skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of Searle's Chinese Room Argument[0]: imagine you have a particularly dreary job where you sit in a room filled with boxes of symbols written on paper. Every now and again someone comes in and hands you some new symbols. You look through your rulebook and, depending on what it says, hand them some symbols back. It turns out that these rules actually implement a conversational program in Chinese. And if you can implement those rules and not understand Chinese, why would you think a computer program, implementing its own rules, could understand anything?

The common "Systems Reply" response to this is that you're looking at the wrong layer of abstraction. The computer hardware (or the person in the room) doesn't understand Chinese, the computer plus the rules plus the data forms a system that understands Chinese. Searle's answer to this is that, well, what if you memorised the rules and the database? You might know all the rules, you might be able to follow them, but you wouldn't understand Chinese.

What I think is fascinating about this is that it's vulnerable to Bayesian Judo[1]: if you have a strong belief that computers aren't capable of true understanding because of the Chinese Room Argument, then building an actual Chinese Room-style computer and having it show understanding should be a fairly strong blow to that belief.

Now, it's easy to quibble about what true understanding actually means, but one version (used by Searle's answer) is this: "[..] he would not know the meaning of the Chinese word for hamburger. He still cannot get semantics from syntax." But this news is exactly that! A computer translation of the same semantic concept from one syntax to another without ever having been taught the rules connecting them. In other words, this is semantics from syntax implemented by nothing but a computer, a database, and a set of rules.

So, by the reverse Chinese Room Argument, I would say this system exhibits a kind of understanding. Not a very sophisticated kind, mind you, but something that should still spook you if you believe computers are categorically incapable of thinking like us.

[0] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/i5/bayesian_judo/
Why the hell even bring that up. Not a very good tutorial in any way when the writer starts throwing around unrelated terms they don't grok.
Someone gives you a one paragraph description of a feature... I assume you don't immediately open up the debugger and start git bisecting... I'm talking about the things that happen immediately after being presented with a problem, and before you start typing code.
What if it was something like soap? How could you possibly tell if you were buying fake soap? If you get sick, do you immediately suspect that your soap supplier has defrauded you?
It seems similar to automatically captioning images.
Ditto. I have submitted at least 10 PRs to fix Python3 bugs in OSS projects directly because of this. So perhaps I have made the world .000001% better.
> The fact that you can't run Python 2 and Python 3 at the same time

I'm confused by this statement. I can start a python2 interpreter, background it, then start a python3 interpreter. Is there some other area that they inhibit each other in?
Maybe if there was a little more encouragement of non-paywalled submissions, where possible?

Here's a Bloomberg article that seems to cover mostly the same ground as this WSJ piece, for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-22/pilot-str...

Sometimes the WSJ or NYT or whoever just has something to offer that others do not. In many cases, though, it seems like there's other paywall-free reporting that could work basically as well.
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Also, I do know that "a president elected with a national popular vote would still very much be a democratic republic" because that is how our system is set up, at it's core; but then it becomes paradoxical because the national popular vote got the president elected, therefore, the mentality (of the ignorant) would also be that this country is a democracy.
My point is, people should acknowledge that our popular vote has never gotten a president elected and for a good reason; we do not need a demagogue in the Federal Branch appealing to the emotions of people, separating the masses, and creating a them and us mentality; we have state rights for that reasong (10th amendment) and we have article 1 Section 8 for limiting the federal government.
Hence, when I say limit the federal government most have this negative stereotype that I do not believe in progressive change when in fact I do; I just do not ask for it from the president, I ask for it within my state; like In California. . .
> Also, it's been over a decade, maybe even multiple decades, and Python 3 still isn't above about 30% in adoption.

Python 3 was released in 2008. Eight years ago.
I think it was a reference his first tweet.

(https://twitter.com/jack/status/20)
Zed just needs to be at war with something.
That may have been true in the past but the situation has rapidly changed over the last decade. Amphetamine and opioid abuse stemming from over-prescription is becoming far too common and doctors are now experiencing the full spectrum from people genuinely in pain to high-risk heroin addicts. When the latest public health scare is a drug abuse epidemic attributed to the medical system instead of the black market, it's far harder to ignore the futility of the war on drugs.
There is also not an infinite number of other companies.
The problem is they are basically saying that almost every "best pratice" recommended over the past 5-10 years is absolutely the wrong thing to be doing. Don't be surprised when people throw up their hands in frustration.
By the same token, doctors are better equipped to understand (to the extent we can) the neurochemical reactions being caused by drugs and how they act on the brain. I would imagine a doctor who e.g. understands how many anti-depressants work by targeting the serotonin system would find it interesting the way many psychedelics also are serotonergic - people are basically just dumping analogues of their own neurotransmitters into their brain.

