skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't say "properly quoting." I said "properly escaping" and mentioned the DBI quote method E.g. $safestring=$myDBIobject->quote($taintedstring)

From the O'Reilly book "Programming the Perl DBI"

"By far the most important utility method is quote(), which correctly quotes and escapes SQL statements in a way that is suitable for a given database engine."

If you're going to reuse a query with different values then it makes more sense to use parameterized queries. If you're going to reuse an input string in multiple queries which don't themselves get reused then it makes more sense to use an escape function like quote.

If you're using a method like DBI's "selectrow_array" which combines the "prepare," "execute," and "fetchrow_array" steps into one method call then you pretty much have to use the quote method.
V8 is very impressive. It is one of the fastest virtual machines for dynamic languages. Look where it scores on the shootout.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

It is nearly 10x faster than Ruby 1.8 and 5x faster than CPython. Of the shootout, it is the fastest dynamically typed language other than LuaJIT.
And because Justin is already a successful writer who edits Maxim.com. He founded the comedy site Holy Taco (now owned by Break Media) and for the show he's getting the help of the co-creators of "Will and Grace."

"Shit My Dad Says" was just what turned him into a hot ticket and gave his creativity a specific character to explore.
You're assuming that Java uses more memory than Python; why?
Bytecodes meet Combinators: invokedynamic on the JVM
Man I love Felix Dennis!

"I'll leave you with a timeless piece of advice from Felix Dennis:

The first step? Just do it
And bluff your way through it.
Remember to duck!
Godspeed ...

and Good Luck!"
Found on Schneier on Security blog http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/protecting_oss...
I was under the impression that it was porn of geeks...
We're in BizSpark. We have a dedicated server, and our hosting company (SoftLayer) used our production licenses. (Great company in general, by the way.)
Uh?... English and French are two general-purpose human languages and I was talking about computer languages, and then mostly about domain-specific ones.

So I guess you completely missed my point.
Unlocking the Mysteries of Speech
Yup, that's a classic issue; you can end up accidentally using ancient libraries without even realizing it.

Also, 67-68 isn't particularly recent; the latest "stable" would probably be r1318 aka fe83a906ee aka Core 78. You can try trunk as well, but we're having some miscompilation issues with the latest improvements, so I wouldn't trust it for production use yet.

Another note is to check your settings; a lot of people have all sorts of weird encoding commandlines (you included, given the contents of the string I pasted above) from the days when x264's setting system was baroque and confusing. Now the defaults are good and there's some nice automatic presets that let you easily pick a tradeoff of time vs. quality (see x264 --help), so you don't have to mess with weird options.
This post was aimed at the person who is interested in TDD, but hasn't had their first big insight into how it works. It's about "do the simplest thing", not about a full TDD process to build a working production system. As I said to someone else in this thread, such a blog post would be huge. No one would read it. We wouldn't be here talking about it. :)
That'll teach me to scoff at Bond. The first thing I thought of was Bond driving his car in Tomorrow Never Dies (10ish years ago), with a device that looks suspiciously like an iPhone.
Great if you happen to already have a biology degree and know Python to boot! This might just rekindle my old interest in biology.
True, but not everyone is Shakespeare.
So when working with WinForms (.NET) you build the forms without the designer?
Project Management 101 – Back to Basics
The problem is remembering each time you do this. After a while it gets painful to repetitively do the same. Its just easier to install an alternative which comes with a real time scanner.
How I Built a Web 2.0 Dating Site in 66.5 Hours (2007)
Watching V8 and Python development progress, I bet V8 performance will improve significantly in the next couple of years. Also Python comes with the baggage of a much more complex language and feature set.
The majority of the arguments are just FUD. They might have applied in 2001, but to write this post now is just silly. He complains about breaking changes between 1.1 and 2.0 -- 2.0 came out in 2005. My guess is that he's really just angry because Microsoft (and most developers) have moved on from Delphi.

Some of the arguments are reasonable when applied to desktop development, but they're still pretty light on facts. None of them are particularly reasonable when applied to web development.

