skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can say that about every technique that goes 1 level lower in abstraction. Personally, these techniques allow me to write the vast majority of my code in a high level JVM language (Scala in my case) and optimize the very small percentage of my code that needs to be this latency sensitive.

Because I can get so close to native performance in that highly specific case, the idea of using C++ hardly ever comes up. If I need faster than this, C++ is probably not fast enough either and I need to look at "closer to iron" solutions. I for one appreciate that. But then again, I'd much rather program in C than C++.

As far as claims like Java is 3x slower than C++, it is nearly impossible to quantify these things directly. For any given benchmark you will be able to find people who complain about the code in the benchmark not being optimized enough.

Suffice it to say that there are some things Java is faster at and some C++ is and their are techniques in both that allow them to achieve near parity.
I hope not. Sketch should stay lean and be easy to make plugins for. Also, typically auto generated HTML sucks.
If I understand it correctly, Firefox OS is different in how it is not bound to one particular corporation. Mozilla's objective here is "build mobile OS" and not "sell more devices" like Apple or "get info on people so we can sell advertising" like Google.

This makes me wonder about privacy and Firefox OS. Does it require arbitrary account with credit card paired like iOS or Windows Phone? Does it require account to get most of the functionality like Android? Does it require you to agree that Google will get your location data for network location service to function like Android? Does it not allow you to use it without sending (paid) sms to Nokia with your location, like new Nokia phones?

If it doesn't do any of those things, it is different.
How long ago was this a complement? I've never heard that phrase used in such a manner.
"Designed as a single, global replacement for localised character sets, the Unicode standard is beautiful in its simplicity. In essence: collect all the characters in all the scripts known to humanity and number them in one single, canonical list. If new characters are invented or discovered, no problem, just add them to the list. The list isn’t an 8-bit list, or a 16-bit list, it’s just a list, with no limit on its length."

Is this really true? My impression was that UTF-32 is a fixed-length encoding which uses 32 bits to encode all of Unicode. It seems that this means that Unicode can never have more code points than could fit in 32 bits. Right?
Metadata :-)
Fully agree.

It is great that Mozilla is fighting for openness, but in terms of what street joe and street jane want, I think it will join WebOS in a few months.

Given my experience in telecommunications I don't see how sales are going to push these devices out of the shop when users come asking for other OSs.
Is everyone using SpaceFED (https://spacefed.net) and SpaceAPI (http://hackerspaces.nl/spaceapi/) yet? ;)
Ive tried it, it sucks and crashed too many times, bugs reported, but gave up.

Jitsi also doesnt run on our phones last time I checked.

Basically we have these smart-phones, awesome hardware, good devices, but we cant use them to talk confidentially with our friends.
Equinix Partners with CloudSigma to Market Cloud and Data Center Services
What Gmail Knows About You
Anyone saying, "oh, this is just the little guy trying so hard, take it easy on him" really ought to read the thread you linked. The author of CryptoCat's demeanor is surprisingly aggressive in his comments.
It also needs to sell, being different is not enough.

If the only selling point is HTML5 based apps, other OSs also have browsers.
The gaming, specifically MMO community, has a huge problem with nostalgia. Nigh every day someone complains about how World of Warcraft is only getting worse, and that the "good old days" of earlier expansions were some sort of Nirvana of MMO gaming, yet in pretty much every case, this nostalgia is in fact a manufactured memory and these people don't really remember what the game was really like back then. They misunderstand the feeling of nostalgia as a "things were better" feeling rather than what it really is: "we had so much fun together back then."
KeyLines (http://keylines.com/) is in the same space, it's a framework for building network graph visualisations, not just those economic breakdown charts. It's got a great API and team behind it - they're based in Cambridge, UK.

It's built on HTML5 Canvas, and has fallbacks using Flash, etc. for older browsers.
> -there are glyphs composed from several codepoints (base glyph + combining accents), which should be treated as one "character"

The solution is to use Normalization Form C (NFC) (which combines accents with characters).

