skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you have an SSD yet? A good one?

Computers with good SSDs and not too much bloatware (relevant on Windows) do feel faster to me than computers used to be.

I think people can get nostalgic accidentally and overestimate how fast things were in the past. I remember multi-minute loads for games on my Commodore 64. I remember multi-minute Windows 3.1 bootups. I remember watching a JPEG progressively creep in on the early web. I remember watching my school projects in C++ take noticeable time to compile despite what we would now consider their absurdly simple nature. I remember when I was reluctant to click on a 1MB download.

But you do want to avoid having a modern Windows machine on a slow spinning-rust hard drive. Yeow.
Pulse Audio solves the same thing for Linux.
That's my no. 1 request too. Just two days ago I had to reinstall and waste a day because an update messed up my system.

My solution for now is to have TimeShift[0] make regular backups of system files.

[0] https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift
I fail to see how the parent story is relevant to tech at all.

A person with a federal warrant was arrested entering the USA. Why is this hacker news?

If you want to discuss "what might happen" when entering a country, and the entry laws of those countries, I'm game. But again, I don't see how it is tech related.
How Node.js Framework Boosts PayPal’s Performance – Case Study
No, I think your tone is completely inappropriate for HN and is not compatible with a constructive discussion.
Might I suggest, before you begin, looking for what you might create online to see if someone else has beat you to it? Look into DNSCrypt.
Nobody, in any significant numbers, has ever claimed or believed that there were direct manipulations of vote counts. This is a pure strawman. Saying the Russians "hacked the election" is just a sloppy shorthand for the, at this point well-established, attacks on the process that did occur. Nobody is intending it to mean vote-count changes.
Yes, Google can still monitor IP behavior, but you don't leak cookies for instance.
> FYI, yes in a acquisition Uber likely assumed all liabilities, but that would also generally exclude liabilities as a result of criminal acts.

That's not true at all where the act is done in an official capacity and inures to the benefit of the acquired firm. The entire case is basically that Otto was built upon the founder's stolen tech. If Uber purchased and received infringing and stolen property then they are very much on the hook for all applicable damages, including punitive damages for Otto's egregiously bad acts.
It's owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp of "fair and balanced" Fox News fame.
FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

HEADLINE: Dump Mir!!!!!

DESCRIPTION: I know Canonical has put a lot of effort into Mir and at this stage it is probably "too big to fail". But for various reasons my bet is that it will fail. I think this is Canonical repeating Microsoft's Metro mistake. I have a $12K dollar desktop and I don't want an OS optimized for phones !!! I will be able to avoid it but I would rather your engineering effort was better placed.

ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Engineer / Data Scientist
+1 both of these are very much needed by laptop users. Real non-integer scaling would be awesome.
While the nomadic life does sound appealing to me I see it as the ultimate form of instant gratification. You sacrifice all stability and ability to effectively change the world around you in order for some momentary pleasure and as they say in the article they just seem to keep pinning their happiness on future events. It seems to me that pinning your joy on future events is a sure way to accumulate happiness debt (much like tech-debt) that you're effectively unable to pay down.
Yeah. The analogy I'd draw is selling guns is legal. Radical Islamism is legal. A gun store that only advertises on radical Islamist internet fora is at the very least acting recklessly, and thus ought to be held legally responsible for the actions of its customers.
I can't emphasize how annoying bad palm rejection is. I can't have my cursor randomly jumping across the screen and selecting windows that I don't want to type into (always seems to be at the worst time).
It's a Casablanca quote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME
I don't know anything about the particular website he was advertising on, but I could easily see someone in the HN community developing some security software, advertising it via a "Show HN" post, and then being judged for posting it on "Hacker News".
Show HN: Parsenvy – tiny utility for env var parsing in Python with type support
Also, why do they FORCE you to turn over your email in order to get info on the plug in - - or to receive the plug in ? Why not post the plug in and allow mass distribution ?

