skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hackers Access at Least 100,000 Snapchat Photos and Prepare to Leak Them
It's interesting, but not earth-shattering. The "10x fewer nodes" means nothing; how powerful are the new nodes? What's the network? Do you use SSDs? etc. etc.

They also tuned their code to this specific problem:

"Exploiting Cache Locality: In the sort benchmark, each record is 100 bytes, where the sort key is the first 10 bytes. As we were profiling our sort program, we noticed the cache miss rate was high, because each comparison required an object pointer lookup that was random..... Combining TimSort with our new layout to exploit cache locality, the CPU time for sorting was reduced by a factor of 5."

I would love to see MR and Spark compete on the exact same hardware configuration.
A 'smart bracelet' that reads your biometrics, tells you to de-stress
At this point, isn't it more effective to have a virtual machine image with everything set up? Virtualbox runs on tons of platforms, and I imagine you could build a 'CS' box with most of the tools installed and just update it a few times a year.

Granted, that keeps them from learning how to set it up on their own, but his stated goal is to cut out that BS.

I think this would be even more valuable in undergrad, I remember my first few college CS classes spending the whole lab helping people install java on various flavors of windows.
And then there's the time to actually make your movements. Getting your foot onto the brake pedal and pushing on it takes appreciable time, both for the foot to make the movement and for the nerve impulses to get there to make it move.

I recall from looking into this stuff a bit that a good reaction time from "oh shit" to "brakes are applied" is around 750ms. Accounting for people who aren't fully on top of their game (distracted, tired, injured, old, etc.), road designers assume more like 1.5-2s delay for applying brakes. And even that will be optimistic in some cases, as many car crashes demonstrate.
The federal government's aging IT workforce *really* needs younger workers
I just spent 45 minutes on the phone with comcast yesterday for one the offices I manage. I didn't have the account number and the phones were down (voip). I gave them the address and phone number and they still needed the account number. After 45 minutes they just hung up on me. Must be nice to be a monopoly.
Hence why he said "ideal".
How to protect yourself in the sharing economy for $15 a month
It's very possible. They did it to the tobacco industry.

http://www.thetruth.com/

Essentially, as part of the Master Settlement Agreement, the government just said, "You have to put X dollars into this independent anti-smoking group."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheTruth.com
The Hellcats are cheap...Do you want to buy a cheap car?

And of course, it's only until you go to a gas station.
Too bad it uses Flash, especially when it doesn't seem necessary – at all.
And we shouldn't really have expected him to either ...
I find that curious, though, because he went into the election with a relatively conservative platform.

There are at least three different levels to view this at. And thanks to the myth of the rational voter, there are plenty of people who decide that the appearance at one level is sufficient, and the cost/benefit of digging deeper isn't worthwhile.

On the surface, Obama was happy to allow people to believe something different even from what he was actually saying. Many pacifists supported him on this basis.

A level deeper, Obama was never anti-war. If you go back to the record, his only anti-war statements were specific to Iraq. He disliked the politics of that particular war, but never came out as a pacifist (contra those only looking skin-deep).

Deeper than that, we've got to consider political motivations behind his anti-Iraq-war stance. In retrospect it appears that this was largely a political position that was easy for Obama to take on because it entailed undermining GWB's (arguably illegally assumed) authority, thus shifting power away from the GOP and toward the DEMs. In this light, it's hardly surprising that he's chosen to eschew his opposition to unilateral executive power: when the shoe was on the other foot, he was able to obtain further political advantage by doubling down on the same abuses that he'd criticized just a few years earlier.
yes it does!!! Netflix removed the user-agent restriction on Chrome: http://www.engadget.com/2014/09/19/netflix-linux/
Oops, edited. Thanks!
I'm not sure what "yeti" image you are referring to. All images were purchased royalty free images from iStockPhoto.
I think this is a "stages of moral development(1)" thing. In post-conventional levels of development, all tools would be valued for their strengths. We wouldn't denigrate a tool for belonging to a class of tools.

1 - with apologies to Kohlberg
I agree with you on the immigration front as well. And I agree that it is probably true that immigration reform/BI will not succeed on rational grounds. It seems to me that marketing/emotional appeals have the most effect on political/social systems.

When I discuss these topics, I always attempt to make a valid argument (the conclusion follows from the premises), and try to change the discussion to the truth of the premises. Everyone wants to debate the conclusion without looking at the actual premises/validity of the argument.

I appreciate a devil's advocate because it forces me to clarify my own thinking, which hopefully helps me clarify it to others.

