skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TL;DR -- I generally fall in the category of counting graphemes, as per the second FAQ you linked -- when talking about user-facing text processing. I'm don't think it makes sense to try and have one api that tries to both appease (low level) programmers and end-users.

Perhaps I wasn't entirely clear - I certainly see that there are complications. I think you're overcomplicating your examples within the domain of text - I'd say composed characters counts as one, and reversing a string with a composed character, shouldn't reverse/destroy the compositon. The reverse of "õ" isn't "o~", but simply "õ" -- and the length of "o" and "õ" should both be one -- even if they aren't coded similarly.

Now, this won't work for lower level work on "computer language" strings -- so for your unicode-library or whatever you'd have to count differently. Obviously you have to do some magic when converting a multicode-encoded string from big-endian to little-endian and vice-versa -- but that's hardly the same operation as reversing a string.

I'm not familiar with thai, but to me it looks like your "กอ" and "กี" is equivalent to the Norwegian vowel "æ" which used to be written/typset as "ae" (and can still be considered a composition in some input locals). So the length of "ae" is 2, the length of "æ" is 1 as is the length of "a". That would mess up "ae" if reversed -- but I would consider that a "special/archaic" use-case. I'm not sure if that would be similar in Thai -- I don't know for example, if typewriters and computers have been wildly used for comparable time in Norway and Thailand (I'm guessing Thailand have a few thousand more years of printing/literacy).

As mentioned in my comment above, I also find it interesting that if we're taking length to mean "number of things in a sequence", the length of a sentence would be the number of words, the length of a word would be the number of graphemes and the length of a grapheme might either be the number of bit/bytes, or there might be a level in-between of composites.

So we might have:

"This is an example.".length => 4 (or 5 or 8 depending
on how we define spaces and punctuation)
"This".length => 4
"T".length => 1 byte,7 or 8 bits, or maybe even 2 in a
prefix-based encoding (capital-transform t).

The logic would be that the full sentence is treated as a sequence of words that's treated as a sequence of graphemes that are treated as a sequence of codepoints that's treated as a stream of bits...
If they would style it to look like a normal car, or offer a model that does, say like their Altima I would seriously give it consideration.

The Leaf offers the range necessary for my daily commute, 53 miles. It just doesn't do it in the looks department. Now a coupe would be a sweet ride, provided it doesn't look odd.
The problem for a lot of people is that on a small scale physical hosts can appear to be extremely stable.

With a few dozen servers total, I have servers at work that have not had a failure in 8+ years, and we have some hardware that is 12+ years, and until office and data centre moves recently we had hardware that had not been rebooted for 5 years.

We have moved everything to VMs that we take hourly copies of, and can redeploy most of our VMs in minutes because we do know we need to be prepared for hardware failures, and occasionally face them, but they are rare events at our scale.

For people with even smaller setups, with only a handful of servers, they cane easily have periods of years without any failures. Then it's easy for people to get complacent.
For an entry-level position? Sure. For a senior-level position? Don't waste my time. I disagree that the Github repo, resume, etc are useless. You can glean a ton of information about me from those data points that can tell you whether I can code or not. You want to know whether I can think or do basic programming skills? Ask me about my repo. Ask me about projects I've done. If I actually wrote that code, I'd be more than happy to go into detail about the work I've done.

Like someone else said, we wax poetic about DRY all the time, yet you're asking me to take time out of my day to repeat things I already know when that data has already been provided for you. Sigh.

You should be able to have an idea of whether I'm a suitable candidate or not before you even call me, and you should know whether I can code or not before you even bring me into your office.

Entry level position? FizzBuzz all day long. It's the only way you'll find out.

Mid- to Senior-level position? There are better ways to figure out my competency level.

My two cents.
I assume the caller has the responsibility to ensure that x is actually large enough to contain y.
The integrator in this case was the government (CMS is a division of HHS), there's no getting around them as a single point of failure.

1. Having a basic idea of what the system will do is helpful, but in a system that has a lot of very specific business logic that has to be defined and HAS to be right in order to comply with the law, you're not going to get very far without good requirements. Furthermore, depending on how the contract was structured, CGI Federal may not have been allowed to start development work until it was authorized by the customer.

2. CGI may very well have raised multiple red flags, and CMS and HHS could have promptly ignored them. That is one of the maddening things about government IT. You can tell the decision makers that they are heading for disaster and they can simply ignore you.

3. Let's say you plan for every one of your dependencies to fail. What useful product could you deliver in that case? If you don't get certain information you cannot give the user a health insurance product according to the law. This is system where you cannot reasonable ignore a component if you can't get it to work in time. Let's say the interface with the IRS is going to take longer than you thought. You can't just cut that out or substitute dummy data. That would amount to failure to deliver a functioning product.

