skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
XLSB is significantly faster to process because it does not require an XML parser to blast through the data. Numbers are stored directly as IEEE754 doubles. Text may end up larger because XLSB uses UTF16LE for everything, including pure-ASCII strings (since Excel uses that format internally, there is no conversion involved and XLSB still will be faster).

The problem you will encounter is that most programs (Numbers, Google Docs) do not support XLSB.

Shameless plug: https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx supports both XLSX and XLSB (AFAICT the only liberally licensed project that handles the format)
You can tilt the view, as shown in the Kickstarter video, with a straight on projection or top down projection - both are difficult to process visually but you can tilt at a higher angle to get a different effect and visibility (might be good if people are crazy enough to try and build a side-scroller with this engine).
Is it possible to install the proprietary DRM module on Chromium? Similar to how you can extract the Chrome flash player and use it with Chromium?[0]

[0]http://askubuntu.com/questions/158388/how-do-i-make-chromium...
I've been looking forward to Voxel Quest since I first read about it last year - everything about it seems to appeal to my taste in games. Great to see all the progress you've made!
Churchill ensured that Gandhi never received it while he was alive, and he couldn't get it posthumously. I appreciate the efforts of the two recepients, but I don't think it's as great of an achievement to win this prize as the science Nobels.

You can even see the political undertones with the statement about India and Pakistan in the official announcement.
When I view your videos, all I can think is "oooh, he's using some kind of page-fault type engine to pull in and dynamically generate cubical subdivisions of space"

So, assuming that's what's happening, why not pre-render/pre-generate a larger area than the visible area so that this faulting in process isn't as visible for a typical viewport pan.

Also, if you were to reduce the resolution, would that make the faulting/rendering faster? Seems like that would be a good compromise, as many of the demos now feel like the terrain isn't generated fast enough to make a playable game.

Oh, can you also demo destructibility in a future video?
Yes.

And your risk of finding that all the code you've created using a proprietary tool that runs on top of a proprietary platform owned by another entity is greater than just using the tools provided by the platform vendor who controls "the stack" of software below any other vendor providing an add-on.

Basically, (in this case) Oracle can break 3rd party add-on tools and programs anytime they want or make them operate in a suboptimal way by changing their product below. Oracle, Microsoft and other platform vendors have repeated done this in the past.

So buying cloud based or closed source tools that run on top of other closed source products controlled by another entity is a poor bet.
Ask HN: Any ideas on what could I do with 5vs5.com domain?
I own 5vs5.com and I am thinking the last 2 years to make something out of it.

My idea is either to sell the domain or transform it into an online game (obviously something about basketball, probably an online basketball manager game).

I am an experienced web developer (both front and back) working as a freelancer developing web apps and webpage for clients. I have worked in the past in the game industry and actually worked in a social football manager game (not a very successful game, at max it had around 5000 daily users), so we could say that I have some experience on that field.

I could create something on my own but to be honest I do not have the will as I struggle with my clients and also I lack of several skills such as graphic design and marketing.

So would be anyone interested in developing something unique on this domain? I am not sure on what can be done. My thought is that if we can build a small team of people we can create something interesting and fun and maybe even profitable.

I am open to any suggestions or ideas on what can be done with this domain.

You can find my contact email on my profile if you prefer some private talk.
I was actually quoting Philip Grenspun there[1].

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=Gb6vumaGwJAC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA...
I agree with you and disagree at the same time.

Command line interfaces are extremely powerful, simple to implement, extend and leverage, but, GUI's have their own advantages mainly in information density, context clues, and ease of operation. There is a world for them to both live in, but I would disagree with OP's approach of bring graphics to command line and suggest the approach of bringing command lines to GUIs.

I have already embedded a command line terminal in several GUI's I've built for industrial machines. The users can see the corresponding command line command pop up in the terminal when they click a GUI button and are free to type commands into the terminal. They can also define a script or batch of commands and easily assign it to a GUI button.

It was amazingly efficient for engineers to work with prototype machines whose functionality and controls were constantly in flux.

Downsides are that exposing a terminal to a potentially non-expert operator is a potentially dangerous, and I had to spend a good deal of time validating and sanitizing inputs(and risk missing something).

In the end, the terminal was removed in the production GUI, but was extremely helpful in the creation of a functional GUI that worked for the operator, rather than the opposite. In the case where the operator is always going to be an expert and is working with a complicated or constantly changing process, I could see a CLI/GUI interface working well.
I don't think it would be "fair". (Comcast business practices are simply wrong and do not deserve a pass. Nor do past de facto geographical non-compete agreements warrant rewarding them with further expansion.)

Regardless, if the FCC is nonetheless going to act as errand boy in ramming this down our throats, it could at least be somewhat mitigated by a well-structured ruling that municipal et al. broadband is legal, permitted, and shall not be impeded including and especially at the state and local level.

