skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Tokyo is the world’s most livable city.

This is a really bizarre claim. Tokyo, like Japan is special in it's own right, but it, like the rest of Japan, is very homogeneous, you are pretty much getting the same thing everywhere (or slight variations thereof). And, as a non-Japanese, much of what the natives can experience is somewhat closed to outsiders, or simply doesn't appeal to them. And no, Tokyo doesn't list in the actual ranked most livable cities list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_most_liveable_cities

> Tokyo has the most number of Michelin stars for a single city.

Because we all like to eat at Michelin starred restaurants...

This article reads like the author has misinterpreted his own personal preferences as some gospel truth that should apply to everyone. Which really isn't of much use to anyone.
I really wish that BMW would produce a low cost single seat city car that competed more directly with the Renault Twizzy. The i3 is great but for my needs it's honestly way too much and so too expensive.
Great news! Not because I use WebRTC at all, but because I use Safari.

Why would you do that?? It integrates nicely with the OS. Spell checking, keychain, services, keyboard shortcuts, right-click dictionary lookup, easy link sharing. Little things.

I have recently noticed more and more sites are starting to break on Safari. Ever since Chrome forked webkit, it has started to lag behind. Since Safari has a small marketshare and a different engine from the major players, some sites dropped support for it.

A prime example is file-upload to Github issues. You'd think that uploading files is as old as the web itself, but when you try to do this in Safari, it says something like "Sorry, Safari does not support file attachments. Please use a modern browser like Firefox or Chrome."
I just returned from a 10 days vacation.

Nice side effect was that I quit smoking during this time, and don't actually want to continue now.

I had cravings several times during this 10 days, but I had too much stuff to distract myself with, because I packed my vacation with as much activity as possible -- road trip, visited 5 countries, spent time on beaches and in the mountains, etc...

There are few reasons for which vacation is needed for quitting:

- much less stress when on vacation, so less reasons to smoke (for me smoking was in some regard for dealing with stress).

- often smoking is for stimulation and out of boredom, less need for that if having fun on vacation

- often smoking is associated with daily habits (morning coffee with cigarette for me), and on vacation you break out of daily routine, and can skip that

- being physically active (trekking, cycling) during quitting is cool because you start feeling effects of quitting on your endurance immediately (after few days of non-smoking), so it's a good motivation

- even better would to go hiking/camping far from any sources of cigarettes, I did not do it this time, but would do in future if i would relapse into smoking
Not until now. Checking it out.
Variable hardness thermite railroad welding
I was wondering why Facebook had an office in China, despite being banned in the Mainland.
Then realized it was a sales office[1], catering to marketers trying to reach international audiences.

It is admirable that FB has been able to reach 1 billion UVs in a day, despite being banned in Mainland China.

[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-12/facebook-s...
Historical records with PostgreSQL, temporal tables and SQL:2011
The JVM has nearly 99% of the non-Windows server VM market (you can't beat MS on Windows). And tail calls are coming once they matter enough to the users.

What do you mean by GC intrinsics?
Ask HN: I want to bootstrap a business. What books should I read?
I'm a programmer who want to start a business (app or service). I have a potential partner to work with. I want to bootstrap. What books should I read?
But that's an implementation detail of a high-level user-mode thread implemented on top of kernel threads, and something you can implement on the JVM (I know I have) at the language level just like BEAM implements that in C.
Note that these are US patents. They don't necessarily apply elsewhere in the world.
Trimantium Capital thinks there are huge gaps in the Australian VC sector
> It's no wonder that the Netherlands has a larger number of sold bicycles than it has citizens.

