skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comments in this thread are a bit amusing.

I wish I could live in the world where I could bluntly say "I will assume UTF-8 and ignore the rest of the world". Many Japanese documents and sites still use Shift JIS. Windows has this strange Windows-932 format that you will frequently encounter in CUE files outputted by some CD ripping software. ARIB STD-B24, the captioning standard used in Japanese television, has its own text encoding with characters not found in either JIS X 0201 or JIS X 0208. These special characters are mostly icons used in traffic and weather reports, but transcoding to UTF-8 still causes trouble with these icons.
If you haven’t been able to use them for piracy then you’re not trying terribly hard. I downloaded a game directly from IA that’s still actively being sold yesterday.

I don’t doubt that they respond to takedown requests, I just think they need to be more proactive about stuff.
The duck and/or the speech bubbles are outside the viewport. Not a great advertisement for a design studio.
Sure, here you go: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/scratc...
Like probably everyone, probably up to and including Sundar Pichai (I suspect), I have a love hate relationship with Google. In this case, I thought it would be interesting to ask the question, does Google Fi sell user real-time location data? I will let the Leviathan speak for itself:

https://www.google.com/search?q=does+google+fi+sell+users%27...
Would Briar be a good alternative?

https://briarproject.org/

edit: How it works: https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/
If it's turtles all the way down and at every level you use utf-8, it's hard to see how any input with a different encoding (for the same underlying text) will not be detected before any unintended side effects were invoked.

At this point, I don't see any sufficiently good reason to not use utf-8 exclusively in any new system. Conversions to and from other encodings would only be done at well defined boundaries when I'm calling into dependencies that require non utf-8 input for whatever reason.
UV Superradiance from Mega-Networks of Tryptophan in Biological Architectures
> you'd get a lot of mileage out of open sourcing it

I’m not sure. Maintaining an open source project requires even more time than a closed source project. You can have a community-oriented closed source project, too.

> and doubling down on the privacy / local storage angle

Yeah!
If you give me a computer timestamp without a timezone, I can and will assume it's in UTC. It might not be, but if it's not and I process it as though it is, and the sender doesn't like the results, that's on them. I'm willing to spend approximately zero effort trying to guess what nonstandard thing they're trying to send me unless they're paying me or my company a whole lot of money, in which case I'll convert it to UTC upon import and continue on from there.

Same with UTF-8. Life's too short for bothering with anything else today. I'll deal with some weird janky encoding for the right price, but the first thing I'd do is convert it to UTF-8. Damned if I'm going to complicate the innards of my code with special case code paths for non-UTF-8.

If there were some inherent issue with UTF-8 that made it significantly worse than some other encoding for a given task, I'd be sympathetic to that explanation and wouldn't be such a pain in the neck about this. For instance, if it were the case that it did a bad job of encoding Mandarin or Urdu or Xhosa or Persian, and the people who use those languages strongly preferred to use something else, I'd understand. However, I've never heard a viable explanation for not using UTF-8 other than legacy software support, and if you want to continue to use something ancient and weird, it's on you to adapt it to the rest of the world because they're definitely not going to adapt the world to you.
I stopped in the episode where, for me at least, out of absolutely nowhere, Spacey's character seduces a body guard and him and his wife have a 3some with him. I'm sure many people loved that. For me, I was like WTF? what was completely out of left field, added to punch up ratings or just it insert shock value. I stopped watching. What that in the UK version?
"Ultraviolet Superradiance from Mega-Networks of Tryptophan in Biological Architectures" (2024) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936

- "Quantum fiber optics in the brain enhance processing, may protect against degenerative diseases" (2024) https://phys.org/news/2024-04-quantum-fiber-optics-brain-deg...
If the Unicode consortium haven't been able to come up with a way of encoding their name correctly, I don't see what hope I have of doing so.

Bonus - as soon as the Unicode consortium do find a way, my software should be able to handle it with no further changes. Well, it might need a recompile against a newer `libicu` as I don't think they maintain ABI backcompat between versions. But there's not much I can do about that.
It’s really cool. I’m glad it worked. What you didn’t know probably kept you from analysis paralysis.
No, Emirates is Dubai and Etihad is Abu Dhabi.
Are there Japanese characters missing in UTF-8? They should be added ASAP.

I know there's a weird Chinese/Japanese encoding problem where characters that kind-of look alike have the same character id, and the font file is responsible for disambiguation (terrible for multi-language content and we should really add more characters to create versions for each, but still the best we have).
Many Japanese websites have migrated from Shift-JIS to UTF-8, but this still ignores the fact that e.g. television captioning uses special characters[1] that are not found in UTF-8 or Shift-JIS. Windows itself has a habit of using its own Windows-932 encoding, which frequently causes problems in the Unix software I use. (e.g. Emacs fails at auto-detecting this format, and instructing Emacs to use Shift-JIS will result in decoding issues)

[1] section 1.2 in https://www.fontucom.com/pdf/AFSARIBR-Map.pdf
That applies to all recurring credit card charges.
I'd give some advice about "the company won't...", but there will always be a line of people ready to believe that the company will love them back.

