skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the vast majority of a language users, the community and the libraries matter a lot more than the merits of the core language. Look at R. I'm not sure anyone would hold it up as a great core language. However, it is very successful and becoming more so, due to its awesome libraries and community.

numpy, scipy and matplotlib are really powerful. Go and Node don't have anything close to their capabilities.
Adoption is a real issue, but one that can be helped by actually using Python 3 (and encouraging others to use it), assuming you think the language is better. Big organizations have more clout here, for example Arch Linux uses Python 3 as the default Python interpreter.

The string/byte confusion is an issue for people who like to pretend that they're the same. They're not. A string can be represented by different byte streams depending on the encoding. That by itself tells you that they are not the same and should not be treated as the same thing. But we have many decades of conflating the two, and old habits die hard.

It's convenient to treat them as the same because IO deals with bytes and `write(some_string)` is easy. JavaScript's `"42" == 42` is just as easy, and just as wrong. The solution is both simple and easy: convert between strings and bytes at the IO interface. Explicit is better than implicit.
He definitely is...

I just checked his twitter to make sure I'm right. He's clearly joking.

https://mobile.twitter.com/zedshaw
Isn't this what killed perl?
After careful statistical analysis I concluded that there is a 9.56% chance Zed is trolling experienced programmers.

Disregarding the trolling about "Turing Completeness", there are some points he raises that are interesting.

On some (most thing) items there, the train has left the station. But some are good to listen to:

Better error messages. Rust has been making progress there so maybe a good place for inspiration. Error codes and links to additional info online has been done (maybe overdone) but I think there is room for more variable names, more info about the context ("looks like you're trying to do X, maybe Y might be better here..." kinda thing).

On the lack of typing and such, MyPy might be a good project to focus on.

Standard library updates would be good, but they are tricky. Wouldn't be nice to have requests in the main library? Yes, but changes are still made to it, it might not be updated for a long time then. As they say modules go to the standard library to die.

Things I'd like to see: better performance (close working with Pyston or PyPy) and better packaging. On packaging there was talk of Pipfile just today. That was a good start. I've been using Python for many years, and I still don't know off the top of my head the basic pip flags and options, or how to start the venv, what goes into setup.py vs goes in requirements.txt vs goes in setup.cfg. The story got better in recent few years, but there is more room for improvement there I think. I often end up with a build.sh script or run.sh which just does the building and venv-ing and such. Can that be done by default? For usability sake? Even if it is not super-consistent and doesn't work for 1% of use cases... Probably.
Time tracking?

Time to move off gitlab.
The status you speak of for physicians in general is derived from saving lives - generally thought to be pretty honorable. Also, doctors who work in more rural areas are trending towards making more than those in cities and already do make more when cost of living is accounted for.
About 30 years ago, my VW and a thousand dollars of tools, having been stolen and stripped, I left my low budget Malibu bodysurfing, workbench with an oscilloscope, free Lincoln Heights cabin and moved to Berkeley and enrolled in the first UCB extension course for the holy grail (at the time) of learning Unix and C programming.
I started building the best library of computer programming books I could buy and about 1/4 of the books mentioned here were my choice then too.
My recommendation to you is extend your computer science interest by going to college and mastering the fundamentals and also in your junior and senior year join in on the most interesting academic or scientific programming projects you can find. These days a Degree is required and your employer is hoping to benefit from the esoteric work you did in college.
> Let's hope python can be saved.

Can you explain why Python would need to be saved? I mean every week on r/MachineLearning there is at least one new Python deep learning framework being launched[1], I wonder if you can mention any other language which is that healthy.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/search?sort=new&res...
I'm not sure what that counterfactual has to do with anything here. It would be relevant if I were saying "clearly we should ignore the electoral college and hand the election to Hillary." I'm not. I'm saying Trump has a bit less of a mandate, losing the popular vote by a small margin, than he would have had if he'd won the popular vote by a small margin, and much less than if he'd won the popular vote by a huge margin. Yes, the numbers would have been different if popular vote had been the chief objective, but... so what?
I think I detect more than a whiff of actual malice here.
I'm getting the sense it is, but he doesn't make it obvious at all (hence it's funnier to him?)
TLDR; A conservative essay full of interesting anecdotes where liberal scientists have stifled businesses with regulations that later turned out to be debunked. It ends on the topic of climate change and insists that liberals are once again over regulating businesses when the only data they have come from models that seem to continually be proven inaccurate.

I appreciate that the author spent the time to construct an opposing viewpoint, but it never answers one lingering question. What's wrong with solar, or wind farm investments? Why shouldn't we switch to battery powered vehicles? The left gets shamed for believing in renewable energy, but there's never a compelling argument against it.
Not completely out of the question as Russian forces did attempt a dry run of election disruption in Ukraine, as cheerfully boasted by pro-Russian rt.com here https://www.rt.com/news/161332-ukraine-president-election-vi...