Or it could be because it has a larger number of stolen bicycles than it has citizens, at least I have a vague memory of seeing a news report to that effect, might have been an exaggeration of course :-)
They don't, but when they do go wrong the consequences are less severe.
Show HN: StringBean – Featherweight Mobile-First Framework
Cycling in Switzerland (not as a commuter, but as part of the yearly lycra invasion riding to the alpine roads), I was very impressed with the cleverness of their mix of separate lanes, on-road lanes, mixed traffic and the occasional dedicated cyclepath. The Swiss cycle infrastructure is clearly driven by compromise in terms of money and space, but it always respects the cyclist and is very good at avoiding safety pitfalls like dedicated cycle infrastructure at roundabouts.

In Germany, otoh, cycle infrastructure is everywhere (even in placed where law doesn't actually allow it) but suffers a lot from a tradition of building cycle infrastructure for the benefit of cars, dating back to you-know-whom. Instead of picking the type of infrastructure by how well it matches the specific needs of the place where it is built, this decision is mostly driven by one size fits all best practice ideas that change like fashion. The result is a dangerous, inconsistent mess that makes some cyclists envy American "cyclists share the road" signs.

Unfortunately, Swiss cities don't have the modal split numbers required to be internationally recognized as a template to copy (even Basel! Maybe statistical methods are to blame?). I think a full copy of Swiss infrastructure would be much more useful than an incomplete imitation of the Netherlands or Copenhagen in places that lack the dedication necessary to do the latter.
Bullshit. Without massive subsidies nuclear energy is not economically viable.
And why would they ? It's like wishing Apple made a cheap phone.
Oliver Sacks Dies at 82; Neurologist and Author Explored the Brain’s Quirks
Anyone know how hard this would be to do in python?
Right now I know of only one charging point in the Lansing area and that's at Kellogg Center on the Michigan State University campus though there could be one or two more I don't know about.

Tesla only has one charger and that is in SW Michigan near Chicago though they recently announced one more in the Ann Arbor-Detroit area.
Just as there is a pattern to "regular" binary coding, there is a pattern to the Gray code -- albeit, perhaps, a more complex one. I'd imagine that after practicing counting from 0 to, say, 15, you'll be able to count further up on your own.
really? I think it's the walled garden that has more to do with it then the true name ... I'm familiar with all the (speculative untested) claims that true name is the secret sauce, but since those arguments come with nothing more than a spiffy domain and a nice stylesheet - I can't really go with it.

metafilter, yelp, hacker news, ebay, instagram, twitter, wikipedia, flickr, stackoverflow, github - none of these have true name policies and they work fine. Google insisted that the decorum of youtube comments would skyrocket after instituting it - but of course they're the same as they ever were.
Amr
good one too http://codingempire.esy.es/
"As bad, when the company acted, he stated, it would often remove pirated e-books but allow e-book pirates to remain on the site."

This tolerance of outright, blatant theft stands in striking contrast the draconian approach that Google takes to Android app developers who can be perma-banned without appeal from all of Google's services if they are even suspected of minor infringements of Google's policies.

"In May, Google stopped enrolling any new self-publishing authors."

And this is why we can't have (semi) nice things. I love reading crappy fan-fic and worse poetry.
Thanks. Note to self: If talking to external recruiter, 1) check if they are willing to keep my salary confidential and 2) get market salary info.

Also, looks like it is good to have a big salary to anchor the target salary higher. You are out of luck if you were working on your own startup for past 5 years with a low salary

In your experience, how common is that candidates lie about/inflate their salary to keep the anchor higher? Was any one caught doing this?
On the other hand, the typical diet in the Netherlands consists largely of cheese and mayonnaise.

The parents who pedal their kids around in a bakfiets [1] (the Dutch equivalent of an SUV) have every incentive to raise their children to be slim, and the parents get a lot of exercise themselves.

[1] http://bicyclebelleboston.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Bak...
Although I have neve been, I somehow doubt its as great as these rich kids are telling. The best parties I have gone to have always been smallish scale, undergorund, borderline or outright illegal. Good things usually start that way then get overtaken by the money makers who mess it up making it larger scale comercial thing for middle class kids who can buy tickets online.
I'm perfectly happy with my Outlander PHEV as it reduced my real life fuel use to somewhere around 15%.

