Your key flaw, and HN's key flaw -- and to be fair, one shared by a lot of other people! -- is the pursuit of civility as an end in itself. Horrendously evil people can accomplish their goals while publicly conducting themselves with perfect civility, as history has taught us again and again. And HN's stance is that that's OK, because all that really matters is they're civil about it.
This isn't the first time you've been told this. It's not going to be the last time you'll be told this. And I know telling you this isn't going to change anything, but I have to try anyway. We know now beyond any doubt (and a legion of Cassandras were telling us long ago) just how easily social-media sites (and yes, HN is one) can turn into instruments and enablers of radicalization despite openly enforcing "civility".
You know what the solution is. You know, on some level, that civility isn't an end in itself; you know that the actual ends to which people use civility as a means matter. You know some of those ends are very, very bad. And you know how to recognize the people doing it. You also hold in your hand the power to do something about it.
Abandon the civility-at-any-cost policy. Stop being an enabler for the stuff I've been responding to in this thread. Take it from an "experienced user" who's had to learn this the hard way when moderating elsewhere. Or, in keeping with the season, treat this as a visitation by a spirit who warns you of the chain you're winding about yourself, link by link, and change it while you still can.
Generally an "undisputed champion" title would require a level of effort that the AlphaZero team apparently isn't interested in. They like to run matches between AlphaZero and Stockfish in private under their own controlled conditions, and publish the results. The rest of the computer chess world likes to run tournaments in full public view, and there are several entities which run tournaments between engines that way which can be used to gauge the relative strength of the engines.
What will be interesting is to see the effect on Leela (https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lczero), which is public and open-source, takes part in public tournaments, and is built -- as much as possible, based on what's been disclosed in the papers -- to use the same approach as AlphaZero.
I don't know for certain, but what I would guess is that strptime() without a day-of-week indicator is ambiguous.
strptime() produces a datetime object, which consists of year, month, day, hour, minute, second, microsecond, time zone, fold. If you do something like "2008-12" with format "%Y-%m", strptime() will fill in the remaining arguments with day=1 and all time components set to zero, so what you get is datetime(year=2018, month=12, day=1, hour=0, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0).
That works because it's unambiguous -- there aren't multiple possible numbering schemes for the day of the month in the strptime() formatting options.
But there are multiple possible numbering schemes for the day of the week, which means a year + week with no day-of-week format code is ambiguous. Worse, the two options don't even share a start: one of them begins numbering at 0 (Sunday) and the other at 1 (Monday).
So I'd guess the insistence on a day-of-week format code is to force you to indicate which day-numbering scheme you want, in order to avoid the possible ambiguity.
(and you might think it's reasonable to assume if someone uses ISO year + ISO week number, they'd also want ISO day-of-week number, but we're talking about dates and times here, and "reasonable" left the building a long time ago)
It could just as easily be argued that, instead of "flipping", or swinging back and forth like a pendulum, the consistent trend of the past 400 years or so is toward increased tolerance of everything except intolerance.
There are people trying to reverse that trend, of course, but the volume at which they're currently screaming that they've been silenced is, I think, a pretty good indicator of the trouble they're having trying to pull it off.
I like to stand up on it and yell out my views. Sometimes I let my friends use it that way, too.
Some guy comes along and would like to use my soapbox to yell out his views. But I don't like him and I don't agree with his views.
Would you like the government to come force me at gunpoint to let him use my soapbox?
What you're arguing, basically, is that once my soapbox gets popular enough that lots of people want to use it, you do want the government to force me, at gunpoint, to let them use it even when I find their views repugnant.
Or, basically, what this person said, and they said it better and in fewer words:
I'm always a bit surprised by people who want to bring up historical analogies without admitting that the US has a long history of censorship; if anything, the type of hard-line free-speech stance assumed by many internet forum posters is an incredibly recent development in American law. And both public (enforced by law) and private (enforced by industry associations or the like) censorship regimes continue to exist in the US today.
And just to clarify a bit: the specific restriction Python imposes is that if a strptime() format string contains one of %G (ISO year) or %V (ISO week number), it must also contain the other one, and must contain a day-of-week format code (%A, %a, %u, or %w).
Examples:
'%G/%m' is illegal; it contains %G without %V, and does not contain a weekday format code. Attempting to call strptime() with this format raises ValueError.
'%V/%u' is illegal; it contains a weekday format, but has %V without %G. Raises ValueError.
'%G/%V' is illegal; it contains both %G and %V, but does not contain a weekday format code. Raises ValueError.
'%G/%V/%u' is legal; it contains both %G and %V, and contains a weekday format code.
'%G/%V/%w' is legal; it contains %G and %V and a weekday format code. It's a bad idea, though, because %w numbers days 0-6 starting Sunday, while ISO (%u) numbers them 1-7 starting Monday.
If you need to work with ISO week date formats for some reason, you should stick to one of these two format strings:
'%G-W%V-%u'
or
%GW%V%u
The date of this comment (December 26, 2018) comes out as either '2018-W52-3' or '2018W523' using those format strings.
From the perspective of Unicode, no. What you're looking for here is what Unicode calls "equivalence", and it comes in two variations: canonical equivalence and compatibility equivalence.
For example, "é" can be written as either U+00E9 LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE, or as the sequence U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E followed by U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT. These two options have canonical equivalence; what this means is that Unicode treats them as two ways of specifying exactly the same thing.
Now, consider "½". That's U+00BD VULGAR FRACTION ONE HALF. Generally you can replace that with the sequence U+0031 DIGIT ONE, U+002F SOLIDUS, U+0032 DIGIT TWO ("1/2"). This is not quite the same thing; most places where someone writes "½" can safely be replaced by "1/2", but not necessarily all, and it definitely doesn't work in reverse. This is compatibility equivalence, and under compatibility equivalence "½" maps to "1/2".
