skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I submitted it because I'm playing with CloudForest right now. I really appreciate your work, it's fun to use.

I'm co-founder of a digital real estate brokerage[1] and as a weekend hack, I'm using CloudForest to predict sale prices for residential real estate using data from the MLS.

A lot of the predictions are really good with a few that are terrible (like double the list price, which is a feature). Any way to get a certainty value for each prediction? Perhaps I could look at the variance of values from each tree? I'm kind of a noob with decision trees so I'm probably totally off base but maybe that question makes sense. :)

[1]: https://www.openlistings.co/ (YC W15)
Review: Tesla’s new Model S P85D–double your engines, double your fun
If the task is to create content-oriented sites by non-technical people, who just want to put the darn thing online and maybe generate some income, nothing comes even remotely close to PHP, after all these years.
Yeah, I meant 'original web app'. Funny, my company also uses Wordpress because thats what the design studio supplied, and we keep it on a completely isolated server for security reasons.
> how many translate-to-JS languages there are

I'd call it well designed AND most-misunderstood for this very reason.

And this 10-day argument really makes me smile every time I see it. You're barely using anything that was designed in 10 days, ES6 is already here and it changed thing a lot.
Well, you're very wrong. PHP is the 5th most used language on
github(4th if you take CSS out)

http://githut.info/
Regarding UFO's, I enjoyed the documentary Mirage Men: https://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70305797

Quoting the top review: "This is a documentary not about UFOs but rather intelligence operations perpetrated against Americans by their government in order to cover up top secret projects and engage in social control experiments using a particular American subculture."
The PI didn't actually cost that much. I helped out someone he cared about. That's another story.

The person was able to hurt me because he, through a certain station, had the credibility that made what he might say about other people (such as me) matter. His opinions would be taken seriously. After taking a hit, I fixed the problem. It wasn't about vengeance. It was about doing just enough to fix the problem, then moving on. He didn't lose his job per se but I made him enough of a laughingstock that no one would take his word over anyone else's, thus making me safe from him.

After being attacked, it's not unreasonable to think that such defenses are needed in order to protect the future.

I wouldn't do that sort of thing after a "things didn't work out" situation, even if things ended badly or I got fired. I'm an adult; I'll move on. Likewise, I wouldn't retaliate against someone just for saying that I was a jerk or that he didn't like me. (Plenty of people say that I'm a jerk. That's fine.) There has to be a lot more, like fraudulent negative claims about past work performance... something that sounds objective and can be damaging... before I'm ready to fuck up someone's life. People have the right not to like me and to say that they don't; what they don't have the right to do is to deliberately damage my reputation with fraudulent or inaccurate claims.

This was a case where someone deliberately tried to damage me after I had moved far away from him. There was an act of war, and I fought back with force, and I won. I don't believe in starting fights but I do believe in ending them.
> Python and Ruby will be with us for a long time, but PERL and PHP will die an ugly death

> On the JVM we have things like Grails on Groovy, Clojure and Scala which have strong development teams and visions for the future.

> PHP, like PERL, just doesn't fit in any more.

It's because you don't understand PHP's users perspective that you say these things. PHP isn't going away anytime soon. The most popular CMSs are written in PHP, not in Ruby,Python or Clojure. In the small business space, PHP is king, not Scala nor Groovy. Of course it's your opinion, but it's not based on any facts.
In practice we find that algorithms in P usually have small exponents. And thus P is a good shorthand for tractable. If case 2 happens, we'll have to change our shorthand to what we actually care about: tractability.

Similar arguments apply to case 1. (We know quite a bit about how a proof of NP ?= P could _not_ look like, because people already proved that certain strategies for a proof don't work. I am not sure if we can already rule out N^log log log log N, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
Modules can be seen as a collection of types (abstract or otherwise) and functions acting upon those types. Very prosaically, this can just be a type parameterized dictionary (or vtable if that floats your boat).

Haskell's "constrained" types look like this

c => a

where the type `a` requires access to the details of a constraint `c`. It turns out that constraints are merely type parameterized dictionaries of functions acting upon those types. We could reify them into concrete data types if we liked and then replace the fat arrow

(Dict of c) -> a

and get something functionally equivalent.

Now, instead of doing that Haskell has the typeclass mechanism which allows the compiler to automatically generate and pass needed constraints based on a prolog-like logic that executes at compile time. This can be convenient but restricts the flexibility of these dictionaries.

ML modules can do some of the very same things but require the user to manually wire the proper module in at the right time instead of letting the compiler do it [0]. The benefit is that your modules are more modular and can support more sophistication.

