skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disbelieve. Which would you prefer to read to get the output of a system call?

`your system call and args`

subprocess.Popen(['your', 'system', 'call', 'and', 'args'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]

The former is the traditional syntax supported in various shells, Perl, and Ruby. The latter is what you need if you want your code to run in Python 2.6.

And this is before we get into the fact that the minutia of syntax and layout is only a minor factor in the maintainability of large projects.
i remember going to the library to write reports for school
Obviously, far far far away from a YC investor day... Wondering how you get to perfect relevance ration for a demo pit (quality of startups, quality of investors, quality of press, ...).
Let me echo VivTech. You dont need to memorize all the algorithms and variants, but you do need to know what is there, so that sometime later when you need a solution, you know where to look. Also you need to dive deeply into some aspect such as sort or lists so that you get a good feel for big O notation and analysis. You may never implement a sort or tree algorithm, but is good to know which one to pick when you need it.

I've never had to use FFT, but sorts, trees, and graph traversal are pretty common.

My introduction to algorithms oh so many moons ago was Sedgewick when it was a single volume in C(?). I found it easy to read and use.
This tends to work pretty well - I got into it via Joe's Goals, but got sick of the interface and tech, so built a command-line tool to do the same kind of thing - http://tmcw.github.com/habiter/
The new scrolling isn't totally incompatible with scroll wheel usage, if you're willing to overthink it a little bit. Imagine that the scroll wheel is resting on the page, and that by applying upward/forward movement to the top of the wheel, you apply downward force to the page, moving your viewing pane higher on the page. Like so: http://imgur.com/245lA
Where did your middle-class customers go?
How to be THE LUCKIEST GUY ON THE PLANET in 4 Easy Steps
Alternatively, you can create a second gmail account to 'archive' your least used contacts, and your primary account for your most used. I do this for archived email as well, for example.
"Oh yes, I always use at least third base passwords"
Ask HN: Advice on switching to Python
Hey HN, TL;DR at the bottom.

I've been coding PHP as a hobby for 1.5 years on-and-off. I've done some client work and some small personal sites with LAMP.

For the past 2 months I've been coding a lot, and trying to pick a PHP framework (just coding pure PHP before now). Went through Zend, Symfony, Kohana, CodeIgniter Reactor, found none to be suitable, then settled on Yii (great framework).

However, as I'm not currently invested in any PHP frameworks, or even in the PHP language too much, I decided to see if I should try something else. (This is for a high-potential project)

After researching, I'm now leaning towards Python. Partly because of the ubiquitous Django, partly because of those who already use it (not that I'm doing it to be 'cool', but so many companies and HNers can't be wrong), and partly because it couldn't hurt to have another language either way.

I know the whole "use what you know" motto, but as I'm still at square one (haven't starting coding the project) and not in need of income for a few years (first year college student) I'd like to do it right from the start.

PHP was great for learning everything from variables and loops to OOP, Design Patterns, etc. so I'd like to think picking up a new language won't be a huge task. I'm doing C# in college and find it no problem due to my PHP experience.

I'm a few chapters into Dive Into Python (http://diveintopython.org/) and it seems even easier than PHP so far.

Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated before I go all-out.

TL;DR: 1st year college student, coding (hobby) PHP on-and-off for 1.5 years, about to start a big (potential startup) project and going to switch to Python/Django. Feedback?

Thanks for reading :)
1971: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. If we increased the maximum in the data base schema, we'd have to modify half of our software. Sorry, IT.

1981: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. Our software vendor set this limit and we don't have the source code. Sorry, IT.

1991: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. We don't have enough room in our budget for more hard disk. Sorry, IT.

2001: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. Our network traffic is so high that we had to set arbitrary limits. Sorry, IT.

2011: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. The internet is full. Sorry, Google.

[EDIT: Replaced "contacts" with "records" 5 times. The general case causes less confusion. Thank you, juiceandjuice.]
This is one of the books I had waiting on the desk of any new employee that I hired in the last 5 years. The whole book is a must read, but for me personally I referenced the sections on coding conventions and defensive programming for new employees all of the time.

The other practice I picked up from Steve was stepping through each code execution branch in the debugger to informally confirm the correct behavior when I was building w/o explicit unit tests.
Apple's Lala purchase appears to have been "insurance"
Really? Most of the standard web dev stuff (Ruby, PHP, Apache, etc.) comes out of the box and works quite well, and if you need either specialized versions of things (rvm, virtualenv, custom Apache, etc.) or stuff that doesn't come with OS X (lighttpd, node.js, etc.) wouldn't it be installed in /usr/local?

