skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But what about the first argument? Couldn't you make the case that the pythonic way of handling it is to only care about if the object responds to __getitem__(0)?

Mmm no? Here, what he cares about is that it's a single-element collection, he doesn't just want the collection's first item. If he did, foo[0] would do a better job.

So the object responding to __getitem__(0) is not a sufficient condition.

In fact, it's entirely wrong as sets do _not_ implement __getitem__. Worse, __getitem__(0) does a very different thing than unpacking on a dict. Unpacking is more ducky than __getitem__ for this case, because it expresses the following: the right-hand is a single-element iterable. Any iterable will work as long as it only has a single item, it doesn't have to be a sequence, a mapping, or even a collection (generators or callable_iterators will work just as well)
If that's the reasoning, why are FaceBook and Twitter not included? They have a good reputation among tech people, a bunch of engineers working for them, and (in FaceBook's case at least) they push salaries up a lot.

The particular companies involved make me think this really is about good partnership relations - until Android, Apple and Google had a really good relationship, Apple and Pixer share a head honcho, they all buy from Intel, Intuit's not really a competitor to any of them, etc. The effect, of course, is to drive down wages for the employees who would otherwise have been poached, and that's why the DoJ got involved. But I doubt that execs at each of those companies were telling themselves "We're going to drive down wages for our key employees" when they made the policy.
I agree with this article, but this seems like a pipe dream in the current corporate environment. In my experience, most corporations demand long periods of work with very few breaks, let alone 60 to 90 minute napping periods.

Let's hope studies like this can spark a discussion within mainstream corporate culture.
Speaking of Plan 9 and Go, I have to ask the same question: why isn't Go more popular?
The Tax-Cut Racket: GOP blackmail
If someone's knowledge of Python is so shallow that they can't handle tuple unpacking, they should learn more Python. It's one of the basic foundations of the language, and it's hardly a difficult concept.
Just as bad, in my mind. But I could be alone on that.
I did a BSC in Computer Science at University. About half my class failed our first ever programming assignment because of plagiarism. Loads of people had just shared the code between them, character for character. There were a few cases where they even left the original authors name in the comments at the top of the code.

Instances of plagiarism dropped after that. At least they learned how to change variables, function names, comments and whitespace enough to get around the automated plagiarism detection tool.
Same reason the Hurd never materialized. Linux was good enough that nobody cared to put in the massive effort required to make the slightly better solution industry-strength. It's something like the death by a thousand cuts, only in this case, the thousand cuts are unsupported hardware and silly programs that don't have ports or package maintainers, but that people still want anyway. BSD gets away with being the unpopular but probably better alternative to Linux by a massive effort to port all linux software to it, and a great linux compatibility layer for things that aren't ported.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Your_Eyes_Only_(film)
I've been using this on a couple projects for the past month or so, and it's awesome. Before I was tearing my hear out trying to keep track of state on my fully ajax-driven pages, and now all my routes and actions are neatly defined as a sammy.js app. I honestly can see building all my apps as non-refreshing fully asynchronous implementations given how easy this has made things.

It's also nice that it is very reminiscent of Sinatra and Rails routes, being a Rails developer myself. My rails app pretty much just serve as APIs for my front end js driven interfaces. Slick!
That's very different than OP's piece of code: you're not trying to assert that the iterable yields a single element, you already know it.

Furthermore, OP's assertion-unpacking will work not just on lists, but also on dicts (will return the only key, not the only value, and the key doesn't have to be ``0``), on sets (which don't implement __getitem__ at all), on arbitrary collections and even on arbitrary iterables (including callable_iterator and generators)

Also, please don't put the constant on the left-hand of a comparison in Python, it's useless and ugly.
This site has a useful bike security FAQ: http://www.baitbike.com/Security_For_Your_Bike.html

Q: Isn't there a GPS device available that I can hide on my bike?

