passive

I have a form of aphantasia, and also poor memory of certain kinds, usually when there's a physical component to the remembering. Names from faces is a big challenge for me by default, but I've learned to practice.

Because Requests makes HTTP much easier to work with, which has dramatically expanded the pool of developers who are comfortable doing that kind of work. When we've had to add some level of concurrency to an HTTP tool, we have serious discussions over whether to swap out Requests, or to just run multiple instances of the tool, especially if it's a tool that only requires concurrency sometimes. This is nothing against aiohttp or others, but Requests is de facto standard library.

Yeah, I think the topic is very interesting, and I'm generally in favour of celebrating successful urban planning, but this slathered on the positive adjectives so thick that I'm surprised Xi Jinping isn't on the byline.

Which is a shame, because I do want to know more about this, but it's hard to trust the article.

For about 7 years, I've been battling undiagnosed Candidiasis. Cutting down wheat and sugar dramatically has mostly eliminated my symptoms, though when I get careless it comes back.

I've talked to three doctors about my symptoms, and done various tests, which don't show anything. None of them seemed to accept the idea that it could be caused by Candida. It's interesting to see it getting some media attention, though certainly this particular report makes me a bit nervous.

Yup, I'm completely on board for a way to monitor my consumable items.

The re-ordering part is a bonus, but simply knowing what I'm nearly out of in real time would be very, very, helpful.

I imagine this is more true of people with kids, who are not naturally inclined to track and communicate this information. They will, however, chew you out when you return from the store without more of the cereal that they have just finished. ;)

Neat. I've used HelloSign for several things over the years, with their fax support saving me a ton of time on numerous occasions. They've always been very easy to deal with.

No, not like that. You have a delivery service for your credit reports, which can make outgoing connections as it pleases, that ensures every credit report it delivers is paid for. You invoke it from inside your network, sending it the credit report along with the transaction number. It looks up that transaction to figure out where it needs to deliver the credit report. It doesn't have access to read any of the raw data.

Won't be perfectly secure, but it diminishes a major area of risk.

(There are other architectures that will accomplish the same thing, the key is that if a machine can access the user databases, you should be drastically limiting what kind of outgoing connections it can make.)

I think this is probably where this needs to go (prison time is interesting, but if we can't get it for financiers who profit off of crashing the economy, we'll never get it for ostensible negligence).

Establish standards for the value of stolen data. Something like the worst possible case. So for Equifax, which is potentially a gold mine for identity theft, fine them the average stolen identity cost (~$1300), for each of the 143 million records. 200 billion dollars (probably even 20 billion) seems it would be sufficient enough incentive to properly secure our data.

I also suspect we would need some kind of regular auditing, to ensure companies could afford a breach. Something like this would be a substantial drain on startups, as it would add another significant risk factor.

In the long run, what probably needs to happen is some kind of "data insurance", and we just expect that all companies working with our personal data carry it (or possibly even legislate that they carry it, similar to automobiles). It would make things easier for startups, who would pay much cheaper rates while their adoption was low, while also incentivizing them to limit their data collection to only what they needed.

Disclaimer: I work in the insurance industry, focused particularly on property insurance for disaster prone areas. Lately it feels like there are a lot of parallels between how personal data is stored these days, and Florida in the 90s.

If my business is distributing data, the number one thing I would monitor for is that I'm getting paid for the data I distribute. Data that gets distributed for free is nearly the worst thing my software can do, so I should be investing a ton in preventing it.

Sure, but that's at least an additional piece of security, requiring additional work to bypass.

I totally agree that 100% exfil detection is near impossible. But if you were going to try to get close to it, this is one of the world's databases where you really would want to. Their entire model is about collecting a shit ton of information and providing very heavily controlled access to it. Very well paid people should have spent a lot of time examining how to balance the need to pull in data from many sources, while providing only monetized ways to actually retrieve said data. They're like an old-timey pirate captain, who spends most of her time roaming all over the place in the hopes of being able to plunder someone else's treasure, then hiding said treasure in a safe place.

Except they really didn't take the hiding the treasure part very seriously. ;)

Whitelisting allowed outgoing targets isn't absurd at all. It should be standard practice for anyone running a system remotely like Equifax's. It's not the only type of protection, but if your business is basically a lump of data, you want to know exactly who you're communicating with.

I've worked with JIRA (and Confluence) on a daily basis for the last 6 years. During that time, I have personally spent months of time working on JIRA, to make it do what we wanted. Before that, I worked with JIRA on-and-off for 7 years (with Trac and Rally tagging in here and there).

