tl;dr: Unicode codepoints don't have a 1-to-1 relationship with characters that are actually displayed. This has always been the case (due to zero-width characters, accent modifiers that go after another character, Hangul etc.) but has recently got complicated by the use of ZWJ (zero-width joiner) to make emojis out of combinations of other emojis, modifiers for skin colour, and variation selectors. There is also stuff like flag being made out of two characters, e.g. flag_D + flag_E = German flag.
Your language's length function is probably just returning the number of unicode codepoints in the string. You need to a function that computes the number of 'extended grapheme clusters' if you want to get actually displayed characters. And if that function is out of date, it might not handle ZWJ and variation selectors properly, and still give you a value of 2 instead of 1. Make sure your libraries are up to date.
Also, if you are writing a command line tool, you need to use a library to work out how many 'columns' a string will occupy for stuff like word wrapping, truncation etc. Chinese and Japanese characters take up two columns, many characters take up 0 columns, and all the above (emoji crap) can also affect the column count.
In short the Unicode standard has gotten pretty confusing and messy!
This was fascinating, thanks. Made me think about why I used 99 as my max -- I think it's because back in the SNES days, all the RPGs used 99 as a limit.
Is it really 50% though since more than one ball is falling through at a time? Wouldn't a steel ball hitting another steel ball affect it's possible path?
Seeing things for what they really are...isn’t that our greatest desire and our greatest fear? I love the voice in this fiction, and the astonishing fact that it is provided to the world in a newspaper. Speculative fiction is where truth can be approached safely. Keep it going.
As I understand it, the "Do 10,000 hours" idea is about achieving expertise. It doesn't mean that you had to have to started specializing and achieving that expertise when you were 3 years old. So I think that the premise of the article, though not necessarily that of the book itself, is a straw-dog argument.
The arrogance of nurses and physicians in constantly waking patients up, completely unaware and uncaring of the health detriment that comes with loss of sleep, is inexcusable. While some people can go back to sleep after being awakened, there are many of us who have real difficulty getting back to sleep, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all.
Lynx was widely used at my university when I started there in 1993. I remember vaguely not liking Mosaic and other early inline graphic browsers, not because they weren't revolutionary, but because they were too slow on our relatively slow networks and phone connections.
Privacy is not gone. We could set up laws and enforce them. We already do this for medical data (HIPAA). There's no reason we can't do this for other categories of personal data, such as what you buy and where you go. Europe does this with its GDPR. It can be done, but we need a government that doesn't prioritize interests of corporation-people over those of human people.
Where can I find a tutorial, examples, or any concrete details?