skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very well-thought out perspective Forrst, thanks for taking the time to check it out. The post types currently are screenshots, links, and code. Each can have an optional description (free text) and tags if the user so chooses.

I agree that what will set Forrst apart is its community. I aim to help facilitate that growth, as well as help people discover like-minded people they might enjoy knowing and engaging with.
I also thought the exact same thing, but I know that encoding stuff is so complex that I may be missing something. For what its worth, I believe Cocoa does things this way: a string is an abstract object of unicode code points, when its time to read or write you must choose an encoding.
> Is there a technical reason why Ruby doesn't do this?

Han Unification. Gory details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
Your numbers seem off:

Starbucks latte with nonfat milk = 168 calories

http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-starbucks-coffee-caff...

6" Subway Cheesesteak (It was the worst one I could find on browsing) = 360 calories

http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-subway-sandwiches-6-c...

Small bag of Lays potato chips = 150 calories

http://www.dietfacts.com/html/nutrition-facts/frito-lay-lays...

Kit-kat bar = 210 calories

http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-hersheys-kit-kat-milk...

Fazoli's spaghetti and meatballs (Again, the worst I could find) = 720 calories

http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-fazolis-spaghetti-mea...

If you were to add in an extra large vanilla shake from McDonald's you'd add a quick 1100 calories to your day.
Dude, you are seriously unbalanced. Do you have any talents other than yelling into a video camera? Who appointed you the watchdog of tech industry ethics?

The worst you can say about Sam Odio is that he wasn't more timely and direct with his refusal. As others have pointed out, saying maybe is often an easier way of saying no. In the end he didn't provide the kick back and he did the right thing by going to Techcrunch.

I'm sure you've got your own skeletons and as you so ominously warned Odio, 'you will get what's coming to you'.

Karma's a bitch.
Are these encodings common enough that they're worth supporting in the basic String class? Surely another class could be provided to handle these edge cases, they don't have to be natively handled.

There's no need for any data loss to occur - the String class would merely not support converting from non round-trippable encodings.
There isn't a good idea that a standards body hasn't fucked up. Maybe it's because these problems are harder than they seem. Or maybe they're just plain screwed up. Or maybe it's Adobe.
Magic Paint And A Loquacious German At Microsoft TechFest (Videos)
A not-insignificant fly in the ointment is that Tor gets used a lot right now by spammers. So much in fact that we had to ban Tor nodes from connecting to any justin.tv server. I wouldn't be surprised if many other websites have the same system in place - it's technically easy to arrange - see http://www.ahbl.org/
I'm pretty sure it was all one take - most of their videos are like that. It may have taken multiple tries to get everything right ('Here it goes again', their most popular video with the treadmills, took 17 attempts, but they captured it all in one take [source:Wikipedia]).

No word yet on how many attempts this took - hopefully they didn't drop too many pianos
Apple Only Wants 16+ Year-Olds Working Its Dodgy Sweatshops - Apple - Gawker
Edward Tufte is definitely a recognized design guru but ever since I found out about him I have been _very_ puzzled about the design of his website. I would expect a design guru to have a better website.
It’s going to take five years - six words that can save your startup
Save the U233
Top hacker says Windows 7 is harder to hit - Mac OS is a doddle
The guys who made the Rube Goldberg machine are brilliant hackers based in LA: http://syynlabs.com/
Isn't this more like "channel incompetence" than channel conflict? My understanding of channel conflict is that it happens when manufacturers disintermediate their channel partners by selling directly to customers (which is exactly what it seems Oracle will be doing now).

What Sun did was to fail to police their channel partners and confirm that they would actually sell intermediate quantities of equipment; I know that throughout the '90s it was extremely difficult for me to buy single Sun SPARC systems (workstations and servers), and as noted in my original message too many startups found it impossible to buy six figures worth of systems.

