skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the practical effect of this? We'll have to wait until someone writes a reasonable alternative for these GPUs to be supported in Linux?

Edit: Here's the start of the thread https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2016-Decemb...
Ask HN: Large scale mapping of JavaScript in the wild?
Is there anybody crawling the web for JavaScript files and looking at metrics or patterns in the way that lexicographers might study a corpus of natural language?
Thanks.

I just do the work because it's fun, that's the rewarding part for me. I just like to wander around working on random "mathy" pure and applied problems in a variety of areas...
I'm from Belarus.

Belarus laws and politics had been for a long time a playground for Russia. Kinda "before implementing it for all users in production, let's try it on a smaller audience to see if it works or not."

So this ban is mostly an exercise for Russia, to get some experience.
Load Balancing is Impossible [video]
Google could allow a small group to work on something with use of Google's full software stack, and HR etc, but host it in google cloud (or proxy through google cloud so it looks like it's in google cloud) and don't mention it's from google (and segregate the user data away from google) If it gets traction, you can reveal it's a google project or fold the learnings into appropriate google projects or spin it off (although spin off is more complex if you did build it on top of the usual google stack)

Allow something like ten people years and a reasonable amount of hardware, and when you run out of that, come back for more budget or make revenue.

I haven't worked at google, but from experience at large companies, having the basics set for huge scale helps a lot (and avoids choice paralysis) so you can concentrate on doing the thing you wanted to do.
Hey, good to see you again! You're far too kind :) It's very rewarding to hear that we could make a difference. Best of luck to you as well!
ACP Panels
It's counterintuitive because it is not true.
One issue is just that unless you work for Google (and maybe even if you do) -- you can't know exactly what kind of data structure(s) you are to Google (or any other service provider, large and small). You could be just an IP address, or an IP address and a User-agent or all of the above and then some other crazy stuff, like a browser canvas profile and operating system and age/race/income/sex... no one on the outside of a black box knows for sure exactly how it operates.
Can China’s Smoking Ban Stick?
Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories
That may be true, but is irrelevant.

Mathematics is not patentable either, and there are many "significantly new" innovations there.

The position of whether software should be patentable depends mostly if you think of it like math, or like pharmaceuticals. The former requires mostly just a lot of thinking, and very little money. The latter requires massive quantities of cash, expensive equipment, trials, lawyers, etc.

A large number of software patents don't even require a lot of thinking- the majority of the work goes into writing the patent, rather than the creating the system to be patented.

Short patents on truly new software inventions could be overall a benefit to the software industry. But the crappy ones are unquestionably a significant drag.
Did you hear about the Ubuntu Edge fundraiser?
Ask HN: Why Is the US National Airspace System So Dated?
Does anyone here work with the FAA, ATC, commercial aviation, NextGen, etc.? Everything about the National Airspace System seems dated and wrong. Here's a stream of questions that immediately come to mind that all sort of convey the same thing: Why do we still talk over the radio instead of receiving instructions digitally to accept/change/deny? Why don’t controllers and pilots have the same information? Why aren’t the arrivals/departures at many major airports fully utilized? Why do controllers so frequently step aircraft down instead of letting us reach our ‘top-of-descent’ and utilize more efficient vertical navigation capabilities? Why are new aircraft, with processors from the 80s, considered "advanced"? Why do I get slowed down, then sped up, then slowed down? Why don’t controllers just control the aircraft themselves from the ground since they’re the ones who know what’s happening? Why are so few airlines approved for LPV (and why do we still use ILS)? Why is it true that an airline pilot today could operate in 1970 without missing a beat (the competent ones, at least)? Why does my job still exist? So much more is possible, but nothing seems to change.
Source: Current airline captain.
Business is Fun (Vendel, Goldberg) is part one of hopefully a multipart, incredibly researched, history of the company.

https://www.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Business-Curt-Vendel/dp/098...

