skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The MBTA's a case study in incompetence, due to years of turf battles between the lege and governor's office. It's run by a bunch of overlapping boards with an org chart that looks like a spider web.

So anyways, they're about 30 billion in the hole over the next 10 years for what it will cost to do routine maintenance on the system going forward, mostly because it was all neglected for 20 years during the big dig fiasco.

I continually wonder why we can't build these things in this country anymore.. in the 20th century, a whole bunch of cities went from 0 to a complete transit infrastructure. These days, adding a single line or extension is a multi-decade fiasco (green line extension in Somerville, or the second east side line in manhattan).
I highly recommend his book "Bailout Nation," the most comprehensive overview of our current situation. Data driven and very well written.
Privatize the road system. Completely private public transits will emerge to compete. It's really that simple.

People don't use public transit because they're already paying for the roads with their taxes. If they had to pay tolls reflecting the true cost of maintaining the roads they would choose public transit, and public transit accessible housing and workplaces.

Pre-50s toll roads were much more common and private street car lines were very common.
Airplanes are profitable thanks to government subsidies/services (TSA/FAA, rural airports, etc). Same for tour buses (they didn't pay for the road!).
Fares often pay only a fraction of the cost of mass transit. For example, my local light rail costs about $8/ride. The fare is only $1.90.

(Sorry, the source is the dead tree version of one of my local rags.)
... and all that Lucky Charm sugar gives you cancer of the semicolon.
It depends what type of science you're doing, and what stage the science is in. When we are at the gathering data hypothesis building stage observations, and case studies are important and are often based on confidential data.
Increase population density. Admitedly, this is not a quick fix.
I would LOVE SRO cars. The CTA in Chicago ran some trials last summer, but the populace was too lazy and bitched enough that they ended the trials early and no SRO cars exist any more.
The three legacies of Darwin
One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars - not people, new figures show
Ask HN: For user generated content, how do you deal with questionnable material?
I'm working on a web app that let's people build timelines. One thing I haven't quite figured out yet is how I'm going to deal with situations where users create timelines that contain sensitive or questionable content.

For example, my app makes it very easy to build biographical timelines. Autobiographies are fine, but what happens when a user creates a timeline for another person and posts private information such as date or birth, their location, etc? That also assumes that I can confirm that a timeline is autobiographical, which would be impossible in practice.

Other less clear examples:

- Disgruntled boyfriend creates an autobiography with details about a previous relationship. The ex-girlfriend learns about it, emails me and asks for me to remove it.

- Controversial timelines, such as history of Israel, Palestine, and absurd timelines: Jewish World Domination, etc.

This problem isn't unique to timelines. All of this could be done on a blog, for example; my app is just a different medium.

For sites like posterous and other apps that lets users generate content, how do you deal with situations like this?
hmm, this might be the answer:
http://gizmodo.com/5305394/activate-multitouch-gestures-in-f...

Maybe I needed to re-enable it a while ago and forgot.
If you must eat plants and can't watch the animals then:

Spread a bit on your skin, wait a while to see if there's a rash. Touch some to your lips and tongue, again waiting a while to see if there's a reaction. Eat a tiny bit, wait a while. Eat a larger bit and then wait. Continue upping the dose.

This is from memory from the SAS survival guide. Should take days and isn't very safe but may be the best you've got.
I'd agree with the first, but why the second?

As I mentioned in another thread, nothing I've seen suggests that fares are a barrier to use of the bus or subway. With the MBTA, subway rides are $2, bus rides are $1.50, and a week-long pass for unlimited use of both is $15. Even New York's $89/month for unlimited use of subway and local bus is many times more cost-effective than cab fare or car insurance.
I particularly liked the penultimate paragraph, I will quote here:

"But the natural sciences rightly forewarn us that there are limits to this process – the law of entropy, while the dominant discourse of mainstream and conventional economics from Harvard to Cambridge to Beijing University to Delhi University has no theoretical notion of limits and is therefore the most dangerous of all social science disciplines when it comes to thinking about ways to live in harmony with our environment. It is not for nothing that one of the earliest and most thoughtful and ecologically sensitive of economists, Kenneth Boulding, way back in the 1950s said, that to believe in unlimited growth in a finite world one had to be either a fool or an economist!"
From the policy (linked from the article): Open source software means that the underlying source code is not copyrighted and therefore available free of charge to read, modify, and build upon. Isn't this factually incorrect? I thought that, say, GPL was technically a type of copyright.
The Mac Book had Windows on it. Why wouldn't he sign it?
Exactly. The closest I get is a Mac Mini that lives in a closet, running as a file/media server. Completely quiet, out of the way, etc.
Fair enough, but I think you pretty much have to read all news with an eye toward that outlet's particular editorial slant, and I'd just as well have editorializing upfront with the Economist instead of under the guise of being purely impartial.

