skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The principal difference of opinion is that pass thinks usernames and sites are public information. Some of the alternatives do not.

While in some cases the difference is moot (I'm sure I have a bunch of registrations on things like forums where membership is public anyway), there are cases where it's not.
I'm not sure why Guido Van Rossum bothered to answer at all.
Right, chaotic behavior is a valid issue. But in any realistic situation, you'll have lots of effects that inevitably get left out of simulations that contribute larger perturbations/errors than this rounding error would. (Heck, I suspect that even the thermal motion of the individual atoms in an object would have a larger effect.)

So no simulation will ever get exactly the "right" answer at that level. For practical purposes, all we care about is getting an answer that's within the ensemble of reasonable outcomes for initial conditions like ours.
In the news today: some people enjoy getting high.

The only remarkable thing in this story, in my opinion, is that it is a reminder that there are cannabis dispensaries in California.
Practicality beats purity. Python should support better function literals for the same reason that it supports the "implicit" [1,2,3] instead of making you explicitly create a list and call append. I'd say self falls into the same category, although I haven't found it as much an annoyance as some.
It doesn't do that for the interpreter / compiler. But it's a common enough idiom that the human reader can rely on it.
my brain is blown away that there was so much color

-These image captures are 3 layer BW stills, the color is from a secondary process. Its a logic thing. The colour you are seeing is from photoshop[1,2,3]. Its about as 'real' as the latest issue of XYZ magazine's cover art.[4] That's not to in any way disparage it, but the reason they look "contemporary" is because of the way the images have been post-processed in photoshop. It would be trivial, for example, to make them look like they came out of instagram. Just a tech-point. Its slightly odd nobody else pointed this out, that's all. The guy was ahead of his time in thinking through the RGB seperation process, that's what is really brilliant...no doubt about that.

[Edit: Obviously, the presence of measurable electromagnetic radiation on the Earth's atmosphere, and/or its reflectivity, is the same now as it ever was. BW light sensitive emulsions have been very good for a long time. Viz, Ansel Adams, Ed Weston, etc.]

_________________

Notes:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_RGB_color_space

[4] Literally. Digital sensor = BW. They are filtered into RGB monoochrome images, just like this guy pioneered. Then, they are reconstructed using SW. So, to the end user, it does not matter if you are starting from digital and/or analogue base images. The end images are literally the function of the SW and the Display (ie, all modern). If they were prints, they would be constrained by the tech of the print medium, etc.
I've messed around a bit with the Bullet physics library and was wondering if anyone knows how it works under the hood. It's not brute forcing the collisions, because it can handle thousands of objects.

Does anyone know how they do the approximation? There is a fudge factor you can set for say a 10% boundary around an object, where it's almost like it moves all of the objects and then takes a best guess where they should be placed for the next physics frame. But I'm curious what their approach is called, if it's a general solution.
The two comments that frame this as an over-reaction to a helpful list of links have a valid point. But, for what it's worth, my first read of esolyt's post was that it was a terse reprimand for reposting, and in that mindset I definitely appreciated your reply.

I'm pretty sure that in another time and place (perhaps reddit, several years back) I too would have presumed that esolyt had a friendly intent. I wonder if I've stopped giving the benefit of the doubt in general, or if my perception of the vibe in certain comment threads is darker.
I hate wasted documentation
Anti-Dumping, tampering with VirtualSize to defeat VirtualAlloc() n' friends
Would love to hear HN's thoughts on the idea that less is more earlier on and more is more later on in the product development life cycle.
Interesting idea. If one doesn't want to leak any profile information, one could only show the number of results to non-users but not the actual profiles.

Of course, it's very hard to prevent any malicious use of the profile data.
I think you missed the point in a big way. In the news today; getting high makes some people better parents and, frankly, better people.
I'm confused. Would you say that someone who takes their doctor-prescribed dose of xanax, vicodin, or ritalin was "getting high"?
Also, it would be great to notified about ALL your blog posts, not only this series. :-)
I would say that idiomatic python code often does not overuse objects. Lack of immutable data is indeed something I miss (especially COW dict/list/set).

One thing that is clearly overused in python code is dictionaries to pass data where the set of keys is fixed and known, or worse passing dict with different set of keys instead of proper 'modelling'. Things like traits (http://code.enthought.com/projects/traits - disclaimer, I work for Enthought ), or even simple libraries like remoteobjects (https://github.com/saymedia/remoteobjects) can be helpful in those cases.

I myself don't use IDE much: I am too entrenched with vim to gain enough from an IDE, although pycharm is quite nice. I would much rather see libraries around things IDE do ('live' 'AST' of a whole project, good refactoring, debugging) so that one can integrate them in whatever environment people use. I think we are going there (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/python-st...).

