skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not a secret at all, PEP 8 even acknowledges it - see http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#naming-conventions - and of course attention to backwards compatibility is a good thing.

- usually constants are capitalized, but math.pi and math.e aren't

- the Decimal class has methods like is_nan(), and generally puts underscores in the method names, while the math package provides methods like isnan()

- even within the same package, you have cases like itertools.groupby() and itertools.combinations_with_replacement()

Not a deal breaker, it's just a drag when you only work in a language once every few months, and you constantly have to look at the docs to know whether something is alllowercase, ALLCAPS, camelCased, with_underscores, etc.
Five Steps to Solid Cloud and Mobile App Delivery
Why is this on the frontpage of HN? It has nothing to do with startups or technology.
It would be great if I had a big enough graph to answer your question. Hopefully this will change. It would be very interesting data.

My hope is that, given enough users, there will be many predictions across existing hierarchies.
That's true of all doctors from oncologists to surgeons. But in this case back pain is largely caused by anxiety and inflammation, and marijuana is an anxiolytic and an anti-inflammatory, in addition to being an analgesic. So yeah, it kind of makes sense that weed would help with back pain, as it has been shown to many times over. Weed isn't a panacea by any means, but at the same time it's better than any other pharmacological option in terms of safety and efficacy.
Valve Seeking Testers for the Beta Version of Steam on Linux
> Python doesn't cleanly "fit in the head" the way Ruby or JavaScript do, at least for me.

I imagine the order on which you learn is important. I learned OOP with Smalltalk and C++ not only didn't fit in my head, it created an impressive allergic reaction. It took me 8 years to be able to get back to it and finally learn.

And it still feels a horrible kludge.

I learned Python before I had contact with Ruby and I find the irregular syntax hard to parse.
funny I've gone through the fridge sample myself. However I choose the path in between the two solutions: yes just flowing and tertris'ing your stuff definitely costs less time, but I soon discovered it would drive me mad after a while because I couldn't find things quickly. Not because they were unreachable, but becasue they were in a different place every week or so. Which is hard if like me, the autistic side of your brain likes to have things always in the same place just because that way of organising undeniably gives you the fastest way to get something back. So now I still go with the tetris way, but to make it more convenient afterwards (and to make the game more interesting, lol) there are now categories.

Anyway long story short: you are 100% right and the OP's story is a fine read but too general. Which is often the case on the net.
OK this is more than I need right now, but I did get curious about the "script" command that captures your term session to a text file- to start and stop use:

script
ctrl-d

But when looking at my output file (if you just do what I did above it will be called 'typescript') it has control characters around the file names. How can I suppress these?
He's not getting high, he's "undergoing treatment".
A reference to Moore's law in the lead paragraphs of
an article in popular media is a useful diagnostic.

If the law is mentioned at all, usually in ~200 words,
I expect the writer to handwave with low signal/noise
about some supposedly latest-and-greatest tech and I
can decide whether to read the rest of the article.

If the writer butchers an explanation of Moore's law,
I can simply skip the rest of the article, confident
that there will be enough other errors to drown out
any surviving signal.
A really interesting read. We've all done at least one of them!
It's supposed to be tongue in cheek.
"Don't think. Get your hands dirty. Get stuff done." - right now becomes my Twitter signature :)
Right, of course it was the mutable use of an internal data structure.

class Foo:
bar = [1]

foo1 = Foo()
foo2 = Foo()
foo2.bar.append(2)
print foo1.bar
print foo2.bar

prints
[1, 2]
[1, 2]

And that's the reason why I don't like that the standard way I define common instance members is an init function. Are there any decorators I could use to do that outside of any class function?
I'm looking for opportunities in this space and am just getting up to speed, so thank you for this. I eagerly subscribed. Best of luck with it.
Procedural Eyeball in GLSL
That's a tough question and I don't have a great answer. I guess I'd prefer the advice of someone who was a skeptic themselves and who was predisposed to doing nothing over guessing.
Minor imperfections are very often indicative of bigger underlying problems. We're talking about a physical product here. Variations in the output demonstrate a need to tighten up the process. You can't just redeploy, like with software. I think it makes all kinds of sense to get it right before you ship on a massive scale. Recalls and warranty work erode margins.
I don't know what trampoline-injecting means and my googlefu has failed me. Would you briefly explain what you mean?
If by readable you mean proportional, then I believe a lot of the resistance comes from vertical alignment issues. For instance:

def func_with_lots_of_parms(parm1, parm2,
parm3, parm4):

In my experience that's pretty difficult to do consistently with a proportional font, and then when someone changes to a different font, the alignment will be off.

