skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My concern is that we repeat so often "Python is slow" that we can forget when this is a valid assumption. I've already dealt with people using since the start of a project a low-level language because "it's faster" (and the project was obviously not CPU-bound). The same goes with explaining a huge latency on connecting to a web service as "you're using Python on the client"

Is Python slower than C? In some cases YES. Is Python a slow language? NO, not always. Do I think that titles like "Why Python is slow" are misleading? YES, because are too generic, and give the wrong kind of idea.

Speed, as scalability or a lot of other concepts, are WAY more a problem of architecture and design than language. This doesn't mean that languages are irrelevant, but their importance in the achievement (or failure) of those goals is largely overstated.

PD: You can replace Python with Ruby or JavaScript.
Snowden Swiped Password From NSA Coworker
Agree! I can page through code like a speed-reader, until I get to some pretty-printed spaced-out page where I have to stop and line up stuff like that. I think its just OCD folks distracting themselves, its absolutely not contributing to the code, reader or bottom line.
The video is intended to pique the interest of CMS choosers with short attention spans... you're right that it's a poor substitute for a real demo, and we'll try to get something up as soon as possible. What's the best practice for refreshing the content on demo sites? I worry that a scheduled content reset will confuse people who are halfway through trying publishing a test page.

The CoffeeScript and LESS integration is a tricky one. We like LESS but we're worried that npm / lessc is an annoying dependency, and we're considering switching to SASS / SCSS, which has a pure-Python compiler, unlike LESS. Opinions very welcome.
This is how I would love to see Facebook's Trending Topics
Stock Video – Royalty Free Library
Is getting shot at a benefit?
Jamplay Guitar Chords
Is depression really that much more prevalent among programmers than those of other professions? I am quite curious about this given how often you find depression-themed posts on this site.

If there have been any studies on this, links would be appreciated.
The fine article states:

You can check whether there are open NTP servers that
support the MONLIST command running on your network by
visiting the Open NTP Project[0]. Even if you don't think
you're running an NTP server, you should check your
network because you may be running one inadvertently.

[0] links to http://openntpproject.org/
I think this is pretty common for any industry. Experience gains salary. The fact that it is a flying machine doesn't really change that much. It seems that the regionals are serving as a training pool for the larger carriers to draw from. I wouldnt call that a ponzi scheme, but unions can create unnatural salary gaps. Is the problem that people feel they are putting their life in the hands of someone paid 21k? That happens with any form mass transit.
Maybe I'm biased (no Objective-C experience), but in the platforms I work with this is a 15-minute task, so I wouldn't hire either. There is nothing extraordinary about being familiar with XML or regular expressions.
I've noticed that particularly in web development there's a lot of dogmatism and feel that a lot of the "best practices" (I personally hate that phrase...) being thrown around are just a way to make web developers feel like they're qualified and superior just because they can say "I follow the rules, you don't!" It's about making websites, not some sort of pseudo-religion. Do what you think is the best way to present your content, don't be a mindless follower.

After all, who goes around viewing the source of webpages they visit (unless something is terribly broken and you want to find out why)? If I can see the content I couldn't care less.

This is from the perspective of someone who has done a lot of "web development" with nothing more than a text editor and a browser (or several)... I've used w3schools as well as the official HTML specs; I don't care what the latest fads are and don't even want to expend the effort to, I just do what works to show the content I want to show to my visitors and that's it.
Brilliant name! Good work chaps!
Aardvark = EarthPig Google Etymology / Word History tree
API’s Lack Conventions and Standards: Two Perspectives on Solutions
I have nothing against service in the armed forces, but I doubt it would be more lucrative. You may sign up to be a pilot and wind up doing something completely different (if you don't make it through the training). Also, if consider time on base as time on the job, it may equate to less than minimum wage overall. At least, that's the way it is with mandatory service in Israel. Not sure how it works in the US though.
Again, I assume the article only served as an example of how in Python you usually end up using dictionaries or classes, which have fundamentally different performance characteristics compared to C-structs. Yes, you could use tuples instead, in some cases, and get performance characteristics comparable to C structs. Often this is not an option though, and you would still have to use classes or dictionaries. There are many scenarios you could conveniently implement in C using structs, that would end up as an ungodly mess in Python if you would implement them using nothing but tuples.

Just as a thought exercise, try to come up with a way to represent and manipulate an hierarchical, mutable C-structure with 20 fields, using nothing but tuples in Python.
> Even after a redesign a few years ago, their pages still use “.asp”, which is basically an extinct platform that almost nobody uses anymore.

And? For all we care, it could be built in FORTRAN and still be a valuable resource. What in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster an argument is that???
Debian: rock solid stability
http://www.amazon.com/Transition-Advanced-Mathematics-Dougla...

