skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author appears to suffer from nostalgia bias, longing for turn of the century progressivism to reign in his old corporate foe. This same well of centralized thinking gave a brave new world eugenics, prohibition, and industrial nationalism. Antitrust is indeed an important emergency power of the government, but its utility is most often the self-corrction of errors caused by the state itself.

If you want to target monopolies in this modern age, go after companies like Comcast that arise out of state induced monoploy as a matter of necessity but go unregulated beyond that. The only thing Amazon is guilty of is decreasing costs of living for millions. It is no more at fault for liss of jobs in bygone industries as Ford was for layoffs in the horse and buggy industry.

The authors's argument essentially amounts to the Corporations Being All Corporationy.
Yes. We should definitely require everyone to use the One True Way! Because that has always worked so well in the past!

[P.S. You also fail to explain why not just use Microsoft for the One True Way rather than a LISP machine. Microsoft is all about making their tools work together with other Microsoft tools so that everyone should do things the Microsoft Way!]
Pigshell – Unix the Web
I have Comcast residential and went for 19 days without internet service in August. Took ~10 calls and 5 cancelled service rep trips (by them), before it got fixed.
You seem to be discussing net human effects and cherry picking a particularly positive example. I'm discussing the immediate effects of automation on the lives of the workers formerly employed in the automated jobs.
I tend to agree with you on dating method accuracy vs the likelihood of a 14,000 year period of activity. Such a long period of activity seems like a stretch.

Regarding cultural evolution. There seems to be a historical trend of accelerating evolution. Projected 10s of thousands of years back in time, this means that 1,000 years of technological evolution produced very little change. Prehistoric artifacts that survive are a small fraction of those made but those we have lots of (mainly stone tools) do follow an accelerating evolution path. Going back to cro magnum and older subspecies, we find 100,000s of years where technology remains unchanged. Big stone axes manufactured in the same places with the same methods. The Oldowan industry of ancient hominins existed, often using the same quarries for hundreds of thousands of years.

Also, we have cave painting sites in Australia with thousands of years of artwork where the tradition of cave painting survived into modern times. Some ancient sites even recorded the arrival for colonialists.

Ancient human history is strange. I agree on every point but… I think it's also good to keep an open mind and not allow our modern ideas of how human societies change, especially the pace of change colour our conclusions too much.
If you're doing RAID, you should have ECC. All hardware RAID controllers have ECC cache, and if you're doing software RAID, you should have ECC system RAM. But this is just common sense, I guess, since it's useless to write data to redundant storage if it's already been bit-flipped in RAM.
Hard not to invoke Betteridge's law of headlines over this one...
Agreed. I'd also be very surprised if Snapsave was routing user traffic through their servers. Apps like 6snap connect directly to Snapchat and everything works fine... so storing images on their own servers shouldn't be necessary.
What should having a master's degree in computer science indicate about somebody's ability to swap out a power supply? I'm curious.
I have no experience with TWC, but moved from Cox to Comcast territory about 4 years ago and would put the quality of their service at about equal. Customer service is no comparison however. Cox wins that by a wide margin.
when did command line builds of free software that enable one to " ... be 10x or even 100x more productive than peers who don't know how to set up those tools." become too tedious and esoteric for computer science students to master without hand holding?
More in this comment by the author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436716
That explains why NASA (and other agencies) always seem to have so many issues with unit conversions. It's all just Measurement Bullshitery that they shouldn't have to deal with! /s
>the development of unix is something I'd be interested in reading more about

http://www.levenez.com/unix/ has a good amount of info and links on the history of Unix and the people who worked on it. I came across the site a while ago and browsed it some. Interesting stuff, some of it at least. Recursively traversing the links should give even more.
Everybody's knowledge breaks down if you dig deep enough. You can for example ask how to produce the metal for the wiring of that power supply and from which minerals and ores. You don't need to know this since this isn't computer science and other people provide the materials for you. So the issue boils down to two questions. A philosophical one and a practical one.

Does understanding of the power supply belong to computer science or to some other discipline, like electrical engineering?

