skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find the wildcards most useful when implementing decorators or other cross-cutting metaprogramming features. For example, you could easily do a tracing decorator like this:

def trace(fn):
def worker(*args):
logging.info('Called %s with args %r', fn.__name__, args)
return fn(*args)
worker.__name__ = fn.__name__
# other decorator boilerplate
return worker

@trace
def foo(bar, baz):
...

@trace
def foo2(x1, x2, x3):
...

(Note that logging.info itself takes args & kwargs as its arguments, and passes them along as formatting arguments for the string.)

If you've ever looked at AspectJ or even Haskell, this sort of functionality is virtually impossible in a statically-typed language. You go through all sorts of contortions to be able to say "I want to operate on any type of function, and I don't care how many or what type of arguments it has", and then come out with something insanely complicated that satisfies nobody. For certain use-cases, you really don't care what type of arguments it takes, you just want to pass it through to some other function.

I do wonder if there's some other language feature that could be used to achieve this without breaking documentation or static analysis, though.
To all thinking up ways to "distract NSA" - keep in mind that they employ skilled magicians that know how to use crazy spells and are smarter than most of us here. Oh, and they also have several orders of magnitude more money.

By magic I obviously mean math, which is the real-world equivalent, at least for information. The kind of math that leads to reading signals -30db below noise level by handheld devices (aka. GPS). The kind of math that leads to extracting causality graph out of data collected on a single point in time. The kind of math that leads to recreating your social graph out of small bits of metadata. And those are only the things invented some time ago that now everybody knows how to do. What they can, and do, now, we don't know.

So basically any scheme to "distract NSA" should be assumed to be able only to give them some good laughter, until proven otherwise by some mathemagicians.
This is the foundation for the Lean Startup methodology espoused by Steve Blank, Eric Reis, Ash Maurya and others, but until recently it has been articulated in the jargon of the business community such that it is difficult to see in terms of the scientific method.

I think Ash Maurya's upcoming book, "The Customer Factory", is perhaps the first attempt to codify the Lean Startup entirely in terms of how a scientist builds and tests models. As a technical person, not a business person, I am eagerly awaiting this book in hopes that it frames the startup process in the same ways that I tend to see the world (in terms of axioms, hypotheses and experiments).
Is that really newsworthy? I think it should be clear by now that many senators think of Snowden as a traitor... Maybe the real news is that a senator knows how to use Wikipedia?
This is a massive error- on the order of Intel's FDIV bug.
Honestly, I've been thinking about it. Have not tried it out that way yet. One step at a time. Step one was upgrading from 3 to 4 and doing some semantic cleanup (no more grid classes anywhere).
I really appreciate your answer. As I said in the first post, I am a learner too, so I will update it with your insights :)
Use Bootstrap + Angular and you can write your whole application in HTML-only!
The point is that it does not spell doom to the rest of your mathematical career because one fact was wrong back in first grade
I'm pretty sure that most of the upvoters did just read the title, not the article.
Also, BTW, I hate the practice of using default arguments to avoid breaking existing code, because it makes the code reflect how it got there and not what it does. You end up with a bunch of call sites, some that take n arguments and some that take n+1, and you have to look at the function definition to see what the n-arg call sites are doing. I would much rather use an automated refactoring tool to edit all call sites to take n+1 arguments with the default inline in the call, although this is a bit hard to do in Python.

In my experience, the best use for default arguments is when the API contract really does call for "default usage", but occasionally you need to pass an extra arg for special purposes. So if 95% of call sites only need n args but 1-2 of them need to vary a parameter or two of the algorithm, then defaults are appropriate. Passing the extra args by keyword usually ends up being much more readable in this case though.
I've used both, but I'm talking about 3. I tried it out after extensively trying out Foundation's grid and found it does not work nearly as well. It does some odd things with negative margins and such that make it impossible to use any of the mixins without following the exact prescription of container > row > column.
I don't know if it's reasonable to identify Syrians rebelling against a brutal and oppressive regime as "the Arab Spring killing people."
[EDIT: edited typo, clarified what TAILS was] I had mentioned (split between a couple other posts) that even with JS enabled, Noscript will prevent many XSS/CSRF and clickjacking attempts, which has been explained to me as the reason for its inclusion. And That disabling Javascript actually makes you more fingerprintable because it's rare for browsers to do this.

I am guessing that the payload that article mentions s/he does not have included a Windows (or Windows Firefox)-specific exploit which bypassed the tor tunnel so that they could then match the cookie in and out of Tor to identify the traffic origin. Otherwise, just having the cookie through Tor would be pretty worthless.

