skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I have used python 2 quite often, as well as python 3. Python 2 is sloppy in this regard. You can use a "str" to represent text, and it will work perfectly, so long as you stay within the ASCII character set, setting up hidden bugs later. Telling everybody to just use u"", while correct, sets up "" as something that looks correct, but isn't. In addition, suggesting that "str" is a sequence of bytes, rather than a string, is rather inappropriate. The documentation refers to them as strings, they are created in similar manner to strings in other languages, and they are generally accepted by library methods that set text properties.

I agree that there were some changes that were unnecessary, like the removal of the u"" syntax. That said, I think that the fundamental change, which was to have the thing named "string" be a string, was the right choice. Python has always been about having the obvious choice be the correct choice. Telling everybody that "quoted text" is not text runs counter to this.
VPN isn't even that good of a protection anymore when all countries the traffic goes through log it and cooperate.

VPN providers would have to introduce a random delay for their users, otherwise looking at all the exact times along the way gives a pretty good idea who accesses what.
Poker Expert Guide
Why Is Search Crucial for E-Commerce Websites/Apps?
Yea, Java/C# with AOT can be faster than C. Only under some circumstances, on some hardware, if VM supports it.
It's extraordinarily helpful and is the sign of a mature, professional developer.
> requiring AV for NSFW subreddits

Just for UK geolocated users? I dunno, it would be even more unpopular with the user base than the last round of cleanup. And it would cost them money.
> I've been nursing a theory for a long time that modern society has an accidental saving grace. And that is, if you're competent, its usually better to just not commit crime.

This is an odd comment. Clearly the mechanism you describe is correct, but there's literally nothing accidental about it at all. The entire stated purpose of the criminal justice system is to create a set of incentives sufficient to ensure this calculus applies.
The post goes directly from "heap allocations were frequent within rustc" to "effort to minimize heap allocations", and proceeds to detailing speedups.

→ Systems programming newbie question: why are heap allocations bad for performance? Is it the additional level of indirection? The cost of calling your memory allocator? Something else?

My background, if that helps focusing answers: python/js programmer, did a tiny bit of C/C++, am ~approximately~ familiar with the stack (call frames, each with its context) vs. the heap (where to allocate memory for big/long-lived objects e.g. arrays and trees).
Our government's drug policy is not informed, it is not considered and it is not reasonable.

Exhibit A is the sacking of Professor David Nutt, who was the most senior government advisor on drugs. His scientific advice contradicted government policy, so he was replaced with someone who would toe the party line. The Home Secretary did not consult the Science Minister on this decision. After Nutt's sacking, five other members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs resigned in protest.

The government has shown utter contempt for evidence on the harms of drugs. They have consistently rejected scientific evidence when it contradicts their political ideology. Their reasoning for criminalisation is facile and circular. An examination of the relationship between the Home Office and the ACMD shows this with absolute clarity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt
I've been the hybrid/web guy for a long time, but recently I realized native apps are not going anywhere.
(I'm stil in the "I don't need your app" camp, but it doesn't change this realization).

The issue is, most of the "apps" do not need to be apps, they can well be web pages. Everyone thinks they need "an app" because it's hot this year. But for apps that make more sense being an app, native is much better solution.

For example, for apps that need to store data and work reliably offline, I'd much more trust a native app than any PWA despite of all the services workers and other stuff that it implements.

(Side rant: I hate governments spending public money on apps for two selected, closed ecosystems, instead of producing a good interoperable webapp).

From purely technical point of view, in my experience (writing Cordova app, and reading about NativeScript and other technologies) is that all of the "write once, use on 10 platforms" frameworks are typically more polished for iOS than for Android, or vice versa.

We've built two Cordova apps in the last time, one with Ionic, one earlier with proprietary framework. While they work okayish on Android, the UX on iOS is rather horrible due to a number of smallish issues that when added up, sum to a big difference.

Next, with Cordova et al. you can do easy things easily, but hard things are hard or impossible; you are always behind the native platform capabilities (which change very often and fast), which give a lot more power.

Edit:
The point of cost of getting users into a native app is fair, I very very rarely download new apps. This only gets harder as app stores get bombarded with thousands of apps each week. But it doesn't mean native apps should be totally abandoned. They have their place in the ecosystem.
Daniel Negreanu
> Stuff that makes it dead simple for anyone to maintain their privacy - you just have to use a different messenger.

Assuming (caveat: big assumption) a legitimate implementation, I bet WhatsApp is the big frustration in the UK - it was already hugely popular here before it went end-to-end encrypted.
Yup. There is an insane difference between how straightforward it is to transform data structures in Javascript and how cumbersome it is in Java.
I think you have make a distinction between "bad ideas of XML" and "essential ideas of CS that were implemented in XML because it was the fad at the time, and SGML before that, and are now being reimplemented in JSON, and will be reimplementing in the next big thing".

