skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If have just been writing a lot of C code to support unicode in a new project. It reads UTF-8 converts to UTF-32 does lots of clever stuff and spits UTF-8 out once again.

Here's my take: UTF-8 should, rightly, be the only interchangeable text format of choice for the right-minded individual. The other UTFs should be internal formats used in-memory or on disk cache / database / etc

Why? Simple: UTF-8 rocks!

It's a beautifully designed, backwardly compatible, nifty piece of back-of-a-napkin genius. Simple to code and decode (once you understand it), simple to check with a regular expression (once you realise it is essentially just a token with a set number of chars), and simple to add the wealth of the world's characters to your app with a reasonable amount of code. Plus, it's compact in the way Huffman coding is compact (at least from a western perspective).

Also, no-one should ever be using (char ❄) in the 21st century unless it is to temporarily hold a UTF-8 string before converting to wchar.

Why? Because you almost certainly don't have a (char ❄), you have a UTF-8 sequence (^^^see above). Sadly this makes your memory mapped files slightly redundant. But don't fret, this is the future: convert them to 32-bits and release them. Be happy that you can now treat any character sequence, in common usage, in the whole of humanity like an array.

As for UTF-16, why bother? It's neither compact, clever, nor big enough to hold every character on the internet. &#128169; needs more than 16 bits and everyone, now, needs to support a poop with eyes.

tl;dr: Share UTF-8 promiscuously, keep UTF-32 for private moments. Don't dally with UTF-16, she's an old tease and can't handle poop.

note: ❄ = asterisk :)
A Senseless Conversation (sci-fi short on the Turing Test)
Mysql's character encoding is pretty hilarious. I love how its "latin1" is nothing of the sort (it's actually cp1252 with eight characters shuffled around).
Bootstrap in production, especially in early versions of a user facing web app, makes perfect sense. It lets those of us who are great at writing back end try to go to market with a pretty good looking front end.

Very few users will know or care about what CSS framework or guidelines we use. They care about the value that our application provides for them. They just need an easy to use, easy to navigate way to get to what they want that we're offering. If you can afford to bring on a designer to put your own stamp on your application from day one, great. However for many of us, we want to get to a working prototype and then see if we're headed in the right direction before investing in providing a personality to our app.
http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/17166532605/helle... if you want to talk this through
Also, it's not just the math -- it's the data. Successful investors spend large amounts of time every day poring over financial reports to find companies whose stated value is different than their actual value. That's not something really teachable; you just have to want to sit there for hours doing it.
I thought of "Tek" from William Shatner's (really Ron Goulart's) TekWar.
Hear, hear! (http://unbecominglevity.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2008/1...)
I thought the cool-off time was enforced by setting progressively longer times for the "reply" link to appear as threads lengthen. The idea is that as exchanges get longer, the probability of needing a "cooling off" period before replying increases.
did you do any validation of your idea? (airtime) / how did you do it?
Eyercize is a very interesting resource to get started - http://www.eyercize.com/
I've thinking about things like this since Nike+ made it sort of mainstream. I think it's pretty neat because I'm never disciplined enough to do a full log after the fact.

As a matter of practicality, though, is it 100% voice controlled? Do I have to count out my reps? Because with any significant amount of weight, I'm not too articulate.
M.I.A. performs during the Super Bowl XLVI Halftime Show | Word News24
Doesn't matter much, if they are still able to shut down a competitor like Nest legally, especially seeing as millions of people will continue to buy their products.

I can't do anything about millions of people, but I can do something about my own buying patterns. I can also tell others why I did so and hope they agree with me.
You Can’t Copyright Porn, Harassed BitTorrent Defendant Insists
Would that be a sign Americans have been reducing usage of the learn verb? I guess that correlates with the amount of posts here about the problems of American education.
awesome team and progress. rooting for you guys!
Go for Java programmers
Ask HN: What are your top 5 Wordpress plugins you couldn't live without?
To give a bit of background, I am starting off a new festival site so I am particularly interested in Paypal / ticket selling plugins and a mapping plugin for getting people to the festival. The thread is pretty open though, as any good plugin deserves a mention.
Perhaps I'm mistaken about this, especially since this article was my first time hearing about delegate, but I believe that live and delegate are only able to be used for existing DOM events like "click", etc., whereas livequery calls a function on occurrences like elements appearing in the DOM, for which there is no built-in way to watch with jQuery.