Other people that could be dinged by this would be anybody usuing that specific version of Firefox, without Torbutton. Torbutton wipes cookies when you switch between Tor and not-Tor, but Torbutton as a separate tool has been discontinued and TBB promoted, because to be safe you really need to have a separate browser profile.

On Linux (not targeted by this exploit, but maybe someday) you could avoid this using an Apparmor/SeLinux profile that prevented TBB Firefox from even making a network connection that's not to the Tor tunnel, or possibly even prevent Firefox from knowing it's own IP. Dunno if something like this is even possible on Windows. For traveling, I currently have been experimenting with a VM with TBB and an apparmor profile, and an iptables rule to prevent ANY outside traffic, except Tor. It works but it's a pain in the ass and nobody could be expected to install all that shit. That's what they made TAILS (A bootable disc image with only Tor, saves nothing to your machine, contains no known exploitable extraneous apps) for, people could check that out. Even running TAILS in a VM would have prevented this, though they recommend for maximum security you burn it and boot it.

No sympathy for child pornographers, but obv. this could be used against anybody seeking anonymity.
It's more like the government hiring non-government forces that can then legally possess arms that other "non-affiliated" people (i.e. civilians) can't, and being given legal immunity for killing random people, some of which might turn out to be criminals. I.e. Batman, with a bit less moral compass.
"If JavaScript is an old internal combustion engine car, then TypeScript is one with automatic transmission and power steering, while Dart is a new electric car."

TypeScript + ReSharper (recently announced) => cold-fusion powered flying car :).
If I understand the article correctly, the disabling of sync etc. is done by the device CONNECTING to the hotspot, not the device providing the hotspot. The hotspot just notifies downstream users "hey, I'm on a metered connection". If you connect with your laptop, it ignores the flag and sucks up as much data as you want it to.

The only point about your android phone PUSHING the flag, is that it's not a non-standard implementation of the protocol. If you want to disable this on your phone, you have to tell it to ignore that flag, rather than tell it to not request it.
I looked at the live demo first. It didn't look like there'd be much bootstrap involved so I almost closed the article, but it's actually worth a read because there's more to it than meets the eye.
I was curious whether the fact that shm_open() essentially calls open() is true, and in fact it is, at least with eglibc on Linux:

http://sources.debian.net/src/eglibc/2.17-3/sysdeps/posix/sh...
It would be much more straight-forward than it would be in Rails. Passport is very easy to use compared to libraries like Devise, and it gives you the option to write your own middleware to use along with it. Middleware in Express is literally just a function you call in between the route parameter and the callback, like so:

app.get('/dashboard', ensureAuthenticated(), function(req, res) { });

Your ensureAuthenticated function would look like this:

function ensureAuthenticated(req, res, next) {
if (req.isAuthenticated()) {
next();
} else {
res.send('You are not authorized to access this page.');
}
}

Passport provides a few of these utility middlewares out of the box. It seems intimidating at first and I could spend a long time explaining it, but it would be much better just to dive in and give it a try. You can even head over to their IRC, which is #passportjs if I remember correctly, and ask which strategy would be best for your application and get started from there.
Good article except for the stealth mode advice.

The best answer to "What's your secret sauce?" - domain experience...
> The quote in the article claims that the exploit affects 17 and higher, only on NT-based platforms.

It does a check for NT-based platforms, the TBB will always identify itself as Windows/NT, even on Linux.

>Tor Browser Bundle disallows JavaScript by default

It has JS globally enabled by default.
Here is a statement by the tor project about it:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-current-eve...
This isn't even lossy compression - it's misleading compression
Since almost all the comments in this thread are about Ayn Rand rather than about other details of the submitted article, I may as well share here from Kung Fu Monkey "Ephemera 2009 (7)"

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html

a quotation I may have learned about first here on HN:

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Well, as a republic, the government is usually about 2 years out of sync with the public: we won't actually get a chance to yell at them until next election.
Django is Python-based. Python is a great place for her to start. Python comes with IDLE and there are any number of other tools she can get. LOTS of resources for Python too.
docs.python.org has a tutorial
learnpythonthehardway.org is revered, as well.
I used to believe this (I have been in two unions), but after having interacted with them from the other side of the table, I now call bullshit. They are nothing more than a negotiating device. Which isn't normatively good or bad...it just isn't the noble protect-the-downtrodden cause they like to portray themselves as.
No, but I think it's foolish to assume it isn't.
Brief thoughts on Docker
Yeah, I won't ever, ever, run production servers on ArchLinux. (Even though I still use arch for my own machine). Doing that is asking for unnecessary pain.

I was used with slackware, gentoo, debian and ubuntu to make frequent update to make sure I had the latest security fixes. On archlinux, it's a different story. "Updating" means "Take a gamble to update the system hoping important packages haven't been changed, renamed or deleted.". Ok, it's not really a gamble because you're supposed to read the archlinux news to know if your next update will fuck up everything.

