skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take note of this article, don't think it doesn't apply to you just because you don't have an internationalized rails app.

i totally respect the need in the ruby community to support different charsets, but i wish ruby 1.9.1 had a mode where we could say DEFAULT_CHARSET_IN_CASE_OF_INCOMPATIBLE_ENCODING= "utf-8" and then it would convert to that encoding when in doubt. Would totally solve our issues.

details:

We just moved a fairly large Rails 2.3.4 app to 1.9.1 this week and have run into a number of 'incompatible charset encoding' issues.

My client is running a site that sends middle american students to middle american colleges. There's not a foreign character or thought in sight (which is a separate issue). However, our content writers occasionally use MS Word and a "smart quote" slips into the uploaded content.

When that happens, our rails HAML layout is in one encoding, and the partial that renders the smart-quote-bomb text from the database are now in different encodings, and the page errors.

The solution is to write a custom sanitize() method on string that forces encodings and gsubs away smart quotes. The consequences of missing one in 1.9.1 are just higher than in 1.8.7.
Very glad to see a blackberry app coming out.

Anyone know if it will have a built-in pdf reader? It really should, as BB doesn't natively open them, and other readers aren't great.
Enlightenment: life is temporary.
It's an amazing world we live in where a company as huge as Microsoft is complaining that adding the <canvas> tag is too hard.
Google news currently lists 449 articles about this, NYT, WP, WSJ and so on. You can bet that it's visible to a lot of people. Facebooks users are for the most part not capable of building an alternative but there are people that can, and this seems to bring them from having stuff 'on the drawingboard' to actually doing it. The next privacy cock-up and this kind of article will carry a list of alternatives.
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Right. But the bit where they don't give it to Apple immediately makes it theft.

Which is worse, buying stolen property, or stealing property? If they couldn't be accused of the former, they would be accused of the latter.

You seem to forget the very basis on which this was declared buying stolen property: the theft itself. The theft itself would have occurred no matter whether it was bought or not, and both parties would be guilty if it was just handed over.
It really doesn't matter how much political clout Apple has. The Gizmodo people made the police officers' jobs too easy by publishing all the evidence necessary to convict them. They were low-hanging fruit.
They don't belong in the real world in the sense that people get paid in the real world. Meanwhile, most academics go into debt, earn very little, and work long hours trying to genuinely contribute something to society as a whole.

This is why so many phd students in computer science and related technical fields go into industry where they can get over double the salary from day one. Many academics do have a very negative view of none academics, precisely because of the sentiment that you so eloquently put into words.

The irony is that society is eager as ever to consume the technologies and knowledge that comes from academic research, yet somehow expect all that for free, and even get angry when their results don't come fast enough.

The me generation indeed.
That's interesting, I'm curious to hear more about it. Which country is that?
Amusing comment, but I don't really understand why Flash has this reputation of crashing. I don't remember seeing it crash my browser, at least in a very long time. Why is there a "flash is crap" meme? Is it because it's unstable on Linux?
At that time we had just released Flix Cloud. We have spent the last year supporting that product and learning from our customers. This release of Zencoder is the result.

As for the last question: when you're offered a spot in YC, you don't turn it down!
Use of narco analysis, brain-mapping unconstitutional: Indian Court
After using the Mac for the first time ( bought it just for iPhone development ) I was impressed .
Forget iPhone and iPad , what if Mac becomes the standard.
Read 'Mac is back' by Paul Graham.
Many of my friends who do not do any programming bought Mac recently.
Windows PC now feels like a waste of time to me.
Maybe the masses will catch up later.
Absolutely wrong, if you are talking about apply for grant money. If there is one thing that the government loves when giving out grants, it's strong industry support and/or clear impact on society.

The view you saw more likely comes from the fact that the knowledge those people generate in industry will be locked up behind IP walls for generations, and thus it's a loss to the academic pool of information.
I added 3 links to screen shots (one from an Android phone) on the front page so people can also et a quick idea of what the app does.

re: when I reorder the list it would be nice if the edit wouldn't pop up:

The help text tells you how to work around this: just grab a focus or a todo item with the mouse just to the right of the text to drag it, otherwise you get both drag and drop and in place editing. I thought of requiring a ctrl key with a mouse click to get around this problem, but once I got used to mousing down just next to the text to drag, that seemed easy. (I need to make the help text more clear.)

Thanks for your comments.
GET THE CORRET TRAINING
So you want to try for the CCIE. Be prepared for a lot of long hours and hard work. But the payoff is worth it! Here are some suggestions.
Short answer: Apparently.