I suspect these folks are just going to use my email for more of the same as the marketers . . .

I guess I could register a "burner" email that is useless except for Noiszy . . . .
No kidding.
I think fake news is a symptom of humanity's social fabric or contract coming apart.
His intent was to create software to sell at hackforums which also sells pay-per-installs. I doubt there is even a single user on hackforums who bought his software who would use it for legitimate purposes.
This feature comes by default with PulseAudio, maybe Ubuntu doesn't expose it well enough in their audio settings. I think Gnome Settings has it, KDE definitely does.
Just curious, what is missing from the implementations in the other distros you tried? I switched from Ubuntu to openSUSE last year and so far that's the only distribution where i've used snapper + lvm. I think having an implementation like theirs is pretty user friendly (just a personal opinion) or at least a good start. It gives an option to use snapper + btrfs at install time + option to boot into a read only snapshot from grub at boot time.
$ apt-get install purge-old-kernels

The program 'purge-old-kernels' is currently not installed.
You can install it by typing: apt install byobu

"byobu"? packages.debian.org to the rescue...

https://packages.debian.org/jessie/byobu
"Using Byobu, you can quickly create and move between different windows over a single SSH connection or TTY terminal, split each of those windows into multiple panes, monitor dozens of important statistics about your system, detach and reattach to sessions later while your programs continue to run in the background."

Uhm... what?
If cas latency haven't changed for 20 years, and the memory wall in general being a huge pain, does anybody know why didn't some sort of 2.5D memory(even using low-resolution lithography and carriers cheaper than silicon), haven't entered the market ?
Below is the article in a nutshell. Conclusion is not vry satisfying.

"So why do they persist in promoting this education for management, which, according to mounting evidence, produces so much mismanagement?

The answer is unfortunately obvious: with so many of their graduates getting to the “top”, why change? But there is another answer that is also becoming obvious: because at this top, too many of their graduates are corrupting the economy.7"
- Does Unity still uses compiz?

- What about Mir?

(it's been a while since I last used Ubuntu, my view of it may be outdated)
it really is a mess. i connected a 4k xps 15 to FHD monitor, the only way for it to work is via open source nvidia drivers and using xrandr to scale the external monitor and then use other settings to scale everything to FHD. that and some other things made me return the xps and order the new macbook.
I don't think so. It does have immediate feedback when you change something, but you have to either know what each option does, or just play around. And it's only available in gnome-tweak-tool, not in the standard control panels.
I had this same problem. I switched back to nouveau drivers for my Nvidia card, instead of the proprietary drivers, and everything works perfectly. I also seem to be getting better overall performance in day-to-day desktop activities and battery life. I don't really do anything that needs 3d other than the desktop compositor.

When I was using he non-open-source drivers, Ctrl-Alt-F# to change virtual terminals would sometimes help. I would switch to a random virtual terminal and back and sometimes it would be working again.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop.

- HEADLINE: Produce a working Bluetooth stack.

- DESCRIPTION: The [audio] Bluetooth stack is in an embarrassingly malfunctional state, especially after the move to Bluez 5. Based on my tests on multiple machines and devices, even simply connecting a BT headphone requires hacks of the BT stack. Historically, the [audio] BT stack has always been in malfunctional state, regardless of the latest developments.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: developer/sysadmin.
You mean devalue the dev role and pay them less Id bet that to progress to CTO/CEO you will still need a degree.

This is the unspoken down side to the German model if Hans take the vocational track he will be limiting his career progression.
Neanderthal 0.9.0 – Clojure high-performance computing is getting into shape
HelloWorks by HelloSign
I know its popular to hate on Peter Thiel here but I think he's been right about this cohort for a long time, and that its not really surprising. Emphasis mine:

> I think one challenge a lot of the business schools have is they end up attracting students who are very extroverted and have very low conviction, and they put them in this hot house environment for a few years — at the end of which, a large number of people go into whatever was the last trendy thing to do. They’ve done studies at Harvard Business School where they’ve found that the largest cohort always went into the wrong field. So in 1989, they all went to work for Michael Milken, a year or two before he went to jail. They were never interested in Silicon Valley except for 1999, 2000. The last decade their interest was housing and private equity.

