skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's possible to just force everyone into unicode strings in a way that doesn't cause too much trouble. It's impossible to try to do this gradually via a future import, and it's impossible to work out all the potential scenarios where things would behave differently, and particularly the performance characteristics can change and pretty wildly at that, but it sounds like this still, as painful as it would be, sounds like a better approach than P2->P3.

Basically, all strings would internally be represented as unicode (OR as a byte array + an encoding, that might be a little too ambitious though), and it has 2 APIs that it can be accessed by. non-instance related operations (such as making new strings) similarly has 2 APIs. pre-unicode-switch code gets an API that emulates as best as is possible the behaviour as before, and post-unicode-switch code gets the full unicode API as exists now for unicode strings.

Even if encoding is flat out broken, if you put in a stream of chars and store that as <whatever>, and then later you query this thing, the broken usually ends up undoing itself. Yes, this will fail spectacularly once you try to for example concatenate a string with broken encoding to a string with a different encoding, but presumably places that are international proof have switched to unicode strings long ago, and places that aren't really aware of the importance of anything that isn't in ASCII 32-127 will find all their code to magically 'just work'.

Similar things should be possible for the iterator business. Internally things are iterators, but if ever any P2 code touches them, they turn into a (memory hogging, etc) list. yes, of course, this will flat out break if you attempt to pass an infinite iterator to code that isn't used to it, but these are all transitional pains, and the key point is: As long as you don't fork the pre-big-switch version (beyond security updates), sooner rather than later libraries will fix the bugs, or their community of users will just die out as someone else writes a new one to fill the void.

Painful? yes. very. We've seen this in programming land before. Java5 introduced generics and as a result any interaction with pretty much any library written before it resulted in a cavalcade of unsafe/raw warnings. It sucked. Huge communities stuck to 1.4 (IBM WebSphere notably stayed there for almost half a decade before moving on to 1.5).

But, today? Libraries have upgraded or have been replaced. The chance you still run into pre-generics code is tiny. It took long, it sucked, yadayada, but for all intents and purposes that was java's Python2->Python3, and everyone is on Python3 at this point. In the same time span as P2->P3, roughly speaking, and that seems like it's nowhere near complete.
The example in the article is of a functional cloned part that has half as many pins, and needs only 1 external oscillator instead of 2.

Author does not decap the chip, but the implication is that there was indeed some real engineering that went into the design of the clone.
Classics

John Resig : The Dom is a mess
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgI52y27O_I

Javascript, The Good Parts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook

Speed up your Javascript
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHtdZgou0qU

Brendan Eich : Fluent 2013: Brendan Eich, "JavaScript at 18: Legal to Gamble"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrf9ONmtXbM&list=PLbzmrLqsBB4...

Paul Irish : 10 things I learned from the Jquery source
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_qE1iAmjFg&list=PLnKbkxvOAna...

Less known but very interesting

Building High-Performing JavaScript for Modern Engines
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/4-000
> IE can track, and has tracked users behavior even when they’re not on Bing. (We got in trouble for this once, hehe.)

Am I the only one concerned with both the fact that IE tracks its users, and the attitude of this Microsoft employee about it?
Check out https://gingkoapp.com . I think they can embed images, not sure about graphs. Overall I find this an interesting way to structure and create documents -- sort of like mind-maps but more textual.
HP Printer Install Wizard for Windows | HP Support
Cryoseism
Clearly that venue data is valuable to them. Guaranteeing 99% accuracy can be a crucial selling point for 3rd parties. With a subscription-based offering, that data can provide a significant revenue stream.
Why do I have to download the Mac or Windows apps in order to export the notes?
Finally, alt-coins can dilute themselves into oblivion.
Things like this always reminds me of the way the Romans poisoned themselves with lead pipes for centuries. What modern equivalents to this do we have? Soap? Cell phones? Sitting? Who knows. There have to be plenty of things in the modern world that we aren't yet fully aware are killing us over time.

Having said that, now that I've Googled the Roman lead pipe fact I learned in High School I have found that to be in question as well, so really I don't know what to trust ever.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is question everything.
But why would a $15/hour minimum wage work and $100/hour won't? Where between 15 and 100 do you draw the line and why?
Ask HN: User-testing for things with no GUI (e.g. programming langs, databases)?
I do a lot of video user testing, A/B testing, website analytics, etc. related to sites that I manage.

But for something on the backend, like a programming language or a database, how are these things user tested? Do concerns about usability fall by the wayside because most users will become experts in the system?

If user-testing is not used, how are users taken into account when deciding on the roadmap?
This happened to me as well--back in 2007 I watched the entire Ana Nicole Smith trial and then death! I came to understand that I need STRUCTURE to carry out my work and I cannot do that on my own and not form home...so I announced to everyone that I had taken a full time job! I actually got up a 7.30pm, showered and leave the house to go to a coffee shop to work at 9am. Once I started I could not just back out of it--people would think I was just CRAZY. Eventually I found more people like myself and pretty good co-working spaces which allowed me to keep a fixed schedule and socialize.