It has a larger battery than most plugins, and my daily commute is 98% electric.
> I recently wrote a good chunk of a RESTful SQL-backed application in Python in two days that took a team of 3 people in Clojure over 2 months to just get to the basic level of library support one would expect from things like sqlalchemy and flask.

Nonsense. Java library interop is great. If you could write it in 2 days in Python then it wouldn't take more than a week in clojure. In the very worst case scenario you could simply write "Java in Clojure" and directly use Java libraries.

> Clojure isn't simple -- it's basically a step up from assembler in how little it provides.

It gives you full access to the JVM and its tens of thousands of man years worth of high quality libraries.

As for the language itself it has macros, first class functions, built in vectors and maps, structural editing, fantastic REPL support, and a top rate concurrency story to name a few features.
Metcals, Mantises, own reflow line, they certainly dont eff around. F1 bans testing? they Matrix tests. Im all jelly.

This is certainly a good PR piece, makes me want to work there.
How will a Chrome extension prevent WebRTC ip leaking in Safari?
Nice work; how about optimising the C output? Ten plusses in a row can be shortened to *p+=10 for example.
The Twizzy is not very low cost and for that is has no windows I wouldn't even consider it a car.
Do you think the numbers given as example are just randomly choosen?
7 (ok sign)
8 (pointing finger)
11 (should have been 13?)
12 (peace sign)
25 (satan/metal hand sign)

They missed
4 (the finger)
17 (phone sign)

Coincidence? I don't think so... Aliens, maybe.
Whatever their precise plans are, I hope this finally means we can stop paying attention to Hyperarrogant Elon. :)
Range is of very little concern in urban stop and go traffic. But even there and though it's the worst environment for a straight ICE car, it'll still have a better autonomy than the EV.

Furthermore while regenerative braking offers some advantages to EV, chances are that's lost by the loss of energy to cooling (in summer) and especially heating (in winter) the car interior.
> And no, Tokyo doesn't list in the actual ranked most livable cities list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_most_liveable_cities

There are three surveys on that page. The last one, Monocle, does indeed put Tokyo at number 1.
Australia seems a bit ambivalent about meeting its international obligations around carbon, but in several other countries they're solving this relatively simple issue with incentives, subsidies and planning regulations. It's really not hard at all.
Reagents: Expressing and Composing Fine-Grained Concurrency
Drone carrying porn, drugs and a loaded gun is stopped near prison
I'm pro-nuclear because it's one of the lowest risk forms of electricity production in terms of human lives per kilowatt, with the possible exception of utility scale solar.

The occasional wind turbine workers and rooftop solar installers have been killed doing their work; in extremely small numbers but each turbine and rooftop only makes a minuscule quantity of energy.

Hydro is usually very safe, except that the dams can fail and wipe out entire cities. When Banqiao Dam failed, 26 thousand people died. If you want to talk about the "what if" dangers of nuclear, you have to accept that Hydro's "what if" scenarios are far, far, far more deadly.

Deaths per trillion kW hours

170,000 Coal
36,000 Oil
24,000 Biomass
4,000 Gas
1,400 Hydro
440 Solar (rooftop)
150 Wind
90 Nuclear

Source: http://onforb.es/1JpfxzR
Oliver Sacks dies at 82
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, I only saw one friend writing in another script but he is clearly a minority, the vast majority of people on my case (France) are writing in cursive.
There's no such thing as "the value IO ()". The type IO () has tons of possible values, which all have different internal representations:

1) The IO action that does nothing.

2) The IO action that prints the string "Hello World" and then returns nothing.

3) The IO action that reads a string from the console, reverses it, prints it back, and then returns nothing.

4) ...

