skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The key is object mutability. A list type is mutable and a tuple type is immutable.

I don't think the question has much to do with mutability, it isn't surprising to me nor would I imagine most programmers that a list is mutable, that's very common.

The surprising part of this question is that the default value of 'l' continues to exist outside the lexical scope of the function, the expected behavior is that the value of 'l' is initialized at function call time and is garbage collected after each call. As it sits, using default values in python is sort of like defining a global that only has a named reference inside the function block, which is very strange.
We did source this piece a few days ago - we think the industry can deliver a lot more actionable impact moving forward (specifically to enterprise/ smb's).

Our mission is to build more productive, enjoyable, & inspiring work environments... because life is too short for work to suck. (tagline still WIP)
It is a dire situation, but the fact that the researcher(s) went to great effort to get into that particular journal shows that at least the perceived quality of the journal is still being used as a rough metric for the quality of the research. So quality is still a factor, even if quantity has far too much weight.

If they had simply wanted to get published, then it seems like there are plenty of journals that will accept almost anything (they get paid on publication). More than 150 out of 300 open access journals accepted an obvious spoof paper last year[1].

[1]http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
I really enjoyed reading Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp.

Not sure if it is The Best. But it certainly is in my top-N list of books that I really enjoyed. Well written, great material. I did not end up doing much with Common Lisp but I did pick up some good things from the book.
I agree, though as bcoates indicated, cloud hosts are adapting to this demand. While bare-metal access is indeed very unlikely to happen in a shared tenancy environment, there will be at least some efforts towards lower-level access.
i like how tough my old country fights for the rights of its own people... well, may be not of all people, just some of them :)

Anyway, not defending the guy in any manner, just wondering, what if hacking CCs weren't a crime in Russia (or whatever other wild 3rd world country), or if it were just say a minor infraction there, like a traffic ticket whereis in US it would be a capital offense - would it be normal to catch these people, bring into US and execute them? Should US bring half of Nigeria population into US? (does it sound like i'm making the case for the Unified World Government ? :)
With government, the problem is that "here" is very different from "there."

Which is why we really want the federal government to be really small or things like these happen.
I'm not a Python dev, but I've been meaning to learn for a while. So this is really interesting stuff. A few questions, if you don't mind.

I understand mutability and immutability in other languages (and I gave your link a quick read to make sure there weren't any weird Python-specific rules), so I understand how the list can change and still be the same object, but a tuple or string would not. But why does that mean that the default parameter object remains in existence throughout all calls, instead of being recreated each time it is called?

Is there a reason for this being the default behavior? It seems like the majority of the time you would want to use a default parameter, you'd want it to behave like your bug-free examples.
Conceivably a company could spend a million dollars on implementation and upkeep without using a pre written framework. The amount of detailed rules and yes/no's really is excessive. Besides telling designers animation acceleration behaviors it includes specifications on what kind of photographs are acceptable or not.

Just like a religion telling people how, what, and when to eat the whole thing almost comes across as a compliance test. It is more absurd because user interface design is art. It is also a fundamental piece of branding: how magazines, web sites, and software communicate their differentiations to their user base.

As someone who pays a hell of a lot of attention to user interface design, and has run continuous A/B tests for years to millions of people, some of the elements are questionable. If you implement them you will confuse a sizable number of users. It looks good, but does not come across as one of those things like where Google tests multiple shades of a single color to see which works the best.
Forgive me, I'm not sure which right you're referring to.

The text of the first amendment of the United States of America reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

AA (in my understanding) doesn't force any religion. The 12 steps (link http://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/smf-121_en.pdf) talk about "a power greater than ourselves". There's no reason that couldn't be the judge assigning the sentence, in this case.
my go to is: right click link -> "open in incognito window"

for chrome at least. Firefox has similar functionality, though I'm not sure if it can be accessed from a right-click.
Fonts are quite the subjective thing. M+ looks a little on the thin side to me. I greatly prefer Menlo (regular, which happens to be the default for Sublime Text on OS X) or Consolas.
Ask HN: Tips for slaying Apple App Store rejections?
Finally got my app approved by Apple after a couple rounds of rejection/modify/res-submits. The process was quite opaque at times.

Thought it would be cool to hear other's hard won tips and tricks. There is surprisingly little NON-GENERIC advice online to demystify the process.

One anecdotal tip I picked up (your mileage may vary)

-------------------------------------

If you end up receiving a call from an Apple Rep after rejection, ask them straight up if they personally used/reviewed your app or not.

