skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to try this in about 5 minutes, hopefully I will have phone reception in the elevator to update if I get stuck.
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Coming from someone who spends a lot of time in Hotels... This hack works in _very_ few elevators.
> dict.TryGetValue is an odd example here

I sure as hell hope so, but that's what fleitz used.
I think the worst design decision was putting the print button next to the save button. I've definitely sent code files in excess of 50k lines to some unknown printer before by accident.
> allow me to click outside the picture or press esc to close the lightbox

Word. I always make my lightboxes to close on ESC. I hate when I'm forced to click some tiny random-located icon.
Thanks for creating a Google group for HNers in Bangalore.
If there is a meetup anytime soon, will there be any specific agenda, or will it be general?
From the little I know about VB.net, it's much more approachable for people not cut out to program (ie non-engineer types) then any other mainstream language on the back-end.

Don't forget - the high school education system is set up so you learn what you have to in order to tick a box and pass your exams, the fact that something might be relevant/useful to your career is an accident.

From that perspective, the teacher probably just wants to teach lowest-common denominator easy programming to tick the box.

I agree with Ryanto - if you want to learn Python (or any other language) it's better to do it in your own time.
1. VB.net ain't your daddy's basic

2. I respect Dijkstra, but I think he was wrong on this
None of those things would make you miss your flight.
None of those things would make you miss your flight or get canned.
How about this?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1885006

:)
3) Just wear a cricket box. Tell them you love the game if they ask questions.
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I think Java just doesn't fit with the character of HNers. It is a stale, boring, simple language. As such it is mostly interesting to 9/5 programmers, not for creative people who build the companies of the future. The latter group wants 'creative' languages that do not tell you how to do things, such as LISP, Haskell, and Ruby.

Maybe it's an overgeneralization, but I still think it is generally true.
It might also depend on how well he knows VB.net... learning that from someone who knows it well would be better than learning python from someone who's just picked it up to teach a class...
I know exactly what you mean. I have spend enough years interacting with people from Turkey that I no longer recognize any kind of Turkish accent.
That's the one feature that's definitly missing from Safari. (Safari only just now learned to re-open the last tab with Command-Z. All the other tabs you'll have to search for yourself in the recently closed pages-menu.)
Jeffrey Goldberg's sequel to "the Resistance"
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who writes code like that?

creators = [
{
"name": {
"name_authority": TextField,
"name_authority_id": IntegerField,
"display_string": TextField
},
"user_id" :IntegerField,
"roles": [TextField],
"attrs": [TextField],
"xts": [TextField]
}
]

anyway
How is this in any way a secret? Sure, they don't go and shutdown sites and disrupt services for months while integrating acquired companies like Google does, but the bottom of the amazon.com home page lists their sites. Amazon buys sites that do well independently, and they do it publicly. For some anecdotal evidence, see the kindle for sale on woot.com when Amazon bought them.
I've started doing the basic version of this: in my case, before I quote something, I'll ask for a detailed written explanation of what it is, even if I will still meet with them to discuss it further and think through my part of the estimate. You'd be surprised how many people don't have the energy to even summarize their thoughts on paper.

But I wonder how he uses this technique with his specific examples. He asks for an introduction to someone else before the first meeting, or after business has been conducted? As a means of weeding out the nonserious, you'd have to introduce the "ask" early on in the process..
This is one of the things that Play does well; setters and getters are generated for you at runtime so you only have to write it as:

public Date submittedAt;

and set/get it as you would any other variable. Easily one of my favorite things about the framework, and saves my { and } keys work as well.
Python is an awesome language, but in a HS class you probably won't get past simple scripting paradigms. If you guys were already CS students with solid programming experience as well as the theory behind it, or if you were just science students wanting to hack around, then python would be a great choice.

However, I think it would be more beneficial if you guys were to learn (sorry) Java and OO knowledge so that you could take the AP test and perhaps save time and money if you decide to move on to college.

Either way, VB.NET would be at the bottom of my list. C# would be great, but the professor might find the C-style coding too overwhelming for the students. And F#, being functional, is probably out of the question for a number of reasons.
Thanks for the reply. There is a connection, of course, but it is not that Amazon knows. Statement B is evidence in the sense that it suggests Amazon does not believe security is sufficiently iron-clad around EC2, which would allow for statement A to be possible in the first place.

I honestly did not expect my comment to create such angst. I recognize that the wording was a bit confusing, but it seems the main thing people are upset about is that I am spreading FUD. Of course that would be quite inappropriate if it was completely unfounded, but I have stated exactly where my concerns came from, so it seems perfectly legit to me.

Your reply is very reasonable and polite, but I am disappointed at the bulk of knee-jerk reactions to this post, as well as their passive aggressive/ad-hominen nature.