I don't think this will break many web dev tools. Unless you mean stuff like Sequel Pro or TextMate; even then, I can't imagine most apps won't make the transition smoothly.
Not really, Big-O has its places. I think his point in that area was that the constant factors do matter, and are glossed over (by definition) in Big-O. Reminds me of DJB's book on high-speed crypto, where he talks about this issue: http://cr.yp.to/highspeed.html
These are things you can't do yet. The yet is the important part- never forget that.

I read somewhere above that you spend a lot of time fixing bugs. Congratulations! You're already a programmer!

To move onward and upward, the biggest thing you can do is change your mindset from "how do I make this problem go away?" to "what is causing this problem to happen?" At the end of the day, you'll still get those bugs fixed, but you'll have a deeper understanding of the things that led to them in the first place.

Once you know that, breaking things down and shuffling ideas becomes second nature.
To repeat: jury nullification is a check on state power. It prevents the state from convicting. A lot of US criminal procedure law functions the same way: it prevents conviction. The presumption of innocence, the burden of proof, the right not to be unreasonably searched, the right to an attorney, the right to present and confront witnesses, etc, all can function to prevent the conviction of a guilty person. We accept this because we think that too much state power is worse than regular crime. If you want to be sure of convicting the guilty every time, you're going to have to accept the loss of many freedoms as well as the conviction of many innocent people.
Blog | GM Infotech
That's probably one of the best comments to demonstrate the "engineer spirit": no quabble about the sexism claims, the quality of the pixel art, or if it's a good way to make people pick good passwords... Mere optimization.
Scores of IBM workers in Research Triangle Park may lose jobs in cutbacks
I would consider a design problem like that a bit worse than an arbitrary limit, from both the perspective that the artificial limit demonstrates someone considered that edge case and the perspective that the arbitrary limit will probably be easier to change in the future. If they're storing the contacts in a way that they're bumping up against some real constraint, it could be far more difficult to change it.
my sister managed to find a copy of settlers of catan in a toys'r'us in Ottawa, Canada. we were both extremely shocked by that, as were the employees at the store itself.
Calling Yahoo a startup that begat the search engine is glossing over a HUGE chunk of early web history.

Scott Yanoff's list was the real origin of the web directory, which led to Filo and Yang's YAHOO list (yes, it's a backronym)
But would Google loose money? If the big content farms shut down tomorrow how would that effect Google? There would instantly be fewer ad views. Wouldn't the fewer views be worth more (same number of people placing ads with fewer places to put them) causing an increase in ad price to cover the difference?
MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Early 2011 Teardown
Bedroom Interior Design | Bedroom Interior Design Photos
A bedroom is a place in a home that a person spends an average of 5 to 8 hours each day. If you think a little at this, you’ll find out that actually you spend a lot of time in the bedroom.
Thanks for pointing this out. My thought is that the system handles relevant vs irrelevant content.

We certainly get a good number of people reading our strip from our HN posts. The majority of posts submitted to HN don't get voted up or commented on - does this mean they are not good posts?

Our comic is for a technical audience so we're submitting this to a technical audience.

Also, how many of the posts on the front page of HN are gamed?

Regards...
So, are you a paying customer? This seems very unthoughtful of them. Actually i was considering evaluating them for enterprise use, looks like i will have to postpone the evaluation.
Your solution, unlike the Flash one, utterly fails to spike my CPU.

That's a new one on me for things labelled "HTML5". :D
Any laid-off IBM'ers who are interested in possibly collaborating on a startup, give me a shout. The startup is based around open-source knowledge management, BI and analytics. The goal is to be "The Red Hat of KM, BI and analytics."
Keep at it - if you keep reading books and learning, you will get better, even if at the time it feels as if you're not making any progress.

You'll work and work, and it seems as if you're getting nowhere, then suddenly one day you'll wake up and you'll look back and realize, "Wow, I really have come a long way from where I started"
I love this idea. Is there an easy and accurate-ish algorithm that could generate the numbers involved?
With relay back to a previous thread on 'advances seen in our lifetime' it again amazes me how fast things are moving, especially in the medical field. And for $200 yet... brilliant. Leonard "Bones" McCoy would be proud.
I forget shit all of the time related to programming. I then started a blog that just documented snippets to accomplish various tasks in various languages that I use. This way if I forget, and I do all of the time, I can refer to my blog. Double bonus: Google indexes the content and people come by to give alternative suggestions. Win-win.

Good luck.
Or they did set a minimal speed target and are able to reach that target using the current systems/algorithms as long as everyone keeps their database under 10,000 contacts. 10,001 probably would work, but the programmers verified and are able to _guarantee_ the agreed speed with 10,000
The right to a jury trial in criminal cases is only available for serious offenses (possibility of six months in jail.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_by_jury_in_the_United_Sta...
It is possible they made the limit to "protect" you from timeouts caused by performance limitations. Perhaps the contact system is still working with a weak indexing system, or maybe they send all the contacts to the browser in one giant JSON response.
Dropbox and Evernote are deal kills for me too. I'm going to play with Lion for a day or two more then switch back to my image of SL.

