codefisher

Ditto the above comment. If users don't want to be asked if they want to download/open a file they can use the "Automatically do this from now on" option that Firefox gives them, or the equivalent in their preferred browser. Then users get their preferences, and the not servers forced on them.

So far we have 3 of the 4 people post here. Can the last one own up? Or did someone underestimate how many people don't have a facebook account...

If your really serious about developing stuff what will end up running on a Linux server, I think you should really be using Linux on the development machine. I know that is not always practical, but more people should do it. No one would dream of writing a Mac app on Windows, and I don't see why Linux should be any different.

"If they provided a link to something supporting their position I'd probably pass out from shock."

Ok I will take that as a challenge to produce a link, so how is this.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/policy_driven_de...

Did you pass out?

My stance is that all the name calling (ie. deniers) does not help. In the field of science a healthy level of scepticism is required, and it helps further study. It is only when an issue becomes political (Global Warning) or religious (Evolution/Creationism) and leave their scientific basis that people get pilloried for saying they are not convinced and such n' such an issue is not up to scratch and needs more research to confirm or disprove it.

As the the 95% of people. Yes that stat would be right. 95% of people are always out of their depth in any argument of any complexity. But it says nothing about their position. I have lots of friends that believe things, but if faced with a skilled debtor can't hold their own position. Nor should they have to. Life is too busy to be on top of every issue.

For those interested, the author of this was actually Guido himself.

I would have used "".join(map(chr, list)) myself. But I am not sure that was support in the version of python available at the time. It is equivalent to f6.

To some of those talking about the dynamic nature of python means you have to look up chr every time, there is a way to stop that, see this project http://github.com/rfk/promise/

There are some interesting ideas to work around the problems with this method in the comments, such as hashing the ip with a secret string on the link to stop others making you ban all your users. And also sorts of other stuff - even putting a CAPTCHA on the ban page as an escape method. But in the end I think the method is flawed:

1) a singled infected computer on a network could take out a large number of users. 2) any thing doing prefetching will cause them to be banned. 3) there is a risk of taking out valid bots, and verifying them correctly is just too expensive for a large site.

My main issue with bots is their spam, so I just use tools like Akismet to keep that under control.

How about people with low karma (like myself) not being allowed to comment on articles that appear on the front page. Then only people really interested in following HN, and trying to form some kind of reputation in the community would be able to get much exposure. Trolls in general I would think are much more interested in putting out comments that a number of people will see.

Went and did a search on my email, the first time I recommenced it to someone else was the 13th Oct 2007. So yeah 2007 it is!

He forgets what the main purpose of frameworks are for, doing all the boring repetitive bits, so I can get down to writing the new and interesting parts of my web app. For example doing form validation, and displaying the errors back again is really common, and annoying. Any good framework makes it painless.

And what about running on multiple databases. What happens if I need to be able to support MySql and Postgres? Really hard without a framework.

It has been around for awhile, been using it since about 2008. Cool service.