skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's not much pressure. I don't think anyone reasonably expects the Unicode consortium to fix the problems with Han Unification at all - mainly because Unicode is already too pervasive, and the cost to update existing technology to make it compatible would be too big.

There's specialized software, encodings and fonts that can be downloaded for writing traditional characters such as Mojikyo (http://www.mojikyo.org/PWU8N/index.php), but any text is basically incompatible with other software, including the web, except via converting them to images.

It's unlikely this will change. Technological progress is more important to most people, and anything not in Unicode will eventually be lost in time, just like spoken languages disappear every year as state educations force a standardized language on people.
It took me 3 QA jobs and a very good manager to get my programming career off the ground, so I can completely relate to the message of this blog.
I think there's an interesting sort of parallel between the differences between Stallman/FSF and those of the O'Reilly "open source" camp; and the differences between deontological and consequentialist ethics. In some ways, it seems like software consequentialism fits neatly into Gabriel's "Worse-is-Better" categorization. As a self-hating meat-eating OS X using Kantian, this is dismaying to me.
I don't think your example does what you think it does, match fo followed by o zero or more times, followed by bar.

when you do understand regex, you'll be amazed at the myriad of things you can do with it.
As a self-taught newbie programmer, one of my early question was, "How do letters get drawn on the screen?"

My limited understanding is that it works like:

bits (0's and 1's) -> encoding (e.g. UTF-8) -> glyphs (e.g. Unicode) -> Some insanely complicated black box. This black box knows how to do all sorts of things like kerning, combining cháracters, bizarre punctuation，and other magic.

I understand UTF-8 and Unicode, but I have no idea how all the other magic works. Why is AV nicely kerned, and 我. nicely spaced? Apparenty this is a really hard problem because my trusty old code editor Textmate didn't get it right. Unicode to screen is a terribly hard problem.
One the best accidents in my life was getting a student job. Without the 'years of experience' it gave me, I don't think employers would have given me the time of day. With it, I did get the time of day and most places cared more about the work I'd been doing than the grades I'd been getting.
Maybe RMS thinks corporations and free contract and market forces are some kind of sham, and maybe he's right, but it isn't as if there isn't another point of view.

While RMS may be something of anarchist, I would also like to point out that here he is making a very kind of argument. That is, when someone uses proprietary, closed source software they are inherently signing a "mystery contract", meaning that since because they inherent don't know what the software will do, they inherently give away some of their knowledge. And moreover, given that software (in the form of browsers etc) is now used as people's "window on the world", people potentially give up a lot of their freedom (and the NSA revelations certainly show the potential here).

I think all of the argument for the efficiency and desirability of free markets hinge on full information availability to allow free choice. And so I actually think a libertarian could agree that proprietary soft is inherently undesirable just as they'd agree a "contract for slavery" would inherent undesirable.
Should you write unit tests for experiments and MVPs?
And why is this a bad thing?
Your (and RMS's) definition of "freedom" and mine are different. I see software as "free" when it lets me do whatever with it, including modification and distribution with NO restrictions. GPL software adds restrictions, and even if those restrictions promote freedom, the restrictions themselves are the antithesis of free in my view.
This is standard issue phone screen sort of stuff. You could have a technical recruiter do this, which is what I would assume happened here.
I was OK with "Digital Restrictions Management" because the original acronym is just as political, but when RMS says "iBad" and "iGroan" instead of "iPad" and "iPhone" I have to roll my eyes. I thought we grew out of that sort of thing after we left "Micro$oft" behind.
REIL code only. :-(

With no free/open-source x86-->REIL translator, this is not as exciting as I was hoping it is.

Good luck with it though. Am a bit disappointed as I can't test it right away.
by being proprietary.
it may also be illegal, most interviews are covered by an NDA.
In IE, you mean? A standards-compliant browser shouldn't need to guess at the encoding. It can be found in the <meta> tag or (if that wasn't supplied or we're not dealing with HTML) in the Content-Type header. If it isn't found there, I believe HTML says, "it's ISO-8859-1 (latin1)".

That said, certain browsers have been known to guess.
So you don't think bash is now "less central"? Off the top of my head, Clang now provides an alternative C compiler. Arguably the windowing system has become more central as there are more users that don't touch the shell, and that has never been GNU. None of this is to say there is not still a substantial amount of GNU code, just that it is a smaller fraction of a typical system than it used to be.

It's by no means wishful thinking - I am a little more a GNU partisan than not.
> Sorry, we couldn't find that page. Here are some others for you to explore.

