skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Everyone on the team is responsible for good user experience. The existence of a person who does nothing more than "UX" is a process smell.

In all the good startups I've known, everyone was responsible for sales, hiring and creating an awesome work environment. Does that mean that sales and HR people are similarly "process smells"?
garbage article
Woodrow Wilson was a disaster, and quite the anti-intellectual towards subjects that lent themselves towards one correct answer. Some quotes of his: "I don't let facts cloud my opinions". "The natural man despises mathematics". Also, his Treaty of Versaille was the main cause of WWII. I have no idea why he is revered as a president.

EDIT: After brushing up on a little ww2 history, it seems as though I've attributed too much blame to Wilson. He pushed a liberal approach towards Germany, the French delegation pushed for harsh reparations, and he lost out.
It's a turing complete language. Why is it surprising or note-worthy that you can implement ML algorithms in it?
I think Buffer is a really great brand name by the way
amen brotha
self __init__ self.__init__ self self __init__ self
I use it on my mobile phone without a hitch.
> Then again, if I wanted OOP, I'd use C#.

Which is not just reductionist, but downright silly. C# is not a very good OO language, in the same way Java isn't.

When I want OOP, I play with Smalltalk. Or Self.
It's not that the language is hiding self/this so much as what manually passing those as variables represent. What you are saying is that you never need to call a method like this?

> instance.method(instance)
This article was from 2009 too, and since then typed arrays have arrived which HUGELY sped up my messing-around-with-neural nets (without me actually having to write good code)!
> Writing a C extension to do computationally intensive work is fairly simple.

Even more so with Cython, which does most of the hard work for you.
pixurwall.com/friendsposter - facebook.com/printstreet
There's so many solutions to the "speed" argument I don't even see it as an issue.

- C-extentions (many std and 3rd party libs that need speed are written in C)
- numpy http://numpy.scipy.org/
- numba https://github.com/numba/numba
- cython http://www.cython.org/
- pyrex http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/python/Pyrex/
- http://psyco.sourceforge.net/ -> PyPy (some day...)
> Python doesn't cleanly "fit in the head" the way Ruby or JavaScript do, at least for me.

I find the severe breakages and insanities of Javascript (such as tracking what `this` is) take much more brain-space than Python ever did, personally.
it doesn't wear a suit
Having been through several cycles of burnout over the years I tend to agree with you. These days I take nearly as much time to play as work, and my work is better for it.

That said, I wonder how much the type of work has an impact on diminishing productivity over a duration. Also wonder if EM takes this into account in other ways, like vacation time, etc.
Does this method have a name/are there any reasonable papers out there describing it?
I found this in the comments to the blog post - Topaz, a REBOL inspired (but not compatible) language which compiles to javascript[1]. I found it worthy of it's own submission[2] with more info.

[1] http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/topaz/try-topaz.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4492952
This is the feature I would use this for. I've written custom solutions to do this in the past, and while I'm confident in them, it induces a large cognitive load to make sure they are secure. I would much rather trust another, well-vetted solution (meaning, of course, this has to reach well-vetted stage, but if I were in need, I'd spend time vetting).
Likes "are" not a currency. I get that, thanks...but there has to be a way to utilize them.
An up vote just for Unicode in Python 2. It kills my life big time.
Google’s “Develop for Good” hackathon winners tackle environment, human rights
Even if I'm using two-space indentation, I will still use as many spaces as necessary for alignment or to make my code more aesthetically pleasing.
Your Colorful Visual Studio 2012 with the Color Theme Editor
This thread mostly contains superficial complaints (whitespace, self, the GIL) that are either explicit design decisions or not important for the kind of programming Python wants to address. Some more important problems that materially affect normal and sane use of Python:

- Broken scoping by default (the thread does raise this)

- Unicode is very painful in python2 (addressed very well by python3)

- Duck typing sometimes prevents early detection of genuine programming mistakes because of overuse: False + 1 == True

- No good isolation tools (virtualenv, the most common tool, silently fails to isolate dependencies when moved, which is obviously makes it tough to deploy using it)

- Poor packaging tools (only a few tools than they all have serious limitations such as not being able to package c-extensions).

