skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: I don't know VB.NET, I barely know VBScript,

I do think that Python would make an excellent intro language, given that there is relatively little syntactic cruft hiding the bones. (To be sure, it was not my first language, so this is speculation.) PythonWin is an excellent environment. wxPython makes it straightforward to put together GUIs if that's what you want to do. You can write to the Google App Engine and deploy to the web for $0.00.

The point that others raise, that it would be bad if the teacher is also learning an unfamiliar language, is a valid one. I don't think you want your instructor to be stuck fighting the language.

Have you considered as an alternative doing LPTHW on the side with your friends?
Mmmm... overall I'd say don't try to talk him/her 'round. Don't get me wrong... I love Python and am ambivalent towards vb.NET. In defense of VB, it's good for teaching in the sense that students feel like they're accomplishing something... that they're actually building something. They can rattle out a gui and integrate it with the Windows API (for something like a Paint app) easily. Which is cool for them.

Having said that, I think Python is better for students (vb is so unlike other languages). However you're likely to piss your teacher off if you come off all 'hurr u r so stupit, you should teach Python' to him. Easy to piss ppl off that way.
It would be nice to expect HN to reciprocate, but I don't think that it's likely.

API access always needs to be part of a strategy, because granting it will change the landscape within which your business operates.
The document was linked here before but is very detailed and interesting, even naming specific issues:

A) The large population of older travelers, >65 years of age, is particularly at
risk from the mutagenic effects of the X-rays based on the known biology of
melanocyte aging.

B) A fraction of the female population is especially sensitive to mutagenesis provoking
radiation leading to breast cancer. Notably, because these women,
who have defects in DNA repair mechanisms, are particularly prone to cancer,
X-ray mammograms are not performed on them. The dose to breast tissue
beneath the skin represents a similar risk.

C) Blood (white blood cells) perfusing the skin is also at risk.

D) The population of immunocompromised individuals--HIV and cancer
patients (see above) is likely to be at risk for cancer induction by the high skin
dose.

E) The risk of radiation emission to children and adolescents does not appear to
have been fully evaluated.

F) The policy towards pregnant women needs to be defined once the theoretical
risks to the fetus are determined.

G) Because of the proximity of the testicles to skin, this tissue is at risk for
sperm mutagenesis.

H) Have the effects of the radiation on the cornea and thymus been determined?
Reducing the HN overload ...
FWIW, either your feed, or the feed you're pulling from is not correctly handling encoding.

"Announcing Brightbox Cloud â the UKu0027s first true cloud hosting platform"
I would guess it'll be ridiculously inconvenient if simply mousing over the images turned them modal with 2 second transitions.
Anyone from Pune here? It's my hometown and I visit at least once a year. I'd love to meet some HNers when I'm there next.
Tell your teacher if he teaches Python, students will remember him, whereas a VB.net teacher is forgettable.
Wouldn't linode / EC2 be the UKs first cloud hosting?
"somewhat tardy"?

The Queen has been keeping up with technology remarkably, for example, owning an iPod in 2005. Not bad for someone who was 79 at the time...

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1040898/queen-buys-...
Nokia takes back control of Symbian software
One place I worked the project managers where very enthusiastic about using Agile techniques. When I questioned them about it, it turned out that Agile to them meant "make stuff up as you go along". To them it just meant that they could resign all sense of responsibility, didn't had to do any planning or documentation. How great is that?
Yep. Brazil just had a record abstention in the last election (21.5%) and voting here is mandatory, probably because the voting day overlapped with a extended holiday. Might as well let only the interested ones vote, no?
Ask HN:  When will I be able to move a FB event invitation to Google Calendar?
Brightbox is the first in the UK with cloud-like features such as isolated (and interconnected) Zones.

EC2 eu-west datacentres are in Ireland.
urm, that slidedeck is from google employee, so fairly obviously bias plus the "proof" it provides is one slide with an anecdotal quote.

I cant provide any stronger proof aside from their 500+ million users, but anecdotally, outside this hacker news / techcrunch esque commmunity, nobody cares about the facebook privacy issues. At the very least its in question enough to not be "completely and utterly wrong"
Make a directory on your machine for the book, with subdirectories for each chapter. Put the code files for the problems/examples in the proper place and you should have no doubts.