A: Yes, however, while GPS is cool, it does have several drawbacks when used on a bike. First, it is power hungry and a bike doesn't have a power source like a car does. Any device installed on a bicycle would need to be powered by an internal battery and thus would need to recharged on a daily basis, weekly at best. Most consumers would simply be riding around with a dead battery 90% of the time. Second, the devices are still too large to be able to effectively hide it on a bike, keeping in mind that it would not work if hidden within the metal frame. Third, while the cost of GPS devices are coming down, there is still the monthly fee that is needed to connect the device with the cellular network and to access a tracking website, usually $20 to $40 per month. If you are still interested in putting a GPS tracking device on your own bike, take a look at www.accutracking.com for the most affordable solution that we have seen.
I have a fake FB account for this reason. It is amazing how many people will friend someone who doesn't exist
When I started doing server side JavaScript a few years ago I was frustrated by JavaScript libraries which were unnecessarily tied to browser-specific APIs like the DOM. That seems to have been somewhat fixed. Now I'm frustrated by the reverse.

The first step to fixing this is getting good implementations of CommonJS modules in the browser. JavaScript needs a module system (no, <script> tags are not good enough) and CommonJS is the closest thing we have to a standard that can be added to existing environments.

Also important for interoperability is making sure people don't use proprietary extensions to CommonJS modules, which Node unfortunately has plenty of.
I don't think this corporate culture is "mainstream" in the programming world. I mean, yes, there are some backwards workplaces where they have cameras to make sure you are working Really Hard 24/7 (or 8/5, anyway), but this is not the norm. The norm is being able to disappear for hours without anyone even noticing.

Outside of creative fields like programming, I imagine it's a little bit more skewed towards "working hard", but that mostly amounts to showing up to meetings. If you don't have a meeting scheduled, nobody will notice.

(Personal experience: my work-from-home job with a company of 5 was much stricter than my work-in-the-office job at the 5th biggest company in the US. It's not "corporate culture", it's neurotic manager culture.)
I don't think, but those Jet Pack guys were getting awfully close...

http://www.martinjetpack.com/
Lose 45 minutes (30 min nap + 15 min setup/teardown) for oh so much more energy for the rest of the day? It might not work out for you, but try it for a week!
Bono's ONE foundation under fire for giving 1% of funds to charity
I'm sorry, but its just not worth expending the extra effort to get you signed up to my service. I can get millions of people before it even starts becoming an issue.
It would be interesting to see HN-ers that use facebook auth in their apps share some stats on how big percentage use it?

I too believe you should have your own auth system as a base, but maybe someone can provide some numbers proving that it actually is a waste.
I don't think the High Score List really matters - it helps the 1% (estimation) percent of the community that's there, but for the rest of us, it's like trying to achieve the Home Run Record - it's largely a pointless metric.

If there was something like "who received the most karma in the last week", then there would be cause for concern/thought that the community would be hurt by such a list.
> If someone's knowledge of Python is so shallow that they can't handle tuple unpacking

Did you know that "tuple unpacking" actually works on arbitrary iterables (in fact, the relevant function in Python's C code is called ``unpack_iterable``)?

>>> def f(): yield 3
...
>>> b, = f()
>>> b
3

you should be careful with such declarations.
Google for "USB gps tracker" and see what you find. There's a few options out there.

Of course, inside your handlebars has reception issues, as well as size constraints.
If you put up a few photos of a good looking girl for the profile pic and a random album, it's quite easy to get over a hundred friends, and not too hard to get many hundreds if you post on a few of those friending groups.
This is AMAZING feedback. We definitely hear you on all of this and promise to get our website up to snuff. Customer support, on-boarding of new clients, and making things faster, more secure, and more scalable every day have all been our biggest priorities so far.