- Some of the standard library is downright terrible. csv and robotsparser are good examples. This has the pernicious effect of widely-distributing libraries that have subtle but serious drawbacks.
My biggest issue at this point is the implicit scoping. I've been using Python for 8 years (as well as a bunch of other languages, both for work and personally), and — while a lost cause, it won't be changed at this point — I've come to believe it was a Really Bad Idea[0].

Not only does it make bindings awkward (and sometimes broken, in different ways depending on the way "scope inference" is implemented) and tends to hide errors (e.g. typo) or generate them much later than possible (even though lexical checking is very cheap to perform at parse time, with explicit scopes), it has pretty much no actual benefit I can think of.

Especially in Python where assignment is a statement, not an expression, so it's not like explicit scoping would prevent putting assignments in place they're currently allowed.

[0] and it's one of the things I find utterly retarded in coffeescript.
Ask HN: Have we reached the point where sites need a mobile AND tablet version?
We finally launched the mobile version of LinkUp this week, and since then we've heard nothing but requests of "when will the tablet version be ready?"

Asking this question on SO, you hear nothing but mantras about "responsive design" and "go where the users are." Great points given infinite resources, but if we had those we wouldn't be on HN on a weekend. I had thought that the point of tablet was to make the desktop-experience more portable, but the cries of the masses are leading me to think I was misled.

So to the Hacker News community - are tablet-oriented websites really something in our future?
Very interesting.

Tiny nitpick: this is more an iPhone 4 than a 4S: the black notch on the top frame is not present with the 4S. (they have one notch at the top of each side) Though to be perfectly accurate, you'll also need two notches at the bottom (one on each side) of the frame as well. ;-)
reasoning by BDFL here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/237312/1188079
Using controversy to drive new users
Sock Puppets. Online Reviews: Completely Worthless or Only Mostly Worthless?
The code to call super is awkward. Instead of saying super(MyClass, self).foo(), I would rather just say super.foo().

Having to specify self or cls as the first argument of an instance or class method. This one is weird when you are learning Python because you don't pass in the first variable but it gets magically inserted for you.

Creating a class method using a method decorator. Using a decorator to do something like this seems like a hack to me.

Not having a clean way to specify what all the instance variables are outside of the constructor. People with a java background are used to putting instance variable declarations as the first thing inside a class definition. In Python, these will be static variables. This seems weird and inconsistent with the how method declarations work (methods only become class methods when a decorator is used).

BTW, I like Python.
Because up until relatively recently, JS was slow and crippled. The public image of JS is that its only use is Ajax and making popups. It's only recently being recognized as a "real language". Surprising and note-worthy that you can do ML in JS? No. But novel? Yes.
Displays correctly in FF 17 / Ubuntu 12.04, but only when Firefox is windowed. When maximised, the Unity bar takes over and I see the same bug you're seeing.
This seems silly, to me the only benefit of using tabs is so that users can view it with their own default tab size. In which case space-aligned lines would look out-of-place and probably be hard to read
Quite a few poor and superficial answers in that link. The usual argument that dynamic typing does not scale for large projects is largely unfounded. There are large projects in Lisp, I don't get why people don't use the dynamic card as often there. What I have seen happened on badly engineered large projects is people blaming it on dynamic typing because there is no documentation and no structural integrity in the project. But the people behind those projects would not be able to do much in any language IMO. In a sense, it allows for poor programmers to do more.

The speed issue is a significant one, but not usually for the reasons given. The big drawback of being slow means a lots of its implementation is not written in python.

