skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree completely. Python could fix a LOT of that by using the (completely seriously named) https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/ WTF-8 (Wobbly Transformation Format − 8-bit) encoding for it's native Unicode (like) strings.

Additionally Python should then allow the (explicit) casting of WTF8 datatype to bytes and from bytes to WTF8 datatype (edit: note, I mean invalid data would be read, stored within a WTF8 datatype as such, then converted /back/ to an invalid UTF-8 bytestream identical to the one read in).

The main reason that Python Unicode handling is broken is that it creates problems that aren't necessary to exist or solve. In the real world, you encounter unvalidated data; and many times you don't /care/ if it's valid. It's just some human name for a bytestream. Or some not-quite valid Unicode stored within a file, or maybe something else that you want to handle like a bytestream but pick matching Unicode bits out of.
Ah yes, you're right! I worked on this over the summer, so I must have gotten them a bit mixed up.

I copied the FONT info from each one into the NFNT portion of the resource fork in a newer file, then imported that file into FontForge for conversion to OS X-readable .dfont.

http://i.imgur.com/teGJ7qp.png
Ask HN: Which ebook reader to buy?
I want to buy a good and not very expensive ebook reader.
I'd like it to have no restrictions (to allow me download and store any free ebook).
I have not that much time to surf the web and forums. So if you surfed the web in searching for one, can you please leave here a suggestion?
Interesting stats regarding version 2/3 usage from a moderator of /r/python today:

Here's the breakdown by which Pythons were used to download from PyPI in the last two weeks:

2.7 85.90%
2.6 6.66%
3.4 4.64%
3.5 2.09%
3.3 0.56%
3.2 0.12%

(Two weeks was ~133 million downloads)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/45sm94/what_are_the...
Don't forget h1 text reflowing and scroll bars appearing when you move the mouse between the left column and the main section!

Animated ads like the ones on this site are what made me start using adblockers years ago, I literally can't read the text when they're on the page.
Yeah, I don't see a lot of talk of how hard it is to clean up code. A lot of programmers just aren't good at it, so maybe it's just as well that they don't do much of it...

"Convert your working code to good design" is not a trivial task, and like you say, a big part of it is to pick your battles.
I've heard good things about ivy, but haven't got around to revamping my config in some time. I'll check it out next time I do.
I wonder if they're just less bored.

When I was in high school, it was just hard to interact and hard to find stuff to do. We mostly didn't have cars, phones, or spaces of our own, so we had to sort of clandestinely squeeze our lives into grownups spaces. Have a friend over in our parents house, borrow our parents car, use the shared phone (that our parents could listen in on).

And we were limited to what little entertainment was in our hometown. For me there was a movie theater and a couple of coffee shops, but largely just a lot of empty space.

These days kids can create unlimited spaces in virtual reality* to connect with each other, and they have unlimited access to virtual spaces created by people all over the world. They can just pull out their phone and be endlessly entertained.

The idea of having a baby is much more appealing when you are bored as hell and have no other apparent future.

The article on apparent causes (http://www.vox.com/2014/8/20/5987845/the-mystery-of-the-fall...) also didn't mention feminism, which is an odd omission. More and more young women are able to imagine all kinds of futures for themselves. Girls have more to lose by getting pregnant than they ever have, and because of the internet I think they know it.

* When I say virtual reality, I'm talking about Instagram, Tumblr, etc, not Oculus. The metaverse has existed for a long time, Oculus is just helping us immerse our bodies in it.
Which role? A general purpose programming language with an emphasis on readability?
I think sama mentioned that it's now more common for founder to take some money off the table starting at their B round. It makes sense, you don't that the entrepreneur focused on their money problems. A little financial can go a long way with your family.
lisp is beautiful. The crown jewels of computer science. getting to spend time with it reminds you that programming can be fun (and profound) while you are being paid to work with some awful drudgery language solving some stupid problem. Being close to lisp, in this way, is like being at the same party as Audrey Hepburn. It reminds you of grace.
They have both.

Their original offering was indeed a centralized off-chain payment network, where they hold funds on behalf of everyone and just move coins in their own internal database. https://21.co/learn/21-micropayments/#off-chain-transactions...

What they released now is a trustless solution based on "real" bitcoin payments: https://21.co/learn/21-micropayments/#micropayment-channels

(Note, however, that this exists for nearly two years as part of BitcoinJ and other libraries... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11100518)
"What's this Go? C for people that are afraid of malloc() ?"
I'm not suggesting that, merely asking if a ridiculous hypothetical situation would be legal. And contrary to your implication, there have been 40 SCOTUS justices who had no prior judicial experience, including several Chief Justices.

source: http://supreme.findlaw.com/supreme_court/justices/nopriorexp...
> If you work on a real-world project, you soon realize how complex and entangled the view layer can become in Rails. Controllers inheriting from non-obvious parents, including modules and helpers that implicitly require instance variables. And to add even more complexity on top of it, before and after filters (or actions since Rails 4) that can be inherited or skipped by children.