So to get to your actual question: U+017F LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S has compatibility equivalence with U+0073 LATIN SMALL LETTER S. But U+03C2 GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA does not have any type of equivalence with U+03C3 GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA.
If you follow the general recommendations for things like comparing Unicode identifiers, you'll apply normalization to form NFKC (which decomposes by canonical equivalence, then recomposes by compatibility equivalence); this will turn a "ſ" into a "s". It will never turn a "ς" into a "σ".
A lot of languages take their date/time formatting from C strftime (and quite a few simply use light wrappers around actual strftime), where the format code for ISO year is %G.
And FWIW, Python's (strftime-based) datetime library won't let you mix ISO and non-ISO format codes. Trying to use %G with %m, for example, raises an exception, as does trying to use %Y with %V (%V is the ISO week number format code).
Only if you churn -- signing up for a card, redeeming the signup bonus, then signing up for another, and so on.
And card issuers know about churning. The highest-value cards also have limits to how often you can churn. Chase's "5/24" rule (if you've opened 5 or more new credit cards in the past 24 months, anywhere, Chase will automatically decline you on any application for one of their cards) is one of the more well-known anti-churning tactics, but not the only one. You have to immerse yourself in the churning/manufactured spending world to really get much more than one or two free tickets from card signup bonuses.
On the other hand, if you already travel enough to reach at least mid-tier status with one airline, it's often worth it to do so; that's when you start getting into large RDM bonus territory. Combine with the airline's branded card and you can easily generate enough mileage to take a nice vacation every year.
What the parent was talking about is usually called "same-day change" (abbreviated "SDC"), and is in fact only available free of charge to passengers who have a minimum status level within the frequent-flyer program.
Another related perk is the "guaranteed seat" -- the ability to purchase a ticket within 24 hours of the flight, and receive a guarantee that you will have a seat and will not be "bumped" due to overbooking (they'll bump someone else off the flight instead, if it comes to that). Which tends to kick in at the higher status tiers; back in my days of flying too much, I only used that perk once, and the last-minute ticket was expensive, but it was worth it to know I would get where I was going.
The value of loyalty programs, for the customer, tends to inversely correlate to the state of the economy.
In very broad terms: tourism is a larger part of the travel market than business travel. When the economy is bad, fewer people travel for pleasure, and those who do don't fly as much. So loyalty programs ramp up the rewards for the people who are still flying, in order to hang onto them. Then when the economy recovers and tourism picks up again, there's less need to desperately keep customers by any means available, so loyalty programs start getting slashed.
On top of that, at all times the big US airlines tend to hand out redeemable-only miles like candy (elite-qualifying miles are the ones that are hard to accumulate¹), which makes them a heavily inflationary currency and requires jacking up the redemption rates every so often to soften the blow of all those outstanding miles.
--
¹ Airlines in the US issue two types of miles. Redeemable miles, usually abbreviated "RDM" in the frequent-flyer forums, do what the name implies: you can redeem them instead of using cash to purchase a ticket. They offer no other perks. The other type is the "elite-qualifying mile" ("EQM"), which can be redeemed for a ticket but also contributes toward qualifying for some level of "elite" frequent-flyer status with the airline. Elite status is what gets you free upgrades and free checked bags and all the other perks.
Elite-qualifying miles, with very few exceptions, can only be earned by actually purchasing a ticket, getting on the plane and flying (sometimes this process is also referred to as "BIS" -- "Butt-In-Seat" -- miles). All the "50,000 miles for signing up!" type offers you see with credit cards are denominated in redeemable miles, for example. If you know your way around the loyalty programs, you can generate hundreds of thousands of redeemable miles per year without too much effort. Achieving 100k elite-qualifying miles in a year, however, is a significant feat and typically qualifies you to the highest public status tier (the big three US airlines each have at least one unpublished tier above that, offered by invitation only to customers perceived as extremely high-value).
Some of his short stories are particularly interesting. "The Roads Must Roll", for example, though written before Ayn Rand started churning out books, anticipates and attempts to brutally tear apart the ideas of "Atlas Shrugged".
If people who have issue with military are given someone else to do, you can't simultaneously claim they have to be willing to die.
Without committing to any position on the book itself (it's certainly an interesting Rorschach test), it is at least clearly stated that there are more than enough dangerous jobs available for non-combatant service to still involve risk of death. In the book this is presented as a mathematical balancing: power over the lives of others is granted only after demonstrating willingness to risk your life for others. You can find plenty of fault with that principle, but the book is at least pretty consistent on requiring it.
On the other hand, there is no substantive content in metaphysics (at least as far as ontology goes) if the statements do not pick out real entities.
You've just committed the fallacy of begging the question -- you assumed the truth of mathematical realism in this line, and arguably in a couple others.
If mathematical realism is false, various parts of your argument start to crumble.
This isn't the first time you've been told this. It's not going to be the last time you'll be told this. And I know telling you this isn't going to change anything, but I have to try anyway. We know now beyond any doubt (and a legion of Cassandras were telling us long ago) just how easily social-media sites (and yes, HN is one) can turn into instruments and enablers of radicalization despite openly enforcing "civility".
You know what the solution is. You know, on some level, that civility isn't an end in itself; you know that the actual ends to which people use civility as a means matter. You know some of those ends are very, very bad. And you know how to recognize the people doing it. You also hold in your hand the power to do something about it.
Abandon the civility-at-any-cost policy. Stop being an enabler for the stuff I've been responding to in this thread. Take it from an "experienced user" who's had to learn this the hard way when moderating elsewhere. Or, in keeping with the season, treat this as a visitation by a spirit who warns you of the chain you're winding about yourself, link by link, and change it while you still can.