Even when I don't agree with them, it's always an enlightening read.
I think people are dramatically overstating the degree to which the WSJ has increased its political content. There's a slight swing, but I believe people's perceptions are exaggerated because of what they expect from Murdoch.

I also think it's rare to talk about economics in a way that's free of political bias. I think most of the time the bias is just subliminal, and people are more likely to notice on WSJ at the moment due to Murdoch.

The bigger problem for me with the WSJ is that it seems to include more and more "soft" economic news (lifestyle, human interest, etc) and less "hard" news. I don't have hard data on it, but it feels that way. Could be my own version of Murdoch awareness.
In information theory terms, a simulation can not contain more information that the sum total of the input data and the content of the simulation algorithm.

This is false outside of the most trivial definition, when you simulate evolutionary systems you can create systems far more complex than the algorithm used to generate them, the problem domain, or any other factor prior to running the simulation. That information is crated from your random input stream which does not contain information in the classical definition.

PS: As to the larger context of the discussion. From a simulation standpoint sending other scientist the code and having them run it is a bad idea. Reproducibility does not involve the lab that made the discovery sending the devices used to make the discovery to another lab. The goal is for someone to be able to see the same effect with the most independent setup possible. If scientist A says "building this a model with these assumptions > this result." Then another lab creates their own software which runs and finds either the same or a different result. Or, they can look at the assumptions or inputs and say this is bad data try again. Or, they can look at the code and say, here is a bug fix it and try again. But, those are three independent steps best carried out by diffrent groups.
I certainly agree with you that there is a lot of publication of results generated with computers that is non-reproducible. However, I'm not sure publishing the complete codes that were used is necessary, as long as there is a detailed description of the algorithm used. In essence, I think it's essential that multiple people write their own codes and reproduce the result. The danger in publishing your code is that it is easier for someone to "reproduce" your study by just taking my code and running it, and there is a danger in having the community rely on a small number of codes.

The PYTHIA example someone posted is a good one: It's my understanding that basically everyone in high-energy physics uses it, and while that means it gets a lot of testing I'm not sure that many actually bother to look through the code in detail, because "it's what everybody uses, so if it had a bug it would have been found already".

The situation is similar, but not quite as bad, in astrophysical hydrodynamics simulations. Basically the entire field uses 6 different codes, but they do work on different principles, and the teams do conduct controlled tests of the agreement between them on specific problems.

About the chaos problem, I suspect that the problem is worse. My impression is that often there is not even a basic test that the results are numerically converged, regardless of esoteric strange attractors.

I'm curious, can you mention any specific cases that you are worried about wrt the chaotic behavior.
I remember hearing a similar thing about Friendster. They didn't have much success in the US, but at one point, they just suddenly exploded in popularity the Philippines.
Only if you have an imperialist/colonist slant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_dialects#Sister_and_daugh...
Bruce Schneier's essay "Privacy in the Age of Persistence" goes deeper into the underlying issue.

http://www.schneier.com/essay-261.html
Consolidate the routes and reduce the number of stops on routes. Attempt to compensate for this by increasing capacity where possible on reduced routes.
I cringe every time I log into the AMEX site. I cannot believe a financial institution as large and with the resources they have allows that kind of lax security. Even worse when you consider the business accounts that manage hundreds or thousands of corporate amex cards.
Privacy in the Age of Persistence
I agree with many of your sentiments. Here is a view from "inside" (I do PDE solvers from a mathematics and computational physics perspective, have written open-source models, and contribute to a popular open-source solver library).

1. Very little of numerical analysis is about propagation of rounding errors. I think you underestimate the reliability of floating point numbers in this context. The challenge of numerical analysis is not in representing the continuous one-dimensional object (real numbers), but in representing an infinite dimensional space in finite dimensions. You might appreciate Trefethen's "The definition of numerical analysis" (http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/nick.trefethen/publication/PDF/19...).

2. We can prove convergence of iterative methods for some problems of practical interest. More frequently, we can prove that if the iterative method converges, then it converges to a meaningful solution. Such results are unavailable for some systems, and this is where we enter the domain of Verification (the code converges to exact continuum solutions at the appropriate rate) and Validation (the continuum equations approximate reality). V&V is a rapidly growing field which offers a number of mature tools, but is still under-appreciated in many disciplines. The fact that V&V is rarely taught at university, even to applied mathematics graduate students, let alone physicists, doesn't help.

