skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Level playing field?

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/04/firefox-install-google-chro...

> Without Chrome, we’d be at the mercy of Internet Explorer or other web browsers when users want to get to Google.

How so? Is Matt (or Google) afraid that other web browsers would block Google properties?

I never saw Chrome as the way for Google to ascertain that the general public can have unfettered access to Google properties, I saw - and see - Chrome as a way to extend the Google eco-system onto the end users device, and to gain access to URLs that otherwise would remain hidden from Google to reduce the 'dark web' as seen through Google as well as a way to track users on pages that don't have Google Analytics installed. When technically speaking it really shouldn't matter what browser the users uses, as long as it is standards compliant it should simply work.

Killing off reader didn't do much to level the playingfield either, RSS is so much more open than everything that tries to replace it.

On the whole, Matt is on the ball that Google would be a better company ('less evil') if they were willing and able to play on a level playingfield but I don't see Google as a company willing to do either. They could if they really wanted to, but they are definitely not doing that.

Between the corporate newspeak about how every change that violates consumer privacy even more that gets hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread and Googles abuse of their muscle when it comes to such things as copyright violation on an unprecedented scale Google, if anything, seems to be totally allergic to level playing fields.

Anyway, props to Matt for making public his call on Google to be nicer (especially during his leave), let's see what will happen because of this.
The Shanghai maglev is german technology (Transrapid). The development began around 1969. Siemens and ThyssenKrupp were mainly looking for a demonstration of the technological capabilities as there was no real world application, mainly due to costs, besides it being ready for application since 1991.
To give a counterpoint, I frequently get into trouble with Linux 3.12.6. If I open more than a few tabs (70 say, with FF I can do an order of magnitude more) in Chrome it maxes out on memory to the point of the system becoming useless. Funnily enough it actually maxes out on swap space even though there is RAM available and then starts thrashing like crazy. Setting swappiness alleviates this somewhat but not entirely. Its a box with 1 GB ram + 1 GB swap. Not big by current standards, but has more than plenty RAM in my opinion if it werent for the tendency to write bloatware these days.

Yeah I could get some more RAM, but this box is a good testbed for software with a leaner streak, bloat does not excite me as much, sorry. Funnily enough this seems to offend a whole lot of people, as if I owe it to them to have more RAM on my m/c. It is probably worth it just for that amusement.

Definitely interested in giving *BSD a shot. The thing that has stopped me so far is the difficulty in sharing data between them.

EDIT @DanBC

> 70 tabs is not normal and 700 is just, well, weird.

So I have been told :)

Firefox manages it well enough though, I would assume Dillo would too. Dont want to hijack the thread with why I abuse tabs so, but I still contend that 1 GB is enough if the code is tight. 1 GB is a huge freaking load of memory if you think about it.
Many people are leaving Linux because of systemd (among other issues); but are choosing FreeBSD because of ZFS, pf, geli, jails, dtrace, bhyve, etc. (I haven't used the latter two myself yet, but the rest are fantastic.)