Nowadays I am required to work at the client's site. When I am offered to work from home I simply turn the opportunity down...unless I actually have nothing big to do in which case what's the difference.
The hint mentions "the importance of comments". The only comment I can spot in the actual code is here (with a couple of characters of context):

I/**/n

The code up to that point (2100 bytes total) is roughly as long as the listed output of the size tool (1979). The difference is probably due to the fact that I just counted raw bytes rather than accounting for whitespace and such. My guess, then, is that /* */ without a space hits a bug in the size tool where it probably counts that as the beginning of a comment but misses the end, causing it to count the entire remainder of the program as a comment. The compiler, meanwhile, will see that as an empty comment and continue reading code.

This was a fairly predictable consequence of providing an official size tool. Used to be, they just laid out the rules for figuring out sizes, and you had to either count manually, or build your own tool to count. Now, bugs in the size tool end up being bugs in the rules, and fun like this ensues. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion. I would say it certainly makes things interesting!

Edit: HN formatting makes the inline form of that comment look like a C++/C99-style // comment. Fun!
Unemployment is a market distortion?
No, but friends of NSA like Mike Rogers have said in public that "he's not worried about this spying, because NSA doesn't spy on him, because he's not a 'bad guy'".

Of course, I don't think even he believes that, because he knows exactly what NSA is doing, but it's good to know for a fact that NSA does spy on US Congress, too. Maybe this information will make the undecided politicians to take the right side.
The NSA is one of the most powerful organizations on this planet, and the only people that could actually be kind of a threat to them, are members of congress. So in other words: the only people on this planet, who have the ability to do something against the total surveillance of the world... are exempt from surveillance.

Who the fuck, would believe that?
I say cut the ridiculous amount of taxes (34 percent for those making a decent living) & increase the minimum wage.

No one can live off of $7.25 an hour and $10.10 is definitely a fair/decent wage.

Sure the cost for things will go up when it's increased, but with taxes decreased I'm more then happy to pay the higher costs. A higher cost that keeps people working and earning a living rather then not working and sitting around living off the peoples' tax dollars.
Show HN: A task-based concurrency framework for Java
Bings' lack of market share compared to Google is not because of any of the reasons listed.

It has to do with the perception people have, and the fact that they more regularly associate searching the web with Google and "googling it" vs. Bing and "binging it".

At least this is the case for average, non-hacker news people.

Why does Google have this perception? I don't know, but I will guess it likely has to do with it being the one search engine that really caught on and was able to sustain its momentum.

Competing against google would not be done by any of these incremental/less important technical metrics but more having to do with changing the notion of searching the web, and how, in a likely very niched way at first.
Ask HN: Anyone else have symptoms similar to Aspergers?
I have not been diagnosed but I think I'm smart enough to know I have both ADHD and social anxiety disorder. I found out some of the things I do are actually OCD as well, mostly my thoughts. I was also misdiagnosed with borderline-personality disorder during an ADHD test as a kid. I may have Aspergers or my life growing up as a solo developer messed me up. Does anyone else experience symptoms like these?
Sure. An admin doesn't get the logs in an email, over an unsecured medium.
Sounds like it's a choice between a short period of minimum wage pay and then getting replaced by "cost saving technologies", or a slightly longer period of subsistence wages and then still getting replaced. It's easy to argue that since the cost of technology goes down with time that any replacement of workers due to a minimum wage hike will happen anyways when the tech gets cheap enough.

Here's a question. Both market concentration (as in oligopoly) and unemployment have significant downward effects on wages especially in the low end of the labor market. I don't like minimum wage and I wish we didn't have it but it's the best solution I've seen to these problems. Do you have a solution to these problems?
Being A Young Entrepreneur: My Quick and Dirty Story
I wonder if any of the money geniuses on here would care to speculate on what a deal like this would be worth.
Just buy cheap dish soap at a dollar store.
I'm calling bullshit on this article. Despite misdeeds, wrongdoings, corruption and outright lies by TEPCO and IAEA this article poo-poos the long-term impact of this international disaster.

"No matter what happens in Fukushima, it's not going to be a problem over here." -- Eric Norman

NO MATTER WHAT?? That's a pretty big statement. Especially since that, when radiation levels were detected to increase, the EPA just raised the minimum level of harmful radiation to a higher level. See?? Not a problem anymore.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/01/governments-worldwide...

"With the amount of dilution that would occur, any kind of release in Japan would be non-detectable here," said David Yogi

But it has been detected...

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/leaky-fukushima-nuclear-plant...