> there are ligatures that hold single codepoints, but which semantically are multiple "characters"

OK, so use Normalization Form KC (NFKC) (which splits ligatures, and combines accents with characters).

You're right that "length" of a unicode string is very ambiguous. Arguably, you shouldn't be able to call "length" without supplying an argument about what you are actually asking.
Contrary to what is said, Javascript IS an object-oriented language and prototype-based inheritance IS a language feature.
Designing Responsive Websites Visually - Webflow
I encounter it occasionally. (Although I am certainly not the article's target demographic.)
> It's Minority Report without the psychics.

Wow, that never occurred to me. Analyzing Metadata really is a lot like "pre-crime".

Sure, in a sense all police or intelligence work can be looked at in a way that makes it seem "like pre-crime" - after all, crime prevention does have its merits. But putting every single citizen on the list is something different entirely and really does smack of "psychics".
Web-based SSH for EC2 using a javascript VT emulator
From your web browser, users can open multiple shells, execute and shared commands, upload files to EC2 instances (see links in comments)
Fireworks. Does everything on this list apart from the retina stuff (need to do it the same way you do in Photoshop)
Disconnect - make the web faster, more private, and more secure
I believe it depends on the encoding - UTF-32 has a limit of 2^32 characters, but UTF-8 could potentially expand infinitely (ignoring the current arbitrary 4-byte limit).
Made me think of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QI1iuAvTKE
This is currently the most open mobile OS. Count me in!
Does it need them… as a screen design tool?
How times change
Unicode code points go up to 0x10FFFF, which fits in 21 bits.

If this were ever to become a problem (which I don't see happening any time soon), the transition from UCS-2 to UTF-16 is prior art on how to pull off the extension of a coding space.

Somewhat unrelated, but nevertheless worth mentioning as it's a common misconception: While UTF-32 is a fixed-length coding for Unicode characters, often, the more interesting unit is the grapheme cluster, effectively making UTF-32 into a variable-length coding.
And why do you think the rupee sign, if successful in India, would not be adopted by the rest as well? "$" is by no means limited to the Mexican peso it was originally intended for.

And yes, I do agree that the rupee sign is a little masterpiece of typography, but that's somewhat beside my point -- the inconvenience of switching to anything is the same.
Unicode can never have more code points than could fit into 21 bits. Because Unicode is a 21-bit code. This has historical reasons because Unicode was a 16-bit code initially and it soon became apparent that 65536 characters are not enough, especially with the commitment of

a) compatibility to every pre-existing character set and

b) including historical scripts too¹

21 bits was what emerged from expanding UCS-2 to UTF-16 via surrogate pairs and Unicode was reörganised into 17 “planes”, the first of which, the BMP, containing all code points allocated so far. UTF-32 then just was a simple encoding scheme that allows to have one code point per code unit that is also efficient to process. 21- or 24-bit code units would be unwieldy on most architectures (especially regarding unaligned memory access).

___________

¹ Arguably the decision to include Emoji made a bigger dent in the code point space than hieroglyphs, Linear [AB], etc., though, but that came a litte later.
In the beginning there was smoke signals
Demo: http://bit.ly/1dbOTI1

Download: http://bit.ly/12SK4xb
> And how exactly is it "different"?

Robert Nyman of Mozilla pointed me at this:

https://blog.mozilla.org/ligong/2013/06/03/foxconn-joins-the...

"Foxconn stated that they intend to have FFOS running on all categories of the “8 screen” devices, from smartphone to tablets to laptops to TVs and outdoor signage."

Name me another mobile OS that will be running on laptops or outdoor signage. :) This, I think, is the bigger vision of FF OS that is the reason people should get interested and involved.
Mojang receives C&D letter over "Putt Putt" trademark due to Let's Play videos
> What’s a bit?

> What’s a byte?

I'm not sure what the target demographic is.
I think your logic is flawed. I will agree with it if you will replace "for most practical programs" by "for most in-house or agency-coded enterprise applications".

Another point is that Java bytecode doesn't have SIMD primitives, so unless JIT can do SIMD-optimizations, any SIMD-aware C/C++ compiler will beat Java.

