skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
JavaScript's access to individual parts of a string works on code units, which are distinct from code points, which in turn are distinct from characters. A single (visible) character can be composed of multiple code points, such as a character plus an accent. However, a single code point can also be represented by multiple code units, where a code unit is a fixed number of bits. UTF-16 is a variable-width encoding, so a given code point can be either one code unit or two; in this case, the cat face is a single character, composed of a single code point, composed of two code units.

(UTF-8 is another variable-width encoding where a code point can be anywhere from one to four 8-bit code units, and UTF-32 is a fixed-width encoding where every code point is exactly 32-bit one code unit. Because code points can be accents or modifiers, UTF-32 is still variable-width with respect to characters, because there's no guarantee that a given character is composed of a single code unit.)

Because UTF-16 is a variable-width encoding, and because JavaScript exposes UTF-16 code units (instead of code points or characters), it is possible to delete half of a code point and even end up with an invalid UTF-16 string in some cases (IIRC). As another comment mentions, some languages (e.g. Python 3) expose code points instead, which still isn't the same as characters.
Does anybody know how WPEngine compares to PHPFog?
What makes a project like this succeed so spectacularly on kickstarter? Is it because the video is so well done? Or because Tim Schafer is behind it? Or because a lot of people want to play an adventure game? Or the perfect storm of all of the above? Just trying to wrap my brain around it.
I swear I'm not a Luddite, but I just don't see the advantage of these apps versus going out and meeting new people, no matter whether it's at a coffee shop, on the street, in a park, at a conference or at a bar. Investing your time in a few five minute conversations has got to be a better way to meet interesting new people than broadcasting your interests in a 100-yard radius and having an algorithm match you to people who happen to agree with your choice of keywords (and have to be using the same app.)

Can someone explain the appeal of these "ambient location" apps?
True point on practicality, but there are plenty of two-seaters (or virtually two-seaters) driving around. The point was, just because it's inexpensive doesn't mean it's automatically popular.
100 Million Americans Watch Online Video Per Day
Well written article for explaining to someone new the "risks"/rewards of passing crowdfunding legislation.
You're conflating two different estimates: Boisjoly was certain that the particular launch would fail, and a survey of engineers gave a 1-2% estimate for failure across all flights.

Both of those predictions turned out to be extraordinarily accurate.
Just a small suggestion in that case (because it makes it so painful on mobile devices).

Little dragon logo (maybe 15k?) and a CSS3 gradient?
http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/

If your site was otherwise graphics-heavy I wouldn't say anything, but it is a really sparse/clean layout already.
Industry insiders correct me if I'm wrong, but Grim Fandango was pretty much the final nail in the coffin (no pun intended) of the pure adventure genre, because it had terrible sales. Simultaneously, it was a true masterpiece - one of the best in the genre. So it's not surprising that lots of people grew up loving adventure games and now have the disposable income and the nostalgia to fund a Kickstarter project, while at the same time making this a risky project for a game publisher.
It's really amazing he raised that much money so quickly, with so many in the higher tiers as well, especially since the higher tiers of funding are still a donation and do not provide any equity in the project. I suppose the original art wouldn't be worthless though!
Hackers Hit Apple Supplier Foxconn
I think the "recognized as legit by peers and employers alike" is the important part

I think an alternative to the current model of getting yourself deep in debt to prove you're employable would do society alot of good
This was an issue for the Nexus One and the Nexus S, but not anymore with the Galaxy Nexus.

The Nexus S comes in two GSM versions, one that would only do 3G on T-Mobile's AWS band, and one come in a version that would do 3G on AT&T's 3G band. The AT&T model would only do EDGE on T-Mobile, and vice-versa. I think the AT&T version is only sold at Best Buy:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/null/Google-Nexus-S/pcmcat224600...

