skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a bad attitude toward Ubuntu's work on this. I also remember that their philosophy statement

http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/our-philosophy

(which advocates that users should be able to exercise free software freedoms with "their software" -- I presume meaning the software that the users use) used to be easy to find from the front page. Clicking around on the home page today, it was far easier for me to find the Netflix announcement than an explanation of what free software is or the idea that Ubuntu supports or advocates it (!).

I've sometimes asked Ubuntu folks about how Canonical's work with proprietary ISVs fits in with their commitment to software freedom, but I haven't gotten any explanation.
3D Urban Madness
Linkbaity titles don't work if you're not BuzzFeed or Business Insider.
I'm not a fan of DRM either, but it's hardly Ebola. It's more like a persistent rash.

Well, except maybe in the case of Sony music CDs.
This seems to me akin to saying that: because learning how to use a tool is never research (the tool is already built) it is therefore bullshit and a waste of time. I like the command line so I'm biased in this direction but you need to know your tools in order to do work. What if a mechanic didn't want to deal with all that "how-to-use-a-wrench" bullshit and just wanted to fix things!
He also goes on to say,

"Throughout this entire ordeal where I'm uttering ridiculous epithets like 'git pipe fork pipe stdout pipe stderr apt-get revert rollback pipe pipe grep pipe to less make install redirect rm rm ls ls -l ls tar -zxvf rm rm rm ssh mv ssh curl wget pip,'"

In other words, "ridiculous epithets" seems to be equivalent to telling the machine to do something. Have you got a way to get git to control your source without actually invoking git?

Workflow tooling can indeed be incredibly useful, but the context isn't the only requirement for success. If something underpinning that tooling changes or breaks, someone is going to have to understand what happened.

The people who regard that understanding as "ridiculous" are the worst people to work with and to my mind are the primary reasons that this "profession" gets little respect.
On the plus side it means pharmaceutical companies won't be marketing oxytocin as a relationship aide.
With autobrake and safe following distance, even approaching 25% of cars using the systems would drastically reduce the amount of multi-car pileups.

I think a recent one in the news was 20+ cars. If just one of those cars had autobrake and safe following distance this could have been halved or quartered and wouldn't have blocked a highway for a few hours.
Part of the reason that people still use the *nix style interface is that the large number of people who thought they'd come up with a better design were actually wrong about that. It's harder than it looks.
It would be interesting to see a "double auction" price mechanism/order book, i.e., potential passengers submit their bids and drivers simultaneously submit their ask prices. As a passenger, you could either take the "market" price for a ride or submit a lower bid.
+1. I too have been using Conspire lately, and quite successfully. Great product.
I have heard anecdotally that graphicsmagick and imagemagick both have awful memory leaks. Did you run into this? We serve ~400 reqs/sec from our image server after putting a CDN in front of it, so we couldn't work with memory leaks.

File size was a problem for us too, as was file format. We needed a solution that would work with pngs, jpegs, gifs and tiffs.
The best way to do something about this kind of trolling is to make the punishment fit the crime. This is exactly what laws were originally created for. Before we had laws and enforcement for actions like rape, murder, theft, assault, etc, I'm sure those actions had a very similar place in society--the majority didn't engage in them, but the minority did destroyed the lives of their victims. This is no different. Internet assault is a recent invention, made possible by the invention of the internet. Therefore, it follows that we need to invent appropriate laws and penalties. And the difference in severity of penalties between internet assault and unauthorized access to a computer needs to be similar to the difference in penalties between physical assault and breaking and entering.

If this was the case, then we can clearly see the problems with Tor Ekeland's statement, "You may think weev is an asshole. But being an asshole is not a crime, and neither is obtaining unsecured information from publicly facing servers." Ekeland thinks that the big problem is that weev's AT&T activities were a crime. Regardless of what you think about that, the bigger problem is that weev's asshole activities are not a crime.

Ekeland consolidates a broad spectrum of harassment into one term "being an asshole", and labels it as not a crime. But that is short-sighted. As Kathy points out, there is a point where the spectrum of digital harassment jumps over into the realm of real-life damage. And that should be a crime that carries stiff penalties and is prosecuted aggressively.

Oh, and one other point. Kathy laments how weev has been glorified in the tech community. My guess is that this is caused by nothing other than ignorance. If all you know about weev is that he seems to fall into the group of people that were at least somewhat unjustly targeted by the government for, scare quotes, "hacking" and received a punishment that seemed too harsh, then you'll probably express support for him (read, that cause). Even if you've heard that he says things on the internet that are trollish asshole material, you, like Ekeland, probably won't change your opinion much. What tips the scale here is the knowledge that his troll speech has had the very real consequence of destroying someone's life. That fact is everything. If you don't know someone is bad, you can't correctly adjust your opinion of them. So props to Kathy for speaking out.
Our Journey to and Through YC
I believe the network had become a bottleneck. As per the article:

> [O]ur Spark cluster was able to sustain ... 1.1 GB/s/node network activity during the reduce phase, saturating the 10Gbps link available on these machines.

