skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The typical user does not install an operating system. Thus, it would imply a pre-installed Ubuntu with adequately compatible hardware and all your worries disappear.
And therein lies the insanity that is a BOM: it's a character that's meant to be invisible, even to your UTF-8 capable text editor. With this in mind, it's not clear what is supposed to be able to view or edit this character, short of a hex editor. Somebody else mentioned even cat ignores it; how are you supposed to easily tell that it's there or not?

IMHO a BOM is completely ridiculous to have on a UTF-8 file, because UTF-8 has no ambiguity over endian-ness that a BOM needs to resolve, and it breaks the principle that UTF-8 can serve as ASCII when all the codepoints <0x7F.

Is there any point to using it in UTF-8 besides pain, suffering, and "well UTF-16 and UTF-32 have it"?

The answer, straight from the horse's mouth.

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/ch02.pdf , pg. 36

"Use of a BOM is neither required nor recommended for UTF-8, but may be encountered in contexts where UTF-8 data is converted from other encoding forms that use a BOM or where the BOM is used as a UTF-8 signature."

That's right, the UTF-8 BOM is neither required nor recommended. I rest my case.
The point of the article is that they've discovered a concrete physical link between environment and DNA. We knew it happened, but now we have an instance. It's a pretty big step.

Aside: Evolution works by natural selection across generations - the ones with the good genes live, bad genes lose. An individual's genes don't need to change for the process to take place. Of course, random mutations in DNA are a big part of what cause the variation that results in good and bad genes, so yes, sometimes changes happen within an individual. But those are random changes, whereas this is a response to the immediate environment.
So you think most people found the post interesting because of the thing that they're actually going to talk about next time rather than the actual content?

Actually, yes. I posted a comment on the previous article saying so. The information in the current article is rather trite. The intricacies of kernel privilege escalation is a different story.
Let’s Write Sherlock Holmes Essay
Sherlock Holmes is definitely one of the most popular book characters of all times. That is why most literatures teachers ask the students to write a Sherlock Holmes essay now and then. It falls into the category of literary essays. But maybe it won’t be enough for you to read just one book, since it is a character developed through a series of four novels and more than fifty short stories. That is why you have so much to say about him..
> UNIX ideology taken to the logical extreme

I thought "UNIX ideology" was "streams in motion; streams at rest." (Everything reads streams and produces streams; you create complex programs by piping a stream through smaller programs.) Shell scripting is really the pinnacle of UNIXism.
> That is a classic pickup line, you know? Walk up to a girl and compliment another equally beautiful girl. This usually triggers a bit of jealousy and the guy seems increasingly attractive out of competition with the other girl.

Thank you for that bit of information, but like you, I too have a penis between my legs. My apologies if I gave the wrong impression. :-p
Yeah, I heard you can get those from I.B.M. :-P

When your style guide requires you to misspell proper names, that's when you know it's total crap.
Do you actually hate the languages listed under "Not Used", or do you just find them useless for the kind of work you do?
SUPPORT DANTE TO BECOME THE FIRST NOBODY TO HOST SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
Oh please, how am I ever supposed to make practical use of this without NSZombieEnabled?!
> How can you hate any language until you have spent the time to learn and understand it?

There's also a risk that if you don't know a popular, but bad languages (or at least take time to understand why people call it bad, rather than just read what other people have said), you won't know to avoid other languages built along the same lines.

Also, while a language overall might be unpleasant, it can still teach you new concepts. I had to be dragged screaming and kicking away from Perl and C++ into Java. However, Java has got me thinking "if only there was a garbage collected statically typed language with a good concurrency/threading story that wasn't as verbose, had first class functions and (optionally) did some form of MI/mixins". That thought lead me onto Scala, OCaml and (once I have some free cycles) Haskell.
DNS is basically a huge associative array [which] gets cached at nameservers

Uhoh. This might be a dangerous meme.
oh, yeah, the canonical lecture about you may not especially enjoy java and C# the languages but the JVM and .NET platforms are pretty evolved platforms, nice IDE plugins, gazillions of well-tested libs for any common needs.