My bad - I mispelled "Eggen" as "Eggers"
Obviously it depends on the route (ideally one that has no competition and a lot of passengers), but you definitely have more room for profit when carrying 500 people. I've been on a fair share of empty commuter flights as well, you know they're losing money even just counting fuel costs.
That's a good point too, but not what I was trying to get at. I realize now I wasn't clear enough. I was talking more about people that recognize science as a good thing and tend to follow what is presented as scientific facts, but aren't specifically trained in it. The problem I see is that some scientists are taking data that points toward a conclusion, even if it isn't well supported or rigorous data and talking as if it is absolutely certain and proven. This degrades people's trust in scientists, and likely science in general. It's also a problem of the media too, since they're the ones promoting the scientists that act in this way.
Sigh.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=733940

FWIW, if you install the ntp package and do ntpdc -n -c monlist localhost you'll get a response but I haven't checked if it's configured by default to reject non-LAN requests.
Curious if you included ctypes.Structure in your benchmark.
I am a python programmer who has yet to dive into ctypes, and I am curious if you have ever played with cffi[1], and if so, thoughts? The project seems to be aimed at the same use cases that you would use ctypes for.

1: http://cffi.readthedocs.org/en/release-0.8/
NumPy, eventually?
A walled garden can be used to guard against bugs, viruses, spam. But when its used to curate according to somebody's idea of taste or usefulness, that's arrogance. Let the market decide.

Absolute power corrupts.
That's why the cable industry put this guy into that job, to make deals like this easy as pie. Soon we will have The Cable Company and The Phone Company. Or maybe just The Company.
The uncommon part is the very expensive training required before landing that $21k gig.
Find the best professors and take all of their classes. Set your sights on the 400-levels.

It's not a race to the end.

The CS courses cross-listed as SOC, ECON, etc will tend to be interesting. There will be Linguistics majors in NLP.

Keep reading RFCs.

Keep all your code private, on a remote server, and version-controlled.
Ubuntu - ( just works ).
but I am exploring Arch these days and looks like I will like it more if I can stick to it for more time ..

Servers - Debian ( Stable, Secure, Well documented with good tutorials )
"pretty high" but they've got $45b to 'invest' in buying out competition, instead of spending a fraction of that to compete head to head in specific markets, then eventually more markets?

If it's deregulated, then they can enter the market and compete on service and price, not buy up the competition so there's no chance of anyone else ever being able to enter. TWC has been pretty active in trying to prevent municipal fiber in NC, and I suspect with even more money/muscle/lobby power behind them, it will be easier to squash any semblance of competition in any form.
Cool new Perl feature: postfix dereferencing
Or at least, we don't need 10 comments saying the exact same thing.
It's not a bad technology choice. It's that people themselves evolve, get interested and learn new things.

Armin apparently is somewhat involved with Rust now, I doubt that's because he is going to write web application in it but it's because he has become interested in developing applications that require a low-level language.

Ian Bicking has been working for Mozilla for a while now and Mozilla is very focused on using Javascript...

Important people in the Python community becoming interested in new things, learning new things, is not a bad thing, it's a very good thing. You want people with influence to learn new things, get excited about them. That's what sparks evolution, new ideas and creativity.
https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail

http://wagtail.io (marketing site)

http://www.rca.ac.uk/
22 Online Entrepreneurs Reveal How They Stay Motivated
PABX IP Virtual o que é e Como Funciona
That's true, that a gap remains when you adjust for a some obvious confounding factors, which makes it all the stranger that people are so determined to use the non-adjusted figure, it's as if the bigger number somehow resonates more with what they want to believe, than the more scientifically valid one. Maybe they're scared a that a smaller gap could be bridged by simply examining a few more variables.
Most people I work with are well aware of why we write software. I can't think of anybody that is so preoccupied with the programming side of things that they disregard the business side.

So it's simply not a problem I encounter, but maybe your experience is different.
The Supercoducting Supercollider was started during the Cold War too, but that didn't stop anyone from cancelling it half-way through.
Yes, the sacred place C still enjoys is many times related to lack of knowledge how to use the tools properly.

With proper implementations and correct use of data structures, there are seldom reasons to use C on user space applications.
Users are mostly unaware. You'd be surprised at how many users think Apple makes all of the apps in the App Store. I think the biggest problem is truth in advertisement. If it were properly regulated, getting an iPhone would be advertised as something more akin to leasing than purchasing.
I think lots of people in the Python community are very good at what they are doing and just adjust to whatever the new situation requires. There are lots of Python people that made a move to the JVM after they outgrew their Python environments. There are many that are now writing lots of Go and JavaScript.

I don't think people "move on", they just also start using more than one programming language. A few years ago Python + C was all you needed. Now you need to deal with JavaScript if you want it or not, often there is Ruby involved because of deployment tools, there is more and more Go code, Java became popular in the same community etc.
Python and performance can be summed up as "just think about what it has to do to add two ints together". The I/O requirements of that vastly exceed the CPU requirements.

