skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds like a gap in the curriculum that could be filled by grad students. I'm not in CS, but I know that the bioinformatics students have organized a course that covers some basics of the unix command line tools, probably because data conversion is a big part of most projects.

There's also "Best practices for scientific computing" (http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.0530) that covers some of the same ground, and physics departments usually have a scientific computing course as well.

Also, if it's really a one-off use of something, the department IT person could probably do it for you.
Can anyone expound further on the practical applications of quantum computing? In my limited understanding, I think the following are definitely candidates (presented in no particular order), but I'm sure there are others:

1. Shor's algorithm could expose all encryption algorithms that are based on integer factorization.

2. Quantum simulation could open new avenues of research into how our universe operates at the quantum level. This could lead to advancements in materials science, for example.

3. Quantum computing could open new avenues of research into the P versus NP problem.

4. Quantum computing could open the door to the possibility of instantaneous communication via an understanding of action at a distance / quantum entanglement.

Edit: Thanks for all of the great responses, clarifications and links to further reading.
When was the last time you used a Windows PC? Windows 8 boots and shows you the login screen in under 10 seconds.
Why is it isometric when you are using voxels? I see the lighting is accurate, so why the limitation?
Some CAD programs do this. You could execute a command with fully defined parameters to make something happen, or maybe you'd execute the command and enter the parameters by selecting things in the GUI when prompted. It is a very powerful way to work, but the learning curve is often steep.
Thanks. You didn't have any programming experience before starting with the Stanford course? If yes then that's pretty impressive. I understand, to some extent, the frustration around getting stuck and not having any guidance. Do you think the job market for iOS developers is still pretty hot or has stagnated now?
Ah sorry about that seems to be a screw up on the responsive design. Still working out the bugs on mobile and tablets. Give it a try on your laptop! :)
It's a list of languages that I work in professionally, am studying for school, or have tried to teach myself - and I admit to the ones i'm still not terribly familiar with. I've at least written something in each of them, but I suppose your definition of 'knowledge' might be more strict?
What makes voxels better or worse than polygons for this kind of game and art style?
The Unix System: Making Computers More Productive (1982) [video]
Likely because student A's research requires tools X, Y, and Z, while student B's research requires X, L, and M.
It is a style choice mostly. :) I am fan of old isometric games like Ultima (which was really diametric), and Fallout. Also, simplest to store tilesets when there is no perspective projection - this means they can be rendered once to a larger bitmap for better performance, and that can be scrolled around on its own (versus redrawing thousands of chunks every frame)
Are you going to be releasing the engine and a game? Or just one? I may have missed that. But it looks truly amazing.
I've been a manager working for telco companies so I know a bit about it. Usually the backlog is a good metric but it works from when you have already sold the product.
Usually to assess what happens before the sales team is asked to assess the probability of closing the deal and discount the deal size by that probability. An increase of the scope (and of the total value) or of the probability to close the deal represents your metric.
It is not very scientific but could be made pretty accurate. E.g: you know the price of your product and how much you are willing to give a discount in order to close the deal. Also, even if negotiation, especially with big companies, could be unpredictable, it is usually done in steps and each steps closer means an higher chance of success. A possible sequence of steps is:
- RFI received.
- RFI answered.
- Q&A and first meeting
- Follows Up
- RFP received
- RFP answered
- First round of Q&A/meetings
- Short Listed
- Second round of Q&A/meetings
- Product demo
- Final negotiation (usually price and conditions)
This is the process for RFI, there's a different one (and a little bit more complex) for "cold calls" that probably is more applicable to startups. Obviously some steps are optional and the names could changes but this is how it works.
Just a final note, though. If you are a startup in B2B avoid, at the beginning at least, big corporation as client if you can. They have a huge negotiation power, they will drive down your price like crazy and being your biggest client they will use their force to ask you a lot of extra work than the one negotiated. You will end up loosing a lot of money on the deal and also you will have little ability to follows other deals. Yes, they are useful to qualify for other clients and if you lock them in they could be quite profitable, but unless you have deep pocket they will crash your company.
Agreed, the visuals are just fantastic. Kind of clashes with my memories of the last Voxel game I played, one of these terribad Delta Force games.
I just had a glance about the functionality, but for my understanding, this is the best idea right behind ifttt. Pipelining all the web's things with well designed interfaces on a shell. Even if the product itself would be unstable, alone the idea is great enough for a gold-medal. Keep it up!
I met with one of the Coin founders and he had something really interesting to say on this topic. If apple-pay is successful it will disintermediate the banks from the money process/transaction. They are clearly not wanting this to happen and so are happy with things like plstc and coin.
Told you we could do better! Seriously you just made my day. I'll use this from now on.
Thanks, yes - once the source goes out, I'm hoping people will do all sorts of crazy stuff with it. I will hire whoever is the best fit as well, within limitations of whatever my budget is. :)
Demographic descriptions for every zip code
A Device Could Detect Dozens of Cancers with a Single Blood Test
Similarly, no amount of escaping would protect you from Shellshock.

