skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PHP is one language, I am absolutely not willing to (primarily) develop in. I've left a PHP-only job almost entirely over the matter of language choice (there PHP was used for everything. My worst decision there was -- after getting a Hadoop cluster going -- showing the team how to do Map/Reduce in PHP via the streaming API).

I've never felt a strong repulsion to any language like I do with PHP and I wonder why. I think at the core of are these facts: it's optimized for web development, doing anything complex or CS/math intensive (developing algorithms, doing off line computation, systems programming) is sometimes possible, but always painful. I've played with PHP3 before college and other than what I've learned in a databases course, very little what I've learned in a university seems to be applicable to routine PHP programming. It doesn't feel like actual development.

Ironically, PHP seems to work very well in conjunction with more powerful languages: Yahoo, Facebook and others are built with PHP as essentially a template layer, with Java/C++/Erlang/Perl/Python on the backend. Perhaps the fact that coding PHP doesn't feel like software engineering is it's greatest asset. It's a language that a web developer can immediately be productive in. Yet it also exposes what is often tediousness and triviality of most web development. I remember first playing with emacs, SLIME, cl-sql, mod_lisp and UCW: while I was writing a web application (something PHP is well suited for), I felt I was excercising my brain a great deal more. To a lesser extent it felt true with Python/CherryPy and Perl/mod_perl.

Perhaps what makes PHP successful at Yahoo and Facebook is that they're serious, well-funded technology companies who are able to attract talented developers (who can take advantage of PHP's easy interoperability with C). An early stage start-up choosing PHP seems to almost doom itself by attracting a crowd that treats PHP as Blub (rather than as a sometimes appropriate tool), or in less refined terms "script kiddies".
That isn't true in the new 27" iMac http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac-Intel-27-Inch/1236/1#top
What I think they mean is that if you remove a file locally, it is still probably accessible on the production machine if you just use scp to copy the files over directly. Rsync is a better option for this if you want to ensure locally removed files are in fact removed on your production machine(s).

I haven't done PHP work for almost 5-6 years, but when we did it, I had post-commit scripts set up in SVN (or was it CVS back then?) that if a commit was tagged "production" would trigger the production server to perform a fresh checkout. That was the only deploy step needed.

Funny, but you can get the same type of setup working with any language. Scp a WAR file into the appropriate Tomcat directory and your Java project is good to go (no reloading of the appserver required). Or, if you have auto-reloading of modules setup in Python, you can do the same thing.

So, this type of deployment isn't just for PHP... but with PHP it is the default (only?) method.
I think your close minded attitude ("I don't want to learn anything outside of my comfort zone, as it isn't clear whether it will get me from point A to point B") and vulgarity ("dick around") is what got you the down votes.
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There are only supposed to be 3 RPS choices anyway.
Thanks, we maxed out at the 120 word limit in our answer there already but I'll see if we can trim or put it elsewhere.

I couldn't help but notice that your contact page is a perfect description of the problem we're trying to solve :)
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Phishing has never been more fun!

Anyway, here's my feeble attempt: http://mug.gd/96W
I'm pretty sure Youtube is still the defacto.
If you don't like what I said, tell me why.
Can't you just look at the location bar and see that the url is still mug.gd?

Or is this a joke and I missed it?
spatial points?
Hierarchical Namespace Component
Great interview. It answered a lot of my question for my idea and website.. Great Great interview.. Thanks you guys for sharing..
Actually they do offer Oracle in the cloud. All the features of Oracle full with Grid Control access, etc.

Amazon did a demo at the Oracle Open World a few weeks ago and it looked promising.

http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/global-solution-providers/or...
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I've learned many abstract strategy games. I play some fairly well, others not so much so.

When I approach a new game, I assume it will take many hundreds (or thousands!) of plays to become truly good at it. I assume that I will play poorly for my first N games -- so, it's best to get them out of the way as quickly as possible. I try to think in terms of, "did I learn something from that loss?" -- if the answer is yes, it was still a worthwhile experience.

I think this is a good lesson for learning anything new. I think my first N programs were extremely poorly written. There was so much that I didn't know when I was starting out with programming! Now, 10+ years later I feel like I have a pretty good handle on things, but there are still areas of programming that I would like to know better.

I expect I'd see the same pattern learning anything new. If I were interested in drawing I'd expect the first hundred or more pictures to be lousy. If I wanted to become a writer, I'd expect the first hundred stories to be boring or full of misspellings and poor grammar.