Basically any tight loop, heavy use of hash tables (so that's Python, Ruby etc.) or floating point (since this is a sore spot for ARM) is going to create an explosion in time used. C/C++/C#/Java can, by being careful about the types being used, be much faster.
>i mean... you used a regex?

That was my initial impression, but after I reread the sentence I interpreted it as he used an RSS parser to get to the element with the data and then used a regex to extract the information from the data.

He didn't specify how the data was formatted inside the RSS element which leaves me to believe it might be something custom and not a simple CSV. This would be a perfectly valid use case for a regex.
The whole idea of a "Foundation" is just trying to apply a future-shocked paradigm to something that fundamentally does not need it.
For a "business" publication, Businessweek seems to have dropped the ball on basic economics here: there's fewer pilots available to work at the wages regionals want to pay, but that's not a "shortage", that's the market expressing a preference for higher pay.

See also the yoyos whining about a "skilled-worker shortage" when then actually mean "we can't hire experienced machinists for $10/hr!".
Wackette in The Thursday Mourning with Kat Vecchione 02/13 by The Wacko Network
Understanding Bitcoin’s transaction malleability problem
Thank you! It's named after these lovely little birds which hang round our offices (near Oxford, in the UK) from spring to autumn:

https://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/families/pipits.a...
An idea for a content reset, would be to warn the user before it actually happens and/or having a visible countdown widget that tells you when reset happens.

I see that the npm dependency might draw away people, maybe provide and add-on that depends on npm and makes it easy to integrate CoffeeScript, LESS, SASS?
"Ignorance is bliss."
It's now legal to link to copyrighted material in the EU
Are User Identification Networks the Future of Commercial Bitcoin Transactions?
>Bitcoin is a fiat currency and I trust the Bitcoin specification a lot more than I'll trust any central bank. They're notorious for usury, secret bailouts, and inflation.

That's great for you. What about the average consumer?

>This is the same thing that happened with online shopping at the end of the '90 and early '00s. Consumers got used to using their credit cards online and they will get used to the notion of owning, transferring, and protecting digital property.

Except with the vast difference that credit card companies were already well established in mainstream life, and people trust them (right or wrong) to keep their information safe. Pair that with a massive PR campaign on the part of credit card companies, and you've got something.

>There is no such headache. The software will improve and the banking infrastructure will grow. I expect to see banks that hold their reserves in Bitcoin and give out lines of credit denominated in Bitcoin. Infrastructure will solve this problem, but first capital is needed to meet current regulatory compliance with the archaic legacy system that is currently in place.

Yes, yes there is. Imagine, again, being an average suburban housewife. Now, try to cash out your bitcoin. Try to wrap your head around the volatility of the currency.

I genuinely believe you're being a bit too optimistic about how banks and bitcoin will interact. After consulting with large and small banks alike, I've learned they are incredibly risk averse. Something as volatile as bitcoin, and as out of their control, is a red flag from day one. There may come a day when banks exchange in bitcoin, with heavy fees, but I'm not certain that they will hold their reserves in it, or extend lines of credit in it, either.

There's more to this than having a secure currency. There is a lot of politics. There is quite a bit of control that banks want to have. They, generally, want to make sure that any bets they make can be insured. Can they do that with bitcoin?

Cryptocurrency in general, but Bitcoin and dogecoin especially strike me as being marketed as the next big get rich quick scheme, and I'm leery of that, regardless of the technology behind it.

Maybe I'm wrong, who knows; I'm just fascinated to see this develop, and am generally as cynical as possible.
There's a bit of skew in the number of articles here. Some high profile cases and a desire to de-stigmatise mental health problems means that people are keen to discuss good articles about mental health problems and treatment.

I suspect that there is some correlation between 'programmers' and 'people who have depression' because 'programmers' includes many 'people with Aspergers' and there is known links between Aspergers and depression.

Although I to would love to see good quality research.

(This is perhaps a nice website idea: "Here's a research paper. What are the problems with it? Is "$Thing@ supported by this evidence? How do I find more research?"

This would be an attempt to educate the public about scientific literacy.)
Please don't join the military because you want to learn to fly. Only join the military if you fully agree with the political and human action that joining the US military government is.

I don't want to say that you shouldn't, we could discuss all night about it, just don't do it for the wrong reasons.

Flying will be only a part of what you do in the military, consider if you are REALLY OK with all the other aspects of military life before joining.
> So the point is valid - the code should be using tuples and not dictionaries or classes.

Yes if this was "production code" but for the sake of comparison in this example it should be a Python class vs. C struct.