In the end I've gained more than I lost, it's just that a catalyst was needed to get past the inertia of changing operating systems again.
I have replied about the web site on the top comment. I have noticed that the readability varies greatly across browsers/OS/devices. Anyway, the color scheme and layout we are using currently are far from being the best. We will change that before officially opening the doors to our guests. :)
I do not know about Chicago or Englewood, so I do not have much to comment on this particular stuff, but riding on the theme - I work across a Whole Foods and across the street are many low-income apartments, I did not find many people from those apartments shopping or working at whole foods. If their desire is to address food deserts this store has to be completely different from their standard configuration and unless that is not the case, this is either well-intentioned yet misguided effort or calculated low cost land acquisition.
Yes, the Shanghai maglev is about the same speed and distance, and it does spend almost the entire trip accelerating and decelerating. You get to 430km/h for maybe less than a minute. Average speed would be a more meaningful number to compare high speed trains with.
A lot of the features you mention sound like old listservs and mailing lists (moderators, archives, searches). And the rest sound like a wordpress blog (archives, tags). It would great to see the perfect combination of all those features in Groups. I barely use them now for how clunky they are.
On Smushing Bugs
Well if you have a Square type that's a subtype of Rectangle then you can't have methods on Rectangle that, when called on a Square instance, would invalidate the invariant of a Square. If your system is sufficiently dynamic (prototype-based?) you can exchange the class of an instance at runtime. If not, simply make your Rectangles immutable, so a setWith method returns a new instance and you can then return a new Rectangle or a new Square from a Rectangle's setWidth. That should work in any statically typed language with inclusion polymorphism.
Bruce Sterling's Distraction. He touches on net-smart nomads, technology-driven disruption and the resulting unemployment, gridlock in congress, something similar to the Occupy movement in DC, a trade war with China that ended when they dumped all US IP online, a war referred to as 'Iraq 3', etc.

This is seriously impressive considering that it was published in 1998. My current hypothesis is that he's a time traveller messing with us.
Congrats to the team @ ETH!
Apple's Sir Jony Ive interview: Bad design is 'offensive'
DefineJS – A lightweight implementation of AMD module format
Could your showing interest in it have caused it to be registered by someone else?

Always take precautions: http://www.thesitewizard.com/gettingstarted/precautions-to-t...
The maglev to Shanghai airport is not a pleasant ride. Try the Shanghai-Hangzhou high speed rail. Not maglev but does 300 km/h and the ride is smooth as butter.
Barbecue's a real microcosm in the food world. I'm a pretty learned foodie, but I had no idea just how widely barbecue techniques were spread around the world until I started looking into it a few years ago.

I think the US can legitimately claim to be the barbecue kings of the world, but there are some really interesting barbecue traditions elsewhere, from Japan to Brazil. (I've since become somewhat addicted to Brasilian barbecue, which fits very nicely with a Paleo diet.)

I, meanwhile, come from the UK. We love our barbecue. We're also, natively - and weirdly for a food-loving nation - absolutely terrible at it.
It is, hint: time value of money.
Maybe Facebook should stop trying to bug the entire web if they care about spying so much.
That's because it's targeted at the Enterprise, where it's not uncommon to pay $100-$200k in yearly licensing for comparable software.
WebSyn.ca(an open cloud document suite) now has interactive charts
Exactly! When I was telling me friend about the post he kept saying "that sounds like a forum." But I guess the point here is, Facebook can maintain that great casual social network feel and still make Groups a lot more powerful than it already is.
> Go model a square and a rectangle in your favorite statically typed language.
Okay.

data Shape = Square Int | Rectangle Int Int deriving (Show)

> You will find that square extends rectangle and setting the length on a square also sets the width.
Why? I don't really see a need for square to extend a rectangle.

> So if I have a collection of rectangles which contains an unknown number of squares of which I set the width on each of them.
Like this?

> let unknowns = [(5,4),(3,2),(4,4)]
> let toShape (x,y) = if x == y then Square x else Rectangle x y
> map toShape unknowns
[Rectangle 5 4,Rectangle 3 2,Square 4]

Tomorrow I'll see if I can make this type-safe by using dependent typing as shown in: [0][1][2]

This was easily solvable in my staticly typed language as you can see. In something like Idris I could have
very easily encoded the toShape function the the type signature.

0: http://www.alfredodinapoli.com/posts/2014-10-13-fun-with-dep...
1: https://www.fpcomplete.com/user/konn/prove-your-haskell-for-...
2: http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2014-08-25-dep-types-part-...
Quote from OA;

"In layman's terms, the hardware interface is called Linux, while the rest of the part: the shell, core tools, etc are GNU.It's a piece from there, another from somewhere else and merging the whole thing into one collectively known as GNU/Linux. [...] In FreeBSD, the whole thing is a complete unit."