This is especially relevant for the kind of task this article discusses: PFOR Delta integer compression.
You can take responsibility for your actions.

You could try to construct an argument that what you did was reasonable given the circumstances, but from your brief description, it's pretty clear you overstepped the line.

On the positive side - threats of lawsuits are enormously more common that actual lawsuits. Having someone say "pay up or I'll file a lawsuit" is a long way short of "being sued". It's entirely possible he'll be no more competent at engaging legal representation and taking this to lawsuit stage than he was at securing his website.

Don't antagonise him (any more, you've already done enough there). (If it's true,) make it clear to him that suing for large amounts of money isn't going to be useful - since you don't have assets to cover it.

Bottom line - the legal system is _exactly_ the right tool for this job. You did something that's not just "childish", but clearly wrong (breaking into the site), and exacerbated it by then writing the extension and publicising it to your stolen user email list (surely there were great big alarm bells going off in your head when you decided to do that?).

If you're lucky, you're about to learn a lesson in how easy it is to almost get in big trouble. If you're not lucky you are about to learn about accepting responsibility for your actions like an adult.
The code is much more readable if the bitwise operators do not look almost identical to the logical ones.
1. Become an expert in computer programming.

2. Understand computer science.

3. Understand computer engineering and architecture.

4. Understand people.

5. Understand bullshit.

Then, try programming a game from 20 years ago.
>water goes to the lowest point since it weighs more than fuel

While that's true, it takes time, and it won't get enough of the water out of the fuel[0]. Also, the aircraft must not be disturbed for the water to settle out. Operation demands for aircraft don't allow that. Even if they did, some water will remain in the fuel.

While the engines are operating, fuel is constantly circulating which disperses any water within the fuel. Airport fuel supplies at major airports are usually tightly controlled, but it's still be possible for water to get in.

>I kind of assumed the FOHE was something that used external air,

The FOHE is a Heat Exchanger, sort of like the radiator in your car, but instead of engine coolant/air the working fluids are Engine Oil/Jet Feul. Both the fuel and oil systems are closed systems, with one exception. As fuel is consumed in flight, the volume of that fuel must be displaced by outside air. Fuel tank to atmospheric pressure must never exceed some low differential pressure. This is one source of moisture ingress that must be dealt with, and can cause water to accumulate in tanks if left unchecked.

>you descend through humid and coolish air ie not summer heat,

Are you aware that the air temperature at altitude 35,000 ft is around -55C?

[0] http://www.petrolplaza.com/technology/articles/MiZlbiYxMDI3N...

edit: Here is a bunch of related photos if you're interested. http://englishrussia.com/2013/06/20/how-aircrafts-are-fueled...
There are a number of flaws in your argument. The first is that we can do two things at once. Using privacy-protecting technologies is not mutually exclusive with promoting privacy-protecting legislation. We can, and should, do both.

But the more significant point is that using this stuff, as an individual, isn't really going to cut it without more, but who says that's the idea? We need to be creating things like this. What we have here is a list of open source projects you should all be contributing to and promoting to anyone you have influence over, and a list whose holes and shortcomings provide opportunities for creating new things.

I mean what good is Diaspora if everyone you know is still on Facebook anyway? But if you create an account and use it regularly, and convince as many people as you can to do likewise, that's how change ultimately happens.

And what you can do is: Read Facebook, write Diaspora. Don't shut off your Facebook account if all your friends still use it. Not enough people are sufficiently purist for that to scale. Just stop posting anything to Facebook that doesn't consist of "I just posted something you might be interested in to Diaspora" and then let all your friends wonder what they could be missing.
"The FISA court works. The separation of powers works."

'works' for who, buddy?
> We can already quite successfully run HTML5/CSS/JavaScript-based apps on Android, iOS, and BlackBerry OS for instance.

Right, but in Firefox you also have "native" HTML5 apps, which give access to more hardware functionality than a regular web app.

