raamdev

I would really love to have an iPhone app that allows me to read and comment on HN (as opposed to just browsing with Safari). Something similar to the SFNetNews app for reading Slashdot, etc. I was thinking of writing one for HN since I haven't been able to find one and I figure it will be a good first-iPhone-app for me. :)

> I've gone through more change in the last 2-3 years than most of my life (I'm now 21). I would not even understand who I was 2 years ago, let alone last year.

I've noticed this as well and I think it might be a good indicator of how "set in our ways" we are becoming. Myself, I always feel like I'm so much smarter and more experienced than the "me" of 1 year, 1 month, and even 1 week ago. (When I read posts on my blog from years ago, I feel like I'm reading a stranger's blog!)

I continue to feel this way, so I take it as an indication that I'm still growing, learning, and understanding new things and seeing things from new perspectives. If I felt like I was no smarter or different than I was a year ago, I'd think something was seriously wrong!

If anything, programming helps us think abstractly -- definitely a good exercise for the the human brain.

I run a little web hosting business myself and from what I know about the industry most hosts should offer both at this point (with PHP5 as the default). If PHP4 is the default on your host, you can try adding this to an .htaccess file in the root directory of your site:

   AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php

If your host is running the latest version of CPanel, you should be able to access your control panel and change the default version yourself: Software Services -> PHP Configuration.

If that doesn't work, complain to your host and demand PHP5!

I'm really looking forward to Recess! I've been in the need of a PHP REST Framework for a small project and Recess seems to be the closest thing to what I need. All the other Frameworks seemed to have REST functionality "hacked" in, instead of being built with REST in mind.

I can't wait! :)

I think a lot of being "set in our ways" has to do with not accepting that we might be wrong about something, or that we might not fully understand something. As we age, we like to believe we know things and feel certain of the way things are. As an infant, we quickly learn about gravity and come to accept that it pulls things to the ground. We put our life in the hands of that belief when we learn to walk. When we start making decisions in life, we like to believe that we know enough to understand everything involved.

The older we age, the more we seem to be driven to find answers to things we don't understand. When we find answers that seem to fit we find comfort in locking them in place as pure fact, since they make future decisions that much easier. Children know they don't know, and therefore are more open to learning, growing, and changing. Keeping this process going as we age involves looking objectively at everything and never accepting one answer as the only answer.

I've already noticed myself being locked into a particular way: I've been anti-social my entire life and I grew to accept that. I was happy with it, and it didn't bother me. But recently I realized that the one thing I'm not good at should be the thing I work hardest at improving, otherwise how can I continue to grow in life? Children are playful because they're constantly curious, constantly asking questions. Hackers maintain this curiosity, this questioning mentality, which is exactly why they're the ones at the frontier of so many emerging technologies.

I'm only 26, so I'll just have to wait and see if my thinking is correct. :)

LOL, that's awesome! A few years ago I had a similar idea and registered googlefor.info, but like so many of my "site ideas", time got the best of it.

Now I just need to remember to letmegooglethatforyou.com'ify every question someone asks me before I tell them "just Google it!".

That's awesome! Thanks! I've got to find more articles like that one.

Or perhaps humans are lazy by nature and, since PHP does a very bad job of keeping us in line, the less disciplined of us end up writing bad PHP code. Of course, if we don't know how to write good code to start with, it's not PHP's fault. I think the simple fact that you can write good, elegant PHP code goes to show that it simply demands a more disciplined programmer (or a framework to help with that discipline).

FTA: "The researchers noted that previous experiments with flies found that bacterial infection threw off the insects' circadian rhythm, and not having this internal clock working properly made them highly susceptible to infection."

I wonder how much of an effect caffeine has on our circadian rhythm and how much that might be screwing with our health. I've looked around a little and haven't been able to find any studies on the two.

It wasn't the temperature, it was the combination of 4 inches of rain on Friday + just-below-freezing temperatures and wind. That combination caused crap-loads of ice to form on trees, wires, and even telephone poles (some poles fell over from the weight of the ice). There were seemingly healthy 18" trees that just fell over from the weight of all the ice, blocking roads and pulling down power lines with them.

My parents live in NH, at the end of a dead-end dirt road and they're probably going to be without power until Wednesday. I spent most of the weekend trying to keep their generator working for them (my hands still smell of gas). All the Home Depot's in the area are price gouging, selling the generators as they come off the truck for $200 more than they're normally priced (and only allowing one per-customer). I even heard that people were driving truck-loads of generators up from further South and selling them off the back of their trucks.

(I attempted to write something creative about all this on my blog if you're bored at work: http://tinyurl.com/5uyu6n)

I started programming when I was 12 and sadly my path to PHP looked something like this:

  QBasic -> Visual Basic -> HTML/CSS -> PHP

With what I know now (various bits of Java, C, bash, Python, OOP, etc), I wish so much that my path to PHP looked more like this:

  C -> Bash -> Java -> HTML/CSS -> PHP

Everyone who uses PHP professionally knows that it's extremely easy to write crappy PHP code. While PHP is easy for beginners to learn, it's equally as easy for them learn bad programming habits.

After 15 years, I'm finally putting in the time to learn the language I should have started with: C. I really wish it was the first language I learned because it would have made learning other languages so much easier (and learning those other languages would have made me a much better PHP programming when I started using it).

