High doses of ketamine can temporarily switch off the brain, say researchers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/high-doses-of-ketamine-can-temporarily-switch-off-the-brain-say-researchers <comment><USER3> My experience with Ketamine was that it was simply _too much fun, too weird, and felt too good_ \-- I had to distance myself from it, regarding it like some kind of psychedelic heroin. I can understand why it's addictive.

However, it does have its purpose. I've heard of a lot of people cleaning up their lives through its application.

And reading about it is always fascinating -- Stanislav Grof: [https://realitysandwich.com/321100/my-ketamine-journeys- or-k...](https://realitysandwich.com/321100/my-ketamine-journeys-or-ketamine- and-the-enchantment-of-other-worlds/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, I honestly can say, that a hole dose of ketamine might change you in ways you can't comprehend before you go into it. It made me view consciousness as something special, not entirely captured by physical laws.

It is hard to explain, but beware before you enter. It changes you.

<comment><USER5> Would it have any therapeutic effect for people convicted of violent crimes? Even white collar crimes like embezzlement?

Obviously they'd have to volunteer for something like that but it'd be interesting to see if it changes them for he better or worse...

<comment><USER6> I'd be worried about the state endorsing or experimenting with this, even as a voluntary measure. Coming withing even an AU of normalizing pharmacologically 'correcting' asocial behavior could put us on a very dark path.

<comment><USER7> For better or worse, we're very much already on this path. We chemically 'corrected' 'asocial' behavior by chemically castrating homosexuals, the most high profile case being Alan Turing in the 1950's. He is believed to have later committed suicide.

Society's views on homosexuality have progressed since then, but there _is_ a bar for being gainfully employed and housed in the US. Unmediated, some mentally ill people are not able to meet that bar. Too asocial to hold down a job and thus too poor to afford housing. Medicated, they are. If the alternative to being medicated and a productive member of society is to be homeless or in prison, aren't we already there?

For those that are able to finding the right medication, it's life-changing. We should be very _very_ cautious about what the state can force people to do, but we should all strive for a society that's better equipped to handle and treat mental illness and the problems that stem from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> depression: have you tried turning it off and then back on again?

tongue in cheek, but i think the more we learn about mechanism of action the more it's not the worst 1st order approximation.

<comment><USER9> Ketamine, psilocybin and electro conclusive therapy are all similar in that regards.

Ect is the definitive treatment of resistant depression, but if you can get the same effect without requiring a psychiatrist, anesthesiologist, cna, respiratory, and nursing, why wouldn't you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was lucky / unlucky enough to have one ketamine experience due to a shoulder dislocation. I cannot stress highly enough that I would not recommend it unless you are highly tolerant of some disturbing stuff. It was a very short (under 15 seconds), very intense, forced experience of being in essentially an insect mind that was shunted along a path of thought and movement in a 2D maze with no options whatsoever. It led to a very dark place with a surprise ending that felt hopeless beyond anything I could have imagined. The punchline was I learned in real time that not only was I dying (in the trip, not in real life) but also that the entire universe did not actually exist and never had; it had all been an illusion and a lie. And as I was learning this everything shrank down to a point and blinked out, no time for questioning, all gone.

Fortunately at the same time a small part of me was watching the process from the side (in horror) and somehow at some level I had a distant inkling and ray of hope that it was all a trip. And then it was over and... extremely slow fade back to consciousness over 15 minutes or so. Very not recommended but very interesting.

<comment><USER11> .. and the part of you that watched all of this and was concious of it happening is the real you

<comment><USER12> That's my understanding of it as well. All this about the universe ending, never existing, being an illusion and a lie, that's just the collapse of a ego. The lie it tells us so that we fight for its continued existence is that the other side of it is some kind of horrific oblivion. Actually, the other side is a serene wholeness. It is the source of beauty.

The individual ego is a useful way for the universe to experience itself in a subject/object relationship and we should respect it for what it is, but a side-effect of confusing the real self with this flimsy thing is pain and suffering due to the delusion of separation.

I invite anyone who has had this experience, rather than compartmentalizing it as a bad thing, to try and integrate it into life in productive ways. It can lead to some really wonderful things.

<comment><USER10> Yeah I do try to take the good from it. Thanks for the comment.

<comment><USER11> Good and bad is simply perspective, my friend.

Go on Youtube and look for:

\- Eckhart Tolle - The park bench (and everything else)

\- Adyashanti - Enlightenment Unfolding (and everything else)

It takes years, but you'll come to terms with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So I'm no scientician, but 24mg/kg is like 1.5g for an average human. I'm pretty sure that this would not only turn of a humans brain, it may cause it to burst into flames as well.

<comment><USER14> The median lethal dose for people appears to be between 6g and 32g depending on method of administration.

[0] [https://erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/ketamine_faq.shtml](https://erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/ketamine_faq.shtml)

edit: After investigating, the source for this claim is the Merck Index from 1989, which is not readily available online. Anyone who would use the above information to determine the appropriate ketamine dose for themselves or someone else is a dangerous fool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hopefully people will have an open mind reading my comment, however within spiritual circles it is somewhat known that many people can't tolerate doing any type of entheogen too many times; what that amount of times is and dosing where you lose complete connection will be subjective. I'm also not trying to suggest all changes that occur after going through such an experience is the act of "losing your soul or connection to your soul" \- however that arguably is possibility at one end of the spectrum of possibilities. Some people seem fine doing Ayahuasca their whole lives, like shamans - whether they are now dependant on it and have regular access to it is another question, however other people through ego mind addiction (entheogens are powerful for breaking physical addictions, however are addictive for the mind) and force themselves into ceremonies or experience that they know they will regularly if not 100% of the time experience pure terror, not listening to their body's fear response for what it doesn't want to experience and is trying to guide them away from experiencing - instead their ego mind maintaining control and tricks them to continue; the body is inherently intelligent and part of the equation that needs to not be ignored to find balance and allowing your body's systems to guide you to optimal health, equilibrium.

<comment><USER16> > however within spiritual circles it is somewhat known

Writing things like this is really losses credibility for you.

<comment><USER15> Oh yeah? How else would you define the context of people who gather regularly in community in relation to spirituality or gatherings for ceremony? Curious what preconceptions and prejudices you have of who you classify that are automatically discredited in your mind because they use the term "spiritual circle" \- or am I misunderstanding what in that sentence discredits me?

Ever been to an Ayahuasca ceremony or talking circle? Just trying to get an idea of your own experiences.

<comment><USER17> Last time I had been in a spiritual circle in London there was a guy telling a bunch of single mothers that when he went to India he saw flying meditating yogis.

The funny thing is that the mothers were there for the company (it was a pleasant place to be, that's why I was visiting too); but the guy's assumption was that everyone visiting was literally an idiot because he thought they came there for his theories.

I am sorry but most of the time when I hear this another theory of mind (of which there's a bunch on Shroomery btw - you are not alone) and "spiritual circles" this is what I imagine you are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have undergone several ketamine treatments for depression. I have had 1 positive session out of 9 total.

Some trips were 'fun' others were not. My first experience with it was quite rough.

The positive experience went as follows: pure nothingness. (I refer to it internally as `#cat brain >/dev/null`)

It was incredible. Hope that I can silence all the noise in my brain. It was peace. It may have been zen. I've wanted to kill myself just so I can return to that level of peace. I haven't because I shouldn't. But it gives me hope that I won't feel this way forever.

I have tried a variety of audio therapy and cognitive direction while undergoing treatment to assist the process.

Examples include: (a) concentrated positive thoughts {thinking of a happy place/directed peaceful imagery} (b) "not thinking" just let the trip take me wherever it goes. {this may be the best course of treatment} (c) soothing sounds {nature sounds, music used while meditating, etc} (d) guided meditation

The most recurrent theme I experienced (the trips would include visual and auditory hallucinations) would be repeating geometric patterns and a techo/dub-step style of music. These were pleasant experiences that I didn't mind, although I felt that they didn't quite do the trick.

<comment><USER19> Hey there. I hope you're well on your way to feeling better/happy. Best of luck :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My personal empirical research agrees with the headline.

<comment><USER21> > _Six of the sheep were given a single higher dose of ketamine, 24mg /kg. > This is at the high end of the anaesthetic range. Initially, the same > response was seen as with a lower dose. But within two minutes of > administering the drug, the brain activity of five of these six sheep > stopped completely, one of them for several minutes - a phenomenon that has > never been seen before._

You have taken 24mg/kg of ketamine before? I find that nearly impossible to believe.

Approximately 15% of that dosage causes mammals to lose consciousness.