If the network is the bottleneck it makes sense to reduce the number of nodes to reduce the network communications.
No training except for googling stuff and pestering their customer service folks.

I learned openscad from the tutorials. I use meshcam to generate tool paths. Mostly I use python to generate the source art and just cut that out.
I honestly don't see the problem. Don't want your students to learn the innards of computers running Linux? Configure a Vagrant instance and have your students Vagrant-Up. Could have been done inside the time he took to write that blogpost.
If you're trying to insinuate the North American definition of 'inexpensive due to inferior quality', that doesn't apply here at all. One is a muscle car, and one is the most advanced electric vehicle in the world. Apples to oranges. On comparing price to horsepower, it's totally cheap in comparison, and yes I would prefer the Dodge.

Assuming $80 per tank, with a fillup once per week, it would take me 14.4 years of continuous driving for the cost of gas to equal that of the Tesla, without taking my house's electric bills into account.
I completely agree. The only beginners I have taught were my sons ---I wrote what I thought were the basics for them in a book, The Hackers Ways [1]--- but P. Guo's articles very much resonate with me as well. Helping them see that the tools were the means to an end, something they could master and that would make them much more efficient, was a big part of the effort.

[1] http://juanreyero.com/hacker-ways/index.html
Super Mario 64 VR Remake
Nothing, unfortunately. I guess he means it's been around to long and it's based on flawed design principles.
Is there any context? Widlar is one of my heroes, right up there with Euler, Archimedes, Newton, etc. But I don't quite see why this is news today?
shell is a programming language. You are interactively programming and in a more efficient way too. You are telling the computer to do things for you (instead of clicking on pictures) or speaking in more verbose language.

So I don't really get your objection. Even if you programmed what you wanted computer to do in some other "real" language you would be doing exactly the same thing only in different syntax. And source code would still be even bigger bottleneck :D. Try writing python script to wget a file and extract it to local file system. I think you will find it's more time consuming :D.
You can get the 85kWh Model S for $80k with an EPA rated range of 265 miles. Let's see what the other companies are offering:

BMW i3: $41k @ 81 mile range
Nissan Leaf: $30k @ 75 mile range
Honda Fit: $36k @ 82 mile range

It has 3 times more range than any of these cars and sells for 2-3x as much but is a few classes above when it comes to safety, comfort, performance, options, etc... The Model S deserves every bit of praise it gets.
I share your distaste for DRM, but wanted to throw in a comment of support for Netflix. A couple of years ago I was quite disgusted by how a Netflix employee was heckled on stage at the Linux Collaboration Summit. It seems hypocritical of our community to tout user freedom and then fail to treat a public speaker with decency. The right to redistribute other people's stuff unconditionally is not such a basic human right that it justifies such poor social behaviour.

I don't like DRM, and the impression I get from most Netflix employees is that they don't like it either. They haven't chosen to take the approach of Stallman and avoid all-things-DRM entirely, but theirs is an understandable choice and one I respect, even if I do not agree with it. They have contributed some awesome stuff to the free software community and are making media available in more readily accessible ways, even if it's not as readily accessible as some of us may like. It's the people producing the media who insist on such controls being in place in order to license their content to Netlix.

So - thanks, Netflix engineers!
It sounds like maybe he should invest some research time into improving software interfaces.

I get the frustration with getting mired in infrastructure before you can actually start producing useful things. I experience that regularly. But you know what? It's going to be there for your whole career, and it's often a useful driver which inspires people to improve the things that annoy them. I usually learn very useful things in the process which improve my ability to comprehend the entire system.

I think there's a balance to be found here - it's unreasonable to expect students to spend their entire semister in an advanced CS research class learning how to use rudimentary tools, but maybe it's also unreasonable to put people into advanced CS research classes before they've learned how to use their field's rudimentary tools. The student should know how to do it, and the professor should attempt to ensure that they don't have to.

On a different topic: My anecdotal experience is that academically produced or oriented software is nearly always among the worst offenders of this - it is overly complex, poorly documented, and not well supported. This leads me to wonder if there are attitudes in academia that such things are "bullshit" that get in the way of "real work", which lead to this problem in the first place.
What was the max throughput your server could handle? We ended up using Go because we serve 400 - 600 reqs/sec and Python/Ruby solutions didn't have high throughput.
So far: goatse, troll face, and rm -rf

epic trolls, gamers...
> But why LIDAR though?