If they didn't use app, it is basically just a "developer relations courtesy call" and they will only be passing on some information that may help you re-submit. They won't offer up this fact up though on their own volition. So take it from me, better to find out at the beginning of the call so you don't spend a ton of time and stress explaining something they can't understand or take action on anyway.

Now, in the case where they had used the app, this was a better outcome. They started out the same basic way, "we've rejected because so and so..." then I was actually able to explain some things, probe for some insights, and then get a second review without having to re-sumbit.
From working at a giant megacorp I can see three gamification trends:

1) Everything is slower at a big corp than a startup, so they're laughing and onto the next big thing whereas level 7 middle manager at megacorp inc is just implementing it at megacorp inc because they've just caught up to where everyone else was 10 years ago. There's still money to be made, but to slow moving non-tech billion dollar companies not million dollar companies and other tech startups.

2) Managers hate it because employee reward should continue to be based solely on golf games and kissing up and physical attraction and socioeconomic class, just like it has been historically. Having some app decide who's doin it right and who's doin it wrong smacks of replacing that manager with a tiny little shell script, and oddly enough managers don't like the idea of downsizing themselves. Never sell gamification to the manager of "mere resources", sell to the manager's manager or higher.

3) Someone's 3rd party tool is hard to game and manipulate, but something home grown can be screwed around with so the "right" people win, both preselected peons and preselected lower level mgrs. This is crucial. Don't sell an incorruptible black box, nobody wants that. Sell a toolkit, something where you can pick the winners ahead of time and then generate the "proof" you were correct. In other words emphasize customization of algo and ability to run tests on historical data so the customized algo produces the predefined result. This also means gather a lot of data so its always numerologically possible to generate the predetermined result, even if you have to do something weird like divide the coffee budget by the internet bandwidth consumed multiplied by the number of ceiling tiles in the department, this is also called "data mining".
There's a difference between crashing and returning null. If head returned null on an empty list, that null could be passed around to different places in the program before it crashed from a null pointer exception.

There can be unexpected crashes in Haskell, but not because of null.
It's considered even better writing style to be clear with your titles.

When clicking on this, I assumed there would be either; cited facts or a general consensus from a large number of users that this font is "the best". Instead, what this is, is an opinion.

> Retina screens make subtle strokes and thinner weights look better, and M+ does that: its thin is ethereal, almost a stick font.

Opinion.

> It’s much narrower than average, so 80 characters per line can fit in less than half of my screen width - so I can use a vertical split in vim to edit two or more files at a time.

My opinion is that you might as well just use a smaller font size if this is an issue. Narrowing makes things harder to read than proportionately down-sizing - to me.

> It covers Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Kanji and Kana: beyond that, few monospace fonts will do, though you can always fall back to Arial Unicode.

Don't most other mainstream fonts?

> It’s clear: 0 is slashed to differentiated it from O, and 1 is easy to tell apart from I, and l.

Don't most other mainstream fonts?

Edit: Just to be clear - I don't have a downer on the initiative of creating fonts (especially when they're open source and trying to make life easier for programmers), I'm just shooting the breeze over a bit of grammar. I'm sure lots of people will/do like this font. :)
The language of AA and other programs like them have failure as a built-in premise of attendance. Just by insisting on abstinence assumes that failure is the only possible outcome of non-abstinence, however moderated or controlled that non-abstinence is.

First and foremost obviously one has to clear themselves of physical addiction, which in most cases should be done with professional medical guidance. Afterwards comes the psychological compulsion to use. For me the best thing was to think rationally about the decision to use, and whether it was going to give me the benefit I sought. In most cases, having a drink doesn't help with the situations in which I wanted it, except for very short-term (hour or two); clearly not a long term solution to problems like anxiety, social awkwardness, depression. I think rational positive thinking like this can be made habitual with practice. Having group support from something like A.A can be beneficial in the early days of this process.

The issue with abstinence based programs is that they don't treat the underlying cause of the problem. Their focus is purely on a singular behavior which the problem led to. People in them are terrified of a single drink because it represents failure, but they don't identify what that single drink really means to them psychologically and how to address that problem in a rational way.

I know people who have benefited from AA, but their attitudes generally seem to be "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater." They take out the positives and ignore the negatives.

There are alternatives to A.A. however, for example SMART:
http://www.smartrecovery.org/
PostgreSQL Performance on Docker
For those brave enough to visit the site, they have a 'reading' section.

It seems this litigation has been going on since at least 2012 and Jason Van Dyke is still handling it with general attempts at litigating anyone and everyone who can be 'connected' in some way via 'the internet'.

