skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason that there is a lot of articles about strings is because there is a vocal minority that really hates the Python 3 string changes, and they where the most contentious changes in the language.

Current Python 3 has changed a lot since the first versions of Python 3, and there is a whole host of improvements that makes it superior. None of them earth shaking but a host of them worth it. Python 3.6 was just released, and I would recommend having a look at its whats new document, to get a feel for what has changed since 2.7.
Trying to Secure My Digital Life
I think you are out of touch with the possibility Snowden could simply be lying.

He could still have had access to part of the documents. He could have given the documents he published, or another set of documents, to a Russian operative up to a few months earlier.

He certainly revealed everything he knew to the FSB. Or do you think the FSB would take "no" for an answer from someone who is fully at the mercy of the Russian government?
unicode is a subtype of basestring. And it existed since the beginning of Python 2, afaik. It's extremely unfair to compare Python 3 strings to Python 2 str, when Python 3 str is just a rename of Python 2 unicode and has basically the same features. And the article doesn't even mention that Python 2 has all the same features.
Although tablet formulations of diamorph also exist

>The doctors I work with who have done fellowships in USA state that oxycodone is (?was) given out like lollywater compared to hospitals here, where it is only prescribed if the patient has a REALLY good reason they can't have oral morphine.

My experience as a medical student on elective in the US was this - I couldn't believe the quantities of opiates prescribed cf. Australia
That's not a Python 2 str, that's a unicode object. Those two things are not the same. The unicode string behaviour is (indeed mostly) the same as what Python 3 calls a str.

Python 2.7.13 (default, Dec 19 2016, 10:24:34)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.42.1)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> s = u'おはようございます'
>>> type(s)
<type 'unicode'>
>>> s = 'おはようございます'
>>> type(s)
<type 'str'>

Also, just doing a from __future__ import unicode_literals can cause problems in Python 2 if you're using other libraries that don't correctly handle str vs unicode or make assumptions about character encoding.
OK, after thinking about this.

I have problems with non serious debaters that argue dishonestly. This is a subject where people write dishonest propaganda and where I have read a bit.

I can handle a few dishonest debaters, see previous comments, but there were too many here.

I guess the hateful people won. :-)

(I don't really have any interest in the subject matter, for a few I years I followed my native media with NYT/BBC/Washington Post.)
> It's just 2 clicks

Three, actually. One on the i+lock icon pair, one on the right-pointing arrow, then one on "more info". If I'd need more details (like issue and expiry dates, which is pretty common thing to be interested in), then it's 1 more button "view certificate". And if I'd happen to be interested in certificate public key properties (algorithm and key size) it's a really long story, 6 clicks away from the address bar.

It certainly makes sense to not show something right away, on the first click. But the current UI hides quite essential information (to those who can understand it) way too deep. I'm really not persuaded it would hurt usability and confuse users if such information would be 2 clicks away, rather than 4-6.

(And, really, it mustn't hurt to show at least "have I visited this page prior to today? yep, 234 times" on the very first click. And probably won't confuse anyone much to also see something like "TLS1.2, modern ciphers" or "TLS1.0, legacy ciphers".)

> Ctrl/Cmd-I

Toggles bookmarks sidebar for me. I'm unaware of any shortcut to open page info.
It is explained on the previous slide. It looks like syntactic sugar, but it is actually a much more complex feature that involves iterators (which potentially requires several function calls if it is a user-defined iterator).

And even with optimizations that detect when it is a well-known fundamental iterator (like an Array), you still have to pay for the detection (after all, you might have an eval that calls this function with a non-Array, and Array can be monkey-patched).
> Startups are going to have to suck it up and accept that environments where employees are expected to work more than 8 hours per day are actively hostile to anyone responsible for rearing children

Or I guess women just won't join startups?

And startups aren't the only places where women work more than 8 hours/day.
It would certainly make more sense to have it in Moon township near the airport. There is more open land, there is no need to cross the bridges, the facilities for warehouse and shipping are nearby (Fedex has a hub at PIT airport). There is enough free land area to build supplier locations next door to the main plant. The airport corridor (I376) is being rapidly expanded and has a lot of new business space. Housing is available and cheaper than the city. PIT airport has a major military installation (Air Refueling Wing) and is likely to gain another in the next round of base closing so it would make it convenient to work with military applications.

The main reason to have it in downtown Pittsburgh is to be near CMU. Perhaps CMU could consider opening a robotics extension campus in Moon. In Pittsburgh parking, storage, shipping, suppliers, and future growth would all be space constrained.
I went through 3 different Crucial M4s, all replaced under warranty due to unrecoverable read errors and subsequent data loss.

That model really had some serious issues at the time.
Interestingly, Emacs is probably the most reliable editor ever. I had not a single crash in 25+ years in daily use in Linux!
Obama is a massive disappointment. His clearly pro surveillance actions, support for the Syria war and needless belligerance towards Russia are a complete mystery coming from a democrat and given his public posturing as a 'reasonable person'.