The ANTIC podcast also has some absolutely incredible interviews with folks form the era: https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/

"Racing the Beam" is a more technical analysis of some of the early Atari platform development for the VCS/2600. This platform was Atari's cash cow and they failed to really pivot away from it. https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies...

These are probably good starting points.
Indeed. What I'm looking for isn't the tree hash it's the hash of the patch itself. I don't think that's explicit anywhere.
Would you mind sharing some of those advantages of Node, and disadvantages of Elixir/Erlang? It's hard to have a meaningful discussion around vague assertions.
Sucks to be an AMD graphics driver developer, right now.
Giant natural fluctuation models and anthropogenic warming [pdf]
How Selfies Became My Tool for Empathy
Note that there is no shorthand syntax (yet), where you define a partitioned schema in just one line of DDL.

As of now, you still need to create the root partitioned table as one command specifying the partitioning method (list or range), partitioning columns (aka PARTITION BY LIST | RANGE (<columns>)) and then a command for every partition specifying the partition bounds. No triggers or CHECK constraints anymore though. Why that way? Because we then don't have to assume any particular use case, for which to provide a shorthand syntax -- like fixed width/interval range partitions, etc.

That said, having the syntax described at the beginning of the last paragraph in the initial version does not preclude offering a shorthand syntax in later releases, as, and if we figure out that offering some such syntax for more common use cases is useful after all.
For those looking to create their own webpage like this, it looks like it was based on Lucas Bebber's Storytelling Map:

http://tympanus.net/codrops/2015/12/16/animated-map-path-for...
I've looked at the paper [1], but I can't figure out how this is different from backscattered RFID with 802.11 on top. The paper says RFID requires a full-duplex radio while the WiFi chipset is orders of magnitude less expensive. Are they modulating differently or is there some RF magic?

[1] http://passivewifi.cs.washington.edu/files/passive_wifi.pdf
Both of your points are confabulated, which is unfortunate since I agree with your ultimate conclusion (i.e., that this act's intended goal could be accomplished without legislation).

1) Theater audiences consist largely of tourists, at least in New York. They're spending vacation money, but they're no wealthier than the average American on vacation. Taking out the tourist audience, the city subsidizes the theater district via public school trips (I was the recipient of more than one of these) and other public arts programs.

2) Demand doesn't "radically" outstrip supply, at least not for the vast majority of on-Broadway shows. For most, the two are about equal, and prices reflect this ($30-$50 if you buy at TKTS or reasonably in advance). The exception is blockbusters like Hamilton and The Book Of Mormon (if that's still the case) which are, again, boosted largely by tourist sales.
That's a pretty big claim.. Hate to be that person but do you have any sources on that?
That's a pretty smart move.
Hmm, but they said SSL is already enabled if you visit the site with https. Shouldn't redirecting http > https be completely risk free then or am I missing something?
Summary: HALs in the linux kernel are a not acceptable, even large companies are held to some standards.

Well, at least for the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) subsystem.
> This is reflected in Google's financials as a falling 'cost per click' (what Google gets for an ad click).

But what is not known is the cost of a _similar_ click. Since the number of clicks increases dramatically quarter over quarter, it could be that it's the new clicks that are bringing the cost down.
Mostly anything a human can test, a machine can test even if it requires end-to-end UI-automation integration testing. If there's a test that's part of the suite that is worth running every time something changes, it's simply a matter of cost: How much time will automation take, how long will the automation last, what is the cost of maintenance, is that less than the cost of a person doing it manually?

People tend to be bad at forecasting these kinds of costs, its easy for prejudice for or against test automation to cloud one's ability to be impartial in the forecast.
I love the idea of a Renaissance of the Real. I also wonder what effort we should make to retain analog skills that are made obsolete by smartphones and ubiquitous computing (e.g., map reading, planning social events in advance…).
Actually, yes. That's exactly correct. You can probably directly correlate their growth with the rise of widely available broadband internet access for homes in the 90s.
Their current gen glasses do not do any AR - but they've been acquiring / hiring very aggressively in space for a couple of years now. It's pretty transparent what their long term goal is with their glasses.