The GSM Galaxy Nexus has a pentaband radio and so you'll get 3G on T-Mobile or AT&T all on the same model.
It seems like of course you should be able to do this, but the article brings up some valid concerns. Still, I think it's a bit condescending to say to people we're just protecting you when most of us understand the risks involved with a startup. Most aren't Facebook. Most are the company you never heard of because it failed after 6 months.
> Can I get a WooThemes-caliber theme done for your CMS at 3 AM in the morning for $70 without talking to anyone?

I know you run a business, so for you the answer may be 'yes', but for most people running a blog: is this really a huge concern?

To borrow an upthread analogy, if I'm switching from a car to a bike, whether I'll be able to get a complete paintjob at 3am for $70 without talking to someone is not really something that's going to make the pros/cons list.
There seems to be a good supply of legislators that are willing to take donations for laws that benefits special interests at the expense of the many.

If this legislative problem persists I believe there are only three ways of fighting back:

Entrepreneurship: inventions that speed up the demise of the companies funding this and remove the dependency legislators have on special interests.

Legislation: increase cost of enforcement. Donate to legislators that increase friction to these processes by adding requirements and process to:

- the submitter of a request (e.g a copyright holder).
- the processor of a request (e.g the FBI)
- the executor of a request (e.g the dns system)

Technology: make the laws unenforceable by:

- making information untrackable (e.g making it X%
likely that trackable information is incorrect)
- changing the trust model of the internet (e.g replacement to dns).
Link to a print version (one page): http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/02/08/manoj-bh...
Show HN: Private RubyGem Server
TL;DR - http://www.gemfury.com - pre-launch feedback appreciated

Hello HN,

In true hacker tradition, a tool built for ourselves often grows into a service of its own. In the past few months, we've been polishing our private RubyGem server into something that other Ruby developers can use. Today, I'd like to ask for your feedback on where we stand and whether we're "launch-ready".

The service is called Gemfury and offers customers a private RubyGem repository in the cloud. The story is that many RubyGems are built as open source and solid infrastructure exists to develop and distribute those. However, if you want to encapsulate proprietary code into Gems, infrastructure becomes burdensome where all the pieces are disjoint and need to be self-hosted. Gemfury fills one piece of that story in the cloud.

We will be officially launching soon, and I wanted to get your expert opinion on whether we're missing anything.

Please take a look and reply what you think in the comments:

http://www.gemfury.com
Tim Schafer is a reinvent-the-wheel kind of guy, and most of the giant publishers prefer to polish their existing wheels. They run very risk-averse business models -- preferring to milk big, cash cow franchises for all they're worth before being dragged, kicking and screaming, into new IP. They'd much rather invest hundreds of millions into Sequel #235 of Big Franchise X than invest even a fraction of that budget across a spectrum of innovative, but less self-evidently commercial titles. It's not at all dissimilar to the way the big-studio movie business works.

Schafer is the kind of guy who wins awards and accolades, but doesn't move as many millions as, say, "Call of Duty 45: Modern Ware 38: Future Warfare." His stuff is wildly inventive, but it's quirky and plays to a (relatively) niche audience.

But I'd argue that Schafer and Kickstarter are a great pair, precisely because of that dynamic. He's got his fanbase. While that fanbase is smaller than the Big Studio Franchise customer base, it's much more devoted. And if he can work directly with his loyal fanbase, ideally even growing it in the process, then he can do well financially and operate with greater creative freedom.
Is this another sign that the new sought-after perk is meaningful work? The time of beer and ping-pong tables maybe coming to an end?
Mr. Buffett, like a lot of people, mischaracterizes gold as an investment. It is not. Gold is a store of wealth, not a tool realizing future gains (although that may happen). It is disingenuous to compare gold to stocks, or even to farmland as Buffett does. When you buy land, it doesn't miraculously produce crops (wealth) for you, you must input labor and resources (money) first.

I know this is nothing new, but investing in yourself through education is far and away the best investment out there. Governments, thieves, natural disasters and who knows what else can seize or destroy your stocks, bonds, gold, and land, but they can never touch your knowledge and experience. Even if you loose all of your possessions, you can use what you know to reacquire them. If the goal is "preserve AND grow" wealth, educating yourself is the best investment.
I know how it works.

