skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That doesn't really follow. Just because they can do something worse doesn't mean they can just get away with doing something less bad.

What if Ubuntu uploaded some phrases from your local documents to show you better results or ads? Is that acceptable? What about uploading entire documents, keystrokes, Google search terms etc. to better target ads?

You trust them enough to run their entire OS right? What if it was Microsoft that did this to improve Bing instead of Ubuntu? Why are so many people running Windows if they don't trust Microsoft already?
I haven't really had any problems with iOS 6 on my iPhone 4S. Then again, I live in a big city within the United States, so the map change was an adjustment rather than a disaster. But I can understand the negative feedback.

This is also the first time (in recent history) that hardcore Apple fans are finding themselves responding to critics by saying, "Yes, that's a valid point, but..." rather than "No, you're wrong because..." Chink in the armor.
IIRC it involves money. And the Wintel manufacturers have a lot of history in distinguishing on price, so they'll gladly gunk things up with stickers in exchange for some bucks off of the components.
"These are not ads because they are not paid placement, they are straightforward Amazon search results for your search."

both ads and affiliate links make money when you click on them and buy something (nobody would buy ads if they didn't result in sales in one way or another)

The precise details of how they are paid for is almost irrelevant. I appreciate affiliate links in search results like this are much better than paid placement ads, but to say they're totally different things is untrue.

If Amazon didn't offer an affiliate scheme, would Ubuntu still be so keen to integrate their search results in the same way?
> Haskell is a relatively recent language

Not really, it's older than both Ruby and Python. Compared to Prolog and C, yes I suppose so.
Honestly, and this applies to all updates on any system: wait a month. Developers will move over their apps. Any major bugs will be found and shook out. Stackoverflow/blogs will be populated with answers on "how do I do $thing_that_has_changed"?

And B, upgrade a non-essential machine first. The only thing you gain by upgrading willy-nilly is Internet e-peen points, and after a while you realize those aren't worth losing a day or week or month or year's worth of work (hello rsync -E) to being the first mouse. Yes, this isn't as exciting. As for me, I like my systems very very boring.
Well, what features do people here think are worth the upgrade?

I for one like the new privacy settings.

Passbook could be really interesting, but I think it'll be well over a year, before people in my country consider taking advantage of it.
Thx for the hint :) The task originated from a task I had to do at university in Algorithms class as an introduction to GAs and I liked the simplicity of it.
I did know about the _ being ignored in blocks. What I didn't know it that

do |variable, (array, elements)|

is valid syntax. That's so neat :)
Rather than address concerns, straight up snark on Twitter. https://mobile.twitter.com/ubuntu/tweets
sounds like famous last words:

"You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters

-8<------

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

-8<------------------

"Twenty minutes compared to never, that's a lot. Our customer, the (U.S.) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), would get very upset (if) somebody looks in their database," Ellison said.

-8<----------------------

Note, that S3 and EC2 have all the right certifications too.
What might those be? Honest question. My inexperience is probably showing, but I have a hard time picturing what the middle ground might look like.
>It seems to me that the FLOSS community is facing M$ 2.0. But then, hey, "please don’t feed the trolls."

I like how he was dismissing the concerns as FUD. I wish he just said it was about money, since it hard to employ 500 people to work on Ubuntu, instead of making it sound like Ubuntu is trying to enhance the user experience by forcing Amazon searches on people.
Agreed, I am more confident with Amazon S3 as opposed to an undisclosed private server.

I like that the instructions guided you through creating a secured tar file.

I like the idea of Tar backups, but no offense to you, I just don't trust the reliability. You can't offer a resilient backup service entirely free, it just doesn't work. Storage costs money, and developers know that better than anyone else.

That being said, the actual code looks pretty simple.

Think you're on the right track here. Don't think I would pay for the service though.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you...

...than u rule da web.
> Someone needs to stop trying to arrange their life around their tech and try it the other way around.

I work on my laptop on my commute on the train. This saves me two hours every day and allows me to live in a beautiful place.

Someone does indeed needs to stop trying to arrange their life around their tech and try it the other way around, Mr. IT Manager For a High Tech Company with a ridiculously giant phone, a netbook, a laptop and a PC.
I'm not saying that it being your main language is bad, it's just the syntax is absolutely terrible to read and understand for those of us on C-style languages. If the point was to teach others, the vast majority of your audience is not going to be reading coffeescript and learning much.
The problem with code quality is that there's so much AND-ing that most people give up on understanding this massively difficult problem that is as much social and industrial as it is technical.

One of the first things you learn about systems is that parallel dependencies (OR-gates) are better than serial dependencies (AND-gates). The first has redundancy, the second has multiple single points of failure. That's also true with regard to how people manage their careers. Naive people will "yes, sir" and put their eggs into one basket. More savvy people network across the company so that if things go bad where they are, they have options.

