skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UTF16 gives you the worst of both worlds: it wastes a lot of memory for ASCII-like languages (mostly ASCII plus some special characters), you have to deal with byte ordering and you still don't get the advantages of directly addressing a specific character without parsing the whole string up to the character you want.

But.

If you widen the character even more, you'd probably still want it to be somewhat word-aligned so you'd use 32bit per character which would have enough storage to store all of Unicode plus some. The cost though is obvious: you waste memory.

Depending on the language, you even waste a lot of memory: think ASCII or ASCII-like (the middle european languages). In UHF-8 those need - depending on language - barely more than one byte up to two bytes per character. Representing these languages with 4 bytes per character makes you use nearly 4 times the memory reasonably needed.

This changes the farther east you move. Representing Chinese (no ASCII, many character points high up in the set) in utf-8, you begin wasting a lot of memory due to the ASCII compatibility. As encoding a Unicode code point in utf-8 uses around one byte more than if you would just store the code point as an integer.

So on international software running on potentially limited memory while targeting the eastern languages, you will again be better off using utf-16 as it requires less storage for characters really high up in the Unicode plane.

Also, if you know that you are just extended ASCII, you can optimize and access characters directly without parsing the whole string, giving you another speed advantage.

I don't know what's the best way to go. 32 bits is wasteful, utf-16 is sometimes wasteful, has endianness issues and still needs parsing (but is less wasteful than 32bits in most realistic cases) and utf-8 is really wasteful for high code points and always requires parsing but doesn't have the endianness issues.

I guess as always these are just tools and you have to pick what works in your situation. Developers have to adapt to what was picked.
Just wanted to echo morrow's suggestion - inline registration is a perfect way of collecting and registering users. It's a natural flow, not jarring at all, and also almost endearing if I type my email into the terminal and I get an email in the background and continue working.
I tend to agree. I dislike many uses of rounded corners.

I also find it ironic that in the example diagram they use to compare squared vs. rounded corners, they use squared corners on the A, B, and C boxes, implicitly acknowledging that they are more appropriate than rounded corners in this case.
I heard it was relatively laggy compared to the iPad- if Android has shown anything, not a deal breaker, but pretty important.
I feel silly for not developing any apps. It is just JavaScript and CSS. I've heard that a million time, but never really looked into it.

edit: booting into webos would be booting into a browser the same way booting into chrome os is booting into a browser.
I can vouch for the githubbers that I have met liking a beer or three.

But it's not a 'sports team' deal it's more of a 'relaxed' or 'enjoy work' approach to life and work. The cultural fit of the company seems to be very important.
To me, this list seems to suggest the opposite actually.

[1] is the company where one of the main developers of PyPy works. [2] appears to be a discussion where they are looking for anyone using PyPy in production. [3] seems to be an article about someone experimenting with PyPy for git processing. [4] is the developers looking for non-toy examples of production use so that they can get more funding.
I really hope WebOS finds safe harbor. We lost Maemo or Meego or whatever it's (was) called last week and now this. The players are dropping out too early. Maybe the iPad "won" but the space will be big enough to support other players. I want more choices at this early stage, not fewer.
It isn't exactly common subexpressions. Basically the problem is things like matrix multiplies always get unrolled.

