andjones

This article seems to be picking on date / time manipulation within PHP. I don't see a database in use.

The title should say something about PHP not handling date/time correctly. This is nothing new.

I'm not positive if MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or similar would perform the same date and time manipulation correctly. However, I know from personal experience that MySQL handles date/times more consistently than PHP.

I'm curious to see if someone with more knowledge than myself can chime in on the issue.

Full article: https://www.google.com/search?q=In+Facebook+Deal%2C+Board+Wa...

I am not clear if the Klingon example was the author's (Matt Macari) or that was used by the Oracle lawyers.

Clarification?

What stories require 10s of millions of dollars to bring to life?

Perhaps I'm showing my ignorance of the film industry. But, what stories require 10s of millions to make?

Gold per ounce

1968 $39.31 2012 $1,750.00 (current price give or take)

http://www.nma.org/pdf/gold/his_gold_prices.pdf

Berkshire Hathaway one share

1968 $36.00 2012 $118,000.00 (current price give or take)

http://allfinancialmatters.com/2008/04/02/a-look-at-berkshir...

Which would you rather invest in?

Perhaps we choose dichotomies such as the article suggests because they serve as useful points for further discussion.

You offer many examples of companies that do not fit the two extremes of Spolsky's article. Where would you place them on the sliding scale you mention? Both have grown quickly and taken venture captial. I would place them more toward the Amazon side of the scale.

Very little in the world is black or white. Conflict and disagreement happens quite often. What you do about conflict and disagreement is the important part.

I actually quite agree that the BBB code of conduct is harmful. I'm not trying to argue for the code of conduct.

What bothers me about the article is that Fee Fighters is arguing from the point of a victim. Yes BBB has a harmful code of conduct, but Fee Fighters had a chance to review it and signed up for that.

> Nobody cares about the BBB code of conduct.

I don't understand this comment? This article is about how Fee Fighters lost their accreditation due to the BBB code of conduct? I think Fee Fighters cares about the BBB code of conduct. Many people who have upvoted this post and downvoted my original comment care one way or another I believe.

On the one hand Fee Fighters is fighting the "noble" fight, but they lose points for being so ideological.

BBB is a business and their terms are well known. Fee Fighters knew them and was required to abide by them and chose not to.

I do like that Fee Fighters is bringing this issue to bear. I'm personally not a fan of BBB. Pay to play doesn't seem like the incentives are aligned correctly. That and I can't afford their accreditation process for my business.

For those interested in this kind of story, and manipulation of markets in general, one of the best books I've read on the subject, published in 1923: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

http://www.amazon.com/Reminiscences-Stock-Operator-Edwin-Lef...

I have an issue with the general premise of this article.

Who is saying that javascript is web assembly?

I've only seen one comment in the comments so far, and its weak at that. Yes no human can read Google's javascript, but that says nothing about its efficiency, optimization, or correspondence with machine language. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2783060

I feel the title of this link is misleading. I think it should be titled "Follow your passion and the money will follow".

can you provide any sources please?

First, I do not believe this is the place to make a stand about our trust in humanity. I believe that is best left to philosopher who has all of human discourse to use.

My argument rests on the fact that Airbnb is moving closer to the average. Airbnb is moving closer to the average in the sense that they are attracting more people. After several million bookings, the general booking population will look more like the average in terms of disabilities, crime, unemployment, and many other imaginable statistics. Airbnb may not be quite there, but they are certainly growing closer.

The question becomes, how to improve trust as Airbnb moves closer to the average?

One such way is to implement trust systems. One such way is their existing feedback systems for people who use Airbnb. Hosts and renters alike can rate each other across several factors. Over time, one can develop a reputation that is accepted as a "I will do no evil". Heck, Airbnb could even reward these people with lower booking rates / larger cut as host.

Trust systems are fine for those who have earned trust within the system. How does one bootstrap trust in an increasing paranoid system? There is a cost associated with this in the sense of gaining references or examining the social network of a first time renter. After such examination the responsibility relies upon some host to have an increasingly long conversation with a first time renter. This can be done before or after booking. However at the end of the conversation, one ultimately relies on their own judgement, which means the conversation can be gamed.

In a future, Airbnb could work with outside systems. Airbnb could work with criminal databases, social information, along with associated other signals. All these approaches hint at a big brother approach where Airbnb is the ultimate judge and jury on who can host and/or rent. I don't see Airbnb being very popular in this approach.

In the end, I think Airbnb has the responsibility to make things right in this situation. In the future I think they have the responsibility to make things right while their business model relies on the trust of their customers. Increase awareness and increase their own detection measures to the extent that they do not become big brother.

Ultimately, I think things like this will continue to happen. However, the success (or failure) of the Airbnb billion+ business will depend on their response to such future events. Continue to make the host (the supply) happy and Airbnb will do well.

It's not illegal to manipulate the US Dollar as long as your name is the Federal Reserve.

Is it possible that those two events are connected?

I love the idea, however there is a fundamental problem with the way we ask for things that must be overcome:

Only those that think they deserve what they're asking for will ask. The problem boils down to self worth. If I truly believe that I am worth (a million dollars|to be funded|a beer|a lesson in rails), then I will get it [1]. In this sense, this tool does a great job of connecting a need to those who can possibly fulfill that need within your social network.