<comment><USER22> What would happen to a human taking such a big dose? Brain damage? Death? Permanent coma? And would the outcome be the same even if monitored by healthcare professionals? Or would they be able to stop the person from taking damage from it?

<comment><USER23> "Ketamine abusers are known to take doses many times higher than those given to the sheep in this research. It is also likely that progressively higher doses have to be taken to get the same effect. The researchers say that such high doses can cause liver damage, may stop the heart, and be fatal."

<comment><USER24> It is _really_ hard to find a fatality attributed to ketamine. Recreational users are known to take heroic doses. This sounds like pure speculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not surprised, vets already have been using ketamine to anesthetize reptiles.

<comment><USER26> It's used to sedate humans, too: [https://www.denverpost.com/2019/10/14/ketamine-sedative- law-...](https://www.denverpost.com/2019/10/14/ketamine-sedative-law- enforcement-elijah-mcclain/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've been working for a Ketamine Clinic the past few months, and it's fascinating to learn about (bunch of good resources here: [https://www.fargoketamineclinic.com](https://www.fargoketamineclinic.com) ). While it can be incredibly addicting, it's also opening new research into solving depression. Because it works differently than traditional antidepressants by targeting the NMDA receptors and binding to them to increase glutamate, it could vastly help people with treatment resistant depression. The problem is that with high doses like this article suggests, it can be dangerous. So it's a complicated area.

</comment><comment><USER28> It feels like most drugs change your mood or appear to change your environment. The thing about k-hole level doses of ketamine is that it feels like it transports you to another place entirely - lot's of people speak of feeling the presence of multiple universes and timelines, and of feeling like they are moving between them.

I have a friend who, after his first k-hole experience, was completely in awe of life and the universe for some time afterwards. He would become emotional and choked up talking about the beauty of it.

He was also half way convinced that ketamine would allow him to travel through space and time to anywhere while in the hole. He couldn't wait to throw himself back into a hole so he could travel the torrent of the universe stream and explore further.

Nobody here has mentioned Erowid yet - I highly recommend it if you want to read more about people's experiences while on ketamine, or indeed any other drug.

</comment><comment><USER29> The spiritual experiences on ketamine and other arylcyclohexylamine are _intense_. Far more intense for me than any other drug I've tried. I've had unexplainable experiences as well, where information retrieved in the drug state turned out was accurate.

<comment><USER30> That's the wonderful thing about drugs: they trigger the areas of the brain that normally signal an insight or epiphany, but without the hassle of having an actual epiphany. In reality you're lying motionless on the floor for hours thinking nothing.

<comment><USER31> Ages ago my next older brother told me that when he smoked pot he liked to sit and think because he had deep insights, and the right answer to what he was considering was clearer than in a sober state.

He didn't smoke around me and I hadn't (and still haven't) smoked pot. One Saturday night he came home and it was obvious he was pretty baked. That is when he dropped one of his insight bombshells on me: Stevie Wonder is the Frank Sinatra of our generation.

I had the same though you just made: maybe it wasn't that he had clearer insights, just the perception of it because other thoughts that might contradict the conclusion didn't cross his mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if this could be used in the treatment of brain injuries. Let's say someone comes into the ER with a brain bleed / stroke - could they induce a brain shutdown to help prevent further damage, while they worked on the injury?

<comment><USER32> That's an interesting thought. I wonder if there are any parallels with how hypothermia can be induced to preserve brain function (following a period of hypoxia)?

<comment><USER28> That's exactly the thing that spurred my thinking :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> And people dancing on large doses of Ketamine clearly have little brain intervention.

The K Hole must be the plug hole of one's mind

<comment><USER34> Dancing on ketamine is such a foreign concept to me. At low doses, its more like sit quietly because my muscles are so relaxed and at high doses (still low doses compared to the article) its lie on the floor while falling through the void. I couldn't imagine physical activity in either case.

<comment><USER35> There are multiple forms: esketamine, arketamine, and a racemic mixture of both of those. Es type is much more effective as anesthetic than other types so user could experience the hallucinogen effects while remaining sort of mobile.

<comment><USER34> Sort of mobile, sure. I've been able to walk around on it. A bit wobbly, but doable. Dancing would be a level of exertion beyond that though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> s/temporarily/permanently

I partied a lot as a kid and this is a lethal dosage for humans.

<comment><USER14> The median lethal dose for humans appears to be between 6g and 32g depending on the method of administration.[0] Drugs have different median lethal mg/kg dose ratios across species.[1]

[0] [https://erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/ketamine_faq.shtml](https://erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/ketamine_faq.shtml) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose#Examples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose#Examples)

edit: After investigating, the source for this claim is the Merck Index from 1989, which is not readily available online. Anyone who would use the above information to determine the appropriate ketamine dose for themselves or someone else is a dangerous fool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is the person still the same person?

<comment><USER38> There's no such thing. We are different people second by second.

<comment><USER39> That must be annoying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> isnt ketamine a horse tranquillizer lol, doesnt seem like a stretch for it to be an anesthetic

<comment><USER41> It is indeed a horse tranquilizer; it works across species, in cats, dogs, humans, and probably myriad others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Why not post the actual source, rather than some second-hand clickbait?

"Characteristic patterns of EEG oscillations in sheep (Ovis aries) induced by ketamine may explain the psychotropic effects seen in humans"

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66023-8?error=coo...](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66023-8?error=cookies_not_supported&code=8efd8d81-a3eb-4044-8208-2ea77d5a0eac)

<comment><USER43> ...seems like the official press release of the paper so quite okay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Enough of anything can _permanently_ switch off the brain.

I really wish scientific reporters would at least attempt to use meaningful language in their headlines.

<comment><USER45> > But within two minutes of administering the drug, the brain activity of five > of these six sheep stopped completely, one of them for several minutes - <USER2> > phenomenon that has never been seen before.

...

> "A few minutes later their brains were functioning normally again - it was > as though they had just been switched off and on."

Headline seems spot-on to me. What exactly is your gripe?

<comment><USER46> I think he's had too much ketamine.</comment></comment></comment>


Switching gears, Canada's BlackBerry to open autonomous vehicle hub - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-blackberry-autos-idUSKBN14801N <comment><USER2> Yes, because I'd like to get a self-driving car from a company that is known to support legalized backdoors.</comment>


Ask HN: Review our startup: Mugasha - A better way to listen to electronic dance music - <AUTHOR> http://mugasha.com/YC-Hackers

<comment><USER3> This is sad.

I actually love electronic dance music.

But.. I clicked twice, ended up on a page full of from to fill out, and just didn't have the energy to go through with it 'cuz I had no idea what the point was. So as my 4yo (who used all said energy up) would say.. I x'd it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is pretty lazy IMHO. Its a beta site, read the comments above on why there is a login.

<comment><USER3> Now that I came back to HN for my morning fix and made it through the form:

1\. Seems to only have trance-y stuff, not the general electronic dance music (e.g. search for popular non-trance artists: Pendulum, Prodigy, or Aphex Twin). The only problem with that is the expectation from the description.

2\. On my browsers (Safari, FF3), the sets search edit box isn't clickable / won't take focus. I can only search tracks and artists.

3\. How does this help me? Is it just a nicer interface than Amazon's? I frequent sites like <http://dnb-sets.de> to listen to music. I suppose this is a compelling argument for pandora to take mixed sets into their playlist?

Now, I've closed it because I don't see a reason to use it. This is a major problem because I figure I'm probably the best consumer you can imagine for this. I love this music. I listen to it online for literally hours nearly every day. I'm very hungry to find new stuff to listen to, have it available to listen to again (I had physical media storage problems back when raves were big), and I'm happy to pay ridiculous sums for the service (e.g. i'd pay $10 just to know the name of the D&B song from 1-2 years ago with certain fight club samples#, and if I couldn't quickly find a mix with it online, maybe $25 for an mp3 of it).

If the site had a much broader range of music, and at least 100x more of it, I might use it. Even then, you'd need a compelling reason for me to stick around on your site (e.g. making it easy for me to find tracks I don't know what they are and buy them... or sucking in zillions of mixes and indexing them continuously in a way more convenient than others do).

___

# example sample, Tyler Durden: "You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you." This isn't the more common tune you'll find in your quick search. Like I said, I'm serious, I want this tune.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really appreciate your feedback. All your points are valid. The search box is disabled on the set page to keep the UI consistent but that functionality is not built yet. You again make a valid point that there isnt much content on the site. Relatively. Yes, Electronica is huge, there are literally dozens of genre. We really wanted to launch the service at a certain level before investing the time in covering different genres. It will come, eventually and hopefully you will return to the site.

