skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> UTF-8 was an amazing concept: it single handedly and brilliantly handled backward ASCII compatibility making sure that Unicode is adopted by masses. Whoever came up with it must at least receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

> I'm sure Ken Thompson and Rob Pike will be happy to hear someone thinks that way.

If that's the case then I think the designers of GB18030 deserve it more, because they achieved an encoding that is able to map all Unicode codepoints while being backwards compatible with GB2312, which is itself backwards compatible with ASCII.

But seriously UTF-8 is like sliced bread after having dealt with we-thought-64K-is-enough-so-lets-all-use-16-bits UCS-2/UTF-16.
Sounds like you'd be a great person to join the team as chief string theorist. :-)
FCC considering proposal for encrypted amateur radio
The USG has slowly, by steps, become brutal, unprincipled, and indifferent to the suffering of civilians--it's own civilians not excepted. Loyalty to the chain of command is the only value that matters (that's why the USG hates Snowden so much, BTW). Our leadership (both business and political) has woken up to the startling truth that there is no check on their power, and restraint is for losers. As governor Christie pointed out so eloquently, it's not about principles, it's about winning.

The brutality is expressed in different ways to different people. At home, the bureaucracy is brutal, the police are brutal, and the justice system is brutal - the law is applied unequally (when it is applied at all) to those with money and power. Abroad, we undermine legitimate governments, invade countries illegally, assassinate people with drones, we torture, detain people indefinitely, commit war crimes - all with impunity from our own people, even after the atrocity has been exposed and there are no doubts about the facts involved. We vote for new leaders - and the new leaders continue the same practices and grant immunity to their predecessors.

Relatively small incidents like Miranda's detention or that guy who wrote the incredible "Don't Fly on Ramadan" piece show how brutal, unprincipled, and indifferent to suffering our governments have become - and now it's totally out in the open. There are too many examples to cite: police mistakenly raid homes by mistake, shooting dogs and then leaving empty handed but telling the terrorized home-owners "you're lucky we didn't arrest you"; women being groped by deputies who are ignored by the family court judge when she tries to get protection; Cameron Ortiz and Aron Swartz; Manning, etc. Of course, terrible things happen. But in each of these cases no-one up the line thought there was a problem. Any corrective action has to be forced by overwhelming public sentiment - and even then the powerful know that time is on their side.

It's time we start asking ourselves whether or not we feel like there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect us against wide-spread abuse at the hands of our government. It's time we ask ourselves if there's really anyone who has any sense of urgency to address the ever growing problem of brutal, unprincipled, and indifferent application of power in the US. Is democracy enough? Is democracy of the type that we have, dominated by a manipulative, effective, money-driven two-party machine, giving us the candidates that we want?

Why aren't people at every level of government getting fighting mad when these stories come out, and who take immediate, decisive corrective action to make sure that a) the people responsible are not only terminated immediately, but criminally charged, and b) make sure it doesn't happen again? Why aren't people at every level of government so afraid to admit mistakes, apologize for wrong-doing, and ashamed at the lack of restraint, the lack of compassion, and the lack of principled action shown by their people? Where do we find these candidates?
Check out fogus' lists of "Perlis languages":
http://blog.fogus.me/2011/08/14/perlis-languages/
http://blog.fogus.me/2011/10/18/programming-language-develop...
What it's like to live in space.
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Lots of it.
I was at the BattleHack in Berlin.
The event itself was absolutely fantastic. It was definitely the best organized hackathon I've ever been part of.

Still, the final results felt similarly weird. The winner was a (non-technical) dude who had been pitching his startup for months already and found himself an amazingly talented developer at the hackathon.
They made use of most of the sponsor APIs and added PayPal as a payment option for the already existing service.
To me it felt like the guy was just going to random hackathons so he could get work done on his website for free.
Even though the developer seemed to be exceptionally good, it seemed like he was just being taken advantage of by a guy who couldn't get his startup to have more traction.

There were definitely much more impressive hacks out there. (Mine honestly wasn't one of them, so it's not just jealousy talking).
In addition, the theme of the hackathon was 'solving local problems'. Now if not having a platform to get product X in city Y is a local problem, it might fit.
For me though, the interpretation was more 'making the world a better place' and not 'building a purely profit-oriented application to sell stuff using PayPal'.

I think they simply chose the most monetizable product that was in the competition.
Made the whole event, which, I repeat, was about the best organized and executed hackathon I've ever seen, suddenly feel cheap.
This is really dangerous.

Even enthusiasts mix up the anonymity offered with Tor with security.

I can almost guarantee that this will do waaaay more harm than good. People will enable this and think they are safe while they are suddenly routing all their cleartext through an untrusted third party (that is, very often, malicious).