IDE/debugger is another issue, although some of it is a matter of people not knowing the tool. Especially on bad codebases, even something as simple as pyflakes running in the background is invaluable, and many people don't use this.
Did you learn python after you learned ruby or javascript? I have the exact same complaint about ruby not fitting in my head, and I think it's because I learned python first.
Original, slightly longer: http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/calvin-father-on-bla...
EFF Appeals Court to make Search Warrants Mandatory for Phone Tracking
I think it depends on what language someone has come from before using JS. For instance if you come from a ruby background you're probably used to using two spaces.
Is this a quote from somewhere? I laughed, and now want to make a opensource project suitupy
So in summary, I believe that the comments in the MySQL news posting
are slightly confused. On MacOS X fsync() behaves the same as it does
on all Unices. That's not good enough if you really care about data
integrity and so we also provide the F_FULLFSYNC fcntl. As far as I
know, MacOS X is the only OS to provide this feature for apps that
need to truly guarantee their data is on disk.

The full post goes into detail. http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-dev/2005/Feb/msg00072...
These statues are painted afterwards and is probably not the "true" colors.
Sexy French Maid Halloween Costume for Women
German government hiring developers to make spyware for computer surveillance
A First for Udacity
U.S. University Will Accept Transfer Credit for One of Its Courses
WSJ: iPhone 5 will Support LTE Networks in Europe and Asia
Among the wide range of available rumors at the moment this can only be as pleasant. an article published recently by the Wall Street Journal mentioned that the next iPhone could be compatible with LTE frequencies in Europe and Asia.
I doubt that you could use NAND Flash as RAM substitute as it is right now. Basically it's a block device with page size about 8KB and erase block ~ 2MB. Data could be read and written only in pages, in-chip page load times are on the order of 100us, page write 1ms, block erase -- 5ms, and it takes about 100us to transfer page data in either direction. So, random read/write latencies are 10^2 / 10^1 times lower than HDD's, but still about 10^3 / 10^4 times larger than DRAM's. I guess internal architecture could be redisigned to reduce block sizes and allow parallel operations inside a sigle chip, but it's unclear how much it will affect density and price.

But it would be useful to put NAND controller closer to CPU, remove block device emulation layer and let OS do wear-leveling and block allocation. We could get high-performance swap or put there specialized MTD filesystems like UBIFS.
Why Do We Let Politics Suck in the Information Age?
In a sense, it allows for poor programmers to do more.

Exactly. Dynamic typing can provide a temporary fig leaf for bad design in ways where static type checking would be less forgiving. Doesn't make dynamic typing wrong, it just means that bad programmers can get in over their heads more completely and more quickly.
"Real mass-market VR is just around the corner" is something I've been hearing since I was a little kid (I'm 30). I'll be super happy when/if it does happen, but won't hold my breath until it does.

Consider TrackIR, a phenomenal gaming technology that has been around for years and significantly increases immersion and "natural" input/control yet has failed to find meaningful traction with developers outside of simulators and a few other niche titles like Arma. Or 3D, which is still little more than a quickly-tiring gimmick despite a much wider range of titles being developed with support for it. Or Kinect, which, after the initial rush, has proved to still mostly be a solution in search of a problem.

Even if VR hardware has finally reached feasibility for mass-market production and pricing, without a large developer commitment it won't take off. It faces the same catch-22 as every add-on technology, requiring large developer time investment to support yet not having the market share to warrant such an investment, and the market share never getting large enough to warrant it because the investment is never made. The announced "launch titles" for the Rift don't really indicate that this hurdle is anywhere close to being surpassed.

It's cool to think about these things but "the future is now!" is inevitably premature. The article frames the entire thing as hypothetical to try to avoid this, but is still pretty gushing to the point of walking past these obvious and serious challenges.
True, if you look at Intel's flash chips they do this internally, you've got the flash 'controller' which sits astride a bunch of actual flash being written in parallel and its doing the wear leveling. I've played a bit with Intel's PCIe attached flash and can vouch for it being quite a bit faster than going through the SATA port, now if we can get them to move it to the FSB so that I can talk to it via the L1/L2/L3 cache then I'll be really happy.
Just curious, how much of this risk can be mitigated by contracts (terms of service) between the buyer and seller?
Where you were already using external queues, threads shouldn't have been an issue: just have multiple processes going (one for each core). Or use the processing package if you want more "threadlike" control.