I usually use it to watch when elements appear and then bind handlers to them inside the callback. Kinda does away with the need for live.
> we’re definitely going to try to take a more “real” tone rather than the false formality that pervades most company communications

This makes me wonder if by now there is an entire generation of tech entrepreneurs that has never read the Cluetrain Manifesto: http://www.cluetrain.com/
Yes, that would fit easily. Here's an example of the text data that you can find in the block chain by running the "strings" command: http://pastebin.com/ZqqFEqkc
Try XFCE. Linus Torvalds said he uses it.

Meanwhile, KDE isn't all that bad nowadays. I actually kinda like KDE 4.8, it's come a long way since the early days of KDE 4.
"Resolving copyright violations is really easy"

I think may be slightly off here. Some cases of copyright violation are quite blatent, but many others become tricky.

Music companies have been known to file DMCA complaints over content that their own PR-branches filed for publicity. Other times there is the question of derivative work and whether it is fair use, authorized, or in violation. For that matter, when talking about older works, something can be under copyright in one country but in the public domain in another, depending on their copyright term.

In contast, with the question of what is offensive, it matters greatly on who you ask. All but the most banal and obvious facts will likely offend someone.
The problem is the same factors that slow negative discussion also block positive discussion.

Also, I highly doubt the front page is purposely designed to take 4 seconds to load - doesn't happen all the time, but too often.
You are right that I did not choose my words very carefully. The underlying point still stands.
Its really easy. You find companies with trustworthy management and sound businesses, look at their growth, find a reasonable discounted expected future growth, then calculate the net present value of discounted future growth. If the stock is trading for that amount, then you pass. If the stock is trading at a discount to that, then you buy.

Those who think the market is efficient are saying that there are no stocks like that... but if you look around, its not hard to find them.

When I was a buy and hold investor, I made %50-%100 returns each year spending about 5 hours a year in investigation (and most of that was just because I liked checking out possibilities. Most of it was fun. Once I'd found the keepers, it took me an hour each year - about 15 minutes each quarter- to update the numbers in the spreadsheet.)
This is a total rip of this article: http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-game without any attribution.
It's at https://honeywell.com/Pages/contact-us.aspx . I selected that I'm a "Customer", no company, product type "Thermostats", inquiry type "Home Owner".
While the article is right in the basic summation JavaScript != Lisp I think it is not entirely accurate to say that JavaScript did not borrow heavy from lisp to create a simplified languadge that is more similar to Lisp than C. As well JavaScript's object system borrowed and expanded on Lisp's collections data structures. Whether one thinks it is a bad design or not JavaScript's prototype inheritance is based of a hash table like structure that resembles higher order collections. The designers intent with JavaScript was to make it as simple as BASIC to pick up, but allow it to be somewhat powerful. While they made some dreadful decisions along the way, they achieved their goals which is a pretty good achievement. But to me, I see the fingerprint of a stripped down Lisp more than I do say a stripped down C.

On a personal note, I think JavaScript and the browser's implementers decision to make it an event based system has made the whole development of UI's very elegant. I always likes UI systems that favored events and observers over procedural controllers as such I think JavaScript is a fantastic languadge for UI development.