The simple answer is that we don't know how to do it with stereo vision alone yet. Getting range reliably is hard, and your brain uses lots of tricks to do it.

The second answer is that we need better-than-human performance if this is to take off. So using human-type sensing might not be good enough anyway.

Lots of researchers are pushing on vision-based driving, though.
Some days I wish someone would have already created a tool to do all of the stuff I needed to do.
Wouldn't work. You need Chrome (not Chromium) to run it.
I too love the CLI, but I wish someone would go through and standardize flags, naming, ordering concerns, long-form arguments, etc across all of the POSIX tools. GNU put in some effort here, but in my opinion they didn't go far enough and non-GNU operating systems (BSD, OSX, etc) are missing out.

Actually, as much as I dislike Apple, they're probably one of the few entities that could pull off something like this.
Has the DRM for Chrome been cracked yet? It seems that having the complete data flow from the server sent packets through to the displayed data would make it relatively easy to work back and crack it sufficiently to make saving drm-ed streams to a local compressed video format possible.

Obviously you could use a modified video driver or grab the data from the actual display - the problem with that would be speed and data size.

Presumably the data stream of the compressed video is in memory at some point in the process and could be sniffed?

IF it's been cracked doesn't it show the futility of applying DRM in the first place?
Task Organization for Enterprise DevOps
Isn't this just blossoming into the vi/emacs/IDE debate couched in different language?

Can you -- in principle -- accomplish goal X with tool Y? Yes, almost always. Some people will be far, far more efficient with the CLI and likewise some people will do better with GUIs.

There are some tasks that are only amenable to CLI work, like kernel development. And there are some that are only amenable to enormous IDEs like mobile app development.

The author is saying that for the scope of his problems, the CLI just gets in the way. This isn't always true. He is careful not to make any sweeping generalizations.
The DevOps Culture Cocktail
Show HN: Reprofiler makes sales reps smarter
The thing is, layout is content.

Even right here on HN. One comment being a reply to another is indicated visually with a level of indentation. That's semantic meaning. A comment saying "I disagree" carries vastly different meaning depending on what comment is its parent. If you remove layout from HN, you remove threading from conversations and lose or change the meaning of posts.

We use layout to indicate meaning in all sorts of ways. Even a simple set of tabular data with two columns will depend on visual layout. An item for sale needs to be next to the correct price for that item, for example. An image with a caption depends on having the caption spatially near the image.

I agree that it feels like layout belongs in a new layer of the stack. But how do you do that? You'd need all sorts of semantic meaning to be expressible in the data structures from the API. Things like parent/child post hierarchy, or item/price, or image/caption, or any number of other relations. How do you generalize that? This sounds tantamount to and as intractable as strong AI in the area of knowledge processing.
Did this get killed? I can't find it on the list
If you won any other Nobel Prize (including the literature) is because you deserve it. If you won the Peace Prize, is only partially because you deserve it, but also because you need it.

Nobel Peace Prize laureates are usually taking a stand on controversial topics in their own countries/communities. They need an international prestigious stamp to show that they are on the right side of history and have international support. But also you need to deserve it.
Malala has the perfect balance of both. She is incredibly smart, self-conscious, has a natural sense of dignitiy and integrity that protect her from the traps of ego and fame - something very hard to do for any human being, let alone a teenager. She is making quite an impact on girl's education.
But also she needs it badly. Her life is constantly in danger and this stamp and support from the Nobel Prize will protect her life and her struggle. More people in her community will consider that she might be right.

Red Cross is another example of both deserving and needing the prize. They must enter the worst war zones, and all sides must believe they are not spies for the enemy. Their brand is the most important brand in the world.

Then you have Obama. His prize is controversial because he obviously didn't deserve it. But the commitee thought he needded it, and I agree. Not because he needed more power or validation, like Malala. But he could use a "nudge" to improve peace in the world. Sure, it was a risky move - and didn't pay well. But it is part of the goal of Nobel Peace Prize as I see it: help the laureates to do the right thing toward peace. So I don't think it was a necessarily bad move. But it surely hurts its brand. I think the commitee should be more conservative about who deserves its prize; but I agree that is also important to find who need it.
OK, sure, thanks for your comments :-)
Babson: Growing Entrepreneurship with Exposure to Real World Entrepreneurs
Wait for the curl script that downloads it and pipes it to sudo.
Should've mentioned NSFW
Actually, not between processes - all Powershell commands run in the same address space as the shell, and must be implemented in .Net. I don't think you can easily write an external process which takes a Powershell object directly as input.
Paraphrasing some actual experiences I've had: I want to install GNU Guile 2 on my Mac laptop so that I can write a prototype of an AI program. To install Guile 2 I need to install some prerequisite library. The prerequisite library won't build with the version of GCC I have installed. The easiest way to upgrade GCC is to get the newest version of Apple Xcode tools. The newest version of Xcode tools requires the latest version of OS X. But I also run Avid Pro Tools for music production on this computer, and the latest version of OS X is not clearly compatible with my version of Avid Pro Tools. So I'd need to pay $300 to upgrade Pro Tools so I can upgrade OS X so I can upgrade Xcode so I can upgrade GCC so I can build a library so I can install Guile 2.
There are two types of formats generally recognized as XLS: Excel 5.0/95 "BIFF5" and Excel 97-2003 "BIFF8". The former uses a language-specific codepage like 1252 and the latter can use a language-specific codepage or the more general 1200 (UTF16LE).