[0] Caveat: this compiler automatic dictionary wiring will be enabled, in part, with OCaml's modular implicits which are coming down the pike soon.
You're not necessarily right just because you went through a foreclosure.
The trouble with PMs is that being the most political of the bunch, they also tend to get promoted into management in much greater quantities. Once promoted, guess what, they promote their own (because that's their social circle), and hire a ton more PMs, which then get promoted and hire still more PMs. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you've run the company into the ground, then move elsewhere (e.g. to Google).
Complexity Zoo.
Sometimes I find myself wrestling with the other side of the coin.

Lots of us sit around contemplating whether we're slowly programming ourselves into obsolescence. Or maybe not contemplating the "ifs" of it, so much as the "hows" and "whens" of our inevitable replacement by robots.

And so part of me aches at the blistering, scathing inequalities and wealth disparities implicit in absurdities such as luxury ice, but then I start to wonder what will happen to me when I write that one last shell script that seals my fate as a superfluous meat bag in an otherwise harmonious ballet of circuits and servomotors.

What else will there be worth doing in a post-scarcity economy, besides frequenting upscale hospitality establishments? What if a future of abundance, and robotic hyper-intelligence, turns us all into part-time chefs, bus boys and waitresses?

But yeah, we really do have to get on that whole starvation thing first... maybe it'll be us left out in the cold, if we're not careful about our own obsolescence.
Ecocapsule – Future home
I had the displeasure of working with an EX-PM from MSFT. Her constant pressure for status reports, the inability to properly gather feedback from the client and the awful ability to write a specifications document made me incredulous. How could someone with a master's in technology (CS and something else) could be so awful? Turns out she didn't even know how to program. In fact, the product she lead then project for was significantly different than what the client required. She was fired after the client threatened to pull the project if she stayed on board.

I would speak to her and try to understand what was her main goal. Could never find anything aside of just being in charge and aiming to get all the credit. This person was more fit to work at the DMV.
https://archive.org/details/MathBlaster4amCrack

Sadly, it isn't currently runnable in the browser, but I'm sure that will be fixed soon.
There's also the fact that you have to jailbreak it first, which is going to be scary and difficult for many (most) users.

When DRM was only enforced by the software, you just patched over the software and were good to go. Now that it's enforced by the operating system, it no longer appears so simple to the average user.
And almost certainly, NP \not \subset BQP. In fact, there are only a few problems found so far where quantum computing gives a speedup compared to classical computers.
I'd like some citation on the claim that Ruby and Rails is taught "usually" in University web programming courses.
I especially love where the author likens resuming a crack attempt after giving up for months to a detective picking up a cold case.
Switch to the percentage view of the languages, you'll notice that PHP's percentage is decreasing: 7.7% -> 6.3%.

It isn't decreasing as fast as Ruby is (although that may be an artifact of the Ruby community being a first adopter of Github), but it is still decreasing.

C++, C#, Go, JavaScript, Java, Shell and CSS are not decreasing.
While I agree strongly with your sentiment, why even bother bringing up the "conspiracy nut" label? It's only ever used in an ad hominem attack, and has nothing to do with the truth. All arguments should be judged on sources and reason, regardless of how farfetched or paranoid they seem from your perspective.
At Princeton, John Nash sat at my lunch table in the campus center a few times. The first time it happened, I didn't know for sure it was John Nash, but there was something about him that just told me that it was. It happened many more times and I always felt a sense of awe to be in his presence. Another example of the fine line between brilliance and insanity and how they are interrelated. Not the way you would have expected John Nash to go. Rest in Peace and thank you for your contributions to the world.
You have badly misread my comment.
I don't get why so many people seem to be biased against PHP. It isn't an awful language or anything.
Sorry, initially I received error 504 every time I clicked post. Only afterwards did I noticed that while I kept trying to post and received an error message, things got posted several times.
I would call the ability not to be misunderstood a very important design requirement. I'm using ES6, it didn't change almost anything for me. Even the official docs say it is minimalistic improvement, just syntactic sugar. I like the string interpolation, but the class keyword doesn't really do much more than prototype.method =. There isn't really inheritance, super doesn't do what anyone expects, 'this' is not improved. At least 'let' helps with scoping problems.
Your second paragraph exactly matches the point your parent wanted to put across. Yet, you typed in the first paragraph. You want to show you got more insight, huh?
Mozilla changes Firefox OS strategy due to Android’s popularity
"The lecture gave a big list of some of the amazing things we could do if we could prove that P = NP. Some of the items on that list were protein folding (to cure cancer) and scheduling."

Moreover, while the most obvious way of proving P = NP would be to find a P solution to an NP-complete problem, it's possible that someone will show existence of such a solution without being able to identify the particular solution. In that case, we don't get to do anything we couldn't do before.