Once again, this is exactly the kind of feedback I wanted and expected from the HN community. Cheers.

<comment><USER4> You might want to indicate at first that you're focusing on certain genres (trance, it seems). The first several searches that I tried (for techno) returned nothing. Managing expectations there seems like it could be important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why do you slap me in the face with a full page sign up form, without giving me any clear benefits to signing up?

<comment><USER6> I think he isn't trying to court you guys as a consumer, but rather as fellow hackers to test his beta site. You guys should cut him some slack — I always thought YC was a positive environment, but all your comments are incredibly unhelpful and just showcase your personal laziness.

BTW, this is site is FREAKIN' AWESOME!!!

It has a bunch of live DJ sets that you can listen to and even allows you to jump between tracks. It's for people that enjoy trance music and are tired of having to constantly find new sets.

Good job man, keep up the good work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know whether this is a usability issue or not. But, I really don't like the extra long input text area:

This issue is quite critical on acquiring new users. A good read on designing sign up form.

[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/04/web-form- design-p...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/04/web-form-design- patterns-sign-up-forms/)

[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/08/web-form- design-p...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/08/web-form-design- patterns-sign-up-forms-part-2/)

<comment><USER8> Few more usability comments related to sign up:

"Login" should be "Username" (username is used on the login form)

"Name" should be "Full Name" or dropped altogether

Log me in when I register, there's no reason to have me retype my details

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get what it does after reading your front page and about page. Why should I sign up?

<comment><USER4> It feel like this is another case of slogans gone wrong. "Music. Gather. Share." Huh?

It seems like the message should be something like, "Listen to full DJ sets, searchable by track."

<comment><USER9> Ahh that would be awesome. I have always wanted the ability to have a set annotated, so that i can replay my favs and skip to certain sections easily - is this what it does?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea pretty much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish you could browse the available sets and DJs without signing up for an account. To force me to do that is a bit of a pain. I'd rather go back to doing some "real work" than to go through the trouble of signing up so I can explore your new site quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is the idea. I dont't like signing up for accounts either. The only reason we have account signup right now is for the beta period. Essentially to understand how people are using the site and to make fixes accordingly. When we launch we want it to work perfectly, right now its far from that.

<comment><USER11> Now you understand how people will use the site: they will look at it, not instantly understand why it's worth giving personal information to, leave, and tell their friends it's not worthwhile.

If you want to track interaction, just give everyone a cookie (or Flash cookie, nearly nobody clears those) and watch behavior by that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love it! I like listening to live sets, but I'm always annoyed when I want to know what a certain track in the middle of a set is. If you're lucky you can find a breakdown of the set list, but this is way better than even that.

 _[me goes to unsubscribe from electronic music podcasts in iTunes]_

Now, just make it so you can continue browsing the site without interrupting the currently playing track/set. You could do that with frames, or by loading content using AJAX (that's what <http://www.thesixtyone.com/> does)

</comment><comment><USER13> I've always wanted a GUIDE to good electronica, techno, dance etc because I know I like it, I just don't know whats good... so it sounds like your site may help me! Right now I'm listening to some random tracks I've found... so far so good....

The UI is nice, one thing that would help, though I'm spoiled, is how on the new playlist.com website you can browse music without interrupting your player stream.

</comment><comment><USER14> The title of the 'forogt password' page is misspelled :)

I love this by the way. I always listen to long trance mixes while progging..

</comment><comment><USER15> i tried signing up a few times but couldn't make it work. username too short, then the invite code disappeared on the retry page. i tried going back to step 1 and it still wouldn't let me sign up.

<comment><USER16> ditto.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just increased the number of incites. "hackersftw" is the invite code

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone else feel that the play/pause button is backwards? For me, the button displays the "Play" arrow when the music is playing and it shows the pause button when it is paused. I know that sounds like how it should be, but I think that's the reverse of most other players that show the Play button when music is not playing, and, after clicking, the music begins and the button switches to give you the option to pause.

Also, I noticed that the album art was constantly flickering for me.

(I'm using FF 3.0.5 on OS X 10.5.6)

</comment><comment><USER18> I was only able to get two of the sets to play. Every other one sits at 0:00 with the play button clicked. Added it to my Flashblock whitelist, but the flash bar was way below the player, which was weird. The player should be able to pop out or iframe or something so that you can browse while listening. How do I gather and share? You should pre-check the buy links so they could go to Amazon, itunes, Juno, or wherever, based on who has it. Many tracks are hard to find mixes.

<comment><AUTHOR> could you post a screenshot of what you are seeing?

<comment><USER18> Everything looked fine, but for the sound of silence. I hit play and it stayed on 0:00.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks great, but... I can't seem to get any sound out of it? I click the Play button, and absolutely nothing happens.

It's disappointing, since I actually want to use it :p

Tried it in Chrome and Firefox 3 so far.

Small side note: log me in right after I register! Especially if you don't require email confirmation. It's a minor one-time irritation, but any friction you can remove, especially at the beginning of a user's experience, is worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> What flash player do you have? You should have 9 or above

<comment><USER19> WIN 9,0,115,0

according to [http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn...](http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507)

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm. could you try updating it with the latest one?

<comment><USER19> Upgraded to WIN 10,0,12,36 - works now.

Edit: about 15 minutes into a set, it stopped playing with no explanation, although the time elapsed changed to NaN:NaN:NaN. Changing tracks or fiddling with the controls couldn't get it going again, but reloading the page did.

Love the concept, and I'm going to keep using it, but it seems to need a bit more QA :p

<comment><AUTHOR> our streaming server went down an hour ago. We definitely need to test more.

<comment><USER20> Why are you using a streaming server? Stream over http, save on a little infrastructure since the files are generally going to be easily consumable by most broadband connections due to their small sizes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love this.

A couple of things.

1.1 The invite a friend form is broken. 1.2 Could I invite multiple friends using the same form?

2.1 Why are you searching for music like this at Amazon.com? I think you would have much better luck using beatport.com.

I just started using this right now; I'll keep you posted when I have more comments.

Thanks for creating this.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's broken about the invite form? Could you take a screenshot. I have noticed sometimes if you load the page and click on invite friends too soon it takes you to a white page with a blank form. This is because the JS hasn't finished loading. I'll have a fix for that soon.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, that's exactly what was happening. It's working now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks nice. I'm into this sort of music, so I'll use it for a few days and tell you if I have any problems/changes/ideas

:-)

</comment><comment><USER23> I wish you the best of luck. My momentum ran out with the signup form. And I like electronic music.

But regardless, congratulations! You got something up and running, and the custom link greeting page was a very nice touch. Please give us updates + progress reports.

</comment><comment><USER20> \- Let me queue up dj sets. \- Give me a desktop player so I can listen without keeping firefox open. \- Not clear why I have to create an account since I can't do anything with it other than leave comments

Have you checked out soundcloud?

</comment><comment><USER24> I can't seem to type anything on this page: <http://mugasha.com/browse/sets>

The input box has a highlight but when I click on it, I can't type anything at all.

</comment><comment><USER25> Every single set listed is eurotrance. Many even play the same tracks. Furthermore, they are all from established DJs. When does the 'upload set' feature make it in, and truly democratize techno music?

</comment><comment><USER26> I want a play button on the home page. Doesn't really matter what, but I want to get something happening without figuring out navigation.

</comment><comment><USER27> Looks like great progress since TC50 Akshay! Going to take the app for a spin in more detail tomorrow. I'll send feedback.

<comment><USER27> Here you go:

1\. Flow of the signup form. I think this was mentioned before, but the "login" field should be titled "username" since you have it on the login field to the right.

2\. Can you add a lighter color to the footer? I think it may look better with three variants of the black on the page.

3\. Can you direct me to a tour of what Mugasha does, rather then pointing me to text with a "Find out more" pointing me to an "About" page with copy? Give me a guided tour, show me what it is and why it's useful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Buy track by track?? Why?

I listen to whole sets, not single tracks... why have a per-track buy button?

<comment><USER29> I agree. If I'm listening to a good set I'm much more likely to "buy set" than I am to take the time to buy them one at a time. "Buy set" option highly suggested.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can't really buy sets. Sets are basically podcasts that are mixed by DJs weekly for promotional purpose. Unless we collaborate with sites like Beatport or Juno to make this happen.

<comment><USER28> I understand that, but as it happens, sets (and mix CDs which are basically less often released, higher quality sets) are the only thing I listen to as far as electronic music is concerned.

I do not listen to progressive house in single tracks. That doesn't even begin to make sense - progressive house is all about the progression across a set.