(And I'm working really hard to avoid the ad hominem about someone who reads and replies to email while driving a car.)
It's estimated there are 25-50 serial killers active in the US at any given time. There are also around 6k new unsolved murders each year. The point is that a murder done by someone with no connection to the victim is very hard to solve.
Cybersecurity researchers spotlight a new ransomware threat – file uploading
Many animals do have more UV extension than you might initially assume useful: due to scattering following the inverse fourth power of wavelength the sky is lit in the UV a long time before sunrise.

Presumably wouldn't apply anywhere near as far as 148nm since as you note that light doesn't make it to earth.
Android only? Ugh
SpaceX Employees Are Getting Hurt in Alarming Numbers
Russian Arrest Warrant Issued for Ex-Chess Champion Garry Kasparov
In Iceland, the president is chosen by simple majority of votes. The sitting president got about 39% of the vote. There were 9 candidates.
Of course, this problem is usually brushed off saying that this is a largely powerless office, the prime minister and his cabinet hold the executive power.
Plotly offers more power and flexibility than chart.js and provides a much simpler API than D3 (it has D3 and webgl renderers).
The ecosystem is broad and includes React, Angular and other wrappers and language-interfaces for Python, Rust, Go, Scala and many others (incl Common Lisp).

If you start plotting a lot of data it can grow with you since it supports typed arrays and webgl rendering without undue boilerplate.

Disclaimer... I work for Plotly
A bit obvious that hosting this sort of service in the U.S would have bad consequences.
Google Fi is an MVNO. They use the big 3 for coverage and they are definitely selling your location data.
Yeah, I haven't seen the milky way with naked eye for a few years.
I took it to be a joke, but the symbol will be shown in several places around a nursery/kindergarten. It's also designed to be noticed, and printed on a reflective (often glow-in-the-dark) material.

https://www.holytrinity.herts.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020... (primary school corridor).

https://www.building-blocks-nurseries.co.uk/uploads/rucV7eaP... (nursery corridor).
I don't think the parent is suggesting that they be fined based on their profit.

They're saying it's unusual to use revenue to talk about how easily a company could pay a fine, given that (cashflow cleverness aside) your revenue doesn't determine your ability to pay for arbitary extras.

In reality neither does net profit, as nonessentials and comp tend to consume just enough to leave a profitability which keeps shareholders happy.
"That's nothing, I can find new molecules just by aiming my telescope at any of those bright dots." :p

Sounds like this is interesting because 2-methoxyethanol (C3H8O2) is one of the more structurally-complex ones we've managed to detect, although the article doesn't go into whether that has any significance to potential biologies. Here on earth it's often found as a solvent, such as in nail-polish.

> We do this by looking at the rotational spectra of molecules, the unique patterns of light they give off as they tumble end-over-end in space.

That seems poetically similar finding exoplanets going around and periodicially dimming of their parent stars, except on the very small end instead of the very big one.
Having written and sold machine learning software for over 15 years, you are definitely over-reacting. There is about a 10 year pattern. Every 10 years AI gets drummed up as the next big thing. It is all marketing hype. It always fails.

This happened in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, and now the 20s. Without fail. It is a hyped up trend.

Only be concerned when someone is presenting a real breakthrough in the science (not the commercial aspect). A real breakthrough in the science will not have any immediate economic impact.

Convolutional neural networks are absolutely not revolutionary over the prior state of the art. These are incremental gains in model accuracy at the cost of massive data structures. There is no real leap up here in the ability for a machine to reason.

ChatGPT is just snake oil. Calm down. It will come and go.
>Third, if and when software liability becomes law and covers open source software included in a product, then companies will finally invest substantially in the open source software ecosystem.

This is delusional. Companies will stop releasing open source a software if it cost them money to do it. It is already enough of a fight to just get legal to sign off for ip reasons. If accounting got involved it would simply never happen.
Hahahahaha cheers, I had just forgotten about this and was going to sleep, but hey, what's a couple more hours of freaking out! :)
> would you guess the unit instead of specifying what you expect?

It depends on the circumstances. It might be the least bad thing to do. Or not.

But that wasn't my point. I replied to this:

> I can assume the length of a meter or the weight of a gram

Sure, the length of a meter and the "weight" of a gram are both standardized. (To be very picky, "gram" is a mass, not a weight. The actual weight depends on the "g" constant, which on average is 9.81 m/s^2 on earth, but can vary about 0.5%.)

So if you know the input is in meters, you don't need to do any further processing.

