skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Python is the best language in the world for interacting with the web, and I'm going to show you why.

I disagree. I didn't need to read it, but I did, and I still feel that way.

The statement says language, but the actual points made are about the libraries and the community (i. e. the ecosystem).

I think the ruby ecosystem is actually better, for a few reasons:

* Deep integration with JavaScript (ExecJS and TheRubyRacer are way ahead of what is available in Python, Perl, and PHP)

* Many different excellent choices for talking to HTTP APIs, including the highly innovative Faraday

* A top-notch JVM implementation (JRuby has had more traction than Jython over the last five years)

* Lots of good auth libraries: OAuth (for authenticating with a plethora of outside services), Devise (pre-built auth with confirmation emails, password resets), and OAuth2 provider (server) implementations

* Ruby has evented programming too. Goliath is pretty good.

Python is great but I take issue with saying that it's the best web dev language out there.
Raising Your Network advertising site's RSS Subscription.
I don't know why that's true in general, but in my case, when Apple does poorly in the market, I feel more hopeful for the positive impacts computing can have on a society. As many here have pointed out (and as many others have disagreed with) Apple has become a company that has made censorship and curated computing in particular a profitable business model. It is my contention that the more that model becomes unprofitable, the better off we are as users, as it disincentives other companies from imitating the worst aspects of modern-day Apple.
Jotly Parodies Our Mobile, Local, Social App Obsession
What's very cool about this is that the page itself is actually a sample that will sell you on the book.

Best marketing of the year award.

Really awesome.
http://db.tt/S1d9PWQ
There are copywriting agencies, definitely. Some good ones exist, and I do consult. But it seems to me that startups - those who are bootstrapping, at least - don't often have that much to spend. And it's hard to tell a good copywriter from a great, high-converting writer. But very good food for thought, thematt! Merci!!!
Leave MV 2 hours before your actual flight time. This will give you ample time to drive to the airport (~20-30 mins) plus time to return the car (~5 minutes). The rest of the time is to prevent you from being late to your gate depending on the line. Its rare that you need 1.5 hours but its happened to me before where I arrive an hour early thinking I have ample time and the line somehow becomes insanely long. It may not happen to you this Friday night but better safe than sorry.
Yeah, i guess this could be a play to get more people to run more speculative campaigns to test the waters instead of letting organic do it.
:) I'll take that award with a great big smile. Thanks!
I think the site is buckling under the HN stress lol, especially the checkout cart. I doubt that this would be an issue under normal circumstances, but I just wanted to let you know that the site is getting tons of attention. Congrats! =D
Searching for the next Google
Did you factor this into your strategy viability assessment?:

If DropBox sold to Apple, they'd be out of The Game. Instead of carving out their own niche, with the thrill and risk that goes with it, they'd be supporting a game that Apple has already defined, and is winning. They wouldn't be able to gallop forward towards a future of their choosing, with competitors making them Better from all sides, they'd be IT support for the iApps division.

Do you factor the love of entrepreneurship into your equation?
pestaa got in touch with me directly and we had a productive discussion about it. Just for anyone who was following :-)
great post, I enjoyed reading it and following along!!!
>...it's protecting pictures of cats and drunk college parties

While that summary is not incorrect, I think it's worth noting those pictures you mentioned are valued somewhere above $80,000,000,000
(http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/27/facebook-valuation-sharesp...)
Maybe there's more to it than that.
import requests

r = requests.get('http://gun.io')
print r.content

That's it! In only three lines of python, you can grab a whole webpage and print it to the screen. Awesome!

Well, that's a poor selling point that unduly diminishes the credibility of the article. Your audience is likely to know snappy alternatives such as

curl gun.io
I bet you liked the transfer game in Paradroid. If you don't know it, you should definitely check it out. Myself, I can't fathom the fun in throwing down money on a mechanical random process. I play small-stakes poker occasionally, but that's just because I enjoy bluffing.
Review our startup: Instantly create a blog theme that matches your website
Didn't see an email address in your profile. Let me know what it is, or grab mine from my profile.
You've earned it. I like to think of myself as being somewhat hardened against being marketed to and I found myself continuing to read right up to the payload. That's not easy.
But how to I get Python in my browser. Python on the back and front end is my dream.
Japan: We're losing to Apple, and here's why
Oh, no! We'll look into it. It's a high-class problem to have... lots of traffic jamming up the cart. :) Thanks for the heads up.