The input of a DJ in selecting, arranging, mixing the tracks into a set is what makes electronic music great to me. I would not buy single electronic music tracks, but I might consider paying for a subscription that would give me access to vast amounts of sets by the likes of John Digweed, Anthony Pappa, Sasha, Dave Seaman, Mirel Jarca, Nick Warren, Danny Howells, etc...

Also, worth noting, if I can't download them to my computer in a DRM-free format, those sets are absolutely worthless to me. However, I'd be very willing to pay a subscription fee (even with a - reasonably generous - <USER2> on the number of sets that I can download. In fact, I used to subscribe (for money) to freshlymixed.com, and all they did was record and republish Digweed's kiss100 mixes and the Essential Mixes from BBC 1.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I am really happy to hear that you are interested in those features. A lot of the things you mentioned are planned and will eventually come into play. We are young right now, but we are definitely here to grow. Cheers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The blog page gave me a 406 error in internet explorer (ver number 7.0.6001.1800. vista).

<comment><USER30> Using XP at home, I can't register, it gives multiple errors, and using the password recovery page, it gives the following error: _A password reset link was not sent, you may have enetered an invalid email address._ (typo on original page).

<comment><USER30> Errors when trying to register:

 _Invitation is required_

 _Invitation has already been taken_

I used the link in the original post. If you want to send me an invite, use my nick/handle at yahoo dot com. I'd also use the same nick/handle as the login name as I post here with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Somehow, after I click to listen a track, it breaks the "back button". ff3.05 osx

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, that is a problem. Silly SWFAddress... Its on the list ;)</comment></comment>


"Two Scoops of Django" is out in beta - <AUTHOR> http://pydanny.com/two-scoops-beta-released.html

<comment><USER2> I picked this up the day it came out and I have been super impressed with the frequency of the updates that have been made. The book is very well written and useful. It also covers 1.5, which is great.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I've been using Django for a few years now and I've been learning new things from it.

Particularly helpful as I'm starting to transition to Class Based Generic Views in some of my projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> django is an ecosystem begging for a cookbook of tips and tricks. There is surely something in this that I don't know.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of HN Christmas 2011 theme? - <AUTHOR> My first comment would be about black colored links are not readable on maroon backgrounds. <comment><USER2> Love the colored numbers! Not a big fan of the title bar because maroon and black don't mix too well (at least on my screen).

<comment><USER3> I seem to only have colored numbers. My topbar is still orange.

<comment><USER4> You've probably hit the karma threshold where you can set the top bar to any color, and have the default color set (if you go to your profile page there would be a "topcolor" field)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title bar it too dark and definitely did not scream Christmas to me; it wasn't until I noticed the colored numbers that I realized what it was. I'd suggest dropping the title and just going with the numbers.

<comment><USER6> Same here, I noticed the title bar first, was somewhat confused as to what the color change was for (though I assumed Christmas), and then I saw the numbers.

If it's really necessary to do something for Christmas why not just a small tree next to the logo, or perhaps replacing it. Changing the color scheme to me doesn't really add much Christmas flair to anything, it just makes the familiar design more jarring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> yay numbers, boo top bar.

</comment><comment><USER8> That 'Christmas burgundy' #BE2828 is the wrong color. You need a 'Santa-suit' red. Maybe, #DC0000? Merry Christmas to all!

</comment><comment><USER9> I assumed all the GoDaddy stories were just being highlighted in red for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER10> How about just a simple Christmas Tree icon near the Ycombinator logo?

The color simplicity is one of the best things of HN's design.

</comment><comment><USER11> I agree with most of the comments, like the numbers, either drop the top bar or make it a brighter red

</comment><comment><USER12> I dig the numbers and am somewhat ambivalent about the top bar. It doesn't really bother me, though.

</comment><comment><USER13> I didn't notice it until I saw someone mention it. I never look at HN when I visit HN.

It's OK.

</comment><comment><USER14> Kind of hard on the eyes if you ask me. The contrast is off.

</comment><comment><USER15> how is this topbar Maroon color and those green/red numbers related to Christmas? I am not from US, so I might be missing something?

<comment><USER3> I have no clue what is with the maroon topbar but red and green are traditional Christmas colors in the US.

<comment><USER16> I wonder how colour-blind folks feel about it...

<comment><USER3> I'm slightly color-blind (not red-green, something not well known and milder and somewhat treatable with the right supplements, so less so than I once was) and I have a crappy monitor in that regard on my netbook (I know because I have seen the green newbie names on a better monitor and it is much more visible there than here). Plus my topbar is only maroon when I hit "reply". So I had not noticed it until people began commenting. If I look closely, I can tell the numbers alternate color.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yeah, drop it please.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't like it.

</comment><comment><USER19> relax people. it's just for the holidays.

</comment><comment><USER20> Phew, I was scared, thought it was some kind of warning/ban. Thank you for telling me this. A commemorative theme should be lighter.</comment>


Is a Shorter Web Address Worth Big Money? bit.ly Raises $2M - <AUTHOR> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090330/is-a-shorter-web-address-worth-big-money-bitly-raises-2m/?mod=ATD_rss <comment><USER2> Not a fan of this investment. Shorting a URL is a good with many substitutes and limited consumer lock in (unless you count bookmarks, which could be easily replaced).

EDIT: Guys, on Hacker News you shouldn't downvote comments you disagree with. You should only down vote comments that add nothing of value to the conversation. My position is very well reasoned out. And as for real time analytics, that's a good with a lot of substitutes as well. The referer given by your web browser for example?

Also, if knowing the click through rates for tweets ever becomes a market with money in it, Twitter can spend 500K to buy another one of the millions of URL shorteners out there and integrate it into their service. If their entire business model depends on analytics for Twitter, they are waiting to get stomped on by Twitter's tens of millions of venture capital.

<comment><USER3> It's about the real-time analytics, not the length of the URL

<comment><USER4> That's a big maybe. I'd wager that a small percentage of the people who use bit.ly to shorten links are actually using the metrics. And I agree that bit.ly could probably be cloned trivially. There's no network effect, so there's no real reason to use bit.ly over any other service.

<comment><USER5> Growing 10% per week. So there's SOME network effect. ;-) They aren't buying adwords!

I think the play is in the aggregate data... i.e. take the most linked to stuff, toss it on a page, and you have Digg without the voting (good content theoretically bubbling up).

All that said, I'm not a huge fan of the investment-- certainly could be big, but it's fairly challenging to imagine it as huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well as they mention midway through the article: it's not the URL, it's the analytics.

Number of followers is a very coarse metric for twitter popularity, it would be very useful to know click-through rates to gauge which content draws more viewers. Right now it's hard to tell which updates "sell" better than others.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. It's the only reason I use bit.ly; so that I have a basic gauge on how many people clicked through, and when.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Dumb question:

I understand how URL shorteners work (hash the URL)

however, how do they make money?

<comment><USER9> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508278>

Really, really good discussion there.

<comment><USER10> Even better discussion if you read the entire topic: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508132>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't really know whether this will pan out or not, but I do find it really strange how people defend this move with "examples" like twitter and facebook. Even if we assume that these are valid comparisons, we do realize that neither Facebook nor Twitter is really a success yet and the jury is still out on both of them right? Unless you're using "being able to endlessly raise VC" as your metric of success, then there is still no guarantee that they will actually generate tons of money and match their valuations. For all we know this completely twice-removed model of generating profits _doesn't_ work, and thus using them as shining examples isn't that prudent.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think the key misunderstanding here is judging bit.ly (or any other company's) value by whether/how much money VCs invest in them.

VCs raised money which they now are expected to invest. They don't know what will end up a good investment, since they don't have some future-predicting sixth sense that the rest of us lack. Bit.ly has some buzz around it, a few A-list bloggers mention it occasionally and the word "Twitter" can be seen in a few places on its front page, so it gets dropped $2m.

I'm not being sarcastic here - these are valid reasons to invest, the same features might help the VC flip it later to, say, Twitter for $10m. (And there's always AOL! :)

<comment><USER13> _I'm not being sarcastic here - these are valid reasons to invest, the same features might help the VC flip it later to, say, Twitter for $10m. (And there's always AOL! :)_

Cynism at its best. A stupid investment can be justified when there's reason to believe that someone even _more_ stupid will come around to bail you out later. Don't get me wrong, I do see the truth in this statement. I also find it deeply disturbing.

<comment><USER12> From the VC perspective, they're doing their job - getting a return on the investment. I agree it's disturbing, because ultimately it's a bubble, which is then followed by bust and so on... It makes for interesting times, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The amount of money a "Web 2.0" site raises is inversely proportional to the value of the service it offers.