To me, formatting code is more about creating a good experience for other people (and future me) and less about pleasing present me.
He is doing the right thing. They start out low volume and are ramping up. Little issues that are ignored can end up being really big issues (and expensive) once combined with all the other little issues at higher volumes. Additionally every single one of them can be learned from. Maybe you need to tweak the design to improve things, maybe a new machine will help, perhaps a supplier is having issues which will blow up as volume ramps.

When you are doing manufacturing there is something they call the learning curve which is roughly the rate at which efficiency improves. The more attention and learning you can do earlier on, the steeper that curve can be which will also affect your profitability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

For example current estimates are that Boeing are losing $100m on each 787 manufactured. They expect that their learning curve will bring them into profitability down the road, which much debate as to how steep the curve is, whether it will be better than prior planes (eg 777), and if Boeing was the capital to keep this up.
That first graph could be a lot clearer.
This is very interesting and I completely agree with your points made. Exploring certain new activities and turning them into habits (as mentioned), whilst staying in an alert thinking state to figure out the issue on transferring computer components are both vital and important things to do.

What I'd like to pick up on is your last sentence on is "As a corollary, maybe if you limit your attempts to control to a reasonable degree and you are able to keep your thinking focused, you should think as much as possible.", which is what I believe this is all about.

When we aren't trying to figure out problems on transferring computer components, but when we are waking up and brushing our teeth, walking to the store, eating lunch, driving home, those are the moments were we tend to still think, when it isn't necessary. Eckhart Tolle put it this way:

"Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observer you rmind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy. This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction." (p. 19, The Power Of Now)

Looking back, "Why you should give up thinking 80-90% of your thoughts" as the title would probably help to clarify. Let me know if that makes any more sense to bring it into perspective.
Actually, that result would be newsworthy. But this is not that. This is an anecdote from a pot user saying that he likes using pot. That's really all it is. It's not bad, but it's not something that's going to change management at the level of the medical system, and it's certainly not news that, anecdotally, people on marijuana often behave friendly.

If this were a randomized controlled trial (or even a cohort study) showing that pot use actually does improve some measurable parenting outcome, it would actually be hacker news-worthy, in my opinion.
You're right, I was mixing something up. You need mutable data structures to show the behaviour I mean, see my other comment in this tree.
I didn't debate whether it was working for him ... Just that I would have been a bit more skeptical.
Well, it's just an Op-Ed, but the NYT's has taken official positions in favor of medical marijuana: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/opinion/a-dose-of-compassi...
>What a sorry excuse for a parent.

Can you please explain what you mean by this? What I got from this article is that he was stressed to the point of not being able to sleep on occasions and that he felt his relationship with his children was not what it could be; he found a way to address that.

It feels to me like a "sorry excuse for a parent" would be someone not considering their children's wellbeing; but this seemed to be one of the author's main preoccupations here.

Is he hurting his children in anyway?
If I had back pain & anxiety, I'm pretty sure my kid would get an extra dollop of frustration from me, no doubt about it. When people are stressed or in pain, other people around them are impacted.
I'm not arguing with the results he's experienced ... I'm all for better parents in general.
It's not considered 'work'.

You're counting hours as if the 40 hour ceiling is of importance; no offense but it doesn't seem like you understand passion.
You should provide more information on how the service works and what it does before asking for an e-mail address to sign up.
Facebook-Style Elections for U.S. President: Could It Work? - The Airspace
This is true, I've tried to write Python code in CoffeeScript, for instance using Python's range() or the colon at the end of the beginning of a block.
Interesting how Mobile Computing was not in their radar in 2006. I wonder if it would be today.
That's exactly what I thought! What a stupid article: "I was a loser father until I started doing drugs! Let's legalize marijuana!" I'm not sure how such a shitty article made it into the NYT, or HN for that matter.
Thanks for the support! I wanted to set it up so that I'm not flooding inboxes-- so you may be better off subscribing to the blog's Atom/RSS feed :)
That's because C and C++ are not static languages. Only people who leaned C and C++ first think they are.
Have you read the papers I linked in detail? Some of them, such as HyperLogLog, provide corrections to give better estimates for small sets, and although I can't follow the proof in its entirety, they claim to be more efficient than the alternatives, including the one you propose.
I am also annoyed by the omission of a truly useful lambda. But the rest of the language is compact enough that I've never found techniques relying on closures to be unwieldy in Python. shrug
I would say it is different in this case because you only go to those CannaMed doctors for 1 reason- to get your medical marijuana card. Paying for the visit is basically just part of the cost of getting the card. There are no upsells, the doctor isn't profitting off you buying the "medicine", etc. He gets paid for your visit and that's it.