I assume their partners understood that Sun handled the really big purchases (maybe they got a piece of the action???) and that the only conflict was when Sun set up their web storefront for the small purchases a customer could put on a credit card.
AT&T replaces Google with Yahoo on Android phone
Hacking The NY Times Best Seller List
This is exactly the point of Hackety Hack.

I need to wrap up this OSX and Windows stuff so that I can actually promote it.
I know what you mean. I did that a lot (hard coding problems, hoping to get money, just an excuse to code). What I ended up realizing was that for me coding is like mountain climbing, and that I really enjoy each new peak.

There is some research into the problem space, the ascent, the feeling of victory, but the descent (aka the supporting code around the core problem) while possibly challenging just isn't satisfying.

If you're able (hourly pay/equity/whatever) and want to see some of your things get off the ground, find someone else that hasn't climbed those boring/supporting peaks and give them a chance to help and to do some climbing of their own.
You can see the camera man's reflection in the silver ball about 2m28s into the video.
Registrants of canceled Android Developer Lab getting a free phone?
Practically speaking, what data are you talking about? Which characters don't map? The mapping here looks pretty complete, except for "DBCS LEAD BYTE". Is that a problem? Other non-round trip mappings look like it's because different vendors have different meanings for that character. That's not Unicode's fault.

http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT/WINDOW...
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1159352
Yay, I struggle with this too.

Have this compulsive need to complete the entire book.

Afraid, that not devoting enough effort I will shortchange my reading effort. That I'd be withdrawing from a challenging but fruitful experience (if the text is difficult, or the author's style is boring or has a level of incomprehensibility).

I resolved this dilemma by at least making it half way through a book, or at least first two chapters for those dreadful cases. Or not at all, as of late, have realized that there is just so much to read, that no need to waste on uninteresting/uninspired.
Steve Jobs, 1996: "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal"
Some of it has to do with Han Unification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification).

Mostly, though, it's because some of these characters are overloaded. If you've got a Windows system, go into the DOS window and type "chcp 932" (you may need the Japanese language files installed). When you type '\', you'll get '¥' (making "C:\Program Files\" look like "C:¥Program Files¥").

In the systems where what become CP932 were first used, the backslash wasn't necessary in Japanese, so that character point was used to encode the yen symbol. Other systems used the backslash, so it was encoded as a different point. When JIS unified the existing Japanese code pages, it couldn't very well go back in time to change all that old data, so it merged the two encodings on many things. So, there's only one Unicode codepoint for the yen glyph ¥, but in this one encoding there's two different characters for it.

This is the most blatant example of a problem with Unicode transcoding, but as far as I know, it's not the only one.

See http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-utf8@nl.linux.org/msg02337... for what could be done, but probably won't.
I couldn’t imagine jumping into programming (or even wanting to) without a problem to solve first. That’s the whole point of programming, anyway. If someone wants to learn programming, maybe we could help by directing them towards a problem they’d find interesting.
I used the bruegger's bagel and medium latte from their website:

http://www.brueggers.com/documents/nutrition.pdf

Subway value was from the "Cold Cut Combo":

http://www.subway.com/subwayroot/menunutrition/nutrition/pdf...

(Note that Subway's page says the cheesesteak sub you mention is 520 calories, not 360.)

spaghetti and meatballs value was from here
http://www.calorieking.com/foods/calories-in-italian-spaghet...

I did inflate the potato chips, I thought the small bag was 3oz, not 1oz. Also I thought the kit kat was per bar.

3800 calories is still only a little bit of work. Most people I know drink 2 lattes, 2 or more beers, and would consider the 6" sub the "diet" option.
Fundamentally, science is a two-step process:

Observe. Theorize. (Repeat as long as it takes to stabilize.)

A great deal of structure has arisen around both of these things. Descriptions of how observations should be carried out, how experiments should be designed to test theories, how results should be reported, how outlying data should be handled, when your data is "good enough" to stop repeating (95% CIs and such), and more.

