable one i found in a link on one of the flickr pages... just click the + button and you can use your mouse wheel to zoom in/out... pretty cool and super high res:
http://www.closr.it/show/Aoq6CwSieQ5
Looks like you're getting great feedback here, congrats. Without giving away proprietary info, is it possible to give some technical details such as what backend technologies you use, and who you're using to send SMS & phone calls?
Much of this resonates with my experience in big organisations - but generally bad memories surface, not good ones.

Enterprise software is like toilet paper in centrally-planned economies such as the old eastern bloc: substandard, rationed, barely functional, ugly and grey, and sometimes leaves you bleeding from the related orifice.

I'd be interested in hearing about transformational enterprise software marketing, where all these pricing and sales practices - which range from annoying to downright disgusting if you're a customer - are turned on their head.

Is anyone doing this and care to share their story?
I agree with OP's assessment of the enterprise world; I do not come to the same conclusions.

I have been on both sides of the enterprise software sale many times and have concluded that a) it always sucks and b) it's rarely in anyone's best interest.

So instead of examining the current model and making suggestions for accomodating or improving it, I prefer to suggest an alternative.

I believe the best way to crack the enterprise software market is the same way to eat an elephant: one bite at a time through the soft underbelly...

Find a critical business function being done in Excel and provide an alternative web app.

Find a "business within a business" and automate it with modern technology. (Examples are small independent business units, warehouses, job shops, sample shops, anything a user has set up that can be autonomous.)

Provide a modern satelite system to augment and integrate with an existing enterprise monster. (A separate module for one function like payroll or fixed assets, special processes for marketing, engineering, manufacturing, etc.) The possibilities are endless. Somebody is not getting what they need out of SAP, Oracle, or whatever.

Provide a separate business unit with everything they need. This may be cheaper than the customer adding more licenses to their ERP system.

The key to this approach is staying under corporate IT's radar. The way to do that is by keeping your prices below your customer's boss's threshold.

How do I know this can work? Because it has, many times. I have implemented dozens of apps in enterprises that they thought they could never have because of the existing software and sales model.

And I remember history. At one time, IT departments were very threatened by PC's. They challenged their ivory tower with a mainframe and dumb terminals. So users just bought their own PCs from their expense budgets and forced IT's hand.

Lightning can strike twice. Users are once again tired of waiting 18 months for a fix and are ripe for a custom 37signals type of solution. Let the app rush begin.
If they're already on the market you are basically acting in bad faith. I suggest you find an original name for your application.
When I complained about the temperature in the library, the staff agreed, but said there was nothing they could do about it, as the heating was broken. However, I was there last week and even though it was warm outside, it felt like the heating was still on. And this is in a new building hailed for its innovative design.

I'm in continuing disputes about the local government's wastefulness, laziness and lack of care. We had no drains outside our house for years, and it took almost 4 years and 17 complaints to get it sorted - despite them having an office that overlooked the street that flooded when it rained heavily!

They charge us about $1500 for additional services - principally cleaning the area between the house and the street - which they spend no more than 20 minutes a week cleaning. I've taken to photographing the dirt and refuse, as I'm refusing to pay for these poor quality and very costly services.

If everyone else refused to pay for these services, they would not have the money to waste on over-heating the library.
Look, I am good at Math. I even love Number Theory. But what you wrote scares me. Can I run away now?

(I hope to one day be able to look at it and say 'my, that is so simple...' like I do with high school math)
I'm not fully convinced. The bit of spec you quote says that implementations can add "properties not described in this specification, and values for those properties, for objects that are described in this specification", which I take to mean that you can add properties that the spec doesn't mention, not that you can add properties that the spec does mention and doesn't say those objects have. And "internal properties" are not really properties, which makes it even less clear that that language gives licence for an implementation to add them to objects they aren't specified for.

(I do still think the spec should be interpreted as making regexps callable, but only because it doesn't explicitly say that implementations aren't allowed to decide for themselves about internal properties whose existence and/or value is left unspecified in the spec.)
Scheme, the SICP way.
I on the other hand welcome our new music overlords. here's why: http://paulstamatiou.com/review-spotify-music-on-demand

I think this is the future.. why worry about maintaining your catalogs and syncing between computers. Let it be online. As for the whole "but i like owning my stuff" argument, I mentioned that in my post. And as for the offline client issue, yeah they're working on it.. I still burn CDs for my car so I'll be interested in how this works out. But I figure in 10-15 years every ipod or other such device you listen to music on, even your car, will be online.. I never want to have to deal with ensuring all my songs have proper and accurate ID3 tag info. If I have to see Track 1, Track 2.. again I'm gonna go apeshit.
You can't picture a plane passing through the origin and whose normal vector is (1,1,1)?!? This is possibly the easiest plane to visualize, imho. What I find hard to visualize is the intersection of m hyperplanes in n-dimensional space.

On 3-d graphing tools, try this out (a bit overkill, though):

http://f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/a_geo/a_geo__e.htm
DreamIt Ventures Releases Ten Startups Into The Wild
Think Geek Background Fade Technique [Screencast]
You point out that his argument is a rather simple one: hard work is the only path to innovation and therefore value. I totally agree with you regarding this simplicity, but I also understand the inclination to idealize hard work. In part because, as the article emphasizes, hard work has become unfashionable and tremendously underrated.

There's a reason the great innovators of the past are ripe with cliched quotes about "inspiration and perspiration." You are right that combining things in unforeseen ways is a legitimate path to innovation, but additional effort could only serve to enhance the process, don't you think?

