gthank

Python 2 will store Unicode as either UCS-16 or UCS-32, depending on how it was compiled. The horrible monstrosity that is the default "string" (those are scare quotes; I know how the formatting on here works) in Python 2 is not Unicode, so it obviously doesn't use UCS-16 or UCS-32.

TL;DR Write it in Rust, export via FFI, bind from Python via cffi.

The long version is: go watch this video from PyCon that will answer this question and probably others https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CwJ0MH-4MA

Somebody has to build the containers and/or images, and it's on them to make that an automated, repeatable process.

Please tell me those discussions are on the mailing list.

If you honestly believe that all you have to do is stand up a bunch of instances of Mongo/Cassandra/whatever and you instantly get acceptable HA, then you need to read the [Jepsen series](https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen)

Having used them both a fair bit (though not to write novels, like some of the people on here): Markdown source is prettier to look at. This might seem minor, but it's the primary goal of Markdown. If I'm writing something highly technical, I prefer RST; if I'm writing something closer to plain English, I prefer Markdown.

I use Eclipse (now that I no longer have an IntelliJ license) for doing heavy-duty Java, but if I can get away with it, I prefer to do things in MacVim. Eclipse is just too clunky feeling when I want to do simple text editing tasks; it totally throws me out of my flow. That's why I'm on HN right now, as a matter of fact. So clearly, I am not an unbiased observer. That said: have you tried Pathogen/Vundle? Vim plugin management these days is light-years better than the equivalent Eclipse nightmare (I've given up on about half my Eclipse plugins as things constantly break).

It's PHP. They obviously wanted a broken language. Now the devs are taking that away from them.

I'm pretty sure it hoses Norton's "security" software, too. Of course, if you can't handle documented file system options, I don't trust you to detect exploits….

Jenkins.

For a lot of dynamic languages, at least, the templating engine is a surprisingly large portion of your page load times. I wish I could bring up the breakdown I saw a while back, but it's certainly non-trivial in many cases.

Less than a year? That's really short. Have you tried busting out a multimeter on your wiring (since you sound like the DIY type) or calling an electrician?

The post clearly says they have to add the source or delete them.

You won't see me saying that I think Groupon is a great value or anything, but I think that you have to acknowledge the difference between the people Groupon is reaching and the people FB or Google is reaching: Groupon's audience is people who are actively looking to spend money, whereas most of the people who see Google or FBs ads are doing something else entirely (and would probably not notice if they just went away).

These articles are cropping up because Google (quite cleverly) utilized the "We're Open" mantra to gain a lot of momentum very quickly. Since the evolution of Android shows more and more evidence of "We're Open When Convenient/Beneficial", a lot of their most ardent supporters now feel betrayed/played.

If Google had said "We're not as secretive as Apple", there would be less bitterness now, but there also never would have been the sort of momentum/buzz they built early on.

A lot of Spring code predates the rising popularity of "convention over configuration" (thank you, Rails, for getting this so widely accepted), so if you're in one of those code bases, you're going to see a LOT of the Java+XML verbosity that led to everyone lampooning Java.

In exchange, you get a ton of flexibility. You probably only need 5-10% of it, but that 5-10% is NICE. The ability to do clean testing of your data tier, for instance, is glorious when you first experience it. Goodbye, horrible ResultSet mocks!

If you're lucky enough to work on a codebase that fully embraces autowiring and all the spiffy new annotations, then you get all this awesome stuff, but with virtually none of the crazy XML configuration stuff that makes it impossible to just trace the source and figure out what the hell is going on.

For Java web frameworks, Play! http://www.playframework.org/ is definitely on the top of my list for green-field projects. I've only used it on small things so far, but it really seems to have learned the lessons of Django and Rails.

https://github.com/weavejester/compojure is on my To-Try list for Clojure stuff. Until I get around to it, I'm just monitoring buzz on the web, but so far it's been mostly positive.

Go read the relevant Quora thread http://www.quora.com/What-will-happen-to-http-bit-ly-links-i...

Because it means you're (probably) going to be running Windows on your servers, which isn't cheap.

I'd settle for them managing to bill me properly for my POTS line after no more than 3 tries (it took 6 after my most recent move).

