skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gillette has been promoting positive tweets made by customers, such that they appear as ads in my newsfeed.
> If hash(x) == hash(y), then some_dict[x] and some_dict[y] will return the same value

This was my first thought too, so I checked but

>>> hash(0)

0

>>> hash(0.0)

0

>>> hash('')

0

>>> {0: 4}['']

KeyError: ''

Which makes sense, because there is checking for hash collisions, and when they are resolved 0 == 0.0 while 0 != ''
That works because the power grid and power generators are heavily regulated by the government. Is AWS ready to classify itself as a utility and be under government regulation?
That said, I owe you an apology. I don't think my style in the thread above is good.

If I were moderating a site like HN, I think I'd have explicit guidelines for anyone wanting to present a perspective which is a minority view or in any way otherwise controversial.

My guidelines would recommend special care in keeping your presentation with a completely neutral tone and an absolute absence of snark.

And in particular, the poster should be explicitly informed that his or her opponents will not, cannot, and probably even should not be held to anything remotely like the same high bar. Because that's life, kid.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10366681
Unreal. Recently at work, I've been having a problem with packages delivered while we were out: the FedEx driver leaves them at random offices in our building or even across the street but never leaves a delivery notice. I go to the FedEx site and it will be signed for by "George" or whoever but there's no clue where it is...so I walk door-to-door down the street to find it. I was mostly just pissed at the driver until I read this article today. Now I think I'm more pissed at FedEx and America's (and that includes me) insatiable appetite for cheap shit bought on the Internet and delivered quickly. The end result of all of this is injured delivery drivers, rich factory owners in China, and piles of clutter in our garages and attics.
I thought I knew python .... I guess I do not know python ...

awesome idea - thank you
Fixing Safari View Controller
Show HN: Simple Easy Flashcards for Students and Teachers
On Apple’s incredible platform advantage
A picture of a child seems especially personal too.
Can someone explain why the first one is a wat?
To me it seems perfectly logical

Cast false to a string, then check the Boolean value of that string. It's not an empty string so of course it would be true.
If that were the sole reason, it should have been fixed when introducing Python 3. It seems to be much less controversial than other breaking changes in Python 3.

I think the more important reason is that Python doesn't really have an emphasis on the boolean type in general. The `if` statement works for every type, in contrast to other languages allowing only the boolean type in `if`. It is very common to use `if string_or_number_or_anything: blah blah` in Python. While I won't make a stance whether this is a good thing or not, it is still awkward that Python allows implicit conversion between `bool` and `int`.
To give a bit of background:

I'm a full-time professional software developer, and I started this a couple years ago as a simple/fast/easy way to make flashcards for studying foreign languages.

Later enhancements focused on creating a teacher account role, which allows teachers to assign stacks of flashcards to students and watch the progress of their class in real time.

The app has been live for about a year, and successes with it include a law student passing the bar exam after using it for their exam prep.
Isn't that pretty normal? I walked to school alone my whole life. Walk to the bus stop, take the bus to school, walk to the school. Pretty usual.
Would the bail really be paid on physical cash?

I'd expect them to take an electronic transfer, or a cheque in the name of the bank.
"The data is valuable only if someone has fair access to it. What an individual or a thousand may do with that data is an unknown and that is the real opportunity here, not the promise of a million subscribers paying you a dollar each."

Why is the data only valuable if someone has fair access to it? Right now, basically anyone can go license the Twitter data and have access to the full firehose. And I don't know how you know if the data is real opportunity here (vs. advertising).

"The desire by some individuals to make insane amounts of money on an idea are directly responsible for a massive SUCK experience for the end users of the software because those users are then forced to use the software in a way that makes the revenue predictable. I used to love to use Twitter because of all the wide variety of apps and things I could do with it with code. Now it's just unusable and dying. I would pay to make that different, but there isn't anything they offer that's worth my time and effort, so I'll go elsewhere."

Are you offering a better path for Twitter and their shareholders, or are you offering a path that feels better, but may have a much lesser outcome for those parties? If so, why would they take it?

And while I agree with you that Twitter is dying, it's not unusable, it's just not usable in the way that you want to use it.
Le Tote (YC S13) Is Hiring Ruby Developers – Change fashion with us
The 158 Families Funding the 2016 Presidential Election
"You can’t manage what you can’t measure"

If you don't want this software turned on and used against you, then stop the creation of it before it gets started. We laughed at HAL 9000, yet people are willing to treat each other like trash because, "the program told me too". The dictators of the past and the ones to come are going to "love" your new software!

Stand up and get this stopped. Where are the SOPA and PIPA blackout folks? We need them now more than ever. Bloggers need to talk about this. People are going to "hate" programmers if this is what we unleash on the world. Stop it, just stop it.