I've used lots of operator overloading based autodiff packages for C++. They are great, but the issue is not how the function is recorded (I used operator overloading myself in my python package) but how it gets executed at runtime. Unless a compiler (or JIT) is called sometime between when the operator overloading happens and execution happens, the function is basically being interpreted at runtime. This is what happens in, e.g. ADOL-C, SACADE, and CPPAD, all of which come with a significant (e.g. 20x) performance penalty as compared with hand-written derivatives.
Google+ Update: Slide-in Animation for New Notifications [video]
I dislike UTF16 for a very simple reason: it's another type of encoding to deal with. If I could force the entire world to dump UTF16 and use UTF8, I would. Hell, I'd force everyone to dump UTF8 and use UTF16 if I could too. It's just such a pain in the ass to have to deal with having so many ways of encoding text on the web.
You are such a cheesy hater. Steve is a hacker and a pioneer in many fields. Why do you hate him?
Is Saying Thank You the Key to Customer Success?
Absolutely wonderful. This is the successor to TryRuby I always hoped someone would build.
The iPad 2 has a smaller, lower resolution display than the other tablets in those charts. Once you compensate for that it still has an advantage, but barely. It hardly leaves the other tablets "in the dust".
Run Amazon Elastic MapReduce on EC2 Spot Instances
Was airport steak delivery to Shankman great service or a marketing gimmick?
Whitelist them.
I though the back to school promotion was relatively new.
Especially since the x-large profile was introduced in Gingerbread and many Gingerbread tablets are not x-large.
The opening line of extrapolating a SFO cafe to a Post-PC _world_ was pretty cheesy. This guy has no idea how things work in the world, especially Asia.

Also no mention of how Carly Fiorina got rid of the R&D teams to cut costs, leading to the current disaster. Siegler comes across as a shallow fanboy, atleast Gruber can put some better spin on things.
Australian parliament too busy to censor the internet (see comments #6 and #7)
It's simple if you think about it. Making rectangles with rounded corners takes work. You have to go out of your way. That so many craftsman, engineers, etc. did so is suggestive.

Moreover, looking at a lot of rounded rectangles will have the same effect that the examples in the linked article did. You'll notice that objects with them are more appealing than their counterparts.
Stupid Idea: Hoisting at the end (Javascript)
They should have a student plan. I see this being very useful for college and university students like me. Your one tablet could contain all of your books and manual!
In California Geography, everything east of the Rockies is "the East Coast".
Depends on the college. I sat in on a CS class recently at a local university and there were 2 or 3 Apple products in a lecture hall of 100 something students.
I think the PRE2 is a great device. Google Apps email, SMS texting and Google Maps is fantastic. Browser works great. The clever status light, the window swiping, the bottom gesture panel logic and the clever window bundling makes Android and Bada feel completely retarded. Very good over the air software updater. Pointing that out since Bada is very dumb in that department and requires a huge iTunes like application. The HP CEO is either retarded or scared.

Like... I got an HP laptop and an HP phone... and suddenly this is not cool enough for HP because of some premature, rushed to marked, tablets ?

Disclosure: I have received a few developer phones over the years.
Super-duper smart idea. Who's going to go to the supermarket for just a $3 tub of yogurt? Supermarkets use loss leaders to get customers in the door all the time. This gives them better reach and awesome analytics.
I don't think you are a designer, so I would buy a template for your site and integrate it.
thanks, morrow, this is a great suggestion. we'll implement it once we finish adding more capacity and rewriting some of the stuff to lessen load.
I am actually considering not sending a confirmation email. Every maillist message already includes an immediate unsubscribe list, and I thought perhaps to add a small note at the bottom of subscriber's first email, something like

---

You are receiving this email because someone (presumably you)
subscribed $(email) to the $(maillist-name). Subscription
request was received from a network address of $(ip) on $(date).

If you did not request this subscription, or would like to be
removed from the maillist for another reason, visit this link
to unsubscribe - $(link).

A bit of a mouthful, but essentially this simply piggy-backs the confirmation request on an actual mailing list message. Thoughts?
Success, I suspect.

OSes have grown much closer to each other over the last five to eight years; websites (or "the cloud" or whatever term you wish to refer to server-browser-driven software) are much more important; the relative cost gap between Macs and Windows machines is much smaller; Apple laptops appear to be vastly better made than any mainstream Windows laptops save Thinkpads.