Sorry to anyone who's experiencing trouble. The discount lasts a few days, so please do return - or email me, if you need any help: joanna AT copyhackers DOT com.
I don't know much about consumer product sales, but I wouldn't think that it's entirely impossible that different products have somewhat different seasonal sales patterns.
First, why is the author recommending SimpleJSON? Just use json, it's built into the standard lib! (Also if I'm not mistaken the json implementation included in Python may even be based on simplejson, the APIs are very similar even if not.)

Second, I disagree that Django is the best web framework. It might be the best web framework, but it depends on what you're doing. I've come to prefer Flask for its simplicity and overall the way it feels more Pythonic.

That said, requests cannot be recommended enough! It is an awesome package that should not be missed if you're doing web programming in Python.
Dropbox CEO: We’ll integrate with everything
The law requires they send a hard-copy.
It's one of the little loop-holes.
Personal Trainer makes himself fat on purpose
Actually, CS 241 is now the web security class. This, from what I was told, was a totally different class that was focused more on web development as a whole, rather than web security.
Or even just urllib?

import urllib

foo = urllib.urlopen("http://gun.io).read()
print foo

I mean...maybe urllib (or urllib2) are old and unhip at this point, but they're heavily documented.

I use urllib all over my projects and have never encountered any problems.
Hey everyone, I'm one of the founders. We started Blogic to cure the headache of recreating your website's theme on an entirely separate blogging platform such as WordPress. It was a huge pain with my last startup, and inspired me enough to solve it. Please email sean [at] blogic [dot] com with any suggestions or feedback.
That'll get you about 1% of the data Facebook actually hold about you.
I understand why they want Zuck to speak (it helps raise the profile of the event) but I'm not particularly excited. His talks are notoriously stodgy and unfocused, especially his Startup School appearances.

I'm much more excited about Max Levchin and Drew Houston. From past talks I've seen them do, I feel their message will be better focused and higher yield for the startup audience. The best talks last year were from entrepreneurs who had tasted a mix of failure and success - Dalton Caldwell and Brian Chesky.
Samsung Outs Verizon-Bound Galaxy Nexus On Their Website
This itself is a compelling example. The bundle discount + the 50% off further hacker news discount makes it a very attractive purchase, and that itself is a compelling demonstration of his knowledge and reason to buy the books :) He knows how to sell
Great deal and one of the things I have been needing for my start up (www.flyinghighcoffee.com). I saw a few load issues when checking out but I stuck with it and got it done.

Safari won't download the file, though when I try to get it from my iPad.
Has Romero done anything worthwhile since touching Quake? and who is Brenda Braithwaite? Maybe I am out of date...

I'd take it all with a pinch of salt - but then I am a game programmer talking about game designers - so take me with a pinch as well. :)

I think Valve have the right idea on game design from what they have shared. For one thing they actually ship consistently good games - for another they take a very scientific and reproducable approach. No confusing, unsubstantiated theories floating around, or guesses based on vague psychology... just iteration based on experiment.

Its a shame more developers don't share more with their crazy NDA happy approaches. I think it would be good if game design was considered more seriously as a field, but its not going to happen when academia and industry are far apart and the industry is keeping all of its knowledge of the field locked away behind NDAs.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3408/the_cabal_valves_...

http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2006/GDC2006_HL2De...

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/147512/interviewslookin...
Completely off topic, but did you just link me to halfway though a you-tube video? That's Fantastic, ya lean somethin new every day.
When I was in high school back in China, my school offered a ~$1/month subscription to receive SMS notices from school & teachers. From what I know, I didn't see any parents that refused this subscription. This is a proven business.
I bought it - but why do you need my billing address/phone number for an ebook. I was glad to see the PayPal option, but I was slightly put off by giving you all that info.