Mark up the book (well, if it's paper) as you go. And the expression "bookmark" did not always involve URLs.
Show HN: My side project in comedy rap
Dang, hadn't heard that. Well, at least the next Bethesda RPG will have a decent engine to build on...
A Big Collection of Fun and Find all about Karachi
There doesn't appear to be a way to prevent these attacks without locking out legitimate users, making DoS (denial-of-service attacks) trivial (thereby locking out legitimate users), or both. The fundamental problem is that the bad guys can open lots of connections.

Suppose you pause for 10s (after an incorrect password/before checking the password/...). This make it very easy to spawn so many sshd processes that you end up with a DoS (either the system stops spawning sshd processes, locking out everyone, or it is overwhelmed). If you solve this somehow, the bad guys can just open a ton of connections and just wait 10s - they'll need more connections, but they can still saturate the link with login attempts. Blocking IPs after too many connections doesn't help much against botnets; limiting the number of total connections locks out legitimate users; blocking all but specific address blocks locks out legitimate users (at home, or your sysadmin-on-a-holiday trying to fix your system in an internet cafe halfway across the globe.)

In short, anything you do seems to make it easy (easier) to lock out legitimate users. On the other hand, switching to private-key-only or private-key-and-one-time-password-only (or instituting a check on password quality) makes this attack infeasible.
or the "->" ("threading") macro, a recursive solution, or a lib like

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/11a...
Using MySQL as a NoSQL - A story for exceeding 750,000 qps on a commodity server
Being a pedant, while EC2 is available in the UK, the nearest datacentres are (I believe) in Ireland, which isn't part of the UK.
if a large enough proportion of the population consistent opts out of the backscatter, the system will collapse on itself.

I disagree. Why in the world should the authorities care that the lines for "opt-outs" are incredibly long, and the machines are getting low usage?
Startup Quote: Dave McClure, founder, 500 Startups
That which does not kill you makes you stronger.

- Dave McClure (@davemcclure)

http://startupquote.com/post/1520974581
From investment bank to PA? That'd be a huge pay cut
I also use ssh-agent on Windows, through msysgit. I think putty also includes some utility that does the same thing.
Scroll to the bottom and you'll get links to the other cities, outside of Silicon Valley, you should start a company in. A lot of potential in the Midwest; Chicago has already been covered and I expect a spotlight on Detroit in the future - opportunities to do business with a reshaped auto industry, wealth of IT people, access to VCs and incubators, easy access to Canada, etc.
That "fragile" ball and "thin" atmosphere have been going strong for millions and millions of years. What the heck does he consider "enduring"? Fashionable politics really clouds the brain.
Show him the google trends for "vb.net".

http://www.google.com/trends?q=vb.net
Thanks for the feedback. The date mixup was a typo that somehow escaped our notice despite several re-readings, but good point about reminding users what the service is. That you yourself think about your product daily is no reason to entertain the fond hope that users sign up and then immediately frame a screenshot of your site on their desk to gaze at lovingly, just waiting for the next moment they can throw you a pageview.
Looks cool, I tried to install it under ubuntu and got the error (SB-KERNEL:ASSERT-ERROR
(STRING-EQUAL ASDF-INSTALL::URL "http:// :END1 7)

Full procedure if anyone's interested is:

sudo apt-get install sbcl sbcl-asdf

$ rlwrap sbcl
This is SBCL 1.0.29.11.debian, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
More information about SBCL is available at <http://www.sbcl.org/>.

SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses. See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.
* (require 'asdf)

NIL
* (require 'asdf-install)

; loading system definition from
; /usr/lib/sbcl/sb-bsd-sockets/sb-bsd-sockets.asd into #<PACKAGE "ASDF0">
; registering #<SYSTEM SB-BSD-SOCKETS {AD248A1}> as SB-BSD-SOCKETS
; registering #<SYSTEM SB-BSD-SOCKETS-TESTS {AE975D9}> as SB-BSD-SOCKETS-TESTS
("SB-BSD-SOCKETS" "ASDF-INSTALL")
* (asdf-install:install :cells)
Install where?
1) System-wide install:
System in /usr/lib/sbcl/site-systems/
Files in /usr/lib/sbcl/site/
2) Personal installation:
System in /home/john/.sbcl/systems/
Files in /home/john/.sbcl/site/
--> 2

debugger invoked on a SIMPLE-ERROR in thread #<THREAD "initial thread" RUNNING {AA5E589}>:
The assertion (STRING-EQUAL ASDF-INSTALL::URL "http:// :END1 7) failed.