Incidentally, I'm not sure we are really heading for a post-scarcity economy. That seems the weakest part of the argument to me. Or at least the toughest part to demonstrate conclusively. So, i think there are rational reasons to be against BI as well.
Which American President Was the Most Intelligent Speaker?
This was what I was going to say. As an example, a course I did on Coursera recently had an ubuntu VM you could just download and it ran everything that was required for the course. This is probably quite prevalent in CS-related MOOCs and I think in most cases is a great idea.
Oh, I know it's not air-tight. I say it's a major concession because large ISPs seem to see municipal broadband as a huge wrench in their plans, so taking away their ability to fight it would not just be some sort of 'lip service' concession that they don't really care about.

As for forcing them to stop + lobby for it? You might even run into some Supreme Court issues, and they might challenge it on free speech grounds. It would be an uphill battle for something that might not even be enforceable (which is why I also said that it's not enough of a concession to make the merger a net public gain).
"I've spent the past decade mostly leading my own research projects. This meant that I did the majority of the command-line bullshittery and programming to produce the results that led to publications, especially ones where I was the first author. In short, I've gotten very, very, very good at command-line bullshittery."

You mean you learned a new skill and got better at it? Your example suggests that there's only one way to improve your skills when it comes to working with "command-line bullshittery"
cool, thanks for the explanation.

I wonder if it would be possible to use that dedicated audio playback hardware for this purpose, I would definitely pay a relatively small sum towards RND if anybody is interested!

I also wonder if there's a worry that average users might turn this on accidentally, running their battery out and then shouting at Apple? If that's the case, it could be happily buried in the Accessibility menu I think. Seriously, this feature would enable me to keep my iPhone in my top pocket while I go out and be able to access Siri rather than cart about all the other equipment. It would be great!

Edit: Why isn't accessibility in Dragon's menu?!
Human eyes are actually equivalent to very high end video cameras, and the image process that you can do in your squishy grey 10 watt processor is still way better than anything we can do with computers. You need your navigation system to be able to directly sense in 3 dimensions for it to be competitive.
In a linked article about why the "command-line" is "bullshittery" in the first place he compares Python to Excel and declares Excel superior because it can make graphs much more easily. His students apparently ask why use Python when you can use Excel.

First off, Python is not a command line. Secondly, what the fuck does he think Excel's source code is written in? MS Publisher? They're just different things.

The author does not seem to understand why command line tools still work the way they worked in the sixties (as he loves to point out), which is because it just works. He mentions git, the version management system that uses the command line mostly, but forgets to mention that although git could surely have (and has) a GUI, it would disable you from doing many things. I often pipe git output to other tools, something you just cannot do with a GUI.

Oh, and he uses nano for command line text editing. I suppose that also explains a thing or two when working with Vim or Emacs is so much better than any other text editor.
Yes, I can. I am a system administrator who also knows a great deal about storage, and manages a good chuck of the storage servers at my employment. We use ZFS for our backup servers, both onsite, and offsite, and we use them for a couple generic storage servers as well, one of which is constantly under heavy stress, all the time. That server is http://mirrors.xmission.com.

I am personally using it on my workstation for a /home mount, and I have it on a highly available KVM 2-node cluster, replicated with GlusterFS using InfiniBand. While I have had networking issues with GlusterFS, which have since been ironed out, I have not had any stability, reliability, or data corruption issues with ZFS. At all. I've been running this cluster for 3 years straight, and it's the cluster that is housing my ZFS documentation at https://pthree.org/category/zfs

ZFS on Linux is absolutely "production ready". While it's true there are some ARC issues floating about, trim support is missing for SSDs, and some other things, remember that ZFS has been stable for a decade. It's just been brought into Linux kernel space with the help of the Solaris Porting Layer (spl) module.

Claiming that ZFS on Linux is not stable, and not production ready is nothing more than FUD.
Living in the east bay (Berkeley) means your options are pretty limited in terms of service, but we have a local company (www.lmi.net) which has incredible service. When there was an outage, they sent the technician 2 hours after I called and I've never had any trouble with them.
It's being updated in the main distribution. Usually a week or so behind when a new version of chrome is released.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/trusty-changes/2014-Septem...
Racoon Nation (PBS special) was pretty eye opening.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/raccoon-nation/full-...
All pull requests will be accepted. Let's see where it goes
Be fair. Every class isn't "How to configure a VM and toolchain" class.
Who Needs Algebra? New Approach to College Math Helps More Pass
I find it so odd that automated driving and auto-safety features (adaptive cruise, lane assist, etc.) are being so aggressively developed.

These features have never once appealed to me and I can't imagine using them even if I had them. I find it very hard to square the "American Love of Driving" and the cultural connotations that driving has in the US with systems that relegate the driver to a passenger ...

Maybe for stop and go rush hour driving ... but beyond that, I don't see the appeal.
Clearly, all of the people who make useful and powerful tools should spend less time on useful features and more time on shiny Apple-style UIs. Because who wants useful features when you can make software cater to people who don't want to learn?