At the very least a lot of passwords will be gathered (alongside email in a lot of cases) in insecure and unencrypted forums etc. And since most people have the same password for unencrypted forums as their email, facebook and twitter...

For this to work it will have to be an option buried deep and before enabling it you'd have to have a huge nag box (the size of a blue screen) that clearly shows the dangers of this. And although many have tried I haven't seen any implementation of such a nag box that actually works (forces the user to think and not just press "OK"/"YES"). And even if it did work people won't understand it, at most they will understand that "okay, this is risky" but they have no way of evaluating that risk since they have no idea what they really are enabling.

That said, Tor inbuilt into firefox would be awesome. I just can't imagine it doing more good than harm.
JsFiddle is down
All countries enforce loyalty. If I moved to Canada I would be forced to be loyal to the Canadian government. To make matters worse I would also have to swear or affirm an oath of loyalty to some lady and her heirs and successors across the ocean.

Are there any countries that do not take punitive actions when citizens decide they do not feel like paying their taxes?
What went wrong? The corporate culture degraded until it was poison to both retaining good employees and taking on challenging projects.

What went wrong? Ballmer expended a lot of effort to remove any potential challengers to the throne during his tenure, ridding the company of many talented and ambitious high-level managers, having an obvious impact on the company.

What went wrong? Microsoft reacted to the economic downturn in '08 by treating its employees like shit for a few years in order to pinch pennies even while it kept tens of billions of dollars of cash on hand.

What went wrong? Instead of making each part of the company more autonomous and independent, or even spinning off parts of the company into separate ventures, the whole company remained one giant, bloated empire while the industry changed dramatically around it. Most parts of the company aren't "hungry" the way they would be if they were spun off as startups.

What went wrong? The strategy tax got shoved down everyone's throats in every way imaginable. Microsoft wanted to own every market out there instead of concentrating on its core strengths and executing well on what it could. It dumped a lot of money into trying to catch google et al with the "live" rebrand and then "bing". It dumped a lot of money and opportunity cost through strategy tax in trying to catch flash through silverlight, which is now virtually defunct.

What went wrong? At nearly every step MS is capable of executing on engineering ground well but failing to make things that people actually want. The Xbox One is by far the most impressive console of the next generation but it's marketed so poorly that few people are aware of its actual capabilities and advantages though many are aware of its downsides and limitations. Windows phone and surface are solid products but they're not the products they need to be to actually compete against samsung and apple. And the list just continues.

What went wrong? The company made a lot of key mistakes over the last half decade, many of them at a strategic level. Who exactly is most responsible for that?
Hmm, interesting.

I'm also looking at doing a web-scraping project with Node.js.

I was going to go with CasperJS (http://casperjs.org/), which seems fairly active and is based on PhantomJS.

Their quickstart guide is actually creating a scraper:

http://docs.casperjs.org/en/latest/quickstart.html

However, I'm wondering how this (Cheerio) compares - anybody have any experiences?
There's also the American obsession with having a big lawn even when you don't have time to care for it or even enjoy it.
The Hong Kong we tend to think of is the very densely populated Hong Kong Island and Kowloon area across the bay. Actually there is a huge area beyond Kowloon to the north known as the New Territories which is much less developed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Territories
It is funny because when I was studying a language in college, one professor came into one of my freshmen year courses, and administered a test without noise, and then varying levels of background noise. This obvious experiment led me to believe, given my annoyance and inability to focus, that this must hold true.
Creating non-compromised endpoint hardware is a bit of a problem. I'm actually not sure if it is possible, even in principle.

Maybe if there was an open source/open hardware router which contained a chip with secure boot, into which you yourself could burn the public key, and then it would only allow the code signed by that key... Sounds too complicated to be user friendly.

Besides, there is no way to verify that the hardware router that somebody considers to be secure was not replaced by an identically looking box that had been compromised :( .
It seems like there's been another surge of interest of late in mesh networks. Last time this happened, I wrote up a piece explaining why mesh networks are really a poor solution for circumventing censorship: http://sha.ddih.org/2011/11/26/why-wireless-mesh-networks-wo.... Since then, some of my colleagues and I at Berkeley wrote a more academic version of this blog post. The talk is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doMYDmtzsTQ and you can grab the paper too if you're interested: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~shaddi/papers/foci13.pdf. The short version is mesh networks have fundamental scaling limitations that make them a poor choice for building alternative infrastructures like the ones discussed in this article; for example, a result from 2000 showed that capacity available to each node in a mesh network actually decreases as the mesh grows.