I don't know if that's a common approach for Texas lawyers (one place I've never been) but it looks like this is some sort of ongoing 'war' against pinkmeth by Jason/Shelby. The tweets claiming to be from Jason are all pretty aggressive/out there and searches on Shelby Conklin are inconclusive even though it's a fairly unusual name. I wasn't even completely convinced she exists as described as the person in these papers.

Could this be some sort of publicity stunt ? Or am I just too suspicious ?
"Some concurrency" and Erlang-style concurrency are a thousand miles apart. Read this www.erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf. No matter which language you are using, this will help you expand your perspective on the subject of building reliable systems.
Thanks for the help, though Vim is already my choice for insanely-powerful text editor with 2k+ page user manual :) I tried emacs, but the dependence on the control key for everything makes it kinda painful on every keyboard I have. I suppose I could probably remap a bunch of keys or something, but Vim seems to work much better in the default configuration. I know this tends to be a big flamewar subject, so it is what it is.

Anyways, your Hello World and runhaskell are much more along the lines of what I'm looking for. Also checking out the other people's suggested Learn you a Haskell.
So you choose to implement a very simple "calendar" app with a HTML5 Canvas Game Engine!?!?! Not only that you then layer the javascript on top of that with a 3rd party javascript interpreter (Ejecta)....

That doesn't sound simple at all! That sounds super complicated...

Why not use jquerymobile and some css?
Shouldn't this link directly to GitHub instead? (https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch)

Also, just in case the author of Snabb Switch is reading this, it would be really helpful to provide a short example program of how to use this. A brief look over the documentation didn't show anything. (It's possibly I just missed it. In which case it would be great if you linked to it in the README or otherwise made it prominent).
Non specific lower back pain used to be treated with bed rest and firmer mattresses.

Now we know those are both bad things. When you lie on your bed you want to be able to slide your hand, with a little bit of effort, under your spine at your lower back.

We also know that carefully taking pain relief and keeping the back moving helps, as does specific exercise to strengthen the muscles.

Plenty of white collar workers have non specific lower back pain and spending hundreds of dollars on chairs may help, but exercise will help more.
I actually quite like Unifont for coding :S
Would be cool to have all Metro/ios/Google design styles merged to one Bootstrap theme and then just on some LESS or JS I could switch view to different device.
> I mean I see a lot of folks doing hyper-scaling with containers, indeed you can get a lot of containers on a host and they are blindingly fast. But that doesn't excite me as much as people using it to automate their dev-test-build pipeline.

This is it exactly. When I can develop locally using my favorite editor and my favorite OS, but then deploy -- still locally, mind -- to what is more or less the production environment... This has huge benefits for avoiding the "works on my box" problems that arise as code makes its way to prod.
If I know your bank's routing number (not a secret) and your account number, I can create a demand draft to take money out of your account. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_draft
Ask HN: Recommended reading on Diversity, Recruiting, and Culture?
I'm part of a lunch book club at Keen IO and we've been talking quite a bit about diversity and what it should mean in our industry. While it was easy for us to find rich material on topics like innovation and design principles, it's been more challenging to find good resources to help us tackle the challenge of recruiting for our growing team. Like many startups, it's easy for us to reach into our network and add candidates like existing employees in to our funnel. Clearly the conversation around this issue is growing, but as a community we still seem to be short on solutions. Has anyone here read "Privilege, Power, and Difference"? What hidden gems I haven't come across?

Looking forward to advice and recommendations!
You probably need to do the illegal-in-the-US cleartype font patches to get non-half-assed linux font rendering.
First discussion on Hacker News (1966 days ago)
I have been taking C60 (1,5 mg/day) for 2 months with no noticeable effects. I was hoping for some improvement in my faulty mitochondria, but nada.

For a shitload of info about C60 in humans, go here[1]

[1] http://www.longecity.org/forum/forum/415-c60health/
loadgen is a good first example program. That is a load generator that can transmit an arbitrarily large amount of traffic (hundreds of Gbps) from a trace file using a negligible amount of CPU. This is practical and being used every day.

https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch/tree/master/src/desig...

Here is the driver hack that makes it possible:
https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch/blob/master/src/apps/...
Note that this as a condition of release (which goes beyond just DUI) has over the last decade been explicitly struck down as unconstitutional where the person subject to the order has a religious objection to the program by at least the 2nd, 7th, and 9th Circuits -- and upheld, AFAIK, by no federal appellate court.

So, while it has been a common practice, the tide is turning fairly rapidly against it in the legal system.
(Disclaimer: All I know of Snabb is from reading the web site and a few discussion group posts)

Because Snabb is specialized around a few specific NICs and virtual IO interfaces with specific features, it is able to do things like set up the network hardware to be memory mapped. As in, after some setup, Snabb can bang on the bits of a specific memory range and that will change bits in the network card state without the OS or even the driver being involved. This means you are not calling send() or select(), you are dealing directly with the Intel NIC hardware interface.