It's like complaining about regular expressions "Are we _really_ going to reinvent all the spectacularly bad ideas of Perl, except this time in Python?
"To ensure they do not succeed, we do not comment publicly on the methods or capabilities available to the security and intelligence agencies."

Oh but you don't need to, because it's obvious. All my encrypted traffic to my overseas based VPN will be logged (legal). Then you'll demand my keys so that you can decrypt it. If I don't or can't comply then I will be - by definition - a criminal and potentially a terror suspect.

Which is why 'just use a VPN' is not really a satisfactory response to this kind of legislative landscape. Just doing so paints a target on you.

Which is not to say I don't appreciate the VPN providers stepping up, the more VPN users there are the more expensive it is to persecute them individually.
It is already starting to happen here.[1][2] Western leaders and the establishment media are all in a furor about 'fake news' being shared on social media, how it is a problem those platforms need to 'solve' in order to maintain public order and make sure citizens are getting the right information.

That's exactly the justification the Chinese government uses.

[1]

“Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls — things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms and we have to learn to deal with them.”

Merkel, 62, said the challenge for democrats was to “reach and inspire people — we must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it.”

She said she supported initiatives by her right-left coalition government to crack down on “hate speech” on social media in the face of what she said were “concerns about the stability of our familiar order”.

http://guardian.ng/news/merkel-warns-against-fake-news-drivi...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/17/barack-obama-f...
Pipelines: Your Doorway to Continuous Development
Still a nope for me. Adverts are a vector of malware and 0-day attacks. We already know that the advert companies aren't too keen in fixing these issues, either.

Lowering adblockers for a site means lowering my ability to protect against these attacks.
If I stopped buying a coffee everyday I could buy so much cool shit
It is not about language capability to accept new words but about language users motivation to do so.
You can get used pulls from Jameco, Unicorn Electronics or eBay.

AFTER you finish your z80 thing, of course.
Surveillance isn't particularly rational or consistent, sadly.
I'll admit my examples were poor, but both of those you cited are apples to oranges comparisons.

First, the lawsuits against the FDA are for over extending their regulatory reach, not for incorrectly asserting the qualities of a product.

The note on the EPA is likewise allowing suits when it fails to act, not when it causes harm by acting. Even the Navajo lawsuit over the golden kings mine incident is based on years of neglectful oversight. The gold king mine corporation and some contractors are being named in the lawsuit for the actual damages.

Edit: for what it's worth, I'm not personally in favor of ending ALL regulation in favor of creating a market for ratings companies; there are plenty of places in the economy where it wouldn't work as well as others. I'm merely playing devil's advocate, since the question was asked. The best places for this sort of thinking are really limited to consumer goods, if that.
hmmmm, not sure about this. It could play out badly for business owners. how does google determine if a place should now be deemed full? how do they calculate capacity without understanding each business model and operational workflows?

some stores might look full but actually service their customers in average times? they might have provisioning tills for when N customers are in store? What if some people do not use google services?

If I was a business owner I would be angry at the possibility of google turning away potential customers because of what it thinks my business can handle without any accurate data.
While Elliott writes a lot of good posts, in my eyes his blog posts are a bit too much biased.
Is it possible to order and pay for food as you're heading to a restaurant so it will be ready soon after you arrive (through seamless or something else)? I imagine this will be the norm someday soon.
Your email regex doesn't accept some basic patterns, like foo+bar@foobar.com. Also, a lot of newer TLDs can be longer than 6 symbols, like ".clothing".

See [1] or [2] for some inspiration.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448844
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9089129
Taking a rights based approach to patents is not the right one, we should look at outcomes instead.

Independent inventors rarely seek patents and their best bet to contest the patent is to sell it to a patent troll, companies tell their employees to never read patent filings to not be willfully infringing and truly novel patented ideas are simply avoided until the patent expires or alternative methods are found (eg ECC crypto).

I'm sure you can find some cases where patents have served as a social good, but I expect them to be outweighed by all their negative outcomes.
That's a major source of anxiety I've had this past week. I have on three separate occasions had to let tech-savvy folks know it has passed. They have also shared my absolute disgust and want to protest.

Based on the HN thread about the snoopers charter last week, I was spurred on to try do something about it. I searched and read so much about activism but I honestly feel, without a semi-large scale protest in the streets, all this is a) going to proceed unheard of and b) be trivialised by the media.

Any pointers on effective social change at scale? Particularly the scale part.
Literally no comments as of now here say it's a bad thing, nor any answers there, nor any comments.