<comment><USER15> Does that mean a bootstrapped, unfunded start up (like, say, recent Ask HN candidate ChuWe) delivers infinitely more value than Facebook?

sgroves will be happy to hear that!

<comment><USER14> How do you calculate the value of Facebook and ChuWe?</comment></comment></comment>


Evil Google Waiting on Line One - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2015/09/07/evil-google-waiting-on-line-one/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand. Is Cringley really so clueless that he believes these calls are _actually_ from Google?

Of course not, he's an adult human who lives in the U.S., speaks English, and has a telephone. He's been around this block before.

So what axe is he grinding by posting this silly faux rant? He doesn't like Google. Ok, many reasonable people don't.

But he might as well be on Google's PR payroll for this one -- anyone who can fog a mirror will dismiss these shrill accusations and disregard the accuser, which imparts some credibility to the accused.

So, wtf?

<comment><USER3> So he's assuming they are from Google (because they say that they are). Do you have some inside knowledge that these calls are not actually from Google?

Several commenters take your position but at least one strongly does not.

<comment><USER4> These are known scams. Google does not call businesses telling them to sign up so they can remain indexed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an unfortunately common phone scam. [https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/2952493?hl=en](https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/2952493?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER6> I've received these calls myself. I don't think they are really from Google but from some spammy SEO company.

I also have been assuming that the reason I received a call in the first place is due to my contact information being linked to a domain name that I own.

</comment><comment><USER7> You wouldn't believe how many defunct corporations in Delaware have 'google' in the name, often together with other spam words such as 'cash'.

</comment><comment><USER8> He is trolling, right?

</comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, and Microsoft called to let me know that my computer is sending out spam, and they needed my help to let them log on.

I hate it when Microsoft does that!</comment>


The Complexities of Implementing Inline Autocomplete for Content Editables - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/streak-developer-blog/the-complexities-of-implementing-inline-autocomplete-for-content-editables-e358c0ed504b <comment><USER2> We (Streak) recently rebuilt one of our most popular features which relies on providing autocomplete suggestions in a content editable and were surprised at some of the complexities. Thought we'd write it up for others.</comment>


Smart-contracts, game theory and a lottery that may never end - <AUTHOR> This is not another take on how blockchain will change the world. Or Business. Or Finance. Or any of that nonsense.
Blockchains let you write applications that no one owns or controls. Applications that are essential unstoppable.
One of the more dangerous yet intriguing smart contracts released recently I think could bear a wider introduction.
It's hard to sum up all at once but basically: part psychological experiment, part economic blackhole.
There is a large cryptocurrency prize pool. There is 12:00 hour time that is constantly decreasing. Once this timer runs out, the last 100 participants win a share of the prize pool Current this is around ~$17,000 USD per person in the top 100. To get in the top 100 list, you have to purchase "gift boxes". These are essentially tickets that increase in redeemable value as more money flows into the game. Every gift box purchase adds more money to the final pot, and also increases the timer by 2 minute + 30 seconds / box. For example, if someone purchased 10 boxes, then the timer would increase by an added 7 minutes (2 minutes plus 5 minutes). Ticker price is currently only ~$0.30 USD, making it fairly trivial for one player to add a large increment to the current time.
Obviously this is a variant of a pyramid scheme, as early investors are disproportionately rewarded.
How will this end?? How many people will pay $0.30 for a chance to win ~$17,000 USD? Also the more people that enter, the larger the pot is and the more attention there is preventing the clock from reaching zero...
Is all the money entering this game essentially stuck forever? Is this a lottery that gets bigger and bigger but no one every wins?
https://just.game/ https://justgame.hostedwiki.co/pages/FAQ <comment><USER2> Don't worry. It won't get stuck forever. The anonymous founder of the game will probably run away with the money when there is a lot in the pot. I predict 10 million in the pot before that happens.

<comment><USER3> If you were going to take the money and run you would be better off doing it sooner rather than later. A law enforcement agency probably isn't going to do too much investigation for $20k but $10 million might get someone turning over some stones

<comment><USER4> Really? I mean, do smart contracts actually hold any legal standing at all? If it does, under what jurisdiction? Who are the victims?

If it gets big enough I can imagine some anti terrorist groups like the NSA or FBI making sure the money isn't used for that. I can definitely see the IRS potentially looking into it. But deep down, if the person who takes the money shows there was no real contract and he was just collecting it, what more could be done?

<comment><USER3> That is exactly what I mean. For $10,000 I don't think anyone is going to be looking for the answers to those questions. For $10,000,000 people might start asking these questions.

I definitely do think that what was described would be illegal in most districts in the US. Forget about the implementation. The organizer says "Hey bid on the jackpot, the last bidder gets to take the whole thing." and then they walk away with the jackpot. The question is who's laws did the organizer break?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Look at PHP's Continuing Evolution - <AUTHOR> https://www.acquia.com/blog/look-phps-continuing-evolution <comment><USER3> This article is important because there are still so many people who talk about how bad PHP is, based on their knowledge of some version from years ago.

There was (another) recent Ruby vs. PHP Bashfest some months ago that was essentially:

"PHP sucks. It can't do X...oh, it can? Well, it can't do Y...oh, it has been able to since 3 major release ago..well, it can't..."

PHP is far different than you probably think it is. I also can't help but feel that a huge number of they people who naysay it are only parroting things they don't even understand - I rarely hear them explain precisely why such and such quirk in the language is bad for programming

<comment><USER4> To give a serious answer to this: While you are right that php bashing isn't always rooted in informed objectivity, the point you're making is missing something deeper.

It's sort of like when that person with a crush on you who you just don't like but who insists that if you really got to know them everything would be different. It's just not true.

Even if could prove a 1 to 1 correspondence between features of ruby and php, php would still be... ugly. It would still lack grace. The feeling of looking at a page of php code just wouldn't be as pleasing. I believe it is this raw, irrational difference, this visceral reaction to the physicality of the code, and not a misunderstanding of features (even if they are misunderstood) that accounts for the most of the hate you allude to.

<comment><USER5> I personally think if you have raw, irrational, visceral reaction to programming languages, there's some priorities problem here. Those are tools. You're supposed to use them, not fall in deep emotional love (or hate) with them, that's what you do with people, not tools. I know this opinion may be unpopular and I know people do fall in love with tools (and use people) but I think they're doing it all wrong.

<comment><USER6> Tools should be designed to fit with humans; the goal is to minimize how much humans have to contort themselves to fit their tools.

There'll always be some degree of learning and adjusting. But a mallet is still an improvement over a rock, because it's designed to fit in a human hand. I doubt anyone scoffed at the mallet and blogged that rocks have 80% market share so why can't we just get over it already.

<comment><USER5> That's fine. People have different needs and preferences. Some drive Honda Accord, some drive BMW convertible and some drive GMC truck. It's just looks a little silly when Accord driver comes out and starts pronouncing that trucks are absolutely useless and he has deep visceral hate with anything that ugly stupid space at the back that nobody ever needs and millions of people that buy trucks are actually idiots just incapable of driving a clearly superior Accord.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure how to reconcile this analogy with the existence of government programs (carpool lanes, tax incentives for hybrids) that encourage the use of more efficient cars with more people in them, on the grounds that it's better overall for the ecosystem.

<comment><USER5> I sincerely hope you don't imply you'd like government coercion to be used on people "for their own good" when they choose what tool to use for their purposes. Or for the government bureaucrats to select winners in software world and facilitate wealth transfer from actually popular tools to those that are only viable as beneficiaries of government coercion.

<comment><USER7> I think his point is that the truck analogy doesn't favor PHP when he considers that society has made an effort to reduce the use of trucks due to their general inefficiency compared to sedans.

I think the analogy fails because trucks and sedans are different tools for different purposes (one is better for transporting people, one is better for transporting cargo), while PHP and Ruby pretty much do the same thing, one is just prettier and streamlined.

<comment><USER5> >>> while PHP and Ruby pretty much do the same thing

Says who?

>>> one is just prettier and streamlined.

By which objective measure of "prettier" and "streamlined"?

<comment><USER7> _Says who?_

Says the fact that PHP and Ruby are both object oriented imperative scripting languages that are commonly used for connecting to a DB and spitting out markup. It's impossible to shove a refrigerator into the back of a sedan, but there is no analogous refrigerator that PHP _xor_ Ruby is incapable of hauling.

 _By which objective measure of "prettier" and "streamlined"?_

Well it is subjective, but the nebulous consensus is that Ruby has a cleaner and more readable syntax than PHP.

<comment><USER5> Any Turing-complete language can do any computational task that is computable by Turing-complete languages, so by that criteria every language is the same. Obviously, in practice they are not.

