skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
\u20ac specifies a code point, not an encoding. (specifically the code point 000020AC). The encoding of wchar_t in C89 is up to the implementor, and in particular GCC uses UCS4 on most platforms. But this is besides the point; C99 and C++ both require that any C language processor that runs across that sequence of characters to immediately interpret it as the Unicode character €, or rather to behave as if it did. So you can have function names like "b\u00EAte" if you were for some reason incapable of typing ê.

What setting the locale to UTF-8 does is require (well, for very weak definitions of require; the standard is pretty damned quiet on anything other than C or POSIX locales) that the Unicode character sequence in question be output in the UTF-8 encoding. Presumably you could define a locale en_US.UTF-16 that output in UTF-16, although I would point and laugh if you did.

In sum: C89 doesn't say a damn thing of any use about wide chars; just that they exist and here's some convenient functions (and that only in TR1). C99 requires that you be able to specify characters using Unicode code points in wide character strings but otherwise does not specify input or output. The locales, which are standardized only by convention, talk about encoding from a well specified (usually) disk format to whatever the library's internal representation is.
On the front lines of the Netflix Prize
Tom compiler: Transformations of programs for C{,++,#}, Java, Python, Ocaml
I don't agree with the author of the article when he writes that we don't need another search engine. We definitely need alternative search engines here because the quasi total control and monopole on the information funnelled to nearly all internet users is a very serious problem. This is too much power in the hands of one player. In addition to the incredible amount of knowledge it has on everyones searches and thus interests and works, it is in a position that would make it possible to totally bias and corrupt the perception a user can have on knowledge published on the web.

There is also room for improvement in the "experience" provided by google.

But I fully agree with the authors on the evaluation on the Bing stuff. My experience of bing, by comparing search results on the scientific topic I'm working on, where disappointing. Microsoft results appeared to be highly biased toward particular scientific institutions which, I have heard, have some research partnerships with Microsoft.

An advertisement campaign may catch attention, but it won't change the experience perception. A very good point of the article author.
Well, a startup is doing this. Powerset is supposedly behind Bing.

Do you honestly think an unknown startup can take a bite out of Google and not get acquired in the process?
What I think is interesting is that they're beyond what general recommendation engines can provide; it sounds like they're down to making domain specific optimizations. I wonder how many of these techniques will be generally applicable.
Sorry if what I said above was misleading - I didn't see him at the exam, it was just proctored by TAs, but that is not unusual. Also, he couldn't have been in today - got this e-mail a couple hours ago:

>Dear CS students,

>I'm deeply saddened and shocked to inform you that our CS faculty colleague Rajeev Motwani passed away last night in an accident at his home. Our sympathy goes out to Rajeev's friends and family, and to the large number of colleagues and students whose education and lives have been enriched by his.
"I don't see how these are going to just disappear if GM is gone. There are other car companies these suppliers can sell to."

That's your opinion, but the facts are pretty clearly against you. Listen to the radio and read the newspaper -- the suppliers are already failing. And they're not failing because there's no demand for cars (GM sold about 9 million cars last year, incidentally), but because their primary customer has stopped paying the bills. That's what the government is trying to save -- not to mention the numerous American towns that have no economy without the local GM plant.

And before you argue that bailing out these towns is the wrong solution, try to remember that the world doesn't turn on a dime. Yes, a place like Youngstown, Ohio probably needs to find a way to survive without the GM plant. But they aren't going to diversify their economy overnight, and it isn't going to help them to let their primary employer die.

So maybe you're right, and some non-zero number of these suppliers would survive a total GM liquidation. I don't know. The point is, the bailout isn't designed to save GM, so much as it's designed to save the entire economy that surrounds GM. Everyone who tries to make the calculation in terms of a cost-per-GM-head is being simple, and is failing to consider the larger picture.
How about just opening up the documentation necessary to service or modify the mechanical and microprocessor-based systems in my car and then putting that into a kindle-like device? I'd much rather have something that would help me diagnose, maintain and modify my vehicle then something like a GPS. I'd also want to subscribe to service that would keep this documentation up to date.
I had the pleasure of visiting their office last weekend for a couple days. It is the most amazing working environment I've ever seen. As one of the employees aptly describes it, it's a 'work resort'!
"Sure, lots of people still pay the upgrade tax on Windows and Office every two years, but only because they have to."