Do you need to be registered with LinkedIn to read?
I tried logging in and still couldn't read it.
Precisely: many if not most websites have Google Analytics JS, so you're being tracked around the web (ghost profile) even without a google account.
Cross cutting tribal groups have historically been difficult to deal with. Just look at how much trouble the Jews have had.
Day 180: Finished
There have been kerfluffles in the past where people (companies) did exactly that. Gave someone a binary, then told them to download the source from somebody else. People got angry.
A nightmare? Not at all. My car insurance (State Farm) is considered a mutual company, and when payouts are less than premiums, I get a refund check.
This isn't his tone, it is the foundation of his argument -- closed source is necessarily and fundamentally immoral, nay, evil. That's an extraordinary claim, which drives his thinking to absolutism. And its bases have implications far outside the field of software.
Have you ever seen codepoint 0 used for anything other than terminating a string?
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UTF8 is indeed variable width; UTF16 and UTF32 are, AFAIK, fixed width. Both use unicode standard.

Your knowledge is wrong.

As of 2012, there are 110,182 assigned Unicode characters, and 137,468 more which have been reserved for private use.

With 16 bits there are only 65,536 possible values, and so UTF-16 has to be variable width. (Though it was originally intended to be fixed width. A misconception unfortunately embedded in the design of languages from the time such as Java.)
We want to replace REIL with BAP. REIL was a good starting point, since instructions are very easy to parse and understand, but BAP is the future.

Another option is to adapt the open source (r)reil translator[1]

[1] https://bitbucket.org/mb0/gdsl/src/94d607a5f058/specificatio...
try this from Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
"Last, but not least, how on Earth do they (employers) think that they can grow their company if they don’t train juniors? If you do not hire juniors, in ten years there won’t be any seniors left to hire."

I think that this article has identified a serious risk here. Who is going to want to major in CS in the future if they know that the odds of getting an entry-level job in their field when they graduate are getting worse and worse?
Isn't security is under one of those "things you can fix later"...

The problem is that the saying is: make it work, make it good, make it fast. Most programmers stop after the first step. "Make it secure" is not even an afterthought, and generally you only think about it after being bitten.

To be honest, "make it work" can be hard in itself. How do I justify spending four hours to add an issue and fifty to go through the other steps? I can imagine telling my boss "oh yeah, I added the feature two days ago, then I cleaned up the design, now I'm optimizing it and then I'll think of ways in which it can be exploited".
qmail and djbdns from before the public domain switch.
I would say that the GPL is instead primarily concerned with the freedom of the software, not the authors or users. GPL software can never be taken hostage, even if that inconveniences every human who might want to use it. It's appropriate for some things, but not for everything.
Much of theory and thinking on markets recognizes information assymmetries. That's one reason trust, reputation and enforceability of contract matter. People buy stuff in functioning markets without full knowledge or transparency all the time.

And sure, some decisions are so clearly lousy that they can't be respected / enforced -- such as a contract for slavery. But they are few and far between. Saying an iPhone is the same thing as indentured servitude is a pretty long reach.
This is the only route I know of to get past the absurdity of "entry-level" job descriptions requiring 2–4 years experience.
I once wrote a potted history to the precursors of Unicode, starting from the telegraph codes:

http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/unicode-...
"I am for one ok with propriety software... What I am not ok with though are monopolies, lock-ins and influencing education."

I think one important point is that closed-source proprietary software inherently implies lock-in. Some portion of proprietary file formats are crappy bags of bytes because the company wants a lock-in and some portion are that way because of simple laziness and you can't easily sort which.

The other thing about people using matlab is that society at large, the scientific community and such-and-such large groups pay the price of crap being caught within matlab and whoever writes the original code can just move on.
I'm sure if you just said SIGCHLD you demonstrated the knowledge they were looking for. If you gave your extended answer, they would probably be additionally impressed.
Copyright is a pre-existing arrangement that binds you whether you personally consent to it or not. That is to say, it is the law. Your obligation to respect it does not depend on any additional commercial agreements we may or may not make. It is there, in full force, a priori.

Indeed, its unavoidable existence provides the reason WHY you'd consider making a deal in the first place, since without the force of law to consider, you'd be free to satisfy your wants without making any recompense to those who carry the costs of the thing you desired.

For artists, legitimate competition (of which there is no shortage) comes from other artists offering different works that are either better or cheaper. Piracy is a different beast altogether.

And for the record, there are no monopolies in the creative world, only exclusive rights to individual properties, an that's a very different thing. To put it in perspective, it's the difference between owning and renting one apartment and owning and renting every apartment building in an entire city.