Something we've thought A LOT about is the pricing model. I completely agree with you that $50 per month is too expensive for a beginner. I was in the same place as you a year ago (and arguably would still be were this not my company) and would never had considered $50 for hosting. We think this is OK though. We don't want to compete with Dreamhost on price and as a beginner you shouldn't need all the extras we're providing (though I do understand the appeal of the "easy" part on it's own). Once you've actually gotten some significant traffic and you ARE making a buck off of your blog or site then suddenly we are affordable!

Essentially.. we don't want to be your training wheels or your used Honda Civic. We want to be your Ford F150 or Audi. Lame analogy but true!

All that said, we WILL listen and will provide a solution if there is enough demand.
From the 9fans mailing list a while back, someone asked what the plan9 people at Google use:

http://9fans.net/archive/2010/02/344

and

http://9fans.net/archive/2010/02/366
Is charging for a token seriously a comparative option? C'mon, when did authentication become so difficult?
I feel that's a flawed attitude. It's like reverse entitlement.

Were I a startup founder, I would make it my goal to ensure that EVERY. single. potential customer can use my site, within my capabilities.

(edit: I don't know why you're getting downvoted; you stated your philosophy as part of the discussion, which I don't think is a good reason to get downvoted.)
Incidentally, requiring Facebook/Twitter on any iPhone/iPad app will absolutely destroy your ratings.

Take the recently released Gourmet Live app for example: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id391597058?mt=8

Although they made some especially poor choices in that app (you can end up navigating into sections of the app that you can't get out of without giving a Facebook/Twitter login, oops).
It does - I think the OP is referring to all the open graph data you need to add to your page to have this functionality work properly.
Agreed. I've lost track of how many times I've gone to a Quora answer, thought 'I must take a closer look at Quora', gone to the root domain, realised you need a Facebook login, then just navigated away.

I even have a Facebook account somewhere - just don't like logging into another site like this for some reason.
It is my goal. But not right now.
I sucked it up and registered anyway, but I still hate it and it makes me loathe to use the site.
You might make the same argument for only supporting IE as the only browser you app works with. I suspect it's actually an issue from day one as there are folks who would sign up but don't because you require Facebook.
It's easier for students. When I'm on that schedule, I wake up around 7 a.m. (naturally), nap around 4:30 or 5 p.m., and go to bed around 1 a.m. It's maintainable when I don't have regular late-afternoon meetings, and very helpful during "death march"-type projects because it feels like having two days in one.

As a side effect, dinner shifts later in the day. This is noticeable in places where siestas are common, like Spain -- early breakfast, nothing happening in the mid-afternoon, and then everyone emerges for dinner and night life around 8-10 p.m.
A New Approach to MaxFlow?
Unless you like eating the meat of 400 people, anyway.
Well hopefully he did the former, but the latter is a worthwhile stopgap for all the gem writers who haven't though about it, and it's already the #2 google result for add_bundler_dependencies, so I say "well done!"
You are aware that there are more people not on facebook than people on facebook, right?
Scala or Ruby/Rails
If we decide to develop our web application in Scala/Lift would we have any challenges finding the right developers to support changes/iterations in the future? I have heard good things about Scala/Lift but am concerned that we may not have the same type of community of developers that exist for Ruby/Rails. Thanks.
While GWT, Pyjamas, and other such toolkits have a ways to go I think there is some reason to believe that in the end they might work out.

For example, Pyjamas just got a kickstart in development (again) and released a compiler that can target both javascript and GTK from a single codebase. It also incorporates a JSON-RPC client, effectively abstracting out backend calls into what appear to be normal Python methods in the source.

My idea was to couple Pyjamas as an alternative front-end to normal template packages. You could theoretically write your entire application, UI code and all, in normal Python. The UI code would be heavily coupled to your backend code as if there were no seperation between the two. Once compiled to the javascript target, the interface should work just as well without any notice from you, the humble developer (making calls over JSON-RPC).