If we can't get these corporate behemoths to actually compete against each other, then let others step in to provide the competition. There seem to be plenty of volunteers eager to do so.
What were they doing for work at the time? Was this a jaunt financed by savings or family wealth, or was it balanced with gainful employment the whole time?
That's crazy talk. Nazi Germany much?

Also, one of the major incentives to maintain a strong defense is to keep from having to use it. Of course this principle, like anything else, can be taken too far.
It is evidence they are willing to make trade-offs.
Imagine if this monstrosity comes together and then later merges with Verizon. I think I read about that in the bible once.
Why Virgin America's Ex-CEO Hates Airline Websites
Why do you want to wait to release the engine source instead of putting it on github right now ?
Norway's New Banknote Designs Are Pixelated Landscapes
Watch This Tesla Drive Itself at the Press of a Button [video]
Those things are like your baby but when you have a real baby then thats your BABY!

I think all people want to transcend their own death and for men, it's through creating useful things and for women the instinct is more for raising good children.
Since the Kickstarter is not linked anywhere (not even in the blog post!) here it is: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gavan/voxel-quest
Author here.

- Please use a desktop browser (Chrome preferred). While mobile browsers kinda-sorta work if you're just clicking through the examples, keyboard input doesn't work on mobiles (yet).

- Pigshell has few users (in fact, using the plural is a slight marketing exaggeration) so please bear with me for any teething issues, broken links, inadequate documentation...

- One of the practical use cases is copying files across Google accounts, and backing it up to your desktop. (Details here: http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/doc/gdrive.html) The nice thing about a unix approach is that the exact same cp command can be used to copy GDrive to Dropbox, or any other supported filesystem.

- Some more D3 visualization examples here, using Mike Bostock's gist viewer: http://bl.ocks.org/ganeshv (Do use the "Open in a new window" links, like this one: http://bl.ocks.org/ganeshv/raw/46cc526d41d16995ccdc/).
The duty cycle on LIDARs is very low. If you're ranging to 200 meters, the receiver is only taking data for 1.2us. At 60 Hz scanning, the receiver is active for 72us/sec, or 0.0072% of the time. So in the presence of 100 other transmitters (worst case), you'll get a conflict 0.72% of the time. If the transmit time is randomized slightly (which I don't think Velodyne does, but a production device must), you won't get the same bogus reading twice in a row. Over three readings, if you throw out outliers, this problem should go away.
<p>
If the LIDAR data has too many outliers, it's necessary to slow down and only use data from short ranges. At some short range, the LIDAR will "burn through" any jamming from a more distant range, per the radar equation. I agree that on production vehicles, anti-jam software, as described above, will be necessary.
1. Cloudera left M/R for Spark, Mahout left M/R for Spark. Spark community will be huge soon.

2. Yes, Spark was/is buggy.

3. For me Spark is really paradigm shift, next generation framework compared to M/R
There is some destructibility in this video, but I'll go over it more in the future. :)

You can make it go a lot faster by lowering the resolution, as I point out a bit down the page in the article. Every reduction of 2 in resolution ups performance and memory usage by 4-8 times, based on if the process is 2D (post process) or 3D related (chunk rendering). I'm continuing to add more optimizations to make things faster as I go along.

I am also going to add in better support for caching and prerendering - right now it all happens exclusively in GPU memory - I can easily expand the view even further with system memory and hard disk usage.
Thanks for the correction, that explains so much--I was picturing a lot of DCOM craziness.
I imagining a scenario in which I have a team and I have 10% git experts, 90% not -- can I create a system in which they are basically "drop boxing" and the merging etc gets handled automatically or decisioned by an expert? -- Maybe ultimately everyone should just learn git since it isn't that complicated.
Pacifism, like anything else, can be taken too far. Einstein himself migrated away from it as he grew older. And Gandhi advocated nonviolent resistance to the Nazis, which very few sane people would agree with then or now.
Two things that I've found that help a lot with the problem the author describes: Cloud hosting and YouTube.

We recently created some research software[1] that was somewhat kludgy to set up, and asked a high school student to give it a try. He got stuck on some early steps -- like working with the DVCS.

So we created a YouTube video[2] that walks through provisioning a new host on Digital Ocean, and each step after that. The video got him "un-stuck", and as a fallback he could always abandon what he was doing and simply replicate the entire video step-by-step.

1. https://sharps-ds2.atlassian.net

2. http://youtu.be/p54CCUEhfig
TMUX: A Screen Redux
Right after minute 32:00 Alex Schultz says "Facebook was viral via word of mouth because of the awesome product". Is this really true? I think "Use your email login and password and invite your contacts" namely contact import was the viral technique. The payload and frequency was high and the CR was ok.

