skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've found that it matters pretty quickly. I've seen the Python conversion error alluded to in the article quite frequently, and if you search for it you'll find no shortage of people asking about it.

Most programs have to deal with non-ASCII now. Even if your target audience and users are all English-speaking Americans, people are getting used to things like emdashes and smart quotes, and it's pretty bush league if your program doesn't support them or displays them incorrectly.

The number of programmers who can just blithely ignore Unicode is dwindling by the day.
I just think this is irrelevant to why I read TechCrunch, not particularly low.
Ask HN: Where to get promo stickers made?
This is somewhat of a lame question, but I really like some of the stickers I picked up at RailsConf–especially from Heroku, Github, and EngineYard.

I plan to have some made for an upcoming tradeshow we're exhibiting at. Can anyone recommend a place to have them made?
I agree that people should not talk about "money" disappearing. But liquidity definitely has disappeared; a lot of people who thought they had liquidity turned out to not have it, and have curtailed purchases as a result.

That has real economic effects; it's not just some paper game.
Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior
I would start with a 529 plan for college savings. It has tax advantages, a pretty high maximum contribution, plus its transferable. Also, I think they are pretty lenient on what it can be applied to once your kid is in college ... for example, you can put it toward a laptop and housing (even living at home).
Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Evolutionary Psychology
This has been around for a while, and is much more widely known than the reply from the software team leader on the Pathfinder mission -- which puts a somewhat different light on things.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/mbj/Mars_Pathf...
Elephants Can Dance – Reinventing HP
Thank you for reminding me to update my whois record.
Excessive 'Head Count' And 'Billing' Days Over For Indian Software Companies ?
Strong inferred typing is (generally) superior to static in the sense that it gives you the best of both worlds, flexibility and safety. Strong typing plus a clear separation between pure and impure code gets you a lot. Test harnesses are vital still, but testing blindly (which is what most unit testing does) is scarcely better than old-fashioned manual QA.
I don't think that "The Roaring 2000s" is really inapt. I suspect that when people look back on the decade from 50 years hence, they will see it as a boom time that ran out of steam pretty spectacularly towards the end.

The events of the first few years in any decade seem to be weighted more heavily when that decade is summed up later than events that occur in the latter years.

I don't have an opinion either way on Dent, but the titles and publication dates of his books don't make him look that bad.
Your UI focus is wrong. For instance, on the question page the main things are category, post date, number of bids. These elements take up as much height space as the question itself. The question is also in a textbox which I have to scroll to read. The focus should be on the question (which should just be in a div). Right now it looks like an accessory instead of the focus.

BTW, out of curiosity... was this built with asp.net mvc?
It's possible, I suppose, but I seem to remember that it happened long before I added any extensions (I don't have very many - 2 or 3 of the more popular ones like adblock and firebug). I guess it wouldn't hurt to experiment again.
If you ask me, the complexity of something as large as the global economy is such that nobody could possibly make any predictions about it. It's a chaotic system, where today's butterfly can be tomorrow's hurricane. There are thousands of people making predictions and a few of them are bound to be right... but most of those economists that are supposed to be able to say anything sensible about this are just wrong.
Good idea, but oops on my part - I should have mentioned the information in the 'edit' above. In other words, we're not sure she'll go to college in the US (although I think it's better than in Italy, whereas pre-college is likely better here).

BTW, I sent you an email a few days ago regarding Bend, photo sites and such...
SIGKILL? Uh, you know there is a little function called exit() that exits the program.

Other than that, yes, I agree with you, but I suspect what's actually taking all the time is paging back in the data that it wants to write to disk when it syncs, and not necessarily freeing the memory.
You can try http://bumperstickers.cafepress.com/custom_stickers. Zazzle.com also makes stickers.
Mercury: A functional logic programming language
What I do criticize is the way some people apply "Objectivism." This is certainly not unique. I also find the attitudes of many Christians to be distinctly not Christ-like.

That's actually a really apt comparison! I think I'll borrow that in the future.
The tutorial (PDF) is a good place to start:
http://www.mercury.csse.unimelb.edu.au/tutorial/book/book.pd...
A lot of these are personal preference and borderline traditionalist, and as pointed out by others, the dynamic binding one is in fact not strictly true.

One thing that does however bother me about Clojure is the interaction of dynamic binding and lazy evaluation. Allow me to illustrate:

=> (def *test* 0)
#'user/*test*
=> (binding [*test* 2]
(map #(* % *test*) '(1 2 3)))
(0 0 0)

The call to map is lazy, and the returned seq is only evaluated once it hits the 'P' of REPL, which is outside the dynamic binding of test. If you surround the map call with (doall and ), the result is (2 4 6).