I can see wanting my name for doing a watermark and my email so you can send me an update when the next book in the series comes out, but the rest seemed unnecessary so you might want to consider removing them as "Required Fields".
>You are invested in these things, it is not that easy.

By analogy with predatory lending, i'd name it predatory social network lock-in. Hook 'em while they're young, while they don't know any better and while they not able to analyze consequences, ie. while they not able to make an informed decision.
Home Insurance London
My first impression was "wow, slow site load." Maybe add a few more servers before posting to HN ;)

EDIT2 - The site is responding a LOT faster now, it must have been a one-time issue.

When trying to replace the content of my site (beeets.com) in Chrome 14 I get

www.blogic.com/assets/themer-inner.js:6 Uncaught TypeError: Object [object Object] has no method 'stringify'

so I'm not able to review the product

- EDIT (error from Firefox 7, more or less the same)-

Error: JSON.stringify is not a function
Source File: https://www.blogic.com/assets/themer-inner.js
Line: 6
That is an interesting point. And, incidentally, I've been thinking along similar lines, though not restricted to Apple. Like in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955472
> I can no longer distinguish between mail that I have read and mail that I simply don't care about.

Why is this distinction important? When do you need to browse through mail that you've read? If you need to find something you can just search for it by content or individual.

The problem with automatically applying a 'seen' label, is that it forces you to to immediately filter through all your new mail. You can't stop halfway because then some 'unseen' mail will get marked 'seen'.
This is a really good, and visceral marketing campaign!
The "implementation" in the meaning of the C standard includes the OS and toolchain. If the C toolchain does not provide a 16 bit type, then it need not define (u)int16_t, regardless of the CPU that it is running on.
Microtouch - a handheld AVR touch screen demo board
People buy lots of laptops in August/September for back to school. People buy lots of iPods in December for gifts. People buy lots of iPhones in whatever quarter they launch a new iPhone in.
sorry to nitpick but she's a she.
Great you're getting back at it. Tiny workouts during the week work wonders for the brain.

Much of the info below wouldn't be new territory for you, but I hope it helps. The points I wanted to emphasize: measure, prevent plateaus, and that less is more.

Losing weight and putting on muscle should come easy initially, since you've had a break for a while.

--------

Most importantly, 'measure':

- Keep note of your 8-rep max. Make sure you're not pushing yourself too far. Most folks feel embarrassed to add on the tiny 1.5-2 pound weights to what they're currently lifting. But thats thats the sort of increment you should be looking at -- 1.5-2 pounds every other week. This can't go on infinitely.

- Vitals: blood pressure, creatinine levels, pulse rate, pulse deceleration time. If you're doing it right, you should see improvements on some of these. Most folks choose to ignore deceleration time.

- Muscle repair time. How long they stay sore. Things that've reduced repair-time for me: glutamine, multi-vitamins, fish-oil, upping the protein intake (fish etc.).

- Optimize the diet --> repair time --> strength-gains relationship. There certainly is a level of protein intake (differs per person) that'll result in maximized gains & lesser repair time.

- Quality of sleep. Note down how rested you felt when you woke up. Tune your diet/vitamin intake for better sleep & more vivid dreams even.

- Food intake. The exact items you've consumed, vitamins involved, calories (tagged by fat, carb, protein).

- Productivity, through measurable values: pomodoro's, lines of code, emails replied to, calls made, blog posts written etc.

- Energy levels during the day. Times you felt sleepy, irritated, low-on-resolve etc.

- Body function: pains felt, skin irritations, bowel-movements, urination-frequency.

- And obviously, you'd be tracking body weight constantly (preferably on a daily basis). Personally, I wasn't too bothered about tracking inches on my biceps and such.

