skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If a company didn't do all these tricks, they'd be paying 5x more and would never be creating all these jobs due to the enormous tax burden.
Yeah, it's really sad the number of legacy APIs which have standardized on UTF-16.

The Windows API calles UTF-16 "Unicode". Most Mac OS X APIs use UTF-16. JavaScript and Java both use UTF-16. ICU uses UTF-16. So while UTF-8 is technically superior in almost every way, it's going to be an uphill battle to standardize on it.

I appreciate that new languages like Rust and Go made the choice of UTF-8 as their native text encoding. But there's a lot of inertia for UTF-16, and I'm not sure it'll be easy to ever get free of it.
Turing completeness is a pretty good indicator of whether you're looking at a programming language or not.
I would agree, except that the crazy rules that favor the large companies are pretty much written by the large companies aren't they? Its cool that they're just following the rules in a way that makes the most sense for them, but not that they corrupt the political process.
The amount they do pay is fairly irrelevant, it's the equivilent to a single person saying "I know I owe taxes, but hey I've already paid a lot, so..."

The more relevant part of their statement is "Apple has conducted all of its business with the highest of ethical standards, complying with applicable laws and accounting rules." That's their actual response, the rest is just decoration.

I also like the irony (though to be fair you can see why they said it) of saying "We have contributed to many charitable causes but have never sought publicity for doing so"... in a press release.
You should be able to install g-apps from .apk - It's possible to do on other android devices and unless amazon did something curious to the Fire it shouldn't be any different. There are gmail, calendar and other google apks floating around that you could use.
Strings (NSString) on Apple platforms are UTF-16. The Apple platforms are not exactly lagging behind in either multilingual, or text processing. I wonder what this team of three people knows that Apple doesn't? Or is it the other way around, that Apple knows something they don't, and when it comes to shipping products that work in the real world, Apple has figured out how to do it?
It's not as stupid as you think. If you don't know what you are going to do with the data, particularly with low level network packet data like this, it is tricky to sanitize it in a way that it will be useful. That actually requires a ton of thought, and it is way simpler collect the data, keep it isolated, and then come up with ways of accessing/collecting it that protect against privacy violations.

Here's the thing: almost all of the privacy violations that people actually reference in the articles about this issue are data (e-mails, login passwords, URL's, etc.) that are already being transmitted to ISP's (where ironically, there has been a lot of discussion about them being required to archive this data). ISP's have a far less fragmented and transient view of the data than a Google Street Car, and they know precisely where their customers live. The only possible privacy violation here is with data exchanged between systems within the LAN of the home, which is a very different kind of information, is generally not that useful when viewed as a few isolated packets, and which requires a degree of technical sophistication such that you'd really think the same people doing it would also know to encrypt their wireless networks, even if only with something as lame as WEP.
True. Thanks a lot. Will fix it.
utf-8 is a single byte encoding. Reversing the order of a sequence that's one byte long just gives back that one byte.
"lolwut" is all I have to say.
Should Apple buy Foursquare and Square?
A quick introduction to x86 assembly for everyone
It's refreshing to know that all it takes to develop a winning mobile OS strategy is a BA in journalism.
I don't see how Tim's conclusions follow from his premises.

If we are supposed to think of general taxation and the overall amount of government spending as reasonably justified on the grounds that these things were the outcome of a democratic process which "the people" (somewhat indirectly) agreed on, doesn't the same logic suggest that the loopholes are similarly reasonable and justified?

Loopholes aren't a bug in an otherwise perfect system; they are part of the negotiating process that produces laws. If it weren't for the loopholes, legislators wouldn't be able to find support for tax rates as high as they are. The loopholes are there for a reason. The loopholes are part of the exact same "social contract" that produced the taxes.
First of all, IQ tests are bullshit.

Second, everyone can be a "genius" as long as they put a lot of work into anything. It doesn't take much to become better than the average person - you just have to be slightly better.

Once you start working on something for a long time and thinking about it more than 50% (arbitrary, but about right) of all your waking time, your brain will dedicate a big part of its new neurons and synapses towards that, leading to new thought that would've otherwise never occurred.

Genius also directly relates to discipline - if you don't have the self-control (whether through willpower or some sort of OCD-like disorder) to learn and create something, anything, you'll be just average.
This is phenomenal work KateRay. DL sourcecode and would love to help!
All 7-bit ASCII is valid UTF-8, so you're fine as long as you're really using 7-bit ASCII and not latin1 or Windows-1252, etc.
P.S. Just my opinion, please don't downvote (or downvote just this comment, it's separated for that reason): I don't believe creativity in arts equals genius. I find that most of the expensive pictures of old plain and simply suck and are only popular/expensive because of their exclusivity and because the people who can afford them are willing to pay that price (I understand that - I would probably want to buy the first painting a human ever made).