The problem is: They pawn it off as v 1.0 or better :/
Thanks for your comment. I added 3 links on the first page for screen shots (2 web browser, 1 on a Droid phone).
Because they need to keep doing more terrorist attacks, not perpetuate open warfare. If they turn the heat up too much, it turns into open warfare and the U.S. invades Afghanistan. If it stays infrequent and random, the U.S. only does a missile strike.

Put another way, if somebody tries to break into your network (even if they fail) every single day, you'll do something to stop it. If they try only every so often, 2 or 3 times a year, you might notice it and be alarmed a bit, but probably wouldn't do anything to stop it. Most likely because 2 or 3 data points isn't enough pattern to figure out an abatement strategy.

In Iraq the modus operandi was IEDs, dozens a day, so the U.S. poured enormous resources into defeating IEDs (billions and billions of dollars), that resulted in everything from signal jammers to the popularization of geospatial intelligence and social network analysis.

If the method had been infrequent, we would have just been on a heightened sense of alert all the time, but not sure where to resource defeat efforts.
While it may not have played a major role in your decision, you have to know that this will dramatically improve your SEO. Come on. :)
First symptoms of psychosis evident in 12-year-olds
One problem with the reporting in this story is that psychosis (a symptom) is assumed to be associated mostly with schizophrenia (just one of several mental disorders that can have psychotic symptoms). Not all psychosis results from schizophrenia.
Do we know what Apple's relationship is with the show? Are they paying for positive product placement? According to one reference I found online the Ellen show employs a product placement team that solicits in-show sponsorship. If that is indeed the case here I don't blame Apple for wanting clear cut good PR.
Great guide.
Well I doubt you. I know people at MS as well, and most of them prefer to live outside the city where they pay a sane amount for a nice house instead of a cramped apartment, and lower crime rates. My experience is that it is only the young 20 somethings that want a vibrant nightlife that prefer the city.

Putting the company downtown will effectively force everyone to go through the I-90 or 520 bridge which suffer from massive traffic or live in the city. City life is not for everyone.

And about the exercising, there's much less to be done downtown unless you like doing everything indoors. Walking around the street isn't very entertaining unless you are shopping or eating at restaurants. You could take the time you save from not having to commute to seattle and use it to exercise. And didn't they tell you they have trails and soccer fields at the Redmond campus?
> Afaik, most Asian characters can be encoded as 2 bytes in UTF-8

I overstated my case for sure. The Unified ideograms are four words wide, but the non-unified extensions are larger, iirc. And while disk space is hardly a problem anymore, you might see why programmers from 10 years ago may have made different choices.

> But it still seems to me that extending Unicode to also include those variatons of characters is a better and more clean solution than these workarounds.

I certainly can't argue with that. But Unicode is a standard, and real problems don't have time to wait around for standards bodies. In the eyes of many East Asian organizations, Unicode is broken now, and so the burden falls on the programmer.

Even here in the US, there are tons of data sitting around in tables encoded in Windows-1251 and ISO-8859-1. Having had to deal with UTF-8 and Latin-1 mismatches in the past, I don't find ruby1.9's encoding all that onerous myself.
Another one: http://allyourstartuparebelongto.us/
i might be wrong but they even had higher prices at launch

I was thinking they were targeting film and media agencies (high-end market); instead of the thousands little bootstrapping startups.

zencoder should look into colocating servers and having customized servers with a video card capable of video transcoding... their costs would lower dramatically
If you rest on the premise that merely because your program compiles it is also correct then you will face a career full of frustration and mediocrity.
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Same.

I just switched from an iPhone to a Nexus One last week.

This week, with the release of Dropbox for Android, my transition is complete (with the exception of the lack of support for audiobooks on Android itself).
he then said that "Oh yes; ok, 3.".
Animated Terminal Progress Bar in Python
It's actually really stable on linux 32 bit. I haven't seen it crash... and i develop for it sometimes.
Terrorism is a legitimate tool or strategy of warfare. It's terrible, distasteful and I think we can all agree it's bad. But in terms of asymmetrical warfare strategy it's the strongest weapon you can use. People often forget that because most people think along lines of war having rules and being civil (and following conventions of war and honorable rules of engagement and such).

But it wasn't all that long ago really that it was perfectly common and acceptable to do things worse than terrorism. Like rape and pillage an entire city as a perfectly legitimate and really quite typical invasion tactic.
What if there is an app for that?
Be sure to catch the last paragraph: "While the incidence of psychotic symptoms in this study was around 5 or 6 percent, the adult incidence of schizophrenia is believed to be about 1 percent, Keefe added. There are some recent findings however, that many more people experience hallucinations and delusions without being diagnosed as psychotic, he said."