Take these together, and you'll see a lot of Aluminum MacBooks on campus. Geeks like them because of the Terminal, GNU toolchain, and the fact that other geeks have spent lots of time optimizing the general OS X programming environment; everyone else likes them because they're more aesthetically attractive than Windows laptops.
And hardly anyone ever sees it in action, so it's harder and costlier to attract talented developers.
Moreover, ASUS is following the Transformer up with the eee Pad Slider in September and a second-generation Transformer using Tegra 3 Kal-El (though the release-date rumors for this vary). In other words, ASUS isn't just talking the talk, they're walking the walk.
thanks! i learned JS while writing the tutorial so it definitely was quite an experience. really appreciate the compliment!
I've been in the same room with him mid-rant. I'm guessing you haven't.
LPTHW is terrific. we're hoping to offer courses beyond basic javascript so you'll be able to learn from Codecademy too. the easiest thing to do is make something - think of what you'd like to make and keep referencing books on your way to completing it!
What open-source tools are people using to build real-time big data analysis systems?

Jeff Jonas of IBM doesn't recommend batch systems such as Hadoop (http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2011/04/the-data-is-..., http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/27/big-data/) for real-time context accumulation systems. I have heard that IBM is making use of topological embedding algorithms to build distributed graph databases capable of real-time analysis, but very little of that research is public.
thanks, amasad. looking into this now!
Great idea, excellent execution....some slow server and unresponsive consoles, but that's normal for a launch!

Overall, an amazing website!
Translation: Apple VS Samsung/Motorola.
Well, that, and they come to me in a beautiful way. The grocery weekly is alright, but it places a lot of the burden on me - so many choices, and prices, I have no idea what the real "good deal" is.

One of the ingenius parts of this approach is that I don't have to choose. Every day it rocks up in my inbox, 60% of, I can make a quick decision.

That, along with integrating with the loyalty cards (just like the article said, these guys are brilliant), is going to be super attractive to busy people looking to save time and money.

Sign me up.
Multiple user accounts.
Kids growing up with iPods (especially the touch).
I remember reading somewhere that the profit ratio is about 1:10 for Macs vs. PCs so in your scenario Apple made twice as much money in your cafe than the PC OEMs did. That's exactly why HP is getting out of the consumer PC business.

You might be right though that lots of people have no interest in a post-PC era but how much longer will the discount PC isle be well stocked? They may not have much of a choice. HP decided the business model is broken and not worth saving. They were relying on constant growth of the PC market to slash prices to the bone. Now what? If there's not enough demand prices will have to increase. If the business model is broken for HP isn't it probably broken for Dell and the other big PC OEMs too. They will benefit in the short term from HP bowing out but over the next 3-5 years they will face the same problem. So chances are the post-discount-PC era is going to happen with or without the users consent.
Perhaps that and http://CodeSchool.com ?
Yep, there are dupes and there are mistyped addresses. But plenty of unconfirmed @gmail.com (about 50%) as well as addresses personal servers (on judging by the domain names).
Back in the 80's Apple had legendary promotions for students. Student discounts of up to 40% weren't unheard of.
It's better to use double-opt-in:

1) Enter email on web page.

2) Open confirmation link in email inbox.

If you skip second step - there is a risk that email ends up in spam folder and is constantly delivered there.
Another risk - user did not really request your subscription. That would often result in your emails being marked as spam.
Happen to have, or know of, a version of that that has the images intact? I'm getting broken ones on every single item in the post.
This isn't a customer service story. This is a PR story. If it isn't something they do for all customers in a similar situation, then it's not customer service, it's a stunt.
Heckle: a static project site generator for node.js
How can I change to the previous directory instead of going up?
I keep a work log using Day One on the Mac/iOS. Mostly so I can remember who I called, changes I made to code, etc. I rarely if ever look back on it.