4. Again, you can elicit as hard as you want, if they don't give you the requirements because the law is still up in the air, or because the president might change his mind, or because someone wants to meet with all the stakeholders in the other agencies first, there is absolutely nothing you can do. I've been on projects where the stakeholder with the final say couldn't be bothered to give their input until the software was done. I've also been on projects where the decision maker prevented us from getting the input of the employees that would actually be using the application. Sometimes the people you're dealing with are not rational actors.

5. Fixing the contract award process is certainly part of the solution. Normally many teams could submit a bid for the work, but due to the insane time scale it was skipped for healthcare.gov. I think having a proof of concept competition after some sort of initial proposal selection gate could be useful. It could sort of be like how the military has contractors build prototypes for weapons systems competitions.
That's all about regulatory risk, SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, etc. Let's be honest it is a "complaint" about a password policy, at best a means to an end. Unless you read that as a complaint about the motivation, because I did not.

I can't stand this the "Security is a tradeoff with usability" line. It is not. When you lock the airplane lavatory door and the light turns on what is the tradeoff? As far as I am concerned Acme Bank's website is unusable if anyone can login as me. How usable are your funds if anyone can transfer them out of your control?
To me fizzbuzz eliminates certain types of candidates who have absolutely no reasoning skills. You would be surprised at how many people are out there who have learned how to regurgitate lessons from school but seemingly have no clue how to solve any real work.

These people do manage to get themselves hired based on their academic degree and they wind up contributing absolutely nothing, while consuming time from the developers around them until eventually they are dismissed.

You don't want one of these guys on your team. Simple fizzbuzz exercises will usually uncover them unless they have managed to memorize it previously.
Moleskine with an 'e'.

Custom Moleskin is also an interesting product, but relevant to preventing blisters on unhappy feet.
> "I choose to reserve judgement, but have a gut feeling that it will be shown to be more harmful than cigarettes"

Please don't put words in my mouth. I never said anything like that - certainly never that I felt that they would be shown to be more harmful than cigarettes.

> Excuse me for not accepting the pseudo-science weasel word "toxic".

I don't know why you think that a medical term is a "pseudo-science weasel word".

> If you do not bring in more specifics, then what you are saying is meaningless.

It's a lot less meaningless than the original statement "e-cigarettes are harmless", which is backed not by rigorous scientific research on e-cigarettes themselves, but rather (at best) on fairly questionable reasoning based on a misunderstanding of drug toxicology.
It was to lower health care costs over time

I'm not sure how this is possible. The other goals you mention are feasible, but only to the extent that they prevent cost saving.

the chief goal of the ACA was not to lower your premium

Well, it was intended to lower some, and raise others. People with preexisting conditions cannot be insured. They can only be subsidized with something falsely called "insurance". The losers in ACA are pretty much the same as with single payer: The young, healthy, and productive. Call it fair or unfair, the situation is much different than with single payer in that ACA is going to let people see just how much they themselves are getting boned.
Yes, but it's like a thousand other things that can make you a better developer.

It has always seemed quite useless to me to try to learn as much theory as you can before starting to actually do significant projects. You should learn by doing those project, and when it appears that you need theory to make it better, then you learn it.

I think there is a huge parallel with the lean model for CS teaching, programming yourself should always be the starting point.
While you code/hack, here's the Full Album of Lou Reed's Transformer....Today is NOT a perfect day. Be sure to select HD for playback quality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwDZT8XXkFw#t=378&hd=1
“That's a quote that (in various different wordings) has been attributed to Brian Eno countless times, though even the author of the most comprehensive Eno biography couldn't track down the original source. Of more importance, The Velvet Underground & Nico [the debut album], though not exactly a hit the first time around, sold a lot more than just a few thousand copies — and more, even, than the "30,000 copies in the first five years" that Lou Reed himself told Eno the LP sold. An MGM royalty statement shows sales of 58,476 copies through February 14, 1969 (about two years after its initial release)—not at all bad for a late-'60s LP, if far less than Andy Warhol and the Velvets hoped for.”
I'm off the market, but if I were asked to do FizzBuzz on a tech intervieew, I would do it, but conditional on the interviewer doing something as idiotic immediately after that. Like write an iterator for a binary tree.

