skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mark to mystery is a pretty amusing term but I've never once heard it before - is it really something that gets said?
How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Global Taxes
Ever heard of tipping?

Also, I am willing to pay more than required for products that I am particularly keen on, which is why I'm such a fan of Kickstarter
So? There is a new version of the spec, go read it, learn how it's supposed to work, then decide which parts you want to implement. Point is, there is not a single HTML5 tag in 4chan's markup as far as I could see. They're completely missing the point.

It's only the OCD CSS designers who treat every superfluous div and span as a stain upon their work. The rest of us happily use the new meaningful HTML5 structure where appropriate, and keep sprinkling on divs/spans to help guide the layout and style.

And FYI, the <b> tag wasn't supposed to be replaced by CSS, it was supposed to be replaced by <strong> in cases where you wanted to highlight a span in text. Because the act of highlighting text shouldn't be coupled to what it looks like. Unfortunately, most people can't think in semantic terms and still write web content like it's MS Word. That's why HTML is such a complex beast: because we humans constantly give ourselves too much credit, and ultimately, the web is an enormous hack job achieved through minimum effort.
UPDATE: Yes, I read yours. I suggested a non-NULL terminator for strings that are not length-terminated. Your alternative only applies to length-terminated strings.

You manage this by having the sending end slice things into lengths for the receiver. Is there some globally-recognized standard for doing so that I'm not aware of?

Because if there isn't, my termination proposal (an invalid Unicode byte) is just as valid as your framing protocol.
His family example doesn't really work. If we had all agreed to throw this big party then each person who agreed stated his obligations to the party. If someone had not agreed to the party, they simply would have not payed and not come. This is not how it works with the government. You are forced to come to the party and pay for it to make everyone else happy. It does not matter that it cost you or that it is not what you want to do. You must surrender yourself for societies "greater good."

It is also worth mentioning that happiness is a subjective value. It is pointless to draw a conclusion about what make society happy when only individuals can be happy. If someone goes their own way, they are not leaving happiness on the table, they are seeking it out elsewhere.
Google was sniffing traffic, not using the APs to access the Internet.
Why do you say that? The CEO and CFO work for and are judged by the board and whatever standards they care to use. The board in turn is free to make decisions independent of shareholder financial interests. There is nothing intrisically true about your statement about CEO/CFO only optimizing for maximum financial gain.

The real issue is that most people think they are legally bound to always make the optimal financial move even if that means being immoral or unethical. Even worse is that many people think that doing so has a certain morality of its own, which IMO is completely, bizarro, nuts.

http://www.directorship.com/stout-shareholders-as-owners/
http://hbr.org/2010/04/the-myth-of-shareholder-capitalism/ar...
The computational complexity of Minesweeper
Logged in? I don't even have an account. Consider making the comment form available, with a request to log-in / sign-up on form submission. (Also, do you really want comments to be used for feedback as you've suggested here, rather than for comments on the value (or otherwise) of the educational resource?)
I did research, what you're seeing is part of the research process :)
I agree strongly, conferences in particular are very important in this regard. Perhaps in some fields people are cautious about sharing full results at conferences, but in most it is very much encouraged and beneficial to get your ideas out there to the community before a paper can come out. The "12 month time-lag" cited in the article usually includes at least one conference presentation, in which the main results can be presented, often receiving useful feedback that can result in a stronger finished paper as well.

Could scientists make better use of modern communication media? Sure. I particularly wish more fields would adopt the arXiv model. But the peer-reviewed journal is not going to be displaced anytime soon, the best we can hope for is to make the process more transparent and open, more reflective of the interests of Science and scientists, and less of the for-profit journal industry. I highly doubt that the problem will be solved by "science startups." There are large non-profit interests as well, I expect the progress to be made by individual scientists, universities, and professional organizations who have an interest in destroying the status quo.
I'm also using Mint but LMDE, the debian version with XFCE as a desktop. Cinnamon looks alright but XFCE is nice on Mint.
If the IQ test is bullshit, this anecdote and your reasoning aren't good reasons to conclude that for several reasons, and to mention a few:

1. It may not be true that he had an IQ of 122

2. A score of 122 is still kind of high

3. If it were wrong in one case it doesn't invalidate it, especially since we're talking about a Nobel prize winner in physics

4. If he did take a test, that was several decades ago and I'd imagine the test has evolved from then

5. This test may have not been good for Feynman since he is much better in science and math

On another point, I think the author is incorrectly using Feynman as a person of average intelligence when it's obvious he was very much well above average in math being that he was a Putnam Fellow.

>He obtained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in mathematics and physics—an unprecedented feat—but did rather poorly on the history and English portions. [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Early_life
if google gives privileged access to android to motorola (earlier access to os builds for testing, for example), that's just going to motivate samsung, htc, sony etc to differentiate further, as they will have a disadvantage in time to market
See my comment above; I can construct cases that make this sort of conversion have unacceptable overhead.