Similarly, look at the relationships chemically between sumatriptan (used to treat cluster headaches), psilocybin and DMT. Or the opioids, stimulants ... substances like coca and kratom that have been used for hundreds or thousands of years and analogues of which are used in medical settings all the time.

The argument that these are crazy, dangerous substances with zero legitimate medical value pretty instantly falls apart to anyone who understands how closely related nearly all of these substances are to pharma drugs widely understood to have legitimate medical value.

I'd in fact be interested to hear which "drugs" have the least relation to any recognized western medicine. Salvia divinorum?
Presumably components of the hardware or software could be compromised somewhere upstream by nation-state actors like the CIA and NSA's TAO. It's not as if Iran's nuclear facilities were connected to the Internet and that didn't exactly keep their centrifuges safe.
Do you have ANY idea how probability works? If you are going to roll a 6 sided die, and you ask me, "What is the probability that I will roll something besides a 6?" I will tell you that you have about an 83% chance of rolling a 6. If you roll, and you get a 6, it doesn't mean I was WRONG on the probability. It just means your roll fell into that 17% chance of getting a 6.

You can't take the result of one election and decide if Nate Silver is right or wrong in his probability. Instead, you have to take his many predictions and see how accurate they are; do his 90% predictions come true 90% of the time, do his 80% predictions come true 80% of the time, etc.

You can't take one time where he said Hillary had a 70% chance of winning, and say he was wrong because she lost.
This author is nuts.
"Python" and "dead language" in same sentence? Maybe if it was Perl or Java, I'd have understood.

P.S: I'm really sorry Java guys, I know Java isn't going to die, atleast not for another 100 years, but since I don't like it much, I'm putting it in the list here.
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I think Python is amazing to get small stuff ip and running and quick scripts, but it quickly becomes a nightmare as the project scales up.
>Maybe, but according to wikipedia/the internet there is no scientific consensus that sunscreen works either or that global warming exists.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_...

The scientific consensus is that the Earth's climate system is unequivocally warming, and that it is extremely likely (meaning 95% probability or higher) that this warming is predominantly caused by humans. It is likely that this mainly arises from increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as from deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, partially offset by human caused increases in aerosols; natural changes had little effect
Howdy Zed, there's a small typo in your printf statement. As written,

x = 'Zed'
print f"Howdy {x}"

Should read,

x = 'Zed'
printf "Howdy {x}"

I was under the suspicion that, "f" was some sort of operator or something, much like q is for Perl,

print q{Howdy Zend};
The fun is the LTS users will want 95% of the bug fixes and 30% of the features only in the current version. Oh and each customer wants a different 30% of the features. So you need to build them a custom branch or they quit.
It is almost as if all combinations of political and economic systems can't be mapped to a one dimensional spectrum...
> In the programming language theory there is this basic requirement that, given a "complete" programming language, I can run any other programming language. In the world of Java I'm able to run Ruby, Java, C++, C, and Lua all at the same time. In the world of Microsoft I can run F#, C#, C++, and Python all at the same time. This isn't just a theoretical thing. There is solid math behind it. Math that is truly the foundation of computer science.

What does this even mean?
One (Large) company in the UK years ago - "Our psychometric tests indicate that you are possibly a smoker and we are a no smoking organisation"

Have never even held a cigarette in my life let alone smoked one

Tests included questions like "Johnny had a joint on Friday after work, is he OK to work on Monday?"

"Do you think smokers work to equal levels as their non-smoking employees"

and so on

Pretty sure this was illegal but I was young and had no idea so meh
Quite an interesting read, it kind of reminds me of this story which I bumped into the other day:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-e8c6cbab-da44-4a3c-8...
No, unless you really try to confound them together
It sounds like the author's just miffed about incompatibilities in general -- specifically, that they can't (necessarily) import python 2 code whilst running under a python 3 interpreter and vice versa.
So many inaccuracies and exaggerations that it feels sarcastic.
The thing about Zed is that his shtick was originally a joke: a parody of overconfident asshole programmers. But... well, like Orwell said, "He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it."
Unless you are a known name in your field, your resume should be a single page.
> The war on drugs has not made one dent in the demand or the supply.