Which is all to say, I know me some JIRA.

The fundamental thing that this article points out is that JIRA tickets are about work, not software, and as a consequence of wanting to track our software, most users of JIRA spend a considerable amount of time and money approximating the tracking of software.

(No, Confluence isn't for tracking software either. It's for filling in the more flexible pieces of data that JIRA doesn't handle so well.)

This is correct, but I would say calling it an antipattern is going too far. A well-customized JIRA is probably the best system in existence for approximating the tracking of software.

But (probably) it doesn't have to be, which is hopefully where the author was trying to get. Something like Github issues, for example, binds code to "tickets", which at least conceptually is a step in the right direction. But software is quite a bit more than code, which is why our JIRA has tickets related to provisioning infrastructure, deploying, managing data, etc. I'm not aware of any JIRA alternative that considers all these facets of software creation holistically, though it's been a year or two since I looked into it seriously.

there are a lot of ways to develop software, and maybe designing a useful system that encompasses all potential aspects becomes too abstract to actually be efficient.

What I can conceive of is something of a mash up between JIRA and BDD, where desired changes are first described as a new end-state, and then the necessary work to achieve (and automatically validate) that state is broken off in tickets that are linked to that end-state description in some way. The key being that that first description is always your source of truth about the software, with the linked tickets helping organize the work before it is ready, and serving as reference information afterwards.

We are close to approximating something like this with Gitlab, JIRA, and Radish-BDD, but it's a lot of wiring and educating about conventions. I think you could do it in a single piece of software.

Upvoted because Ellen is a wonderful person (she went to school with my little brother).

But not sure why on Hacker News :)

This is nice.

I very frequently use something like the following:

    [node.find(SOME_XPATH).get("value") for node in tree if node.find(SOME_XPATH) is not None]

Which I can soon rewrite as:

    [found_node.get("value") for node in tree if (found_node := node.find(SOME_XPATH)) is not None]

There's a certain amount of complexity introduced, but I think removing the duplication makes up for it. This is one of the few remaining cases in Python where I feel like there's not a simple way to avoid repeating myself.

As someone who grew up in a western Buddhist community (and skimmed the article), this rings true to me.

I largely credit my success at work to the tools for working with my mind imparted by my upbringing and continued practice. However, mindfulness is just one of those tools.

There are forms of meditation that build upon mindfulness that I would argue can be very helpful to motivation. To put it another way, once you are able to focus your mind on the present moment, there are other things you can focus it on.

For instance, if I've got a meeting coming up where I need to partner with people with whom I know I usually have a combative relationship, engaging in a compassion meditation, such as Tonglen, motivates me to see their problems and want to help solve them.

Mindfulness itself is wonderful, but it is among the most basic of techniques for training your mind. It is remarkably comparable to physical exercise, where a basic level of activity yields amazing results for your overall health, but must be accompanied by specific training if you want to dramatically change your physical capabilities.

This is bizarre to me.

Xiaomi has been making fitness trackers that are dramatically better than Fitbit's low-end for years:

  - 1/4-1/3 the price
  - 4x+ battery life
  - waterproof
  - more reliable, at least for me (my Flex required 2 replacements in 6 months)

I've been amazed that Fitbit has been able to succeed despite this. I assume people really like the social aspects of the software, which Xiaomi doesn't really do.

If Fitbit had to steal secrets to produce such an inferior product, how the heck did Xiaomi do this? Did they kidnap people from Jawbone (or someone else) and enslave them?

I think this is more of a complement to Selenium, where you can use Selenium to drive the browser to test the UI, with Polly providing recorded back-end responses. I need to look into it more, but this might address a need we have to make it easy (and quick) for our front-end developers to run our test suite locally during development, without having to spin up anything in the backend or rely on flaky non-Production environments.

EDIT: I am aware there are many other tools that can address this, we just haven't had the time yet to implement them. :)

I like the look they are going for, but by April of next year, I'm confident Xiaomi could be selling something like this for $150.

My dad could juggle reasonably well, I'm fairly certain up to 6 balls. As a kid this was amazing, and it killed me that I couldn't do it at all. I was generally bad at physical things, but I tried this a lot, and never got anywhere.

Then, in my mid-twenties, my mother-in-law gave me a juggling book, apropos of nothing. I followed the instructions, and within a couple of days, could reasonably keep 3 balls in the air. I've never gotten any better than that, but by resetting my expectations and following instructions set out for me, I was able to cross that threshold so now my kids think I'm amazing. :)

This is a nice summary, but it is a little fuzzy on one key point, as I understand it:

Facebook is still going to legally operate out of Ireland to dodge taxes.

