skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I myself am getting at PhD in quantum information. I completely agree that the timeline for quantum computing was extremely optimistic 20 years ago. However, I think current estimates are much closer to the truth. We now have a much better understanding of the systems on which we are building QCs. Estimates of fault-tolerance thresholds have become much better. We have 20 years of experimental progress to extrapolate when we expect to hit these thresholds.

I agree that progress in the 20s and 70s was much faster. But they were grabbing onto low-hanging fruit. Building even a 'bad' quantum computer is several orders of magnitude more difficult task than building, say, a 486 processor. The degree of experimental control required is much much more. What I see looking back is steady progress towards greater experimental control in multiple systems and very frequent and steady achievements of milestones.

What you forget when you compare quantum computing with DNA sequencing or image recognitions is that quantum computing is at the bottom of current theoretical paradigm. When you do DNA sequencing the science of your instruments (eg. centrifuges) is not suspect. In QC everything is suspect; your system, your detection mechanisms, your control systems. If you normalize every field by its fundamental difficulty you will find that quantum information is keeping up with other fields.
But the only concern you mentioned was about the priority of other shareholders which I think is a bit much.
Google displaying Wikipedia content in Knowledge Graph has resulted in a large hit to Wikipedia's traffic (20-30%). Thankfully Wikipedia said they did not see a drop in donations correlated with Google's change.

However, for sites that do monetize through ads, Google's 'scraping' of the content is indeed stealing if the content would 'organically' draw more clicks otherwise.
The bestselling minivan only sells 110K units in a given year. That's not millions.
The Full StackOverflow Developer
Is it really that different from the performance parts divisions of the major auto makers? Like Toyota uses TRD to build and sell aftermarket parts that you can get installed at the Toyota dealer. Mercedes does it with AMG, Ford with Ford Performance, etc...
The point is that Netflix is already WhiteStream. Being 'race-blind' isn't inherently a bad thing, but within a white-biased culture, some things need to change before we can leave race behind.

The point remains valid - why isn't there a black James Bond? Because Hollywood doesn't think Americans will go to a movie starring a black hero. It's really a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you don't film the movie, they won't watch it.

(Driving Miss Daisy is not a great example of Afro-positive movies, but whatever)
What do you mean with not very green, I do know they carry chemicals inside, but the not very green part is the manufacturing or the battery itself.

But Tesla is also working in a big battery factory, and I read this plant is very green.

But how is the batteries less green than cars producing contamination. (The batteries could be worst, that's is something I haven't even considered)¿?
Not all of the ice is water ice. Some is methane ice, carbon monoxide ice, etc. That being said, I've definitely heard members of the New Horizons team speculating about water ice being responsible for some of the mountains they've seen and even the idea of Pluto having an internal ocean at some point.
I have been researching mazdas (CX-5) lately and they do get updates to the info/nav system. I think I read there is a crashing problem in v.51 or something, but its fixed in v.55. Not the same as tesla, but better than others.
You've probably seen these lists, but in case you haven't, I think they're great:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
What is doubly amazing about this: they must really be confident of their testing procedures and software practices, because the liability of pushing a bad software update and causing injury to a driver... confidence, for sure. I'm certain this is the reason Toyota and others don't ever update the software in your car, after you purchase it, unless it's a recall firmware fix.
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And if they make you pay for it anyway, that doesn't give them the incentive to release better media. As long as they release something they get payed.

I suspect blank media revenue is distributed in proportion to entertainment media's popularity, although the levy approach solidifies that status of industry gatekeepers to some extent.
my dad has a Tesla, I've driven it, and I think it is entirely different. The acceleration you see in a Tesla happens at times like, when you're trying to make a left turn in front of some other cars really fast; you're going from zero to about 30 miles in hour in less than a second, silently. If you happen to not have seen a pedestrian in the crosswalk as you do this, that pedestrian is dead; they will not hear you, and you will be through them before you even know it.

The acceleration of the Tesla presents a challenge to normal human reaction times on a routine basis. It encourages the driver to use the greater acceleration advantage to do things that would not be possible in more traditional cars, like zooming from a dead stop to a very high speed to get through turns or rapidly changing traffic blockages. All with zero engine noise emitted to the world around you.

I love the tesla but the acceleration / noise thing is definitely going to cause more accidents until some mitigation is applied (which I hope to be that the cars just drive themselves).
If Google is listening, Scholar should actually tell if some research paper is covered by a patent or not and vice versa.

For example :

- Paper : http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/hoppe/proj/par...

- Patent : https://www.google.co.uk/patents/US7567254

There's loads of examples like this and it's hard to find them.
Uber, Lyft face disability access questions from Massachusetts
Their HQ was a mess. If your business is cleaning then you should have cleaning in your blood and dream about pine sol when you sleep. I get the sense that the company was started for the sake of starting any company. In doing so they created a company without any vision.

