skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or the student could even have the knowledge from another source and just need validation through the exam rather than infantilization.

I can easily imagine students rigging their reader with activity simulators.

I wonder which faculty will fall for such useless misguided control trip.
Py2 -> Py3 is not that hard (when you don't step into troubles with system functions and Unicode) but porting libraries can be very hard, because some of them are rather complex and many include C coding -- and porting that stuff is much harder.
if a student is able to study all the content the night before and still get a decent grade compared to long-haul studiers then there's something seriously wrong with the coursework
If I can put these things in my driveway, and private road, then I'm all for it! I'd be quite happy to drive up the 1km stretch that leads to my ranch, knowing that its also harvesting the free energy normally wasted on the road.

So I'm all for this project, even if it doesn't "seem feasible" yet. The whole point is that if you've got some paved road on your property, or will have in the near future, then putting these things in that space, while also providing a driving surface, is an additional bonus that keeps on giving.
"Why are they acting in a way that will drive off the creation of new content in the long term?"

Paying authors 70% rather than 15% is going to "drive them off"?

Okay.
Totally, and I know you are not alone. I think it's just a matter of boundaries, and when it comes to the data access layer of my applications I definitely want to feel very comfortable with the library I'm using. That's why SQLAlchemy is so popular, IMO, the implementation is rock-freekin-solid. The API may be more verbose, but you can understand it, and in doing so trust it to do the right thing.
(FooBar.foo > 123) | (FooBar.foo == None) & (FooBar.bar < 12)

No strings, and I get an actual expression object instance that I can, for example, store in a variable and reuse in any number of queries.
And what stops Charlie Stross from selling eBooks through his own website and taking PayPal as payment?
Marketing told you it is hard? Or did you try it?
Great point about DRM free books - if they can do it that's one step forward but they'll still need to open up the formats and distribution so people can read them on whatever device they want.

Problem is right now they have selection issues, no cross platform availability and they colluded to raise prices.
Yeah, why not? What problem is an ORM actually solving in that case?

Yes, an ORM saves you the time of writing out the code to map the fields on the row to the fields on the object. But it doesn't do that for free. Let's say the results of your query are, shortly thereafter, looped over and one property is checked. Well, in NHibernate, that property is lazy-loaded by default, so now that you're touching it, it generates an individual select query for every element in the list. That's simple enough to fix: change that property to not be lazily loaded. Now suddenly a completely different part of the system is getting an OutOfMemoryException because you're querying over an unfiltered dataset and now it's loading a huge table into memory.

Your trivial query in SQL is not a trivial query in an ORM. Let's keep trivial problems trivial.

There are tools that do this better, by essentially providing a domain-specific language that generates SQL queries (LINQ-to-SQL, parts of sqlalchemy, and, it looks like, PonyORM). These certainly result in more aesthetically pleasing code, but you're still essentially writing SQL, except that you don't have access to the entire SQL implementation. You want to remove constraints, apply an update, and then add the constraints back? Good luck doing that with anything other than SQL. This probably won't hurt you for trivial queries, but having the ORM in your code means that it's only a matter of time before someone on your team starts doing something non-trivial with it, and then the beast will raise its ugly head. And besides, while you can be careful with these DSL-style ORMs and they won't hurt you, they won't help you that much either. Typing a little more isn't the bottleneck.
Ironically, one thesis of the book is that consciousness arises when you can remember your past thoughts.
I'm of the opinion that nothing will be perfect and that you can not please everyone. That said, it is good to hear dissenting voices.
The thing that resonates in this story for me, is that these monopsonies mostly harm producers (writers, musicians), not consumers. The monopsonists keep prices quite low and service quite high, compared to monopolists. It really feels like a problem for Stross, but not too generally for mankind (Stross-fans aside).

Troubles on the producer side might force some producers out, but since this is in the creative sphere we cannot really know which Shakespeare we've missed because he "became a banker".