Would it matter in a real-world setting? I can't say for sure, because nobody I know of has tried making a production-quality UTF-8 web layout engine. But, in my mind, none of the benefits of UTF-8 (memory usage being the main one in a browser [1]) outweigh the performance risks of doing conversion. And the risk is real.

[1]: Note that you still need UTF-16 anyway, for interoperability with JavaScript. So using UTF-8 might even lead to worse memory usage, due to the necessity of duplicating strings, than a careful UTF-16-everywhere scheme that takes advantage of string buffer sharing between the JS heap and the layout engine heap would.
Cat doesn't know and doesn't need to know what kind of input it gets, it's just for concatenatig files. Files themselves can be binary for all that matters (indeed, it was used very often to concatenate tape devices to be used by tar further down in the pipe).
> Before Android came out, each vendor had their own OS.

... which was Symbian. Android in the new Symbian - omnipresent but much more capable.
I have been working and thinking in many of these ways but as I am not prolific at creating revolutionary ideas I suspect that this mindset is not enough for genius to arise. The article also lacks consideration over the positional requirements for acclaim.

There is an extra strategy that is missing and I feel is of utmost importance. You must be in the habit of normalizing your knowledge. You need to generalise and compose ideas into principles. Without doing so, it is extremely difficult to quickly and correctly compose and verify new ideas, draw relationships between them, and visualize at the appropriate level of abstraction.

Does anybody else keep a text file of recurring patterns that occur in thought, biology, architecture and nature?
A more productive comment would explain the difference between those two ideas for the benefit of people (such as most Americans) who have not encountered authors' rights.
Transcription services
Transcription Services: $72 per recorded hour - $1.2 per recorded minute
Closed Captioning: $5.5 per recorded minute
I wish each plugin listed had a descriptive paragraph instead of just a one liner. I've meticulously curated my vimrc to accommodate my particular work-flow and visual preferences, so I'm pretty hesitant to introduce a bunch of new plugins and configurations without knowing exactly what is happening (as many of the plugins go unused if I am not distinctly aware that I wanted the functionality).
No, I read Mr. O'Reilly's piece and am responding to it. You seem to be saying that, because I reject the premises and false arguments that he makes in his introduction, therefore I didn't read it? Feel free to respond to my substantive point rather than just distracting from the actual conversation.
I, too, see no way to submit a comment when logged out. I think the interface is the problem here - when you are logged out, it should say "[Sign up] or [log in] to leave a comment.". That would guide the user on how to create a comment. It's not obvious that you have to sign up first, because some site allow users to leave anonymous comments.
If the money is due, then it must be paid. Presumably Google is getting some value too?
I think that is a great sentiment. To find systems that work a lot better than the current one, which is incredibly slow, we are going to need to try a lot of different ideas.

When you are venturing into the unknown, innovation is tough and challenging, but it's also very rewarding.
what they're doing is legal so what's you're problem?

Apple pays billions in taxes, pays dividends to shareholders, employs thousands, etc. if you're not happy with that, maybe you should move to countries with higher corporate tax rates, i'm sure they have a better/bigger economy than the US (they don't, take a good guess why.).
I use UTF-8 for transmitted data and disk I/O, and I use UCS-4 (wchar_t on Linux/FreeBSD) for internal representation of strings in my software.

I generally agree with this article, but I disagree with it on the point that UTF-8 is the only appropriate encoding for strings stored in memory, and also I disagree on the point wchar_t should be removed from C++ standard or made sizeof 1, as in Android NDK.

Let me explain why.

In UTF-8 single Unicode character may be encoded in multiple ways. For example NUL (U+0000) can be encoded as 00 or as C0 80. The second encoding is illegal because it's longer than necessary and forbidden by standard, but naive parser may extract NUL out of it. If UTF-8 input was not properly sanitized, or there is a bug in charset converter, this may result in exploit like SQL injection or arbitrary filesystem access or something like that: malicious party can encode not only NUL, but ", /, \ etc this way.

Also UTF-8 string can't be cut at arbitrary position. Byte groups (UTF-8 runes) must be processed as a whole, so appear either on left side or on the right side of cut.

Reversing of UTF-8 string is tricky, especially when illegal character sequences are present in input string and corresponding code points (U+FFFD) must be preserved in output string.

I think UTF-8 for network transmitted data and disk I/O is inevitable, but our software should keep all in-memory strings in UCS-4 only, and take adequate security precautions in all places where conversion between UTF-8 and UCS-4 happens.