It's a common misconception to think that IO X is a wrapper around X with some "type system magic" to prevent it from being used outside IO. It's nothing like that. For example, IO String is not a wrapper around a String, doesn't contain any String inside, and cannot be converted to String. Meditate on the fact that System.IO.getLine is not a function, but a value of type IO String. Then you will understand why IO () has tons of possible values.
As I said in another comment, if you use a fountain pen in a business setting (as I do), people look at you funny.

I was around 10 when erasers first appeared, and they were strictly forbidden during all my school years, because they tended to make a big mess (or a hole) in the paper. We were told to strike errors properly, with a ruler.

Today it's true that they are permitted, to my amazement.

Among my children's teachers, some recommend fountain pens, some say they dislike it, but mostly kids can use what they like best.
Maybe a good excuse after certain insulting hand gestures?

"No, I wasn't flipping you off with both hands, I was trying to tell you the number 132 in binary."
Larry Wall: 5 Programming Languages Everyone Should Know
Not sure why this JVM comparison is pulled all the time, from anyone with a little JVM experience it is clear the author has not a lot of knowledge of the JVM. Please don't.

Sent the author of the paper some mails, but sadly got no reply.
That link seems to be unrelated, you probably put the wrong one.

I notice that Wind and Solar aren't much worse than Nuclear, though, and they don't produce highly radioactive, toxic waste we must safely store for millenia, don't take decades to set up, don't cost as much, do not require incredibly high levels of competence to be safe...
From Germany here. The issue is not that nuclear is "clean" in an absolute sense, it's that the alternatives are incredibly more dirty and dangerous so relative to those it is incredibly clean.

Here are 3 articles comparing the death-rates of various means of generating power.

Nice graphical representation:

http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclea...

For each death attributable to nuclear, 4000 are attributable to coal. 4000:1. Incredible, but apparently true.

NASA shows the deaths that have already been prevented due to nuclear, currently the rate appears to be 80000 per year. That's 80000 people alive per year who would have been dead without nuclear:

http://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/

Forbes has a nice comprehensive overview that shows rooftop solar having a higher death rate than nuclear:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

[EDIT: pulled salient points from the quoted articles into the post]
So pretty much like the current i3 with the "Range Extender" option or the i8?
Cost? Fontain pens are very impractical devices. Ink wells, ink spills, carrying pens around, fixing them - this ends up.
If you interested about the topic more deeply the conversation between Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, and DHH is an excellent source: http://martinfowler.com/articles/is-tdd-dead/
Thanks-- that's a good idea. I didn't think of optimization at all but that sounds like a fun step to take next.
Oooooh, I love "guess what the interviewer is thinking instead of answering his question."

For example the natural response might be, "Well, I personally can count to ten" and, after you pressed about alternative schemes: "On a more theoretical level you could of course enumerate way more states than ten using your fingers. Just think of American sign language, which has 26 letters only one of which includes motion (the Z).[1] And that's on a single hand, so just counting the letters in ASL only - and no other gestures, you can count to at least 676. Add a few more static hand shapes - there are lots of shapes in ASL- maybe try to learn a hundred per hand, which is good because you can encode two digits in each hand, I could confidently count to 10,000 using just my fingers. It would probably take no more than a few days to learn."

Would I pass your interview? Probably not, because it wasn't what you were thinking of. Even though I just showed you that I could count to ten times higher than the number you were thinking of.

And I wouldn't even mention what I was REALLY thinking which is "Hmmmm, I wonder where the limit is. A human hand has about 26 degrees of freedom, so two hands have about 52, if we encode a degree using just 2 bits - one of four levels of flexion - we're at 52 * 2 = 104 bits. So something like 10^31 = what is that 'ten nonillion'. I probably shouldn't say nonillion. No, I definitely shouldn't say nonillion. Probably even a million is pushing it, I shouldn't say that. But I bet it's possible - a million is just twenty bits, that's just 10 bits per hand, or two bits per finger and it's obvious that a finger has way more than 4 positions it can take - looking at my own hand my first knuckles are independent of the crook of the finger, it doesn't take much effort at all to control them independently.... I bet I can count to a million."