Everytime you intervene and rock a boat there are severe consequences for tens of millions of people. It cannot be the kind of casual action we have been taking for decades. Basic human stuff. When it comes to refugees the 'empathy' dissipates quickly and we cannot even absorb hundreds. If these kind of actions was about sincerely caring about other people why would this be?

Given the kind of aggressive civic activism seen for Jan 20 one would conclude people just don't care about surveillance enough or we would see similar levels of activism. But it's also interesting to consider the levels of propaganda at play and the need to 'organize' and fund certain actions. There are enough special interests to do the former but not enough for the latter. For a average citizen even before you start organizing you will end up on dozens of lists and the security state will make your life difficult.
Well thought out and thanks for sharing. Having worked in quite a few sales / B2B / Fortune environments, I see VR in a lot of ways similar to video conferencing. Sure, it works and can save lots of money in time and travel, but I don't think it really has the value proposition to be a huge cultural change. I definitely see the use cases in training (heavy equipment, safety management) down the line.
Last month, we had to add support for HINDI language in our APIs within 2 weeks as Indian govt wanted to launch learning program in both languages. We being a young startup of less than 2 years could not afford to lose this opportunity by asking more time. Because all of our code was in python3.5, there was nothing we had to do. Hindi support was magically available and everything worked flawlessly.

Fingers crossed on the program launch... :)
Latin-1 files work just fine. The examples in the post are just overly complicated: open('test.txt','w',encoding='latin-1').write('No need to separately encode or decode.')
Seriously. It's easy to "fetch a URL with text content into a string" with Python 2 right now _because Python 2 assumes that all bytes are ASCII_.
I thought the article would be about replacing CTOs with AIs, based on the title.
Well that's OK then
This is a fantastic way to assess website functionality. It would drive me insane on day to day use.

In all reality, I just want to dump the modern web's approach. CSS, Javascript, you name it. Give me simple HTML and text ads, if you need ads. Give me pictures when I want them, with descriptive captions. I agree with the intent of the blog--quit making crappy ads and bloated sites!

I use elinks often, and find it's text-based approach easier to comprehend. What are your thoughts?
Exactly. But look at what responses I get when I just point out the possibility Snowden may be lying.

I do recognize the value of the revelations. I just don't accept Snowden's motives at face value.

I'm not saying there is evidence for colusion with Russia prior to the affair, but it's very possible and explains quite a few things.
The people complaining about "Python3 broke strings!" and who are targeted by the article likely don't use unicode objects in python2, and probably don't think they need them, if they did they probably wouldn't have such issues with the change?
Next they will be tattooing numbers on homeless peoples arms.. then low paid workers then middle income then...
Show HN: Industrial I/O solutions for developers, AI and robots
You keep repeating "defection to Russia" but it's a well known and officially confirmed fact that US Justice Department revoked his passport during his attempt to fly from Hong Kong to Ecuador (connecting Via Moscow > Cuba > Venezuela). He landed in Moscow with invalid passport, unable to board the next plane.

Literally, the reason he is in Russia is because US government waned him there. Either because they calculated that might discredit him, or to point fingers to Russia, or sheer incompetence, or whatever other reason or reasons. But the fact is, Snowden is in Russia because the US government put him there.
Hey, everyone!
We are developing an industrial grade controller that allows developers to build cloud controllable machines to measure analog signals and control output pins.
I am interested in what you think about this product. What do you think about this idea? What can I improve? Who do you think will buy this controller?
Very cool.

I noticed an interesting quote in the article:

Before Pinyin was developed, 85% of Chinese people could not read, now almost all can.

While the literacy rate used to be 15% and is now 95%, that means that there are still 54 million illiterate people in the country. Obviously nothing wrong with the quote and it is at least in spirit correct, but it's interesting how vague language can be.

Edit: while looking for those numbers, came across this which is a bit dated now (2001), but gives more insight into the situation there:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/news/chinas-long-but-uneve...

According to Wang Dai, an official with the ministry's Illiteracy Elimination Office, literacy rates stand uniformly near the 95 percent level in the nation's major cities, and throughout its more prosperous coastal region.

In China's less developed western region, however, there remains much to be done. The problem is especially acute in areas populated by non-Chinese ethnic minorities, such as Tibet, where illiteracy rates today run as high as 42 percent.

Nationwide, there are still 30 million Chinese between the ages of 15 and 50 who cannot read at all. Adding in all those defined as "semi-literate" and those, like Hua Lijun, who are above 50, the total approaches 150 million. About 70 percent of all illiterate Chinese are women. The largest gains against illiteracy were made in the 1950s and 1960s when the government made good on its promises to provide at least basic education throughout much of the country.
> "We spent three years developing Pinyin. People made fun of
> us, joking that it had taken us a long time to deal with just
> 26 letters"

I actually think it is quite fast. Grasping an entire languages phonology is a huge accomplishment and condensing it to its bare minimum is also impressive.