Go does look nice, but it misses two killer features for me: NumPy and the whole scipy ecosystem, and C integration (in both directions). I think the python community itself does not realize how big and significant the scipy ecosystem is (nothing comes anywhere near in any common language AFAIK).
IIRC, the guy had connections in the USA so he could grap some very early color tape to film the beginnings of the Normandie. Thanks to whoever was involved in this process.
You're probably aware of LuaJIT (http://http://luajit.org/) already but I'll toss it in for other readers: as a former heavy user of ctypes, after discovering LuaJIT and its FFI I haven't touched ctypes again. For people who need to do this kind of work, it's worth looking into (enough so that one of the core PyPy developers is emulating LuaJIT's FFI design in the project Python CFFI http://cffi.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html).
Picture #30: Clicking the Google Map link shows three bridges that cross the river today. The center bridge appears to be the one from the photograph.

Those stone piers are beautiful and my guess, still fully functional 100 years later.
Rolls eyes ... Is anyone else shocked that a CannaMed doctor thought he was a perfect candidate for cannabis? If he'd visited a Chiropractor, I'm sure he would have gotten manipulated and I bet a psychologist would have suggested bi-weekly sessions.

I don't want to start a debate about the value of medical marijuana, but you do need to consider the motivation of the people giving you recommendations.
The trouble I have with Metcalfe's Law and similar is that all of them
are far too optimistic. Most English speakers have heard the phrase,
"Point of diminishing returns," and such points do exist. Worse yet,
there's also the phrase "Collapse under its own weight," describing the
point where something got so big or widespread to retain its integrity,
so its groth essentially harmed itself and failed.

If you look around, you'll see this kind of diminishing returns and self
destruction in a lot of different places, from "social" environments
like this forum, to your over-flowing email box, to the constant
interruption of your cell phone.
I don't think there's any trade-off here. If you want a mobile app that isn't text based, a desktop app that isn't console based, or a browser auto-fill plugin, then it's fairly trivial to write one, considering the extremely simple design of pass. So stop whining, and write this component; it's easy. There is no trade-off. Full feature parity is a possibility.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall... we don't do one.
> or if you don't remember it exactly, list all files, copy its name, paste

bash tab completion...
German FBI hiring developers to make spyware
It seems strange at first but now it feels pretty natural. The alternatives might be to have a new global function (like len) or to have every possible iterator type have join (which sounds complicated).
The advice about having a mindset of looking at the world via first principals rather than through assumptions and analogies was a great insight.

Musk then elaborated nicely, saying that people use the assumption that batteries have always been expensive so they always will be expensive. A better way to look at the problem is to check the London spot price for the individual battery components; cobalt, aluminium etc and deriving a price from that.

Are there books or resources where I can train this 'mental muscle' of looking at the world through first principals?

I should mention that don't have a physics or engineering background myself.
You are very wrong about where MLS games are played: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Soccer_sta...
Who am I to criticize Elon Musk, but several things in this interview seemed puzzling to me, and concerning if I were an investor in Tesla. And I'm not even talking about the explicit discussions of their corporate finances.

> ... deliver cars to customers who have been waiting for a long time

If the demand for Tesla cars at a given price point exceeds their supply, shouldn't they be charging more?

> Q: Have you had cars come back from customers, where you noticed a mistake ... A: No.

If the CEO is inspecting every single car, sending lots of them back for (what in some cases sound like) extremely minor tweaks, despite the fact that they haven't had any real complaints about quality, while potential customers are on long waiting lists -- might the CEO's well-intentioned perfectionism be hurting them?

I mean, it's great to see someone obsessed about quality, but I want to see Tesla turn a profit and become an established force in the market, and this article makes me continue to wonder if they'll make it.
> With rare exceptions, software begins when it's shipped. What everybody thinks of as the finish line is actually the starting line. Successful software is maintained, extended, and enhanced for years and even decades afterwards.

And games often are among the rare exceptions.
I suspect that people who expect and look forward to working +50 hours/week would perform much better than people who are guilted into it. Also sounds like they're well compensated for it.

I liked his "special forces" analogy.
How Dangerous Is Your Couch?
In python 1.X it was a function under the string module. This is maintained in 2.x but goes away in 3.x.

string.join(['1','2','3'], ' ') == ' '.join(['1','2','3'])
Is this any different from drinking coffee because you're a miserable excuse for a human when you haven't been under the effects of caffeine?
Yes, of course. Not that I am opposed to getting high...
Is there a vector-graphics language that similar to CSS in capabilities and expressive power, but with a more approachable syntax?