I believe every language has its uses and PHP is no different. While its a shame there is so much crappy PHP code out there, open-source projects like WordPress have shown it has its place. (If WordPress themes and plugins were not so easy for non-programmers to learn how to create and modify, I don't think WordPress would be where it is today.)

One of the coolest things about Twitter is how it allows you to see, in almost real-time, what huge groups of people are talking about.

You can see a map with where people are posting on Twitter from: http://twittervision.com/

You can see a real-time tag cloud showing what topics people are talking about on Twitter: http://www.twitscoop.com

And of course, you can search Twitter to see what people are saying about something: http://search.twitter.com

Case in point: A few weeks ago there was a Yahoo outage on the East-Coast for about 40 minutes. When I first discovered it, I searched Twitter for "Yahoo" and found a dozen people within the past minute complaining Yahoo was down. This quickly confirmed the outage for me.

These are just a few examples, but I think you get the idea. I rebelled against Twitter at first, but now I think it's awesome. The turning point for me was actually a Penny Arcade comic (http://tinyurl.com/6gh4lg) and the follow-up blog post (http://tinyurl.com/5c4zds) that made me realize (http://tinyurl.com/5tj2kk) I don't use Twitter for what they intended (to answer the question, "What are you doing?"). Twitter is exciting because the number of possible things it can be used for are nearly endless and the ways the data can be used are almost equally as endless.

Another awesome usage of Twitter that I've seen recently is the way site admins are using Twitter to leave status updates about the outage. They list their Twitter feed on the "We'll be right back" page, but since it's Twitter, people can choose to "follow" the user and get updates without visiting the site (if they enable "mobile updates", they'll even get notified via SMS). mininova.org is one site I've noticed using Twitter like this.

I use LiquidWeb (http://liquidweb.com) for managed servers, although they also offer colocation. Their datacenter is entirely self-owned and their technical support is outstanding. They always have very helpful, very knowledgeable technical people on-hand, at any hour. They're located in Lansing, MI.

I was home-schooled my entire life. I wrote everything on the computer; notes, todo's, letters, essays, everything. My dad is a writer and he would give me essays and books to grammar-check for him when I was young, so my English grammar is pretty good. My handwriting, however, is so embarrassing. I write in all capital letters and it looks like chicken-scratch. Hell, I can't honestly say I even know how to write all the cursive letters!

I'm 26 and I know my writing isn't going to magically get any better with time. I've been looking for good material to help teach myself how to handwrite, but I haven't found much. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place (or not hard enough).

If anyone has any suggestions for improving my handwriting, I would love to hear them. (I saw the post about the "Write Now" book, and I'm definitely going to pick that up.)

My co-worker wrote about the genius of the Obama campaign logo earlier this year:

http://www.herecomesthescience.com/2008/02/06/the-genius-of-...

He shows the other campaign logos for comparison and it's pretty amazing how similar the other logos look to each other.

I'm relatively new here, so thanks for the tip! I consider myself very science-oriented and I dislike religion. I didn't even realize my comment might be viewed as going "against the naturalistic worldview", but now I know better. :)

None taken. My dad is a writer by profession (he was a technical writer while I was young, and that lead me to computers and programming). He is by no means scientific in anything he says or does and he always taught me and my siblings to think for ourselves and never take anything as fact simply because someone said so.

I was just sharing that I thought it was amazing how there are texts (the Vedas) that have been around for thousands and thousands of years that basically state as fact the very stuff people are discovering today. Most people would agree that it's absurd to say that people even one thousand years ago knew about atoms and the big bang, and yet there seem to be books that say they did.

My dad does appear to assume a lot of stuff, and we have argued (debated) on topics for hours and hours. But as someone who believes that it's statistically guaranteed that we're not alone in the universe, I also believe it's equally as probable that people knew about, and wrote about, stuff we're "discovering" today.

For the past 26 years my dad has told me it has. He says this big bang is just one of many big bangs and that big bangs have been going on for an infinite amount of time (forever).

He also told me about particles smaller than atoms before quarks were moved from theory to fact. I never really thought much about all the stuff he told me until I started hearing of discoveries and theories about the same stuff.

He studies Sanskrit and the Vedas.

I've found when doing mass mailings the best solution is to use a service whose sole job is to insure your email gets delivered. I haven't used many such services, but Constant Contact (constantcontact.com) comes to mind. They provide things like tracking how many people viewed the email (by using HTML in the email to load a remote image, I believe), tracking link clicks inside the email, etc, though for your purposes it doesn't sound like this kind of service would be helpful.

In this world of spam paranoia, I've found it to be way too much trouble to do mass mailings yourself and expect to actually get around all the spam filters. Services like Constant Contact are paid to do just that, so your chances are much better.

I use AuthSMTP for all of my personal and business outgoing email and it's great (I've been using them for almost two years now). I've never had any downtime and they have a simple interface to view sent emails, so I can easily confirm an email was actually sent if I'm in doubt. The one or two times I've interfaced with their support, they seemed technically adept and were very helpful.

For my clients who insist on writing scripts to do their own mass mailings, I always recommend using AuthSMTP and simply writing the script to stay within AuthSMTP's stated volume guidelines (maximum of 50 recipients per single message, though they recommend keeping it to 10). Oh, and they do have a "Show Errors Logged" section that shows you all the emails that didn't go through.

* plants bomb and runs to the vi side