The other thing I'd note is that this article is referring to "mesh networks", when it really means "community networks": networks run by a community, regardless of whether the network is a mesh or not. I don't know about the Athens network in particular, but I know that the Freifunk and Guifi networks are rather hierarchically structured (i.e., are not true mesh networks). This is necessary for building a wireless network with reasonable performance due to the aforementioned fundamental scaling limitations of mesh networks.

I love the enthusiasm of everyone working on mesh networks, but I think it's valuable to keep a critical perspective and not get carried away with that enthusiasm, if for no other reason than to stay honest about the technical challenges involved.
> A lot of the users could be biologists

In my experience, biologists are allergic to the command line. They need web interfaces.

In the case where they don't mind using the command line, providing Linux x64 binaries (along with the source) is plenty sufficient.

Note that I'm not saying they shouldn't distribute the jar if that's the kind of game they want to play. I'm saying they shouldn't restrict themselves to distributing a jar.

> I do agree that the software should be open source.

Me too. But it's not an ideological point. I wasn't kidding when I said that, in all probability, I'll have to fix whatever software I'm using. Or at the very least, read the source code to understand what it is that they've implemented. (You'd think it'd be clear from the methods section in their paper...)

/rant
Is it not normal to have a team made before the hackathon? We're registered for a few hackathons and a lot of them ask us to join a team ahead of time or join one when we get there but they do ask that teams put down their idea. The rule we adhered to was no prior coding or design work before the hackathon so build everything there but feel free to discuss the idea we want to go in with.
So every Firefox app needing jQuery needs to include it in its code base? Doesn't the OS have shared libraries or something? Especially jQuery which, my estimate is, will be used a lot by app developers to interact with the DOM.
A fair amount of the examples involve mutation; a practice that Clojure discourages. A lot of the macros are very instructive, however.
I think this is not inherently true for all humans though. Not all noise prevents me from doing "insightful" tasks. Passing cars, birds, heavy winds or unintelligible conversation don't seem to bother me.

Conversations I can actually understand or singing - I've had a colleague who sung at his job - does seem to kill any reasonable thinking process in my case.

In fact, I think absolute silence is detrimental to the thought process - I find it very hard to concentrate on hard problems without some degree of environmental noise.
Agreed, it fails to take into account the Clinton DOJ anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft which basically popped the dotcom stock bubble. The stock has remained flat then grown steadily since. The article also fails to mention the growth of annual revenue which has raised steadily and has tripled under Balmer's watch.

At the moment, Microsoft stock pays a 3% stock dividend which is a pretty good investment return, so it's less important for the stock to appreciate.
Most capital cities in Australia had a wireless mesh project during that era. wireless.org[1] was (and still is?) the toplevel website.

Melbourne and Perth seem to be the only ones left with active nodes? Canberra (air.net) used to be strong. Sydney lives on in the form of a website[2] and nodedb[3], a world wide map of mesh network nodes, started by "evilbunny" (Duane Groth).

The servers are still live, but the content is well out of date. The projects are dead, but all the infrastructure seems to still be there, if interest ever revives.

[1] http://www.wireless.org.au/

[1] http://www.sydneywireless.com/

[2] http://www.nodedb.com/
If you have text fields in your columns and you don't actually need them, SELECT * in indeed bad as it will cause temporary tables to be made, even if indexes exist for the query.
Numbeo - comparison of cost of living around the world
This might help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6275510
Webalchemy - realtime, Pythonic web framework
The experience with Microsoft devices was not so great. I will give you one instance - They never left the keyboard from tablet and phone. Ballmer laughed off iphone when he heard it is a $500 device and have no keyboard, and he said no one is going to buy this device. He still not understood the point. While apple made the interaction with idevices very sexy. Rest is history and you very well know it.
Moving On and Letting Go
It's a reference to [1], not a description.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_Co...
It depends on several factors. How good is the tutor is and how long tutor has experience in RoR programming. If somebody is starting out to develop a customer base then this is perhaps a good start.
I agree the price is low but If he completely new(I mean having less recognition) in this area is planning to take a dozen or two students per session then the price is ok.

If it is targeted at intermediate level, I would certainly be glad to take it.
Technology has made outsourcing much easier providing tools such as Skype.
not a single post has mentioned the brilliant taxonomy, Borges "claimed" to have discovered in a Chinese text entitled "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge", and mentioned in a 1942 essay by Borges on John Wilkins.

Highly Recommended reading (and only a hundred or so words):
http://eendress.com/acts-of-knowledge/
I'd say probably "claim".
The difference is that Google had the trust of hackers when it launched Android. Apple is a different demographic, it's almost the "luxury" line of tech products.
Any advice or link for someone new to Lisp like me? Also, is there any good open source project using Lisp that I can fork/download and tinker with? I'm still having problem wrapping my head around Lisp. Even implementing some simple algorithms in Lisp took some time for me.