This is of course a trivial case, but I've been bitten by this in practice where the binding, lazy sequence and var evaluation were a few call steps apart, and it's always been very unpleasant. Most of the time, it's involved vars which don't have a root binding, so it throws an error, but in other cases it's a lot more serious.

I guess the same problem can be provoked in both Clojure and CL by returning a closure evaluating that var to back outside the dynamic binding, but since you'd be explicitly invoking the closure, it's a lot more obvious what's going to happen than the "magic" that is lazy evaluation.
Oh wow, thanks for sharing. :) As the last person stated, even though it is a hoax, there are still wonderful stories packed inside. I'd recommend it still to anyone.
There is nothing wrong with doom and gloom, in and of itself. It is only a problem if you turn out to be wrong. In fact, Nouriel Roubini, termed by some as Dr. Doom, turned out to be too optimistic about this downturn, wrongly predicting the Dow to dip only to 7500 when in fact it ended in the 6000s.
This guide is more into the history of the styles than how to differentiate one style from the other.
Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State
The 7-Year Developer Crossroad
http://www.stickergiant.com/ does it right (vinyl, die-cut).
http://www.printrunner.com/ does it cheap.

Or if your timing is right, we (startupschwag.com) will get you 500+ free (using printrunner) and ship a few hundred to bloggers.
I think you and I have very different definitions of clip art.

I like the photos, personally.
Just wait until the FTC fines you for a comment you make on a blog
Nitpick: it's written xkcd or XKCD, not Xkcd. (Source: http://xkcd.com/about)
Interesting. What is your useragent? It looks for firefox inside it (case insensitive). You can also get it from http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?category=66
"when transforming from (byte) strings to Unicode, you are decoding your data"

Oh, so in memory they are not bytes anymore, but "code sequences"? Fair enough to attempt to clarify a point, but please don't make it even more confusing than it actually is.

I guess (what I take away from the article, even though it is not written in it) the actual "transforming" stage only applies to single letters then - "unicode" would be the mapping of a number to a letter, and the encodings (utf-8 and so on) are different ways to represent the number?

Also, is it true that utf-16 can represent all of unicode? Because I was under the impression that it can't?
http://di.fm

I prefer Euro myself
I like scripting my shell using a shell scripting langauge; if I have a few dozen (or hundred) console operations that need to be done often, then a shell script is more concise than ruby. If I need to add error handling, exceptions, networking, etc, then it's time to move up, but if all that's needed are external programs and some looping and conditionals, then I don't see any problem with scripting.
Christopher Alexander on the perfection of imperfection
Or, he could mean, "Because they are refusing to publish in a format that most of their audience can easily play, get it here so you can actually listen to it."

For instance, I have nothing that can play vinyl. I can't even detect a difference between 128/256 bitrate MP3s due to ear infections I had as a kid, so vinyl is pointless to me.

If the album was up on Beatport/iTunes/Amazon, I'd buy it after I listened to it. It's very frustrating to hear something fantastic on Pandora, and upon attempting to buy the damn thing finding out that it's only in vinyl or not available digitally anywhere.

I've got almost a thousand dollars in iTunes/Beatport purchases. I really wish more publishers and artists would make it user friendly for me to give them my money.
http://stickerrobot.com/
Another vote for Sticker Giant
I think it is funny that the guy went and said something correct like this:

"In an ideal world, high-level languages like Python would replace all other programming languages."

That includes smalltalk, scheme, clisp, and every marvelous language not yet invented.

But then he goes on and says something very closed minded like

"Someday we will all program in python."

As if python got everything correct, and we have a perfect map of how humans think with it. The arrogance.
Also, not trying to be rude, but is English your first language? If not, and assuming the venture is located in an English speaking country, I would say that as a non-native English speaker you are more likely to be treated unfairly.
It's pretty standard to price eclipse plugins that way, though the vast bulk of them are free.
Please consider my comment. Firstly, it was in response to this comment:

> That's pretty unreadable for someone who doesn't know clojure.

The real reason for commenting was to show that it is readable and yes, providing the "readable" Python equivalent.

There are two points - firstly, Clojure is (or is becoming?) a lazy language and the list type is different, so no they are definitely not exactly the same.

This brings us to a broader point in that even if you were to have laziness in Python it still wouldn't matter because I'm not the only coder in the world and there are a lot of Pythonists like the author of the article who do it the Pythonic way, which as already hinted, I think is just braindead.
Wow ... You seriously think knowledge of financial engineering has a greater impact than knowledge of DNA?

You need some perspective.
My wife and I looked at 529's for our 9 month old, and most decided against them. Partly because over the 18-22 year time frame (assuming relatively conservative investment choices) the tax benefits really aren't that large. And some of it is a risk thing: there's a very large cost spread (both tuition and financial aid availability) between different schools. Putting enough in to be worthwhile at an out of state private institution runs the risk of putting in too much to be useful for an in-state public school, etc...