You are solely considering the latest generation of equipment. There is still a lot of analogue kit (crossbar switches/relays) out there across the globe. There are even small pockets of it in the UK.

POTS is definitely not irrelevant if you throw away the notion that everyone is not an iPhone wielding hipster.

However you miss the point. The existing abstraction of "phone number" is so universally powerful that the underlying implementation, regardless of what encapsulation and routing algorithms used is effectively a logical replacement for the analogue switching.

It's like "virual analogue synthesizers" which are replacements for synthesizers. The abstraction was so powerful, the new technology emulates the old.
"Communism" as a general philosophy may not be violent, but if you look in the Communist Manifesto, and the entity which calls itself the Communist Party, the stuff they're concerned about - advocating "armed overthrow of the US government" - was a present and real threat.

Not that I'd care to throw out a blanket justification for any and all anti-Communist measures out there, mind you. But it's possible to downplay the threat excessively too.
Ask HN: how to find a good designer in San Francisco
I've done the backend work for a visual search engine for fashion.

I'm looking for someone to do the visual design, and produce html/css.

Any suggestions on how to find talented designers?

Ideally, I'd like someone physically in San Francisco so I can build a personal relationship, and do future projects together.
Megaupload shutdown did nothing to slow piracy, study finds
Coding is great, but what about exposing them to some hard, meaningful problems while we're at it as well? Otherwise, we're just gonna get 10 times more photo sharing apps in the future.
There is no attitude.

It's simply a fact that military action in Iran would not have the purpose of helping Iranian citizens. That is not logically equivalent to the statement that US/NATO would/should abandon regard for civilian life in pursuit of nuclear disarmament. Do you really want the US 'helping' anyone? Military intervention in Iran would not be an exercise in nation-building or 'liberation'.

The rest of your comment is some victim-complex hyperbolic fantasy. It's a course of events that should be considered but it is by no means whatsoever a certain consequent of military action.
I really like seeing this bill come up - the opposite of the Research Works Act, and a bill that will greatly improve access to research in the U.S.

I am concerned, however, that it uses “peer reviewed journals” as the standard for mandating publication. Computer science does most of its ongoing publication in conferences, not journals; also, specifically naming “journals” seems to me to invite name games, unless journal is defined sufficiently broadly in the bill's text.

I would prefer to see the requirements kick in when research is published in any peer-reviewed publication.

But still, this bill is a great step forward, and things like this are details that can hopefully be worked out.
Sure there is evidence, the 1970s provided lots of it, and the last 15 years have provided even more.

A quick glance at the Dow chart from 1960x to 1983x tells that story very well.

Gold did extremely well during the inflationary late 1960s and the 1970s. Stocks did horrifically terrible in the 1970s (which is where Buffett made a lot of his killing in the market, buying dirt cheap). Right up until the point where Volcker broke the back of inflation in the early 1980s, at which point stocks had a stellar run while inflation was relatively tame.

The reason this happens is: inflation hammers almost every core ingredient of an economy. It kills real savings, because the rate of return on cash can never outrun inflation. It pushes up of the price of commodities that producers need, while eroding wages capabilities for the bottom 90% (the rich can shield their wealth from inflation, poor can't shield their wages). That makes producing things more expensive, while simultaneously limiting the ability to raise prices on consumers that have less real cash to spend. So it squeezes companies, and it erodes real growth.

If you have a 5% to 10% net profit margin, and you're growing at 5% to 10% per year, which are perfectly common rates for most businesses - if you run real inflation at 5%, you're making it radically harder to survive random risk events in the course of business, you're removing critical points of profit and the ability to stick back cash for a rainy day. In effect, that hammers the stock market because it's an inter-connected economy in which IBM or Microsoft or Dell or Cisco all depend on small businesses. And so on and so forth.

