skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There doesn't seem to be any interest in checking type annotations at run-time. Unfortunately, without doing so, type annotations look authoritative but are essentially just comments.

I believe Julia is an example of a dynamically-typed language which does perform such checks at run-time - including as part of its support for multiple dispatch.
Even then, if they don't like the responses, they may seek the deanonymize.
I agree, it feels like the author is going out of their way to write really really verbose C#
> PEP8: This document gives coding conventions for the Python code comprising the standard library in the main Python distribution.

It's fine not to follow PEP8 for your own software. It's a useful guide, not a law.
no that's a meme lol
I just told this story on HN, but my car window was smashed on 10/13/18 and the theives got my wallet and house keys.

They used my credit card at foot locker (~$500), The Store Manager confirmed two guys made the purchase and corporate said they would turn over the video if police just ask.

A month later the bank fraud dept informed me someone was trying to cash a fake check ($1,600) against my account at an ATM using my ID (stolen from the car) and they ATM video shows the guy and the would turn it over to police if they requested it.

I even emailed the detective with chain and all he had to do was reply all, but the detective refuses (“we don’t look into these things”). Meanwhile these people have my address and key (even though I rekeyed) they may be lurking and try to come in, and I should be entitled to know what these people look like.

I was attacked on HN for suggesting this but I’ll suggest it again, since the author of this post already had video of these theives, there needs to be a platform to post these videos for the public to crowdsource the identity of these people.

I know there are not police resources to pursue every amazon purchase, but in my case it was grand theft and it’s ongoing, and likely to escalate, but the police are unwilling to do anything to help (but be damn sure they’d look into it if they were the victims).
The iPod touches also have lower-quality displays, lower-capacity batteries, base units have less storage capacity, usually have older or slightly underpowered A chips, and lower-quality materials leading to a slightly inferior build quality compared to iPhone.

(Also, iPod touch hasn't been updated for three years)
It feels like in this instance the reflexive reaction of the developers is what made the passing of the proposal more likely by putting the committee in a psychological position where they're dismissing large amounts of feedback, making them more likely to throw out the proverbial baby. Had there been no discussion about the syntax, maybe the comments saying "we don't need this feature" would have been listened to.

It also didn't help that library authors are over-represented in the committee relative to the regular users of the language.

Ultimately, I agree that we need to have an authority to make the final decision and it helps if it's informed, but we need to be aware that it's not going to be perfect and it will have blind spots, so perhaps a way for people to veto those decisions should exist.
> In contrast, many Python modules include initialization functions that run during the import.

I just thought it's a natural consequence of a dynamic languge. Defining a class IS running code - you can even decide to define or not to define something based on a runtime random roll.
I think I can answer this one because it is one of my gripes of Python. The problem isn't that it doesn't copy, rather it is that the = assignment operator specifically doesn't copy.

If you create a list "list1", set "list2 = list1", and change list1, both of the lists change. When I learned Python, this was a major source of confusion for me. Eventually I learned that in Python, instead of nothing being a pointer as it first appears, it is actually that everything is a pointer. On the other hand, while the same things occur in C++, the assignment operator does a shallow copy and anytime you are doing a pointer copy it is explicit.
> Has the author never given a pointer as an argument to a function before?

Possibly not, many devs now-days have never used a real native language.
I never thought of publishing on amazon, interesting.

Which tool do you use for editing your ebooks?

So far I have self published my ebooks with the leanpub markdown editor.

However it leaves a mention of leanpub inside the book.

Pretty sure it wouldn’t be ok to have this for amazon.
...a cliche that needs repeating as often as possible in as many venues as possible; until it reaches the level of ingrained knowledge that people have regarding staring into the sun, or handling downed power lines.
The real solution would be a simple box on your porch that only opens once without a key, of has a one-way mechanism, or that the delivery guy has a one-time code for. These have been tried in various forms, but they never catch one.
It's no wonder really. If you build a system that allows anonymity and untraceability you will end up hosting everything that can't normally happen without anonymity and untraceability.