This is a weird article at this point in time.

The question it addresses:

"Does Python's performance matter?"

Has always had the answer:

"Sometimes, and you have options for those cases."

The OP found a "sometimes", and he's using one of those options. In this case, he's got Python for prototyping and glue, with Haskell improving performance. This is as it should be.

I don't know of any Python advocates who say it's the right tool for every part of every job. What we will say is it's usually a good "first" tool for every job. Building a system out in Python allows you to get something representative fairly quickly, which helps identify if there are areas where Python alone is not enough.

Thank you, this is a great summary of many important points on this topic.

This is mostly very good, but it wasn't a lack of technical capability that kept the ISPs in line. It was the continued threat of having net neutrality legislation updated to apply to them (or worse, for them, having internet access regulated completely as a public service).

Well, there were regulations in place, but due to a technicality, they no longer officially applied once home internet started arriving over cable/dsl/fiber as a networked service instead of dial-up.

Lots of people pointed this technicality out, and wanted to update the regulations to account for it. The ISPs, naturally, weren't too keen on that, so they spent a lot of money on lobbyists to say "everything is fine, if you add more regulation you will break the internet". Thing is, they couldn't really do this on the one hand while simultaneously selling the Waltons the keys to the e-commerce kingdom. They had to adhere to the norms established by regulations, mostly.

But 20 years later, they can pretend that there never were any regulations, and that these norms magically enforce themselves, so why regulate?

This may be mostly correct, but the framing is nonsense.

Republicans, on issue after issue, don't give a shit about conforming to proper legislative processes. To pretend they have converted, on an issue that happens to benefit Wall St, and which all Democrats voted against, is willful blindness.

It's like saying there's something noble about an arsonist refusing to burn down the forest in his own backyard.

Insight Catastrophe Group | https://www.icg360.com/ | Quality Engineer | REMOTE preferred | full-time

Insight's vision is to innovate and modernize property insurance solutions through technology, risk management and consulting from industry experts. Insight uses sophisticated modeling to deliver value to clients and policyholders nationwide.

We have a mostly-remote software organization, developing a RESTful web-services platform the supports HTML and Flash (for now) front ends. At this time, we can only hire people who can legally work in the US.

We are looking to add an engineer to our QA team, focused both on automation of tests against our HTML interfaces, and various general API-level test activities. We've established how we want to provide Quality services across the company, and we are growing the team to facilitate that.

Our ideal candidate has some testing experience, is comfortable with a "scripting" language or two, but is hungry to learn more about the best way to produce and maintain high-quality software.

NOTE: We hired a similar position back in February (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13542545), and while we will be reaching out to some of those who applied then, don't let that discourage you from contacting me again now. :)

If this interests you, send me a note: alec<dot>munro<at>icg360<dot>com

When I visited the whales exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in New York, 3 years ago or so, they showed that early whales were kind of like alligators, so I'm not sure why this is a new discovery. Perhaps it just firms up the timeline for when their feeding mechanism changed, or maybe there's some other detail that's escaping me here.

I've done trivial and non-trivial projects in both, and the general summary presented here feels correct. If you've got something with content, that matches most common situations (users, content related to users, content related to other content), Django will get you there quickly and efficiently.

But I still use Flask a lot more, because most of what I create are limited use web services that do interesting things behind the scenes. Caching proxies to improve performance of legacy services, script runners, report generation tools.

Most of the time, Flask feels like the de facto web server, like Requests is the de facto web client.

The fact that you use the term "skin-flashing" here is a little concerning. Perhaps it was just meant as a shorthand for attractive woman, because otherwise you've taken a woman's choice of dress and behaviour and made them part of your neurosis. Unless of course she is giving you the Basic Instinct treatment (is that too old a reference for this site?), in which case I'm entirely out of advice for you.

I'm not a mind reader, but all men think this way to some degree. For myself, I don't possess a visual imagination, so the thoughts don't stick, but they do re-occur. However, I also have no difficulty ensuring this doesn't interfere with my relationships with my co-workers. I know whatever ideas I have are just transient thoughts, and there will never be a point where acting on them is worth the damage I might do.

Of course, as a disclaimer, I telecommute, so I'm rarely in physical contact with the women I work with. I'm also a Buddhist, so I have a lot of practice letting my thoughts go.