Do you need to swap your power supply on your own or can you rely on other people offering this as a service? Apple's move to prevent users from replacing batteries in iPhones offers an interesting perspective here.
Dear Professor,

Computing might help solving your problem. [1]

[1]https://www.virtualbox.org/
I disagree completely. Amazon is successful through legal means. What do you want to do? Government punishing them for being too successful? As long as there isn't regulation that prohibits market entrants --a big reason for monopolies in the late 19th and early 20th century -- I don't see exactly what someone would suggest to do. The free market is a cumulation of mutually beneficial exchanges-- its a volunteer economy. Amazon's not forcing anyone to do anything. Publisher's do business with Amazon because it benefits them. They could easily stick with Barnes and Noble. Capitalism is by no means perfect but it's the best way to distribute capital. It's the only economic system that's brought masses of people out of poverty. For someone to say government should step in and set pricings!? Force Amazon to breakup?! Government knows better than anyone else? They know the market better than the participants? Who are these people in this all-knowing government? I'd like to meet them.

What industry does Amazon have monopolized anyway? 41% on new books? cool. their cheaper prices on books benefit all of americans more than it hurts the handful of publishers. Fact is monopolies are defined by if they set higher prices than would-be in a perfect competition industry. As long as prices are low -- it signals they have competition-- so don't come at me talking about how big of a monopoly they are.
The “fake cell tower” story was PR for a cell phone company
> Clearly this researcher, in his role as mentor, has identified a skill gap that's hindering his students.

This is a well known pre-course prep step, part of a bigger to do list for all teachers to make sure the tools you suggest to the students are bundled to be setup in an easy way for your target audience.
It was not the purpose of the blog post. Anyway, you mentioned a couple of different things here. First, there are a few companies that offer production level support. SoftNAS is one. For full disclosure, my 2014 tax return will include consulting fees earned from fixing bugs for SoftNAS. It is in use at various large companies, including Netflix and Boeing:

http://www.softnas.com/

Another is PogoStor, which advertises that the hardware that they sell has been certified by Nexenta for use with ZFS:

http://www.pogostorage.com/products/nexenta/overview/whycert...

They also have their own Linux distribution based on ZoL, for which I assume that they offer commercial support:

http://www.pogostorage.com/products/pogostor/pogostor-overvi...

As for certification, it is not clear if you mean hardware certification or system administrator certification. I am not aware of any filesystems that have system administrator certifications. As for hardware certifications, ZFS is designed for use with commodity hardware. It probably does not make sense to try to certify it for the full range of hardware it supports (although a subset is certified by Nexenta). Specific hardware guidelines are available on the official Open ZFS wiki:

http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Hardware
Can you describe what can't be detected without a LIDAR scanner and without the Tesla's onboard ultrasound sensors?
The bad thing here is that it sounds like these are graduate students, not undergrads. Grad students should understand how to wrangle the command line (if not, how did they get through undergrad?).
Can someone with technical background explain me how does this language compare to Rust?

The syntax looks way easier to me (I'm familiar with ruby) than Rust, but are there any use cases where Ceylon targets over Rust and vice-versa?

EDIT: NM, the one is for systems programming (Rust) the other one is for high-level OOP (web-based apps, gui, etc.)
posts like this are why 90% of students coming out of these university's can't pass simple programming assessments.
Chrome 37+ already had the necessary DRM extentions, but it only worked with a recent version of the NSS library. It was possible to play HTML5 video on Netflix in Linux since then, but you needed to fake your user agent to say you were on Windows.

The reason it works now is that Ubuntu 14.04 (the latest LTS version) has updated to the necessary version of NSS, so Netflix will serve HTML5 video to the standard Chrome user agent on Ubuntu. Netflix just didn't allow it before because the LTS version didn't support it - you had to manually update the NSS library outside of the package manager to make it work. Netflix just didn't want to flip the switch to allow it until it would work on the standard packages on the LTS version.

Source from a Netflix post on the Ubuntu mailing list - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2014-...

It seems to work on any Linux distro with the necessary Chrome and NSS versions now without any user agent altering - I'm able to watch Netflix on Arch Linux now with the standard user agent.
Good for you for saying so! I'm always "impressed" by folks who immediately dump on FREE software that doesn't meet their exact needs.
Well, yes and no. If you want to look at something very small, you have to learn how to use a microscope. It's not that hard to learn how to use a simple microscope, and you can make adjustments by thinking about the physical principles, which are universal. And if a certain type of microscope isn't suitable, you can always change or someone can design a better one.

The *nix command line is not based on physical law. There is no mathematical or physical reason that human-computer action has to be through an underpowered, user hostile design that requires lots of unnecessary memorization. People use it because everyone does. You can come up with a better design, but you'll still have to use the old design if you want to interact with anyone else.