> And this is ignoring Firefox OS's inflexibility when it comes to using languages other than JavaScript

I don't see how Firefox OS is less flexible than other systems. In Android, you're forced to use Java; in iOS you're forced to use Objective C (everything else, like RubyMotion are hacks, at best).
ASCII is by far the most successful character encoding that computers have used. It was invented in 1963, back in the era of punch cards and core memory. Modern RAM did not exist until 1975 -- a decade later.

Unicode is the replacement, not the competitor, like 64-bit IP addresses are the replacement for 32-bit IP addresses. It was developed in the early 1990s when RAM got cheap enough that you could afford two-bytes per character.

Personally, I deal with data all the time and rarely encounter unicode. Of course, I'm in the US dealing with big files out of financial and marketing databases. In fact, I've seen more EBCDIC than UNICODE.
Asiana Airlines Flight 214: A Pilot’s Perspective
Usage-based broadband pricing could decimate Netflix
Exploring Bayesian Bandits - an Online Tool
I would start to look for legal representation just in case this guy actually files a lawsuit.

But to be honest, crappy insecure site or not you went poking around and even created an extension that bypasses their (crappy) business model.

You made some poor decisions time to deal with the consequences, depending on the state/country he might or might not have a good claim against you.

Seek legal representation
>64-bit IP addresses are the replacement for 32-bit IP addresses

IPv6 addresses are 128-bit.
I think his argument is on shaky ground. No matter what you change the proof-of-work function to, it will always be possible to develop specialized hardware that outperforms general purpose hardware.

I accept his argument that it's dangerous for vast amounts of mining power to be centralized to a small number of actors. I don't agree that changing the PoW function would solve this in the medium term. It might work in the short term, as developing specialized hardware would take time.

I suppose one solution would be to change the PoW function at set intervals, randomly selecting one function from a large pool. This would discourage the development of specialized hardware.
It's not even really a replacement. More of an extension. Anything that talks Unicode can talk ASCII (although not vice versa).
That's incorrect - the UTF-8 scheme encodes the sequence length in the first byte as the number of bits set to 1 until the first 0.

The original limit was 6 bytes encoding 31 bits, but this was lowered to 4 bytes encoding 21 bits. If I'm not mistaken, 7 bytes encoding 36 bits (or 8 bytes encoding 42 bits if you make the 0 optional) should be the hard limit.
Really like the interface and functionality! Great job. Think you'll eventually branch out to other kinds of ticketed events (theatrical productions, what have you) using the same basic format and algorithms?
Ask HN: Where to find Artificial Intelligence/NLP early adopter customers
Hi HN,
Where can one find a set of customers/early adopters for Artificial intelligence/Natural language processing technology.
We are not looking to sell the company but looking for paying partners/customers willing to work in a SAAS model.
I imagine there would be people interested in giving semantically correct answers to questions asked in natural language.
The epilogue is using a pretty specific comparison, which is a little out of whack in my experience. Rent / Mortgage comparisons are usually a little closer.

That being said, I completely agree with this article. The most important point is that buying is often worthwhile due to government meddling... it's difficult for other investments to compete with a house ownership appreciation that's tax free.
It doesn't require any of these things.

I have been using mine for ~6 months without a credit card. I have downloaded a number of free applications and the only times I had to log in was when I decided to rate them. I have not tested non-free applications, but the documentation seems to indicate that you have the choice between PayPal or some operator-provided billing mechanism. I don't know the details, though.

You do not have a system-wide identity. The Marketplace supports authentication through Mozilla Persona/BrowserID, which is quite different from other single sign-on authentication schemes, insofar as it is anonymous, almost zero-knowledge, open-source and decentralized (admittedly, I don't know of any Persona provider other than Mozilla, but anyone with a http server can become a Persona provider).
And for that matter the Wii U is a great ad for a PS 3 or an Xbox 360
Take a look at finalterm/Termlets/ps.
No wonder that it is so fast.
The Impending Arrival of Emotionally Intelligent Machines
Depends on the target market. For me, not having any of the above mentioned "features" is a selling point for me. Do other people care? Possibly no, but that doesn't concern me.

also, Firefox OS devices have potential to be cheaper than android devices, because there's no extortion from Microsoft, and may be consistent, unlike Android with many terrible manufacturer-made OS modifications and version fragmentation. Even now, android 2.3 devices are sold.
Think you're right. The article could with a rewrite as Unicode used to be 16 bit until 1996 (according to Wikipedia) which explains why Java/Windows are really UTF-16 based.