I haven't tried my magic mouse on Lion yet, so I hadn't run into that problem yet.
Some choice bits from the teardown - makes me want to wait until Apple sorts out these little QC issues (I have bought nearly every MBP model Apple ever sold and every time I bought immediately following the release - it ended up having some issue or the other) -

* One thing that has us a little concerned about the new models is their quality control.

* A stripped screw near the subwoofer enclosure and an unlocked ZIF socket for the IR sensor should not be things found inside a completely unmolested computer with an $1800 base price.

* Absurd amounts of pre-applied thermal paste may cause problems down the road.
I've had a serious problem with Gawker sites failing to properly include third-party javascript. Even JQuery. The whole page then fails to load. Definitely how NOT to do things.
Huh? Do people really do this?

At some point in some conversation, somebody is going to ask "so, what are you working on?". You're going to end up trying to explain it one way or another.

For some things, a quick demo is worth a thousand words.

So it's not a question of 'if', but how much time are you going to waste futzing with your computer in the middle of a social conversation.
Yes, that's a reasonable scenario for heavily regulated industries, some B2B and most government work. It doesn't really address my point about "running out of jobs", though.

Older people doing jobs of that sort in no way means that there's a shortage of work younger people could do... unless you're implying that Japanese people are both

1) unwilling to purchase goods and services outside of large industries that discriminate against young people

and

2) incapable of creating goods or services non-Japanese would pay for
For those like me, wondering (no disrespect) who Ward Canningham is:

Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham (commonly known by its domain name, c2.com), on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He currently lives in Beaverton, Oregon and is the chief technology officer for AboutUs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham
who cares what a professional shill thinks anyway.
The question of whether stupidity is worse than malice is one for the ages.
What the heck is "css-hacker"?
FWIW, Highrise also sets seemingly "arbitrary" limits to the number of contacts you can have in an account: http://highrisehq.com/signup

I guess both Google and 37signals do it because it's just a quick and dirty way to manage resources. There maybe be other reasons that we're not aware of though (e.g. people using more than that number of contacts might frequently be using the app for nefarious purposes?).

It's a shame because limitations like these ultimately place limits on your creativity. In the case of Highrise for example, I once had an idea to use it to manage and track communications for all of my applications users, but obviously that doesn't work if there are hard limits there.

Not sure I have a moral to my little story, except that arbitrary limits are understandable, but frustrating and unfortunate.
This the site he designed: http://www.kamikazecookery.com/

The blog that's linked uses a popular Wordpress theme.
Atmosphere Framework 0.7 released: GWT, Wicket, Redis, XMPP, Async I/O
This release contains an impressive number of new functionality and bug fixes. The extensive list of fixed bugs for that release can be read here, and the new functionality like Native GWT, Wicket, Async I/O, etc.
What now?

You're statement is a little confusing. All our passwords are munged with encryption, they all look like hash garbage. How could they differentiate?

My only guess is that perhaps you've interpreted my comment as a database entry, rather than a UI progression--and you think that "%1 off coupon" is stored with the login table. That clearly wasn't what I was saying--thats a poor design. I'm saying simply offer a coupon code to users if their password validates certain levels of difficulty. It doesn't need to be tied to the account in anyway.

Also, I think that at the point of my database being in the wild, I'd think hackers will be less focusing on cracking a stored password and more interested in trying to restore the encrypted payment details?
4. You will not attempt or encourage others to:

A. sell, rent, lease, sublicense, redistribute, or syndicate the
Twitter API or Twitter Content to any third party for such
party to develop additional products or services without prior
written approval from Twitter;

- http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms

But you never know.
Huawei to U.S.: I’m Ready for My Examination, Doctor
Very neat service. Falls into that "Why didn't we have this already? category. Excited to try it out.
Microsoft Gets it, Sony Just F-ing Hates You
A design problem could be motivated by the need to save space (and even 2 bytes per row would save google a lot of database space). Even google doesn't have infinite storage, and there's always going to be a real limit somewhere.
"""Dear Google, I Have More Than 10,000 Contacts"""

Then you are a hoarder, and you collect stuff to avoid thinking of DEATH.

(Psychology hacker)
You can see his technique here -
http://tyrannyfighters.com/category/announcement/page/3/

Whatever about the law on what he was doing, they was clearly wrong to be harassing the videographer, and DHS appear to have paid out $5000 in settlement.
http://blogofbile.com/2010/10/18/settlement-with-department-...