But dealing with input text files with an unknown encoding is like dealing with input lengths with an unknown unit.

So while UTF-8 itself might be standardized, it is not the same as all input text files always being in UTF-8.

You can choose to say that all input text files must be in valid UTF-8, or the program refuses to load them. Or you can use silent heuristics. Or something inbetween.
they are just failed business with above average marketing budgets. It would have sold to facebook just the same if it took over market as whatsapp did.
TIL Briar does "offline messaging". This is news to me, though I've never used it.

That said, I am curious to hear more about the offline messaging. If it only is able to exchange when the two people who are trying to communicate with eachother are directly nearby it isn't so much a mesh network, right? A mesh network would be able to route across other nodes to get to its destination. Does Briar do that? The "How it works" page doesn't really seem to answer much, so I am assuming not.
His accomplishments are impressive but all famous business bios and advice are just survivorship bias. being successful is so hard it seems and improbable.
It's unfair to expect someone to work for free. In-app purchases are a common and reasonable way for programmers to sustain themselves while providing a valuable service to users. After all, programmers, like everyone else, need to make a living.
And has no concept of fair use :P
It looks like this allows short range communication, but doesn't set up a meshnet. So wouldn't be great for anything more than a couple hundred feet.

Beyond that though, at this point for protests (in the US at least), the suggested opsec is to leave your phone at home.
That's a definite maybe!

Some countries make the airline need to know in advance whether to let you even board. Say the US with the electronic visaless authorization. You gotta give the airline your ESTA. Canada wants to know as well. So you need to have your PR card or Canadian passport on file or the electronic authorization.

But that doesn't stop you from entering Europe on a European passport. You can have your say Canadian passport on file and fly out on that. At the destination you show your European passport (smaller line ups and basically you are just waived through). You never show the Canadian passport in the EU on arrival. You have the Canadian one on file and show that when leaving so they let you board. Back in Canada you use your Canadian passport to enter.

This way you never get any visa stamps and you "fly through passport control" on either end.

So yeah, even if this is maybe used by "sleeper agents" it's also just normal for dual citizens.
Unless you're using an OS older than Windows 2000, or a linux distro from the 2000s, where some form of Unicode was not the default encoding, or maybe an ancient Win32 program compiled without "UNICODE" defined, it shouldn't be a problem. I specifically work with a lot of Japanese software and have not seen this problem in many years.

And even back in the mid 2000s, the only real problems I saw otherwise, were things like malformed html pages that assumed a specific encoding that they wouldn't tell you, or an MP3 file with an ID3 tag with CP932 shoved into it against the (v1) spec.

I also disagree with the author that Shift-JIS can be "good enough" hueristically detected due to its use of both 7 and 8-bit characters in both the high and low bytes to mean different things depending on what character is actually intended. Even string searching requires a complex custom-made version just for Shift-JIS handling.
Actually, seems like the opposite is true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18885149
You would like a citation that people with an interest in rhetoric and logic tend to be pedantic and more likely to correct others if they see an opportunity to do so? I cite the comment section of https://news.ycombinator.com/news
The documentation page.
https://sqlite.org/draft/whybytecode.html
You all can tell by reading the article, that no matter the facts of the situation, no matter whether what happened was good or bad, right or wrong, the author of the article is coming from a place of hate and bias, right? Every ounce of the article oozes bias. They also made sure to insert in the approved political/social hit points, e.g. about unions, anti-work, etc. This was written by someone that isn't a single percent interested in impartial journalism. This was written by someone trying to influence you to their ideology.

And no, I'm not trying to ad hominem it, "the author is bad/immoral, so ignore the article, ignore what Tesla did", I'm just saying that if you read this you have to realize you're not receiving actual information, right? It's just pure propaganda. People don't actually read this and just nod their head and soak it in, right? At least consume news where the author has a shred of integrity.
What a bad, hyperbolic take. UTF-8 can encode the entire Unicode space. All you need is up-to-date libraries and fonts to display the codepoints correctly. It is backwards compatible forever. So requiring UTF-8 allows Japanese to represent their writing method exactly how it is and keep the scheme for a very long time with room to improve.
Yes, but ...

Counter examples exist: the NASA moon landing tapes were lost, but a copy was found in a horde in Australia. Dr Who episodes, lost by the BBC, have been collected from fans' recordings, etc.

There's some difficulty in connecting those who want the info with those who have it, but if the search gets enough publicity, it can work. This seems like a problem that could be solved with software.
Again though, these are just kind of assertions. I am sure what you’re suggesting is mostly right, but I would actually like data instead of just going off gut feelings.