This gives the impression that the real-world Rails programmer doesn't really understand what his programs are doing.
I'm surprised at the shock and awe.

It's a test. It's not production code. It runs and is able to verify behavior. It runs isolated, and no other code is running when it does.

Building publishAt is more powerful than publishNow, but building something more powerful than what you need is hardly good practice. And you still end up with the problem of how you test the code calling publishAt.

This isn't some whack job in the corner saying something he came up with is a good idea. This is how the Ruby community thinks and writes software, with great success. And it does in fact clash with other communities.

The point of this discussion isn't really whether one approach is better than the other. The point is that our tools (specifically dynamic languages with flexible metaprogramming) drastically influence our view of what is acceptable. Your strong disagreement demonstrates the point.
They would have very inside knowledge of the problem space and complete control of the company.
I think it's HN echo chamber. A lot of articles here about new exciting technologies, but when you look at job postings for example this is not the same song.

I'm very excited about Elixir for example. There is a new Elixir blog post/article/github repo posted on HN every day, you would think that Elixir is the new cool thing. Well, not easy to find companies that actually use it.
I would instantly disregard anyone who says this. Just run it in daemon mode and connect with emacsclient.
Yes...but one that is also very fast, portable and with great generic programming.
"not very expensive" could be useful to be explicit here. What is not very expensive for you?
I use the GNU Shepherd init system as an unprivileged user to manage my emacs daemon, and other things like gpg-agent.

The real benefit of 'emacs --daemon', for me, isn't the faster client startup time, but the unification of the many programs that may spawn $EDITOR. Rather than each one spawning a new Emacs process, these programs spawn a client in the window I already have open where I can access everything else I was working on. On top of that, I use the ItsAllText extension for Firefox to edit text fields inside of that same Emacs instance, too. Very convenient.
I play around with NodeJS and front end frameworks like React for my own side projects, but all of my paying client work is made with good ol Django. It just does so many things well and is very mature. I recommend for production code using libraries that have a strong community and have been around for a while so that they don't keep changing all the time.
I'm on 24.5, and I don't know how it was in the past, but Emacs' default minibuffer reading functionality is good enough that Ido, Ivy, Helm or whatnot seem superfluous to me. I can type
C-x C-f ~/Git/projectx/src/ding/~/.xombrero/runtime//etc/fstab RET

it will do the correct thing, and it will give visual feedback. Also I can type

M-x rev-bu RET

and it will run revert-buffer, and if I type TAB instead of RET, it will complete to actual command name. It will ignore case in completions if these variables are set:

;; Ignore case when completing file names in minibuffer.
read-file-name-completion-ignore-case t
read-buffer-completion-ignore-case t
completion-ignore-case t

Also an indispensable config:

enable-recursive-minibuffers t

What does them tools provide that can't be easily done by these? And ido fails when entering a TRAMP file name, so one has to hit C-f in minibuf to drop to the original prompt.
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Which parts of Python 3 do you regard as being worse than Python 2?
We should not be commuting 45 minutes. In the future, you telecommute or live in communities designed to minimize commutes. Traveling long distance should basically be an edge-case and might involve something totally different from short-distance transport like an evacuated tube train e.g. "HyperLoop".

http://tinyvillages.org
yes, but are these articles early sensitive indicators of things to come or just esoteric blovation?
For the record, it was a typo on my part, though I do like this discussion.
If anybody is curious, the zmap project from the University of Michigan does this and more.

https://zmap.io
well, that's for terminal mode. With a window manager, most application has similar start up time which I assume is caused by similar xorg routines being run.

However, running Emacs in daemon mode does reduce this to instant. Not sure why this is.
Is he right about Herbalife being a pyramid scheme?

Is this really a question requiring an answer?
I like Python, but it's gone downhill.

Python was doing just fine until Python's little tin god came up with Python 3 and tried to drive a stake through the heart of Python 2. That backfired, badly; six years on, Python 2 still has far more production use than Python 3. (No, it's not about Unicode. Python 2.6 and later do Unicode just fine. I've written sizeable all-Unicode systems in Python 2.6. It's just that in 3.x, it's the default.)

Coming up next, Python 4, with typing syntax that isn't checked. Ugly typing syntax - some in comments, some as annotations. There's an argument for optional type declarations that are checked, but unchecked declarations are trouble waiting to happen.

The PyPy crowd has brought off a miracle - an optimizing compiler for Python that supports almost all the dynamism of CPython. It took a long time, but they did it. CPython should be retired now, or made to conform to PyPy. But no; the little tin god insists that his CPython defines the language. The PyPy developers struggle to keep up.