P.S. Doesn't execlp() require a NULL at the end of the parameter list?
Both - initially the engine source will be put out to help boost the community and mods around the game - a game is being built so that relevant features are added to the engine. Kind of dogfooding my own engine I guess. :)
#4 shouldn't be possible according to the No-Communication Theorem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
I just found out about XLSB.. if really saves me so much time / space, I might just start using it for all large spreadsheets..
I think they should put a 10-20 year waiting limit on the Peace price. Give history some time to see what actually happened. Not to denigrate Malala, she sounds like an amazing young women. But I don't see that she has actually accomplished anything yet. Maybe in 20 years the quality of life and education for women in Islamic countries will have gone up notably, and she will have been identified as the catalyst for that. Then she will definitely deserve the prize.

But right now it sounds like feel-good wishful thinking.

I think that giving the prize to the people who contributed the most for peace in 1994 or earlier would give us some perspective, some confirmation that what they actually did worked and led to a better, more peaceful world.
Quantum Machine Learning would be drastically sped up, as many linear operations could be done in log(N): http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0411

A quantum machine learning computer could make scientific advances simply by processing large datasets at rate dramatically faster than humans and/or current machine learning systems.
While I can't speak to many specific vulnerabilities, I do know that Apple issues software updates for their routers.

More importantly, they provide their own router management utility (Mac/Windows only), which everyone will have installed when they set up their router. It notifies you of new firmware releases and prompts you to install them. Yes, you could do something similar on an admin panel at 192.168.1.1, but nobody's every going to check it. As much as I loved my WRT54GL and its various 3rd party firmwares, I think Apple's approach is better for general use.

Their most recent release was in April 2014, IIRC in response to Heartbleed. http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1708
With 1 or 2 qubits you wouldn't even be able to compute 2 + 2 because storing 4 in binary requires 3 bits. 100 qubits is also not particularly useful, not because they aren't fast but because most of the interesting stuff simply doesn't fit. RSA keys are thousands of bits long, for example.

You need enough qubits to store the problem, and the working state of the algorithm you're using, and the overhead introduced by error correcting codes, and the overhead from your gates not being ideal, and so on. Austin Fowler gave a talk a few months ago where he goes through the overheads in a particular problem (finding molecular ground state energies) and ends up optimistically requiring tens of millions of qubits [1].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbFoXT73xVQ&feature=youtu.be...
>> It seems like that's maybe actually the position you're taking

That's definitely part of it. I'm all for free-as-in-libre software, but the fact is very few people are willing to bet their entire business on free-as-in-gratis software, and that's understandable. When we attack companies who contribute heavily to free software because they do not contribute exclusively to free software, we're harming the free software movement as much as they are.

As a side note, I agree we need to come up with better ways to stop consumers from thinking of DRM as inevitable. Like most people on HN, I'm sure, I'm often asked for help with technical things - I find it has a big impact on people (albeit one at a time) when I explain how the vendor of the product makes it difficult for me to help them or for them to help themselves, and how they should consider vendors who place freedom above profit.
You're right though. Even MS is starting to realize the lack of power in their GUI-centric designers. I will say that, in trying to catch up, theyre way out of practice in buildin powerful/customizable command like tools (see SQLMetal and t4 for starters)
> Most white people are not privileged, because most people are not privileged.

This is a misrepresentation of what white privilege means. It means that all things equal being white gives you an unearned advantage in (western) society. The same applies to gender-privilege, cis-privilege, wealth-privilege, and so on. Our society would be better if we wouldn't give or deny people opportunities based on those attributes.

All white people have white privilege, but a white person can obviously still be less privileged than a person of color. You can argue that "most white people are not privileged" because on an absolute privilege scale most white people aren't all doing so great, but that still semantic nonsense for the reason I give above. Nobody makes the ridiculous assertion that being white automatically makes your life awesome, so to use white privilege like that is a straw man. To put it simply: being white and poor in Appalachia sucks, but being a poor minority in Appalachia sucks worse. Therefore white privilege.
A quantum computer isn't really much like a super-powered classical computer. There are certain specific things it's amazingly good at (most notably, factorizing large integers), some other things it's quite good at (e.g., some kinds of search operation), and lots of things for which no one knows how to make quantum computers any faster than classical ones.

So, if you have a quantum computer, you're probably going to want to use it for breaking RSA or similar cryptography by factorizing large numbers.

