skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Per the wiki page on ASCII:

"The committee considered an eight-bit code, since eight bits (octets) would allow two four-bit patterns to efficiently encode two digits with binary coded decimal. However, it would require all data transmission to send eight bits when seven could suffice. The committee voted to use a seven-bit code to minimize costs associated with data transmission. Since perforated tape at the time could record eight bits in one position, it also allowed for a parity bit for error checking if desired.[17] Eight-bit machines (with octets as the native data type) that did not use parity checking typically set the eighth bit to 0.[18]"
That's really great feedback -- I was the dev behind nReduce. I think that makes total sense that removing the hard deadline reduced everyone's motivations.

Joe and I tried to play with a lot of the timing, from first using the notion of 3 month batches, to opening it up for people to join every week (and doing a weekly join session to onboard people), to just opening it up completely.

We didn't see any immediate overall engagement drop after opening it up for people to join anytime and set their own checkin day, but we did notice once people received less than three comments per week on their checkin they dropped off within a few weeks.
yes, yes and yes.

Just a group, to share with, to grow with and to argue with - when there are no artificial deadlines, no customers and the only marker is writing the best code possible. you won't make perfection, but at least you know you cannot blame the outside world.

some fortunate souls have that group and environment Monday to Friday. if you are not one, to paraphrase Hannibal, find one or start one.
Free means as free in freedom, not as in free beer.
I'm the original dev and I actually am interested in launching it again too (with modifications). Shoot me an email!
When is that a nice thing to have? It's almost never a useful operation to perform when working with Unicode strings.
http://txt2re.com/ is my favorite RegEx tool. It goes beyond just testing your regular expressions against a sample. It builds the pattern for you and generates the code in different languages.
I've noticed this trend before, and I don't even have a hypothesis to explain it. To me, clouds of flies inside the restaurant are off-putting. Yet apparently most people either don't notice, or don't care...?
"Disc" and "data" aren't adjectives.
This might be shortsighted, but maybe the fact that Discourse was not "getting as many contributions as they expected simply because their JavaScript was obfuscated behind Coffee" is a good thing. Surely, the higher quality contributors prefer CoffeeScript. ;)
Is it about what you want, or about what best represents your product to your audience? e.g., you give the brief to a designer and they work from that.

Would you run a code contest to have a software product built?
Not gwern, but http://www.gwern.net/About
This always reminds me of the Microsoft long filename support for Windows NT. They basically use the unused bits of the old DOS 8.3 file entry (8 characters for the filename, 3 characters for the extension) to signal a long file name. Then they allocate enough space to store the file name depending on its length. The genius part is, that older systems only see the shorter filenames and keep on working.

The specification of the format is at [1], although I would love to see a nice drawing of the hack.

[1]: http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?MSDOSFileSystem
He's probably referring to debugging etc.
Yeah, but that's a small price to pay for every single person in the country to get excellent best-in-world health care for absolutely free. Right? . . . . Right. . . .?

At any rate, the NPR calculator only works if you enter the number of people registering for the "Exchange". So, am I to understand that if you're not registering for "The Exchange", then you will bear no additional costs? I had hoped they'd have some crazy complex calculator that would estimate how much your premiums and taxes and other things would go up with existing HMO plans and so on.
Right, but if you're sniping you generally have time to chose your shot, and more than a few seconds to make it. In DOTA2 in the middle of a teamfight, the whole tide of the engagement can change in 1-2 seconds, and when there's creeps everywhere it can get more difficult to mouse-select your target.
I prefer structured text (aka CV). Even in case of free text, you just parse it to extract that structured information - experience, past employers, skills, etc... but you just compare other irrelevant part of the text to other candidates irrelevant part of the text. It becomes more like a gambling rather than objective justification. Who's text is original? personal? better arranged?

And you'll surely miss many great minds just because their text was not that touchy...
Please also don't overemphasize on online activity, be it blogs, github or stackoverflow. Again, you'll miss many great minds.
I found my profile account number and it works for the graph link but I am not that number on the site
It's about as good as you're going to get with character encoding. Unicode + UTF-8 will likely be the standard for representation and encoding for decades to come.
Client-side SSL/TLS MITM, compromised CA and server impersonation detection
Civ 5 is not real time strategy, it's turn based, and as such requires almost negligible mechanical skill to play.

I could imagine playing Civ on the couch with the Steam Controller - it'd work well. I don't think even Valve expects to bring StarCraft or Dota to the lounge room though - those games are designed around a mouse.
Production Quality MongoDB Setup with Docker
Reread this and imagine it's a code contest. Less subjective maybe, but would you want to build for someone with such a vague demand? "I need it to do, err, I don't know. Can't quite put my finger on it."
Text-only is also what I was thinking.

