skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like your drawing style! I love horror stuff :) Got you bookmarked now, thanks for sharing!

My music site is http://www.johnnybroadway.com/ The main album up there is basically unplugged/acoustic but there are clips from my next one in the player on the left. I'm actually working on 3 more projects now, a 12 song album about a mobster (with a producer too, first time in a proper studio in 10 years! :), one EP just for fun I'm recording at home, and I've started writing a handful of songs for the next one as well...

The styles seem to be ranging from folk/country/blues to faster pop/rock and with the newer stuff more electronic as well (getting into Ableton, super fun!). On stage, it's pretty much me on vocals/guitar and I do some harmonica and use a looping pedal for a lot of stuff too. The video on my page is a song that starts with just a drum loop and ends up with five guitars going over it :)
Ask HN: PHP as your secret sauce? 
I was exchanging email with the founder of a somewhat notable startup yesterday and discovered they did most of their work in PHP. It was a little surprising for me to hear, given how much hand-wringing seems to go on about ever using PHP versus Ruby, Python, Erlang, Clojure, or really any other language.

But then I started thinking about it, a huge number of startups have gotten big using PHP. Facebook and Digg immediately come to mind.

I haven't used PHP since 1998, so I don't know the significance of the changes it's gotten over the past decade... but is it possible that PHP can be some kind of secret sauce?

Maybe simpler is somehow the key to getting things done faster?

PHP junkies - is it worthwhile to pick the language back up even today? Or is the momentum shifting to more modern languages?
Apparently you didn't actually LOOK at the car.

If you offered someone from the "general population" either the Grand Sport or any other "good" car they would pick the Grand Sport every time.
Command substitution using $(...) is valid POSIX syntax, not a bashism.

$ /bin/dash
$ echo $(uname -r)
2.6.31-rc7
I just meant non-hackers.
They could have at least chosen another picture, rather than photoshopping the original one.
There are only two possibilities here:

1. The more oil we extract, the less oil is left in the ground

2. The oil supply is infinite

I know which my money's on...
Out of curiosity, can anyone point me at some well-argued articles offering a refutation of Mackey's original editorial?

Alternatively, bonus points if you can find me someone supporting boycotting Whole Foods who ridiculed the boycotting of the Dixie Chicks. Or vice versa.
This shows that SOME folks in favor of government run healthcare are not really interested in a debate. The laughable "tea parties" and town hall interruptions show that SOME folks on the other side aren't either.

But then, unless you have the IQ of a watermelon, you really didn't need this to figure out that a lot of people on either side of the political spectrum already have their minds made up.
I don't think this invalidates any of Apple's marketing speak because it still "just works."

The fact that this is built into the OS and doesn't have to be separately installed, upgraded, or managed fits in perfectly with what makes OS X a great and easy to use OS.
But if IBM doesn't "hurt America", it will "hurt the world".
if this is true, i hope they fixed it by now.
I billed at AUD 75/hour as a Windows admin when 17.

Now GBP 550/day at 28 as a Linux architect and infrastructure software developer.
Yeah, I'll give you that that's pretty odd.
I don't have specific data on Medicare, but you aren't exactly arguing against what I said, I notice. One would expect the beneficiaries of a government program to be militantly protective of it, and the less efficient, the more so -- no one hires lobbyists to reduce money or services they're getting.
He suggests on one of the later pages that cities should have state troopers drive in a constant-speed band across the lanes. (He also points out that group of citizens doing this independently in Toronto was arrested for it.)
If someone has time, perhaps they could take the data from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_con...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(PPP)_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(nomin...

And see how well they correlate.
I've never said either of those things. The first one is absurd.
Agile Testing versus Waterfall Test Phases
Such blatant incompetence astounds me. They can't even validate a field when they know the exact format of the content it should contain?
I was not saying that you should charger per hour. I was asking that the numbers you floated will make more sense if you can provide how much time you spent on each of those projects. For example: you mentioned $100k on RoR project. This number will make more sense if you mention whether it took you 1000 hours or 10000 hours or maybe 3 months or 3 years.
If Russia has been shipping these to Iran for awhile, what was the Bush administration doing shaking nukes at Iran? Did they not know about it, or simply not care about retaliation against Israel?
"but he then completely loses it by claiming that it's plant-based nutrition (organic, no doubt) that we all need rather than doctors and medicine"

That's not what he wrote. He wrote:

Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.

Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.