TEPCO is likely connected to the japanese mob:

http://rt.com/news/fukushima-workers-violations-yakuza-730/

The IAEA is there is promote nuclear power:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISu7O47d1Ko

US sailors claim cancer from Fukushima assistance:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/12/20/sickened-by-service-mor...

Finally, the worst part of the cleanup is still yet to happen:

http://fairewinds.org/media/in-the-news/mission-impossible-f...

The snopes article is a form of deceptive propaganda and is all-around bullshit.
The point is that no country behaves as a whole and therefore doesn't tolerate anything. You wouldn't find even two people who agree on all the issues, so how can you expect 310+ million people to agree on one of them? Also it looks like the supply of min wage workers far outweighs the demand for them.
"The problem for Microsoft is the same problem that faced Apple."

Pretty much: Apple was faced with a competitor who owned a vast majority of the PC market. They never took over the majority, but they managed to earn a profit from a minority of people who were willing to pay a premium for computers that worked better than the crapware offered by most Windows OEMs. Windows was cheap, and just good enough to write TPS reports.

Google now offers similar crapware: heavily-gamed and -"personalized" search results slathered with ads and just good enough to be better than most alternatives. There's plenty of room for a company to offer something better: paid subscription search, less-complete search with fewer ads and more accuracy, or something else (I'm not a "10x founder," so I can't think of these things.).
So you play a lot of games? :)
Yep, and notice that the article was talking about a reduction in aggregate poverty rather than total employment. If a few people lose their jobs but a significantly larger number of people get higher wages, poverty in aggregate goes down.

But as the article points points out, there is excellent and robust empirical evidence that the current minimum wage (and even earlier minimum wages in America, which were much higher) are too low to significantly affect total employment. Wikipedia has an excellent writeup of the scholarship on this topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies
And you'll leave your phone home too, right?
Right. They skimp on strain relief for esthetic rather than financial reasons.
It's just a shame that it looks like your options are paying $3 for a part that cost $2 to make, or $30 for a part that cost $6 to make
Thank the heavens for snopes.com, a breath of fresh research in a rumor-and-conspiracy-choked web...
DDG is mineral water. Better for your health.
That's completely understandable. Sorry for not catching the broken link! I don't know what happened there for me doing that.

Linode looks like it's in a lot better shape than DO currently. DO has some issues with Docker that prevent it from being very viable.

I'll have to give it a try, thanks again for being so diligent with the tests! The information is useful.
Of course I am not an economist at all, but still I see here some paradox. Minimal wedges are paid for the jobs that require low qualifications or in fact no qualifications. So for example if we raise 4$ per hour to 5$ for such jobs, we may reduce the value of 1 dollar. If 1 hour of such job was worth 4$ and now is worth 5$, then now 1$ has less value than it used to have. As a consequence the whole economy may experience inflation. I do not believe in simple solutions to complicated problems. Printing more money do not reduce poverty and rising minimal wedges is for me a little bit like printing money.
Soap was fully functional a few thousand years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_soap

Everything since has just been feature creep.

I use a single type of bar soap around the house for washing my hands, showering and shaving. Works just fine, not to mention probably saving me a pretty penny every year. On top of that, the dry skin problems I had with liquid soap are gone.
Are you sure that you don't mean "especially with AV"? AV is an attack surface, not a security mechanism.

Also, how do you know that chipTAN has not been used for stealing money yet? Criminals commonly don't publish their methods, and as far as banks are concerned, the customer did something wrong and is lying unless the customer can prove that the (proprietary) security system is broken. Not exactly favourable conditions for finding out about security problems.

Also, how do you know that finding a security flaw in chipTAN/some chipTAN implementation is more difficult than finding a security flaw in your webbrowser for someone who is motivated by the monetary reward of doing so? You are aware of the gaping security holes in GSM SIM card software, for example?

I think you are making a whole lot of not particularly well-supported assumptions there.
Yep, and that's why it's important for the search engine to be able to collect information about you! It's not just for commercial ends like ad targeting.
Good lord, what a fantastic video. Absolutely nailed it.

I particularly like this because it's a first-hand, completely transparent account, rather than a second-hand/third-hand/this-might-have-happen account of white privilege.
Well, maybe. The original has 47 power pins, more than the counterfeit has any pins. It's likely that the original designers included these to improve noise margins in various parts of the chip. It's also likely that the 32-pin version has rather worse problems with power and ground noise.

It _is_ possible, of course, that the original has excessive margins and the counterfeit one is a tighter design. We'd have to see the eye diagrams on both sides to be sure.
The cheap one: looks like we're running without containment, just not enough to cook us.
It's like you didn't even think through your example at all. If minimum wage is suddenly $50/hr, businesses begin to collapse.