Implemented via the Web Inspector:

http://static.deliciouslynerdy.com/tarsnap/logo-and-favicon....

http://static.deliciouslynerdy.com/tarsnap/styles.png
Your URL is broken but it sure sounds like you're describing the FAT32 long filename hack which appeared in Windows 95. That has nothing to do with NTFS.
It is, but it's not worth wasting 4x memory for the common case of mostly-Latin text.

It also turns out that you very rarely need arbitrary string indexing. Most of the time, when you're indexing into a string, it's a fixed (and relatively small) number of bytes from the start or end. UTF-8 can do this in a tight inner loop that just checks for bytes that don't start with 0b10. If you need .startswith or .endswith, you can just compare bytes with a byte length offset. If you need to do substring search, you can do Boyer-Moore on bytes. If you need to test for equality, do it on bytes. If you need to chop a string in half for divide & conquer algorithms and only need to be approximately right, you can chop in half by bytes and then use UTF-8's self-synchronizing property to find the nearest character boundary.
No. 5 and 6 bit codes existed. And according to Wikipedia (which cites a book "Coded Character Sets, History and Development") making ASCII an 8 bit encoding was considered (not to encode more characters, but to embed BCD data efficiently) but not done because reducing the required bandwith for all text by 12.5% represented a really significant cost reduction at that time.
UTF-8 is a nice format for storage/transmission. If you're going to do some heavy processing with your text you're supposed to convert it to a fixed-width format in memory (typically UTF-32).
Tarsnap users almost always already know what tar is. The fact that tarsnap has a tar command line -- i.e., one they already know -- is a big deal for a lot of tarsnap users.
I've been developing a concept called "irresponsible coding," which is basically the idea that you need 'good engineering' time as well as some form of 'irresponsible, exploratory coding.' I've given a few talks on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlyQOLRiEPs

I think that we've often lost a lot of the wonder and whimsy in software. Code is like magic! But you don't get that when BDDing a new feature so you can check it off in Pivotal.

I agree that not coding every single day is a really fantastic idea as well.
> (I'm one of the architects of the Ripple network.)

Please see the thread linked to above. There were several trust topologies given than are obviously non-convergent in your model and you appeared to have no answer for them.

Effectively you have ripple servers which must have central selection/control (or the system is not guaranteed to converge), and they can set balances to whatever they want. ... and then clients that simply believe the majority of the servers they are pointed at.
The solution I would like to see is that instead of just offloading the cost of individual health care to the collective whole of all America, we address the underlying absurd costs of healthcare, itself.

If healthcare insurance were treated like automobile insurance, it would be affordable for the individual and it would remain the individual's responsibility to take care of it themselves.

Instead, our solution to a $20,000 ER visit is to move the expense from the person receiving the treatment to the entire tax-payer base . . . the health care industry still benefits, either way and only those paying the bill for everyone feel the negative impact.

Why is our only solution "more government! More taxes! pay for everyone else's problems!". Why can't we find a way to address the pricing, in the first place? Why is this not even a discussion that has been had?

Oh, right. Lobbyists.
10 Reasons Your Startup Will Fail
The robocar and the bicycle
"Anyone here a half decent designer? I want to pay someone $500 to make me a logo."
From http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamController/

"Whole genres of games that were previously only playable with a keyboard and mouse are now accessible from the sofa. RTS games. Casual, cursor-driven games. Strategy games. 4x space exploration games. A huge variety of indie games. Simulation titles. And of course, Euro Truck Simulator 2. "

They do expect it to work with RTS.
> Don't confuse the Ripple payment network with ripples, its native currency

Funny, you were arguing that XRP wasn't a currency not so long ago.

It looks like from the code that all the orderbooks are XRP<>other. Seems like you can't opt out of trading XRP for your other stuff... so the fact that you and the other opencoin people own zillions of XRP is pretty material.
What kind of science? Data. Data describes the science. So say we all.
I think this is extremely accurate. I'm launching a new brand next month with a .co and I've found that people that are into tech things like it while the older generations give me a blank stare.
Surrogate pairs mean you can't do this with UTF-16 either. Combining characters make it much less useful for UTF-32, as your understanding of a character no longer matches the user's. So arbitrary strings can't be guaranteed to have this property no matter which standard encoding you use.
The number on this site refers to the profile picture. Some people have multiple profile pictures over time, and some have deleted their account, etc. Example: Zuck is 1 on this page but his FBID is 4.
This is one more than you had before 44CON, no?
You can use something like https://github.com/al3x/sovereign and at least not have your data in Google et al. The problem is, it's not as convenient.
Interesting to see a lot of Harvard grads on row #1 indeed.
You are right if you focus solely on designers from countries with a high cost of living. I'm pretty sure the friend who did my little shop's logo(you can see it at http://rightfold.io) could make something that Colin likes for less than 500$.
well don't forget that they are also using the api to get the full_name of users
Will you do something about it ? Personally, thinking about the possibilities of the network and the protocol makes me eager to develop software that use it.