I do feel sorry for Stross the writer that might have to switch publisher, or the artist who gets .002 cents per download, but hey, my Amazon or Spotify experience rocks and delivers great value.

Other comments rightly add that in the transition from monopsony to oligopsony (: say Apple enters) producers might be able to retain more value, but then again, these producers still have to deal with the middle men. You have this stacked market here where each party would blame the others for not getting his / her 'appropriate' level of reward:

producer (creative, high-risk endeavor, superstar effects) <--> publishing house (makes market, creates prints, less risky endeavor, but has competition in picking winners) <--> *platform Amazon (delivers product, makes userbase, pays per sale: least risk but low added value per sale)
In the future, you don't read books; books read you.

Presumably there's a requirement to be connected to the Internet for some DRM-ish thing, which also reminds me of this: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

(I only hope this doesn't turn into "This student has been accessing his textbook in a weird pattern... he must be trying to circumvent the DRM!")
Do you have a link for these numbers?
Probably the best thing that could have been done with SoundCloud
On the one hand, Krugman, Summers, and other economists praise Piketty primarily for his unique, groundbreaking empirical work on income inequality.

On the other hand, when FT critique his empirical work, Piketty says that his work has already been superceded by other work that proves income inequality is growing. So nothing the FT can say about Piketty's work will overturn this now well established fact.

So which is it? I'm inclined to go with the former, because those economists focused on Piketty's empirical work and downplayed his theoretical work and policy suggestions. And my own knowledge of economics informs me that detailed empirical work of this sort is not done enough. So I think that while Piketty might consider the empirical part of his book to be a detail, in fact it is a very important matter. All that remains is how valid FT's criticism is, and how much it changes the results.
If the python developers wanted to spend the time to reimplemented bad behavior, they could have create a reverse "import from deprecated ...".

It would solve most of the problem, while encouraging a switch to the new'er version by forcing every user to type in "import from deprecated" in top of their script.

I just think they didn't want to do that, given the massive work and non-existent personal gain. However, any company that want to invest their money on it can since its open source.
One big problem is the there aren't any existing societies that dress, pose, and feed the dead. So it's very difficult to investigate why they would do that.
What Killed Michael Porter's Monitor Group?
When you have several Python programs, where does /usr/bin/python point to?

I must admit, that I did not think to much about it until now, but normally there is only /usr/bin/python in the scripts.

Of course, if everybody has /usr/bin/python3 inside his Python3 programs, everything could work (unless some of your apps need special environment vars like PYTHONPATH, what could make it troublesome again).

But still, the standard installation of Debian (and others, as much I know) does not include Python3 by default, you at least have to add it to your installation. That is something, you must tell your customers, when you ship Python3 programs.
Docker continuous deployment with weave and Buildbox
There's a particularly good link to an insightful counter-argument from another author way down in the comments: http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/amazon-v-hache...
Even if Python 3 emerges as this great thing, it could still stunt the Python ecosystem. Python (the thing) is distinct from Python programming, there are plenty of amazing languages that no one uses.
His agreement with Hachette, which, as he has explained, he believes to be an agreement in his best interest.

Seriously, has it been so long since Microsoft that people can't recognise straight up abuse of market position anymore?
Same here but binded to F1 and always running it's own tmux session with a root logged terminal, a regular one aaaannnddd a Cmus openend! :P

Nice one about the IRC... will put it on the tmux fourth tab! :D
> Also there is the problem, that it is not trivial to have Python2+3 on the same installation. Most Linux distros still run with Py2.
>

Actually, it's trivial nowadays with projects like pyenv. You can even have different python versions in a per-project-directory basis.

Check out the installation guide (https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv#installation) and a commands reference (https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv/blob/master/COMMANDS.md)

There's also an extension that provides virtualenv integration - https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv-virtualenv
Because they don't want to be publishers, they want to be writers. As said in the article.
Am I the only one hating Twitter's Android app behavior in terms of fixed bars?