There's not a lot of public information available on technicalities of voting, but would be interesting to dig deeper on who controls the voting machines, how are they checked for malware, who controls the links from the machines to the local severs, how's the data transferred between the local and regional electoral commissions, what's the feasibility of having a third party covertly inserting proxy servers into the process, etc.
>Government can use force (the very real threat of jail, fines, etc) against you to suppress your speech.

Is free speech a thing worth keeping or not? If it is, than anything that realistically threatens it on a global scale needs to be kept in check.

Now, let's not pretend that the only way to suppress speech is to use violence. Governments have a long history of using much subtler and sometimes more efficient tactics like blacklisting. For example, in Soviet Union many "inconvenient" people were free to live as they chose, except they had no chance in hell of getting decent housing or a good job, and were ostracized by many out of fear of "political contagion".

So it's not about violence. It's about power. And companies like Google and Facebook have "soft" power rivaling many nation-states.
He's well known for his hyperbole and ranting but he's also intelligent and usually able to back up his claims with some kind of argument.
There are so many clearly false claims in this piece though I assume it's just trolling.

As I mentioned in another thread the OED's word of the year is post-truth.

Zed is clearly a modern man.
Spark for Mac beta by Readdle (binary)
The most visible changes, such as print being a function, are the easiest and most trivial to adapt to. They clean up the language, and can be automatically converted from one to the other. This can be pulled into python 2 with "from __future__" imports.

The harder part is the string handling. In Python 2, you have one class, string, which is performing two different jobs. It is acting both as a holder for text, and as a holder for binary data. This sort of works, because ASCII looks like binary data if you squint it. If your users are English-only, then this probably sounds like a reasonable thing. Once you need to start supporting Unicode, this ambiguity causes a world of pain.

On python 3, this ambiguity is removed. You have bytes, which are binary data, and strings, which are encoded text. No longer is there one class trying in vain to represent both concepts. This is also why automatic translation doesn't work, because the translator doesn't know which concept you were trying to user when you used a python 2 string. This is a rather low level change, which is why it took libraries so long to update, and why it couldn't be done without breaking backwards compatibility.
http://pypy.org/download.html

py3.3 support is at alpha level. py3.5 support is in the pipeline and already available for testing. It's unlikely they'll do any effort that's targeting py2 specifically anymore.
We also encountered some customers like that - true evangelists but refuse to partake in public endorsement for fear of losing competitive advantage. We even offered discounts, but to no avail.

On the contrary, we found the European and Australian customers to be completely different; competing companies in the same local markets seem to be quite chummy and will share such information freely.

Obviously not to be generalized. We have North American evangelists too.
It's been longer than 10 years, and known for quite some time by most.. The xkcd article is over 5yo itself, and a lot of people pushed for more open passwords for ages...

I do one controversial think and that's trim password imput (mainly because of trailing whitespace selection in some apps/oses). Other than that, if you can input it, you can use it... though now doing some unicode normalization for unity combos is probably a good idea prior to hashing.

https://xkcd.com/936/
But there is a plan and the milestones are being achieved.
Yes, and it all makes sense in this state of current affairs, but unfortunately (in my opinion) it is not that easy; by sticking to that mindset we once again get into the problems we have today; say we do it as you propose, and we have a great president running for office and he has all these proposals like free college, environmental energy subsidies, and whatever else you may think of; even though I agree with them, it would still be pointless for me to vote for him because I'm a constitutionalist (libertarian) and all those programs would be unconstitutional, just like the NSA spying; hence for consistency (thanks to the constitution) I disagree with everything you are saying, but I agree if I step into the paradox we call our state of current affairs;
My views may make me sound like a fundamentalist, and in essence I am, but think about it; It should not matter who the president is and neither should our vote for president. You seem to understand how our different branches of government work hence you should know that the states are where the real, genuine, constitutional changes should take place; not within the Federal Branch (do not confuse powers with rights); it is all about checks and balances; you cannot have a federal government that taxes for social programs and then disagree when it taxes for programs that kill innocents, spy on the people, or bail out corporations. . .hence consistency and the argument that voting for president should not matter; because you must keep in mind that social norms influence individual behaviors and perceptions. . .and the democratic norm only forms what George Washington warned us about in the previous quote I referenced. . . this is not only pragmatism, it is mindsets.
Hey half your Michigan guys come to Chicago. Only half go to SV :)
Perhaps it reduced demand, but at what cost?

The part where people were freaked out because the government intentionally poisoned alcohol for distribution?

