skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except that:

- In CJK languages, unicode codepoints can't be represented in 2 bytes. They take up 2 'char' objects; the first is a surrogate code point.

- In the presence of surrogates, charAt() and length() give wrong answers. Their indexes refer to the number of 'char' objects up through that point, not the number of Unicode codepoints. If there is a surrogate codepoint present anywhere before your index in the string, you will be off.

- To help get around this, the Java APIs added codePointAt and codePointBefore. These are still broken; the indexes are based off of chars, not codepoints.

- To get around this, we have codePointCount and offsetByCodePoint. Finally, these are semantically correct. However, they give up O(1) string indexing.

Did you know all of this? There's more, too, where calling CharSequence.subSequence causes a memory leak because you're pulling out a small portion (say, 10 bytes) of a large backing buffer (say, 1MB), and storing it in a persistent object prevents the GC from collecting the buffer, since a portion of its data is still live. This has caused real memory leaks in Google servers, enough that they had to educate the whole developer base about the pitfalls of it. But I figured I had enough to pick on with Java's broken Unicode handling to illustrate the grandparent's point: strings are hard. If you think you understand them, you're probably not aware of some of the trade-offs between performance, correctness, multilingual support, and developer APIs.
Quasiquote is going into Java 9.
All of your complaints seem to be UI features. Swapping out the rendering engine for Webkit wouldn't fix any of them.
I thought same thing - while I love references to GOT it didn't make any sense.
With my brief encounter of him, he was one of the nicest guys I've ever run across. He took everyone seriously despite the level of customer. He always helped like jx5 was saying. Damn.
Lmfao isn't that extremely ironic? The purpose of the shuttle was to have a semi-reusable rocket to save a little money. Instead we end up blowing billions just maintaining and refurbishing the fleet. The shuttle very obviously wasn't the way to go.

I think SpaceX's grasshopper setup is more promising. It doesn't need to withstand the same pressures that the shuttle had to because of the altitude at which it returns to Earth, so there's not so much to refurbish. That, and it also comes down like a pencil rather than like a rock.
If you bill by the day how do you manage expectations of how much of that day goes to client work? Particularly if the work is onsite?

I would like to stop billing by the hour but I fear if I bill by the day I'll get "well my days last 12 hours, why don't yours?" Oftentimes when there is a lot of programming to do and not much managing, planning, etc I am burned out after six hours.
This pisses me off so much. They're just trying to push it down the road, either hoping that people will forget about it, or so they can blame it on Republicans later that they are the ones who are not releasing it because they'll control Senate (which wouldn't necessarily be false, but the Democrats have the opportunity to do it now but instead are delaying it on purpose over extremely bogus reasons that have already been debunked such as "putting agents lives in danger" or whatever).
The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate
No reason, I'm still adding providers. It's barely MVP right now.
I'm no expert, but I have the impression that F# has a strong type system, being an ML variant (perhaps sacrificing a bit for CLR compatibility).

I'm a big fan of Clojure and a dabbler in OCaml/Haskell, and I feel that F# has a lot to offer in terms of library access, same as Clojure/Scala for the JVM. In any case, I'm certainly happy its there in case I ever have occasion to work with .NET.
So let me get this right: Github, an american company, bows down to threads by a russian company, about russian law, to censor american peoples access?

How the hell is this not a much bigger story?
Maybe you meant Pokemon.

Digimon's characters were quite deep. Matt vs Tai had the rivalry thing going (especially since Matt represented friendship, despite straying from the path he eventually proved himself to be a very reliable friend). Tai's progression from false-courage (accidentally turning Agumon into SkullGreymon) to true courage (MetalGreymon) is also quite thought provoking.

Its got a relatively straightforward formula. Associate each character with a virtue, and then they told a story about it. (Courage for Tai, Friendship Matt, Knowledge Izzy, Sincerity Mimi, Honesty Joe, Hope TK). The evolution of each character was associated with a physical being (the Digimon) that got stronger as each kid recognized the strength of their virtue.