But our methods for "how results should be reported" were developed in an age when print journals were the main source of scientific reporting. There simply wasn't room for long descriptions of specific setup details, daily travails, etc. There wasn't room for complete data sets of millions of points. Now there is. It's refreshing to see someone taking an approach to science that says "we've got the space to report every detail, so let's do it. Anyone can dig deeper and get the full story if they're interested."
I thought Cassandra used only keys for selects - but in this post I see you can also use slices of from..to values. Are there any other predicates that one can use? Like ones implementing 'LIKE string%' or 'LIKE %string%'?

It doesn't look like that from the API wiki, but maybe someone knows if that's possible, or planned.
If a CP932 '\' is interpreted as '¥', but is exported as CP932 '¥', there's data loss. Unless Python 3 keeps the original data around when it converts to Unicode (probably UTF-8 or UTF-16), there will be data loss in those cases. It's unavoidable.
Nope.

Twitter's business model should be to tend to the platform and create the eco-system around it that creates value for both the 3rd parties AND twitter.

If twitter acquires a participant in the ecosystem, that vertical is essentially locked up because how can a third party compete directly with twitter? Search is the obvious example because it has happened (Summize).

While it is true Twitter is creating accounts for business, they are not going to be offering the kind of functionality CoTweet and others offer.
If there's ~398 byte combinations that can be translated only one way, but not the other, you're still losing data. (The big one that always gets pointed out? '\' and '¥'.)
It has text that can be read. What else do you need?
To be honest, I don't know what you're saying.

All I wanted to say was that those three sites could be technically created using HTML5.

You then seemed to say that HTML5 doesn't actually let you create the effects exhibited in those websites. I corrected you and referred you to the modules.

Sorry for any misunderstandings. If we are clear on the above, and you would like to bring up a new point, I'd be happy to engage in a separate debate.
"Really?"

Is the target dead? Were they stopped?

Really.

"I was under the impression that something like 25 agents had their covers blown by having their pictures in every major newspaper in the world."

And their names are...?

Considering that a number of analysts point out that the involved people appeared aware of, but not concerned by, the security cameras, it seems unlikely that any exposure was unexpected.
Also some discussion here by the project co-author: http://jmoiron.net/blog/johnny-cache/
It wasn't Picasso, but Eliot.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041138
Um. Wasn't Java's original choice UCS-2 (same as NTFS originally)? UTF-16 has surrogate characters and the length will be one or two 16-bit values depending on whether it's a surrogate. UCS-2 was a fixed 16-bit character size, long since deemed a mistake.
There is one thing I do not like at all in the Paleo Diet: MEAT.

There are countless studies about effects of eating meat, from heart disease to cancer. What study is there about the BENEFITS of meat? This diet is a dangerous fad.

I personally prefer the Eat To Live diet: basically loads and loads of greens, veggies and fruit.
Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation
The Startup Bus: Is This How Outsiders See Startup Culture?
10% fewer calories could mean reducing your intake by 250 calories a day. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories, so that's a difference of 1lb of fat every 2 weeks. If you were maintaining your weight at the previous level, you'd lose 1lb every 2 weeks at the 10% reduced level. When it comes to dietary health, it's all about small changes and long time horizons.
The problem with the New York Times
Sure, but when you're talking about what makes a place better than another for startups, what matters is not who's more important, but what the limiting factor is.

And to me it seems clear that in NYC it's investors, not entrepreneurs. Sure there might be tons of smart & innovative hackers here. But if most of them aren't going to get funded, then they're gonna move to the Valley.