I am still on the fence for back end business logic and infrastructure projects. When given the choice, I would rather just use Clojure or Java as opposed to JavaScript, there is no doubt about it that Lisp is a more powerful languadge and given the choice I would use it over JavaScript, but in the UI, JavaScript is powerful enough, yet easy enough for a designer to pick it up, as such I think it is designed well for it's intended purpose. Even if I don't agree with every design decision and even if it does not exactly resemble Lisp in it's efforts to mimic some of the power of Lisp.
Aw, thanks Brandon! We care a lot about the team we're building and we're looking for people who believe in our mission. If you missed it, we're offering new hires (and any referrers) what we call "The Ultimate Collaborative Consumption Package":

$1000 worth of credit that you can spend on Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Grubwithus and Skillshare.

You can learn more at: http://ridejoy.com/jobs
Well, then it looks like X.1 is what you want, at least since 2001. There was a grain of truth in the old "enterprise" adage, "Don't use X.0", after all.
Kinda tempted! I'm an occasionally-coding artist, not a startup-dreaming programmer, though. Not sure how painfully out of place that might make me.
I think a lot of new code tends to just assume UTF-8, and if you try and use something else that's your problem (I know I do this). Older code had to be able to detect encodings.
The question is whether there is any consistent way in which to deal with the "mistakes" of past governments. One thing is for sure, if you pardon Alan Turing, you must pardon everyone who committed that "crime" and other "crimes" that are now human rights. Being a great scientist cannot be what buys you the right to be gay.

What about all the other absurd laws of the past, many of which still shape the present? Large parts of UK land are still owned by the aristocracy. Can her Majesty's government even pretend to right past wrongs when the monarchy itself is a symbol of unspeakable crimes against humanity?
Now..what I want to know is..how to best combine the power of dvorak and vim
Your "life insurance" from your company is, in all likelihood, much closer to a token benefit than something that's appropriately sized for your needs. (Especially if you have dependents!) It's also not especially cost-effective if you're "buying more of it" from your employer's vendor anyway.

Buy term life insurance on your own for you and your wife, assuming you have dependents.

(Google it; start with a link from Suze Orman's site, or anything. It's largely commoditized for most people from what I can tell. I had to buy from one of two specific vendors because many policies exclude dying when serving as part of an airplane crew; I'm a private pilot; my family needs financial support without regard to my manner of passing, so...)
"The problem, then, is that once the "suffering" is gone, or sufficiently lessened, there is no real reason to keep building."

Then how is the project incomplete? If it's not a product that you're planning to sell, put your code on Github or the like and others will add any features that you're missing.
Also, based on the geometry of the xwave headset it looks like the electrode(s) are very rostral, so I would imagine that it picks up a lot of EOG from the eyes and EMG from the frontalis and corrugator supercilii (eyebrow muscles).

The ground, again from what I can tell from the photo, is on the earlobe. This is not a terrible place for a ground (there are no muscles there) but it's not ideal for removing EMG artifacts.
In the last decade or so I have tried a lot of options for my own projects. Currently I have 3 year commitments for a small EC2 instance and a micro EC2 instance, and I sometimes use Heroku.

I also keep a large memory large EC2 instance configured but paused 99% of the time and I just use it for a few hours occasionally when I need more horsepower. I also use Elastic MapReduce.

I like EBS volumes, BTW, because they are easy to backup with S3 snapshots and I have nothing that requires very high I/O performance. For customers, I set up RAID 0 on EBS, but for my stuff, I don't bother.

I used to rent conventional VPS's but "standardizing" on Amazon's infrastructure seemed like a good move because all of my customers (except for perhaps 1 or 2) in the last 4 years use AWS.

Knowing AWS inside-out is a good job skill, and running your own projects on AWS helps learn reusable skills.
Highly pluggable WebSockets framework for Node.js and the browser
Sean - it takes one to know one. =)

We know it's an uphill battle to win the ridesharing space but we're determined to make it work.
To me, the big orange numbers on the left are the first thing that pop out at me, pulling me back into older stories with significant number of new comments.
This article is helping me validate my theory about someone's opinion about Facebook as a litmus test for how disconnected from regular people they are.

Dave Winer doesn't like Facebook (totally valid opinion).