I think the OA will be quite happy with a mature systemd based GNU/Linux OS. Seems to like complete units.

PS: 'Many' is a hard concept when the OS is freely downloadable and not particularly monitored. One hopes the refugees actually make donations/buy DVDs.
I really like the ideas from Greg Egan, so any of his books.

I still love Gibson, even his later books.

I want to say one of my favourite books is "Salt" by Adam Roberts. I love the characters and description of political views and the way the war between factions plays out. Roberts' other books are pretty good too.

I loved REAMDE - I could have done with a bit more inside the game and a bit less tramping through the woods. I love Stephenson's other books too.

Finally: Bruce Sterling seems to be under-appreciated. Hard to recommend one of his books.

This question is perhaps a FAQ. Has anyone on HN ever scraped the answers posted to the various threads, added information about number of mentions or votes; with links to Amazon (and other book sellers)?

Having some carefully chosen adds and duplicating all the links with affiliate links would turn this into a mostly passive income project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky

It's easy to categorise these as wonderful and well written space opera, but that undersells them. Their author (Venor Vinge) invented the idea of the Singularity, and worked as a computer science professor. Both won both the Hugo Award.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game

As good as people say it is.

Most of Richard Morgan's works (esp the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeshi_Kovacs series). Not his fantasy books though.

For fantasy books, Patrick Rothfuss is doing good stuff. The Kingkiller Chronicles is excellent. Read his other books before "Slow Regard of Silent Things", though, because that is one weird story.

From more recent SciFi books:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl is excellent.

I'm currently reading Ancillary Justice and I'm really enjoying it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_Justice
Most academic institutions pay to have access to the large academic sites. If you do need to read a paper that's still behind a paywall, you usually email someone at a different university who does have access, or even just look up the authors academic page, which will often have a pdf. So I can't see paywalls being an issue. It certainly never was for me or my former colleagues.
> Maybe pardoning Turing is a necessary first step to see that everyone deserves similar treatment?

Perhaps. But I haven't seen any moves to pardon all the other people as well. And the cynic in me things it won't happen.
I think (not sure) that I disagree with what he's saying. Groups seems like a product designed to be as easy and obvious to use as possible - all these confounding features would make it harder to use for a large number of people.

It seems like they want something more built-for-purpose - perhaps a mailing list, or even a bulletin board - and I'm not sure Facebook should compromise the usability of their product for a niche use like this.
[LIVE] Julien Assange Q&A at Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival
Yeah, actually for me at the moment, Lua is the thing, eLua specifically. No onboard editor .. yet!
Xkcd - wrench vs encryption
Any public network that passes datagrams?
zoho.com is pretty good
Show HN: Imgur for QR-Codes
Como fazer Carne seca com abóbora
70 tabs is not normal and 700 is just, well, weird. It's great to run a machine with "low" amounts of RAM but you shouldn't then complain if it does weird things.

I'd be interested in what happens if you run 700 Dillo instances?
So, I agree that this may complicate the experience depending on how it's implemented, but as I mention in the post, if you're not a power user and don't want to see all of this - FB could maybe place a switch in group settings that could turn all of these extra features on. Features like moderators, tags, can easily be ignored if you don't need/use them.
My suspicion is that pardons don't miraculously happen. I suspect it happens because of the hard work and passion of people who want to make a difference.
Indeed, here's an interesting paper arguing this point:

SSA is Functional Programming. Andrew W. Appel.
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/ssafun.ps

What is omitted there however is a discussion of pointer parameters and call-by-reference; probably these cannot be treated in the same way as local variables since they point to a fixed address passed in by the caller, so at that point SSA can't be functional, unless I'm missing something.
One of the reasons the apology and pardon were delayed for so long is because some of those very many gay men are still alive and the government didn't want to open themselves to compensation claims.