I tend to read tweets from oldest to newest, and the "Home/Discover/Activity" bar always gets on my way. Moreover, I don't even need the top blue bar. Just gimme the content!
What is that photo from wikipedia?
Anyone know that theme?
Conversely, I've been able to publish through Amazon's on-demand imprint, CreateSpace, books that I would have no way of publishing otherwise. I make a few hundred bucks a month and have fun with self-publishing. The Kindle editions also earn 70% royalties. I make some money, so does Amazon, and those who buy the books get what they want. Everyone wins.
This really depends on the device. iOS devices with their fancy inertial stuff scrolling is very pleasant but if you're using entry level cheap devices, scrolling is not as easy or pleasant. Specially with the new trend of infinite scrolling sites where your scroll down for days...
That fancy quote seems to be saying "Jaynes believes what he says, even though he gives no reason for any reader to believe him." That's not science, that's storytelling, of the very kind he is analyzing in ancient literature.

It is almost as though he is writing a neuroscience book, using the style someone like Homer or Plato would have used.
In dogs’ play, researchers see honesty and deceit, perhaps morality
There has been some research in this area. This paper http://www.innerfire.nl/files/concentration-pickkers.pdf has one of my favorite opening sentences ever:

Objective: To investigate whether a special concentration/meditation technique employed by a Dutch individual known as ‘the iceman’ can influence anatomic nervous system activity and the innate immune response.

Looking more broadly in the literature, you can find many "biofeedback" studies related to inflammation and the immune system. For instance http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10484-010-9139-5 shows some interesting results in normal people (not just "the iceman"), but unfortunately, followup studies by that group were impeded by the untimely death of the last author :(
Minecraft in space: why Nasa is embracing Kerbal Space Program
Let us not fall into the peasant trap of calling a website, which you need never visit, that sells commodities, which you need never purchase, a monopoly.

Amazon's strategy is price, convenience and selection. It has been since at least the famous 1997 letter to shareholders.

(Of course, Kindle isn't a monopoly either. None of the pricing is predatory - ie temporarily selling at a loss for anticompetitive purposes. It's razor and blades.)

First World Problems at its finest. "Those fucking starbucks guys have a MONOPOLY on good coffee!!" Suck it up or use widely-available inferior products and services.
Please make a new extension `py3` and run both on the same VM. I know the str|unicode|buf issue is not easy, but you guys have lots of smart people.
I tweeted about this a while ago, I don't have the numbers at hand. Unfortunately to get those numbers you need to nudge the pypi maintainer as the data dump is too large to keep in a database without wasting money. As such if I would want to run the report again I would need to import multi gigabytes of logs again which takes time.
From TFA, possibly further down than you read:

"I could do this myself, and self-publish, but I don't want to be a publisher, I want to be a writer: we have this thing called "the division of labour", and it suits me quite well to out-source that side of the job to specialists ... in particular if I were to self-publish through Amazon I would be vulnerable to exactly the same pressure that Hachette is currently on the receiving end of, but with less recourse"
The first example of a monopsony I was taught at school was that of the market for teachers if all schools are run by the state. Then teachers can only be employed by the state (if they want to remain teachers).
Poster mentions msft dropping support for ironpython (there were other languages too - ironruby, for instance) -- where "drop support" was to open source them.

Just last year, msft gave $100k to the ipython project -

http://ipython.org/microsoft-donation-2013.html

It feels like the original commentor has a beef against msft to read company action into what is an individuals blog entry...
The Humble Book Bundle has only appeared fairly rarely (maybe that's changed now?), and tends to stick to "geeky" books, unfortunately.
Not possible due to how the interpreter and extension interface is structured.
The parent's tone doesn't come across as belittling to me - it seems more like a playful, joking form of sarcasm - although I guess tone is difficult to decipher on the web. Nevertheless, there's no harm in a little humour, and I prefer to give parent the benefit of the doubt.
None, it appears O and ở are interchangeable to Google.
I'm the author. I've never worked at Microsoft (where did you get that?). I'm a Linux guy.