My question to you is this: are you truly unaware of how the law and limited property rights work? Or are you just inventing warped definitions to justify a one-sided, self-serving, and abusive relationship with authors and artists that you know, deep down, is wrong?
I find it richly ironic when that comic gets posted on these blog networks. Hint: look at the rest of the web page.
Do you know hosting sites with different terms?
So, like I'm on your side but RMS view is more complex than that. But I think even if the criticism attacks somewhat of a strawman view, I think you are essentially right. However, I think it is simpler to just say regardless of whether or not RMS view is "morally right," which is a rather complex matter itself, I think it is enough to recognize the reality that it is an unworkable Utopia that virtually no one would really want to live in and certainly would not led us very far toward technological innovation ... And before anyone gets up in arms about, Stallman has freely admitted as much and remains principled and undaunted by that. I get it. Apparently, Kant wouldn't haves lied to the murderer either ... but let's get real here.
It goes with a moral value that RMS and FSF have been very persistent about: strengthening the community and helping your neighbour.

RMS even once gave a talk at one of 2600's HOPE conventions where he said that given a moral dilemma of having to give a copy of a proprietary program to a friend and violate the license versus not giving them a copy and sticking to the license, it would be best to go ahead and violate it.

Of course, he later went on to explain that free software would serve to get rid of this moral dilemma and that it would be optimal to not use proprietary software at all.

RMS' speeches always highlight the value of the community and the role free software plays in strengthening bonds. I believe he's right, as file sharing in general has become an invaluable part of daily life in the developed world.
individual glyphs: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-...

kerning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning#Digital_typography

some stuff is embedded in the font, other things the OS will do on a "best guess" basis -- which is why things look radically different between operating systems and even between different apps on the same OS if they use their own font rendering.

Check out a very high-quality open source font rendering engine: https://developer.gnome.org/pango/unstable/
One way to think about text encoding is that it provides a nice way to represent indexes into a big array of glyphs: "unicode". Fonts map (some) of these indexes to graphic representations and provide "font hinting" -- clues as to how different letters should be rendered at different sizes -- and kerning information.

Usually your desktop environment is the thing that handles all of this, providing widgets for other programs to combine to create GUIs. I can't find it right now, but you can probably find e.g. GNOME/GTK's implementation.

(Re: Textmate: code is typically rendered in monospace font -- where every glyph has the same size -- so that it has the same alignment in every font with every renderer.)
Without getting into the utility or truth of this post, it's this kind of mealy, on the edge of misleading double-talk that makes me feel cynical and burned-out at a company. It's paternalistic, and a way of talking down to people who can't handle the truth. But damn it, looking at this from the author's perspective, if you're going to build a large company, everyone won't be realistic, and many people probably do need paternal looking-after. It strikes me as probably-necessary if you don't really know everyonen you're working with, or in cultures like the bay area where people have weird expectations.
"It's not dilution that pisses the engineers off; it's the general fact that what they get (equity-wise and career-wise) is so inferior to what the startup mythology promises."

Oh, please. You're overselling your hand. Programmers aren't victorian textile workers -- they have their pick of jobs, all with fantastic perks, great working conditions and greener grass just around the corner. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and telling you to work at a startup. If you don't think a particular job is a fair deal, then go do something else. Unlike most people, you have lots of great choices.

There are many real problems with software as an industry (e.g. age and gender discrimination), but if your worst complaint is that you're not getting as rich as you thought you might from your day job thinking hard thoughts and typing, then you need a perspective adjustment.
You as a recipient of software can never demand the source code. That right is reserved for the copyright authors. At most, you can go and complain to the copyright owner, and they in turn can demand that the distributor provide source code.
The problem is that for every Joe who has no experience but can program there are 100s others who have no experience and cannot program. You will learn this as soon as you decide to hire a junior and teach him or her. And then what will you do?

Even phone screening takes time. It might take just as little as 5 minutes to fail somebody on a phone screen but with all the set up and scheduling you are unlikely to process more than a dozen screens per day per interviewer. And people passing such a short phone screen are not guaranteed to be fit even for a junior position. A face to face interview takes even more time and money. Eventually you need to cut your costs.