I think it's actually a really smart approach. MS spent ~2 billion and multiple years of R+D to get the Hololens built. Snapchat's coming at it from another angle, start simple and build up with each successive generation. The fact that they already have people clamoring for something this basic is telling...
I could argue the opposite, that working developers who have an autodidactic bent tend to be attracted to FP, while those who picked computer science because it is a good career learn OOP in school and stick with it.
That's probably step 2 (or 8). The current situation seems like a good step one, though.
incessant questions

You mean like "do you want to apply for a credit card?"?

There's a reason for that. The associate gets $2 for every store credit card and $4 for every bank credit card sign-up. It's a big deal to a kid making $10/hr. But it certainly doesn't help the overall experience for those people who don't want another credit card.
Miami County, KS requires 20 acres for a new house. That is to halt the urban sprawl from Kansas City.
The Chrome distribution deal with Adobe was always Windows-only, as far as I know. So I'm not surprised you're not seeing it on Linux. That said, Adobe is just showing whatever they were paid to show, for whoever the target audience is. With Firefox on Windows as of today it shows checkboxes for some antivirus programs instead of Chrome; I assume McAffee outbid Google here.

With IE11, which does support ActiveX, it shows ... a Chrome download checkbox. And the Google toolbar.
Y Combinator’s COO Qasar Younis Shares Tips for Success
> Want an example where the programmer codes in something other than “antiquated” RPG? How about HTML5, JavaScript, and C#?

With all due respect, Sir -- and I understand I will be in your shoes in 4 decades -- the site you've built, using HTML5, JS, Grails, Groovy and what not I presume - kettlerusa.com - has the look and feel of a 90s website (think the whitehouse.gov * unders Bill & Gore's administration), esp. that ugly green "Free Shipping" button at the bottom right. The site's also not responsive / mobile friendly and gives several "rookie" invalidations, errors when run through common web validators. I didn't even get to performance testing.

So... is there some truth to what Zuckerberg said (and I am no fan of his BTW). Personally I don't think Old(er) people are any less smart than younger people. But I do see time and again that Old(er) people have a hard time (or are not putting effort into) understanding and implementing current tech trends in terms of UI, Usability, best practices etc.

Thoughts?

* EDIT 1: Found the Whitehouse.gov homepage from the 90s. Funny that Whitehouse.gov posted it as a "throwback" but this wouldn't be anything I would be proud of if I was the President in this Web Era lol. => https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/10/23/throwback-thursda...

EDIT 2: Why is everyone down-voting me? Do you all really think the UI is great? And that a mobile-unfriendly site is ok in 2016???

EDIT 3: OP's site kettlerusa.com has crashed now. Shows that it was ill prepared for a traffic surge (from HN). Also implies caching and scaling was not addressed. So how does show that this old programmer has "kept up to date"? Caching is very basic.
The Libreboot C201 from Minifree really ridiculously open source
Ask HN: Do people need this tech to exist?
Background: I've been working on some tech that enables detailed capture of the real world through photogrammetry. This effectively allows for the capture of highly detailed environments that can be explored in VR. I'm trying to determine the people who would most benefit from something like this. I know for a fact that I would definitely pay to put on a VR headset and walk through the Louvre, but I don't know if I'm the norm or an outlier. Are there any other people or fields that need this tech to exist? Is there a use case for this technology that you need to have?
I had a C class in college where we submitted homework with a program on a server. The program would compile the C code, run it with a bunch of inputs, and then report back if it passed (i.e. the output matched the expected output). The output was expected to be in exactly the correct format, so the submit program would helpfully print your output and the expected output so you could fix any formatting issues.

I got about 2 assignments into the class before I realized that I was being a chump. I wrote a C program that simply printed out the expected output, and submitted it. I received a passing grade on the assignment, so I took it further. I wrote a Perl script which would submit "int main(void){return 0;}", read the expected output, generate a C file that printed out that output, and submit it again.