If there's no visible opposition, why are so many people preemptively defending it?
I hope I am wrong, though!

Doctors are already fighting the good fight every day -- carrying the fire (the vast majority, at least). I have always mostly lived in a liberal bubble and over my life I'd say 90% of the people I have interacted with often over a long period were liberal, and this extends to 90% of my extended family too. Bubbled in all the way. All of these physicians in my bubbles throughout life have mostly fit the liberal label (except maybe fiscally) and would be more than happy with treating drug addiction like a health problem. And lots already do! Depends on the city, of course.

Things like "ending the war on drugs" are simply not on your average doctors' mind in the day to day (in my experience). They have other stuff to do, like maybe save a life or two, finish that big paper on immortality or w/e, and they simply go right ahead being doctors, knowing in the back of their mind they are largely "above" the drug war anyway, since they can and do dole out narcotics constantly.

To my dad, an 80mg oxycontin (the old ones, the holy grail of opiate pill abuse) lost its status as a "ooooh, awwww, look at this neat pill" thing probably within 60 seconds of becoming a doctor (that's a guess). My mom was/is a psychologist (retired) and doled out narcotic tranquilizers left and right as well (though at the VA, so she got left alone). It happens to pharmacists too, even a pharmacy tech friend of mine would go "meh" at a 1500 count bottle of perc 30s.

The drugs just become part of the day to day like, for lots of HN readers and myself at least, working on tens of millions of dollars with of computing infrastructure is business as usual.

I think the access to narcotics and constant distribution and "above it" feeling is relevant to why I think doctors won't be leading the anti-war on drugs movement. I don't know for sure about many other than my parents and a few others, but I'm guessing they would all end the war on drugs tomorrow and treat it as a health issue if they knew how to do it without making things infinitely worse. And I'd venture to say most doctors I've known over my (liberal-bubbled) life would agree without much thought put into it -- if they aren't already in some small (or big) way.
Women love sex tech – but not saucy VR
You can hook this robot, the GoPiGo, up to a Raspberry Pi Zero as well: http://www.dexterindustries.com/projects/gopigo-raspberry-pi... and a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxZVe_N9Tbk&t=236s
Because it's cumbersome-ness decreases usage
It's from the guy who wrote Clean Code and Clean Coder which are gems themselves !
Sounds like what the Chipotle or Starbucks apps do right now.
Ok, sorry:

It's a simple and widely-known fact that China kidnaps and cages its dissidents.

Better?
Cool idea but I would highly suggest that you fix all the misspelled words.
As far as I know, no one advocating abolishment of software patents sees the need for an alternative. Fat32 is not in common use because people are enthusiastic about it, but because it's easy to implement, and it's compaitble. At a technical level, it's no different from trying to patent a database schema.
Vex is great, I won't trash that platform. The GoPiGo has a lot more depth on programming, and has quite a few projects.
I don't like DigitalOcean community.
I also see this in my friends that do dumb stuff for their income. Most of them are flat out stupid and the rest are only able to think about the next few days.

TV isn't a good representation of most of it - it rarely shows how little profit drug dealers actually clear, for example.
Smartphone Stabilizer Turns Your Videos into Cinematic Moments
This is one of those really important business decisions that feels almost trivial but with profound positive results. It immediately reminded me of Southwest Air and how they credit some of their early success to _only_ flying 737s. Letting them standardize their maintenance and getting very good at keeping that one model of airplane flying.
To me, even bigger problem is a general fact that a large majority of people easily agree to restrict liberties (some of them hard won) because "terrorists can also do this". A more defensible argument would be "outlaw X if a fraction of law abiding citizens snagged would be tiny".

I would be curious though how big a majority would still support the logic that "we should restrict/track any X if X helps terrorists", if the question were to be posed cleanly (i.e., without scaremongering examples on the same page). If the problem is presentation, not internal beliefs the pendulum may swing back sooner rather than later.
I think it's mainly cache effects; things in heap memory tend to be more spread out, and that hurts spatial locality which is the basis of caching. The indirection is part of this too, since "jumping around" following pointers can pollute the cache which in turn can make subsequent accesses slower.

Sure, the allocator itself can be expensive, and that's certainly important if you're doing "too many" allocations, but in general I think it's worse caching that matters the most.
Can you sell fake t-shirts? Or some sort of other non-tangible good?

Something I've seen on other sites, like GameDev.net, is that you can buy a membership, which for all intents and purposes is a donation, since it doesn't really get you much besides an extra tag next to your name.
Their pricing looks insane? Like an order of magnitude less than DO, OVH, ...