He laments that GDI+ isn't hardware-accelerated, but if I recall correctly, WPF (the newer UI toolkit that came out in 2007) is.

"Almost every programmer said you have to write XAML by hand" -- I won't defend Microsoft's obsession with visual tools, but I learned that I have to write HTML by hand years ago, and I'm not complaining.

String processing is slower? Probably because .NET strings are immutable, which actually creates large performance gains in the vast majority of cases.

If your performance concerns are so stringent that you need to worry about whether the type system in a language is rooted, you're either over-optimizing or you should be working with C.
If there's a sign of a bubble, it's companies building things that already exist, on top of companies that have no business model. Skeptical.
Let me know if you can figure that out and we'll implement the feature asap.
Test ADSL - Speedtest - ADSL Speed Test
Isn't that contradictory?

If all turing-complete languages are equally expressive, how does adding another feature to a language that's already turing-complete can possibly make it more expressive than it already is? It was turing-complete before the addition and it's just as much turing-complete after the addition.

I'm not really impressed by turing-tarpit-style arguments. There's at least one thing I can do in Common Lisp that I can't in Java: Implementing new syntaxic constructs look exactly like they're part of the language. I won't bore you with a long laundry-list of other similar things.

In fact, you know what? If by the turing-completeness criterion all languages are equally expressive, then the important points of comparison between languages in terms of expressiveness are necessarily matters other than turing-completeness.

Or would you argue that, say, x86 machine-language is just as expressive as say, Java? According to your turing-completeness argument that would seem like a yes. By the way, I do include a certain measure of "productivity" in my use of the word "expressiveness". Do you?
Offline and Online Product Recommendations Between Moms
Instituting a uniform is quite effective in cutting down on this, but it's not foolproof. Having attended a school where uniforms were mandatory there was still discrimination based on the brand name of the uniform.

The uniform code basically consisted of stating the style, color and form of the items of clothing to wear. Leaving it up to parents to buy clothing that suited their budget (within the uniform guidelines). So kids would be mocked if they used a lesser known brand name instead of say, dockers.

I think current rules have been made stricter so now the school shirts are sold by the school itself.

Granted, it does solve all the problems of kids just coming to school dressed in attire that would be the cause of derision, either because the kid is eccentric or because the parents are neglectful.
Experience.

Or you can look at the numbers for yourself on the shootout site. Java using 10-100x as much memory is not uncommon.
Do you have a link to a good "getting started" article written for a desktop user? (someone looking to encode nice looking videos, not build an encoding infrastructure)

This seems like an issue with a great deal of nuance, and I'd find such a resource invaluable.
Someone that is viewed as a good communicator will be viewed by people as having overcome/conquered such shortcomings whether it's true or not.
Layoffs Reported At Adobe
Surprisingly just a :P makes the whole thing less of a hit.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=933630
Actually that is a problem. We started to notice about two years ago that we were getting applications from people who seemed mainly to want YC on their resumes. We try to filter those out, but we still get fooled occasionally.
I didn’t know that chromosomes are so big. The photoreceptor (or sperm, for that matter) seems way too small to fit 46 (23). What am I missing?
Hmm, I can't seem to see the email in your profile.
Alright, thank you for the input. I'll take it into consideration.
Of pages that have improved by using alternative font - unfortunately I can't. If anyone is doing that, they certainly don't advertise it, so I can't give you any specific examples.

I based my opinion almost entirely on my experience, that even a slight change of font can make a big difference in someone's perception. I've seen people being positively surprised when I use a "different" font for normal everyday text (1-2 pages). Nothing crazy - just a bit more stylish. I also got an impression that using nice fonts (with better visible horizontal lines, etc.) got me an additional point or two at the university (no scientific test of course - I've seen very similar in content, but typographically "nicer" texts getting higher marks - just my opinion)
Raising money especially from VC works in a strange fashion. As in medical practice a doctor believes other doctor. Similary VC firms believer or trust previous entreprenuers whether its a good idea or bad idea. I am not saying YC idea is bad. PG is a very smart individual who succesfully sold his company to Yahoo (I have lot of respect for him). I am talking in general.
If you see all the CEO's get shuffled around even if they are bad. Similary all the previous succesfull founders and enterprenuers get their funding from VC's easily. You cannot pin on a single point that they got 2 million funding from a top notch VC firm, it should be good idea. Rather I will say Sequoia trusted PG easily then you or me because he already proved himself.
Would using server-side javascript make the project less likely to happen?