Apparently the TA for the class never checked the submitted assignments and relied entirely on the submit program, so I was uncaught for a few weeks. My downfall was trying to make the Perl script as efficient as possible (I had extra time on my hands because I didn't have to do the C assignments!). I had run my Perl script a few dozen times while optimizing it, and apparently the TA received an email every time an assignment was submitted. He brought it up to the professor and I was called into his office. Luckily he was lenient and let me just redo the assignments :)
I'm not a fan of "cost discipline." It sounds more like stingy, conservative, short-sighted, and backward.

My problem isn't with Google spending tons of money on "far out" things, it's with those "far out" things not actually being far out.

If they were spending billions to develop teleportation, anti-aging (both internally and skin/beauty-wise), intelligence/fluidity increasing drugs, disease cures, etc, then I'd be all about it. Especially if they were making progress, as another problem is setting out to develop teleportation, making no progress after 5 years, then continuing anyway.

There are also nearer-term things to work on like wireless charging, batteries with increased capacity (and/or more efficient/passive energy usage), solar/wind/nuclear power to add variety to energy sources, lower cost Tesla Model S equivalents (rather than the brute force approach being used by Tesla with the Model 3), etc.

There also more relevant education in schools (actual knowledge and skills, rather than an indoctrination with "smile, show up on time, conform, and do what you're told"), streamlining/elimination of politics (government), elimination of middle-management and company politics, ending hunger, getting rid of prejudice and inequality, minimizing crime (especially violent crime), etc.

In the grand scheme of things, they are really doing nothing, going nowhere, and spending endless amounts of money doing it.

Also, there are the crap products they keep releasing. Something needs to be done to put an end to that crappiness.
This announcement actually broke some code of mine today. I have a scheduled AWS Lambda function that downloads the current EC2 Price List every hour to make some real-time cost savings calculations for stopped resources. The addition of the Canada prices to that file made it just a bit too large for the memory assigned to the function, causing a silent "Process exited without completing request" crash. Good times.
This is why the Linux kernel runs and will continue to run the world.

The No men is all that stands between us and the Yes men.

Praise and salutations to the No men, God bless you.
Conveniently, if you started with a Dragon 32/TRS 80 Color keyboard (and presumably some others of that time?), the symbols above number N was ASCII symbol 0x2N: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/PIC_0119...

The standard US QWERTY keyboard does not quite follow this, though it is close (there's some insertions, substitutions ;)).
SteamOS and SteamMachines will be delayed as well.

Nvidia support for Linux is hard to get as well. Now AMD support is also hard to get.

Hardware OEM companies make Windows drivers, and don't seem to care about Linux. This is the same thing that happened to IBM and OS/2 not good third party driver support.

There are open source drivers that work, but are not as fast as the proprietary drivers.

Linux needs better display drivers and for that OpenCL or Vulkan support as well. Windows uses dotnet and DirectX for games.
Hangouts/Skype don't surprise me much. Didn't realize you could use it for torrents.

Personally I'm heavy in the native app camp instead of trying to turn everything into webpages, so I guess that explains why I don't really know what this feature is and haven't been waiting for it.

Thanks
I wonder if you could use this technique to make a completely passive wi-fi device. Ie, no battery or plug of any kind, just using the power of the wifi emitter. I guess it would be similar to passive NFC, but at a longer range and driven by a separate device from the one that does the receiving. Or would the power requirements be too high?

Edit: I just realised that the earlier prototype video from the comments indicates that's the goal, but it's not mentioned in this more recent one. Instead they just talk about higher power efficiency. I wonder if that means they tried it and it wasn't feasible.