As time goes by, and those men die, the pressure for an apology drops but the possibility increases. I hope campaigners do keep the pressure on.
OpenBSD (newbie alert, I'm no expert): when following -stable or -current branch in OpenBSD, the documents advise you to keep the source tree for the kernel, the src and the X system in step with each other and to only take ports or binary packages from the appropriate repository. You are also advised to compile the updated kernel first, reboot into the new kernel and then recompile the src and xenocara(X system) trees. So although the individual programs are all separate, they are intended to work together as a whole with common configuration settings &c and the source is kept in a single cvs tree.

You can't mix and match (say) an Xorg taken from somewhere else and your own special cat program.

My understanding of the systemd project - especially later versions with kdbus in the kernel and udev integrated in along with networking and the console - is that you may need to 'lockstep' your choice of kernel, systemd packages and possibly the DE if using Gnome in order to have a functioning system. I can see advantages in this but it does represent a considerable cultural change in the Linux world which has previously been a little bit like a Lego set.

If I have this wrong, please advise and correct.
I would say this is by no means a flaw of Linked Data (the Semantic Web approach). There is an essential duality in many domains, including mathematics. For example, we can adhere different approaches to describe the math theory as a whole from the following points of view:

1) Classical (N. Burbaki's approach): Kantor's set theory and logic
2) Constructive: where we are standing on constructive (intuitionistic) logic
3) Univalent foundations of mathematics (a novel approach).

Even if we stick to the 1st approach only (as we did for the ontology), there are also many dualities (alternative definitions), if we apply, say, terminology from geometry or, alternatively, from set theory while describing the same math objects.

Anyway, I think the methodology, we are working on during this project, should clarify many such hidden aspects. And we expect that it will be valuable for the modern math theory itself. So, let's collaborate:)
> Many people are leaving Linux because of systemd

Do you have any number to justify this statement?

I also note that all the tools you mentioned are of interest mostly in a server context (of course if you manage servers you will happily use them on your desktop too).
You either have an AOT compiler or an interpreter with JIT compilation. What's a JIT compiler?
It's definitely not a deep technical analysis as it's not written by a kernel engineer, but it's also plausible. VM management and swapping can and do have implementation quality differences on this scale.

The kernel VM is all about heuristics. In a memory pressure situation, it's constantly discarding cached pages that it thinks are better used for other data, making decisions about whether to swap out some data to make room for more cache, etc.

If you remember/look at the history of Linux VM and swap behaviour tuning and algorithms, there have been large improvements and regressions in this area historically.
I would imaging reciprosity and level playing field would require Google's robots.txt to be an open free-for-all. I mean, since we're talking about embracing the open web. I Googled "is Google crawlable" and similar and that doesn't seem to be a thing. I checked the robots.txt and that seems to disallow a lot of stuff. Search, news, groups, images, etc. [1]

Google does a great job of taking the open web, repackaging it, slapping it up behind a (crawling) wall, extracting maximum cash from the result. It will always be able to suck in your content "think of the users!" but that'll generally be a 1-way street. Yes there are API's, but that's still a different relationship to "we crawl whatever we want, we put any content we want in our search results, because users".

Unrelated: Chrome (which I use and love) also had the added benefit of reducing the amount of money they'd be paying to Firefox for the search deal. Not a terrible outcome. It might even have paid for itself right there, but that's utter speculation.

[1] http://www.google.com/robots.txt - seems to be far more disallow than allow
So if others are evil , it's okay to be evil because that's a level playing field? Maybe change it "Don't be Evil*" ?

Hangouts/XMPP , RSS, the big brother aspect of GA - No matter how you justify them they're never going to be good.
>"Without Android, phone makers could shut Google out of mobile phones completely. Chrome and Android help ensure that users can get to Google without interference; they protect our users from other companies’ potentially unlevel playing fields."

This quote just rings so incredibly hollow.

I challenge anyone to name one mobile-OS (or OS in general) who has blocked Google servies ever. And no, not being the default is not blocking. First one to do so would be facing widespread consumer outrage, so I doubt anyone is even considering this.