Don't forget VS2010 out in 12 days, woohoo! And i'm not sure what it means to combine Hotspot, OpenJDK and JRockit but it'll be excitin'
The problem is that what you wrote is exactly what you might have written if you were trying to be a dick. In theory, the perfect ambiguity of the message would be cool in itself, leaving your recipient in a surreal quantum juxtaposition of two states, which she could maintain by responding equally ambiguously, and you would respond in kind, and after you two bonded online over your shared joke you would get together for coffee and talk about Poe's Law. In theory. In reality, the "bitter, sarcastic dick" possibility has a much bigger emotional impact than the "friendly joker" possibility, so it's a very unpleasant email to receive, which can (perfectly reasonably) be taken as evidence that it wasn't sent with friendly intent.

Solution: provide some kind of clue to reassure her that you are, in fact, joking, and not turning into Mr. Hyde at the first hint of rejection.
Very hard to read that website.
That's a great idea - good luck with the app and make sure to update on HN when you release TapTyping!
There's plenty of real tech in the SF Bay -- you just have to have enough sense to look for it since, yes, the signal-to-noise ratio in SF is a lot worse than other tech areas.
I was thinking "there's more than one way to do it". Perl can also handle streams very efficiently and do lots more. Having worked in the operations world, I also find shell scripting to be an anti-pattern. Automation/tools built as shell scripts are much more brittle and harder to make _production_ ready (i.e., running 24/7 in a datacenter with no human intervention, but being held up to a strict SLA).

Perl (as well as Ruby and to a lesser extent Python) lets you scale from simple scripts to full-on tools. It's easy to write pipes, filters, one-liners and simple scripts in Perl. You can then add logging to them (using the excellent log4perl package), let them make socket calls to a monitoring system (or embed a server in them to let a monitoring system connect to them), debug them with a real debugger, extend them to call C libraries (xs is easy) and package them into classes and packages, allowing others to re-use them as components of other systems.
I've never learned a language I've hated to get a job, but I've learned to hate many languages (or at least aspects thereof).

Learned being the operative word.

At this point in your career you'd be well served to learn idiomatic blub a few times over, in the same way you'll be well served to work with a variety of personality types.

When the time comes for your next venture, be it in 6 months, or 6 years, you'll make a better decision i.e. grounded in understanding, about each.

Rinse; repeat.

Edit:

I'm not suggesting you take just any old job, however. Be discerning.
More than the screen?
For those of us who don't have the luxury of human firewalls, I recommend a puppet. The puppet answers the emails so that you don't have to. He says whatever needs to be said to bring the business and customer to a successful resolution. The puppet has no ego, the puppet has no worries, the puppet has no deep-seated need for approval, the puppet exists only to reach mutually beneficial solutions.

My puppet has gotten through a couple of cheerful responses to emails which, if I had read them myself, would have left me unable to sleep for weeks.

My puppet also reports that the worst one had a follow-up "Thanks for getting back to me! Oh sorry I was so stressed yesterday lol." The puppet lols, too.
Mistaken paternity would be readily apparent from a 23andMe test. There is a section where they compare family DNA, and a child is expected to share 50% of their chromosomal segments with their father. Of course, both child and parent would have to be tested.

I agree completely, the disease predispositions in the 23andMe service fall far from being of any value. http://Navigenics.com and http://www.deCODEme.com do a better job at this.
APOD: Water on Moon
It uses pthreads. The source is very approachable and small, if you want to dig a bit more.
License Agreement for Go To Hellman Blog
This reminds me, nearly every Apple video has the iPad on the leg of somebody sitting crosslegged, sort of stuck there with magic velcro or something. Having balanced a fair share of laptops on my legs, and not enjoying the precariousness of it, I would be a bit frightened of hammering on a $600 slab with an unprotected glass front without securing it with at least one of my hands. And typing with one hand, even on a physical keyboard, stinks.
I've seen ruby objects with #source_location before, but, agreed, should be default.
I understand the point of this article but...