I learned it the hard way... Once, I had to update a server to get a more recent version of a package.. which ended up deleting all rc.d in favor of using systemd. No warning, no nothing. The only answer I could get is "Why are you updating without reading the archlinux news". Fun couple all nighters time.
Thank you ALex for bring up these issues. I just would like to point out that ethics and morality are both normative propositions (in the sense that they are different cross culture and society). Basically what is consider desirable vs. undesirable behavior. As we all must have found out by now, what is consider desirable and undesirable that very different from place to place.

It would perhaps to be more constructive to consider a positive model of integrity (Positive as in positive theory in economics). In many ways we have confused morality and ethics with integrity. Integrity when distinguished in the positive model it can be apply consistently across culture, societies, groups or organization (kind like the law of gravity).

For those who are interested, you download the short paper by Dr. Mike Jensen on social science research network related to positive model of integrity:

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1511274
There's a phrase attributed to Stalin: "Killing a person is a crime, killing millions is statistics". It's sad how relevant (s/killing/spying/g) it still is.
Do what you love, what you are good at and what people are willing to pay for.

Look for a job with interesting work, nice people to work with and a financially stable company. Sometimes you have to settle for two out of three.
Sometimes I wish there was a charitable organization that ran ads showing depressed looking people buying lottery tickets and losing.
Well, federal disaster funds are pretty commonly used to pay for things like blizzards and hurricanes. So, while I agree with you that no one specifically mentioned it, I can understand how it would be an issue if we were to really dig into the whole "disaster cleanup" issue further. It is also the case that politicians who call one disaster aid package "wasteful" are quick to call for aid when their own regions are hit, so there's that.
Just attach an encrypted text of the Bill of Rights to every email. Be sure to re-encrypt every time so that they can't win back their storage by de-duping.
You can clearly see the third train providing lighting at 3:10. Very interesting.
Whatever work he brings in, it cannot sustain both of you, so either he needs to make billable hours, or you both need to seek employees to bring in more money.

Also whatever you do, really try to seek help from someone older you can trust, who has experience doing business. You need someone to assist you in setting up the terms between you and your future business partner.
This is all very hand-wavy. First of all, hellbanning is not always the same thing everywhere, so no, there's no guarantee that a serious troll knows how hellbanning works. More importantly, I have actually had to deal with forum trolls as an under-resourced dev for a very popular and long-running forum. It's an arms race, plain and simple. Information asymetry is to the developer's advantage. Have I gotten to the point of implementing hellbanning? No... but I understand the justification for why it's done.
I found this article http://freepythontips.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/a-url-shorten... also interesting and well-written.
Given that they did not have "video" back then (in the sense of electronically captured image data, whether digital or analog), isn't this really "footage"?
Trust in journalism is inherently tied to brand: we trust the Globe (or the Times or whatever) to do fact-checking for us. There is still no reason for me to trust anyone on the internet with this regard: it could be karl rove in his PJs for all I know. In this sense newspapers still hold immense value even though they've lost most ways of commodifying it.
Browsing in a VM doesn't help: the VM still has an IP address.
Licensing fees have nothing to do with it. The reason is that Thunderbolt is expensive to manufacture, and mass-market computers have tiny profit margins.

Adoption is starting. Newegg lists a variety of Thunderbolt gadgets. Mostly it seems to be storage products, where 10 Gbps Ethernet is needed but makes Thunderbolt look cheap.
agreed. Manning is a totally different story, I think. The stuff he released didn't do much to protect innocent people, etc. Snowden I could stand behind.

That said, it would be just awesome if Manning got the Nobel Peace Prize, just, what, 5 years after Obama did?
you can use semantic naming with bootstrap too.

.wrapper {
.make-row();
}
.content-main {
.make-column(8);
}
.content-secondary {
.make-column(3);
.make-column-offset(1);
}
<div class="wrapper">
<div class="content-main">...</div>
<div class="content-secondary">...</div>
</div>
1. This tightly couples the service to the view. Changes in the view and/or service will potentially result in nasty surprises and spaghetti code. For instance, what happens if the business processes change one day and "login" needs to return "logged in but email address unconfirmed"? You want the rules to deal with that scenario confined to a LoginController, not scattered around through each view (consider: an omnipresent login box view vs. a login/signup form view used when a user performs an action that potentially requires login, e.g. "Checkout")

2. In reality, this simple sample obscures what happens in the real world when you add an input for the user key & password:

a. you will need to pass the parameters to the auth service. At that point hopefully you will won't do anything crazy and will simply e.g. bind the user key & password to $scope properties, and pass the scope properties through to the auth service.

b. As stated in (1), your login & logout controller functions need to consider the result of their auth calls and map that result back to a meaningful state for the view -- in the simplest case, it'll just be "logged in" or "logged out", but it can also be e.g. "logged in but email address unconfirmed", which could require a message to be displayed to the user. The best place for this state is again a $scope property.