That's an interesting point about it never making the price go up. If there were a non-trivial chance that it caused the price to go up, do you think the haggling would be less common?

Since haggling vaguely offends my sense of how the world should work—even though I know that has no bearing on how it does work—it kinds gives me the warm fuzzies to imagine some random procurement person's expression as the price goes up every time s?he asks for a discount.

Azul's systems are pretty much the definition of high-volume. Nobody (sane) buys an embarrassingly parallel machine with custom hardware and software just to host their blog on it.

Actually, most of the people least able to defend themselves walk out on it, just as the hospitals expect, because they have the least to lose. When you're already horribly impoverished, what does one more bill that you'll never be able to pay mean?

The ones who really catch it in the shorts are people who have never been unable to pay off an obligation before: their credit and hard-earned reputations are probably ruined (the first for however long a bankruptcy takes to go off the books, the second possibly forever), their day-to-day lives will become a gigantic burden since a bankruptcy will demolish any accumulated wealth/assets, and that's not even considering what it will do to their self-image for them to feel like they aren't living up to their personal standard.

Just so we're clear: I think this system is terrible, and desperately hope that something is done to fix it. I'm not sure what the right fix is, but I hope somebody out there finds it.

The way it works is they bill outrageous amounts in the expectation that they will either be totally stiffed or have to negotiate a much lower settlement (which is essentially what insurance companies do, AFAIK). In the rare case where somebody actually pays the full bill, they're subsidizing care for those who walk out on the bill (or part of it). This strikes me as an extremely broken way of doing things, but it seems to be the norm, so maybe it's a really, really bad Nash equilibrium.

That's too bad about emacs. I was really starting to like him. ;-)

He seems to be arguing that you shouldn't handicap the computer by removing one of its advantages, but they've already handicapped the humans by removing lots of their advantages: at least in the parts I've seen, there have been no audio or visual clues, and it's my understanding that Watson gets the text of the question over the wire, not even having to OCR the same text that the humans get to read while waiting for Alex to finish reading the question.

I'm an IBMer and I think Watson has been extremely impressive, but as a Jeopardy fan it gets tiresome to see Watson win the race to the buzzer this often.

Finally, I'm hoping that tonight features more of the wordplay-heavy clues that I hear were present on the first night (why oh why was that on Valentine's Day???), because that is the element that excited me most when I heard about the challenge.

My point is that a human nervous system is MUCH slower than Watson's equivalent. It is probable (don't know, but it seems likely) that it is more variable, as well. As such, under the current rules, Watson has an overwhelming advantage. If all the contestants know the answer before the question is "read", then Watson will consistently beat the humans to the buzzer. The only hope for the humans is that Watson hasn't decided an answer by the time the question is finished being "read".

Without some way to account for the fact that the human nervous system CANNOT beat Watson to the buzzer on any sort of consistent basis, the game is far less compelling than it should be.

You're right: consistently being 6x faster on the buzzer than the common case for your opponent is going to let you destroy them. Their only hope is that you can't come up with a response before Alex finishes reading the question.

I arrived at the 6x approximation by googling around for avg. ethernet latencies. I'm consistently seeing numbers of .3 - .35 ms for an ethernet ping/pong. I think it's fair to assume that with the money IBM has invested in this, Watson is on at least ethernet quality connections.

This. A thousand times this. Watson absolutely CRUSHED the human players on pretty much every question that was basic facts. I know Watson can probably generate answers faster than humans on simple search stuff, but it seemed so bad at some points that I wondered: is Watson not wired in with some sort of delay that mimics the delay that humans have between deciding to buzz in and actually buzzing in? A lack of such a system would seem to skew the results somewhat.

Since we're swapping anecdotes: I'd guesstimate 75% of the fixed-bid projects I worked on back when I worked for a consulting shop barely broke even or actively lost money. Estimating the project well enough to make a profitable bid is hard if, like many shops, you work in whatever domain happens to be sending customers your way.

It's also typically a huge win for the employees: at a pre-IPO company, your stock isn't really worth very much, because it's hard to find somebody to buy it (for most employees). So instead of paying taxes for a highly illiquid asset, you instead get an option (probably with a really nice strike price), and you don't pay taxes until you exercise it.