Perhaps I am just in a poor mood, but I believe I will be moving on from HN. It was one of the few excuses left for me to procrastinate, so at least I should be more productive. ;)

EDIT: This, by the way, is an excellent article, though somewhat dated, on some of the security shortcomings of EC2. Note it does not address the "nightmare scenario" that Xen (the virtual machine software) is itself vulnerable.

http://cloudsecurity.org/blog/2009/04/08/is-amazon-aws-reall...
If it turns out that your app is not suited for their purposes, but they didn't really have a way to realise that up-front, a refund is generally the way to go. You might also have to do some extra work to accomodate them transitioning out of your service.

Let's say you have a simple reminder list site. All the work you did (assertions, constraints on database tables, memory limits on the PHP process, whatever) assumed that users would have at most 200 todo items. One user has hit 800, now the website asserts out whenever he asks it to do anything, and you know that your infrastructure couldn't cope with a dramatically higher number of todos.

There are long term questions to ask about the product here. But in the short term, what I would do, roughly in order of priority, is:

* Do some quick queries to see if any other users will hit the same problem soon.

* Temporarily tweak the app wherever possible so it works with up to 900 items.

* Communicate all of this to the user. Sorry, we didn't anticipate this, if you really need that many todo items, we're not the app for you. Offer them a refund. Point out that things will work for now, but they are near the newly raised limit.

* Help the user transition - "if you want to leave us, tell us when you've stopped adding new items, and we'll email all of your existing items in an Excel spreadsheet"

* Fix your app so users can't create more than a few hundred items.
To be honest I think VB.Net is a decent choice for a high school level course. It's an approachable modern language backed by a huge framework with easy access to web, Windows and console programming. The IDE is free and relatively user friendly for someone familiar with Windows, which is much more likely than anything else.

Don't underestimate VB.Net. It has a terrible history but most of that ended with VB6. Another bonus is that once you know VB.Net the jump to C# is trivial and now you know 2 in demand languages. You can also compile the same code into a program along side F#, IronRuby and yes, IronPython.

You aren't there to learn syntax, you are there to learn to program. You should absolutely learn Python on your own as well, knowing one will make the other much easier to pick up anyway. Once you've done that go and learn Scheme, or Ruby, or Scala, ir preferably all of the above.
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Wow, that was nostalgic. I remember when I was a kid reading about the blue boxes. I was fascinated, but by that time the computer age had started and I spent my time on Commodores and early IBM PCs. It all reminds me on how much time people spend today working on jailbreaking, rooting, and otherwise hacking their phones, consoles, and computers.
I was thinking of meeting this coming Saturday or Sunday.

Agenda...well my secret agenda is to convince someone to join me in what I am doing, or get convinced about what someone else is doing! :)
I'm in Egypt at the moment. We're in Dahab, on the Sinai peninsular - but we spent several weeks travelling on the Nile from Cairo to Aswan and Luxor before we got here.

The experience that really brought home the importance of the Nile was taking the overnight train from Cairo to Aswan. You wake up in the morning to sunrise over the Nile. If you look out of the left hand window of the train, you see desert - nothing but sand and rocks. If you look out of the right hand window, you see literally just a few hundred metres of lush green farmland followed by the expanse of the river. It makes you realise that a large chunk of Egypt's usable land is hundreds of miles long but less than half a mile wide.
VB.Net is far closer to C# or Java than VB6. It's like a real grown up OO language now.
MIT teaches it as its intro now...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602307

and Norvig uses it...

http://www.norvig.com/python-lisp.html

I mean what more endorsement is needed? How about something really eloquent...

http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
Although I should point, C# is my language of choice on .Net.
Hi, sorry for that! What is the most common version used currently?
Exactly. Just signed up for Linode (768) YESTERDAY. Great deals though.
Money quote for the non-lisper:

> For simplicity, let’s use the notation

Yes, let's! Except in lisp, you can't. ;)

(Yes, feeling snarky.)
Undownvoted for being somewhat relevant. We are really talking about different languages though.
From video it looks like Opera Mobile for Andorid does not support resizing to fill the screen on double tap, you have to adjust it manually :(
destructuring-bind ;)
Anyone know what this article meant by "enphaoronate"?
We definitely don't need all the fluff, and I like the philosophical cleanliness of Lisp (from a distance), but to me it seems like too basic of a building block to think with. Haskell's point free style and K's vector building blocks seem more useful to me for use in philosophical reasoning about algorithms.
The individuals working for minimum wage are not imposing, they're trying to do their jobs. Your beef is with a group of people who allocated millions of funds in a bill passed years ago. Harassing the people hired to implement the bill isn't going to convince many lawmakers of anything.
Definitely. .NET is .NET and especially being imperative, VB is mostly just syntactic differences over C#. But neither of those languages are tested on the AP exam ;)
Seems like only a few hours ago that http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883748 was asserting that the door-closing button in most elevators is a no-op.
They wouldn't require a lot of startup (if any) but wouldn't be able to raise a large amount of money, either.