Type HELP for debugger help, or (SB-EXT:QUIT) to exit from SBCL.

restarts (invokable by number or by possibly-abbreviated name):
As the interface is similar to Chinese character mouse input software (which is really fast), maybe the backends could be more similar..
This looks good. I don't have anything to use it for at the moment, but being UK based, I've often wondered about cloud solutions and found them US centric, so looking forward to seeing how this evolves.

Especially looking forward to seeing the pricing!
Hyung, are you in Vietnam? :)
Good idea: everybody loves Lua.

But why oh why is the whole page built from tiny little Flash things? It looks ridiculous if Click2Flash (or similar) is installed. Unusable.
Neat. I didn't know you could do anything like that with MySQL. Does Postgres have an equivalent? I wouldn't move from an SQL DB to a NoSQL key/value store without a significant performance improvement. Seems like you can tune MySQL far more than I realised...
The Azerty format (used widely in France) is horrible for coding - curly braces are a 3 key combo, so I'm typing on an azerty keyboard with qwerty bindings!

Most of my co-workers also prefer qwerty for coding, but azerty has better access to é and ç etc... I'm not typing much prose, so I'm sticking with qwerty for now.
Electric Jolt to Brain Boosts Math Skills
I don't think there's much value in articles such as this. This one in particular uses an incredible amount of vague language (What do you mean by "agile"?), and sets up a number of straw men (Did anyone ever claim retrospectives fix everything?).

This kind of writing always seems to me to be trying to limit discussion in some way. It pretends to criticize a certain approach by bringing up problems that don't really exist (or aren't important), but implicitly accepting the basic principles of the thing they're criticizing, thus framing the debate. On one side we have the total religious fanatics who apply Agile to everything, and on the other are the sensible agilists, who don't think that "retrospectives fix everything". Okay, that's a debate you can have but it's an extremely narrow spectrum of opinion. If you're really trying to reach people who are "agile-averse", then you ought to argue for your approach with them and demonstrate that your way has merit.
Already discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1592625
There are a couple of comments on the original article that mention this:

PostgreSQL supports C-based UDF so it might not be impossible, but I'm not sure whether PostgreSQL has a standard/documented/safe way to access to internal data structures from UDFs.

…and…

Yoshinori-san, very interesting! We use a similar technique for our site together Postgresql. We have our own Software ODBA that writes SQL, marshals the data and puts the marshaled Data into the PGsql-DB. All of our data is always in the memory if the Application is running. ODBA is written in Ruby. You can find it here: http://scm.ywesee.com/?p=odba/.git;a=summary

So maybe?
I'm also interested to know the pros of this service vs. say Linode's UK data centre?
Normally, I like watching the RSS because I see everything, and I find things that are interesting that never get voted up high enough to hit those feeds.

However, lately, there's been a ton of crap that has nothing to do with hacking or startups. That makes it really tempting to start using those feeds and let others do the work of weeding out the crap.
I graduated with a slightly above average score by not studying for the whole semester but cram everything in the last two weeks before exams. I used my free time (> 25 hrs per week) to run an entrepreneurs club at uni that I cofounded, learned a huge lot about networking, raising money, marketing, teamwork, leadership etc etc... The club did a lot of impressive things.

Sadly none of the skills I learned from my extra curricular activities counted on my resume because the HRs treated it as a standard non-commitment student club thing. Truth be told now I'm having trouble finding jobs, and I wish I actually studied during my uni years because I felt I learned nothing from it... But that I don't really regret, what I regret was not starting up an actual business whilst still a student because after you graduate social pressure start to come from every direction to force you find a job (girlfriend, parents, friends, etc)

Sorry, I didn't hack my education. This is more of a not-to-do
I am in Pune. visakhcr at gmail dot com
Putty has Pageant.
Yes. That's one of the reasons I don't think this person had anything to do with defrauding the client by falsifying or skipping tests. They're not even smart (or English-literate) enough to lie about it.
Congratualtions. Look forward to reading the tech posts.