Look further into the company and you see things like the founders saying working on Christmas Eve is ok. Presentations where they say luck is irrelevant and working hard and smart are the keys to success. That's some American Psycho sh*t.
The hash they use is more complicated than that:

converts images into a common black-and-white format
and uniform size, then divides the image into squares
and assigns a numerical value that represents the
unique shading found within each square. Together,
those numerical values represent the "PhotoDNA
signature" or "hash" of an image

- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/PhotoDNA/FAQ

What I was suggesting was that the hash generation tool they use be distributed so the hash can be generated locally before sending to MS. This way MS can continue to keep all known hashes to themselves while making it easier for businesses to bulk check images without huge bandwidth charges or privacy issues.
If they shut down due to lawsuits, don't debt holders (plaintiffs) get priority access to remaining cash?
These are tough questions. Wondering if anyone has actually gotten concrete-true answers to these during the interview process?
If you are in IT as a normal 9 to 5er then it is already happening as the larger corporations work to suppress wages, a downward pressure that is felt throughout the market. To say nothing of how much of one's economic productivity is stolen by being charged for services that others use via taxation (even when you don't count welfare; I'm talking things where big companies get corporate welfare and tax breaks with the burden falling on the average taxpayer).
I will never buy a vehicle with both an infotainment system and a steering wheel. Subaru lost a sale of a brand new car when the dealer sat down, turned the key, and the radio showed.... a loading bar.

Fuck that. I deal with shitty software enough everywhere else in my life. I'm not going to put up with that in a 4000lb piece of metal going 70 MPH.
I am all for positive discrimination. For instance I do not think it is a bad idea to have all-women hackathons -- I do not think that's unfair. I furthermore wish you all the best with the business and I get the pitch: Besides the mainstream movies there is an entire untapped market of non-Hollywood movies with a lot of potential for growth. This is, after all, a business, not a political party (please avoid this debate entirely).
I'd save the questions for the offer negotiation, but most of the equity questions are reasonable. I can understand someone not telling you the revenue/cost numbers, and that's where your due-diligence on the company/gut come in.
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I've been reading Henry Ford's autobiography ("My Life and Work"), and it seems like Musk is taking a page directly from Ford's playbook with continuous product (and component) updates that are (mostly) backwards compatible with previously-produced vehicles in the same model.

The parallels are pretty amazing, and they go much much deeper too (eg. fabrication automation, experimentation, engineering to the highest extent possible, etc).
As discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8489273
So basically, if we can build a new probe within the next year and a half, and if this new Arianne variant is now available, we might have a chance of sending an orbiter to reach Pluto by 2033? That sounds like an opportunity that's too good to pass up if we can pull it off.

I mean, the flyby's awesome, and it's bound to give us all sorts of new insights on the formation of the Solar System, but having a permanent orbiter there would let us continually study Pluto (and its moons), giving us that degree of information on a continuous basis.
> It was the experience of that interaction that mattered and I didn't feel that Homejoy lived up to that promise.

...literally all maid companies are ineffective at screening out people who might give the impression they take things. Its why its a running joke.

I get people on HN think of cleaners should be paragons of ethical morality incapable of creating a misunderstanding for $10/hr.

I'm still going to call it extremely naive to expect anything close to 100% of cleaners to meet that standard.
I have also been working my way through learning Blender. 2 years back, when I was writing a 3D game, I learnt Blender in the context of importing models, setting textures, material, exporting to the quake .md5 format.

Blender has a steep learning curve. Along the way I learnt some very basic modeling to build objects joining default shapes like Lego!!!
That was Round 1 of learning and that gave me an insight into what I needed. I enjoyed it enough to want to learn further, with a 'different' full time day job.

Now, I am working my way through cg-masters video tutorials (warning: these are $$ not free), but worth the money. The order in which I work through these are:
1. Master It. Vol 1 & 2 fundamentals.
2. Character Creation Vol 1, 2, 3.
3. Environment Modeling & Texturing OR Environment & Animation
All of the above at: http://www.cgmasters.net/training-dvds/

For character animation much recommended (again $$):
1. Animation Fundamentals from https://cgcookie.com/course/blender-animation-fundamentals/, I have the DVD of this, now it is only online I think.

Books I have referred to:
1. The first book I worked my way through: Blender Foundations (Roland Heiss) : http://www.amazon.com/Blender-Foundations-Essential-Guide-Le...
2. Browsed through: Beginning Blender and Tradigital Blender.

Now I would recommend: Blender MasterClass from NoStarch. I would recommend purchasing a paper copy of this book.

I have also been making notes of what I am learning through the cg-masters videos: https://bitbucket.org/dmsurti/learn-blender, snail like progress here, and no progress since Mar this year.