Basically, it just seemed simpler and more flexible to firewall off the savings now in a regular account (which, to be fair, we haven't actually done yet) than to deal with the 529 stuff.
The Zen of HN
Python has cool, witty Zen. This is not as cool and hardly witty, but I figured I'd take a stab at it and let the rest of you improve or rewrite it. It's on GitHub, and I'm no poet, so feel free to edit/fork/dismiss as you see fit.
People forget that the whole point of abandoning strong typing in environments like Smalltalk was the extreme speed of exploratory programming that it supported. If you can have strong typing and have low overhead rapid exploratory programming, then why not? Duck Typing is not a goal, it's a means!

I disagree that testing blindly is scarcely better than manual QA. If it's automated, the cost of leveraging your tests is small. The cost of adding more tests is not multiplied by iterations. With automation, increased frequency of tests can be used to localize the cause of bugs to particular changes in time.
You can just turn it off with http://www.bing.com/?rb=0 and on with http://www.bing.com/?rb=1
Indians do great work and are smart, but fail to take shower daily. So correct title would be: Most Indian Grads Smell.
also give crunchbase a try
Unfortunately, chemistry would thwart your efforts. The binding of proteins to other molecules (like sialic acid) is a reversible process. In other words, it's not as if each Hemaglutinin binds to a single sialic acid molecule and that's it. Each Hemaglutinin is constantly binding and unbinding, so adding extra sialic acid might slow down the process of fusing with the host cell, but it wouldn't prevent it.

Actually, the way that the current antivirals work is sort of the opposite. When the new viral particles are emerging from their host cell they end up stuck on the sialic acid molecules on the surface. That's where the Neuraminidase (the "N" of H1N1) comes in. It's job is to cut the new virus particles free of the host cell that produced them. If you block that, you can effectively stall the infection before it gets started.
But repeat business is harder to come by.
Tracking Down a Stolen iPhone
In Memoriam: George Carlin, 7 Words You Can Say on Twitter
In that case wouldn't you write some components in C and glue it all together with something like ruby?
The Cute Cat Theory of Internet Censorship
You can use instruments to find out the number of fps. Very useful to optimize uitableviews.
As with their language, this is a marvel of inefficiency (good luck giving directions) and makes me wonder how they accomplish so much while starting at what seems from the outside to be such a tremendous disadvantage.
It's true. UTF-16, like UTF-8 is a variable length encoding. UTF-8 uses less memory, and with UTF-16 it's much easier to determine the string length.
I think http://sticviews.com/ is probably the most affordable place to make custom stickers - you just upload an image file and choose a custom shape, dimensions, and material. They make laptop skins and stuff, too. I got one for less than $10.
There are a lot of prescription drugs and a lot of edge cases. I think the Pill is a prescription drug in the US because it can be used to have a chemical abortion which is a seperate issue.

You can probably find a fairly large number of drugs that could become over the counter and every year many make that jump. However, antibiotics sould not fall into this category.
You can already do image processing in lowly Javascript, example http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/content-aware-image-resizin... , and machine learning can be done in pure Python, example http://montepython.sourceforge.net/ .
Isn't there more to power than that? For example, in clojure you can't change the binding of a function in a namespace after it has been compiled. In python or ruby you do have the power to do that.
Hi ctb9,

No, I don't take it rude. It's ok. Thanks.

All of the involved people are Chinese in China. I am sure the law differs but the actual smarts might share common attributes.
A word which is w bits long can hold a number between 0 and 2^w-1. If you want to hold a larger interval than that you need to increase the size of w.

Perhaps you can make it smaller than log(n) for many use cases by restricting the type of input you accept but O(f(x)) only refers to the worse case.
I hear that! I have one of the same new "thin" aluminium keyboards and I love it! I find it easier to use than anything else I have tried...
I don't think downvotes should be used for disagreeing.
Myspace is now 'Myproblem' for Murdoch
This looks to me a likely and very miserable position to be in, and embarrassing.
1) Sample size of one (or did I misread?) -- Enron. I don't have any guesses on what a wider analysis would reveal, but you can draw all kinds of conclusions from data when you have the data and the backstory and no other data to verify against.

2) I wonder if this data is actionable in any useful way (other than leaving immediately before TSHTF). I think the "Hey Guys, we shouldn't be doing this!" emails probably stay down in the noise, and the corner probably turns with the "OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT!" email. Since no company is going to give access to their anonymised on an ongoing basis, I believe the only people that would have access to this would effectively be blocked by insider trading rules, making acting on this data legally dangerous.
Give credit where credit is due. If the Usefultools team did the legwork and found this app and did a write up there's nothing wrong with linking to their article.
I prefer Ron Garret's experiences of debugging Lisp in a REPL on a deep space probe.
I thought the same thing, but I think it can be compared to the MillionDollar Homepage... right?
You're probably thinking of UCS-2, which is very similar to UTF-16, but doesn't have "surrogate pairs" to represent codepoints beyond the 16-bit limit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16/UCS-2
A high percentage when founders believe they have something valuable to protect. In early formative stages, probably only a small minority.

