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MattConfluenceon Authentication and the Have I Been Pwned API

Frankly, USD3.50/month for API access is still an incredible bargain for a service of this quality. Normal users can still use the webpage form to look themselves up for free, API users pay a nominal fee that should cover the cost of the resources they consume.

The only concern I can think of is that this opens the gate to raising the fee in the future to profit from it, considering that Troy is "selling out" soon [1] and will not be in control of the service for ever. HIBP is the kind of service I think ought to be provided by a non-profit entity. But Troy's record is good, so I have faith that he will do his best to pick a good new home for HIBP.

[1] https://www.troyhunt.com/project-svalbard-the-future-of-have...

MattConfluenceon Python built-ins worth learning

A recent(-ish) addition to Python 3 I also think is worth mentioning is the statistics module: https://docs.python.org/3/library/statistics.html

Every codebase eventually needs an averaging function, now you don't have to re-implement it yourself every time. Plus it's a nice toolbox of a few different utilities that you would otherwise need to install numpy/scipy/etc. to get.

MattConfluenceon Theory of self-reproducing automata (1966)

I have an anecdote about this book!

I wrote my master's thesis about some cellular automata experiments. This was in 2016, so in the 50th anniversary year of the book. While doing background research I checked my university library's online database and found they had a copy of this book in storage off-site. So I had it retrieved and checked it out. Perfect condition. On the little card on the inside of the cover that shows previous borrowers there was one name and date, some time in the 70's, around the time my dad attended the same university.

While it is possible there were more borrowers of the book that just weren't noted on the card (I myself was registered in a digital system of course), there can't have been many, since there was so little wear and tear. Made me wonder what other "treasures" are lying around libraries around the world, waiting generations between each time someone checks them out.

MattConfluenceon Coroner letters changed habits of doctors whose patients died of overdoses

Interestingly, the article is available to me in Norway, where the GDPR is also in effect, just as in the EU.

And the site does indeed load JS from a horrendous number of domains.

MattConfluenceon Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

> The story was that they would build three Ark ships. Into the A ship would go all the leaders, scientists and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made things and did things, and the B ark would hold everyone else, such as hairdressers and telephone sanitisers. They sent the B ship off first, but of course the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

MattConfluenceon Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

Is it really odd that two people could reach the same conclusion when presented with the same video?

MattConfluenceon Some software cannot be used at Google

It's probably just that Google has published their internal document on the topic, which I don't think many other companies have done.

MattConfluenceon The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

I've read a funny anecdote (no idea whether it is accurate) that von Neumann's loud gramophone music was a big source of frustration for his office neighbor, Albert Einstein.

MattConfluenceon Python Graph Gallery

What I did when I had a similar problem was to have a completely separate visualization program and pass data messages to it (using Celery and RabbitMQ). But that was in a setting where I was already using Celery for other tasks. Setting up a message queue for just visualization feels a bit over-engineered. Maybe you can just write to a text file, or a Sqlite db, and have the visualization program poll for changes.

MattConfluenceon China Forces Norway to Adhere to ‘One China’ Policy

The article is from January.

MattConfluenceon Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

Danish (and Swedish) used to have three grammatical genders, but the feminine and masculine merged at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

MattConfluenceon Norway, where no salaries are secret

The taxation-lookup site doesn't offer any aggregated data, however you can find some statistics at the national statistics bureau's website: https://ssb.no/en/inntekt-og-forbruk (link to page in English)

MattConfluenceon Ask HN: What code samples should programmers read?

I program a lot of Python using PyCharm, and one of my favorite features of this combination of language and IDE is how easy it is to hop into the source of your dependencies. Anything you have imported into your code you can bring up the context menu for and click "go to declaration" (or use the relevant keyboard shortcut).

Python dependencies are source code, not compiled blobs, and the import syntax makes it very explicit where definitions come from.

If I'm unsure how to do something with the library I usually look at the source of the relevant module before looking up online docs.

MattConfluenceon Scunthorpe Problem

I'm currently attending, and we're still on username@stud.ntnu.no emails. I haven't had any experience with anything bouncing in my 5 years though.

MattConfluenceon Django 1.11 Released

You might want to look into Django Rest Framework [1]. It is very well made and documented. Django's ORM + DRF is a great combination for API servers.

[1] http://www.django-rest-framework.org/

MattConfluenceon Build a digital clock in Conway's Life

For something less academic and more "look at cool stuff" there's also https://www.reddit.com/r/cellular_automata/

MattConfluenceon Python 2.8?

> Giving people more time to transition is going to benefit some projects.

Python 3 was released in December 2008. Python 2.7 was released in July 2010, and was given 5 years of support which was then extended to 10.

Those people who have not transitioned yet have not done so because of lack of time. They might have valid reasons for delaying, but time is not one.

MattConfluenceon Grokking Python 3’s str

It's a bit of a clunky sentence because of the name conflict between the concept of multiple bytes and the Python data type.

A byte is a sequence of bits, and "bytes" is the name of a sequence of bytes in Python.

MattConfluenceon DDoS Attack Against Dyn Managed DNS

How about *.github.io?

Edit: saw your other reply and looked it up myself, it's 23.235.33.133

MattConfluenceon Facebook is imposing American censorship on the rest of the world

I was puzzled by that sentence too, but I figured it could be interpreted as "going in the same direction, for a different reason".

MattConfluenceon GCC 6: -Wmisleading-indentation vs. “goto fail;”

Since Python 3 the interpreter will halt when detecting mixed whitespace, forcing the programmer to deal with it.

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#tabs-or-spaces

MattConfluenceon The Unsuitability of English (2015)

> For many concepts there are four different roots: one Anglo-Saxon, one Norman French, one Latin, and one Greek.

Funny how he left out Norse, since that is where English gets the word "root" from.

MattConfluenceon Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

Sounds about right. Frank Drake created his famous equation [1] to try to quantify the probability of detecting ETI, but you do need to make guesses at some of the inputs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

MattConfluenceon The Pirate Bay is counting down

Kant's categorical imperative:

> Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

If everyone blocked ads the websites that rely on ad revenue would lose money and have to shut down.

Sure, if only some of the users block ads they can probably survive, but someone had to see the ads. How do I justify that I get to block ads while others don't?

That said, without adblock I do find NoScript to be a necessity when navigating some parts of the web (e.g. TPB), which has the side effect of being a sort-of ad-block. But that I can live with.

MattConfluenceon Random Startup Generator

http://www.blarworld.net/hackernewsgen.html

  Ask HN: Does my startup need to code unicorn picture technology?

MattConfluenceon Retirement of Prof. Andy Tanenbaum

On branch prediction:

  It would be nice if we could just plug a crystal ball into
  a free PCI slot to help out with the prediction,
  but so far this approach has not borne fruit. 
  
  Lacking such a peripheral,
  various ways have been devised to do the prediction. [...]

MattConfluenceon Anti-Patterns in Python Programming

How about

  >>> lyrics_list = ["her", "name", "is", "rio"]
  >>> words = ["is", "rio"]
  >>> print '\n'.join("{} is in the lyrics".format(word) for word in set(lyrics_list) & set(words))
  rio is in the lyrics
  is is in the lyrics