I think you just said everything is OK.
A lightbox is actually just a modal window which elegantly responds to user interaction: the user wanting to view a larger version of the image. I actually think it's way more elegant and userfriendly than a hardlink to the image which distracts you way more from your browser experience than a lightbox.
Anyone using CloudFront in production care to share their experience?
If I know correctly there'll be a Startup Saturday in Bangalore at IIM-B. I'll be there to pitch and announce my product as well. :)
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Does anyone else have trouble with making the distinction between curly braces and parenthesis?

I'm pretty near sighted, so I always have to squint to figure out if something is a brace or a paren. I think it is one of the main reasons I like lisp...

There are no braces, and all I have to do is make sure that emacs indents everything properly (ctrl+alt+q at top of form... in my head I call it 'regrinding') so I know that the forms I've written have the closing parens in the proper places.

I know people complain about the parens, but I spend literally no time fudging with the formatting of my lisp code.. emacs just does it. Java and C code, however I always end up fiddling with (even with an 'advanced' IDE like eclipse).
Is there a way to tell if the Heroku piece of the deal is still active? I suppose we may know after it expires, but at this point, I don't see a definitive confirmation either way of whether it is active or not.

It would be a great excuse to finally try some Ruby coding!
Of course, pictures like this are more profound for what you don’t see: country borders.

There are some borders you can see from space, such as the transition between North and South Korea:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark....
"Secret" being a hyperbole, they meant "little known". I'm betting that if you surveyed the general public, few would be able to name even one of these other brands.
No.

The better way is to change the URL -- then you setup your ETags + Cache-Control so that the object never expires, ever.

See Also:

http://public.yahoo.com/bfrance/radwin/talks/http-caching-ap...

http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2007/06/06/mod_never...
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I'm using http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password primarily on my Windows machine and synced to my Mac via Dropbox. It still in beta for Windows but is working great for anything browser related.

There are a few things it doesn't do and possibly aren't reasonably practical, e.g. remote desktop passwords, SSH passwords, Minecraft login etc. I do use it for storing misc things like SSH keys though.

As for passwords in my site, salt them, SHA2 hash them and throw them away.
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> Maybe I'm weird, but now I want to know what those lonely spots of light are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Pu_42cHz4#t=02m48s
For added convenience:

@ARTICLE{oiuytgfyhujik:11,
author = {{oiuytgfyhujik}},
title = {{on: World's largest association of pilots boycotts body scanners}},
year = {2011},
journal = {{Journal of Ironic Internet Postings}},
note = {\url{http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1885309}}
}
There was an interesting opinion piece in New Scientist about radiation safety levels recently (31 July 2010). It looked at health studies from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and studies of chemotherapy patients that suggest that the current recommended radiation limit (1 millisievert per year) is overly cautious. The article went on to suggest that the recommendation be raised to a lifetime total of 5 sieverts at no more than 0.1 sievert per month.

The article is here, unfortunately behind a pay wall: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727715.800-whos-afra...
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Pretty sure it's just a goof trying to make a word that sounds like it means 'enlarge' with 'pharoah' in it. The tone of the article sounds like the author may have been a little loopy on some 'medicine' when writing.

Sure, space travel will pay for itself by engendering international love. Um, ok.
Let's say you are a cubicle-dwellling enterprise schulb. You have a repetitive task to perform. Do you:

1) Spend 3 weeks requesting permission to install your favorite programming tools

2) Look around your Start Menu, suck it up and code it in Excel.

(That is ignoring VB's tight integration, first mover advantage, and the fact that an entire generation of kids grew up coding MS-BASIC.)
Don't worry about it. You may hate vb.net, you hopefully won't care all that much. Either way, if your teacher wants to teach it, there's a reason (probably he's familiar with it and not with python, or he's on the MS payroll). It doesn't matter to you.

You sound like you want to learn about programming. "Programming" is a different discipline than "programming in vb.net" or "programming in python" or "programming in lisp". Learning about programming is a multi-step process, in which you first learn to define a problem in a sensible way and create a set of instructions for solving it, then write it in a language a computer understands, and then learn how to figure out any one of a million other ways to write it for a computer to understand. The first and last steps are the most important and can take years, the middle one usually takes a semester or two at the most.