Hackers marvel at the idea of complete anonymity and untraceability because it's technically exciting and fits so well with the hacker thinking. I mean, why should you have to reveal who you are because of mere accountability? Everyone knows hackers don't cause harm and when they do it's only a good deed because the system they "broke" was obviously broken already. But the same technology is a much more prominent tool for criminals, molesters, and such. So that's what you will get on the anonymous networks and not so much hackers with good intentions.
I'm probably fussier than I used to be and the fact that I work mostly from home gives me more flexibility than I used to have :-)

I'd be more likely to bread and saute some flounder--which is a pretty quick meal too. (And flounder is sold in vacuum packed individual servings so it can definitely serve as a "what's in the freezer?" meal.)
I've seen that a few times too. I wonder if it is actually to try to protect it from rain?
I hear what you are saying with the audience, I was overselling my point. But I do work in tech and I still find this really un-relatable. I've never even come close to the place where receiving a raise or a promotion is unappreciated.
I agree. The author is clearly detached and saddened by events; any perceived "tone-deafness" probably has more to due with the individual reader's jealousy or envy of his station than with the overall story he's telling.
Yeah they do an incredible job, seem to have things before certain official channels do as you mentioned. The company I'm employed with works with Iridium, so I like keeping track of how the NEXT deployment is going.
I thought I would just add this for the record...

>My wife doesn't have nag me about what I what I want for the week's dinner.

This line has been misinterpreted. My wife would normally ask me on Sunday, what we should have for dinner for the week. My response was usually "whatever is fine", which doesn't really help her. Blue Apron removes that question. My wife never "nagged" me, it was more my fault, because didn't give a good answer. So the overall process was an issue and mostly on my part.

After over ten years of marriage and a child and two dogs, it really becomes clear how important a partnership is.

My son is now learning to cook with me as well. Obviously, men can be in the kitchen as well. It's fun, even if I'm just a "blue apron cook".

I'm also adding this clarification because it's pretty slow here at work and I have to look busy...
I think a way to aerate the fart spray into the glitter as it launches out would be a nice touch, not only would the glitter get on everything, it would smell bad and be hard to get out.
Women's World (1982)
I wish I could have invested. Does anyone know how to do it?
That doesn't seem to be the case here though.
"Felt like". That's beautiful. The dude had a feel and lost the equivalent of 2300 years of labor (at the US median income).

There's this bit in Taleb's first book, "Fooled by Randomness". This was before he made a shit-ton of money. He pointed out that a lot of the nominally successful traders he worked around would declare a strategy, make a few bets, make a lot of money, and then act like geniuses for thinking up the strategy. However, they'd never really examine the obvious alternate hypothesis: they got lucky.

I used to work for a proprietary trading firm. We'd get new traders by taking very confident, driven people (e.g., former Olympic athletes), making them be clerks for a while, and then turning them loose in the pits. The CFO kept a very close eye on them early on because their natural confidence combined with early successes lead them to believe they were gods. It wasn't until they got really hammered by a bad bet or two that she'd begin to trust them.

It reminds me of a favorite line: "Every corpse on Mount Everest was once a highly motivated person with a can do-attitude."
Maybe I was just totally missing his tone. I'll give it another read and use this voice. :) thanks.
No disagreement here. It's just that what I originally wrote I feel is under emphasized.
Assuming there are other nearby deliveries (there always are), then you driving to the local store to buy it would pollute much more.
Probably a C extension that needs to be compiled against a new version. Unlikely it is an actual compatibility break.
I used to program in Python, and found Ruby as a language to give me everything Python provides but with a more Programmer friendly syntax.

I never understood why you would use a function like len() in an Object Oriented Language (instead of x.len ) or having to explicitly add self to every method...
I do not believe this. Or if your friend WAS sued, I wouldn't be surprised if the case was thrown out.
Go to the actual Microsoft link, they are not at all asking that. They're asking for FEEDBACK from people using it.

> take Trill for a spin, and tell us what you think! Reach out to us at asktrill@microsoft.com, we’d love to hear from you.
Why Wave Failed and Slack Thrived?
Or just get an actual camera and set it to track back and forth. Most of them have that option.
> That's actually fine considering the goals of the system, but any time anyone mentioned it Ian and others would go a bit ballistic.

The system did not and could not store information permanently, if it did it would fill up, which is a non-starter when it depends on people volunteering their hard disk space.

I don't know about going ballistic, but since this issue is addressed directly in their papers (section 3.4 of the linked paper) I can see us getting irritated by people re-asking questions that have already been answered.
Aside from the optimizing-where-to-buy part, this sounds like what https://mealime.com is attempting to do. I've only used it for one meal so far so but if you select multiple meals it creates a combined shopping list.
It's a bit more difficult to trade shares, and brokerages will often have restrictions on trading OTC stocks for retail investors.