I don't mean Leonardo Da Vinci and others who created new processes for painting - I mean specifically the squares, buckets of paint on canvas and Picasso-like LSD-induced paintings, which are just works of art, not genius. Any decent artist with Photoshop can do better nowadays.
You thought that times article was entertainment? It seemed to touch the major tax issues to me. Bottom line, individuals don't get these kind of tax relief options
Text is maddening, the modern Tower of Babel.

Is there a definitive reference, or small handful of references, to learn all that's worth knowing about text, from ASCII to UTF-∞ and beyond?
this is not hacker news :)
Before I launched my startup with no outside funding, I went looking for $250k on the basis that it did not require large scale to turn a profit, it would turn a small profit immediately, and that there was no sense in asking for more money than we could use at the beginning to acquire a few paying customers and code the next iteration.

Turns out I had it all backwards. Several investors, declining, confirmed to me that the amount I was asking for was frighteningly low. I showed breakdowns of what would go to hiring and equipment, what would go to advertising, and what was the emergency fund - ($100k) - and how we really wouldn't need more because it would start paying for itself quickly. That wasn't satisfying to them.

What I also didn't know was that turning a profit was the last thing on their minds. It took me awhile to piece that together. I have to thank HN for opening my eyes to it.

The problem with speculative investors is that they aren't producing anything of value. They aren't building the software, they aren't in the trenches trying to acquire users or running customer service.

So I launched with a couple of friends who threw in some very, very small investments of a few grand, rented the equipment I would have wanted to buy, and ran it myself. And I haven't been able to grow it nearly as fast as I would have wanted to. But y'know what? It's making a profit. I just paid a 12.4% dividend on investments for the first quarter. Average time on the site is 45 minutes. We convert 1.5% of users at an average of $75 each. And I hold 81.5% of the company.

So... are investors looking for massively overhyped, vaporous, disruptive monster-IPOs wrong? No, but it's kind of like going to the track and only betting on the longest-shot horses you can find. The whole game would cease to function if a majority of cooler heads weren't making wiser investments with better chances of pretty-good payouts, in companies that actually turn a profit. Of course, the whole game might cease to function pretty soon; things right now look an awful lot like 1998. But people with good ideas and a shoestring budget will keep finding ways to turn a profit that keeps the lights on; and for that I'm glad I didn't find an investor, and did it my way.
> So 5.4 | 0 will gives 5, which is a flooring operation. However, -5.4 will give -5. And that’s a ceiling operation.

So, | is actually doing a round toward zero. It seems like the problem described is actually caused by simply misunderstanding what the floor function does (round toward negative infinity).
NSString is decades old, from NeXTSTEP (you can see that in the name: "NS"). While its possible they could change it, the in-memory representation doesn't matter much in this case. When you transfer data out, such as with writeToFile:encoding: or convert it into a char * (often with UTF8String, or one of the C string methods), you are almost always specifying an encoding anyway. And, for most Cocoa apps, that encoding is UTF8.
Au contraire, i think, just like really great art, it's easy for an average person like me to identify genius when we see it.
The amount they do pay is fairly irrelevant, it's the equivilent to a single person saying "I know I owe taxes, but hey I've already paid a lot, so..."

"So I'm not going to pay more than I'm legally required to". I have no problem with that.
I don't see what literacy rates has to do with remixing except when literary works are involved.

If anything a low literacy rate probably means that people are less exposed to the concept of "droit d'auteur", a concept internationally established at the Berne Convention by the literary elite in France (victor hugo, et al).

The concept of copyright is largely grounded in written works. If anything the recorded music industry was one of the first to challenge "right of the author". The sheet music industry was up in arms when recorded music became mainstream.

I also get the impression that writers are generally more likely to be adamant about copyright that musicians. When you are producing 4 minute songs versus 200 page tomes, there is a much greater chance that whatever work you are producing will demonstrate elements of the works that influenced the author.
The biggest problem I'd imagine with the direct-soldered die is that it's a much more rigid interface, which means any localised heating is going to put much more mechanical strain on the die.

In contrast, the TIM is much more flexible, and the reduced heat transfer might actually work in its favour, by buffering sudden thermal spikes to reduce the cross-die gradient (and thus stress).
HaikuOS x86_64 port part of Google Summer of Code
Of course you'll be closer to a "genius" if you act like one or better yet, have one as your mentor.

If you're lazy, though, you can always just tail a genius, then steal his thunder :-D
Google should just become an access provider. As an ISP they would have authority to go over each and every packet with as fine a comb as they can muster. In the interests of "regulatory compliance" and "providing better service" of course.

It's disturbing to see some commenters making arguments that essentially amount to "but everyone else has always done it or is now doing it".