So, in practice you would just use a $scope.loggedIn or $scope.user property maintained by the controller login() and logout() functions to resolve this issue.
For those who do not know, The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change". [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Nobel_Peace_Prize
Consistent, enable an abstract model to be synced with the DOM
It's specifically targeting Firefox 17 for Windows. Versions less than 17 seem to be targeted as well, but the resource (content_1.html) doesn't seem to have ever been available. It does not target anything above 17.

http://pastebin.mozilla.org/2777139
that has explained the mechanics of kwargs, but not explained why we would use kwargs. I hardly ever use kwargs because I think they make the source code hard to read.

I think they are useful for systems with big configurations (that grow with features during development). I give every customizable function a reference to the big master config dict. Still not sure if that's a good design or not ...
In my opinion, the enum module will do very little to improve your life. It uses a great deal of machinery to solve a somewhat shallow problem.

Yes, there will be a few cases when it will improve code and help manage complexity. But it introduces its own complexities as well (i.e. learning two distinct enumeration types, serialization issues, etc).

One example of an unexpected complication is the effect on serialization. Python is having to change (and slow down) its JSON module just to accommodate integer enums (http://bugs.python.org/issue18264). Third-party modules will need to adapt as well. Another example is the awkward __module__ attribute that you will need to support pickles.

That said, the real issue is that for many everyday needs, it is hard to beat the simplicity of what people were already doing. For example, sometime you only need a couple of constant references into list positions: PREV=1; NEXT=2; link_next[PREV] = link_prev[NEXT]. Or you need a handful of self-describing constants that can be compared for equality: ROUND_DOWN = 'ROUND_DOWN'; ROUND_UP = 'ROUND_UP'. Both of these examples were taken from code in the standard library. Both work just fine and do not need any of the high-powered machinery in the enum module.

Once in a while, having an enum will be nice, but you can expect people to go wild with it and use them everywhere. This will churn your code without producing any visible benefit for end users. Just as with PEP 8, the enum module will attract fools like moths to a flame.

Do yourself a favor and don't push for enums to be used everywhere. Show restraint and save them for cases like the socket module where we really did need a way to manage the menagerie of constants.
Nice work!

Unfortunately, doesn't really work on either iPhone or Android 4.3 phone - background is not visible and the design doesn't look as stunning.

That's the problem with responsive design - very difficult to get perfect.
> the most pedagogical way

One issue with education research is that all too often, for each set of articles in reputable journals arguing with copious evidence that students learn best when taught left to right there is another set for right to left. It can be very frustrating to try to teach in the most pedagogical way.
There's a large difference between experimentation and not properly vetting a vehicle containing living things.
The timing of this post is fortuitous, as I'm looking at building a landing page and had a long discussion last night with a front-end developer about using Bootstrap to do it. He's urging me to use Foundation instead.

I haven't developed production level front-end code for years, and Bootstrap looks like a quick and easy way to get something up that doesn't look like arse (instead, it looks like Bootstrap). But I am hearing great things about Foundation as a good basis for long-term development; semantic design being a major point, plus lack of bloat.
How would that help? If the NSA tracks a billion accouns, how is even a million fake ones going to make a difference? I'm pretty sure "spam" is not a new concept to them.

If they want to look up any real person, they'll still be able to find all their email/IM accounts. If you include a way for the recipient of an email to tell "fake" messages from real ones, then the NSA will be able to tell as well.
Normal people seem to get that it's considerably harder to ship a barn than a letter, and that if you want to move a barn you use a specialty service rather than the post office.

The size and number of files are and should be totally relevant even to "normal" people. When someone asks for something in e-mail, it's perfectly reasonable to say "no, it's much too big" and expect them to understand.
Single page:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/business/workers-of-amazon...
Whenever I teach a Python workshop I have to make sure to go over this or it leads to confusion for about 20% of people.

But that's for new programmers. Either AngularJS is attracting people very new to programming, or there must be some popular language (not Haskell) where

a = 10
b = a
a = 20
b == a is True

is still true. What language that is, I don't know.
Top 5 Reasons Why So Many Startups Fail To Last
Tulip is a work in progress. It will be ready when it is ready :-)

Guido is still planning for this to make it into Python 3.4. This isn't a beta release. There are more features to come.
Sources aplenty. There are probably other authors who could claim the same, but I doubt there are any women among them :) An interesting character, indeed.