To have code quality, you need people who are good at writing code AND reasonable system designs AND competent understanding of the relevant data structures AND a culture (of the company or project) that values and protects code quality. All of these are relatively uncommon, the result being that quality code is damn rare.
I read this headline with the narrator's voice from "Dr. Strangelove" (who had a similar line).

"Each B-52 can deliver a nuclear bombload of 50 megatons, equal to 16 times the total explosive force of all the bombs and shells used by all the armies in World War Two."
> not ads because they are not paid placements

> it pays us to make your Amazon journey get off to a faster start

Pays how then? Indeed, this needs to be an opt-in feature. But then, as slick as Ubuntu can make it, one has to use Unity for this correct? So those who opt to use a superior (for them) DE should be unaffected?

Is Mark trying to kill Unity then?
There are plenty of Finder enhancements and replacements. This is one of the more popular: http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/
"This has to be the only man-made destruction that can bee seen with the naked eye from space."

No, you can see Los Angeles from space.
I knew a guy who bought a flat-rate take-every-train-for-free ticket (ca 4000$ in Germany) instead of renting an office. Not my idea of the perfect working place, but it worked for him.
This is my thought exactly.
Entity Disambiguation in Google Auto-complete
He might well have slipped freudian style there, or perhaps doesn't actually know what Ubuntu does? I'm not up to speed as to whether Mark is a coder or a business man only.
Thank you! I appreciate you pointing out this substantive and fundamental error in my post. I am so glad that you are engaged with the important aspects of the subject at hand instead of dragging down the discussion through petty, mindless pedantry on matters of little to no consequence.
In many other situations that foster CYA cultures, the people doing the evaluating have as much to lose (might lose my job, lose a bonus, etc).

Student/teacher situations are somewhat unique in that students don't choose to be there, and will usually be gone in 1 year, and definitely in a few years. Students have far less to lose in this situation. That may make some of the be more harsh, but it likely (based on the article) will just make more of them honest.

I can't be honest with my boss because he might make life a living hell or fire me. I can certainly be honest with a teacher in a school who I'll never see again in my life.
10 people learn about techniques A, B, and C who didn't before. 10 other people start thinking in terms of metrics N1 and N2 who weren't before. We learn and improve collectively. I think that is a pretty amazing thing about the internet and boards like this.

That's not to say that some things don't get passed around a lot, but that's generally because they're worthwhile enough to make sure that everyone gets a look.
"tarbackup was made just for fun, tarbackup uses a private server" excelent selling points for a backup service.
There is gvim for OSX. But personally I prefer vim inside terminator or terminal. That was before I switched to Arch Linux after 12 years of using mac.
My 3GS works identically on v5 and v6. No performance or battery life degradation, no new lags. My friends with 4 and 4S tell that battery life actually improved, especially for 4S.
Neither of us use jailbreaks of any kind.

PS: and as for iPad 2 I'm not sure about battery life, I rarely discharge it from 100 to 0 in one session.
My iPhone 4 feels faster (no benchmarks, maybe it's just the reboot) with iOS6, and I like the shared photo streams. Battery life seems to be largely the same.
Lots of folks here rightly bring up how this compares to a smartphone. I think this shows how brutal being in the supercomputer biz is.
I did, and I'm glad. The maps thing is unfortunate, but I'm sure it will get better. In the mean time you can still use maps.google.com and I'm sure Google will release their own app some day.

Bits of the system feel faster, but I can say that Music got a massive speed improvement. I have a playlist of over 5k songs that I like to listen to shuffled. On iOS 5.1, opening that playlist for the first time would take two or three seconds and hitting the "Shuffle all" button at the top of the list to start playing would take take another few seconds.

In iOS 6, they're both extremely fast. Combine that with the ability to use iCloud tabs and I'm quite happy.
"...OSX has a lot of small advantages over Windows."

OSX is Unix. OSX has a TON of small and large advantages over Windows.
Then why, and please answer this, is Y Combinator funding teamd without an idea?
One of the big tricks here is not to be religious about any technique. Pick what fits best given the information that you've got for the situation that you find yourself in and don't be afraid to change the mix over time as the situation changes or you find yourself in the possession of new knowledge that is inconsistent with your past views on the state of affairs.

If you blindly adhere to some method or other then you're going to find out exactly what the limitations are so you are going to have to be flexible and you're going to have to mix-and-match as time goes by.

As an example, 'agile' comes up here with some regularity. It's a great principle but it's not a religious thing. Feel free to adopt some but not all of agile to come out ahead. Adopt all of agile in a religious fashion and you'll come out a loser.
I agree, but of course they are quick to disavow any responsibility, saying only the people who decide to throw stones are to blame.