I don't know enough about nutrition to discuss the second graf, but he doesn't imply that good nutrition negates the need for health care--people get diseases and injuries that aren't caused by bad decisions of their own the other 30% of the time--but it's equal "stupidity" to think "let's spend trillions of public dollars on treating each other for diabetes and heart disease instead of putting down the cheeseburger and going for a jog".
Except that antivirus software is, by definition, always playing catchup. When you hit the point that you need antivirus software, you've already lost.
Twitter seems to be down now (1:45 PM Pacific)
Google: It's Really About the Backlinks
I see no reason to suggest that this behaviour is somehow unique to the Chinese/IKEA combination.

I see the article as a pretty decent reason, actually. Journalists are lazy -- if they could write this story about Dallas or Detroit, they would.
I don't know about you, but speculation about the reality of international affairs certainly "gratifies [my] intellectual curiosity". See: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> He starts his article with a line from Maggie Thatcher on socialism. Not a subtle way to tee off a debate - he may as well have dropped in a couple of references to the Third Reich while he was at it.

Thatcher presided over a country with socialized health care and heavily unionized coal mining, and complained about them.

In the US, we are now debating having the government run the health sector. I.e. "socialism".

I don't think that a criticism of socialized healthcare from someone who's been there is quite the same thing as "referencing the third Reich".
Our TC50 rejection story
I thought this made vaguely interesting reading. Also mentions our YC rejection experience.
The observation is that there is an anti-malware facility.

Then there's a leap to the conclusion that it is an anti-virus facility.

Did I miss some important detail here? I thought a virus was a very specific type of malware, and there's not enough detail to conclude that it is "anti-virus".
I don't think the implication was that you "must be a dolt" if you feel the need for a type system, just that you probably shouldn't be writing in Ruby. I don't expect C to handle memory for me, I don't expect Java to interface cleanly with the underlying OS, and I don't expect Ruby to enforce type declarations.

I think the point is that, if you feel like you're missing something by not having types enforced in Ruby, then you're probably using the wrong tool for the job. Sure, I could probably turn a claw hammer around and use the nail-puller to turn a screw in a pinch, but I'm not going to run a carpentry business like that.
Just for the sake of giving us more information, would you be willing to compare your RoR app with a website I made a while ago.

I got paid $500 to make http://www.solafcars.com (works in multiple languages, includes an admin panel, everything on the site is editable). I would assume your RoR app was much bigger, but let us know how it compares.

I know I got underpaid though.
Also stupid is screwing your shareholders by pissing off your company's customers.
"WHY must a bottleneck develop at a merge zone? Well, obviously because there's too many cars on one road. And because everyone must take turns slowly merging together. WRONG! Wrong wrong wrong. Even during extremely low-traffic conditions, everyone still takes turns, yet everyone merges as a high speed flow,like a zipper. A bottleneck never appears."

New York city drivers are really excellent at the zipper merge thing. While living there, I got really used to not having to slow down much at merge points. Everyone just drove at a decent speed using all available lanes then smoothly merged at the point where the lane was closed.

Moving back to Pennsylvania, people start queuing up in one lane a mile before the merge point, and traffic grinds to a stand still. This is insane. Usually, though, if you do the sane thing and use the other lane up to the merge point, you can get in without trouble.

Maybe I was one of the early mergers before I lived in New York, and have just blocked it out of my memory. Now, though, seeing it happen really grates on my nerves. One of many reasons I'm glad I hardly ever drive anymore. :)
Yep. 503's. I assume they instituted an air gap.
As far as the (stock) markets are concerned, Mackey's opinion piece doesn't seem to have affected the value of WFMI. After a brief dip, the value of WFMI has steadily increased during the past week:
http://bit.ly/4BCUjh
Where can we get this code?
> By your reasoning, a good programmer who can finish the job in half the time of a bad programmer's, is also 50% cheaper.

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. I said energy not time. Perhaps you could clarify.

> People are willing to pay $10000 for a flock of Britney Spears's hair. You don't seriously believe that that 10k represents the amount of energy required to make the hair, right?

How much energy does Britney Spears use compared to an average person? So yes, that hair cost a lot of energy to make.

And if someone stole that hair, then they earned a profit of $10,000, which they will then spend, and consume products/energy equal to $10,000 (which they would not have done if they didn't have that money).

Price = cost + profit.

Cost is easy to correlate to energy usage.

Profit goes in someones pocket, and works just like wages. The more you have, the more you spend, and therefor the more energy you use.
Sweet finally some good hacker madness in the ATL!
As a result of the Photoshopping, notice the duplication of the window ledge right behind the guy's head.
The man has also been an outspoken libertarian for years. There's no fundamental reason why an organic vegan hippie can't be a multimillionaire capitalist in this country. "You don't like to eat animals therefore you must support a public option" isn't anywhere close to a logical conclusion, even if most organic vegan hippies do happen to support it.
The sad thing is people seem to have got used to such incompetence. They expect websites to be broken, insecure, incomplete etc.