> a credit card form is not a feature

It absolutely is. It's a feature that every paying customer will use at least once. I would say if you can't properly support international CC orders/addresses, then make that your policy and don't ask for the country.

There's nothing wrong with saying "Sorry, US addresses only" if you don't have the resources to support international. But if you're asking your users what country they live in, you should have all of the machinery in place to properly process it.
If you read the post you'll see that we have OBJJ_ZOMBIE_DETECTION. It actually works :).
The only thing to avoid are companies that don't care about developer talent. Their goal isn't to grow talent, they want to find someone who will jump right in and meet their business needs (no more, but also no less) -- and when they leave, can be easily be replaced. That's why they're using these technologies: they can just look for somebody who knows Struts 1.4, Oracle and Spring (or w/e) (and these people are plentiful).

That's not to say they don't care about any talent: it's just software development is neither their core competency nor a competitive advantage. They may have great pay and hours (and may be doing something great for the world), but if you're a programmer because you love programming, you should go (at least for your first job) to an employer that will invest in you.
Moran Atias: The Israeli Beauty Is Equally Famous Abroad
I loved Dr. Doolittle when I was a kid so this brought a smile to my face.
I had no idea there was so many. There are almost as many as there are web frameworks. ;-)

unittest is standard but it always feels klunky to me (perhaps that's the lingering stench of Java ... I kid). nose is my favorite at the moment. It is more complicated that I would prefer but writing tests is very easy and the reporting of failures is good.
Web browser: http://dig.jsondns.org/IN/hacker.wp.dg.cx/TXT
Drawing this sort of specious parallel is entertaining, to be sure, but doesn't help people place orders.

It does if the order form requires this information. A little extraneous information on the postage label isn't going to cause significant delays for your mail as long as the underlying details are right (street address and ZIP code for most of the US - everything else is filler). Mail delivery systems are designed to deal with this (hence the introduction of the ZIP code in the first place) because people don't always address their mail to technical specifications.
Not off topic, my grandmother just cannot use a mouse. She's sat in front of my PC and is absolutely baffled by it.

I might as well have asked her to do Differential Calculus.

However, I think the iPad will be different. If she's playing say, solitaire and wants to move something - she touches it with her finger and moves it. Easy.
My favorite abuse of DNS is Dan Kaminsky using it to stream DNS.
Not implying there isn't. Quantitatively, there is likely still more real tech in Bay Area than anywhere else. I am in Bay Area and likely not going anywhere :-) It's the signal-to-noise ratio can be distracting and upsetting for somebody new. I've seen lots of smart young technologists waste away implementing a "business guy's" vision and (after three-four years of nothing but web development) end up unhappy, but with few other career options.
And this is not an April Fool's joke. The app store hadn't updated for me when I first saw this. Then the actual buy screen still said $49.99. Now I can't buy it because it's being modified in the store. Sometimes Hacker News is too quick with the news. :-)

I imagine this app is at worth at least the price of a cup of coffee.
For this to be funny, your actual product has to be well-known.
That is actually a very valid question - anyone know the stack similar to rabbitmq server + celeryd , but built around zeromq ?
I dislike those languages, in part because I find them unnecessary for my purposes, and in part because I hate their fanatical adherents.
In my opinion, it depends on the crossover of users. If the information is clearly not useful to different users its ok to put them on different sites. If one site is fastestanimals.com and one is baseballplayers.com then it might be better to create separate sites to cater to the audiences separately.

I sometimes wonder why serverfault, poweruser and stackoverflow are on different domains as I think in many cases its the same user community. nobody is going to search three times in each service.

I think you're lining yourself up to be spread too thin. Creating infographics is time consuming and I would suspect that it would be better to focus on one topic and really nail that first before thinking about spreading out across multiple topics. Can you really create enough infographics on one topic often enough to have users coming back to your site over and over? What about multiple topics?