Dave Winer doesn't like how centralized Facebook has become for people and events (also a totally valid opinion).

But according to Dave Winer, he can't even understand why someone would use Facebook: "So Scoble, you can go enjoy whatever it is you like about Facebook. I can’t imagine what that might be."

This strikes me as someone with a complete lack of understanding for how people use the internet. I see this increasingly, as people not only harbor negative opinions about certain aspects of technology, but can't even comprehend a world in which users actually like using these services.

I'm frightened that people ostensibly involved in the technology industry can possess a chasm this deep between their own model of how things should be and reality.
Nathan's talking about solving recurring problems (that belong to a single problem class).
A simpler way to do this is to keep stories around on the home page that continue to receive comments
Yeah, that's what I was trying to say. Don't we all know by now that one-size-fits-all is not an optimal solution?
Great point. Per my example above, we might only discover that "64ms kinda sucks", not that "an additional 32ms on top of the original 32ms kinda sucks".

And who knows, maybe after a "kinda sucky valley" there's some comfy-feeling region up above 250ms, where the "float" just feels okay. :)
Wasn't that called MySpace? :)
Congrats guys. Nice execution so far. Time to take that ball and run, because Steve Blank and others would say that you have taken down a big risk milestone for everybody interested in the market, indeed you have validated it. Now it's time for the second movers join the party :)

To other developers (Rails, anyone?):

Want to create a similar/better/different version (I've got the points of differentiation written up) get in touch. Up to 50% of the equity is on the table (subject to terms, conditions, etc.), plus I seed fund (no salaries until proper milestone and subject to terms, conditions, etc.).

Before you scream "copycat," consider that this project has been on my backlog since before RideJoy existed or registered its domain name. The brands I've got for this include part of my "P2P" line, plus a "_ _ _str" name, both registered prior to RideJoy: p2pRides.com and Ridestr.com.

Why don't I do it myself? Because I can't (yet?). I'm a former venture finance guy who moved to Europe and tried to get some things going, including Airbnb before Airbnb was Airbnb. Google for "BuzzPal Revealing Its Product - ArcticStartup" for the video, which kind of sucks, but is what it is. It was also a bad name for the project, but I didn't yet own p2pRooms.com or any of other better ones for that project yet (do no and it's still on the backlog).

Why did I say "yet" in the paragraph above? Because I am now studying Software Engineering with an emphasis on what I need to learn to launch these kinds of projects myself and/or assess and analyze technical partners, co-founders, etc.

To RideJoy or Airbnb or others who have been and are making offers to acquire domain names: Deals are possible, but probably something with upside vs. straight cash deals like the one I did last year (related to Amazon's $500-million acquisition of Diapers.com).
I'm not sure what you mean by write amplification. A small write (say, updating a small key) will cause a single disk write for the journal. What additional writes are you seeing?
I use paper + pencil to track my Simple Fit workouts now and have never used a voice-controlled app for fitness.

A few questions:

1. Have you considered adding a demo video? Although your screen shots are well done, I'd love to see the app in action.

2. Can you do more than track reps & sets? I find that most fitness apps are not flexible enough for Simple Fit or interval type training.

3. Can you talk about the app development process? How was the original idea formulated, validated, etc? Did you outsource the development? Any other interesting insights?
By that logic, the "N-word" isn't "hatred of blacks", so it's not racist.

"Bitch" is a loaded sexist term, much like the "N-word" is a loaded racist term. There's really never a good reason to use it when you can use something else instead. And just because some people do use it doesn't mean you have to sink to their level when there's a thousand other words you could use.
I say use Bootstrap, just don't use it as a crutch. It's a great tool to accelerate your design process, but it's not a one-size-fits-all template for every app or site.