The difficulty is that what I consider "hard work" may differ from you. One can work "very hard" selling toxin-removing footpads by inventing clever stories and concocting fictitious demonstrations. They may even become the best damned footpad salesman in the northeast and others will laud them for being such a go-getter. Though they're in the business of deception, they have no problem putting food on the table. They're acting wholly rational under the rules of capitalism.

Many people, even the highly-educated and successful, no longer consider these "bigger questions" in a thoughtful and introspective manner. Instead, they neutralize them with denial in the form of some unbelievably prevalent utilitarian cliches like "whatever floats your boat" or "there's a sucker born every minute."

My point is that gripes about businesses not creating value can actually tap very deep philosophical nerves, but, in an almost Orwellian sense, contemplation of these things is not what modern societies consider a worthy use of time.
While the names are similar, they are 2 different products.
Are There Good Debit Consolidation Loans For Bad Credit?
How is this particularly different to any other time in the history of the commercial internet?

The scale of attack that is required to completely bring down any of the large services that we use on a daily basis are so large that they could otherwise be focused on the DNS infrastructure, or the internet infrastructure of a decent-sized country. Much smaller attacks have been used in the past to take out large IRC networks (hence disrupting communications for hundreds of thousands of users). Mail bombs, spam attacks on news groups, internet worms, etc etc. This has all been going on for years. If anything, companies like Facebook and Google are better equipped to deal with the threat than most, because they have the resources to do so as a high profile target (note that I don't include Twitter in this category, because they have had trouble staying up under normal loads).

So I don't think this highlights the fragility of "the new internet", it's just the fragility of the internet in general. An attack on the scale required to take down Facebook would be able to cause similar amounts of disruption almost anywhere it was targeted.

If anything, I think the rise of rapid provision of cloud computing resources are probably making the internet _less_ fragile, in that a well-designed application can scale proportionally to its (legitimate) user base within hours or days, not weeks or months as it used to be.
This is ridiculous. I was just thinking last week that even though I took linear and did fairly well I never really grasped eigenvalues and eigenvectors since I see them coming up fairly frequently as far as math concepts go and don't instantly have an intuitive grasp. Literally the next week I see this posted on hn.
An alternate generational periodization scheme
Serializing a regexp as, say, "/foo/" would mean emitting alleged JSON that doesn't conform to the JSON grammar in the spec, and that existing JSON parsers might be completely unable to do anything with. It might make some sense to change the spec to include regexp literals, but while the spec says what it does it would be unresponsible for any browser's stringify implementation to emit things that others' parse implementations might barf on.

(It's a pity that JSON isn't more easily extensible in a backward-compatible manner. On the other hand, it's not clear how that could have been enabled without breaking the it's-just-a-subset-of-JS-literal-syntax principle.)
Put your finger on it: The future of interactive technology
> Darn. I wanted to have a play with it.

Just in case - perhaps you will also enjoy playing with the non-verified L4?

http://l4ka.org/

http://l4ka.org/download/
I'm not an expert or industry insider so take the following lightly.

The reason why they make more money on tour is because of how the current music industry contracts are set up. The music industry take a massive cut of record sales leaving the artist with very little. Also, when recording an album, an artist gets an advance from their label to pay for the studio, the sound engineers, etc. This advance is paid back through their royalties before they ever see a cheque from the label. As you can imagine the cost of a professional cd recording is quite high. The combination of a small cut + reimbursement makes it so that most bands never see a cent from cd sales and make it up with touring and merchandise sales.

This however is changing and not in a good way. Increasingly, labels are forcing artists into what's commonly reffered to as a "360 deal" which gives a cut of everything to the label. CD sales, touring, merchandise, etc, the label gets a cut of it all.
What about the WMAP? It studied the CMB radiation and gives us evidence of the big bang, a flat euclidean universe, the amount and type of matter in the universe, and even more!

Sure, the ultra deep field is cool, but in importance the WMAP picture is waaay more important.
Draw (or, better, imagine) a cube with corners at (+-1,+-1,+-1). The plane through the ++- vertices is x+y+z=1. The plane through the +-- vertices is x+y+z=-1. The plane you want is parallel to those and half-way between them. Does that help at all?
yes. can't hurt.
Microsoft, when it's operating right, can be an explosive game player. Project Natal is the perfect example of this, they saw what the competition offered (Wii motion controller) and took a move potentially ten steps better. Sony saw the competition and took a move to mimic (playstation motion controller, AKA the Sony Nun-chuck clone), which is staying a step behind the game.

Microsoft's main problem, from what I can see, is that it rarely gets itself into the proper gear to actively compete. Perhaps with Project Natal, seeing a true threat helped, which is something they haven't seen in a long time in the OS market.
Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar—simplicity through inflexibility
Don't Keep Up With Social Technology
Since the Pirate Party's proposals are never going to be enacted in law (or at least not without allowing a great deal of time for various interest groups to comment) I don't see that this will be a practical issue.

It is interesting, though, to read Stallman reiterating that copyleft depends on strong copyright!
Rapid development serving 500,000 pages/hour
This is the problem I had with Linear Algebra. The first half of the class felt like I was just being drilled definitions. But once all the definitions click, it's rather simple.
Ah, ok, that's different. A trademark has 'scope'. The right time would be when you've settled on a name, before you invest into marketing that name to the general public.

Any point after that and you might be too late...