I'll admit that I don't know much about the SEO aspects of this though.
go to xkcd.com: The webcomic XKCD now has a command prompt
I believe fuzzy logic, or something similar, is used in some handwriting recognition software. E.g. as you are looking at a letter, you start with "This letter is an A" as having value 1/26, etc... and start to change them as you look at it. In this case its very similar to probability. I'm not sure of any other uses.

However, I remember reading studies that seemed to indicate that apes/chimps use fuzzy logic. I don't remember who wrote it or how they tested it, but it seemed fairly convincing at the time.

So, I guess I'd say its not so useful now (at least not as an independent concept) but if its true that humans use it, it might become useful in the future.

In the end though, fuzzy logic isn't going to solve your problems for you, at least not alone. The way you use the fuzzy logic is going to be much more important.
Just like the Segway.
I.B.M. is the correct style for the company's name. Their official name is still International Business Machines. Therefore, it is an acronym and should be shown as such. "IBM" isn't the proper name of the company. You could argue that it's a marketing term (it's certainly a trademark). From my limited USPTO search, it looks like "IBM" wasn't even registered as a mark until 1990.

U.S.B. is in the same boat... it's an acronym. If they really want to get the NYT on board, they'll have to change the name.

Side note: this isn't the case with AT&T (anymore) as that is the company's official name. AT&T doesn't actually stand for anything (officially).

I know it's pedantic, but if the New York Times stops caring about such things, who will?
Hmm what takes more time? An 800 word blog post or adding an "Outside US" option to the select control for "State"?
You say you love the concept but then you show that you completely don't get the concept.
http://xkcd.com/

The front page has an embedded command prompt. You can navigate the comics by typing "prev" and "next". It also supports some unix commands.

According to "license.txt":

Client-side logic for Wordpress CLI theme :: R. McFarland, 2006, 2007, 2008
jQuery rewrite and overhaul :: Chromakode, 2010
I wonder whether earlier pricing ($49) was chosen to only have serious users before opening up the app to everyone. Perhaps an effective method to recruit beta testers who care.
Best/worst April Fools jokes?
Seeing the command prompt on http://xkcd.com/ makes me wonder what the best and worst April Fools jokes are that people have run into this year. List them here.
Exactly what I thought when I saw the title.

Kamen blithely forecast that by the end of 2002, his enterprise would be stamping out 10,000 machines a week. Meanwhile, his best-known backer, venture capitalist John Doerr, predicted Segway would rack up $1 billion in sales faster than any company in history.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.03/segway.html
Signing Time Dvd Boxset
Had to laugh at this: "Since $ has become the coolest way to do completely non-standard lookups in an almost indecipherable way"... It is true that this has practically become a meme amongst the JavaScript libraries. (did jQuery start the trend?)
Google Books, Google Maps Get 3D View (& No April Fool’s)
That sounds like a good little usability trick. I might do that next time I have a countries dropdown in a form.
Imaginary Color
To determine whether Sharp's new four-primary-color HDTVs would matter, I spent the evening researching light perception and color theory. If you haven't seen the commercials, they're adding a yellow element to each pixel in order to better-reproduce yellows and golds.

Anyway, I stumbled across this article on imaginary color. Check out this gem:

At Walt Disney World, Kodak engineered Epcot's pavement to be a certain hue of pink so that the grass would look greener through the reverse of this effect.
To determine whether Sharp's new four-primary-color HDTVs would matter, I spent the evening researching light perception and color theory. If you haven't seen the commercials, they're adding a yellow element to each pixel in order to better-reproduce yellows and golds.