This was about books and videos. Don't forget the hardware. PLEASE buy a keyboard with a num-pad, I have the Logitech Solar which has this as also a great 3 button mouse, the Logitech Anywhere Mx. I have worked without this setup and it is a pain to work without these, in Blender.

This has been the way it has worked out for me. I hope it helps you figure your way out. It is a hard grind, but totally worth it, especially to keep the right brain happy and not starving, as we mostly do. And just like you I am doing this only for fun and not to change careers. Just trying to do the only right brain activity well.
You are completely right, even though I would like to own a car for my daily use, and a big car for trips and etc, is not feasible, for me at least, so I have to buy the best of both worlds.

I disagree with the 1/4 of the time charging, with a solution like the Tesla's battery swap, it would be far less(I could be completely wrong in this).
I feel like the limit of what these motors can do now is being held back by something they can't control anymore, tire grip.

I think a lot of these software updates on the acceleration speed aren't because they all of the sudden figured out how to get more power from the electric motor. I think it's from tweaking the "no-slip" system or whatever they call theirs. Basically when the car detects it's losing grip, it cuts back the power. I think this is a balancing act on how to get the system to push the limits of slipping without putting the average user into a ditch because they tried out the "ludicrous" mode.

I'm sure on static conditions in a lab, Tesla can make the thing do something like 2s. It would require something other than a regular tire on a regular road though.
Well it doesn't :) It has 8GB storage (and the backup has that much too).
Thanks, we missed this one.

When a story has had significant attention within the last year or so, we bury reposts as dupes. After that, reposts are fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Django Test Runner – Atom Plugin
If you consider Netflix more analogous to HBO[1]than to cable than this is similar to BET.

I think individual channels will win out over cable style packages, though there might be room for an aggregator that offers discounts.

I'd rather pay for HBO and Netflix over cable.

To my knowledge the majority of cable channels are just content from a handful of producers divided up by "genre", since most people will have entire sections of unused channels that don't match their interest when paying for cable I think we'll move towards pick and choose — possibly really soon.

[1]Which is their quoted mission, "become HBO faster than HBO can become us".
> Presumably they are making a profit at it. They spent a bunch of money to set up factories to produce, package, and market melatonin, why suppose that FDA approval, but not these hurdles, would stop them?

Clearly more hurdles are... more hurdles?
Not only that but apparently "this is not an overnight venture; we know it'll take a long time, and we’re all committed to it." Appears to have been exactly a 204 day "commitment".

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." seems apt.

For job hunters, be alert and suspicious when hiring and marketing overlap.

Best of luck to the ex-HomeJoy engineers.
Flud – Torrent Downloader
Ask HN: Sites with the best search/browse UX
I am developing a B2B eCommerce site that will accommodate a wide range of asset types.

I am working on the browse/search aspect of the site and trying to develop UX that will allow both usage modalities to happen on the same page.

I am not a professional UX designer and I am hoping to draw inspiration from other web sites. I am going for a sleek, modern, and mobile friendly feel (though for the best user experience I am willing to make 2 versions of the page, desktop and mobile).

Is there an eCommerce site that you feel totally nails searching and browsing from a UX perspective? If so, what key thing do they do better than other sites?

The two I use most often are Amazon and eBay, but in my opinion they are good at search but bad at browsing. I think Zillow is good-to-great with regards to browsing, but that may say more about the information compactness of maps vs text than anything else.

Is browsing UX a harder problem than search UX?
That's a great point, and thank you for the information and the link. I will research it and see what comes back. I am thinking your point about identity verification is really the true problem. The credit scoring is what it is, the fact that errant records are linked because of poor identity discrimination is really a core issue. Cool! Thanks again.
Great advice I will keep in mind all the time, thank you :)
I'm talking specifically about imposing fixed costs on the purchase of labor.

I'd propose a different method of handling a "baseline level of services", specifically a Basic Job Guarantee which pays only in-kind benefits [1]. But that's a somewhat orthogonal issue. The key point is that when you impose kinks and missing regions in supply&demand curves, bad things happen.

[1] I.e., you show up, do 8 hours of work for the govt and in return your basic needs are met; you get a govt dorm, govt brand clothes and 3 nutritious govt meals/day in a cheap location.
It is 100% different. This isn't aftermarket performance parts (which is an incredibly narrow field of upgrades), this is updates and new features actively being provided to everyone who has purchased the vehicle. Hell, most cars require you to go into a dealer for a software update in the first place, don't even think about going in to get a new feature like cruise control installed unless you got it as a shoddy aftermarket replacement (OEM parts are generally hard to find aftermarket).

