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adatta02on Higher Order PHP

It seems like what the PHP team really needs to do is drop backwards compatibility with PHP4+ (on the road map for 6 maybe?), clean up the OO implementation, and then implement closures and anonymous functions.

What they need to NOT do is ridiculous things like this http://news.php.net/php.internals/41374.

adatta02on Infinitecanvas

Pretty neat - according to the blog post (http://dragonosticism.wordpress.com/) it isn't a Seadragon app though

adatta02on Ask HN: What web framework(s) do you guys use?

symfony here also

adatta02on Ask HN: Which school do you attend?

Go Jumbos!

adatta02on How Difficult is it to Write a Compiler?

just to name a few: argument passing, process scheduling, register allocation, big vs little Endian - I realize this is a weak list but personally I expected more stuff to have some reasons behind the decisions.

adatta02on How Difficult is it to Write a Compiler?

After I took a compilers class (or an operating systems class for that matter) the thing that really stood out is how much stuff is dictated simply by convention or remains a "black art" where only a few people really understand how it works.

In any case, I'd venture to say writing a simple compiler should be pretty easy these days with tools like LLVM - http://llvm.org/ - and the slew of lexers/parsers available for different platforms.

adatta02on Poll: What experiment to run on AWS mechanical turk?

we used the Turk service to basically do OCR on about 3k images - http://shout.setfive.com/2008/11/20/artificial-artificial-in...

adatta02on Ask HN: Do you write more/better code when you are drinking/drunk?

I drink while I'm coding pretty routinely. I can't really tell if it makes me any more productive but it definitely holds up the programmer stereotype.

There is also that sense of urgency that you have to get stuff done before you get to drunk...

adatta02on Importance of Having Technical Knowledge Onboard

The issue seems to come down to trust. How can you trust any third party to be acting in your best interest?

The situation comes up anywhere where you don't have domain knowledge of the project. I've seen several people get burned by shody contractors, plumbers, mechanics, ect. It strikes me like finding a competent and honest development team reduces to the same problem.

Unfortunately, in this era of outsourcing and globalization it seems significantly more difficult to find a local development shop that someone can personally recommend.

adatta02on Artificial AI-Our experiance with AWS Mechanical Turk

sorry for not making it clear - the bitmaps all ready had text inside of them so we were basically looking for OCR.

adatta02on Ask HN: My host has me over a barrel. I've placed myself in a pickle. How to handle?

check out http://novanix.com/

I realize the website looks shady as all hell. But we use them for EVERYTHING and we've never had a problem. Their support is also top notch. Usually answers+fixes <30 mins.

adatta02on Ask HN: django vs php: a hard choice

check out the symfony framework for php - http://www.symfony-project.org/

It has MVC architecture, is decently fast, and has an active community behind it.

adatta02on Helpful Resources on Web Crawling?

solr might also be worth a look. http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ It's based on Lucene also but has JSON/XML connectors to alleviate some of the pain of using Nutch.

adatta02on Ask YC: Regex web search?

Google will also "fill in the blank" according to this http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&... matches "Olympics" but perhaps more interesting is http://www.google.com/search?q=Isaac+Newton+discovered+*&...