skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
... until you realise these "very basic" features are not very basic at all and pretty much depend on your current use-case. What length do you mean? Byte length? Character length? Code Point length? In case of indexOf, how do you handle surrogate pairs? does indexOf('ä') only find 'ä' (LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS) or also 'ä' (LATIN SMALL LETTER A followed by COMBINING DIAERESIS)?

The good thing about the Swift API is that it gives you all the building blocks needed to actually having a chance at getting this right. Many other languages sweep those things under a rug and you're screwed or you'll have a much, much harder job to get it right if you need to.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10482068
In comparison to the new site the first sentence on the old one throws me off:

Guile is the GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions, the
official extension language for the GNU operating system.

Oh, so it is a language for writing plugins in. Kinda cool, but Python seems
more newbie friendly than scheme for the same purpose. Might have a niche for
some more scientific applications...

Compared to the new site:

Guile is designed to help programmers create flexible applications that can
be extended by users or other programmers with plug-ins, modules, or
scripts.

That sounds much more general purpose. Maybe you would write the whole
application in guile not just part of it.
...
This entire article is about how those operations are basic at all, and will cause bugs if you're not careful.
I teach Python to high school students on a regular basis, and I'm really looking forward to seeing this project completed.

Most of my students start out with zero technical experience, and simple things like installing a text editor just become one more hurdle they need to get past in order to start programming. Having a decent, usable text editor bundled with the language itself will be really helpful for absolute beginners.
I should clarify... My principal goal is not the money, but right now i need it for help my family to solve some things. The only thing that give me peace in this moment is to help my mom to be quiet, without stress and enjoying the life that she deserves, and i think that i can meet that by searching a job outside.
A Casio keeps better time than a Rolex. Casio was in the time-keeeping business, and Rolex is in the men's jewelry business.
This is going to make life very hard for UK security companies and researchers. Suppose you find a backdoor in router code. Do you disclose the problem, or not? That backdoor just might be the Official GCHQ Backdoor, and you're in danger of harsh UK prison sentence.
Come now. I've started 5 companies at this point. I volunteer a fair bit helping entrepreneurs. If you can't tell the difference between critique of managerialist tropes and wholesale rejection of capitalism, you aren't trying very hard.

You seem to have shifted your metric from working hard to the work being complicated. But again, plenty of people do complicated work without getting zillions of dollars for it. I know math PhDs who do amazing technical work; it's far more complex than the workaday accounting done by executives. I know organizational consultants and senior HR people who are way better at designing organizations than your average executive. I know plenty of front-line managers who have much more complex managerial problems than senior execs.

What you're missing is that as with Cuba and North Korea, the people on top get disproportionate rewards solely because they are on top of a large power structure. They all "deserve" those rewards for the same reason: they won at the musical-chairs game of hierarchy. Were Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong smarter or harder working than their competitors? Maybe. Or maybe they were just lucky in either the talent lottery or in how things played out.

The only difference here is that our game is built around competing entities that, on average, create economic value, so there's possibly more social utility that results from the hierarchy games. But the people creating the economic value are mostly the ones doing the actual work.

I generally don't begrudge people the money they collected. The game is the game. But let's not confuse winning the game with "deserving" the winnings in some moral sense. That's the just world fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
> implementation-defined (since different platforms have different conventions) mapping from strings to path objects.

Unfortunately, this translates to a problem. We don't have that many path representations any more, but Common Lisp implementations for the same platform (or platform family, like POSIX) do the translation differently.

If you want to work with CL pathnames, but expose paths as strings to the user, and use multiple CL implementations, you have to write your own path translation which behaves the same way.

For instance, what is

a/b/c/

? Is that a pathname with directory a b c, and an empty name? Or directory a b and name c?

Do you map suffixes to types? How about compounded suffixes like .tar.gz? Is that a "tar.gz" type or a "gz" type?
Announcing MongoDB 3.2 – A giant leap
I'm sure there's something like what you're describing in existence, probably in a lab somewhere, clamped in front of a metal plate with burn marks on it. I think you're out of luck on commercially available man-portable lasers for effectively shooting down a drone in a real-world scenario. There's a reason why people making videos of their lasers on Youtube are using them to pop balloons.

Even if that sort of laser for sale at a reasonable cost, you probably don't want or need one for killing drones. If you've escalated to actually blowing the drone out of the sky, you might as well use a gun. Guns are great at that and they're much cheaper. The bullets and shot you fire into the air do pose a safety risk on the way back down, but if reasonable steps are taken it's probably not a big enough deal to justify using a laser instead. (Caveat: in dense urban areas it's very difficult to even begin taking those "reasonable steps" and firing anything into the air is a recipe for tragedy. If you're seriously looking to take out a drone in a city, a laser makes a lot more sense.)