The programmer responsible should be made to write out lines or something - "I must always validate every single user input".
OS X is nowhere near needing antivirus software, regardless of what features the OS X security team has managed to get added to the release.

Just another example of the difference between "safety" and "security". Houses in Kennilworth, IL need less security than houses in Rogers Park --- there are something like 192 police officers per Kennilworth township block --- and yet Kennilworth houses can be counted on to have state-of-the-art security, because they can, and state-of-the-art security is a selling point.
Yep, it's 503'd for me at the moment. Just thinking of all those poor people who now have news and no place to post it.

Edit Looks to be back.
He could have got reasonable country data without any extra questions by using an ip-to-location API; I think Google have one available.
Meh. There's no meaningful difference. Malware's the general term. A virus is malware that spreads passively. A worm is malware that spreads actively. "Trojan" is a bad term for the malware trait (which worms and viruses can have) of allowing unauthorized users access to the infected host.

It's probably better not to dignify the "science" of malware by enforcing proper usage of terminology.
I accidentally get a similar effect when I try to drive a patch of road with the car in neutral. It's a very non-intuitive experience: from the engine sound I'd think I'm slowing down considerably, but from looking at the numbers I stay at pretty much the same speed for a looong time.

When I do this before stoplights I sometimes catch a green light with road to spare, and I'm able to avoid stopping at all. This helps me somewhat, but as a side effect it helps the traffic behind me a lot more.

I'll try to do this more often. Keeping in neutral is easier then trying to compute an optimum speed, and it'll help a lot with the consumption too.
The implication is pretty clear:

If you're **able to not make such silly mistakes** and
enjoy the power and expression of a dynamic language,
then use them, you won't miss types much at all.

If you **pay attention to what you're writing**, you
don't make such silly mistakes often.

Bolting a home-brew type system on a dynamic language
just seems rather pointless, if you need it, **you're not
really ready to be using a dynamic language.**

As an intelligent software engineer I do pay attention to the code that I write and have come to the conclusion that advanced type systems, as a tool for writing concise and correct code, provides me with an overall win.

Your mileage may vary.

That said, I'd be very willing to bet that a Ruby type checker/static analyzer will find bugs (some of them serious) in your codebase, despite pervasive unit tests. That has certainly been my experience with Python+pylint, and Erlang+dialyzer.
I'll blog my results
OS X doesn't need antivirus software, and I didn't say that it did. Not needing it is a selling point, saying "you know, we don't need it, but we threw it in there anyway despite that it's worthless" isn't.
you should team up with wuffoo so we can make real (stunning) forms with all the appropriate "out of 5..." style questions.

maybe make that a more detailed survey?
Bug Labs - Open Source and Modular Hardware
briancray, where do you fit in?
It's not damning, but it is interesting.
Yeah ... I was suggesting that a more sophisticated algorithm for arithmetic on very large integers could eliminate substantial similarities, leaving the 'zone of difference'. A limited 'bit window' needs to be more versatile.

For example, a while back a man got a bill for $35 billion ... that wouldn't happen with more intelligence built into routines. (OUR minds look at 999...999 and 999...997 and see quickly what can be eliminated.)
If that's the case, I wonder why the Asian guy stayed in the picture.
Not needing and having are two different selling points, both in evidence here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)
Surface Area Required to Power the World with Solar
In what part of the US do you live? Having just completed a cross-country move, I can assure you that driving behaviors wildly vary from coast to coast.
What's nuts is how easy this is to exploit. I could explain this to a friend over the phone-- no previous XSS experience necessary.

Compared to the whole mikey fiasco, where he found a hole in the on display script for tweets.
it follows some guidelines of lots of copy-writing books that I'm trying to read these days

Agree that the comment was good, what guidelines are you thinking of?
This is it: http://nosqleast.com/nosql.js

