ubernostrum

At the same time, I hate and actively avoid typical tech interview processes, and I suspect my pass rate if I did a bunch of them would start out low and only grow after a while once I got used to "interview coding" (which is basically a separate skill from actual programming).

So I don't know why they see this effect. My first guess would be that it's a kind of survivorship bias; outside of the occasional splash of someone trendy inspiring some new users, using the classic Unix-y editors seems to correlate with older/more experienced programmers. Who, because they've managed to stick around as long as they have, probably can manage to get hired when they want or need to.

https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/

Which drives home the point a lot of people are forgetting: it was never secure to begin with, unless you were going to the effort of encrypting all your own emails client-side before sending, and only communicating with others who did the same. Fastmail was never an end-to-end encrypted service, so they already could have been served orders from a government to hand over data, and if that government had jurisdiction and the orders were properly formed for that jurisdiction, they would've had to comply.

So as bad as this bill is, it doesn't really change things for Fastmail.

Yes, you should definitely switch to Chrome instead, which has a sterling track record of respecting you as a human and not as a revenue source.

Or maybe knock off the hyperbole and start asking whether there are tradeoffs being made in favor of increased security for the average user. Which does require a more nuanced view than Braveheart-style screaming about freedom.

It's under a GPL-compatible license. Fork it and do what you like.

This is a pretty FUD-y way to FUD your FUD.

And you can install an anti-paywall extension in Firefox.

The moment you concede the Linux "well you can work around it" argument is the moment you have to stop arguing on pure absolute principle and start arguing about practicality and the relative difficulty of workarounds.

And you brought this up in a thread about something not even close to the same situation, yet presented it as relevant. And doubled down despite being contradicted by your own sources. He worked there. He knew he worked there. He was not just popping in for half an hour that one time to have lunch with them. He worked there and they trained him on their techniques while he worked there. The fact that the word "visitor" was in there is not relevant and does not make it be the same situation that this thread was about. It is not the same situation. It is not a similar situation. It is not the same situation because -- have I mentioned this? -- he worked there.

You could produce something that uses the same basic scheme as UTF-8 (using the leading byte to indicate the total number of bytes used for the code point), but it would not be UTF-8 as we know it (which caps at four bytes per code point), and different encoders/decoders would need to be developed.

No, I'm claiming that it should not have been surprising that the agreement for someone who worked there included such claims. How I personally feel about it is irrelevant; it's a standard practice, and to be expected.

What I am arguing with is your repeated use of terms like "visitor", to make it sound like the guy just popped in for lunch one day and they claimed all his work. He worked there. They trained and taught him. While there are contexts in which "visitor" can be the appropriate term for that (again, see "visiting professor"), the usual connotation of "visitor" is incredibly misleading here, and I wish you'd be more clear about it.

You're making it sound like he just popped in one day and had a sandwich and a chat with the people working there. Your own citation, though, is to "the time he began working at Cetus". The "visitor" NDA there is more like "visit" in the sense of "visiting professor" -- someone who will be there for an extended time, working alongside the other people there.

And your original link to Wikipedia's summary says:

The Stanford lab in which Holodniy worked had been working on developing better HIV tests, and wanted to try the new PCR method, so Holodniy's supervisor had arranged for him to work at Cetus to learn the technique ... [a]fter completing his training at Cetus, Holodniy then returned to Stanford where he and other Stanford employees tested the HIV measurement technique.

If you work somewhere for a while and they give you training in the stuff they do, they're going to want you to keep that confidential and probably want to make claims on anything you develop as a result of what they taught you. You are heavily misrepresenting the word "visitor" to make it sound like he was only there for an office tour or something.

One of many sources quoting David Lewis, one of the Republican politicians who made clear their intent:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/2018/08/2...

“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” said Rep. David Lewis, a Republican member of the North Carolina General Assembly, addressing fellow legislators when they passed the plan in 2016. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

He added: “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

When voters went to the polls that fall, the 10-3 outcome was exactly as Lewis had predicted, even though Republican candidates won just 53 percent of the statewide vote.

And yet you don't take the "freedom" argument to its final conclusion, which is that you must grant Freedom -1. That's the freedom for anyone, anywhere, to run any software on your hardware, at any time and for any purpose.

And this is only half-joking: all access restrictions, even ones as basic as filesystem permissions, impinge on freedom in some fashion. You can work around them, of course, but you can work around Firefox's extension signing (and Apple's app signing, and lots and lots of other systems that people insist are objectively reducing "freedom"). Which means that to be consistent, you either have to be against even those basic access-control mechanisms, or you have to compromise on absolute "freedom" and begin arguing about how difficult or complex a workaround can be before you personally would rule out allowing a system to require it.

A plane is a contiguous set of 65,536 (216) code points. The lowest-numbered plane was originally the only one; now it's simply Plane 0 (officially, the "Basic Multilingual Plane"). "Astral Plane" is a collective term to refer to planes beyond that, of which there are now 16, for a total of 17 planes.

Unicode currently promises to cap at 17 planes because that's the limit of what UTF-16 can encode with surrogate pairs; anything beyond Plane 16 (officially, "Supplementary Private Use Area-B") would require some other scheme to encode in 16-bit units.

Unicode does not use anywhere near the amount of space even those 17 planes represent; you could encode seven full copies of current Unicode in the unassigned and non-reserved space available, and still have room left over (eight full copies if you un-reserve Planes 15 and 16).

If we ever truly needed more than 17 planes, we'd have trouble trying to do UTF-16, but that's a problem with UTF-16, not with Unicode. UTF-8 as currently defined would run into trouble beyond 32 planes, but we'd either abandon it for something else, or bolt on some inelegant hack to extend UTF-8 beyond four bytes.