3. It takes effort to turn a one-off code that only runs in your special environment into portable, distributable software. Funding agencies and institutions place little emphasis on this process, so it is regularly neglected. It is exacerbated by the fact that few physicists have any background or interest in software engineering, thus making it more challenging to release non-broken software.
Enable Multitouch in Nexus One Web Browser | Redmond Pie
This reminds me, I have a Steve Ballmer signature edition Win7 from the house party pack I signed up for and the sent to me. Its black and gold with his J Hancock on it. Microsoft's marketing, whatever you think of it, trickles from the top.
In the life sciences provenance is as important as reproducibility, and you can use software systems to manage provenance. The paper requirement will go away over time. Even the FDA, which required paper in the past, is moving to an electronic model. But you do need to document methods somewhere and not just in code, a reference document which could be shared, even if the specific implementation is different
From http://ceph.newdream.net/roadmap/

"We hope to have the system usable (for non-critical applications) by the end of 2009 in a single-mds configuration. Even then, however, we would not recommend going without backups for any important data, or deploying in situations where availability is critical."

It looks interesting, but not ready for prime time. Anyone using this in the wild?
“Syntactic sugar found to be leading cause of semantic diabetes.”

Steve Dekorte on Twitter recently

http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/7926192582
Separate the functions of providing mass transit service and providing mobility for those who can't afford it on their own. There is no need to subsidize mass transit beyond the value of the congestion, pollution, and any other externalities it reduces. Cincinnati does this to an extent through Everybody Rides Metro[1]. A similar concept is facing a lot more resistance in Austin[2].

Another necessary policy shift is ceasing to discourage transit-supportive density. Most American cities have wide swathes of land zoned for single-family housing. If everyone is forced to spread out by their government, it will be harder to provide high quality mass transit. This is even worse when you have neighborhoods full of culs-de-sac, which I think should be outlawed, or at the very least they shouldn't be maintained with public funds as they are effectively private driveways that make the street network function more poorly.

Cities also often tax density by requiring large developments to provide a certain amount of funds for affordable housing. Dense developments make housing more affordable in the areas where people want to live by supplying more of it without a commensurate effect on demand. Single-family housing rarely has the same requirements. We shouldn't be taxing the things that make our transit systems work better and provide more affordable housing than the alternatives. Most zoning should be abolished.

[1] http://www.everybodyridesmetro.org/

[2] http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:...
"... and a pony" is just an admission that you've already asked a lot and it might not happen. A pony is the kind of thing a child requests on a whim, who is then crushed because they don't understand how ridiculously impractical it would be.
OK, but making sure two people don't try to use the same port for different things doesn't have much to do with making sure whatever they're doing is documented.

Surely, you wouldn't want to create a new service that defaults to a port already in common use, but unlisted because the protocol didn't meet someone's definition of open.
I think you need to own your company name.

The dropbox guys claimed to have done just fine when all they owned was getdropbox.com but I'd be curious to know if there's been any change in traffic from people going straight to their new domain vs referrals from google, et al.

"Dropbox" is becoming enough of a name-brand that I'd be surprised if they didn't see a significant spike in traffic.
That's most definitely incorrect. And it's not just a technicality; copyright law is the legal foundation of free/open source software.
Do you mean "Git has features Subversion doesn't and can't support"? :)
This is just an ad hominem attack as far as I can see. He links to two things to support his point but neither actually do

1. "Boskin's Obama Crash" But when you follow that link you find the article he was pointing to was an opinion piece so it doesn't support his point (which was that he'd always thought the OpEd page was crazy but that he now feels that's bleeding into the reporting)

2. "New Bank Rules Sink Stocks". His problem with this article, in his own words, is "we know that day-to-day action is mostly nonsense". He goes on to say "Assigning a definitive causative factor is at best a guessing game, at worst an exercise in futility." That's just foolish. There are brokers on the trading floor, you can ask them why they're selling and every news outlet reported it was because of proposed banking regulation so the logical assumption was that there is an overall sentiment on the floor. This isn't the WSJ. ABCNews, BBC, et al. reported the same thing (http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2010/01/dow-drops-20..., http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8473720.stm)
I guess one common variation is the monkey eating you...
I'm not sure if the Wii controller is accurate enough to realize what imaginative developers would have in mind for it.

Case in point: Force Unleashed has a very limited set of motions (vertical/horizontal swings). This game should have been the killer app for the Wii, but it was really awful.

Natal proposed to have the accuracy and range of motion an imaginative developer could really exploit.
Natural and intuitive is a loaded phrase. It's natural and intuitive because you have prior experience with the prior offerings from one vendor. People going from OSX 10.4 to windows 7 to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard are going to be parroting your comments just in the other direction.
"The underlying source code is not copyrighted and therefore available free of charge to read, modify, and build upon."