To technologist who gather on this forum, I charge you to not create this despicable future. Golden rule (Matthew 7:12), do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Other than wishful thinking, any reasons for thinking they wont be?
It’s effectively an impossibility to do it differently – kids have to walk to school, and have to take bike or public transit at age 10 to secondary school – often biking 20km in one direction, or using the bus halfway across the city.

Parents can’t afford to waste time (or money) taking their kids to school when those can go to school perfectly safe anyway.

So it makes sense that children age 10 would be able to use the bus and go into the city and buy stuff themselves.
What's the furthest you reckon they walk?

I was driven to school, though I walked 250m to a neighbours house half the time for the lift. Walking to school would have taken over half an hour at a good, adult pace.

(The fear was probably traffic more than strangers.)
blue raincoat
I interpret "wat" in the original "wat" presentation as "certain behaviors that can't be predicted by reading the code". In this regard, I don't think many things pointed out in the article can be considered as "wat". I could predict the behavior of many items fairly easily. The same thing could not be applied when I watched the original "wat" presentation.

The only exception I think is the bool coercion. Even though I can predict the behavior, I find it fairly disturbing. I believe that should have been removed when transitioning to Python 3. It is very unfortunate, considering Python is generally reluctant to implicit type conversion.
Is the skew enough that you have more comments than users?
Or giving it a solid shove, by the looks of it. It seems stable against only its own weight.
Possibly "Every Icon" by John Simon Jr., 1997

http://www.radicalart.info/AlgorithmicArt/grid/every/EveryIc...
+= on lists is an annoying one:

def myfunc(mylist):
mylist += [1,2,3]

is NOT the same as:

def myfunc(mylist):
mylist = mylist + [1,2,3]

Try this on each of those definitions:

a = [4,5,6]
myfunc(a)
print a

The first one mutates 'a', the second only reassigns (and discards) a temporary `mylist`.

Put another way, += is not just syntactic sugar. With lists, it actually mutates the original list.
No. Very little of a CS degree is "coding" - CS is so much more than that. It's even beyond "engineering".

A proper CS degree teaches you how to think, how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities.

What separates CS from other degrees is that it does filter out those without the horsepower or fortitude on both the quant side (algorithms) and the creative side (systems, architecture).

That means, that even if the SV bubble crashes, CS majors are the best equipped to handle whatever career is hot next - any hiring manager at Goldman, McKinsey, or F500 company X will tell you the same.
Jane McGonical goes into this in her new book Superbetter too. She singles out Luminosity.
Its more like (although Im not sure the exact implementation).

def make_key(obj):
return (obj.__class__.__module__, obj.__class__.__name__, hash(obj))

make_key(x) == make_key(y)
Not only that, scare quotes are often used precisely to misrepresent an idea and then avoid responsibility for it, which seems like a pretty dishonest rhetorical strategy to me.

He's technically "not lying," but many people won't notice the footnote nor appreciate the difference. All they will hear is "front-running == should be illegal"
I pay rent every month with a check, and this still seems common. Only one of my previous four landlords has accepted another form of payment (a large rental company who accepted credit/debit cards).
A job at McKinsey or Goldman pays far more (risk-adjusted, 7-10 years out of school) than a CS degree does - you can verify that easily. If you're optimizing for money, CS is not the answer (unless you're leveraging it to get a job on Wall Street).
That's exactly what the grandparent is saying
So, the openvpn unit file would make use of the %i or %I specifier described here? [0]

[0] http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.unit...
I really enjoyed the presentation of this piece. I understand that may not be a popular sentiment, but the graphics and interactivity worked well in creating a sort of atmosphere as well as helping me get a better understanding of the situation.

It wasn't perfect, but it was interesting and memorable. I could perceive the difficulty the authorities faced in trying to storm the bunker. It was neat.

And of course, the article still looks beautiful when put through the Readability extension. For people complaining about interactivity, you can use extensions to disable it (although I understand the frustration and also wish there was a built in way to disable it).

And more on topic: it was highly unsettling to me that Mr. Dykes could kill Mr. Poland even after the gift of fresh eggs and homemade jelly. The gunshot noises really got to me. The presentation of this article felt more real and visceral than most articles do. I'm glad I bothered to put on the headphones and try it.
Of course it is. You can see the strategy of rapidly iterating on game mechanics first, for theoretically releasable, yet too crappy for the market, in interviews of old school devs: Sid Meier and Peter Molyneux built their first hits this way. Today we also see this approach in Early Access games on Steam.

The reason we don't see it everywhere though is because in AAA games, deadlines are seen as something so important that large parts of the game are built simultaneously. In your typical modern story-based action game, you have different teams working on different levels, and some people might spend all their time in just one or two levels: To get that level of parallelism, and have over 100 people working on a game, chances are that the development process will not have much to do with agile.