> So there is something about the way in which business school is decoupled from anything really substantive that I’d want to rethink.

From this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/10... (but I heard him express this in a talk on Youtube that I can't find, and not in that article.)

There seems to be something that's almost by definition generic about MBA types that's built in to the network of people (paraphrasing Thiel and others, who decides to go to business school, unless they simply have no other ideas and its the "thing to do"?) or the education itself. They are probably still excellent for lots of businesses, but they may be the businesses that Warren buffet calls "a business that's doing so well an idiot could run it." They may not be businesses that need to pivot in any meaningful way.
Anisotropic and vertex Wobble GLSL shader
Seems a nice idea
Not much at first. 30%, perhaps. But as reuse is tweaked, more things are recovered, less refurbishment needed, things can get really cheap.

Ultimately, SpaceX wants to get the cost to orbit for propellant down to about $9/kg. From the current $10,000 to $2000 per kg. For propellant launches on ITS, which will be larger and will have the booster land on the launch cradle and have the upperstage be fully reusable:
http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/mars_presentation.p... (based on figures given on page 36 and 41)

$9/kg is ridiculously cheap ($4/pound). 3 orders of magnitude cheaper than current costs. More general payloads will cost more (due to processing requirements), but that gives you an idea. The idea is you reduce the cost of the launch to about twice the cost of the propellant. The only way that's feasible is rapid reuse and by launching a lot.

Also, ITS will use the cheapest source of energy today: methane. Can also be synthesized from air, water, and sunlight as SpaceX is planning on Mars.

The energy costs of achieving orbit is about the same energy costs as flying around the world, for the same payload. So it's not, in principle, absurdly expensive (relative to current per-person energy usage) just from an energy point of view to fly stuff to orbit.
- FLAVOR: All flavors

- HEADLINE: General polish + "good" defaults for non-technical users.

- DESCRIPTION: Quite a few releases we had lots of new features, however they all shipped with a LOT of bugs, some small, some big - I would really love if once in a while the major focus would be to just polish the defaults to make the experience hassle free for users. Xubuntu shipped with broken color scheme or not working sound, Ubuntu Gnome almost always has some bugs that are a pain. I would love to have a release where all the desktop functionality just works and is polished without me tinkering with things.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Developer/Sysops
The 19 Best Free Project Management Apps
The civil war was not required to remove slavery, it could easily have been removed via the law; which it was. The war was the unfortunate result of the lawful attempts to remove slavery from the country. If the war had not happened, the Southern states would have left the country to form their own with slavery and the remaining US states would have continued making slavery illegal. The war was partly to keep the Union together. But it's a complicated thing that doesn't have just one simplified element to it.
For the R9 390, this[1] is a high-critical bug that has been outstanding for over 18 months. If it gets to 2 years old, I'm throwing it a birthday party.

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91880
The author here. I'll be happy to help you getting started, or answer your questions here.
> REST seems like jumping from that situation to a situation where you have an object hierarchy modelled as a tree and can only perform CRUD. But why?

Because, frankly, most people doing "REST" don't understand REST. While URLs can imply a tree structure, REST does not give URLs any meaning besides resource identifiers; relations are communicated in resource representations not URLs and can be any model you like.

There is a sense in which operations are essentially CRUD-like but, in the database analogy, it's CRUD operations against views with arbitrarily complex definitions, and trigger logic for operations other than reads, not CRUD against base tables.

> As in the article, what if I have operations which only make sense as a combination of CRUDs on different objects?

Then, most likely, you have a resource for the operation, which you create to initiate the operation (or create to configure and have a specified update to trigger.)

> What if my type system doesn't map nicely to a tree?