(I realize more investors could move here/get started here, and it does seem to be happening, but they have much more inertia and are rich, so they don't have to move, unlike most cash-strapped entrepreneurs looking for the next bit of funding that will allow them to really expand.)
I listen to audiobooks on my iPod while bicycling through the countryside.
I can kind of see his point. Joel seems to be running his business in a very open way, with lots of details about hiring and such being blogged about publicly and in his magazine column. It would be a bit of a disconnect to get closer in as interviewee, just to see the traditional corporate walls come up. It doesn't surprise me though.
There is NO way that is healthy. No way.
"The State of the NY technology industry is strong"
I couldn't get it to work in Mac OS X Snow Leopard with Chrome. I could see myself, but the other box was always either non existent or white.
Can Bloom Boxes Power Entire Data Centers?
What about those of us who are insatiably curious and love to learn for learning's sake?

I'd find it more frustrating than anything to be confronted with a significant problem right out of the gate.
MacGyver of the Day: Limor "Ladyada" Fried
It's interesting you say that because the doctor who wrote ETL, which you mention in another post, prescribes intermittent fasting all the time. He's even written a book about it: http://www.amazon.com/Fasting-Eating-Health-Medical-Conqueri...
Private Erlang package repos with Erlware Portius
Genetic Identity Theft: Will You Need to Protect Your Genome?
Scientists Have Discovered Booze That Won't Give You A Hangover
Awesome! That was one thing I was going to ask for, too. =)
Sorry, but by filing this lawsuit, Apple is trying to force us to do exactly that. Or at least, force us to stop using HTC phones that "look like" an iPhone.

You're appealing to choice in your argument, but by asserting patent rights Apple is saying that there is no choice.
Hope this is successful! There's a pronounced lack of incubators or "angel" funding sources for independent game developers.
Going to space in a homemade rocket: What you can do if you put your mind to it
Facebook Connect, anyone?

It'd eliminate the account creation hurdle and allow you to get more users involved right off the bat through discriminating sharing of data on users' Walls/Profiles.
While I agree with the advice about outliers, I'm not sure I'd describe the average small business owner as rich...

Is your personal experience simply different to mine?
There's No Room for the Idea Guy
I suggest you start here:

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Objective-C-2-0-Stephen-Ko...

Perhaps you can move to the book you have after you are reasonably comfortable with objective-c (and a little bit of cocoa).

Good luck.
UTF-\d is not unicode. Unicode isn't an encoding, it's the decoded representation of a character encoding.

[edit] clarified example
>>> s = u'\xa5' # shiftjis decoding of \
>>> print s.encode('shiftjis')
\
>>> print s.encode('utf-8')
¥
As smokey_the_bear said, your basal metabolic rate will go up as you gain weight, meaning you will eventually need 3800 calories a day to maintain your current weight. I'm guessing this point is somewhere around 400lb, roughly. You'd have to add calories above and beyond to keep gaining weight.

Also you have to look at the level of activity. An athlete or construction worker can probably eat 3800 calories every day and not gain weight.
Is programming twice as much work as designing? (2 programmers, 1 designer).

What would change if programming was 4x faster than it is now (e.g. because of imaginary better tools)? Would you do 2 designers with 1 programmer? Could you offload some of the designer work to programmers?
Different strokes. I got into programming by goofing off. Sometimes I wonder about all these droids around me and all their silly "problems" they are obsessed with solving.
"You mean like Google Voice and Google Maps Navigation? Unfortunately that doesn't seem to have helped much."

Android is a few years behind IPhone but is gaining traction. I seriously do not feel like Android needs much help. All it needs is just time and have Apple continue to try to put tight controls on its ecosystem.
All good points. However, there are more issues with dealing with strings in the wild than just round-tripping between encodings.

Many of the issues I've dealt with when data mining involved mixed encodings within the same document, documents labelled with the wrong encoding in the metadata, and documents with no encoding information. There's only so much you can do as far as sniffing character sets and languages to avoid mojibake and other, more subtle, problems.

For my purposes, converting to Unicode and losing round-tripping is only a minor concern, whereas dealing with non-Unicode encodings is often a source of major problems.