Even worse than the live stream was the radio DJ who was encouraging people to go to the 'party' (he has since apologized).

This relates a bit to the problem of copycat crimes and the reporting of suicides causing an increase in suicides. Publicity increases the problem, but it's hard to get all the media to agree voluntarily on not giving it too much attention.

I wonder how this problem should be solved. In an ideal world you could have a system as in science with independent peer review, to do fact checking and preventing hypes. But of course such a system would be much too slow and you would have lots of people complaining it's not free press.
Same here. Part of the joy for me is the insanity that comes on a brew day. At one point I was brewing about twice a month and seriously considered setting up my own automation system. Now I brew less frequently (maybe 4-6 times a year) and its become more enjoyable to just gave the semi-organized chaos on an early weekend morning. Plus I usually give most of my beer away and my friends enjoy the free, decen beer

I know I'll probably never be able to recreat most beers I make now, but who cares. There are so many styles, ingredients, and wacky concepts out there that I never brew the same thing twice. Plus, when I get that magical batch every so I often it usually wins me some new brew toys at the local competitions.

The one thing I would like to automate is fermentation temperature, but it's been difficult to convince the wife that I need another fridge next to the kegerator.

RDWHAHB
If you don't mind expanding a little, I'd be interested to know why they're not suited to combinatorial optimization, and what they are in fact more suited to?
I've seen this is numerous areas.

Think about business analysis... Let's say you're analyzing the best way to support Marketing at a consumer products company like Colgate. If you start with fancy windows, or the latest technology, you won't help the business nearly as much as if you think through the data needs of the business first, and then worry about presentation later. The data model outlasts the presentation software.

Consider doing a webpage. It's much better to think about what you want to show (the HTML) first, and worry about style (CSS) and scripting (pick your tool) after.

This isn't to say coding isn't important too. You need programming skills to get what you need in the end. It's that data is the foundation. A poor data model reflects either an overly complex or unthought business model.
The 5 things you should know to avoid reading unuseful articles
In all code examples you can press the down arrow to view the horrible (c-style) Javascript source.

The javascript seems to be mainly horrible because of the coffeescript code being object oriented and its lack of a more powerful looping construct.
I'll keep it free by not requiring payment! :) I've already put $2.5K+ into the box just for fun. I don't expect to recover any costs; I'm just providing a service for people. Even if nobody actually needs to restore their data, at least they could if they wanted to.

There are no guarantees, but I have a 20Mb/5Mb internet connection that's just waiting to get some more use. The system is set up with 7+ TB of storage that'd I'd love for you to fill up, and I can afford putting more hard drives in when it gets to that point. http://www.piqd.com/tarbackup_server.png

This really is just a hobby thing for now. :) The code is already posted. https://github.com/nanch/tarbackup
Thank you. Yes, I do plan on testing everything. In fact, this post was a test.
Show HN: Landing page for my startup
Apparently, the Cray T90 in the 32-processor configuration had 360GBps of shared memory bandwidth - this is still many times above a shared memory configuration that you can get on the desktop today. Of course, supercomputers have largely moved on from shared memory systems to clusters, and have larger aggregate bandwidth - but shared memory still has its uses. Just a point for all the comparisons to smartphones and what not.

EDIT: just to expand on this a bit, this means that there are workloads that these old-school supercomputers will run much faster than a modern high-end desktop. This particularly applies to workloads which have a lot of shared memory access at random locations - a very difficult case for the modern systems, which depend on high cache hit rates. Also, the GFLOPS ratings of these supercomputer processors are in many ways more real than the ratings of commodity processors, which depend on the pipelines being filled in very specific ways. So no, you can't replace this system (at least the 32-processor version) with a smartphone or even a desktop. Which is not to say it would be cost-effective at 39 million of 1996 dollars.
Very good article. I think the leadup lends to a profound conclusion - all this work reaching perfection, and laptops may cease to exist in a few years.
Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does
khem, Eiffel Tower, you say? You mean, in Paris? I'm pretty sure that Paris has its infrastructure better prepared to handle riots than Haren. The things people mention around here -- like, say, redirecting huge crowds -- require actual urban architecture that's prepared for it.

Also, a proportional "party" in Paris would be two million people. Have fun controlling that.
Thank you. And hey, you didn't buy the popcorn from me. :)
I hope to post about 3 times a week.
> Why would anyone download Ubuntu avec crap when Ubuntu sans crap will be available via BitTorrent within hrs after release?

