skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are there non-ascii compatible encodings that are default in any OSes? With ascii-incompatible system/terminal encoding a lot of software will stop working. Strange things happen, but this looks like a theoretical issue, and ascii looks safe. In Python 2.x __str__ of all standard container types are ASCII-only (even if elements has non-ascii __str__), and __repr__ of standard objects is also ASCII-only as far as I can tell. ASCII-only is an option, and it is not uncommon and relatively safe (but it has its own issues of course).

It was exactly this unicode_literals property (turning everything into unicode) that helped to reveal bugs :) For example, models were trained on bytestrings under Python 2.x, and nobody remembers what was the encoding of the text models were trained on. This was unnoticed for several years because instead of raising an exception functions just handled some egde cases (e.g. unicode punctuation) in a suboptimal way. This leads to almost correct results, but with less accuracy/precision/recall. After changing to "unicode everywhere" the issue became visible.

The issue was not with cancer-like turning text into unicode, issue was with the code that works with text and doesn't support unicode. Python 2.x standard library has such APIs, and this causes troubles, but I don't see how it is a bug in the code that works with text and returns unicode.

What I'm writing are common words and a standard "unicode mantra", but anyways.

We could say "programmers should just handle encodings properly, and unicode_literals have nothing to do with this", but this doesn't always work. "Unicode everywhere" makes some code changes necessary, but some of these changes reveal real bugs.

Another story: I took 2 different courses from 2 different top-notch universities at coursera.org where instructors gave us starter code (written in Python 2.x) for programming assignments. The code was not bad, but there were many cases of incorrect encodings handling in most of the provided files (such errors that would be impossible in Python 3.x) - this was the code that was supposed to teach students something (including Python programming).

What I like about unicode_literals is that it makes things more consistent and easier (at least for me) to reason about: if variable is unicode under 3.x, it is unicode in 2.x, the same applies to bytestrings. In cases where different behaviour is necessary (e.g. because of non-unicode API in 2.x stdlib), explicit str("foo") is used; otherwise code is written in Python 3.x and works with the same semantics under Python 2.x.

Just curious, what newcomer issues are you talking about, and who do you mean by "newcomers"?
Xbox 3, 4, 8, Infinity. Nope...they had to choose "One". Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Not as simple as that. I actually took a look at the XMPP extensions list to see if I could replicate Hangouts on top of them. You'd need a new audio/video layer with support for centralised DSP, MUC and carbon copies at the very minimum. Not to mention typing notifications (do they work with MUC?), cross-client notification dismissal, automatic client priority assignment (if I'm using a client atm, don't ring all devices, just the one I'm using) and I'm sure a lot more.

Half of these things (e.g. carbon copies) are spec'd out but barely supported.
Canonical answers, eh? There where times we called those Frequently Asked Questions. Nevertheless, it's a good compilation of their respective answers.
Unifying the TV Watching experience can be very awesome. Should be interesting to see what the actual cable companies think and how they integrate in the end.
I think that's the point. They're trying to capture a market far larger than people who care about the next Halo, because those people are going to buy this anyway.
Quadcopter drone network aims to deliver emergency supplies to disaster areas
> When you forced to pay $300/night in Manhattan at the W hotel, Atlas Shrugged.

No one is "forcing" you to spend $300/night in Manhattan for a hotel. You should read that book again because you are also not using "Atlas Shrugged" in a meaningful context.

> Not a AR fan btw, just saying both sides of the fence have their pros and cons. I'd place higher value on an apartment complex that explicitly did not allow short-term renting within their contract.

Laws and regulations around housing are put in place to protect all residents, the landlord, the community, regardless of what Joe the landlord remembered or didn't remember to put into his stock lease.

> The other problem is... what's the difference between me using AirBNB and me knowing a friend who let me stayed at his place for 6 days and I just happened to give him some money as a thank you gift?

And what's the difference between cooking for friends who give you money for groceries and opening a restaurant in your apartment? You can always make an argument that appeals to the extreme in making your case, but thankfully that doesn't make it a legally relevant argument.
Uh, no. Git commit messages which are stored in public repositories such as Github are public, because public repositories are public. Git commit messages which are stored in private repositories are private. Git commit messages have the same access restrictions as the repositories which contain them. Duh?
Completely agree.

You don't have to be a fluffy bunny about everything.

You stop and realize that your momentary investment in sincerity and tact reap rewards for your personal image, which people want to work with you, who is going to feel like taking a bit of extra time to help you out when you need it, and the general good will and atmosphere of the community, which inspires growth and adaption while lubricating the flow of ideas (as another response said; I'm stealing that).
And these are precisely the people who won't be watching the reveal of a new console.
If you're using this page to get hired, be warned that while this will impress future colleagues, actual hiring managers may get confused, or just not bother.