It is unfortunate that you have to know that kind of thing a priori.

"Oh, look, a nice, built-in threading module."

Yes, BUT...

EDIT: I just re-read the way you wrote the "threading" comment and realized you probably weren't talking about it in the same context. Amazing what a word or two can do to understanding.
> Poor packaging tools (only a few tools than they all have serious limitations such as not being able to package c-extensions).

Python stdlib will let you package a C extension. I am not sure why you think the opposite. http://docs.python.org/extending/index.html

> No good isolation tools (virtualenv, the most common tool, silently fails to isolate dependencies when moved)

If you mean it's not relocatable, there's a new option for this http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/index.html#making-enviro...

But being not relocatable is not really an issue, as you can simply re-run virtualenv in the new place. All libs you previously installed will work without having to install them again

> Some of the standard library is downright terrible. csv and robotsparser are good examples. This has the side effect of widely-distributing libraries that have subtle but serious drawbacks.

Some stuff in the stdlib are not good that's true, but we have a gigantic library ecosystem at pypi.python.org will very well written piece of libs. Using Python seriously, I have never ever felt the serious drawbacks you are talking about except with tarlib in python 2.4 which was seriously broken.
Actually, in the details of the story you find that you can "enjoy" the infection elsewhere...

"Only five states — New York, California, Texas, Oregon and Illinois — report the disease, and the data is inconsistent. Oftentimes, departments rely on each other to deal with paperwork, and the numbers are never recorded, Smith says. As a result, not much is known about tapeworm outbreaks in the U.S. — or the parasites themselves."

It also sounds as though the long dormancy of the symptoms make it extremely difficult to determine where it was contracted.
Gauss Malware Detection Tool released by Iranian CERT
Statistics aren't people. In other words, Your Mileage May Vary.
I can't tell if the last bit is being sarcastic on bad naming, or it's an oversight: the function you want is called os.makedirs http://docs.python.org/library/os.html#os.makedirs and has been around since 1.5.2.
3 months of nReduce (virtual incubator) from a startup's POV.
It is kinda slow, making it a little hard to make full graphical apps with a scripting language like Python (or Ruby, for that matter).

Why are all scripting languages "interpreted" rather than compiled, by the way? Is it not possible to create a dynamic language as powerful as Ruby that's also interpreted?
Not familiar with 'drum' memory I take it? Back in the way back time a bunch of read/write heads all sitting long a drum which was spinning underneath them. It had some similarities to flash, no seek time, you just picked the head to read or write, if you wrote you wrote the entire track because there wasn't an index (usually). Cool stuff.
Or the recent numba: https://github.com/numba/numba
So, apparently smiling in pictures is a relatively new trend?
I saw your other comment. Unfortunately, there is at least one, very large, platform where the terminal access is not really an option. Does Windows mobile OS provide terminal access?
Pot for Parents
Can we rename "the trough of disillusionment" to "the pit of despair"? That's how I've felt when I had products trapped there and it's also a great movie reference.
I have built an app of over 500k sloc in Python.

In retrospective, I feel the python as a language was a good choice, it helped us move very fast and do a lot of things :

- One good pythonner is very productive

- It was easier to get someone aboard, it is easy to get python and to reasonnably efficient with it.

- there are libraries for everything.

- going to cython or c++ was always an easy alternative for those crtical part of the code.

The only cases where python can be problematic are :

- high reliability code like trains or planes software, because python code is not provable.

- very high performance, where the slowness of python in the not critical part of code can be a problem.

Besides, It doesn't protect you against the classic problems of a big codebase built by a different of people over a period of time. Tools like pynocle or pylint were good for this.