>>> Well it is subjective, but the nebulous consensus is that Ruby has a cleaner and more readable syntax than PHP.

Consensus of whom? "Nobody I know voted for him", right?

<comment><USER7> _Any Turing-complete language can do any computational task that is computable by Turing-complete languages, so by that criteria every language is the same. Obviously, in practice they are not._

That's a straw man, I didn't use that as a criteria.

 _PHP and Ruby are both object oriented imperative scripting languages that are commonly used for connecting to a DB and spitting out markup_

See that? That's me describing specific qualities of the languages that make them similar. Of course, you could use Ruby or PHP to write a graphics engine (in fact, I have done so with Ruby), but that is not a common use case. Most of the time, Ruby and PHP are used to solve the same set of problems: scripting server-side logic for the web.

 _Consensus of whom?_

The internet? The programming community? That's why I used the "nebulous" qualifier. I'm not saying it's a fact, but it's a pretty popular sentiment which is about as solid as it gets with regard to matters of taste.

Yes, PHP and Ruby are different, but _most of the time_ they are used to do the same thing.

<comment><USER5> >>> That's me describing specific qualities of the languages that make them similar.

Yes, they are both imperative, non-compiled and can be used to do network connections and output texts. Doesn't really narrow it down. Any further restriction (like narrowing network connections to DBs and texts to HTML or any other specific markup language) just makes it false.

>>> scripting server-side logic for the web

That's closer, but so do tons of other languages.

>>> The internet? The programming community?

See, I just talked to the internet and she says she never told you that.

>>> it's a pretty popular sentiment

Among your friends? I certainly can believe that.

>>> as solid as it gets with regard to matters of taste

Absolutely no problem with taste. The problem comes when somebody tries to declare his taste to be an objective truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "That 80% marketshare is not going anywhere anytime soon."

>> I have seen this mentioned many times before, and also worked in PHP development teams. However I think this statement is confusing. There is no way that php _development_ or _programming_ is 80% of the market. I suspect that when you crawl round the internet a lot of spam blogs and advertising content is based off of php based CMS like Wordpress and Drupal - because it is so easy to get a generic template driven website up and running with a good SEO basis. I can believe 80% of the websites that return content could be PHP based.

<comment><USER6> This is maybe the third comment about whether the 80% is lies, damned lies, or statistics.

I would much rather see a conversation about how other languages can bridge the gaps of "hello world in a browser isn't obvious" and "deployment is hard". Those are important and useful things to do, regardless of PHP's market share.

<comment><USER9> I thought Ruby has all but bridged it?

<comment><USER6> With what? Rails? Doesn't that require generating a whole "project" (whatever that is) with a bunch of directories and files and then figuring out where everything is and...

PHP requires opening index.php and typing "hello world". Obviously that's not going to work anywhere else, but something like Flask (or Sinatra) is much closer.

Deployment, maybe. The biggest stumbling block is that no matter how magical a deployment solution anyone invents, it's worthless unless there are free/cheap hosts that come with it installed and have cPanel integration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a comprehensive list of new major language features, there is a wiki: [https://wiki.php.net/rfc#implemented](https://wiki.php.net/rfc#implemented)

One major feature not listed on the submitted article is namespaces, which is fairly major and it's just starting to reach critical mass in terms of reach. Despite being probably _the_ most major feature in the past five years, most users should be able to enjoy using namespaces to their heart's content (along with all the libraries that utilize it, for example Amazon's latest PHP SDK (which is thoroughly impressive)).

For reference, Python3 came out in 2008 and it's also just starting to reach critical mass in terms of library support ( _cough_ third-party Django libraries).

There is also a third-party committee[1][2] with the goal of establishing things like coding guidelines, logging interfaces, HTTP request/response interfaces, and so forth.

[1] [http://www.php-fig.org/](http://www.php-fig.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards](https://github.com/php-fig/fig- standards)

<comment><USER6> Why is Python 3 relevant? Porting a large Python 2 library to Python 3 (or, more likely, to both 2 and 3) is a significant undertaking. Porting a PHP library to use namespaces would largely be a matter of adding global aliases for backwards-compatibility, surely?

<comment><USER10> Porting a library from non-namespaced to properly-namespaced code is fairly significant, and there should be little-to-no backwards incompat. issues between pre-php-5.3 and post-php-5.3.

The difference is a fairly large undertaking both in code size and technical challenge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is something almost endearingly quaint about the author's earnest excitement over a verbose closure implementation and a procedural incarnation of the map method, like hearing a hunter-gatherer describe in awe the magic pictures in a box which is in reality a junked television set from 30 years ago.

<comment><USER7> Mmmmmm, sweet condescension. Nothing floats my boat higher than expressing superiority to PHP developers. They actually consider themselves to be real programmers, aren't they just the cutest?

<comment><USER6> GP's phrasing aside, it _does_ make the article read as though the author has never used any other closure implementation (and, by extension, any other programming language).

<comment><USER7> Well, perhaps he _hasn 't_ used any other closure implementation... why would that merit mockery? I doubt the same tone would be taken if he were a Ruby novice adulating over block syntax. It's just hip to condescend to PHP developers.

<comment><USER6> I'm only observing that the article comes across weirdly as a result, especially when the author makes judgments like "simple". Not defending the condescension. (Though the same tone might well be taken if he were a Ruby novice writing articles titled "A Look at Ruby's Continuing Evolution".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Evolution" describes an unguided process which is declared successful as long as there are still living descendants.

Just sayin'.

<comment><USER12> >unguided

I wouldn't say so. Most species (read: groups, not individuals) adapt when nature throws an exception they can't handle. Mutations capable of handling these exceptions become predominant in a group, while obsolete gene pools die off.

PHP shows too little of this for its progression over time to be called "evolution."

<comment><USER13> Fine. Let's call it "intelligent design" then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On topic: PHP gets lambdas and closures; generators; traits.

In other words, PHP is definitely becoming a better, more reasonable language.

Of course it's still possible to write awful code using some old PHP features. But it's now far easier to write _good_ , maintainable and expressive code, as one would in Python, or Ruby, or Go, or [you name it].

With this regard, PHP's evolution is not unlike C++'s.

<comment><USER14> That has to be one of the strangest syntax's I've seen for closures ever. I get why it has to be that way sort of. (backwards compatibility) but it only serves to illustrate how PHP has hamstrung itself in the past.

Comparing PHP's evolution to C++ isn't exactly flattering either.

<comment><USER5> What's so strange in it? It looks pretty much exactly like JS, for example, with one small addition of "use" clause. It has very little to do with "backwards compatibility" \- since there's nothing to be backwards compatible to, closures didn't exist before.

<comment><USER14> The use clause is the weird part. I would imagine the reason it has to be there is because it would be bad if functions that weren't written with closures in mind previously suddenly turned into closures. Otherwise why even bother?

<comment><USER5> The reason has nothing to do with that. The reason is that closures don't need most of the variables from parent scope, but if they were imported, since PHP is refcounting they'd keep a lock on those variables even after exit from the original scope - as long as the closure exists - even though nobody actually needs them.

Since PHP has $$var (and other things like this) we can not know in advance which variables the function uses in local scope, so if we did automatic scope importing, we'd have to keep the whole scope of the parent function for the lifetime of the closure in case some of the variables would be needed. This, if parent scope contained some large objects, would result in a memory and performance hit each time closures are used.

Thus, it was decided that we'd make scope importing explicit (the use clause), so if you want to import variable, you have to say it. Experience shows that vast majority of closures need no more than one or two vars from parent scope, so the tradeoff is fine. Of course, if closures would import dozens of variables regularly, we'd have to seek different solution, but this is not the situation.

Additional benefit - though not the reason - is readability improvement, as now you know where each variable is coming from, otherwise reading in-closure code you wouldn't know if the variable that is not mentioned anywhere is a mistake or it is actually expected to be imported from outside.

BTW, C++11 is using the same idea: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_function#C.2B.2B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_function#C.2B.2B) though they have catch-all syntaxes which in PHP wouldn't work since PHP is a dynamic language.

<comment><USER14> That was a very informative explanation thank you.

I still think it looks weird even if PHP's semantics make it necesary but that's totally subjective :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "That 80% marketshare is not going anywhere anytime soon."

Whatever helps you sleep at night.

<comment><USER16> PHP is unlikely to power the next start up. But I wouldn't be so cynical about it's success, especially in other segments of the web.

<comment><USER17> Why not? , programmers might hate it but they don't always drive start-up direction. Getting something to market and being useful is just more important than semantics when you're facing a budget.