With that said, I must admit I don't know how pinyin relates to other phonetic systems such as the Bopomofo[0] or Wade-Giles[1] and for all I know it might just be the exact same system with different letters.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles
I find this kind of strange. I've never thought about what percentage of asians or blacks work at a company, or what percentage are men or women before considering a job opportunity. It just has never mattered to me. 100% men, 100% women, 100% asian. I just don't care.
And the purpose of points systems is to cap out the number of infractions[0] a driver can perform regardless of their wealth. If you can shift the points loss, they can not fulfil their purpose.

[0] for infractions which are all short of an immediate license loss
JS semantics are garbage both for writing code and for optimizations - and all new ES standards just keep piling on top instead of fixing it for fear of breaking backcompat. WASM with GC can't come soon enough.
E10s has been underway for years though.
When companies stop selling prototypes for full price maybe I'll get one of these. For now it's just another toy full of unaccomplished promises and useless hype, waiting to be abandoned for the user after experiencing motion sickness. No immersion at all and nothing impressive at this very moment. Considering I'm hearing it's the "future" since virtual boy... this future is waiting too much to be reached.
> I'm glad I'm unemployed so I have time to configure it!

That raises the question if the author is also unemployed so that he had the time to write it ;-) It would be interesting to know how much time he actually needed.
> I was with the author until …

It seems excessive to dismiss the whole article just because you disagree on this side-note.
It's simple economic fact that a subsidy or other government benefit which decreases as your income increases is exactly the same as an income tax.

It's called "Effective Marginal Tax Rate" if you want to Google it.

From the CBO; "The effective marginal tax rate (for brevity, hereafter referred to as the marginal tax rate) is the percentage of an additional dollar of earnings that is unavailable to an individual because it is paid in taxes or offset by reduced benefits from government programs."

I mean, it seems almost ridiculous to say that buying health insurance & health care is a tax, but when the government is paying over a trillion dollars a year to buy health care for everyone except those who are too young or earning too much money, that's exactly what it's become.

And I'm definitely not complaining that healthy people should not have to pay for health insurance. In fact the healthiest 50 percent of people who pay for health insurance use only 3.5 percent of services, it's what allows the entire system to work!
FBI informant at Best Buy’s Geek Squad conducted warrantless searches
It's also what happens to actual criminals, so it's not that useful as a differentiator.
Nothing is too hot to handle for a big nation state like China. I don't know exactly why China didn't detain him. But there are a whole lot of possibilities from being to slow off the mark, avoiding ruffled feathers with the US, up to an agreement with Russia.

Maybe Snowden really hadn't anything with him in Hong Kong which he hasn't already shared with Journalists and the Russians.
> watch police and fire fighting personnel raise funds...

What? Where does that happen? Isn't policing a primary responsibility for the government, to be paid from taxes by everyone? Fundraising seems very misplaced for them, no matter how.
All the articles are about strings since those are the most fought-about change, and the thing you'll likely have to deal with the most when porting. Python3 IMHO has no single "killer feature", but especially with recent versions has a lot of very nice things that add up, which isn't talked about in the prominent articles because it is not controversial. (Well, the async stuff kind of is, since it's a feature many people want, but it also is quite confusing)
And yet JS is faster than most other dynamic languages. Pretty good garbage if you ask me.
Multiregional brain on a chip
> but in this case that's not a concern

Why? It seems that if premiums are rising relentlessly for one company that the insured will seek out other companies, and hence that one company will "lose the customer".

Or am I missing something?
Oh, not at all. I'm just saying that no one did string handling right when Python was conceived. (And, evidently, much of the brokenness persists).
It's not going to crash. You'll get an error.
Another Final Obama Admin Last Act: Proposing How to Rethink College with Tech
Amazon EC2 F1 Instances
Doesn't "when no one else is around and driving through empty streets at thirty miles per hour in twenty-five zones" mean that no one else was around [to get hurt/injured]?

I don't think he's trivializing traffic laws. They have a place and a purpose. If no one is around no one is around and their purpose (preventing the public from bodily injury) doesn't need enforcement. If only we would use "common sense". Using cameras to get around no eye witnesses is about raising punishment and revenue above public safety unless you don't enforce the ticket unless another person or vehicle is visible on the picture. But then we are throwing due process out the window when we can't question our accusor (witness) and see into the source code etc. That's not something to trivialize.

(Don't get mean wrong, I wish there were more officers to write tickets to people who go 30 down the residential home lined streets where I live. 30 is to fast for conditions as a child could be unseen behind an object near the street or run out of a house or building into the street and 30 would be too fast to do a vehicle in time.)
So... What are you saying?