Here is the master list of codepages used by Excel: https://github.com/SheetJS/js-codepage/blob/master/excel.csv (disclaimer: I built this as part of the in-browser XLS parser https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xls)
Where does the decryption actually happen? Is it in the CPU chip?
Integration with Chef Gives Opsview Users Exceptional Automation Capabilities
When did Netflix not work under Ubuntu? I have never had an issue using Firefox.
One of the neat things about computer science research is that researcher B's work is frequently based on researcher A's software and A's software is "academic", which means that it actually works on exactly the three examples in A's dissertation.
Ask HN: What's are your best Apple Watch app ideas?
What's the Uber for Apple Watch?
There may be space in the whole curriculum for that, but it's probably not essential here and now. The whole pull of Bret Victor's presentations is that they show us what it would look like to program if our tools were as modern as Word.

The baking-metaphor problem is that you have students who are supposed to come in and investigate how the arrangements of toppings on a pizza affect both nebulous qualities (like deliciousness and heterogeneity) and rigorously measurable ones (like moisture and elasticity) of the pizza crust. However, when they come to your kitchen, usually most professors put them in a totally new room which contains millstones and grain and milk ready to be turned into fresh mozzarella, with nothing labeled. There are reasons for this -- real pizza aficionados have very different choices about how they want to compose their sauces and which cheeses they want on the finished result and even what leavening agent causes the dough to rise, so the framework for pizza-baking is as general-purpose as possible. But those reasons make things difficult for the newcomer.

The professor is just saying, "when we start, I walk everyone through the process of finding the flours over here, the additives over there, and using the bread-machine to mix them and knead them. I then show them where to find the canned sauces and the pre-grated cheeses, so that they can start with minimal knowledge baking up some pizzas for science. Our concerns are very high-level and I want them to be fussing with baking times and topping arrangements, but so many of my students seem to be stuck on trying to turn milk into mozzarella."
Yes, I hate the ceremony. Oh the sacred ancient language that is so standard we can never touch it because Open Web!
Tesla Unveils Self-driving Car
The base model at 4,600 is also very heavy for a car in the class, so buyers likely aren't going to mind 300 more lbs for AWD. :-)
If the author is reading this:

> For vim 7.3 and less, it works well for almost all kinds of file formats,

> ie. .xls,.xlam,.xla,.xlsb,.xlsx,.xlsm,.xltx,.xltm,.xlt etc

Someone already pointed it out (https://github.com/yakiang/excel.vim/issues/5) on github: xlrd does not support the XLSB format (and the xlrd authors expressed no interest in building it)
That sounds logical at first blush, but you're actually looking at the problem backwards.

Markets have power, standards organisations don't.

If the W3C had for some reason told browser vendors "now you have to ship DRM to comply with the standard", with no evidence that it was something that consumers wanted, they would have been told to go to hell. Exactly that happened with a whole bunch of other W3C "standards" that no one was actually interested in shipping; XHTML2, SMIL, XForms, etc.

In practice what happened with DRM is that consumers made it clear that they were very happy to run DRM systems in exchange for access to media. For example almost everyone is prepared to install Flash and Silverlight to get access to video services like NetFlix. Media companies also made it clear that they had no intention of giving up on using DRM on their products, especially whilst consumers were showing themselves to be so ready to embrace DRM-using services. So it's already been the case for some years — essentially for as long as bandwidth sufficient for streaming video has been commonplace — that, as a browser vendor, you have the choice between supporting content that uses DRM (e.g. through your plugin system) or losing so much marketshare you become irrelevant.

More recently browser vendors, including Microsoft, Apple, and Google, decided to cut out the plugin middleman and start shipping their own proprietary DRM systems baked directly into their browser. It was at this point the W3C got involved in standardizing the interface between the browser and the DRM system. But this was long after there was any hope of keeping DRM off the web; everything that's happening now is a retroactive damage limitation exercise.
Does anyone know or can explain simplistically why if we can get supercomputer like power from 100 qubits then why not a desktop computer like power with 1 or 2 qubits? I assume that the computational capacity increases exponentially with the number of qubits, but how?