But many of the games that most people would consider great come from much love, refinement and iteration, along with relatively long development periods. This is why Blizzard always takes forever, and we have the concept of Valve Time.
This is interesting, and the technique is certainly surprising to me, but I don't think "reversible concrete" is a reasonable way to describe what has been produced. Perhaps it is a lot more stable than it looks, but what about compression loads?
I live in Australia and cannot see the later chapters coming into reality.
There Is No .bro in Brotli: Google/Mozilla Engineers Nix File Type as Offensive
I've hit this too, it would be really nice if AssertError didn't inherit from Exception. There's a whole Exception object hierarchy but it seems like none of the parents of Exception are actually useable for anything
All of those things are covered by the ToS and EULA, in which the users give the social network a free license to use content as they see fit, including relicensing. At least all major SNS has this type of licensing agreement with users.

If the network has an embedding feature, then we must assume that the network allows embedding of content that the network has the right to distribute. I'm quite surprised if Instagram has an embed feature, but says you need to ask permission to use it.

If you download the content and host it yourself, that is of course different and you need permission from either the user or the network.
How many McKinsey or Goldman jobs are there? How many of the women that enter the funnel are there in 7-10 years?

In addition to money, how flexible are the McKinsey or Goldman jobs with having and raising children?
> I would sue the hell out of these people.

I often hear people say this, but do you actually have the ~20-200+k to actually sue in this case? Because, the vast majority of people out there really don't have the option to just sue. And, I think that's part of why are justice system stays so broken. Many people only find out how corrupt it is after there in it's cross-hairs.
My house is more than 200M from the road, and the road is a lightly traveled side road. It is unlikely the driver was within a mile or two of my house when misreporting deliveries.

UPS's customers, the retailers depending on UPS to meet premium delivery times, are being badly let down by UPS's failure to detect such misreporting.
Not really as you're constantly having to turn the volume off and on when the show resumes. So you're interacting with the actual ad and subconsciously you've acknowledged what they're advertising.

As for hurting advertising by your click though scheme - do you really think you're the first one to have thought of this? They have measures in place to identify and disregard this.
Google Reader got so much right, except maybe feed discovery. Google could have incrementally morphed Reader, something that worked. Twitter is like RSS for regular people.
Go Quiz: 10 simple problems to solve
You remind me of Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi. He was inspired by LSD to explore the mystical side of Judaism. But aspects of the LSD experience bothered him:

> It also wasn't Jewish enough for me. A universe in which everything was happening, regardless of whether it was kosher or not, wasn't Jewish enough.

http://books.google.com/books?id=HZq2YrPxL1IC

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/us/zalman-schachter-shalom...

Perhaps you are also a bit bothered by some aspects of your experiences that do not totally agree with materialism? Excuse me, but do you possibly feel ashamed to have thought certain things while tripping, perhaps concerned that you were delusional? Or maybe not, not everybody thinks that way.

Are you truly "impressed and amazed" by chemistry alone? Many feel that modern materialism is a cheap and disappointing answer to the question of what is really actually going on in the universe, the sum total of everything that is and will be. But of course chemistry is part of it, and it is really amazing.
A similar technique (albeit a poor-mans version) that I use when I have an expensive bit of HTML to render is to load a div after the initial page has completely rendered, using intercooler.js:

http://intercoolerjs.org/examples/lazyload.html

You can throw an indicator in there too, to let users know what is going on.
Why is this a relevant question? Of course some of them are doing it for money, why wouldn't they? You think it's any different for men?
I had not thought about this before the parent posted, but there is a difference between a line on the way in and a line on the way out. The first is attractive and the second is obnoxious. One of the reasons I love British pubs and Japanese ticket-machine restaurants is that you pay up front and when you are ready to go home you just leave.

Japanese convenience stores also get this right most of the time. There is almost never a line up at the cash register. As soon as one begins to form, the employees will drop whatever they are doing and open up a new register. At some places, the register can actually handle more than one customer at a time, so if you have someone fumbling for change, they can start tallying up goods for the next person in line.

Possibly I'm not typical, but I often spend a lot of time browsing in stores. As soon as I have decided that I'm done, though, I get very irritated at anything that slows me down. I had never really put my finger on it until reading the OP's post.
> A proper CS degree teaches you how to think

Any degree that claims it teaches you how to think should ring the snake-oil alarm.

> how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities

So how do they teach that? Or does that just mean they got a few group projects, where smart people bump into each other but don't really learn to solve problems in a team?

Unis tend to suck at teaching teamwork. Though they tend to be pretty good at teaching algorithms and systems (which are good to know, and don't go out of date too quickly).
"Outrage postmortem"
I take offence to the notion that beers are fungible.
From outside, this thread looks like a set of mocking, contemptuous dismissals of anyone who doesn't agree with that ideological monoculture.