Have you evaluated causal trees against OT as the collaboration algorithm?

See:

bouillon.math.usu.ru/articles/ctre.pdf
bouillon.math.usu.ru/articles/broth5.pdf
Sell your apps & software for free
Why doesn't opening a large number of connections to a server secured by private-key work as a DoS attack? Isn't the number of connections required to overload the system the same regardless of security method?
afaik Brightbox have multiple physical data centre locations, so you can do the same kind of multi-zone deployment you can with EC2 in the US. Linode have one data centre, it will obviously have diverse power and connectivity but it's still one physical location (remember, even Rackspace who clearly have diverse everything still have downtime in their flagship data centre which is one physical location http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rackspace#Downtime)
Here's the group for Pune.

http://groups.google.com/group/hnpune
Why Open Source is Better for Your Business than Microsoft
You know, I'd settle for $1/user/year, if I had 500 million users.
What really upsets me about Facebook is I refuse to start an account there but they already know everything about me because they tricked all my AOL/gmail-using friends into giving them full access to their contact lists.

So I constantly get spam from Facebook personalized with my name, location and list of friends, based on all the stupid data they have sucked up. It's borderline stalking.
The number of connections is equal, but it is - at least in theory - possible to set a lower timeout when using private keys.
The local newspaper created Django for their own internal use, and then open sourced it later. That doesn't fit into the article's topic of starting a business from the ground up.
10 ways to earn from open source
Html5 headings and document sectioning
Graph reading FAIL.
Monster Energy Hoodies
In case you're interested, here are other reports of the same story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1869772

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870798

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1871276

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872308

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1875650

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1876231

None of the submissions have any comments ...
MacTech 2010: Wil Shipley on the Mac App Store
Personally, if I am presenting to clients, I always check everything I'm going to show beforehand - I run through what I'll be demo'ing and check that it works as expected. I'm not sure why Matt didn't do that, but there you go.
I got obnoxiously high karma on Hacker News.
I think that it's obvious that the work culture at Apple is not one of suggesting that you leave at 5:30pm.

It takes an effort by management to prevent working hours from ballooning out when people are working on long projects. It's very obvious that Apple are not doing that.

My company expects people to leave on the dot at 5:30pm. It's great.
1140px grid system. Time to scrap 960px?
Wasn't Flexiscale the first UK cloud service?
This is a great list of the essentials. Without a liquidation preference, you can lose while the founders win; without the ability to participate pro-rata in future rounds, you can't control your exposure to dilution; and without a board seat, your effectiveness as both an investor and advisor are compromised.

Where do you go from there? What else winds up in a lot of your term sheets?
Plagues of the Mind by Bruce S. Thornton
Amazon Offers 70-30 Revenue Share to Magazine and Newspaper Publishers
How to Judge the Efficacy of a Link
As it happens generally, the focus of link builders is always on pursuing links and more links. What is more important is to consider whether pursuing a particular link will be beneficial in the long run or not.
The new homepage is here: https://github.com/kennytilton/cells/wiki
Funny thing is that, as bandwidth keeps increasing, server side caching will be less and less meaningful.
I agree with the commenters, liquidation preferences only really make sense as protection when they are 1X. Higher than that and it starts smelling an awful lot like greed.

And personally, I would prefer a liquidation preference over the investor tying my hands too much. They invested in me, they should put their mouth where their money is.
My bad, I thought I'd checked. What's the 'right' thing to do, delete this?
I just returned from a very similar tour (Cairo to Aswan to Luxor, skipped Dahab), probably one week before you. The tour was in Dahab last week. Maybe we crossed paths as our group was leaving and your group was coming.

I took the hot air ballon option in the Valley of the Kings, and from the basket you could see the Nile. Turn a little bit, and you see the farmlands, and turn some more you would see the desert.