And sizeof(wchar_t)==4 in GCC ABI is not a design defect, wchar_t exists for a good reason. I admit that sizeof(wchar_t)==2 on Windows is utterly broken.
Who has a leg up in this? Duck duck go maybe? The more I use them the more I love them...
This argument is silly. Why not prefix every UTF-8 string with a BOM then? It's wasteful and unnecessary, because UTF-8's clean structure already makes it trivial to detect, and false positives are all but impossible for real-world text. There's a paper out there that proves this.

The UTF-8 BOM was a Microsoft invention. Nobody else uses it, and it breaks tons of things. Two examples off the top of my head: Unix hashbang scripts (i.e. #!/bin/bash), and PHP scripts (the BOM will trigger HTTP header finalization before any code is run).
Hi Andrew,

I agree with the premise of your post - (top) CS departments do offer machine learning / stats classes in later year of their programmes. I, myself, am taking probabilistic modelling and ML at the graduate level (although, still an undergrad).

What I disagree is that a main thing data scientists do is "work with regular expressions (not hard!), find, grep, sed, awk, and other Unix tools". In fact, if you've done any work on real datasets and have, say, 40GB of data, the last thing you want to be doing is writing regexps or playing with awk. Instead, you want to parallelize your pre-processing steps with Hadoop, or, perhaps, some other higher-level MapReduce framework.

Now that you have data this big, you also run into another problem - Matlab is no longer capable of loading your data into RAM. So this is where various stochastic sampling techniques come into play. And once you're done building your model, then you might want to use your full dataset. At this point, we again turn to Hadoop and, perhaps, Mahout.

To sum this up, the premise of your article is correct, but the advice you're giving is not, given the context. Sure, awk, grep and other Unix tools are good to know and learn, but won't help you much beyond working with small datasets. And when the dataset is small, you might just as well write your own Python parser and not worry too much about it ;)
I think what you are trying to say is:

"because UTF-8 has invalid character sequences, we could potentially use one of them to represent end-of-string, which would allow us the flexibility of a null-terminated string (not keeping track of the length) without the restriction of no-nulls-allowed."

You're right! Great. But you are not revealing a "strange thing" about Unicode. You are instead making a general comment about null-terminated strings. So why use such inflammatory and misleading language like "If you claim to support Unicode, you have to support NULL characters"?

Update: I don't object to your idea at all, it's a neat trick! It's just that the way it's phrased, it sounds like Unicode's design contributed to this NULL-terminal problem, when in fact even NULL-terminated ASCII strings cannot 'handle' a null character in this sense.

To augment your idea, though, how about you use '0xFF 0x00' as a terminator? This way, backward-compatibility is preserved in all cases except UTF-8 => ASCII with NULLs, and in this case the string will be truncated rather than a buffer overflow (i.e. "fail closed").
Really? I would argue that a bubble is a psychological bug that causes investors to ignore the numbers. They're usually right there in front of you, but the bubble effect short-circuits the rational thought process that tells you not to invest without checking the data.

Now, I will be willing to grant that perhaps we're about to be in a bubble, but now we're venturing into the land of speculation, aren't we? If gathering data to tell us what the markets are going to do were easy, bubbles wouldn't ever begin in the first place, would they?
if the BOM appears in the middle of the file than it should be considered a zero width non breaking space (so basically ignored) so why is this an issue?
Let's do it the "right" way. You drive around and collect ssid for each network. Then you discover half of them are "linksys". Oops, should have collected mac address instead. So now you have to drive the trucks around all over again. Or, if you'd saved complete packets, you just analyze them instead. You never know what you're missing until you're missing it.
Ubuntu was always just a Debian knock-off with a different theme, why not go for the original and the best?

http://www.debian.org/
> "the best solution would be to designate a permanent Olympic venue somewhere isolated — Diego Garcia would be a prime candidate"

A better idea would be letting the Chagossians return to their homeland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians).
Of course they do...All individuals are free to form corporations and take advantage of these loopholes...
try out gtypist if you use Ubuntu.
> In fact, if something created existence, that would require an entity that operates outside of our current understanding of physics.

Obviously. I suspect you don't know that much about physics, but that's kind of implied: You can't create the laws of physics from within the laws of physics.

> What evidence do we have for this theory?

Conservation of energy, entropy. It's very well accepted that whatever created our current laws came from outside the laws.

There are some scientific explanations for the existence of matter, but none for the existence of the laws. The closest anyone comes is the idea that all possible laws exist (multiverse) - but of course that doesn't answer the question of where the framework the existence of any laws at all comes.

> Maybe there are more laws of physics to be discovered.

Maybe, but that doesn't answer the question of where those laws came from. All you did is move up a step, but you answered nothing.

> there were numerous supernatural explanations

Not really. The explanations were actually scientific - look up Aristotelian physics. They may have been wrong, but they were entirely secular.

> Does a god pull the sun across the sky in his chariot each day? No!

No one actually believed that. It was part of legends and stories told for entertainment.