Because, even if they do things like this, I'd trust an official image more than some file off Bittorrent. Of course, someone could start (another) fork, but getting momentum and name recognition takes time.
It's not the fact that they are competing with Uber, it's how. If your way of dealing with a competing business is to pass laws that shut that business down to preserve a monopolistic system, instead of competing on price and quality of service, you are going to "look like the bad guys" no matter what. How would what the city and taxi drivers are doing look any better if they had done it a year ago? How could they have competed in a more reasonable way if they have started sooner?
I think just like alecdibble, you're missing the point. sudonim isn't commenting on the ethics or legality of Uber's strategy, but putting him/herself in the Uber CEO's shoes and imagining the stress associated with executing on a strategy that depends on pissing powerful people off.

Again, it's a brilliant strategy, but might be a stressful experience if you're on Uber's side of the table.
I love it. That feeling of being lost is a big driver for me.
We have just deployed first version of our online survey software. We think we have built some great features (more coming soon).

I realize there is still a lot of rough places there, but we're working hard to improve the site and make the landing page as clear as possible.

All suggestions and opinions welcome.
The music lens searches thru your music library. When the files containing the music are outside of the library, they are treated as files, not as songs. Is it really so strange?
any concrete examples you can point to?
That's not just trust in them, it's partly trust in the community that if they shipped a malicious browser, say, someone would notice and cry foul.

Offering source that doesn't match the binaries doesn't stop someone monitoring their own network traffic. And if you recompile the binaries with the same settings, the hashes should match.
We could have said the same thing about search engines. Banner ads are never going to pay the costs for all that traffic and all the needed engineers...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0521663504

functional data structures - how to bend your brain in a functional world - nearly twenty years old. Still have to take a run up to read it
The first result when I googled "donate ubuntu" was this link: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved/donate

It's not super hard to do. If we all gave them $20 for each new version (something they truly deserve) they would not be in dire straits.
Completely agree - code quality depends on code review and the belief you should not foist rubbish on others - and that is almost always down to culture and comms
I think you must be quite surprised at the responses you're getting to your offer of a free gift. But some things are serious enough that them being free is a serious red flag.

In other words, I've you had presented this as a commercial offering in stead of as a hobby and just for fun you would have given a better first impression, one that proved that you had thought through the problem before embarking on solving it.

HN has been a pretty strong critic of the way tarsnap is being run (specifically from a marketing point of view), the collective view is not that it is too expensive but rather that it is not yet expensive enough and that it needs to appeal more to non-techies.

You've solved none of the problems that tarsnap already solved and then on top of that you have added a whole pile of new ones. So I think that even though I applaud your generosity and your general approach that this is not going to go very far. Using 'tar' means you're targeting developers, most other people will have never even heard of tar other than that black sticky stuff. Developers know the value of their data better than anybody else does (or at least, they should) and they will evaluate a backup service based on that value.
You make some great points here, thanks for the feedback. The code for the server scripts is posted on git if you have any suggestions on the security end. http://www.github.com/nanch/tarbackup/

- how long will it be around: for the foreseeable future

- how I plan to stay alive in the long run: I don't see why the service would need to be shut down.
Idea for StartUp Weekend Pgh- app that lets you make an inventory of your stuff
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Would you use an app that lets you quickly create an inventory of your stuff? Why or why not? What would you inventory - follow @myInvenStory on Twitter for more.
My initial reaction to non-local search results in the Dash by default was one of dismay, but after reading this post by Shuttleworth, I've decided to reserve judgment until Canonical has worked out all the kinks. The source of conflict, I believe, is that Canonical is trying to serve three distinct market segments which will react very differently to the new feature:

* Enterprise customers deploying hundreds or thousands of desktops. They will love this feature, because it will allow them to customize which external and internal online sources employees will be able to search, and then they will be able to track all employee searches.

* Regular people -- that is, the kind of people who don't even know about HN. These people will also love non-local search in the Dash. They already search for everything on Google, buy everything through Amazon, and readily hand over all their intimate, personal information to FaceBook... without ever giving their own privacy a second thought.

* Power users who're aware of the privacy issues involved. Virtually everyone in this market segment, including me, feels strongly that non-local search should be offered only as an opt-in feature, if at all.

Viewed in this light, Canonical's decision to implement non-local search can at least be understood: they're trying to make their customers happy, but they've unintentionally pissed off the smallest of the three market segments above: power users. (Sorry for the harsh language; I can think of no better way to convey how a lot of Ubuntu power users feel about this.) Alas, power users may be the smallest of the three market segments above, but they have disproportionate influence over the other two. Disregarding the concerns of power users may not be a good idea in the long run.

In retrospect, Canonical could have -- indeed, should have -- handled the announcement of this feature much better. There was really no announcement; the news was just 'dumped' on the community on a third-party blog. Is this really how Canonical wants to treat power users?
Patented Dreams