skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For $68 billion, you could fly everybody in San Francisco to Los Angeles, and everybody in Los Angeles to San Francisco, and back again, about forty times. And that's before it starts going over budget.

But of course, the line doesn't go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It goes from Burbank to Merced, on the good-governance principle that if you build something completely freaking useless, then somebody might find another hundred billion dollars to turn it into something useful at some point in the indeterminate future.
Is this... a Pentagon submarine article? http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
11 resources for improving your writing
That's a neat trick, thanks for pointing me out. I've always wondered how Windows could have accomplished that. It's a shame that Linux doesn't have such an equivalent. If we are to do the same thing in Linux, a login shell (bash or zsh or even GNOME) would be the right place to implement?
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The $68 billion figure is actually an overestimate. It's not in 2015 dollars; rather, it's adjusted for hypothetical future inflation. So if a tunnel is planned for 2025, that tunnel is priced in inflated 2025 dollars (using whatever made-up number for future inflation), not 2015 dollars.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10449673
Its just an intuitive hypothesis. And point to note is that ever since we started doing agriculture, and that was around 20,000 years ago. We started to have more idle time for creating tools and arts, in general more sedentary than hunting/gathering. Even the works of mathematicians since several centuries ago, I can imagine, would have implied being sedentary while they worked. So software is just the latest in that chain of things since we started doing agriculture.
Surely @ ~$18k p/mo in profit this can be figured out though, as in, outsource the cruft as much as feasible. That's far worth keeping a company in operation, imho.

Assuming the business won't simply shut down without the founders being full throttle on these sorts of tasks, it'll free up time for M&A.

Curious, why the urge to sell?
You can fix this by misspelling your input text. Use 'red' as the read past tense. Use 'laif' and 'lif' in the latter.
I watched the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs lecture recordings, and one lesson I got out of them very strongly: create a toolkit to solve problems in the space of your initial conception of the problem. Your initial instinct of what the problem is, is typically wrong, and the demands on your program typically evolve anyway.

I hesitate to use the phrase "domain specific language" because it brings baggage, but that's the platonic ideal of a toolkit.

The core skill of building toolkits is picking flexible ways to decompose problems. Top-down planning and decomposition has a way of biting you in the ass at the worst times, when you're almost done except for one corner case. Bottom-up construction tends to be more flexible if dirtier.
Here's a great piece from Geoffrey Pullum (fairly pre-eminent linguist) on the passive voice: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf

I think the discussion on this article has been very good, actually, and I'm not sure phrases like "intellectual seriousness" really add much to the debate.
“Write like I talk” would be the most surefire social-media-suicide method I could think of.
The $68 billion figure includes the full length of the line from downtown LA to downtown SF. The segment from Burbank to Merced is just the first one to be built. There are already tracks (albeit not high speed ones) from Burbank to LA and from Merced to Oakland, so when that section finishes you'd still have a one seat ride except for the last five miles crossing San Francisco Bay (for which you'd have to transfer to BART).
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That's practically irrelevant, and also stunningly blind to how humans actually function. Entertainment is important - its sufficiently important that we've dedicated considerable resources to it throughout the sum of human history, to the point that we ship giant entertainment venues to warzones.

But more to economic point: TVs are cheap. The TVs people complain about are maybe ~$500, and you can do very well if you shop second hand. They are a one-off capital expense which considerably improves your life, and which the lack of sale thereof utterly fails to meaningfully help you not be poor.

Because poverty is a flow problem, and it fails to be defined by whether or not one owns certain conspicuous goods. If we were talking about impoverished people who were nonetheless buying $3000 LCDs on debt every few years, then we might have something to talk about. But since concrete examples are always conspicuously absent when points of this nature are brought up, I'm content to point to the economics: selling your TV wouldn't meaningfully improve your situation, buying a TV doesn't meaningfully degrade it.

It's also worth noting that in a discussion of being unable to climb out of poverty, requiring people to dispose of all their worldly possessions before we help them is a good way to create a poverty trap.
That's a really eye-opening comparison
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Sorry, it's my mistake that didn't explain it clearly. Our bracelet isn't a power bank, it has a built-in usb cable to help you connect your phone to a charger, so there is no battery inside.
I was wondering about Android updates :

"The Fairphone 2 will come pre-installed with Android™ 5.1 Lollipop. We provide a two-year warranty period for software maintenance. We plan to offer regular software updates, however, there are too many factors at play to give you a concrete schedule at this point."

2 years is short for a phone that you're supposed to keep a long time.