And as the text describes, a dict behaves similarly to a class in Python when it comes to runtime perf.
Agreed, as developers we know that when someone goes "hey, we should rebuild the entire (reasonably stable) project using another language!" that we should get the torch and pitchfork out.

If it's not broken, and there's still developers capable of working on it, do not rewrite it. Especially not to impress a bunch of nerds who're sat going "ASP?!".
> i hate to be negative or damning in anyway - you make many valid points. however what you did there is an awful performance imo. i suspect it comes from living in web circles too much. i mean... you used a regex? this is one of the rare cases where i would write a c program with old fashioned procedural logic and expect it to be done much faster and to a higher quality.

You were able to come to these conclusions with no knowledge of the content of the data stream, just assumptions?

> also yes, good programmers perform very well in unfamiliar environments.

I think your definition of "good programmer" is nearing unicorn territory.

> not having the api you want is a common real world problem - learning new apis on the fly is a vital developer skill. the idea of an unfamiliar api should neither be daunting or challenging - unless it is of exceptionally poor quality (poor naming, no docs, no samples you must reverse engineer everything - but that shouldn't stop you either).

By the sound of it, there was no API here. He was thrown a raw RSS feed and had to figure out what was in it and how to extract the relevant information.

> also, i hear a lot about the value of regexes - be careful, this is a web centric view. regexes are a very limited parsing/recognition tool and outside of web development - they go unused for most such problems - they either aren't powerful enough or add a needless layer of complexity in the general case.

NLP makes heavy use of regexes for tasks where GLR parsers are overkill or where we have to fix character encoding or other such data noise.

> good luck though. given more time and practice you will learn to eat these interviews up then spit them out with you rejecting them for making a poor first impression on you as a prospective employer... interviews work both ways after all.

Exactly what we need to do, teach to the test. That will keep interviews effective.
Transportable Dual GSM/Triple UMTS Firewall and Analysis Tool
You might also want to look at cffi – it's not in stdlib but the interface is pretty nice for this kind of thing:

http://cffi.readthedocs.org/

In the specific example above, however, I'd try to reduce that overhead by going even more C-style and allocating an array or two so you avoid the overhead of individual instances and instead have one Python object for many elements.
Paxman's whole shtick is that he argues with the people he interviews. Usually it is quite effective, because mostly he interviews politicians who are full of shit and he points it out in a way that more reverential interviewers don't. However, he probably doesn't mean everything he says: he just takes a contrarian view to whatever the interviewee says.
Motivational habit | Words of a Nerd
There's usually other ways to demonstrate experience than just years on the job, but in union shops that is the primary indicator. At least, that's how I remember it (worked in a union shop for a total of... 8 weeks?) In many jobs, there's not much more experience you need to get the job done, so 'time on job' is really all there is. Flying... certainly more experience should equate to better ability (dealing with weather, etc). Cutting meat in a butcher shop? 10 days or 10 years is going to be pretty much the same.
SMS Phishers Exploit Twilio and ow.ly to Steal Mobile Account Logins
One does not simply walk into Mordor. As mentioned in the article, at the spec level it makes perfect sense. Examples include hot-swap processor and memory boards. But to actually go about designing large processor chips - that's not easy. It needs DNA, one simply can't put together such a team by ones and twos. Apple had to go buy PA Semi, a start-up that had serious expertise in chip design covering two processor families.

That apart, does anyone know how much capex and opex benefit a company like Google or Facebook will gain by designing their own chips, as opposed to using commodity silicon?
This looks interesting, but I can't take it seriously. From what I can tell, you haven't written any tests at all.
Why is npm listed as dependency ? Just curious. Congrats on this, it looks awesome.
It's about responsibility. The captain of an airplane is responsible for the lives of everyone aboard, and for the equipment itself. It is a criminal offense to disobey an order given by the captain.
Thank you for the tip. I was looking for such an app for a long time! It is really worth its money.
Kubuntu -- Just works for me and I much prefer the KDE desktop. Have it set up on 3 completely different machines and it works great on all of them. I highly recommend everybody who uses Ubuntu and is looking for something different to at least try it out.
As far as I can tell these attacks always rely on amplification using IP Spoofing. I take it there's no way of mitigating that in a lower layer without adding some leaky abstraction or general overhead to the network? So, for example, (speaking as someone who knows nothing about these things) you could add some sort of handshake along the lines of:

ntp server sees request from 1.1.1.1 (spoofed by attacker)
ntp server goes to 1.1.1.1 to check that they really sent the request (sort of ack type thing)
1.1.1.1 comes back to say that it's an uninitiated request
ntp server discards similar future requests for some time

Obviously that would require more toing and froing, along with more white / black list tracking etc. Then again, can't all machines have sensible defaults in their firewalls to stop them from participating in such attacks?

Is this not an issue for TCP?

EDIT: I'm assuming it's because UDP doesn't do any checking / acknowledge stuff by default?