But the Digimon characters made relationships based on their virtues, in particular Tai (Courage) vs Matt (friendship). The younger sister of Tai (Kari, representing "Light") was good friends with Matt's younger brother TK (Hope). Etc. etc.

There was a _lot_ of character interaction and development.

On the other hand, Pokemon is just straight up milking the series. Real depth of characters can be found in "Pokemon Special" comics however, and some Pokemon games have legitimate villains now.
Is that not cool anymore. What's the next "cool" thing?
Thomas, and do you think "freelancer" is how they should title themselves? It's not so much about increasing your negotiating skills and rate 'as a freelancer' but expanding what you're doing so that it's quite a poor title at that point.
React.js Conf Tickets going on sale  noon PST
Watching the little capsule barrel in toward the water before the parachutes opened - all I could think of was HOLY CRAP POP THOSE CHUTES!
When data gets creepy: the secrets we don’t realise we’re giving away
Have you tried the userimg.jl hack? It's _very_ hacky, but it will convince you that precompiling packages is viable in the short-term.
Yes but webp hasn't taken off as much as some would like as a defacto standard.

BPG looks good upon cursory inspection. It seems to be more efficient than WebP and supports 42-bit color. It also has .png's features of transparency and lossless compression although I didn't see anything mentioned about animation to replace .gif.

Bonus: since it's based on h.265 hardware support will come naturally and should be just a software update for devices that already have HEVC capability.
You are right, it does say that. I missed it.
Web Workers are closer to "processes" in the Erlang sense of the term. They're walled off fairly extensively from the rest of the JS runtime that spawned them because that is pretty much the only good way to backport threading onto a language that wasn't designed with it in mind from the beginning.

Languages like C which had them bodged on years later, well, I'd call that a bad way to do it. It worked for the time but there's a reason why we are all fleeing that implementation of threading and it still stains the entire idea of "multithreading" decades later.

If JS is ever going to get threading, the best case scenario is for it to look like Perl or PHP's efforts... years and years of implementation work to get to something that pretty much everybody recommends you still just stay away from. And Perl and PHP were trying to integrate threading into just one runtime each, and without a browser connected at the hip with its own ideas about threading embedded into decades of code. I would not hold your breath for "true" JS threads anytime soon.
You mentioned the reduction in your energy bill, but do you happen to track how much of that comes from selling back to the grid and how much comes from you using your solar power directly? If you're generating 10kW a few hours each day, I would guess that's the only time you're selling back. Would there be any point in an energy storage system for you? I've always had this fanciful notion of having a solar array and building an underground flywheel for storage, but only because I'm riveted by flywheels.

I haven't looked into the ROI of CFLs or LEDs vs. incandescents in a while. I imagine they have improved. Lately, I've even seen some LED bulbs in stores that don't look horrible. Of course, I would buy them anyway just to save time changing bulbs!
That is the standard conservative incrementalist position about systems. I think it's a denial of the efficacy of conceptual thought.

It often stems from an analogy to biological evolution, but evolution is a geological-timescale process that occurs over aeons. To use it as a guide to cultural, social, and engineering progress is the naturalistic fallacy not to mention a bit of a category error.

That being said -- I do consider the challenging of the "crappy old OS + virtualization" paradigm unlikely due to the lack of a strong financial incentive to do the work. The amount of work required is waaaaay beyond amateur open source hacker thresholds.