Then you don't use a tree representation REST doesn't need URLs as anything other thab opaque identifiers and resource representations can communicate any relationship structure you want.

> If the server is to my client side another library, why do I impose CRUD on every operation and pretend that this makes sense?

Well, one, CRUD against resources with unconstrained definitions is part fairly flexible and universal model, so it probably makes sense as long as you don't artificially constrain the model, and second, REST isn't always the right choice anyway. There is nothing wrong with doing RPC or other non-REST things (and it would be better if we could accept that so people could stop feeling obligated to say that the non-REST things they are doing are "REST" and muddying the waters.)
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Server

- HEADLINE: install RAID 1 boot w UEFI

- DESCRIPTION: Installation has gotten more difficult for a simple server since UEFI. Often would like to setup an inexpensive (e.g. Dell/HP) server with SATA and RAID 1 boot. This has become a difficult task.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Sys Admin
FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

HEADLINE: Turnkey virtual GPU dGPU virtualization of Linux and Windows

DESCRIPTION: A turnkey (easy GUI setup) that uses virtual GPU support in driver to partition the GPU into multiple devices (or just two) where one can be shared with a Linux or Windows VM, on Windows this would allow dGPU (almost native DirectX 11 gaming) with only one graphics card (as well as on laptops). This would allow alot of Windows users to switch to Ubuntu as their main OS and only start a VM to use their privacy invading Win desktops to play games. Fedora is discussing something like this.

See this for more info. I realize proper vGPU support at the lower levels is a ways away, but so is 17.10 and 18.04 ;-)

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.1...
Stuio Roof Totem Forest Friends Only $16.99
I think the main problem is that we conflate the political spectrum (what are the responsibilities of the State?) and the epistemological spectrum (how do we determine what is true and not?). The "Western World", for better and worse, is a product of the Enlightenment, and as a result is irreducibly leftist in its epistemology: modern democracy depends on a belief that a citizenry armed with the scientific method and rational discourse can rule themselves without resorting to the authority of a king or a holy book.

The Right Wing (in the US, our Republican Party) is less identifiable by its right-wing policies as it is by its right-wing epistemology: they reject all scientific evidence for climate change, biological and geological history, medicine, etc. For the religious, this manifests itself in the old epistemology that says the Bible is the sole source of all Truth. For the non-religious, this tends to manifest itself as total nihilism, which is expressed in the more heartless strains of Libertarian Objectivism; for these people, might equals right and society is a zero-sum game where the only truth is winning and losing.

And this epistemological divide is the one that is tearing us apart. When you say there's no serious right-leaning counter-weight to (the NYT et al.), what you mean is that there is no serious news outlet that doesn't hold the Enlightenment values. And when you put it in this light, it's an obvious statement, isn't it? Politically speaking, the WSJ and the Economist can very much be considered right of center (leaving aside that the median center has moved right over the last 40 years), but they are still rooted in Enlightenment science and rationalism.

Point is, although the political right wing is currently the main base of the epistemological right wing, it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. And the problem with saying we need more right-wing voices in mainstream media is that there are so few of them who meet the basic epistemological requirements; when they do, they are often rejected by the broader right wing for being too far left!
SHA1 is already broken shit.
Also known as sponsored content.
inb4 it gets removed from Chrome Web Store!
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has an MBA. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has an MBA. AWS CEO Andrew Jassy has an MBA, etc.

It is easy to undervalue marketing, sales, financial and other non-technical skills. There are definitely terrible MBAs, but also amazing ones.
This exists: http://yacy.net/en/index.html
He did say that. He was also the CEO of a company that still sucks at solving these kinds of problems. Guess it's harder than he gave them credit for.
Potentially, if they deliberately sold to criminals with knowledge (or a situation where they should have known) that the weapons would be used for criminal activity (as a primary purpose).