For me, the question is: Does this knowledge make it easier or more difficult to start a new pursuit?
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What's there to be scared of? In the US, utility companies are extremely efficient and capable of servicing a huge number of customers with a near constant uptime.
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Really? Namespaces aren't important for building large scale software? I'd argue that unless you are writing in C for a good reason, namespaces are absolutely a requirement for any-scale of software.

You can argue about closures and mixins, which are handy for people that know how to use them, but are not essential. But are you really going to argue against namespaces?

Ironically, the newer versions of PHP have most of those things, but most people who would care to use them left PHP years ago.
The huge difference being that in Germany you have functional apprenticeship programs. In the US, which this article is centric to, you're really just going to go to college, have little option besides CS, and then end up somewhere in the chasm of this debate.

Trade schools exist, but since they're generally looked down upon you're not going to see a lot of popularity in Programming Trade degrees. Though perhaps the only difference between programming and metal craftsmen is that CS is more obviously popular and valuable these days. P only might equal NP so computers and robots haven't yet taken over the job of crafting programs.

This is meant to be a lot less a critique of programming and a lot more a nod toward the intense craft that goes into many of the things you might learn as a "trade". The general skill to build something physical and high quality is so frequently looked down upon these days.
We can, normal users probably still don't know that.
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I think the idea is that a lot of these url shorteners now also include their bars on top.
Eh, I couldn't think of anything clever for points. (I did say feeble...)
Both Facebook and LinkedIn also do this with external links from their sites, but that makes sense coming from M$-esque companies.

I guess this is a good point though, as twitter will automagically shorten URLs that you enter anyway.
> my template engine compiles to PHP's built-in template language

No, PHP is a template language... just a very complete one.

> PHP is a get-things-done language and it always has been

No, PHP is more of a spaghetti language. Sure, it's easy to get something working. Make a tweak here, a bug fix there. If you need a quick knock off, just copy the files, copy and paste a bit, and you're good to go.

But after going through that a few dozen times, you quickly end up with a tangled mess of spaghetti code. Speaking as someone who wrote and had to fix plenty of code (from myself and others) like that, it's not something that I'd like to do. PHP makes it very easy to get trapped like this.

Like any language, it is possible to write good, well abstracted code. Unlike others though, PHP makes is very easy to write bad code. I don't know why... perhaps it's that the learning curve is _too_ low.

The newer versions are definitely trying to elevate the language, but I think that ship has already sailed.
C is not C++, though.
ah, I just thought the "uninteresting" part was the mug and spatial points was some HN greasemonkey feature you had...
I've been through the selection process way more times than I like, and have been unhappy with every CMS I've deployed (five of them, to date: Zope, Plone, OpenACS, Joomla, Drupal).

Drupal is the least bad option I've come upon, so far.

But, I have very wide-ranging requirements, probably beyond what you're dealing with. My minimal feature set, without which I couldn't launch: forums, documentation management (most content management systems manage large amounts of content horribly--see note below for more on that), ecommerce with hooks for tying into a preexisting license management system, issue tracker, decent search, and reasonable notifications for everything above.

Drupal has a few things going for it over all of the others I've tried:

* Cohesiveness. For whatever reason, Drupal modules tend to use the core libraries with reasonable consistency, and they tend to be written from scratch explicitly for Drupal. Joomla, the worst on this question, is the least coherent pile of code I've ever worked with; Joomla core may be mostly sane, but by the time you add any modules of any complexity, it's an absolute mess.

* Reasonable backend. The database is pretty sane. When it makes sense to have a central store (content nodes, for example), Drupal uses a central store. When it makes sense to have a separate table (shopping cart order stuff, for example), it puts it in a separate table. I've been able to build external tools in Perl and PHP to interact with Drupal in ways that were extremely hard in prior systems I've used.

* Large ecosystem. OpenACS had a handful of really smart developers, and a well-designed core, but there were always more open bugs than developers to close them. Docs for Drupal are good, finding good developers to work on contracts is easy, and the modules are generally of high quality.

Note about content management: We have over a thousand printed pages worth of docs, with dozens of new pages being written every month, and I've been horribly disappointed by the tools for dealing with those docs in every CMS we've tried, though Drupal is getting closer, now that I've written import tools. Joomla was the worst, I think. I ended up bridging in DokuWiki, so I could manage docs as flat files. So, while I have a lot more requirements than just content management, the content management features do get a serious workout in our deployment.