There are (ordinary, non-quantum) algorithms for factorizing large-ish numbers. They work pretty well for numbers of modest size. But they don't scale well as the numbers get very large. Something like exp(log(n)^1/3 log(log(n))^2/3) to factorize a number near to n. Or, in terms of the number of bits, something like exp(b^1/3 log(b)^2/3).

So this works fine for numbers up to, let's say, 200 bits on a single machine or 1000 bits for a team with a substantial network. (Note: all numbers here are kinda made up but of the right order of magnitude.)

With a quantum computer, you can factorize a b-bit number with something like 2b qubits, b^3 quantum gates, and a runtime that scales more manageably with b.

So there's not much point in using a quantum computer until the number of qubits it has gets large enough to use for factorizing numbers bigger than you can do on your PC. Which means somewhere on the order of 100 qubits. As the number goes up, the advantage of the quantum computer over the classical computer increases. The transition from "slower than your PC" to "faster than any classical computer that will ever be built" takes place over a fairly small range of qubit-count.

Down with much smaller numbers of qubits, though, the quantum computer can maybe manage to find the factors of, say, 15. Which is, shall we say, quite a lot less than the computer on your desktop can do.
Yes, it displays only one message, the last message of the conversation.
I would disagree as well. I read the story of two young co-founders managing & learning through their failures of applying to YC & eventually getting thru, made them stronger, and building some solid foundations for working again together in the future. When the going gets tough...
Ah Delta Force, Commanche, Novalogic...the birthplace of my interest in voxels. :)
Consider that a computer science professor beginning a research program with students is roughly equivalent to a software development manager, just recently promoted from a development role.
One neat trick is "storing bandwidth".

http://strilanc.com/quantum/2014/05/03/Storing-Bandwidth-wit...
How the open-source community should respond to Adobe pulling Linux support
That price sounds like you got screwed or are not getting offers similar to other parts of the Bay Area.

I moved here last year as well and signed up for a promo that got me 50/7, their Blast service, for ~$45/mo with the intro rate. It went up to ~$70-80+ and I talked them down to just under $70.

Then they recently decided to double my bandwidth for the same price and now I regularly get 100/12 for their Blast service. I'm in Mountain View and know someone in SF with a similar package. I JUST have internet, none of the other crap.

Their service is what you would expect, and while I fully expect prices to go up on average if this finishes going through, I have to say that I was shocked at what I got for my money here compared to say, Chicago, where there are a few larger ISPs in competition.
Thanks! The map on the frontend side makes use of a nifty library called Leaflet, as well as Mapbox and OpenStreetMaps. On the backend side there's a bunch of python going on but that's part of the secret sauce. :)
Got it. So you couldn't do a view where you could see the horizon or anything due to the performance fixes. The scrolling wouldn't quite work out. It's interesting, I never thought to do it that way. I suppose you could do like spherical deformation postprocessing if you wanted to make this like tiny planets, but then the problem is that the sides wouldn't correctly show perspective. Anyway, it looks great.
Hmm. Debian only has 3.14.5. Frustrating. Ah wait unstable has it...
The date range is 9/22 to 10/8. That's two weeks, which means it's only 2 data points for each given day-of-week + time combo, so analysis might not be accurate for DOY charts.

Otherwise, since the sample size is large (2000+ pts in the worst case), this is a good analysis.

How are you making the charts? It's not any JS library I've seen, and looking at the source, the code appears to be custom.
What we need is a worm that uses the most common vulns to reflash these routers with a recent version of openwrt. Yeah, right ... :)
A foreign power. A crippling of non-military communications and the work economy would be very useful in some wartime scenarios.
3. P vs. NP is a problem phrased in the language of classical Turing machines. In that sense, quantum computing has no bearing on it. It is unknown whether NP problems can be solved efficiently on quantum computers.

4. Is a common misunderstanding about entanglement. Unfortunately, while entanglement does allow non-classical long-distance correlations, it does not allow for communication. Think of it this way: suppose we took two random number generators that start with the same seed, and thus produce the same stream of bits. Then you take yours over there while I keep mine over here. This doesn't help us communicate faster, because we don't get to pick the bits that come out of the generator. So too with quantum entanglement.
The reason the shell is used everywhere is because it's guaranteed to be installed (although DHCP used Bash explicitly), is much faster to start and run a simple script than Python, and its syntax is the command line that everybody should be familiar with.
Understanding cryptography and ciphers
Detech Your Classroom
When I moved out to the Bay Area I wanted to go with Sonic, especially over Comcast. However their speeds were just SO SLOW, especially for the price, compared to Comcast.