I feel like someday everybody will have a ripple account but they won't know it. Ripple is interesting because it is transparent and fast enough to enable developpers to create the future of everything around money.
Yes, please just say it here and share it with the greater community. :)
Money in Politics. Silicon Valley’s contrarian point of view
Politicians, government, and many government employees are petulant children that will take their ball home the instant they feel they're not getting their way.
The only thing I can really think of is donating money to the EFF. Still, unless the American people take to the streets, nothing will change.
fibonacci - YouTube
Zero-marginal cost offerings practically require such a thing.
It's extremely common actually.

He says the controller is a bit "bulky" compared to the PS3 controller, I wonder if the 3D-printing material makes it heavier than the end product might be.
Facebook first level interview for Linux admin position
For mathematics and physics, the 'unit' of spaced repetition should be skills, not questions. You would need a program which can generate questions that test a particular skill, such as partial differentiation or factorizing quadratics. If you get a question wrong, that indicates that you need to spend more time practicing that type of question.
I'm very excited about the huge range of possibilities MOOCs open up

Businesses have argued for years that traditional institutions don't prepare students with the skills they (the businesses) would like them to have.

I can see businesses working together to design a "degree" & approaching institutions to cover all the different classes, then post them as MOOCs

Young people could be hired with only a 2-year Associate degree (I think it is good that they get some general, broad studies first & learn what college classes are like in a more traditional atmosphere), then finish their degree in a work/study atmosphere at the company, without as much horrible debt. The businesses would help to pay the costs of running the MOOC. The classes are still open to anyone.

This may not work for everyone, but how many of you are in IT and more or less did this already?

Perhaps there are flaws with that plan, or better ways to implement it, but the point is - Do you see the possibilities this opens up?
Most heavy text-processing applications I know actually tokenize text to words (well, technically terms), keep a lexicon mapping from the term ID to textual representation, and then work in term space. Individual letters are usually not semantically meaningful in most languages (both human and machine), and so your analysis becomes much easier if you operate in a space that is semantically meaningful.
Exactly. Use their need to make sure things actually work to get them to upgrade.
An Interactive, Personalized, Newspaper on the Web (1993)
For me it was absolutely surprising that out of the 200 Android apps, only 4 used spaced repetition but beeing an Android developer myself, I took the challenge to make it better:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.leowandersl...

FluxCards provides spaced repetition learning with easy to edit and create own cards. You can sneak the answer line by line, you can finger-paint and the stats are fast and meaningful.

It is free to use with 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 days intervals. Beyond that you need the premium version but your cards are yours, so if you consider it not worth the fee, you can export your cards to SD and use them in Anki.

And yes, spaced repetition rocks. I can only encourage any flash cards programmer to implement it, as all these apps that implement flash cards but no spaced repetition learning are just not worth your time.
VFAT [1] existed in WinNT 3.5, which was released in 1994.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Long_file...
I make no claims about this being better code, but here are two repositories that were developed with 100% TDD.

Let's Play TDD (Java): https://github.com/jamesshore/lets_play_tdd/

Let's Code Test-Driven JavaScript: https://github.com/jamesshore/lets_code_javascript

I'm not trying to blow your socks off—I think the typical programmer will say "yuck!" when looking at any code they haven't seen before—but I thought you might be interested in the examples.

Both of these codebases were developed "live" on camera. You can see the screencasts here:

Let's Play TDD (free): http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Lets-Play/

Let's Code JavaScript (monthly subscription): http://www.letscodejavascript.com/
Bad news for patent trolls
I think Apple defined it by taking a tactile interface that can be used by a child or non-technical grandparent, replaced the iPod and a cell phone, great web browser, apps[1], and had a ready made ecosystem in iTunes and iPod accessories. Blackberry didn't get the combination[2].

Your right, it was more complicated, it was a combination with a little bit old and a little bit new.

1) partner apps first, third-party later

2) although some of "future" videos they made seemed to get it, but alas future videos don't make future products.
No rate limits?
What is it with the obsession with regular expressions? They are useful things, sure, but I just use them in connection with grep or if I search for strings and normally they are pretty basic, e.g.