I'm seduced by the modular hardware but as long as they don't tell me they'll port the latest Android until the hardware can't run it, I'm not interested.
What happened to the future? (2011)
thanks,we will try it later, but intel's size is too big for us.
Or you can just use PowerShell, which allows you to manipulate all kinds of things in a filesystem-like manner (PSProviders):

Get-ChildItem env:

New-Item -Path "env:\myvar" -Value "MyValue"

Amongst other things, it works for the registry and even Active Directory.

Edit: for persistency you actually need to use [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("TestVariable", "Test value.", "User")
If you place environment variables in ~/.bashrc, it would work. However, generally they are placed in ~/.profile which is read only when a login shell is launched. (And ~/.bashrc is not even read when you start a GUI session, anyways.) This is especially problematic in the GUI environment because in that case the login shell is the desktop environment itself. So you need to restart the whole environment (close all the windows, logout, and login) to load the new environment variables.

Windows gets over this problem by letting the login shell (explorer.exe) reload the environment variables in place. So, if we are to do the same thing in Linux, we might have to patch bash, zsh, and GNOME etc. to understand the environment variable change events and reload itself appropriately. I'm not sure where to start, but I believe this is the one thing that Windows did right, so I want to see it happen.
Ruby can't use "?." operator.

Can we use ".?" syntax

Why couldn't Ruby use "?."?
Windows installers can and should be signed, since at least Wondows XP, so it can be safe to download a browser over an unencrypted connection...
Also, from the horse's mouth: http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/10/07/the-secret-diary...

(P.S. this, from the book's editor, is actually a much better piece, which I would have posted if had bumped into it first.)
Depends what sort of conference for a formal one most of the speeches will be planed before hand and speakers will be trying for rhetorical effect and its not natural speech.

And some experienced speakers will have their speaches written out and timed.
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I'd never previously considered the question of what sort of speed a self-driving car could reach on an intercity freeway. No reason why it would need to be significantly slower than a high-speed train.

Think individual cars are inefficient? Not compared to a train, and especially not compared to a train that is anything other than 100% full.
Perhaps, but it seemed to do a pretty poor job of remembering me...

At least with Google, despite them being a pretty poor example of good auth UX, you only ever have to type in your password (+ 2fa code etc)
Sadly, XP users who should be installing Firefox or Linux or Nokia users who should be installing Opera Mini don't read tech news. Is anyone trying to inform them ahead of time?
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One train is like 500 autonomous vechicles on one road, and more comfortable. It will still win energy-wise. That you can hop on robotaxi after arriving makes it even more desirable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10183725
I slammed this company on social media. Here's how the CEO responded
Whoa! I didn't know of the Python syntax for complex numbers (1j). I was confusing the number 1 with lower case l and wondering where the "lj" symbol is coming from. Apparently you also need to use exp() from scipy, Python's standard math.exp() can't handle complex numbers (at least in python2).

The model in the blog post was obviously a simplified model. It assumes circular and coplanar trajectories, both of which are good approximations for back-of-a-napkin calculations such as this one but not super accurate for real life analysis.

In the hopes that there are some programmers interested in astrodynamics or celestial mechanics, I'll shamelessly take this opportunity to promote a related programming project of mine: https://github.com/rikusalminen/twobody

It's a simple C library that solves some fundamental problems in celestial mechanics, including state of the art solvers for time of flight (ie. solving Kepler's equation using the Laguerre-Conway method) and can work in 3D and with elliptic (and hyperbolic and parabolic) trajectories. It may seem a bit cryptic (I wish I had the time to write docs), but if you're familiar with the field, you should be able to understand most of it.
Sure. But what percentage of users would that be? Single digits?
Click the icon in the upper left, then go to Properties | Layout | Window Size. The size is measured in characters.

It's rather inconvenient, though.
Trains are still faster and more efficient than cars, autonomous or not.
Politically, from my own personal experience, most infrastructure projects are sold to the public with a much lower price tag than what they know to be the actual costs, because people are incredibly price sensitive when approving important infrastructure projects.

What we need is a true accounting of the cost of things, and the political willingness to do them. This way we don't have to worry about politicians 'underbidding' their projects just to get enough popular support. It becomes a rigged game when that happens, where the public approves projects that everyone on the project side knows will costs several times that early estimate.

If we want the bridges and the tunnels and the shared transportation, sanitation, etc. We need to understand that these projects cost money, and we need to be able to have t true accounting of them, not one that is politically convenient.

Otherwise, we'll just have this, with 2x and 3x being common run ups, ad infinitum.

Good numbers, on all projects, would help us better allocate our future dollars. Big numbers shouldn't kill meaningful and worthwhile projects. Bad ideas should.

The Swiss seem to be able to do it.