AMG also doesn't make parts anymore, they make tuned versions of existing cars, as new products.
Cycles is pretty great. RenderMan's value is entirely in it's extremely fine level of control. It's typically used in production settings by RenderMan power users who can write custom shaders, complex interactions with non turn key systems, like custom simulators, and other production workflow tools.

It has been hammered on in many ways by many people for several decades and is focused on stable efficient production. For this reason it can take quite a lot of work to get great images out of it, the configurability and control come at a cost.

I think of light transport simulators as a completely different thing from production renderers. A simulator is like a camera that captures reality, where as production renderers are not bound by reality so they are more like fine art tools (brushes, rulers, etc.).
>I believe this is the fastest production car under 300k that you can buy.

The 2014 Porsche 911 Turbo S was tested by Car and Driver at 2.5 seconds 0-60, and it's ~$200K, depending on options:
http://www.caranddriver.com/porsche/911-turbo-turbo-s

I suspect the 2015 Turbo S might be a bit quicker.
So, did you end up buying a different vehicle? If so, which one?
> The whole problem, it seems, is that email is the only protocol on the internet where the sender can initiate contact with whoever he wants.

What? All p2p/federated protocols are by necessity sender-initiated because someone has to start the conversation.

The "who contacts whom" part is separate from the "which data am I (not) interested in" problem. With email you simply don't know the latter.
Comcast - mediocrity is an improvement.
Hearing about INTERCAL always reminds me of this: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/6088-the-worst-programm...
To add to your last statement, it seems like cars are engineered for the length of a typical lease. Afterwards, nondeterministic electric gremlins start showing themselves.
Most definitions of a production car require that they are mass produced rather than made to order as well as being an original design rather than an aftermarket mod of a production car. I'm not sure of the exact sales model of the Atom 500, but wikipedia says it was a limited edition with only 25 made. Calling it a production car would be generous.
I would like this , but one additional question is "when" should you ask? As in, what part of the interviewing process does one ask about outstanding shares, etc..

Should it be after an offer is extended, immediately after the technical part of the interview, etc..?

I would feel awkward asking some of these specifics about financing early in the process.
I was not passive aggressive. I call that actively aggressive. Because you were using vague indirect statements to say that this guy is worthless. I openly described it as such.

I don't know Simone either, but I'd say there's a fair chance he can contribute more than some illegal hotel scheme. I was pretty disgusted that you value this hype above a human being, and I don't care what 17 other similarly amoral individuals may have said.
Bill Leer, inventor of the Leer jet, spent millions in the early seventies on a modern steam car as a solution to the oil crisis.

http://www.progressivevalues.blogspot.com/2009/05/great-lear...
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News, regardless of how wrong someone else may be. We ban accounts that do this repeatedly.
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Highest resolution of the Mona Lisa
From the article:
> Homejoy was able to raise funding, but not enough to grow
> the company as big as its founders and backers had hoped.
> “We declined those investments because it wasn’t enough, and
> we wanted to stay true to our vision,” Cheung said.

I'm sorry but shutting the company down because the round you could raise wasn't as big as you hoped feels like wimping out. Alive beats true to your vision and dead. In "The Hard Thing About Hard Things", Ben Horowitz coins the term WFIO (pronounced wiff-e-o) for that "We're Fucked, It's Over" feeling that entrepreneurs get on a regular basis. Lawsuits spooking investors is certainly bad but hardly even qualifies.

Given how big an issue the worker classification issue is for the whole economy, I could see the regulatory issues getting sorted out over the next few years. Quitting seems like a premature move to me. How do the investors who put $40m into the company feel? Who's going to invest in this team again? Who's going to go work there?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo....... ;)

This is the exact wrong way round. Continuous colour scales are hugely problematic because of the fact that our colour perception is closely linked to context.

the classic illustration: http://blog.asmartbear.com/wp-content/uploads/Grey_square_op...

If precise comparisons are required you're better off not using colour at all. Colour e.g. in choropleth maps, is good for showing broad spatial trends or highlighting particular areas for selection. A bar chart is better for precise comparisons because we're much better at comparing lengths than colours.
Musicians, like many other professions (I could mention scientists as another example), are usually not into what they are doing because of the money. They sell their music because earning money enables them to play more music, not wasting their time with other work. So I'm not so sure they should mind, as long as they still make enough to keep it going.

Actually most people have some passion they would like to spend on instead of working. Maybe we could arrange it so that we all shared the boring work equally and then spend the rest of the time pursuing our passions? Then musicians could be musicians — and I could be what I want too!
literal 'evil maid' attacks on the horizon

/s ;)
For those of us who are not on leave yet. Undersail coding
I was explicitly referring to the factual status quo of what actually goes on in the supplement industry [0], not what any one has argued people should be allowed to do.

[0] see, e.g., http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/new-york-attorney-g...