As for the observation that most vacancies have hard requirements... The vacancies that don't get closed very quickly so the most vacancies you see are the ones that are looking for people who are hard to find.
Her claim that "“don’t ask for permission” is a dangerously rapey lesson to teach young men" is rather bizarre, given that the expression is attributed to Grace Hopper (specifically "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper) It's extra ironic that Kate Losse complains that the work of women in computer science is ignored and erased, while not recognizing the contribution of Admiral Hopper.
Please do and report back if you have a chance, it sounds like it will be a good one and I'd love to read it.
How bad is the NL in general? I have family there, always thought it was a pretty free-minded country
The alternative is for the whole US to strive for actually being the alternative; the self sufficient decentralized yet United States. If Germany, Singapore, China and Japan provided alternatives, while we continue to hold on to old ways, like: not investing as much into energy efficiency, or thinking outside the box like Germany -> we will lose to white labeled and foreign hosted OSS. To solve this we would need a social market economy [0] or at least a mandate to tax for fractionally financed civic OSS, open hardware (self sufficient micro servers), data, and R&D.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy
Yeah, honestly even asking for clarification which shows that you really understand the concepts at play is probably as good or even better than providing the intended answer.
>can a signal that is ignored be considered to be sent at all?

Yes, because wether or not it is trapped is up to the application..
The only way feminism can perpetuate itself is by convincing everyone women are powerless.
Tom Jennings did something similar which only goes up through ASCII: http://www.wps.com/J/codes/

You might also know Tom Jennings from having created Fidonet and having written the BIOS which became the basis for Phoenix Technologies BIOS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings
After zooming in to 2 different areas and dragging it around for a bit, I now don't get images and I just get a popup asking me to log in to Facebook whenever I try zoom in anywhere.
We simply aren't ready for this. Barrier to entry should be kept high for this stuff.
Naturally, you are correct, when taken to logical extreme. However, the bread and butter of communication is assumption (shared meaning of words, etc.). It's probably fair to assume that most people within this community can look forward to some relative happiness and achievement in life, and I don't think it's bad to support one another in "powering through" bad times. I'm no hard-line pro-lifer: if my grandma asked me to help her suicide, like she quietly mentioned she might many years earlier as the two of us watched her mother die, I'd certainly consider it.
We don't want to go too far down the Windows livze tiles path yet, but it would make sense further down the line.

Funnily enough, we made it possible to pin the site on Windows 8, so you can have it as a tile itself: http://www.iegallery.com/PinnedSites/Details/16114
Nonsense, we don't depend on Excel for pivot tables, lots of other software can do that, likewise we don't depend on github, AWS or any of the other examples. This is total hogwash.
> there's a fine line between shielding employees from the emotional burden of the full truth and creating an emotional burden by hiding some of the truth.

And when you take it upon yourself to mediate the truth, you're put in a position of unlimited temptation with fewer people around to keep you balanced.
The debt ceiling is being used as leverage. It is not, in and of itself, causing the shutdown.
I've been checking out all of this new stuff recently, like http://www.packer.io and http://www.coreos.com. It all seems cool, but I can't help but think it's too little too late.

I want to deploy at the application level, not the OS image level. The abstraction that I want is:

Servers: Something that runs applications. Could be a physical server, an instance on EC2, or a local process, etc.

Applications: My code. Black boxes.

I want to be able to boot up a new server and throw some applications on it, like a new MongoDB shard or whatever. Then tear some applications down, or tear whole servers down.

And I want it all to be managed by a RESTful API over HTTP so that I can write a script to automate deployment, and even automate the scaling of my service.

I think you can do it with just Docker, a bare Linux distro, and a few scripts.

Does this exist yet?
Right, gratis = free, libre = free.
Can you explain how utf-16 is a design flaw? This sounds totally kooky to me. Are you thinking of the more limited UCS-2? Utf-16 represents the same set of chars as utf-8. It's true that lots of errors can occur when people assume 1 wchar = 1 codepoint = 1 glyph but utf-8 has similar complexity and I've seen plenty of people screw it up too. It sounds much more to me like you are saying that "not working how I am used to" is the same as "design flaw".

Edit: put another way, the NT kernel since its inception represented and continues to represent all strings as 16 bit integers, saying that they need to "meaningfully address this" is like saying Linux should migrate away from 8-bit strings; there is no reason to do it. A lossless conversion exists and I fail to see it as a big deal, it's just a historical thing because NT's initial development predates UTF-8.
He's simplifying for dramatic effect.
> UTF-8 would pretty much only need to be updated if the unicode standard redefines what a code point is (e.g. starts using floating point, decimals, imaginary numbers or something else that is also unlikely to happen)

Or if they decide that they need more codepoints, so some invalid-but-possible UTF-8 byte sequences suddenly become valid.
I’ll second this vote, this book is very good. When I learned from it there were two separate editions, now they are together, which is great.
Even Windows-format ASCII isn't fixed width - CR-LF is a two-byte 'codepoint'...
Well, I took one for the team and registered. The world hasn't ended yet. I'll let you guys know. :)