Another downside is that the laser needs to be held on its target to work, and that's a pain in the ass when the target is a drone. Even a relatively stable model flown by a skilled operator is still going to bob and weave, and the drone is presumably not hovering perfectly still while you're trying to break it. Today, hitting that target once with a shotgun is probably easier than holding a laser on it for the amount of time you'd need.

In the future, that will probably not remain true. Lasers (or really any devices that emit energy in a tight beam) are inherently better long-range direct-fire weapons than firearms because the laser moves in a straight line and you can get it to go farther. Travel time is pretty obviously another area where lasers win. As laser technology improves, we'll see more powerful lasers that can do damage in less time and automated platforms for doing the aiming. A future scenario where militaries use automated energy weapons against unmanned aircraft is very realistic, so a future scenario where a police officer shoots down a drone with a laser is certainly within the realm of possibility.
> However, if we're going to expect more, it should look more like the new Guile site and less like this.

I was referring to both sites. Both the Guix and Guile sites are better than your typical impenetrable GNU project website. Guix, unlike Guile, isn't a mature project, so it's content isn't going to be all that great.

Keep in mind that the site is for _GuixSD_, not Guix itself. That's the reason for that blurb in the first bullet point: they're differentiating it from other distros not package managers.

You're wrong about the second bulletpoint. That state quite clearly what the benefits are: "transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and more". That's all because it's functional, but simply saying that Guix a functional package manager doesn't really communicate what's going on. Stating that Guix is declarative doesn't tell you anything: RPM .spec files are mostly declarative, but simply being declarative doesn't give you the benefits of a functional package manager, like Nix and Guix. Nix's (and Guix's) declarative nature is a side-effect of their functional nature, nothing more.

They don't care about Nix, not in the slightest. Nix is a means to an end, nothing more.

Could the Guix site do with improvement? Certainly. Do I think the Guile site is better? Definitely! But compared to the average GNU project site, the Guix site isn't all that bad.
Oh has that stopped? IBM has them for free if you sign up as a partner, but the OVH service has pretty convenient.
Talented security folks, especially those that can engineer security rather than penetration testing, have so many opportunities that fighting an uphill battle on mailing lists just isn't very attractive.
I completely agree, but framing it as a plant vs some terrible terrible thing is a bit of a falacy.

After all nightshade and tobacco are both just plants, but are really pretty awful for you.
Link for the lazy: https://github.com/ispc/ispc/
Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees
Some interesting insights on Grsecurity's approach by OpenBSD's Nick Holland in the comments section:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduc...
std provides String (utf8), OsString (bytes/wtf8), PathBuf (bytes/wtf8), CString (null-terminated).

Each has their own unsized view: str, OsStr, Path, and CStr.

We also provide AsciiExt for those times where you really truly believe you want to be working with a String as Ascii.

That said, we generally try to make it as ergonomic as possible to pass a plain str where a Path/OsStr is expected. This is because utf8 is a subset of wtf8, so it's always fine to convert in that direction blindly (and it's really nice to just be like `File::open("foo.txt")` when hacking something together). This is why so many interfaces are riddled with something like `P: As<Path>`. The differentiation largely exists for the other direction, IMO. Paths and OsStrs aren't guaranteed to be valid UTF8, and shouldn't be provided where a proper utf8 string is expected.

Path is just a convenience wrapper over OsStr that understands the platform's seperator conventions and provides convenient utilities.
I know a few poor working class people who looked to Uber as their lifeline. Instead what they experienced is yet another form of legal exploitation of vulnerable population. Same as payday loans etc...
Not a radio guy but there isn't some way to listen for radio signals, figure out where they are comming from (to get the opperator) then duplicate them and land the drone
ShiftJS: Swift to JavaScript transpiler
I am really looking forward to an improved IDLE. If anyone is interested in contributing to the project (it is written in python), here's a link: https://docs.python.org/devguide/
I tried all of them untill Black & White (Gen V, I guess), but never got into it as with Gen 1 and 2.

I guess it was a lack of wonder and discovery. I usually went back to the same pokemon I used in previous games.

I recovered some of that feeling with Black & White, because it didn't have any of the previous pokemon available to be captured. But, being a older and smarter guy I started googling stuff and min-maxing pretty early, which ended up ruining the game for me.

But I still search for that game that can make me feel like I did with Pokemon.

(And, just for the record, I consider Gold & Silver to be the best videogame sequel ever. They got everything right!)
> The security issues and user updates with Android are making me consider Windows.