It's also just generally a milestone that the company is really not doing well, so investors tend to sell and recover what they can.
Ask HN: Focus on a single side project?
Context: I have a successful SaaS side project that I have built and launched, and it's doing great. I spend very little time on my first SaaS (~4 hours/week).

I'm in the middle of launching a new SaaS. The new SaaS is my "side project". It's a for-profit, non-trivial service. However, I often get an urge to have a second project going such as a book. Do you fight these urges or give in?
At some point in my Uni I thought of writing a "curly braces to python" translator that will take code in "pseudo python" which allowed curly braces and would convert/indent it the correct way.
I agree, but nitpicking:

> 1) radiation is heavy, so it sinks,

Most radioactive atoms (found in Uranium reactors) are heavy (but heavy means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metals ).

Most of the compound of these atoms are insoluble, they probably precipitated as oxides or carbonates a long time ago and are at the bottom of the sea. They are probably very dense and go to the bottom.

Some atoms are soluble in water, I think that Cesium 137 is be the main concern, but now it will be mixed by the water and distributed in the whole sea (or at least a big part of the Pacific) so the concentration should be tiny.

Also, Iodine 131 has some soluble forms, but the half life is only 8 days, so it's completely gone now. (There are probably some natural sources.)
These are industry standard terms that allow for efficient high-level descriptions of complex concepts. That's what jargon is for.

It's on you to know those concepts so you can understand these terms. Would you read technical descriptions that a doctor would be familiar with and complain that they don't explain all the basics for you? Perhaps you should invest effort in learning instead of skipping it and moving on?
U.S. Gov Agencies Need to Improve Securing Systems/Protecting Against Intrusions [pdf]
> PyPy, PyPi, NumPy, SciPy, SymPy, PyGtk, Pyglet, PyGame...

pyimport pygame

Name two things wrong with what I wrote above.
That's forward compatibility which few folks require. Backwards, yes most do.
This will solve nothing... I can still use a rubber band and my belt loop to copy this behavior. Unless they are taking away rubber bands, this is a feel-good law that wont solve a damn thing.
I preemptively contacted Support to verify my bona fides - I think my cap now (self-requested) is something like 50 or so
Can you explain why? It seems fairly clear from his own words.
There is nothing disproportionate about the blowback he got. It was not 'something crappy', it was a baseless and extremely disgusting accusation.

Normal people don't accuse someone who risked their life of being a paedo simply because they disagreed with him.
Hello! Blog post writer here. Happy to answer any questions.
Not inside the US. There is no expectation of privacy when you are in public.
Pronto Means Ready (by Anthony Levandowski)
I had a conversation in a forum recently about something like this. This particular forum has a kind of upvoting system but no downvoting system. Occasionally there's threads asking to put in a downvote system or asking why there isn't one.

The general consensus tends to be that it's easy to just agree with something but if you disagree with a topic or post it encourages better conversation to have to explain your stance and why you disagree.

I've posted on those forums for a long time and generally i notice this is what tends to happen more as opposed to a place like reddit, or even here sometimes, where a post just gets downvoted away with no counterpoints or discussions.
Exact answers are nice, but sometimes you need to know whether two ellipses do or don't intersect, as fast as possible, and then do the more computationally intensive math only for the interesting cases.

For instance, if the distance between centers is greater than the sum of the major radiuses, the ellipses do not have a real area of intersection, and imaginary areas are not useful for the problem at hand, so you stop calculating and move on to the next pair. If the distance between centers is smaller than the larger minor radius, there is a real area of intersection, and you can put it on the list to calculate it later.

In seven steps, you can determine the desired answer to the limit of floating point precision faster than the exact symbolic answer determined by actually solving the quartic as a "single step", which is actually encapsulating quite a lot of multiplications, and at least six distinct conditional cases.

But on the other hand, the rapid approximation is the work of one afternoon, and can be debugged one step at a time, while the exact answer is a doctoral-level thesis.

And if you're drawing your ellipses on the surface of an ellipsoid, like the WGS84 geoid, the value of approximations becomes even greater, because the exact answers will come from an even higher-order polynomial equation.