My primary OS is Window's XP, which I got in 2001-ish. That's a little more than 2 years...
I did my undergrad in DC and I'm now in the Bay Area...so I can anecdotally confirm what the article says. The Metro is excellent...BART/Caltrain is nice for getting to the airport, or getting into the city, but it seems pretty useless for getting around the city itself.
Something that I think is similar is dwell-clicking software (for disabled people, I think--just like the one-handle faucet).
Sports hadicappers and sports handicapping
High profit sports betting picks providing montly profits to our users with your sports handicapping service
I use http://www.fastmail.fm/mail/familyplans.html because it allows me to trivially manage everything related to email for my entire family.
Here, here! I notice it too. W3M does this, but since Firefox doesn't, this would be a cool feature.
Interesting article, but it would really help me believe the author knows the topic (text encoding) by not having goofy HTML entity encoding scattered all over the place (making the C++ code extremely hard to read) and not use smart quotes in the code samples.
#8 and #9 contradict each other.

If you're supposed to create an "interface", let's assume that's the public api.

But if you're trying to make methods small enough that comments are not needed, you're doing so for implementation purposes, since chances are most of those methods will be private.

Personally, I think a few comments are nice, especially to help orient someone their first time reading the code.

If you're doing something so magical that it requires comments to have any hope of being understood, you should have a really good reason for using so much magic.
More important then writing short methods is consideration of the methods purpose and name.

Any method should have only one purpose and that purpose should be expressed in its name. If it can't be expressed that way the function is to complex.
Very nice service. I would've used it for my project had it been available when I started, but I had to build most of the features you listed in house (we pull about 80K feeds). One feature that might be interesting to add is returning the results in json format since that's easier to parse now that most modern languages have that built it. And, by the way, are you aware that Google offers similar APIs? They restrict using it to personal and non-profit, so I couldn't use it.
True -- And some code I've read (such as Rails) uses an options hash that gets augmented and passed all over the place. This, I think, diminishes readability and could (in the wrong hands) endanger reliability.
Watching this movie makes me proud of my new business, whose focus is reforestation and funding education in underprivileged areas via philanthropic consumerism.
This has been brought up before and I happen to agree with you, but inevitably some of the purists will get mad at you for posting a meta-post and they will tell you to use the feature request section (at the bottom of the page) for this kind of things.

Just so you know.
You're right, they probably haven't even heard of linux, and that's likely the way it'll stay, even as they start buying netbooks preloaded with linux.
Death awaits us at every corner of life.

Tomorrow is Saturday. So, go out, hug a friend, enjoy a good meal, dance with a partner, love someone you love because you never know when death lurks in the shadows.
The Onion predicted this three years ago. No, seriously:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47978

I wonder how many of "satirical" articles actually wind up describing the future; it would be fairly easy to do a study on, say, articles published in 1999 and see how many of them have since become accurate.
As soon as the page loads, the text describing what the site does becomes covered by one of the messages. Epic fail until that is fixed. Quite cool otherwise.
JQuery TOOLS - The UI library for the Web
Interesting idea. I subscribed.
Interface tries to intelligently rearrange itself, and ends up annoying user? Reminds me of that old MS Office "feature" of hiding unused menu items, which bugged me like crazy.
For a nice high-level introduction to the Tom compiler, I'd suggest reading section 4.2 of the following paper:

http://www.loria.fr/~moreau/Papiers/MoreauRV-CC2003.pdf
Apple on the other hand, often seems to actively prefer to compete at a disadvantage. It's hard to get an Apple for work, it usually employees voicing (loudly) a preference. They rarely use price to break into or maintain markets. They want people to overcome those barriers to get the product. So if someone buys an Apple or an iphone it's because they really wanted it. When they win, it's usually because they made something someone really wanted. Wanted enough to pay for it themselves; nag their boss; learn something new or some other obstacle. It would be a break from this strategy if iphones started to be mass issued by employers putting them in to the hands of people who are apathetic.

MSFT take the opposite approach. Their usually involve the path of least resistance. That often using high high/dominant market share; pricing strategies; barriers to switching; barriers to being the odd one out, etc.

Both are IMO good business strategies & both are good businesses. But there is a qualitative difference in the approach. If sheer commitment to high level of craftsmanship is the primary way to winning, they probably won't win.
Nokia 6230i / 6230b Black Unlocked at unlockcell.com
Nokia 6230 brand with 6230i and 6230b is here with features that are outstanding and the phone gives you the more desired outputs. The phone is very interesting with its features and functions like different messaging features such as SMS, MMS, Email, and Instant Messaging which let you send and receive messages and pictures with audio files.
Because Lotus Notes was one of the first groupware applications which Google Wave looks like it's trying to be.
Timothy Draper’s Rose-Colored Glasses
Yes, the article title is wildly unfair. But an article titled "the g++ std::locale implementation under Mac OSX is broken" isn't nearly as interesting as claiming that C++ might not be able to support Unicode.