So make it much more obvious where to download your CV.

Of course, if you just want the karma points, then it's all good.
Now I feel old. :(
You're paying for whatever was agreed upon. This is an industry standard but if the pricing structure wasn't clear beforehand then that was the photographer's fault.
"Practically silent" means my wife will practically force me to buy one, as she (rightfully) complains about the jet engine turbines the launch day 360 uses for fans.

I've been holding off buying a dedicated Blu-ray player, so that has some value. Don't care about Kinect, not enough room in the TV room. Don't care about being "connected" as I have enough Skype-enabled, etc. devices around the house.

The hard questions are how Microsoft's ad service, er, Xbox Live will improve my experience. Right now I'm of the opinion that the XL experience has really gone down hill with poor UI and loaded with ads. How is the gaming experience? Is it really going to require "always on"? Do I have to physically hold up my controller to "raise a shield"? I just want to move my thumbs. Am I going to be nickeled-and-dimed with micro payments/DLC?

My point is, this is the first time I'll make an actual decision about buying a new Xbox. Halo made the first one a no-brainer for me. I bought the 2nd because I still worked at MSFT, and I was a company man. This time there is the real possibility that I won't buy an Xbox One. Give recent trends, they better make sure the experience doesn't suck. But I see EA is on the stage right now, so I'm not optimistic.
This post has some special meaning to me. I work as a developer at a cancer hospital. The work I do directly helps clinical trials. I handle everything from trial conception to actual patient accruals and the resulting deluge of data.

Every little bit of tech I get to use which has a net positive affect on my efficiency reduces the time of my deliverables/milestones. My team and I develop the tools/software/data which the doctors/nurses/practitioners rely on to provide care, solve interesting medical puzzles, etc. It is a race against the clock. I get the privilege of writing code that has the potential to help cure cancer.

I switched from TextMate to Sublime Text 2 recently. I've been monitoring Light Table and ST3 as of late. Keep up the good work.
It also takes quite a lot of self-control on the part of the receiver to get something constructive out of derision. Frankly, it's exhausting.

A specific example: I was looking for some help with a bash script a while ago. I am no bash expert. I got heaps of abuse for my terrible script. At first I got emotional, and a good 75% of the time I would have stopped there, feeling grumpy and hating assholes on the internet. This time I took a deep breath, posted my whole script as a gist, and said to one of the most abusive but seemingly knowledgable IRC citizens, "Ok, I see it's not as robust as it could be, so I would appreciate some help. What am I doing wrong? How can I improve this?" The script was much improved in robustness and readability.

I got a good script but I was drained by the effort. If I had gotten your second response instead of the first, think of how much time and good will would have been saved.

Being respectful and understanding is not a waste of time, and being rude is not cutting through the bullshit. Your point regarding derision is spot on, except I don't think it makes the derider feel better either.
Yes, conservative think tanks will always put NYC/Cali as the least favorable business climate. But where's the business? Here. Cali.

I live in NJ, I work in NY, so I got 49 and 50 going strong here. I can tell you, and you'll have to just trust me on this, business is better here than in Alabama or Arkansas which have much better 'business climates'.

You received higher tax returns than what you paid because of the earned income tax credit, a socialist wealth redistribution scheme to benefit low-income workers that would never pass if today's political conservatives had to vote on it. Your dad and I both helped pay for it.
Or HTC from naming their newest flagship phone the "HTC One".
From the web:

"8 gigs of RAM, USB 3.0, Wi-Fi Direct, a Blu-Ray disc drive, 64-bit architecture and "practically silent operation." Super fast switching of TV inputs between TV, Gaming, Skype,IE etc. Runs the Windows NT kernel.
Kinect 2.0 also gets a substantial upgrade. Whitten promised the integrated camera will have a wider field of view, and the sensor will be able to detect more joints, to include rotation of wrists and shoulders. "When you are exercising it can read your heartrate."
"The problem is really with the customer's perception of the value of a professional's time and the work that they do."

Actually I think it's the opposite. It has to do with the photographer's overvalued opinion of their work. How many family budgets can justify $500 for a set of family portraits? How may budgets can justify $1500 for a set of family portraits?

There are a lot more Hampton Inns than Ritz Carltons for a reason. Every photographer thinks they are the Ritz Carlton.
Microsoft's communications are always so unnatural. Why does Microsoft maintain this corporate communication style? Every announcement event is just so uncomfortable.

These are clearly executives on stage whose asset is leadership, but they insist on injecting unnatural banter & distracting idioms. What corporate communications person hears a marketing manager talking about "photons" w/r/t kinect and doesn't cringe?