However, this case seems a bit complex (though the article is pretty biased in making its case, but I'll take it at face value). The guy was dumb (my opinion) to sell it on the forum he did, but he did (apparently) make efforts to prevent its use for criminal purposes. But selling on a forum where one of the primary discussion channels is about criminal hacking, it should've been obvious that was a bad place to advertise this tool.
- FLAVOR: All

- HEADLINE: Make systemd optional

- DESCRIPTION: Most likely using Devuan?

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Developer and sysadmin
Have you tried backports? https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports
trigger warning: mean comment ahead.

Nobody cares about your special-snowflake needs. Python 2 should already be dead and we really need to have major GNU/Linux distribution start dropping it as default.

You can always set it up post-installation.
"Alex Jones is an inside job!"
Hehe, As much as that cracks me up and I would actually love for it to be true... I would need solid lines of evidence and multiple sources backing it up to accept that as true. (Which is exactly why infowars has always fell flat with me)
Even less than that for ITS. The tanker version of ITS is supposed to (eventually) achieve about $9/kg to orbit, with $4 of that being the cost of the propellant. Or, about $2 per pound for the propellant (if you want to use barbarous units).
I switched to alpine because Ubuntu docker containers were massive.
Empathize != agree with. That is a modern perversion of the term.
Here's another article summarizing the German breaks of M-209: http://www.jfbouch.fr/crypto/m209/german_break.html

It mentions in passing that details of the breaks were sent over Enigma which the allies were breaking, so they knew that the Germans were breaking M-209.
There is f.lux for Ubuntu. Although maybe not for Unity? I use Gnome.
They really ought to be using Wayland. There are technical reasons for Mir vs X11, but not really any for Mir vs. Wayland other than NIH.
I'm a big fan of a lot of the work NPR does, but I disagree. I think applying this to the general population is a recipe for bias and disaster. Those agencies have their own slew of motivations which differ from others. Consider them as a source, certainly, but no less fallible than others.

If you hold a certain set of opinions then NPR/PBS doesn't "challenge" you much at all. I'm generally a lefty but I started reading libertarian slanted articles and I have to admit they've got some interesting points of view on things that I hadn't considered before - that's the sort of challenge you want. If you want to be challenged, look to the other side of the spectrum.
FLAVOR: Ubuntu Server

HEADLINE: Include a PyPy3.5 package

DESCRIPTION: Ubuntu already has a package for PyPy compatible with CPython 2.7 in the official repositories. However, a CPython 3.5 compatible version was recently released[1]. PyPy is painful to compile on your own if you don’t have enough RAM. Therefore, an official package would be welcome.

[1] https://morepypy.blogspot.com/2017/03/pypy27-and-pypy35-v57-...

ROLE/AFFILIATION: Researcher at a university
Company I worked for had an explicit policy to never hire MBAs. We had people from all walks of life but no MBAs. The reason is owners have worked in a large company under clueless MBAs who were neither good managers nor good engineers, and just repeated the latest corporate-speak buzzwords over and over, while drawing sizable salaries.
CoreOS-like A/B system partitions would be a very useful addition to Ubuntu.
Drug Lab Scandal Could Overturn 23,000 Convictions
Either it feels like something and therefore is believable, or it is rote repetition of cultural mores that once upon a time felt like something, and is in the end not believable. The fate of all systems of knowledge that prize conformist structural adherence over emotional breadth is failure.
> Do you mean sales of the software itself? There's no way that could work.

Loaning a gun is even easier, but it seems regulated too. I've seen a friend verbally say in front of others that he was transferring full ownership a gun when a friend asked to borrow one for the range because that's what the laws of his state required (WA). He then informed his friend that he would certainly appreciate the gun being transferred back in a week but he had no recourse if not.
The default for X is now the libinput driver. It's a miracle. My guess is that even if Canonical does no work in this area, the touchpad support will be much better.

I've been using it for over a year on MBP/Pixel2 and I've literally never once had a problem with palm detection.

Gesture support though is definitely still weak. Even GNOME that has 4-finger workspace switching has no configurability or hot corners...
http://www.yacy.net/en/