So this seems to have a 500% false positive rate, but some of that is mitigated by under diagnosis in adults.

I wonder if hearing voices in your youth and such is a psychotic symptom how that relates to religious experiences and prayer. Famously, George Bush said he was told by god to end the tyranny in Iraq: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa .

And if it is OK for adults world leaders to exhibit that sort of behaviour how can we fault 12 year olds for the same and label them as potentially ill?
Actually - I heard it did
My BB has native PDF opening. It's "ok". Lots of zooming and scrolling. It may be the OS version.
Maybe not a technical failure, but I can hardly see events like this sitting well with consumers. (Although the problems associated with the Matrix's DVD release seemed to do little harm.)
ai, ok, thanks!
This post makes me wish there was a downvote feature.
Are we sure it crashed? Didn't see a force close... More plausible he accidentally hit the home button.
Easy extensible graphing of your Rails app using Munin
This is a duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320722
Yes, it's about making products, not just conglomerations of features.
Technological advancement and sexual de-stigmatization: the new dating game
because someone there still takes a glimmer of pride in their work?
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You know how serial killers usually follow a set pattern, and that's considered evidence--so if they arrest someone and another killing occurs according to that pattern they assume they didn't catch the guy? I wonder if you can get a hit man on retainer to randomly pull off a "signature killing" in case you get arrested.

More to the point, a terrorist cell should totally be able to cover for a single sniper or sniper team[1] that got caught. Imagine if they caught Malvo and Muhammed and all of a sudden someone else at a DC gas station got shot? Now instead of a couple nuts you have a shadowy and mysterious terrorist organization and as soon as you catch one another one pops up and shoots people in the face.

[1] Interesting fact: even in the military, snipers don't work alone usually. They typically work in teams of two. Also, they don't necessarily shoot people anymore, they might just observe or call in airstrikes. The term is "scout-sniper".
> "But one of these days, someone will launch a comprehensive lawsuit, and a jury will say that an Internet provider like Google is liable," he predicts. "Sooner or later, an Internet provider will pay a massive price" for spreading malicious gossip.

How is that possible? Can juries override safe harbour provisions?

Google has already been sued (in Italy) over something like this, and the outrage about that conviction was fairly universal iirc.
This is really good news.

Microsoft is excellent at producing software that ticks feature boxes. Anyone who remembers magazine reviews of Excel vs Lotus 123 will remember the relentless way MS would improve in the comparison tables in every release until suddenly they were ahead. The same thing happened in the original browser wars.

The problem is that Microsoft has never been good at choosing which feature boxes need ticking themselves.

But now they have decided to care about list of features called "HTML5" they should be able to push things forward well. (I'm hoping anyway. And I'm hoping "Canvas" makes that feature list)
Just checked out Carbonmade, the designer in me is in awe.

Excellent presentation of some beautiful content.
And what ethical standard do you see broken here?

Ning provided a service, has realized that it's not financially feasable, and in the interest of (I presume) their owners/shareholders have decided to discontinue that service. They're allowing groups to continue using the service for a fee if they so desire.

Personal responsibility means weighing the pros/cons of trusting services to "the cloud". It's why there are a few things I still run on a machine in my basement, rather than move to an online provider, even though it could be cheaper for me. It's why I actively back up important documents (and yes, photos) to more than one location.
I worked in a big company where I actually witnessed something very, very close to that happening.

The only difference is that the guy dodged projects, supervisors and reviews for a good 2 years, then hooked up with company owner's daughter. And became the all-time-absent CTO...
HTML5 must be some kind of wundertechnology. Reached draft in 2008, supported on browsers released in 2001.

Come on, it's great that they're ditching Flash, but if it really works on IE6 calling it "HTML5" is nothing but link/pageview-bait. The parts of HTML5 that are supported by IE6 are called HTML4 and Javascript.
Trying to think what would do more for democracy on the Internet than this?

Imagine Facebook as an ISP.

Shiver.
Damien Katz: Google Denies Our Commercial
I agree--I was simply exploring another side to the argument.
No; The line has to be executed for the error to show up in a dynamic language.

Think of types as logical propositions, and type systems as theorem provers. The stricter and more powerful the type system, the more exact and precise the proof will be, and the more you can be guaranteed that things won't go wrong.
Would it be worth buying HP stock? They could own the next generation of computers.
Yeah, they need to figure out how to show ads in the html5 player, then I think the switch will be fairly rapid with Flash being the fallback.
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For a reason related to, but not the same as, the reason sexual modesty evolved (which only exists in social species): because sex is a method to emotionally bond two people together in a way which is pretty much impossible to do otherwise because of the way humans are hardwired. This aspect of sex would be seriously diminished if it was routinely done in public because the participants would have their "social guard" up (that is, they would necessarily be concerned with signaling to others in their group/tribe).