Yes. The library infrastructure of server-side JavaScript is pitiable compared to Python (or C++ or Java). This will change, I have no doubt, and I believe JavaScript will become the most popular language for practically everything short of systems programming in the not too distant future (7-10 years, perhaps), but it's definitely not as easy to build a server-side app in JavaScript today as it is in Python, Ruby, Perl, etc.
Google starts advertising on the homepage
I'm seeing a text ad for: "Enjoy free WiFi over the holidays - 47 airports and all Virgin America flights." on http://www.google.com/
I wear a kilt on occasion. I wore it to work one day. Technically, I was compliant with the dress code, as there was no mention of sex anywhere in the dress code document.
Facebook Users Be Careful Clicking Links On Your Wall | TechJaws.com
So it's the victim's fault for dressing like a woman? I'm sure rape victims are at fault for dressing so provocatively, too?
It's like a choose-your-own-adventure version of the Eames Brothers' "Powers of Ten" movie!
That's not a paid ad though, is it? Google's paying for the free wifi.
The cost starts out too high to justify releasing something that's not optimized when you're operating at Google's scale, especially since the development costs are largely up front whereas the ongoing compute costs keep going for at least a few years. If they didn't keep an eye on this stuff, those factors of 2-10x would eat them alive.

For some value of M and N, having N million users around for M months means that development costs are actually cheaper than compute costs, and I'd assume that they've now reached a point where most new products expect to see more than that magic number of users. A few engineers for a few extra months is only ~100k, and I have no trouble believing that many Google products cost them at least that much over their lifetimes due to resource consumption.

The rest of us can safely ignore all this because our products actually need to grow before we pass that threshold, at which point we deal with the issues; Google is in an enviable position where no optimization is premature.

Even for the rest of us, though, given the performance differences in Python vs. Java (best case 2-4x, worst case more like 40x) relative to the productivity differences (I can't believe this is more than 10x, even for someone very comfortable in Python and merely competent at Java), I'd suspect that many high use software projects even outside of behemoths like Google are actually cheaper in the long run if they're done in Java than they would be in Python.

Prototypes are another issue altogether, but I haven't seen anything that says Google is discouraging people to do those in whatever language they want; AFAIK it's production code that we're talking about here.
I also believe that the failings of the group are always the failings of the leadership. If bullying is rampant in a school, it's because the school administration doesn't do enough to punish bullying. By banning cross-dressing, they only reinforce the bully's belief system.
Ask HN: How do I get a hardware idea made? (by someone else..)
There's an electronic gizmo that I'd like to own (details below). I dont have the time to design it myself, nor the time to market and it and sell it if someone else designs and makes it. So basically I just want to put out the idea and hope that someone else will pick it up and make it (I realize ideas are ten-a-penny, and execution is key, but it's still worth a shot...)
How best can I do that? Is there somewhere I can post such an idea?

The idea is a clock that is waterproof, talking, which automatically turns on when the shower starts. The usage scenario would be:

user starts shower
clocks turns itself on, says 'hi'
5 minutes after turn-on the clock says "that's 5 minutes"
at some times clock announces the time e.g. "the time is 8.45am"
10 minutes after turn-on the clock says "that's 10 minutes", etc....
user turns off the shower, clocks stops talking.
I'd pay around 20 bucks for such a thing.

* - maybe the clock could listen for the sound of the shower, or sense humidity or temperature changes
For a normal desktop user, you should try one of the many encoding GUIs available.