So yeah, completely different than a chiropractor or psychiatrist who profits from your ongoing treatment.
good job on the mashup, even I like it. Wish you could hear it through my ears, it sounds really good.
Precisely. At least the author acknowledged that he was a shitty person around his kids most of the time and he took steps to correct that. His bourbon and coke didn't help him relax; many a man would have upped the alcohol intake with predictable results. He found a legal(ish) alternative with fewer drawbacks than booze. From personal experience, he'd have found similar effects from regular, strenuous exercise, though not as quickly and not as powerfully. People love a short cut.

A little weed in moderation clearly helps him bond with his very young children. If I were him, I'd be concerned about coming to rely on it and about how my toddlers would perceive me as they got slightly older. Kids are very perceptive and they will notice - and worry - when daddy is unusually attentive, imaginative and happy (and glassy eyed.)

Provided his wife remains sober to drive the kids to the ER if they need it, and assuming daddy's stoned playtime with the kids doesn't interfere with his other responsibilities at home I don't see all that much wrong here at the moment. What he's written here is all positive, but then all drug stories start that way.
I bet you've got ls set to colorize file names, right? What you're seeing as"control characters around file names" is VT-100 escape codes to colorize the text different ways. If you do command-line editing in Bash (vi or emacs mode) you'll also see all the control characters that implement the editing. Again, more VT-100 escape code to position the cursor, overwrite characters, etc etc.

Either you set ls to not colorize filenames, or you edit the 'typescript' file. One of the values of script is that it doesn't do any interpretation of the characters it records.
I'll definitely be talking about this one in my Solvers article!
When I took Udacity's online intro to computer science, I also took an into to computer science at a university in person. They do not compare. Udacity was far simpler and just touched the basics.

Unless they updated it to be more robust, Coursera's intro courses are more in depth and some go into theory as well.
Garbage comment; garbage account.
Some suggestions for what kinds of things to write in the "Intentions" area would be helpful. It's pretty vague right now.

Edit to add: I really love this idea, and am looking forward to seeing if it takes off!

One more suggestion: this is the kind of service that actually would really benefit from Facebook integration. You could take likes, photos, etc. to very quickly populate a profile instead of filling it out by hand.
A great candid story of his experience going viral. Could be a little more concise, but still congrats to the guy for stepping up to the plate and crushing it out of the park. So what if it wasn't a technical masterpiece. If he was only intending for this to be a learning experience, I think he should be totally satisfied.
A comment from LinkedIn:

Tariq Qurashi: "I shared this with my two guys in my IT department. Both are brilliant guys. One never finished high school. The other has a double masters that he doesn't really use. That one picked up most his useful training by messing around trying to help people that he knows with problems."
Thanks! Hopefully I can offer some opportunities (as in jobs) through this newsletter as it grows. Feel free to share it with other people interested in 3D printing :)
Yikes, I feel like the last person to hear about PSY and Gangnam Style - great song! 126mil views (original), wow.

Edit: the mashup ruled. More plz
Which control characters?

And you say around file names... did you run "ls" while in your script session? if you generated colorized output, script will record that.

If you don't want colorized output, run "\ls" (bypass any alias you might have for ls, and just run ls directly) or use "ls --color=never".

You'll still see ^M at the end of each line.

You can run "dos2unix typescript" to strip those out.

It's script's job to record your entire session, including any control characters, and it does that.
What do you learn in LFS that you don't learn in Gentoo?

I have started with Gentoo several years ago (and never tried LFS) but I really learned a lot how Linux works. In Gentoo, you can basically do everything. You are just supported in that by a really nice package manager. But you are starting from scratch. You are bootstrapping the system, setting up compiler flags, setting up build flags and decide about every single package you want to have on your system.
cat the file.
Ask HN: The Diaspora alpha pod is open; what do you think?
https://joindiaspora.com/<p>Are any of you already there? What do you think of it?
How does it fit into our current social media landscape?
The Disturbing, Unchecked Rise of the Administrative Subpoena
I haven't yet decided on how much of "how does it work" I want to make public.

Regarding your second question. I thought the landing page and the tour would answer "what it does". Sorry. Obviously, I'd be very curious to know what it didn't tell you. But if you haven't registered, you probably can't answer this question.

I'm not blocking any email domains, so feel free to use some trash mail address, if you want to have a look without sharing your email address.
Mutable default arguments. 'nuff said.
I would say it's completely different than a psychologist or chiropractor because those 2 types of "doctors" get paid every time you come in for treatment. So they have a financial interest in prescribing treatment.

AFAIK Medical marijuana doctors don't have any financial interest in prescribing treatment. They get paid when you come in (which is only the one time), and if they think you can benefit from medical marijuana, they give you the card. They aren't getting paid every time you get high.

The stupid thing about that sentence in the article is that BIG SURPRISE, the CannaMed doctor recommended medical marijuana. No shit! That is why people go to them!
Enterprises Should Bring Some Security Research In-House
How very cool of LMFAO and PSY to celebrate rather than quash his creation.
Ask HN: How do you curate your address book?
I'm participating in a Startup Weekend (#swperth on Twitter), and I pitched an idea called "Tactopus", which is a service for curating your contacts for you.

