Well, it's not a completely outlandish scenario that the value of `init` might come from a variable that is sometimes at the start of the string and sometimes not, and a newcomer might expect `^` to only match when it is.
Don't get me wrong, it's certainly far more useful as it is, I'm glad it works this way.
There's an additional caveat: if you use the optional "init" parameter to specify an offset into the string to start matching, the ^ anchor will match at that offset, which may or may not be what you expect.
Although those functions operate on "binary strings", not Uint8Arrays, and there is no especially clean way that vanilla JS exposes to convert between the two that I am aware of.
From their own benchmarks it seems more like bzip3 is geared towards a different compression/speed trade-off than bzip2, rather than an unambiguous all-around improvement. Am I misreading it?
Went to http://www.sonnyjs.org/ (latest Chrome, Windows 7) - there doesn't seem to be any way to scroll the left-hand menu (it cuts off at "StorageManager" sub-heading for me at default zoom level, I can see there are more by zooming out though) and of the ones I can see, the menu items "render" and "kill" don't seem to do anything.
But if you'd like to search Verbatim and also restrict your results to the most recent month/year/etc., even though these are separate dropdowns under Search Tools, you're out of luck. Google seemingly just won't allow this.
As Jason Scott (@textfiles) notes on Twitter, this will be something of a first: with all the old content coming back, Archive Team/archive.org "literally provided a backup of a site while it swapped owners."
I had to check but yeah, that's true, the ECMA spec even says explicitly in its intro: "JSON is agnostic about numbers", they are "only a sequence of digits".
(Unrelated observation from looking at the spec again: there's no standard/recommended decoding behaviour if an object has several members with the same key.)
But that also uses double precision floating point number representation and UTF-8 for strings, so the only benefit (according to the arguments given in the OP) seems to be text vs. binary-based.
Since the author seems to have a problem with text-based formats in general, here's a counterpoint by Mike Pall on the LuaJIT mailing list [1]:
"On a tangent: IMHO most binary serialization formats like BSON, MessagePack or Protocol Buffers are misdesigns. They add lots of complications to save a couple of bytes. But that does not translate into a substantial improvement of the parsing speed compared to a heavily tuned parser for a much simpler text-based format."
Well, if a security service decides it needs to blackmail someone, they're hardly going to send them a letter on official letterhead. In this case I imagine they'd pretend to be something like a small hacking group, infiltrating individual webcams arbitrarily/opportunistically. Something like that.
Well, sure, but it's not like this message was rushed out within minutes of anything in particular. They seemed quite content to have a completely blank site for hours on end before putting this up.
And it doesn't seem to have been proofread very well. "In the event of [something that has already happened]..."? I don't consider myself a particularly picky person, but come on, you could at least make the effort at a time like this.
Well, at least he's not completely disappeared, I suppose. Otherwise there doesn't appear to be much to actually discuss here. Maybe the fact that he would tell the press that a statement "should" be ready "soon-ish", which seems like total brazen disinterest in taking control of the narrative here, at a time when his company needs it the most.
"I'd rather not touch anything which involves patents at all."
Unfortunately, that's not something you can reasonably expect, ever. Mike Pall made a statement about the IP of LuaJIT [1], and made the point that while his own contributions are freely donated to the public domain...
"I cannot guarantee it to be free of third-party IP however. In fact nobody can. Writing software has become a minefield and any moderately complex piece of software is probably (unknowingly to the author) encumbered by hundreds of dubious patents."
Don't get me wrong, it's certainly far more useful as it is, I'm glad it works this way.