skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As the article points out, when pressed, advocates can rarely specify which toxins are removed, or point to studies which demonstrate effectiveness in humans.

Take cilantro for example. Quoting from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3654245/ :

> (iv) Cilantro (leaves of Coriandrum sativum), a popular culinary and medicinal herb, gained attention when a soup was reported to enhance mercury excretion following dental amalgam removal and remains popular despite limited evidence [46]. In animals, it decreased lead absorption into bone and inhibition of the delta-aminolevulinic acid dehydratase (ALAD) enzyme [47]. Less encouragingly, in a recent trial in 3- to 7-year old children exposed to lead, a cilantro extract was as effective as placebo in increasing renal excretion (improvements across treatment and placebo groups were ascribed to improved diet during the intervention) [48].

See the "limited evidence" and "as effective as placebo"?

The same review article points to https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jts/36/1/36_1_121/_arti... concerning chlorella and methyl mercury. (That paper in turn cites other several animal studies for cadmium, lead, and dioxins.)

If you read that paper, you'll see it was dosed at 4 mg Hg/kg body weight, which is rather acute, and measured across 6 mice. The results can't simply be extrapolated to humans.

So, where is your evidence which shows that cilantro and chlorella are effective chelation agents for humans?
> thinking nothing interesting could possibly be done with PHP

Sadly, a lot of incompetent developers email each other articles like this, as fodder for dev team language flamewars. This quoted sentence is likely hyperbole, but they take it seriously and strawman people.

(Naturally, language evaluation is multidimensional. You consider alternatives, foresee tradeoffs, etc. PHP can be right/wrong in your situation.)

I knew programmers (and their CTO) who trotted out such articles to defend the broken PHP framework which they used to run half the business. I'm sure the framework's own authors would be aghast they still used it. The team working on it had near-zero productivity; virtually all spent maintaining the beast. New hires were flabbergasted at how slow the webapp was, which harmed the productivity of most in the company. One maintainer had a private project to incrementally rewrite the shit in another (very popular) language; the CTO indulged him but refused to support it.

(Mercifully, the company got put out of its misery. People might counter that the PHP codebase didn't kill the company. But of course that's not how it works. Incompetence suffuses many such decisions; each of which is just a facet of the same incompetence. And each incompetent decision reinforces the others.)
databases are not structured documents, you can export them eg in JSON perfectly well. Or for that matter in SQL as is the usual practise. Marked up structured text is a different matter, XML still has a use case there.
If you are interested in pathfinding and these kind of problems, I suggest to check out http://www.pathery.com/ - NP complete K-Most-Vital-Node problem.
Zeller's Congruence is a formula as well (well, more than one depending on which calendar you want to use). Go look at the wikipedia article.

More seriously, any algorithm that doesn't do user I/O is expressible as a fixed formula. What distinction are you trying to draw?
PHP is the duct-tape of programming languages. It might not be pretty but it gets the job done, and getting the job done is all that really matters.

With the exception of JavaScript which is also "wrong" by many puritan developers opinion, PHP is the only language that is welcome to complete novice programmers. All other languages require a lot of setting up.

Furthermore the ease at which I can combine JavaScript with CSS with HTML with PHP is one of the major reasons it ever got so popular. No other language allow me to do that.
hey, remember if you turn your nose up at shitty languages and platforms, you're somehow revealing something bad about yourself.

Not like the exemplary attitude of "awesome lets cut our wrists all day and open windows explorer to deploy"
As a recovering PHP dev (I haven't touched a line in over 2 years) I'm happy I no-longer use it. It's inconsistencies drove me insane and I hate the F'ing dollar sign!

However I seem to have swapped that inconsistent, badly designed language with Javascript.
and yet python does all that without being ugly.
I was lucky enough to meet the guys at Mailchimp a few years ago when my startup was working with them on a project.

It's a great company; super offices, wonderful people and a sustainable, profitable business. If I wasn't in England, I would consider pushing hard to try and become a part of what they're doing.
Sales page wise, there is a lot of room to improve on the testimonials. I don't often see such non-convincing testimonials.
I'm sure you can come up with better ones easily. Not talking about making them up, but just by asking the right questions. Here is some inspiration (as is in many places in the web): http://www.copyblogger.com/testimonials-part-2/
"A flurry of hacks" indicates you did not understand worse-is-better:

http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf

"This advice is corrosive. It warps the minds of youth. It is never a good idea to intentionally aim for
anything less than the best, though one might have to compromise in order to succeed"
AFAIK there is no evidence that running is bad for the knees. There is not enough research to draw firm conclusions, but a Stanford study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2556152/) didn't find a higher incidence of osteoarthritis in runners (20%) vs non-runners (32%) after 18 years of running. There is selection bias in this study since the runners were self-selected.