Edit:
By "underpowered", I mean that passing byte streams and parsing them is less powerful than passing objects. And this is made worse by the fact that different commands have different output syntaxes.
BitTorrent Sync has functionality for generating "encrypted secrets" using the developer API. It is possible to deliver a secret key to a peer which only allows for that peer to access encrypted versions of the folder content.
Even for personal use if you're near people, in a national park or "near" an airport you're going to have trouble.
Yes, but with voice data it's ok if the system gets it wrong occasionally. Worst-case scenario is the user gets annoyed and tries again (or gives up and does something else).

In a driving situation, the worst-case scenario is everybody dies.
Difference between Computer Science class and Computer Programming class?
So considering the OP is an "Assistant Professor of Computer Science University of Rochester" please refine your analogy whether his target audience falls closer to become the cab driver or the mechanic?

Edit: quoted below OP's case:

>> Write a piece of prototype computer software that demonstrates the feasibility of a novel idea."

>> Write a piece of prototype computer software that collects, processes, and analyzes data to produce novel insights about some topic"
I don't know Ceylon, but because it targets JVM/JS VMs, it's not suitable as a systems programming language - which Rust is especially useful for.
"There is a huge disconnect between the elegant high-level ideas discussed on the whiteboard (while presumably sipping cappuccinos) and the grimy, grungy, terrible command-line bullshittery required to set up a computing environment suitable for implementing those ideas in code."

Welcome to real life outside academia, where you need to step down from the ivory tower and actually get your hands dirty. Incidentally we never had automatic configuration and deployment as easy as now with all the recent tools.
It's time to call time on nerd culture
The analogue in CS would be to give the students a pre-configured environment if you want to deep dive into a specific topic before teaching how to set things up. If the students are using a known OS, all you need to distribute is a shell script. Otherwise give 'em a Vagrantfile or something.

That being said, you'll want your students to understand their tools sooner rather than later.
He's thinking of Grover's algorithm.

And yet, if it could be implemented in a fast way, it would bring AES-128 into the range of trivial breakability.
I'm waiting for the part where you explain how this is something the IRS is supposed to resolve or care about.
I've been on both sides of the fence, I remember being a frustrated student who couldn't get libraries, tools, etc. to work, and now I have some years of experience and know the ropes of working in a Linux environment. My best advice for people struggling is that if something feels difficult and painful, you're probably doing it wrong and should look for an easier way.

I remember I would bang my head against a wall trying to get Linux/Unix software to compile in Windows using cygwin, mingw, etc. and it was just a complete nightmare. However running a Linux virtual machine on Windows is drop dead easy--you can have one up in seconds with something like Vagrant. Much, much easier to get stuff working in a real Linux environment.

Once you're in a modern Linux environment if you're compiling software yourself, again you're probably doing it wrong. Check out your package manager and there's probably a compiled version already available. Is it too old? Look for someone else who's compiled it, or an experimental package source and try that next. Still can't find it? Ok download the source and give it a shot. If you have to do anything more than a typical './configure && make && sudo make install' step back and see if maybe you're doing something wrong.
Facility with the Unix command line is not in fact all that valuable for fundamental CS research.
So here's my theory. Whenever we have the experience of a field of useful knowledge being "bullshittery," it's because we ourselves learned it in an ad-hoc and unsystematic way. There's no question that the C language, say, is complex and full of arcana, both syntactic and from the library. But most people go about learning it with the expectation that this is so. We're often accompanied by friends and guides. Learning a language we usually have the sense that there's a fairly clear beginning, middle, and (just maybe) end--or at least saturation point, where our mastery is sufficient to do useful work--to our quest.

The (UNIX?) command line feels like bullshittery not, I suggest, because it's intrinsically more arcane and arbitrary than many languages and standard libraries, but because of our procedure of learning. People tend to discover it. We tend to learn each part (command, option) in response to a specific need. And this both compartmentalizes our knowledge (we know what "ls -la" does but not what "ls -a" does) and makes us quick forgetters (on the idea that what we learn for a specific purpose we tend not to retain for long).

Therefore, don't blame the command line. Blame the educational process. And if you want to experience the command line without frustration--not as "bullshittery" but as simply a tool you understand and have mastered--the solution is to do what the author seems to allude to, which is to take a more systematic and deliberate approach to learning the thing.
I wonder if a similar expansion and increase in intelligence is also occurring with opossums. I had several near my house in Houston, and even had one house invader that I found in my kitchen. After carefully moving it into a cat carrier, I helped the opossum find a new home about a mile away at the bayou.
I wish I had really understood this 20 years ago. And I wasn't even in a startup. I just had things I wanted to work on that took time. Good things, useful things, but I put time/energy/thought into them that should have been spent on my kids.
I think there is really a market for this sort of thing now or in the near future. Most people now have a computer in their pocket capable of doing all their personal computing, but incapable of doing most of their professional computing. So there's a big opening for purpose-built professional systems, and in that arena, I think Smalltalk style system malleability could be a big win.
I wasn't a vehement opponent of W3C implementing DRM, but I'll put my two cents in;

I don't mind if private companies implement DRM in their own products. I do mind DRM being standardized, meaning every vendor has to implement it in order to be complaint with the standard.