I think it's very cool when an image is created in essence programmatically, this really speaks to me as a developer, and I certainly appreciate the declarative nature of CSS, but I wish for something that is easier to read, and so easier to maintain over time, including source control with branches/merges etc. An added bonus to such language would be ability to compile it down to CSS, or Objective-C/UIKit, or C#/Windows, or simply render it to static bitmaps...

As someone who doesn't know CSS, I see it similar to the way I see PERL - you can do cool things, but I wouldn't know where to start if I had to change anything, except by trying all things at random.
>It's worse for complicated products, if I was a manufacturer I'd want to be able to rebut them. For example, I was looking to buy a coffee grinder and the reviews were all over the place. It's obvious that a lot didn't read the instructions or had higher expectations than a product at that price point would provide. People complain that a $30 item is made mainly of plastic.

You can rebut. I mean, for a long time the first hit for 'prgmr.com' was a thread on webhostingtalk[1] where someone was complaining that I hadn't set them up and that I had problems. Fair complaints, on the other hand, at the time, five dollars was an unheard of price for what I was providing (It's no longer an unheard-of price. Moore's law abides.) I responded and eh, I think I ended up coming out looking okay.

I guess the thing is, acknowledging your mistakes, yes, is very unprofessional, but really? I think people are sick of dealing with professionals. Showing some humanity and some humility (even when it's the 'false humility' we all put on so that our arrogance is less irritating to others.) can help you a lot.

On the other hand, on that same website, I'm trying to sell burstable 10G cogent ports[2] for a price that is currently unheard of, and I've gotten no bites, so It's possible that people prefer professionals for expensive things and humans for cheap things.

Note, though, (and this is the 'false humility' I describe) you don't want to directly say "you are too dumb to use the product" - even if they are. I mean, you want to explain the proper use of the product, and you want to back out the deals (refunds, usually) with the people that are unwilling or unable to do it correctly. Saying things here like 'Oh, I should improve this documentation here' or 'oh, I should link to this other documentation over there' is also good, especially if you really can improve that documentation. Personally, I think having a reputation for being not particularly easy to use is very good. You don't want to deal with the people that want handholding, especially when your product is as difficult to use safely as a Linux server.

[1]http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-541344.htm...

[2]http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1186971
The Velocity Verlet integration method isn't much of a jump in complexity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlet_integration#Velocity_Ver...) and works _great_ for kinematic simulators.

As a cool feature, it maintains the energy of the system, so you can slow down, stop, and then rewind time and arrive at the same previous configuration, all by changing the delta T's inside the evaluation.
What it really does is conflate the effects of marijuana with that of heroin and other substances targeted by federal drug laws. In reality they each have distinct pharmacological effects.
I've written about this before here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3580590

Fundamentally, I believe Python's drawback is that it appears to draw heavily from the ABC history it has, and wasn't designed for power and flexibility.

I'd rather use Perl, Ruby or Lisp.
Unveiling Play 2.1 Json API - Part 1 : JsPath & Reads Combinators
I am amazed that this showed up in the NYT. The best line was:
"Don’t you just love the shape of this pen?"
This is an interesting observation. I wonder, too, how much of this is due to changing definitions of [cloud], over time.
Ah, I was just asking about stacktraces, if the line-numbers will then correspond to the CoffeeScript line-numbers.

It's no issue for me personally, but it helps smooth over resistance to CoffeeScript.
Don't these sort of graphs always end up with a couple nodes having the majority of connections?

I'm leery of the idea of rating people and suspect this will just make explicit existing hierarchies.
I don't know what it is but the font on this site looks really bad in my browser.
There are some less than flattering accounts of Elon Musk. I personally haven't yet seen a reason to subscribe to his cult, except that he's put money into some worthwhile ventures. In fact the paranoid part of me assumes that a fair effort is being put into his public image which could account for some of the more ridiculous superhero worship that seems to surround him.

As far the stories there's the one about how badly one of the original Tesla founders was fucked over. I don't have time to look it up but it is ugly. He also insulted some blogger who asked critical questions, replying with "your mom" and stuff like that.

I have no idea one way or the other but be critical of how things are portrayed, particularly if they seem a little too good.

(EDIT: Here's a link about the story mentioned: http://green.autoblog.com/2007/12/02/martin-eberhard-comment...

There's a more detailed account somewhere which includes some very petty maneuvering by Tesla, like removing Martin Eberhard's name from the list of founders and badly damaging his founder's edition Roadster before delivery, but I didn't find it on a quick search)
Longstanding practices are often multiply-determined, and the relative balance of benefits may change according to the situation. (In high-sanitation environments, the rules help enforce cohesion/segregation; in low-sanitation environments, the rules provide protection from endemic parasites.)
While the first part of the article was satirical IMO, I think in general the point is well taken. Life sucks sometimes. People booze, people drink coffee, people do drugs. All for different reasons.