For profit corporations will always find a way to game the system? Just like the whackamole with tax cheats?

That trying to regulate a broken marketplace doesn't work very well?

Perverse incentives lead to perverse behavior?
What does "Live session" mean? I can't find anywhere on Udacity where this is described. It seems like it is a selling point of the program, but why it is a selling point, seems unclear on the on boarding page.
Modern XMPP Server
Drone biz Lily Robotics takes $34m in pre-orders, ships nothing, shuts down
Since traveling in Asia and getting elinks into muscle memory I now use it even on good connections, it's so much more satisfying to get consistently quickly rendered text into my eyeballs.
> The problem is that in Python 2, "str" is a bytestring and "unicode" is a Unicode string, whereas in Python 3 "str" is a Unicode string and "bytes" is a bytestring.

`str` in Python 3 is `unicode` in Python 2. The bytestring type was removed and replaced with a bytes type. Not sure what's particularly confusing about this.

None of this however is the issue with Unicode in Python in general. I think all these articles fail to understand that the actual story behind unicode in the language is very complex.
The real WTF here? Municipal executives who sign contracts with distant third party tech companies containing revenue quotas for those companies.

Perverse incentives! the original purpose of laws against driving too fast or jumping red lights is promoting public safety. When the municipality has an obligation to issue a certain number of violations, the original purpose is subverted. Now, of course another public policy purpose of these laws is to raise revenue.

When the revenue is made possible by a tech company, the municipality probably has a contractual obligation undermining its public safety mission.

Municipal officials, if they were willing, could raise revenue by asking the people to pay more taxes, even excise taxes on vehicles. But there's no incentive for municipal executives to be honest any more: for over a generation the US citizenry has been trained to vote against anyone who asks for more taxes.

So dinging violators of regulations is an easier way for towns to get money. Create regulations that turn ordinary people in to "bad" people, then grab some of their money to make them "good" again. What a system!

Hacker News friends, let's remember that we are, or easily could be, the creators of those distant third party tech companies whose contracts perpetuate the perverse incentives.
> (Note: Personally I would love to have str always represented internally in UTF-8. If it were like this, I would say "cast" was acceptable vocabulary. But it's not like this).

UTF-8 is a good choice for transmission and storage, but since it's somewhat difficult to decode and isn't easily seekable it's not necessarily the best in-memory representation of a string.

Fortunately, that's, from a Python PoV, an implementation detail (even at the C API level).

> By the way, I never needed this. str() is just a convenience function, it's not meant for reliability. As you surely know there is complex interplay with __str__ and __repr__. I use str() for debugging, error message etc. But not for anything that I expect to be able to process further.

Or log messages. Broadly speaking str() means "tell the object to describe itself", while repr() means "tell the object to describe itself, possibly in a way that I can eval() it"
The title literally says that the ‘Real Value’ of this gold coin is that Lady Liberty is black.

I guess you could calculate the value of a black lady liberty by checking her price over spot or compared to other coins? I would guess the gold holds higher portion of the value.

I guess everything needs to look like the cover of a modern schoolbook with every age/race permutation represented. I would be ok with less stock photography filler in the world.
I am looking for a cover that does not soak up the sweat? I like to take the vr to family parties with dozens of people trying the device and the nasty factor can be really if used heavily. I am looking for something that can be wiped with alcohol between uses.
It's a comment on the title but also the article is not even talking about the various issues with Unicode in Python.
> And the article doesn't even mention that Python 2 has all the same features.

Because it's not about the fact that you can achieve the same thing. What the article does is illustrate that a thing that returns 'str' when you call 'type' on it in Python 2 is not the same nor can be used in the same way as what Python 3 would call a 'str'.
Pinyin is a little more compact (I.e. fewer Roman characters per Chinese characters) than Wades-Giles, so more efficient storage. That makes it easier to input chinese characters when using an English keyboard (or keypad on a mobile phone).
Allwinner itself might not be the best example of open source support, but Allwinners products are well supported in the mainline kernel by the outstanding work of the linux sunxi team. See their progress here:

http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

edit: I now see you link to linux-sunxi, so you probably already know about this.
Sushi Sandwiches
This is probably why the scientific computing community is very slow in adopting python3, there are simply very few benefits apart from the threat of 2020.
Agreed! I try to keep my site light. I'd like to see a return of the web to a content layer where the browser can choose how to present it. In the end we want to read content. We don't care about someone's favorite scrolling method or menu system. Why can't I set up my browser preferences to be "show me websites with a light blue background, navigate through a menu bar horizontally across the top," etc. I don't think it would happen with current inertia, but maybe that's an area for a niche browser.
Which is something you can do in Python 3 as well, if you really want the broken behaviour of Python 2 or the behaviour of Py2 is "ok for me".