So other than maintaining compatibility with existing encodings, there is nothing about Unicode's design that forbids tacking on more planes if and as needed. The hard part, as with so many things in programming, was going from "there's only one" to "there's more than one". If we ever needed enough planes to exhaust both UTF-16 and UTF-8.

One very obvious jest is that at the current rate of emoji expansion it may be inevitable to open up the next plane just for emoji.

To put it in perspective, the total set of emoji in Unicode 11.0, which are spread out across multiple blocks in different planes due to historical reasons, add up to less than 2% of the capacity of a single plane, and 0.11% of the available space in a 17-plane Unicode.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=776048

The tl;dr is that MDN is a multilingual site, and supports categorization in a few ways, including by tagging. An example of the bug: the English MDN's CSS reference tagged articles with "CSS Reference". The French MDN's CSS reference tagged them "CSS Référence". Sometimes, the French tag appeared on English articles.

The source of the issue was MySQL's utf8_general_ci collation, which did not see "e" and "é" as distinct, so it was a toss-up as to which tag you'd get back from the database. The solution was to build and install a custom collation to teach MySQL to see accented and unaccented characters as distinct.

Which naturally raises the question of whether they can be manufactured. And, regardless of how you may feel about the ethics of testing that experimentally, László Polgár tested it in order to explore his idea that "geniuses are made, not born". The result of his experiment:

* Oldest daughter Susan (Zsuzsanna) achieved Grandmaster at age 22. Peak rating 2577.

* Middle daughter Sofia (Zsófia) achieved International Master, peak rating 2505.

* Youngest daughter Judit achieved Grandmaster at age 15 years 4 months, at the time youngest person ever to do so. Peak rating 2735, ranked #8 (not "women's #8", worldwide #8).

Between "tanking" (teams that are deliberately bad in order to get better draft picks), massive budget differences (it's not unusual to see large-market teams with payrolls more than double those of small-market teams), and structural issues in the games themselves, parity can be very very difficult to achieve. 538 attempts to use chess-style Elo ratings to track the major sports, and currently they have:

* ~200-point difference between best and worst major-league baseball team

* ~400-point difference between best and worst NFL football team

* ~400-point difference between best and worst NBA basketball team

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpad_Elo

Time pressure is practically where he lives, because of how much time he spends calculating. The idea that he's suddenly going to completely forget how to play when the clock is running low doesn't hold water. Especially when he wasn't facing any immediate threat on the board; the advantage for Black was there, but it was theoretical/positional, and was going to take significant work to convert into a result, or even into lines that would make Caruana have to sweat through the next series of moves. And the engine games keep showing that all of Black's advantage can be thrown away with one or two inaccurate moves even very soon after the draw occurred; Carlsen's well within his rights to decide not to risk that just to try to toy with his opponent.

Starting from the final position of Game 12, the engines have played 18 games to completion against each other, with more to come. 10 draws, 6 wins for Black and 2 for White.

Both of the wins for White picked up the game from the point of the draw with

32. Qa3 Rb8

and continued with White, soon after, aiming to play Nd1 and Nc3 (Stockfish went for those on moves 34 and 35, Ethereal on moves 35 and 37).

This is apparently exactly the line Carlsen said he was worrying about.

The position also seems to present some pretty tricky endgames. Laser, which has a rating 300 points higher than Carlsen's and gets to play with tablebase, managed to lose as Black that way.

(Caruana also suggested he might have tried to get a knight to e6; the engines have drawn a few times starting with that line)

FWIW this is the main thing I like about the App Store rules. There are some sites and services I'll trust with payment information, but there are many, many more I won't. Being able to buy/subscribe to things anyway, with Apple as the trusted intermediary handling the payment, is pretty convenient.

They're running the engines with a 30 minute starting clock plus five-second increment per move.

So far, Ethereal and Stockfish have each managed to win a game as White (Caruana) from the Game 12 position.

Also this site has been running live analysis using Stockfish on 20 CPUs during each game of the championship, and its evaluations frequently have changed with more time to "think":

http://analysis.sesse.net/

Yes, he was in a position that both engines and human grandmasters said was superior, with time pressure. But there's no clear line to force difficult moves for Caruana before the time control kicks in after move 40, and then it's a whole new game; Caruana gets a fresh 50 minutes on the clock and can potentially fight his way to an exhausting draw. Plus there's the risk that any blunder -- and remember this is coming in a crowded, grindy-looking middlegame -- loses the championship.

From that spot, it makes sense for Carlsen to try to go straight to the tiebreak games where he feels he's more strongly favored.

https://www.chess.com/news/view/computer-chess-championship-...

The way it works right now, the reigning champion does nothing until a challenger has earned the right to face him by winning a candidates tournament. Then the winner of the candidates tournament faces the reigning champion in a match for the title. Carlsen, as I understand it, would prefer that the champion take part in a tournament.

The women's championship (also played this month) does feature a tournament. 64 players were seeded, and played single-elimination two-game matches (with rapid games as tiebreakers). The final two players then faced each other in a four-game match (again with rapid games as potential tiebreakers). The final did go to tiebreaks, and was won by defending and now repeat champion Ju Wenjun.

Microsoft did things that actually broke the law. Nobody's yet convinced a court that Apple has done things that broke the law. And Apple is demonstrably not doing the thing Microsoft got in trouble for.

So you're free to argue that in your ideal world, if you made all the laws, Apple would be put out of business. But you're not free to argue that that's what the actual laws in the real world say to do.

If you have an evidence-based argument to make that Apple has a monopoly in the market for mobile operating systems and has illegally used it to try to obtain a monopoly in the market for web browsers, I would be intrigued to hear it.

(in other words, not every bundled web browser is automatically a violation of antitrust law; nor is every attempt to forbid something on iOS automatically a violation)