This author's problem is not with bullshit. It's that he doesn't believe he should have to understand his tools at all. He wants them to magically work because he knows what he wants them to do.

Do you want to do novel, interesting things with your tools? Don't expect someone else to have paved the way for you first.
How come in those situations doesn't the crew notice something's not right and tries to communicate with the pilots?
Show HN: Ask for a Raise Day
If it can effectively respond to the dangerous moves of the kid on his phone, does it need to be as forward-looking and defensive as that?

Tradeoffs are different between computers and humans. Defensive driving is about trying to stay within an envelope where you can safely respond to whatever happens. A computer system will have a different envelope, so it won't need to do the same stuff.

To make a terrible analogy, a human pilot flying by eye needs to eventually make a decision to land at an alternate airport when his primary is fogged in. Is a computer smart enough to make that judgment call? Well, if the computer is equipped with a zero-zero landing system and can safely land in the fog, who cares?

Your question about rear threats is intriguing. The proper response is a lot less clear there, I think. Do you speed up? Slow down? Change lanes? Squirt them with washer fluid? Drop some caltrops from your rear bumper?
While I can sympathize, does anyone else feel it is odd that we are talking about a Computer Science professor complaining about how basic unix tools work? Sure, they aren't perfect, but I think it is going a bit far to say that CS researchers shouldn't have to understand on the other 99.999% of developers in the world use computers. This feels a bit ivory tower to me.
Growth is life for a startup. Are you growing at 5% to 7% every week?
Star wars battle pod arcade game
StackEngine Emerges from Stealth, Adds Operational Layer to Docker
i suspect it will be allowed to go-ahead, the government at all levels seems to like to support the telecommunication monopolies. Municipal and community internet alternatives, or competition, seem to be inhibited by regulation and bureaucracy. There is such a barrier of entry and regulation on cable provisioning that it's hard to see how anyone can compete, and if they do, it's got to be someone the size of Google who have their own agenda.

http://consumerist.com/2014/05/10/why-starting-a-competitor-...

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-jus...
The article says exactly what they ran on. EC2 i2.8xlarge instances which have 32 cores, 800GB SSD and 244GB RAM.
How I hacked Paypal to create money
Around here, I'd say the average driver probably thinks that an active turn signal is just faulty wiring.
At first glance this looks amazing! I'll definitely have a play with this, thanks for sharing.
I'm sure you've seen all the same "street racing" videos with folks crashing that I have. Yes, it's dangerous, but typically what you aren't seeing is that the driver has completely disabled the (normally always-on) traction aids.

I hate hooligan drivers as much as / more than the next guy, and the "horsepower wars" are getting a little out of control, but I don't think that the Model S is any less safe than a Mustang Camaro, or Charger that one can get for less than half the price.

(disclaimer: I'm a huge automotive enthusiast, and regularly take my car on the track)
This is slightly different because it's just a public campaign:

TheTruth.com uses web, print and television promote
its message.

Lobbying efforts are different. How do you know that Comcast-TWC wouldn't just put more funding into a group that opposed municipal broadband than they put into the required pro-muni broadband group?
On the freeway, the time it takes to react to seeing the next car's brake lights isn't the main problem. The bigger problem is how long it takes to judge that car's deceleration.

Are they just tapping the brakes because the road is bending---some people always do---or are they slamming on the brakes because there's a traffic incident that you can't yet see? You're 200-millisecond reaction needs to be completely different in these two cases, but you just can't immediately tell the difference.

Both for people and for automatic cars, judging deceleration is a harder problem than just reacting to a red light going on, but the sensors on automatic cars should give them a big advantage.
A person at the FreeNAS forums wrote a forum post explaining his mistaken believed that ZFS is somehow more prone to catastrophic data loss when bit flips occurred than other filesystems:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-...

The reality is that the worst case consequences for a bit flip is the complete loss of all data, regardless of the filesystem used. While the automated repair routined bundled in fsck utilities are often able to fix problems on other file systems, the problems that they do fix simply do not occur on ZFS. The kinds of problems that kill ZFS are not among those that an automated repair tool can fix. e.g. overwrite all ext4 superblocks with random data and then see if fsck.ext4 can fix it.