It's possible that this lack of a financial incentive betrays a lack of overall value incentive. Maybe containerization + virtualization, while ugly and ham-fisted, is "good enough" and a more elegant approach just wouldn't have enough "win" to it. A similar situation exists with languages like D, Go, and Rust vs C++. They're better, but they're probably not better enough to displace the incumbent. Peter Thiel's rule on competition (from the incredible book Zero to One) is that an upstart alternative usually has to be 10X better to "disrupt" an established market. I can't imagine a polished-up Plan9-ish OS being 10X better than Linux+Docker+KVM on important metrics. A new OS would have to be 10X as productive to program, 10X less time consuming to admin, 10X more efficient at the use of hardware, 10X more secure, or some combination thereof that amounts to a 10X win.
Show HN: Collapse HN Comments
Little chrome extension I made to collapse comments on HN, feel free to use it if you want.
Charging by the day is better than charging by the hour, and week is better than day.

Better than each is to stop valuing your time as "just" time. You'll never have those moments again.

Value your work product. Don't value your work effort, and definitely not your time.

Actually, don't value your work product. Figure out how your customer values your work product and charge that price.

Once you start to realize that your time is the most valuable thing you'll ever have and simultaneously completely worthless as a unit of currency, you'll begin to trade with what you have that is truly of value to the person actually paying the bill: that thing you haven't created yet.
There is a big advantage to node.js that used to be mentioned a lot in its early days, but not much now. The advantage is still there, but it's only noticeable if a developer has experience in other server languages. The big advantage is that node.js had an asynchronous development model from the beginning. This caused all the code written since then to also be written using async. When a node.js project imports other libraries through npm, there is no need to worry about some random synchronous code blocking. All code is written using async because that's the way it was enforced from the beginning.

This is an advantage it shares with other new languages like Go that had good concurrency support from the start. Go has the same advantage with goroutines. All code written by the community since then uses goroutines.

Compare this to python and java which had better concurrency bolted on long after those languages were released. Twisted is basically node.js for python and it existed for a long time before node.js. But one of the main problems with Twisted is that all other existing python code is not written in an async way. A python dev could use Twisted, but as soon as they get some useful library form PIP, it's probably going to block and ruin the whole async.

Java has a similar issue. It was released with heavy threads as the only way to handle concurrency. There have been attempts to try to bolt on async and lightweight thread models. But there is a massive existing ecosystem of java code. None of that will work well with async and no one can rewrite all of it to use some new lightweight thread model.

This is the advantage of a fresh start like node.js or Go. Wheels will be reinvented, but it will have improvements that can't just be bolted on later.

The biggest flaw with node.js right now is that it came too early. If it came out with ES6, it would be a much better ecosystem. If generators/yield had existed from the start, all the callback mess could've been avoided. However, although the callbacks were an unavoidable mess, it did fundamentally force async on the ecosystem. NPM libraries like co show a migration path to the generators/yield future for older node.js code. The IO.js fork should use this opportunity to put something like the co library into core and push generators/yield as the way forward. If Joyent was the cause of the delayed generators/yield support, then they have done great damage to the node.js ecosystem. Node.js should've heavily promoted generator/yield use as soon as it was in V8, not hide it behind a --harmony flag for over a year.
Not to mention it has a JavaScript port that means it can work it browsers today.
Fair point: that should work.

I'm just worried that could confuse the camera, though: image preview wouldn't work, checksumming wouldn't work...
Little chrome extension I made for personal use, feel free to use it if you want.

It will allow you to collapse comment trees on HN.
I think most of the people here object to the levels of internet censorship even in the US.

Just because someone else has a repressed authoritarian culture does not mean I should be beholden to it.
> What King killed people at the red wedding?

Certainly none doing the stabbing in person as described; there's certainly instances in GoT of people claiming the title King killing people personally in GoT, but the Red Wedding is equally certainly not one of them. A key aspect of the Red Wedding was that the Lord directly overseeing the killing (who also wasn't doing it personally) was (perceived up to that point to be) an ally of the targets who were his guests, and (again, perceived) opponent of the King (Joffery) whose cause was served by the killing.
None taken, but I'm afraid that you don't seem to know exactly what you're talking about either.

Just because something CAN supply 100 amps doesn't mean it WILL supply 100 amps. I can touch both terminals of my car's battery with my hands and very little happens. That's because V = I * R, V = 12 and R ~= 100k so I = 0.12 milliamps or 120 microamps.