The problem is that the average Joe (and that's 90% of people buying phones) doesn't care about security issues and updates. IMO the ship has sailed for Windows Phone. It will remain the third player on mobile, like Linux is on desktop.
Adblockers don't work on paid articles or on tweets looking exactly like other tweets.
Twitter has a limit of 140 characters to fit in a regular SMS (the rest 20 are used for the username).

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Message_Service

> Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet, the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS-2 alphabet. Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual short message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters.
> in more than 35 offices

As a second thought, that makes some sense. Regional offices do localization, sales (with support), and legal adaptation mostly. Any company that wants to sell on several countries need such stuff.

More than a hundred employees for each office looks oversized, but not extremely so.

The only question yet open is if Twitter needed all this infrastructure to become a viable business, of if they could open smaller and grow into that size organically. But well, even if Twitter didn't need it, it's reasonable to imagine that some business would need it.

I guess my question of what a company could spend 1 billion of investment on is answered.
Sort of. One spot of trouble is that NSString paths still exist and show up all over the place, even though NSURL is slowly replacing them. Another spot of trouble is that NSURL ends up in a similar situation, because sometimes NSURL means "an arbitrary URL" but often it means "a local file URL and nothing else." NSURL can hold arbitrary URLs with arbitrary schemas, but there are a ton of APIs in the frameworks which take NSURLs but only if they're file: URLs. It would be really nice to have a NSFileRef class or something like that which means, really, this is a reference to a local file, promise.
This is something I've been wondering about bitcoins.

Don't we know those 15 coins' hash/ID and couldn't we (theoretically) send out a burn notice on those coins, saying whoever is paying you these money are the extortionists?

I mean, isn't the blackmail payment visible in the block chain, and thus, the next move of the coins?
If you aren't the best or the cheapest in your market, then you differentiate until you are.
You're building a marketplace so you have 2 sides of needs you have to balance out. I feel your pain as I'm also trying to build a marketplace startup as well.

What I would do is reach out to people who you believe are your target customers (i.e. event planners) and interview them. Then get feedback for your site. You may notice that depending on the event, you could have different needs for different segments. If you do, narrow your segment till you find that the needs are all the same.

You may then have to curate all your venues so that it fits with your target segment. Not all venues may be suitable for all events.

Also, have a chat with your users to understand why they haven't sent a venue request yet.
Why do so many ex-offenders go back in prison?  A new study suggests they don't
Nobody's workload scales better on bigger core boxes without some serious attention to contention and lock avoidance.
>Political diversity clearly belongs there (in particular, it is often very closely tied to diversity of religion),

No, you don't want unlimited diversity of beliefs in an academic environment. You want to converge to the truth.
agreed, but the article also mentions that square may have to issue more shares in order to satisfy guarantees it made to investors in previous rounds. How might this affect the financial position of employees with options granted at the series E share price?
How Jim Weirich inspired me to teach people to write code
Unlike purified morphine, raw opium can be selectively bred--or engineered--for qualities desired by humans. One such quality might be lower incidence of accidental overdose.

So perhaps the poppy also produces a substance that creates an aversion affect (probably due to extreme nausea) when it reaches a certain concentration in the body. If you approach an overdose, you might start puking your guts out, and wouldn't even be able to look at a 1928 O'Keeffe painting without clamping your jaw shut.

With purified morphine or heroin or methadone, you might just fall asleep and never wake up.

But the raw plant material might also contain something you don't know about that erodes the septum in your heart, and you die from chronic use instead of overdose. That's just one of the risks with whole-plant drugs.

Generally speaking, we have attempted to eliminate hidden side effects by using purified molecules, and attempted to overcome overdose by using prescriptions from trained experts. That isn't necessarily the best or only way to run civilization's pharmacy.
Yeah, I know exactly what it looked like: big wall of text with navigation. The sites for Python, Haskell, Ruby, O'Caml &c., all underwent similar changes, and all promote the languages better for that reason.
Nothing wrong with using Twitter to meet people IRL. It seems weird to force those artificial boundaries on your social networks.
My Go is rusty, but this look a little error prone:

// Note that this will create a new UUID each time its .String() method
// is invoked.
fmt.Printf("%s", u) // Cekw67uyMpBGZLRP2HFVbe
fmt.Printf("%s", u) // 4pUYNRFHTG3YVgThPZvCgC

Just imagine an user using u directly instead of assigning to a var:

token := "secret" + u
othertoken := "app" + u
I believe this because the overly-broad interpretation you are taking is ludicrous. It would prevent code owners from asking other countries to take enforcement actions for them, regardless of what license the code was under, if they suspect someone in another party nation misappropriated their code.

It would essentially mean software authors could not enforce their copyright against infringers in other party nations if proving infringement required access to the author's or infringer's source code.
Smooth Drawing for iOS in Swift with Hermite Spline Interpolation
that really does not follow at all, unless you make the assumption that all rights are equally important, which is nonsense.