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

On time and on budget.
>> the best argument against genetic causes of heritable lower intelligence

> If you don't think intelligence is heritable, you're delusional

GP was saying intelligence is heritable, but not necessarily via genetics. Bright parents are likely to be fairly successful and better able to provide a stimulating environment & nutrition that's needed for a kid to be smart (i.e. provide a nurturing environment)
They didn't really have a business model to begin with, they were one of those "let's create a hype and see what happens" startups, led by a guy who thinks of himself as another Steve Jobs. The problem is that their framework was buggy and not really that high performing (the idea of adding matrix transforms on every single dom element is actually not such a good idea at all). If you really wanted a very animated GUI, native is still the only option. Plus, the whole over-animated GUI trend is also starting to fade (do we really need our apps to look like flash intros of the 90s?).
Later I've heard they were aiming for a flash-like IDE for their framework to generate money, this might be somewhat in line with what they're trying now. On reddit a developer who left famo.us only 6 weeks ago said he didn't know anything about this project. So I think that they are running out of money quickly and this is all made up very fast without yet having a real product or example apps.
I would say this is true, because whenever i read a PG essay, i think of his voice, thinking his talks. His uniqe voice, tonality and speed of spoken language into his writings, which in turn helps me to better understand what he syas. I always wanted to hear PG essays from his voice. Like an Audible for PG essays.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines.
Related, at what point will "use a stable build, not a nightly" be a good practice for libraries? Actually, do people mainly use nightlies or releases for development? (Of libraries and apps, not the toolchain itself, obviously.)
Its in the issue comments

def foo?
Object.new
end

foo?.class

since "foo?" is a valid method it would conflict with "?."

Edit: with ".?" looks like "foo?.?class"

Edit 2: side note, this would never pass a code review, the expectation of "foo?" is that it returns true/false.
Facebook Wins Dismissal of $15B Users’ Privacy Suit
tarballs which are also usually compressed (gz, bz2, 7z, xz) may have the benefit of being more efficient to download over bandwidth constraint or size constrained links. Also being 1 file, it's only one request and it works over zmodem or modern derivatives.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Warren Buffett – he's a great 'write like you talk' role model. He explains complex ideas in a folksy, down to earth way. I studied 50 years of his annual letters, and there's probably 13 or 14 techniques he uses to make people read what he writes. (If you're interested, my short book Write Like Warren is free on Leanpub: https://leanpub.com/writelikewarren)

Edit: Dropbox link – https://www.dropbox.com/sh/um4djdcdb5isw6y/AAAzF6Xm-PGrkJT3Z...
Putting on my conspiracy theory hat for a second, I bet this had to do with killing Java on the desktop or something.

Nothing made it harder to get people to use Java apps then telling them to download and install a runtime and then add some path things to some mercurial and hard to use part of the OS.

Just about the only time I've ever had to interact with the path dialog on a windows system its been for the purpose of setting up java.

And sun/oracle hasn't done any favors for themselves either in making the setup process better.
I'm no rubyist, but I think it is because ? is often used at the end of method names

This means that something like foo.thing?.bar is potentially ambiguous.
The tunnels under the San Gabriel Mountains is an optional alignment that is being studied by the CHSRA at the request of the residents who live in affected areas.

It may indeed not be cost-effective, at which point one would assume the CHSRA will go with a different alignment. (The others of which have been studied for longer. This tunnel alignment is a new option they wanted to study before finalizing the route for this stage.)
That thread made me remember how good slashdot could be back in the old days :)
Some jarring mistakes in the copy:

"programatically"

"It's headquarters are at"

"branded to our clients exact needs"
> If earth's at 12 o'clock, where is mars and what direction (N,S,E,W etc) do we aim a rocket for the shortest journey?

Mars would be about 45 degrees ahead of Earth, and we aim the rocket so that when it "exits Earth's gravity" (keyword: hyperbolic excess velocity), it will travel in a path that is parallel with Earth's orbit but faster, so the trajectory will be an ellipse with the highest point around Mars' orbit. When the space craft arrives at Mars many months later, both planets have travelled a significant distance.
Howard Chu of LMDB fame really bags on LSM:

https://twitter.com/hyc_symas/status/650799297143836672

https://twitter.com/hyc_symas/status/657399873562656768
And then you also need a reliable source for your hashing tool, since I don't think Windows XP (which is the most problematic) ships one.
Reminds me of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi.

Deserts kick up so much dust, I wonder how often they have to clean the mirrors.
I would actually love some massive disruption for a couple of days (either man made or natural) - it would expose some faults in the cloud strategies of a lot of companies.
I was with you all the way up to your example, and then I didn't know what mutatis mutandis meant and I changed my mind.