The book 'Which comes first, cardio or weights' from A. Hutchinson offers one hypothesis in which running might protect the knees: by limiting weight gain with advancing age. Less weight means less stress on the joints.
I can't tell whether you intend to agree or disagree with the quote. Your tone suggests you are disagreeing, but your content to me seems to be in agreement.

(I am the article author.)
mtgox? :)

ROFL :D (no tho in hindsight robbing half a billion and getting away with it doesnt seem like bad career path)
You could do the exact same thing using XSLT. eg.

var result = new XSLTProcessor().importStylesheet(xsl).transform(....);

It's a bit of a pointless example because it really depends on the transformations you need. I'm sure in some cases XSLT would be better for the job, and in other cases another language. Most of the time it would generally just depend on your environment, available tools and skillset.
A bad developer will produce bad code in whatever language he is using. If asked, I’d tell everyone “stick to your guns”. Use, whatever gets the job done most quickly and efficient.
> JSON/Javascript is just easier to learn and work with than XML/XSLT.

Unfortuntely running Javascript on the back-end for this purpose is not something most companies do.
Encouraging everybody to learn to program is like teaching music or sport in school. Everybody gets to do a bit, but it doesn't mean that they'll be good enough to do it at a professional level. Few will become top billed rock stars or pro athletes.
I remember Amit's blog from my Realm of the Mad God days. Glad to see him on HN. He has a very interesting series about procedural map generation: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...
That is absolutely amazing, and really makes me wish I knew a damn thing about 3D printing.
I might have expressed myself somewhat unclear. Let me try again. varnishd tries to write to a page not in memory and gets a page fault while doing so. As the kernel has no idea of your intentions to overwrite the whole page it will read the page into memory and then return control to varnish who completes the memory write, merging the write request just made onto the preexisting page.
varnish does not utilize any asynchronous reads. All IO is blocking.
Well this article is over 4 years old, which is positively Paleozoic in language development terms. But I am sure that the discussion here will be equally out of date.

Can we have less of these sort of articles please, it was a waste of my time skimming it.
Please stop sharing this blog post like it's the Holy Grail. It's full of nonsense and false information about PHP. Not that there aren't issues in PHP, but this assembly is just "PHP doesn't have feature X and doesn't behave like language Y, so it must be bad. I didn't bother reading the documentation or any code written after 1998.".
> Furthermore the ease at which I can combine JavaScript with CSS with HTML with PHP is one of the major reasons it ever got so popular. No other language allow me to do that.

If you mean by "the ease of combining Javascript with CSS with HTML" is that you get a mediocre, unsafe templating system out of the box, sure. All mainstream languages have various third-party templating libraries which are usually far superior to PHP. The big advantage to PHP is its omnipresence, large standard library and ease of deployment. It remains, however, an awful, warty language which makes it easier to do the wrong thing than most other languages I know.
PHP doesn't do EVERYTHING but it is good for surprisingly a lot of cases

What happens when you have existing code in Java or python that does something you do not wish to reinvent the wheel with is you simply interface/bridge with from you PHP code.

Right now I have 5 servers running python batch jobs processing some data (for a few months now) which is called by php with results being added to datastore for later access with php

In the past I worked on an asset tracking system where we collected data from RFID readers, whole system was done in PHP with some glue Java and C code for more "to the bone" edge cases

Everything I have done in PHP i could have done in C which I first learned and still use alot of, doesn't mean I want to spend my life wasting it on 90% of cases where a quick php script does the job within reasonable time

I never claimed PHP is "awesome" or whatever you think I did, but it is a very capable language at getting things done fast, especially if you know what you are doing

Yes there are armies of noobs giving PHP a bad name, but instead of turning your nose at them one is better helping them and showing them how to do things better
Is docker fundamentally flawed?
> and getting the job done is all that really matters

Having fun whilst you work also matters. Duct-taping doesn't sound conducive to a good time to me. I want to build, innovate and enjoy.

Secondly, by going with PHP you're exposing yourself to many built-in issues: http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
This is awesome. Well done, OP.
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I'm not sure if you are trolling, but you left out the actual transform. In my experience, XSLT feels optimized towards transforms, which most other languages aren't. I also dislike XSLT, but whenever I do things like this in Python, C# or C++ it tends to get more messy then my XLTS when the transforms are nontrivial.
Empirical Analysis of Programming Language Adoption [pdf] (2013)
The problems that XML and XSLT address have not gone away. It saddens me when the XML-hating JSON community starts reinventing solutions that have all the same issues of bloat and complexity (see JSON schema, Collection+JSON, Siren, etc).