What's the evidence that causes you to believe that there is an "ideological monoculture"[1] here? I don't know how close to a majority it is, but I'd guess there are many people that would agree with you. I for example 'vouched' for your top comment in this thread, since I thought it was wrongly flagged. But I cringed when I saw your 'Weimerica', because that's just not a useful means of discourse, and will cause people to dismiss your earlier (worthwhile) content.

I'd guess that Dan's response to you came from the same sentiment: you started well, but then veered off into "sheeple" territory[2]. Consider: is he more likely to offer corrective advice on "tone" to people with ideas he wants to see more of, or to those whose ideas themselves are unwelcome? Rather than concluding that your ideas aren't welcome here, consider that the problem might simply be the tone.

[1] Speaking of monoculture, did you know that Dan isn't American? Happy Thanksgiving, Dan!

[2] Regardless of the aptness of the term, I find "sheeple" a reliable indicator of a failed argument.
It's just a matter of time, and probably not too much more time, before those same executives and supervisors will succeed in replacing all those human drivers with machines. They don't really want messy, frail, undependable humans having an impact on the size of their next bonus.
Historically, EULAs and TOSs that over reach have had those overreaching provisions nullified in court.

"You provide us a perpetual license to all of your works, as well as anyone else using your tweets, pokes, stories, etc."

With the current state of copyright law in the US, let me tell you how far that's going to fly in court.
One Weird Trick for Faster Android Multithreading
I think DanBC is being sarcastic in suggesting that the only reason you think this is normal is that all the kids who died at 5 years old while going to the grocery store, are no longer around to provide a counterexample because they're dead.

But, maybe not. Poe's law rears its head once again.
I'm not an entrepreneur, but I have worked at 2 startups (less than 20 employees) since 2011.

This is going to sound cliched, but the best way is to start your own company or project from scratch and apply the concepts you learn from these resources.

Here are some "bestsellers", apart from http://startupclass.samaltman.com and PG's essays are

Building Product/Design

-----------------

* Design Sprints by Google Ventures: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=design+sprints

* Startup School Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=startup+school+...

* Interface Design for Startups https://courses.platzi.com/classes/interface-design-startups...

* The Design of Everyday Things: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

* Don't make me Think: http://www.amazon.in/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321344...

* Objectified: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1241325/

* https://www.useronboard.com

* Either Rework or Getting Real by 37 Signals

Execution/Business Models:

---------------------------

1. The Lean Startup: http://theleanstartup.com/book

2. Lean Analytics: http://leananalyticsbook.com/

3. Business Model Generation: http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/

People:

-----------

* How to Win Friends and Influence People

* The Hard Thing about Hard Things: http://www.amazon.com/The-Hard-Thing-About-Things/dp/0062273...

* The Startup of You: http://www.thestartupofyou.com/

Marketing:

----------

* Build an audience before you launch the product - like 37Signals, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, Hubspot

* Traction Book: http://tractionbook.com/

* Be Creative - Each startup is different. There's no silver bullet

Sales:

------

The sales course by Steli Efti: http://close.io/free-sales-course/

Pitching:

-------

Dave McClure: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dave+mcclure+st...

Founder Interviews, stories:

----------

* PandoMonthly: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pandomonthly

* Stanford ECorner: ecorner.stanford.edu
> You're implicitly assuming that having not-terribly-tech-savvy organizations (like governments) protect their own data is somehow better.

Quite often, it is. If all the data is in one place, the payoff for hacking it is much greater than if each bit of data is on a different machine. As the man said, "why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is."
Party, but my main argument is that they're chronic hypocrites whose sole reason was to hurt Google rather than to protect their users privacy. If they really wanted to protect their privacy they would also block them from their targeted ads.
What about a good rainstorm and an overnight freeze?
I do not think that games need more project management, but more people who share the lessons we've also learned in business and system programming.

For instance, we've had articles here about how beautiful the Quake 2 and Doom 3 codebases were. It's not that John Carmack isn't an amazing programmer (I am sure he is far better than me), but the techniques for readability and maintainability that he used in those games are just what anyone writing in a large codebase should be doing. The style he used is exactly what we demand when interviewing senior devs. But then game programmers look at it as if he had discovered cold fusion. But when all you see is games, that are written expecting that once the game is shipped, nobody is going to touch your code again, standards go down. Very different from what we do in business programming, where we know some systems might end up living 15+ years, so we have to write things planning for the system to keep evolving for decades.

If anything, online games and MMOs should be written better, precisely because they are far long lived, and will be edited more, than a throwaway that will just see a few patches if users complain.
Yeah, they will. The moment they see any actionable decrease they'll start to foil them.