There are now a lot of ETFs, you still have to pick among roughly 1,000 of them.
Link: http://www.gemfury.com
You make a valid point. I gave up on rstblog because I wanted a simple feature - like not treating every file in a folder as a potential blog post (e.g., trying to include an image) - and after glancing at the source code, quietly closed my laptop and reconsidered whether the world needed to hear my thoughts in a blogable format.
I'd like to second this opinion. I've had the pleasure of reading and using a lot of his code in the form of the sparsehash, ctemplate and tcmalloc projects and I know for a fact that my own projects would have been a lot harder to write and test without this code.

He's a top notch open source advocate and a great encourager of contributions from non-Google employees, so hat's off and all the best at Khan Academy!
When you do the math on $10 in Facebook stock at founding vs. what it's worth now, you find out that you could have invested in 20,000 startups and even if every single one of them failed except for Facebook, you would have lost NO money. The risk is non-existent. It's a fear tactic.
Ask HN: Review my startup, FleshEatingZipper - One Year Later
Hello everyone! 365 days ago I asked you to check out my startup, FleshEatingZipper: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2194580 (http://flesheatingzipper.com)

I just wanted to let everyone know what we've been up to, how much traffic we've been getting, etc.

The first few months we were so excited getting a few thousand people reading what we were posting and listening to our podcasts. At the end of May we decide to tackle Phoenix Comicon and at the beginning of June we had an article explode at a news aggregator and had almost 30,000 visitors that month.

The traffic dropped down to about 8,000 for the next two month until we were accepted in Google News in the middle of September. September we had 58,000 visitors, October it was 98,000 and November it was 328,000!

This traffic was just to much for our shared hosting account to handle so we bought a server. I work at a data center full time and one of the perks is free colocation/power/bandwidth. We decided to go with nginx and PHP-FPM because of the max connections limitations we read about with Apache.

We did over 1,000 articles and had over 2,500 comments in 2011.

In terms of revenue for 2011 we got paid from Google AdSense $125. We use other ad networks and have been doing campaigns but those have 60 day terms after the campaigns have completed so we didn't see anything else in 2011.

In January we launched our current design and should have a mobile theme soon. The site is WordPress, designed and built internally.

Currently we are averaging about 250,000 visitors a month and preparing for E3 in June.
So what? Then the exploit will work with 100% of browsers instead of, say, 40% as it is now.

Not that much of a difference...
Now imagine SOPA existed 5 years ago, considering Viacom already tried to kill Youtube through a lawsuit. We would be living in an alternative reality right now, without Youtube and probably without any similar website. I suppose BitTorrent's streaming app would've been out a few years earlier.
Often interviewers don't care about something that seems important because we know that one of the other interviewers has already tested it.

There've been times where I've had a candidate code up a solution and I didn't care whether he got the solution right or not. Because other interviewers had already given him coding & algorithm questions, and I figured their feedback would show whether or not he could do that. I was looking for familiarity with JavaScript language features and DOM APIs, and how he approached a vaguely-specified problem and what design choices he made. That was the part that hadn't been tested in earlier interviews.

Interviewing doesn't have to be confrontational. When we're trained, we're told that our job is to get the candidate to show us their best side. That aligns with the interests of both good and bad candidates. It's just that good candidates will be able to show us a really good side, while bad candidates simply don't have that ability. Then it's up to the hiring committee to set a really high bar and only accept candidates that have demonstrated it.
Offer HN: Free Help from a CPA on Tax, Biz and etc.
heyo. anyone that's been on hn for a while has probably seen me offer my help to everyone every so often. if you have anything you want to ask give me a holler or drop a comment below.

you can check me out at cameronkeng.com or an interview i did with mixergy http://mixergy.com/free-first-sections-taxes-course/

plus, i'm creating an online catalog of tax classes online kinda like khan academy style here if you interested:
http://kenginstitute.org/continuing-professional-education/

@cameronkeng
cameronkeng@gmail.com

thanks =)
We've thought about it, need someone to go through and properly anonymize everything, etc -- not at the moment.
An engineer started arranging spysat imaging through "back channels" but was struck down by management - he/she didn't have the guts to escalate it into an official thing.
We're looking to build quality OCR into MuckRock so every document gets it, but it's surprisingly either a) technically difficult or b) financially expensive, choose one.
NPT4279: 2 total submissions.