If you want to be honest about this discussion, you have to go back to the question of "what is the legitimacy of this action"?
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
Am I the only one who thinks it's possible this is a parody?
"just setting up my twttr…again (account suspension was an internal mistake)" - @jack

https://twitter.com/jack/status/801270269184647168

Looks like nothing serious.
Is there a reason this feature offends you so?
It's really strange, considering that gold-smuggling has historically been the source of funding for assorted terrorist orgs.

Demonetization may turn out in hindsight to be a master stroke, but there are too many variables that are hidden.

There remains anonymous routes such as p-notes that are still open for "black-money" routing. Hawala is likely to be hit very hard by this. See Swamy's latest lecture,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMx1WtpAQ8Y
The title should be Losing At Kaggle The Easy Way. They never even broke top 10.
There are enormous industries around WoD and we know what happens when unintended industries form in a capitalist society.
As part of a data science/machine learning course, I have taught many, many beginning students how to use Python 2 and (starting a year ago) Python 3.

The reality is that given what beginning programmers learn, they hardly notice the difference between them. Adding parentheses to print() and some explicit conversions to lists are all that is necessary to convert most code that beginners see. The last I looked at Zed's book, the same is true for his coding examples.

Overall, I believe for newcomers it is more useful to learn Python 3. Given this background, no employer would reasonably believe you cannot learn Python 2 quickly. They will likely even be impressed you are future-proofed.
With all the talk about how the Python group is promoting 3 for its own benefit, I'm curious if in the next few weeks we will see the author's agenda change to "Learn !python the hard way"...
They aren't less legally binding, necessarily, it's a question of "what is the end result".

The TL;DR is: You can't grant more rights than you have or can sublicense, no matter what the TOS does.

The same is true of most property. You can't gain an interest greater than the one the person who gave it to you had.

Otherwise, you'd be able to create greater title out of thin air (IE a guy with a life interest can't grant you a fee simple)

Imagine instead github's TOS said "by uploading, you grant the right to use the software under the BSD license".
Bob, who has no rights at all, uploads your commercial software. Is it suddenly BSD licensed? No, because Bob didn't have the right to grant "the right to use the software under the BSD license". Even if Github made Bob sign the contract with his blood, it doesn't give away any rights Bob doesn't own.

Here's the truth table version. Note: We assume the validity and bindingness of the TOS, which would certainly be a serious issue in any litigation.

A has necessary rights to grant right to fork.
A uploads thing to github with license that prevents forks.

end result -> You probably have right to fork.

A has does not have necessary rights to grant right to fork.
A uploads thing to github with license that prevents forks.

end result -> You probably do not have right to fork. Any TOS violation is a separate contractual issue.

A has necessary rights to grant right to fork.
A uploads thing to github with license that is silent on forks.

end result -> You probably have right to fork.

A does not have necessary rights to grant right to fork.
A uploads thing to github with license that is silent on forks.

end result -> gray area. You probably do not have right to fork. You may or may not be able to argue an implicit license.

Note that this gets even more complex if A is a member of a corporation, as you have actual and apparent authority issues.
You need one of Aadhaar Card, Pan Card, Ration Card etc to open a bank account.

I give up arguing about "nobody will have undeclared cash of more than 10 lacs". It's hard to challenge faith with reason.
Malicious Video Link Can Cause Any iOS Device to Freeze
Kenneth Rogoff: India’s Currency Exchange and the Curse of Cash
"The source for this is available from the CVS archive here: ... But trust me, it won't help. I've debugged my way through it. It's very... hand written."

First computer ZX80, so I missed the BBCM.

Thx @David, the reason I asked was I was interested to see ^how^ it was written, but probably more to the point, what made it good? Sounds like speed was a loved feature. Was there ever a API or documentation made public?

Reason: want to hack a language together a BASIC-like language (are of use) for graphics.
Being in alpha isn't exactly 'having moved on' ;-)
Many different strains of flu. A healthy adult would be expected to have a smaller reaction.
> But post Snowden, and particularly after the result of the last election here in the US, it's clear that everything on the web should be encrypted by default.

I agree, however, https only barely protects against this, as state actors can easily get a hold of a root cert. You need key pinning if you really want to stop a state from reading your plain text traffic, and even then, traffic analysis and metadata are often enough for them.
So, if the government asks nicely and Facebook "decides" to delete all your posts, you claim that's not censorship?
I've written into several companies in the past saying "your password policy are bad for __ reason", and they always of course write back saying basically "our security team doesn't care, shut up". There've been quite a few times I've cancelled accounts right after signing up because of just how absurd they were (for instance I believe Trade King forces you to click type your password with the mouse on an on-screen keyboard just in case you have a keylogger malware).

It's great that there's now a "right answer", and it seems to be based on some solid research about what actually helps and what doesn't.