The "lazy people" you refer to is 98% of the Python community.

Python 3 didn't "gain" static type checking. You can (and I do) run pylint against Python 2 code which is just static analysis, not full type checking. The situation here has not changed between Python 2 and 3.

Python is glue code. You write a small piece of Python to tie together external libraries. Moving a smallish piece of Python code from Python 2 to Python 3 often means porting several 3rd party libraries. If you were to move to Ruby, all you'd need to rewrite is your own code, as there are likely already 3rd party libraries which need no porting.
What if the student printed out the books and studied it from there?

What if the student blocks it with firewall or has no internet or breaks the assumption like by running it on Wine or whatever?

What if they simply don't read the coursebook because they can do without?
Whoosh...

EDIT: A OpenVPN/SOCKS/WebSocket/HTTP/TCP/IP is a terrible idea and I'm assuming it was meant as a joke. Thus, the addition of Javascript to the comment makes no difference at all. Thus, my comment was intended as a joke since it's irrelevant (again) in which language a bad proposal is implemented.

There, you took all the fun out of it. Happy? ;-)
Note also that Amazon charges ordinary authors an onerous per kb delivery charge under the 70% royalty option. You get to pay the charge whether the Kindle owner buys the book over 3G or Wifi, even though Amazon only incurs the costs when delivering 3G data.

The contract is also full of delightful potential gotchas like Amazon demanding worldwide distribution rights at exchange rates set by them, without reference to any externally defined rates.

The whole thing is incredibly biased in favour of Amazon over the author. This should be absolutely no surprise whatsoever given Amazon's history: At one point, they were charging EU authors their local VAT rate, whilst only paying 3% VAT in Luxembourg: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/oct/21/amazon-for... (they may have given up on this particular piece of blatant gouging, but I'm sure they're trying to make up for it elsewhere).
> Likely the next invalid format we'll have to parse is PDFs containing tables...

And after that you will have to parse PDFs containing scans (as images, not text) of pages containing tables...
That does not fit any ORM I've looked at (and, sorry, Java people, I don't care to look at your tools anymore).

ORMs normaly default to either "in transaction" or "not in transaction", and require explicit code to change that. They guarantee the order of commands that change data, and let you get into the database any time you want.

The only characteristic that fits my experience is that you don't know when SELECTs are executed. And, if this is a problem for you, you are doing something very strange.
Reminds me of Ruby, IMHO the version jump from 1.8.7 to 1.9.* killed it. Different scoping rules made porting a non-trivial task, many packages have never been ported to 1.9 and one of the early 1.9.* major releases was extremely buggy...

Nowadays hardly anybody seems to use Ruby for new projects...
That is interesting, but, as far as I know, only a very small percentage of people have schizophrenia.

I would imagine that in a primitive environment, you will be eaten if you can't trust your hearing.

But I might be totally wrong, I haven't read the book.
I note that even after he includes other media in the size of these behemoths, the numbers he's quoting are factors of 5 or 6 smaller than Amazon (a number notably missing from his analysis)

Yes, on many occasions these guys would be the scariest 12-year old in the playground. But this time they're getting picked on by Mike Tyson.
He is not talking about fetching a gazillion rows but about writing a gazilkion similar-but-not-the-same queries!
Thanks, that looks interesting. I will note it for the time, I have the problem.
Apparently the only measure of a programming language's worth is how many libraries it has.

Alright, boys. Pack it in. We're all going back to C89. Don't try anything new, because you'll never catch up.
XD - a messaging app that looks radically different
Can you briefly summarize the Saxon/Bicameral connection? This is all new to me. I first remember reading about the bicameral mind on a online book called "Saturnian Cosmology". But I had no idea it could overlap with Saxon law.
Express your idea about bad websites, It's anonymous too...
"onerous per kb delivery charge"

$0.15/megabyte.