The Fed, seeing this collapse, would massively inflate the dollar. Anyone with savings would have their savings destroyed, and the churn would make everyone poorer than before, quite specifically the same people you were trying to help.
It sounds like you're a fan of statically typed languages. Maybe try WebSharper (F#), Play/Lift (Scala).
As I'm researching topics, I open a new tab for each link I follow. This creates a "stack" of open tabs that I pop down through later.
It would be interesting to try to come up with some scenario that would maximize the damage caused by Fukushima, then model whether that would be a problem for any other county.

Explosion? Complete melt-down? Meteor strike? Super volcanic eruption?

Interestingly, worst-case might be to have the reactor limp along while continuing to cool it with water that's being pumped back into the ocean. Like they're doing now. Having it totally destroyed, or pushed under the sea, although perhaps creating an bad initial spike, probably wouldn't release as much radiation long-term.

This entire incident has become a test for how scientifically literate people are. And most folks aren't hitting on much.
Personally, I'm amazed that they let him blog stuff in this detail about MS's search business practices. Not speaking for the org or about the official stance, but I would not consider doing so as a member of SI at Google. And I always had the intuition that MS was even more restrictive about such things. Maybe not?
When the wage is higher than mine :P
They wiretapped all of Washington DC, "by accident", in an election year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-br...
> There's never an excuse for chmod'ing something 777

Agreed. Biblical implications aside, chmod 666 and chmod 777 are rarely a good idea.

(http://www.gotothings.com/linux/permissions-with-the-chmod-c...)
We use a ton of USB adapters where I work and are using them all day long with several different systems. A few months ago we got a batch of cheap adapters and one noticeable difference was the cheap ones get really hot compared to the more expensive name brand adapters. Appear to work OK, though.
According to Bunnie's investigation into microSD cards[1], that low serial number probably indicates that the components were produced on a "ghost shift", when a rogue worker comes in at night and runs the plant off the books

[1] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022
That sounds like a very plausible theory.
All of the electronic artists that are big in Aus right now do. Had drinks with a whole heaps of em at Bigsound a few weeks back and chatted to a few of them, all really nice people.
There are some advantages to COM, in that having a standard, somewhat introspectable notion of what an object is and what its lifetime is helped Firefox add cycle collection several years ago. (By contrast, leaks are harder to avoid in WebKit and Blink, because there is no cycle collector, at least until Blink lands Oilpan.)

I think COM's biggest sin was doing all this stuff without language support. It's just not sensible to graft interfaces and automatic memory management onto C without modifying the language. Objective-C is basically a slightly more duck typed COM, but it's not nearly as reviled because the object model is so deeply integrated into the language.
To say nothing of the engineering challenges with crawling the entire Internet. Your first cut will likely refresh every several months or so. Remember when Google did that, back in like 2005? It was very effing hard then. Google now crawls pages newly linked from authority sites essentially instantaneously.
m not sure if you'll classify it as "credible" but the wikipedia article on HPI shows a clear ranking of countries that roughly correlates to the minimum wage (higher the wage, lower the poverty ranking). Which.. Doesn't seem like rocket science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Poverty_Index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_countr...
.NET Memory Shrinker
In the craftsman's toolbox I would add Virginia Tufte's lovely and inspiring book "Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style". To write better, one must write better sentences. Start here.
I guess so, it's just that his direction under Apple will not be his own. Perhaps he will be allowed to work on whatever he wants, even if it's risky or experimental?

If that was part of the nature of the deal, then I could see it being quite attractive.
I meant you have to readd your accounts with the device when you flash a new ROM (even if you backed up the app and data previously). Poor English in my previous comment.
That is, in fact, the first step to a PEP! According to this: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0001/ :)

Are you on the ML already?
yes, lots of us

i recommend exercise, paleo diet, 5-htp and occasional cannabis

also this book is good:
http://www.amazon.com/Aspergers-Syndrome-Mindfulness-Taking-...
Can someone please give me his thoughts on this hypothetical situation?

Let's say a farmer buys some extra land and instead of hiring 50 people to work on it he buys a fancy tractor.

- Would it be right for those 50 people to demand from the tractor factory to stop making tractors because they are out of work?

- Would it be right for them to demand from the government the wages they would have received if the tractors were not made in the first place?

- Would it be right for everyone to pay a higher price for food because farmer had to hire 50 people instead of a tractor?
I think his point (which is correct) is it doesn't matter if bacteria develop resistance to triclosan. Triclosan is not used to control bacteria in the medical setting and there is no cross-resistance to antibiotics.
My guess is that Apple values his underlying algorithm implementation, not his app. The implementation seems highly architecture specific and tuned for certain ARM processors.

It seems like Apple might replace their iOS JPEG implementation with his, and all developers on iOS will benefit from the very fast image encoding routines.
Rise. http://www.simplebots.co