I think there is a group 3 that people ignore: people who could absolutely afford the product but pirate it anyway because they don’t want to pay for it. I don’t know the numbers, I don’t even think it’s the majority, but I also don’t think it’s zero either.
Burnout – When does work start feeling pointless? – DW Documentary
Related submissions:

Open letter to the NixOS foundation (50 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40107370

The dire state of NixOS's moderation culture (76 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40166912

---

Additionally, these r/NixOS submissions may be of interest:

Jon Ringer: "In case I'm unable to return, wish you all the best" (348 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cd5fod/in_case_im_u...

Transparency about jonringer’s suspension (153 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ceeg8h/transparency...

Thoughts on Jon Ringer's temporary suspension (71 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ceiz36/thoughts_on_...

Moderation no-go zones (55 comments; ongoing)
https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cfv8vo/moderation_n...

---

Finally, the RFC to improve the situation:

https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175
Two-dimensional nanomaterial sets expansion record
That works until you can't pay your bills unless you take a new contract where you have to deal with a large amount of historical text files from various sources.

Then it's no longer "someone else's problem".
There is another story on the HN front page about the FCC fining wireless carriers for sharing location data. Someone left a comment comparing the fine for each carrier to their yearly revenue. The biggest fine was for only 0.1% of the carrier's yearly revenue.

What the Internet Archive did was obviously illegal, no matter how well intentioned, and I'm disappointed in how they've handled the situation. But what those carriers did is arguably much worse in regards to the public good. So why is the IA looking at its potential end while those carriers receive wrist slaps?
Ultimately SGI was running Linux and AFAIK the actual hardware isn't using any secret sauce driver code, so yeah if you can get it powered on without it bursting in flames and get past the management locks you can probably get it working. It's definitely not impossible if you can somehow assemble the pieces.
Oh I have no doubt that was the aim in the HoC remake. It just wasn't any good, unlike Succession. Not all character development and dynamics are interesting.

The scope and pacing in the original was just perfect. Just because you can layer on more, doesn't mean it's gonna make it better. Much was pure tedium and seemed to serve filling time first and foremost.
> It's really a pretense, because you can have DRM without copyright. DRM is just a weak, autonomous enforcement layer being bolted on. That pretense is the only thing that's keeping IA online at this point. Otherwise, there would be no excuse to allow their distribution of copyrighted works at all.

Well sure there is, because it also works the other way around. You can have copyright without DRM, and enforce it not via some weak and easily bypassed technological fig leaf but with the full force of the government. A patron who makes a permanent copy even though they've claimed and agreed to have destroyed their temporary one would be liable for copyright infringement. There is no reason the law couldn't still prohibit that while allowing temporary lending.

Copyright holders would have no more or less trouble enforcing this than they do any other infringing copying that happens in private, like when the user downloads the same book from a shadow library in a foreign country. The difference is that the local library has paid the copyright holder for an official copy, implying that they haven't done anything wrong, and neither have any patrons who don't illicitly retain a copy. Why should people doing nothing wrong have any liability?
I'm a little confused why you would need NPT to resolve this? Why not just create a separate local prefix for your local networking needs? Unless you mean something else by "breaks routing"?
A strange game; the only winning move is not to play
There are load management/load sharing products available for EV chargers today. Here’s a white paper from Eaton: https://www.eaton.com/content/dam/eaton/products/emobility/e...
Riverdale is that thing you hate but made the primary characteristic of the show. Especially past season 1.

They’ll set up what feels like a season finale in most episodes, then instead of resolving it in the next, quickly toss it aside or even just ignore it. It’s not good, and I would not recommend it at all, but it’s maybe the weirdest show I’ve seen.

I remain unsure whether the writers were aware they were writing one extremely-long joke about television writing, or if they thought it was actually good.
In Canada you can buy your prescribed meds and then file an insurance form. I did that myself more than once when 'computers were down' but cash registers were not.
I'm not sure where this idea comes from. That clause is treated as the source of the right to access the civil litigation system; this is what "petitioning the government for redress of grievances" means. The right to sue the government itself doesn't meaningfully exist except as the government permits (sovereign immunity), and it was much later that this clause was read (IMO correctly but I'm just some dude) to cover non-litigation activities.
I haven't seen discussion of this point yet, but the post completely fails to provide any data to back up its assertion that charset detection heuristics works, because the feedback I've seen from people who actually work with charsets is that it largely doesn't (especially if you're based on naive one-byte frequency analysis). Okay, sure, it works if you want to distinguish between KOI8-R and Windows-1252, but what about Windows-1252 and Windows-1257?

See for example this effort in building a universal charset detector in Gecko: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1551276
If you really want a chat tool to start a revolution, meet in person with people you trust and don't bring any electronic devices with you. And only talk to people who you really trust. Forget phones.
Making it hard to cancel should be illegal
The majority of the article is about providing counterpoints to the statements in the first paragraphs

> Counterclaim #3: Software liability laws will not necessarily lead to broad corporate investment in the open source software ecosystem.