Most ebooks are considerably less than one megabyte.

"even though Amazon only incurs the costs when delivering 3G data."

Really? They get data centers and bandwidth for free?
The point you raise regarding the impact userbase-size has on the library is very important in the Python2/3 split. It's similar to the divide that multi-architecture releases have to deal with, where less common platforms are more likely to have long-lived bugs just because the userbase is smaller and less likely to find and identify them.

If, as the author of an impressive collection of Python libraries, you had to make a rough estimate of when your Python 3 userbase will reach critical mass, such that they have a reasonable shot at finding those bugs and getting them fixed, how far into the future do you think we're looking?
No, amazon is a 60B company fighting with a 2B company. It's a loss leader - they might earn less than they could this year, but eventually Hatchette will give up and accept amazon's terms (it's not like they really have a choice) or go out of digital distrubition, and any other publishers will see that there's no alternative.

At that point amazon is free to dictate terms to any publishers (perhaps with the exception of larger ones that could plausibly bootstrap their own retail channels if forced to) and earn their loss back.
> What if the student printed out the books and studied it from there?

Printing ? But that would mean circumventing DRM to produce an illicit copy - surely an honest student would not do that !
Yes, it does. If something is deprecated, that just means people are advised not to depend on it, usually because it's going away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deprecation It doesn't mean that it has already gone away.
Jaynes is suggesting the bicameral mind as a model for the way societies described the sources of motivation which moved individuals to action. Our current scientific model places the locus of motivation internal to the individual when it's not suffering Skinnarianism. But again this is our scientific model.

The world is full of people who claim to be motivated externally. It is a rather common feature of religions, particularly those in the Western tradition - and from the Western tradition is where Jaynes draws his examples in support of bicameralism. Hearing a god's voice is so common that we don't institutionalize people on that basis. Hell in the US, we often elect them to office.

Closer to home, where did your feeling that Jaynes viewpoint must be rebutted come from? That's meant as a scientific question meaning what was the locus from which the force strong enough to overcome not being bothered arose and how does a unicameral model better explain it?
I could see the usefulness in collecting anonymized data for later analysis, but the use described in the article just seems ridiculous.
Yes and no; exactly like music, and say, cinema, artists will still produce without money, but quantity and quality will become mutually exclusive.

In the article Stross says that "after a while, there will be no more Charlie Stross novels because I will be unable to earn a living and will have to go find a paying job".
Even if Amazon doesn't pressure self-publishers on price today, a career writer has to think about where the market will be 10 or 15 years from now.

The claim is not that Amazon is pressuring self-publishing authors today - it's that they could start in the future, as an ebook monopoly would give them have the means, motive and opportunity.
What do you mean unattributed ? http://awesomescreenshot.com/02c2v8j95f
Do you have examples for these critical 3rd party libraries that haven't yet been ported?

As I noted elsewhere in this thread, the list gets shorter every day:

http://python3wos.appspot.com/
> I would imagine that in a primitive environment, you will be eaten if you can't trust your hearing.

That's not actually how schizophrenia works though; it's quite a bit more subtle/complex/varied than just the classic 'hearing things.'
>yet the highest profitability, bodes well given Tesla's high growth rate.

Comparing these companies like this is a bit odd. Tesla produced 25,000 cars last year. The others produce millions. Tesla produces a single, "luxury" model, which by definition has good margins. That's tougher to maintain at scale, with lower end, higher competition car classes.

I'm actually surprised Daimler's margins are as high they are. Ford has a lot of legacy costs.
OMF, I have been looking for Cobra's home page for years! I saw it a few years ago, and was quite impressed by it, bookmarked it and then forgot all about it. Then spent the next few years searching through Lambda the Ultimate, the Internet, etc to try and find it again. And now it's in front of me again, and more mature to boot! Whoot! :)