Those without the confidence to ask will be left in the dust. They will see this as another divisive tool between the haves and have nots.

If you can solve the problem of self worth, that is a billion dollar problem [2]. Its not a problem many of us in the start-up world consider. I think you must have a relatively high enough self worth to with stand failure and keep self promoting a start-ups.

We all deserve the very best in life. Some of the unhappy people I know are afraid to ask for the very best, or just don't think they deserve it. I think your tool is a step in the right direction.

[1] Within reason. If I ask for a trillion and believe I'm worth a trillion, I will get what I asked for. That is, my peer group will let me know that is silly.

[2] Also cooler than a million dollar problem

It sounds like you're more interested in programming languages in general. You might find these books interesting:

Essentials of Programming Languages http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-Danie...

The Little Schemer http://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/02...

The fact that many PHP projects end up in unmaintainable spaghetti code is a mark against the programmer and not the language.

Take your average PHP programmer and force him/her to code in Ruby and the same mess will result.

The fact that PHP has so many "noob" programmer is indicative of its success in creating so many great projects and websites. We have made PHP so easy that even your grandmother can do it.

From the article:

If you are capable of making wise software design decisions, PHP is a great choice to build your web application with.

The accessibility of PHP is its strength and downfall.

There exist so many third party libraries because of the low barrier to entry. But as more people join the party, the party moves toward the average. The average third party library is an untested and undocumented mess. I do not think this is specific to PHP.

Previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1733089

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799700

Mark Zuckerberg no longer owns 50% of the outstanding Facebook stock. He personally couldn't lose half of Facebook even if he wanted to?

This test shows what was valued - at least at Harvard - in the late 1800's. Greek and Latin were more important, as well as knowledge of geography of the known world and algebra and geometry.

Algebra and geometry, I feel, are still important today (see SAT). Greek and Latin are less important, although they are still in the background. The humanities have changed and we now learn about more modern authors / topics and the humanities classes in general have cooler names (i.e. Microcomputer Application in Kinesiology or Topics in African Society and Culture).

There's probably some bigger point I'm missing here like "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it" or something similar.

Teaching kids about how to conjugate Latin verbs or some other rote activity always seemed pointless to me. Perhaps I'm preaching to the choir, but learning about entrepreneurship or practicing selling things would have been much more useful to me than many of the things I learned in high school or undergrad.

indeed... see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2363697

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367132

thank you for quoting a source (bloomberg). I'd like to see more journalism/rants that quote some source for reference.

I think this a wonderful approach and I was taught at Indiana University.

Recursion helped me learn how to break problems apart. Working with lists and the list primitives all the time gave me a leg up in data structures. Anonymous functions taught me about abstraction. Macros taught me to write programs for clarity and let the machine do the rewrite work. Many of the analytical skills I learned from FP I carry over to programming in other languages and problems solving in general.

The biggest complaint heard was "I don't see how this applies in the real world". This is fair, the number of job listings out there that mention Lisp, Scheme, or Haskell are far outweighted by other languages (i.e. java, C, C#, PHP, etc).

I always responded that learning FP teaches you how to think about programming. One of those "give a man a fish / teach a man to fish". That response generally drew blank stares, but it's something I believe is true.

"deprives society of one great programmer in favor of one mediocre writer"

I'd say since you care about writing you will eventually excel at it. Of course, society will be the ultimate judge. But you have passion for writing and that matters more than society's perception about what you should be doing.

Wouldn't the median be a bit more useful? The highest selling apps will tend to skew the average upwards. The median would be more useful to determine what the average app creator might make.

I had the fortune of working with Jonathan Sobel at IU and hearing this story.

We were taught to translate a recursive program to continuation passing style in a way that many variables could be translated to registers directly. If I remember correctly, Jonathan translated this from Scheme to C and just compiled that result.

This a route I took last year for a client. I self represented and the clerks at the courthouse were friendly and helped where they could. In North Carolina, the cap for small claims action is $5000. Once my case was heard, it took 10 minutes between the start and a judgement in my favor. From start to finish though it took two months so as to serve a summons properly and allow time to appeal the judgement.

It helps if you've received checks from the company previously and can give the bank account information to a sheriff to collect for you.

My random musings from three years in CS grad school at UNC:

Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into two classes. The first class wanted the PhD as a means to an end, such as doing research, or getting a professorship. The second class had more abstract and less well-defined goals. Sometimes that meant generally "doing good for the world", or "seemed like the right thing to do", or "the working world sucks, this is the lesser of two evils".

I fell into the second class.

I spent three years doing computer science grad school at UNC. I passed my dissertation proposal and then decided to leave.

I don't resent those three years and did learn a few things along the way.

Getting a PhD is ultimately about getting 5 other PhD's to sign off on your dissertation. At least that's the requirement in computer science at UNC. I wish that had been more clear to me at the beginning.

Graduate school as a means of stalling to find something you love to work on is not a horrible way to go. In the meantime you might solve a few problems. I also consider it noble that we (graduate students) as a whole are willing to do the nation's research for such little pay.

Had I thought long and hard about why I was doing the PhD to being with, I may not have started. But life always charges its own tuition.

From the article "As long as you have an answer that you believe in passionately, then that's enough." My three years in graduate school taught me that the most. Find something you love, or least have passion and do that. It may be a silly belief, but it's worth believing in.