In short, everything sucks, but I've found Drupal to suck an acceptable amount less. I don't like PHP, but there are no acceptable alternatives in other languages.
So, who's going to make the next spymaster?
Oh, there's a lot more I changed than that.
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This is why you should use images for titles: http://mug.gd/QSEu
There was a fairly decent style guide on the rubygarden wiki, but it was incinerated by spam.

There's also this: http://github.com/chneukirchen/styleguide

But the best path may be to read a lot of (good) code and see what people do.
> All I do is speak the truth.

I think you should let them come to an agreement first before they can jointly accuse you.
Isn't it a bad idea to retrieve any url since then an attacker could use this service to sql inject without leaving his IP on the victims log?
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There is a management culture of referring to technical people as "resources", e.g. this person is a "Java resource" and we'll need 3 "Linux resources" on that project.

They sure don't like it when I call 'em "Powerpoint resources".
Replace "watch.swf" with "warp.swf" in YouTube and see the results
G4 Powerbooks (PPC) were known to cause severe burns to people. So much so that Apple never called them laptops because you couldn't use them on your lap. (Granted, those people were wearing shorts and had the computer on bare skin, and the heat built up slowly so you didn't notice it).

Point being, the PPC Macs ran damn hot. My old G4 powerbook ran hotter than my current MacBook Pro. IIRC, notebook cooling and power requirements were the main reasons for the switch to Intel chips.
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Yeah, it's kinda like the point of learning the different sorts is not really to learn how to sort things - it's a vehicle for teaching big-O notation.
As an aside, does anyone else besides me find small white text on a black background incredibly painful to read? My eyes have a very hard time focusing on it.
Looking forward to some benchmarks. If its fast enough, this'll make me switch over to EC2.
The word "platitude" springs to mind, as well as the phrase "it's easier said than done." Everyone knows the basic processes of cognitive behavioral therapy; it's applying them when you're actually feeling anxiety that's hard.
I don't know much about the Go game, but this is such a beautifully written article about the general anxiety one encounters while learning new things. I have this exact feeling in my effort to learn programming (despite working as a programmer for 10 years now). Every time I encounter a new concept (possibly very basic), I criticize myself for working as a programmer without knowing such things.
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Dropbox makes desktop software and a web interface to cloud storage and shouldn't be affected negatively by new cloud services.
Benchmarks. Show themselves significantly faster and more configurable (finely tuned via software) and people will pay.
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No macros; otherwise it fits his bill fairly well.
I thought it was a 200 word limit
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Beaten with their own weapons:

http://mug.gd/l5g1W
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These facts are what allow you to make informed decisions. Democracy and capitalism both work only as well as the population is able to make good choices. I'd say science literacy is actually very important.
I'm paranoid, and my first thought is that if you put 'friendly' ads on there, it'll only be so long until someone comes along and calls what you're doing profiting from copyright infringement. What's the deal with copyright on geocities stuff? I'm not well-versed in this matter.
With go there are three very different stages of learning (has something to do with the fact that there are different sized boards). First you learn the rules - how to place the pieces, when is a group alive etc. Then you learn tactics: how are pieces 2-3 spaces apart linked, common patterns, counting etc. Finally you can make use of the 19x19 board and learn strategy - like how it's better to control corners rather then edges and edges rather then the center.

At each step you will get totaled by people who are ahead of you because each step gives you a completely new way of seeing the game. And you can't cheat and "learn ahead": strategy without tactics is useless.

Also, if you hate losing, for the love of god never play online. Sometimes it looks like half the population of Korea is online playing the other half, and when they classify themselves as "beginners" it usually means they can beat you while watching TV.
The best founder dating hack I've found: stop saying "I have a startup" and start saying "I run my own company."

A short sentence, but there's confidence, power, wealth, passion (and a fair bit of pretentious bs) in there.
We run a few Mac OS X Servers at work. Unfortunately, they are a few versions old (2 are Panther, 1 Tiger). They are probably closer to Windows Server 2008 than Ultimate editions of windows. But neither is probably a good comparison.

The core system is your standard Mac OS X. I feel odd when I log onto our servers and see an iTunes icon. So you won't miss anything by getting the Mac OSX Server.

The "server" part is more like having all of the capabilities of a Linux server, with a nice easy to use GUI to configure them. The newer versions include some Mac specific services, but for the most part, it's like having a Linux server and a Mac Desktop in one package.

I think the main benefit is licensing... with the "normal" version I think you are restricted as to how many people can connect (10?). But the server version is unlimited. This probably doesn't matter to you, but the Mini server would be nice for a department file server, or something like that.