This is a serious misconception as open source code is copyrighted -- it's just licensed to end users with terms that may allow modification and creation of derivative works. If you don't abide by terms of the particular open source license, then it's still copyright infringement.
Not impossible, but it would have been harder. If you did succeed in thinking about them, it seems likely that along the way you would invent a language that supported them. By that I mean you would have developed notation to write your thoughts down compactly. You wouldn't need to implement the language.

There was nothing to stop people from doing calculus pre-Newton. But doing calculus without the language (theorems and definitions) of calculus would be hard. Once Newton had provided the language, it became something high school students could learn.

(Historical accuracy not guaranteed, but I hope it illustrates my point.)
PHP mistakes, misconceptions, bad practices and blatant no nos.
4. It is often not worth the effort to turn a one-off code into distributable software. There is a good chance that only a small number of people care about the PDE you are trying to solve.

I contemplated making a distributable solver for the Schrodinger equation, but there was little interest.

A quote I've heard attributed to Cleve Moler (chief scientist at Matlab): "PDEs are a niche market."
He was pretty good natured about the entire thing.
The first one is meant to be pro-CL. It says that there are problems that are so difficult or large that they can only be solved with some of the unique features Lisp, such as macros. Of course, all programming languages in use are Turing-complete, so technically you could use any language. In practice, however, the mental capacities of the programmers form a barrier: imagine writing an OS in Brainfuck. So when people are working on such problems in C or Fortran, sooner or later they will - unknowingly - come up with the ad hoc implementation of CL in their program, to get some of that additional abstraction Lisp provides.
There's a huge lag between building transit and it being able to cover its own costs.

Truly, it's our zoning laws that have sunk the American city. There are no good transit routes because everyone is living in cul-de-sac neighborhoods a half-mile from one another. There's no mixed-use zoning, so home, work, food, entertainment -- essentially everything -- is miles away from everything else. Thus the routes are intractable to build gradually and a critical mass of ridership disinterested until you have effectively a complete network on offer.

Most US cities simply can't afford to run a money-losing transit system for two or three years. Even if you gifted them the money to build it.
I know some people who would put the date as far back as 2002, the year they unintentionally created a certain, unfortunate class-warfare neologism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_duckies
I was reading this just yesterday:
http://oreilly.com/social-media/excerpts/9780596802004/why-s...

It's a chapter from the latest book by Scott Berkun (the author of "Making Things Happen") about public speaking and it mentions some numbers for how much speakers can get paid. At the very bottom, he writes that he's averaging $100k a year right now, from books and presentations. Just a few data points.
You realize that Microsoft doesn't actually create PC hardware, right?
Cool Visualization indeed. Completely useless, but cool.
Facebook's Ideal Future
Another useful rule is that all grasses (and their seeds) are edible. Not particularly tasty or nutritious, but they won't kill you.
I agree with all these things. I would even charge a small nominal fee for monthly usage of the wifi. Have advertising come on the FM Radio.
if the NYT were a business and financial publication with a long history of levelheadedness and fact-based reporting, then yes, they would've also jumped the shark.
As a user I should be able to tell a website that I want it to forget something I'm putting on it after a while. Nothing complicated, say a default setting of one year. Not on sites like Posterous or Flickr, but on sites like Facebook, Twitter, even HN.

This isn't likely to happen though without legislation, which is a shame.
I love how this guy clearly has no idea what he's talking about, relies primarily on a single source (US Army Survival Manual) that's based on decades of research and experience in these kinds of life-and-death situations, then proceeds to disagree with the source on multiple points. So much for fighting ignorance...
> doubling the size of the hash table whenever
> there are too many entries in it.

And then re-hashing and dealing with all that implies. Surely all of that is much harder than chasing a pair of pointers down the list.

Also, it doesn't work in the case of, say, Pollard's Rho method of factoring. I really need to change the original article to make it clear that that's a case I'm interested in.
Don't take responsibility for content people create on your site, or you open yourself up to legal liability for it.

Most services like posterous, twitter, Wordpress.com etc. prohibit users posting defamatory or harassing material, giving you the right to enforce it but not the responsibility.

As for timelines that are simply controversial rather than harassing, you really don't want to become the speech police. As you've already said: your app is just a medium. It's not your speech, you don't have to agree with it. If it's legal, you should allow it. Users hate arbitrary restrictions (LiveJournal has spent sooooo much time trying to do this).

As always, for the actual legal implications, you should consult a lawyer. I'm not one, and my opinions aren't legal advice. =)
More Ads for one. I know in DC Metro (where I am) the ads are insanely small and you could definitely increase ad space on the subway and buses. Cram Ads down people in order to pay for the transit system.