So, in the end, python has obvious weakness. Most of the time It seems like a solid choice (among others). Right tools for the job, etc.
Honestly, the only people who could offer any insight are the large companies with huge datacenters

Yup, this gives you good insights into the 'current' crop. We've got about 15,000 drives in our Santa Clara data center at Blekko (mostly enterprise SATA, 2TB (WD), but some 1TB (Seagate) too) In large populations like that I prefer to keep one family, which I know folks decry a monoculture but that keeps the failure rate more consistent across all drives which helps manage replacing them.
Bower, Browser package manager by Twitter
Another large factor is high overhead industrys is customer acquisition. In a world of CYA people often take multiple detailed bids, but that means you need to charge for not just that bid but all the failed bids. Say a bid is 2% of total costs, and 1/5 bids win now that's an extra 10% overhead.
I don't know if this was the case here, but in other pictures of the time people didn't smile so much in photos as the slow shutter speed meant they were more likely to blur, as a smile is harder to maintain than a neutral expression.
Show HN: HumanamuH predicts which people will enrich your life
The demo console does weird things in iCab on my iPad. First, it brings up the print dialog; then it reloads the page. It works fine in Safari. I've never seen anything like that happen before.
I posted only in order to clarify -- cell phones are cordless and they operate in the frequency range you describe.
Show HN: A weekly 3D printing newsletter
This is probably not to do with photography but portraiture in general. Think about all the drawn and painted portraits you've ever seen.
A good idea but I think it would have to be random and blind where the poster didn't know when it would happen to them. Would take considerable work so most likely the admins would not go for it.

Perhaps a random anon on a comment here and there to test on a rolling basis.
... and it will let you meet them.

Hi everyone! I'd much appreciate your feedback, ideas, questions etc. regarding HumanamuH [1].

HumanamuH is all about efficiently meeting people who you find worthwhile to meet. It works like this:

1) You search for people

2) You talk to them

3) You rate them

4) HumanamuH predicts who else is worth meeting

Your predictions are based on people who like and dislike the same people as you do. It's important to note that people don't get a global rating, so there won't be good and bad people. There will only be people who are more or less likely to find meeting each other worthwhile.

There are still many issues I have to work on. The biggest challenge I am currently facing is to get users in order to find out how people feel about HumanamuH. If you have any advice on how to "go viral", I'd be happy to listen.

[1] Why this name? Its slogan is "Where humans meet." therefore "Human" meets "Human" => "HumanamuH".
"If you learn to like Python, you will learn to hate other languages."

I think it would be more accurate to say that if you learn other languages, you'll learn not to hate Python. Python is kind of mediocre in a lot of ways, but it's the only language without any deal breakers.
Clojure on the Raspberry Pi
Malindi Tourist Attractions, Activities
assignment is a statement if you want it to be, but you can generally use setattr() as well. E.g. modifying global scope as an expression:

import sys
module = sys.modules[__name__]

def foo(k,v):
setattr(module, k, v)

foo('spam','eggs')
assert(spam == 'eggs')
I started this side project because I find myself reading a lot of 3D printing news lately. On top of that, I'm not satisfied with the distribution of 3D printing news. There is the weekly Shapeways newsletter where they promote products, but they hardly cover any interesting news IMHO.

Any feedback? Feel free to subscribe.. and see you next week! :)
I realize that the post is making an analogy, but it's based on fact. I worked in a car shop for a few months, and we charged a premium for "exotic" cars - something like 2x the cost of normal service. The reason was entirely on the insurance costs for handling those customers' vehicles.
> Does Windows

Thank you, come again!
I don't think the fact that people conform is surprising. What is, possibly, surprising is that someone laid it out there - that they are being a conformist.

Typically, in my experience, people aren't that honest with themselves.
Indent however you want to, and don't try to argue objectively for one way or the other. It doesn't work like that.

Rather than argue the merits of spaces versus tabs, it's much more important to make sure that you have a consistent style within a single project, especially with multiple developers.