At a wide angle, I was able to take a picture of all three in one shot. The Nile is truly the lifeblood of the region.
This also allows for the middle-click user flow.
I think I might have caused confusing by "tweaking" the title on submission. Brightbox claim to be "the UK’s first true IaaS platform" but I wasn't familiar with the term IaaS (though I know what it stands for). It seems, to me, that "IaaS" has a little more to it than just selling VPSes which companies have been doing for ages.
The problem is that not all browsers support CSS3.
In my case, I am currently working through SICP (mid Chapter 4) and I use a highlighter to mark the key concepts presented in the book. Once I'm done with a chapter, I have a Google spreadsheet where I maintain lists of the concepts explained in each chapter. Every now and then, I sift through those lists at a glance and see all the new knowledge that I have been exposed to.

Also, I am doing all the exercises which are saved in my Dropbox folder. Again, once I am done with a chapter, I post them in my blog. That helps me a lot in keeping a feeling of progress and accomplishment.
I have two VPSes at Linode's UK data centre as well as a Brightbox VPS I just obtained. I'm not sure I can come up with a fair apples-for-apples benchmark though I might try fetching some big files from the US just to see how they both fare with connectivity.. If anyone can recommend some good, fair tests though, I'd be happy to try them.

Update: As a basic test I did some ping runs. Linode benched on average just 1% lower latency over 10 pings but had higher max latency so was less consistent. On Brightbox latency was spookily consistent.
It is technically possible to make a book 2 metres wide. There's a reason why we don't.
Car Dunia: New Euro Ford Fiesta To Be launched in India by Jan-Feb 2011
you probably wouldn't "need" nearly as much elasticity.

You discard that as if nobody needed elasticity.

Have you ever dealt with a large B2C site? Traffic tends to be heavily seasonal there, and in many other genres, too.

"Capacity planning" is a nice word for what in reality commonly boils down a bit of educated guessing, followed by the decision to keep a $reasonable amount of over-capacity around. The exact value of $reasonable is hardly ever specified by much more than the equivalent of a dice-roll.

Moreover, the interesting question is not which provider can provision a pile of metal within 4 hours. The interesting question is which of them will take those machines back a day later, without charging for a full month. A cloud will do that. Will your managed ISP?
Interesting that bypassing the SQL part of MySQL would increase performance by that much. In the comments he says that prepared statements would still be slower but it would be useful to see some numbers on his hardware to compare with.
My Hacker News firehose is flowing again
This depends on the school's plagiarism policy - at my university, you're not allowed to reuse your own work. Auto-plagiarism. It's acceptable to cite previous work if relevant, but not to submit the same paper twice.
Rockmelt - another Web Browser
I hadn't seen it before and I found it rather interesting.

If noone else complains, I say give it a shot. Definitely a good resource which can take some word of mouth.
http://www.coderloop.com/puzzles/

When looking at this page it's not immediately obvious that I have to click on the name of the puzzle to go to it.
Which customer would tell me that? Which of my customers have you spoken to? None apparently. The Agile way, make stuff up and fling it at people.
http://www.amazon.com/Bhutan-Visual-Odyssey-Himalayan-Kingdo...
"Offering VPSes at a single datacentre (even with an API) is, in our humble opinion, not a "cloud". There are actually very few existing "true" cloud providers - Amazon EC2 is, of course, currently the largest and most well known." -- FAQs
Developers themselves could also simply scrape this data as needed...

preg_match_all('%<td>.*?id=up_([0-9]{5,25}).*?<td class="title"><a href="(.*?)".*?>(.*?)</a>.*?</td>.*?score_[0-9]{5,25}>(.*?) poin.*?user\?id=(.*?)">.*?</a> (.*?) ago%s', $html, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

I'm working on an interesting app now that I plan to release later today using that same regex. (PLEASE NOTE: I am not a regex God, so I KNOW that it can probably be optimized/simplified significantly... But it works great :D)

Simply curl the ./newest page and apply that. The output is a beautiful array that can be manipulated at your pleasure.

This method is also impossible to "kill", as it is essentially normal traffic. As long as they don't do a major redesign or block your user agent (which you can easily change) (or possibly IP, but unlikely), this method works great.