In this, the "don't care" part of the problem space is always used to make the shape of the solution as simple as possible. So when you always care about exact answers, discovered elegantly, you're actually discarding the means to make the solution more elegant in way you might not have realized.
Problem is that some package thieves just trail behind the delivery truck. So even if hidden, they know it's there.
But then the thieves would know if there is a package because the lid would be down.
Catholic Charities

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

Salvation Army

A local pet food bank
What mechanism brought your rent-controlled apartment to rent-stabilized?

We've been a rent-controlled 1br apartment since 1969 (lucky...) and the rent is around $1500.

Also that rent-stabilized apartment doesn't go to market rate just because they move out. Depending on how much of the building is rent stabilized, it would likely stay rent-stabilized until the rent threshold crossed ~$2700. A rent-controlled apartment would become rent-stabilized.
Compared to someone who leaves their home by car once per day to get routine items, it's arguably a lot better since that delivery truck makes hundreds of deliveries per round trip.

Compared to someone who is super frugal, list driven, plans ahead, has one trip a month to get necessities, and grows their food in their yard, sure, it's more impactful.

Perspective always matters.
I read much more of a cheeky tone, mixed with perhaps a dash of melancholy. I think the tone here is more one of jaded skepticism that his new role is more important than his old one. And he's probably right, from a certain point of view. But that probably means he should have declined the promotion.

He admits that he was probably on the chopping block for quite a while at the end. And yet, he calls the essay "Firing Frankness"? Comes off as bitter, to be totally frank.
> You can claim that it’s not the most common or most plausible view, but that doesn’t make it so.

You're right. But if it's a question of evidence, I can certainly provide it.

The fact that most people in the world adhere to one of the major religions [1] [2], which have moral duties, a fortiori implies that your view isn't the most common. Even this is vastly under-counting, of course, since it excludes humanists and non-humanists who adhere to secular ethics. I think the uncommonness of your view is quite clear and it would be disingenuous to deny that.

Second, your view isn't the most common even among professional philosophers whose raison d'etre is precisely to ask and analyze these questions. Specifically, your view is the most common neither among those who study meta-ethics nor among the general population [3].

> Even if your claim is true, most people also believed common myths like the earth being flat at one point, so that’s hardly a compelling argument.

I didn't say its uncommonness makes it untrue. I said it's neither the most common (which may or may not warrant a higher burden of proof) nor the most plausible.

[1] http://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-relig...

[2] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

[3] https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
>Nothing you've listed here precludes fakery.

You think he can get a decent engineering job, especially for a government agency, in the future with a viral public hoax on his record?

Yeah, probably not and YouTube isn't going to rake in money forever, not that he uploads often enough to be anywhere near a top earner anyway.
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I think the id glitter already exists, or I have another one of those pesky memories from some alternate dimension / tv series / dream.
> does not apply to them in dealings with foreign companies _while abroad_

Of course, if you're defining "foreign companies" as "companies who have no dealings with EU citizens", the GDPR doesn't apply.

> The gdpr applies to anyone or any company inside the European Union.

I believe this should be "anyone or any company which has dealings with anyone inside the European Union", no? Which is quite the difference.
> (A) blanket hatred of “the media” seems to be somewhat misplaced, considering this post itself starts with a link to The Atlantic’s “pretty good post-mortem”.

I didn't read it as hatred of "the media". I read it as "be careful, it's increasingly easy to re-use existing high-quality but poorly known fictional media to support a hoax instead of the entertainment it was designed for." along with "be careful, statistical outliers will happen in large populations, and they make for good news".

> (B) why does this go right to the top on HN, while (as but one example) the recently released, data-driven analyses of the role of social media in the 2016 election get flagged to hell for being “too political”

Because one is specifically about politics, and the other is about media and communication. This is about tools and techniques which may or may not be political in nature.

> and having “nothing to do with tech”?

Tech related is not a prerequisite for being on HN.
I agree with you! I just get a little bothered by some of the attitudes. I'm sorry if I've come off negative.
I don't often use python nor do I know it well but it's obvious to me that several of these points are stupid, misinformed or wrong. Numbers 3, 5 and 8 are just nonsense whining. Number 7 is terribly wrong.

I find it incredibly surprising that this person got a Computer Science PhD while confusing Python lists with arrays and not knowing that pass by reference semantics is by no means niche.