In this case, smoking pot in a controlled manner helps this person exponentially release and enjoy small moments with his kids.

Change in scenery is good, and changing your physical location to achieve that is not always necessary. Changing your state of mind can achieve the same effects.
Big fan of this post, for the format more than anything. I find these types of posts often hard to contextualize without solid reference points, and it helps having differing opinions side by side.
Live cockroach-bot: A wireless sensor that will last a long time
It is definitely true that a vocal minority of users are destructive to any network they find themselves in. Examples of negative users include things like trolls and spammers.

Another problem is that the natural desire of the people running the network to monetize it creates incentives to weaken the experience.

Both of these can lead to sub-linear growth in overall value as a network grows. But measuring value is already hard. Modeling all of the ways to screw up a network is even harder, and I doubt that there is any simple approximate general law that describes it.
If you want to do that use the @staticmethod decorator.
If it seriously improved his life with little or no negative side effects... I'd say he was indeed the perfect candidate. I find too much of medicine is dedicated to make life longer; it's good that some of it is trying to make life better (I'm not saying the balance is off in this matter, I honestly wouldn't know how to measure it).
First, I'm not saying that getting high is bad, or good. I'm just observing that this particular parent likes to get high, and I don't find that newsworthy.

Whether I consider taking a prescribed medication "getting high" depends on the dose and the use-case.

Vicodin contains an opioid, so if you are not in pain but take it, you will get high. Actually, its codeine derivative is variably metabolized so you may not get high (or pain relief, for that matter).

Xanax (alprazolam) is a benzo, whose effects are similar to alcohol. I don't think most people would consider this a "high", whether or not for therapeutic purposes.

Ritalin (methylphenidate) is a stimulant; people do use it to get high, sometimes even people who are prescribed it for a real medical problem.

The 'high' is a side effect of many medical therapies that we'd like to get rid of, if possible, to improve our ability to help people without the scourges of addiction and abuse. The same is true of marijuana, for some uses; for this particular person's use, however, the goal is to get high.
What do you mean by "usable function literals"?

lambdas. Your example isn't a literal, it's just a declared function named "multiplier". Sure, it has equivalent functionality, in the same sense that Python could remove collection literals like [1,2,3] and you could still create lists and maps by hand. But that would be silly.

even if you have to do a bit of work to get them

And that work means that useful techniques become too unwieldy to use in practice.
That's fair. My editor marks those for me automatically, so they're much less of an issue for me, but they are still really stupid.

On the other hand, you can work around that particularly stupidity just by being careful. Working around the Python limitations requires either something hacky like using a one-element list instead of a variable or (only in 3, I think) a rather ugly "nonlocal" statement at the top of your scope.
Yet another reason I block everyone's webfonts.

(Designers on OS X: ClearType does not render fonts the same way.)
Wonderful !

Wonder how many of these historical remains are still present in Russia? Would love to visit the country once.
This can prove to be a show stopper. I own one with offers. But I know few people who are very "religious" about their gadgets - they can pay more but having random ads/pictures (AT&T, new books ads by Amazon itself..) displayed on their devices is something they cannot tolerate.
Just out of curiosity, as someone who agrees with you (and is skeptical by default), how do you typically explain _how_ to actually consider the motivation of such people?

For example, chiropractors often offer free assessments which usually entail an X-ray. I'm not sure how risk-free this is, especially for healthy people in their early twenties. Of course, these assessments usually find misaligned vertebrae and lead the person to go back for a paid visit. Sometimes it's hard to compete with a certified practitioner's recommendation...
Project Culture Stifles Innovation
I have recently been considering buying a tablet. I heard nothing positive about the original Fire, but I intended to give the new one a look. I am a fan of my Kindle 3. Although a total bust as a lightweight alternative to textbooks (as the formatting was generally poor and the greyscale diagrams worthless), it allows me to read outdoors in direct sunlight, which something I do quite a bit. The forced advertising, however, has convinced me to skip the new Fire entirely.

I realize that I personally am a marginal corner case for any large manufacturer, but I am failing to grasp the logic of not providing a paid opt-out. People who don't care will buy the cheaper device, people with strong feelings in the negative will pay extra to avoid the ads, and some number of people will buy it thinking they will opt out later and never bother to do so. In any case Amazon would have hard numbers on the eyeballs they have for sale. I think those numbers would be greater with paid opt-outs than without those who now will not even consider the device.
I'm pretty sure the author thinks the same thing you do, based on the sentence "[my doctor] checked not only my pulse but my blood pressure as well."
Passbook starts showing up search results in App Store [video]