Giving up my "right" to unemployed free time is a lot less important than giving up my right to not be sold into slavery.
Web security Capture the Flag 2015
I'm not the same poster as above but a bit of Googling turned up several sources that appear reputable though I didn't dig real deep. I have no dog in this fight whatsoever but here's a link to one that I found interesting & that seems to have been well-conducted at first glance:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Max range for birdshot is ~120 feet so a drone can just increase its altitude and be safe. Also you have to be aware of what is beyond your target which might not be possible in an urban environment.
Link directly to the comment:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduc...

And here is the referenced email with a bit of context:

http://osdir.com/ml/general/2014-02/msg44493.html
Well this is what I meant in an earlier post about most companies going from grey to black -- I think it's well understood that black companies have AT LEAST these issues (and I'm sure more that I don't know about), but this is definitely not the case at every japanese company I think...

I think one of the only exceptions I know of is Nikon, I've heard they don't have such strict/crazy practices. Trying hard to think of more exceptions, but I can't, so maybe you're right :\
Ask HN: Masters or Bachelors degree, which is better?
For someone like myself who has a bachelors degree in a subject unrelated to computer science (business in my case), would I be better pursuing a bachelors or a masters in computer science?
That's not true. Firstly, a single tweet doesn't necessarily fit into a single SMS (as the Twitter limit is per character, whereas an SMS is limited per byte).

Secondly, an SMS is limited to 140 bytes, which is 160 7 bit 'characters', or 140 8 bit 'characters' or 70 16 bit 'characters' (in UCS 2, normally).
If it had hooves and a tail then it could have been a horse.

Seriously, it's difficult to imagine that the process that produced this could have produced anything else. Everything was done in secret. The few admitted to the proceedings were required mafia-style to agree to their generally corrupt direction and total secrecy ahead of time. The later one got in, the fewer scraps one could beg from the head table. The officials responsible are all looking forward to comfortable corporate positions after the whole mess goes into effect.

These observations typically inspire scores of well-informed "this is simply how it is done in these modern times" rejoinders. As if that weren't an even bigger indictment of these modern times. The comparison that comes to mind is NSA-supplied curve constants in cryptography. Sure NSA might not have derived the constants in such a fashion that would leave them able to break cryptography. At this point, however, why would a thinking human being assume their innocence? When rules for the public are created in public the motivations of the rulemakers can be scrutinized by the public, before the public is subject to those rules. Take for example the just-defeated Ohio pot initiative, which was billed as simple legalization but was in fact a permanent pot-growing monopoly for the few farmers who had paid for the advertising. Those rules did not withstand public scrutiny.

From a giant secret proceeding like this, we can be sure that the problems identified so far by EFF, etc. are only the tip of the iceberg.
Why would the GPL not be considered a commercially negotiated contract?
I've got to agree this seems like an offensive against democratic movement towards open source being required in the public sector.

With all the secrecy one has to try and determine who might have written these clauses (USA multinational corporations presumably) and what the clauses are supposed to achieve (higher profits).

Preventing countries from freely moving away from the strongest capitalist models of software production seems like something that's likely to appear in TPP & TTIP; anything socialist also seems like it's going to be a target.
Tizen Surpassed BlackBerry Being the Fourth Largest Smartphone OS in Q3 2015
Obama Expected to Reject Construction of Keystone XL Oil Pipeline
Twitter might be having troubles as a public company, but this article has very little to say about it that's insightful.
The unusual politics of Silicon Valley, explained
I'm not sure about "paid time off". It's not a salaried job in the first place -- you work as little or as much as you want, and take vacation whenever and however much you want. However, give them a time/distance-wise wage increase to get to an equilibrium point where most drivers are generally happy in life with the amount of unpaid time they can feasibly take off.
I was a student at an SAT prep center during high school and worked there for a year during college. The strategy we recommended for essays was to build a chart with one book, one quote, one historical event, etc. The best choices were broadly applicable across different essay topics.

Students would then write multiple practice essays referencing the same sources over and over. In 25 minutes, there's no time to come up with something original. It's better to have a go-to set of sources that you can mold to fit the essay topic at hand.
Yes, languages coming from MS deserve respect. Especially F#.
32 bit is not worth having, nothing modern supports it.

The G5 was supported with Fedora until recently but alas support was dropped. Also the newer Power distros are the new ppc64le flavour, which is a slightly different ABI and little endian but the G5 is not alas dual endian so does not support it. But they are cheap and quiet and mine has been running reliably, although I might install FreeBSD on it next as that has ongoing support.
People have done just that using the Xbox Kinect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmMzc2-ray0