The language isn't the worst problem. It's the wildly variable quality of the libraries. The great thing about Go is that it has libraries which are used internally by Google, and thus have been executed billions of times. Python's PyPi (formerly Cheese Shop) has no quality control, and many versions of very similar libraries, each with different bugs. There's no convergence.
The same is indeed of true of programming, at least in my experience. I took a management/consulting detour that lasted about 18 months and getting back into programming was quite though. I could not focus, could not hold the problem in my head, could not go from design concepts to implementation details. It took me a solid 6 months to get back to my former level.
> everything in computer-land was base-2 and things were simple

This has never been true though. Processors have never been "kibihertz". Nor busses, nor modems. Just ram.

The board I'm building at the moment has ram specified as 10ns. That's 10x10^-9 seconds, not 10x2^-20 seconds. Which sounds silly to have to even say, but that's how I feel every time someone wants to pretend that just because something was commonly held when they were at school, does not mean it fits today's standards.

And harddrives, the one everyone obsessed about because their OS incorrectly shows them base2. No. No they weren't. The famous pictures of an IBM305 being lifted out of a plane. That's a 5Mb drive. It holds 5 million characters. 5,000,000 characters.

It's embarrassing enough that this fallacy is older than half our readers. It's even more embarrassing that it was never true in the first place.
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I'm happy TeXmacs works so well for you! For my needs, LyX and LaTeX work better and so I choose to use them. It's nice to see a diversity of software that can be of use for everyone :)
> (the one exception is that I always found proving things difficult)

Proofs are at the heart of math. Everything else is something different.
Python is not dying, it's mature and stable.
The wording and implication of these questions have very different meaning to me today than they did in the 1980-1990s, I can only imagine the 1960s..

Now it is entirely clear to me that if a high profile speaker comes, it is not that they are merely being reimbursed for travel expenses with a few extravagances, nice dinners.. maybe a meaningless honorary certificate.

Being politically controversial and then cashing in on the speech circuit is now an openly discussed career plan. Paying for the high profile but educationally useless speeches is one way that even average colleges are moving from public/educational spaces into transaction centers for prestige and accolades.

If you rephrase the question to be clear that no one is being payed for their presence, then I could care less who shows up to speak of their own volition.

But all of those choices are now in a bundled product where you must pay the 4 year sticker price, so what you don't like will need to be handled by their ever growing PR-agency, oops I really meant to say administration..
It speaks to how finite we are around "knowledge." At the moment we reach understanding, we experience a sophomoric feeling of confidence. But as it fades farther and farther from our working memory, we become less fluent and more hesitant. The emerging pattern becomes one of "I can understand these interesting concepts, but it takes a lot of work and they don't last, so I have to choose to understand practically and situationally." And then in the end our bodies and personalities turn out to control our minds more than we might want to believe, as we turn away from one problem and towards a different one on some whim, never able to view the whole.

As I recognize this more in myself, I am more inclined to become a bit of a librarian and develop better methods of personal note-taking and information retrieval, so that I lose less each time my mind flutters. At the moment that's turned into a fascination with mind maps - every time I need to critically-think through a problem I start mapping it. In the future I might look into ways of searching through those maps.
You're right indeed. 21's mining chip does give a negative ROI, even in areas where electricity is very cheap.

Why would anyone buy a $400 mining chip that costs more in electricity than it produces in bitcoins, when they can just buy $400 worth of bitcoins? Beats me...
I experiment the same problem with "trivial regular expressions" in two yeats old Perl programs.
Did this all happen while they were in the bar? Seriously though, both stereotypes are off-base (Go? really?)
At least it keeps you from having regrets about `should have done a degree'.
Because it's young and we still don't know how it will pan out.
Ubiquitous solar, wind, and batteries together with much more energy efficient buildings and devices will make traditional electric utilities mostly irrelevant. In the future, long or even medium length electric distribution will mainly be for back-up purposes. Nano/micro-grids will be more like commercial/consumer products purchased by neighborhood developers or individual homeowners, that integrate over common platforms, rather than utilities.

http://tinyvillages.org
And 25 is near and with xwidget support, i.e. embedding things like a Webkit instance in a buffer. I guess I will be able to "exec emacs --debug-init" in my .xsession soon.
I'd love to get started using emacs, but it's extremely difficult.

I want to use it to write c++ on Windows. I'd like to have autocompletion support, and navigation support on a large project (>1million lines).

I have yet to manage to get it set up. If it were more straightforward to set up and use, more people would use it I'm sure.
Functional Analysis or Nonlinear Functional Analysis?
Don't forget that Django and React make a great combination.