[1] http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/handshapes.htm
Misleading headline slightly...
I think when this came up a few months ago someone checked and found it was a bug -- it may have been fixed by now but I haven't checked recently since I don't have flash in ff anymore.
Larry Wall: How to Code Like Larry Wall
MASSAGE THERAPY SUCCESS STRATEGIES: SECRETS EXPOSED
Both do same error, that they start with premise of curing addicted people. The same error that nearly all psychologist or psychiatrists share. They declare people who are not normal as insane, and want to change them. A better way, imho, is to make people conscious that they are different, and thats important for them to find a place in life, where their difference is a bonus.

One of my favorite parable, is the imagination: You are very talented. You can lay eggs. Society defines being healthy as not picking on other chicken or own feathers. But its not you who is insane, the cages are a system of insanity.

The extreme cases of junkies on the street, and alcoholics in their flat come into mind, when thinking about addiction. Those are extreme cases of people who have no place in real life also. The drugs, are their way to find a place in life to be happy. Even if only for a short time. Teach them ways to become autonomic, to find their own path through life, and addiction will calm down by itself.
I definitely remember (as a child in the UK) that our touch-tone phone had a pulse option that could be switched on the underside. If you flicked the switch then instead of a tone you would hear click-click-click-click when you pressed a number. This would have been in the early to mid-90s, though we were quite poor so the phone might have been older.
Yup. I count in binary on the pillow during sex so I can last longer. Been doing it for years now. Works wonders.
US considered nuclear strike after 9/11
That you claim that there is no conspiracy is empirically false. The street used to be exclusively for pedestrians. Read about car manufacturers in the USA and how they conspired to bring down both pedestrian traffic and also public transportation.
Modesty is not his strong point, but if you've never played with Mathematica, have a play with it - the way it works is very interesting.
I think BMW has been working on technologies for electric cars for a very long time already, probably even longer than all-electric car manufacturers like Tesla have existed. In Munich you already see quite a lot of electric BMWs and charging stations, so the technology seems to be pretty mature as far as I can tell.

I think the main reason they did not make the transition to (partially) electric cars earlier is that they did not want to cannibalize their business with non-electric cars. Another point is the still-missing charging infrastructure and the (to my limited knowledge) lack of some universal standard for charging stations. The final point is that today potential buyers of electric cars still have many good alternatives that are as much or even more ecological than all-electric cars. If you look e.g. at the new models from Volkswagen or BMW, many of the smaller ones use 4 liters of gasoline / 100 km or less (i.e. > 71 MPG), which is pretty hard to beat in terms of eco-friendliness and efficiency considering that electricity is still much more expensive than gasoline in terms of energy / price.

One driving factor in the transition to partially electric cars might be that there are not many other possibilities left to further increase the efficiency of conventional engines. In fact, most of the increase in efficiency that we have seen in the last decade was not due to better thermodynamic design of the motor block but better control of e.g. the fuel injection through more advanced sensors and electronics. As this optimization path seems to have reached is maximum potential it probably makes a lot of sense to use electric motors to e.g. recover braking energy, which should shave off another few percent in fuel consumption (Toyota already proved the feasibility of this very successfully with their Prius series).
Interesting read! I think the biggest advantage / disadvantage is the double-edged sword of there just not being a lot of startups in Tokyo. It's really easy to cut through the noise and stand out, but at the same time, there's not as much of a high-quality community of people doing interesting things.

For anyone looking to experience the Tokyo startup community first-hand, we're going there next month with Hacker Paradise (hackerparadise.org) and will be throwing a number of events with the local tech scene.
I find it kind of interesting that the two of us are discussing the value of true names when we both are using our true names voluntarily.

You can have a successful site without true names, but it takes much more effort once you open the door to the masses. Almost all the examples you provide have major issues with trolls and spammers - the one exception is HN, but I think this is more to do with the strong community ethos here and it's limited appeal.