I'd recommend Staxrip, Ripbot264, or Handbrake; all are relatively simple GUIs built around x264. For Handbrake, make sure you get the latest snapshot (the last release, 0.9.3, is very outdated).

On Linux or Mac, there are fewer options, but Handbrake is still one of them. If you prefer a commandline interface, see http://rob.opendot.cl/index.php/useful-stuff/ffmpeg-x264-enc... .

Handbrake has a great support channel on Freenode (#handbrake) as well.
DNA only exists in the form of chromosomes at particular parts of a cell's life (namely, cell division) and is a highly organized structure consisting of DNA and of proteins.

Neither sperm nor photoreceptors undergo cell division, so for all its existence its DNA exists in an undifferentiated mass inside the cell. DNA is long, but skinny, so it compacts quite nicely.
I made a point on their GetSatisfaction feedback page, and will state again, if they can somehow lay down the cash for one or two of the most-used designer fonts, say, Helvetica Neue, or Gotham, or Garamond, then designers and web designers would flock to this service. Additionally, if they were to add a few of the popular-to-designer bit type faces, such as any of the FFF fonts, then again, designers would eat that up. Designers just have their standard kit of faces they turn to.
Welcome to SWAN Home Page
The JVM memory cost is generally paid only once. Python doesn't have an effective thread implementation, but Java does.

And, of course, CPU usage of Python is pretty much unarguably higher than Java for most things, assuming well-written code in each language.
From my limited experience. ING Direct debit cards (MasterCard) have a consistent eight digit BIN.
Yes. That O'Reilly book is giving extremely bad advice. You should work from the premise that there is no safe concatenated string query (regardless of the corner cases where that isn't true).
Designing and Using Combinators: The Essence of Functional Programming
Thanks. This is an area that I don't keep up with, and it's great to have a recommendation from someone in the know.
Defining the Big Shift
Exactly. At that point it's more of a trade-off between luxury and performance.
I fell in love with a girl, so I built a web app to dedicate to her.
I fell head over heals for a girl. I thought about her way too often, missed her way more than a normal person ought to, and was pretty much in a constant state of love-induced sugar shock. I didn't want to seem overzealous or desperate, so I tried to play it cool -- and yet, the impulse to post embarrassing, saccharine love quotes to Facebook was overwhelming (I am but only a dork, after all).

So I did what any self-respecting geek would do in my position: I computed a SHA-2 hash of her name and put it in that weird little box thingy on the left hand side of my Facebook profile. It provided just the right balance of self expression and social tact. I was happy.

I liked the idea so much that I decided I would wrap it in a small application and dedicate it to the object of my dorkitude. As I knew it would take a few weeks to flesh out and things were (shockingly) starting to work out between this lovely individual and myself, I thought that the final product might make for a cute little way of sharing my feelings. The idea of tiny "cupidcode" links spreading across facebook and the twitters -- each rooted in my nerdy affection for this particular young lady -- seemed like a terribly powerful way to say "I really think you're great". And because I suck at music and writing, it was pretty much my only option.

Fast forward a few weeks, and cupidco.de is done. It's probably not well suited for the sorts of folks that read YC so I hope you don't mind me sharing my link with you. My hope is that this post will kick-start the spread of a few cupidcodes 'cross the nets so that my crush (who I've been seeing now for about two weeks!) may casually stumble upon one while checking her facebook or reading a blog and discover just how special she is to me.

tl;dr -- fell in love with a chick, wanted to do something special for her, suck at everything else, so I built her a webapp.
I really really dislike when services do not disclose pricing. I cannot find anything other than "Try it free for 30 days." Clicking "Learn More" gives me no more info. Regardless how much it is, this just gives me an underhanded feeling. I thought it was common knowledge these days that full disclosure of pricing is what works in generating user interaction. Not knowing what the price will be after those 30 days, I simply will not "Try it".
Ask HN: Refund cost of iPhone app for user x if you sell 2x?
Would this encourage people to buy more iPhone apps and tell their friends about them?