Check out my fork of Pylons on bitbucket to see how I've made wsgi apps speak json-rpc. It's a start. The problem right now is that I've heard many people moan that Pyjamas (and even GWT for that matter) do not spit out the best js. Something that could use improvement over time (and something I think will as long as there are interested developers). Either way, the next step is to write a paster template plugin to setup a project for using Pyjamas and a distribute pluging to add a compilation step to the build process.
Something you might like: WooRank.com will dynamically generate a (basic) SEO checklist based on your site, including suggestions on how to improve certain areas.
Surely it's easier to write your own authentication system than plug in to Facebooks?
Agreed. Clearly the author isn't that intelligent - as he/she doesn't understand what irony means.
I like CoffeeScript, but what does it have to do with Eric's complaints? It does nothing to prevent people from duplicating effort or tying libraries to a specific environment.
I am. What you're probably not aware of is who my market is (hint: 90% of them have facebook accounts).
Much easier to have a throw-away Twitter account than FB.
You don't have to turn your phone off during the entire takeoff and landing, just when the stewardesses come to check you.

Apparently that's the only dangerous part.
On the other hand, if B is "sleeps more" (which was, after all, the claim in the subject line here) then A -> B and B -> A are pretty much the same thing, except that the meaning of B -> A is a little unclear.
Ya, I had never heard of Plan 9 until I started doing graduate work, and then one in ten papers somehow referenced plan 9, and almost every single operating system paper references it some how.
Sharing my connection information, some of my real life activities and hobbies, and a few private messages with Facebook seems risky enough already. When another company wants me to connect, my mind just balks.
Only a minor detail, but the author says the children need to learn to walk.

At some point I learned of an experiment that proved walking was an instinct, the only thing stopping a newborn from walking is the lack of support and strength. Unfortunately, I don't remember the details of the experiment. But there are many animals that walk as soon as they are born.
Personally for me as a user it's because I don't trust Facebook.

I also think it is a bad idea to outsource your authentication mechanism to a single private entity. What happens if your user deletes their account? What if Facebook thinks your site exhibits suspicious behavior and decides to not send along its users' authentication? Probably won't happen but if it does it could be a world of hurt, much like PayPal.
(In my opinion) Here's a bunch of reasons why Plan9 isn't popular, and then a reason or two why something like it likely will be before too long:

The first obvious answer (also mentioned in other comments) is because "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant". See Rob Pike's paper by that name: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf

To the reasons Pike offers there, I'll add:

1. The companies that owned the software had poor strategies for encouraging widespread adoption, if that was even ever their goal.

2. The first dot-com boom ca 2000 greatly expanded the IT / programmer workforce and (I claim) significantly dumbed it down. The advantages of a new operating system lack economic impact until a huge number of programmers are trained to use those advantages. We have huge sunk costs invested in maintaining a huge supply of mostly weakly skilled programmers and admins, a sort unlikely to adapt to and adopt a new OS.

3. In a related way, the sectors that could in principle drive something like Plan 9 adoption are heavily invested, by now, in massive amounts of bloatware that, dysfunctional as it is, is both critical and non-portable.

4. Modern hardware is fast enough that fairly high level programming languages and environments tend to dominate. These often include a "least common denominator" view OS capabilities so that programs port easily among Windows, Linux, Unix, MacOS, etc. This hurts demand for OS features other than the "least common denominator".

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

Why it might get better:

Notice that none of the reasons listed above apply to a market niche like "the OS for Google's clusters" or, say, massive clusters providing an SQL-based RDMS.

On clusters like that:

1) You don't need a mass audience of buyers for a new OS. One or a few big customers will be plenty.

2) You don't care about hordes of cheap, weakly skilled programmers. Paying experts is peanuts compared to your hardware, power, and real estate costs.

3) You're not tied to bloatware. You need only run a few things very, very well.

4) You don't need to do "least common denominator" programming and, in fact, any new OS feature that can save you some $s per server-hour is potentially a huge win.

My betting money is that Pike et al. will produce YANOS (yet another new OS), quite possibly mostly written in the Go programming language, really well suited for huge compute clusters.
Not substantially performant for use in systems programming.

