captaincrowbar

"Rust essentially never wastes cycles on bounds checking thanks to the design of its iterators."

Can you explain this or point me to the relevant documentation or code please?

A phone recording surviving the crash isn't too implausible. Remember that it doesn't need the whole phone to come through in one piece, only the memory chip (possibly an SD card).

On the other hand, the reason I'm very skeptical about this story is this part: "Near the end there was reportedly a heavy shake and the cabin tilted sharply to one side. After further screams the video ended, Bild said."

The impact speed has been estimated at about 700 km/h, or about 200 metres per second. The fuselage of an A320 is 37 metres long. First impact to complete destruction would take about 1/10 of a second; the described sequence of events takes far too long to be plausible. (The only way it might work is if the first impact was on a wingtip.)

The non-retina MBP is still available. Or at least it was up to a few minutes ago; they've just taken the store page down for updating, I wouldn't be surprised if the old MBP is gone when it returns. Although you'll probably still be able to buy one until the stock runs out.

If you're going to call something a "moon" of Earth merely because it's in an orbital resonance, then by the same argument, Pluto is a moon of Neptune.

My thoughts...

This seems to be basically just a chat server (with message attachments). The notebook style UI is cute but doesn't seem to mean anything. Is there anything here I couldn't do on Skype?

What platforms does this support? There's a picture of a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. They all look vaguely like Apple products, so maybe this is Mac/iOS only, or maybe that's just the icons you happened to have on hand. If it is Apple only, that kind of platform limitation will be a big (almost certainly fatal) handicap to collaboration software. If it isn't, you need to make that clearer.

A hamburger menu (traditionally used to mean "everything else") on the left, and an ellipsis menu (also traditionally used to mean "everything else") on the right? Oh dear.

Maps are a bit different to web search though. There was never a Google Maps-quality geographical database available for sale; to get good maps Apple has to send people out into the world to compile the data. It was inevitable that any competing map service would start out underwhelming, because mapping is a job that intrinsically requires a good deal of time and actual physical work to make it high quality. Web search is different; that's something you can build almost entirely in secret (apart from the odd hint when someone spots a new user agent string), without having to step out of your metaphorical basement until it's fully baked.

Why are so many people under the impression TextEdit doesn't do plain text? Just go to the Format menu and select Make Plain Text, or go into the preferences and make plain text the default.

Works just fine for me too.

A recommendation: if you like The Martian, you'll probably like the movie The Europa Report.

Out there in the real world, people are going to keep putting unrestricted binary data inside of strings regardless of whether or not anyone has decided to allow it.

For those who don't know, this is from Robert Nystrom, author of Game Programming Patterns: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634734

Obligatory xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/217/

Arthur C. Clarke, who knew both Stanley Kubrick and Wernher von Braun, reported in his autobiography, Astounding Days, that Kubrick once asked him to "tell Wernher I wasn't getting at him." Clarke added that "I never did, because firstly, I didn't believe him, and secondly, even if Stanley wasn't, Peter Sellers certainly was."

This looked like great news until I came to "Heavy use of threads is also going to be a problem since Emscripten doesn't currently support them."

Sorry, this is a total showstopper for me. I'll check back when Emscripten actually lets me use more than 1/4 or 1/8 of the CPU.

I did something similar (without macros, with a bit more type safety since the keywords have an associated type, and with a shortcut for boolean arguments):

https://github.com/CaptainCrowbar/kwargs

If you're generating integers, or selecting from a discrete set with uniform probabilities, there's no reason to involve floating point at any point in the process.

What struck me about this was the emphasis on the business market. Even though Nadella denies that they'll be focusing more on business than consumer, every time the interviewer tries to ask about consumer products, Nadella immediately starts talking about dual-use products, how important he thinks it is for MS devices to be usable for work too. It looks like, if you just want something for your home and aren't interested in bringing it to work, Microsoft doesn't want to know you.

What's "annotated" about it? It's just a copy of the original essay, unchanged.

I can't find, anywhere in the documentation or a quick skim of the source code, any clue as to which version of Python this requires.

Now that we're resigned to never seeing Half-Life 3, I guess Valve felt obliged to come up with another vague "we'll release it some time in the indefinite future" product to keep us on our toes.

You can do this in one line, without calling strip() twice: stripped_words = [w for w in [w.strip() for w in words] if w]

"It is neither daring nor original to predict that within decades the world's best chess player will be a machine ... Other games such as Go are presently less susceptible to machine analysis, a fact which sometimes provokes incredible displays of intellectual snobbery from Go players who like to denigrate chess as a child's game. When in due course a machine also becomes the top Go player, such people will no doubt move to games like snakes-and-ladders where computers have no detectable advantage." -- David Langford (1979)

My favourite of the many variations I've seen on this one: "If all you have is an icepick, every comrade looks like Trotsky."

"Unicode (ie. the standard set forth by the unicode consortium) has nothing to say about encoding."

Yes it does. The UTF-8/16/32 encodings are defined in the Unicode standard (chapter 3.9, page 89), they're not some kind of aftermarket add-on.

"UTF-8 has the possibility of having encoding errors, where things like UTF-32 do not."

Also not true. The set of valid Unicode code points is the same regardless of the encoding (0-0xd7ff and 0xe000-0x10ffff); anything outside those two ranges is just as invalid in UTF-32 as its UTF-8 encoded equivalent would be. A stream containing nothing but 0xff bytes, for example, would be illegal regardless of which UTF you tried to interpret it as.

The UTF-8 tool (http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~richard/utf-8.html) says it's U+FFFC OBJECT REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, which is intended to act as a placeholder for images, media, etc.

I switched from DynDNS to NoIP last year, but I'm probably going to switch again soon; NoIP's Mac auto-updater is broken and they don't seem to give a shit about fixing it.

Also worthy of note: "You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform..." http://qntm.org/calendar

I'm kind of baffled by this. Python has operator overloading, so what's wrong with using * for matrix multiplication? I know there's a bit in the PEP that claims to answer this, but I can't understand their argument. Can someone explain?

The site seems to have been thoroughly slashdotted ... er, fireballed ... er, hackernewsificated ... honestly, hasn't someone come up with a word yet for when HN does this?

If I'm reading the "Beyond Logs" section right, he seems to think that's a feature, not a bug.