When you are Google you can pretty much do as you please. That includes taking the high road and ignoring foolish critics. Or taking the low road. And ignoring foolish(?) critics.

Ethics is a choice not an obligation.
If you search hard enough, you can find a one-line anecdote to support any position.
This is a great resource; it was extremely useful when I was writing a UTF-8 library myself. I found the UTF-8 stress test file is particularly useful to run tests against: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-test.txt
The PR says nothing of importance or relevance. But to be fair, Apple didn't name drop any charitable orgs still.
I expect all actors, including corporations, to act in their own self-interest. The problem isn't that they corrupt the political process. I expect them to try to shift the rules into their favor. The problem is that the political process is corruptible in the first place. That's what we should be working on ... and the only way to fix it is to instill an expectation of identical treatment for everybody.

All citizens, all parties, play under the same set of rules.

If you start playing favorites with the poor or some depressed economic sector, it simply opens the door for everybody else to play the game and game the system.
As the authors explain in the post, many things use UTF-16 internally (Python, Java, C#, etc...). It does not mean that it's the best solution.

Have you read the article? They make a good explanation at why UTF-16 is "the worst of both worlds" (wide characters AND variable lenght).
If you are "parsing" a string then you will have problems unless you specifically make the code deal with unicode code points and not bytes. If you just accept a char* and then pass it on with the contents as is you'll generally be fine (except on Windows).
Some old languages have also made that choice, albeit recently in Python's case:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3120/
I think that's the point; In the real world, any significant chunk of non-roman text is embedded in far more roman text, or in terms of internals of programs, is generally dwarfed by the size of other data structures.

More or less, I'd say that storage size of text usually doesn't matter.
Your ideas are worthless
> Darwin was actually relatively unoriginal in his ideas about evolution, which was already commonplace in biological circles. He really just added a bit of sciency-but-not-quite-scientific rigor and coined the term "natural selection", then got famous for it.

That’s entirely unfair. Darwin spent his whole life furiously gathering evidence from everywhere he could and communicating with the rest of the biology community worldwide. If you read any of his books (the most fun, I think, is the Voyage of the Beagle) the constant probing and questioning shines through. The man made hypotheses about everything he saw and tested them where he could, or suggested possible tests even when they were beyond him. The character I see when I read Darwin is a passionately curious, perceptive, insightful, and careful man.

To call, for instance, The Origin of Species, one of the most remarkable presentations of evidence of the 19th century, “sciencey-but-not-scientific” is to project modern standards onto the past. There were certainly other people with similar ideas in the biology community (Wallace for one), but they weren’t anywhere close to mainstream. Darwin’s evidence in The Origin, however, was overwhelming. And It stands up remarkably well today; some parts could certainly use updates after 150 more years of inquiry by many more people with better tools, but it’s mostly very good.
Google's inability to get new software into user's hands is definitely going to be a problem going forward. I'm actually surprised it hasn't burnt them worse already. Take ICS for example. It was a very good update for Android yet by the time it reaches even 25% marketshare iOS6 and Windows Phone 8 will probably be out. It's quite possible iOS7 will be released before ICS/JB comprise even 50% of the Android market. Is that really sustainable?
Wow! What is your site?
Why naturally jump to the conclusion that Comcast (Who, while many will criticize, probably know vaguely what they're doing) is broken before researching /why/ it wasn't working? DNS isn't the most simple thing in the world, and things like this can catch a lot of people out, particularly if your DNS host doesn't tell you root level CNAMEs are not recommended, but automatically assuming someone else must be doing something wrong, just because you think it should be working, is frankly stupid. It's the sort of thing I'd expect from TheDailyWTF or /r/talesfromtechsupport, not a reader of Hacker News.
I'll add:

"...because we're super rich and can hire ultra clever accountants to abuse loopholes in your tax laws that were put in place by politicians paid by other super rich corporations specifically to get away with paying less taxes thereby grossly violating the trust of the American public and the spirit of taxation in general."

Are you still ok with that?
Hate fossil fuels? Then buy up the reserves
well, should Europe demand same prices as US too? the price for many things in Europe is the same as in US numerically, just in a difference currency ;) EUR instead of USD.

Companies charges whatever they feel like they can get away with. Its called free market.

You want them to lower the price - stop buying.
Why do that when you can take the IHS off and attach the heatsink directly to the silicon? You know, like everyone does on their laptops...
3+billion is a huge amount of money the last time I checked. The fact is Apple derives most of its revenue abroad, and it's unfair to subject their overseas earnings to US taxes.
NSStrings are opaque--you always call accessor functions and never have access to the low level backing store. The reason they are good is that you can't get data into or out of them without specifying an encoding, which leaves the actual encoding of the backing store as an implementation detail.