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3534924
I can only speak for myself, but I certainly have considerably more of a sense of humor and tolerance for mistakes in a product that costs $2 versus one that costs $2000. If you are charging me serious dough, then you better damn well have your ducks in a row. If you are offering a free product, then all you need is enough redeeming qualities to hold my attention.
What Is It Like To Own A Nest Thermometer?
The Big Data Era
Hackers of Symantec source claim Symantec offered $50k to keep quiet
I worded my post poorly. I meant to imply that their big value finds in free agency came through offense. They were able to adequately replace Damon and Giambi (Jason) with much cheaper counterparts. It would have been much more difficult to find cheap replacements for the big three.

Zito, Hudson, and Mulder were all draft picks. I think Moneyball did discuss the A's strategy to draft college pitchers instead of high school, as Beane found high school pitchers to be over-valued.
Want to jump start your startup? Check out the 5 best mags for entrepreneurs.
> not "this is a rock-solid, time-tested piece of software that works in absolutely every browser perfectly".

I wouldn't and didn't say that. Just that I'd expect it to work with the most common browser out there.
Show HN: We've Prelaunched - eFolio.me
I'm developing an early start-up called eFolio.
Not much information is available yet but, it's being developed to solve many problems pertaining to employment.

As this is my first prelaunch I'm still trying to find ways to gain exposure, if anyone has advice from a previous a experience, it'd be nice to share.

Any feedback is welcome.
> They're also taking steps to be able and use Google Closure Compiler's advanced optimizations...

That is awesome, thanks for pointing it out!
I agree with you. I can achieve flow while programming sometimes that when I look back wonder how I managed to accomplish certain things in the time I had. Often the code has to be reworked to hash out bugs or inconsistancies but that doesn't mean the state of mind didn't exist.

A more accurate way to display it is -- bare with me -- watching replays in Starcraft 2. I've played the original for years and the sequal since its beta release and I am fairly aware of my limitations, but just once in a while I am able to lock in and accomplish much more intense output than what I'm typically capable of (replays back this up too). I'm not a pro, I still have much to learn but it doesn't mean I can't "lock in".
I've never used Chef either, but those don't strike me as unique challenges. Building a Chef-only distribution mechanism to support discovery, versioning, and source viewing is fine and all, but such things do already exist in any sane dependency management infrastructure (whether we're talking about gems or maven jars or cpan or whatever). In particular, the dev side of me is baffled by the notion of having a separate toolchain for downloading source dependencies. git submodules and such are bad enough, but mucking around with a special workflow to download sources seems like it's a long path with few benefits and perhaps some big downsides (i.e. build/process repeatability?).

That said, perhaps none of that really matters; I wonder if all this comes down to hidden assumptions re: constituencies and heterogeneous skillsets, which I think is what you were pointing at in the beginning of your comment. i.e. "you need to learn the Chef toolchain" may be a more sale-able/scalable message than "you need to learn the Ruby/gem toolchain".
A bit of friendly feedback. When I view the site in Firefox or Chrome (width of 1100px), the paragraph that starts "Last year" is covered up by the photo "Pitching MassChallenge". It only shows if my browser width is at least 1185px. Great stuff btw!
What happened to the @var variables? Not a big fan of this data prefix stuff.
I actually used a Razer Imperator, but I found it to be very flaky: about once an hour it would lose the plot completely and I'd have to unplug and reinsert the USB cable. Not a great experience in-game :-( I don't know if it was that particular mouse or the OS/X driver that was causing me problems, though.

I switched to a Steelseries Xai, and I've been loving it. It doesn't have any special mac drivers but all of the fancy settings are controllable via a little LCD screen on the bottom of the mouse.

I'm not sure if its affected by this "32 ms" problem. I only use OS/X so I might just be used to it at this point.
I've once used a program called "Start Killer" on my Windows 7 desktop, which removed the start menu button. I did this because I thought the desktop would look better without it. The Start menu would still come up when the Windows key was pressed, so that still worked, but I quickly found it annoying because there was no way to activate it with the mouse (which I did more often than I realized).

As for Windows 8, I have high hopes for it because I like Windows 7, but I do think Microsoft is going to end up with a weird GUI mashup if they are not careful.