While I am also opposed to the war on drugs, let's not make overbroad claims. There is evidence that alcohol prohibition actually reduced demand. Not 100%, but significantly. From Wikipedia:

> The Prohibition was effective in reducing per-capita consumption, and consumption remained lower for a quarter-century after Prohibition had been repealed.[34]

34: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470475/

From that article:

> Nevertheless, once Prohibition became the law of the land, many citizens decided to obey it. Referendum results in the immediate post-Volstead period showed widespread support, and the Supreme Court quickly fended off challenges to the new law. Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the latter years of the 1910s, when both the cultural and the legal climate were increasingly inhospitable to drink, and in the early years after National Prohibition went into effect. They rose after that, but generally did not reach the peaks recorded during the period 1900 to 1915. After Repeal, when tax data permit better-founded consumption estimates than we have for the Prohibition Era, per capita annual consumption stood at 1.2 US gallons (4.5 liters), less than half the level of the pre-Prohibition period.32

32. Miron Jeffrey A. and Jeffrey Zwiebel, “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition,” American Economic Review 81 (1991): 242–247; Dills and Miron, “Alcohol Prohibition and Cirrhosis”; NIAAA, “Apparent per Capita Ethanol Consumption.” The figure is for 1935.
Can we not have this /r/The_Donald crap here please?
if you know perl, http://oc.pm.org/

There were a lot of Meetup,although not as much as Bay Area.

I used to be there, and now in Bay Area, really miss OC.
Hi, thanks for bring a good extension for us. However, after i trying, i don't think the extension is user-friendly, and i think it is a little complicate because i don't know how to use it. The users always lazy, they rarely to read such a long extension instructions.
How is this to supposed to show "how vulnerable you are to this sort of attack"? This runs standalone.

1. As a general rule, if you download and run an untrusted standalone program, it could probably steal your passwords even if you use a password vault (although that would certainly make it a little bit harder).

2. You can just go into the Chrome password manager and click "show" to see any stored password. No tool needed.

Chrome uses sandboxing and process isolation extensively. Using the default browser password store certainly presents a ripe target if someone manages to totally own the browser, but technically there's not a huge leap from owning the browser to owning an external password store, and certainly not grabbing any and all passwords entered into the browser via a password vault.

I'm not disagreeing that a standalone password vault encrypted with a master password is effectively more secure than the built-in manager. I do think it has been exaggerated both how much more so it is. Saving strong passwords with the built-in password store is generally much less bad than, for instance, using a common memorized password, or using very weak passwords. Both of which are likely outcomes of "never use the password store."
No, it's correct (new in Python 3.6):
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0498/

The print statement however is not valid Python 3 :).
If it was so easy to do some of these things that the author wants, why hasn't someone already done it?
Pretty sure Zed's playing a joke on experienced programmes. He's clearly mentioned that the book is for complete beginners and that's why the entire section for experienced programmers is crap.

Funny how many haven't seen it and are arguing pointlessly.
I didn't know Zed Shaw was that stupid. Or is he just trolling?
The argument is bad but the headline has a point: the value of a language is the quality of its libraries and the community that maintains it. Python 3 seems like a mistake; it fractured the community and sent people away. (to golang, to scala, probably even to ruby).

If I were a library maintainer on py2 I would have felt betrayed by py3. Suddenly print is a function? 'yield from' won't be available on the py2 branch? Yikes.

C++ is an example of the serious negative consequences of language change. The language has been in flux for decades and the 3rd-party code shows it. Some fraction of good libraries rely on c++14 features. Many others duplicate in library code features that have been available in the language since c++11 or earlier. Boost, the 'missing standard library' for cpp, is something you either love or hate.

The end result for c++ in 2016 is that large shops either (a) don't use it or (b) don't use the new features and have a slow acceptance process for 3rd-party libs.

You can argue that the C community is healthier than C++ -- a ton of important system libraries are written in C and have bindings to tons of languages. Yes, they have problems (openssl cough), yes nobody understands unspecified behavior across compilers, but C has done a good job of supporting lots of platforms and staying relatively stable.

Betraying the community can kill a language. Perl learned this lesson the hard way. Let's hope python can be saved.
In my experience a lot of the problems with automatically converting existing Python 2 code to Python 3 code is that the Python 2 code usually makes fundamentally broken assumptions when it comes to unicode and bytes.
> When I see that I can use any symbol from '%!#&' or whatever list they provide, I can only imagine it's a really naive SQL-injection defense. Is there any valid reason for this?

One reason I've seen for this is that the website is just a front-end for some older mainframe system that has password rules from 1987. Banks and insurance companies are frequently culprits here.
The benefits of a national popular election for president are getting rid of the silly game built up around winning the electoral college. People say that the electoral college means less populated states get a say ... but (for example) Trump came to my state of 5.5 million exactly once for a public event and didn't even leave the airport.

A national popular vote would mean that Florida and Ohio don't get a disproportional advantage and also that winning the presidency doesn't require you to be good at playing the electoral college or district drawing game. It means that every vote counts a little bit more and that wherever a candidate goes they can make a difference for their final vote count.