If I were getting a Mini, I'd get the Server one just for the hard drives. Don't let the "server" part discourage you... it's still a Mac.
Wow.

"The fact that operating system design posed some at the time tough conceptual and logical problems was hardly allowed to surface. Consequently, those problems did not get the attention they deserved, and this had far-reaching consequences: I recently read a series of articles on the Shuttle on-board software and, though President Reagan has generously offered a teacher a free ride, I tell you I am not available."

This talk was given at a conference in mid-November 1984. The flight with a teacher on board was, of course, the Challenger in January of 1986.

Of course, the disaster wasn't due to software... but still rather uncanny.
Hey there! I'm one of the guys building the scalable, bolt-on search. Thanks for the mention :D
Good point. However, if "list of no fewer than 1 strings" is an interesting type, then why can't "integer no smaller than 1" be an interesting type?
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yeah, for most simple apps, scp will do the trick, but anytime you start writing scripts to upload the same set of files on 5 different machines, it's time to use capistrano.
Studies have been done (Kohn cites one in "The Folly Of Merit Pay") that show more teachers are driven out of teaching by the unintended negative consequences of performance-based pay than are attracted to it by the prospect of more money.

That certainly makes sense, but the question addressed in this article was not quantity but quality. Which one attracts a higher caliber of teacher (for whichever definition of higher caliber is being used at the moment)?
Yes, it's greek :). Your not ethnocentric by the way. The national flags let you switch the UI language. Foreign products/purchases/shops will not be change/translated. Not all features are implemented yet though: in the future, these "overseas" items (shops and purchases) will be filtered by the distance of your reference locations.
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As far as I know that's exactly the situation that there was before, after all Yahoo also had ads all over the place (and those were 'non friendly', as in popups and stuff like that).

Bandwidth costs $, I'll take the risk as long as it is managable, if it goes over that then it will have to make some money. Not much but enough to keep going.

The copyright of the materials is totally clear, it lies with the original authors, not with me.

But since they were being 'hosted' before in an environment that made their sites disappear on an hourly basis before and that will no longer happen they might even see it as an improvement, hard to tell at this point in time.

If someone owns a piece of it and doesn't want it on there I'm sure they'll tell me, it's not as if I'm hiding.

To me it's on the order of the preservation of the 'stone age' of the internet, if I can only preserve it 'offline' for my own gratification that would be a useless thing, it has to live on. If you're willing to sponsor the bandwidth then we can look at that, that would be an easy way to keep it completely advertising free. Personally I would prefer that but if it is to be done out of pocket then that will only go so far. If I have to drop a grand on it per month to keep it ad free then I'll do that. If it is more then that then there will have to be some other way to make it pay for itself. Maybe a donation button (though I don't think those work very well, I'm one of the few people I know that actually does donate to projects that I use), or some other mechanism.

Time will tell. But without the data it all stops, so that had to come first.
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Mixins are actually kind of nasty; better to use Traits/Roles instead.
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You can do closures, namespaces, mixins, etc in all of those languages (C++, C, Java). Some of them involve libraries, but the fact that people are engineering libraries to do those things means there is actually a need for those things in the enterprise community. I'd say C++ probably has all of those at the expense of uglier looking code. Java has a wealth of libraries that provide feature support for most of those too... I've done mixins & meta-programming at "enterprise level" jobs using Java before (Barclay's Bank), but the code is much more verbose and uglier than languages that support it natively.

My guess is that you haven't actually done enterprise-level jobs using those languages before, otherwise you probably would have seen many of those standard techniques used in the so-called "blub" languages of C, C++, and Java, even if the language didn't provide the feature natively.
Amusing example :)
I wasn't aware just how many posts on TC are about Twitter.
Your post appeals to two audiences; the blub/PHP programmer that reads your post to justify his own tastes, and the OMG Ruby Is So Awesome programmer, who wants to read your post to tell you how dumb you are.

I wrote about Java once on my blog. Never again. That is a crazy language community.
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Technically speaking, Java can have mixins as well if you include libraries that provide it. Stuff like Spring AOP uses aspectj under the covers and you can mimic mixin-like functionality in your classes with a few annotations here and there.
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5.1 scales better, and I would bet they're looking into XtraDB (if not already using it) which will go even further on multi-core machines.

edit - 5.1 (recent releases) scales better mostly due to InnoDB 1.0.4 which incorporates a number of patches from Google (Mark Callagan), Percona and more.
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