In a similar vein I wish there were somehow a standard for http login and change password requests. Right now password managers are pretty hit or miss about whether they can actually fill a form and log you in, sometimes it just can't find the right field, sometimes there's a javascript field check of some sort so you have to click into the field after the password manager fills it before you can submit, etc. Having some kind of a standard would let you more reliably be able to automate logging in, rotating all passwords (at least on accounts without MFA), etc.
I bought into the ONO to see more development in the area of LCD resin printing. Great to see it actually working! Here is the best video I can find: https://youtu.be/SjCIkxHVhNM?t=62
That is true. However, it is not necessary to escalate to throwing people in jail to qualify as censorship.
I'm not sure why it's a huge overpromise.
It's the same as when i fix screwups on behalf of Google.
You are assuming a lot about the authority structures of the company that may or may not be true :)

I generally would assume that if someone makes that comment, and you can verify that they are who they say they are, that they will in fact, be able to accomplish what they say.
A regular Bitcoin address of the form `1LoD3JXVckEKkZh8nkSrvmQaovnGYu8fNP` is non-private, everyone knows this. Posting such an address in your public profile allows blockchain data harvesting firms to learn when your address receives BTC and from where, and to whom your address sends money to.

But there is no reason to post such an address. If Alice wants to post a fully private Bitcoin address that can't be monitored by data harvesting firms, she should post a stealth address [1]. If Bob wants to send Alice BTC, he takes Alice's stealth address and derives from it a regular Bitcoin address. No one but Bob can know what Alice's derived Bitcoin address is, because the address is derived from Bob's private data.

The libbitcoin software suite supports these stealth addresses, but because libbitcoin isn't VC backed and doesn't have the hype of moneyed interests behind it, libbitcoin wasn't good enough for Keybase. They probably never even evaluated it.

A ZCash "zaddress" is basically just a Bitcoin stealth address.

That the CEO of a privacy-focused social networking service is not in tune with this information is a huge red flag to me. As each Keybase.io profile is an implicit endorsement of Keybase and by extension Keybase's investors, I was deeply saddened and frustrated to learn the news that Keybase has decided for its entire userbase to prop up ZCash based on their faulty assumptions.

[1] http://sx.dyne.org/stealth.html
Then you've already failed my not having a plan to disable accounts
If you're looking for a new tutorial for beginners, I really liked "Dive Into Python 3" (http://www.diveintopython3.net/) and have had some success giving that link to new coders.
Got the mattermost integration working with one of our repos today and it seems pretty great. Probably going to move over from Slack to it as I try to consolidate services. I just need them to release the ability to have issue boards that cover multiple repos and it'll be perfect for us.
Value is really something you have to think about right. Value it too high, and the person may not think it worth their while for the piece they get, value it low and you feel cheated.

A good proxy would be : how much in salary would it take a good engineer with some product know-how to build what you've built.
The article as a whole is quite sensationalist.

Once people have access to your underlying device - what exactly do you think is going to happen?

"Oh but if you disconnected your microphone then think again". How many bloody people do that? A few dozen in the world?

What a piece of shit.

Now the technical underpinning that jacks can be reassigned isn't new for Realtek, lots of PC motherboards have given the option for years and years.

This is all not really news.
Not half as bad as Social Security Numbers.
The version tested in paper should not have P2P,so it was much slower than current version.
The government wouldn't do it. A private company, perhaps even a Facebook-owned subsidiary or a partner, would do it, according to the government's guidelines. Does that make it not censorship?
TIL: Alexa, an Amazon.com company.
Some further related reading; Fowler talks polling for events in some of his Enterprise Integration stuff http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/enterpriseREST.html

EDIT: Not Fowler, but his site lol.
No, that's just Machine Drunk Brawling, aka. Sophisticated Stupidity.
"Joel on Software". Much like the bible, it's full of parables that can be interpretted in multiple ways, contains a lot of advice that is no longer relevant and contains enough good parts to cherry pick that I can consider myself a spolskyite.
No... if the government is getting involved at all I definitely think it's censorship.

The Chinese case is obviously censorship. I don't think anyone disputes that.
Do you have any sources/examples besides Stephen Glass, which was over eighteen years ago?
Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’
Show HN: GitPlex – A new Git repo management server with code review
I let Debian install security updates automatically; they haven't broken anything so far. The devices are only available from the LAN and only expose SSH, Bonjour, and the actual Airplay protocol server, so I'm not too worried.

I wrote a systemd unit for the daemon so it comes up again on a power cycle, and encapsulated the config in a puppet repo for repeatable deploys (did the first one by hand, developed puppet and used it for them both when it came time for the second installation).

Hardest part was WiFi, you have set some config flag to keep the dongle from falling asleep when idle. But I caught that on the first day of deployment, and it hasn't been an issue since.

If you don't want a Linux project or an expensive project, there are cheap Bluetooth audio receivers on Amazon.