Treating the person on the other side of the table is a fake works both ways. Don't underestimate how actually offensive a FizzBuzz question to a qualified developer is.
Myth or Eno legend? Who knows? Here's an interesting backgrounder, though: http://www.richieunterberger.com/vumyth.html
And it's almost trivial to add new entries after each update. I can't imagine they don't have it, but I can imagine that they didn't use it this time ("check takes too much time, let's just ship it").
I've heard from multiple sources that people fail fizzbuzz. I now read multiple posts here saying the same. As a hobbyist programmer with a few free lance projects under my belt who never worked in "the industry" I find it simply fascinating.
My first reaction is that maybe your interview is very stressing or maybe you ask the applicants to write the code on paper and fail them for any typo. I just can't believe anybody, anybody who ever programmed anything failed such tests in reasonable environment.
I mean if I couldn't write fizz-buzz I would never get any code to work. I mean I imagine myself failing to implement a dictionary in C having limited time and being under pressure without a bug somewhere but fizz-buzz ? really ? :)
For most markdown flavors, a forward slash before the character (\) should do the trick. [Re-Edit] Finally saw the help and HN isn't typical markdown. 2 spaces for pre tags only.
I'm not one of the underrepresented groups, but I think it's irrefutable that these issues are central when introducing someone to a new technology and community.

I understand that these issues are usually discussed separately from purely technical matters, but that doesn't mean that they're separable, or can be considered in isolation. There seems to be a lot of people who are uncomfortable with this, judging by how this discussion has magically jumped from the previous article to this one.

Lastly, it's hugely offensive to suggest that Kyle did this to establish his liberal bonafides or for any other reason than to create a more open and welcoming community. This sort of cynicism is just as toxic to the community as open prejudice.
So we probably shouldn’t discuss NSA surveillance ever again here on HN, right?

Lou Reed spoke on technology at SXSW. He was an audio purist. He made a video mocking the GOP. I think he qualified as an influential geek and deserves a black band on the title bar of HN.
A tire tax might be simpler to implement, and would capture similar information.
Likely the 4% are relying on IE6 because of intranet tech that was written eons ago when IE6 was new. And to upgrade would break that system. You may want to send out some help and let them know the new IE has a compatibility mode and they can set it to 6 and still have a *better browser http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh920756(v=vs.85)...
> I'm sorry but a year+ at those companies proves you've provided at least something of worth to them.
Not sure about that. I think there are lots of "well known companies" where a good bluffer can relabel themselves and bounce around enough that nobody realizes they haven't got anything to offer.

>We wax poetic about DRY yet you're gonna ask me to repeat myself?
Some people can wax poetic pretty effectively without being effective at implementation. I've written a 1 line fizzbuzz python generator in less than 2 minutes. If one is too arrogant/uncompromising to take the two minutes to satisfy this (if asked), or unable to turn it into something interesting ("This is done with generators. I might never do it this way in practice, but the question you asked me was so mind-numbingly boring I had to do it this way to entertain myself"), then one probably won't work that well on an effective team.
I don't have an iOS device anymore, and I never used that site when I did, so I forgot it did the fake-iOS thing. I definitely prefer the non-iOS theme. It looks and works great on FxOS.
Generally I agree, but I've asked FizzBuzz to mid-to-senior level folks who just can't get it. There are plenty of less qualified programmers who got into entry level positions and have held onto jobs long enough that they are now considered mid or senior level.

FizzBuzz provides a great level setter for folks who lack a clearly searchable, well-known code repository.

One half-joking suggestion to anyone using your GitHub repo as a resume: make yourself a FizzBuzz project. You can include basic one so the box can be checked, but as a hiring manager, it'd be fun to see novel and humorous solutions to it that show cases your particular background (e.g. front-end developer? Show me the CSS3 solution.)
There's a building collection of small pieces of Javascript code automatically fetchable from the browser in http://www.corslit.com/. Does it sound like it? I think it should.

Explanation here: http://williamcotton.com/another-way-to-publish-code
I don't believe the article said that the repo, resume, etc. are useless, it's just that you need to establish a baseline of "can this person code"?

Having done hundreds of interviews, I'm sorry to say that even seemingly "senior-level" people (people with years of programming "experience" on their resume) have shown an inability to do basic coding from scratch. It seems there's a subset of developers who cobble stuff together and code-and-fix to make things work. This is ironically less of a problem with entry-level people.

Yes, if you have a public repo of code, I'll ask you about it, but I want to see you live code something, both to see the code you write and your thinking process about solving the problem. If you feel that's a waste of your time (and if you're truly senior-level, it really won't take very long at all), that's fine, but I will continue to do it.
Am I wrong to be annoyed that they're ripping off the Ars Technica brand?
waiting for firefox OS
You're missing the point. What you are not realizing is how many people actually fail fizzbuzz.

If it seems so simple and useless to you because it's easy, then you are not one of the people who will ever be weeded out by a fizzbuzz style question.

Put it this way... Would you want to work with somebody who was unable to handle fizzbuzz?
It's about solving logical problems and expressing those solutions using code. Definitely useful.
Someone with more knowledge of the situation than me may be able to offer more useful input, but it appears that the terms of the Tizen SDK are troubling from an openness perspective:
https://developer.tizen.org/forums/sdk-ide/tizen-sdk-licensi...
More likely Go's build system is influenced by Google's build system, which came first.
No, I'm saying that in order to get the $15 million there has to be some sort of measures in place to make sure that people don't game the system. If you just give them $15 million with no strings attached, they might decide to do the bare minimum and pocket the rest.