You probably still want Django to handle server-side rendering for most of your site (unless you're a masochist). Django Rest Framework for the API, and React (or whatever) to handle the app-like parts.
Old-time system developers wrote Go.
Lost me after the long praise for the packaging (which I consider irrelevant) at:

"The watch displays a swirling globular particle cloud – it’s not anything in particular but it looks like it could be an abstract representation of a lot of things: flocking starlings; schooling plankton; a neural network; a star cluster sped up so that every second represents a billion years; a concept-art study for the sentient planet Solaris in the Stanislaw Lem novel of the same name."

Excuse my cynicism, but I'm here to read informative reviews/analysis, insightful ideas, rather than look at gorgeous
 photos of black technology set to wood textures and read this syrupy poetry. :-/
The Moonshot Proposal – Giving away my startup to a nonprofit – Comments needed
Reasonable Python is much younger than that. (Only fair, if you make an adjustment for reasonable js.)
Great point. I think this applies to scientific research in general, which is why the constant emphasis on only funding research with clear and immediate economic payoff seems a bit shortsighted.

In reality, chances are that most research won't lead to anything significant - but the 1% that does will have outsized impact that will more than pay for the rest. And we don't know which 1% this will be in advance.
I started using Python because everyone around me was starting to use it about a year ago. By now I'm rather proficient at it and it's replacing my primary language (PHP) to write quick scripts to run from the command line. In a few weeks I'll also be working on a web project in Python (where I'd normally have picked PHP).

I still use PHP and bash a ton, will use Java in school next semester, used C# during my internship, but Python is among my core tools right now. I notice that library support for Python is so, so much better than for PHP, making my life a lot easier at times.

As for Go, I still intend to look at it, at some point in the future. Basically like I intended to look at Python three or four years ago.

Javascript, yeah for in browsers.

Julia? I heard of it but I still think of the girl first and the language second. Never looked at it and don't see it come by that often. Data science you say? I thought R was hot there, a language I was going to look at somewhere in the next few months (my girlfriend will get it in university, good opportunity for me as well).
That fits in level 3 cache these days:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-i7-nehalem-cpu,204...
If you're looking for an "open" e-reader, your best bet is probably one from Kobo: https://us.kobobooks.com/
Stuff like Numba greatly decreases the need for Julia.

C++17 also feels surprisingly dynamic, and together with Cython for easy Python-C++ interop also decreases the need for Julia.

And reports from the Julia world are not exactly encouraging - http://danluu.com/julialang/
So would you object to a map like this[1] because Alaska and Hawaii are not geographically to scale with the other states? (Or in the correct geographic position for that matter)

Clearly distorting those 2 states does not distort the information the map conveys. So too with the other 48.

>...they always show the total votes bar chart next to the map...

I'm afraid not. Indeed the map I cited does not. Anyone glancing at it could fairly likely think Red won when in fact Blue won by very large margin. Actually it's hard to imagine a more confusing graphic.

[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Electora...
Given the terrible state of advertising, I would welcome a search engine that penalizes pages with popovers, animated ads, auto playing audio, and so on. Google would never build this, given its business model.

I hope Wikipedia brings some innovation to search, untethered from advertising revenue.
I currently operate this service, let me know if there's any questions about it!
> Old-Timer Developer:

> I will use [a language with mandatory garbage collection]

I lol'd
I had never considered Julia as a general purpose language. I assumed it was targetted mainly at data science etc.
The kindle is far from "open," but note you can convert any .epub to .mobi using calibre, so technically you can read anything.

Works pretty well.
I definitely missed a connective thought in that comment. I am not saying hard drugs are good. I am saying the movement to soft and prescription drugs is just another form of weakness.

To me, (and this will grab more downvotes), the alarming part of that data is the idea that "less fighting" is good. There are certain behaviors that I feel are good for teenagers. Teens not fighting = teens not being teens, for whatever reason that may be.
October 16, 2000
- I am giving away the 100% of my startup. More than 4 years of effort of lots of people, money and dreams.

- I commit to destine an extra around $10.000 of my own money (all I have) to that cause if people think and show that the Moonshot Proposal is something that worth a try.

- I commit to destine a 10% of my life income to social causes, from now to my death. (I will give it, even if you don’t support this proposal).

So yes, as the saying goes: “I am all in.” .... you can read it more in the link.

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

Since some of you already know Watsi and other YCombinator nonprofit startups, I would love to read your opinion.

I will read your comments and answer your questions here.
Thanks in advance.
Agreed. If anything, the poverty that comes with drugs and early pregnancy is closer to economic enslavement.
My PhD is in physics, from 20+ years ago, and I would not be able to explain or defend it today without studying it for a while. I've even forgotten the language (Pascal) that I wrote my experimental control and analysis code in.

My experiment formed the basis of a fairly productive new research program for my thesis advisor, so at least it lived on in somebody's brain, but not in mine. ;-)