The more interesting question is if you're designing a new operating system would you pick UTF-8 or UTF-32 as the basis of your character system. Bearing in mind you need to normalise strings anyway for comparison purposes the general space efficiencies for UTF-8 for most systems seem tempting.
Where are you getting the UK data from?

Also how do you handle, UK Postcodes, and Counties?
Truth is 2 is not important, 4 and 5 are most important.
What do you think about http://richardharr.is/unicode-in-five-minutes.html ?
When Mos Def was force-fed Guantánamo Bay-style – eyewitness account
Intel Haswell - What you need to know
I think this is great explanation for anyone who's approaching the subject for the first time. It gives a good introduction as to why you're staring at broken data coming from a db and just how royally screwed your afternoon is going to be getting back into shape :)
This is a transplanted answer to a Quora question:

https://www.quora.com/Computer-Programming/What-does-it-take...

The problem is that in the body of the Quora question, which is omitted in the Forbes transplantation, the asker elaborates that he wants to master C++. Without knowing that, the immediate reference to C++ makes no sense, nor does step #1 saying to "become an expert in computer programming" when that sounds like the exact question itself.

It's usually better to post the original article rather than a wrapper article, especially when the wrapper contributes nothing and even confuses matters.

Edit: BTW, answerer takes the notion of the value of being full stack and blows it out to include all of computer science, computer engineering, anthropology, sociology, psychology, literature, and poetry. Cute, and maybe entertaining to some, but probably less than truly helpful. Become a Renaissance man as a prerequisite? Sure, and pick up deity status too, ya know, just in case.
Single page:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/20...
While Python beats Java at a lot of things, that wasn't the point.

The point was, a badly written Java program can beat a badly written C++ program, because the Java optimiser is more robust against stupid decisions by the programmer.

PyPy might make your point correct though. While PyPy will never beat well-written C++ (at least, not in the foreseeable future), it might start beating badly written C++.
Human chromosome number and conformity in science
Sometimes things don't vertically center properly when I use the "Align Vertically" button. I haven't seen anyone else complain about this, so am I doing something wrong?

Here's an example: http://imgur.com/kgbMwJ2

Ninja edit: After looking at the screenshot I posted above again, it looks like the entire textbox is being vertically centered (the blue outline is centered), but not the text inside of it. Why does it a function this way and can I change it so that it vertically centers the text? Thanks.
A Game 20 Years In the Making
Wow, the selected answer by Joel is, unusually, awful. Has he ever tried to teach someone who is at his 30's and with no programming experience? He suggests the "The C Programming Language, K&R"? Yeah, at that pace he will be able to write a `for loop` by the time he is forty.
It does indeed look like a cube... from an off-axis angle thanks to the irregular protrusion of the tread. If you were to cut the excess tread off straight across the axis you'd have a pretty normal looking wheel.

The explanation of why it's better is also pretty flimsy. The video basically says, "I put together a weird shape that can sort of fit in a cube but also rolls! Gnarly man!". These are basically skateboard wheels with treads, which might make them decent off-road wheels (people already make these). Those irregular edges look really weird to slide sideways on and I have a feeling they might be a little bit unpredictable.

I'm not sure if this is a good invention or not, but they've already picked up $80K on kickstarter, so it's certainly a great example of how to run a kickstarter campaign!
PowerShell is ok until you actually have to use it for something non-trivial, at which point it's the usual "layers-of-pain" that you get with anything Microsoft these days.
Windows Phone does not require an account paired with a credit card.
Why is Forbes discussing this? Amd even when it is, it seems like a link baiting headline!
I don't believe people anywhere in the world will keep buying phones for $800. I believe this has been a fad and it's starting to fade.