I mean, really...C++ can work with individual bits; it can obviously support Unicode strings. The problem here is one of making the compiler aware of the details of the platform on which it's being used. The blame here appears to lie on Apple:

http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-dev/2008/Mar/msg00015...

http://lists.apple.com/archives/unix-porting/2006/Dec/msg000...
Former king of America's mortgage market charged with fraud
You can't put a dress on an also ran and take on Google. It has to kick Google's ass.

Wrong. Microsoft only has to show it can compete, and it has won. They get to keep: the significant portion of the populace that's only dimly aware that they can switch search engines and also the portion that doesn't care. Certain types of results have a slicker presentation -- right there, many of the habitual users of those subsets are going to go to Bing, and these habitual searchers are probably many of the people most valuable to advertisers.

Remember, to win against the Germans at Stalingrad, the Russians first had to fight them to a standstill and keep them grinding their gears there for awhile. Sometimes the key to victory is to sap your opponent's momentum by just holding them at bay. (That said, I hope Google pulls off some fantastic stuff in response!)

I just wish Microsoft would learn from its past and be a leader again.

Actually, I think they just took the lead in search results presentation.
I wanted to post this as an example of how HTML 5 "just works" in Chromium and Chromium "almost works" on Mac. =)
I'd like to know, too. I haven't bought a new game since 1995 or 1996. I've seen some games at my friends' and I tried out some technological milestones such as Quake 3 when it was released on Linux but didn't really catch up on playing anymore. The only thing I've been repeatedly played is Doom -- I use it for processing ideas in the subconscious while keeping my conscious thinking in the gameplay.

I thought that perhaps it's the difference between a 15-year-old and a 30-year-old but then I decided to try out some old games I used to play in the early 90's. I set up F1GP, EOB, EOB2, Syndicate, Monkey Island, Super Frog, Civilization, UFO, etc. and I was hooked! They were just fantastic and FUN! Some even more so than back in the early 90's! I would definitely buy games like those if I knew which of the new ones were good.

Of course, not having Windows is a huge restriction with regard to gaming but a one that has suited me fine all these years. If there turns out to be a killer game somewhere I might just set up a virtual machine for XP and try it out.
Remembering Rajeev
Boutique Labs are the wave of the future
I understand that the main point was to rightly criticize the GM bailout, but subsidizing YC would be wrong for essentially the same reason. Governments are unable to allocate capital as efficiently as markets can. This holds even if Paul Graham is the central planner, no matter how much you might hope otherwise.
Given current technology, the trend becomes irreversible?
Yes, that's right, for those just tuning in, this has been broken since at least 2006. Probably earlier.

I'm just speechless.
Home Movie: The world around us
Watch this movie released on World Environmental Day
Perhaps they couldn't get the domain http://automaticallyclickeverythingfor.me ?

I mean really, it's just like using a normal UI while maniacally clicking as fast as possible. Every nav item you hover over gets selected. Every text field gets entered. Every button you move past gets pressed. It's like that Atari 2600 joystick with the "autofire" switch.

I went through their alternative button ideas. Two of them I "clicked" unintentionally. One of the I couldn't get to "click" at all.

All in all, they've successfully proved that this is a bad idea.
"And before you argue that bailing out these towns is the wrong solution, try to remember that the world doesn't turn on a dime. Yes, a place like Youngstown, Ohio probably needs to find a way to survive without the GM plant. But they aren't going to diversify their economy overnight, and it isn't going to help them to let their primary employer die."

How much can we afford to spend on people's romantic attraction to their home town? This country's had ghost towns appear when markets collapse and industries disappear before, it could stand to see that happen again. I happen to live in a college town where the second biggest employer (i.e. not the college) is hiring electronics assemblers every week, because it's in a growing market. Why can't a few people leave Michigan and move here?

It's probably wrong to think about this in terms of Youngstown, Ohio surviving the death of GM. People can leave Youngstown.
Ask HN: Does religion have a future
After watching the recent star trek movie I realized that the science fiction movies have altogether kind of agreed that there is no religion in future except in cases of some distant planets with Paganism.

There is no Church/Mosque/Temples anymore :)
Very rarely do we see the remain of Mexican Aztec culture but no Christianity or Islam (for that matter any other major religion)
Perhaps the money would be to keep them away so he can get some work done...
This is very interesting observation. Over last few centuries we have seen many religions evolving drastically, I guess the far future will have religions but they will evolve in such a way that I and you may not be able to find resemblance between them and todays religion
setlocale() in C and C++ affects the entire process. Setting it to anything other than the "C" locale very likely breaks stuff elsewhere and it's completely unpredictable.