Lots of start-ups started with PHP (foursquare, groupon, facebook, etc, etc) because of the minimal cost and the convenience offered by popularity. If it works out and they get funding they can spend all that sweet cash on whatever they prefer.

Mobile apps and heavy REST services maybe not, but websites are still popular, and PHP is playing catch up for those services too.

<comment><USER16> I don't disagree. I was responding to the sarcastic comment about PHP, not really trying to address using it for a start up. Our start up used it as well. It's not the sexiest or most fun environment, but it works and it's the devil I know.

<comment><USER18> This is my situation too. I mean, I know PHP and I know CodeIgniter. I have tons of already ready to deploy code based in those idioms, so why port everything to laravel? or Ruby? Maybe down the line or something... but not when speed matters.

<comment><USER6> Speed will always matter. You'll never find time to address technical debt; you have to make it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is so much to dislike about PHP that the only thing I can say nice about PHP is that it's the easiest way to just deploy to any server ever. Beyond that, I don't think I would look to PHP to do anything ever if I had a choice of project language.

<comment><USER20> As someone that has had to mess with deploying large PHP project in a previous life, I'd have to disagree.

Using mod_php? Better fix your file permissions. Use any non-trivial language feature? - better make sure you have the right minor version installed. Use functions from the supposed standard library (e.g., anything from gd_*, xml, process control, cryptography modules)? - better pray PHP was compiled with those enabled. Use routing in your PHP app (and you're crazy if you don't)? - better pray apache is configured to accept your .htaccess, or port the mod_rewrite rules for the non-apache server you're on. And then all of this while futzing with the 3 different php.ini files scattered around the filesystem.

Between virtualenv and pip, deploying python has been loads easier, as is getting team members up and running with a dev server.

<comment><USER21> Out of the box php generally works, which is often touted as a benefit. Personally i think if you can afford a server you can afford 20 minutes time for someone who knows what they're doing.

Every one of your examples tells me that you chose not to invest in those 20 minutes.

Here's a hint: there is a reason "developer" and "administrator" are usually different roles.

<comment><USER20> Out of the box php generally works so long as you have trivial php code (that doesn't take advantage of new language features, doesn't need routing, doesn't need to write to the filesystem, and doesn't common library modules). Needless to say, that generally rules out any serious project out there.

I'm not saying I chose not to invest in those 20 minutes, I'm saying there's nothing about PHP that makes it inherently easier than other things to deploy real projects. You still have to deal with version incompatibilities, you still have to deal with configuration, you still have to deal with differing resources. That applies to all stacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> PHP's continuing evolution is also represented by the frameworks available for the language. For instance, Symfony2, paired with Composer, is (IMHO) analogous to Rails for Ruby and Django for Python.

HN can be an echo chamber for Ruby, Python and Golang. But outside of the Bay Area, a lot of people are very excited about Symfony2.

<comment><USER23> Laravel 4 is amazing, too. Symfony2 feels like a beomoth to me (a few versions later and it will probably be on-par with Zend in terms of over-architecturing as it is going right now) whereas Laravel is lean and elastic yet offering the complete package in an easy consumable format.

<comment><USER24> I'm seeing a lot of love for Laravel 4 at the moment and I'm not 'getting' it. Sure, the framework's easier to pick up than Symfony2 and not as over- engineered, but it doesn't feel as complete (forms, anyone?) or as well designed (what's up with all these static methods?)

Laravel 4 is becoming the CodeIgniter of the PHP 5.4 frameworks - <USER2> enough for people to jump on as they can get something done. And the CodeIgniter comparison is not a compliment.

<comment><USER23> Laravel doesn't come close to CI in terms of trash. It is very well architectured to the point where everything is modular, testable, properly documented and done with a reason. Static methods are actually facades as pointed out and are key in having proper testable applications.

* Forms? It has support for forms in more way than one. Read the docs! :-)

<comment><USER24> > Static methods are actually facades as pointed out and are key in having > proper testable applications.

Thanks, I had a look about a year ago at the facades document and it seemed a justification for using static methods, rather than a reason.

I'm pushing hard on this as I really want to understand it. I am surrounded by PHP programmers chanting "Every time you use a Singletons a kitten dies" and "No static methods". Yet when I used (and contributed to PEAR) they were positively encouraged. Is the change another fad, or fact-based?

> * Forms? It has support for forms in more way than one. Read the docs! :-)

I have :) I see helpers to generate form fields and a validation library. I see no way to create form entities, to extend forms (to create variations on a base form), or to abstract the field definitions from the view (while the visible value of select box options could be in the remit of the designer, modifying the value shouldn't be accessible to anyone other than the programmer, and neither IMO should choosing the field type (drop down or multiple radio buttons? Multiple select or checkboxes?)

Also no support for 0..N repeating fields baked in (with conditional validation), or 1..N fields - stuff I use in almost every form. Every form library I've discovered falls short in these requirements though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Evolved shit is still shit. Half of issues mentioned here ([http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)) are still not solved.

<comment><USER26> I've always loved that fractal of bad design rant. Many of his gripes follow really neatly from his initial analogy of the hammer with claws on both sides.

Let's say you want to hammer in a nail. You reach into a tool box and pull out something that you think is a hammer. Instead it has claws on both sides, and is in fact a nail puller. You don't know much about tools so you use it to beat in nails, all the while grumbling to your friends that it's a bad hammer.

For instance, I don't see how you expect to "solve" most of the "issues" in that. The fact that the author does not like the way == works in a weakly typed language is not a bug. Sure, it present bugs in code when programmers don't know how implicit type casting works, but it's really nice if you do.

<comment><USER6> Hello, author here. You're not the first to scoff at my hammer description, but perhaps you can explain to me what kind of nail puller looks exactly like a hammer but with two claws, or why it would be useful to have the exact same tool on both sides of the handle. (This is still a PHP analogy.)

I don't see how to solve most of the issues, either. That sucks, and I genuinely sympathize with Zend on this, but it doesn't make them not-issues. As I think I said, they'd be acceptable if they were reasonable tradeoffs, but many of them are not.

Your == counterargument seems apologetic and trivially applied to anything: whenever a program is wrong because the language violated expectations, it's the programmer's fault for not having memorized some matrix of arcane rules. Languages aren't perfect and human beings have wildly differing expectations, but ultimately we only _have_ programming languages to make it easier to express ourselves—no one's stopping you from writing the next big web 2.0 thing in x86 machine code. So yes, when it's difficult to reliably ask a language "are these things the same" without learning paragraphs of gotchas, that's bad.

Glad you enjoyed the article!

<comment><USER26> I think you are stretching the hammer analogy well beyond its useful limit. I've no idea what php function you think has a redundant left and right version, but to humor you, sure there are lots of nail pullers that have two similar sides or ends to attack different sizes. eg [http://s.shld.net/is/image/Sears/00938076000](http://s.shld.net/is/image/Sears/00938076000) There are also lots of physical tools that completely reasonably do have exactly duplicated sides or ends because they wear out, but I don't see how you want that to apply to software.

Talking about == is not trivial or apologetic. That's the way I expect comparison to work in a loosely typed language. I expect 0, 0.0, '0', '0.0', -0, 00, 0x00, null and false to be logically equivalent most of the time. If it also means that if I don't validate input from an http request 0=='0 foodle fish' also evaluates as true, then that's a cost I'm willing to bear.

<comment><USER6> Would you expect "1.30" == "13e-1", since both are strings? How about "0xb" == "0xB"? 0 == "zero"?

I don't see how this is anything but bugprone, and all to save you from actually saying what you meant and slapping a couple int()s on your input.

Compare JavaScript, a language with much the same == problems, where the community generally advises against ever using == at all. CoffeeScript (different syntax that compiles directly to JavaScript) even translates == into ===, leaving the original buggy operator unavailable.

<comment><USER26> I would not expect "1.30" == "13e-1" or "0xb" == "0xB" to compare as true, but it's of kind of cool that they magically do.

I don't think 0 == "zero" is a meaningful comparison, so I don't think there is any single sensible answer. I know "zero" will be cast into 0 and therefore it will be true. That's not a matter of expected language logic, it's just personal preference on do you want your language to fail hard when given garbage input, or continue.

Most input to a PHP program is going to be strings. It is going to have come from an untyped GET or POST request string decoded into string parameters. If you expect it to be integers it needs to be cast somewhere. For most applications you should be doing that explicitly, taking control of the process and deciding how to respond to user error or other invalid input.

Our main difference of opinion seems to be that I think it is good that the language tries to help when the programmer is lazy, and you think it should immediately reprimand them with a rolled up newspaper so they will be forced to do it properly before seeing any output.