$ grep -r -n --color "foo*bar" src

If I want to validate input data with the machine I just use a parser.
So #1 is Mark's picture from back then and he and everyone else would be in the page multiple times.
The Addams Family - (1991) - HDRip » HostVideo.Ru
I like it. Would be nice to be able to match against multiple test strings though.
We should be grateful to UTF-8 for saving us from fixed multibyte Internet (so persistently pushed by MS, IBM and others), which would have made little sense in this predominantly 8-bit world. I remember someone saying at the time: the future is 16-bit modems and floppy disks anyway, so why not switch to Unicode now? Somehow that sounded absurd to me.

Anyway, 20 years later, hardware is still mostly 8-bit, and basically nobody cares about Unicode apart from font designers and the Unicode Consortium.

(On a side note, UTF-8 as a hack is a distant relative to Huffman encoding, itself a beautiful thing.)
The Genius Who Perished on Flight 11
Aria giovanni
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.leowandersl... would need a developer for a browser version. I have big plans and if you convince me, I might pay you for that or we agree on a share.
It already has 10k users and a 4.5* rating.
Computer Science in Real Life: Namespacing
IMO, the designer is not to blame if the client keeps changing their mind about what they (or their spouse, nephew, neighbour or cat) like - which, believe it or not, happens.
Well, there's the marketplace application. Let's see the bounce rate on that baby. Then you need to file tax returns to get the tax credit. According to this link, 41% of the population does not file a tax return. I bet the percentage is higher among the uninsured, think about it. http://taxfoundation.org/article/number-americans-paying-zer...
Scientists with "prestige" get positions at nice universities, labs, raises, smart people who want to talk to them, smart PhD students who want to work with them, etc.

Scientists without "prestige" end up being poorly paid, teaching intro to chemistry at a community college to students who just want a piece of paper to help them find a job, and unable to get the funding to even buy a laptop, let alone a lab.

So prestige matters a lot to scientists, whether they like it or not.

The only way you have a chance at solving this system is by changing the reward metrics; find a way to make it more rewarding to release the data then to keep it for yourself. But if you just mandate the data be released, then the scientists will be actively discouraged from collecting data, and probably move away from the field.
fixed your link: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/index-mobile.php?date=062...
he's not saying data science isn't regular old science. But processing lots of data points has made modern science much more powerful because of the availability of data.
Except that because, in unicode, there is no one-to-one correspondence between code points an character, so even in utf-32 providing i-th char is not O(1). As Richard O'Keefe clearly explains: "Now as it happens I don't think random access is important. Here's why. Consider Ṏ. There are three ways to encode that: O + ̃ + ̈ | Õ + ̈ | Ṏ. This one "user character" may be one, two, or three code points ..." [1]

[1]: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-October/06...
>> you can't really type with muscle memory and have to look at the screen when trace-typing.

I used to be a devout BlackBerry user, and could happily type out entire emails in meetings with my device under the table, send then, and be 100% confident that I had typed what I was planning on typing. Likewise I could type while walking, and only glance down to see what my incoming messages were. In many jobs, the ability to do that is essential to success. I can't come near that with any type of soft keyboard.

Having said all that, I don't use a BB any more - my 9900 died, and I bought a Nexus 4. I was looking at a Q10, but it was $300 more expensive than the Nexus, it still doesn't have anywhere near the number of apps, and I was no longer in a place in life where the key BB features - BBM and the ability to type long emails without looking - mattered any more.
But when Wikipedia goes dark to protest SOPA, that's advocacy!
Synthetic Biology startup releases new platform to hack DNA
I don't see how this is "getting" the scientists. The only people being punished are those who legitimately profit off of the paywall... science journals. If anything, this will give the scientists more exposure, and thus higher chance of citations.
First it was bitcoin being decried as a "scam currency". Then bitcoiners called litecoin a "pump n dump" alt-chain. Now its BTC and LTC promoters campaigning against Ripple. Quite interesting...
http://www.TeselaGen.com is also releasing a series of tutorials to train bio-hackers use its technology:
http://classroom.tv/course/1588/TeselaGens_basic_BioCAD_tuto...
Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
That is definitely true for early terminals, however the parity bit got tossed after things got less lossy. There was an 8 bit ASCII definition called "Extended ASCII" which was (is?) used for things like Curses which describes a lot of characters which have been remapped in UTF-8.
Haven't tried CS:GO, but do you think it's related to being on console + PC?

Coming from HL/HL2/CS, the controls are very very tight, but over the last few years it seems like most games are always xbox+ps3+pc and they never seem to be that great for PC. Either consoles get away with a lot worse controls, or the ports/PC-versions are just worse quality :(

P.S. I will say an example for me wasn't CS:GO, but some of the newer Call of Duties. Which is ironic because the first Call of Duty back on PC was actually one of the few games that could contend with Valve-quality FPS controls (I felt).