Edit: Looks like it's because they're using Atom and ARM based servers.
Because for almost any other site this would be seen as a net negative. In this case, we've all (or very nearly all) benefited from stackoverflow in a meaningful and tangible (often monetary) way.

The preemptive defense will hopefully reduce any knee-jerk criticism over ads.
"I just entered a string of random characters."

"That is correct. Thank you."
How Secure is NativeScript?
Javascript Developer: SPA/PWAs are better!

Swift Developer: Native apps are better!

Reality: both will be around for a long time and both have their appropriate use cases. At some point they may converge but we are far from it.

Also, creating any app (web or native) and hoping to achieve widespread success is a gamble.
Isn't one of their examples invalid XML?

http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS9H2Y_7.5.0/com....

Shouldn't

<json:string name="ficoScore"> > 640</json:string>

be

<json:string name="ficoScore"> &gt; 640</json:string>
In fact, it's already possibly (and easy) to obtain the un-anonymized browsing history of millions of people. I was part of a (journalistic) team that got their hands on a free sample from a company that offers "website traffic analytics", and which uses browser extensions as well as mobile apps as their main surveillance tools.

The data set contained the complete browsing history of almost 3 million German Internet users, and except for a few popular sites (like Facebook), no URL cleaning/anonymization was performed at all.

So here we have a single provider that is able to capture the browser traffic of 5 % of the population already, and is ready to disseminate this data to anyone who can pay the price (even giving out months of data for free). As there are dozens more companies that collect data using a variety of ways, it wouldn't be surprising to me if you could stitch these individual data sets together to get the traffic of > 50 % of all Internet users, without having any central point of data collection.

So although the government is a real threat to citizens privacy, unregulated private actors are much more dangerous in my opinion.
Honour for software writer on Apollo moon mission
Latvia Passes Innovative Startup Law
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13002598
> The Investigatory Powers Bill provides law enforcement and the security and intelligence agencies with the powers they need to protect the UK and its citizens from terrorists and serious criminals.

But how it is going to protect the UK from funny criminals?
Using identification techniques. Its a big topic if it interests you try to google it :)
Neat! I use Telegram on a daily basis, so this seems interesting.
Not going to say a dermatologist or podiatrist can't save lives, but I think they get most of the respect granted doctors who do without the same effect on society.
I see this is a Java library, but if you're in the command line (or even if you are able to call an external process for the job) jq[1] is great.

[1]: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/
Ask HN: Is it legal to sell FB and Twitter username along with my domain iMUST.do?
I own the domain (http://imust.do), previously bought with the idea of building a gamified to-do app (in lines of GymPact meets Any.Do).

Being an app of social nature, I had also reserved the usernames on Facebook (fb.com/imust.do) & Twitter (twitter.com/@imustdo). But now I want to sell the usernames to the buyer of the domain.

Is this legally allowed?
...but still not auditable crypto. Questionable priorities there.
Does this have any bearing on efficient protein folding analysis for whole cell simulation?
Honest question - do you think Zuck listens to rank and file employees?
Parallel XCTest – Execute XCTest Suites in Parallel on Multiple iOS Simulators
DSSSL [1], the SGML predecessor of XSLT and CSS, included a full blown built in Scheme interpreter, by the standard. That turned out to be a bit too much raw power and complexity for most people, so it never really caught on outside of the Boeing Airplane Maintenance Manual Publication Department and other big enterprisy SGML-loving organizations like that.

Microsoft's non-standard implementation of XSLT [2] is "out of the tarpit" Turing complete [3] because it lets you write handlers in JavaScript and other languages, to actually get some useful work done and call external librarys, without bending over backwards.

Of course Microsoft's non-standard extensions to XSLT aren't supported outside of Windows. But after using it, going back to plain XSLT was pretty frustrating to me, and in many cases it was easier just to forget about XSLT and write straight-up JavaScript code with XML parsing and XPath expressions.

There's nothing that XSLT can do that you can't easily implement in a JavaScript library. At this point it's better to start with JavaScript and forget about XSLT, instead trying to use XSLT, hitting a wall, realizing you want to ship on some platform other than Windows, then rewriting it all in Java, then realizing you want it to run in the browser, then rewriting it all in JavaScript, which you should have started with in the first place.

Another point for JavaScript: In the past decade, a whole hell of a lot more effort has been put into making JavaScript run fast, than making XSLT run fast.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Style_Semantics_and_S...

[2] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb986124.aspx

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
> The issue is, most of the "apps" do not need to be apps, they can well be web pages. Everyone thinks they need "an app" because it's hot this year.

Why is "being a webpage" suddenly the default state of an application?

I'd rather turn this around and say:

"The issue is, most of the webpages do not need to be webpages, they can well be native apps. Everyone thinks they need 'a webpage' because it's hot this year."