Maybe you could stipulate that each company has to meet a minimum bar in order to get that $15 million. Maybe advance some of the money up front, then pay the rest if they meet the bar. If they fail to meet the bar, they have to give back some of the money.

In any system you implement you need to give a lot of consideration to how someone might abuse the system because someone absolutely is going to at some point.
It's not markdown. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc There are really only two things you can format on HN: italics (with asterisks) and literal lines (with two leading spaces).
... and curiously Google is migrating stuff to Play services for this exact reason : so you can benefit from its upgrades without upgrading the OS itself.
No I'm not. The former commenter was on about aethetics because he was talking about people being drawn to pretty things. However I don't think Windows has better usability / experience either. If it did, I wouldn't be running Linux as my primary desktop. But again, usability is partly down to personal preference / workflow as well.
I'm covered by Medicare so I don't know these details; I do agree it would be insane to have unlimited coinsurance, and a little research shows that it's capped through the out-of-pocket maximum. Which in the Humana plan I just looked includes the larger deductable.

WRT to dishonesty, "e.g." -> for example, illegal aliens aren't the only ones included, just the most clear cut and harshest example for me; trust me, you're labeling me as dishonest.
Right, so having done a bit of thinking about this, I'd like to apologise for making the statements above publicly. I do stand by them, and based on the number of upvotes my comments received there I was not alone in forming the impression I did. However, my concerns, justified or not, should have been sent privately rather than making a public fuss about it on a thread at the top of HN.

It was a mistake to post this as a thread on a public forum, and I apologise for that.

I think you should be wary that other people might form the same impressions that I've formed, and perhaps be more exact and clear in your responses. For example, you say you meant to say:

> I replied by suggesting that refutation conflated a lack of transparency in an area of law specifically designed by Congress not to be transparent with a general contempt for the laws of Congress, which contempt is not actually in evidence. I also, as you pointedly refused to acknowledge, expressed dissatisfaction with that state of affairs.

When what you said was:

> It's clear to me (and I hope everyone) that the executive branch and particularly the DoD is not transparent.

> While most laws exist simultaneously in the distinct (and sometimes even contradictory) forms of statutes, rules, and operational norms, foreign intelligence laws start out by necessity with fuzzy statutory foundations, and end by necessity with secret operational norms. This situation is indeed exacerbated by the DoD's (and, I suppose, FISC's) unwillingness to be clear about its rules and rulemaking process.

> But this is an article about the use of surveillance evidence as criminal evidence. So, my refined question would be, in what sense does this executive branch have secret rules or norms that apply to the criminal justice system?*

I still don't quite see where you point out that there's a conflation of "a lack of transparency in an area of law specifically designed by Congress not to be transparent with a general contempt for the laws of Congress, which contempt is not actually in evidence". Perhaps I'm not smart enough to read between the lines, but then that's probably the case of others too. What it sounded to me was a get-out clause for anyone to ignore the laws (roughly equivalent to the statement "no one can possibly know exactly what was meant by the people who wrote the law, so those who vigorously stretch the meaning of those laws are perfectly in their right to do so.").

Surveillance is a touchy topic for many. It can get people emotional. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that the society that is currently forming thanks to those laws is a direct existential threat - i.e. that if those people win the game entirely, I (and you) will either have to join them and give up our freedom to choose to do the right thing, or give up our lives. I'm sorry I brought this up in a public forum rather than via an email, but I think you should be aware of this possible reactions to what I (and perhaps others) sometimes perceive as a vigorous defence of the government surveillance programmes.

Happy to continue this conversation by email if you wish to do so. My email is on my blog, at swombat.com.
No, these are design flaws that anything over TCP/IP needs to deal with. In particular, closing the connection to indicate the end of a file transfer is really bad (what if somebody pulls an ethernet cord?)

Fix sliding window? I don't think you understand TCP. This is an optimization to TCP to prevent the need to ACK every packet. It means fewer bytes on the wire and less CPU load for TCP processing, while also maintaining a respectable degree of reliability.

TCP checksums are not sufficient for data streams of more than a few kB.
I think he's most likely considering the worth of the material that goes into it. For ex. you can buy approx 5 pounds of HP multipurpose paper from Amazon for $6.78 with free shipping (http://www.amazon.com/HP-Multipurpose-Inkjet-Brightness-1120...), while a Moleskine weighs probably under 0.2 pounds, including the covers.
I might turn around and ask you to print out the alphabet. I mean, I don't want to work for someone who can't write.
Don't forget, if the market crashes and AMZN stock gets a 50% haircut, that big pile of cash AAPL has been shoveling their profits onto on can get mighty scary to everyone very quickly.