A placeholder site is up at www.tactopus.com with links to a discussion page, by the way, if you'd like to help us out with some feedback.

I figured it's basically a universal truth that we all get a bit annoyed when emails to old friends bounce, or at the thought of letting everyone know about our new phone number or email address. And I also figured that going through your address book and fixing up all your contacts is so much more painful that we just accept this all as how it has to be.

But what I'd like to know from the HN community is this: Am I in the minority here, or have I struck a chord? Does everyone already use some amazing tool that I'm somehow unaware of, or is it just not that big a deal?

So how do you make sure all your contact information is correct and complete?
Why context is so important
Taskrabbit API: Make apps powered by (trusted) people
I wasn't referring to the tradeoff between plain text formats and usability, I was talking about the tradeoff between 1password and pass as it is today. I realize the apps can be written, and I think it has the potential to be better than those other password managers.

So stop whining, and write this component; it's easy.

You would get a lot further in convincing people to use and contribute to your app if you toned down the condescension. I like your app and support unix tools with open formats but you come across as someone who would be very difficult to work with.
Yeah... in theory. When it comes to Scala, Intellij is still getting there, and I haven't tried other options recently.
Performance is great for me too, but when you have a ton of balls the collision detection fails. Probably just a bug in the quadtree. Otherwise, great performance!
Signed up. I'm doing algorithms-1 course now - so not sure if I can complete all assignments. Btw, how is the ML course ? Is it too math intensive...
If you're an adolescent, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you are predisposed to heart disease, stroke, or psychosis, if you use heavy machinery frequently or work in government, then occasional cannabis use may not improve your quality of life. It's not hard to be a perfect candidate.
Well, sure. He decided he wanted pot before he went to the pot doctor. This was just to make things (semi) legal.
I've been working on a basic multi-layer perceptron network using IndexedDB. I found IDB performance is not quite as fast as needed to pull it off with the algos I was using
Actually, not so much. Leveraging the technology from your last game development cycle is par for the course.
And if we are playing economics, while they experience that misery they also aren't earning money or paying taxes resulting in lost productivity. Their family is also likely sidelined for a while so that adds to reduced productivity, taxes and income to places they frequent.
Thanks for sharing. That's awesome! I was dreading hearing that they made you take the vid down. Nice.

The only technical glitch I minded was at 1:10. Psy's on screen just long enough to open his mouth without any words playing. But I'm a musician and this is a nit. But if you re-edit this ever just thought I'd add this.
I find this article ironic...

Techcrunch is a "publication" I've always found questionable and wondered how much sock-puppetry was hiding under the covers. Note I have no hard evidence, just a feel.

Sock puppets complaining about sock puppets... Go figure.
>In this case, smoking pot in a controlled manner helps this person exponentially release and enjoy small moments with his kids.

That may be true, but I wonder what the kids will say when they're grown. It might be something like "We loved our dad when we were kids. But he was always stoned."
Very cool! The mashup is really catchy and the author did a great job mixing LMFAO and Psy.

The first mashup I remember listening to was the Eminem/Britney Spears mashup (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j98zaF5592c). It was particularly funny because Eminem had recently dissed Britney Spears, but the ironic thing is that this mashup sounded better than the originals of both songs.

The only question I have is how do these mashup-er's isolate the vocals and instrumentals so clearly? Are the vocal and instrumental tracks available for most songs these days, so that fans can create mashups?
If only everyone who was a jerk to anyone would try weed. We'd be a lot better off.
5 Minutes with Ben "I am a nerd" Goldacre (video)
Learning to walk/bike is in no way comparable to learning to code. Learning to walk/bike is primarily a physical muscular action to train your body to keep it's balance etc. Once you have learned to walk or bike, you have learned it. Learning to code is an activity of the brain where there is no clear defining line as to when you have learned. You might feel that you have learned a few languages or frameworks but there is still more or still something else that you can learn. So, it's amore gradual and continuous process. Hope this makes sense.
FYI - the confirmation email ended up in my spam folder. I'm not sure if that's gmail's default behavior or whether I've encouraged it to be a little too agressive, something to watch out for though.
'This individual should be a "lifer". If you're pursuing an exciting and lucrative career in the field of Information Technology, don't contact us.'

What is this "lifer" that you're seeking? Not sure I'm following this...
Startups should learn from "10 Rules for Dealing with the Sharks on Wall Street"
Surely these "10 Rules for Dealing with the Sharks on Wall Street" can be applied to startups when dealing with VCs or when a startup is negociating a new partership/deal or any kind and that third party is a Goliah