> posits that the limitations of our current scientific knowledge must be explained by the supernatural

There is only one limitation that needs the supernatural: The existence of nature. Lets say our world is a simulation on a computer. Does that count as a natural or supernatural explanation to you?
Yeah, making the comment form available would be a good idea. And I didn't mean that people should use them as feedback to me, but to the author of the link description. Need to add a way for people to edit the descriptions.
Taxes had nothing to do with it. Early on, one of the Chrome VRP reporters asked that we donate his bounty to the International Red Cross. We all felt his generosity deserved some extra recognition, so we decided to top off the reward, and do the same in the future for approved charities. We also decided that unclaimed rewards would be paid to the International Red Cross.

That's pretty much the whole story. It was a quick email thread between a few people in Chrome Security and Google Security.
I like this one-liner:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html?...

"Q (Deborah Solomon for the New York Times): What is your I.Q.?

"A (Stephen Hawking): I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers."
Tims post has two parts. The first part is him explaining why he has wrote it (Hey, I've read the NYT piece as well!) and then what he has to say (Hey, let me elaborate on the theme of taxation).

The NYT piece is not a premise in his argument, it's simply the reason why he writes about taxation.
The idea of taxing corporations on the very arbitrary definition of profit is a big issue imo. It would be more accurate to tax when money changes hands going in or out, not as a sales tax but a resource tax. This approach may decrease the need for the 50k page definition of profit vs investment. I have not given t his much thought but taxing the end state seems wishful thinking, because anyone would decrease there end state as much as possible before getting there?
This kind of work should get much more attention than it does. It's non-trivial, fairly new and does something potentially very useful (which is more than I can say for most "X in JavaScripts" things submitted here).
How can an ordinary person invest in startups?
Kickstarter sounds like a viable option for bringing more software to Linux if only for the reason that it's attracting a lot of attention lately.

There is a danger of this making Linux a second-priority OS but it pretty much is already so I don't know if this is a huge issue. A team behind a proven software for Windows or OSX could say "Hey look we've made this great tool for Windows/OSX users and made a lot of money on it.. We'll bring it to Linux if we raise X amount of dollars". The Linux users are significant enough and generous enough (as proven by the humble bundles) that it would work financially and would make the Linux ecosystem explode with new variety.

Open source developers on the other hand might find it easier to raise funds and continue to hack away on their projects with a similar solution. The Ardour developer could go on an open-sourced version of Kickstarter and say "Hey guys I've developed this awesome audio software that a lot of people use. Here are the features I'd like to bring to the next version.... I need to raise 100K in order to be able to continue working on this."
It appears that your view of IBM, and other tech companies in general, are skewed to some degree:

> "These days, IBM is in decline. Friends/tech blogs/even sites like Cringely -- http://www.cringely.com/ -- note how IBM is quickly trying to shed any semblance to it's old self in names of meeting investor expectations."

I believe that is referred to as resource allocation/shifting. All corporations do this, not just IBM. It's not necessarily a bad thing nor good thing, it just is.

> "But, I wonder, will we every see the hey day of IBM Research, PARC, Bell Labs, etc. ever again?"

Simply browsing the technology/science sections on Google News will show what research companies like IBM, Google, etc. are involved in. Sure, Watson is the first thing people think of when they hear of IBM, but that's not their only endeavor. Just off the top of my head, last I read IBM was undergoing research in the areas of quantum computing and optimized processor fabrication techniques.
Probably just because there's no single charity that they focus on. From what I understand, Apple just matches any donation by an employee to a qualified charity; as such, the list would be large, and would just amount to a list of a bunch of popular / large charities.

If you're curious, I'm sure the list is available in their filings somewhere.
Where Did All the Accomplished People Go?
For The Record, I Think Rocket Internet is Cool | Tech in Asia
In the first half of fiscal year 2012 our U.S. operations have generated almost $5 billion in federal and state income taxes, including income taxes withheld on employee stock gains, making us among the top payers of U.S. income tax.

"among the top payers" in absolute terms, right? I don't think that's the part that is being debated - the amount paid by Apple relative to total earnings is what is being discussed.
I have now! cheers :)
UTF-8 is easy to figure out. However, it's only a doorway to Unicode, and Unicode is not simple.

If you do anything more than chopping codepoints and passing them around — use a library. There's a lot of technical complexity due to quirks of Unicode and inherent complexity of world's diverse writing systems.

Avoid using concept of a "character" as much as you can, as it's fuzzy, e.g. there are combining characters and ligatures (codepoint != character).

Be aware that string comparison cannot be done just by comparing codepoints, and there are different levels of "sameness" of Unicode strings coming from different normalisations, e.g. NFC and NFKD.

Case-insensitive comparison cannot be done by lowercasing a string: http://www.moserware.com/2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-...

Unfortunately I don't know much about RTL text, and there's lots of traps there too (e.g. there are control characters for controlling text direction).