Let your teacher walk you and the rest of the class through the middle one with vb.net, then go home with your smarty-pants friends and start slogging away at the other two steps. Every time you get a programming assignment, do it in vb.net. Then do it in python. Then figure out what they have in common and where they are different. Explain it to your friends, and listen to their explanations. Then do it again in all the other languages you can find.
Pretty amazing. On the books, Cairo has 11 million people. Most people think its closer to 20, and that, day to day, another 20 or so come in from outside for work. I lived there on and off for a few years, and it's truly one of the most remarkable places in the world.
Not just listenable - fascinating!

This episode isn't quite at the level of the "Giant Pool of Money" one that gave Planet Money its birth, but it's still quite good! The Planet Money podcasts (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/) have also been excellent lately, especially their investigations into gold and t-shirt making.
Well, both have enough documentation that you can learn them without the need for a formal curriculum, and both are certainly worth learning - the .net VM is among the best of its kinds. Since a lot of VB.net documentation is in the form of expensive books, while Python documentation can be had for free, convince your teacher to use VB.net, and use your school as a resource to pay for your books.
You could always write a vb.net interpreter in python :-)
http://tekpub.com/production/iphone
I spent a month in Egypt when I was much younger.

Nothing drives home the beauty, the fragility, and somehow the hospitality of the country like this image.

I didn't get to see Luxor or Aswan (it was out of season), and I missed Alex because I ran out of money. The time I spent in Cairo, Sharm, Giza, Ainh-Soknah, and 6th of October City changed my life.

To anyone considering it: if you have the chance to travel, do it. Nothing makes the world seem smaller and the people seem closer.
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It's obviously humor, since backscatter x-ray scanners haven't been invented for as long as a standard pilot's career yet.
Ok, you're taking "advertise" too literally. What I meant was that software typically is thrown out to the world to serve a certain function, I wasn't making a comment on advertising materials :-).

I see what you're saying, but when you build something you typically have an idea of how it'll work, even if you don't have a precise specification. My view is that if the software is of good quality, it will work like that. If it's of bad quality, it'll sort kinds work some of the time like you expected. :-)

In general, saying that certain bugs aren't really is usually a cop-out (not saying you're coping out, just that this is what I hear as a typical excuse). In industry, you're usually quickly taking feature requests out of the "bug" category very quickly, and "working as designed" is usually the result of misunderstandings, not software failure -- and is also quickly pushed out of the bug category. Anything that pings back and forth a lot is probably a result of bad feature planning, which, again, reflects on the software quality.
I don't think Python is a good idea for a high-school class (where a big bunch of the people don't really care about programming anyways). Hell anyone that already knows a bit of programming will be completely thrown off his chair by the whitespace constraints, while new ones will probably have an awful time trying to debug anything.

Python is a great language and it certainly is 'easy' in contrast to a bunch of other languages, BUT a high-school class is to learn to program in general, and Python doesn't strike me as a good language to learn to do so from scratch.

Ruby is a bit better, but I'd argue the same thing. VB.net really is a better suited language to learn to program, and although I don't really like it myself, I agree with everyone saying it's a great language to start with. You can always learn Python on your own time, and I'd even argue that with what you'll cover in a high-school class, it really doesn't even matter since you'll be ahead of the whole class (not the people, the curricula) in a month if you learn Python on your own.
Why?

1) Your teacher cannot learn a new language well enough to teach a bunch of high school students in time. Have some consideration for him.

2) Your goal when starting to learn programming is not to learn the syntax of any one language, it's to learn to solve problems using programming.
- Learn about P-code ( or psuedo code )
- Learn about Simple Data Structures.
- Learn about conditional( if-then-else ) constructs
- Learn about iterative( for-while ) constructs,
- Learn how to declare variables and initialize them;
- Learn how to edit-debug-run code
- Learn how to version-control code (any file in general)
- Learn how to write functions/methods/sub-routines.
- Learn how to comment your code for future debugging

These are fundamentally the same in almost all modern programming languages. The syntax changes from one to another is mostly cosmetic. The key is good coding and problem solving habits and attitudes.

3) It's easy to spend time on the internet and be anamored about a particular language, particular OS, particular editor etc - but in the long run, they are commodities; there's no great big differences between them

4) If you really want to work in python, do so. Finish your problems in VB.NET and re-write it in python. Just don't impose your preferences on your teacher and entire class.
It would detract from the goal of the class.
You should! I really would prefer Python over VBA for my Excel programming.
For a second I thought this said GitHub and I was completely shocked given mojombo's SUS speech...
That's because Mac Firefox is a dirty, filthy no-good hack.
Hang on, do we know this is for real? I followed the link to news.com.au, and I can find one or two other blogs that are referring to this, but the APA site itself (http://public.alliedpilots.org/) makes no reference to anything like this, including in their "For the Media" section (press releases and such).