EDIT: Also, I should point out that your sexual modesty is more strongly determined by your genes than your upbringing. Sexual modesty is universal across human culture, even among people who have been raised in bizarre cults which tried to eliminate such modesty.
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I'd love to see Apple do a watch, or a clip-on to a watch that enabled financial transactions as a substitute for cash.

It'd probably need some type of rfid, and the merchant some type of biometric, otherwise if someone saw the watch, they might be tempted to steal.
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I think it's mostly because it eats resources like it's the only thing running on my system. My fan spins up every time i try to watch a youtube clip. Oh and it does crash occasionally, although much less frequently as time goes on.
This idea has been around for a while I think. Freenet would be a pretty sweet platform for something like it ;p
Tell HN : Google's sense of humour
I have become a big fan of Google fast flip and they seemed to have a wicked sense of humor

" Unfortunately it appears our dolphin has escaped from its tank, causing our server to get confused.

If you come back a little later everything should hopefully be back to normal. "
I have an Android phone and love it, but I have seen certain apps CTD.
Yeah, I don't give them a by on this either. It's not on the level of a BSOD during a CEO demonstration, but it's not promising either.
Have you tried playing SMB crossover with it? It crashes flash in less than 5 minutes of game play for me if I use the contra guy.
I have had EXACTLY the same thought about the 5 year moving average. Although I think having the excess going to pay down debt is just an encouragement to run up more debt. Instead, why not hold/invest, like a private university would?
This is great feedback! Thanks dude.
Love this "coming soon" page
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That's not the premise he's making. He's saying it's more convenient. Also, I would think twice before referencing ayende and using the phrase "...[ayende] will face a career full of frustration and mediocrity."
Almost perfect.
I just realized we missed Erlang.
"Do something that scares you, every day"

From the 'sunscreen' speech.

The whole thing is worth listening to or reading.

http://www.google.com/search?q=sunscreen+speech
Interesting that this is also on the HN frontpage: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1323164 (Surviving the Age of Humiliation)
Yes, but that is 86400 seconds from now ..
But I thought we weren't embarrassed anymore? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1322721
I'm glad I actually read the article, because while I too like strong typing and compilation errors, but I don't want to be associated with programmers who do things like this:

>Today I had to modify a piece of JavaScript code. The code used return a single string, and I needed to modify it to return an array of objects. Using C#, it would have been easy, change the return type, hit the compile button, fix the errors, rinse & repeat until it compiles.

The compiler does not save you from having to think, and like InclinedPlane says, compilation doesn't 'prove' correctness, only shows you that the compiler could at least sludge its way through your code.

The code should pass some mental unit tests of expected inputs and outputs before you even make the change.
More importantly I think is, these old economy businesses being compared are valuable to a large degree just because they are essential. Now, the iPhone isn't essential, but if you have some extra cash, it is one of the first things a lot of people buy, the sales figures prove this.

If Apple can avoid any anti-trust suits, I think they have clear sailing for the next 2 to 3 years. I dislike Apple, but I LOVE my iPhone (but only compared to everything else).
You work for scribd too ?
I've kept my mouth shut for a while now, but I have to be honest - I can't stand this fucking bullshit anymore. Do you realize how pathetic you look by posting this back-and-forth tech company drivel? I don't have or use an Android, an iPhone, a Palm or whatever other pointless gadget everyone here masturbates to, so I'm not saying this as a fanboy of anything. I'm just tired of seeing all this tech gossip posted to the front page. It's not interesting, it's not new and it makes Hacker News appear no better than Reddit - read some of the comments in this thread to see what I mean.
I tried del.icio.us when it first came up and didn't find it too helpful. Does it allow to sort and search bookmarks by entry date? Does it allow to search bookmarks by doing a full search of the pages they actually refer to? I wish there was something smarter...
I guess I lump .NET together with Silverlight, and the software I have to use for work is currently unusable on Moonlight.
If this doesn't rely on HTML5 features, why call it HTML5?

DHTML or javascript would have been good enough then, wouldn't it?
It's your ethical responsibility, whether as an individual or a corporation, to only let people rely on you if you're reliable. If you're not, you have to go out of your way to prevent people from leaning on you, because you know they'll fall over when you step aside. It is their ethical responsibility as well to find out if you're reliable, but it goes both ways.