I remember Facebook growth days somewhat well. People logged in with their emails and passwords were asked to provide their email provider passwords (to be fair, somewhat deceivingly) to invite everyone in their addressbook to come to Facebook. And I remember quite well some people didn't event notice the difference between whether they were asked for a Facebook password or their email provider password, and didn't really understand what was asked by inviting their friends.
I initially thought the same thing. But then I considered that many of the theoreticians probably write their papers in LaTeX.
To understand why Obama won the prize, you need to understand about the history of the prize. The prizes were created because Nobel was upset that his invention of TNT caused so much destruction in the world. At the time, TNT was a WMD.

Obama's worked to reduce nuclear weapons while in the US Senate. That effort would've made Nobel proud.

Further, Obama recently removed Syria's declared chemical weapon stock pile. If he didn't earn it before this, he definitely earned it now. This is directly at the heart of why the Nobel prize was created.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize

In 1888, Nobel was astonished to read his own obituary, titled The merchant of death is dead, in a French newspaper. As it was Alfred's brother Ludvig who had died, the obituary was eight years premature. The article disconcerted Nobel and made him apprehensive about how he would be remembered. This inspired him to change his will.
rtmpdump -r rtmp://cp262207.edgefcs.net:80/ondemand/techchannel/10959/videos/10959_AA11180_Unix_FL8_576x432_700K -o unix.flv
Sort of off topic, but I have to say that WhatsTheFare is the only web app I've got saved to my home screen. A very, very simple but valuable tool. It's now a permanent part of my "workflow". It's like inter-app information arbitrage.
Thanks for sharing. As a eBay Inc. developer, wish I had tried it before.
It is strange that nobody commenting in this thread, or in any other thread of HN, will feel the way the author's students feel about the command line.

I would also expect that most people commenting on HN, whatever their degree of knowledge, find the command line and all the things it can do, all the tools they know how to use or they know they can learn, a lot interesting and valuable.

These are the characteristics of people who really love computers and, by consequence, whatever that means, "computer science". The students referred by the the author are not truly interested in the computers as the HN visitors, and they should not be in an university doing "research" with the final objective of producing "publications".

For such a mismatch of interests and people to happen there must be a very misleading set of incentives driving the academia today.
Sorry to hear that. It's a lot of work and the Scala team at Typesafe is pretty small. We welcome all the help we can get, but we're focussed on solving exactly these issues. If you'd like to get certain bugs prioritized -- we offer dev support.
That is a good point, I majored in Computer Engineering, so my experience is a little bit different (kind of hard to cross compile to various embedded platforms without using a command line).
or 2 checkboxes

remote, office
It looks like they're using Google's Visualization API.
Isn't one of the main idea of entanglement/superposition the fact that the qubits' values are not pre-determined? I.e. the two random generators don't have the same actual seed, but as soon as the first one is used, it generates a seed, and the second one will also use the same seed from then on?

I still have some difficulty understanding how that doesn't rule out some undetectable determinism, and how/if it's possible to measure if the superposition has already collapsed (i.e. the seed has already been determined), something apparently useful in quantum encryption.
The curriculum goes far beyond the knowledge of most IT professionals (not to mention our current graduate students), as it is focused on research; IT pros don't normally know much about, say, Python libraries for machine learning or signal processing.
Why I'm Giving Wikipedia 6 Bucks a Month
I've been in such a scenario. Making it simple and drool-proof for some people while everyone else works around the consequences of that is not as lovely as it sounds. It winds up being much, much easier to just teach whoever else enough of the basics to use git.

It's almost certainly less difficult to use than whatever ERP the company uses.
I actually do use DDG prolifically and have come to love all the widgets. I just think its silly for google to demand that you log in to use a glorified egg timer. Why do you need me to log in for that?
They should assign them to work on an ultra-violent mini shooter with an unreasonable number of different weapons and monsters.
Been doing this for about a year now through pipelight[0] and another more esoteric hack before then. I hope this fix is not so hard on the cpu although I'm guessing it is the same wine hack in a different form.

[0] https://launchpad.net/pipelight
"A computer scientist specializes in the theory of computation and the design of computational systems." Computer science is about hardware e.g. VLSI. It is a shame that CS undergrads aren't forced to learn a little more about circuits, etc
Cars started 100 years ago. Are we going to announce every new Ford model? This is just a new train design similar to the trains they already have in place on the Victoria and Jubilee lines and others.

The only reason this article got to the top is because of some misplaced enthusiasm by miserable British commuters. I can understand and even relate to that as a former London commuter myself, but it has no place on HN.
Paul Graham has talked about the pain of installing software, and every time I have to do it, I always have trepidation. "Is this going to be the time apt-get barfs at me?"

Software installation is still a big pile of bullshit. For the people who spend their time deep inside one ecosystem, it can be okay, but most people have something to do besides live deep inside one ecosystem.