<comment><USER6> It's good when languages try to help. Reprimanding someone for not doing enough work is useless.

My problem is that the language is _guessing wildly_ , in ways too obscure to be mentioned in the documentation or known by you (a user of the language), even when both operands are strings. That means it _appears to work_ much of the time even if you don't think you're being lazy, but might actually have a bunch of false positives you didn't expect. And that's kind of a bad thing in a programming language. Same sort of reason manually escaping everything is hard to get right: if you forget, your code still works fine under "normal" circumstances.

Now, if == did a strict comparison and there were a separate imlazyjustslopittogether operator, there wouldn't be a problem. Defaults matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have to create some push based (websockets or similar) web service that's event driven (events on the stock market). The prototype has been written in PHP, but doesn't do very much. I'm STRONGLY considering moving to nodejs.

We now use Composer for packages, an automatic classloader, an application framework and a database abstraction. But even with all this stuff, PHP is still an incredible pain.

PHP might be good at the situation where: on every request, you start a new script, that builds a webpage and sends it to the client. But once you try to make it do something else... Frustration awaits.

<comment><USER28> Your worldview ( Your last statement, that you think PHP is only suitable for a single request in a fcgi environment.) of PHP's capabilities are the pain point here.

What difficulties are you encountering trying to do basic pub/sub? Application developers have solved those exact same issues for decades now. Nodejs didn't invent "event-based programming".

<comment><USER29> I've written a lot of PHP, and while I can think of a number of ways you _might_ use PHP to provide the backend for websocket-like communication (writing a long-running server, using multipart responses, adaptive polling), it seems pretty fair to me to say this isn't the place where PHP is strongest out of the box. Particularly compared to nodejs.

If you know of a PHP runtime-host, library, or even just a development approach that makes supporting it as easy as nodejs, though, I'm all ears.

<comment><USER28> [http://reactphp.org/](http://reactphp.org/) ( more specifically [http://socketo.me/](http://socketo.me/) ) work very well for actually implementing websockets. It's fast and incredibly easy. Igor ([https://github.com/igorw](https://github.com/igorw)) is a really talented guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "That 80% marketshare is not going anywhere anytime soon." \- I had to look this up to confirm... It changes my perspective on the language.

<comment><USER31> could you share what you found? i'm curious

<comment><USER32> I'm guessing this: [http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl- php/all/all](http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/all/all)

<comment><USER30> This one too: [http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_languag...](http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all)

This page was also interesting... Keep in mind, it's only the top 10,000,000 in Alexa: [http://w3techs.com/forum/topic/22677](http://w3techs.com/forum/topic/22677)

"In total, we have a few thousand technology indicators, many of them can be used - directly or indirectly - to determine the server-side language.

The number of sites where we don't identify any language is relatively small. The reason why we don't include it in the statistics is, that we want to show shifts in the relative popularity of technologies, not distorted by changes in our abilities to detect them."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There's a lot of noise about PHP becoming a better language by adding features. Isn't it well established that adding features to a dud product is not the path to a better one?

</comment><comment><USER34> In my opinion, the _only_ problem PHP suffers is that it's populated by many young, inexperienced developers. It's ease of use and low barrier of entry is a double-edged sword.

Many developers (especially ones building upon CMSes primarily) don't need to move beyond knowing Wordpress, ExpressionEngine or CodeIgniter.

So many "easy to use" products are built on it (Wordpress alone powers ~18% of "the internet") that it makes sense that we see so many mis- or un-informed developers crowding Google and StackOverflow.

You can make good code in PHP. You can also learn other languages. You can, more importantly, learn when it's a good idea to use other languages. However, if people don't need to learn more, many won't. That's human nature.

Saying "PHP sucks" is missing the point that other people have other needs, other experience and other education levels from you.

PHP, as a language with low barrier to entry, can fulfill many's needs without requiring a CS education, and without writing their own framework/cms.

Source: 18% of internet: [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/07/27/wordpress- now-power...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/07/27/wordpress-now- powers-18-9-of-the-web-has-over-46m-downloads-according-to-founder-matt- mullenweg/)

<comment><USER5> >>> is that it's populated by many young, inexperienced developers.

It's not a bug, it's a feature. PHP _is_ by design the language for young, inexperienced developers. It's like saying the only problem a school has is that it's full of kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> There are whole books written about how terrible JavaScript is, and yet it is one of the most popular languages today. People have learned to work around the quirks and develop best practices to avoid pitfalls.

PHP is an actively developed language. It has its pitfalls and problems, but is also provides more modern ways to use the language that avoid those problems.

<comment><USER36> > it is one of the most popular languages today

Javascript is popular because people have no choice but to use that. Let's be truthfull here.

Only a few people actually like this language.If it wasnt for the web nobody would use javascript ,which is totally inconsistent with the strongly typed DOM.

Kudos to microsoft as they created DHTML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Another thing I didn't notice earlier, after perusing the implemented RFCs: More Python-like array syntax:

[1, 2, 3] ['key1': 'val1', 'key2': 'val2']

We've been on 5.4+ at work for some time now and if I'd know that a year ago it would've saved me a lot of array()s and visual noise.

<comment><USER38> The colon-based syntax was voted down.

What went live in 5.4 was support for brackets in lieu of array()

        // Typical array syntax
        $arr = array('key' => 'asdf');

        // Supported in 5.4+
        $arr = ['key' => 'asdf'];

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't find the closure syntax simple really, since it's essentially a hack to copy the variable into the current scope, since PHP doesn't support lexical scope.

<comment><USER6> PHP supports lexical scope; it's just local to the current function.

The actual problem is that PHP automatically initializes variables even on read—the same reason all globals have to be manually "imported", even if they're only read from. Similar to the problem Python 3's `nonlocal` solves, except imagine a world where Python didn't have NameErrors and instead initialized every unrecognized name to None.

<comment><USER39> Is there much PHP code that relies on this "feature" or could they have changed it to actually search in the enclosing scope if something was read, and avoided the silly "use" keyword? I mean it's not like PHP has an actual spec, so they can change it whenever they feel like it as long as it doesn't break much.

<comment><USER6> Variable declaration is pretty core to the language. Remember register_globals? That was only a problem _because_ so much code relied on having undeclared variables act like empty strings.

I suppose they could have made it work differently just for nested functions, but that's a major inconsistency, it's not clear how it would interact with globals, etc.

<comment><USER21> register globals didn't "make undeclared variables act like empty strings".

register globals imported request parameters from the query string and post body into the global variable scope.

having undeclared variables "act like empty strings" is related to non-strict variable comparison (== vs ===) and either silencing errors, or not displaying/caring about them.

<comment><USER6> register_globals could not have existed without the legality of undeclared variables, and it could not have been a security issue without code that relied on using undefinedness as a default value.

<comment><USER21> undeclared variabels aren't legal, they cause errors. if your php is configured to ignore those errors thats on you.

of course it could be a security issue without undefined variables coercing to an empty string in string context - it could allow request parameters to override defined variables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Any chance it can get rid of the dollar sign?

<comment><USER21> Is this a joke?

<comment><USER40> That would be a joke if I was wishing replacing it with Euro sign.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> PHP is maturing but large user base and projects may slow the diffusion of idioms based on the new additions. Or maybe the next major releases of say joomla, wordpress and such have redesigned their core to leverage that. Maybe they'll follow the eclipse ecosystem-wide synchronisation of projects.

</comment><comment><USER18> I often believe that these arguments over which language is better are a detriment to actually getting stuff done. But here I am commenting on stuff, rather than coding... so what does that say about me? :)

</comment><comment><USER42> Laravel looks great, is it still a one-person-mainly project? if so that really concerns me, same as Gitlab project.

</comment><comment><USER43> I hadn't spotted the iterators earlier, interesting.

<comment><USER44> Really? They have been around since 5.0, which is nearly a decade old. See some of the other interfaces SPL provides here: [http://php.net/manual/en/book.spl.php](http://php.net/manual/en/book.spl.php)

<comment><USER43> I meant generators, as in yield

<comment><USER5> Generators mostly are just a convenient syntax for iterators (i.e. if you wanted, you could have generators years ago, just required to do some awkward boilerplate code).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


200 Lousy Bicycles For UN Climate Conference: - onreact-com http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/09/140-bicycles-for-un-climate-conference.html

<comment> onreact-com How hypocritical! I guess they use their hybrid Hummers instead.</comment>


Syrian Electronic Army attacks Outbrain - <AUTHOR> http://m.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2289438/syrian-electronic-army-attacks-outbrain

<comment><USER2> More like shadowy Western intel group attacks outbrain, blames shadowy Middle Eastern group.</comment>