I'm not really sure that if (literally) Hitler won the electoral college vote that the electors would go against their district's election so we're left with deciding which game is better to play – the popular vote game or the electoral college game.

I think the electoral vote game could reduce the divisiveness of elections and lead candidates to really find and fight for the middle of the political spectrum. Maybe some game theorists have real science behind the effects of the different strategies.

It stops being a republic when most of the ruling decisions are put directly to the populace. Go to war with Canada? National popular vote. Legalize catnip? National popular vote. National budget? National Popular vote. Ratify a treaty? National popular vote. Vim or Emacs? Vim.

Places like California with their multitude of referendums approach this but are still very far away from removing the republic moniker.
I think the author means that there's no single interpreter that supports both languages (a la DrRacket's #lang directive, perhaps?).
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This is an excellent treatise on both the value of a computer science education and the importance of being sure that things you say in public aren't verifiably false.
I'm not familiar with CMJ but happy to discuss the idea. Write to me, email is in my profile.

As a paper it would be significantly stronger if it did the binary case, though.
Google is a public, profit making company. Can't really believe the "Do no evil" mantra. It was a financial decision to pull out. They were losing ground to Baidu and this allowed them to save face.

It's like how Google shuts down every other product - it's not making profit.
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I'm pretty sure that if you understand both Turing completeness and the practice of actual programming, then you know that in most cases the one has virtually nothing to do with the other. (Which is not meant at all to imply that the author of linked article understands Turing completeness, just that even though he doesn't seem to he could still be excellent at teaching programming.)
Someone should show this to Donald Trump.
For which they set a 4K limit on password length. I think even the commenter you replied to would find that satisfactory, being much more than 64 characters.
Roben,
I'm actually disappointed to find out that you've made this course free.
It seems the folk on reddit gave you a nasty bit of pressure?

Well, i don't see how you're going to be able to maintain this project(100's of hours of videos) without earning anything for it. Quality is bound to decrease in the long run.
I believe you should stick with your previous model(Free for a month or two, subscribe when its useful or pay a fixed sum for lifetime access).
This title was stolen from hacker news.
"It's sad to watch Python destroy itself because it's such a great language, but that seems to be where things are headed."

The author has a point here. I've been programming Python for about 10 years now. Really concerned about the future of the language. Languages like Node and Go are progressing rapidly, but what's happening to Python? I used to complain about Node, but with the latest ES6/ES7 improvements it's actually pretty decent. The difference in usability between npm and pip is also huge.

Python is still my favorite language, but they really need to fix this part of the ecosystem. Maybe it's time to release Python 4 that has a clean upgrade path from 2 and enough language improvements to encourage users to adopt it?
Judges are definitely not masterminds.

Lawmakers are sort of masterminds, especially when defining the founding principles of the law. They don't have pencil production, and usually any particular production, in mind.

The beauty is that a general principle allows almost any business to flourish; the lawmakers need not know what specific business it might be. This makes such laws reasonably future-proof.
That's also about the time Zed switched to Python.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080305002455/http://www.zedsha...
Yes. If you don't think so, then just tell your browser to remember your passwords and don't bother with another tool.
Then the question becomes "why is he talking about turing completeness, something that is either irrelevant, or that he knows nothing about?"
I just point them towards Unlambda. Turing completeness in three characters (plus one for output)

http://www.madore.org/~david/programs/unlambda/#what_is
> You move your mouse too much

This is the third time in as many days I've read that. Is this becoming the go-to excuse for rejecting applicants? I mean, as with all excuses it has a basis in reality -- I'd be bothered enough by an applicant sitting there futzing around with the mouse to have doubts about their technical competence -- and yet it's completely irrelevant to the actual job of a software engineer, which is to stave off manglement long enough to cobble something together.
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After 8 years the man has a point, most of his arguments are not correct though. Conclusion stands, python is shooting itself in the foot.
One feature of Python 3 that I found really pleasantly useful recently (thank you SO :) ) was passing generators to the zip() function in a for loop, like:

for a, b in zip(generatorA(), generatorB()):

In Python 2 you have to import itertools to do this. I bring this up because I find examples like this all the time in Python 3 where core, modern language features like generators are more tightly integrated and easier to use. It's really a better version of the language and if you're starting fresh on a Python project you should do yourself a favor and use it.
Credit card numbers themselves are security theater.
Evidence of the effectiveness of Tylenol on fever or headache is very, very weak. It's similar to the evidence for aloe.

Mostly Tylenol is administered as a placebo. Fake aloe is at least useful as a moisturizer.
This is how ISO happened...
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Chasing the Scream is a fantastic book on this very topic. Highly recommended.