It is all cost/benefit, though. What does it cost to use lawyers? What is at stake? In my experience, it is the rare case where founders will sink large resources into something (significant labor, etc.) without some legal documentation.

Some do LegalZoom, but this has its own problems (failure to use restricted stock and to capture IP being the most important). I have written about this elsewhere.

My general guideline: if a startup has real prospects, it is usually worth investing in legal resources as soon as practicable, even if it means doing a deferred-fee deal with the lawyers. The initial setup itself is usually not that expensive. At the very least, you should go as a team to a qualified lawyer for an initial meeting to get advice about the process - then you will have a basis to make a more informed decision.
Unfortunately, it will take a long time for all the web dev to switch (from PHP) to Python. Lazyness is stronger than any high-level language feature or development speed.
I've long given up trying to convince my clients to switch for a python-friendly host.
Imagine: i still have some clients running their website on PHP4.
But imagine not having things break that way. All those laptops could be in use by someone less financially fortunate than yourself, or pressed into use as file-servers or whatever.

I just think it's a waste of resources to design for failure. So much of what we use on a daily basis is destined for landfill in short order...
Right; that was intended to mean that people sometimes use them for disagreement, despite that they probably shouldn't. Any thoughts on a better wording?
If there are insiders with some inkling of approaching disaster, then it makes sense that traffic analysis can reveal a spike in anxiety and contingency planning by members of an organization.

If I were dishonest, then I might try traffic analysis as a means to accomplish insider trading. It's very indirect. None of the information assets that traditionally raise red flags are involved. Unlike traditional insider trading, your confederates/information sources wouldn't have to know what you were up to, specifically. It wouldn't work in every case, but if it worked often enough to give you a considerable statistical advantage, then one could still make a financial killing this way.

This makes me worry about LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as Google and Yahoo. It would be relatively easy for employees there to accomplish such traffic analysis undetected, then to correlate this with market information.

EDIT: A defensibly legal means of leveraging this. Start a holding company that happens to control the IT of all of its subsidiaries. Structure the subsidiaries to be as independent as possible, otherwise. Make decisions to "invest" in your subsidiaries based on the traffic analysis. (This could also include insuring specific ventures against failure.)
It seems it's an overall very negative position to be in, aggregrating all the replies.

thanks. I think I need to re-consider again very very seriously.
It has audio samples for each style.
Next paragraph in the article

"A popular outcry over the PC filtering plan prompted the Chinese government to clarify that, although the surveillance software will ship with every computer, it does not have to be used."

So I guess it will be 3.
I proposed through a friend to give a talk on the project to his employer, the research arm of a very large computing company.

If I insisted on being paid (as I have in the past) they would have said, “Good-bye”.

Before forming an opinion, or recommending a solution, I need to get clear on the situation: He's insisted on payment in the past, but he believes this time they'll say "Goodbye". But he didn't ask them... so, it seems he's imagining getting knocked back, without checking out the reality. Is that what he's saying?
Relax man. Chill a little. No one doubts that US universities are the best and that Indian universities and graduates have quite a long way to go (to put it mildly).
Because great design/construction has it's own value? I think Apple computers prove this pretty well.

Building/owning something that has been constructed with great attention to detail is an absolute pleasure. As a quick example: There are many custom knifemakers worldwide making a living off of knive that they hand-make for up to several thousand dollars per piece. Owning one of their pieces is amazing because you can be absolutely confident that you'll have to try very hard to break it.

Making something like this is a labor of love and is definitely it's own reward.
SIGKILL because it gives finalizers and at-exit handlers no chance to run. The building has been emptied: knock it down, don't waste time picking it apart brick by brick.

I doubt that paging all the stuff it wants to write is the reason. If that were the case, killing it during the grind would corrupt its save files, and the time duration of the grind would be proportional to what needs saving (just a few files of fairly constant size) versus proportional to how much memory it's hogging.

I think it's paging all right - it's paging back in every fiddling little object to call its finalizer.
True, many will become infected naturally. The problem is that the antigenic shift of influenza is affected by transmission rate. That is, the more times a virus gets passed from person to person, the more it can mutate. The vaccines that are developed are based on a "normal" rate of antigenic shift. If large groups of people try to get infected, there is a risk that they will throw off this rate.
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More like "it used to be". It now has one of the highest GDP/Capita rates in Europe.

Actually, I just checked Wikipedia - it has the 6th highest GDP/c in the world.