Not much to it, really.
150,000/yr (~75/hr) is low.
Good thing this did not end up in the wrong hands or we might have ended up with a giant Twitter Worm :)
Slide Chop: presentations for hackers
Having it negates the "not needing it" selling point IMO. In addition, it being worthless and taking up space and CPU cycles (however passive it is) is a negative in my book. I don't see how it's a selling point at all.
The thing about OOP is that you need your objects to belong to your solution domain, not your problem domain. If you get this backwards, you will likely be unhappy.
There's an enormous thread over at reddit discussing this right now as well:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/9e157/microsoft_poland_...
The Nature of Time Winning Essays
Oh, I see what you mean. It probably took about 1000 hours total, but spanned over a period of a year. So maybe 20 hours per week. I was just learning Rails at the time, so it took a bit longer than it otherwise would have. I could probably make what I made in about 1 to 2 months tops now.
Did this take more than 3 hours to make? Did you provide any post-implementation support at all? If either are true, you wildly underbid.
Programming in Pictures can work as long as you limit it yourself to a narrow domain and a suitable language. For example when I worked for an animation studio a lot of the artists 'programmed' their own shaders using a drag and drop picture based programming tool.
Well, one of my apps, Nearby Tweets, fits into the Content Aggregator model
This is pretty interesting. I wonder if the projections take into account increased efficiency of the panel technology over time?
This is hysterical. They forgot to photoshop his hand.
I am if you read the link, which is actually a good survey of what turns out to be a somewhat complicated question, due to the differing populations served. I don't think it's fully settled, but I think the assertion "Medicare has lower administrative costs that private insurance" has a much better shot at surviving than the negative of that assertion.

The government is unbeatably efficient at writing checks. I don't know where you get this notion that somehow the government would be an inefficient purveyor of health insurance. It simply isn't true.
To my knowledge, the Thatcher quote has nothing to do with their health care system, and it would appear she was an advocate of the NHS, not an opponent.

From http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp...

Our stewardship of the public finances has been better than that of any Government for nearly 50 years. It has enabled us to repay debt and cut taxes. The resulting success of the private sector has generated the wealth and revenues which pay for better social services—to double the amount being spent to help the disabled, to give extra help to war widows, and vastly to increase spending on the national health service. More than 1 million more patients are being treated each year and there are 8,000 more doctors and 53,000 more nurses to treat them.

That is the record of eleven and a half years of Conservative Government and Conservative principles. All these are grounds for congratulation, not censure, least of all from the Leader of the Opposition, who has no alternative policies.
In an ideal world, the purpose of political speech is to persuade. Mackey's piece, while inflammatory in parts, is an argument that he intends to persuade at least some people.

In an ideal world, the appropriate response to political speech that one find's wrong, objectionable, erroneous, or otherwise misleading is to engage in political speech yourself. The cure for political speech is more political speech.

However, I agree with you that the average person does not have the same level of access to venues for political speech that Mackey does. It's not easy to get pride of place on the WSJ editorial page. Not even terribly easy to get your letter to the editor printed.

Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves what the purpose of the boycott is. We can all agree that free people are necessarily free to spend their money where they like, going out of their way to avoid certain brands in favor of others. Usually, we avoid brands because the products that the brand represents are flawed, sub-par, or fraudulent. Obviously, this is not the case with the Whole Foods boycott. Boycotting Whole Foods for the political speech of its CEO is an action not directed at Whole Foods per se, but at the political opinion of one man responsible for the company.

Will affecting Whole Foods' bottom-line persuade Mackey? Will it persuade the rest of the public? Unlikely in either case. A boycott of this sort is not meant to persuade, it's meant to punish. This is why people like the author of the linked article and others think that this kind of boycott crosses the line from civil speech to incivility. The rationale seems to be: if we can't persuade Mackey or achieve a place on a soapbox comparable to his, then perhaps we can punish him enough that he will regret having spoken up.

Seeking to punish Mackey for expressing his opinion is not an equivalent act of free speech. It crosses the line into incivility.
A freelancer's wage is different from a salaryman's wage - health insurance dollars and the "self-employment tax" are two sizable bites to take into consideration.
Is that a MacBook in front of the man with the many faces(tm)?
Most users will see any security feature as a net positive. Note the positive publicity (amongst normal users) for Leopard ASLR, a feature that adds no real security. Adding basic anti-malware features to the OS will not negate any of the security value prop in Snow Leopard.

I share your take on antivirus software, but do note that preventing a user from installing something with a known virus on it does not have negative utility.
Selling illegal DVDs not illegal because of blunder (UK)
Clickable links:

http://www.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/default.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/poland/businessproductivity/default...
Or you could just buy an ipod touch, if you don't need GPS or camera features.
Actually, polymorphism is when two or more clearly different phenotypes exist in the same population of a species — in other words, the occurrence of more than one form or morph. </tounge-in-cheek>

Polymorphism is certainly not a very well defined notion. Personally, I think the best answer would be "I don't know a precise definition, I've heard it mean different things based on context, for example...".