That said, I am usually able to resuscitate a pool that another person would have considered to have been killed by a bit flip. I not only find such failure modes to be incredibly rare, but I find those that I cannot fix to be a rarity among the cases where things did in fact go wrong.
Cheepest VPS Server EVER only 50c/month or $6/year
50% off SSD Servers - $0.50c Per Month - 5 Minute Setup

Backed with 15 years in business.

http://cloudatcost.com
Please use coupon Code: BIGGER50 www.cloudatcost.com
Not to mention a hard-wired muscle-memory response system for crisis situations.
So, We Know Who Is Running Our Ello Account
Actually, I meant that Minecraft is more interesting that the current crop of social networks. These types of pages are interesting, social network pages are not.
When you can fit an exaflop electronic computer into a car, then maybe two cameras would be sufficient. Right now, we have to make do with less, and better sensors can make up the difference.
Example server..
1 Xeon vCPU
1 public IP
512MB ECC RAM
10GB HDD
1gig Internet
ZFS doesn't need any more "resources" than any other kernel space filesystem. Deduplication on the other hand, does need a good amount of RAM, if you want to prevent the deduplication table (DDT) from spilling to slow spinning rust. However, if you have a fast, and large SSD L2ARC, the DDT spilling over to the L2ARC might not have drastic consequences.

Regardless, unless using the DDT feature of ZFS, it doesn't need anymore resources than ext4 or XFS.
My experience says probably not. LIDARs are very directional at any given instant, and you need to filter out outliers anyways thanks to things shimmering in the sun.
I think it's got to be time to revisit some of the ideas of the Smalltalk or Lisp machines, principally that of one language all the way down from app to lowest level.

One of the biggest pieces of brain damage the UNIXes have inflicted on the world is the division between command environment and programming language. It may have once served a purpose, but in modern systems we have a level of madness that is the equivalent of expecting a literature student to master all Indo-European languages before being able to work in French.

The growing importance of services over the network and containers gives some cause for optimism, since if we can agree about the interfaces between services (yeah, big if) then each container can hopefully become a steadily simpler world unto itself.
In fact, git has multiple GUIs. Often a user will use multiple in their git workflow, because git is too complex to fit neatly into one UI.
For the interactive general purpose data munging and quick execution of simple commands that the shell is best at, I really don't know what a better system would look like. It seems like a really hard problem. Anything purely text based ends up being fairly cumbersome to use for simple commands if it has to use real data structures (consider having to type (["a", "b"]) instead of a b to pass arguments with json style syntax or whatever). At least that was my experience of trying to write a very simple shell. There are a hell of a lot of people a hell of a lot smarter than me though.

It seems to me that a lot of shell scripts could be ported to other languages. Does DHCP on Linux need to use a shell script instead of python or something like that? The benefits of the shell grammar and semantics which are designed to make interactive use easy seem more like hindrances in a lot of those kinds of use cases. I assume it's largely done to make it easier for sysadmins to customise things. If I was a sysadmin I'd much rather learn python (and feel like I actually understood it) than the crazy byzantine grammar of bash. Maybe that's why I'm not a sysadmin.

This paper by Rob Pike might also be of interest: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf

>The current UNIX® text processing tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line.
Seems like you get a static IP and can change your OS at any time ...
New meaning to "formating".

p.s: I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.
I answered this question here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8437921
I understand the perspective you're taking, but I politely disagree. I think you're missing the bigger point here.

Let's say someone is interested in baking a cake. There is a LOT you can learn, spanning general baking techniques, chemistry, design, art, tasting, etc. But if your immediate response is "we need flour, so go plant some wheat and wait a few months," they would likely lose interest.

Teaching people to plant and harvest wheat is awesome, but for most people it probably shouldn't be the first thing you're met with when you are trying to learn how bake a cake.
Yeah, this guy makes no sense. Let's throw away our personal life for more work. He brands himself as a 'personal branding expert' yet you can't find any links to what this guy actually did, or what his history is. He mentions his sister, yet never mentions her name. I have no idea of this is a kid who grew up in Chicago in squallor, or grew up rich in New York. On LinkedIn he says he went to Babson College in MA. At this point I think he's doing a bad job honestly.
A course I've taken on Coursera years ago did exactly that. Not that would have been a big problem for me to setup the software we needed (I was on the very same Linux distro anyway) but it saved time to me too and I didn't read all the usual bullshittery (funny word) in the forums.

So Dear Professor, you had to deal with the command line to setup your own machine, do it in a VM and let your students download it.

For extra safety pin the versions of the software your students will be working on (for example Octave) if you're afraid that an automatically updated new version will be incompatible with the assignments and all the other stuff you prepared for your class.
I loved this quote:

"This permits me to collaborate with all those who seek to bring the two cultures closer together. I nonetheless hope, of course, that “the best man wins.” That is, socialism."
StackEngine – Discover, Orchestrate, Scale Docker
> But do we hate driving so much now that we're taking drivers out of the driving experience?

For the most part, yes. Plenty of people in LA/NYC have multi-hour commutes each day, and I imagine they'd be very happy to work in the car if the computer could drive. I just finished an 8 hour drive to visit family, and it'd have been much more pleasant if I could just hang out with the family and play games in the car for that time.

> why not make better technology for public transportation which makes way more sense

In the US, because it's a political non-starter in most areas.
Tesla announces new 691 hp model S P85D