Now of course we're talking about 48V not 12V but that's still less than half a milliamp, unless of course you have both of your hands drenched in saltwater and you grab as much exposed wire as you can, in which case the body's resistance is going to be much less than 100k. But for any reasonable adult it's fairly difficult to kill yourself with 48V.

Will people still need to be careful? Absolutely. But the idea is that at least at first, it's much easier to get around codes requiring permits and inspections and whatnot that make it much harder for individuals to do without explicit approval of the government (know how to file a permit? great. are you a certified electrician? sorry...). Given that in many places the government owns, regulates or otherwise has a substantial interest in the electrical utility company this at least temporarily would allow people to do this on their own. The laws could always change, but it tends to take a while at which point there might be enough people doing it that it wouldn't get passed.
I really dig it, but I'm not yet familiar with BPG. It seems that decoding it would take more processing power, and potentially be slower than JPG. Is this the case? Under the "performance" section, decoding speed was not mentioned.
Amazon RDS for Aurora (Preview)
Thing is, if you want Go- or Erlang-style piping of data, well, Erlang and Go are right there... and both written from day 1 to support those use cases, rather than bodging them onto a language ten years later....
Censor Russian people's access.
If you bill daily/weekly, make sure you don't slack a little and cut out early on some days. Billing hourly ensures nobody feels shorted, you aren't there, you aren't billing, etc. But with a daily billing, it might be easy to slip into a mindset of "I accomplished all of today's goals X, Y, and Z. I'm going to head out 30 minutes early today." Sooner or later, you'll have a client that ads up that time and feels like you've shorted them (especially on a longer project where the sum can be a full day or more).

If you bill daily, make sure you put in a full day. I would also make sure your definition of a "day" is known upfront (8 hours not including a lunch, or whatever). This way there is no confusion later.
Nice link! Check this one instead of mine if you haven't done so.
Its purpose is to replace the JPEG image format when quality or file size is an issue.

Some of the HEVC algorithms may be protected by patents in some countries

There have been some patent disputes over JPEG, but I don't think replacing it with another possibly patented format is a good idea, even if it's technically superior in some ways.
I'm almost 20 years into a successful, solo freelancing career. GP's advice is worth researching.

You might not be missing anything by sticking to hourly billing if you are aiming at a downmarket clientele. They usually appreciate hourly billing because they are either making nice margins off of your work (by reselling or by quality derived) or undercharging for their own work. Hourly billing is comfortable for them because they are usually extremely price-sensitive. This works OK for a lot of new freelancers, who themselves are also very price-sensitive.

The upside of only doing hourly billing is steady work. The downside is that you may never understand what upmarket work is like.

If you are aiming at upmarket clientele (or just clientele who are upmarket from your current set of clients), you have to adapt to a different mindset--quality, specialty, and responsiveness are key; pricing is used as a toolset that supports your business goal of offering those three things. Pricing becomes a group of activities that act as a market positioning message, negotiating tool, sales pitch, etc. All of that from a little dollar sign with a number after it (or a set of them).

If you are not aiming at any market, you might be headed downmarket. Good idea to check on that. Most freelancers do the same amount of pricing research as the average lemonade stand. Many freelancers who go out of business have authored their own personal failure narrative that revolves around an uneducated view on pricing.
The Chinese Town Descended from Romans?
Timers are sort of threads..
Not being a regular reader, I was a bit startled go there for the firsttime in a while and find a website that looks like Buzzfeed. I hope the existing editorial team or some more thoughtful soul can pony up enough capital to launch The Even Newer Republic or something along those lines.

That quote from Guy Vidra about how he can't bring himself to read past 500 words of any article should haunt him for the remainder of his career.
The "new contributors" link you provided uses commits from before the fork, so it doesn't really have any information.
> every time I have to research something I end up feeling like a know-nothing

I once heard a programmer say her job description was "learning new things". I'm a generalist like you, with a handful of specialties, and I don't think you should have any guilt or embarrassment about doing research. In fact the ability to research and learn is a skill too.
Only because right now the economics of coal fueled electric plants are favorable.