In the consumer class connections, they simply did not offer fast enough speeds, and Comcast just blew them out of the water. Really wish they'd get their speeds up as I would definitely consider switching.
With polygons, you must explicitly pass in every vertex and corresponding data (unless you use a geometry shader). This gets huge fast - with just usually around 12 32 bit floats per vertex (position, normal, material and tex coords). That is 48 bytes per vertex. Not only that, but each vertex must be processed (transformed) and the resulting polygon clipped, which is usually a more or less order-dependent operation and thus not well designed for multithreading on GPUs (they do use tiling though to address this I think, but usually this means redundant calculations).

With voxels, positions are inherently stored, and guaranteed to have some cache locality if they are uncompressed. Thus, GPUs are really good a chugging through large amounts of bitmaps, which is what I am doing (only rendering to bitmaps). With teraflops of compute power now, you can do trillions of flops every second, and in my case I can render about 1-2 billion voxels per second.

Additionally, doing procedural generation with polygonal surfaces is much more complex (I've done it, I know). Implementing stuff like voronoi patterns (used for the rocks) is trivial with voxels. Not the case with polygons, unless you are just wrapping voxelized data. Its the difference between evaluating a graph at every point, and calculating the graph at only the needed points. Voxels are implicit, polygons are explicit.

Really, you can think of VQ like a really fancy graphing calculator (in fact, all of the structures are just an extension of superellipsoids) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superellipsoid)
> Can anyone expound further on the practical applications of quantum computing?

My research is in molecular dynamics simulations and quantum chemistry. A lot of progress has been made in the field in the last few decades; however, there is a roadblock right now that no one really knows how to get around called the fermion sign problem. If we want to simulate atoms or molecules as accurately as we can, the number of resources we require scales exponentially with the number of particles. This is basically due to the Coulombic (electrostatic) interactions between the electrons in the atom. Accounting for these interactions gives many materials their interesting properties, but we've only been able to come up with approximations for solving these systems.

Quantum computing would allow these systems to be solved in polynomial time. The advantage would be enormous; in some cases, atomic simulation results would match experimental ones exactly†, and that is a very exciting notion.

(†glossing over a huge number of details here)
Okay... let's go into this... how are the strings in excel encoded anyway?

I'd be willing to bet money that at least some of the formats in question aren't UTF-8, they are likely ASCII encoded against a character set or code page.

Then you have to read that codepage, and convert the necessary characters to their Unicode equivalents, and from there do you downcode to utf-8?

Does the language this library is written in support that translation? Are there modules to do that? Is the license for those module(s) necessary compatible?

Who's going to go through the different document versions to confirm, and adjust for the various encodings for non-ascii characters?

It's not as simple as saying "don't choke on unicode".
See above, hopefully answers some of the question.
I wouldn't really use reddit as an example of quality CSS styling. Yes, it can be used improperly. It can also be used to create clean semantic HTML. Table-as-layout cannot.
If you have to pay for hardware to run it on, that would be part of B.
> memset(p,â€™\0â€™,10);
These students are clearly not interested in computers, and they should be dropped by the university to go work on some other field.
There are also a couple of interesting articles about this. Here's one that I think was submitted to HN a few months ago:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/15/magazine/bad-p...

Fascinating stuff.
No I'm not wrong and there mere fact that you mention the exception means you've conceded my point; and those aren't bugs, they're in the spec which means it was never a subset of JS.

> JSON is literally a JS object literal (with the additional requirement that any key be a string).

Which makes it not a JS object literal but a near subset with slightly different rules with unicode strings that make it not even a subset.
Famed Antikythera wreck yields more treasures
But these are file formats that may well not be encoded in UTF-8.. the formats already exist.. it isn't like he's creating a new spreadsheet format here. Some of them may well be encoded to something that works fine against unicode/utf-8, others not so much.
The strength of Hadoop isn't so much speed but that it's been around and there is a pretty impressive and fairly mature set of projects that comprises the Hadoop ecosystem, from Yarn to Hive, etc. There are still many issues to resolve, and this evolution will continue for decades to come.

The TB sort benchmark is pretty useless to me - I am much more concerned with stability, a vibrant community (which means people, the software they write and institutions using Hadoop in production).

Last time I tinkered with Spark (this was over a year ago) it was so buggy, next to useless, but perhaps things have changed.

Still - the idea that there is some sort of a revolutionary new approach that is paradigm-shifting and is way better than anything before should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

The problem of distributed computing is not a simple one. I remember tinkering with the Linux kernel back in the mid nineties, and 20 years later it still has ways to go to improve.

Twenty years from now it might or might not be Hadoop that is the tool for this sort of thing, we don't know, but I will not take seriously anything or anyone who claims that the "next best thing" is here in 2014.