Is it just momentum within a communications team? Is it that they can't abandon this style because it's so deeply embedded in their communications team's culture? Or does this style actually work on some market segment?
>> I'd rather buy my own camera and learn to take photos properly than pay $25 per digital copy, it would be more fun.

Taking photos for yourself is always fun.

Taking photos for other people for money is not nearly as fun as you think it is, especially if your customers don't respect what you do and think that they could do your job by buying a camera.

I'm not a pro photographer, but I've definitely had my share of customers who'd constantly complain about how much we were charging them because they thought that by reading a manual, they could do what we do.
I get your point, I really do. It's a decent argument, but if that's his gasoline, let him use it. Motivation is a hard thing to come by and his story just illustrates how hard it can be to focus and build something when dealing with emotional issues.

I don't think it hurts anyone when he says he's helping solve cancer, he's not stealing anyone's thunder. There's plenty of evidence of tool/library developers not getting any credit in the end product. If someone directly finds a cure using Light Table as their IDE, I'm pretty damn sure not a lot of people are going to seek out Chris and congratulate him on curing cancer. But he would've helped and that's the important thing. So let him have his motivation and keep building things.
But its not honesty as you're implying - its blind vitriol. Anything that turns off communication which is always a Bad Idea, especially when dealing with subjective topics.

Also I find it disturbing that you connect bug fixes to a world view, the two couldn't be more separate.
Not sure if this would work, but it offers to let you "upload" from an existing Google Drive folder. I wonder what would happen if you added the >50MB file to google drive, and then selected it from its Drive location in the books uploader UI.

The largest files I have to test area 40MB PDF and 35MB Epub, which worked. I tried a 100MB iso renamed to pdf, but it seemed to detect the right mime type and excluded it
It does work for the use case for a handful of different email addresses(work and personal for example), but not when you're using a new email address for every single domain.

The ideal workflow for me would be to sign in to persona using my Gmail address as my single identity, and then have it auto-generate (or retrieve by posting details to a Gishpuppy URL) an email address for that specific domain, and only pass that on to the website. In the current model I still need to confirm each new email address by clicking on a link, which reduces the value of a single login greatly. Also, I don't want to be choosing between 900+ Gishpuppy addresses when signing into a site again.

This might not be the ideal workflow for everyone, but its a feature I can't include, because of the lack of API hooks or extensions. Using 'the modest proposal' on the other hand, I could chain together browser extensions sufficiently to add the functionality I need, to get new email addresses from Gishpuppy and existing credentials from LastPass. I guess the word I was going for was not centralised, but inextensible.
I had a quick look at using the hnsearch api to build some kind of filtered return of comments, which removed posts from any user who had just created the account (or had a <1 avg karma), IE: drive by accounts.

I couldn't work it out quick enough to warrant further time investment, because I'm not convinced if it is actually a good solution.

Having not been in the same situation as Dave Winer I don't know how I'd actually respond. I like to think that I've been on the internet long enough to realize that toxic anon comments should roll off like water on a duck. But maybe I'd get super depressed and go cry in a corner.

I probably won't find out any time soon, because I have nothing which would gather a huge focus on HN.

Final question on the end of my ramble, is this all #famouspeopleproblems?
Swipely successfully pivots from Blippy competitor to a $12M B Round
I can see why you'd feel that way, but I'm specifically referencing his conduct in threads when I describe his sense of self-elevation. To wit:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5739469

If you had to reach a certain level of accomplishment in order to engage in criticism, the world would be pretty dull indeed. There's also intellectual dishonesty there. Marissa Mayer is infinitely more accomplished than he but he nonetheless criticizes her in his post, especially the cheap line where he telepathically infers her associates were embarrassed when she left the call.
Camera software and automated exposure and focus have drastically reduced the technical barrier. As a photographer, I'm both amused and appalled by people who spend two grand on a camera, leave it on "Auto", realize their photos suck, and wonder if they should buy an even more expensive camera.

If you don't have a computer best-guessing exposure for you and you don't understand exposure yourself, you're screwed. If you understand exposure, you don't NEED the computer to make guesses for you. My expensive DSLR is set to manual, so I don't have the computer "guess" the wrong thing.
From HTC to XBOX
This is my position as well. History is replete with examples of people being punished harshly for reporting security problems. In the Randal Schwartz case, discussed in a link above, he was working for Intel and doing routine best practices security testing there that got him arrested and convicted. So even if you are working with complete authorization, if you have political enemies or just clueless people around, they can make the argument that you are the bad guy.

So stay quiet and let the real bad guys figure it out.

There are also many who make reasonable incomes selling exploits on the black market.
Why would someone else's flag affect my front page?
I didn't mean that it would be a malicious act. People have varying degrees of taste about photography. I might think a picture looks great the way I photoshopped it because it's my nephew and my monitor is calibrated incorrectly. Someone else might see it and think that there are dodge halos everywhere and all detail in the skin is lost because they tried to remove blemishes but instead removed all detail.