Ubuntu != linux, it is just a distro. Similarly Chrome is not the browser standard, it's only an implementation.

If this story was actually "Linux adds DRM to kernel for netflix and other media companies" I think you would see a huge reaction.
> Given that, calling it a "risk" is, I think, a bit of an unfair characterization. A "source of occasional discomfort", would be fairer.

What I meant by "risk" wasn't technical difficulties, but a contingency plan if the young language doesn't take off. Even though Kotlin and Ceylon are very similar, it's easier to change back to Java from Kotlin than it is from Ceylon (and I'd argue that it's easier to gradually introduce Kotlin into a project -- a class here and a class there -- than Ceylon).

Still, both Ceylon and Kotlin are a nice, gradual evolution of "blue-collar" programming languages, and I hope one or both gain widespread adoption.
> Take REPLs, SQL prompts, etc.

That's still "command-line bullshitery" according to him though. Because it's an 'arcane interface' that "hasn't changed since the 60's". When his student wonders why he is using a text-based interface, he doesn't have an answer. Since he doesn't know, then obviously there is no good reason, so It's All Bullshit(tm) is the answer.
Yeah the western countries seemed to kind of highball the prices.

Average expense based on Statistics Canada puts the expenditure at 7,000 per annum, which works out to $130 a week, which is about on par with me and my wife's expenditure and we're almost dead on median income.

If you start throwing in fast food that price would really spike, but for the average family in an average week you're not going to see a doubling of food expenditure based on fast food. We might spend $25 in a week on fast food.
Why doesn't he set up a config management server, like puppet or chef or ansible, and have students get set up that way? Or provision some VMs? Or provide some Docker containers?

I have tweeted him thusly.
I was just looking for a citation to Clay Shirky's thought about organizations' first priority being the survival of the organization, and on the "Here Comes Everybody" wiki page, some... guy was referenced as "Nobel-prize winning whatever whatsisname": would his ideas about groups have been cited if he hadn't won that prize? And would I've been looking up something Shirky said if he we're'nt Professor of New York at New Media University?

Joy is in being, not having; where one was over some honor flung: to've been at Woodstock in sixty-nine, Manhattan in oh-one, the net/web in $year, off the reef at Barbados, the shoulder of Orion... Awards and titles seem the recluse of rats. Those who got instead of go'd.
I have the opposite problem. I hate GUI bullshittery. With the command-line I can string together multiple tools with options to work the way I need them to.

If you throw in a tool with nothing but a fancy GUI, I can't simply pipe data through it. I have to find buttons to click, search for hidden menus, resize windows, etc. What a waste of time! Give me a man page any day!

He says Excel is superior because it makes charts easier? Guy is in the wrong field. Learn some octave or matlab.
Personally, I am sick and tired of all this hammer bullshittery. I just want to build houses. Now I have to hold this nail in one hand and hit it with the heavy thing??!! WTF is this all about? What if I hit my thumb? It's bullshit is what it is. I mean, come on. This is stone age technology. You want me to start with a hammer and nails? I want the damn nail gun now! I don't care if I don't know what to do with it. I'm an entitled brat.

More seriously, every real program is going to interact with a file system in some way at some point. You should learn how to use that before you nail gun yourself in the thumb. Unfortunately that means learning some command line "bullshittery."
Introduction to rate limiting with Redis [Part 1]
Not to mention that even if one replaces "pipe" with "|", the resulting string would return a syntax error on the shell? When the hell would you pipe the command "git" to anything (not "git log", not "git diff", but "git")?
From (quickly) reading the article, it seems like "drudgery" would be a much more apropos word choice. Though given that he doesn't appear to describe how to do so, maybe not.

Where I agree with him is that there can be a tendency to make command line usage into something of a fetish; computer science should not be a command line competition. On the other hand, making effective use of command line tools will eventually help almost anyone doing computer scienciey things immensely.

In summary (and possibly what the article was trying to say), students shouldn't feel embarrassed or intimidated by a complex series of command line invocations; eventually they may know what they all mean, but they're just a tool.
ZEISS VR One
Nude Snapchat images put online by hackers