It's also possible that we'll find a solution to an NP-complete problem that's O(n^million). That's in P, but may be substantially more out of reach than our O(2^n) approaches on realistically sized problems.
> saved yourself 5 minutes and shaken it

Don't shake martinis or manhattans. It gets tiny ice chips in the drink. Bond was an idiot.
At the very least, that Linux-based OpenVZ containers have been widely deployed for many years in many orders of magnitude higher volumes than FreeBSD Jails, Solaris Zones, or anything else.
Not as well when we use more than one core:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...
Can you even run it as a mobile application w\ push notifications if it's over Tor? Wouldn't that require some kind of central server anyway...
What do you think an awful language should do?
I imagine OP is referencing the Alexander quote: "Collect it all, tag it, store it....And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it....."

More info:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/07/15/crux-nsa-story-...
"You simply cannot run a top-level Internet business on PHP anymore" - I guess you mean ONLY on PHP.

Maybe Facebook is not using just PHP...
Twitter and Slideshare demonstrated that you cannot run their businesses exclusively with Ruby on Rail.
Pinterest and Quora have done the same with Python.

At a certain scale, it is more economical and efficient to optimize part of your architecture with services written in other languages.

This has always be true. People has massively relay on caches that are usually written C/C++ Ex: memcache is a very tiny piece of C has been used with PHP, Python, Ruby forever.

However you would be surprised to know how many million dollar businesses are running almost exclusively on PHP. I am not saying that is the best choice, but it is the reality.
> Universities are usually teaching Ruby and Rails in their web programming courses (at least in US).

I wish this were the case. As an undergraduate in 2013, I took an intro web programming class where we were taught using Java and J2EE...in 2013! My friend went to a school with a top CS program (top 10 or top 20 in the country I think), and his web programming class was also in Java, though I don't remember if they used the horrid J2EE or not.

As a side note, I learned more and made more progress teaching myself Python and Django in a week than I did in that class.
Application Error
An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

I hope they aren't earning 500k to host this website.
And, given that the median software engineering in Silicon Valley seems to be around $140K (+/- $10K) - are the high performance 10x engineers compensated accordingly?

(I think the answer is to the second question is "Yes", but you need to go work for a startup and use those 10x skills to make it successful, so that you can get your 10x compensation in the form of equity)
A discourse on milling wood by hand
You don't find it ironic that you said "most-misunderstood" in a discussion about language, and somehow thought this is a problem worth overlooking?
I love JavaScript, but I completely agree.

Arguably the best JavaScript book is titled "JavaScript: the good parts." That is a pretty clear message that there are a lot of bad parts around.
That does not mean anything. The point is, PHP is not being kept alive by just couple of companies.
If you wear a seat belt while in the back seat, you are considered weird.

By definition doing anything outside of "normal" is weird, but in the case of social conventions it's usually because people just haven't thought about it enough. I'd rather be considered weird than be in a crash without a seatbelt on.
This sounds like 90% of the world. Not just China.
If you've never seen the "Japanese bartender parlor trick":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1zrDxVFcX4
Wordpress also keeps php very relevant. Very, very relevant. You can make so much money focusing on WP that it's not even funny. Even with the endless marketing agencies and low cost options available.
Programming in PHP these days doesn't seem significantly different than programming in ASP.NET MVC or Node or maybe even Ruby. I started playing around with Laravel recently to throw up a quick site on some free hosting I have available and what tools does it require to manage the front-end: npm, bower, and gulp!

PHP may be closer to death now than ever because it's becoming less distinct as a platform.
To be fair, if you're writing in a language with a shitty type system, encoding types into names isn't horrible. For things like units of measurement, like distinguishing int32[seconds] from int32[ticks] it's pretty useful.

It's only the dumb use, where you repeat the type name as part of the variable that such notation gets deserved derision.

If MS had been a bit more forward thinking, they'd have come up with a language, or extended C/C++, to be able to enforce all that notation via the type, killing the need for special notation.
Stanford: http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs142-winter15/index...
MIT: http://6.470.scripts.mit.edu/2015/schedule
People who downvote this: you should turn in your hacker card, and log out from this site. :-)
That's what sieves are for. A good bartender knows to remove the ice chips before serving the cocktail.
Text-only Google cache is readable despite a few missing images. only thing I could get to load.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:N3H4fWz...
Better than ever? That's factually incorrect. The majority of Americans were better off in the late 70's. Median wealth has been declining.
My first real programming project was a ticket system for IBM in 2000 using PHP 3. I have to say that I knew C, java and perl. However, for generating HTML at the time PHP took far less time to create the pages I needed than any other language. In fact I went from learning PHP to writing my first full blown ticket system in a matter of two weeks. I'm terrible at programming. Now I use Ruby and Python plus have to do C and Java for Android. I still feel PHP was far easier to go from complete Novice to writing apps than any other language. Maybe I just haven't become well enough versed in this web 2.0 to know what it is I'm missing.
Well,

The argument of the article, as far as I can follow it, seems to be people making 500k/year are essentially entrepreneurs/inventors - they are paid for the possibility/probability that they will invent something for the company rather than for a steady stream of assigned tasks.