I would not be surprised if someone soon announces a "JSON Transformation" tool that can convert one JSON schema to another. Followed shortly by a standard for JSON namespaces so you can mix different schemas, a standard for binary JSON, a standard for JSON-encryption, and so on.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
A 3rd approach to University outreach:

Work placement programs/ mentorship/ networks Ex. Ivy League
No one remembers LZEXE?
I don't know what Stellar is. I had a look at their website. It's a decentralised [1] currency something or other. But this blog post states:

> We were able to replay most of these rolled back transactions on chain B to minimize the impact

And

> To ensure no ledger forks going forward in Stellar, we have decided to temporarily only run one validating node until the new consensus algorithm is live

I don't see the decentralisation here?

[1] https://www.stellar.org/learn/#Decentralized_network "This means that the Stellar network does not depend on any single entity"
Another typo in the same article:

> race() recurses3 with the result of run_step_of_race().

Edit: Finished reading the article. Brilliant. Even the footnotes were better explanations than commonly found.
Yeah, this appears to be just online statistics. The only "AI" thing about it is that it can match natural language queries to your spreadsheet column names.
Wow that's very clever!
Sure that Safari is C++ and not Objective-C?
Curious what Rails objectively offers that Symfony cannot?
If you extend 2d encoding to 3d you can get nice video compression scheme: http://people.f4.htw-berlin.de/~barthel/paper/BaVo95.pdf

I believe it is almost the only interesting application.
They have de-decentralized so that there are no more ledger splits. Sort of embarrassing but understandable. It is understood that they will re-decentralize once they get a new consensus algorithm I guess.
Agree with you that NextSTEP is well designed (at least in the upper layers, not necessarily the Mach-based kernel...) but the reason why it succeeded where BeOS failed are not technical: BeOS failed because of network effects (market too small for ISVs) and Microsoft actively preventing OEMs from installing it, and NextSTEP avoided both of these problems by being bought by Apple.

iOS is not really running on a "resource-constrained" platform; the first iPhone already had 128MB RAM, which was a lot of RAM for a PC in 1999, in particular considering the low screen resolution. Apple just got the timing right; the mobile hardware became powerful enough to run "real" OSes (instead of things like Symbian or WinCE that were actually developed for resource-constrained hardware) around 2005.
This is true, and I wouldn't turn my nose up at a job from a company I really like (eg. MailChimp) just because it was PHP.

However as far as professional development concerned, I'd be very concerned about being hobbled by sticking with PHP over the long term.

First, because it doesn't have any strong ideas to explore as a language, it just cobbles together ideas from other languages in a very ad-hoc and half-baked manner. If you want to learn the power of first-class functions with closures for instance, those things exist in PHP, but the syntax is so baroque that you'd be excused for thinking they're not worth the trouble.

This effect is compounded by the fact that the PHP community is an archipelago of experts in a sea of beginners. If you're a newbie coming in it's relatively hard to figure out who to listen to to advance your skills.

Finally, there's the external signaling aspect. Although it's unfair, the hard truth is that software developer talent is the classic market for lemons. Most people evaluating you will not have the knowledge and experience to evaluate your skills objectively (heck, I'm a hiring tech lead and even I can't really tell until I actually start working with someone). For a lot of people, the language you use is the signal they use, and in this regard PHP is at the bottom of the food chain just about HTML/CSS.
> PHP is the only language that is welcome to complete novice
> programmers. All other languages require a lot of setting up.

One thing that is often overlooked with PHP is the fact that the deployment process if extremely easy, even for novice programmers. Simply use FTP/SFTP/SCP/whatever to copy over your files to a server, reload your browser, done. It's completely optimised for the scenario where you simply want to create a webpage.

Compare that to something like Python, which is very 'novice-friendly' as well, but needs quite some steps before you have a working website deployed on a server.
I've done tons of PHP coding on various projects, some of which I'm quite proud of. That said, I will probably never stop cringing at the use of PHP for any project. It's a terrible tool in a huge number of ways, some of them fundamental. Yes, it's a functional tool, but mostly it's a competitively capable tool only because every other language/platform out there is also more or less equivalently terrible in some other way.
PHP is not duct tape when used properly. It enjoys a vibrant ecosystem (Packagist), sports one of the best dependency management systems around (Composer), and offers an outstandingly customizable framework (Symfony).
Really depend on your hosting provider. I use gandi, and deployment is as hard "git push gandi master && ssh login@host 'deploy default.git master'". If you administrate the box yourself, I haven't found setting up, say, Apache with Python particularly hard, assuming you have enough sysadmin knowledge in the first place.
>TBH if a "developer" cringes their nose at a very capable tool, just because it is not the latest "cool" thing, It tells me a lot about them.