Now turn it around, and ask if Google has ever blocked anything for its competitors (XMPP, apps on WP, non-Chrome browser access to Google-services, blocking non-Chrome browsers with Google-only DRM, non-Google advertising on Android, etc etc).

I think it's pretty obvious which one is need of having its playing field leveled, and it's not Google. Not by a mile.
The group of people who would campaign for pardons largely overlaps with the group of people campaigning for equal treatment under today's laws. (Same age of consent was law in England & Wales in 2001; 2009! for Northern Ireland; protections for discrimination - partial since 2003, full since 2010; gay marriage since 2014, civil partnership since 2005).

There's only so much you can campaign on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Kingd...
It should be noted that Rebol comes with an arbitrary precision (bignum) arithmetic option via it's money! datatype - http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Money

>> .1 + .2 + .3
== 0.6000000000000001

>> type? 0.1
== decimal!

>> $.1 + $.2 + $.3
== $0.6

>> type? $0.1
== money!

Red will most likely get this soon but perhaps with a different nomenclature (Red as already renamed decimal! to float!).
Why can't Matt say that? Effectively he is saying that. And saying it from his now-extended-to-2015 leave. It's a pretty powerful statement. And it makes me wonder if he's going to return to Google or move on.
Looks like that's the whole point of this site. Why does crowdfunding science bother you?
Putting ssh on another port is just plain stupid.

To say that you might avoid a 0-day exploit is just a strawman argument.

The main problem with ssh is PASSWORDS not zero day exploits.

If you were serious about blocking potential bad hosts exploiting your internet-facing hosts you'd use a firewall and only allow certain hosts to connect.
And you can do things like refresh (say) the one third of the desktop computers that need a higher spec (Cad, Video &c) every two years and then 'hand down' the older boxes to the other two thirds in stages. Worked quite well in one College I worked in a few years ago.
> I challenge anyone to name one mobile-OS (or OS in general) who has blocked Google servies ever.

Google Chrome on iOS uses a different engine because Apple controls what engine can be used by browsers. That's a restriction placed on Google - although the fact that Google happily uses a different engine on that platform is a pretty big hint that when they want the user data they'll compromise on stuff like this.
Very interesting result, and it makes you feel really sorry that most of those old papers are behind paywalls. (Incidentally, this is a problem which is not going to get solved even if everyone switched to open-access venues today.)

Just a comment though: not all citations are equal, so just counting them is quite a crude metric. For instance, a lot of citations in my field (theoretical CS) are "attribution citations" that point the reader to the original paper that introduced a concept or proved a result; and these are not the same as citations of work that you actually extend, or to which you compare.

As in theoretical CS things progress fast and people usually improve upon fairly recent works, my feeling (not backed up by data) is that most citations of work older than 10 years are attribution citations; and for attribution, you don't really need to have read the original paper, you just need to know what it introduced or proved. So maybe the Web is making it easier to look up older papers and cite them, but it doesn't mean that the older paper will influence your research beyond adding a bibliographical entry.

You could say those additional cites may be useful to the reader, but even then, readers unfamiliar with a concept would often do better to find a recent survey about the concept, rather than try to understand the original paper that introduced it. (The original paper is usually hard to read because it is old and language and notation have changed; and people probably didn't have a good understanding of the concept when they introduced it.) So those citations are mostly for courtesy.
It is important to read this in the context of republishing an internal memory.

It it interesting to see how to disagree with the company's direction and drive home a point.

Publishing openly is subtly communicating to the top brass at Google.

It is clear Matt finish a not excited about the direction Google is going re: standards. Thankfully, Microsoft is going the other direction.
I rode the Shanghai airport maglev a couple of hours ago. I glanced up at the speed display a few times during the middle of the journey, and it was always within 290-301 km/h.

The journey time was something like 8 minutes, from the airport to Longyang Road.