That seems different than the legendary "x10" programmer who theoretically just does the same task ten times as fast as the "ordinary programmer".
Sounds like a funny idea for a reddit bot.
Likewise, seems strange they repo'd the car after just a week.
My father once told me to do what no one else wants to. Good advice.
"We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don’t care about this crap at all."

I'm a PHP developer by choice and I like that quote. I like throwing things together - I don't use frameworks, I use libraries. By combining an ORM, a template engine, and my own router... those things form an MVC framework that I actually understand. The frameworks like RoR, people don't understand what's going on when something goes wrong because they put on so much abstraction... PHP remains simple, and I like it.

To be honest I like javascript better, but PHP has more reusable code on the web so most things are still way easier to do in PHP than Node.js. Also I think composer is a great package manager, it's not like PHP doesn't have a good one.

I enjoy hacking things together and agree with Ramus that abstract classes and protected properties are worthless. Wordpress was hacked together and it's still doing fine... all that code and not one abstract class. That's the PHP developer philosophy the author was looking for... we do what we want.
At the moment I don't need anyone but over the years I have used CL for short-term projects. Some of them were remote, some required in-person meets. I'm just saying that they all seemed to get work on CL pretty regularly.
Powershell's object pipeline far outshines the Unix style "pass around strings and dick with parsing everywhere". It also handles quoting in a much more sane manner, eliminating security holes or just plain bugs you get in, say, bash. The included editor and command line completion for arguments is really slick. Painting PS as just NIH is simply incorrect.

MS bringing back Services for Unix for real is a somewhat orthogonal issue than coming up with a superior shell.
> The reasons to choose it in 2000 were compelling, but there is no reason to choose it today — the world has changed, and there are dozens of better choices now.

I'm not convinced that he has the reasons for choosing PHP quite right -- either circa 2000 or now.

If you're writing your own web application, really, you've always had complete freedom in choosing the language. Saying your alternatives in 2000 were C, Java, Perl and ASP captures the zeitgeist rather than the actual choices. For example, Python was already a solid option (and Zope was a thing), and a few people/companies you might have heard of even built a successful startup or two off of weird choices like Lisp or TCL. That's one of the great things about the web: you speak HTTP/HTML, it doesn't matter what your back end is written in.

What PHP always had going for it over other options were these things:

1) It was really easy to add to Apache-based commodity shared hosting. So people running hosting companies did. So it was widely available on very affordable hosting.

2) The document-as-program model. Yes, it's terrible from a "separation of concerns" standpoint. Yes, you hate it for the right reasons. That's probably part of what keeps you seeing its strengths:

(a) It's an easy model to grasp, and a particularly gentle step for someone who's only written markup documents. It doesn't even have to end in spaghetti madness (though that's a popular path).

(b) The deployment story is dead easy.

3) Arguably one of the better online reference/tutorial sets for a long time (much less true today, but circa 2000? yeah).

As far as I can tell, it still has most of these advantages which made it the de facto runtime of the back-end web. And it's stayed more or less competitive as a more serious option as various developers and high-profile users have improved the language itself and shaped the practices of the community.

There are two things I see that may be potential sea changes, though:

1) The rise of JS on the back end presents another easy path for people who might start as document authors and then move into front-end scripting. Maybe. Node still has deployment issues and some other complexity I don't think PHP presents. I'm keeping an eye on nginx+js, though... that story sounds enough like Apache+PHP to me that I think there's potential.

2) Or maybe traditional shared commodity hosting doesn't matter as much anymore. The VPS is essentially price competitive with generic hosting now. On the other hand, that's just cost in currency, managing your own virtual server often means more of a sysadmin/ops time investment (not always a gentle step). But then there's containers, and I wonder if managed standardized package configurations for them might finally mean the deployment story for other stacks is going to get as easy as PHP (or even easier).
Or go read the quora answer that instigated the article as it contains the images: http://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-jobs-do-software-engineers....
I haven't experienced one myself, but much of the inquiries about certain facts (including kjackson's) makes me wonder if there were some artistic liberties taken when writing this heartfelt story.
I love how he blames Obama. I had a different perspective on our last 2 presidents. I sold everything in the final 2 years of Bush's presidency then bought into the stock market shortly before Obama took office. I've never had to sleep at a Starbucks.
I'm not sure where you're getting this. The NSA is not a military organization. And all organs of the executive branch are bound by law and the Constitution.

They may get away with illegal behavior for a time, but that doesn't mean it isn't illegal.