So, personally, having worked both in languages that deal with strings by converting them internally to Unicode, and ones that treat them as encoding-tagged byte streams, I definitely favor the ones that deal with them as Unicode. But, my purposes aren't everyone's, and I'm not convinced there's a paradigm that would suit both usage patterns.
"It looks like twitter + images/screenshots, more or less"

Perhaps another way to use forrst is as something like ffffound.com for code & web design - I browse it mostly in "Everyone's Posts" view, just to see interesting/inspiring stuff.
I'm in agreement with one point at least.

I used to force myself to complete books that I wasn't enjoying out of some misplaced sense of achievement on completing a "difficult" book.

I had the misfortune of reading "A Chancer" by James Kelman (otherwise, one of my favourite authors.) I was on a 4 hour bus trip, I was a captive audience. It was dreadful.

I stopped reading the boring story that I didn't care about and let my mind wander for 4 hours instead.

After that I now feel empowered to put down a book that I'm not enjoying, even one I feel is meant to be "good for me."
That and the timing of the machines to the song amazes me the most.
Tor does not mean that you are barred from authenticating end-users. It means that the network they are on can't tell who they are.

Freenode runs a hidden Tor service that requires you to register a PGP key with them. Otherwise, Tor connections are blocked (because of spam).
I've never noticed a youtube video before that was offered in 1080p. Great picture and it loaded quickly too. Although there were a few hiccups in the video during quick pans.
What functional skill would be most valuable for an enthusiastic idea guy? Writing SQL queries, scripting in Python, PHP/CSS front end, or something else?
cotweet.com has been down all day as far as I can tell. I hope it comes back soon.
I think a big factor of "why now in NYC?" was the recession: with firms collapsing, job security at an all time low, and dismal salary and bonu$ prospects, all the talented individuals that had flocked to Wall Street and hedge funds were now leaving or forced out. This yielded two things: smart, networked, tech savvy individuals that had monetary padding (via a few years of pulling down salaries and bonuses back in the gilded era) to bootstrap an idea and the network to tap into AND investment oriented folks looking for opportunities that offered a better ROI than the dismal public capital markets'.
If you're at all interested in getting users to click on links to your site, then you need to make the url relevant. All the discussion of unique ids and other parts is for technical types who want to split definitions. If you are after traffic, whether, search, referral or text advertising (adwords) then you'll want a short, concise Url that closely matches what the searcher wants. Click through rates for adwords where the url matches the search term can be twice as high as when they don't match.

Rightly or wrongly, the average internet user equates the Url as a strong indicator of the content on a page. Google follows what people do, so they weight it highly as well.

Want traffic? Short human readable Urls you need.
Wow! You guys are harsh. Love it. I should have been harsher. :P
I suppose this comment thread is pretty illustrative of why it's so hard for people to count calories to lose weight - even though we both looked up data it was different enough that it could be significant in someone's diet.

I was personally enlightened, at least.
"I have thrown my life into Divvyshot for the last year. I've personally invested close to $100,000 into the company. I would probably give anything I have to see it succeed. Other than a happy and fulfilling relationship with my girlfriend, there's nothing I want more."

Sounds like a big deal to me. Not good when good men like Sam have to deal with men of dubious morals and ethics and for the kicker we get to hear that the issue is that our sense [of] humor is lacking.

Peace and love.
Pre-ordering isn't really gaming the system, it's been understood that having a following pretty much ensures you're going to hit onto a list. The real question here is whether or not these two can turn their online-audience into an offline-audience.

With authors I've frequently decided to become an online fan after being an offline fan for up to years. However I've rarely done it the other way, and never for a book.
60% of Americans believe the Noah's Ark story to be literally true.

Assuming you don't believe 2 members of every terrestrial species fit in a wooden boat and repopulated the entire Earth from complete extinction during man's lifetime, you are probably more sane than average.

EDIT: source: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/primetime/US/views_of_bible_p...
Needs a better explanation of what it is, what it does, and why anyone would use it - think of the end users.

Also, for time-sensitive video chat, Twitter OAuth is where it's at.