That being said, I never delete anything and have files going back 18 years on my Drobo, so I can pretty much have a record of online activity for over half my life.
I have not. I don't know him personally. What about him repulses so many people? I am genuinely curious. Please share, I'm sure a lot of us are wondering the same thing.
Here are the slides for his "Unicode Shootout: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly":

http://code.activestate.com/lists/perl5-porters/166738/

Hmmm... According to that email he says that Java is second, but in his first talk he did say that Ruby (1.9+) was second in his mind (and he seemed to be visibily frustrated with Java's Unicode support).
Since Jobs returned to Apple, he's directed a sharp and rapid rise in the value of the company, including launches of several separate high visibility and impact product lines. But you already know this. Your claim is a lot like saying Michael Jordan got lucky to have such weak competition.

I'm a fan. When something is good, the only rational choice is to be one.
We'll try to wrap the errors with something a little more user friendly. Thanks!
I too was oblivious to this feature for months into my win7 experience.

I think that speaks to the usefulness of such eye candy.
Looking into fixing this tomorrow as soon as we get the load under control. Thanks!
Please don't use the word 'hipster' and expect to be taken seriously. So many groups of people have been tagged with it that it's completely meaningless.
A fucking piece of consumer electronics doesnt make my heart sing under any circumstances. What a poltroon.
How so? And we're definitely providing much more than just "learning rails."
Yeah, I guess the biggest issue is someone plugging in john@acmecorp.com just to test the subscription form, and then actual John getting a maillist message and tagging it as a spam. The question here is if the same John would or would not tag a plain confirmation message as spam too, and I suspect that he would, in which case what I wrote above is no worse than a double-opt-in in edge cases.
Apple never had a well-developed enterprise strategy, but after killing the xserve and xserve raid and integrating their server software with their consumer OS at least they have a coherent one: they don't care about it.
I can't see the deal without subscribing (and it's not available in my country, so I won't subscribe to wreck their data purity) but from the price described, I'm assuming it's one product?

I read (http://m.news.com.au/ITNewsTopStories/pg/0/fi792074.htm) that a major retailer here in Australia was investing in their own online business based predominantly around bulk purchases of non-perishables (soap, detergent, toothpaste, etc). However now visiting what I think is the site in question (http://www.harveynormanbigbuys.com.au) shows too many options and a lot of junk.

I still think a site doing only household non-perishables at a significant discount would fare well.
Yep...that was intentional.
Steve Jobs is many things. He's a tech visionary and a great communicator. He's also an asshole and a liar. Like many great historic figures, his good qualities are inextricably bound up with his bad qualities.

I don't have any animosity towards the guy at all but I have to chuckle when he shovels out bologna like that.
Like they gave up on the XBox while bleeding billions?
Thanks. Both http://codemountain.org and http://codeacademy.org are doing very well!
It suggests that there aren't many production users, true. But it does prove that there are some.
An aside to this thread, but Windows Phone 7 isn't as bad as you might think. I understand that you are mainly wary of the Microsoft slow moving / non-exciting culture but Windows Phone 7 is quite exciting. Microsoft Research does a lot of really fabulous HCI research and slowly but surely it is percolating through the company despite having dinosaurs like Ballmer in charge. To refer to a lame example, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that a phone UI actually used amodal completion in it's design(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amodal_perception). A mobile phone with its limited screen real estate is ideal for such a design and I believe this came out of their research lab.

Anyway, Siegler's article had the interesting reference to Amazon. If Jeff Bezos/Amazon picks up WebOS, it might just have a chance of survival.
Correct, no true Scotsman has three heads and an integrated espresso machine. Likewise, the Fujitsu tablets have nothing in common with current iOS/Android devices.
I can't deny that Apple has executed extremely well in the last decade. I use and enjoy a bunch of their devices. But their competition has also been really dumb and that's distracted from some of the genuine weaknesses of Apple's gear over the same time period.

