cogs

Simple use case: What version of the json module is this live code running? (when you don't even know the attribute name)

# At a pdb prompt, from a frame where json is global or local:

  (Pdb) import pobshell; pobshell.shell()

  Welcome to Pobshell - type 'help' for commands, 'quit' to exit 
  / ▶ find json --name *version* -i -a -l
  /json/__version__  str                       '2.0.9'                                                  
  /json/codecs/sys/api_version  int                       1013                                           
  /json/codecs/sys/hexversion  int                       51055600                                       
  /json/codecs/sys/version  str                       '3.11.11 | packaged by  

  # -i case insensitive
  # -a include hidden attributes (_ and __ prefixed names)
  # -l give an 'ls -l' listing of the matched objects

Clickable links for convenience:

* 2 min demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5QoSrc_E_A

* PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/pobshell/

* GitHub: https://github.com/pdalloz/pobshell

Note: This is an alpha release. Built and tested with Python 3.12 on MacOS, Ubuntu, Windows (native + WSL).

I’m especially curious to hear how devs use this: — Exploring packages? — Debugging data state? — Teaching Python? — Something unexpected?

Any feedback is appreciated!

But how many citizens know calculus, literature and physics? Certainly not enough know history - or US democracy wouldn't be facing the threat it does now.

The poorly educated need a livelihood too. If the economy is healthier for global trade (I think it is), then some way must be found of destributing its benefits to the demographics who got hit. Otherwise you get revolution or populism.

Telling an unemployed factory worker to send their kids to college doesn't help. Doesn't help the factory worker, and doesn't help kids who see education and middle class jobs as about as unreal as the idea of becoming a famous influencer or kingpin drug dealer.

As an aside: Hardware as a service is annoying and feels horrible, but is probably the only way to achieve the long lifetimes we need for consumer goods in a world where reviews are unreliable and we need to stop wasting resources on planned obsolescence.

We managed to recognise stromatolites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite

I wonder if the fact that DNA & RNA only occur with one chirality tells us something about how frequently this step occurs in the Drake equation. If the step from non biological organic molecules to RNA & DNA happens often, wouldn't we expect L-DNA and L-RNA to appear in nature?

Even searching for tank woman or tank cat returns results!

Attribution is not from tracing connections or domain ownership, it's from looking at the coding style, the "Tactics, Techniques and Procedures" and the choice of targets.

There's surely a lot of bespoke software in those core Govt systems. So they'll be trying to run a software image from months ago with yesterdays data. The success of that depends on how quickly the software has been changing.

With sticks and stones? They've been inside the nuclear defence computers for months. With sanctions? When the government may just stop working altogether for a year or more?

Yes, its the clean images I'm wondering about. It might not be easy to find clean images that are compatible with separate data backups.

But if you restore from backup aren't you going to restore the trojans? And if the trojans wipe the disks after x days of radio silence?

I can see the appeal of these. Just holding one makes you feel you can soak in attention to detail and beautiful handwriting through your fingertips. But the reality is different. I don't have the patience to wait for the ink to dry when I want to turn the page, nor to muck about with blotting paper. Everything just ends up smudged.

But it seems I'm not alone here in being a pen geek, so maybe it's a good place to share a discovery that has been revolutionary for me: Erasable gel and ballpoint pens!

Bright colours, no sharpening, easy and effective erasing of my mistakes. Yayyy. I've tried quite a few, my favourite at the moment are Pilot Kleer.

Now I'm no longer afraid to write in a new moleskin!

Actually you can sometimes convince people their ideas are wrong by laughing at their ideas. I'll never forget my Dad's reaction when I bought a magazine about flying saucers.

Whether or not we can change each others views by laughing at them, it shouldn't be forbidden. In fact it's healthy. All religions, and atheists too, have ideas that should be subjected to the scrutiny of laughter.

Don't confuse hatred of people with laughing at ridiculous ideas. I 100% support everyone's right to hold ridiculous ideas (as long as they don't impact the rest of us).

Laugh at the ties people wear to the office, or the suits with tails that people wear to prestigious events; but laugh as well at pompous religious robes.

Laugh at the belief that flying saucers exist, the belief that fairies exist, the belief that god X Y or Z exists, or at the idea that the universe is just a soup of particles and radiation that cares nothing about us.

Any worthwhile idea or belief can withstand laughter, and probably did when it was young. The fact that some people cannot, means it's not reasonable to take the piss out of the shy kid in class. Laughing at a vulnerable person or group of people is wrong. But for ideas - especially for ideas that claim justification in mystical personal experience rather than rationality - laughter can be the best argument.

I like Mathematica a lot, and I'm happy to see the client library for Python. What it really needs though is a decent debugger. I'd upgrade today if this release had one.

I think the people at Wolfram and heavyweight Wolfram Language users use Eclipse - which provides support for debugging. Though running with Eclipse in one window and Notebook in another is a bit of a dogs dinner.