Startup Workaway II: Thailand. 25 founders. 10 days. 1 kick-ass resort. (startupworkaway.com)
19 points by npt4279 33 minutes ago | 3 comments

Startup Workaway: 20 founders. 10 days. 1 beach house in Costa Rica. Apply now (startupworkaway.com)
61 points by npt4279 283 days ago | comments

Not saying this isn't interesting or appealing to the HN crowd, but disclosing that you are probably affiliated with this organization.
It's Tim Schafer going back to a game genre where he produced games that people (rightly) have an undying love for.

The only surprise with this is that you wonder why he didn't do it already.
Outie car
Really? The interviewer asked you to implement a sort on a problem that had nothing to do with sorting?
Why Node.js is Awesome: A short history of web applications
Asynchronously Load HTML Templates For Backbone Views
Of course it depends on what you need, but wordpress is not even close to the best blog software if you need standard blog features and a site that actually runs without the kind of maintenance problems described.

If you want a huge plugin ecosystem and easy theming then yes, it is the best. You just better get caching right because it's going to hit your database 100+ times per page load once you install those themes and plugins.
So ... it'll be a lot like Amazon Cloud Drive then? And Microsoft's SkyDrive?
Even though I currently work remotely from school at a fantastic company that I used to work for full-time before I re-entered school, being able to help KA in anyway would be a dream come true for me. Sadly I've had to resort to creating a crontab entry for e-mailing me when any non-known IP visits the projects page I set up for my application, no visits yet :(

I'm kicking myself for not making something like the URL kamens tweeted couple days ago for the kid who was looking to intern, but it's kind of hard to make a beautiful website when the thing I'm most comfortable with is backend design and MySQL.

I'm just hoping kamens' tweet about "throwing away half your resumes" so you don't hire unlucky candidates doesn't end up being the case!
Disclaimer: The 'organization' is me! Sorry; I didn't see a textfield to put any commentary in, when you submit a URL.
Why The Pajero Sport Has Not Launched in India?
Launch conference hits $369k in prizes/convertible notes
I woke my pregnant wife up 10 minutes ago to tell her that I'm sending Kickstarter $15 to back a project because they are the ones who made the games we played together years ago and will make the same type of game with the money. She almost danced to the news. We live in some city you never heard of, in Turkey.
And programming (at least for some of us :p) is exactly the opposite--it's usually portrayed as dry and relatively boring, like clerk work, but in reality is actually pretty awesome.
It's shocking to compare my county which shows up as a hard to click speck on that map with some in the mid west.

Sioux County (Fort Yates), N.D.Population (2010): 4,153
Population (2005): 4,084
Inbound income per cap. (2009): $8,800
Outbound income per cap. (2009): $13,400
Non-migrant income per cap. (2009): $11,000
Edit: Area: 1,094 sq mi, Density 3/sq mile

Arlington County (Arlington), Va.Population (2010): 207,627
Population (2005): 187,760
Inbound income per cap. (2009): $44,900
Outbound income per cap. (2009): $49,500
Non-migrant income per cap. (2009): $59,000
Edit: Area: 26 sq mi, Density 7,995/sq mi

PS: Of that 26 sq mi the federal government owns 4.6 square miles (11.9 km2) much of which is Arlington Cemetery which means population density on private land is close to 10,000/sq mile.
note: any YCombinator startups from the past two years who would like a free table and a pair of tickets can email me jason@launch.is and i will hook it up.
Or to move even further away from the idea of driven genius - who would bother to do things like create audiobooks, if they weren't afforded copyright protection?
I remember that when I was doing my startup, it occurred to me that I simply could not do it if Google did not exist. Several times a day, I'd Google for obscure library error messages or documentation for obscure libraries. Heck, I wouldn't even have known that those libraries existed, or that what we were trying to do was even possible, without Google.