It sounds a lot more like game console engine programming than node.js programming. As a game console engine programmer, that's pretty interesting to me :)
I've found that, when it comes to learning a new language from scratch, google and stackoverflow just aren't very helpful. Once you have the basics down, they're good for picking up extra bits and pieces, but at the beginning, when you have no idea where to even start, I find I need something a little more organized.

I will try out that stuff for ghci.conf, though.
I think the effect you describe is the primary reason why gluten-free is so effective for most (but definitely not all) people. Replacing a cookie with a piece of fruit is a good idea no matter what diet you're on.

The gluten free fad has made it so easy to find gluten-free cookies et al that the effect you describe much less significant.
Cylinders in Spheres
Hospitals mining credit card data to predict and control patient behavior
What a bizarre worldview. Is a pipe manufacturer is responsible when someone drowns in a bathtub?
Well, that would partly depend on the consensus pool as they may have their own blacklisting mechanisms, but broadly every message in the system is signed by the client making the request, and the consensus node passing it on. Every signature is published, so consensus nodes passing on messages that were incorrectly signed can be detected very easily. There are other attacks (not forwarding any messages is a simple one) that can be used, so pools will have to implement their own policies on timeouts/uptime etc.
Quickblox Q-municate lets developers build their own Whatsapp with ease
... Well that's an ancient typo. Corrected, thanks.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.."

When you force people into a program that references some idea of God you are doing exactly that..
Is this Ripple in disguise?
Who are the people behind this project??
How does the fix work? Does it prevent the browser from sending the referrer URL? Or maybe load all documents from the same URL with the document ID in a POST request instead or GET?
This was addressed at the Linux Plumbers Conference and the Linux kernel mailing list a few years ago. The problem is not just hardware manufacturers trying to differentiate themselves, but carriers fucking around with software loads trying to differentiate themselves. On the hardware side at least, this resulted in virtually a brand new port to every new SBC that came out, even though they were almost all ARM.

It used to be you could run Linux on MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, Intel, etc, and not be able to tell the difference from an end user perspective. Then everyone got dollar signs in their eyes, and Google managed to fudge the whole "open" thing so that people were okay with binary drivers (I also blame Ubuntu for acceptance of this), and now you see the mess it's resulted in.

Don't get me wrong, I'll take the Android bazaar with its wide variety of choice every day (and twice on Sunday) over the one-size-fits-all-we'll-tell-you-what-you-need style of iOS, but the insanity with differentiating things via closed methods needs to stop. And the Android/Linux developers are aware of the problem and dealing with it the best they can; the problem is all the handset manufacturers and carriers fucking things up.
Show HN: ConGrep – Searchable Congress
The elephant in the room is that gamification does not work in the workplace. Work, a place where we spend most of our time and energy in our entire lives, is something most people want to be meaningful and important—treating it like a game is the opposite of purposeful.

On top of that, it's not effective. The idealistic idea that competition breeds productivity and effectiveness is a flat-out lie. Instead, you get in-fighting, unfairness, bitterness, resentment, and incorrect direction. Even in a seemingly simple procedural job like a production line, gamification and management by objective leads to the wrong results. It is extremely difficult to correctly align the objectives with the true goals of the company, and especially difficult to produce quality output.

Instead, what companies need is good leadership, clear communication of common purpose, and ways and motivation to improve both individuals and systems of production constantly. There is no replacement.

Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

I'm quite happy to see the natural rejection of this entire industry, it inspires confidence.
Speaking of cash registers, I have an anecdote that shows you don't have to actually look at the data as a manager, just publish it.

More than 20 years ago a giant poster at a grocery store I worked at as a student, displayed the delta between a cash registers contents and the computers theory of how much cash was there, per cashier. With the obvious implication a large string of large negatives would be detected. So nobody swiped cash out of the register, they're looking too closely.

The act of generating the data and publishing it was enough to get the result without ever taking action. I would imagine there are enterprise level gamification implications here. Put the call center stats on the big screen for all to see and the mgmt can simply ignore the stats, more or less, assuming the employees fall for it.
> AA (in my understanding) doesn't force any religion.

Your understanding is incorrect on two levels; first, AA are religious even if in a somewhat generically deistic way, and not secular in and of themselves, second, the actual AA groups in a particular area to which defendants are permitted to choose are often even more specifically religious than AA-on-its-own, to the point of being affiliated with specific established religious institutions other than AA itself.