Realistically, for serious text processing you need to leave the entire broken POSIX locale system and C++ wchar_t alone and work with libraries such as ICU.
The trend of that evolution is very much on the lines with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

IF we see the dogma of religion has been defeated by reason and logic over time. But some part of it still exists. Who knows eventually even that will get extinct?
now thats a movie of the year.
Sid Meier and Will Wright
If these are built right, they could be very nice places to live. See Philip Greenspun's idea for Latin-American style villages in the US:

http://philip.greenspun.com/non-profit/
(scroll to bottom)
From my point of view the video is basically saying collaboration is most important as a programmer. Unlike athletes, programmers have to work together to achieve something great. Anything that is really impressive/great will come from the contribution of many programmers (eg linux). The question is: what is the most effective way to collaborate? Is there something about the ego that makes us ineffective? It would be really interesting if they had elaborated more on what makes a "healthy ego". Personally, as one of the critics has said, "people have egos no matter how humble they appear to be." It is simply human nature. Perhaps sometime it is more important to not to dumb down our own egos (or other people's) but to be more empathetic and reasonable working together.
Wouldn't this be true only if you're doing the same thing over and over?
Found this one as well:

http://box.mepholio.com/
I suppose purists should vote up these previous requests for a visual footer:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250242

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517280
Huh, I did not know that.

I'm a little sceptical that anyone would notice new replies added to a post made "835 days ago", but as you point out, that's where feature requests are supposed to go, so I guess I'll add my two cents there.

Thanks!

EDIT: Upon closer inspection, it seems the Feature Requests story is no longer accepting replies. However, it seems my suggestion was made nearly a year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250242

...and again 82 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517280

Oh well.
Palm Saturday
...which isn't the end of the world, since ICU comes with a bunch of stuff that makes life bearable when developing international software, like language-aware collation and regular expressions. If you're going to be developing real i18n software in C++, you're always going to be using ICU or something like it. There's no reason to bother with std::locale.

In fact, I'm guessing that Apple never got around to fixing this because they probably don't use std::locale for real i18n work internally.

(update: the ICU homepage says that Mac OSX uses ICU internally -- http://site.icu-project.org/)
I created a fix for that some time ago. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=357268
Ask HN: S-Corp/C-Corp/LLC
Hey all,

Apologies if this subject seems to come up every so often, but I've sifted through searchyc and haven't found much.

I plan on registering a company, with 2 others, that will, as of now, be bootstrapped into a lifestyle business. At this point, you'd probably suggest I go with S-Corp or LLC because of their tax pass through and our desire to bootstrap. However, I do not want to sacrifice any possible opportunities that may arise down the road, with respects to granting options, raising vc money, or being acquired. Perhaps these are issues I shouldn't worry about now, but I'd rather set things up properly from the get go, which is why I am considering a C-Corp.

Any advice on when/why an llc/c corp/s corp would be chosen would be greatly appreciated.

Also, I'm looking for recommendations as to who to file these papers with. I'm in southern California.

Thanks.
Brilliant...I added DHH to the list.
I'm guessing you're an American, because everybody else is very ill served by the C/POSIX locale. Locales are about something different than general text munging, and if setting the locale to something other than C (which, BTW, is done by default on Ubuntu since many years ago; been en_US.UTF-8 since as far back as I can remember) broke software, that software is seriously stupidly designed. Locales are about making the date come out in the order the user was expecting, the default text encoding, error messages. They are fundamentally about interfacing to the user in the way that the user expects.

And yes, they are flawed, seriously so, mostly due to a lack of ambition. setlocale assumes that the locale the user is currently working in is also the locale the user has always been working in since time immemorial, and it assumes there is only one user. If you have a multilingual document, you're in trouble. If you use the locale date/time printer for anything other than immediate input and output to the user, you're in trouble (and there are circles of hell that certain Usenet newsreader authors will burn in for all eternity for this one). Any time you write a file out to disk with one locale and read it in with another you are potentially in horrible danger. This is where something like ICU comes in really handy; any time you have to deal with data from several different origins, you will be ill served by locale. So in that sense, you're quite right.

But all this is a very different problem from making printf work the way it is advertised as doing, from making it possible to output a Unicode string that you have told the computer in as many ways that you wish to output in UTF-8, write in UTF-8. If you want to do simple text output and not deal with ICU, GNU recode, whatever, you need to use setlocale or your libc will mutely suppress everything but 7-bit ASCII, and you will be very, very confused.
What does the spacebar do?
(Val)grinding your code
Pretty sure you can convert S Corp into C Corp at a later date and declare the multiple classes of stock needed to raise money. I believe if you convert into a C Corp from the S Corp, you have to wait a period of time (5 years?) to convert back into an S corp if you so wished. LLC is a different beast. I've personally never been involved with an LLC.

I'm not an attorney or tax guy, just a startup guy.

Update: Brad Feld Explains this well/confirms some things. http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2006/02/s-corps-vs-llcs.html
You're in a browser. Try it?
S-Corp’s vs. LLC’s