Edit 2: Aha, got it. There are three separate projects:

1. Ambient Backscatter (2013): no external power, no base station (uses ambient frequencies like TV), not wifi, low data rate (1Kbps) and short range (<1 metre) [http://abc.cs.washington.edu/]

2. Wi-Fi Backscatter (2014): no external power, base station, kinda wifi (encodes data in the CSI/RSSI metadata and presence/absence of packets), low data rate (1Kbps) and slightly less short range(<3 metres) [http://iotwifi.cs.washington.edu/]

3. Passive Wi-Fi (2016): low external power, base station, actual wifi (802.11b packets), high data rate (11Mbps) and long range (<30 metres) [http://passivewifi.cs.washington.edu/]
I'm curious what the state of the art in rule engines is? I feel this is a neglected topic these days. I'm almost surprised to see new work on the topic.
Dave Airlie's followup is pretty great,

> Here's the thing, we want AMD to join the graphics community not hang out inside the company in silos. We need to enable FreeSync on Linux, go ask the community how would be best to do it, don't shove it inside the driver hidden in a special ioctl. Got some new HDMI features that are secret, talk to other ppl in the same position and work out a plan
for moving forward. At the moment there is no engaging with the Linux
stack because you aren't really using it, as long as you hide behind
the abstraction there won't be much engagement, and neither side
benefits, so why should we merge the code if nobody benefits?

> The platform problem/Windows mindset is scary and makes a lot of decisions for you, open source doesn't have those restrictions, and I don't accept drivers that try and push those development model problems into our codebase.
I wanted to see the criteria that the experiment was going to be evaluated on. I feared that since the metrics for the pro side would be more readily available (like measuring how many fewer flamewars there are or how they quickly get flagged instead of sprawling through the comments) than the "it isn't a good change side" (fewer meaningful discussions or a subtle bias towards one side in an issue), that the experiment would provide all the evidence needed to extend the ban.
I know I am also really sensitive and jumpy around things they perceive as censorship, even for a week.
Here's Paula Gearon's (https://github.com/quoll) talk on Naga at Clojure Conj 2016:

Production Rules on Databases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rRzESy0X2k
I'm excited for the Web Bluetooth feature. Also position:sticky is very welcome...
There are GUI versions of emacs too, some on platforms where they are not expected to respond to Ctrl-Z.
To expand on this--

Imagine you have a website with a payment form on an HTTPS page, but you embed some external analytics script over HTTP. If your visitor's request is MITMed (e.g. they're in a coffee shop or some other insecure WiFi access point, etc), then an attacker can modify the script (that's over HTTP) to send these credit card details to the attacker's server. Once there's a single HTTP resource on the page, HTTPS means a whole lot less, hence the scary warnings.
We find astronomical information very useful in learning about our own part of the universe. Space is home to lots of plasma physics, all planetary geology beyond sample size one, and high energy events we might find it difficult to re-create, like the big bang.

Even if in the end it's just pretty pictures (maybe you think every part of physics potentially relevant to engineers has been discovered), why don't space critics put the same heat on Hollwood? The real question here is why we spend billions on imaginary planets, but I've never heard it asked.
Anyone want to explain this in simple terms for us folk not knee-deep in kernel graphics driver politics?
I wonder why this feedback came just now and not earlier.

It will be time consuming to change now.
That's an interesting take... this is why Linux gaming sucks. I get the pragmatism but we also need to be realistic that they aren't going to maintain a completely separate driver for Linux when the Linux gaming market share is barely a rounding error.
PoWIFI
Google for Chinese developers
Giving you an extra $300/year was never on the table and it's kinda ridiculous you'd call them equivalent.

They're spending $20 a week at wholesale to give 80 engineers ~2 cans a day. Your share would be $12.50/year.
I don't know anything about this topic, but there was a demo/paper at SIGGRAPH 2015 of a light-field HMD. It was a pretty popular booth, for what that's worth: http://www.computationalimaging.org/publications/the-light-f...
Exactly what I'm wondering since they've been working on this for quite some time and asked for feedback a long time ago. How do you sit on this until they are this far along?
Growing up in Alberta, people often referred to Ontario/QC as "out east" and "down east." My brother still does that. And many people there seem unable to make a proper distinction between eastern and central Canada economically or politically too.