The fact is, I don't even know (or see documented) that the backing is UTF-16--Apple is free to change that at their whim and no user programs would break.
A slight tangent, but I'm curious, can Google claim the donation is from Google for tax purposes even though it's under the instruction of Nils instead of him receiving cash? If so, is that why they offer to double it?
No. You never need to know how to interpret the bits in each byte; you cannot address individual bits. Endianness refers to how different bytes within a multi-byte value are addressed; little endian means that the smaller addresses refer to the lower order bytes, big endian mean that smaller addresses refer to the higher order bytes.

Think of it as which order you write the digits in a number. Each digit (byte) means the same thing regardless of whether you are big-endian or little-endian. But in big endian, you would write one thousand two hundred thirty four as 1234, while in little endian you would write it 4321.
>You could then send queries to multiple DNS servers simultaneously, so that no single server can censor.

>Now think of all the latency added by that system

If you send the requests at the same time, the latency should be the same as querying the slowest of the DNS servers individually (or the nth fastest server, where n is the number required to establish a quorum, if you don't require results from all the servers).
Love the idea. Execution is pretty nice. If some designer might space a few minutes to get the colours a little friendlier, that would be great!
There are many other canonical examples of geniuses that serve as a good foundation for the myth of Genius. Think about how daring it was to propose some of the most unconventional scientific insights when there wasn't even enough experimental evidence to justify them (why would light speed ever be constant? why would anyone ever think light is emitted in discrete packets?). Those ideas sounded crazy enough as it is, now imagine taking the extra mile to create whole scientific theories around them.
The TechCrunch Meet-Up In NYC Is Officially Official: RSVP Now
Agree with this point. I'm 26, and I find that I am most inventive and creative when I'm doing something others would label as "child-like."
I think that your impression of doing related work is overly simplified. Since you are submitting to a conference/journal in your field, chances are high that the reviewers are knowledgable in the subject area and will point out errors in attributing due credits to related work.

While I agree that there are systemic problems with peer review and how the science "enterprise" works, there is fitting analogy from politics by Winston Churchill: "The worst form of government except for all the others."
Google sued in France over 'Jewish' searches
In my opinion, individuals aren't supposed to. Businesses have lower base tax rates and deductions in order to encourage money making, and thus job creating, environments.
I thought about putting in zero, but I'm thinking of this in the mathematical group Z sub n, the natural numbers. That ring does not include zero, and it's as if it doesn't exist. One, on the other hand, is the multiplicative identity, so it is the background color, a factor of all the other numbers.
Perhaps the most unforgivable thing you've done here is forced me to weigh in on the side of javert. >:(

If you cannot separate political policies from military ones, you cannot pretend to argue usefully about this.

"I only recognize that a distinction could exist when we restrict the discussion to conscripted armies."

You need to further elaborate on this, because one easy interpretation is that you have no idea how to reason about volunteer armies. I'm not going to even go into more esoteric arguments about how "volunteer" anything actually is--just consider that the military does not (except in some bizzaro world some people seem to want to live in) spontaneously go to war. The politicians guide policies, the politicians set agendas, and declare wars and deploy troops (for our sake here, I consider the President in the politician camp).

(I'll also argue that things like what the CIA/Homeland Sec. do that require drones and such are wrong, so save it.)

It is wrong to inflict injury on another human being (we could argue this, but let's not). That said, surgeons cut to good effect, police detain suicide attempts, and bouncers eject unruly patrons. We can argue that harm is being done in all those cases, but to good effect.

More to the point, though, javert is saying that the military deserves praise in terms of how effective/professional they are, and you did not disagree beyond saying that the divide between politics and force was beyond you.

You cannot with a straight face tell me that you refuse to agree that the (American) military is due praise for their ability due to their given directions--while at the same time participating in this community here on HN.

Tell me, what is the cost of pushing consumerism and advertising on people? What is the cost of buying the latest and greatest smartphone? What is the cost of the shinier, faster computer? What is the cost of developing games and amusements to distract and destroy manhours of productivity?

What is the cost of datamining to circumvent privacy and better target ads? Of streamlining sharing of information about friends who wouldn't do so themselves?

So, please, by all means, criticize those dumb sociopaths in the military--but hold yourself to the same goddamn standard when talking about the majority of your fellow hackers!
Other stuff animals survive and evolve without:

- Hacker News

- Internet

- Electricity

- Toilets

Porn is a reaction to our cultural practices from the past. If it weren't for porn, maybe our societies would be more open sex-wise.

Can I ask on what do you base this? Because I see sexually liberated subcultures making and sharing their own (non-commercial) porn. http://www.freedomporn.org/ is a good example.
Wait. What? Where's the data? There's a citation of P/E ratios for large tech companies and then the author's assertions about his judgements about seed and A series valuations. That's not really a lot of actual data in my book.
How does boot time compare to stock/distro Vim?