In the Notebook environment I found the current debugging functionality to be pretty terrible. The GUI needs to work much more like a modern IDE, to support easy single stepping, inspection and editing of values, so us mere mortals can figure out what is going wrong when results aren't what you expect (and this is half of what programming is, after all).

In fact it might provide that somewhere among the layers of complexity of its meta-debugging whatnots. But I never figured it out, and really I shouldn't have to be fighting complexity when I'm just trying to find out why my program isn't working.

A decent debugger would help us understand the product better than any number of new documentation functions.

What if you're having trouble with an API, you don't look at code to see what kind of arguments a function needs? You just go to the docs? What if the docs are sparse?

That's what I used to think too.

But some (admittedly junior) developers I've spoken to said that there was so much concern about IP theft they weren't allowed to look at other peoples' code (I assume Stack Overflow was an exception).

And this link https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/100081/does-two... is about someone who was accused of plagiarism because of two lines of code.

We're opening up the beta today

That's a US comparison.

It's complicated to make cost comparisons - do you compare own brands or known brands, etc. But in the UK shoppers report Aldi and Lidl as being better value

https://www.which.co.uk/news/2018/02/the-best-and-worst-supe...

I see no one has mentioned Scrivener.

I love it because it allows ideas to grow organically from a single sentence to a whole book; or a single idea into a project spec and plan.

I use it to manage all my personal projects. They usually start off as an entry in my Scrivener based journal, and get a Scrivener document of their own when they start to fly.

The reason it's so good, is that the UI supports shuffling all the bits and pieces to structure and restructure the project as it evolves; and it equally well supports long form writing, capturing idea snippets, screen shots and webpage clippings.

Tools like Evernote are good for capturing, but rubbish for turning the bits and pieces into a single project.

Wow. But then the question is - what word does the letter represent: is it a topic, a project, the name of the tool ... ?

I do like the idea that "Most files go straight to the default suggested path".

Maybe the rest is a little Google-centric for me. Perhaps that's why I'm having trouble being organised; I haven't bought 100% into any ecosystem.

Do you not keep source code locally? Or is it in two places?

He's very active on Twitter, and goes around giving talks about the impact of technology. I'd guess that doesn't stretch to the impact of lousy customer service.

I cancelled my subscription last year after similar problems with full text search.

I did get a download of my data, albeit it took a while, after requesting it from my settings page.

I've never had a reply to any of my emails to him. Alhough I did eventually get a reply on twitter, which said "Sorry for the terrible support" But then I heard nothing more, and got no replies to further emails either.

I think he's too busy being a celebrity. And it's a shame because he was kind of a figure head for independents doing a good job, and I was a bit of an evangelist. Oh well.

Programming for beginners is just as accessible as it has ever been, there are good languages (some specifically for beginners: Logo, and game making languages and so on) and good courses.

Where do I think programming has stalled is in the business environment. There, as the article correctly points out, it's much harder to automate your job unless you work in an IT department.

Most business end-users do their work in Microsoft Office, and this is one area where I think the tools have stalled. Visual Basic and its object models are a painful hurdle for a smart non-programmer who is trying to get things done efficiently, or who wants to learn programming for its own sake.

There have been some attempts to wire up Excel with Python, but until Microsoft decides to bundle an easy tool with every user's MS Office, programming is going to remain an arcane art.

I can't find any mention of commercial license pricing anywhere, can anyone enlighten me?

Because python links dynamically, I believe it's possible to use python Qt bindings commercially without a commercial Qt license. Does pyside2 support this?

I know C++ isn't really dying off, but what is the best platform-agnostic compiled object-orientated language these days?

I liked Borland Pascal, and I know Delphi is kind of ticking along, but I'd rather invest in a language that is growing.

Swift looks nice but still seems too Apple focused.

Don't want to start a war, just open to some tips on the ecosystem..

It's not on the BBC News England page now (8 hours after story was posted in the early morning UK time). I did find it, as you say on the Politics page, and yes it was one of the smaller headlines with the title "Police admit role in blacklisting workers".

Nothing to imply the security services were involved or that there was a risk to our democracy, sounds more like they keep a list of people who do a bad job painting police stations.

I would go to the politics page if I wanted to follow the twists and turns of UK politics. I wouldn't expect to have to go there to find out something so serious.

I guess I'm going to have to look again at where I get my news. The Today programme is very good, but I can't scan it like I can a webpage, so I don't listen often.

Oh, and my original title made clear, although the BBC title which HN has now imposed did not: this was done by Special Branch.

Special Branch are the police arm of the UK domestic security services, not the kind of neighbourhood police implied by the name "Metropolitan Police"

Apparently this was on the BBC front page this morning, but somehow I blinked and missed it.

I don't have any trade union axe to grind, but I'm pretty shocked both by the security services behaviour, and by the lack of coverage this is getting.

Whatever your opinion on trade unions, it's a pretty fundamental threat to democracy when the security services monitor legal behaviour and can destroy someone's livelihood for behaviour they disapprove of.

And .. why isn't this on the BBC News front page all day? I get most of my news there, and now I worry how many other democracy-shaking stories I might have missed.