When you remember how badly designed and marketed the iPod's competitors were its success is less remarkable.
Can they analyse the bible ? (or any holy book for that matter)
HP recently did a lunch-and-learn for the IT staff at my university. They had marketing material that heavily pitched WebOS as the basis of enterprise-ready products.
I think it totally depends on your subscriber base, but with Hacker Newsletter I've seen about a 95% success rate. I have always used the default MailChimp subject which is "Hacker Newsletter List: Please Confirm Subscription".
Thanks for the tip, I linked your website out to some of my non-programmer friends who I would have never thought would like it, and one of them is already on lesson 3!
Interesting feedback: I had my gf do it, and she got stuck in the .length portion, because she kept typing:

"name".length.

This is because the prompt said:

Well done! How long is your name? Find out by typing your name in quotes and ending it with .length.

For me, that'd be "Ryan".length.

Apparently its not clear enough what is code and what isn't. While you and I can tell that the last period belongs to the sentence and not the code, it was a bit confusing for her. Perhaps putting the code in a different font (as well as the current highlighting) would do the trick?
Why Warren Buffett is Wrong
I'm not clear as to if you were trying for irony with that statement so I'll call you on it:

Seriously, I doubt it's 5%

...they should at least make up numbers that are marginally ...

If your going to mock someone for "making up" numbers try not to make up numbers of your own in the same post. The op provided data, you did not. Unless you were going for irony; in that case, well never mind.
Luddites - social movement against industrial revolution
I am currently part of a scheme to buy groceries wholesale with 38 people. I eat for a week for $30. We are expanding, it is all voluntary. There is a potential here for a startup that simply wants to connect people to partake in such a scheme. I have found people knowing about it is sufficient for participation.
Definitely not fly by night. This is why I was surprised.
It will also give better data - you can see of the people who opened the email and displayed images, what percent actually clicked the link.
I'm willing to bet that the fraction of people with flush toilets is higher among people on welfare today than it was in the general population during the 20's or 30's.
Your reward system is hard coded. So you pay attention to the sensory data correlates that result in the highest preference satisfaction. This gets compounded until you've bootstrapped up to having a reasonable causal model of the things that affect you the most.
Are you serious about this? Or is this a tongue-in-cheek statement?
> passing dates around as 'seconds since 1970' has
> made date parsing on ios effortless

I'm confused. How does the way that you store dates internally have anything to do with date parsing? If you are accepting dates from users, then you still have to normalize then to unix timestamps.

That also doesn't cover things like:

* Take this date and convert it into a week represented by the last Sunday of the week (i.e. 20110410 represents 20110403-20110409).

* Basically anything involving days of the week.
I agree that the obstacles to entry are much lower for Apple now. But there is still a significant price premium for Apple laptops. Maybe it's not consequential for people that can afford to pay tuition in a Western university but for the rest of the world that premium is still decisive.
Instantly scored a 150 out of a 100 possible points on my scale, this Andy Rubin.

May God bless your soul. What you've given will come back ten fold.
"So you'd bet that if I shadowed 1,000 self-made millionaires while they were building their businesses, and then shadowed a random sampling of (employed) Americans, the millionaires would work LESS than average? Really?"

No, I never said anything of the like. In fact, I said that the qualities more likely to make you successful are also likely to predict working long hours. What I would say is that if you could make two copies of the world, one where entrepreneurs work reasonable hours and one where they work extensive hours, they would generally have better outcomes with the former.

In essence, it seems that working in crunch mode for extended periods of time is a bad habit of highly motivated people.

"Entrepreneurial success generally requires a wide variety of different tasks."

Obviously, there are all sorts of businesses and all sorts of entrepreneurs, but I'm not sure that the data available suggests that working with varied tasks alleviates problems of fatigue. Additionally, the penalties of multitasking are generally well documented. If the tasks just need to be completed and are straight-forward, or if you're in a short lead-up to a deadline, certainly there are times when it makes sense to work extended hours.
HP made the right moves: It’s no Apple, so it shouldn’t try to be
Who makes better printers? I've always been a fan of HP due to their work on HPLIP.