I think this is due to the fact that I learned to program in C. Nowadays I work mainly with python/ruby/javascript, but I got the feeling that I could improve myself as a programmer by learning Lisp.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6275510
I skimmed your paper, but I'm curious, based on your research into this area what an alternative would be to create private networks for citizens without laying out cable everywhere (which theoretically could also be tapped).
I have a lot of experience with roofnet, Meraki and Open Mesh. They work to some extent, but not nearly with the degree of reliability that an ordinary customer would tolerate. You are not going to get a reliable network with single-radio devices in an urban setting with lots of interference and construction materials that are not friendly to wireless signals. You can do somewhat better if you plan out your backhaul links using traditional, non-mesh technologies and only use mesh for the very last few hundred feet, and stick to dual-radio N devices. There is a lot of hype about some of these networks in Europe (Athens, Austria, Berlin, etc.) but what people fail to realize is that these networks are used by geeks who are happy to build their own antennas, mess around with a linux shell, etc. If you just hand people devices you're not going to have a network that is tolerable for most consumers. It may work okay in a developing country in the middle of a revolution where people are willing to hack something together, but for ordinary consumers who want a reliable connection and don't care about the underlying technology it just doesn't work.
And most of them have a choice of multiple ISPs offering 1Gbps FTTH for about US$20-40 a month...
Loeb & co had agreed to step down if their %age of Yahoo shares ever dropped below 2%. It did, so they're out.

A guy like Loeb doesn't hang around forever, just long enough to get the bulk of the upside. At a guess Loeb is impatient with Mayer's reform, it takes too long for him & his allies. Corporate raiders make their money with short term plans, they rarely sit around as long as they did here.
https://www.google.com/search?q=hong+kong+living+in+cages&tb...

One apartment may be filled with workers living in small cages stacked three or four high.
You can actually put up the "this is dangerous" sign for pretty much any invention out there. I understand that you are not advocating "this should not be done" but like any other feature one needs to be vigilant with Tor.
As opposed to wireless which doesn't have to be tapped (i.e. can just be listened in on with antennas)?
In Europe pretty much any old house is made out of brick. They've been through many earthquakes, built hundreds of years ago and still standing; and this is without reinforcement.
Yeah, that's good point.
>It failed because the Nazis used unprecedented tactics and technology to storm through Belgium and the Netherlands faster than anyone thought they could;

The German war plans were captured by the Belgians in 1940's "Mechelen Incident". The Germans subsequently changed the plan, but the allies reacted to the German attack assuming the original plan.

The final ("Manstein") plan was a big gamble on Germany's part, and the generals hated it because the German army would have be obliterated if the allies countered properly.

Your basic point is correct, though. It's easy to blame France's collapse on the Maginot Line, but reality isn't so simple.
One of the things that I remember from 1996 Gate's book "The Road Ahead" is him calling the day when everyone will walk around with his smart phone.

"You'll be able to carry the wallet PC in your pocket or purse. It will display messages and schedules and also let you read or send electronic mail and faxes, monitor weather and stock reports, play both simple and sophisticated games, browse information if you're bored, or choose from among thousands of easy-to-call up photos of your kids."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book...
It is bad because in a column store each column will be stored in a different location, resulting in seeks on disk or cache misses in memory. In a row store the complete row will often be in a contiguous block of memory. It gets worse when the column store uses dictionary compression and the dictionary is not already cached, since you need one more memory access to a random location. For wide tables the overhead is noticeable and the application should really only retrieve what is necessary.
Exploiting Broadcast Information in Cellular Networks
It's not more dangerous than connecting through a regular proxy, or through a Wifi network at some coffee shop or hotel. And how trustworthy is your ISP exactly?

For example, while I visited the US it happened at 2 motels I stayed at for their network to insert ads in the web pages I was visiting. So they where not only snooping my traffic, but going further into altering it. Also, go to any conference or gathering of people, create an open Wifi hotspot (like, with your phone) and then enjoy all the cookies and passwords flowing through, from all the clueless people that connect to it.

Truth of the matter is, websites should be secure by default. Those that aren't represent a huge security risk. Fortunately many of the big ones are (e.g. GMail, Twitter, Facebook, etc...)

Also see:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep

[2] http://faceniff.ponury.net/
Many of those apartments are subdivided into smaller apartments. Entire family may live in just
40-square-foot apartment.
Perhaps unrelated. What are you thoughts so far on Julia?

http://julialang.org/
Are you saying that tor exit nodes are generally malicious? I mean, I understand the precautions involved in routing the data like that, and that there's the possibility, but is it really that rampant?