--------

While it might seem mundane to track all of that stuff, you'll have a ton of fun coming up with interesting conclusions from the data. If you stick with it for at least 8 weeks -- measuring, analyzing, implementing, improving -- you'd have turned yourself 80% better.

Also,

- For a diet, I'd suggest Tim Ferris's 'slow carb' variant of the low-carb diets that are all over the place. It works quite well. Cheat-days are mandatory.

- My workout consists mostly of compound lifts (squats, bench etc.). I'd set aside a couple of days each week for cardio -- lasting about 25-30mins. Resistance training about 3-4 times a week, and keep switching workouts (you'll find a plethora of interesting ones at the bodybuilding forums) every month or so, to prevent plateauing.
requests comes close to Perl's LWP::UserAgent in terms of usability, but LWP::UserAgent has been around for years. I don't know how that makes Python the 'best language for interacting with the web.'
(Wrong): Sounds to me like JSON2.js failed to load or timed out for you, probably accounting for the slow load & eventual failure. Refreshing should do the trick!

Update: Your site, Beeets.com, doesn’t seem to be working for me, either. It loads fine but I can’t select a content area. Probably some sort of JS conflict — though this is, encouragingly, the first time we have actually seen this in the wild! We’ll take a look.

Update2: It looks to me like Mootools, which your site is including, redefines window.JSON (which is native in modern browsers, and which we include for old browsers) with an object that is incompatible with the browser-native JSON method "stringify". https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global.... But in my jsfiddle attempt to confirm this, Mootools is playing nice… maybe some other script on the page is doing this.
Just curious, what would prevent you from using this on a daily basis? And what other new metrics would you like to see?
it is disconcerting to have your password emailed to you. are you storing the passwords in cleartext? Would definitely prefer if you didn't.
This is really, really cool. Thanks for making this.

I really dig the Flask project (love the website and the docs, and everybody who uses it raves about it) and I hope to play with it more in the future, but I don't think I'd recommend it to somebody who is a first timer, largely because of one issue: Data. Flask leaves you to sort it out on your own, which is great if you're capable of that, but Django holds your hand, which is more appropriate for a beginner.
What's the deal with "Europe" vs Facebook? Is anyone else catching a little bit of nationalism?
Brenda Brathwaite is the responsible for the Wizardry videogame series, if you're old enough to have played them. She also has done extensive work in teaching game design, you might like Challenges for Game Designers, which she co-authored with Ian Schreiber. More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Brathwaite
Apple’s Earnings: 5 Things You Need to Know
Ask HN: Where do software startups find good sales people?
Lately, I've noticed that some software/saas startups have real sales/marketing people following up on trial accounts. In fact, I've personally interacted with people from KISSMetrics, RightScale and a few others–and I think they've done a great job.

We're in a position with one product where having such a person would probably be a good idea. So, I'm curious:

Where can you find a good sales person? (Most HN posts and job boards I use are developer-focused)
Yes, I see. It can be annoying when someone widens the scope of an already-narrowed discussion, as my comment tried to do. Thanks for your restatement and clarification.
IIRC, (most?) browsers will still send the referrer (sorry, "referer") if you're going HTTPS->HTTPS, so if your your site is using SSL, you'll still get to see the referral data, wouldn't you? Whereas HTTPS->HTTP won't send referrer data and businesses would lose valuable information.

Perhaps this provides an incentive for sites to start serving HTTPS-Only, or at least showing Google only the SSL version (e.g. showing rel='canonical' with the HTTPS link). On the other hand, Google is still disincentivizing use of SSL through AdSense, which I believe is still HTTP-Only.

Even with the AdSense disincentive, it could still help. Knowing your referrer keywords is much more important to businesses than AdSense, and it's a very good thing for a site that wants my money to be served by HTTPS-Only, since you can MITM a site easier if there are any HTTP-Only pages on said site.

Sites relying heavily on AdSense, OTOH, would be more likely to be ad-supported rather than product sales-supported, and thus would have less need to be fully secured, since you're less likely to enter sensitive information there (excepting, of course, people who stubbornly reuse the same password everywhere).