It's obviously a good thing that normal people be enabled to understand as much as possible of the laws that govern them, even at the expense of a little wasted ink. (Unfortunately in British law being able to read the legislation often won't get you very far anyway, because of case law).
Because it might be better if the browser would be updated even years after the support for XP has been dropped? At least update IE, or show people the Browserchoice Window with a message saying "IE is no longer supported, select another browser"
The most efficient way to get to Mars is nicely explained in Chapter 21 of "From Stargazers to Starships": http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Smars1.htm

You are asking for the "shortest journey" however.
Well, the shortest journey would be to accelerate to the speed of light when they are pretty much closest to each other and arrive a couple of minutes later. Not very feasible as of 2015.
Worse than that. As the migration to SHA2 is forced, even if they want to upgrade they won't be able to because they won't be able to securely download executables for modern browsers.

Catch-22
Relying on something you might have in the future seems like a bad idea to me. Infrasturcture needs constant improvements if you don'T do anything for years you might end up in a unresolveable mess.
Should be noted that Ruby on Rails has had try [1] for years, which is something that I've noticed has a tendency to be the classic band-aid for loose error handling.

[1] http://www.rubydoc.info/docs/rails/Object:try
apparently, she should be white too.
“Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas” — seriously?
Blood alcohol concentration correlates to unlawful behavior.

For both dilemmas, a person who won’t touch that switch or won’t push anyone is legally innocent. There’s no way he’ll have to go to the court, while the organizer[s] of those experiments will be charged with a 1st degree murder and found guilty.

OTOH, a person who will switch those rails or push an innocent will be charged with a murder of that 1 person she killed, and I’m seriously doubt any jury will find the suspect not guilty.

Drunk people don’t realize legal consequences of their [in]action. That’s why they conclude saving 5 people justifies killing the 1.
20% of Web users can't do better without an
OS upgrade - IE on xp

XP users don't need an OS upgrade - they just need to switch to Firefox or Chrome.
It is good to have case sensitivity in the file system, and insensitivity in the UI.
It can be confusing but it isn't that complicated. Basically you have to options, either let pam set the environment or use your shell of choice (in which case the shell start-up file should be sourced from the X session script as well). Having to log out and back in may be inconvenient but it's unavoidable and a small price to pay in my opinion.
Can we please ban from humanity any journalist that writes "will be able to power X homes" ...

Just give GW, it would be enough If you want to put to scale use something else (will provide the output of 1/2 hoover dams, will be able to supply 0.1% of US electricity or power 5000000 tumble dryers or 3 ATI cards) Homes just don't need electricity to exist ...
Exploring ES6
Nexus 6P
And if they dropped support for OS, new
browsers are unlikely to work in this OS anyway.

Firefox and Chrome manage to support XP just fine.
It already is a good practice.

Most people seem to use stable.

I work on tools so I prefer nightlies (but I use multirust so it's easy to switch). And Servo (which I also work on) uses its own snapshots.
SHA-1 is clearly imperfect, but not that big a problem here. The writing is on the wall for SHA-1's collision resistance. A break in collision resistance would allow a malicious software maintainer to distribute different tarballs to people of interest than to the internet at large, but would not allow a third party to replace a honestly-generated tarball with some other tarball ("second pre-image").

Since you almost certainly need to trust the maintainer not to insert backdoors anyway (a well-hidden backdoor will not be detected by the normal packaging process), trusting the maintainer not to maliciously distribute different software to a small number of people of interest isn't that unreasonable.
"Microsoft gave the other 1 % (devs) Microsoft obviously a very low priority in the past."

You know there's a lot of bad things to say about Microsoft (I still can't get other the "telemetry updates" and I'm seriously studying moving to Ubuntu 15.10) but saying MS gave developers a very low priority is probably the mots unjust criticism you could ever give them and tells me you probably never developed anything on Windows.

I'd go even as far as to say that MS is the most developer friendly corp out there. The amount of effort they put in their tools, languages, frameworks, whatever is impressive. It's easy and it just works.

Microsoft is to devs what Apple is to users.
No, you're not thinking of it the right way.

500 autonomous vehicles on the road are a train. Only without expensive, single-purpose hardwired tracks.
I have somewhat mixed feelings regarding SHA1 support. On the one hand, it is useful in some cases to support legacy clients that "can't" upgrade. On the other hand, I don't feel too bad about cutting off clients that are basically a blight on the internet - many of these applications have numerous security issues beyond weak crypto.

As far as the CAs and browsers go, I would expect them to push back based on concern of not being able to enforce "you must support SHA256 and can only use SHA1 as a fallback". The browser vendors have the threat of scary SSL error screens, but people often click through those anyway, and habituating people to doing so is bad. Exceptions could be disabled, but that might just push more people to legacy browsers because they "work".

I think this is gonna end up being one of those "pick the least bad solution" kind of things.