A few weeks ago I was just trying to find a JavaScript minifier on a Linux VM. So I googled and spent an hour digging through various pieces of crap, incompatible versions of libraries, asinine "gem install" error messages, and fun reading Stack Overflow answers saying things like "why didn't you have lib-foo-fuck-you installed already?"

And none of this is valuable for me to learn because in five years all the current package maintenance stuff is going to be thrown out and replaced. Not necessarily by something better (although that's likely the hope, leading to http://xkcd.com/927/ ).
Is this the commercial you're talking about?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id8CQ-vsojQ
1. He is implying the students believe it. From their point of view, the CLI does look arcane, primitive, and useless.

2. it's more complicated than that. Yes, if you understand something, you can explain it. No, you can't automatically explain it in 5 minutes. Sometimes, the knowledge gap is so great that you need months to explain it all. In 5 minutes, you can only make claims your students will feel entitled not to believe if they feel like it. If your claims don't match their experience, and you have not demonstrated trustworthiness, they simply won't believe you, then tune out. http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_dista...
I wouldn't generally call that programming.
But those guys were vesting not just resting. Salary is not same.
Logo design WIP: theMapped
Your post mentions "single root IO virtualization" as a factor in maximizing network performance. I am wondering what the impact of this was in your sorting. Do you have data for runs where you didn't enable this?
They aren't. If you believe that, you're doing something very wrong. Long lasting bonds/relationships/friendships are a lot of work.

New relationships require for you to put yourself in a position where you meet new people. It also requires for you to have opportunities for people to hang out with you.
> I think if someone cares about security, they've already flashed DD-WRT by now and those who don't... well, router (in)security will not stop their systems from being overtaken.

Nonsense.

a) People shouldn't have to flash their firmware to have an adequate level of security. If we're creating software we should hold some at least responsibility to provide basic security. Engineers in other fields take safety extremely seriously, why should software only provide it to a small percentage of people with technical knowledge?

b) Using up-to-date operating systems with update processes and security-conscious decision-making when packaging 3rd-party software is not a huge cost to these companies.

c) The goal of any security is to significantly increase costs and complexities of attacks. No solution will completely eliminate possibilities for attack but that doesn't negate need for security.
> how are the strings in excel encoded anyway?

Length-prefixed byte arrays encoded using various code pages. There are a small number that excel uses: https://github.com/SheetJS/js-codepage/blob/master/excel.csv (the columns are CP#, mapping, single/double-byte)

> 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?

If we can put together an Apache2-licensed module in JS in an afternoon (https://github.com/SheetJS/js-codepage) it can be done in python.

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

Someone already did that: https://github.com/SheetJS/test_files/tree/master/biff5 has artifacts for every language type
Is there an introduction to web app development in Ceylon? I'm curious how it compares to React / Angular / GWT / Dart.
I'm confused, you say you could factor a b-bit number with "something like 2b qubits", but then go on to say you'd only need 100 qubits to factor bigger numbers than a PC.

Factoring a 50-bit number is not that big a deal. I used my Python command-line calculator program (all the hard stuff is done by mpmath, pyprimes and other open-source code I didn't write) to factor a 50-bit number just now:

c:\>rpn -t 2 50 7 + factor

[ 37, 30429727211963 ]

29.569 seconds

I'm sure Mathematica is much faster.

It seems to me several hundred cubits would be necessary to outperform classical algorithms on commodity hardware.
I'm really hoping to see out of the box multi-master myself, not to mention I think that with the improved JSON/JSONB formats, that PLV8 will become more important in this space.

With multi-master (or a better failover strategy in general), I can potentially drop MongoDB in favor of PostgreSQL, what has kept me from it is the HA strategy has been missing from the open/free/libre version, and the commercial support is cost prohibitive imho.
Brand Storytelling: The Content Marketing Imperative with Michael Brenner
Fascinating data. I love that they did the "cost of loyalty" analysis. I know several people who only use Uber and don't even have alternative apps on their phones. I'll have to send them this article.
I see where your coming from, but if you want a cross-platform timer solution, relying on a google widget seems like a reach. At the vary least they should let anyone use the timer and only force you to login if you wish to continue the session on another device.
What you are describing is enterprise sales. I co-founded one of those. Early traction is easy to spot:

- at first, you can barely get first meetings with any potential customers. You track how many companies even agreed to meet with you once.

- a few months in, you get your hopes up (incorrectly - usually). A few companies you met are talking about doing an evaluation of your product.

- another few months go by, just one of all your contacts moved to do an evaluation, but then they postponed their purchasing decision to the next fiscal year.

- still no revenue, but now you have a funnel: x prospects in first meeting, y prospects in second meeting, z prospects in eval, 0 prospects have bought. Keep tracking those numbers and the trend will be clear.
They published updated versions of needed libraries for Ubuntu 14.04 (SRUs), which is not normally done outside of security issues.