Anyway, I stumbled across this article on imaginary color. Check out this gem:

At Walt Disney World, Kodak engineered Epcot's pavement to be a certain hue of pink so that the grass would look greener through the reverse of this effect.
Or they could take a jackhammer to the Apple TV. Then it might be more useful.
Don't believe a word the sheep say. They're all liars.
Could someone please explain me why I should buy the app? http://m.wolframalpha.com seems to be exactly the same thing. The only reason for buying the app I see, is supporting WolframAlpha. Please tell me if I am wrong.
have to fight to get the changes accepted

One of the main reasons I stay the hell away from OSS unless I can fork it.
Red MacBook Pro Cases and macbook hard case
My Macbook Case & macbook hard case helps to protect and gives you stylize look for your Macbook case with different Macbook cover's of all sizes,colors and materials. Adding new product regularly. Offering the best price.
This post made me laugh. And I think it is exactly at what I trying to get at when I said that internationalization isn't easy. Nice!
Dissertation methodology – get basics right
The kind of dissertation methodology that you use will determine the actual worth of your work. If you take the requisite time to decide on the kind of methods that you want to use in order to come to unbiased conclusions, you could surely have a good piece of work to submit.

The kind of dissertation methodology that you use will determine the actual worth of your work. If you take the requisite time to decide on the kind of methods that you want to use in order to come to unbiased conclusions, you could surely have a good piece of work to submit.
what about the ability to post jobs?
Well, these are very good numbers for a passive income, are these numbers normal or it's more a success story and not always frequent to have this?
Lucky we don't have to wait for EEStor ultracapacitors to power it eh John?
Enable "undo send" in labs and then just hit 'z' (assuming you have keyboard shortcuts enabled too).
That's pretty awesome that the conversion and rendering of video to text is actually done in client side within flash (initially I thought 'oh man, what a rape it must be on their servers doing the conversions'). Well played Youtube, well played.

relavant: aaxine and cacaxine (if you want to watch own movies at home in ascii art, even stream them over a ssh terminal)
Okay, this comment will sound trollish, but that's not my intent. I am not an C++ advocate by any stretch of imagination and I presently program in Java for living (and certainly like my job). Note, however, I am also speaking of in the context of professional programming, not open source projects/communities.

I tend to find that C++ jobs and the C++ developer community is usually (key word being usually, not always or even "almost always") more pleasant than the Java and even dynamic language jobs and communities.

I'd guess first reason is that C++ isn't very useful when you're doing simple work (such as data base driven websites, although it's certainly possible e.g., okcupid).
The sort of projects where only C or C++ make sense tend to just be more interesting (embedded, systems programming, high performance/low latency computing).

As it isn't an easy language, it takes more motivation than just money to learn it when there are other choices on the market. It's difficult for all the wrong reasons: not because it introduces powerful concepts like Lisp and ML-family languages do (which take time and effort to learn and understand), but because of complexities of manual memory management (especially if your dev organization doesn't like boost::shared_ptr and boost::scoped_ptr), inadequate standard libraries (stl and boost are nice -- again, if your dev organization allows you to use them -- but you almost always have to go beyond them and build your own data structures), etc... However as a result of the difficulty barrier, people who program in it tend to be smart and passionate and are more likely to write tools in Python and Perl and learn Haskell in their free time.

Additionally, when the PHB mandates C++, he can appeal to the developers' favourite (and most dangerous) indulgence: premature optimization instead of telling the truth ("I don't want to get fired if I screw up, so I am going with Industry Best Practices"). I've seen organizations go Perl to C++ and OCaml+Scheme to C++. There would be discontent, but there usually wouldn't be an exodus. I've never seen companies go Perl to Java or C++ to Java without an exodus of developers (either before the switch, allowing the switch to happen, or after, caused by the switch).
Some Google ones are:

Google Annotations Gallery - http://code.google.com/p/gag/

Query times on Google search -
Results 1 - 10 of about 672,000,000 for test [definition]. (at warp 8.88) - Results 1 - 10 of about 24,400,000 for foo. (2.00 shakes of a lamb's tail)

3d view on books and street view (try it!)

Translate for animals - http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/translateforanimals/

Any I'm missing?
Yes. Thanks for digging up the specifics.

I'm actually very bullish on the iPad, and the category of touch/tablet computers... but couldn't resist pointing out the similarity to Doerr's Segway boosterism.
He keeps saying "we", who is we? Himself and Fred Nile?
The app has created custom keyboards for typing mathematical formulas. Makes for a much better experience.