Would it be considered gambling?
Just a note... It appears the installer is Nullsoft's NSIS system.
Ok, thanks for clarifying :)
...yet the guy from Google explaining the reasoning claimed higher memory usage as one reason Python was discouraged.

I don't know myself, as I've never written a full non-trivial, scalable business application side-by-side in Java and Python, but I'm definitely hesitant to disregard what a Google engineer says about it, as I'd imagine they have more experience with that sort of thing than most of the rest of us, and I can't believe they'd make technology decisions like that without measurements to back them up.

Is it possible that the benchmarks are not giving realistic estimates about how large apps scale in memory usage?
I agree, the point about employment was nitpicking. I should have made that clearer. I liked the essay overall.
This is pathetic and you're pathetic.
exactly.

i'm not a designer, so i'm obviously out of the loop. still curious about what's going on, though. thus: how much difference do fonts make? any a/b tests? any qualitative urls you can recommend that will blow my mind? keep in mind i use a mac...windows and buttons and fonts already look pretty.
You had to create an account just to express that sentiment? I find that more pathetic.
just added it for pitchfork.com, and loving it.
I'm going to assume that he's talking about "How to Become a C# Programmer" http://bit.ly/2OlHRI, unless he's published multiple ebooks within the last week.
If the app is any good it should sell through personal recommendation. Why add a "tacky" promotion that (to my mind) says "dump this app on two acquaintances and you get you money refunded" - message feels entirely negative to me.
The sign up page (https://chartbeat.com/signup/) says that the price is $9.95 per month.
Hey this is a relatively simple hack. If you're not looking for finesse and would go with anything that works, this could be done in a couple of hours.

Also, rather than looking for sounds or temperature (which can easily produce a lot of false positives), you could simply make your tap into a switch and use it to trigger the clock.
Hey, thanks for putting the word "porn" directly in the URL itself. I'm sure the company content filters are going to love that.
Yes. University should be intrinsically leet. Top 10% only.
There was a time in the past when some services online wouldn't immediately authorize the card - it would only check if the value was a "valid" number.

So, you could, hypothetically, get 1-3 hours of shell internet access based on a generated number.
If she was a geek this would be a pretty good icebreaker. Or a really creepy one. Keep it smooth!
The idea is that if you are the 1000th person to buy the app, then you get your money back if/when the 2000th person buys the app.
"The project is named pysistence because most of the data structures it implements are persistent. This doesn’t mean persistent in the sense that they are stored in a database or the file system. Rather, it means the data structures may only be modified by copying."

Is this "persistent" or "immutable"?
Honestly though, she'll probably take it better if you tell her yourself. Otherwise it'll look like you were hiding this from her, and that'll start to bring up uncomfortable questions. :P
well my guess is that the fon't is hiding here

<h1 class="tk-bello-pro" style="visibility:hidden">
The easiest way to use <em>Real Fonts</em> <span>on your website</span>
</h1>

the big fat "The easiest way to use Real Fonts on your website" is actually a real font
You mean the nth user gets a refund when the (2n)th user buys? As n approaches +inf.0, the incentive approaches zero. So it's likely to encourage early adopters, and not latecomers. But usually (I believe) the early adopters need no extra motivation. So the question is whether (sales/2) in this scenario is greater than (sales) in the usual scenario.

Would it be considered gambling?

For the buyer, or the seller? :) It sounds a bit closer to MLM than to gambling ...
This is adorable, and I hope things work out for you. I showed my girlfriend (who is a geek, but not a programmer or engineer or anything of the sort) and she commented: "Okay, that's the cutest f*ing thing EVER."

Some suggestions--What about alternate spellings? It would be unfortunate if someone typed in "Kat Smith" and came up as incorrect because the original poster typed "Kathryn Smith". Also, it would be nice if there were some kind of personalization that you could apply to the public page; you know, like "Guess John Smith's crush" instead of "Guess My Crush".
What you have in common with Bill Clinton
A short post on what startup founders have in common with Bill Clinton and what they can try to do about it.