I'd like to see this lead to a push of vendors who both sell a product and use AdSense to demand Google support SSL for AdSense, since they would need both referrer data and AdSense to survive. Once Google cracks and adds SSL support to AdWords, smaller sites will be more inclined to offer there content as HTTPS-Only.

It's a step in the right direction, at least.
Deleting data in a complicated system is not at all a trivial task as data integrity can easily be impacted. So Facebook's excuse that they can't delete data at their scale is probably not just PR speak. For them there is no downside to keeping data besides a minority of their userbase complaining. Meanwhile the downside to deleting data is potentially huge and a mistake would be nonrecoverable. I wouldn't expect them to start deleting data anytime soon unless legally required to do so. I do agree that the verbage used on their site should more accurately reflect the actions occuring on their backend.
d3.js, which was used for this is pretty sweet. If you haven't checked it out, take a peak at the github repo.

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/
Multiple tries, two different browsers, no reported resource loading failures from my dev tools (All scripts are loading).
It is an awesome OS except for one significant drawback: javascript. If not for the dependency on js these phones and tablets wouldn't lock-up hard so often or hang for several seconds after touching the screen more often than not. I know js fans will object but their single-threaded, interpreted language is the #2 source of Palm/HP's troubles.

The #1 Palm issue, however, is the hardware manufacturer/s. If Palm had been able to use the same CN fabs as Apple the Pre would be _big_. But they weren't and as a result the Pre/Pixi/Touchpad are larger than they could have been and, more significantly, the (Pre/Pixi) keyboards are the worst on any smartphone.
The cost savings would be pretty massive for a company this size. This is not a trivial aspect to the business, but a way to get significant profitability gains.
As a second nitpick here, some countries don't have states. You shouldn't make it a required field either.
The coursework is for Rails 2.3. Things have significantly changed in the Rails framework. A lot of great info on web applications in general, including security, javascript, css, and AJAX, though.

Also, something that might escape the attention of our younger hackers: the class instructor is THE John Ousterhout, creator of Tcl and Tk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ousterhout
All good questions. I'm using WooCommerce theme for WordPress, which ties into PayPal, and those are required fields. We don't store any personal information... unless you choose to create an account (and then you can modify that account, too!). Oh, and - obviously - we don't collect or store any credit card info; we leave all of that to the experts at PayPal. Sorry if it's a problem at all!!!
> Just a thought: can we find some input, which will turn into a malicious script, when compressed or encoded by an algorithm and saved as a file on the server?

This is not possible with gzip:

http://www.gzip.org/zlib/rfc-gzip.html#file-format

I should mention that on top of this technique, I also rename all files uploaded to a random hash that is stored in a database. That hash is never revealed to the client. When the file is downloaded, the real name is provided from the database as the file name, while the source of the file is read from its true location.

So even if an intruder were to upload a malicious file and somehow managed to bypass the encoding algorithm ... he wouldn't know where to find it. He would have to hack the database on top of everything just to find out where it is.
Data? Can you explain that? Not sure what you mean.
It also depends on what you need to do with the web. Perl is currently the best language for interacting with Unicode, for example. If you web needs include Unicode, you might have trouble with Ruby or Python, unless you're willing to accept half-ass, partial, or just plain wrong Unicode implementations.
Hourly heatmaps with Google Analytics
Your concern is not justified. The change only applies to logged-in users who - by definition - must be exchanging cookies with google.com already.
Mary Meeker’s 2011 Presentation On Internet Trends [Slides]
To parse Html and XML, BeautifulSoup is awesome.
I browsed it at work and it looked great!

Unfortunately, I came home to order and found this:
Database Error - Error establishing a database connection
That's a great catch, Mandar. We'll have to do some behind the scenes work to figure out how to resolve state/province issues. Apologies!!! It's required 'cos that's what the credit card companies need to process your info.
Really sorry for that failure, it's definitely on our end somewhere, but appears to be unique to your site. That's the beauty of the problem we're solving - unknown inputs. Can I email you when it's fixed?