Not substantially powerful or enough libraries for use in web dev (yet, this could change).

Global GC (inappropriate for the niche it's ostensibly targeting).

Overly opinionated about concurrency. (C++ and Java are the gold-standard for library-centric concurrency methodologies)

Go sits in an uncanny valley.
Acquiring customers in a complex industry with complicated pricing
I've not seen any websites that require a Facebook account to log in, but my immediate reaction on seeing one would be to assume the person who implemented it doesn't know what they're doing and can't be trusted with my data.
A screencast is not the appropriate way to introduce your code to developers. We want text.
Poll: Do you read phrack?
Yes, every article, every issue.
A couple articles from each issue that look cool.
Once in a while, if I happen to check and there's a new issue, I'll read an article or two.
I've skimmed one once.
I know what phrack is.
Perhaps your watch could display both the current time and how many days you have left if you keep living the way you are.

I think walking around with a death clock ticking away on my wrist would stress me out to the point of significantly lowering my life expectancy. Does the app account for that?
It's the BSG thing, right?
There is a good chance you might lose doing that.

Use Lisp for its strengths, and other technologies for theirs. Server side CL, client side jQuery, Postgres on the backend, and your choice of caches, proxies and middle-ware in between.

I have tried nearly every other combination of New Thing and Hyped Awesome, and came to this conclusion: don't do everything yourself, and don't use technologies others are not investing big $ in. Anyone can push something to github and launch a nice tryfoo.org site, that doesn't mean you should use it.

FWIW, I am migrating my entire web toolchain to the JVM and intend to start writing servlets in Lisp. Let Big Business be my R&D bitch. JVM is good enough, and it's posh.
Yes. Why is that surprising? f is a generator, generators are iterables, iterables can be unpacked. I've always thought that the tuple referred to by 'tuple unpacking' was the target containing the variables being assigned, rather than the thing being unpacked, because you frequently unpack things other than tuples.
Good alternative explanation. I did plead ignorance sometime when was asked about some issues that I know well to avoid doing the work. People say, "so you work in IT. I have this problem at my home computer..."
Not for my market. 90% of them have facebook accounts.
It's so variable. I had a burrito last week at 24th and Shotwell that was more than half the size of my upper arm.
In other words "Apple dominates tech news"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1730962
Forcing me to be okay with everyone and their dog seeing what I do on my own time and on a completely different site is unacceptable, and frankly just lazy on their part. That has nothing to do with "commitment." I as a consumer get nothing out of it other than a lack of privacy and the heavy-handed assumption that some startup's "service" outweighs that.

No thanks, and the fact that I'm not the only one means that if you're using FB to authenticate as a startup (IE need to get as many PURCHASING customers as possible), you're doing it wrong.

If I like your service enough, I will make sure to tell people about it. You do not need to try to do that job for me. That's insulting.

Edit: Please note that I realise that you may be an exception if it is something whose market IS a Facebook user (apps, etc), and I am simply addressing the issue as a whole as I have seen completely disparate sites that require a FB login for no reason that I can fathom.
I earlier posted reasons why (IMO) Plan9 "failed" but will likely (in a new form) succeed on big compute clusters.

The other possible place for a big breakthrough is mobile. For example, if all of your "apps" are in Java and those apps hardly ever touch traditional unix system calls, it is easy to knock a Linux or Windows OS out from the bottom of the stack.
1. It's not marketed -- professionally or at a grassroots level.

2. It's a research OS not necessarily meant for every day use.
I signed up using twitter oauth recently. This may be new since you looked at Quora.
I particularly liked the last paragraph.

"Ron’s advice to Angel investors is analogous to Paul’s advice to founders: focus on what really matters. Focus on anything else is at best distracting and at worst disingenuous and destructive. Entrepreneurs get distracted sometimes, and, I guess, so do angel investors."