Coal based plants will die down as cost per kWh of ocean tide, wind, solar, etc are optimized.
Ask HN: I have 8 months of video advertising in Japan. Ideas on what to display?
Hi All,

As part of a development contract I did here in Japan, I am the proud owner of some video advertising in Nagoya station (digital signage). The problem is, I don't have anything in particular I want to show.

It's a great opportunity to have some fun / interesting advertising, and I'd like to extend my fortune to the HN community.

Anyone have any interesting ideas / videos that you'd like to show to 600k people a day in Nagoya station?

The details:
* One, 15 second spot
* horizontal, 16x9, full HD
* can have sound
* Plays every 2 minutes
* advertising will run for 8 months
* Can change out the video fairly often (up to once a day)
* Audience is 99% Japanese, but English is fine

Would love to hear your ideas.

-- Keith
Wow, I didn't even know there were open-source HEVC encoders. I thought there were patent issues. Now I'm off to re-encode my bluray collection!
The enumerated powers clause does not authorize the NSA, so effectively, everything they do is unconstitutional.
How the Cloud Is Like a Home Improvement Center
The Ur Programming Language
Your body does not let the 5kW go through it.
From the link

>> Ignoring clouds, the daily average irradiance for the Earth is approximately 250 W/m2

Emphasis added. Seems like clouds might be a non-trivial factor, yes?
As I said on reddit as well, I'd really like to hear from someone with a year of serious Node experience and then a year of serious Go experience who ended up wanting to go back to Node, for anything other than perhaps a library than only Node had. While the Internet is large and any crazy criterion will match somebody, somewhere, my strong suspicion is that this is not a large set of people. I suspect it's more-or-less a one-way door.
Syntax error on line 4: Russian government acknowledging others' superiority.
Pronounced 'bee-peg'?
If you scratch 4/5 star hotel and replace it with "fairly nice property" there's plenty of parts of Asia where he could live well off the interest on $1m for the foreseeable future.
Thanks, things are much clear now :)
I think it's awesome that these are going online.

I'm a bit curious why they aren't pdf files - the viewer scheme they use is rather awkward, and can't be downloaded and read on an ebook, for example.
Segment Is Hiring an Analytics Evangelist and Community Lead
I am far too compulsive about reading ASOIAF theories to let this go - What are Renly Truthers (and how does it relate to the above)?
The Chinese people are not our enemy. China has had a large mindshare in Western culture for centuries and now their government is getting strong enough to project power that challenges the West. Overall the Chinese seem very level headed and determined to contribute toward global stability and growth.

I fear, however, that their presence on the world stage may be something unlike we've ever seen. People today are naive in trusting the restraint, rationality, and reach of the CCP's agenda.
That doesn't make it right. There have been something like 6 Kinder egg related deaths in the last 20 years [1], versus 1.5 BILLION of them sold every year [2]. Meanwhile, thousands of people die each year from choking on normal food that doesn't contain plastic objects.

[1] http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/15909

[2] http://kinderbrands.com.au/company/
This is precisely how most home solar installations work. They provide power directly to the grid and offset the power that they still draw from the meter. Most solar installations feed power to the grid at the meter, so the power company still knows how much power you consume, they just also see how much you provide and then only charge you the difference.

it is this setup in particular that is problematic for spikes in generation, since the power company can't just disconnect your solar array if it is adding too much power at a low demand time.
In Suit, Cisco Accuses Arista of Copying Work
Cisco sues Arista for patent infringement
> ...said Ellen Hayes, a PG&E spokeswoman. “Having a solar panel that isn’t connected to the grid is like having a computer that’s not connected to the Internet.”

... "still useful". Is that the rest of the quote?