They might think they've done a nice thing but they haven't. I've also seen wedding pictures show up in newspaper ads because it was the best picture that the person had of themselves.

Hoomans don't understand or respect copyright, in general. When it's a big corporation it's one thing. When it's a guy/gal carrying forty pounds of gear around in their 15 year old car trying to make your memories last forever when they've got 1/500th of a second to get it right for ~$40/hr the copyright belongs to them. People should understand it.

Edited for gender neutrality.
Class of 2013: Learn To Write Code, Sure. But Really Learn to Write.
/me duckduckgoes!
That's because the numbering only gets bumped for sufficiently "major" upgrades, typically marked by a redesign. There was the original iPhone, then there was the 3G (which introduced 3G and a new design) and its minor upgrade the 3Gs, then the 4 (which introduced the retina display and a new design) and its upgrade the 4S, then the 5 (which introduced the new aspect ratio).
"I see people being horrible to confused newcomers, instead of steering them in the right direction."

Side thought - this happens in many communities as an indoctrination ritual (people laughing making fun of the newbie). So I'm wonder what the basis of it is (rooted in survival or human nature?) because there must be one.
That's not a particularly good analogy, because both roles require significant commitment to practice and study. Trying to achieve both would take would likely render you worse than most at either. Being a good programmer takes training and effort; being respectful and understanding does not take any superhuman effort. It just requires understanding that demeaning people is not acceptable behavior.

vs.

SHUT UP. Your analogy is awful and I never want to hear that kind of drivel from another HN poster EVER again. Go rtfm on English lol
True but the press/blogs will summarize this and a ton of people will have heard about it by the end of the day. They really want to be the only box in your living room, not just something you boot up when you want to play Halo, so they're emphasizing things other than the games at this point.
When I got married I put an ad on Craigslist seeking a photographer willing to do "work for hire" so that I would have the copyright. This is how photographers hire other photographers (e.g. for multi photographer shoots). I got many more responses along the lines of "how dare you ask for work-for-hire" than actual offers.

I had to spell out explicitly to the photographer that I hired that only I would own the copyrights to the photos and they she could not use them on her website, etc.

This was a few years ago. I think it's more common today for people to include the digital copies in the price or sell them to you for an additional fee.
You've still the chance to be better than them in every way (features, quality, marketing). Nothing's lost yet.
Breaking Open: AngularJS w/ creator Miško Hevery
The audience for this is probably stock analysts.
This is an industry ripe for disruption. I took a half assed shot at it last year (still online but left for dead) with shutterhire.com

My basic concept was that at some price photographers would give away all the digitals, customers should be able to "use" them (but not sell them) as they wished, and that people should choose photographers almost exclusively on the quality of their work. The business would be a marketplace fee for arranging the transaction.

I ultimately gave up due to personal priorities (children / day job) and a complicated legal mountain to climb (who owns copyright? Do you force everyone into a contract?).

If anyone wants to pick it up I'd be happy to share the code.
Hm, most of that is already supported (both in the spec, clients and servers) in user-to-user chats, I don’t know how difficult it will be for MUCs. Audio/Video is the problematic part here, I agree, but at least for me text is a big improvement over the times when I had to call people.

Would it not have been possible to offer a XMPP MUC as a text-based interface to hangouts, to allow ‘legacy’ users to still be connected?
So it is OK for people to live there (health-wise) but not OK for people to stay there temporarily? I mean, if there are 200 people in a building and it burns down does it really matter if they were there temporarily or permanently? Bizarre.

The only way justification I could see is that if it were not hygienic, there is a chance of a outbreak of a virus happening (but that is no different than the metro or a flea market).
The intention of the law or lawmakers does not matter at all after the law is passed.
"When you are exercising it can read your heartrate."

Why would you present a device that clearly looks like HAL 9000, integrates a very skynet-esque xbox live and choose to say it can read your heartbeat?

Wouldn't it be better to give the context as a choice? It comes across as telescreen that is taking your biometrics without permission. Why did they choose to take the creepy angle? What is wrong with these people?
I'm just glad they brought back volume control on the mini player. I use the mini player all the time at work, and the inability to set iTunes volume independently of other sound generators on my computer was really annoying. The album art thing I didn't notice because only about 20% of my music had album art.
Exclusive First Look at Xbox One
It's funny that they are advertising "64bit" as a feature. The Nintendo 64 took that flag in 1999.
Agreed. Playground take downs have no place in this forum.
If they can really wrangle all of the other sources to come through and be controllable by the xbox, that would be very cool. Maybe my parents will be able to work our tv without us having to write detailed instructions.
Red and processed meat linked to higher cancer risk (pdf)