I doubt you could convince a developer to condense their opinion of PHP to "PHP isn't the latest cool thing, so I don't like it." As such, I posit you're being as judgmental and dismissive as your supposed adversary.
Good, so I'll replace the '<' in XML with '#:-D' and the '>' with '%:-/'

Or replace indenting levels with the XPath of where it belongs and make order optional

Syntax matters.
Is ?: still left associative in PHP?
Most large companies with well-oiled legacy systems actually are not that bad to work with. I've seen the guts of a large PHP system, and while it was still re-inventing the wheel all over the place, they had still solved all of their problems and had established practices that encouraged stable business. Not interesting, but neither are consolidate businesses to begin with.

PHP will cease to be gross when it's not just the large implementations that are very nicely done. This is not the PHP that exists in the vast seas between these islands. PHP is not something that a rotational employee or someone who is career-conscious will choose or accept for long. They want to work at your company for a while. This can be good. PHP is a career limiter in a way and I think the cringe reaction is a natural tendency to want to open up the conversation to see if what could be a good rotational job is also a toolchain dead end. Career conscious programmers don't want dead ends.

The gripe is and always will be that PHP encourages bad practices because it includes a bunch of "features" that are undeniably prone to bad habits. It's not personal. Really, we don't want companies using PHP well to die. We don't want the programmers using PHP to go away. We want PHP to stay put because better tools are out there, and anything that perpetuates the use of PHP in new products feels gross. It feels especially gross to the career-conscious young ones. Sorry.
Well, "syntactic sugar" usually refers to things that can be translated in a syntactically local, structure-preserving way. I'm aware that generators can be compiled down to an ES5 representation, but it requires non-trivial analysis. Take a look at the example on their home page: https://facebook.github.io/regenerator/.

Do you also consider functions to be syntactic sugar? Because you can also implement them in terms of a switch statement.
Just ordered some groceries for tomorrow, hope it goes well. I find myself constantly too worn out after work to buy groceries, and buying amazon fresh is only good for some stuff.
> PHP is the duct-tape of programming languages

Perl would like to have a word with you :)
Don't forget 'How to broadcast Digital TV using only a VGA monitor'. http://bellard.org/dvbt/
I looked up "terribad", since it seemed an unlikely typo. The luminaries at Urban Dictionary told me it was "[t]he act of being terrible and bad at the same time"; I can't for the life of me see how something could be terrible and not also be bad.
The most dangerous thing about PHP is it's amiable appearance. But it's friendly appearance is like a car without seat belts. "Hey, look, there is nothing restricting your movement inside the cabin.".

The horrid (and unfixable) nature of the language does not become apparent until after you use it for a while. (How long it takes may vary, but you ll hit it eventually, if you keep yourself in good company.). So if you list features of PHP, you might get a list of nice features. But every one of them will be subtly broken when put to real use...
Smarch?
>Or did people's being healthier cause them to be runners?

There was another study that showed that people who take up mixed martial arts in their late 40s are healthier than people of the same age who only walk [1]. No word on whether genetics plays a role.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Walker
"the latter point is one of the reasons most people like to avoid XML"

And these are exactly those who will never "get" that XML is much more than a data container for tree-like structures. They should stick to JSON or CSV for that matter.
Good article about how to get a woman comfortable with your touch
We're stuck with one badly designed language on the frontend (Javascript), for reasons we can't really change now. But why on earth would you choose another badly designed language on the back end when you have so many better options?

Stop being lazy and unprofessional and spend a month or two learning one of the many better commonly used web dev languages.
I don't think any PHP was used to put anything on a comet recently.
I am not arguing this is right. I am just pointing out this is entirely possible. In fact I would tend to agree with you. Tobacco is a proven bad drug, and it hasn't been made illegal. There are obviously other parameters to take into account but still.
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I understand now. Not enough that the kernel unnecessarily loads a page that is about to be fully rewritten, it also blocks the thread that is trapped in a pagefault, while it could potentially go and serve another connection. I can see how write() can be faster than mmap(), thanks.
>All mainstream languages have various third-party templating libraries which are usually far superior to PHP.

Including PHP, of course.
Oh, documentation. It is still broken, even on the most basic level, I should say.

http://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/comments/2md8c0/new_safe_cast...
A good developer uses the best tools available, because she/he knows the value of using them.
I think that since Mailchimp has grown strong enough to hold a consequent part of the email-sending software market, unsubscribing from newsletters/spam has been a lot more easy than before.
Kind of defeats the out-of-the-box thing, though.
Its a generational thing. Programmers grown up on JavaScript will prefer JSON. Its not a unique phenomenon. My guess is the noSQL was born out of fact that many young programmers simply don't know how to write SQL, if they don't know/want to use SQL and rely on ORM mapping alone, then they can as well do away with SQL databases too.
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I'm somewhat familiar with Bitcoin, and I've heard of Stellar, and my sense is they are related - both a decentralized consensus based ledger system. I'm wondering if the problem that Stellar encountered is something that Bitcoin has some resistance to. Anybody have some insight?
We also don't see many new licensees.