I'm not sure its a good idea that they can hand out tax-payer money to avoid judgement against them for their illegal acts.
"In order to control points where many lines are incident, we create a cell decompostion using the polynomial ham sandwich theorem. "
Call for research participation – how functional is your workplace?
I would suspect the real reason is something along the lines of "We download the entire contact list in JS in the client to do autocompletion, so if it gets too big your browser runs out of memory and crashes." They might also be storing the contacts database as a single row in their backend store. Either way it's not necessarily as easy as a quick change in an upper limit, and the number of users affected is likely to be quite small, so I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't exactly at the top of their priorities.
I really enjoyed Rails for Zombies, so I'm looking forward to seeing what this is all about.

Is there a more informative page that's live yet? The only other thing I could get to was http://help.codeschool.com/ and it didn't have much on it.
> Obviously someone set an arbitrary limit based on their expert

Google is known to based their decisions on actual data, they probably noticed that most people were below eg 500 contacts and 99.9% below 9000 (or such) and decided that 10000 would be safe.
Face Tracing + Perspective Projection on FPGA
Top Gadgets Awaited for 2011
What are the downsides of the current DNS arrangement? Could any be leveraged to make a serious challenge, to create something that was more independent of government?

Please shoot these ideas down:

- Find a very liberal nation, create a subdomain, and then subnet it. e.g. reassign.nz

- Create a wikipedia-like community around a subdomain arrangement. Start with the current world DNS, but immediately fork. Make decisions based on debate around a fixed set of values.
I am a 24-year-old and would say that I would rather do the consulting + startup route than VC funding. However, I tend to not be attracted to building the next twitter, groupon, Facebook and instead would rather build the next company you've never heard of(TM).
Creativity comes from limits.
I wonder how many people solve it and then do not send in their key. I know I'm not. I cannot be the only one that was more interested in doing the challenge than the rewards.
On the spectrum of scaling an application AWS has definitely leaned hard towards scaling out. (where the other end is scaling up) This means it caters a little more to denormalized databases and load balanced web servers than it does to one giant mysql database server or a cluster of a few large database servers.

I agree with nethergoat in that if you need low latency communication between ec2 instances that you should be using their hpc instances with faster/optomized ethernet.

I however disagree with nethergoat and agree with cagenut and think that the vast-majority of applications still currently depend more on a scale up paradigm. That is slowly moving towards scale out as people/businesses see its benefits and AWS is catering to this trend.
>You are talking about parallelism at the instruction level. I'm trying to explain that that is note what people mean when they say "instruction level parallelism."

ok, just point which of the 2 ILP executions i mentioned above isn't really ILP, and which of the 2 DLP executions
isn't really a DLP.
Paul G says there's no bubble. Ha!
Because it is based on BigTable and it has certain limitations designed to make it easier to implement, including a limit on how many elements one can return.

Also, 10k contacts is properly far more than most people would ever have so it is not a big deal.
Here is the link to the paper
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/71/71ra16.full.pdf
I started to reply in detail, but it all just started to sound like I was attacking you, and that's not my intention. I've just observed that it feels like you're spamming the site with stuff that almost never gets upvoted, and hence feels like it's just not a good fit for this crowd.

But hey, that's your call, and I was just hoping to let you know what impression you're giving.
Interesting - I'm on a Late 2010 MBA (11 inch) and mine says TRIM Support: No
Python still has (even in 3.2) os.system, which is the equivalent of the backticks from perl/shell. The subprocess module is preferred because you have more control and options than simply deferring to the C library's system() call.
Sure, I'd call that a valid point.

Replacing one dictatorship with another has significant historical president, and might be very simple if everyone agrees on who should be in charge. One might argue, though, that if the new regime needs to actively suppress an oppositional group, by any means, then the solution might no longer qualify as simple.
Gmail contacts sync with mobile phones like the G1 which don't have tons of memory or processor power. Try using one of those phone with 9000+ contacts and its not a nice experience.

The limitation is there for performance reasons. Besides why is your sales guy is using gmail as his crm?
Facebook acquires Pursuit
In Japan, Women Think Mark Zuckerberg Is A Hamburger
We don't believe that spreadsheets of data about your own Twitter account are a useful way to "develop an additional product or service" and that's not how we're pitching the feature. This feature is based on requests from several professional social media managers among our beta users, who wanted a way of exporting the data to give their management reports on their Twitter usage. If we find out that anyone is paying to download our spreadsheets for the purpose of re-importing the spreadsheets to build their own Twitter-related product or service, we will take appropriate action.

Thanks for the note of caution, though. There are risks to developing a service on top of a third-party platform, and we strive to maintain a good relationship with Twitter to mitigate those risks.
The individual point releases (10.6.x) have rolled out new kernels via Software Update (not every time, but it happens), I see no reason why that can't be done over the App Store.
I agree with you until the ad hominem attacks on Penelope Trunk. A quick google search shows she runs Brazen Careerist the venture-backed startup.